The Phantom of the Temple

VI

Judge Dee's large official palankeen was standing ready in the front yard, eight sturdy bearers by its side. The headman was also waiting there, accompanied by ten constables on horseback. Judge Dee entered the palan­keen, followed by Sergeant Hoong.

While they were being carried to the east gate, the sergeant asked: 'Why should the murderer have gone to all the trouble of severing the heads of his victims, sir? And why switch the bodies?'

'The obvious answer, Sergeant, is that, although the murderer — or murderers! — didn't mind Seng-san being identified as one of the victims, for some mysterious reason he didn't want Seng-san's body found. At the same time he wanted to conceal the fact that there had been a second murder, and he wanted to hide the identity of his second victim. But there could be also other, less obvious reasons. However, let's not worry about that yet. Our first task is to discover Seng-san's body, and the head of the other victim. Those must be hidden somewhere in or near the deserted temple.'

When the cortege had passed through the east city gate, a few loafers hanging around the small shops and street stalls lining the country road went to fol­low, curious to know what was afoot. But the headman raised his whip and barked at them to stay behind.

A little further on an ornamental stone arch at the foot of the wooded mountain slope indicated the beginning of the flight of steps leading uphill. The headman and the constables dismounted. While the bearers were lowering Judge Dee's palankeen to the ground, he said to the sergeant quickly:

'Remember, Hoong, that our men are not to know exactly what we are looking for! I'll tell them it's a large box or something like that.' The judge descended and bestowed a dubious look on the steep staircase. 'A stiff climb on a hot day, headman!'

'Nearly two hundred steps, Your Honour. But it's the quickest way. Behind the temple there's a footpath that goes down the slope in an easy descent to the highway, and from there it's but a short walk to the north city gate. But then it takes you more than an hour to reach the top of the hill. Only hunters and woodgatherers use that road. The riff-raff that stay in the temple overnight go up these stairs.'

'All right.' The judge gathered up the front of his robe and began the ascent of the broad, weatherbeaten stone steps.

Half-way up the judge ordered a brief rest, for he had noticed that the sergeant was breathing heavily. Arrived on the top of the stairs, they saw a weed-overgrown clear­ing among tall trees. On the other side rose a triple temple gate of grey stone with, on either side, a formidable-look­ing high wall. Over the central arch of the gate appeared three characters in multicoloured mosaic, reading Tzu-yun-szu, 'Temple of the Purple Clouds'.

'The narrow pathway along the wall on the right leads to the small new temple, the so-called Hermitage, sir,' explained the headman. 'The Abbess lives there, with one maidservant. I haven't asked them yet whether they heard or saw anything last night.'

'I want to see the scene of the crime first,' Judge Dee told him. 'Lead the way!’

The paved front courtyard was overgrown with weeds and the walls were crumbling here and there, but the temple's main hall with its high roof, flanked by two three-storeyed towers, had withstood the ravages of time intact.

'This outlandish architecture,' the judge remarked to Sergeant Hoong, 'can of course never come near the per­fection of ours. I have to admit, however, that from a technical point of view the Indian builders did a good job. Those two towers are absolutely symmetrical. I gather that this temple was built three hundred years ago, and it is still in a remarkably good state of repair. Where did you find Ah-liu, headman?'

The headman took them to the edge of the wilderness on the left of the courtyard. On the right was a piece of wasteland, strewn with large boulders. The judge noticed that it was slightly cooler here than down in the city. The warm air was filled with the incessant strident chirp­ing of cicadas.

'This wilderness was once an extensive, well-kept garden, Your Honour,' the headman explained. 'Now it's a mass of tangled vegetation where even the scoundrels who gather in the temple and courtyard don't dare to go. It is said that there are many poisonous snakes.' Pointing to an old oak tree, he went on: 'The accused was lying under that tree, sir, his head resting on the raised root. My conjecture is that he meant to take to his heels after he had murdered Seng-san. But he stumbled in the dark over that tree root. Drunk as he was, the fall knocked him out completely,'

'I see. Let's go inside.'

While the constables were pushing the six-fold lattice doors of the main hall open, fragments of mouldering wood came down on their heads. Judge Dee went up the three broad stone stairs, stepped over the high threshold, and looked curiously at the cavernous, half-dark hall. On the right and left a row of six heavy stone pillars sup­ported the thick rafters high above, from which dust-laden cobwebs hung down like so many grey pennons. At the far end, against the back wall, the judge saw vaguely an altar table of solid ebony, more than twelve feet long and about five feet high. In the side wall was a small narrow door, and above it, high up in the wall, a square window, boarded up with planks. Pointing at the win­dow, Judge Dee asked, 'Can't your men open that, head­man? It's too dark in here!'

At a sign from the headman two constables went to a niche in the wall behind the left row of pillars. They took two halberds from it. With those they set to work on the boarded-up window. While they were busy, Judge Dee walked on to the centre of the hall and silently surveyed it, slowly caressing his long sidewhiskers. The clammy, oppressive air seemed to clog up his lungs. Except for the holes bored at regular intervals in the wall for placing burning torches in, there was nothing left to suggest the orgies that had taken place there years ago, yet the hall emanated a subtle atmosphere of evil. Suddenly the judge had the uncanny feeling that unseen eyes were fixing him with a hostile stare.

'They say that formerly the walls were hung with large coloured pictures, Your Honour,' the headman spoke up beside him. 'Of naked gods and goddesses, and—'

'I am not interested in hearsay!’ Judge Dee snapped. Seeing the leer freeze on the headman's face, he asked, more friendly, 'Where do you think those ashes on the floor behind the pillars come from, headman?'

'In winter, Your Honour, the scum that frequent this place burn faggots here. They come to stay here over­night, especially during the cold months, for the thick walls protect them against rain and snow.'

'The heap of ashes here in the centre looks quite recent, though,' the judge remarked. The ashes were lying in a shallow round cavity, hollowed out in one of the flag­stones. Around the cavity a wreath of lotus petals had been carved into the stone. The judge noticed that this particular flagstone was located in the exact centre of the floor. The eight flags surrounding it were marked by in­cised letters of a foreign script.

The boards that had covered the window at the back of the hall fell down with a thud. Two black shapes hurtled down from the rafters. One came flapping past Judge Dee's head with an eerie, piercing screech. Then the bats made for the dark cavity over the front entrance.

Sergeant Hoong had been studying the floor in front of the altar table. He righted himself and said, 'Now that we have better light, sir, you can see clearly that there was a veritable pool of blood here. But the thick layer of dust and refuse has absorbed it. And there are so many confused footprints all over that it's hard to draw any conclusions.'

Judge Dee went over to him and examined the floor. 'No, Heaven knows what happened here! Headman, get your men around me!' When the constables were stand­ing in a half-circle in front of him, the judge resumed, 'I have information to the effect that, before or after the murder, a large wooden box was concealed inside this temple, or in the grounds outside. We shall begin inside.

I'll take the left wing with Sergeant Hoong and three men, the headman takes the right with the others. It must have been a fairly large box, so look for hidden cup­boards, stone flags that show signs of having been taken up recently, trap doors and so on. Get to work!'

Two constables opened the door beside the niche for the ritual weapons. Besides the two long halberds which they had put back there, the niche contained one Tartar double axe, an exact replica of the murder weapon. They entered a narrow corridor about twenty-five feet long, with four door-openings on either side. These proved to give access to long, narrow rooms, each lit by a gaping window; the paper-covered latticework had disappeared long ago.

'Evidently these rooms were the cells of the priests,' the judge remarked. 'There must be a similar set of eight cells over in the right wing, for the groundplan of this temple is exactly symmetrical. Hey, come here, you!' Pointing at the tiled floor, Judge Dee told the constable: 'See whether you can pry those tiles loose. They don't seem to fit closely. Your two colleagues can inspect the floors of the cells opposite.'

The constable inserted the point of his knife in the groove between the flagstones. Three could be raised easily.

'See what was buried there!'

The man dug with his knife in the loose earth but there was nothing underneath except the solid stones of the temple's foundations.

'We are hot on the scent, sir!' Hoong exclaimed, ex­cited. 'Someone wanted to bury something bulky here, but gave up when he found he couldn't make the hole deep enough!'

'Exactly, Hoong. We can skip the other cells. The murderer will have gone on to the tower, to see whether there's a hollow space under the floor. He—'

'Come and have a look, please, Your Honour!’ another constable said. 'Half of the floor in the cell opposite has been taken up!’

They quickly followed him. Six tiles in the centre of the cell had been removed and neatly piled up in the corner. Judge Dee rubbed his finger over the one on top: it was covered with a thin film of dust. 'Let's have a look at the other cells, men!'

They found that the floor of every single cell had been tampered with. In some cells the tiles had been neatly replaced, in others they had been carelessly thrown into a corner.

'On to the tower!’ the judge ordered. He passed through the door-opening at the end of the corridor and entered the spacious octagonal hall that constituted the ground floor of the west tower. Here the floor had not been tampered with.

'Stands to reason,' Judge Dee muttered. 'These slabs are fixed into a layer of cement. You need a pickaxe to make a hole here. But look at the wainscoting!'

In several places the mouldering wooden boards that covered the brick wall had been torn down, disclosing an intervening space of about two inches.

'I don't understand why ...' the sergeant began, per­plexed.

'I do,' the judge interrupted gruffly. 'You inspect the staircase and the two floors above, men. Come along, Sergeant! We'll climb up to the top, to get some fresh air!'

They went up the creaking stairs, carefully stepping round the holes that gaped where a mouldering step had dropped out.

A narrow balcony went around the tower's top floor, under the overhanging eaves of the pointed roof. Judge Dee stood at the low balustrade. Folding his hands in his wide sleeves, he stared at the mass of green treetops be­low. After a while he turned to the sergeant and said, with a smile:

'Sorry that I was so short with you downstairs, Hoong. This is really a most vexing case. Now we have obtained our first clue, but that seems to have no bearing at all upon our murder! This temple was searched, and very thoroughly too. But not for a place to hide a body and a severed head, and not yesterday, but some time ago. The object of the search was something small, not larger than a few inches square, I'd say.'

The sergeant nodded slowly. Then he asked, 'How do you know that the object they were looking for was so small, sir?'

'Well, when the searcher had lifted the tiles in the first cell, and found that the layer of earth underneath was only five or six inches thick, he examined the floor of every other cell, hoping to find something buried there. Then he went on to search the empty space behind the wainscoting, and that is only a few inches from the brick wall, as you saw just now.' He thought a few moments, then resumed: 'I also think that the search was con­ducted independently by two different persons. One had much experience in this work; he tried to cover up his searching by carefully replacing the tiles. The other didn't care, he just threw the discarded tiles into a corner, and tore down the wainscoting.'

'You said that this search for a hidden object has no bearing on our case, sir. But we know that Seng-san used to frequent this temple. There might be a link between the murder and the search, even though the search took place long before the murder was com­mitted.'

'Yes, you are right, Hoong! That's a possibility we must seriously consider. Perhaps Seng-san and the other man were murdered because they found what a second party had been looking for in vain!’ He considered for a while, stroking his long beard. 'As to our missing body and severed head, we won't find those inside. You'll have noticed that there isn't a drop of blood anywhere, nor any signs of blood having been wiped up.' He pointed at the treetops below. 'The obvious place to look for those remains is in that wilderness there. Quite a job, for from here you can see clearly how large the temple grounds are. Well, we'd better go down again.'

The three constables who had been inspecting the floors below reported that they had found no traces of a search having been conducted there. The walls had no wains­coting, and the bricks had not been tampered with.

The headman was standing in the hall, wiping his dirt-smeared, moist face with his neckcloth. His men were standing around him, talking in whispers.

'Someone has been tampering with the floors and the walls, sir,' he reported with a crestfallen look. 'But we didn't find any sign of a large box.'

'It must have been buried somewhere in the garden, headman. By the way, where does that narrow door near the altar over there lead to? I saw no back gate in the surrounding wall when I was standing on the top floor of the west tower.'

'The door leads to the narrow space behind the hall, Your Honour. Formerly there was a gate in the wall, but it has been bricked up for many years.'

'All right. Take all your men to the garden. Look for a spot where some digging has been done recently. In the meantime we shall pay a visit to the Hermitage, Sergeant.'

While crossing the front yard, Judge Dee said, 'The murderer must have had an accomplice, Hoong. To drag Seng-san's body all the way outside, smear blood on Ah-liu's jacket, then bury the body and the other man's head somewhere in that dense wilderness — that isn't exactly a one-man job! Two murderers, and no motive! I don't like this at all, Hoong.'

They passed through the triple gate and took the foot­path running along the front of the temple's outer wall.

Judge Dee resumed: 'In times of political unrest, Buddhist monks often bury golden statues and other valuable objects of worship in order to prevent their being stolen. If there should be such a buried treasure in this deserted temple, then we would have a sound motive. The only trouble is that I have never heard a buried treasure mentioned in connection with this particular place!'

'Perhaps someone happened to discover a note about that in some old, forgotten record, sir.'

'Yes, there's a lot in that, Hoong! Suppose that the man then engaged three or four scoundrels to help him to make a secret search for the hidden treasure? If Seng-san and the other man were among them, and tried to keep the whole loot for themselves, that would give the others a good motive for murdering them. This theory would establish a logical link between the search and the murders.'

The path entered the wooded patch between the temple and the Hermitage. The judge halted and turned round.

'From here we have a good view of the entire temple. The hill goes down rather steeply directly behind the back wall. That's why the path leading down to the highway makes all those sharp turns. We must try to learn more about the history of the temple, Hoong. When we are back in the tribunal, I want you to investigate the old files in the chancery. Find out when exactly the authorities ordered the inmates to evacuate the temple, who the Abbot was and where he went, and whether there was ever any rumour about buried treasure.'

After a few minutes' walk through the forest they saw the neatly plastered wall of the Hermitage, a small one-storeyed temple built in purely Chinese style. The roof was decked with green-glazed tiles; the curved ridge ended in upturned points shaped like dragon-tails. They heard faintly the quacking of ducks. Except for that there was only the constant drone of the cicadas.

Sergeant Hoong rattled the knocker of polished copper on the red-lacquered gate. After he had repeated this several times, the peephole opened and a girl's face appeared behind the grating. She studied the two visitors suspiciously with her large, alert eyes, then asked sharply:

'What do you want?'

'We are from the tribunal,' the sergeant told her. 'Open up!'

The girl admitted them to a small paved yard. Evi­dently she was the maid, for she wore a simple dark-blue jacket and wide trousers of the same material. Judge Dee noticed that she had a common but rather pretty face; there were dimples in her round cheeks. The grey flag­stones of the yard were scrupulously clean and had been sprinkled with water to keep the air cool. On the left stood a small building of red brick, on the right a larger one with a veranda. The walls of the temple hall at the back were plastered a spotless white and the pillars sup­porting the curved eaves were lacquered red. Beside the well in the corner stood a rack carrying a row of potted plants, and on the highest shelf a few porcelain vases with tastefully arranged flowers. The judge recognized the style of flower arrangement practised by his wives and guessed that these were the work of the Abbess. The subtle fragrance of orchids drifted in the air. The judge reflected that, after the deserted temple, these refined surroundings were a pleasant change indeed.

'Well,' the girl asked impatiently, 'what can I do for you, sir?'

'Take my visiting-card to the Abbess,' Judge Dee said, groping in his sleeve.

'The Abbess is sleeping,' she said sullenly. 'Tonight she has to go to the city, to attend a party in the magistrate's residence. If you insist, I shall ...'

'Oh no,' Judge Dee said quickly. 'I came only to in­quire whether you heard or saw anything unusual last night. Some vagabonds were making trouble in the deserted temple. About midnight.'

'About midnight? ' she scoffed. Indicating the buildings with a sweeping gesture, she went on: 'All this I have to keep clean, all alone by myself, mind you! It's a very small temple, but there are a lot of knick-knacks on the altar that need to be dusted. Do you think I feel like sitting up late at night after a day's hard work?'

'Do you also do all the shopping?' the judge asked curiously. 'If you have to go up and down that staircase every day—'

'I go only once a week for the soy, salt and beancurd. We don't eat meat or fish — worse luck!’

'I hear the quacking of ducks, though.'

Her face softened.

'Those are mine. The Abbess lets me keep them, for the eggs. They are ever so cute, the small ones... .' She checked herself and asked curtly, 'Anything else I can do for you?'

'Not at this time. Come along, Hoong. Let's see how things are progressing at the temple.'

'What a pert young hussy!' the sergeant remarked when they were walking through the wood again.

The judge shrugged his shoulders.

'She's fond of ducks, and that is something, at least. Well, I am glad to have seen the Hermitage. The elegant atmosphere confirms the high opinion my ladies have of the Abbess.'

The headman and two constables were sitting on the steps of the main hall, looking hot and dishevelled. They jumped up when they saw Judge Dee enter the court­yard.

'No use, Your Honour! I'd swear that no one has been into that accursed wilderness over there for a long, long time! There isn't even a pathway. And there are no traces of any digging that we could see. The other men are still trying to get through by skirting the outer wall.'

Judge Dee sat down on a large boulder in the shadow of the wall and began to fan himself vigorously.

'You mentioned that the murderer must have had an accomplice, sir,' the sergeant said after a while. 'Couldn't they have put the body on an improvised stretcher and carried it down the hill?'

'Possible, but not very probable. They would have run the risk of meeting other vagabonds, and those are very inquisitive folk. The garden is our best bet, I think.'

One by one the constables emerged from the garden. They shook their heads.

The judge rose.

'It's getting late. We'd better go back to the tribunal. Seal the doors of the hall, headman. Leave two men here to guard the place. And see to it that they are relieved at nightfall.'