Much had happened to Mr. Milburgh between the time of his discovery lying bound and helpless and showing evidence that he had been in the hands of a Chinese torturer and the moment he left Sam Stay. He had read of the murder, and had been shocked, and, in his way, grieved.
It was not to save Odette Rider that he sent his note to Scotland Yard, but rather to avenge himself upon the man who had killed the only woman in the world who had touched his warped nature. Nor had he any intention of committing suicide. He had the passports which he had secured a year before in readiness for such a step (he had kept that clerical uniform of his by him all that time) and was ready at a moment's notice to leave the country.
His tickets were in his pocket, and when he despatched the district messenger to Scotland Yard he was on his way to Waterloo station to catch the Havre boat train. The police, he knew, would be watching the station, but he had no fear that they would discover beneath the benign exterior of a country clergyman, the wanted manager of Lyne's Store, even supposing that there was a warrant out for his arrest.
He was standing at a bookstall, purchasing literature to while away the hours of the journey, when he felt a hand laid on his arm and experienced a curious sinking sensation. He turned to look into a brown mask of a face he had seen before.
"Well, my man," he asked with a smile, "what can I do for you?"
He had asked the question in identical terms of Sam Stay--his brain told him that much, mechanically.
"You will come with me, Mr. Milburgh," said Ling Chu. "It will be better for you if you do not make any trouble."
"You are making a mistake."
"If I am making a mistake," said Ling Chu calmly, "you have only to tell that policeman that I have mistaken you for Milburgh, who is wanted by the police on a charge of murder, and I shall get into very serious trouble."
Milburgh's lips were quivering with fear and his face was a pasty grey.
"I will come," he said.
Ling Chu walked by his side, and they passed out of Waterloo station. The journey to Bond Street remained in Milburgh's memory like a horrible dream. He was not used to travelling on omnibuses, being something of a sybarite who spared nothing to ensure his own comfort. Ling Chu on the contrary had a penchant for buses and seemed to enjoy them.
No word was spoken until they reached the sitting-room of Tarling's flat. Milburgh expected to see the detective. He had already arrived at the conclusion that Ling Chu was but a messenger who had been sent by the man from Shanghai to bring him to his presence. But there was no sign of Tarling.
"Now, my friend, what do you want?" he asked. "It is true I am Mr. Milburgh, but when you say that I have committed murder you are telling a wicked lie."
He had gained some courage, because he had expected in the first place to be taken immediately to Scotland Yard and placed in custody. The fact that Tarling's flat lay at the end of the journey seemed to suggest that the situation was not as desperate as he had imagined.
Ling Chu, turning suddenly upon Milburgh, gripped him by the wrist, half-turning as he did so. Before Milburgh knew what was happening, he was lying on the floor, face downwards, with Ling Chu's knee in the small of his back. He felt something like a wire loop slipped about his wrists, and suffered an excruciating pain as the Chinaman tightened the connecting link of the native handcuff.
"Get up," said Ling Chu sternly, and, exerting a surprising strength, lifted the man to his feet.
"What are you going to do?" said Milburgh, his teeth chattering with fear.
There was no answer. Ling Chu gripped the man by one hand and opening the door with the other, pushed him into a room which was barely furnished. Against the wall there was an iron bed, and on to this the man was pushed, collapsing in a heap.
The Chinese thief-catcher went about his work in a scientific fashion. First he fastened and threaded a length of silk rope through one of the rails of the bed and into the slack of this he lifted Milburgh's head, so that he could not struggle except at the risk of being strangled.
Ling Chu turned him over, unfastened the handcuffs, and methodically bound first one wrist and then the other to the side of the bed.
"What are you going to do?" repeated Milburgh, but the Chinaman made no reply.
He produced from a belt beneath his blouse a wicked-looking knife, and the manager opened his mouth to shout. He was beside himself with terror, but any cause for fear had yet to come. The Chinaman stopped the cry by dropping a pillow on the man's face, and began deliberately to cut the clothing on the upper part of his body.
"If you cry out," he said calmly, "the people will think it is I who am singing! Chinamen have no music in their voices, and sometimes when I have sung my native songs, people have come up to discover who was suffering."
"You are acting illegally," breathed Milburgh, in a last attempt to save the situation. "For your crime you will suffer imprisonment"
"I shall be fortunate," said Ling Chu; "for prison is life. But you will hang at the end of a long rope."
He had lifted the pillow from Milburgh's face, and now that pallid man was following every movement of the Chinaman with a fearful eye. Presently Milburgh was stripped to the waist, and Ling Chu regarded his handiwork complacently.
He went to a cupboard in the wall, and took out a small brown bottle, which he placed on a table by the side of the bed. Then he himself sat upon the edge of the bed and spoke. His English was almost perfect, though now and again he hesitated in the choice of a word, and there were moments when he was a little stilted in his speech, and more than a little pedantic. He spoke slowly and with great deliberation.
"You do not know the Chinese people? You have not been or lived in China? When I say lived I do not mean staying for a week at a good hotel in one of the coast towns. Your Mr. Lyne lived in China in that way. It was not a successful residence."
"I know nothing about Mr. Lyne," interrupted Milburgh, sensing that Ling Chu in some way associated him with Thornton Lyne's misadventures.
"Good!" said Ling Chu, tapping the flat blade of his knife upon his palm. "If you had lived in China--in the real China--you might have a dim idea of our people and their characteristics. It is said that the Chinaman does not fear death or pain, which is a slight exaggeration, because I have known criminals who feared both."
His thin lips curved for a second in the ghost of a smile, as though at some amusing recollection. Then he grew serious again.
"From the Western standpoint we are a primitive people. From our own point of view we are rigidly honourable. Also--and this I would emphasise." He did, in fact, emphasise his words to the terror of Mr. Milburgh, with the point of his knife upon the other's broad chest, though so lightly was the knife held that Milburgh felt nothing but the slightest tingle.
"We do not set the same value upon the rights of the individual as do you people in the West. For example," he explained carefully, "we are not tender with our prisoners, if we think that by applying a little pressure to them we can assist the process of justice."
"What do you mean?" asked Milburgh, a grisly thought dawning upon his mind.
"In Britain--and in America too, I understand--though the Americans are much more enlightened on this subject--when you arrest a member of a gang you are content with cross-examining him and giving him full scope for the exercise of his inventive power. You ask him questions and go on asking and asking, and you do not know whether he is lying or telling the truth."
Mr. Milburgh began to breathe heavily.
"Has that idea sunk into your mind?" asked Ling Chu.
"I don't know what you mean," said Mr. Milburgh in a quavering voice. "All I know is that you are committing a most----"
Ling Chu stopped him with a gesture.
"I am perfectly well aware of what I am doing," he said. "Now listen to me. A week or so ago, Mr. Thornton Lyne, your employer, was found dead in Hyde Park. He was dressed in his shirt and trousers, and about his body, in an endeavour to stanch the wound, somebody had wrapped a silk night-dress. He was killed in the flat of a small lady, whose name I cannot pronounce, but you will know her."
Milburgh's eyes never left the Chinaman's, and he nodded.
"He was killed by you," said Ling Chu slowly, "because he had discovered that you had been robbing him, and you were in fear that he would hand you over to the police."
"That's a lie," roared Milburgh. "It's a lie--I tell you it's a lie!"
"I shall discover whether it is a lie in a few moments," said Ling Chu.
He put his hand inside his blouse and Milburgh watched him fascinated, but he produced nothing more deadly than a silver cigarette-case, which he opened. He selected a cigarette and lit it, and for a few minutes puffed in silence, his thoughtful eyes fixed upon Milburgh. Then he rose and went to the cupboard and took out a larger bottle and placed it beside the other.
Ling Chu pulled again at his cigarette and then threw it into the grate.
"It is in the interests of all parties," he said in his slow, halting way, "that the truth should be known, both for the sake of my honourable master, Lieh Jen, the Hunter, and his honourable Little Lady."
He took up his knife and bent over the terror-stricken man.
"This will not hurt you," said Ling Chu, and drew four straight lines across the other's breast. The keen razor edge seemed scarcely to touch the flesh, yet where the knife had passed was a thin red mark like a scratch.
Milburgh scarcely felt a twinge of pain, only a mild irritating smarting and no more. The Chinaman laid down the knife and took up the smaller bottle.
"In this," he said, "is a vegetable extract. It is what you would call capsicum, but it is not quite like your pepper because it is distilled from a native root. In this bottle," he picked up the larger, "is a Chinese oil which immediately relieves the pain which capsicum causes."
"What are you going to do?" asked Milburgh, struggling. "You dog! You fiend!"
"With a little brush I will paint capsicum on these places." He touched Milburgh's chest with his long white ringers. "Little by little, millimetre by millimetre my brush will move, and you will experience such pain as you have never experienced before. It is pain which will rack you from head to foot, and will remain with you all your life in memory. Sometimes," he said philosophically, "it drives me mad, but I do not think it will drive you mad."
He took out the cork and dipped a little camel-hair brush in the mixture, withdrawing it moist with fluid. He was watching Milburgh all the time, and when the stout man opened his mouth to yell he thrust a silk handkerchief, which he drew with lightning speed from his pocket, into the open mouth.
"Wait, wait!" gasped the muffled voice of Milburgh. "I have something to tell you--something that your master should know."
"That is very good," said Ling Chu coolly, and pulled out the handkerchief. "You shall tell me the truth."
"What truth can I tell you?" asked the man, sweating with fear. Great beads of sweat were lying on his face.
"You shall confess the truth that you killed Thornton Lyne," said Ling Chu. "That is the only truth I want to hear."
"I swear I did not kill him! I swear it, I swear it!" raved the prisoner. "Wait, wait!" he whimpered as the other picked up the handkerchief. "Do you know what has happened to Miss Rider?"
The Chinaman checked his movement.
"To Miss Rider?" he said quickly. (He pronounced the word "Lider.")
Brokenly, gaspingly, breathlessly, Milburgh told the story of his meeting with Sam Stay. In his distress and mental anguish he reproduced faithfully not only every word, but every intonation, and the Chinaman listened with half-closed eyes. Then, when Milburgh had finished, he put down his bottle and thrust in the cork.
"My master would wish that the little woman should escape danger," he said. "To-night he does not return, so I must go myself to the hospital--you can wait."
"Let me go," said Milburgh. "I will help you."
Ling Chu shook his head.
"You can wait," he said with a sinister smile. "I will go first to the hospital and afterwards, if all is well, I will return for you."
He took a clean white towel from the dressing-table and laid it over his victim's face. Upon the towel he sprinkled the contents of a third bottle which he took from the cupboard, and Milburgh remembered no more until he looked up into the puzzled face of Tarling an hour later.
