“Was he? I’ll send someone to look for him. But in the meantime I wondered if you’d take a look at the body yourself. If you’re not too squeamish, that is? I need him officially identified before we move him. These Chinese would lie to their grandmother if it suited them. They all claim they’ve never seen him before.”
“All right.” I swallowed hard. Frankly I was not at all keen to view a body described as flatter than a pancake, but I had my image as a cool-headed detective to uphold, and I was rather flattered that Captain Kear was treating me as an equal and not as a helpless woman who might swoon at any second.
He ushered me down the stairs ahead of him. The street was still deserted and the church was now silent. I thought that probably any sensible Chinese had shut himself in his rooms, just in case he found himself grabbed as a suspect or new tong violence erupted. There was still a crowd around the body. Hardly any of them were Chinese, but there were curious Italians, Jews, and Irish, being held back by constables. I heard one of them saying, “Here’s the captain now,” as Captain Kear elbowed his way ungraciously through the crowd.
“Is the morgue wagon on its way?” he asked one of the constables holding back the crowd.
“Yes, sir. Should be here any moment.”
“And the doctor?”
“Been summoned, sir,” the same constable replied. “Might have a problem locating him. It’s a holiday.” His tone implied that it should have been a holiday for him too, if he hadn’t been summoned to this scene.
“And has somebody been to HQ on Mulberry to request a photographer? I want a photograph of him before he’s moved.”
“I’d say he’s not looking at his best for a photograph,” one of the constables quipped and got a general laugh.
“Get going then, Mafini.” The captain barked the order.
One of the constables forced his way through the crowd and took off, running.
“I’ve brought this young lady to identify him,” Captain Kear said. “If you don’t mind taking a look, Miss Murphy.”
I sensed the curious stares of the crowd as they parted for me to step closer. I took a deep breath, then looked. He was lying on his back, spread-eagled like a starfish, limbs sticking out at unnatural angles like a broken rag doll. His mouth was open in surprise, his eyes staring up at the sky. He was wearing a nightshirt that made him somehow look even more pathetic, like Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. The white nightshirt was now spattered with blood. There was a great pool of blood around his head, now black with a carpet of flies. I shut my eyes and looked away.
“Yes,” I said, turning back to Captain Kear when I had composed myself. “That is definitely Lee Sing Tai.”
“Thank you,” he said. “Come away now. I’ll just need a few particulars and then you can go.”
I looked back at the corpse. “There is no way he’d have landed like this if he’d tripped and fallen,” I said, as the thought came to me. “He’d have fallen forward and landed on his face. He had to have been pushed.”
As I said the words I heard a murmur go through the crowd and a couple of Chinese at the back took off running. Captain Kear looked up and frowned. “It wasn’t the smartest thing to say that out loud,” he said. “They’ll be reporting back to On Leong in seconds.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t think. Besides, you said they didn’t understand English.”
“Only when it suits them. Most of them understand pretty well.” He took my arm and dragged me away from the crowd. “If what you say is true, then we’d better make it quite clear that we don’t see this as a tong murder. For starters, I’d like to question your runaway bride. Why don’t you come back with me and you can give me her particulars and tell us how far you’ve got on the search.”
He’d phrased it as an invitation, but it really was a command.
“You’d better come along to take notes, O’Byrne,” the captain added. “And I want the missing servants found. Houseboy and cook, wasn’t it? And I gather there are usually bodyguards outside his place. Where the hell were they? They’ve run off too. Get to it, Hanratty, and spread the word that these men are our main suspects if they don’t show up immediately. The rest of you keep the crowd away. Ask if anyone saw him fall, or saw anything at all. Not that I’m hopeful that anyone will come forward, but we can try. Oh, and make sure someone comes to get me the moment the doctor and photographer arrive.”
He shoved his way back through the crowd, clearing a path for me. While he had been giving his orders, I had been taking a long look at the corpse and I’d noticed something else. I moved closer to Captain Kear. “He’s got a wound on one side of his head,” I said, this time in a low voice so that nobody else could overhear. “He couldn’t have received that during the fall.”
“He could have hit something on the way down,” Kear said.