“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.”
“How do you know that?” I demanded.
Barker gave me one of his wintry smiles. “Because that is exactly what I would have done in his circumstances.”
“I’ll accept that,” I said, “but that doesn’t preclude the possibility that he killed all these people.”
“K’ing oversaw the fight in the arena and he is in charge of the lion and dragon dancers which employ some small amount of boxing in their dances, but one look at Mr. K’ing’s hands proved to me he is no fighter. They were as soft as any London businessman’s.”
“But as a businessman, if he got hold of the text, couldn’t he sell it?”
“No, it only had worth to someone who planned to study the forbidden knowledge. K’ing has no personal or financial interest in it. He was more concerned when you began using Chinese fighting arts to attack his people that day you paid a visit to Bok Fu Ying in Limehouse.”
“I was not attacking,” I stated. “I was defending.”
“Aye, but they thought they were the ones defending; defending Bok Fu Ying’s honor.”
“But I wasn’t using Chinese arts at all. They were the Japanese ones you taught me. I can’t believe they didn’t know the difference,” I insisted.
“You assume all Chinese men know Chinese boxing. Do all Englishmen box?” he asked.
“No, not hardly.”
“The fellows you fought had very little training. They were sailors, stevedores, and shipping clerks. As far as they knew, you were attacking them with something that looked Chinese rather than English.”
“And what of Campbell-Ffinch?”
“I shall admit, lad, that Campbell-Ffinch was my chief suspect through much of this case. He is both ruthless and desperate enough to have committed all those murders. He is also accustomed to following clues and knows the Chinese way of doing things. I thought it just possible he knew some dim mak. Ultimately, however, there are two reasons I discounted him. The first was the break-in. It wasn’t his style to rifle through things secretly in thief’s clothing. He would have knocked on the door, put a bullet in each of our heads, and looked for the book at his leisure. Besides, he’d already gone through everything once, using proper channels. It had to be someone else.”
“And the second reason?”
“An Englishman never would have shot an inspector outright. He’d have known how seriously Scotland Yard would take such an action. Only a foreigner with little regard for English law would have killed Bainbridge so cavalierly.”
“What about Charlie Han? He was a possible suspect.”
“He was, but only until I finally saw him. The boy is no criminal. Oh, he has broken some minor laws and been arrested, but they were not laws in China. The poor fellow’s a victim of Bainbridge’s jealousy and his own lack of knowledge of how things work here. I feel sorry for him.”
“I don’t,” I said. “He’s got the Belle o’ Pennyfields looking after him. Heaven knows what she sees in him.”
“There must be something. Miss Petulengro seems very canny and she doesn’t seem the type to suffer fools easily. Perhaps she’ll rub the corners off and make a better man out of him.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” I said, unable to keep the bitterness out of my voice.
“She seems to inspire jealousy wherever she goes,” Barker judged. “But then, attractive and unmarried young women often sow seeds of destruction in their wake, even among old married men like Nevil Bainbridge.”
“I suppose it is possible,” I muttered to myself.
“Another girl who has escaped from your matrimonial clutches, Thomas? I am glad to hear it. She was quite the cheekiest thing in a dress I have ever met. I don’t believe I could have stood the pair of you together. Also, though I am not saying she wouldn’t make someone a fine wife, wouldn’t you have preferred a girl with tastes similar to your own?”