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Updated: June 25, 2025
The water seemed to revive something of his old arrogant spirit, for he got up from his chair, jerked at the collar of his ill-fitting coat it was an old shooting-coat of Tarling's and smiled for the first time. "I think, gentlemen," he said with something of his old airiness, "you will have a difficulty in proving that I am concerned in the murder of Thornton Lyne.
He had gained some courage, because he had expected in the first place to be taken immediately to Scotland Yard and placed in custody. The fact that Tarling's flat lay at the end of the journey seemed to suggest that the situation was not as desperate as he had imagined. Ling Chu, turning suddenly upon Milburgh, gripped him by the wrist, half-turning as he did so.
The first to her mother, saying that she could not come; the second to Lyne, running: "Will you see me at my flat to-night at eleven o'clock? Tarling's heart sank within him. This amazing news was stunning. It was impossible, impossible, he told himself again and again, that this girl could have killed Lyne. Suppose she had? Where had they met?
To extract Tarling's revolver was an easy matter but why, if he had murdered Lyne, would he have left the incriminating weapon behind? That was not like Ling Chu that was the act of a novice. But how had he lured Thornton Lyne to the flat? And how did he know a thought struck him.
"So you knew that, did you?" he said. The Chinaman smiled. It was a most unusual circumstance, for Ling Chu had never smiled within Tarling's recollection. "The papers were in certain order some turned one way and some turned the other. When I saw them after I came back from Scotland Yard they had been disturbed. They could not disturb themselves, master, and none but you would go to my box."
Lyne, but it would strengthen your position tremendously if you had already detailed the scheme to some person in authority." "Thank you very, very much, Mr. Tarling," she said warmly, and looked up into his face with a smile so sweet, so pathetic, so helpless, that Tarling's heart melted towards her. "And if you don't want a solicitor," he said, "you can depend upon me.
"I speak very good English. I was trained at the Jesuit School in Hangkow, but it is not good for a Chinaman to speak English in China, or for any to know that he understands. Yet the master must have known I spoke English and read the language, for why should I keep the little cuttings from the newspapers in the box which the master searched this morning?" Tarling's eyes narrowed.
Within twenty-four hours his description and photograph were in the hands of every chief constable; and if he had not succeeded in leaving the country which was unlikely during the time between the issue of the warrant and his leaving Tarling's room in Hertford, his arrest was inevitable. At five o'clock that afternoon came a new clue.
Ling Chu was a thief-catcher and a great detective, but he had also taken upon himself the business of attending to Tarling's personal comfort. The detective spoke no word, out went straight to the cupboard where he kept his foreign kit. On a shelf in neat array and carefully folded, were the thin white drill suits he wore in the tropics.
"Have you any idea where she would be?" Again Milburgh shook his head. "The only thing " he hesitated and looked into Tarling's eyes. "Well?" asked the detective impatiently. "There is a suggestion, of course, that she may have gone abroad. I do not offer that suggestion, only I know that she spoke French very well and that she had been to the Continent before."
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