Barbara Hambly - Magistrates of Hell

‘I swear I would never have harmed a hair of her head.’ Richard Hobart raised his face from his hands, blue eyes sick with dread. ‘No, I hadn’t the slightest desire to marry Holly – Miss Eddington – but for God’s sake, I wouldn’t have murdered her to get out of it! If I was fool enough to propose to her, the least I could do was go through with it, even if I was . . . was too stupid with drink to know what I was saying.’

Tears swam in his eyes. His face was longer than his father’s and narrow. At Cambridge, Asher had been struck by the boy’s resemblance to his lanky American mother. His cheeks glittered with stubble of the same bronze-gold color as his dirty hair, but his clothes were clean, and not those he’d had on last night. His father, Asher guessed, had brought them earlier that morning: the neat gray suit of a young embassy clerk, its starched, spotless collar adorned with a subdued green tie. Young Hobart’s hands trembled convulsively where they lay on the scuffed table of the interview room, and under a wash of sweat his face was chalky. He must have the hangover of the century, if not worse . Asher wondered how much opium the young man smoked and how frequently.

‘Do you recall anything of the night you proposed?’ He had learned that a matter-of-fact tone would often steady someone on the verge of hysterics.

‘Not a damn thing.’ The young man shook his head in despair. ‘Father was having some kind of ghastly whist-club over that night, so Gil and Hans and I made ourselves scarce. The Eddingtons would be there, you see, and I – well, I was rather avoiding Holly. I know it sounds frightful, Professor Asher, but she did cling so, and she was always going on about how much she loved me . . . A bit sick-making, really.’

A shudder went through him, and he pressed his hand to his lips. ‘We stayed down in the Chinese City long enough, I thought, that they’d all be gone by the time I got back. But I must have been wrong about that, because I have a vague memory of meeting Miss Eddington as I came up the garden walk. I was feeling a bit wibbly in the morning and came down late, thinking Father’d gone by then, but he was sitting at the breakfast table with a face like Jupiter Tonans. He practically struck me over the head with the newspaper and asked me what the hell I meant, getting engaged to Holly Eddington. I guess her mother’d sent the announcement in, first thing, and it was in print by noon.’

‘Were you angry?’

‘I was bally well appalled. Well, Miss Eddington was a . . . I’m sure you know, sir, how hard it is to avoid someone here in the Quarter. And the Eddingtons go everywhere. One doesn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. But I wasn’t falling in love with her, as her mother kept hinting. I’d had enough of that at Cambridge – matchmaking mamas shoving their daughters at me . . . Father’d have it that I never proposed at all: that Miss Eddington and her mother cooked it up between them, knowing I wouldn’t remember what I’d said. But she had a ring – the cheap sort of thing you’ll find down at the Thieves’ Market – and was showing it off all ’round the Quarter by that afternoon. It drove me wild, but what can one say?’

‘When was this?’

‘Last Thursday, the seventeenth. Just a week ago. That wretched mother of hers had invitations out for the engagement party the following day. Oh, dear God!’ He sank his head to his hands again and whispered, ‘I didn’t do it. I swear I didn’t do it, Professor. Look, can they get me out on bail, at least? I’ve been sick as a dog . . .’

‘What about last night?’

‘Could we talk about this later, please?’ Richard swallowed convulsively. ‘I’m sick—’

‘You’re going to be a great deal sicker, and this may be my last chance to get any sense out of you for days,’ responded Asher. ‘Tell me about last night. Where did you go?’

‘The Eight Roads,’ the boy mumbled. ‘Just outside the Chi’ang Gate—’

‘I know where it is. Who was with you?’

‘Hans, Gil, and Crommy. We all had passes – for the gates, I mean, after dark. Crommy gets one of the rickshaw boys to take us; they all know the way.’

Asher shook his head, amazed that those four choice spirits hadn’t been quietly murdered in a hutong months ago. ‘Do you remember coming back?’

‘Not a thing.’

‘Or why you came back early? It was barely ten o’clock when Miss Eddington’s body was found, and she’d only been dead a few minutes.’

‘Ten—’ Richard looked up again, his face now greenish with nausea. ‘I say, I couldn’t have got that drunk in three hours! Are you sure?’

‘Absolutely,’ said Asher. ‘Did you in fact mean to insult your fiancée and her parents?’

‘Good Lord, no! Crommy swore we’d only have a drink or two and – well, and a little jollification, just to brace me up for the ordeal . . .’

Asher reflected that Miss Eddington, had she lived, would have been fortunate to avoid a thundering case of syphilis on her wedding night.

‘I swear I never meant to get really drunk! And I was going to go back to the Eddingtons’. But I honestly can’t remember . . .’ The young man turned a sudden, ghastly hue and pressed his hand to his mouth, at which Asher signed to the guard who stood beside the interview-room door. After the prisoner had been helped from the room, Asher sat for a time at the scarred deal table, looking at the shut door which separated the chamber from the lock-up without truly seeing it.

Seeing instead the Trade Secretary’s narrow garden in the jerking lantern-light, the small gate that opened into the alleyway, which in turn led between the garden wall and that of the British Legation and back to Rue Meiji. The alley serviced half a dozen of the western-style bungalows, allowing Chinese tradesmen and vendors of vegetables and meat to bring their wares to the kitchens, where Chinese servants would prepare them for those who had forced their trade and their religion on the country at gunpoint. At night the alleyway was deserted. Anyone could have come or gone. At ten o’clock, Rue Meiji was still alive with rickshaws – one had only to walk down the alley and lift a hand . . .

A known killer attends a festivity at which a young girl is killed . . .

Ysidro, sitting in the window bay of the Trade Secretary’s rear parlor, thin hands folded, like a white mantis contemplating its prey.

How long has Ysidro been in Peking?

‘’Scuse me, Professor Asher?’

The young man who stood in the interview room’s outer doorway had the slightly grayish look about the mouth of someone suffering a brutal hangover. Still, he held out his hand and introduced himself, though Asher had already deduced that this must be Gil Dempsy, clerk at the American Legation: ‘They told me you were a friend of Sir Grant’s, who he asked to look into this awful mess. I’ll take oath Rick didn’t do it.’

‘Would you?’ Asher followed the young man out on to the verandah that flanked this side of the garrison offices, shaded against the baking heat of the Peking summers but at this season blue and chill. ‘Any thoughts on who might have?’

‘It’s got to have been the Chinese, sir.’ Dempsy sounded a little surprised that there might be any alternative possibility. He took a bamboo box of home-made cigarettes from his jacket pocket, offered Asher one and then lit one up for himself.

‘Why would they have done that?’

‘Who knows why Chinese’ll do anything, sir? It’s not like Miss Eddington’d taken out a million-dollar insurance policy, or was spying for the Germans, or anything.’

Asher turned his mind aside from inquiring whether his informant was sure about these assertions and said instead, ‘Tell me about last night.’ Further inquiry as to Chinese motivations, he was well aware, would get him nothing but Sax Rohmer generalities about inscrutable Oriental evil. ‘Why leave Rick at Eddington’s in that condition instead of taking him home? How drunk was he?’