Will Thomas - The Limehouse Text

“I need to arrange something quickly,” Barker said.

“I don’t like the sound of that. What exactly do you want to do?”

“I want to set up a meeting and bring all of the suspects together into one room.”

“A meeting? You’ve gone mad,” he barked. “What makes you think any of them will come?”

“That’s what I need you for, Terry. You could make them come. It is the Yard’s case, after all.”

“Oh, now you want my help, after being obstinate and impeding our case for days.”

“Someone official must take the killer into custody. I thought you should get the credit.”

“I would have to get approval,” the inspector said doubtfully, but I could see he was imagining the look on Henderson’s face when he brought in the murderer.

“Hang approval,” Barker said. “You are in charge of the investigation, are you not? What happens if, at the end of it, you have the confessed killer of Inspector Bainbridge shackled to your wrist?”

“I’d be a bloody hero,” Poole admitted. “But ordering some people to come won’t mean they’ll come. That Foreign Office blighter will stay away just to spite me. How could I possibly get him there?”

“Tell him he cannot come. Or, better yet, you could let out that I am ready to surrender the text.”

Poole leaned forward. “Now you’re talking. So you have had it all along, then.”

“I didn’t say that. But I might be able to lay hands on it.”

“All right. We’ll do it your way. Where shall this meeting be held?”

“At Ho’s.”

“Ho’s! No, no, never,” he protested hotly. “I’ve seen enough of that place to suit me for the rest of my life. I can’t have an official meeting there.”

“Why not?” Barker countered. “The inquest took place there.”

“Because holding it there would indicate that we had been wrong to arrest him in the first place.”

“But you were wrong to arrest him. He was innocent of any wrongdoing.”

“If that man is innocent of anything, then I’m one of Her Majesty’s ladies-in-waiting. He’s the closest thing to a pirate in the East End, and I suspect half the crimes in London are plotted in his tearoom.”

“I concede that point, but many of the people I want at that meeting reside in Limehouse and it is the only meeting place in the area.”

“Let me think about it. Will you invite Mr. K’ing to this little party of yours?” the inspector asked.

“I would say he is too canny to step into any such snare, but he will be certain to send along a representative, if he does not come himself.”

“Do you have a theory as to who Bainbridge’s killer might be?”

“I do,” Barker said.

“Then tell me who it is!”

Barker shook his head. “I shall let you know at the proper time, in order to arrest him.”

“I’ve been working for the Yard almost fifteen years now, and I’ve never come up against a case like this,” Poole complained. “I cannot make heads or tails of it. Everything is incomprehensible.”

“If it is any consolation, Terry, I believe no one could have solved it who hadn’t spent decades in China.”

“It feels like I am turning a pot ’round and ’round, looking for the handle, but there isn’t one,” Poole said, looking desolate.

Barker gave a cool smile in sympathy. “I’ll give you a handle, though I’m not certain it shall help you. The primary question, obviously, is who committed the murder, but it helps to ask a second one, which is, what did the killer plan to do with the text once he had it?”

“Do with it?” Poole repeated, a trifle lost, but then, I was, too.

“Yes. As has been pointed out many times, the book has almost no monetary value.”

Terence Poole ran a hand through his long side-whiskers, in danger of plucking them out in frustration. “I wasn’t ordered to find the book. My duty is to find Bainbridge’s killer. I shan’t rest day or night until I find him.”

“All shall be revealed in the fullness of time. You look agitated, Terry. I shall have Jenkins brew some green tea.”

Poole snatched his bowler from the edge of Barker’s desk. “You can keep your sophisms and your blasted tea. I’ve got work to do. Have your little meeting if you like, but you’d better be ready to reveal who murdered Bainbridge, and you’d better bloody have proof.”

After Poole had gone, Barker turned his swiveling chair my way. “Get out your pad and pencil, lad. We’ve an invitation to write.”

I got out my pad and waited until Barker began to dictate.

With the compliments of Scotland Yard, Mr. Cyrus Barker, private enquiry agent, invites your attendance at the tearoom of Mr. Ho, near the Commercial Road, Limehouse, in order to discuss a text which has aroused the interest of many. Anyone with said interest in the text or who wishes to acquire it may hear Mr. Barker’s explanations of events pertaining to the volume and its arrival in this country and its subsequent history. The meeting shall be at seven o’clock on the evening of the seventeenth. Your humble servant, Cyrus Barker.

“That will do,” he said. “Type it up and make several copies. Let us see now. Send them to Mr. K’ing, Pollock Forbes, Charlie Han, Miss Petulengro, Mr. Woo, Campbell-Ffinch, and Mr. Hooligan. Am I leaving anyone out?”

“Not that I can see, sir.” I got out the Hammond typewriting machine and set to work.

London has several postal deliveries per day, but I feared that one of the important messages might miscarry. So, instead, I chose one of the excellent messenger services that ply their trade in Whitehall. I gave the fellow an extra half sovereign to see that all were delivered reliably, because I knew that was what Barker wanted. For a Scotsman, he could be surprisingly liberal with his money, but then, he left the ledgers to me.

“Let us go to Limehouse and prepare,” he said.

When Barker says the least, one knows that he is planning something. I tried twice to get him to tell me what was happening, but he was as unwilling to show his hand as a whist player. He spent most of the journey to Ho’s with his face tilted down toward his feet while I tried to reason through everything, without getting any further than Poole.

At Ho’s, he rattled down the steps through the tunnel as nonchalantly as ever, leaving me to hurry along behind him. Once in the tearoom, he conferred with Ho in low tones. The latter was back to ignoring me, I noticed. It wasn’t fair. If I took the blame for causing the fight Barker had been in, then I should also get the credit when Ho came away with his winnings.

The two men got up and moved to the back of the room. Ho took a key from his pocket and opened the doors to the private banquet room, where a few days earlier the jurymen at the inquest had gone to deliberate. I thought it fitting that the case might end where it had begun, in Ho’s tearoom.

There was nothing remarkable about the room. One wall was stone, the other three made up of vertical planks of wood gray with age. Scattered tables and chairs looked as if they had been left as they were when the jurors returned to the court with their verdict. A thin layer of dust had settled. Ho called to one of the waiters, who came in with a bowl of water and a rag and began to clean.

Ho began moving tables about while he and Barker strategized in Chinese. I couldn’t help much with my injured shoulder, but I shuffled chairs around with one good arm and my knee. The tables were set up in a in a T pattern and chairs arranged around the outside to seat ten. This was quite a party Barker was preparing. I hoped at the end of it, he would unmask Quong’s killer and we could bid adieu to this godforsaken end of town for a good, long while.