The Limehouse Text

31

That evening things were almost back to what passes for normal in the Barker household. Mac was on his feet, though still walking with the aid of a cane. My employer was returning to health rapidly and I had hopes of getting my own infernal cast off and sleeping comfortably at last.

We were in Barker’s room, on either side of a coal fire with a pot of tea at his elbow and a pot of coffee at mine, both of which he had carried up himself since Mac couldn’t manage stairs and I couldn’t carry a tray. Barker had a pipe going and the pleasant aroma of his tobacco floated about my head. It was a pleasant scene, even as the firelight glinted on the racks of spears, swords, and other weapons suspended on the low, sloping ceilings. My mind was turning over the case as if it were an object in my hand, holding it this way and that. I had to admit this was the part of private enquiry work I could not do. I could assemble suspects and search for motives and opportunity, but the discounting of persons until one could say without hesitation that this fellow alone was the murderer, well, I couldn’t do it yet. I began to fear I lacked some gland in my brain.

“You look dissatisfied this evening, Thomas. What is wrong?”

“I cannot sort this out, sir. How did you know it was Jimmy Woo and not a half dozen others?”

Barker dismissed my remark with a shake of his head. “You give me too much credit. Had my mind not been clouded with grief and guilt over Quong’s death, I might have tracked down Jimmy Woo a year ago.”

“He was subtle,” I said, “and his disguise excellent. Who would have suspected a funny little interpreter would be a black-hearted killer?”

“I should have,” Barker insisted. “Now that I look back on everything, I should have realized that being a eunuch put him in the perfect place for receiving word of a secret manuscript. Imperial eunuchs fall into several categories. Some, perhaps the best of them, give up the pleasures of the body and become scholars. Others, devastated by the loss, become exaggeratedly effeminate, simpering like court women and collecting scores of outfits. That, in a way, was what he emulated, but he was actually a member of a third category. Worried that his condition would result in a flaccid body, as it often does, Woo trained and honed himself tirelessly, choosing a martial form of life, obsessing about the ways to overcome an adversary. You will note his ability to shoot. Even at this advanced date, the Chinese prefer sword and spear. To find a Chinaman voluntarily learning to use a firearm is remarkable.”

“I’m still lost, I’m afraid. I don’t know anything about the Chinese court.”

“Let us take it chronologically, then,” the Guv said, stirring the fire with a poker. “About a year and a half ago there was a eunuch who lived and worked in the Forbidden City. We do not know his true name, but he was a steward of the Prince, and was interested in Chinese boxing. He was in a position with a great deal of pressure, as all the court constantly jockeys for position around the young Prince or the Dowager Empress, making alliances and ingratiating themselves. Often eunuchs are well connected throughout China in order to bring exotic foods, objets d’art, or information to the city. In order to win favor, a great deal of money is made and frequently changes hands. A monk whom we now know as Luke Chow came across a text that had almost been forgotten in the library of his temple. He sent a fragment to this eunuch who agreed to pay him for the text. Woo knew this was his only opportunity to lay hands on something he’d wanted for years. There are over a dozen such texts in China, but they are closely guarded by the monks to whom they are entrusted. Something happened between them, although we may never know what. Perhaps after letting him into the monastery, Chow realized how dangerous Woo was. In any case, after two of his brother monks were murdered, Chow took the text himself and made his way to Shanghai, signing on aboard the Blue Funnel liner the Ajax. Discovering where Chow had gone, Woo took a faster ship, or perhaps several, and arrived here ahead of him. He waited until the Ajax arrived and followed Chow and the crew to Coffin’s penny hang, where Woo killed him in the middle of the night but was unable to find the text. As a safeguard, Chow had given the text to the only European in the crew, probably with a warning to get rid of it if anything happened to him. Chambers complied with those instructions once Chow was dead, selling the text to the chandler with Chow’s other effects.

“The text came into Petulengro’s chandlery and might be there still if Quong had not happened along and realized what it was. Then he and Woo must have seen each other, and Quong realized he was in danger. Somehow, he managed to elude him but in order to get rid of the text temporarily, he pawned it to Hurtz, hoping a Chinaman would not look there. Woo shot Quong, searched the body, and threw it into the river, but he never found the pawn ticket tucked in the sleeve of the jacket.”

“Lucky for us,” I said, taking the poker from Barker’s hand and banking the coals and ash properly. Scotsmen only understand peat fires.

“You know I don’t believe in luck,” Barker went on. “I bungled it. I got the message that Quong was dead, and all I wanted was to find the killer and avenge his death. Had I been less grief stricken, I would have noted the unusual number of deaths around that New Year’s Eve, as you did, and realized they were all connected.

“Petulengro and Chambers died next, a day apart, one supposedly during a robbery and the other as the result of an accident. I still believe Petulengro was helped into the Great Beyond by Inspector Bainbridge, for reasons we’ve discussed earlier.”

“But at Ho’s you said Woo killed Petulengro, not Bainbridge.”

Barker smiled. “You caught me out, lad. I lied. I’m not proud of it. I’m very certain that Bainbridge killed Petulengro. He was besotted with the man’s niece. I thought it best to put the blame on Woo, rather than the inspector. The man has a widow and men who look up to him. He was at a rough time in his life when age was overtaking him. I thought it best. When one is a private agent, one can make such choices. Where were we? Oh, yes, Chambers. Woo must have asked around the docks about which sailor was Chow’s closest friend, and when Chambers was mentioned, he tracked him down and killed him, using the skills he learned from the fragment of the book. Unfortunately, all these deaths didn’t help Woo find the text. It was lost somewhere in Hurtz’s pawnshop.” He paused. “Good fire.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said. I added a scoop of new coals to the fire and sat back in my chair.

“He was stymied,” Barker went on, “but he knew the manuscript must be somewhere in Limehouse. He settled in to wait for it to surface. He created a role, the eccentric Jimmy Woo, and got a position working for the Asiatic Aid Society. His skills were so good he was hired as an interpreter for the Foreign Office as well, whose people, he must have known, would be hunting for the text themselves after a formal request by the Chinese government. He created a false history for himself as a student at Cambridge, much as K’ing has created his own legend. Woo even inserted a false record of his attendance, should he ever be investigated by Scotland Yard.”

“How did he come to follow us once we had the ticket?” I asked.

“He wasn’t following us at all, but Bainbridge. The inspector had been visiting all the old sites, sifting for information. It was easier for Woo to let him do the work and to eventually lay hands upon his notes. Bainbridge came to me, however, which was a factor Woo hadn’t anticipated. It then became necessary to kill him before he passed on too much information, but by then it was too late. I had the text and, as he found out in the tunnel, it wasn’t going to be easy for him to make me give it up.”

“I still can hardly believe it,” I said. “Woo, with his old school speech and eccentric manner, could kill all those people.”

“You recall me using the phrase ‘smell the blood.’ It’s a term fighters use to describe another of their kind. One learns to look for swollen knuckles and strong wrists, but Woo chose the perfect disguise. The silk gloves covered his boxer’s hands quite well and we had other suspects who were fighters such as Campbell-Ffinch and Hooligan. He was an excellent actor. It would not surprise me if he had been trained as a youth in the Peking Opera schools.”

My mind tried grasping what went on in the Chinese court, but it quickly shifted back to our own little plot of China, Limehouse. “But you had so many other suspects. I would have thought K’ing was our man.”

“Aside from the mythical elements that surround him, I believe he is what he claims to be, a businessman. He was probably a sailor or porter who came here several years ago on short leave and saw the potential. While his brothers, figuratively speaking, were saving their money to return as wealthy men, he was buying up land along the docks. With the money he made, he exported English goods to China and created a monopoly there. When he had created his base of operations down in those neglected sewer pipes, he acquired toughs like Manchu Jack and began to extort businesses, but only in a small way. It is the Chinese manner and expected of him. With the money he received, he consolidated his organization and began giving back to the community with funds to the Asian Aid Society and the Strangers’ Home. He might allow certain men he was extorting to skip payments if they passed along the fictional legend of a long-lived criminal leader named Mr. K’ing. It would stick in the imagination of the Asians along the docks and from there, turn into the general legend of the community. From a humble sailor, he became the unofficial head of the Limehouse community or, in Chinese terms, a warlord.”

“How do you know that?” I demanded.

Barker gave me one of his wintry smiles. “Because that is exactly what I would have done in his circumstances.”

“I’ll accept that,” I said, “but that doesn’t preclude the possibility that he killed all these people.”

“K’ing oversaw the fight in the arena and he is in charge of the lion and dragon dancers which employ some small amount of boxing in their dances, but one look at Mr. K’ing’s hands proved to me he is no fighter. They were as soft as any London businessman’s.”

“But as a businessman, if he got hold of the text, couldn’t he sell it?”

“No, it only had worth to someone who planned to study the forbidden knowledge. K’ing has no personal or financial interest in it. He was more concerned when you began using Chinese fighting arts to attack his people that day you paid a visit to Bok Fu Ying in Limehouse.”

“I was not attacking,” I stated. “I was defending.”

“Aye, but they thought they were the ones defending; defending Bok Fu Ying’s honor.”

“But I wasn’t using Chinese arts at all. They were the Japanese ones you taught me. I can’t believe they didn’t know the difference,” I insisted.

“You assume all Chinese men know Chinese boxing. Do all Englishmen box?” he asked.

“No, not hardly.”

“The fellows you fought had very little training. They were sailors, stevedores, and shipping clerks. As far as they knew, you were attacking them with something that looked Chinese rather than English.”

“And what of Campbell-Ffinch?”

“I shall admit, lad, that Campbell-Ffinch was my chief suspect through much of this case. He is both ruthless and desperate enough to have committed all those murders. He is also accustomed to following clues and knows the Chinese way of doing things. I thought it just possible he knew some dim mak. Ultimately, however, there are two reasons I discounted him. The first was the break-in. It wasn’t his style to rifle through things secretly in thief’s clothing. He would have knocked on the door, put a bullet in each of our heads, and looked for the book at his leisure. Besides, he’d already gone through everything once, using proper channels. It had to be someone else.”

“And the second reason?”

“An Englishman never would have shot an inspector outright. He’d have known how seriously Scotland Yard would take such an action. Only a foreigner with little regard for English law would have killed Bainbridge so cavalierly.”

“What about Charlie Han? He was a possible suspect.”

“He was, but only until I finally saw him. The boy is no criminal. Oh, he has broken some minor laws and been arrested, but they were not laws in China. The poor fellow’s a victim of Bainbridge’s jealousy and his own lack of knowledge of how things work here. I feel sorry for him.”

“I don’t,” I said. “He’s got the Belle o’ Pennyfields looking after him. Heaven knows what she sees in him.”

“There must be something. Miss Petulengro seems very canny and she doesn’t seem the type to suffer fools easily. Perhaps she’ll rub the corners off and make a better man out of him.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” I said, unable to keep the bitterness out of my voice.

“She seems to inspire jealousy wherever she goes,” Barker judged. “But then, attractive and unmarried young women often sow seeds of destruction in their wake, even among old married men like Nevil Bainbridge.”

“I suppose it is possible,” I muttered to myself.

“Another girl who has escaped from your matrimonial clutches, Thomas? I am glad to hear it. She was quite the cheekiest thing in a dress I have ever met. I don’t believe I could have stood the pair of you together. Also, though I am not saying she wouldn’t make someone a fine wife, wouldn’t you have preferred a girl with tastes similar to your own?”

“Surely you’re not suggesting we are not of the same class-”

“Oh, stop that, lad. You know I feel the class system is artificial. But the two of you are so different. It is the very same reason that I would not find you a proper suitor for Bok Fu Ying.”

I began to feel positively wretched. First I discover Hettie is having a relationship with another man and then I am warned off Bok Fu Ying. My mind conjured up her China doll face and earnest eyes, the smell of jasmine in her hair. “What is to happen to Miss Winter then?”

I saw Barker frown a little. He was her guardian, after all, and these were weighty matters. “I shall find a worthy suitor for her eventually, or she shall find one for herself without my help. Really, lad, I’ve never seen a fellow so eager to get himself betrothed. You’re but a pup, but you’re as bad as Robbie Burns, falling in love at the drop of a hat. Ours is not a profession for taking wives, and especially not at your age.”

“What of Pollock Forbes?” I asked, in order to change the subject.

“Pollock? What makes you think we should include him as a suspect?”

“He knows a great deal about what was going on, and he was in K’ing’s opium den. Also, he has a ring, sir, with an insignia on it. I believe he belongs to a secret society of some sort.”

Barker gave me one of his wintry smiles. “He smokes opium because of his tuberculosis. As to secret societies, if we arrest a fellow for being a member of one, I would be the first on the list. Don’t forget, lad, that we called him into the investigation.”

I got up and nodded good night. I was on the stairs when I suddenly turned. “The text, sir. The Limehouse text. Is it really on its way to China?”

“No, lad, it is still here. In such a case as this it has been necessary to keep all my cards to myself. You understand now how vital it was that the book be kept safe, and so I gave it to the man I most trusted in London.”

“Old Quong?”

“Dr. Quong was indeed the Chinaman I gave it to, but he immediately passed it on. It was you, lad. He gave it to you.”

“Me?” I demanded, confused.

“Yes. The text is plastered against your left shoulder blade at the moment.”

All power of speech left me. I’d had it the entire time, while the killer was searching half of London for it? I was Barker’s most trusted man?

“But my injury, sir…” I began.

“Oh, there was nothing really wrong with your shoulder, lad. Once Quong set it back in place, it was right as rain. The tendons there are quite elastic. I hope you’ll forgive the minor inconvenience.”

I thought of the many sleepless nights I had with that hard cast biting into my shoulder, the discomfort as I drove the cab, the taking notes with one hand, the preparation of Barker’s dinner. It all began boiling up.

“I believe I’ll just take a walk, sir. I need some fresh air.”

Barker reached into a drawer of his desk and removed a pair of stout scissors with short curved blades. “Certainly, but I shall need the book. Take off your jacket.”

He proceeded to cut me out of the cast. Plaster rained onto the floor as he wrenched the small package from my back. It had been wrapped in cloth and looked the same as always, a dull yellow, perhaps a trifle wrinkled.

“None the worse for wear, the both of you.”

It was easy for him to say. My limp, pale arm looked ready for one of Vandeleur’s postmortems. I tried to move it, but it hung there at my side uselessly.

“Raise it up over your head and down behind you in a circle, lad. That’s the best thing for it.”

I tried, but halfway up, the atrophied muscles seized up and cramped. I cried out, then used a few choice words I’d learned in prison.

“Really, lad,” Barker said dryly. “You must learn to control your temper.”

“Thank you sir,” I said tightly. “I believe I shall put on a fresh shirt and take that walk now.”

“You do that, Thomas. You realize there is still one thing I haven’t worked out.”

“And what is that?”

“I still must decide what to do with the text.”

I passed the Elephant and Castle, decided not to stop for a pint, and walked down the Old Kent Road. It was cool that evening, but I believe winter’s hold on London had finally been broken. I walked, and as I walked, I thought. The book, that bloody, bloody book, had been in my cast from the beginning. Jimmy Woo, Mr. K’ing, Campbell-Ffinch, and Inspector Poole might have reached out at any time and laid hands on it. Barker had fooled them, had fooled us all. It was brilliant, though I hated to admit it.

When I came back in the front door, I noticed a smell and when I reached the staircase I realized it was burning paper. He’s done it, I thought. He’s burnt the manuscript. I took the staircase two steps at a time.

Barker looked over his shoulder from the fender where he knelt poking the fire. There was ash and black shreds of curling paper rising up the chimney.

“You burnt it!” I murmured.

“No, but I sat here for the last half hour considering it. It would be a wise decision, but ultimately I do not believe it is mine to make. The text belongs to the monks of the Xi Jiang Monastery.”

“So what did you burn?”

“I made a copy that first night, in the basement, a personal copy. It is not a long book, not more than seventy-five pages.”

“But if Woo had laid hands on it, he wouldn’t have needed the original.”

“I know. I translated it into Yiddish. I assumed the killer would search for the book here and be able to read English and possibly Chinese.”

“But why burn it now?”

“It is knowledge no one should have, not even I. I already know too much about dim mak and wish to learn no more. I do not desire to become a personal engine of destruction. Do you recall making nitroglycerine in the Irish case last year? Do you remember what you told me afterward?”

“Yes, sir. ‘Never again.’”

“Exactly. I feel the same about dim mak. Never again.”

“So what shall you do with the real text, sir?”

“I wish I knew, lad. I shall spend a long night praying over it. Perhaps I shall have an answer in the morning.”