Will Thomas: The Limehouse Text

“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 exaggeratedly 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.”