The Limehouse Text

by Will Thomas

  “No,” Woo answered. “I mean, yes, I hoped to learn the secrets and to become a better fighter, but not for my own gain. I wanted to create an elite corps of boxers chosen from among the imperial troops.”

  “I see,” Barker said. “An elite corps. And just what, Mr. Woo, would the elite corps do with that knowledge?”

  Woo put his head down and mumbled something under his breath.

  “I did not hear you, Mr. Woo.”

  He looked up again and his easy manner was gone. I saw fire in his eyes. “I said, we would kill all foreigners within China’s borders, every American and Englishman and French and German and Austrian and Japanese that has been infecting our country. We would wipe out foreign business along the Bund in Shanghai and in the European settlements in Peking and Canton. We would execute your missionaries with their poisonous religion as an example to their weak-willed converts, and we would shut our borders again. China for the Chinese. It is the only way, you see.”

  “You’re mad,” Campbell-Ffinch insisted. “Her Majesty the Dowager Empress would never countenance the wholesale slaughter of honored guests in China. We have been assured of that fact.”

  “Campbell-Ffinch, if you believe that, you are naive,” Mr. K’ing spoke up. “I’ve heard she was responsible for the death of her eldest son for being a spineless weakling. She would no more fear the slaughter of non-Chinese than she would the fleas on one of her prized dogs. If the Prince agreed to such an agreement, even in unofficial terms, one can assume he knew he could convince Her Majesty of the necessity of his actions. I have heard her referred to as the Dragon Lady. She has quite a villainous reputation.”

  “There is but one person in this room who has spoken to the Dowager Empress herself and might best resolve this question,” Ho said. Heads began to turn back and forth, until finally, all gazes settled on my employer.

  Cyrus Barker cleared his throat, as if postponing an unpleasant task, before he spoke. “I have indeed met the Empress and it is true that she has been ruthless in the past, but at other times, she has been lenient. I believe she has relied on one advisor after another over a span of forty years. The Prince is one of those advisors. He is a cold specimen, but she dotes upon him. I believe he could have convinced her of the need of such a course.”

  “I regret we have not had the opportunity of finishing our fight, Mr. Barker, in the tunnel,” Woo said. “I would have enjoyed such a challenge. I suppose there is no chance now?”

  “None whatsoever. I have not come here to fight but to avenge the murder of my late assistant.”

  “Had I known then what I do now, I don’t believe I would have shot Quong and risked bringing myself to your attention. To tell the truth, I did not believe such a skilled fighter as you existed in the West. To think, the mighty Stone Lion of Canton, an Englishman.”

  “Scotsman,” Barker corrected. “I am a Scotsman.”

  There was a silence in the room for a brief moment, and then Ho clapped his hands. “Tea!”

  Barker had made good his promise to Poole, and the two of them rose with their prisoner in hand. My employer opened the door, waiters came in to serve us tea, and then there was a sudden commotion in the doorway. Poole, Woo, and Barker all cried out at once. One of the waiters turned toward us and raised his arms. In his hand was a bloody knife, which he dropped onto the floor with a clatter. It was no waiter at all, despite the apron he wore. It was Old Quong.

  The next I knew, Dr. Quong had been tackled by Campbell-Ffinch, who had finally reasoned that something had gone wrong. I caught a glimpse of Woo through the tangle of limbs. His face was set in a rictus of pain, and the lower half of his suit was covered in blood and gore. Old Quong had cut him horizontally across the abdomen, and rivulets of blood seeped onto the floor and his patent leather boots. I watched his face slowly relax and his eyes roll up as the killer of so many gave way to death.

  “Vengeance!” Old Quong called from the floor as Campbell-Ffinch subdued him. “Vengeance!”

  Poole swore and reached for his keys, having no desire to be shackled to a corpse, while another killer rolled about on the floor. Barker, I think, had the oddest reaction of all. He merely stood and shook his head, amazed at the proceedings.

  So much happened after that that I could hardly keep track. Poole was upset that a murder had occurred right in front of him. Campbell-Ffinch was angry at losing both the book and the killer. Hooligan clapped his hands as if this had all been staged for his entertainment, while Hettie and Charlie Han took the first opportunity to depart.

  As for the inscrutable Mr. K’ing, he spoke not a word but bowed and retrieved his hat, slipping out before Campbell-Ffinch and Inspector Poole noticed he was gone. Forbes was a step behind him.

  Dr. Quong’s wrists were locked in Woo’s blood-spattered restraints and he was led off. We covered the body with a tablecloth as waiters came and went with rags, mops, and buckets and cleaned the blood from the floor. Poole arranged for the body to be removed in one of Ho’s laundry carts, which Ho would bill the Yard for later. Hooligan went into the tearoom for a meal, and Campbell-Ffinch stalked off to make his report.

  When the room was sufficiently clean, Ho locked up and we three went to his office. Ho moved to a cabinet in the back of the room near the shrine. He took out a small white porcelain bottle and three cups and poured each of us a drink.

  “To memory of Quong,” he said and we all downed the fiery liquid, possibly plum brandy. It took the breath out of my lungs and when I got it back, the cups had been refilled.

  “To Dr. Quong,” Barker stated, and down it went a second time.

  Afterward, the Guv smacked his lips and rotated the tiny cup in his hand. “It is convenient that Dr. Quong was here. It is almost as if he were let in.”

  Ho picked up his water pipe and began running a wire through the mouthpiece. “I don’t know what you are talking about.”

  “It occurs to me,” Barker replied, “that Woo may have escaped English justice, but he did not escape Chinese justice.”

  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 exag
geratedly 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.”