Edited by: Lord Immortal
Chapter 7: This Woman is Stupid!(2)
‘I thought it was just an accident. I never imagined it would be a murder!’
After a preliminary interrogation, it was finally confirmed that the deceased was the owner Sun Youcai and his wife Tian-shi.
He paced again, entered the badly burned main house, and carefully scrutinized the corpse again.
For a moment, he picked up a piece of broken tile in the corner, gently poked at the black thing covered on it, frowned, sniffed, and looked at it again. Indeed as expected, he found several pieces of such broken glass, all of which were stained with the same thing.
“Come and see, what is this?”
“The smell seems familiar, but I can’t put my finger on it.” Ma Butuo thought for a moment, shaking his head.
However, Shen Ming was thoughtful. He rummaged around the room for a moment, saying, “My lord, it must have been on the glass.”
Tang Song Nian looked over and saw him holding palm-sized, arc-shaped tiles. On the glass was a half-burnt, half-intact pickled vegetable leaf.
Ma Butuo quickly walked over and took the pickled vegetable leaf and sniffed, “My lord, this is indeed the smell.”
“The wound on Sun Youcai’s head was also stained with it.” Wu Zuo suddenly reminded a matter, and spoke in a hurried.
“Maybe it was this jar of pickled vegetables that broke Sun Youcai’s head?” Ma Butuo was surprised.
Tang Song Nian did not answer the question, but there was also such speculation in his heart.
“My lord, my lord, come and see!” All of a sudden, an official shouted from outside.
Tang Song Nian hurried away and found a young boy of about six or seven years old lying on the ground near a well far from the main house.
“My lord, he is in a coma.” An official picked up the child.
Tang Song Nian took the pulse for the child. His heart suddenly burst, and he cast a suspicious glance at the gray face in the coma. After a long time, he withdrew his hand and asked with a heavy voice, “Whose child is this?”
In addition to the deceased Sun Youcai and his wife, there was one more concubine, Dong Shi and her two-year-old daughter, an old servant couple, and a 13- or 14-year-old maid named Qiu Ping.
“He, he is the son of my madam’s distant cousin. Half a year after his mother asked for shelter, she died of illness, and the child stayed in the manor. In the past, my wife helped to take care of him. Just before, she was busy fighting the fire. At that time, she didn’t even notice that he came here.”
‘Turned out to be a pitible boy…’ Tang Song Nian thought.
Something big happened to Sun Family: both the master and his wife had died. The rest of the people naturally had no mind to bother about this foriegn child. No wonder when he fell into a coma here, nobody noticed.
When the sky flushed a grey dawn, Ruan-shi, who had hardly slept all night, welcomed the returning husband, “You just came back? Has everything been handled properly?”
Tang Song Nian apologized and said, “Did I wake you?”
Ruan-shi shook her head. “How could I sleep without you coming back?”
Knowing her temper, Tang Song Nian rubbed his eyes wearily and whispered, “It was the Sun Family Mansion in the west of the city that was caught on fire. It destroyed the entire main building. Fortunately, the fire was well controlled and did not spread.”
“Were there any casualties?”
Tang Song Nian sighed. “The couple were found dead in the fire.”
Ruan-shi gasped.
People were burned to death!
Tang Song Nian comfortingly patted her on the shoulder, hesitated for a moment, then added, “After the fire was put out, an officer found an unconscious boy near a well in Sun’s Manor: a child from Tian Family, which is a distant relative of Sun’s wife. He was about to lose his life at Sun’s Manor fire accident; in addition, the house was in a mess. So, the boy was left unattended for the time being. Therefore, I decided to bring him back and arrange for someone to take good care of him for a while.”
To be continue
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