Bless the Bride

into his top pocket. “Perhaps he had something incriminating on Frederick Lee—something he wouldn’t return when he fired Frederick. Well I want this Frederick brought in right now. O’Byrne. Go and find him.”
    “Find him, sir? How do I do that if I don’t know where to start looking?”
    “If he was employed by Lee Sing Tai, you can bet your boots he’s an On Leong member and they’ll have his address in their files. And his family details too. He might be hiding out with a clan member. They all band together when one’s in trouble, don’t they?” Captain Kear sat down again. “Go on, then. Jump to it.”
    “Very good, sir.” O’Byrne stifled the sigh. He was a big red-faced Irishman and all this running around on a muggy morning was not to his liking.
    “Oh, and on your way send someone to headquarters and tell them we need to have the cabinet dusted for fingerprints.”
    O’Byrne was clearly wishing that the captain had selected another constable to accompany him. He nodded, then we heard his big boots going down the stairs.
    “Now where’s the wife got to?” Captain Kear demanded. “Didn’t you make it clear that I wanted to speak to her? Go up and tell her that if she doesn’t come down, I’m coming up to her bedroom to get her.”
    Bobby stood up very reluctantly.
    “And you can start giving me the details on the missing woman, Miss Murphy.” He glanced up at me as he removed a small pad from his top pocket.
    “As to that, I know little more than you do—her name is Bo Kei, and you’ve seen the photograph I was given.”
    “And where exactly have you been looking for her?” he asked. “If she’s been gone for a week you haven’t been too successful, have you?”
    “I was only told about her the other day,” I said. “And New York is a big place.”
    “You mentioned missions—was there any reason you started looking there?”
    “I thought she wouldn’t know where to go in a strange city and she would certainly be frightened to stray far from Chinatown. And you know that the missionaries are always prowling around, looking for converts, so they would definitely take in a young woman alone on the streets.”
    “So which of these missions did you visit?”
    Fortunately at this moment we heard groans from the hallway and Lee Sing Tai’s number one wife appeared, hobbling painfully on those little stumps. She was now wearing white, and appeared to have white powder on her face, making her look like a walking ghost. She made her way forward, using the furniture to support herself, while Bobby Lee stood in the doorway, not offering to help her. Captain Kear had risen and offered her the big chair. She shook her head. She wasn’t going to sit in her husband’s chair, even if he was dead. Instead she came toward me. I moved along the sofa and she sat beside me.
    “Mrs. Lee,” the captain said, “I am sorry about your husband. I know this is upsetting for you. I hope you can help us.” He turned to the translator, who presumably repeated this in Chinese. I wondered if Mrs. Lee actually understood any English and was playing dumb. She had certainly eavesdropped on my conversations with her husband. The old woman looked at him suspiciously, then asked a sharp question.
    “She says how can she help you? It is other people who should be helping her,” the interpreter said.
    “We want to know if you have any ideas who might have killed your husband?”
    The interpreter repeated the words. Her eyes shot open and it was clear that until now she had considered his death an accident. She rattled off an angry string of Chinese.
    “She says how can anyone have killed him? He was asleep in his own bed. His houseboy sleeps at the bottom of the stairs. The front door and the bottom door are always locked. There is no way into the house.”
    “Just supposing someone did find a way in—any ideas who that might have been?”
    She listened, then considered this and replied. “That young woman,” the interpreter translated. “She must have returned and done this awful deed.”
    “The new bride, you mean?” the captain asked gently.
    She nodded. “She did not want to be here,” she said through the interpreter. “When she finds that I am number one wife, she does not want to obey me. She is lazy. She does not want to work. I say to my husband—this one is no good. Send her away. But he wants a son very much. I tried to give him a son for many years, but I failed him.” And