He had investigated every dead person in Beiping, but there was one case he could never investigate: his own father's.
The nineteenth year of the Republic, late autumn.
A bloated corpse was fished out of the moat. The deceased's pocket watch had stopped at exactly midnight. That same night, the owner of a silk shop was found dead in his own locked storeroom, with the key in his stomach. Three patrons at a teahouse in Liulichang drank from the same pot, yet only one died of poisoning. Where, exactly, had the poison been put?
Detective Pei Xubai pursued the cases one by one, and the deeper he dug, the more he felt that they were all connected by the same thread.
But the case he most wanted to investigate wasn't any of these.
Ten years ago, his father died while on night duty. The coroner's report read, "Sudden death from heart disease." He had pored over it for ten years, memorizing every word, but he simply couldn't believe it.
Wen Shuning, a doctor at Peking Union Medical College Hospital, had grown up with him in the same alley. He investigated cases, she examined injuries. For ten years, they had worked together among the dead with perfect understanding, but neither had ever dared to broach what lay between them.
Until Pei Xubai found a yellowed photograph in the pocket of the fifth corpse.
He knew the person in the photograph.
And he knew even better the man standing beside him: Wen Shuning's father.
In that moment, he understood: some truths, once dug up, become a knife. And the one it stabs isn't you, but the person closest to you.
