Snake Bite

CHAPTER SIX

Cameron sprang back, shocked. Sherlock caught him before he could stumble and fall.

‘Ah, young Seaman Holmes, isn’t it?’ The voice was as dry and whispery as Sherlock remembered. Arrhenius’s gaze scanned Sherlock up and down. ‘You are better-dressed than I recall from the ship. I am, I confess, surprised to see you here. I believed this to be a soirée for businessmen and those of the officer class. I did not realize that… mere crew members were invited.’

Sherlock took a deep breath. ‘Mr Arrhenius,’ he acknowledged. ‘It’s nice to see you again.’ He indicated Cameron. ‘I have been invited to stay with Mr and Mrs Mackenzie while the Gloria Scott is docked. This is Cameron — their son.’

Arrhenius’s gaze switched across to Cameron, and Sherlock could sense the boy shrinking back. ‘It’s all right,’ he said quietly. ‘Mr Arrhenius suffers from a… a skin condition. It’s not serious, and it’s not catching.’

Now that he knew Mr Arrhenius was present at the dinner, Sherlock could see that the other guests were casting the occasional glance at the man with the blue skin. They weren’t nervous, or worried, but they were certainly interested. It was as if there was something magnetic about the man that attracted their attention, but they were too polite to say anything, or point, or make a fuss. What interested Sherlock was that although they were fascinated, they weren’t all clustering around Mr Arrhenius to ask him questions. Sherlock didn’t really understand that — if he had a question then he usually asked it.

Cameron Mackenzie obviously had the same approach to life as Sherlock. ‘Does it hurt?’ he asked, moving closer and staring, fascinated, at Arrhenius’s face. ‘It looks as if it should.’

‘No, it does not hurt, my young friend. In fact, quite the opposite. The colloidal silver that I have been consuming for years, and which gives my skin this… attractive sheen… protects me from disease. I have not had the slightest illness — not a sniffle, not a sore throat — for all of that time. Not only does it not hurt, it actually prevents me from hurting. Do you see?’

Cameron nodded. ‘Yes, I see,’ he said seriously. ‘That must be really useful. Does that mean your skin is valuable? If it’s silver, I mean. You’re not afraid that someone might kidnap you and try to peel your skin off and sell it?’

Arrhenius laughed: a sound like leaves being rustled by the wind. ‘Sadly, no. The silver is held in the form of oxides and nitrates. It would take a very clever chemist to recover any real silver from my skin — hardly enough to make the effort worthwhile, I am afraid.’

There was something about the thought that suddenly intrigued Sherlock. Not skinning Mr Arrhenius and extracting the silver from his skin — that would be macabre and wrong — but the idea that silver could come in different forms, like nitrates, and oxides, and so on, and that someone who knew enough about chemistry could tell the difference between them, and maybe convert one to the other. It was, he thought, a bit like being able to play around with the building blocks from which everything, from stones to trees to people, was made.

He realized with a sudden shock that Mrs Mackenzie had joined them while he was distracted with his thoughts.

‘Mr Arrhenius, isn’t it?’ she said, touching Arrhenius’s sleeve. ‘We are so pleased you could be here.’

Arrhenius nodded. ‘And I am very grateful to be invited,’ he said. ‘I have found that my appearance can sometimes get in the way of social events. I have become used to eating alone on my travels.’

‘Nonsense,’ Mrs Mackenzie said with a smile. ‘You should see the effects that some of the local potions and medicines have. My husband bought a local remedy for hair loss from a market trader a year ago. He didn’t tell me, of course, but he rubbed it into his scalp every night in secret. One morning he work up, and his hair was bright green. Not only that, but he had a rash all over his scalp, and his face, and his hands. I spent the rest of the day pretending that I couldn’t see anything wrong, and I told the servants to do the same. It was so amusing!’

‘And do I amuse you in the same way?’ Arrhenius asked. His lips were curled into a smile but there was no humour in his voice.

‘Of course not,’ Mrs Mackenzie said reassuringly, touching his sleeve again. ‘We’re very grateful that you’re here with us, and we are looking forward to hearing about your travels. Now, come and meet my husband…’

She led Arrhenius away from the two boys, still chatting to him. Sherlock noticed several people watch him go.

‘What a strange man,’ Cameron said. ‘I wonder if I could make my skin like armour if I ate iron every day.’

‘You would probably just get stomach ache,’ Sherlock replied. ‘And that’s if you are lucky.’

He watched as Arrhenius and Mrs Mackenzie approached Cameron’s father. Mrs Mackenzie briefly introduced them, and then moved away to speak to someone else. Sherlock found his gaze fixed on Malcolm Mackenzie and Mr Arrhenius. They didn’t look like men who had been introduced moments beforehand. They looked, in fact, like men who already knew each other — or, at least, already knew something about each other.

As Sherlock watched, Mr Arrhenius reached into his uniform jacket and took out a package. He passed it over to Mr Mackenzie, who immediately stowed it away in an inside pocket of his own jacket. It was a perfectly innocent transaction, but there was something about the way both men tried to minimize the time that the packet was visible, and the way they both looked around afterwards to see if anyone was watching, that made Sherlock wonder what exactly was in the packet.

The two men talked for a moment or two. There was wariness there, and Sherlock detected anger as well — especially in the way that Mr Arrhenius was standing. Mr Mackenzie seemed defensive, but Mr Arrhenius was definitely losing his temper.

‘Come on,’ Sherlock said abruptly. ‘Show me the garden. I don’t want to stand here much longer. Someone else might try to talk to us, just out of politeness, and I hate making small talk.’

Cameron nodded, and led the way along one of the paths that snaked across the well-manicured garden. Eventually he found a pair of large rocks set into a patch of sand near each other. The sand had been carefully raked into a series of concentric circles rippling out from where the rocks sat. Regardless of the careful arrangement, which struck Sherlock as rather artistic but also rather pointless, Cameron walked across the sand and sat on one of the rocks. Being rather more careful, but still leaving footprints, Sherlock sat on the other.

‘You were going to tell me about America,’ Cameron said.

‘I was,’ Sherlock replied, ‘but I wanted to ask you something first. You mentioned the war between Britain and China earlier on, and your father mentioned it again just now. What actually happened? I don’t remember hearing anything about it at the time, or being taught about it at school, and school was usually very good at making us learn about wars.’

Cameron shrugged. ‘There were actually two wars,’ he said. ‘Both of them quite short. The Chinese call them the Opium Wars.’

‘Opium Wars?’ Sherlock asked, feeling a slight chill. Opium was some kind of drug — he knew that from having been knocked out on several occasions by agents of the Paradol Chamber. They had used a solution of opium in alcohol that was called laudanum. It had made Sherlock unconscious in a few seconds, and given him some very strange dreams.

‘Opium is something that is made from poppies,’ Cameron said. ‘It can be smoked in a pipe, apparently. It makes people feel peaceful, and makes them forget all their problems, at least for a while. You Brits were getting natives in India to grow the poppies and extract the opium, then your ships were bringing it to China and selling it in exchange for silks and other stuff.’

‘But that’s the definition of trade. You sell things and you buy things, and you try to make a profit.’

‘Opium is addictive,’ Cameron pointed out. ‘Once you’ve tried it, you want to keep on trying it. You can’t help yourself. From what I’ve heard, and from what I’ve seen, a lot of the local traders and farmers and even the civil servants spent more and more of their time smoking opium. Crops were left rotting in the fields, and there was less and less food available to buy in the markets. It got to the stage where the streets were empty most of the time, because people were in their houses smoking opium.’

‘That’s obviously a bad thing,’ Sherlock observed.

‘The Manchu rulers agreed. They passed a law forbidding the sale or the use of opium.’

‘Ah,’ Sherlock said as he realized the implications of what Cameron was saying. ‘And then the bottom dropped out of the market for the British importers. They were still bringing the opium over from India, but they couldn’t sell it.’

Cameron nodded his head. ‘From what my father says, the whole British economy was dependent on the income from the sale of opium.’

‘A bit like the Chinese traders and farmers were dependent on smoking it.’ Sherlock paused. ‘So we went to war so that we could keep selling this drug in China, even though people were getting addicted to it and it was having a bad effect.’

Cameron shrugged. ‘Wars don’t just happen for good reasons,’ he pointed out. ‘They happen for bad reasons as well, although your government dressed it up as the Chinese Emperor trying to stifle free trade and the noble Brits doing their best to make sure that their traders could make a decent living. Not much mention of opium there.’

‘But still — it’s wrong! We shouldn’t have been selling this drug, and we certainly shouldn’t have gone to war so that we could keep on selling it!’

‘I agree,’ Cameron said. ‘But what do I know? You won the war. Smoking opium isn’t illegal in England, so the traders claimed that they weren’t doing anything wrong in the first place, and the Emperor was overreacting.’

‘Maybe we shouldn’t have won the war,’ Sherlock muttered darkly. He couldn’t help but wonder how much his brother Mycroft knew about this. Mycroft worked for the Foreign Office, and had something to do with international relations. Had he been involved in these Opium Wars? Had he advised against them, or had he been in favour of them? Sherlock made a mental note to ask Mycroft the next time he saw him. Assuming he ever did see him again.

Thoughts of Mycroft and of opium made him think once more of the times he had been drugged by the Paradol Chamber, and that swimmy, weightless feeling that he had experienced. He shuddered. Horrible though it had been, there was something strangely and dangerously seductive about that feeling. He never wanted to experience it again, and yet a little bit of him missed the way it made him feel. The way it had made him forget about everything that was worrying him.

‘So,’ Cameron prompted. ‘America?’

Sherlock started to tell him about his experiences of New York, and the train journey across the American wilderness, but it turned into more of an account of the adventures he, Matty and Virginia had had. Cameron listened, wide-eyed. Every now and then he would question a detail or make a comment, but mostly he let Sherlock talk.

After twenty minutes or so a gong sounded, letting everyone know that it was time for dinner. Cameron and Sherlock headed together to the dining room, where everyone was gathering. Fortunately, the two of them had been seated together, and even more fortunately, the guests sitting beside and across from them at the long table spent all their time talking to each other and ignoring the boys. When Sherlock had finished his story, and Cameron had finished asking questions, they moved on to other subjects — Cameron’s experiences in China, and Sherlock’s adventures back in England.

Every now and then Sherlock heard some fragment of the conversations going on around him — Captain Bryan or the other officers from the USS Monocacy talking about their voyages, Mr Mackenzie talking about China, or the other businessmen telling stories about the strange places they had been and the odd people they had traded with. At one point he heard Malcolm Mackenzie ask Captain Bryan, ‘Will you be received by the Governor while you are here?’

Captain Bryan shrugged. ‘I must admit,’ he said, ‘to being confused by the various ranks of the dignitaries in China. I had anticipated sending my credentials to the person who rules Shanghai, but my translator tells me that he is of low rank, and not worth dealing with.’

‘That’s true,’ Mackenzie confirmed. ‘Although Shanghai is a major town from our point of view, it is ruled by a Prefect. He is subservient to the Governor of Jiangsu Province, whose palace is located at Nanjing — a little way inland.’

‘Ah,’ Captain Bryan said, ‘I believe that we are meeting with the Governor of Jiangsu somewhere upriver, at a special ceremony.’

Sherlock’s interest in the conversation — not high to begin with — waned as the food arrived. It was quite amazing: shreds of succulent duck served with a dipping sauce made out of plums, followed by slices of peppery lamb with a mixture of crunchy vegetables, and then topped off with steaming dumplings filled with fruit. The food was washed down with sweet white wine. Sherlock ate as much as he could. The tastes and textures put him in mind, strangely, of Wu Chung. He wondered how Wu’s reunion with his family had gone, and he decided to go looking for the cook as soon as he could the next day.

When the last course had been cleared away, Mr Mackenzie suggested that the men withdraw for port and cigars. Mrs Mackenzie ushered the two boys from the dining room. ‘They’ll be talking for hours,’ she said, ‘and it won’t be anything worth listening to. The room will be so filled with cigar smoke that you’d be able to cut the air with a knife. I suggest that you two head for bed. Sherlock — I’ve had the maid make up a separate bed in Cameron’s room for you.’ She yawned suddenly, and covered her mouth. ‘Oh my. I think I’ll turn in as well. It’s been an exhausting day.’

By now Sherlock knew the way across the interior garden to Cameron’s room. He led the way in silence along one of the paved paths that crossed the grass, past the bushes and past the sandy area where they had sat earlier. The sky above them was black and cloudless, speckled with stars. A thin sliver of moon cast a silvery light over everything, reminding Sherlock of Mr Arrhenius and his grey-blue skin.

A dark shape moved between two bushes. Sherlock stopped abruptly.

‘What’s the matter?’ Cameron asked, nearly bumping into Sherlock’s back.

‘I thought I saw an animal.’

Cameron opened his mouth to say something, but Sherlock gestured at him to shut up. He stood motionless, trying to make out the sounds of movement, or breathing, but there was nothing.

He stepped towards the bush that the dark shape had made for. Was it an animal — a cat, or a dog perhaps? Presumably they had cats and dogs in China?

Another step. Still nothing. Had he been mistaken?

He took another step, ready to turn back and head for bed. He let out the breath that he hadn’t even realized he was holding. He had probably mistaken a night bird for something more substantial. Tiredness, and the stress of being in a strange country, were making him nervous.

A stone flew out of the middle of the bush. If it hadn’t glanced off a branch on the way out it would have hit him in the centre of his forehead. As it was it caught him on his cheek and ricocheted away. He flinched, shocked. He could feel something warm and wet on his skin: blood. The stone had cut him!

‘Hey!’ he shouted, outraged. Before Cameron could answer, Sherlock had launched himself at the bush, but another stone spun towards his right eye. He ducked, and the stone sailed overhead, brushing his hair as it passed.

Suddenly a dark shadow broke away from the bush and headed across the grass. The meagre light from the moon wasn’t sufficient for Sherlock to make out any details — all he could see was something about half his size moving away from him fast. He wasn’t even sure if it was running, floating, flying or rolling. Before he could focus on the shape, it had disappeared into the darkness.

Leaving Cameron standing, Sherlock gave chase. Branches clawed at his face as he ran through the bushes. Petals and leaves exploded away from him, littering the ground. He crashed into a clear area. Ahead of him he could make out the dark shape scrambling up the grey trunk of a tree that twisted from the ground like a plume of smoke from a fire. Sherlock raced across the ground separating him from the tree, only realizing as he ran that he was leaving crater-like footprints in the smoothly raked sand of another rock garden. He leaped across a smooth boulder that blocked his path. The tree trunk was a few feet ahead of him now, and without slowing down he jumped, fingers clutching for the lowest branches with both hands while his feet scrabbled for purchase on the silvery-grey trunk. Seconds later he was pulling himself up the tree’s slippery bark. It was like climbing the rigging of the Gloria Scott. Ahead of him he could see a black shadow wriggling through the higher branches. Leaves lashed at his face, catching at the cut left by the stone. Blood trickled down his cheek.

He emerged into clear moonlight, head above the foliage like a swimmer emerging from a rough ocean. Beyond the edge of the leaves he could see the roof of the Mackenzie house — red tiles sloping gently away from him. Some of the tiles were disturbed, knocked out of place. That was the only sign left by whatever it was he had been chasing. It had vanished over the rooftop and presumably jumped to the street. He would never catch it now.

He made his way back to the garden. His muscles were complaining at the unexpected action, and his cheek throbbed where the stone had hit it. He also suspected that he had small cuts and grazes all over his face where twigs and leaves had caught the skin.

‘You,’ Cameron exclaimed when he saw Sherlock, ‘look like you’ve been dragged through a hedge backwards.’

‘Very funny,’ Sherlock growled.

‘What happened?’

‘What did you see?’

Cameron shrugged. ‘Some things came out of the bushes at you. I wasn’t sure if they were birds, or what.’

‘They weren’t birds — they were stones.’

‘All right — they were stones. You ran off. I followed, but by the time I got here you were halfway up the tree. Then you came down again. If this was some kind of game then I guess you won, but you need to tell me the rules for next time.’

‘I think you had an uninvited guest,’ Sherlock said, trying to keep his voice as calm and as level as possible. His heart, however, was still racing.

‘What kind of uninvited guest? You mean a burglar?’

Sherlock shrugged. ‘I couldn’t see. It might have been an animal, or it might have been a person.’ He frowned, trying to picture the thing that he had half glimpsed. ‘A very small person, perhaps.’

‘It threw two stones,’ Cameron pointed out. ‘According to you, anyway.’

Sherlock put a hand up to his cheek. It came away sticky with blood, but the cut didn’t seemed to be too bad. ‘Maybe it was a monkey. They can throw stones. Do you have monkeys in China?’

‘There’re certainly plenty of them around Shanghai. The sailors bring them, and leave them here.’

‘Let’s see if there are any tracks,’ Sherlock said.

He led the way back to the sand of the rock garden. If Sherlock was hoping for distinct claw-marks or shoeprints then he was disappointed. His own footprints had completely obliterated whatever tracks the intruder had left.

‘I should tell Father,’ Cameron said after a while. He sounded uncertain. ‘He might want to call the local constables.’

Sherlock shook his head. ‘There’s no point,’ he said. ‘I can’t be sure exactly what I saw, and whatever it was it’s gone now. We’d be breaking up the party for nothing. We’ll tell him in the morning, over breakfast.’

Sherlock checked his cheek again. The bleeding had almost stopped. He followed Cameron across the rest of the garden, keeping an eye out for any movements in the bushes.

‘You need to clean yourself up,’ Cameron pointed out. ‘I’ll get some water and a cloth.’

After washing the blood off his face and the dirt from his hands, Sherlock undressed and climbed into the low bed that had been set up for him. It took him a while to get to sleep, however. It wasn’t just the lingering excitement and the tension of the chase. He had become used to a hammock slung between two hooks, rocking with the motion of the sea, and the sound of the waves slapping against the hull. A flat bed, a comfortable mattress and complete silence apart from the sound of Cameron’s breathing were disturbing in a way that they wouldn’t have been a few months ago. Eventually, though, he did fall asleep, and almost wished he hadn’t. On board the Gloria Scott he had always gone to sleep too tired to dream, or at least so tired that he slept through his dreams and never remembered them in the morning. Here, in Cameron’s bedroom, in the Mackenzie household, he found himself dreaming about Virginia Crowe. She was standing in a field, a few feet away from him, her red hair flaring in the light of the Farnham sun. Sherlock stepped towards her, but she seemed to drift backwards two steps for each step he took. She got further and further away from him, and the faster he moved the faster she drifted away. Her lips moved, but whatever she was saying, whatever message she was trying to convey, was so faint that he couldn’t understand it. Eventually she was merely a dark spot against the lush green of the fields, and then she was gone.

Sherlock woke up with tears on his cheeks, but he wasn’t even sure what he was crying about.

The boys washed and dressed quickly. Cameron had some spare Chinese clothes which Sherlock put on. He liked the idea of blending in.

Breakfast was just like the ones he was used to in England — bacon, scrambled eggs, sausages and plentiful toast. The sausages had a strange, spicy taste, and the bacon was cooked so crisp that he could snap it in half with an audible crack, but it was the closest thing he’d had to the food he remembered for months. There was even coffee — strong and black, with lots of sugar. He had forgotten how good coffee tasted.

Mr Mackenzie was sitting at the head of the table reading a newspaper. It didn’t look Chinese — Sherlock suspected that the USS Monocacy had brought a stack of newspapers from America, and that Cameron’s father was catching up on the news of the past year or so. He seemed to be distracted. He kept turning the pages and then turning back, as if he had realized that he hadn’t been taking the words in.

‘We thought we saw a burglar last night,’ Cameron announced suddenly.

Mr Mackenzie looked up. He stared at Cameron, frowning.

‘What do you mean, a burglar?’ Mrs Mackenzie asked, concerned, from the other side of the table.

‘In the garden,’ Cameron amplified. ‘As we were going to bed. Sherlock thought he saw something in the bushes. He went to take a look, but whoever it was threw stones at him.’

‘Or whatever,’ Sherlock corrected. ‘We don’t know for sure it was a person.’

‘Dogs don’t throw stones,’ Cameron pointed out. ‘Neither do cats.’

‘But monkeys might, and I don’t know what other animals you have in China that could throw stones.’

‘The chances are,’ Mr Mackenzie said casually, ‘that it was a local child. I seriously doubt that burglars would throw stones. They would be more likely to throw knives, or those metal stars with sharpened edges that I’ve seen them use. I think you’re overdramatizing. It was a long evening. Perhaps the excitement got to you.’

He raised the newspaper again, hiding his face behind it, but Sherlock was concerned to see that his knuckles were white, as if he was clenching his fingers tightly on the paper. Something was worrying him.

After breakfast, Sherlock and Cameron asked if they could head into town and look around.

‘Be careful,’ Mrs Mackenzie said, ‘and be back for lunch. Get me some oranges, if you can. Nice ones, not bruised.’ She turned to her husband. ‘What about you, Malcolm? I was hoping we could go over the details for tomorrow’s cocktail party. Cook is getting into a state about it already.’

Mr Mackenzie lowered the newspaper again. His expression was brooding, thoughtful. ‘I’m afraid that I can’t — not this morning. I’ll be in my study — I have some… some documents to attend to.’

‘Can’t they wait?’

‘No,’ Mr Mackenzie said, so sharply that his wife flinched. ‘I need to look at them today.’

For some reason, Sherlock remembered the package that Captain Tollaway had handed to Mr Mackenzie at the dinner party the night before. Was that the

‘documents’ he was referring to?

‘Oh,’ Mrs Mackenzie said in a small voice. ‘Well — perhaps I could come in later with a cup of coffee and a plate of biscuits for you, and we can talk about it then.’

‘I’ll be locking my door,’ Mr Mackenzie said. His voice was harsh. ‘These documents are very sensitive. I can’t allow anyone to see them. I don’t mean to be rude, my dear,’ he said in a calmer tone. ‘When I’ve finished with them, I’ll come and find you. We can talk then.’

‘Whatever you think best,’ Cameron’s mother said in a neutral voice, but her lips were pursed and here cheeks were flushed.

Sherlock looked over at Cameron. His new friend shrugged. He was frowning with concern. Obviously this was unusual behaviour for the breakfast table.

The rest of the meal was conducted in silence. Cameron’s father seemed embarrassed by his outburst, and his mother seemed not to want to start another conversation in case she provoked more anger. Cameron spent most of the time looking nervously from one to the other, trying to work out what was going on. Sherlock was also trying to work out what was going on. In particular, he was interested in why Cameron’s father wanted to explain away what had happened the night before. In Sherlock’s experience, most home owners who might have played unwitting host to a burglar would be concerned about stopping it from happening again — not pretending that it hadn’t happened in the first place.

After breakfast, the two boys headed out into the town. The sky was blue and cloudless, and although there was a cold nip in the air it promised to be a good day.

‘What do you want to do?’ Cameron asked.

Sherlock remembered his thoughts at the dinner table the night before. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I want to go looking for a friend.’

‘I didn’t think you had any friends in Shanghai.’

‘It’s the cook from the Gloria Scott. He has family here.’ Sherlock tried to remember the address that Wu Chung had given him before leaving the ship. ‘He said I could find him at Renmin Dong Lu. That’s East Renmin Street, isn’t it?’

Cameron nodded. ‘I know where that is. Not the nicest area in Shanghai. Are you sure you want to go and see this guy?’

‘I’d like to.’ Sherlock paused. ‘If you think it’s safe.’

‘If anything happens we can always fight, or run away.’

Together they walked through the streets of Shanghai. Like the day before, there were people everywhere: carrying baskets or pushing carts, leading horses or pushing sheep in front of them with long sticks. Many of them wore broad straw hats to protect themselves from the heat of the sun. Unlike the hats Sherlock was used to back in England, these were all brim and no crown: shallow cones that reminded Sherlock of the sloping roof of the Mackenzie house.

Cameron obviously knew the way. The route took them down narrow alleys and wide thoroughfares, around corners and past rows of shops and stalls.

A sudden booming sound, echoing across the town, made Sherlock stop dead in his tracks. Other people in the street had stopped as well, and were talking to each other in low voices. ‘What’s that?’ he asked.

Cameron frowned. ‘Sounds like a ship’s horn,’ he said. ‘I reckon that’s the USS Monocacy calling all its sailors back, ready to set out on its mission to map the twists and turns of the Yangtze River.’

Sherlock noticed that the other people in the street weren’t looking too happy. ‘I’m not sure that the locals approve,’ he pointed out.

‘It never got mentioned last night — at least, not while we were there — but you have to wonder why the American Government wants to have accurate maps of a Chinese river thousands of miles from American waters. I doubt that they’re doing it out of the goodness of their hearts.’ Cameron shrugged. ‘The obvious suggestion is that they think they might need accurate maps at some time in the future, and there’re only two reasons for that — possible military action or a whole load of American traders heading upriver.’ He indicated the locals, who were still muttering to each other in low voices. ‘They’re debating which of the two options they would prefer.’

Eventually, as they turned a corner, Cameron slowed to a halt.

‘This is East Renmin Street.’

Sherlock nodded. ‘Then let’s ask someone where the Wu family live.’

Cameron smiled at a toothless old woman who was selling fruit at the side of the road. He said something in a burst of Cantonese too fast for Sherlock to pick out the words. She said something in reply, and gestured to a particular house, no different from the rest, a little way away. As with the others he had seen, it was plain and anonymous from the outside: walls of white plaster, roof of red tiles and a door painted green.

The two boys had taken a few steps towards the house when the front door opened and a woman ran out. She was crying.

‘He’s sick!’ she screamed in Cantonese, looking around desperately for help. ‘Someone help me! My husband — he’s sick! I think he is dying!’

The woman’s panic was obvious from her desperate expression. She clearly feared for her husband’s life.

Other people in the street detoured around her as she tried to catch their attention. Sherlock stepped forward. Despite the fact that he was European, not Chinese, she moved towards him.

‘My husband,’ she said again. ‘His name is Wu Chung. Please — can you help me?’