Chapter Eighteen: Crossing the Line

Kang Ge was confident he had everything figured out, but Yan Xue had not initially seen that angle and was rather surprised that the female employee known as Sister Na could be so unconcerned. It did not take her long to understand, however.

A dead former colleague was merely the subject of gossip. Although many people were too frightened to open their eyes while watching a horror film, that did not mean they truly believed in vengeful ghosts in real life. The dead were not frightening. The living were.

Sister Na soon reached an understanding with two other female colleagues she was close to, and the three of them led Yan Xue and Kang Ge into a small conference room. It was not particularly spacious, but there was a small round table, and five people could just about fit around it.

Once they learned Kang Ge and Yan Xue’s identities and the reason for their visit, the three women remained remarkably composed. They made no attempt to show any concern for Cong Fangfang, who had been murdered. Instead, after taking their seats, they exchanged meaningful glances.

“How long have the three of you worked here? You should have a fairly good understanding of Cong Fangfang’s situation, shouldn’t you?” Yan Xue pretended not to know that these three women were among the more senior employees in the department, so as not to betray the young newcomer called Little Cai.

Sister Na was obviously the most senior of them. She nodded. “Yes. All three of us joined before she did.”

“Then that’s perfect. We’re conducting a rational investigation. We need to understand her relationships at this company, as well as at the company she later moved to,” Yan Xue told them.

After taking their seats, the three women had briefly introduced themselves. Apart from Sister Na, one was Li Ying, who had long, curly hair, and the other was Xiaoyun, who wore her chestnut hair short.

Xiaoyun smiled first. Fiddling with her cuff, she said to Yan Xue in a half-joking tone, “Actually, I’m afraid you may have come to the wrong people. I don’t know anything about the job Cong Fangfang moved to afterward. As for this company, if you want to find someone who was close to her, you’d be better off talking to a male colleague. I doubt you’ll be disappointed.”

“Don’t put it that way. What about Niu Wenhui?” Li Ying said from the side, her tone carrying a hint of helplessness.

“That’s true. Wenhui has a stubborn streak. If she heard you saying that, she might actually get angry with you,” Sister Na said with a laugh.

Xiaoyun shrugged and spread her hands. “I’m not stupid! Would I bring it up if she were here?”

“The Niu Wenhui you mentioned—is she also from your department? What time does she usually arrive?” Kang Ge asked, pretending he had never met her. “Was she very close to Cong Fangfang?”

“Niu Wenhui is from our department. She’s a wonderful girl—good-tempered and decent. She’s just too stubborn, too single-minded. She definitely considered Cong Fangfang a close friend. As for how close Cong Fangfang considered her, that’s harder to say.” Sister Na’s opinion of Cong Fangfang was plainly not very high, but she seemed to have a fairly good impression of Niu Wenhui.

“Oh, forget it. Don’t bring up Niu Wenhui!” Xiaoyun looked as though she were exasperated by someone’s hopelessness. “Those two were a case of one being willing to give and the other being willing to take. Wenhui was willing to break up with such a good boyfriend for Cong Fangfang, then suffer and cry at the office every day, all because she couldn’t abandon that so-called ‘good friend.’ Let’s not go out of our way to play the villain!”

“But after Cong Fangfang changed jobs, I heard she stopped keeping in touch with Wenhui. Wenhui even got back together with her boyfriend. That was a blessing in disguise!” Li Ying sighed.

“Who knows what kind of new job Cong Fangfang found? I’d guess Wenhui could no longer do her work for her,” Sister Na said. She saw through things rather clearly, and her conclusion was uncomfortably accurate.

Yan Xue was somewhat astonished by the three women’s talent for gossip. She had assumed they merely knew everything about the incident involving Cong Fangfang that had blown up at the company. She had not expected them to be equally well informed about what had happened between Cong Fangfang and Niu Wenhui.

“That’s all right. We don’t need to find people who were close to her. We’re mainly interested in those who weren’t,” Kang Ge said, feigning confusion without changing expression.

“People who didn’t get along with her…” Xiaoyun counted on her fingers. “There were probably four.”

“Oh, that’s quite a number!” Kang Ge pretended to be surprised. “Were the conflicts between those four and Cong Fangfang work-related, or were there frictions in their personal relationships? How bad did things get?”

“How bad things got is too subjective for me to say. The conflicts were definitely personal. As for work… given Cong Fangfang’s position in our department, that would have been unlikely.” Sister Na waved a hand, clearly unimpressed by Cong Fangfang’s abilities. “I think this girl’s biggest problem was that she never applied her mind to the right things. If you say she wasn’t smart, that would be unfair to her. But if you say she was smart, she never did anything proper. All she thought about was taking shortcuts.

“When she was still on probation, I was responsible for training her. I heard her repeatedly telling several other probationary newcomers how brutally difficult our company’s confirmation assessment was, claiming that only a tiny fraction passed and everyone else was destined to be cannon fodder.

“I told her then not to spread rumors without evidence. No decent company has an easy probationary period. Trying to scare everyone else away would not make her more competitive. At worst, our department could refuse to retain a single person from that intake. It wasn’t as though we had no one else to choose from, or as though the company had to keep her.

“Anyway, that’s what I told her. But the girl probably didn’t take it to heart. After that, she became rather cold toward me. I imagine she thought I was deliberately putting her down.”

“If you ask me, Sister Na, you’re simply someone who loves meddling. If it were me, I’d let her do whatever she wanted. I wouldn’t waste my breath trying to correct her. Cong Fangfang clearly didn’t come to the company to build a career. Anyone who could be frightened away by her probably wasn’t very sharp to begin with. They would have been eliminated sooner or later anyway, so what difference did it make?” Li Ying’s voice held a trace of disdain. “We all had to survive that stage of being clueless rookies. Everyone starts somewhere. But who behaves the way she did?

“She came into the company and immediately latched onto a single-minded girlfriend to do her work for her. Then she cast a net among all the single male colleagues. She would strike up a conversation with one, and after spending some time with him, once she realized he looked better than he actually was, she’d kick him aside and start looking for the next one!”

“Mm. The man she’s talking about is one of the four Xiaoyun mentioned.” Sister Na pointed toward Xiaoyun and said to Kang Ge, “He was a bit of a fool from our company, a year and more senior to Cong Fangfang and the others. The young man was somewhat frivolous and loved showing off. Whenever he had the chance, he liked to boast that his family was well-off and that he worked only for his ideals and enjoyment.

“Honestly, that sort of talk might fool some girl with no worldly experience. Tell me, what kind of person buys a car without considering value for money, cares only about the badge, and treats a car barely over two hundred thousand as a luxury vehicle? A man who spun the keys of a Mercedes around his finger everywhere he went so people could admire them. And we’re supposed to believe he was some kind of second-generation rich kid? Who would buy that?”

“Cong Fangfang believed it at first, didn’t she? You should have seen her when she noticed the emblem on the key. Her eyes practically lit up.” Xiaoyun curled her lips, not bothering to hide her contempt. “At the time, I wondered whether she would be terribly disappointed once she realized he wasn’t actually rich—and what she would do if she couldn’t get rid of him.

“But Cong Fangfang turned out to be far more capable than I’d imagined. The two of them became very close. After a while, she had more or less figured out what he had in the bank. Then our company hired Big Tree. The moment Cong Fangfang saw the way he carried himself, she recognized the bearing of someone who really came from money. She immediately kicked aside that fake rich kid and started cultivating a relationship with Big Tree. You had to admire that kind of decisiveness!”

“What was the name of the man Cong Fangfang dated before? And this Big Tree you mentioned—?” Yan Xue asked.

Xiaoyun explained, “The man who flirted with Cong Fangfang for a while was named Ai Yang. Big Tree was his successor, Gao Dalin. He’s so tall that whenever he stands up in the office, he looks like a crane among chickens. We used to joke that one tree couldn’t make a forest, and since there was no one else nearly as tall as him, calling him Big Forest would be awkward. Big Tree suited him perfectly.”

“Was this Gao Dalin one of the four people you mentioned?”

“Yes, of course. He and Cong Fangfang had been openly involved, practically a couple. Judging by how serious he was, he seemed to be working toward marriage. Then, all of a sudden, the wife of one of your married male colleagues stormed into the office, grabbed your girlfriend by the hair, and started shouting, cursing, and hitting her, accusing her of having an improper relationship with her husband. And the worst part was that she had evidence. It wasn’t some baseless accusation; she put the proof right in front of everyone. How could you not hate someone after that?”

“So Cong Fangfang really did become entangled with one of the married male employees at your company?” Kang Ge asked.

“Whether anything actually happened between them, we weren’t the people involved. No one can say for certain.” Sister Na genuinely enjoyed gossip, but her attitude was surprisingly cautious. “None of us ever witnessed what went on between them in private, so we wouldn’t dare make irresponsible claims. Cong Fangfang is dead, but that couple still has to go on living their lives.

“At the very least, Cong Fangfang was someone who approached every relationship with her own little schemes in mind and had no sense of boundaries whatsoever. She crossed lines constantly and made no shortage of suggestive remarks.

“When our colleague’s wife came to the company to cause a scene, we were all there and heard everything clearly. Cong Fangfang really had gone too far. And even after the woman came all the way to confront her, Cong Fangfang still refused to lower her head or admit fault. She held her chin high, argued shamelessly, and even shoved the woman. So of course it ended in trouble.”