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

Chung Li’s establishment was not as extensive as Charlie Tang’s. The building was smaller, and he offered only Chinese products. Much of his stock seemed to consist of foods and medicines imported from China. At Piercy’s suggestion, he retired with us to a back room, and he and Piercy talked for a few minutes in hushed tones. Then Chung Li nodded. He was a plump, smiling Chinaman with a mouthful of gold teeth that he flashed at us repeatedly.

“I’ll show them,” he promised Piercy.

Having received our thanks, Piercy took his leave of us. Chung Li began an explanation, and at first, until we became accustomed to his elided R’s, he was extremely difficult to understand. Eventually he made himself clear.

At one time the building that housed his shop had an additional front entrance, a door between the shop and the opium establishment next door that opened on a stairway leading to the flat upstairs. The proprietor at that time also owned the building and ran the opium parlour as well as the shop. He liked to display merchandise on the pavement outside. Traffic to the crowded flat upstairs interfered with this, so he had an outside stairway built at the rear of the building, removed the front stairway, and bricked up the front entrance that had led to it.

This left him with a long, narrow room between his shop and the opium parlour. He used it for storage, but he also found another use for it. A platform was erected the full length of the wall, and holes bored through the wall, making it possible to spy into the opium parlour.

Chung Li thought the former proprietor had used it to identify the better class of opium patrons. When they arrived, often at night and always with their faces covered by a convenient scarf, it was difficult to recognise them. Once inside, they felt safe and removed their disguises. The occasional opium addict from high society, or politics, or the theatre, or any other form of public life who had the misfortune to be recognised, quickly became a blackmail victim.

Chung Li paid as little attention as possible to the opium parlour, but he was willing to show us the platform the previous owner had used for spying. Lady Sara, who already knew all about opium parlours from numerous interrogations of addicts, deferred to me, telling me to look for anything that might be useful to us.

I mounted a ladder to the long platform and gingerly made my way to the front of the building. There was no railing. I returned slowly, using the spyholes along the way. I failed to see how this would advance our case, but I had never visited an opium parlour, and I was curious.

There was nothing on display in the front windows, which were heavily curtained with a drab-looking material. The curtains concealed a nondescript shop with a counter and a few items like tobacco, cigars, and sweets offered for sale. On the counter was a small pair of scales. A young, bespectacled Chinese man sat behind the counter reading a book.

The back room was separated from the shop by a partition with a dingy yellow curtain in the doorway. This was the opium-smoking room, and I counted seven customers. The room was furnished with several comfortable chairs, two settees, and an odd wooden structure, a low platform that supported three large mattresses. The opium smokers had their purchases measured out for them in the front of the store and then went to the rear to sit or recline comfortably while they smoked opium, or if majoon, the blend of opium, hemp, and hellebore, was their preference, smoked, chewed, or ate it.

It was a pernicious habit, and it couldn’t be justified, as some tried to do, by the excuse that the user harmed only himself. Heads of families were destroyed; wives and children were left in poverty. Even so, I failed to see what connection it might have with the murder of Wong Li.

Chung Li was unable to tell us where other opium parlours were located. There were a number of them in the East End, he said, and they were easily identified by their curtained front windows, but he paid very little attention to them.

We returned to the emporium of Charlie Tang, where the congregation of police was drawing a crowd. The boy I had hired to hold the borrowed horse was still exercising patient diligence, and he flashed a smile when he saw me. He deduced, rightly, that his long ordeal would be properly rewarded.

Sam Godson had joined the bystanders to see what use we were making of his property. While I was talking with him, the warrant finally arrived. With it came a locksmith. The Chief Inspector had decided — in consideration of the corpse in the sitting room — that he was fully justified in breaking in, but because the premises were the property of a prominent and influential Chinese merchant, he thought it might be wise to do so with finesse.