Dope, Sax Rohmer [good books to read for adults txt] 📗

salty from the Nore. Jervis led them in a north-easterly direction, threading a way through pyramids of rubbish, until with the wind in their teeth they came out upon the river bank at a point where the shore shelved steeply downwards. A number of boats lay on the shingle.

“We're pretty well opposite Greenwich Marshes,” said Jervis. “You can just see one of the big gasometers. The end boat is George's.”

“Have you searched it?” rapped Kerry, placing a fresh piece of chewing-gum between his teeth.

“I have, sir. Oh, he's too wise for that!”

“I propose,” said Seton briskly, “that we borrow one of the other boats and pull down stream to where that short pier juts out. We can hide behind it and watch for our man. I take it he'll be bound up-stream, and the tide will help us to follow him quietly.”

“Right,” said Kerry. “We'll take the small dinghy. It's big enough.”

He turned to Jervis.

“Nip across to the wooden stairs,” he directed, “and tell Inspector White to stand by, but to keep out of sight. If we've started before you return, go back and join him.”

“Very good, sir.”

Jervis turned and disappeared into the mazes of rubbish, as Seton and Kerry grasped the boat and ran it down into the rising tide. Kerry boarding, Seton thrust it out into the river and climbed in over the stern.

“Phew! The current drags like a tow-boat!” said Kerry.

They were being drawn rapidly up-stream. But as Kerry seized the oars and began to pull steadily, this progress was checked. He could make little actual headway, however.

“The tide races round this bend like fury,” he said. “Bear on the oars, sir.”

Seton thereupon came to Kerry's assistance, and gradually the dinghy crept upon its course, until, below the little pier, they found a sheltered spot, where it was possible to run in and lie hidden. As they won this haven:

“Quiet!” said Seton. “Don't move the oars. Look! We were only just in time!”

Immediately above them, where the boats were beached, a man was coming down the slope, carrying a hurricane lantern. As Kerry and Seton watched, the man raised the lantern and swung it to and fro.

“Watch!” whispered Seton. “He's signalling to the Greenwich bank!”

Kerry's teeth snapped savagely together, and he chewed but made no reply, until:

“There it is!” he said rapidly. “On the marshes!”

A speck of light in the darkness it showed, a distant moving lantern on the curtain of the night. Although few would have credited Kerry with the virtue, he was a man of cultured imagination, and it seemed to him, as it seemed to Seton Pasha, that the dim light symbolized the life of the missing woman, of the woman who hovered between the gay world from which tragically she had vanished and some Chinese hell upon whose brink she hovered. Neither of the watchers was thinking of the crime and the criminal, of Sir Lucien Pyne or Kazmah, but of Mrs. Monte Irvin, mysterious victim of a mysterious tragedy. “Oh, Dan! ye must find her! ye must find her! Puir weak hairt—dinna ye ken how she is suffering!” Clairvoyantly, to Kerry's ears was borne an echo of his wife's words.

“The traffic!” he whispered. “If we lose George Martin tonight we deserve to lose the case!”

“I agree, Chief Inspector,” said Seton quietly.

The grating sound made by a boat thrust out from a shingle beach came to their ears above the whispering of the tide. A ghostly figure in the dim light, George Martin clambered into his craft and took to the oars.

“If he's for the Greenwich bank,” said Seton grimly, “he has a stiff task.”

But for the Greenwich bank the boat was headed; and pulling mightily against the current, the man struck out into mid-stream. They watched him for some time, silently, noting how he fought against the tide, sturdily heading for the point at which the signal had shown. Then:

“What do you suggest?” asked Seton. “He may follow the Surrey bank up-stream.”

“I suggest,” said Kerry, “that we drift. Once in Limehouse Reach we'll hear him. There are no pleasure parties punting about that stretch.”

“Let us pull out, then. I propose that we wait for him at some convenient point between the West India Dock and Limehouse Basin.”

“Good,” rapped Kerry, thrusting the boat out into the fierce current. “You may have spent a long time in the East, sir, but you're fairly wise on the geography of the lower Thames.”

Gripped in the strongly running tide they were borne smoothly up-stream, using the oars merely for the purpose of steering. The gloomy mystery of the London river claimed them and imposed silence upon them, until familiar landmarks told of the northern bend of the Thames, and the light above the Lavender Pond shone out upon the unctuously moving water.

Each pulling a scull they headed in for the left bank.

“There's a wharf ahead,” said Seton, looking back over his shoulder. “If we put in beside it we can wait there unobserved.”

“Good enough,” said Kerry.

They bent to the oars, stealing stroke by stroke out of the grip of the tide, and presently came to a tiny pool above the wharf structure, where it was possible to lie undisturbed by the eager current.

Those limitations which are common to all humanity and that guile which is peculiar to the Chinese veiled the fact from their ken that the deserted wharf, in whose shelter they lay, was at once the roof and the gateway of Sin Sin Wa's receiving office!

As the boat drew in to the bank, a Chinese boy who was standing on the wharf retired into the shadows. From a spot visible down-stream but invisible to the men in the boat, he signalled constantly with a hurricane lantern.

Three men from New Scotland Yard were watching the house of Sin Sin Wa, and Sin Sin Wa had given no sign of animation since, some hours earlier, he had extinguished his bedroom light. Yet George, drifting noiselessly up-stream, received a signal to the effect “police” while Seton Pasha and Chief Inspector Kerry lay below the biggest dope cache in London. Seton sometimes swore under his breath. Kerry chewed incessantly. But George never came.

At that eerie hour of the night when all things living, from the lowest to the highest, nor excepting Mother Earth herself, grow chilled, when all Nature's perishable handiwork feels the touch of death—a wild, sudden cry rang out, a wailing, sorrowful cry, that seemed to come from nowhere, from everywhere, from the bank, from the stream; that rose and fell and died sobbing into the hushed whisper of the tide.

Seton's hand fastened like a vise on to Kerry's shoulder,