Chapter 1

While I was helping with the investigation at the police station, I learned a little about the body.

The victim was a woman, but they had yet to establish her age or identity.

Her face had been smashed with a rock.

It was smashed beyond anything you could imagine, like the broken half of a watermelon dropped on the ground.

The body was naked, too.

In other words, the killer had left her with nothing.

Even the clothes she had been wearing had all been stripped off.

Then he had wrapped her completely in a roll of coarse cloth.

Only after that had he hidden her in the abandoned mud-brick house near mine.

That house was only a hundred meters from my home.

People had lived there when I was little, but it had fallen into disuse.

After more than ten years of wind and rain, the roof had long since collapsed.

The cloth-wrapped body had been dumped among those ruined walls.

In conditions that bad, the police had found no useful clues.

They could not even establish where the woman had been killed.

There were no surveillance cameras in our village, either.

As a matter of routine, Officer Li asked whether I had any information to offer.

I thought about it, then told him about the fool.

“What? What rock scissors cloth?” Officer Li looked baffled.

I asked him, “The victim—her head was smashed with a rock, wasn’t it?”

Officer Li paused, but did not answer.

That was as good as a yes.

“Then the killer cut open her clothes with scissors and wrapped her in coarse cloth…”

“Rock, scissors, cloth. That’s the order in which he did those things to her. That’s why the order can’t be wrong.”

At last, Officer Li caught on.

“The fool saw the killer do it!”

The fool’s name was Huang Yue, though not many people knew it.

There was only one fool in our village.

So “the fool” had become his name.

The police soon brought him in.

The trouble was, he was very hard to communicate with. Officer Li came back to ask me about him.

“He can’t explain anything coherently… Could you try talking to him?”

I thought about it, then nodded.

I wanted to clear myself of suspicion once and for all, too.

Officer Li seemed about to say something else, but stopped himself.

I noticed.

A little later, they brought the fool in.

But I could not get much out of him, either.

I asked where he had seen “rock, scissors, cloth”…

He just grinned. Heh-heh, that foolish grin.

I asked whether he knew what had happened in the abandoned mud-brick house near mine…

He not only grinned, but pointed at the spot between his eyebrows.

At the time, we all thought the gesture meant nothing.

In fact, it was just like “rock, scissors, cloth.” We simply did not understand it.

Finally, I lost patience. Almost as if I meant to provoke him, I said, “It’s not rock, scissors, cloth! It’s scissors, rock, cloth!”

He immediately grew angry. His eyes went wide, and he began to shout. “Rock, scissors, cloth! Rock, scissors… cloth! Rock! Rock!”

Officer Li frowned, apparently unhappy with my approach.

But I had my reasons.

“Then where did rock, scissors, cloth happen? Tell me where, and I’ll agree that your order is right.”

The fool gestured angrily, but I could not make any sense of it.

Then an idea came to me.

“Officer Li! Paper and a pen! Let him draw it!”