When Fiona Bennett tried hard to imagine these stories, to picture herself stepping into them and experiencing everything firsthand, even though she couldn’t become a detective, she did manage to get closer and closer to another main character in the story. Yes, she was becoming more and more afraid of those murderers, as if she could smell the stench of a belly being cut open, as if she could see the deep marks left by a scarf tightening around a neck, as if she could hear the metallic scraping of a blade against bare bone. The faint sound of footsteps could rise up behind her at any moment—the feeling of being accompanied by the killer. Fiona Bennett thought, maybe it was because she had really experienced something like this herself.

“It’s useless to read these,” Gabriel Adams said.

“There can’t be that many cruel and twisted cases in real life, right?” Fiona Bennett asked.

“People in real life are even more complicated than those in novels.” Gabriel Adams glanced at her.

“How’s the investigation going?”

“Your friend isn’t quite what you think.”

Other than confirming the time and place for this meeting, the two of them hadn’t been in touch at all during the previous week. For Fiona Bennett, after Frank Bishop burned those letters, she fell into a state of inner conflict. Should she keep going or not? She felt a kind of wavering she didn’t want to admit. On one hand, she started reading a lot of detective novels, seeing how the famous detectives in the books solved cases; on the other hand, she hadn’t actually started to carefully comb through her own memories from back then, or to piece together clues about Susan Wright’s death. She wanted to wait and see what Gabriel Adams could find out. She had a fleeting thought about herself: just a useless bystander.

Gabriel Adams hoped Fiona Bennett would stay away from this matter; he wanted her to be a bystander. If it wasn’t a question she absolutely had to ask, he’d rather go through the trouble of investigating it himself. Just as sometimes a kiss is for saying goodbye, and only after a hug can people move forward, he was making Fiona Bennett face the nightmare from nine years ago again so that she could be free of it forever. So, if possible, he would step into this nightmare himself, and she could just stay outside.

The meeting place was a small café tucked away in an alley off Julu Road. Gabriel Adams had said, “Find somewhere quiet and sunny near your home,” so Fiona Bennett chose this spot. It had only been open for less than a year, and there were always just a few customers; Fiona Bennett had been a few times and had never seen it full. The original garden had been half-enclosed with glass, connecting it to the shop, and the bamboo outside the glass, along with a few pots of Dieffenbachia inside, gave the whole place a semi-outdoor feel. Usually, in the afternoons, they had to cover half the roof to keep out the sun, but today it wasn’t necessary—it was overcast.

“I looked into Susan Wright’s family situation. It’s not very good.”

“Not good?” Fiona Bennett didn’t react at first, and said awkwardly, “Did her parents run into trouble? Ah, all these years… I really should go visit them.”

Although Fiona Bennett had considered Susan Wright a close friend, their friendship had only lasted a few short months and hadn’t extended to their families. That flute was the only time she’d ever interacted with Susan Wright’s father.

“Her family lived in the old shantytown.”

It was like a crack suddenly splitting open a vast ice field.

That old street was a small neighborhood in Shanghai’s Yangpu District, but probably no one in Shanghai hadn’t heard of it. That street meant a chaotic, murky jungle—especially for a girl like Fiona Bennett, it was a place whose very name made her want to cover her nose and avoid it. She’d heard many legends about the old street, like how no outsider could pass through it unscathed. In Fiona Bennett’s mind, everyone who lived there, regardless of gender or age, was a hooligan. It was the holy land of Shanghai’s underworld, and anyone who came out of there was a big shot among the city’s troublemakers.

How could a place like that have anything to do with Susan Wright? How could she have lived there?

“Her father drove a taxi, her mother was chronically ill, and she had an older sister who died of illness in high school. The family was always struggling.”

Fiona Bennett looked at Gabriel Adams, realizing he couldn’t be lying to her. Then, the image she’d built up in her heart collapsed with a crash. It was her who had been lying to herself all along.

She had always thought Susan Wright was from a good family—well-off, well-mannered, with cultured, perhaps even scholarly, ancestors. But it turned out to be the shantytown.

True, Susan Wright had never claimed to be from a privileged background, but she would occasionally talk about how to tell the quality of agarwood, how troublesome it was to care for rosewood furniture, or how a white jade pendant needed to be soaked in a bowl of water if it wasn’t worn for a long time. These fragments could easily be pieced together into a picture of a family with deep roots. Susan Wright would do medical trials to earn money, but she also told Fiona Bennett that she sponsored two children from poor mountain areas in Guizhou to go to school, and the amount she spent on that was almost equal to what she earned from the trials. Susan Wright also said that in a few years, during summer vacation, she wanted to bring those kids to Shanghai for a trip, and she’d invite Fiona Bennett to join them. She often mentioned street names like “Huashan Road,” “Fuxing Road,” “Wukang Road,” as well as “Jing’an Bakery,” “Red House,” and “Majestic Theatre.” Once, she even brought a baguette from Marco Polo Bakery for Fiona Bennett to try, which made Fiona Bennett always think that Susan Wright lived in the “upper corner” of the city, probably in a big house with a garden.

So, all of this was fake.

Fiona Bennett simply couldn’t understand why someone would go to such lengths to package herself like this. Was Susan Wright really that vain?

So what else about her was fake? What was real? What about their friendship?

In an instant, Fiona Bennett realized she didn’t know this person at all.

As for the other side of Susan Wright, Gabriel Adams didn’t go into much detail, because he had only pulled up her file from the police system and hadn’t had time to look deeper. Besides, there was no sign that Susan Wright’s family situation was connected to her death.

In addition, during the week, Gabriel Adams had also visited the medical school and showed Fiona Bennett a photo. The photo was a close-up of a pine tree trunk, with a tree hollow. It was the tree hollow mentioned in the first letter, the “mailbox” first used by the two murderers. According to the letter, Gabriel Adams found it without much trouble. Of course, after nine years, there was no trace left inside.

The tree hollow wasn’t really a clue, just a confirmation. But the dorm supervisor, who still worked in the same building, provided a strange piece of information—who knows how Gabriel Adams got her to talk. Two days before Susan Wright’s incident, or rather, in the early morning of the 25th, just after 4 a.m., she woke up and noticed a light outside the building. In December, it was still pitch dark at that hour. She went out and saw someone crouched outside burning a brazier, which made the hair on her neck stand on end. That person was Susan Wright, squatting there in silence, not responding to the supervisor’s questions, just carrying the brazier back inside. The fire was almost out, and as she picked it up and walked into the hallway, it suddenly went out, and she disappeared into the shadows. The whole thing was so ominous, and with Susan Wright’s incident happening two days later, the supervisor couldn’t help but wonder, every time she thought back on it, whether what she saw that night was really Susan Wright herself, or her soul leaving her body, holding a pre-death ritual for herself.

Fiona Bennett naturally couldn’t make sense of all the information behind these events. She just listened as Gabriel Adams slowly filled in the details from that period. She had clearly lived through it all, but knew nothing about any of it. Now, hearing it, she felt as if she were stepping into a strange new world. No, it was more like stepping into the world’s shadow. When you walk, you don’t pay attention to your own shadow—you just assume it follows you, nothing unusual. But now, she realized that within the countless black dots making up her shadow, there were too many secrets hidden.

“Have you ever thought about what kind of poison Susan Wright’s symptoms might have been caused by?” Gabriel Adams asked Fiona Bennett. It was the first time he’d asked her a question that day. Fiona Bennett wasn’t prepared, and hesitated for a moment. She really hadn’t thought the question through.

“I asked our forensic doctor.” Without waiting for Fiona Bennett’s answer, Gabriel Adams continued, unconcerned.

“I told him about some of Susan Wright’s chronic symptoms. He said it’s hard to say, but the most likely causes are neurological diseases or immune system disorders. I asked, if it was poisoning, what were the possibilities? He said the first thing to consider would be heavy metal poisoning, like lead, mercury, or arsenic.”

Fiona Bennett nodded, then realized that what Gabriel Adams was saying was actually just common knowledge—she should have been able to figure it out herself. It was just that this once-familiar knowledge had rusted and hardened from disuse. She tried to search her memory, then said, “It really does sound like heavy metal poisoning. If it had been suspected at the time, it could have been detected with a urine test. But now, after so many years, I’m not sure if anything could be found in the ashes. Still, if it really was heavy metal poisoning that killed her, most of it would have seeped into the bones, so there should be trace amounts left in the ashes—it just depends on the sensitivity of the equipment.”

“At this point, it’s not the right time to ask the family to re-examine the ashes. Once we have more information, I do plan to visit her father. Next, I’ll try to check which hospitals Susan Wright stayed in at the time. Since she suspected poisoning, she must have had some tests done.”

“Yes, yes, she must have checked everything herself.” Fiona Bennett nodded a few times, then hesitantly asked, “But if she already checked everything, then she probably didn’t find anything, right?”