Chapter 93: The Crime Scene

By the time Township Patrolman Shuwu of Yunshui Village got word and rushed to Willow Tree Hamlet with the hamlet chief and several others, he found he was already too late. The murder scene was a crude thatched hut, a hunter's dwelling, standing at a fork in the road over a hundred paces beyond the hamlet wall.

Tied to a willow stump at the crossroads was a bay horse, and a crowd had gathered at a distance, pointing and gesturing toward the hut.

The hamlet chief raised his two-foot wooden tablet high, first parting the clamorous crowd, and shouted, "The Patrolman has arrived! Make way, make way!"

The crowd hastily parted, and Shuwu, flanked by hamlet guards, strode in with his head held high — only to find a hemp rope barring his way...

This was precisely why the crowd had only watched from afar at the crossroads and not pressed any closer.

Shuwu frowned. The rope was made of several lengths tied together, stretching from a pillar of the hut all the way to the willow stump at the crossroads, set at just waist height. He could neither leap over it with dignity nor stoop to duck under it, and for a moment he was at an awkward loss.

Seeing this, the hamlet chief drew his short dagger, ready to cut the rope and let the Patrolman through.

At once the onlookers waved their hands at him urgently. "You mustn't cut it! That hamlet chief inside had it tied up himself — he said no one is to set foot past it!"

"Hamlet chief? This hamlet falls under the township's jurisdiction. Apart from me, what other hamlet chief is there?"

Annoyed, the hamlet chief slashed through the rope with one stroke and walked with Patrolman Shuwu to the doorway of the hut.

Before they even entered, a faint smell of blood reached their nostrils. Looking closely, they saw a woman's corpse lying face down five paces inside the door, her hair disheveled, her lower body bare, a knife still lodged in her back, blood covering her body...

A few paces further in, on the bed, lay the corpse of a man, bare-chested and face up. He had a knife wound to the throat — the main artery had been pierced, and the blood that had flowed onto the deerskin mat had already clotted...

Besides the two corpses, there was indeed a hamlet chief inside, wearing a red headscarf, bustling about. At that moment, he was pinching off white wall plaster and drawing circles around the two bodies...

"Hamlet Chief Heifu."

The moment he saw the man, Shuwu's face darkened. He demanded, "What are you doing here?"

Heifu looked up, saw Shuwu and the hamlet chief, and rose to bow with clasped hands. "This subordinate greets the Patrolman. I was just riding past the game park and passed by here. Hearing someone shout 'murder,' I followed the sound to take a look. Seeing that the local hamlet chief had not yet arrived, I took it upon myself to restrain the onlookers, so they wouldn't disturb the crime scene."

"Disturb the crime scene?"

Shuwu glanced at the hemp rope at the crossroads and noticed another length tied across the open window. Inside, wherever there were bloodstains, circles had been drawn with white wall plaster...

He was no professional jail clerk, so of course he could not grasp the benefit of such measures. He merely said stiffly, "Since you were the first to arrive, why did you not go after the murderer instead of wasting time here? Doing these useless things?"

"Useless things?"

Heifu found it a little amusing. In his past life, he had at least taken a criminal investigation course, one session of which covered how to secure a crime scene. So he had followed the textbook, enlisting the hamlet headman to help cordon off the entry and exit points with rope, sealing the scene. He had kept the onlookers at least twenty paces from the scene, forbidding them from approaching, to prevent them from disturbing trace evidence and physical clues on the perimeter — the entry and exit paths were best left untrodden, and the doorway and window were absolutely not to be touched!

But one cannot speak of ice to a summer insect. Since Shuwu did not understand, Heifu let the matter drop and instead pointed at the bodies. "Patrolman, please look. The blood on both of them is nearly clotted. I tested the body temperature — most areas are already cold, and faint livor mortis has begun to appear in some places. From this, it is clear that these two victims have been dead for at least two or three double-hours. The murderer has long since fled far away."

This touched on forensic methods for estimating time of death — Heifu only knew the three simplest ones — but spoken aloud now, it was enough to leave the two men dumbfounded.

At that moment, Heifu walked to the doorway and beckoned to a village woman outside, about thirty years old, in a thornwood hairpin and coarse cloth skirt, calling her over to speak.

"She was the one who first discovered the murder. Huan, tell the Patrolman and the hamlet chief what happened, once more."

Requiring the involved party and eyewitnesses to remain at the scene and wait for criminal investigators to arrive was also one of the ways to secure a scene.

The village woman called Huan walked over hesitantly, not daring to look at the corpses. Turning her face away, she bowed to Shuwu, then began, trembling, to recount what had happened once more.

"This woman was called Weihua, the wife of the hunter in the hamlet. I knew her — we often picked mulberries and foraged for wild greens together. Around noon today, I made some mallow soup and wanted to share some with her. I left the hamlet gate and came to her door, only to find it ajar. I called out several times but no one answered, so I pushed the door open and saw her lying on the ground, a knife stabbed into her back..."

Huan's teeth chattered as she spoke — the scene had clearly left an indelible impression on her. And the mallow soup splattered all over the ground by the doorway confirmed her account. After she had cried out, Heifu had ridden over on his horse and taken charge of the scene.

"This woman is the hunter's wife. Then the dead man inside — is he the hunter?"

Shuwu noticed that the room was piled with animal hides and bones, and a bow hung on the wall, though its string had been loosened.

Huan hesitated for a long moment before saying quietly, "That man... is not her husband..."

"Not?"

Shuwu immediately pressed, "Then who is he?"

Heifu picked up the thread. "According to the hamlet residents watching outside, the man is the hamlet gatekeeper, of the Second Grade of Merit."

"A Second Grade holder dead — and the hamlet gatekeeper at that?"

The hamlet chief was taken aback. Shuwu stroked his beard and said, "So that is how it is — the gatekeeper and the hunter's wife were committing adultery!"

In Qin, the punishment for adultery and infidelity was extremely severe. Ordinary men and women caught in adultery were put in wooden stocks and publicly shamed. If the adultery was between half-siblings sharing the same mother but different fathers, the penalty was public execution.

Heifu did not know that after Qin unified the realm, this law would, under the First Emperor's will, grow even harsher. Not only would unfaithful women be harshly condemned by society, but men who could not control themselves and went about seducing married women would also face heavy punishment.

This perhaps had something to do with the First Emperor's early experiences — his mother, Zhao Ji, led an utterly unprincipled private life, not only maintaining ties with Lü Buwei but later keeping the false eunuch Lao Ai in the palace, the two even bearing two children together...

This affair cast an enormous psychological shadow over Qin Shi Huang, so after unifying the realm, the punishment for adultery was further strengthened: "A husband who is a stray boar may be killed without penalty." The term "stray boar" referred to a boar that sneaks into another's home to breed — meaning that if a man burrowed into another man's bed like that boar, killing him carried no liability; anyone could slay him with impunity.

Of course, things had not yet reached that point. Killing was still against the law, let alone two deaths in succession, one of them a hamlet official.

Shuwu pondered for a moment, then slapped his head. "I have it! It must be that the hunter came home, discovered his wife in adultery, and in a rage killed them both before fleeing! That must be it!"

With that, he was about to send men to arrest the hunter.

Heifu said, "The hunter is indeed a major suspect. However, according to the hamlet residents, he often goes up the mountain to hunt and stays away for days at a time. I have already asked the hamlet headman to go look for him..."

Shuwu found that everything he needed to do had already been done by this Heifu, and he could not help feeling deeply displeased. But in front of the crowd, he could not show it.

Just then, another commotion arose from the crowd outside. It turned out that the jail clerk the county tribunal had stationed in the township had arrived.

The jail clerk was the equivalent of a later-era bailiff-cum-coroner, specially trained, and required to appear at every murder case. The one who came was no stranger — he was Xi's right-hand man, the man Heifu had dealt with before: Nu.

Frowning, Nu entered the hut and greeted everyone. He had already seen the cordon rope outside, and once inside, he noticed the white circles drawn on the ground. He could not help asking, "Who took these measures?"

Shuwu secretly gloated, thinking that this Heifu had not only overstepped his authority by throwing his weight around in the hamlet chief's jurisdiction, but had even gone on about "securing the crime scene," tying ropes at random, and drawing circles of unknown purpose on the ground.

In all the cases he had handled, he had never once seen a jail clerk do such things.

So Shuwu pointed gleefully at Heifu and said, "Jail Clerk, it was all done by this Hamet Chief Heifu. I have no idea why he did it either."

Nu looked at Heifu, and his face lit up with delight. He praised loudly, "Well done!"

PS: A little late.

(End of chapter)