CHAPTER 78: CHAPTER 40: TIME AND SPACE

He Kao initially thought it was a scam call; he never rented any bank deposit box. But he was sensitive to this term because twenty years ago, his father Zhou Du was arrested in the deposit box room of the Qi Yuan Commercial Bank.

So he did not hang up the phone and listened patiently until the end to understand the whole story. The bank did indeed have an overdue deposit box, it was rented by his father Zhou Du twenty years ago.

Nowadays, bank deposit box services charge on an annual basis, with the longest rental period being three to five years. How could there be a deposit box kept in the bank for twenty years?

This must be attributed to the era of reforms back then, a time of fierce competition and rampant growth. At that time, Qi Yuan City Commercial Bank had just been established, and as soon as it opened, it launched many innovative services.

At that time, the slogan was to build a service-oriented bank, aiming to increase intermediate business income beyond the traditional deposit and loan interest margin.

The relevant literature also listed many data points, for instance, how much intermediate business income accounted for a percentage of the total income among some internationally representative famous banks.

The deposit box was one of the most conservative and stable of the many new businesses, but it was also a new concept, and everyone was not entirely clear on how to handle it.

So some people looked for materials, if they couldn’t find ready-made ones, they sought experts to translate foreign documents. Some organized teams for overseas study trips... some business processes were even learned from films.

It’s true, they learned it from movies!

In some movies, someone stored a deposit box in a bank, and decades later their heir came to the bank with the credentials... audiences were amazed that foreign banks had such a sense of contract and management level.

The deposit box service launched by Qi Yuan Commercial Bank at that time even allowed anonymous storage, requiring only a voucher and password to deposit and withdraw items.

Zhou Du did not choose this anonymous service; he rented a deposit box under his real name, leaving his ID number and contact information. He rented it for twenty years and paid the rent and deposit all at once.

During these twenty years, he could come to the bank at any time to deposit and withdraw items from the deposit box.

Such a service no longer exists these days because it may lead to various disputes in practice. Later, financial regulatory agencies also issued management regulations for bank deposit boxes, providing unified normative guidance.

But before the regulations were issued, already handled businesses were hard to deal with, and some could only continue according to the original agreement.

For instance, Zhou Du’s case of renting a deposit box for twenty years in one go and having fully paid, even if the bank couldn’t reach the customer, they couldn’t discard or open it on their own before the agreement expired.

The deposit box rent has increased many times over these years. The twenty years of fees Zhou Du paid back then are not enough to rent for a year today, but the accounts cannot be calculated that way.

This year in the first half, the deposit box finally expired. According to the original agreement, after deducting the deposit, the bank still had the obligation to keep it for another six months and actively contact the customer.

Zhou Du had long passed away, and the contact information he left behind was long invalid. But just recently, someone unexpectedly came to the bank to inquire about Zhou Du’s affairs, and the bank instead got in touch with Zhou Du’s sister, Zhou Yan.

Zhou Yan then provided He Kao’s mobile number, and the bank called He Kao, which surprised him a little.

The things deliberately placed in the bank deposit box are most likely valuables, and this time his aunt did not show any greed.

According to what He Kao knew about his aunt, she might not necessarily covet what was his, but with her usual temper, she would have probably gone to the bank first to open the box and "inspect" it on his behalf.

It seems that last incident scared his aunt. That batch of fireworks went missing, saving the family from a crisis. They did not know how He Kao managed it or where he hid the stuff, the less they understood, the more uneasy they felt.

He Kao didn’t even have lunch on Tuesday and specially took an hour off to go to the bank to deal with the matter, only to return disappointed because of incomplete procedures.

He had to provide his father’s death certificate, and at the same time, prove he was the only legal heir of Zhou Du. If not, he needed the approval of other co-heirs.

He Kao asked the staff, since they couldn’t hand it over to him, why did they call him? The other party replied they needed to follow regulations, notifying He Kao in hopes that he would bring the proper paperwork.

He Kao had none of these documents; he couldn’t even prove he was Zhou Du’s son. Because when he was five, his uncle took him to the police station to change his name, and he was registered in his uncle’s household.

He was later raised by his grandparents, but it wasn’t until he was eighteen that he formally "split up" and was re-registered at the new house his grandfather built, now considered a single household.

Faced with such a matter, one usually needs to find someone, so the helpless He Kao thought of two people. He first contacted Uncle Evergreen, the head of the Pugang Town Police Station, through his uncle He Changshan, and then found Qian Guran.

After a week of running around through his uncle, he finally got all the relevant materials. Including Zhou Du’s death certificate, proof of He Kao and Zhou Du’s father-son relationship, and confirmation of his mother’s disappearance, and even his grandparents’ death certificates.

Even though He Kao was a local, he didn’t have very strong social connections, but he knew how to ask for help. For the first time in his life, he requested his uncle to run errands for him, which felt a little strange.