The days of such a street were numbered. Very soon — probably the moment their present leases expired — those single families would be replaced by people who would elevate rental values astronomically by their willingness to live with one or two families in a room. Thus the houses would bring in several times their present income, and the tradesmen and small proprietors would be forced to live elsewhere and probably settle for something far shoddier.
Sam Godson was celebrating Christmas with a houseful of children, his own and those of his employees. He was a plump, jolly, gregarious Englishman who was grateful to life for giving him his own business through which he was able to provide his family with necessities and even an occasional luxury. He knew Constable Kung, and he greeted Lady Sara with proper deference when the Constable introduced her.
Lady Sara proceeded to make the Godson family’s Christmas far more joyous than the window washer had anticipated. She offered him a pound for the temporary rental of a horse, a cart, and a ladder long enough to reach Charlie Tang’s first-storey windows. The family had been ready to sit down to their Christmas dinner, but in consideration of Lady Sara’s status and the pound that had been offered, Mrs. Godson was willing to keep the dinner warm long enough for Sam to accompany us to his business premises — a shed in a mews behind the buildings in the next street — and outfit us with a horse (he had two), a cart (he also had two), and a ladder (he had half a dozen of various lengths). As window washing enterprises went, his was a large one, lavishly equipped, but neither horses, nor carts, nor ladders were very good. He had salvaged what he could, wherever he could. I made my own selection of a ladder, taking the best he had. I intended to climb it myself, and I didn’t care to risk my life on one of the more rickety specimens.
I drove the cart back to Charlie Tang’s premises. Constable Kung and Lady Sara walked and had no difficulty keeping up with Sam Godson’s elderly, plodding horse.
When we reached Charlie Tang’s place, I hired a boy to hold the horse for me. Then, with Constable Kung’s assistance, I raised the heavy ladder to the window opposite the room occupied by Madam Shing. I climbed up cautiously, but the ladder proved sturdy enough. When I reached the top, I looked into a dimly lit bedroom. There was nothing Chinese about it. Clearly Tang’s English wife had charge of the household furnishings. Otherwise, there was nothing of interest to be seen inside, but I busied myself for a few minutes with the window. Then, just in case Wong Li was somewhere out of sight either asleep or lying in a drunken stupor — though Constable Kung was indignant when I suggested this, which would have been a betrayal of Charlie Tang’s trust — I knocked vigorously on the window. There was no response, so I descended.
I said to Lady Sara, “The window is locked securely, and no one has been meddling with it. Certainly no one has opened it recently from the outside. So much for the white-bearded burglar.”
“Try the next window,” she suggested.
It was all of twelve feet away, but perhaps Madam Shing had been so startled by what she saw that she got the window wrong. Constable Kung and I moved the ladder, and again I climbed it. It was another bedroom, this time obviously a children’s room. It was as neatly English as the first bedroom and just as unoccupied. This window, too, had not been opened recently. I rained another fusillade of knocks on it before I descended.
“We might as well try all of the windows,” Lady Sara said.
“Even those in front? Madam Shing could possibly have confused the two side windows, but she certainly couldn’t see around the corner.”
“Nevertheless, as long as we have the ladder...”
We moved around to the front of the building. Fortunately there was little traffic on West India Dock Road on Christmas Day. Constable Kung and I again raised the heavy ladder, and again I climbed it. This time I gazed into the Tang version of a sitting room. As before, the furnishings, as well as the look of the room, were typically English, and the room was as crowded with furniture and bric-a-brac as any middle-class English sitting room. There was a display of Chinese ornaments on one wall, but there was nothing un-English about that. Many middle-class English homes used items from India or the Orient to supply an exotic touch. The well-padded chairs and sofa were what London’s middle class thought London’s upper classes were using, and the books and sheets of music on the new-looking upright piano that stood against a far wall suggested that the Tang children were being marched unwillingly to a piano teacher.
I took all of that in with a glance before directing my attention to a startling item that lay on the floor in the center of the room. It was a man in Chinese costume lying face down with the strangely carved handle of a dagger protruding from his back.
I didn’t bother to rap on the window. Even from a distance of six or eight feet, I could see that the room’s one occupant wasn’t going to respond. I descended slowly, maintaining an unsuitable calm all the way. Then I described what I had seen.
“Was it Wong Li?” Constable Kung demanded.
“I have never met Wong Li,” I said. “Even if I had, I wouldn’t have recognized him, because this character is lying face down with his feet toward the window. Even so, on the basis of everything I have heard this morning, I think we now know why no one has seen Wong Li recently and why he didn’t respond to our knocking.”
Constable Kung climbed the ladder to assure himself that there really was a corpse there. Lady Sara was willing to take my word for it. She observed grimly, “This may be the result of a sordid squabble over drugs or a woman — the kind of thing that local police could be trusted to handle competently — but a murder on the premises of a leading Chinese merchant could have political implications, and that is ample reason for interrupting Chief Inspector Mewer’s Christmas dinner.” She went to find a telephone.
Scotland Yard took the discovery of a corpse in the sitting room of a leading Chinese merchant very seriously indeed. Not only did Chief Inspector Mewer leave his Christmas dinner to investigate, but he brought with him the head of the Criminal Investigation Department. Assistant Commissioner Edward Henry had been Inspector-General of the police in India. During that tenure, he developed a system of fingerprinting and used it with great success. Because of that, he had recently been made Assistant Commissioner and head of the CID, and he was in the process of establishing his fingerprinting system in England.
With them, arriving a few at a time, came a full platoon of members of the CID, also called from their Christmas dinners. Sam Godson’s ladder came into far more use than we had anticipated as one officer after another, beginning with Chief Inspector Mewer and Assistant Commissioner Henry, climbed the ladder to stare into the Tangs’ sitting room.
Assistant Commissioner Henry coveted the dagger the moment he saw it. By that date fingerprints had enabled police to solve crimes and convict criminals with spectacular success in India and South America, but they still had not been used in England. Henry was patiently building his file and waiting for an opportunity. He sensed that one had arrived, and he issued strict orders that no one was to touch the dagger.