“I’ll do my best, sir,” the constable said, looking dubiously at all those closed and shuttered doors.
“Start with On Leong headquarters,” the captain said. “There has to be someone inside and they’d lose face if they didn’t come to the aid of a top man like Lee Sing Tai. Remind them of that.”
O’Byrne sighed as if he suspected it wasn’t going to be an easy task. Captain Kear turned and stomped up the steps to Lee’s apartment. The wailing had stopped and the place was now eerily silent. The old woman was no longer on the sofa. Captain Kear started up the next flight of stairs and I followed, having not been told I couldn’t. This flight opened onto a landing with several doors. One of them was open, revealing a large and ornate bed beyond.
“He definitely slept on the roof last night, did he?” I asked. “Not in his bedroom?”
“How would I know?” the captain said shortly. “When I got here the front door was open as you see it and there was only that hideous old crone making a racket on the sofa. There was no way of getting through to her.”
So the wife was already wailing when Captain Kear got here. He wasn’t the bringer of the bad news. That meant that the whole neighborhood had heard about Lee’s death and everyone was lying low before the police arrived. And where did Bobby Lee fit into this? Had he been around and also quietly slipped away when he heard the news?
As Captain Kear started up the next flight of stairs, I nipped across the hall to take a look at that bedroom. It was as overfurnished and as ornate as the living room downstairs had been—the huge carved mahogany bed, cabinets, a vast wardrobe, and in one corner a shrine, containing a statue of a goddess with more arms than necessary. There were sticks of incense in holders around it and a strange, cloyingly sweet smell lingered in the room, making me want to sneeze. I backed out hastily and hurried to catch up with the captain.
Seventeen
A strong breeze was blowing as I came out onto the roof, bringing in more ominous clouds from the south. It really did seem as if it was going to rain and spoil Sid’s party decorations. There was a flat area of roof ahead of me, bordered to the right by a brick wall where it joined the much taller On Leong building. A brass bedstead was the only item of furniture on the flat part of the roof, and the bedsheets flapped in the wind. Captain Kear was prowling the perimeter, moving distinctly warily and peering down at intervals.
“Couldn’t access it from here,” he was muttering. “Nor from here.”
He made his way down the edge of the roof that overlooked Pell Street, where Lee had fallen to his death, then reached the back of the building where there was a gap between this building and the next. He paused. “I suppose it would be possible for a fit person with plenty of guts to jump across here,” he said, “or to have brought a plank to walk across. Okay, when O’Byrne gets here, I’ll have him find out who owns that building and how easy it is to get up to their roof.”
While he peered down and muttered to himself, I was noticing something quite different. The tar on the roof had become soft in the heat. There were distinct footprints near the edge of the roof—some of them small and dainty, but another set larger, and with deep indentations, like a workingman or laborer’s hobnailed boots.
The small feet could be explained, of course, as Bo Kei had told me herself that she had fled this way. But I could detect that same print facing in both directions—coming and going, so to speak. Had she reached the edge, changed her mind about attempting that formidable leap, retreated, thought it over, then finally plucked up courage to do it? All possible, but for a policeman looking for clues it would spell out that she came, killed Lee, and then left by the same route. Of course I knew that she had a perfect alibi for the crime—she was safely locked away in the settlement house on Elizabeth Street.
And as for the large hobnailed boots—who could they possibly belong to? Most of the Chinese I had seen wore soft cotton slippers, and they worked in laundries or restaurants or apparently cigar factories—no place where heavy boots would be needed. And the footprints were large too—when the Chinese men I had seen had been smaller than me. There was no way of knowing when the big prints had been made, but it would seem to be recently, judging by the lack of dust and grime over them, compared to other areas of the roof.