‘My reputation is strong in the world outside China. If I had failed to spot a murder had been committed - even an Emperor’s - the Great Powers would accept it was just one of those things, an unfortunate death from natural causes. As it was, step by step the plotters made serious blunders.’
‘Among them?’
‘For example over the Pekingese dog Shadza.’
‘How was that a serious blunder?’ I asked, flabbergasted.
‘By contrast with the eunuch’s shattered tympanum you were called in late. Didn’t that strike you as odd? Otherwise, you’ll recall telling me, you might have saved its life at the first sign of distress.’
I gazed blankly at my companion.
‘Holmes, are you telling me the dog’s death was connected to the orchard plot?’
‘Of course it was! It was a necessary part of it. What was the final question they needed answering before launching the crow?‘Would a plant entirely unknown in China, plucked by Yuán from the floor of an obscure forest in England, really do the job?’ Was the alkaloid deadly enough? Would it work as they wished, namely irretrievably destroy the internal organs slowly, over a period of some days? They got their answer with Shadza. I know of no poison able to effect such damage on a dog which wouldn’t do the same to a human. If the wretched, betrayed dog lingered for three or four days before dying painfully from the rupture of just about every internal organ, so would the Emperor.
At first I paid no attention - the dog was dead, unfortunate creature - until you told me the E-D not only refused to let you perform an autopsy, she even said no to analyzing the extraneous fluids. Why? I wondered. Testing the fluids would require no butchery of the corpse. Then it struck me. She feared you might identify the toxin from your experience with such plants in England.’
‘Holmes!’ I exclaimed, ‘it’s absurd - preposterous - to believe the Empress Dowager would allow her favourite Pekingese to be poisoned, deliberately so.’ I added coldly, ‘I have met only one human being who deliberately and in cold blood poisoned a dog, and that man was you, a Scottish terrier if you recall.’
I referred to an incident in the case of murder I titled ‘A Study In Scarlet’ which took place in 1881 or early 1882, not long after I had first become acquainted with Holmes. A baffled Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard was at our Baker Street lodgings. Holmes sent me downstairs to our landlady to fetch an elderly Scottish terrier. My comrade was holding a small chip ointment box containing a couple of pills. Before our startled eyes Holmes fed the animal one of the pills, then, when that had no evident effect, he cut the other pill in two, dissolved it in water, added milk to make it palatable, and presented it to the terrier, whereupon the unfortunate creature gave a convulsive shiver in every limb, and lay as rigid and lifeless as if it had been struck by lightning.
‘My dear fellow,’ came the quick reply, ‘if you recall, we had a murder to solve - and besides, the terrier was old and sickly. I call it a mercy killing. This doesn’t seem to have been the case with Shadza. The food fed to Shadza was as closely regulated and tasted by eunuchs as the Empress Dowager’s herself.’
‘Again, Holmes, especially if what you deduce is correct, why did they call me in at all?’
‘To leave us with the impression accidents do happen. If a most favoured Royal pet can inadvertently ingest toxic plants, so can Royal humans.’
We were passing in sight of the Senkaku Islands when a steward came along the row of cabins with a news-sheet containing items of interest from across China. Even as we left the Empire’s territorial waters events from the mainland were still catching up with us. My attention was caught by a piece from the provincial city of Ningpo. It was headed ‘Palace Eunuch Found Dead’.
‘Word has arrived of another unexplained killing in the Forbidden City. The victim has been identified as a eunuch from Ningpo by the name of Kou Liancai in the employ of the Emperor. He was bound hand and foot and dumped in an open, fly-infested pauper’s pit. The eye-brows had been sliced off. Street dogs had commenced devouring him. Although the head has definitely been identified as Kou’s, the torso lying by (having being severed from its head) had the genitalia intact.’
The news-sheet described how a heavy blow from a sword had removed the young man’s head. Deliberately severing the head from the trunk meant Kou could not serve the Emperor in the Hall of Hades as he had in this life. He may well have endured fearful torture before the coup de grace, another reason why the real torso may have been disposed of separately, death by slicing being solely within the Empress Dowager’s power to order. The penal regulations obliged the torturer to cut in a specified order; eye-brows first, then the shoulders, the breasts, the arms, the legs and then, finally, the heart. I reflected on the chilling contrast between the living, undamaged Kou and the wreckage of that same human-being now, a contrast I confronted many a time as an Army surgeon in the face of the scimitars of Ayub Khan’s Afghan warriors.
Li must have realised how Kou had connived in Holmes’s ingenious trickery. The Aeroscope had been operated from high up in the pipa tree, the only hiding-place with a direct line of sight to the resting Emperor and the orchard path. No man of my or Holmes’s age would have had the dexterity to operate the camera while hanging on for dear life so high in the canopy.
I put the newsletter down. Kou’s murder bore the hallmark of the Chief Eunuch’s vindictive handiwork on the orders of his mistress. Only the Empress Dowager could have specified ‘no coffin and no funeral’. All doubt in my mind about the death of the Empress Dowager’s favourite dog dissipated.
Now the Celestial Emperor was entirely alone, an exposed and pitiable figure. My mind returned to a furtive conversation held when I checked the eardrum for the last time. Emboldened by the way my patient seemed driven to unload his cares upon me, a stranger from a distant land, I ventured, ‘You told me Her Imperial Majesty expected you at any moment to die - to become a guest on high. What made you think that?’
The Emperor reached over his shoulder, the index finger pointing downward.
‘The beizi she ordered me to wear on the journey to the Temple. The one she took away to destroy.’
‘What about it?’ I asked.
‘Do you recall the embroidery on the back?’
‘Of course!’ I replied.
I had paid particular attention to the dragons’ snake-like appearance and the unusual four legs and five paws.
‘Dragons stitched with jewel-beetle wing-cases,’ I continued.
‘Do you recall how many dragons?’ the Emperor asked.
‘As a matter of fact, no,’ I conceded. ‘Quite a few.’
‘Nine,’ said the Emperor. ‘There were nine. When I stood on the Shishaquita and donned the cape, I was sure it was to be my last journey on earth. I didn’t expect to reach the other side of the lake. I even sent Kou down into the bowels of the launch to seek out an assassin’s bomb. Finally we set off. And then, sure enough, the war-crow came.’
I said, ‘I don’t understand. Was it some sort of premonition?’
The Emperor grimaced.
‘It was no premonition. It was the nine dragons. To a Chinese acquainted with the custom of the Ch’ing that number on a Dragon robe spells dethroning and death.’
I said, ‘But I thought nine was a symbol of Imperial power and strength? Only an Emperor is permitted to wear...’
‘Only an Emperor wears the ‘nine dragons robe’ but these robes never have nine dragons stitched on them, only eight. The Emperor is himself a dragon. That brings the number up to nine. The message was clear. Nine dragons plus me makes ten, no longer the Imperial nine. The person who sent me the beizi no longer considered me Emperor.’