A Most Peculiar Malaysian Murder

by Shamini Flint

  The fisherman shrugged. ‘Engine no start!’

  ‘Is it working now?’ The fisherman looked confused. ‘Engine OK now?’ he asked again.

  The man grinned. ‘Yes, OK now!’

  ‘You want some money?’ asked Rupert, taking off his glasses so that the man could see that he was foreign. In the eyes of the locals, most foreigners were wealthy tourists.

  The fisherman gazed out to sea, looking at his compatriots making their way slowly back to shore with the day’s catch on board, a shiny, silvery mass of fish wriggling against each other in tanks on board each boat.

  ‘Every day I go to sea. There is so little fish left. I got five children. Of course I want money!’

  ‘Good.’

  He was back again, the young policeman. Mrs Wong was not surprised.

  He asked, ‘Where is he?’

  She feigned ignorance. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Rupert Winfield – in Room one, one, five?’

  ‘He not in one, one, five, he in one, one, seven. He check out already!’

  The policeman hit her. The blow was so unexpected that she staggered backwards and sat heavily in her chair, holding her jaw. Leaning forward towards her shrinking form, he said, ‘If I cannot find this man, I will come back for you.’

  It was not difficult to work out what had happened. He guessed that his prey had slipped out the back – with the help of the fat woman. His lip curled. If he failed to track down his quarry, he would go back and make her understand that it had not been prudent to get in his way. The policeman thought hard. He knew because he had warned the airport that Rupert Winfield had not escaped that way. The only other possibility was a boat. The policeman climbed on his motorbike and headed out of town on the coast road. He stopped at the first fishing village. The men were just coming in to shore and denied seeing any Mat Salleh, a local term for white man, around their village, let alone taking him out to sea. Their wives, tying up their sarongs and getting ready to help with the fish, backed up this story. They had no reason to lie to him. It seemed likely that Rupert had either gone further up the coast looking for a ride out of Sarawak or he had headed out of town in the opposite direction, east rather than west. There was no way to know for sure. The sergeant shook his head. He was not getting the breaks. At this rate, he might be too late. Forewarned, Rupert Winfield undoubtedly recognised the need for urgency. It seemed doubtful that he had bothered to go further up the coast without at least stopping at this village first to seek a way out. The policeman decided. He would go back the way he had come.

  He struck gold immediately. A small boy skipping stones into the water at the pier agreed at once that a white man had passed that way. ‘Mata biru macam David Beckham!’ Blue eyes like David Beckham, he said in awe. The sergeant handed him a coin.

  ‘Where did he go?’

  The boy nodded nonchalantly in the direction of the sea. ‘Pergi sampan Pakcik!’ He left on the old man’s boat.

  ‘Ke mana?’ Where to?

  The boy shrugged. He did not know and did not care.

  The policeman headed back to town. He would have to report failure.

  Sergeant Shukor knew that it would be best for his career to maintain a distance from the maverick Sikh. Instead, he was getting involved in the details of the case against Jasper Lee. His official remit was to shadow the troublesome policeman from across the border. His unofficial mandate was to encourage him to leave as soon as possible by any means, including being obstructive. But he found himself actively helping out. He had already got the inspector in to see Jasper Lee on a number of occasions.

  He had listened in on the interviews – admiring the way the inspector had mastered the use of silence as a weapon. He just sat there quietly in the cell, patiently waiting for Jasper Lee to start filling the empty spaces with words. There were no threats, no brutality expressed or implied. Just a gradual getting under the skin of an imprisoned man until he talked to pass the time or distract himself from the loneliness of certain death. And from this idle conversation had come nuggets of information. The most peculiar of which was this assertion that Jasper had killed his brother to stop his destruction of the environment. It was a lesson in interview technique that Shukor looked forward to testing the next time he was asked to interrogate a suspect or a witness. And the more the young man learned, the more he felt compelled to return the favour by arranging access for the Singaporean policeman. He knew that, when his superiors got wind of it, as they inevitably would, he would be in a difficult position, but he hoped by then something concrete would have resulted from their efforts.

  He and the inspector sat in what was now their favourite restaurant, sipping hot sweet tea and watching the street vendors flog their wares that ranged from prayer mats to holy beads. All the products were geared towards the Friday prayer crowd who would soon be overflowing from the mosque, forming lines on the pavement facing Mecca and chanting praise of God.

  Shukor was deep in thought.

  At last he said, ‘It is possible.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It is possible that he killed his brother because of what he was doing in East Malaysia, especially Sarawak.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘I’ve been looking at his history,’ replied Shukor.

  He seemed to hesitate for a moment but then slipped a folder across the table to the inspector. Another breach of protocol, handing over confidential police files. It was the haul from Jasper’s second-floor shophouse office in Chinatown. The police were thorough. They did not want the prosecution of Jasper for his brother’s murder to end in failure. They had a confession. They wanted background information as well. After all, he would not be the first accused to retract a confession at the eleventh hour and insist it was provided under duress – whether true or not.

  The inspector looked through the file with interest. The majority of papers were innocuous enough. They indicated an interest in conservation issues in Malaysia. There were World Wide Fund for Nature reports printed off the Internet, various flyers pleading for logging to be stopped in Sarawak, newspaper cuttings on the plight of every animal, from the orang utan to the pygmy elephant, as a result of deforestation. A draft research paper on a nomadic tribe in Borneo – the Penan – was written by one Rupert Winfield. There was also correspondence between Jasper and Rupert Winfield on the problems faced by the indigenous peoples as their symbiotic relationship with nature was thrown out of kilter by the logging industry.

  ‘I guess it shows he genuinely cared about these issues, but that is a long way from murder,’ remarked the inspector.

  ‘That’s because I haven’t shown you the best part,’ was Shukor’s response.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Another folder was slipped across the table.

  The inspector picked it up and flipped it open inquisitively. He started leafing through the pages, his bending posture indicating his progressive interest in the contents.

  At last he looked up at the young man across the table. Shukor was looking a trifle smug. It was not often in their relationship that he was one up on the fat policeman.

  ‘Where did you get this?’

  ‘At his office as well.’

  ‘Well, it is not quite a smoking gun but it does lend some credibility to his claims about his brother.’

  Sergeant Shukor nodded.

  They both looked down at the papers in front of them. It was a miscellaneous collection of company annual reports, government survey maps, handwritten notes, printouts of commodity prices and columns of numbers. It was difficult to see at first what Jasper had been driving at with his careful highlighting of maps and scribbled margin notes. But a careful look made it clear that by putting together the company returns and estimating the volume of wood that had been sold over the various years, more wood was sold by Lee Timber than appeared in their books. They had systematically inflated the prices they received for the timber and processed wood they exported
to justify the large income flowing in. This combined with survey maps showing logging areas, conservation areas and marked with the results of Jasper’s own aerial reconnaissance showed that logging had encroached deep into protected areas.

  There were also letters written by Jasper to various authorities in Sarawak pointing out these findings, but the appended responses were always polite denials that there was a pattern of illegal logging going on under their noses. Their officers had checked out the allegations and found no truth in them.

  In the margin of one of these replies, Jasper had scribbled angrily, ‘How much did you get for this?’

  ‘It was certainly a subject he cared about,’ remarked Inspector Singh.

  Shukor nodded. ‘I can almost believe that he killed his brother for this.’

  ‘A man on a mission?’

  ‘Yes, if he had proof that his own family company was involved in the activities. You know what these Chinese are like – it’s all family honour and saving face.’

  ‘Surely he would have confronted his brother, not killed him!’

  ‘Maybe he did.’

  It was a pertinent point and well made, thought the inspector. It was quite possible that Jasper had confronted his brother and been given short shrift. What was the next step? Murder? Surely, trial by publicity first.

  ‘Wouldn’t he have gone to the newspapers?’

  ‘He might not have had much luck.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Plenty of cronies around. The newspapers might have refused to publish.’

  The inspector pulled at his beard, now flecked with grey. It was possible that Jasper had tried all these options first, failed and then decided to kill Alan. But something did not ring true. He was still not confident that Jasper Lee had killed his brother over such an abstract issue. He thought of the murderers he had caught over the years. Crimes of passion and crimes of greed. He had never come across an altruistic murderer before. He still thought the boyfriend a more likely suspect. But Ravi had not confessed. And Jasper had.

  ‘I do not believe that he was a genuine convert so what is the use of trying to take the children from the mother? It is cruel.’ The thin, ascetic man in white robes and thick glasses spoke in a measured tone.

  ‘We cannot question the conversion. It will open the floodgates for friends and relatives to argue the real intention of a convert after he is dead. People will doubt every new Moslem.’ A young firebrand with flashing eyes and a black beard thumped the table to emphasise his conviction.

  ‘We have to pursue the matter. We cannot set a precedent where we choose if and when to uphold Syariah law. That is not Islamic justice,’ he continued.

  ‘If it was not a genuine conversion, Alan Lee will have to explain his actions to God. We are not the judges of what is in a man’s heart. He went through the necessary steps. He professed to convert to Islam. He declared his children to be Moslem. We have a responsibility to see that his children are brought up in a Moslem household.’

  This assertion was by the president of the Council. He was a venerable scholar and well respected by his colleagues even when they disagreed with him.

  There was a small sigh from the ascetic as he saw which way the Council was leaning. He said, ‘May Allah forgive us.’

  Could she risk losing? The first hearing had been postponed. They were due back in court the following week. Chelsea sat in the waiting room of her Syariah lawyer’s office – impatiently waiting to hear his advice. The waiting room was small and cramped. There were a couple of worn sofas – Chelsea could feel the springs through the floral fabric, yearning to break free. The carpet was stained with coffee or tea, perhaps tears too. There were a couple of Arabic phrases, she assumed from the Quran, framed and hung on the walls. A plastic ashtray with cigarette burn marks all round the rim sat in the middle of the glass-topped, cane coffee table. Next to it was a vase of cheap plastic flowers in those luminescent shades of pink and green which Chelsea, rightly or wrongly, always associated with poor manufacturing standards in China. She knew the lawyer was both senior and successful. Why couldn’t he clean up the filthy waiting room?

  Finally, she was shown in. It was another small, cramped room. This one came with a desk piled high with books. Gold-trimmed black court robes, fraying around the edges from years of use, hung from a coat stand in the corner. The lawyer himself was small, almost gnomic, largely hidden by the piles of paper on his huge desk. He had large, pointy ears poking out on either side of the white cloth cap worn by Moslems who had performed the Hajj in Mecca. He stood up as she came in and she held out her hand, expecting the usual handshake.

  He shook his head slightly. ‘As you know, Mrs Lee, my religion forbids me from having contact with a woman who is not my wife.’

  Chelsea’s hand fell to her side. She was embarrassed, immediately on the defensive.

  As if to accentuate the cultural gap between them, her lawyer walked around the desk, avoiding brushing against her as he did so, and opened the door that she had closed behind her. He pushed a doorstop into place with a slippered foot. He was not allowed to be alone with a woman who was not his wife either, not behind closed doors anyway. The preliminaries dealt with to his satisfaction he smiled, baring large coffee-stained teeth, and said, ‘May I offer you a cup of tea?’

  She shook her head mutely. She needed to get down to business. This man was the most senior practising member of the Syariah bar. He came highly recommended and, despite the slippers and fraying gown, he was expensive. She was not interested in tea-breaks.

  He understood because he said, ‘I know the background to your case, of course.’ Left unsaid was that he would have had to be a hermit to avoid the details of Chelsea’s recent exploits.

  Chelsea nodded. ‘What are my chances? Can they take my children from me?’

  She was not in a mood to beat around the bush and her lawyer looked a little pained at being put on the spot so quickly.

  He said, looking thoughtful, ‘This is a very unusual confluence of circumstances.’

  Chelsea glared at him. Apparently it did not matter whether it was within the Syariah or civil jurisdiction, all lawyers charged by the hour and would not answer a direct question.

  She asked, ‘So what does “unusual confluence of circumstances” mean for me and my children?’

  Her lawyer sighed and looked up. She saw a sincerity in him that reassured her for a moment. His answer however did not. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what the outcome will be.’

  There was a tense silence between them as they both digested his admission of ignorance as if it was an unripe fruit, sour and unpalatable.

  The lawyer spoke first. ‘It is always unfortunate to be precedent-setting in a case that is in the public eye. All the parties involved feel that they have to adopt the harshest line because they don’t want to be seen to be weak.’

  She nodded. She had always lived her life on the front pages of the tabloid press. But now she had gravitated to the broadsheets and the reputations of powerful men were at stake.

  He continued, ‘My contacts at the Islamic Council inform me that they are split on whether to pursue this custody matter in the first place. Not everyone is convinced that your husband’s conversion was genuine.’

  ‘Of course it wasn’t!’ snapped Chelsea.

  ‘Unfortunately, the Council does not want to set a precedent of doubting the authenticity of a religious conversion. You can see why that would be. Whenever any non-Moslem converts, objecting family members will turn to the courts. A matter of faith will become a matter of evidence.’

  Chelsea slumped back into her chair. ‘What are you getting at?’

  ‘The court might not let us introduce evidence that Alan was not really a Moslem. He followed the legal procedures to become a Moslem. They might take it at face value. If they do that – well, then strictly as a matter of Islamic family law, the children should be brought up as Moslems . . . and by Moslems. The court could take t
he children away from you.’

  ‘What can we do?’

  ‘There is one sure way to avoid losing your children,’ the lawyer replied gently.

  She looked up hopefully. ‘What is it?’

  ‘You could convert to Islam too.’

  Chelsea said quietly, ‘I’ve thought about that, of course.’

  ‘Then why don’t you do it?’

  ‘Do you think that two conversions of convenience are really the solution?’

  The lawyer steepled his fingers and looked at her ruefully. ‘It’s best if you don’t reveal to me that any conversion to Islam by you would not be genuine. It is important that your adoption of the religion appears credible.’

  Chelsea snorted. ‘Like Alan’s?’

  The lawyer could not meet her eyes. He looked down, shuffled the papers on his table and sighed.

  Chelsea spoke in a quiet voice. ‘If I convert, it means Alan has won. He has reached out from beyond the grave to control what I do and how I live my life with my kids. I don’t want to give him that victory . . .’

  ‘It might be the only way of keeping your children.’

  She nodded. ‘I realise that. But for now I am still hoping for some justice from the courts.’

  Thirteen

  Singh was not looking forward to his appointment with Chelsea. To ask this woman about her Achilles’ heel would not be pleasant. He was forced to concede that he was shocked to discover that she had a boyfriend on the side. He would not have thought it would be in her character. He supposed he was just not in a position to understand a vulnerable woman. He had no doubt in his mind about Ravi. He was a slippery character on the lookout for women he could exploit. It was his job – the way he made a living. Singh had come across many of his ilk over the years. He would have assumed they were too cowardly to commit murder for gain. But Chelsea’s potential wealth and anticipated gratitude, if her husband was removed from the picture, might have tempted Ravi to overreach.