A Spoonful of Murder

by Robin Stevens

  ‘I was born poor,’ said the first figure below us.

  ‘But at least I still have the five fingers of my hand,’ said the other.

  There was another pause, and I could tell that someone inside was speaking.

  ‘I died once,’ said the first figure.

  ‘Stabbed five times by a jade pin,’ agreed the second.

  I gasped. ‘What is it?’ hissed Daisy. ‘What are they saying? Oh, this is infuriating!’

  ‘They’re talking about a jade pin,’ I told her.

  ‘It’s just the password!’ hissed Ah Lan. ‘It doesn’t mean anything! This is the House of Five Jade Figures.’

  But, in the dark, in a place that I did not know, on a mission that (I was beginning to see) was not only more illegal but also more dangerous than any we had been on before, I was not so sure.

  With a clank, the door below opened, and the two figures disappeared inside.

  ‘Come on,’ whispered Ah Lan. ‘Nothing more to see here. We have to go to the window.’

  He stood up in a half-crouch, and led us along the wall, and then up a gable and onto the building’s roof. We stepped across tiles, using hands and feet to steady ourselves, and at last (it seemed like an eternity) came to a little skylight, a window that was slightly open. I peered down into it, and this is what I saw.

  4

  Below us was a room, bare-floored but hung with flags in red and black. On each side were dark stone tablets, and at the opposite end of the room to us was a large metal pot, half full of what looked like sand. Sticking out of it was a terrifying array of swords and warlike poles with yet more flags hanging from them. But I saw that joss sticks were in the sand too, smoking as though they had been recently lit, and there was a dark object behind the pot that looked very like an altar in a temple, but bare of fruits and flowers.

  A group of people were gathering in the centre of the room. They were all men (I looked carefully), and they were all wearing red and black robes, with knotted handkerchiefs on their heads. It ought to have looked silly, but in fact it was rather menacing.

  They were all talking in low voices, and I was somehow reminded of one of my father’s drinks parties. These men might look strange (especially to Daisy’s eyes – I glanced at her and saw her open-mouthed in amazement), but all the same I thought that they behaved as though they were there to do business. Business with something dangerous and also sacred to it (I looked at the altar and the joss sticks), but business all the same.

  Then one more man came into the room. He was short, and skinny, with a hungry-looking face – like a Hong Kong street boy grown up – but he drew everyone’s eyes. He looked sure of himself, powerful. He stood beside the altar and raised his hands, and all the chatter fell silent. The men arranged themselves in two lines, to his left and his right, and bowed.

  I knew that this was the leader, Sai Yat, and the meeting was about to begin.

  ‘Greetings, Jade Figures,’ said Sai Yat. Then he turned towards the altar and bowed solemnly. All the other men bowed again.

  Then there was a ceremony. I won’t say much about it (for politeness’s sake, as well as safety’s – it’s not wise to get on the wrong side of the Triads). It was a little like one of the ceremonies at a temple, but more warlike and dangerous, and as though I was seeing it through thick glass, everything half ordinary and half strange. I knew that Daisy didn’t understand it at all, and it made me feel terribly odd that I did. I was reminded, all over again, how different my life had been to hers before we arrived at Deepdean.

  ‘And now to business,’ said Sai Yat, clapping his hands. The men around him all stood up straighter and began to murmur among themselves.

  ‘We are being watched,’ said Sai Yat. I flinched. He was so fierce, I could almost believe that his eyes saw all the way up to the little skylight where the three of us crouched, looking in. ‘Detective Leung is watching us.’

  I breathed again.

  ‘We all know what the detective wants: to find the Wong boy. He thinks we have him. He thinks we paid the lift man Shing to kill the maid and take the baby. Now, you are in a sacred space. You are under oath to speak truthfully. Do any of you have Edward Wong, or did you have anything to do with his kidnapping?’

  ‘No,’ said the man to his left.

  ‘No,’ said the man next to him – and on, down the row and back up again.

  ‘No.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No.’

  Sai Yat nodded. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘That is the truth. None of us here have Edward Wong, and we had nothing to do with his kidnapping. There was a pin found in the dead maid, but it was not one of our pins. It was a trick, to throw suspicion on us. Truthfully, I say that we are innocent of this crime. Miss Wong, is that good enough for you?’

  I jumped. I almost fell through the skylight. Because Sai Yat had raised his head, and he was looking – I could not deny it – directly at me.

  Ah Lan put his right hand on my arm. ‘I have to take you downstairs now,’ he said.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Daisy. ‘What’s happened? Why are they— Hazel, why are they all looking at us?’

  ‘They know we’re up here,’ I whispered. ‘Ah Lan told them. Daisy, they knew we were coming!’

  ‘I thought it was too easy!’ cried Daisy. ‘That wall, and this window – I wondered why a criminal gang wouldn’t guard it. Oh, bother it. We should never have trusted Ah Lan!’

  My heart shrank and faltered in my chest. As Ah Lan guided us back down the way we had come, I wondered exactly what we had walked into, and how on earth we would get out of it again.

  5

  Ah Lan led us down and into the courtyard. We came through the door that we had heard being unbolted before. It clanked forbiddingly, and before us was another door, and another and another, all smelling of rusting metal, a little like blood.

  And then the hall was in front of us, and we were facing two rows of expressions that made me quail. These men were fierce, warlike, criminal. This was the Hong Kong of maids’ stories – the bogeymen who would come and eat us up if we were not good little girls. Well, Daisy and I had not been good little girls at all, and here were the bogeymen.

  Sai Yat moved down the middle of the hall towards us, his slippered feet making no sound on the dirt floor. Tigers are sometimes still found in the New Territories, slinking from house to house in the villages and making away with chickens and dogs and babies. I thought they were made-up stories until one day I saw a picture in my father’s South China Morning Post, of a group of moustached and turbaned policemen standing over the sleek striped body of a tiger that was as long as they were tall. I thought now that, if Sai Yat had been that tiger, he would never have allowed himself to be caught. He was more muscular than anyone I had ever seen, every inch of him purposeful. He was almost as short as I was, but the look on his face told me that he was used to being obeyed absolutely.

  ‘Good evening, Miss Wong,’ said Sai Yat, and he bowed his head very slightly.

  I bowed as deeply as I could, almost down to the floor. This was a moment to forget that I was Mr Wong’s eldest daughter, with a maid and a chauffeur of my own.

  ‘Bow, Daisy,’ I said out of the corner of my mouth.

  ‘But I—’ she began.

  ‘BOW,’ I said, as firm as I have ever been with her. And Daisy bowed.

  She did it awkwardly, but she did it, tipping over almost as low as I had, her hair glinting gold in the light from the hall’s torches as it slipped out of her headscarf.

  ‘Hazel,’ said Daisy, her nose still nearly touching her knees, ‘are they going to kill us?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, trying to keep my face calm.

  ‘We are not going to kill either of you,’ said Sai Yat, also in English. ‘Don’t look so surprised. English isn’t a sacred language. I did not ask Ah Lan to bring you here so we could kill you or kidnap you. I asked him to bring you here because I have heard of you, Miss Wong. I have heard the st
ories about what you have done in England.’

  For a moment I couldn’t imagine what he meant. Stories? But then—

  ‘You keep coming across dead bodies, and then somehow the crime is solved,’ said Sai Yat. ‘The maids all talk about you at the Big House. Ah Lan and Ng told me so. Your father thinks you have bad luck, but I think you have a talent.’

  My head jerked up. I couldn’t stop staring at him. I couldn’t quite feel the tips of my fingers either. My tongue tingled.

  ‘Excuse me!’ said Daisy. ‘We have talent. We are detectives. Hazel and I have solved five murder cases, but we have done it together, so don’t you go about saying it’s all Hazel!’

  The hall went very silent. I heard a fly buzz into one of the lamps and fizz out into soot.

  Sai Yat smiled. ‘Miss Wong’s friend,’ he said. ‘You are her sidekick – is that the word?’

  ‘I am not—’ Daisy spluttered.

  Sai Yat held up his hand, and Daisy shut up her mouth like a fish.

  ‘So, here is what you must do for me, in exchange for not killing you, or kidnapping you, or any of the things that I could do – because, as you see, I am a dangerous criminal, and the head of a very large gang, and you are two little girls who are away from home in the middle of the night. I need you to hear me say that my men and I had nothing to do with the kidnapping of your little brother, or the murder of his maid. We do many things, but we did not do this. We have no reason to – we make our money in other ways. When I speak in this sacred hall, I speak the truth, so you must believe me. And you know the truth of the pin, don’t you, Miss Wong? It is not ours. It is yours. Ah Lan has told me that also.’

  I swallowed. My mouth had gone very dry.

  ‘I need you to hear me say that I am gravely offended that the real culprit used the jade pin symbol in their crime. They have demeaned us, and I think you too. We must work together to make them pay.’

  ‘How?’ I asked, swallowing again with difficulty.

  ‘First, you must admit that the pin is yours.’

  ‘But what if my father blames me?’ I whispered.

  ‘Partly I would say that it is none of my concern,’ said Sai Yat. ‘Because it is not. But partly I would say that you are more than able to handle this problem. Fight back with the truth. You know as well as I do that this is not an ordinary kidnapping. It is only pretending to be. It was done not by one of us, but by one of the people your father knows and trusts. You have suspects, do you not?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Mr Wa Fan, Mrs Fu and Mr Svensson. We don’t think Wu Shing was working on his own. We think one of them paid him to take Teddy.’

  ‘Very good,’ said Sai Yat. ‘You are the detective. You will discover who has your brother. I will help you – my men are already looking for Wu Shing, and I will have them watch those three too. Ah Lan will give you any information we uncover, and you will use it to unmask the culprit. Yes?’

  It was hardly a question.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Daisy, after I nudged her hard in the ribs. I could tell she was sulking because Sai Yat was speaking directly to me. She was in the room, but not the centre of attention, and that, for the Honourable Daisy Wells, was very strange indeed.

  ‘Excellent!’ said Sai Yat. ‘As a result, I will not kill you.’ He winked at us, but I had a wobbly feeling that perhaps the joke was not quite as funny as he was making it seem.

  ‘Good luck, Miss Wong,’ he said to me, inclining his head just a little. I bowed back. ‘And good luck, Miss Wells,’ he said, and he reached out and patted Daisy on the head. She jerked back, affronted.

  ‘Gold hair,’ said Sai Yat, grinning. ‘It’s lucky here. Hasn’t anyone told you?’

  ‘There are plenty of things I was not told about Hong Kong,’ said Daisy, narrowing her eyes at me. ‘But I suppose being lucky is one of the better ones.’

  The doors at the back of the hall banged open, and a man came hurrying in.

  ‘Sai Yat,’ he said, bowing deeply. ‘We have found Wu Shing!’

  ‘Yes? Bring him here!’ snapped Sai Yat.

  ‘He is in Peking Mansions, in Wan Chai,’ said the man. ‘He took Room 440 there for a week. He has been boasting to anyone who will listen that he is coming into a fortune and will not need to be there for long. He told them that he has a rich benefactor who will be very generous with money and jewels. We have men who can pick him up now.’

  ‘No,’ said Sai Yat. ‘Tell them to stay where they are for the moment. Let these three go.’ And he nodded at Daisy, Ah Lan and me.

  ‘Where are we going?’ asked Daisy. ‘Is it another adventure?’

  ‘Peking Mansions,’ I said. ‘It’s where Wu Shing has a room – 440.’

  ‘Mansions?’ said Daisy. ‘Are lift operators rich here?’

  ‘They aren’t the English sort of mansions,’ I said, gulping rather. How could I explain to Daisy the difference between what was in her head and the reality? Peking Mansions is a place I had never been. It is where you go when you don’t have the money to go anywhere else – a place that I had been told was dirty, and dark, and full of illness and sorrow. I did not want to go there at all. But I looked at Sai Yat, and I knew that we could not say no to him. He had asked us to work for him, and we had to do what he said.

  I bowed my agreement, and Sai Yat nodded at me sternly. Ah Lan touched us both on the shoulder. We turned and followed him back out of the hall. Just as we were about to step through the doors, I looked back once more and saw Sai Yat standing in the middle of his hall. He was watching us, head thrown back and arms crossed. I could feel his confidence like a hand on my back, and I knew very clearly that this was a man whom we must not fail.

  We had ruled out a very important suspect, and were on the way to speak to another. And the crime seemed one hundred times more dangerous than it had before.

  6

  We piled back onto the cart, and off we went again. We rattled through the streets – darker now, lights dimmed, shouts in the distance. I felt very wide awake, and also rather like I was dreaming. I did not know what time it was – I had left my wristwatch at home – but I knew we were travelling for a long time. From Western, Wan Chai is a long way to go in a cart.

  Ah Lan shoved us along, but I was worried that he was tiring.

  ‘Let us push,’ I said at last, sitting up.

  ‘No,’ said Ah Lan. ‘Your hands – you’ll hurt them, and people will notice. But you can get out and run next to me, if you can keep up.’

  I heard the hint of a mocking smile in his voice again, and felt myself blush.

  ‘Of course we can keep up!’ said Daisy scornfully. ‘I’m faster than you are – or have you already forgotten?’

  We climbed out of the cart (I wobbled, and Daisy had to catch me) and then we were standing on the tarmacked street. Ah Lan took off lightly, the cart bouncing in front of him, and Daisy bounded after him. Wishing most desperately that detecting didn’t have to be so athletic, I followed. I was terrified that I would run into something hard, and even more afraid I would run into something soft.

  At last Ah Lan slowed in a dirty, rubbish-filled street, in front of an ugly building that rose up before us hugely, speckled with lighted windows and humming with activity. Heat and noise seemed to pour out from it like steam from a pot. I saw Daisy, half in shadow, wrinkle her nose, and heard her say, ‘Ugh! Gosh!’

  ‘Peking Mansions,’ said Ah Lan, bowing ironically. ‘Let me hide the cart, and we will go in.’ I saw him nod his head to someone beyond us, and turned to see a man in dark clothes slipping into the shadows on the other side of the street. Sai Yat’s men were here, on guard, and that meant Wu Shing must be inside.

  My heart sped up at the thought of going in – and not just because we were about to face a suspect. I could smell the building already, thick and heavy with a urine-sharp edge. But I took a deep and careful breath, and held out my hand to Daisy, who had gone rather pale. ‘Detective Society handshake
!’ I whispered. ‘Buck up!’

  ‘You don’t need to tell me that!’ hissed Daisy. ‘I am always perfectly bucked!’

  But as she shook my hand she smiled at me properly for the first time since we had entered Sai Yat’s hall.

  ‘Thank you, Watson,’ she whispered, very quietly.

  Following Ah Lan, we stepped inside Peking Mansions and climbed the stairs, which were dirty and echoing. We passed people lying slumped across them – I was afraid they were dead, and clutched at Daisy’s arm, but she whispered, ‘Don’t be a chump, Hazel, they’re just tired. Look, they’re breathing.’

  Wu Shing’s room was 440. The number four, unlucky in Hong Kong, gave me a nervous prickling feeling, but I could not explain that to Daisy. When we reached it, we found the room’s door hanging slightly ajar. Inside it was dark.

  My heart began to pound. What if Teddy was here? What if this was the end of our adventure?

  ‘Torches,’ said Daisy. I pulled my torch out of my pocket, and she took out hers. Ah Lan looked at us, and raised his eyebrows.

  ‘You came prepared,’ he said. ‘Good.’

  Together we went forward, and pushed open the door.

  Inside, our torches played about on what seemed to be an empty room. It was square, windowless, with a pile of dirty blankets in one corner. It smelled – of dirt and pennies and something sweet. There was a basin half full of dark water, and on the floor … was blood.

  I walked forward with trembling legs and a hand that shook rather, so that my torchlight bobbed like a living thing on rusty specks and smears that looked days old. I had a terrified moment in case we found— I do not even want to write it. But we quickly saw that there were no signs of a baby in the room, and no sign that one had ever been here. And this couldn’t be where the ransom call had been made from, either. There was no telephone, and I had seen none in the hallway. Teddy was not here, and I did not think he ever had been.

  Then Daisy exclaimed. She and Ah Lan had started forward towards the blankets, and I saw suddenly that the specks of blood led to them. I clutched my fingers around my torch.