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possibility. He took a bamboo box of home-made cigarettes from his jacket pocket, offered Asher one and then lit one up for himself.
    ‘Why would they have done that?’
    ‘Who knows why Chinese’ll do anything, sir? It’s not like Miss Eddington’d taken out a million-dollar insurance policy, or was spying for the Germans, or anything.’
    Asher turned his mind aside from inquiring whether his informant was sure about these assertions and said instead, ‘Tell me about last night.’ Further inquiry as to Chinese motivations, he was well aware, would get him nothing but Sax Rohmer generalities about inscrutable Oriental evil. ‘Why leave Rick at Eddington’s in that condition instead of taking him home? How drunk was he?’
    ‘That’s just exactly what I don’t know, sir.’ Dempsy picked a fragment of tobacco from his lower lip. ‘The thing is, Hans and Crommy and I were all – well, we didn’t see Rick leave Madame Yu’s. For streets around, you know, there’s nothing but dives, and we were wandering from one to the next. I came out of one place, and Hans said that Crom had said Rick had gone off in a rickshaw, and blamed if any of us could find him. He was pretty capsized when last I saw him,’ the young man concluded. ‘But, drunk or sober, he’d never have hurt a white woman. Not any woman, really.’
    Asher raised his brows. Dempsy looked a little conscious and added, ‘I won’t say I’ve never slapped a Chinese woman, Professor. Hans’d have it that the Chink girls don’t respect you if you don’t, but I never found that. Besides, I really don’t care if they respect me or not.’ He shrugged, uncomfortable despite his words.
    On the parade ground beyond the verandah, an officer’s whistle shrilled out a signal to a troop of khaki-clad Durham Light Infantry, whose every stride kicked up small clouds of yellow dust.
    ‘Do you think Hobart actually proposed to Miss Eddington?’
    Dempsy gave the matter some thought. ‘He could have,’ he said at last. ‘Please don’t think Rick gets hammered like that every night of the week, sir. His pa keeps him pretty busy. And anyone in the Quarter’ll tell you, he won’t drink at those little parties they’re always throwing here, where everybody sips sherry and talks about Back Home. But about three times since he’s been here, we’ve gone down to the Eight Lanes and he’s wound up well and truly obfuscated, and he’s said things to me then that he had no recollection of afterwards. So he could have asked her, yes. But equally, Mrs Eddington was so—’
    His mouth tightened under its thin black mustache, and for a moment his eyes shifted. Not a lie, thought Asher, so much as a second thought:
is it wrong to tell him this?
    ‘He might have said something that Mrs Eddington pushed her daughter into believing was a proposal?’ he suggested gently.
    Dempsy looked embarrassed. ‘The thing is, sir, Mrs Eddington was darn set on Miss Eddington marrying Rick. And I think Miss Eddington was . . . was darn set on marrying
anyone
. Well, she’s twenty-four . . . She
was
twenty-four,’ he corrected himself. ‘When a girl gets to be that age—’
    The door behind them opened. Asher smelled fresh vomit even before he turned to see the soldier who’d taken Rick back to the cells emerge with young Hobart’s fouled gray jacket rolled up into a bundle with the shirt and green silk tie. In a carefully neutral voice, the soldier said, ‘You’d best let Sir Grant know that his son will be needing fresh clothing, sir.’
    Dempsy waved as if to dispel the reek. ‘Jesus! And after all the fuss he made about getting his suits tailored, and his hankies to match.’
    ‘Did he?’ Asher signed the soldier to remain. Folded on top of the gray suit and green tie were the tweeds Rick had been wearing in the garden the previous night, including, grotesquely, the red-and-blue necktie with which Holly Eddington had been strangled.
    ‘Oh, hell, yes.’ The clerk