Jane Carter Investigates: Episode Forty-Five
I was not nearly as shocked as Flo by what greeted us when I
opened that heavy wooden door on the second floor of Sing Lee’s Laundry.
As soon as I slid back the bolt and opened the door a crack, light
flooded out of the opening. I flung the door open and was faced with two
Chinese persons.
There were two prisoners: a young woman about my age and an older
gentleman, huddled up in the corner. I thought at first that the man was
sleeping, but then he groaned and turned over, and I could see that he’d been
badly beaten.
“Quick!” said the girl, springing to her feet. “Shut the door.”
She pulled the door closed by fitting her hand under the crack at
the bottom, but there was no way of latching it from the inside.
The girl didn’t ask who Flo and I were or what we were doing
there. She motioned to a pile of thin mattresses and bedding stacked in the
corner and said, “You’d better hide.”
Flo and I arranged ourselves as best we could behind the bedding.
The girl switched off the light, lay down on the rug, and pretended to sleep.
We waited in silence for a minute or two before we heard footsteps
ascending the stairs.
“We’ll have to leave the paintings,” I heard Violet say. “Let’s
just get the gold and the jewelry and go.”
“I don’t see why we should leave the paintings behind,” a man’s
voice protested. I was pretty sure it must be Ralph. “It’ll only take a few
minutes longer to pack them up.”
“We’re going to get caught,” Violet said. “I told you we should
have just killed them all and dumped their bodies in the river.”
“How was I to know one of them would get away?”
There were a few minutes of rattling about while Ralph and Violet
worked in silence, then we heard footsteps approaching the door of our hideout.
“Ralph, how could you be so careless!” Violet said from the other
side of the door, before flinging it wide open. Light streamed into the room.
Flo and I kept our heads down and, judging by the silence, the Chinese girl on
the rug continued to pretend she was sleeping. The beaten man moaned from his
corner.
Violet abruptly slammed the door shut again, apparently satisfied
that her chickens had not flown the coop. I heard the bolt slide back into
place.
“Did they get away?” Ralph asked. “And it wasn’t me who left the
bolt open.”
“Well, it seems they were too stupid to know the difference,
anyway,” said Violet. “What should we do with them?”
“Leave them where they are,” said Ralph.
“But isn’t it rather cruel to leave them like that?” said Violet.
“We can’t afford for them to talk,” said Ralph. “You want to shoot
them now, and put them out of their misery?”
Evidently Violet, despite her loose talk of dumping bodies in the river, was not in the mood for homicide, because they departed without bloodshed.
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