Twelve Drops

It was twenty minutes to midnight when the desk sergeant put his head round the door of the detectives' room. A shop boy from the chemist's at 41 Szechuen Road had run in a quarter of an hour before to say that his master was dead in his bed; a constable had gone back with him, the police surgeon had been rung up, and would somebody from upstairs kindly go and look. I was the somebody. I took my hat and went on foot, it being ten minutes' walk and there being nothing on wheels to be had at that hour.

Late October is the best the year does in this city: dry and cool, with an edge on the air after dark. The trams had stopped for the night. Their rails ran on ahead of me down the middle of the road, shining on setts still wet from the water-cart, and at the mouth of every lane I passed there was the smell of coal smoke from stoves banked up till morning. This was the Settlement — the square miles of the city that the foreigners run for themselves, with their own council, their own drains and their own police. I had been one of the police in it for eleven years.

Number 41 stood in a row of shopfronts, three floors of grey brick with a gilt board across the front: Penrose & Ainsley, Dispensing Chemists. The shutters were down over the window and over the door, and beside the door, at the height of a man's hand, there was a small brass button on a plate marked Night Bell. One light showed in the whole front of the building, a thin yellow stripe where two shutter boards did not quite meet. A Sikh constable stood in front of it with his hands behind his back, and the stripe lay across his tunic like a chalk mark. He saluted, turned, and knocked twice on the shutter with his knuckles. Inside, a bolt was drawn back.

The shutter went up with a rattle, a glass door opened behind it, and I stepped out of the cool street into the smell of a chemist's shop — camphor, liquorice, surgical spirit, and under all of it something sweetish I have never been able to put a name to. One lamp was burning, on a long mahogany counter. It showed me glass cases of soap and scent on either hand, a wall of little drawers with Latin on them, and behind the counter a folding camp bed with the blanket thrown back.

The boy who had let me in was about seventeen, thin, in a grey cotton shop-coat buttoned to the neck. Ah Kwei, the constable said: the shop boy, the one who had run to the station. He slept here, he told me, in careful English. The front door was locked at seven every evening and the shutters put down, and after that anybody who wanted in or out rang the night bell, and he got up and opened, and wrote it down.

"Wrote it down where?"

He pulled open a drawer under the counter and brought out a school exercise book with a pencil tied to it by a string. "Who, what time, in or out," Ah Kwei said. "Mr Penrose made the rule when I came. After the door is locked, this book is the night of this shop." He opened it at the last written page and laid it under the lamp. There were five lines for the evening, in pencil, and the last of them was his own.

I asked whether the bell could have rung without his hearing it. He pointed above the camp bed. It hung there, a foot over where his head would lie: a brass gong the size of a saucer.

"From five past seven until ten to ten, when Mrs Penrose came home, it did not ring," he said. "Not once. Nobody sleeps through that one."

I went out to the step and put my thumb on the brass button. The shop went off behind me like a fire alarm, and the constable on the pavement did not even turn his head.

When I came in again the boy had turned the book round on the counter, and he gave it to me.

On the wall behind the counter hung a board of brass hooks with keys on most of them. The bottom hook was labelled Lane door in the same careful pencil as the book, and it carried no key at all — only three cardboard tags: Mr. P, Dr. A, Wong. I asked who the third of them was.

"Mr Wong is our compradore," Ah Kwei said, in the voice of a boy explaining which way up a spoon goes. "The Chinese shops do not buy from Mr Penrose; they buy from him. He finds them, he takes their orders, and he puts his own name to their credit, so that when they do not pay, my master asks him for the money and not them. Every foreign firm in this city keeps a compradore."

"And the three keys?"

"Those three gentlemen keep them in the pocket. The lane door is at the back, behind the dispensary. Only the tags live here, so that we know how many keys there are."

I asked him how one got upstairs to the family.

"One stair only," he said. "Also at the back, behind the dispensary. From the shop you must go through."

He lit a hand-lamp and went ahead of me through a door in the back wall, into the dispensary: the room behind the shop where the medicines are made up. It was dark and colder than the shop, and it smelled of something like ether. The lamp ran along shelves of brown bottles, struck a flash off the glass doors of a tall cupboard and let it go again, and showed me, in the far wall, a door faced with sheet iron and shut, with a heavy lock in it. Beside the door a narrow stair went up. Ah Kwei stopped at the foot of it and held the lamp high for me, and I went up.