From the Ship of Fools to Earl of Wugang

Nothing happened that night.

The next morning, as everyone was having breakfast at the Ponticerry mansion, Inspector Douglas came in from outside, covered in a damp, cold mist.

He took the coffee and drank it all in one gulp, then handed a hastily written note to everyone.

"We found the records from the night patrols along the way."

The record quickly reached Edmund, who took it and glanced at it.

Two nights ago, a delivery truck driver who often picked up fares in the southern suburbs took on a lucrative job. His employer was a man with a wooden leg on his right side.

The coachman carried a heavy wooden box, tightly wrapped in tarpaulin, from near the Ponticelli mansion. When loading it onto the cart, the employer had to brace one side with his shoulder to prevent it from sliding off the ramp.

"The destination was near Limehouse." The inspector pressed his finger to the end of the transcript. "But the man stopped the driver several blocks from the riverbank and switched to another car that had been prepared."

The driver only saw the wooden crate being replaced before leaving along a small road leading to the river port area.

"This testimony proves that the murderer did indeed transport the goods to the riverbank." Rebecca flipped through the transcript. "But how many warehouses are there around Limehouse?"

"There are over forty registered locations alone." The inspector finally picked up his coffee and took a sip. "If you add shipyards, private warehouses, and temporary storage yards, we'll have enough to keep us searching until the end of the script."

Edmund replied, "Well, I guess we need other clues."

At nine o'clock in the morning, the carriage sent by the law firm arrived at the mansion.

Vera and two police officers verified the seal together, and then everyone followed the lawyer into the study, watching him use a box cutter to open the sealed testimony.

Alfred Schoerteau's handwritten statement recounts an event that occurred ten years ago:

Ten years ago, Jonathan Garn and three other prisoners, while serving their sentences on an overseas prison island, revealed information about a treasure to Captain Mostan and Major Shorto, who were stationed there.

An agreement was reached: four prisoners would provide the location and method to open the treasure, and two officers would retrieve it for them. The two officers who succeeded would then need to rescue the four prisoners, and the wealth would be divided equally.

In his testimony, Sholto admitted that he changed his mind after seeing the treasure chest and was unwilling to hand over most of his wealth to the criminals.

Mostan insisted on fulfilling the contract, and the two got into a scuffle during the argument. Mostan stumbled and hit the corner of a table, suffering a head injury that killed him instantly.

Sholto concealed the whereabouts of the body, kept the treasure for himself, and then claimed to the police and Mostan's daughter that the body had never been to the mansion.

As I read this, the only sound in the room was the rustling of pages turning.

Rebecca's expression didn't change much; she simply copied down the few pages of testimony that mentioned Mary.

Jiliu leaned against the table and muttered, "The inheritance this character's father left her is really troublesome."

When the four prisoners made their pact, they folded a lead sheet into four layers, wrote their names on each layer, and then pierced it with a bronze nail.

They swore to flee together and divide the treasure equally, with no one to keep it all to themselves.

The largest gem in the treasure was sea-green. Sholto claimed that the gem seemed to have a real effect on the oath. He suffered a kind of mental torment for ten years after breaking the oath.

He had considered handing over the treasure many times, but upon regaining his senses, he could not bear to give up the wealth he already possessed. In the end, he left only this testimony and gave a string of black pearls to Vera, asking his daughter to express his feelings on his behalf.

"Gemstones, lead plates, and oaths." Conrad closed the manuscript. "This explains what was in Bartholomew's safe."

The inspector silently wrote down the four names and immediately instructed the officers to send an urgent telegram to the overseas prison administration to inquire about the four individuals' sentences, disability records, life and death status, and whereabouts after release.

The old files were not connected to London's telegraph system, so the authorities on the island had to retrieve them from the warehouse first. The earliest they could give a first response was evening.

The inspector ordered officers and servants to search for Captain Mostan's body in the sealed well inside the mansion, while the others first investigated the river port.

Edmund spread the coachman's testimony, the width of the ruts measured the previous night, and a map of eastern London all over the table.

He marked the bridges that closed in the early morning, the toll booths where goods needed to be registered, and the steep slopes and narrow alleys that were difficult for heavily loaded horse-drawn carriages to pass, using the changeover points as the center.

Path intuition can only be used as an aid in this regard, but it is not difficult to eliminate possibilities by combining existing information.

By noon, only three areas remained on the map that warranted priority investigation.

The first warehouse was near the old grain wharf and contained only a few irrelevant items; the second warehouse was filled with the smell of preservative oil similar to that of the ropes on the roof, and the group thought they had found the right place, but they were soon greatly disappointed.

After two consecutive failures, the inspector's expression grew increasingly grim.

The third place was an old dock sandwiched between a shipyard and a coal yard. When the group asked the fifth porter, they finally learned that a few days ago a man with wooden legs had been asking around near the workers' shed which shipyards could provide steamboats with shallow draft and fast boiler pressurization.

The clues shifted from the warehouses to the ships, and the group visited several shipyards along the river.

As evening approached, the inspector finally found the name of the boat at a repair shop that also rented out small boats: Aurora.

It belonged to its owner, Modica Smith, and was a modified high-speed steamboat. With its long, narrow hull and larger boilers, it could maintain a considerable speed on the river even when fully loaded.

Smith's wife led everyone into the riverside cottage. She had clearly not slept all night, and her husband's pipe and account book from the previous night were still on the table.

"That man called himself Captain Moran, and his right leg was made of wood," she recalled, hands on her hips. "He had chartered the Aurora for the past two weeks, and he came again the day before yesterday evening, saying he wanted to do a night voyage."

"Who did Mr. Smith bring with him?" the inspector asked.

"Two temporary boatmen. They said they'd be back before dawn." The woman looked out the window at the gray river and shook her head. "But my husband hasn't come back since last night, and there's been no news of the two boatmen either."

The fastest steamship in London Harbour has been missing all night.

Mrs. Smith mentioned that her husband had checked the maintenance ledger before setting sail, and a moment later Rebecca moved the thick, oil-stained book to the window and began checking it page by page, starting with the records from the most recent month.

The Aurora's left-side cylinder malfunctioned seven days ago. The shipyard did not replace the worn piston rings, but only temporarily patched them with asbestos rope and copper sheets.

"In other words, the faster it runs, the easier it is to recognize the sound." Rebecca marked the intervals next to the record with a pencil.

Continuing to flip through the ledger, there were two more miscellaneous orders without a specified owner. One was for two brass nameplates similar in size to the "Aurora," and the other was for a far greater amount of highly volatile fuel than a typical small boat would use, with the delivery address listed as a warehouse on the banks of the Limehouse River.

The inspector tore off the two pages of the order as evidence and immediately called in personnel to verify the shipping records.

In the evening, an urgent telegram from the overseas prison island arrived along with old files.

Jonathan Garn lost his right leg in a quarry accident and went missing eight years ago after escaping from prison. The other three signatories—Mahomet, Abdullah, and Dost—are all dead on the prison island.

To make matters worse, the cemetery on the island had been looted four years ago, and when the coffins were opened for inspection, the remains of all three people were found to be missing.

After reading the telegram, the inspector curled his lip and said, "Prepare the weapons. Go to that warehouse tonight."