Chapter 10: Cave Vision (1/2)
As soon as I spoke, a few police officers swarmed towards me and pressed on my shoulders.
“Who gave you the permission to be here?” the policewoman asked coldly.
“No one did,” I replied, “I just noticed that he made a huge mistake, and I couldn’t help myself from pointing it out.”
“Nonsense!” shouted the coroner. “You mean to say that I got it all wrong? Hah! Don’t you know that I am the most senior coroner in the country? I do admire your courage, though. I’ve seen more than a few kids like you. You must’ve read a few of those Sherlock Holmes novels and now you believe yourself to be a great detective! Let him speak, Xiaotao. Let’s see how he’s going to embarrass himself!”
“We’re too busy to be entertaining this kid, Dr. Qin,” the policewoman reminded.
“Don’t worry,” he replied. “He won’t be taking up much time. Brat, I’m giving you a chance. Why don’t you tell us why it’s a murder and not a suicide? But I must warn you, obstructing police investigation is a crime. You can apologize to me now and I’ll forgive your impertinence!”
My impertinence, huh? I thought. Let’s see who’s going to be the sorry one in the end.
“What if I get it right?” I asked.
“What? That’s impossible!” crowed the coroner, howling in laughter.
“Let’s say I get lucky, then. What happens then?”
“In that case,” said the coroner, “I’ll step down from the investigation, and you’ll be the coroner for this case instead, how about that?”
The other police officers on the scene erupted into laughter. They each eyed me up and down with curiosity as if anticipating how I would be making a fool of myself.
“Dr. Qin!” The policewoman whispered to the coroner.
The coroner made a hand gesture to tell her not to interfere with this. By the looks of it, he probably had a higher rank than the policewoman.
“Let’s hear it then,” he said. “What’s your theory?”
“Well, I’ll tell you!” I replied. When I was under the old tree where the dead body was hanging from, I noticed a big rock that the deceased probably used to get up to the tree to hang himself. But there was a slight indentation on the grass right beside that rock that was easy to overlook.
“Do you see these marks on the grass?” I said. “It proves that when the deceased was ‘committing suicide’, there was someone else there right beside him, hoisting him up. Have you ever heard of someone needing help when committing suicide? Isn’t it clear that it’s a murder?”
The coroner reacted with a laugh.
“I even thought that maybe you’ve found some important clues!” He said. “That’s just the footprints of the gardener who found the body this morning. There’s nothing to it at all! How about that, brat? Are you speechless now?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “These marks aren’t footprints.”
The coroner fell silent. The policewoman looked at him questioningly, and he finally said, “I remember it now. It was because I left my box of tools there when I was examining the body. That’s all it was, and you thought you’ve found a groundbreaking clue just because of that?”
Unbelievable, I thought. This coroner wants me to be wrong so bad that he’s willing to say the marks left by the murderer were made by himself!
Nevertheless, the policewoman believed the coroner’s explanation. I saw the interest in her eyes for me gradually turned back to doubts. Perhaps to her, Dr. Qin was a reputable and experienced coroner, so whatever he said would always hold more water than what I, a random college student she just met, had to say.
To most people, the indentation on the grass might seem unworthy of any attention, but this wasn’t so to me at all. When I was training with Grandpa, he used to make me drink a very bitter concoction of his that he called the ‘Eye Opening Elixir.’ After seven full weeks of drinking this daily, I suddenly lost my eyesight. I panicked, but Grandpa told me to calm down because it was only a readjustment period that my eyes were going through.
Three days later, my eyesight recovered. But it was far from being the same
A sesame seed in front of me now seemed as big as a plate. I could detect the flow of blood through the minimal changes on the skin. Even the movements of the bees’ flapping wings seemed slow to me. Because my eyes were too sensitive, I had to stay in a very dark room for the first few days, because even the flame at the end of a lit matchstick could pierce through my eyes and gave me the worst headache.
Eventually, I understood that Grandpa was training me. It took a considerable period of time before I got used to this terrifyingly sensitive eyesight and was even able to control it. Grandpa said that this was the ‘Cave Vision’ of the Song family that would be of great help to me when I would solve a case in the future.
With my Cave Vision, I could detect the difference in the indentation that objects of different weights and shapes would leave on a bed of grass. In fact, judging by the degree of wilting of the grass that was pressed down, I could surmise that the mark was made about eight to ten hours ago.
I was observing the coroner examining the corpse earlier, and judging from the marks on the deceased’s neck, the stiffness of the corpse and the degree of pupil dilation, it was clear that the time of death was about eight to ten hours ago as well. That pompous coroner, however, determined the time of death to be more than ten hours ago, but I couldn’t be bothered to correct such a basic mistake.
Unfortunately, others couldn’t see what I could clearly see, and so the policewoman gave up on me and started to order her officers to take me away.
“We’ve wasted enough time,” she said. “Somebody get this boy out of here!”
“Wait!” I cried. “But it’s not just the marks left on the grass! The murderer left some handprints on the body as well. Didn’t any of you notice it?”
The policewoman froze, then used her eyes to wordlessly order the police officers who were restraining me to step back. The coroner, on the other hand, was chuckling.
“Look at him babbling nonsense again,” he said. “I’ve just checked the body with UV light and found no fingerprints at all!”