CH 192

Despite the still of the night, the atmosphere in the detention centre’s interrogation room was fraught with tension.

The fake nurse, Amy Borro, sat in silence, ignoring the police officers in front of her. 

There wasn’t a day that she had cooperated since being detained.

At the beginning, she attempted to use a soundly concealed miniature device embedded in her heel to transmit messages to Mansons’ men. Unfortunately, the police chief had set up a mobile signal blocker on her.

Despite the impressive eye roll to the sky, Amy Borro’s plan fell through.

Later, she attempted to feign serious incapacitation, inducing a false heart attack and shock with a drug hidden in her teeth, hoping to create an opportunity to leave the detention centre through this. 

However, the police chief and the squad under him had ample experience. They interceded in the nick of time, catching her in the act.

Amy Borro almost passed out from sheer rage.

“Do you think the police force is full of idiots? That we’ll be in over our heads just because you worked your brain a wee bit? You seriously believe we’ll lap it all up? Keep dreaming.”

The police chief was so annoyed by her little tricks that he got a female officer and a medical examiner to search her from head to toe with a sensor and medical fluoroscope, scouring every inch.

And thus, she lost all her hidden aces.

Without hope, she persisted in maintaining her silence.

“Bloody hell, I just knew it… She’s still at it!” On the other side of the one-way glass, the police chief swore vehemently, pounding his fist on the table. “Just look!”

A few officers that specialised in tracking people stood next to him, as well as a silver-haired man. 

It was Mervyn White.

After Jack White disappeared from the flat, he followed Eunice’s hired hands from one place to the next, yet with nothing gained from it. Thereafter, Eunice contacted the detention centre where Amy Borro was being detained, and he had followed along in the frenzy, hoping to obtain some clues from her.

However, despite listening in for half an hour, they didn’t hear Amy Borro utter a word.

“Today is one of the better days, actually.” The police chief narrowed his eyes. “She reacted slightly at the mention of Jack White, which is more than her aloof attitude from before. We can count it as an opening.” 

He said this to the communicator pinned on his collar. The police in the interrogation room heard this and immediately gained confidence to start a fresh round of questioning.

One of them was a very skilled interrogator. As though finding inspiration, he asked a few questions in quick succession, and there were two instances that Amy Borro seemed on the verge of saying something on an impulse only to swallow it down in the end.

Such movements, naturally, couldn’t be concealed from the police watch. He swiftly followed up in hot pursuit.

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“Even if—” The officer narrowed his eyes and stopped in the middle of his sentence. “What are you laughing at?”

Amy Borrow shook her head, as if she couldn’t even be bothered to answer. But after a while, she suddenly opened her mouth to speak. “He broke off contact with his foster father long ago, and I haven’t seen them communicate in all the time that I’ve been watching him. As for his birth parents…”

She snorted. “What birth parents would go through all the trouble of finding their kid after throwing him away? That stuff only happens in movies.” 

“What are you getting at?”

“They were never real. It was just to dupe Jack when he was in university; who knew that you guys would actually fall for it too.” Amy Borro sneered. “The trick worked on Jack White because he was on bad terms with his foster father, so it was convenient. But it astounds me that it got you guys. You’re just as horribly naive as that foster father of his.”

In truth, this mockery was uncalled for. It had been no more than a few days and they spent all of it eyeing Amy Borro’s connections. Jack White only came into the picture tonight, so they never had the time to investigate too closely.

But it was also because they were no fools that they could glean the bigger picture from what she said. “So, the so-called birth parents… was a scam all along? To reel Jack White in and keep a watch on him as his ‘parents’?” 

Immediately after, the police officer shook his head, mumbling, “That’s not it…”

How could Jack White have any credentials to merit that much attention when he was just starting out at university? Even designing such an elaborate ruse to reel him in?

Another conjecture, much closer to the truth, sprung into his head: it was more probable that the initial target of the ‘birth family’ that appeared out of nowhere was Mervyn White, to work an angle at him through his foster son, Jack White. However, soon uncovering that this ‘angle’ turned out to be a rare talent even more valuable than Mervyn White, they promptly changed their target.

As for Jack White, the moment he met his ‘real parents’, he was already a foot in the mire. 

Across the one-way glass, Mervyn White’s entire body went rigid.

The police could see it, and so could he. He came to the truth even faster than they did, even.

Thunderstruck, he stood blankly rooted to the spot, but in the next moment, as though a thought suddenly hit him, he turned heel and left.

“Huh? Where are you going?” The police chief blanked, calling out as he strode after him. 

“Sorry, I’m going to look for him.” Mervyn White didn’t even glance back.

“What? You know where he went?” The police chief shouted, but Mervyn White had walked out of earshot by then.

He clicked his tongue and barked into the communicator, “Squad 1 continue the interrogation, squad 2 follow Mervyn White!”

Gales howled in the early hours in the mountain pine forest.

It was a clear, starry night around the detention centre, but thunder clapped in the distance here, and rain came down in sheets.

Mervyn White came to the forest empty-handed and was terribly drenched. But it didn’t concern him; he didn’t even register the rain falling on him.

This mountain pine forest didn’t cover a wide area. It was a distance from the regional centre of Fa Wang District, but it was close to the little white house where he used to live. Back in those days, he would occasionally take a weekend walk along the path outside the backyard to the forest less than two kilometres away. 

The little white house was where it all began. That was where he had picked up Jack.

When Jack was a child, he’d occasionally be vexed by some odd things.

It was truly the troubles of a wee child. Mervyn White was tempted to laugh every time he heard it but, in view of the kiddo’s pride, always did his best to rein it in, tackling them with equally innocent methods instead.

There was once that Jack had stewed in his regret and frustration over something for a good couple of days. Mervyn White took an afternoon to lead him towards the mountain pine forest. 

He said, “If anything makes you sad in the future, just follow this trail to the forest. There’s a secret hide-out where you can cry and yell all you want and no one will hear you, I guarantee it. You don’t have to hold back.”

There was indeed a treehouse in the mountain pine forest. Mervyn White didn’t know who built it, but either way, it was abandoned by the time he chanced across it.

The ‘secret hide-out’, as he had called it, was just hogwash to coax the child. Its actual purpose was to have Jack walk down that trail.

The scenery along the trail was full of vitality and, above all, breezy. After walking to the end of the trail, one’s mood would be significantly lightened, or, minimally, their attention would be diverted from all troubles. 

But little did he know that Jack still kept the treehouse in his memory.

Much later on, when his heart was leaden with unspoken worries, or he was at his worst moments, Jack would go to the treehouse for a while.

However, he didn’t go often, nor would he stay long. As time passed, Mervyn White had almost forgotten about this place.

Thankfully, he still remembered it in the end. 

It was raining torrents. Mervyn White slipped a few times as he clipped up to the treehouse.

When he stood at the doorway at last, slight panic gnawed at the usually-carefree man.

Thunder boomed in the distance—he pushed open the door—and two streaks of lightning cleaved the sky. Blinding white light flooded the interior of the treehouse, allowing Mervyn White to clearly see a silhouette huddled in a corner.

He didn’t know how he had moved his feet, but when he next came to his senses, he was already crouching in front of that figure, reaching out to touch the other in near bewilderment. 

“…Jack?” He called in a whisper so soft that he couldn’t be sure that his vocal cords had even made a sound.

The other man whose head was buried in his knees was shuddering from an unidentified pain, and his knee would spasm every now and then.

Convulsions, bone pain, fever, hallucinations…

Each symptom, clinically recorded, was being played out on Jack White at this very moment. But he was utterly silent. 

“…Jack? Is it very painful?” Mervyn White fumbled.

He checked his forehead temperature, felt for his pulse, and tried to loosen the fingers locked around his arms, then he looked around for a blanket or clothing article to wrap around the other.

This entire sequence bordered on reflex. It was what he had always done every time Jack White fell sick ever since he was a child.

Jack White seemed to dimly pull back to the present under the familiar care, and as Mervyn White wrapped damp clothes around him, he quietly whimpered. 

He knew not the time nor where he was. In his delirium, he was stuck in a day decades ago, burrowed in a treehouse after an argument, spending the whole afternoon there until Mervyn White came with food to lure the little brat home.

“Jack, is it very painful?”

Yeah.

Though he didn’t know why he would be in so much pain either. Physically, and mentally. 

It was just a small argument and no more than that, yet before he knew it, he had been in agony for many, many years.

He couldn’t quite make out what Mervyn White was saying. He only knew that he himself desperately wanted to speak. He wanted to say, “I’m sorry. I regret it, dad, I shouldn’t have argued with you…”

He couldn’t discern if he had opened his mouth. If he had actually uttered a word.

He should have, right? 

Because the person who had come with food to lure him home abruptly embraced him and wept. Saying, I’m sorry, I deeply regret it too…

What was he sorry for? What did he regret?

Jack White was puzzled.

He seemed unable to recall a lot of things. He didn’t even know why the sky had already turned so dark, why Mervyn White’s clothes were damp, why his body was in so much pain, and why… he would miss seeing someone he saw less than half a day ago.