“Did you?”

The girl glanced up at him doubtfully, and his distaste for the task set him by his superior increased with the passing of every moment.  He was a man of some imagination, a great reader, and ambitious professionally.  He appreciated the fact that Chief Inspector Kerry looked for great things from him, but for this type of work he had little inclination.

There was too much chivalry in his make-up to enable him to play upon a woman’s sentiments, even in the interests of justice.  By whatever means the man Cohen had met his death, and whether or no the Chinaman Pi Lung had died by the same hand, Lala Huang was innocent of any complicity in these matters, he was perfectly well assured.

Doubts were to come later when he was away from her, when he had had leisure to consider that she might regard him in the light of a third potential rifler of her father’s treasure-house.  But at the moment, looking down into her dark eyes, he reproached himself and wondered where his true duty lay.

“It is so gray and dull and sordid here,” said the girl, looking down the darkened street.  “There is no one much to talk to.”

“But you have your business interests to keep you employed during the day, after all.”

“I hate it all.  I hate it all.”

“But you seem to have perfect freedom?”

“Yes.  My mother, you see, was not Chinese.”

“But you wish to leave Limehouse?”

“I do.  I do.  Just now it is not so bad, but in the winter how I tire of the gray skies, the endless drizzling rain.  Oh!” She shrank back into the shadow of a doorway, clutching at Durham’s arm.  “Don’t let Ah Fu see me.”

“Ah Fu?  Who is Ah Fu?” asked Durham, also drawing back as a furtive figure went slinking down the opposite side of the street.

“My father’s servant.  He let you in this morning.”

“And why must he not see you?”

“I don’t trust him.  I think he tells my father things.”

“What is it that he carries in his hand?”

“A birdcage, I expect.”

“A birdcage?”

“Yes!”

He caught the gleam of her eyes as she looked up at him out of the shadow.

“Is he, then, a bird-fancier?”

“No, no, I can’t explain because I don’t understand myself.  But Ah Fu goes to a place in Shadwell regularly and buys young birds, always very young ones and very little ones.”

“For what or for whom?”

“I don’t know.”

“Have you an aviary in your house?”

“No.”

“Do you mean that they disappear, these purchases of Ah Fu’s?”

“I often see him carrying a cage of young birds, but we have no birds in the house.”

“How perfectly extraordinary!” muttered Durham.

“I distrust Ah Fu,” whispered the girl.  “I am glad he did not see me with you.”

“Young birds,” murmured Durham absently.  “What kind of young birds?  Any particular breed?”