Miss Truth

The Government Officials were all native to Suzhou, among them many a skilled swimmer. Unfortunately, the Pingjiang River was too vast, and where exactly Yin Wanwan had sunk to the bottom remained unknown; the retrieval posed some difficulty.

Liu Pinrang ordered the search to continue, for if the person was indeed Yin Wanwan, as Ran Yan had claimed, then whether she was dead or alive, she was key to the investigation.

"How can you be sure that she is Yin Wanwan?" Liu Pinrang asked in doubt, "Even though Wei Xia earlier mentioned that Yin Wanwan had been violated years ago, and the woman in the cabin just admitted to being violated by Zhang Fei, it’s also possible that Wei Xia was lying."

"There’s Wei Xia’s testimony," Ran Yan started, recalling the two female corpses pieced together at the Government Office, "and another point. Neither of the reconstructed bodies had ever been pregnant or given birth."

"You can tell from the bones whether or not they were pregnant?" Liu Pinrang wondered in amazement.

Ran Yan nodded, "If the person who was violated and drowned all those years ago was truly Yin Wanwan, then there should be birth scars on her pubic bone. According to Wei Xia’s testimony, she should have been at least three months pregnant up until her death, yet the two skeletons we found bore no such scars."

When Ran Yan first saw those two bodies, doubts arose in her mind: one, that Yin Wanwan’s body was not among the bones, and two, that Wei Xia was lying. The first suspicion had two possible scenarios: either the deceased was not Yin Wanwan, or the skeleton found back then had not been submerged.

Ran Yan connected all the doubts and made this bold conjecture.