Johnson's skull and the soft, almost drowsy, gasp that he immediately gave. His body sagged at once as if it had turned to jelly, and slithered down over the side of the boat into the river. At the same time both men dived over the other side and swam away into the shadow of the nearby wharf.
There were perhaps two seconds of startled silence while they stared at the gently widening ripples where Johnson had slid beneath the water, then Lolly suddenly shouted and two sailors jumped in. They dived, surfaced, shouted, dived and surfaced, again and again. Denton gripped the rail, his arms quivering, staring numbly at the black water where the sailors' heads kept bobbing up, then vanishing. He felt a tingling on his scalp at the back of his head, just where the blow had struck Johnson.
All around him there were shouts, questions, answers. Someone brought a lamp and held it over the water. The light glistened peacefully on the silky surface while the shouts grew less excited and the two sailors in the river spent a little longer breathing gulps of air before each dive. Gradually they all became silent, and the two sailors stopped diving altogether, clinging to the side of the sampans. Lolly Kwai looked at Denton inquiringly, his usually genial face lugubrious.
'Perhaps he swam to the shore?' Denton suggested, unbelieving himself.
Lolly shrugged, then shook his head. There had been something conclusive about the way Johnson had slid down below the surface, as though his body had been weighted with lead. 'It is a long time already,' he muttered.
Denton drew his watch out and examined its large dial under the lamp. Twenty past three. They'd been searching for nearly an hour already. He imagined Johnson floating near the bottom with the same bland smile on his face, only his eyebrows faintly raised in surprise. He closed the watch with a snap and put it away. 'I'll have to report it to the French police,' he said dully. 'Take the sampans in tow.' His limbs had stopped trembling. As the boat got under way again, he stared down at the dark, oily water with the last unreal hope that Johnson might yet suddenly pop up his head and wave to them with his cheerful, self-satisfied grin. But at the same time he felt a tremulous, rising sense of relief. Suppose he had boarded the sampan instead of Johnson?
While he was making a long, detailed statement to a French police officer who chewed his pen in ferocious concentration as he tried to translate Denton's sentences into official French, Lolly got the covers unlashed from the impounded sampans. The cargo was nothing but sacks of sawdust. He shook his head gloomily when he showed them to Denton by the grey cheerlessness of the first light. 'It was a trick. No silk at all. They wanted to get Mr Johnson.' He paused, thrusting out his underlip and scratching his slightly stubbled chin. 'Mr Johnson or you.'
The typhoon came and the harbour emptied as all the ships steamed downriver to ride the storm out in the open sea. But it wasn't a bad one, the winds were no stronger than a gale at home, and there was only the continuous rain that fell steadily for two days and nights from a sky vast with clumsy, tumbling grey clouds. The canals flooded onto the streets and sedan-chair bearers walked waist deep in muddy water; the rickshaw and wheelbarrow coolies couldn't work for a day until the floods subsided. Watching the rain from his window, Denton saw a wheelbarrow go floating down the street at the height of the flood, with an anguished coolie plunging after it.
Then the clouds began to thin, to fall apart and let in gaps of blue. The rain eased, and by the evening of the third day the sky was clear and serene, a pale greenish blue with a faint orange tinge where the sun had set, as though that too had been washed by the rain.
Four days later, Johnson's body floated to the surface, bloated and decomposing. It was picked up by the river police three miles down-stream, against the walls of the Bund. Denton was called to the mortuary to identify the body. The dingy waiting room didn't seem to have changed since the first time he'd gone there with Johnson himself to help identify his informer's body. The same clerk was yawning over the same maroon-coloured ledger, the same attendants were chatting and playing cards at the back of the hall. It almost seemed as though the same mute, hollow-eyed men and women were still waiting on the same bare benches for their missing relatives to be brought in.
A senior police inspector turned towards him with a smile of recognition. 'Hello, Denton, haven't seen you since that dinner at your chief's house. How are you getting on?'
It was Everett, the man who'd shared his cabin on the Orcades coming to Shanghai.
'Just been promoted,' Everett said proudly, glancing down at the shiny new pip on his shoulder. He gave Denton a cloth to hold over his nose. 'I'm afraid the body isn't really cold yet, it still smells.'
Denton gazed at the distorted and rotting corpse. The swollen features retained hardly any trace of that insistently affable smugness that Denton had come to detest. It was not a face he was looking at, Denton thought, but the putrid carcase of a face. Only the short, dark hair seemed the same, as though it hadn't died at all. Looking at the hair alone, still dripping on the ice, you could imagine Johnson had just been in for a swim. Denton pressed the cloth closer to his nose. It had been soaked in some strong disinfectant stuff, but he could still smell the powerful sickly-sweet scent of decaying flesh that he'd first caught in the burial house Wei had shown him last summer. When the attendant turned the head, Denton saw a livid, ulcerous bruise at the base of the skull.
He looked away with a sudden queasy turning of his stomach. 'Yes, that's him,' he muttered. 'That's about where he was hit, too.'
Outside, while the two attendants shuffled indifferently past on sandalled feet, carrying in another corpse, Everett paused for a few 'inquiries,' as he called them with a slightly self-important inflection in his voice. 'I suppose you didn't get a good look at the man who struck him?'
'No, it all happened so quickly. He was quite big, that's all.'
'Would you know either of the two men again?'
Everett was jotting down his replies in a little black notebook, and the official act, the official tone of voice, irritated Denton. He shrugged. 'No, it was pitch dark.' He watched a stone-eyed young Chinese being led into the mortuary by a police corporal.
'Would anyone have known he was to be on the launch at that time?'
Denton's chest caught suddenly with the awakening of the thought that Lolly Kwai had left to sleep in his mind. 'He wasn't supposed to be there at all,' he said slowly. 'He only came along because his boat had broken down.'
Everett glanced up at him, then continued writing. 'Looks as though they were after you, then,' he said as he closed the book. 'Shall I take that?' He took the cloth which Denton had been absently holding in his hand and dropped it in a rattan basket.
'They?' Denton repeated. 'Who?' 'In Your line of business,' Everett shrugged, 'there are bound to be people it's dangerous to offend. As in mine.'
Denton thought of Ching scratching his pallid cheek with that talon of a nail in Mason's office. Obviously Mason was taking bribes and Ching had wanted him to buy Denton off too. They were both put out by his refusal perhaps, but this.... He shook his head incredulously, and yet he kept seeing Ching's face, his faintly ironic smile, mocking his unbelief.
'I think it was only meant as a warning,' Everett was saying soothingly. 'It probably just went too far. They hit him too hard, that's all.'
'Unless they knew I can't swim.'
'Oh no, if they wanted to finish someone off, they could do it quite easily. But they don't like drawing too much attention to themselves by killing a foreign devil.' He paused as the stone-eyed Chinese came back down the corridor followed by the corporal, who was noisily clearing his throat and looking for somewhere to spit. The man's eyes were perhaps a little stonier, his mouth a little more stiff. 'It'd be different for a Chinese, of course,' Everett went on. 'They don't mind killing them - nobody takes much notice. Know anyone who might have a grudge against you?'
'I may have got on the wrong side of a ship's agent called Ching - '
Everett's eyebrow's rose. 'There are all sorts of stories about him,' he said with a note both of respect and of warning. 'I should watch your step if I were you.'
Denton felt suddenly as though his back was exposed - he even glanced round over