A boom.
Lightning flashed across the sky.
The surrounding space brightened for an instant, and in that brief moment, it illuminated Song Nanshan's rain-soaked hair and lit up the man's tense face:
"Looks like there really is a situation. Come down and take a look."
"Gu Qiumian?"
Zhang Shutong asked reflexively.
At the same time, he had already quickly pushed open the car door and followed Song Nanshan's footsteps through the rain.
At this moment, neither of them was in the mood to go back to the car for an umbrella. They circled around nearly half the perimeter, almost jogging as they came to the side rear of the villa.
Song Nanshan had already turned on his phone's flashlight:
"This is the backyard of her house. Look—"
Within their field of vision, borrowing the faint light and peering through the pouring rain, was an artificial lawn.
Some uniquely shaped shrubs and trees dotted the surface, quietly withering in the rainy night.
The lawn was naturally surrounded by iron railings as well. At their feet was a wasteland, overgrown with weeds, the tallest of which nearly reached their knees. This desolate scene was like a different world compared to the garden within the fence.
And at the outermost edge of the garden, beneath the black iron railings, a row of potted plants was arranged. Zhang Shutong looked over and discovered that the entire row of flowers had been smashed to pieces.
The exquisite flowerpots were shattered all over the ground, the soil washed away by the rainwater, dark yellow muddy water spreading out from within the railings, slowly flowing to their feet.
Zhang Shutong crouched down, his phone's light lowering accordingly. Sure enough, he saw stones scattered near the flowerpots, nearly as large as two fists put together. He moved bit by bit to the side and discovered several broken bricks.
He stood up again and pulled back some distance from the iron railings, measuring the gap between two bars with his eyes, furrowing his brow:
"Revenge?" His tone wasn't questioning but confirming a fact, so Zhang Shutong changed his words: "Can you confirm this happened today?"
He instinctively looked toward the villa. A very tall tree was planted behind the villa, blocking the line of sight between inside and outside the building. Unless someone specifically checked, they wouldn't discover the situation in the backyard.
"Should be." Old Song said in a low voice. "I came to drop off Qiumian yesterday. Although I didn't look in this direction, there's another thing that can prove it. See that black thing... yeah, shine the flashlight in a bit more."
Zhang Shutong moved his gaze following his finger. In the distance on the lawn crouched a black shadow. Looking more carefully, it wasn't a shadow at all, but rather a...
Big dog.
A black Doberman lay on the grass. The surrounding cold was oppressive, fine rain needling people's faces, yet the dog remained motionless as if asleep.
Then Old Song continued:
"Yesterday Qiumian took me in for a walk. As soon as we walked this way, that thing charged over barking..."
"So when you didn't hear the dog barking just now, you thought to check over here?"
Zhang Shutong immediately guessed the answer.
Song Nanshan nodded, saying that just now he had unbuckled his belt, when he glimpsed from afar that big dog lying in the yard. He got a fright and instinctively changed locations. When he finished relieving himself and walked back, he suddenly realized something wasn't quite right—
The dog might not necessarily have noticed him, but in such cold weather, with such heavy rain, why would it be lying outside?
He went back for another look and discovered the smashed potted plants under the railings, hastily calling Zhang Shutong over.
Zhang Shutong already had a guess in his mind.
He simply half-knelt on the ground, having Old Song hold the flashlight while he pushed aside the wild grass on the ground and carefully examined everything. Finally, he found several fingernail-sized pieces of meat fragments near the fence.
He rubbed them between his fingers, the rainwater on his hand turning the meat fragments into a paste. Zhang Shutong sniffed it, then looked back at Song Nanshan:
"Ham sausage."
"Poisoned to death?"
"Yeah."
Zhang Shutong stood up. There was no longer any need to go look at that dog now.
The two extinguished their phones. In the once-again darkened field of vision, Zhang Shutong instinctively grasped the iron railings before him.
A chill shot straight to his bones.
Smashed flowerpots, a poisoned guard dog... When did these things happen? In this pitch-black night, what else had they failed to discover?
And where was the perpetrator?
Zhang Shutong swept his eyes over the surrounding wasteland, then quickly ran to the front entrance of the villa. The lock on the main door shouldn't have been damaged; otherwise, Gu Qiumian would have noticed when she came home.
Moreover, the methods the perpetrator used were all limited to outside the railings, presumably because they couldn't enter the villa itself. The probability of these judgments was almost ninety-nine point nine nine percent... but no matter how many digits followed that decimal point, the probability wasn't one hundred.
So he first confirmed the door lock, then raised his head to look at the villa's windows. In a small window on the second floor, the side profile of a young girl sitting seemed visible.
The faint and distant sound of a piano penetrated the window, the melody melodious, making even the speed at which the raindrops fell seem slower by comparison. Zhang Shutong didn't understand classical music, but he could at least make some deductions from that lingering piano melody—
That must be a piano room, Gu Qiumian probably still didn't know they hadn't left, and just as Song Nanshan had said, this girl was in a good mood today, so after dinner she went to the piano... But Zhang Shutong really had no time now to think about what she'd done tonight. Song Nanshan also walked to his side. Seeing the figure by the window, both fell silent.
"A bunch of animals." Song Nanshan cursed in a low voice. He gripped his phone tightly, his finger already hovering over his contacts, but he couldn't bring himself to press down.
Perhaps tonight Gu Qiumian was safe.
But even if she was safe, having discovered something abnormal, they should inform her. Yet somehow they couldn't bring themselves to do it.
As if making that phone call would make them accomplices in harming her.
"Let's tell her, have her be careful."
It was Zhang Shutong who spoke up first.
But Song Nanshan had his own ideas:
"I'll call her father first. You go wait in the car. Come on, don't be stubborn, you'll catch a cold if you get drenched..."
He didn't know about the murder case, so his hesitation was understandable. And in a sense, Zhang Shutong could understand his feelings—wanting Gu Qiumian to be vigilant while not wanting to frighten her, especially since her father wasn't home these days.
Song Nanshan also had a careful yet contradictory side. Zhang Shutong knew there was no use persuading him right now, so he returned to the car first and once again recalled the details of this murder case:
One theory was: robbery.
Another theory was: revenge.
He could focus his thoughts on the latter now.
And the direction it pointed to seemed already clear.
The dispute on Commercial Street.
But knowing didn't mean they could catch the murderer. How many shops were on a commercial street? Finding one person, or several people among them—how could that be easy?
Moreover, even if they found them, the murder case hadn't happened yet. How should they resolve this hidden danger?
The method he could think of right now was to first find the person who poisoned the dog. Whether this even counted as a crime was hard to say, but at least before Gu Qiumian's father returned, they could have the police detain the person.
Zhang Shutong immediately thought of another matter:
Beyond the murder case itself, there was the impact it had produced.
He remembered that after this incident, Song Nanshan resigned in disgrace.
He had always thought it was because Gu Qiumian's family was too powerful, forcing the school to give Father Gu an explanation by making Old Song take the fall.
But looking at it now, there was more to the story.
First, the matter of Gu Jianhong leaving the island shouldn't change.
Then, in the previous timeline, Father Gu should have similarly arranged for the homeroom teacher to help look after his daughter for a period of time.
Perhaps on December 7th in the last timeline, Song Nanshan had also dropped Gu Qiumian off like this.
But at that time, he wasn't in the car. Old Song might not have chatted about the past, and more likely, after dropping Gu Qiumian off at home, he left directly, thus failing to discover the irregularities with the flowerpots and dog.
And by the time Monday, December 10th arrived and they discovered the girl's disappearance, it was too late for everything.
Zhang Shutong was now extremely irritated by the subtle wording of "disappearance." Yes, perhaps it was Tuesday or Wednesday when they discovered Gu Qiumian had been killed... but the question was:
Which day did something actually happen to her?
This question would determine where he went tonight.