Magistrates of Hell

THREE

From the Wagons-Lits Hotel it was a straight walk of a few hundred yards along the decaying banks of the old canal, to the gray walls of the British Legation, massive in the morning sunlight. Rickshaw men followed Asher and Lydia like persistent horseflies, with cries of, ‘Anywhere Peking twen’y cent! Chop-chop, feipao—’

Asher stifled the urge to shout, ‘Li k’ai!’ at them – go away! But it was always better when abroad – as His Majesty’s Secret Servants would euphemistically say when they were poking around in countries where they had no business being – to pretend total ignorance of the local tongue. One heard far more interesting things that way. And in any case, he, James Asher, had supposedly never set foot in China before. He laid a gloved hand over Lydia’s, where it rested in the crook of his arm, and looked about him with the fatuous smile of an Englishman surveying a country that didn’t come up to British standards of government, hygiene, morals, cooking, or anything else.

But he murmured to her from time to time. ‘This canal used to be better kept up . . . Behind that wall, where the Japanese Legation is now, was Prince Su’s palace . . . There was a lane over there that led to what they called the Mongol Market. The vegetable-sellers would arrive before dawn on market days with trains of camels, and the noise would drive anybody out of bed . . .’

Lydia, for her part, turned her head with a gaze which appeared regal but was in fact an ingrained battle not to squint at a world which was nothing to her but blobs of dazzling color in the brittle bright Peking sunlight. The sewagy pong of the canal water mixed with flurries of charcoal smoke from the dumpling man’s cart, then sharp sweetness as they passed the vendor of sugared bean-cakes. She was longing to put on her spectacles, Asher knew, with a head-shake of regret. There were times when he wanted to go back and thrash the stepmother and aunts who’d told her she was ugly.

‘The Chinese say that when people first arrive in Peking they weep with disappointment,’ he remarked, ‘and when they leave, they weep with regret.’

She smiled. ‘Did you?’ She had, Asher knew, been disconcerted at her first glimpse of it, from the windows of the train from Tientsin yesterday afternoon: stagnant pools around scattered congeries of pigsties, chicken runs, and clumps of low-built houses in the Chinese City. Even here within the towering walls of the Tatar City, and of the walled Legation Quarter tucked away in one corner of it, the impression was of dirt and desolation, gray walls, blind alleyways, and grinding poverty.

‘I was hidden in a corner of a boxcar filled with raw cowhides,’ returned Asher, ‘with a price on my head and fifteen German soldiers on my trail. So – no.’

Lydia laughed.

At the rambling old palace where His Majesty’s Ambassador still had his headquarters, Asher sent in his card and gave Sir John Jordan the same story he’d given Hobart the previous evening: that he was here to look into a remarkable piece of ancient folklore which had resurfaced, for purposes of incorporation into a book he was writing on the transmission of rodent motifs in Central European legend. ‘While I’m here,’ he went on, after Sir John had inquired in a friendly manner about the book, ‘might I visit Richard Hobart at the stockade?’

The ambassador paused in the act of signing an order for an armed detail to escort Asher to the hills on the following morning, his eyebrows quirked.

‘I’m a cousin of his mother’s –’ this was another fiction, though Asher had met Julia Hobart on the occasion of her son’s matriculation from Caius College – ‘and I’m a bit concerned that poor Hobart might be . . . Well, that any letter he sends her now might paint a picture affected by his own feelings. As is quite natural.’

And, his eyes on the ambassador’s face, he saw it: the flare of the nostrils and the way the lips compressed over words that the man would not say to an outsider.

He not only thinks Richard did it . . . but he also isn’t surprised at the crime. He saw it coming.

No wonder Hobart wants to shove the blame off on to that unprovable mass of aliens outside the Legation walls.

‘Of course, Professor Asher. Mr P’ei—?’ Jordan’s touch on the desk bell brought the dapper Chinese clerk in again. ‘Would you take Professor Asher over to the stockade and tell Captain Morris he’s to be given every accommodation in seeing Hobart?’

Lydia remained behind, for tea: everyone in the Legation Quarter was delighted with any new face, and even the married men would flock around an intelligent, well-spoken lady like pigeons to corn. Asher left Sir John showing her around the courtyard – this part of the original Legation still retained its scarlet pillars, green-tiled roofs and the gold dragons on its ceilings – and followed the helpful Mr P’ei down the bare yellow dust of the central mall to the newly-built barracks and the stockade.

‘I swear I would never have harmed a hair of her head.’ Richard Hobart raised his face from his hands, blue eyes sick with dread. ‘No, I hadn’t the slightest desire to marry Holly – Miss Eddington – but for God’s sake, I wouldn’t have murdered her to get out of it! If I was fool enough to propose to her, the least I could do was go through with it, even if I was . . . was too stupid with drink to know what I was saying.’

Tears swam in his eyes. His face was longer than his father’s and narrow. At Cambridge, Asher had been struck by the boy’s resemblance to his lanky American mother. His cheeks glittered with stubble of the same bronze-gold color as his dirty hair, but his clothes were clean, and not those he’d had on last night. His father, Asher guessed, had brought them earlier that morning: the neat gray suit of a young embassy clerk, its starched, spotless collar adorned with a subdued green tie. Young Hobart’s hands trembled convulsively where they lay on the scuffed table of the interview room, and under a wash of sweat his face was chalky. He must have the hangover of the century, if not worse. Asher wondered how much opium the young man smoked and how frequently.

‘Do you recall anything of the night you proposed?’ He had learned that a matter-of-fact tone would often steady someone on the verge of hysterics.

‘Not a damn thing.’ The young man shook his head in despair. ‘Father was having some kind of ghastly whist-club over that night, so Gil and Hans and I made ourselves scarce. The Eddingtons would be there, you see, and I – well, I was rather avoiding Holly. I know it sounds frightful, Professor Asher, but she did cling so, and she was always going on about how much she loved me . . . A bit sick-making, really.’

A shudder went through him, and he pressed his hand to his lips. ‘We stayed down in the Chinese City long enough, I thought, that they’d all be gone by the time I got back. But I must have been wrong about that, because I have a vague memory of meeting Miss Eddington as I came up the garden walk. I was feeling a bit wibbly in the morning and came down late, thinking Father’d gone by then, but he was sitting at the breakfast table with a face like Jupiter Tonans. He practically struck me over the head with the newspaper and asked me what the hell I meant, getting engaged to Holly Eddington. I guess her mother’d sent the announcement in, first thing, and it was in print by noon.’

‘Were you angry?’

‘I was bally well appalled. Well, Miss Eddington was a . . . I’m sure you know, sir, how hard it is to avoid someone here in the Quarter. And the Eddingtons go everywhere. One doesn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. But I wasn’t falling in love with her, as her mother kept hinting. I’d had enough of that at Cambridge – matchmaking mamas shoving their daughters at me . . . Father’d have it that I never proposed at all: that Miss Eddington and her mother cooked it up between them, knowing I wouldn’t remember what I’d said. But she had a ring – the cheap sort of thing you’ll find down at the Thieves’ Market – and was showing it off all ’round the Quarter by that afternoon. It drove me wild, but what can one say?’

‘When was this?’

‘Last Thursday, the seventeenth. Just a week ago. That wretched mother of hers had invitations out for the engagement party the following day. Oh, dear God!’ He sank his head to his hands again and whispered, ‘I didn’t do it. I swear I didn’t do it, Professor. Look, can they get me out on bail, at least? I’ve been sick as a dog . . .’

‘What about last night?’

‘Could we talk about this later, please?’ Richard swallowed convulsively. ‘I’m sick—’

‘You’re going to be a great deal sicker, and this may be my last chance to get any sense out of you for days,’ responded Asher. ‘Tell me about last night. Where did you go?’

‘The Eight Roads,’ the boy mumbled. ‘Just outside the Chi’ang Gate—’

‘I know where it is. Who was with you?’

‘Hans, Gil, and Crommy. We all had passes – for the gates, I mean, after dark. Crommy gets one of the rickshaw boys to take us; they all know the way.’

Asher shook his head, amazed that those four choice spirits hadn’t been quietly murdered in a hutong months ago. ‘Do you remember coming back?’

‘Not a thing.’

‘Or why you came back early? It was barely ten o’clock when Miss Eddington’s body was found, and she’d only been dead a few minutes.’

‘Ten—’ Richard looked up again, his face now greenish with nausea. ‘I say, I couldn’t have got that drunk in three hours! Are you sure?’

‘Absolutely,’ said Asher. ‘Did you in fact mean to insult your fiancée and her parents?’

‘Good Lord, no! Crommy swore we’d only have a drink or two and – well, and a little jollification, just to brace me up for the ordeal . . .’

Asher reflected that Miss Eddington, had she lived, would have been fortunate to avoid a thundering case of syphilis on her wedding night.

‘I swear I never meant to get really drunk! And I was going to go back to the Eddingtons’. But I honestly can’t remember . . .’ The young man turned a sudden, ghastly hue and pressed his hand to his mouth, at which Asher signed to the guard who stood beside the interview-room door. After the prisoner had been helped from the room, Asher sat for a time at the scarred deal table, looking at the shut door which separated the chamber from the lock-up without truly seeing it.

Seeing instead the Trade Secretary’s narrow garden in the jerking lantern-light, the small gate that opened into the alleyway, which in turn led between the garden wall and that of the British Legation and back to Rue Meiji. The alley serviced half a dozen of the western-style bungalows, allowing Chinese tradesmen and vendors of vegetables and meat to bring their wares to the kitchens, where Chinese servants would prepare them for those who had forced their trade and their religion on the country at gunpoint. At night the alleyway was deserted. Anyone could have come or gone. At ten o’clock, Rue Meiji was still alive with rickshaws – one had only to walk down the alley and lift a hand . . .

A known killer attends a festivity at which a young girl is killed . . .

Ysidro, sitting in the window bay of the Trade Secretary’s rear parlor, thin hands folded, like a white mantis contemplating its prey.

How long has Ysidro been in Peking?

‘’Scuse me, Professor Asher?’

The young man who stood in the interview room’s outer doorway had the slightly grayish look about the mouth of someone suffering a brutal hangover. Still, he held out his hand and introduced himself, though Asher had already deduced that this must be Gil Dempsy, clerk at the American Legation: ‘They told me you were a friend of Sir Grant’s, who he asked to look into this awful mess. I’ll take oath Rick didn’t do it.’

‘Would you?’ Asher followed the young man out on to the verandah that flanked this side of the garrison offices, shaded against the baking heat of the Peking summers but at this season blue and chill. ‘Any thoughts on who might have?’

‘It’s got to have been the Chinese, sir.’ Dempsy sounded a little surprised that there might be any alternative possibility. He took a bamboo box of home-made cigarettes from his jacket pocket, offered Asher one and then lit one up for himself.

‘Why would they have done that?’

‘Who knows why Chinese’ll do anything, sir? It’s not like Miss Eddington’d taken out a million-dollar insurance policy, or was spying for the Germans, or anything.’

Asher turned his mind aside from inquiring whether his informant was sure about these assertions and said instead, ‘Tell me about last night.’ Further inquiry as to Chinese motivations, he was well aware, would get him nothing but Sax Rohmer generalities about inscrutable Oriental evil. ‘Why leave Rick at Eddington’s in that condition instead of taking him home? How drunk was he?’

‘That’s just exactly what I don’t know, sir.’ Dempsy picked a fragment of tobacco from his lower lip. ‘The thing is, Hans and Crommy and I were all – well, we didn’t see Rick leave Madame Yu’s. For streets around, you know, there’s nothing but dives, and we were wandering from one to the next. I came out of one place, and Hans said that Crom had said Rick had gone off in a rickshaw, and blamed if any of us could find him. He was pretty capsized when last I saw him,’ the young man concluded. ‘But, drunk or sober, he’d never have hurt a white woman. Not any woman, really.’

Asher raised his brows. Dempsy looked a little conscious and added, ‘I won’t say I’ve never slapped a Chinese woman, Professor. Hans’d have it that the Chink girls don’t respect you if you don’t, but I never found that. Besides, I really don’t care if they respect me or not.’ He shrugged, uncomfortable despite his words.

On the parade ground beyond the verandah, an officer’s whistle shrilled out a signal to a troop of khaki-clad Durham Light Infantry, whose every stride kicked up small clouds of yellow dust.

‘Do you think Hobart actually proposed to Miss Eddington?’

Dempsy gave the matter some thought. ‘He could have,’ he said at last. ‘Please don’t think Rick gets hammered like that every night of the week, sir. His pa keeps him pretty busy. And anyone in the Quarter’ll tell you, he won’t drink at those little parties they’re always throwing here, where everybody sips sherry and talks about Back Home. But about three times since he’s been here, we’ve gone down to the Eight Lanes and he’s wound up well and truly obfuscated, and he’s said things to me then that he had no recollection of afterwards. So he could have asked her, yes. But equally, Mrs Eddington was so—’

His mouth tightened under its thin black mustache, and for a moment his eyes shifted. Not a lie, thought Asher, so much as a second thought: is it wrong to tell him this?

‘He might have said something that Mrs Eddington pushed her daughter into believing was a proposal?’ he suggested gently.

Dempsy looked embarrassed. ‘The thing is, sir, Mrs Eddington was darn set on Miss Eddington marrying Rick. And I think Miss Eddington was . . . was darn set on marrying anyone. Well, she’s twenty-four . . . She was twenty-four,’ he corrected himself. ‘When a girl gets to be that age—’

The door behind them opened. Asher smelled fresh vomit even before he turned to see the soldier who’d taken Rick back to the cells emerge with young Hobart’s fouled gray jacket rolled up into a bundle with the shirt and green silk tie. In a carefully neutral voice, the soldier said, ‘You’d best let Sir Grant know that his son will be needing fresh clothing, sir.’

Dempsy waved as if to dispel the reek. ‘Jesus! And after all the fuss he made about getting his suits tailored, and his hankies to match.’

‘Did he?’ Asher signed the soldier to remain. Folded on top of the gray suit and green tie were the tweeds Rick had been wearing in the garden the previous night, including, grotesquely, the red-and-blue necktie with which Holly Eddington had been strangled.

‘Oh, hell, yes.’ The clerk made the whisper of a chuckle. ‘I guess I’m an American, sir, and the others are always ribbing me, how I look like I got dressed in a high wind . . .’

Which wasn’t true: Dempsy’s jacket was old and the cut of his trousers far from fashionable, but he had the well-scrubbed look common to many Americans. Despite his queasy pallor, he was freshly shaved, with a clean shirt and his tie done in a neat four-in-hand.

‘Is Rick fussy about his clothes?’

‘Not as bad as Hans Erlich.’ Dempsy grinned. ‘The two of them – Hans and Rick – will go on about what shade of tie goes with which socks like a couple of my mama’s friends back home. But please don’t think there’s anything sissy—’

Asher’s gesture disclaimed any such interpretation, and he took from the folded clothes the red-and-blue silk necktie – which the daylight showed to be entirely inappropriate for the muted mauves and greens of the tweed that Rick had worn the previous night. ‘Was this the tie Rick was wearing last night?’

Dempsy studied it for a moment. ‘No. The one he had on last night had spots, not stripes. The light wasn’t real good, but I think it was sort of greens and grays.’

‘That’s what I thought.’ Asher folded the tie up and tucked it into his pocket.