Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 49, No. 1 & 2, January/February 2004

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.

The police were waiting for a warrant that would give them authority to break into the premises. It promised to be a long wait. Magistrates were difficult to find on Christmas Day.

Lady Sara plucked at my sleeve and signalled to Constable Kung. “All of this police authority standing around and doing nothing will not advance our case an iota,” she said to the Constable. “What we need right now are more witnesses to that argument between Charlie Tang and Wong Li. Will you see if you can find any?”

He hurried away. Lady Sara led me along West India Dock Road to the Chinese Mission House. It was a two-storey, white-painted brick building situated comfortably between a slop shop, an establishment selling used clothing and cheap sailors’ togs, and a Chinese shop whose proprietor had an unlikely English name. The dazzling white front stood out starkly from the dark, weathered bricks of the buildings on either side. A sign in English across the top of the building read CHINESE MISSION. Above the door, four large Chinese characters probably proclaimed the same thing.