picking up a shred of chicken with his chopsticks, which he was patiently teaching Denton to use. 'You never can tell, they might be off scot-free by now. I might never hear of them again. And it'll take at least a couple of months before I get my bounty for the salt, too. Won't be much, of course, but I should be able to hire a boat to get me up to Hankow.' His jaws munched slowly and regularly - rather in the way he talked, Denton thought. 'Hope it comes through before Christmas. Look, try picking up a bean with your chopsticks. Like this. That's a good test of your skill.'
Denton felt a little prick of disappointment and hurt that Johnson unquestioningly assumed the bounty would all go to him, but he tried to reason the smart away. After all, he told himself glumly, as the bean kept slipping off the tips of his chopsticks, his fingers aching with the effort to control them, after all, he'd only gone along to watch, he'd been no help at all, so why should he expect any of the bounty to come his way? He laid his chopsticks down on the plate almost sullenly while Johnson methodically, obliviously, demonstrated with his own how you must hold the bottom one tight with the crook of your finger and thumb against the middle knuckle of your second finger.
'Have you got any plans for Christmas?' Johnson asked casually. Denton sensed an invitation was in the offing to join Johnson on his trip to Hankow and inwardly he resisted it. He looked away uncomfortably as the boy took the plates, guilty over the chagrin he felt about the bounty, guilty that Johnson's blandly persistent friendliness was so tedious. Could it be that overbearing, immoral Mason and wordly-wise Jones secretly interested him more? 'There was some talk about going on a houseboat and doing a bit of shooting,' he said vaguely, continuing to avoid Johnson's mild, solicitous gaze. 'Mason and Jones were talking about it. I don't really know of course. I might be on duty, I suppose.' He glanced apologetically at Johnson's still perspiring face.
Johnson's brown eyes glimmered in their depths, but then he nodded and smiled wryly, almost as if he'd expected all along that Denton wouldn't want to join him. After a few moments' silence he set off for the river bank with his sketchbook, the wry but not unfriendly smile still on his lips. Watching him walk away with his firm, energetic stride, Denton thought remorsefully how solitary he looked, recalling too that he never seemed to be with anyone for long. In the mess he would join a table and converse in his affable yet lifeless manner, and then, when the meal was over, he would be left sitting there by himself. And in the billiards room or the lounge, it always seemed the same - eventually he would be left alone while the others had formed groups with their backs towards him. Was that why he'd been so friendly to him, because he was shunned by all the others?
20
SITTING AT HIS DESK one evening, learning his vocabulary for his next Chinese lesson, Denton kept letting his eyes stray to the photograph of Emily propped against the wall in front of him, next to the picture of his parents. After he murmured each word aloud three times in what he hoped was the right tone, he would try to write the character, then allow himself to gaze at the misty, sepia-coloured portrait in its oval frame. He would purse his lips in an imagined kiss on Emily's, which he couldn't see properly as the photograph was taken in profile, and imagine the moist fresh pressure of her mouth as she responded. Sometimes his eyes would close and he would imagine her body pressing against his, soft and round and giving. Then, before his imagination had stirred him too far, he would open his eyes and check the strokes of the character he'd just drawn.
He was drawing the character for 'like' when there was a cheerful double-knock on the door.
'Come in?' He half-turned, brush in hand.
It was Johnson. Denton's brows rose slightly in surprise. Since that week at the forts, there had been a faint coolness between them, though more on his part than on Johnson's. Denton had started to avoid him except when others were there as well, feeling a slight, but distinct and solid wall inside his chest which he had to surmount whenever Johnson approached him with his affable benevolence.
'Hello.' Johnson closed the door and smiled blandly. 'Busy?'
'I'm learning my Chinese.' Denton dipped his brush in the ink and waited, his hand poised.
'Ah.'
'For tomorrow's lesson.'
'I didn't know you were working at it.' He came across to the desk and looked over Denton's shoulder.
'Just one lesson a week.' Denton held himself rigid, as though afraid Johnson was going to touch him. He gazed steadfastly at the moist, pointed tip of the brush.
'Jolly good,' Johnson said approvingly, yet absently. He leant further over to examine the character; yet, again, he seemed to do so absently. 'It rather looks as though we've got an unpleasant job to do,' he said, straightening up.
'Oh?' When Denton glanced round he saw that Johnson was smiling his usual equable smile, whatever the unpleasant job might be.
'Yes. That fellow that gave us the information about the salt-smugglers - remember him?'
'Yes?'
It wasn't 'us' when you were talking about the bounty, Denton thought with a fleeting sense of recollected smart. It was all 'me' then.
'It looks as though he may have been murdered.'
'Murdered?'
'Mm. They want us to go and identify the body.' Johnson went on dispassionately. 'Won't take long.'
'Us?' Denton exclaimed in alarm. 'But I hardly even saw him!'
'Well, it does help if there are two of us,' Johnson insisted amiably. 'It's a bit difficult to identify them if they've been mutilated, as I gather this one has. I mean, you might've noticed something about him that would help.'
Denton felt, a tide of sick fearfulness washing up his stomach. 'I didn't even look at him,' he protested weakly.
'The police are downstairs waiting,' Johnson went on as if he hadn't heard. 'Won't take half an hour. The mortuary's just round the corner. You'll be back at your Chinese in no time.'
Despite his unwillingness and his squeamish apprehension, Denton tamely pushed back his chair, slipped on his tunic and began silently buttoning it. Johnson leant over the desk again, gazing at the photographs.
'Your parents?' he asked equably.
'Yes.'
'And your sister?'
'I haven't got a sister.' He compressed his lips, then surrendered under Johnson's smiling, innocently inquiring eyes. 'It's my, er, fiancée, actually.' He looked away uncomfortably.
'Oh, fiancée?' Johnson strolled towards the door. 'Very nice' he added perfunctorily.
An English inspector and a Sikh constable were waiting downstairs, the inspector sitting in a cane chair, impatiently slapping the arm with the flat of his hand, the Sikh standing monumentally by the main door. 'Ah, there you are,' the inspector said gruffly as he got up. 'Shall we go?'
The Sikh led the way through the narrow streets, the others followed three abreast. Hawkers were selling from their stalls beneath hissing paraffin lamps - tea, food, fruits and vegetables - and a fortune-teller sat against the wall beside two old men squatting over a Chinese chess board, while a silent crowd stood round them, watching each move. Denton glanced at them all abstractedly and scarcely heard the strident, bargaining voices all round him, his mind tremulously foreseeing every kind of mutilation that a body could suffer; but Johnson was as undisturbed and detached as ever; talking on in that monotonous, faintly twangy voice of his. The inspector merely grunted noncommittally while Denton walked slightly apart, as though an invisible film separated him from both the street and his companions. 'Old Derek's all right,' he remembered Jones saying as they left Johnson picking his teeth in solitude at the dinner table one evening. 'Only he does drone on and on, doesn't he?' That droning jarred on him now more than ever.
Denton felt a new soft, squelchy quiver of fear as the Sikh led the way past a blue-glazed gas light into the mortuary. A few Chinese in white overalls were gossiping loudly at the back of a large hall, in which were several rows of almost empty benches. At the other end of the hall, guarding a gloomy corridor, a clerk sat at a high wooden