SILENT READING: Chapter 52 – Humbert Humbert Nineteen

Chapter 52 Humbert Humbert Nineteen

TL: Cici, Editor: IsaLee

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Synopsis: The reason that only Fei Du could make her talk was not that he was an experienced problematic teenager, but because only Fei Du treated her with the right attitude when they arrested Su Luozhan.

Even if Fei Du suddenly became stupid, illegally drove a car with a lead foot in the downtown area, got arrested by Luo Wenzhou personally, and got locked in a small dark house, it would sound more normal than what he just said.

Luo Wenzhou’s temples throbbed wildly. The overloaded CPU just cooled down a bit, but it seemed to heat up again. The offer was received in April. Even if Fei Du was wealthy, had a lot of social connections, and was able to speak louder than others, he must have started preparing for this last year.

Why?

Did he wake up one day and suddenly become wrapped up in academic research? Was he so fed and had nothing to do? Did he do this in order to get closer to Tao Ran? Or was he suddenly tired of this filed-with-the-stink-of-money world?

At the time, probably because it was a little bit crowded downstairs, a photo held by a middle-aged woman was accidentally knocked out. She reached out for it at once, but a gust of wind just blew over and rolled the old photo even farther. This was clearly just an inessential accident, but for someone who was sensitive enough and vulnerable, it seemed to imply something. The woman suddenly collapsed, squatted on the ground and burst into tears.

The hoarse and sharp wailing rose steeply and slid through the window slit in the corridor. In this disturbing clamour, a forensic technician jogged towards them: “Captain Luo, the test results of the sample you sent yesterday have come out. The blood on the strip belongs to Qu Tong!”

Luo Wenzhou breathed hard and stared at Fei Du for a while, then went to Director Lu’s Office without a word.

Twenty minutes later, Fei Du walked into the temporary detention room for Su Luozhan with two boxes of ice cream, and put them on the small table in the room: “Would you like to have some? Which flavor do you prefer?”

Su Luozhan stared at him and hesitated for a moment, then pointed at the strawberry one.

Fei Du gave her the strawberry one and picked up the other box for himself. Then he took out a pair of headphones from his pocket and inserted it into his mobile phone. He then opened a football game, crossed his legs, and took a bite and watched, totally ignoring her.

The two of them sat there and were relatively silent for a while. In the beginning, Su Luozhan was quiet and did not make any eye contact with him. Halfway through the ice cream, however, she found that he still had no intention of talking, and finally could not help but squint at Fei Du. Her eyes swept over Fei Du’s shirt and his cell phone, and finally fell on his wrist on the table.

Sue Luozhan tilted her head and sized up his watch for a moment. Her toes knocked twice on the ground: “Is your watch genuine?”

Fei Du, who probably had not heard her, did not respond at all.

Su Luozhan waited for a while, stretched out a finger across the table, and gently knocked twice next to his mobile phone.

Fei Du finally noticed her and pulled out one of the earphones: “What?”

The volume of his mobile phone was very loud. They could hear the commentator’s screaming leaking out of the headphones in the quiet room.

Su Luozhan held a corner of the plastic spoon in her mouth: “What are you doing here? Are you not going to interrogate me?”

“Oh, my colleagues are busy, so they let me take care of you for a while.” Fei Du seemed to be reluctant to move his eyes off the screen of the phone, so his eyes only stayed on her for a second before moving back to the game. And he answered her very absentmindedly.

When people kept asking her questions, the girl just feigned ignorance, but when someone was not interested in her, she seemed to feel unwilling to be ignored.

In the beginning, Su Luozhan just kept glancing at Fei Du all the time. After she finished the ice cream, she ended up just staring at him and took the initiative to ask: “Are you also a policeman?”

Fei Du replied lazily: “Intern.”

“Are interns very rich?” Su Luozhan raised her eyebrow like an adult. “Your watch seems to be quite expensive. Is it genuine or fake?”

Fei Du seemed to find her words funny. He first raised his eyebrows in surprise, and then he could not help but laugh out loud: “You even know what ‘fake’ is. Little girl, who taught you this?”

Su Luozhan’s expression turned grim all of a sudden. Obviously, she was offended by his scornful attitude of teasing children.

She knew this left-arm-injured man. When they were in the old house, he also treated her like this. It seemed that he did not believe in what she could do, nor did he believe that she could threaten anyone.

When people found out that they deceived others, they were often proud. However, this kind of pride was not sustainable, because the focus of “playing pigs and eating tigers” was often in the “eat tiger” step. It was certainly not a pleasure to play pigs, especially be treated as a pig.

Su Luozhan bit her lips and carefully assessed whether this guy was really not interested in her, or was just pretending. After a while, she could not help but put down her bait. She replied: “Those uncles taught me.”

Fei Du hesitated for a while, but he did not ask, “Who are those uncles?” Instead, he coaxed her in a pitiful manner: “It will be fine, don’t worry.”

This attitude made Su Luozhan feel like stamping in the air—she could not help but ask again: “Do you mean that I won’t be punished?”

“I mean, no more bad guys will hurt you. As for how to deal with you, that remains to be discussed, but your problem is not serious, and you are still young, you have no criminal liabilities. I guess you will be subject to detention education.” Fei Du considered it for a while, and finally stopped his damn ball game. It seemed that he finally remembered his “police” duties. He looked at the girl with his beautiful eyes, but what he said to her were a bunch of clichés. “Kids like you always don’t know how to protect yourself. So you are used by the bad guys and still don’t know what’s going on. Kid, the past things have passed. After you leave this place, you should study hard—don’t think so much about this. You still have a long way to go…”

Sitting in front of the monitors, Tao Ran had already taken a nap when Fei Du and the girl were wasting time in silence. Right after he woke up, he heard this long sentence and promptly rubbed his eyes: “My God, this is Fei Du… Listen to this cliche! I thought it was you!”

Luo Wenzhou kicked his chair.

Tao Ran got on his feet, wiped his face, and listened to the verbose and pointless speech for a while, then smiled: “The two of you have not quarreled recently, good.”

Luo Wenzhou replied: “What do we quarrel for?”

“Who knows?” Tao Ran grinned. “You don’t remember when you two had a go when you met at the entrance of the Huashi Sub Bureau and were furious all the way back? You even asked someone to give him a ticket.”

Luo Wenzhou: “…”

“I told you,” Tao Ran sighed, still habitually acting as a peacemaker. “Fei Du is really nice. You do him some good, he will give you ten times of goodness in return silently. Although he occasionally makes you angry, he doesn’t really care about a lot of things. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have let us go that easily when his sports car was damaged.”

When Tao Ran finished speaking, he expected a sneer from Luo Wenzhou. Luo Wenzhou, however, did not say anything for a while and just briefly replied, “Hmm.”

Tao Ran: “…”

What on earth happened recently? Why was the world changing every day?!

At this time, Suo Luozhan in the screen suddenly got on her feet. She bent forward, almost laid on her stomach on the small table, and interrupted Fei Du’s ideological education with her body language.

Su Luozhan whispered: “You think I was only being used by someone?”

“Xu Wenchao has been arrested,” said Fei Du sternly. “Although there are still some problems that are not clear, they should be sorted out soon.”

Su Luozhan grinned in a mystic manner.

“If you are willing to identify him, of course…” On these words, Fei Du paused deliberately, then he shook his head and laughed. “Forget it, what good will that do? Do you want to eat anything else? I can ask someone to buy it.”

Su Luozhan ignored his question and asked: “Why can’t I identify him?”

“Because you are a kid,” Fei Du airily said. “Kids are not able to provide evidence. This is a very serious case. Even if you identify him, they will not take it seriously. Even if they do take it seriously, they can’t let you go to court. Little girl, there is only one thing I still have to say: however scared you are, it is not right to hurt other children. At that time, you had a chopper in your hand. Do you know how dangerous it is? If you made a small mistake…”

Su Luozhen suddenly interrupted him: “Perhaps the truth is, I made a mistake so that I couldn’t kill her?”

Fei Du looked down at her and seemed to be stupefied.

Su Luozhan kept playing with a small lock of her hair with a finger and was looking at him with a grin. She was like a hunter who just threw out a bait, and was waiting for the prey to swallow it.

Fei Du’s face seemed to be “serious” now. He pushed his mobile phone aside, and stared at Su Luozhan in a solemn sitting gesture: “I know that it is very difficult for some injured children to convince themselves that they are victims. You may mistakenly believe that only bad guys are very cool, only bad people are capable of doing things, and the victims are weak, stupid and deserving. Sometimes they even blindly imitate those who do bad things, but…”

“The victims are weak, stupid and deserving.” Su Luozhan made a face at him. “Like sheep, they only scream. They are dull and stupid. They only scream when you touch them, and they die immediately if you kill them. They have no value to live at all.”

Fei Du frowned and stared at Su Luozhan angrily: “How can you think of them like this!”

From the time he had treated her as a stupid child and was trying to “educate” her, Su Luozhan had sullen anxiety in her heart. She wished she could tear his gentle face. Only until that moment, when she saw him get shocked and angry, did the anxiety ease a little, and she felt pleasure for no apparent reason.

“I won’t be sentenced anyway, right?” Su Luozhan looked at Fei Du triumphantly. “The lambs are really stupid. They believe everything you say. You approach them once, then they will treat you as a friend, and they will follow wherever you go … haha, I’m going to laugh to death.”

“Su Luozhan,” Fei Du’s lips trembled slightly. “Don’t you speak nonsense!”

Su Luozhan didn’t have the chance to see what expressions Qu Tong’s parents wore after they received the recording. Just imagining it already made her itchy. At this time, she automatically grafted the pain and intolerance of the young “police officer” to her imagination. Her eyes lit up with excitement.

“I didn’t talk nonsense,” she kicked the ground with her toes lightly and innocently. “This is what my mother taught me. She said that when other animals are in danger, they either fight or run away. Only lambs are different — they will only get scared and lose their courage, and then stand still in the same place, following whoever called them. But my mother is also a lamb, very stupid as well. I peeked through her diary. When she was as old as me she also got scared and lost her courage, and since then she dared not even leave her signature.”

Fei Du: “… What signature?”

Su Luozhan reached out a hand delightfully, imitating a telephone receiver, and put it beside her ear: “Because the ‘knight’ who protected her died, she would never dare.”

“Knight?”

“Nauseating, isn’t it?” Su Luozhan smiled scornfully. “In fact, it’s just a ‘diner’ who had a relatively close relationship. People in our family hunted for living. Except for catching ‘lambs’, my mother could do nothing. And when she got old, she couldn’t even do her business. She could only rely on me to support her … hah, finally she’s dead.”

“… Enough, stop,” Fei Du struggled to speak,. “How old are you?”

“I learnt it when I was seven years old,” Su Luozhan grinned at him happily. “My mother entertained the guests with the lamb I caught, and sometimes let me accompany the guests out to ‘hunt’. And when they finished eating, they took the lamb home. The guests do not have to worry about the rest of it — she will take care of them herself. This is a technique she learned from her mother. ”

In front of the monitoring screen, Luo Wenzhou jumped to his feet: “Go investigate Su Xiaolan’s drunkard mother!”

Lang Qiao, who just came in, heard the command and ran out without looking back.

Tao Ran’s drowsiness completely disappeared: “What does she mean? That kid said that Su Xiaolan’s mother was the procuress of a child prostitute and Wu Guangchuan was just her guest? And why did she keep silent when we asked her questions? Fei Du didn’t ask her any questions at all and she just told him herself?”

“You treated her like a suspect, with the attitude of the police,” Luo Wenzhou kept his eyes on the screen and said softly, “Fei Du treated her as a ‘naive child’ with the attitude of a ‘parent’, so she automatically wanted to send him a ‘recording’.

Only Fei Du could make her talk, not because he had more experience as a troublesome teenager, but because when they arrested Su Luozhan, only Fei Du used the “correct” attitude.

“Impossible,” Fei Du jumped to his feet. He bumped into a small wooden table accidentally. It “slammed” and landed heavily on the ground. “The killer was Wu Guangchuan, who died after he was stabbed by the victim’s family member, and those cases never happened again … ”

Saying this, he suddenly stopped and opened his eyes wide as if he was thinking of something horrible.

“It happened, but you just don’t know.” Su Luozhan admired his expression, “That uncle deserved it. My mother liked him, but he was also a scumbag. My mother could not satisfy him — he still liked those stupid lambs. She was so jealous that she went mad, so she invented a ‘funny’ signature.”

Fei Du asked: “You and Xu Wenchao have the same relationship?”

“No!” Su Luozhan called out discontentedly and said scornfully, “What is he? Is he worth it? He is at best a temporary cleaner!”

Fei Du suddenly raised his voice: “Then why do you send recordings to Qu Tong’s home?!”

Su Luozhan hugged his arms to her sides with a smile.

“It’s fun,” she said.

“Boss! Su Xiaolan’s mother’s name was Su Hui. She worked for a short period in the early years, and when the company went bankrupt, she became unemployed and addicted to alcohol at home. She ran a ‘Mahjong Club’ and had a second-hand truck!”

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1. Playing pigs and eating tigers: Pretending to be stupid and weak in order to beat someone smart and strong.