The Limehouse Text (3 page)

“Limehouse,” Poole muttered. “It would have to happen in Limehouse. By gor, I hate the place. I don’t know what Nevil saw in it, I really don’t. You ask for directions or the time of day here and everyone suddenly forgets English and shuts up like an oyster. There is going to be a lot of pressure from upstairs to solve this one quickly. Nevil was a bit unorthodox, but he was an inspector, after all, and Commissioner Henderson does not take kindly to the death of a constable, let alone an inspector. If I do not clear this up quickly, he might put me in charge here permanently, blast the fellow.”

Barker’s stony face showed no expression at the outburst.

“You there,” Poole said, indicating the first constable. “Go fetch a cart to transport the body to K Division.” He turned to another. “You take a lantern and walk along the tunnel and look for clues.” He pointed to a third. “And you come with me and take notes. Shall we go into Mr. Ho’s restaurant, then, and talk, gentlemen?”

Poole questioned us, requestioned us, and then separated us and cross-questioned us. He asked the same questions in so many different ways, I began to get mixed up in the minor details. When he finally let us go two hours later, I’d told him everything. Everything, that is, that my employer wished me to say, for I noted that the one thing Cyrus Barker had been very careful to omit was the existence of the book we had just discovered, the cause of our present misery and of a good deal more to come.

W
HEN WE ARRIVED AT BARKER’S HOME IN NEWINGTON,
he shot up the stairs while I was still removing my coat. I was certain the little package had been burning a hole in his breast pocket the entire day. I went outside to the bathhouse for a good soak, and afterward I ate a solitary dinner. Apparently, Barker was too caught up puzzling over his new treasure to even inform his butler he was not coming down. I ate my
terrine des lapins
while our butler, Jacob Maccabee, hovered about, venting sighs like a bellows. By the time I had reached coffee and cheese, he could stand no more and marched upstairs to speak with his master. A few minutes later, Mac was coming down again, shaking his head and muttering to himself in Yiddish.

Later that night I was stretching out in bed when my feet came in contact with Barker’s Pekingese, Harm, who nipped my toe to inform me he was there. He had a habit of curling up right where I wanted to put my feet or getting tangled up in my limbs, and once or twice he’d even tried to sleep on top of me. I set him right this time and moved him to the side, despite his growling protests. Then I stretched out, all five foot four inches of me, and lay there, listening to the night sounds from the window Barker had permanently screwed open a crack. Another sound came to my ears, enough to make me open my eyes and listen closer.

It was a thrumming sound and it made the house vibrate slightly. It was like the sound a heavy branch makes when a child swings on it from a rope. I knew instantly it must be the heavy bag hanging in the basement. Perhaps my employer was trying out some moves from his little manual. I turned up the gas lamp over my head and consulted my bedside clock, noting that it was almost three-thirty. I admired the man, but sometimes he can be a trifle eccentric. I considered joining him for a moment but instead rolled over and went back to sleep.

Barker was not his usual self at breakfast. I do not believe he had slept at all. He came down with his silk dressing gown tied loosely over his nightshirt and a pair of carpet slippers on his feet. His hair hung down in spikes over his smoky spectacles as if he had worked himself into a lather on the heavy bag.

“I’m not going to the office just now, lad,” he muttered. “I’ll be along in an hour or so.”

“Yes, sir,” I answered. For once, I was the more nattily dressed of the two of us. I wore one of my best suits, a dark cutaway coat and trousers, a gray waistcoat, and a striped tie. I’d polished my boots and beaten back my hair and was now ready to present myself to the world. I bade my adieus, put on my coat and hat, and hailed a cab outside.

It was a novel experience being alone in the cab. Both working and living with my employer, I was at his beck and call through the week, with a half day off on Saturday. I attended worship services with him at the Baptist Metropolitan Tabernacle on Sundays, and at any time, Barker might wish to discuss some part of the case we were working on or to give me instructions for the next day, and there went another hour. I was supposed to go to the office, but just then the thought occurred to me that I might use the time to investigate the building Barker owned. I tapped the trap of the cab overhead with my stick.

“Take me to the docks. Limehouse.”

“Dunno ’bout that, sir,” the driver said through the heavy scarf he wore over his mouth. Cabmen were reluctant to go to that part of London. They often couldn’t get a return fare, their wheels got dirty in the ill-swept streets, and the children of the East End were experts at shying rocks.

“I’ll double your fare, driver. I’m looking for a place called Three Colt Street.”

In ten minutes we were crossing London Bridge, and I was revisiting the scene of our first case in Aldgate. I couldn’t resist a shudder when we passed the Minories and I saw the stable where I had very nearly ended my life. But all things must pass, as my father often said, and here I was, hail of limb, investigating another case. The building had been let to a blacksmith who had assembled a forge in the old trackside building.

I passed through districts and slivers of districts: Spital-fields, Whitechapel, Wapping, Bethnel Green. It was not until we were almost there that the cabman hazarded another remark.

“What was that?” I asked.

“I said, ‘Looks like we ain’t the only ones a’goin’ dockside.’ ”

I leaned forward, looking over the leather doors and the head of the cab horse. A dark brougham was ahead of us, wending its way down Commercial Road. The vehicle looked vaguely familiar. Then I realized why. It was the one owned by Harm’s keeper, a heavily veiled woman who came twice a week to bathe and brush him. The dog had been injured during our first case and she had picked him up in that very brougham. She was another of Barker’s interminable secrets. Who was she? Why the veil? I thought it possible that she might be the widow that my employer occasionally kept company with. The appearance here of our two vehicles together was too much for coincidence.

“I say, follow that brougham!”

Barker’s late assistant had lived at 127 Three Colt Street, and now the veiled woman was going there as well. I could add two and two, and another two, come to think of it. I was in charge of the accounts in our office, and there was a regular amount paid monthly to a Miss Winter at the Bank of England in Threadneedle Street. Were I a betting man, I would say the veiled woman and Miss Winter were one and the same.

When the brougham stopped in front of a two-story building near the waterfront, I had the cabby stop at the end of the street. I peered through the small cab window in time to see the woman’s familiar black-clad figure, with the even more familiar black Pekingese in her arms. I was puzzling over a dozen questions in my mind. Was Barker actually keeping a woman here, and if so, to what end? I paid the cabby and slowly sauntered past.

The house was well kept for the area, without being ostentatious. It was clapboard, but none of the boards was in disrepair and the building had been recently painted. As I watched, a Chinese maid opened a window on the first floor. It didn’t require an enquiry agent to discern that the woman’s room must be there. My vigilance was rewarded when I heard Harm bark in the upper room. But was the home a private residence or let rooms? The question was important, since I couldn’t go into one but might pass freely into the other. Idly crossing the street, I dared press an eye against the window beside the door. I saw a corridor full of doors, no sitting room or hall. Excellent. I opened the door and stepped inside.

I stood a moment on the threshold and closed the door slowly, acclimating myself to the sounds around me. I tensed when a door opened and an elderly Chinese man came out, but he shuffled by without comment or interest and left the building.

I could leave,
I told myself,
or I could go upstairs and introduce myself.
Perhaps I could say that I was in the area and thought I would check on the dog, or that we were investigating Quong’s death and I wished to see the residence whose address he had written in the pawnshop register. No, none of those would wash. I should leave.

I should have, but I didn’t. In his novels, the writer Thomas Hardy often speaks of the Fates as if we are all figures in some universal Greek tragedy, always getting into trouble because of inner weaknesses we cannot control. I though it rather an un-Christian viewpoint, but I went up the stairs just the same.

The upper floor was much like the lower, save that it had a few feminine touches. The maid had just come from serving her mistress and had taken a moment to idly look out of a window in the back of the house that butted against the docks. She turned when she heard me reach the top of the stairs.

“I wonder if I might have a word with your mistress,” I said.

She did nothing save regard me coolly. It occurred to me that she did not speak English.

“Your mistress,” I repeated, a trifle louder, as if it would help. “Miss Winter. I wish to speak with her. I believe she has my employer’s dog.”

I’m convinced that Harm, for all the five years or so he had lived upon this earth, knows only about three words, but one of them is “dog.” From the flat to the right, he began his clarion cry, a sound that conjures up images of his being roasted on a spit alive. The maid still did not move. I took three steps before her arm went out, braced against the wall, barring me from the door. Apparently, she thought herself a bodyguard as well as a maid, which was laughable. She was a pretty little thing, in her pigtail and silk pajama suit, and her China doll face was difficult to take seriously.

“Look here, if you’ll just move,” I said, putting my hand on her shoulder.

The next thing I knew I was sliding across the floor on my back. My shoulder hit the railing so hard I careened off it and slid down a short flight of steps to the first landing. Where had this slip of a girl learned to kick like a mule? Had I been alone, I would have nursed my wounds, but the girl who had been so unladylike as to kick me was still watching, so I shook it off. I’d had worse, or at least as bad. I stood up and tried again. I was not going to be stopped from speaking with Barker’s dog keeper by a chit like her.

The girl actually dared raise her arms up in a fighting stance, left hand out, weight on the back foot, front foot up on its toes—what Barker called a cat stance. I was not going to get by her, if she could help it.
Very well,
I thought,
I shall go through you then, if it must be.

I moved forward again and when I was within her reach, she tried another kick, but I was too smart for her. I blocked it handily and the two punches that came after it. It left her vulnerable for a punch of my own and my hand shot out involuntarily before I stopped myself. I had never struck a girl before, and I’d like to believe it was not in my character to do so. Apparently, she had no such scruples. She clouted me on the chin with her small hand rather like the knock from a wooden cane, then kicked at me. I had no choice but to retreat, which brought a small smile to the girl’s face.

I had no idea what to do. I knew six or seven good kicks myself, but I wouldn’t use them on her, she-tiger though she was, and the dozen or more hand strikes, eye gouges, claws, punches, chops, and others were all forbidden as well. This was an absurd situation. I had been taught all my life that women should be treated with kindness and respect by a gentleman, and though she was Chinese, she was still very much a girl. Kicking and striking were out, which only left one alternative and a very intimate one at that: the Japanese wrestling holds that Barker had been teaching me, which he had formerly taught at Scotland Yard.

She clipped me with another left to the chin, but it was a glancing blow, for I was already moving to my right, catching her around the waist with my left arm and coming ’round behind her. Before she had a chance to react, I snaked my other hand around and clasped it over my first as solid as if they had been locked together. I was suddenly very aware that Chinese girls do not wear corsets, if in fact they wear anything at all under those silk pajama suits. I felt a blush rising from under my collar, but it stopped suddenly as a pair of thumbs went into my eyes.

I would like to think in the past eleven months of constant practice and tutelage under Cyrus Barker that I had grown more lean and muscular. Nothing can be done, however, to train a pair of eyes to withstand a woman’s thumbs, save to pull back one’s head, duck away from her, and put one’s head down out of harm’s way. As I pulled away, she hopped on my toes and kicked my shins. Female or not, I was going to have to do something. But what? Bearing down with my forehead as hard as I could, I succeeded in reaching my arms down far enough to get my hands around her lower limbs and I scooped her up off the floor as if she were a basket of laundry. She began spitting words at me in Chinese, no doubt casting aspersions upon my ancestors, kicking her feet madly in the air and clutching for whatever projecting hair or ears I might have about my person. The worst part was, now that I had her I had no idea what to do with her. For the first time, it dawned on me that coming here had not been one of my brighter ideas.

I spied a window off to the side, the very one she had been looking out as I came up the stairs. My ear caught the call of a gull as it swooped by and my nose could not miss the smell of the Thames. It was a matter of a moment to lift her out the window and to drop her out of my arms and I hoped, out of my life for good. As it turned out, the tide was not yet fully in, and the young maid, pigtail flying, pink pajamas rippling, landed in a deep mudbank below.

Western literature makes much of the almond eyes of the Oriental, but hers were as round at that moment as the sun overhead, as she sat covered in mud from her slippers to her plaited hair. It could have been worse, I told myself. At least I hadn’t dropped her on a wooden boardwalk or a stone pier. When she finally caught her breath she began bellowing and I left her to it. I pulled in my head, crossed the hall, and opened the door. Harm surged out, tail wagging, barking his protests that he had missed all the fun.

The chamber of Miss Winter, for it could only be hers, was empty, but a window in the back was open and the curtain billowed outward. Sticking my head out, I saw steps leading down to the ground floor. The woman had decamped while her devious maid had distracted me. Taking a brief glance about the room—a frilly, girlish place with fans on the wall and low, silk-covered chairs—I tucked Harm under my arm and together we set off in pursuit of the elusive Miss Winter.