Judge Dee at Work

'Did Mr Ho know about those visits?'

'He didn't. We knew how much it would distress him to hear that his father-in-law was in financial trouble while he could do nothing to help him. Mr Ho has no private means, you know. He has to depend on his modest pension for his living.'

'You two were indeed very kind towards Mr Ho!'

'He deserved it; he is a decent fellow. The only thing he couldn't give his wife was intellectual companionship, and that she found in me.'

'I never saw such a complete lack of the most elementary morality!' the judge exclaimed disgustedly. He got up and ordered the coroner: 'Hand this man over to the headman, to be locked up in jail as a murder suspect. Thereafter you and the two con­stables convey Mrs Ho's dead body to the tribunal, and conduct a thorough autopsy. Report to me as soon as you are through. You'll find me in my private office.'

He left, angrily shaking his long sleeves.

Mr Ho and the two shipowners were waiting in Judge Dee's private office, attended upon by a clerk. They wanted to rise when the judge came in, but he motioned them to remain seated. He took the armchair behind his desk, and told the clerk to refill the teacups.

'Has everything been settled, Your Honour?' Mr Ho asked in a dull voice.

Judge Dee emptied his cup, then rested his forearms on the desk and replied slowly, 'Not quite, Mr Ho. I have bad news for you. I found that your wife did not commit suicide. She was mur­dered.'

Mr Ho uttered a suppressed cry. Mr Hwa and Mr Yee ex­changed an astonished look. Then Ho blurted out, 'Murdered? Who did it? And why, in the name of heaven?'

'The evidence points to a painter, by the name of Fung.'

'Fung? A painter? Never heard of him!'

'I warned you the news was bad, Mr Ho. Very bad. Before you married your wife, she had friendly relations with this painter. After the marriage the two kept on seeing each other secretly, in the garden pavilion. It is possible that she grew tired of him and wanted to end the liaison. Knowing that you would be here all afternoon, she may have sent Fung a note asking him to come and see her. And if she then told him that they were through, he may well have killed her.'

Ho sat there staring straight ahead, his thin lips compressed. Yee and Hwa looked embarrassed; they made to get up and leave the judge and Ho alone. But Judge Dee gave them a peremptory sign to stay where they were. At last Mr Ho looked up and asked: 'How did the villain kill her?'

'She was knocked unconscious by a blow on her temple, then strung up by the neck to a beam and strangled. The murderer upset a teapot, and the tea from it extinguished the fire of the incense-clock, establishing half past four or thereabouts as the time he committed his evil deed. I may add that a witness saw the painter Fung loitering about at that time near your garden gate.'

There was a knock on the door. The coroner came in and handed a document to the judge. Quickly glancing through the autopsy report, he saw that the cause of death had indeed been slow strangulation. Beyond the bruise on the temple the body bore no other marks of violence. She had been in the third month of pregnancy.

Judge Dee folded the paper up slowly and put it into his sleeve. Then he said to the coroner, 'Tell the headman to set free the man he put in jail. That person will have to wait a while in the guard­room, though. I may want to question him again later.'

When the coroner had left, Mr Ho got up. He said in a hoarse voice, 'If Your Honour will allow me, I'll now take my leave. I must ...'

'Not yet, Mr Ho,' the judge interrupted. 'I want to ask you a question first. Here in front of Mr Hwa and Mr Yee.'

Ho sat down again with a perplexed look.

'You left your wife in the pavilion at about two o'clock, Mr Ho,' Judge Dee resumed. 'And you were here in this office till five, when your steward came to report your wife's demise. For all we know she could have died any time between two and five. Yet when I told you about her suicide you said: "Only a few hours after I had left her ..." as Mr Hwa and Mr Yee here will attest. How did you know that she died at about half past four?'

Ho made no answer. He stared at the judge with wide, un­believing eyes. Judge Dee went on, his voice suddenly harsh:

'I'll tell you! Because when you had killed your wife at two o'clock, directly after the maid had left the pavilion, you inten­tionally spilled the tea over the incense-clock. You apparently consider me a fairly competent investigator — thank you. You knew that if I visited the scene I would discover that your wife had been murdered, and deduct from the incense-clock that the deed had been done at about half past four. You also assumed that I would find out sooner or later that Fung had been at the garden gate at about that time — lured there by the faked note you had sent him. It was a clever scheme, Ho, worthy of an expert in juridical affairs. But the carefully faked time element proved to be your undoing. You kept telling yourself: I can never be suspected, because the time of the murder is clearly established at half past four. And so you inadvertently made that slip about "a few hours after I had left her". At that time the remark didn't strike me as odd. But as soon as I realized that if Fung was not the murderer it had to be you, I remembered those words, and that provided the final proof of your guilt. The Five Auspicious Clouds didn't prove very auspicious for you, Mr Ho!’