Chapter Text
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It’s almost midnight by the time they finally finish moving all the boxes. Jiang Cheng lets out a heavy sigh of relief, echoing the heavy thump as the last box hits the wooden floorboards, and looks around to see if there’s anywhere available for him to collapse on.
Wei Ying is taking up the entirety of the sofa, one arm thrown over his face dramatically, so he drags himself over and kicks off Wei Ying's feet, quickly occupying the space there while Wei Ying is still squawking indignantly.
“After all the boxes I moved,” he wails, and dumps his legs on Jiang Cheng’s stomach.
Jiang Cheng lets out an oomph as the air leaves his lungs, but he’s far too tired to do anything about the heavy weight on him. “I don’t know what you did, but all the ones you moved were like, stuffed animals or some other light shit.”
“We don’t even have stuffed animals here. Though we should really think about changing that.”
They lie there in silence for another moment, and Jiang Cheng takes in the new building. They’d had to move out of their old office building—something about rats in the wiring and water under the floorboards—and this had been the best place they could find, under such short notice.
It’s bigger than their old place had been. There’s the main room that they’re currently in, which is probably half the size of Jiang Cheng’s entire apartment. So far, they have one desk at the very back of the room, and a couple chairs in front of it—with the thinking that this will be where they speak with clients. The couch he and Wei Ying lie on is a relatively new find (i.e., it’d been sitting by the side of the road when they’d been driving by, and Wen Ning (their mostly paid intern/assistant) had announced it to be lice-free).
Beggars can’t be choosers and all that, and though their PI business is going better than either of them had hoped, there’s no way either of them will be dishing out the money it takes for even a second-hand couch. The last one had had mites.
The back room is a nice addition—their previous office hadn’t had a second room. So far, they’ve piled in a few filing cabinets and a coffee machine (Wei Ying’s husband had mysteriously supplied all of these things, and while Jiang Cheng doesn’t think that Lan Wangji is the type to steal, he’d been suspiciously tight lipped about it).
“What’re we going to do about the toilet paper situation?” Wei Ying asks absentmindedly. One of his legs is tilting back and forth; any second now, Jiang Cheng is going to karate chop him in the knee.
“What toilet paper situation?”
The fact that this place has a bathroom and a kitchen sink is also new, but it means they don’t have to scout out which of their neighbours has working plumbing and make friends with them. Actually, now that Jiang Cheng thinks about it, it’s probably a good idea that they’d moved when they did—over the last five years, he and Wei Ying had slowly but surely worked their way through all their bathroom neighbours, even the ones who weren’t neighbours. Such as the old couple down the street whose place had been a very last minute resort.
“Well, firstly, we aren’t letting your stingy arse buy the TP—”
“I’m the stingy one? Who tried using dishwashing liquid as shampoo for a month?”
“—and there’s no way I’m going to be paying more than you are if we both chip in, so I think we should both buy it.”
“We should both buy the same product that we both have to use? And what’s stopping you from using my TP?”
“I’ve shown up to your house with my own TP, you think I’d stoop to that stuff here? The real question is, what’s stopping you from using my nice, soft, expensive TP? I think we should get a locked cabinet that only we have the keys to—”
“We don’t even lock our confidential files and you want a lock for our toilet paper?”
Jiang Cheng doesn’t think he’s always wanted to become a private investigator, but when one’s entire childhood is spent in one’s father’s private investigator firm, it becomes a bit of a given that you, as one of his offspring, are going to follow in his footsteps. Unless you’re Jiang Yanli, who had taken one look at the dusty offices and terrible interior décor and declared that she wanted to become an architect.
(Jiang Cheng thinks she’d just pulled that from the top of her head of Cool Things To Be, because about two years later she’d tried ballet dancing, and then gone into locksmithing, gotten most of a law degree (to name a few things), and now has finally decided she wants to try her hand at a bakery. He and Wei Ying aren’t complaining, not when they get to try her successful attempts.)
He and Wei Ying, though, had spent much of their early childhood years being babysat by either Jiang Fengmian or Wei Changze, or one of their associates, in their firm, surrounded by reports and people talking about cases.
Yu Ziyuan, who’d come from a long family history of working in law, whether that be as lawyers, judges, or even high ranking police officers, hadn’t exactly turned her nose up at it, but hadn’t really encouraged Jiang Cheng’s career choices either. For a while, he’d tried other pathways, had even been in the police academy for a while and sleuthing on the side, all the way until his parents had decided their children were sufficiently grown and they could head back to their hometown, back to Jiang Cheng’s grandparents.
Jiang Cheng knows there’d been other factors involved, but he doesn’t like thinking about it too deeply. Mysteries of his family are better left untouched.
Their business is now largely consultant work, looking into things for his mother’s law firm that still calls them when they need low-key investigators, because they bear the Jiang and Wei name.
It’s why they have so much on their plate now: there’s the work they’ve just wrapped up for some big case that’s happening on defamation (something something politician sleeping with someone who had not been their spouse), the drug case that Lan Wangji’s department want consultants on, and the weird missing persons case that’d been dropped into their laps right when they’d been in the midst of packing.
Their new office building has insanely cheap rent for a place that’s in such a densely populated area. The building alone has an accounting firm, a bubble tea place, and a massagist. There’s a supermarket down the corner, a bistro, at least three cafes and a handful of restaurants, even a nightclub… Jiang Cheng suspects someone had been murdered in this office, to lower the rent to such a degree.
Or maybe all these places are going to go out of business soon, because the carpark that they’d had to wait around for twenty minutes in just the previous day, at exactly the same time as today, is now almost completely empty.
“Fucking city folks,” Jiang Cheng mutters, circling the parking lot three times before he finally makes up his mind on where to park. The curse of abundant parking spots.
Someone else decides to park right beside him just as he’s getting out, which is awfully strange, because there are so many other spots to park in. He must’ve given some of these thoughts away when he gets out, because she smiles a little, like she’s laughing mostly at herself but unapologetic about it, and says, “Sorry, sorry, I know the entire place is free, but I’ve been parking here for like the last two years. Creature of habit and all that.”
Jiang Cheng doesn’t really know what to say to that. “Good thing I didn’t park in your spot, then.”
“I promise to not have your car towed away if you do,” she says, and Jiang Cheng finds himself snorting. “Hey, are you the new folks in 32B?”
“Yeah, we moved in yesterday,” he says, sticking out a hand. “Jiang Wanyin.”
Her grip is strong in his. “I’m Luo Qingyang; I help run the dance school near the massagist. I have to ask—do you have any siblings?”
Jiang Cheng is an old pro at this by now. His sister has been in such a variety of fields that it’s almost impossible to go anywhere in this city—or the neighbouring ones, for that matter—without running into people who know her. He’d once been in an airport about three timezones away and the person checking him in had turned out to have been a childhood classmate of hers. “You might know my sister. Jiang Yanli?”
Luo Qingyang’s face lights up. “Yanli!” she says, and no matter how many times he witnesses this reaction, Jiang Cheng feels an answering ghost of a smile on his face. “I went to culinary school with her before I dropped out—how is she? Her entrees were to die for.”
Culinary school… Jiang Cheng tries to place her in the timeline in his head of A’Jie so he can properly answer without dropping bombshells on her like ‘she dropped out of law school'. “She left the food scene a few months after finishing culinary school, got married. She's thinking of getting into baking now.”
They’ve entered the building by now, and Jiang Cheng automatically walks towards the stairs, avoiding the terrifying elevator that he’s certain will cause a few deaths and many injuries any day now.
“I’m headed that way,” Luo Qingyang says, pointing a thumb behind them, “but if you have Yanli’s number… or I’ll give you mine, so you can give it to her. Tell her it’s Mianmian.”
Jiang Cheng isn’t in the habit of handing out his sister’s phone number—though he’s far happier giving her public social media accounts—so he nods, glad that she’s taken an awkward refusal out of his hands. He hands her his phone so she can plug in the details, and it’s unfortunate that that’s when Wei Ying decides to show up.
Jiang Cheng hears his whistling echoing down the hallway long before he sees him, and his heart sinks to his stomach as he realises that he’s about to hand him fodder for merciless teasing for at least two months. He glances around; there are no convenient plants or even other hallways for him to disappear into.
Luo Qingyang’s saying something about calling from his phone to hers, so she knows he isn’t a stranger when he texts, and Jiang Cheng nods frantically, accepting his phone back and trying to make the hastiest retreat known to man. “Thanks, I’ll be sure to let Jie know; see you, goodbye—”
“A’Cheng! You’ll never guess what I found on the way here!”
So close, so fucking close. Jiang Cheng barely resists the urge to squeeze his eyes shut or run away, but that’d be far worse. He grits his teeth as Wei Ying saunters towards them, eyes lighting up at the sight of a new person.
“Hello!” he says, far too chipper for a day as dreary as today. “A’Cheng, aren’t you going to introduce me to your new friend?”
Jiang Cheng would like to shove his head through a brick wall, but Luo Qingyang chimes in before he can say anything too scathing for public consumption. “Luo Qingyang. We’re neighbours.”
“She works at the dance school,” Jiang Cheng adds, wanting Wei Ying to know that she’s probably not going to be an immediate bathroom option. And then he remembers that they no longer need bathroom options, and wishes he’d kept his mouth shut when Wei Ying’s delighted gaze turns towards him.
“Wei Wuxian,” he says. “I see you’ve met my extremely single associate!”
Jiang Cheng had been wrong; running away would’ve been far better than having to go through the horrifying ordeal of attempted matchmaking. It’d been easier before Wei Ying had started properly dating Lan Wangji; he’d spent far too much of his brain’s capacity for romantic thought focused on Lan Wangji to care about Jiang Cheng’s love life.
“Your husband is going to be extremely single before long,” he says, glowering at him. “Ms Luo, it was interesting meeting you. Hope I never accidentally steal your parking spot.”
“Hey, you jest now, but when you’ve tried out every spot in that lot and realised that you’ve found the best one, you’ll be just as possessive over it. And call me Mianmian; everyone does.”
“I don’t doubt that,” Wei Ying says. “Jiang Cheng gets very weird about his car.”
“Your husband literally puts clothes on his car and you think I’m the weird one?”
“Hey! It’s cold where the car lives!”
“He parks it in a garage!”
Jiang Cheng doesn’t wait for Wei Ying to reply; he politely nods to Luo Qingyang and hightails it, taking the stairs two at a time. He can hear behind him Wei Ying saying a polite if overly cheerful farewell to her before there are footsteps thundering up the staircase behind him.
Their office is on the third floor. Jiang Cheng reaches it a few seconds before Wei Ying and remembers they only have one key.
Wei Ying has evidently realised this far earlier than Jiang Cheng, because he’s taking his sweet time with the last flight of stairs, smug look on his face. Jiang Cheng should’ve just broken into their own place.
Petty squabbles aside, they do get a lot done. Ever since they started working as consultants for the local police, it’s gotten easier to stay on top of rent and do things other than sneak around outside windows waiting for some idiot to cheat on their spouse with the blinds wide open. (Well, normally Jiang Cheng heads there a little earlier and gets a few snaps of them walking out of the car and inside, but Wei Ying likes to go the extra step and put those six months he did gymnastics to good use.)
“Did they send you the phone records?” Jiang Cheng asks, eyeing the massive backpack Wei Ying is carrying.
He nods. “Dropped them by the old place a bit after you left with the last of the boxes; I put them with the rest of the documents for the case.”
Missing persons cases are normally a bit touch and go—the few times people have come to Jiang and Wei Investigations about it, it’s ended up being runaways. Though there was that one kidnapping, where the kid’s boyfriend ended up being part of an investigation by the cops, but Jiang Cheng still considers it to be at least seventy percent runaway case. It wasn’t the kid’s fault that the weekend getaway the two had planned ended up becoming a hostage situation.
This case, though… they’d been approached by Manuel Santiago, an elderly man who’d seemed to be roughly the age of Jiang Cheng’s own father. He’d come to them just as they’d been moving, and it’d taken them about ten minutes to firstly reassure him that they were not going out of business, but just moving locations.
His nephew Rafael had vanished, he’d said. It’d been the same sort of thing they’d heard before, all the ‘it isn’t like him’ and ‘he’s such a good boy; he wouldn’t run off without telling me’. That’d been two days ago. They’ve barely had any chance to go over the heap of documents he’d given them, or to double check security cameras and phone records, ask about friends and acquaintances… Jiang Cheng hopes Wei Ying hadn’t forgotten to ask Wen Ning to dig into this as well.
“I have to go pick up A’Ling,” Jiang Cheng says a few hours later with a stretch, relieved that he’d thought to set an alarm for it.
Wei Ying tilts his head. “I thought that was just for yesterday,” he says, a question in his words.
Jiang Cheng shrugs, grabbing his coat and keys and phone and snatching up one of the donuts that Wei Ying had forgotten to finish. “I think Zixuan’s got stuff going on at work, and with A’Jie’s new store plans, it’s probably a bit tight for them.”
“Well, I’m always available too, if they need more people.”
“I’m happy to let you stay behind here and do all of the work.”
“I’m telling A’Jie you said that—hey, that was mine! I licked all over it!”
“Gone already,” Jiang Cheng says around the donut he stuffed into his mouth the second Wei Ying’s eyes had landed on it.
He isn’t lying when he tells Jiang Yanli (and Jin Zixuan) that he doesn’t mind picking up Jin Ling. Jiang Cheng’s spent his whole life in the same city as his sister, while Wei Ying had vanished for university for a while, which means that he’s had all the uncle duties he could ever want. He’d thought it’d get easier once A’Ling entered high school, but if anything, it’s stressful to realise that he’s growing up.
He thinks he’s worrying about this far more than A’Ling’s actual parents, who’re strangely okay with the fact that their son likes to spend his time pretending to sleuth and has already solved their high school’s mystery of the strange dripping from the ceiling (the culprit was mouldy food and someone’s expired strawberry milk box).
Picking up kids from schools is one of the most horrendous driving experiences in Jiang Cheng’s life, which is really saying something, because he’d once driven through a snowstorm because A’Jie had been craving jackfruit. He’d probably been more horrified at the price of the extremely out-of-season, imported jackfruit than he had been at the fact that the car had almost slid down a mountain.
He honks twice when he nears the entrance, and then there’re four bodies hurling themselves into the car as one of the teachers starts storming up to them, no doubt to tell Jiang Cheng he can’t honk like that.
“Everyone in? I’m leaving,” he yells, one of them ducking their head beneath the seats to avoid the teacher’s piercing glower as Jiang Cheng peels out of the parking lot at a school-safe speed.
It’s only when they’re halfway to Jin Ling’s home that he remembers there are three other kids in the car. He glances in the rearview mirror to check who they are, and relaxes at the familiar faces.
“Where am I dropping everyone else off?” he asks, knowing the answer already.
Jin Ling exchanges glances with the kids in the back—one of whom is Wen Yuan, Wen Ning’s cousin who lives with him, his sister, and Popo.
After a moment of fierce hissing between the four of them, Wen Yuan clears his throat. “Actually, Jiujiu,” he says, batting his eyes and donning the most teacher's pet look he can, “could we come with you to your new office? We haven’t been yet and—”
“And we’re super hungry, Jiujiu,” one of the other kids butts in.
Jiang Cheng squints at him in the mirror. He’s driving at a snail’s pace so they have time to figure out what they want to do with their lives, and there’s a constant stream of cars behind him blasting them with their horns as they overtake him, which makes it hard to hear what the kids are saying.
“Do you even have money, Zizhen,” he asks, more of a statement than a question.
Zizhen puffs up his chest. “Yes!” he announces. “And there’s that bubble tea place there that everyone’s talking about and it’s apparently right by the corner to your office.”
The other kid, in the prime position of the centre (who Jiang Cheng had seen diving into his car head first, only to get caught up on the roof by his backpack), elbows him in the side. “Speak for yourself,” he laments. “I spent my hard-earned pocket money at that fake arcade.”
Wen Yuan lets out the politest sigh Jiang Cheng has ever heard. “And we all told you not to,” he mutters. “Jiujiu, please?”
Jiang Cheng is not insusceptible to puppy eyes, and he knows they’re milking the jiujiu angle. He lets out a sigh of his own—far less polite, the reason he’d received so many soul destroying glares from his mother at family events—and says, “Fine.”
A cheer goes up throughout the car, and his mouth twitches upwards despite himself.
“What does Wangji want us to even do with his drug case?” Jiang Cheng complains one evening, as they’re just about done for the day. They’re about two weeks into this missing persons case, with no luck. “I don’t think either of us can pull off dumb high schooler anymore.”
Wei Ying sniffs. “Speak for yourself,” he says. “I’m still as spry as any teen.”
“What sort of teens have you been around?”
“I’ll have you know A’Ling told me that he’d spent a total of nineteen hours in bed the other day. Consecutive.”
“Did he not have to take a leak?” A’Ling should get his kidneys checked out, in Jiang Cheng’s opinion.
“Ask him yourself. He’s turning into such a sloth. Just like his Dajiu.”
Jiang Cheng is just about to say that that’s not something his Dajiu should be proud of, when there’s a knock at the door.
They glance at each other, getting up simultaneously to answer it. It’s nine in the evening, and the only reason Wei Ying is still here is because Lan Wangji is still at the precinct, working overtime on the drug assignment. Jiang Cheng had asked him once about how he could handle having a husband who worked such a demanding job, and Wei Ying had shrugged and said that he worked a demanding job too. His passion for his work is attractive, he’d said (or, that’s how Jiang Cheng’s mind chooses to remember the phrasing; what Wei Ying had actually said had been far more graphic).
Wei Ying is near the bookcase, where they keep their baseball bats, just in case it’s actually a robber or someone from a previous case. Not that that’s ever happened to them, but they like to be paranoid and dramatic, to be on the safe side.
Jiang Cheng flings open the door a little harder than necessary, and immediately feels contrite when he sees the elderly lady on the other side of the door. “Yes?” he says warily.
The woman on the other end has a colourful scarf wrapped around her ears, and a dark brown coat that goes all the way down to her knees. There’s a beat-up handbag hanging from her elbow, and her other hand is clutching an umbrella the same way Wei Ying had been holding the baseball bat right before he’d seen their visitor and hastily shoved it back into its nook.
“Jiang and Wei Investigations, yes?” she says, and there’s an accent to her voice that Jiang Cheng should probably try harder to place.
“Yes, that’s us,” Wei Ying pipes up from behind Jiang Cheng. “Please come in, ma’am.”
She waves a hand dismissively, and then places the umbrella by the door. Jiang Cheng can see her taking in the room, and hastily turns on another light. They haven’t unpacked as much as they probably should’ve; he’s taken out the stuff they really need to, but that still means the rest is in boxes piled up in one end of the room.
“Call me Mrs Kazi. A friend of mine referred me to your services. I haven’t ever needed investigators before, so I…” Here she trails off a little, looking lost. Wei Ying has been looking into getting random knickknacks to place around the place, just so clients have something to fixate upon when they’re telling their tales. Her eyes linger on the broken lightbulb that’s sitting on one of the shelves.
Jiang Cheng’s hospitality kicks in a moment too late. “Would you like tea? Or coffee?” he offers, already heading towards the back room to put the kettle on.
“Tea would be nice, dear,” she says absentmindedly. “Black tea, if you have it.”
Of course they have black tea. In fact, they have a veritable mountain of tea, because they each get cut off from coffee three cups in, and have to resort to drinking something. Jiang Cheng nods anyway, and grabs her out a nice, colourful mug that they use to impress elderly women specifically.
He stands in the doorway so he can hear what she’s saying.
“Can you tell us what happened?” Wei Ying’s pulled a chair around the side of the desk, probably so it doesn’t feel as intimidating.
Jiang Cheng watches as she fiddles with a tiny handkerchief, embroidered with flowers. She clears her throat, and begins. “I went to the police, but you know what they’re like. They said to wait twenty-four hours, and I did, and then they said she was probably a runaway, and they’d take the case but she’d probably turn up sooner or later… and my niece is flighty, but she wouldn’t do this!”
The kettle lets out a little noise to let them know it’s done, and Jiang Cheng grabs out a tray and places sugar and cream on it, as well as a little platter of biscuits that Jiang Yanli had brought by.
“She normally comes home late, but she eats breakfast with me every morning,” Mrs Kazi went on. “But two days ago, she wasn’t home. But I texted her, before, and she replied saying she’d go to the little desi market around the corner after work. That was the last time I heard from her.”
Wei Ying leans forward. “The desi store in this block?” he asks, and she nods. “Where does your niece work?”
“The ice creamery. It’s pink and blue.”
Jiang Cheng knows which one she’s talking about. It’s creatively named The Ice Creamery, and has art of a massive ice cream with a chocolate wafer in it—both the ice cream and the chocolate have facial features, and Jiang Cheng would’ve avoided the place entirely when visiting it with his very teenage nephew and gaggle of friends had it not been for the fact that their ice cream is leagues better than the other place.
He’s probably run into Mrs Kazi’s niece at some point. “Do you have photos of her?” he asks, a routine question.
She nods. “I can give you anything you need,” she says as she’s scrolling through her phone. “Her social media, who her friends are—the ones I know of, anyway. The sorts of places she spent time at.”
“How old is your niece, Mrs Kazi?” Jiang Cheng asks, the question suddenly occurring to him.
She looks down at that. “She’s twenty-seven,” she says. “Yes, I know what you’re going to say. Why is she working at an ice creamery, didn’t she finish her studies, is she married? Why is she still living with her elderly aunt? It’s mostly my own fault, you see. My brother—she’s his daughter—her whole family was killed in a car crash when she was still finishing high school, and things… derailed from there. She didn’t wish to continue studying, and… I wasn’t very supportive of this. She fell in with a bad crowd; drugs, you know,” she says it like one would say ‘mosquitos’, waving her hand dismissively, “but she’s been turning her life around, these last few years. She recovered, and we moved here, so we could both have a fresh start.”
Wei Ying gets up, slowly pacing back and forth. Jiang Cheng knows he’s itching to get their board up, to properly map this onto it, but boards tend to freak clients out.
“Okay,” Wei Ying says. “Let’s try to make a timeline. When was her shift?”
“That day it was supposed to end at three p.m. Started at seven.”
“We can check in with the desi market, see what time she came in, when she left. Did she normally take the bus home?”
Mrs Kazi shakes her head. “She prefers to drive. She says it’s cheaper now that she has a parking permit.”
“Which carpark? Maybe her car is still there.” Jiang Cheng leans forward, a notepad in hand to take down the make and model, a numberplate.
“This one, the one in front of this building. I came by yesterday night, actually, to see if she’s still here—her car is still parked outside, but her bag isn’t inside it.”
Jiang Cheng frowns a little. “She parked here normally? Where did she get a permit?”
Mrs Kazi blinks at that. “I’m not sure about that,” she says hesitantly. “I’ll give you all the files you need, if I know where they are. Her computer, her phone… though I don’t know her passwords. You can come to my home and see if there’s anything else in her rooms that may be helpful. As long as you find her. Please.”
Wei Ying abandons the pacing and steps over to her, taking one of her hands. This is why Jiang Cheng will never do this alone, because he’s utterly shit at comforting clients. “We’ll do our best, Mrs Kazi,” he says, and there’s something about the way he squeezes her hand and the earnest determination on his face that makes her shoulders slump a little.