I led her up to my bedroom on the third floor.
“You have pretty room,” she said wistfully. “You are lucky to live here with friends.”
“I don’t actually live here,” I said. “I am staying here until my wedding. Then I will move with my bridegroom into that house directly across the street.”
“You get married?”
“In two weeks’ time.”
“He is good man? Did you choose him or does your family arrange this?”
“I chose him,” I said. “And he is a good man. A little difficult sometimes, but good.”
“I am very happy for you.” Her face grew wistful again. “Frederick is a good man, I think. I am sure I could be happy with him, if only.…”
“It will all work out right, I’m sure.” I touched her shoulder gently. “Now just wait here until I talk this through with my friends. They have been very good to me and I don’t want to put them in any danger.”
“I should never have run away,” she said flatly. “I should have accepted my fate, as we are taught in the Chinese way. For us there is no question of happiness, only duty. This man paid my father a bride price for me. I should have accepted that I belonged to Lee Sing Tai.”
“In America they say that everyone has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” I said. “Nobody here would expect you to face a life of misery with that old man, his wife, and his son making advances to you. And the knowledge that he’d send you to one of his brothels if you didn’t give him a son, when he is clearly too old to have children … no, you definitely did the right thing, Bo Kei. It’s just a pity that somebody chose this moment to kill Mr. Lee.”
As I came down the stairs Daniel’s words did pass through my mind—what looks like a chain of coincidences usually turns out to be linked. Did her running away somehow lead to Mr. Lee’s death? When I thought about it, I came to a sad conclusion. The only person who would have felt himself forced to act at that moment would indeed have been Frederick Lee.
As I arrived back in the kitchen, Sid and Gus were standing, heads together and talking quietly. I felt my stomach do an uneasy lurch. Had I really stretched our friendship too far this time?
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I should never have brought her here, but I had to act quickly, before the police raided the settlement house. I’ll go upstairs and fetch her and take her over to my place. You can claim no knowledge of her if the police ever question you.”
“Oh, no, Molly, don’t misunderstand us,” Sid said. “Of course we want to help. It’s just that—” She paused and looked across at Gus for reassurance again. “Molly, are you quite sure that she is innocent? This is a girl who has already proven that she is prepared to take tremendous risks and is remarkably agile. She leaped across rooftops once. What was there to stop her from repeating the action?”
“She was in the settlement house last night,” I said.
“I’ve been to those places,” Sid said. “People are always coming and going. She could certainly have slipped out if she’d wanted to.”
“And she does have such a perfect motive,” Gus added. “She could never be safe or free while the old Chinaman was alive. These people are so different from us and it is not easy to read their expressions. How can you tell if she is telling the truth? Even our own kind can sometimes lie and deceive us.”
“This is all true,” I said. “And the answer is that I don’t know if she is innocent. But I don’t see how she could have done it alone.” As I said it I thought of those dainty footprints in the soft tar on the rooftop. “But you’ve seen how petite she is. How could she have the strength to hurl a grown man to his death?”
“Then perhaps her lover Frederick is not the nice, innocent boy he seemed to you,” Sid said. “You’re a kind person, Molly Murphy. You’ve let people use you before now.”
“I know that too,” I said. “But I also know that my Celtic sixth sense has often served me well, and my gut feeling is that Bo Kei is innocent. If another policeman was on the case—if my Daniel would only take it over—I’d be happy to leave the whole thing in the hands of the police. But you haven’t seen this Captain Kear. He is brash and arrogant and I could see that he’d already made up his mind that Bo Kei and Frederick are the guilty parties. He won’t even bother to go on looking for the true murderer.”
Sid glanced across at Gus and sighed. “We want to help, Molly. We feel angry at the way this girl has been treated. Of course we can’t condone the buying and selling of women.”