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Page 13
"I often see him carrying a cage of young birds, but we have no
birds in the house."
"How perfectly extraordinary!" muttered Durham.
"I distrust Ah Fu," whispered the girl. "I am glad he did not
see me with you."
"Young birds," murmured Durham absently. "What kind of young
birds? Any particular breed?"
"No; canaries, linnets--all sorts. Isn't it funny?" The girl
laughed in a childish way. "And now I think Ah Fu will have gone
in, so I must say good night."
But when presently Detective Durham found himself walking back
along West India Dock Road, his mind's eye was set upon the
slinking figure of a Chinaman carrying a birdcage.
VI
A HINT OF INCENSE
One Chinaman more or less does not make any very great difference
to the authorities responsible for maintaining law and order in
Limehouse. Asiatic settlers are at liberty to follow their
national propensities, and to knife one another within reason.
This is wisdom. Such recreations are allowed, if not encouraged,
by all wise rulers of Eastern peoples.
"Found drowned," too, is a verdict which has covered many a dark
mystery of old Thames, but "Found in the river, death having been
due to the action of some poison unknown," is a finding which
even in the case of a Chinaman is calculated to stimulate the
jaded official mind.
New Scotland Yard had given Durham a roving commission, and had
been justified in the fact that the second victim, and this time
not a Chinaman, had been found under almost identical conditions.
The link with the establishment of Huang Chow was incomplete, and
Durham fully recognized that it was up to him to make it sound
and incontestable.
Jim Poland was not the only man in the East End who knew that the
dead Chinaman had been in negotiation with Huang Chow. Kerry
knew it, and had passed the information on to Durham.
Some mystery surrounded the life of the old dealer, who was said
to be a mandarin of high rank, but his exact association with the
deaths first of the Chinaman Pi Lung, and second of Cohen,
remained to be proved. Certain critics have declared the
Metropolitan detective service to be obsolete and inefficient.
Kerry, as a potential superintendent, resented these criticisms,
and in his protege Durham, perceived a member of the new
generation who was likely in time to produce results calculated
to remove this stigma.
Durham recognized that a greater responsibility rested upon his
shoulders than the actual importance of the case might have
indicated; and now, proceeding warily along the deserted streets,
he found his brain to be extraordinarily active and his
imagination very much alive.
There is a night life in Limehouse, as he had learned, but it is
a mole life, a subterranean life, of which no sign appears above
ground after a certain hour. Nevertheless, as he entered the
area which harbours those strange, hidden resorts the rumour of
which has served to create the glamour of Chinatown, he found
himself to be thinking of the great influence said to be wielded
by Huang Chow, and wondering if unseen spies watched his
movements.
Lala was Oriental, and now, alone in the night, distrust leapt
into being within him. He had been attracted by her and had
pitied her. He told himself now that this was because of her
dark beauty and the essentially feminine appeal which she made.
She was perhaps a vampire of the most dangerous sort, one who
lured men to strange deaths for some sinister object beyond reach
of a Western imagination.
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