Magistrates of Hell Read online

  The ambassador paused in the act of signing an order for an armed detail to escort Asher to the hills on the following morning, his eyebrows quirked.

  ‘I’m a cousin of his mother’s –’ this was another fiction, though Asher had met Julia Hobart on the occasion of her son’s matriculation from Caius College – ‘and I’m a bit concerned that poor Hobart might be . . . Well, that any letter he sends her now might paint a picture affected by his own feelings. As is quite natural.’

  And, his eyes on the ambassador’s face, he saw it: the flare of the nostrils and the way the lips compressed over words that the man would not say to an outsider.

  He not only thinks Richard did it . . . but he also isn’t surprised at the crime. He saw it coming.

  No wonder Hobart wants to shove the blame off on to that unprovable mass of aliens outside the Legation walls.

  ‘Of course, Professor Asher. Mr P’ei—?’ Jordan’s touch on the desk bell brought the dapper Chinese clerk in again. ‘Would you take Professor Asher over to the stockade and tell Captain Morris he’s to be given every accommodation in seeing Hobart?’

  Lydia remained behind, for tea: everyone in the Legation Quarter was delighted with any new face, and even the married men would flock around an intelligent, well-spoken lady like pigeons to corn. Asher left Sir John showing her around the courtyard – this part of the original Legation still retained its scarlet pillars, green-tiled roofs and the gold dragons on its ceilings – and followed the helpful Mr P’ei down the bare yellow dust of the central mall to the newly-built barracks and the stockade.

  ‘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 som
eone 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?’

  ‘That’s just exactly what I don’t know, sir.’ Dempsy picked a fragment of tobacco from his lower lip. ‘The thing is, Hans and Crommy and I were all – well, we didn’t see Rick leave Madame Yu’s. For streets around, you know, there’s nothing but dives, and we were wandering from one to the next. I came out of one place, and Hans said that Crom had said Rick had gone off in a rickshaw, and blamed if any of us could find him. He was pretty capsized when last I saw him,’ the young man concluded. ‘But, drunk or sober, he’d never have hurt a white woman. Not any woman, really.’

  Asher raised his brows. Dempsy looked a little conscious and added, ‘I won’t say I’ve never slapped a Chinese woman, Professor. Hans’d have it that the Chink girls don’t respect you if you don’t, but I never found that. Besides, I really don’t care if they respect me or not.’ He shrugged, uncomfortable despite his words.

  On the parade ground beyond the verandah, an officer’s whistle shrilled out a signal to a troop of khaki-clad Durham Light Infantry, whose every stride kicked up small clouds of yellow dust.

  ‘Do you think Hobart actually proposed to Miss Eddington?’

  Dempsy gave the matter some thought. ‘He could have,’ he said at last. ‘Please don’t think Rick gets hammered like that every night of the week, sir. His pa keeps him pretty busy. And anyone in the Quarter’ll tell you, he won’t drink at those little parties they’re always throwing here, where everybody sips sherry and talks about Back Home. But about three times since he’s been here, we’ve gone down to the Eight Lanes and he’s wound up well and truly obfuscated, and he’s said things to me then that he had no recollection of afterwards. So he could have asked her, yes. But equally, Mrs Eddington was so—’

  His mouth tightened under its thin black mustache, and for a moment his eyes shifted. Not a lie, thought Asher, so much as a second thought: is it wrong to tell him this?

  ‘He might have said something that Mrs Eddington pushed her daughter into believing was a proposal?’ he suggested gently.

  Dempsy looked embarrassed. ‘The thing is, sir, Mrs Eddington was darn set on Miss Eddington marrying Rick. And I think Miss Eddington was . . . was darn set on marrying anyone. Well, she’s twenty-four . . . She was twenty-four,’ he corrected himself. ‘When a girl gets to be that age—’

  The door behind them opened. Asher smelled fresh vomit even before he turned to see the soldier who’d taken Rick back to the cells emerge with young Hobart’s fouled gray jacket rolled up into a bundle with the shirt and green silk tie. In a carefully neutral voice, the soldier said, ‘You’d best let Sir Grant know that his son will be needing fresh clothing, sir.’

  Dempsy waved as if to dispel the reek. ‘Jesus! And after all the fuss he made about getting his suits tailored, and his hankies to match.’

  ‘Did he?’ Asher signed the soldier to remain. Folded on top of the gray suit and green tie were the tweeds Rick had been wearing in the garden the previous night, including, grotesquely, the red-and-blue necktie with which Holly Eddington had been strangled.

  ‘Oh, hell, yes.’ The clerk made the whisper of a chuckle. ‘I guess I’m an American, sir, and the others are always ribbing me, how I look like I got dressed in a high wind . . .’

  Which wasn’t true: Dempsy’s jacket was old and the cut of his trousers far from fashionable, but he had the well-scrubbed look common to many Americans. Despite his queasy pallor, he was freshly shaved, with a clean shirt and his tie done in a neat four-in-hand.

  ‘Is Rick fussy about his clothes?’

  ‘Not as bad as Hans Erlich.’ Dempsy grinned. ‘The two of them – Hans and Rick – will go on about what shade of tie goes with which socks like a couple of my mama’s friends back home. But please don’t think there’s anything sissy—’

  Asher’s gesture disclaimed any such interpretation, and he took from the folded clothes the red-and-blue silk necktie – which the daylight showed to be entirely inappropriate for the muted mauves and greens of the tweed that Rick had worn the previous night. ‘Was this the tie Rick was wearing last night?’

  Dempsy studied it for a moment. ‘No. The one he had on last night had spots, not stripes. The light wasn’t real good, but I think it was sort of greens and grays.’

  ‘That’s what I thought.’ Asher folded the tie up and tucked it into his pocket.

  FOUR

  ‘Twenty-four hours?’ Professor Karlebach growled like a very old lion troubled by flies. ‘Ach, and for what? These creatures multiply, Jamie! Each night’s delay puts other victims in peril.’

  Laughter from the party at the next table: the Austrian ambassador and two of his aides, chattering in Viennese French.

  With a sidelong glance at them, Karlebach continued, ‘And it increases the chances that these things – these Others – will come to the attention of some one of the powers here.’ He gestured with the most recent issues of the Journal of Oriental Medicine and Etudes Physiologiques, pulled from the crammed pockets of his rusty, old-fashioned frock-coat. ‘Dr Bohren from Berlin, and that cretin Lemaitre from the Sorbonne, have written letters decrying this Bauer woman as a hoax, but you know it’s only a matter of time before someone in some War Department is going to start asking themselves how they might use these things. Surely we can reach this village this afternoon by motor car?’

  ‘We can. Provided nothing goes wrong.’ Asher sat back as the white-jacketed Chinese waiter brought green turtle soup and petite sole aux tomates to their table. The dining room of the Wagons-Lits Hotel was justly famous throughout the diplomatic community for the excellence of its lunches, and Asher had taken great care to obtain a table in the most inconspicuous corner of that elegant salon.

  ‘Have you ever ridden in a motor car, sir?’ Asher asked. ‘The tires are rubber: on a good macadam road you can go twenty or thirty miles between punctures. But here?’ He made an eloquent gesture with his eyebrows. ‘The road ends at Men T’ou Kuo. We’d have to procure horses there – or donkeys, more likely – to ride on to Mingliang. Given the presence of bandit groups in the hills – and Kuo Min-tang militia – personally, I would rather wait till we have an armed escort.’

  ‘I bow to your greater experience, Jamie.’ The old man rumbled his discontent. ‘It’s just, when I think of those who will be placed in danger—’

  ‘If someone will inevitably be placed in danger,’ said Lydia, ‘I would much rather that it not be you, sir, or Jamie.’ And she laid a hand over Asher’s wrist.

  For this reason, with the conclusion of lunch, Asher passed the afternoon in giving his companions a Cook’s Tour of the Legation Quarter, with its odd mix of modern European structures and an
tique gateways left over from the days before the Uprising. Parade grounds, barracks, and soldiers in the uniforms of most of the armies of Europe served to remind them that they were intruders in that ancient land, and unwelcome ones at that.

  ‘Half this area was a regular Chinese neighborhood up till the Boxers shelled it into rubble,’ Asher explained as they paused to marvel over the Gothic absurdity of the French Post Office. ‘A maze of hutongs – those high-walled alleyways – and siheyuan, courtyard houses—’

  ‘Like the Legation this morning?’ asked Lydia.

  ‘They make up most of Peking. Sometimes one courtyard per house, sometimes two or three or five or ten, all leading out of one another. You never knew what was in some of those compounds. What the Boxers didn’t demolish was burned by Chinese mobs, or destroyed by the Expeditionary Force when they came through.’

  Karlebach listened, nodded, and growled, but made the observation that it wasn’t to play Sherlock Holmes that they had come to China. When they reached the end of Legation Street, and looked out through the gate across the open glacis that surrounded the Quarter’s wall, he rumbled, ‘So he could be anywhere out there, could he not? Your vampire.’ He surveyed the sea of upturned tile roofs, the line of gaudy shops on the other side of Hatamen Street. Rickshaws, laden donkeys, and lines of thick-bodied, two-humped shaggy camels passed them, and endless streams of blue-clad Chinese.

  ‘He might.’ Asher felt Lydia’s silence beside him. Her anger at Ysidro over the death of a traveling companion – three years ago in Constantinople – had left her, and she would speak of the vampire perfectly readily if the subject arose. Yet he noticed she never brought up his name herself.