Chapter 40

The old woman's violent death, the urns in the cabinet, and the stiff dead centipede in Gouwa's hand. There was no explaining any of it to the police.

Ning Hengtao was taken to the station and spent a long time explaining. All of it was his mother's doing. She had listened to the flattery of a crooked practitioner, and paid a great deal to have urns stolen out of funeral homes, believing it would lengthen her years, and had in fact been making a wedding dress for a demon.

The police found Ning Hengtao's account hard to credit, but there was no evidence tying any of it to him, and the statements of the funeral home staff his mother had bought cleared him, so they had to let him go, and the matter was dropped.

That night's genuine demon-catching sent Ning Shu's following through the roof. That one night alone brought in twenty thousand in gifts.

Ning Shu put all of it away. Her savings were approaching a million now. After the old woman's funeral her aunt made the decision and they bought the flat Fu Nansheng had on his books. He got them a better price again, and it was settled at one million seven, with a million down. Ning Shu put up the whole of it. Her uncle and aunt wanted to add the hundred thousand they had saved over the years, and Ning Shu would not have it. She told her aunt to keep that for the household.

Her aunt was embarrassed about it, and Ning Shu held firm. Money came to her easily and it came fast. She had made a million in three years and that was in the country. Here in the city it would be easier. What mattered now was that the family had ground of their own to stand on.

Once the flat was bought, Ning Shu had a firm in to finish it properly on top of what was already there.

---

Time went by, and the start of term came round. On the first day of school Gouwa rode Ning Shu in on the bicycle Ning Hengtao had bought him. They were both boarding for the first term, but a bicycle made everything easier.

"When you get to your new class, don't run about with the rich boys in the city. Do your work. Your mum and dad left home and came here to work for your sake."

Ning Shu went at him the whole way. "And don't be useless again and go taking people for big brothers."

"As if." Gouwa laughed cheerfully. "No big brother's a patch on my sister. I'll stick with my sister and I'll do very well out of it."

"Hey, red light." Ning Shu had not finished before there was a crash and Gouwa's front wheel went into the side of a black car crossing in front of them.

The two of them went down together. Ning Shu rubbed herself where she had landed and set her teeth.

Gouwa was not much hurt, and he ran over anxiously and got her up. "Sis, are you all right?"

Ning Shu waved it off. Nothing serious. Then she looked up at the car. A Porsche Cayenne, and Gouwa's bicycle had put a dent straight into the door.

Something in Ning Shu dropped. "That's done it."

Gouwa felt it too. "Sis, that car looks expensive."

Ning Shu sighed. "It is. We couldn't cover it if we sold you."

Gouwa's face changed completely.

Then he said "oh dear" and went straight down on the ground. "I'm done for. My head. I'm so dizzy."

"Oi."

Ning Shu looked at him. She had come out of the entertainment industry, after all, and one glance told her Gouwa was putting it on.

The boy was quick, she would give him that.

Behind the dark window, Lu Zheng watched the pair of them performing on the road outside, with their tears and their cries, and the corner of his mouth went up without his permission. As the driver was about to get out he said, "Be civil."

"Yes, young master." The driver understood him at once.

Gouwa had one eye open, and the moment the driver got out he redoubled his groaning.

Ning Shu said quickly, "I'm sorry. We've hit your car by accident. Whatever it costs, we'll pay for it."

The driver could see perfectly well that the boy on the ground was faking, but his young master had given him his instructions, so he said, "The car's insured. Don't worry about it."

Gouwa let out an enormous breath.

Then the driver added, "The fault is yours, though, so there will have to be compensation."

Ning Shu had no intention of dodging it. Gouwa had not been looking where he was going and he had hit a Porsche, and there was no telling how sick the owner felt about it.

Ning Shu said, "Don't worry. We'll pay what we owe."

"That's good to hear." The driver smiled. "My young master is in a hurry just now. If you'd leave us a number, we'll be in touch about the compensation."

Ning Shu wrote her number down and handed it over, and then asked, "Could we. Could we pay in instalments?"

"The young master will be in touch about the details." The driver got in and handed the slip of paper to Lu Zheng.

Lu Zheng turned the paper over in his long fingers, and his eyes went quiet, and then went deeper.

The Porsche pulled away in a cloud of dust.

Ning Shu got the bicycle up and kicked Gouwa. "Nice work. Of all the cars in the world, you hit a Porsche."

Gouwa picked himself up off the ground and dusted himself down, and asked anxiously, "Sis, how much is this going to cost?"

Ning Shu said, "It won't come in under a few hundred thousand."

Gouwa clutched his chest in horror. "What are we going to do?"

Ning Shu slapped him across his solid chest and said, with no sweetness in it, "Sell you off to pay for it."

---

Gouwa rode Ning Shu into the school grounds, and a good many of the other pupils looked at them on the way in. Ning Shu was striking, and sitting on the back of the bicycle behind a good-looking boy she caught the eye wherever they went.

"Sis, they're behind us again."

Ning Shu frowned and watched the car door open.

Lu Zheng got out in a well-cut white shirt, with the sun across his shoulders, clean and easy.

Ning Shu stopped where she was.

Why him? Why was he coming to Jiangcheng Number One too?

"Sis, that's the one with the birthmark on his…"

Gouwa did not finish. One look from Ning Shu shut him up.

Every girl within sight stopped walking the moment he got out. With that car behind him, he had plenty to be good-looking against.

Ning Shu made a cold sound to herself. The sheer nerve of him.

"Come on." She pulled Gouwa away under Lu Zheng's steady look and walked towards the teaching block.

She was not afraid. What was there to be afraid of? Lu Zheng very likely did not remember meeting her a few times as a child, and even if he did, she was nothing to him and there was no call to lose her nerve.

Ning Shu and Gouwa were not in the same class. She was in Class Two and he was in Class Twelve.

What set her mind at rest was that Lu Zheng was not in her class either.

The class were friendly enough, and everybody was talking a great deal, the way they do at the start of a year. That evening Ning Shu went back to the dormitory and met her roommates.

"I'm Yi Qiu. Yi as in the historian, Qiu as in autumn." The plain, honest girl in the checked skirt in the bed opposite went first. "I hope we'll all get on."

"We're sharing a room, so we should look after one another, and the main thing is we stick together," a girl with short hair said. "I'm Yang Qing, and I'd like to be room monitor and do the running about for everyone."

"Fine by me." Another girl, long-haired and clearly good at dressing herself, said, "I'm Fang Ruoyun. I'm from Jiangcheng, so when it comes to eating and going out I'll show you all round."

"Done."

Once they had got to know one another they lay in their quilts talking about everything under the sun, and before long the talk got round to the uncanny, which turned out to interest all of them very much, and they began telling the strange stories they had heard in their lives.

Then Fang Ruoyun said, "Yours are all made up. They don't count. Mine's about this school. You may not know it, but this used to be a burial hill. They flattened it to build the school, and there were a lot of graves nobody claimed, so they dug a pit and put them in the slope behind the back gate."

"And the story goes that three years ago there was a girl in the year above who wanted to go out late. Her boyfriend was waiting downstairs for her. She lived on the fifth floor, and once she got down to the fourth she could not get out, however she tried."

Yi Qiu asked, "What do you mean, she couldn't get out?"

"Well, you come down from the fourth floor and you should be on the third, shouldn't you? She came down from the fourth floor and she was still on the fourth floor. Going round in circles."

"That's horrible."

"It is. She panicked and ran down as fast as she could, ten floors and more of it, and she was still going round on the fourth. In the end she leaned out of the stairwell window, and her boyfriend was still down there waiting, and he'd been waiting half an hour, and he kept calling up to her to come down, and she could not get down at all."

Then Ning Shu said quietly, "That'll be a ghost walling her in."

"Oh. I know about that." Yang Qing said quickly. "It's when you're walking outside at night and you lose your bearings and you can't tell where you are, and you keep going round in circles."

Ning Shu said, "If you meet one and it isn't anything very strong, swearing at it a couple of times or spitting will break it."

"Ningning, how do you know all this?"

"My grandmother reads feng shui," Ning Shu said. "I learned a bit from her. I know a little."

Fang Ruoyun said, "The story isn't finished. Her boyfriend thought she was playing games with him, this late at night, so he gave up waiting and went home on his own. And the next morning they found her body in front of the dormitory block. She'd gone off the building."

Yang Qing and Yi Qiu both drew breath. "Is that true?"

"It came from the boyfriend. He said he waited down there the whole time and he kept seeing her put her head out of the fourth-floor corridor window, and he thought nothing of it, he thought she was messing him about. Afterwards he told the police all of it exactly as it happened, and the story of how she died got wilder with every telling. That's only one version out of a great many."

"All right, stop, that's enough. Let's go to sleep," Yang Qing said. "Any more and I shan't sleep at all."

Before long they were all heavy-eyed, so they said goodnight to one another and went soundly to sleep.