The Constable Booked the Assassin Every Night novel · Chapter 7 of 24

Chapter 7: Taken

Shouzhi walked him home across the roofs and down the back stair in his own cuffs, with his bare feet bleeding quietly on the tiles.

Neither of them said a word.

In the lodging, Shouzhi lit the lamp, bolted the door, and set Qinghe down on the only chair.

Qinghe sat with his bound hands behind him and the mask on the floor between his boots.

Shouzhi stood across the room with his back to the wall of the nine.

He had never looked at that wall so hard in his life.

"Talk," he said.

"Will you sit?"

"I'll stand."

"Then I'll start with the list."

Qinghe told it in the voice of a man reading a ledger.

There were ten names.

Nine of them belonged to men who had sworn false oaths at one trial, long ago, for money.

He gave their names in order, the broker and the bannerman and the doctor, and every one of them was on Shouzhi's wall.

The tenth was the man who paid for the oaths.

"Ding Wenbo," Shouzhi said.

"Ding Wenbo."

"You've come to kill the Prefect of Shuangjiang."

"Yes."

"Because you say he bought perjury at a trial."

"Because I can prove it," said Qinghe. "Look in the case."

Shouzhi looked in the case, which lay beside the chair.

There was a seam in the bottom of the pipa itself, and a flat packet in oilcloth slid out of it.

Inside were nine small slips of paper.

Shouzhi laid them under the lamp, and they all said much the same thing.

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