The Betel Nut Tree Mystery

by Ovidia Yu

  ‘Why not just tell Nicole how much money she has?’

  Dr Covington took a deep breath. ‘I didn’t want her to know Radley hadn’t left her much. He was young, you understand. Just starting out. He was barely finding his feet in business when he died. But Nicole has nothing to worry about. I’ll make certain she’s well looked after and has everything a young woman could want for a good life. She is the mother of my grandson, after all. Everything I have will go to Junior eventually. Radley was my only son. Who else would I leave it all to?’

  ‘What if Nicole marries again?’ Le Froy asked quietly.

  ‘Whom she marries is entirely up to her. There’s no changing that girl’s mind once she’s made it up. But no matter what Nicole does, Junior will always be my grandson,’ Dr Covington said firmly. ‘My only grandson. Nothing can ever change that now. I can’t expect you to understand but the one focus of my life now is to do right by the boy. I only hope I stay alive and vital enough to see him grow up to be a man his poor father would have been proud of.’

  I felt tears in my eyes. ‘My grandmother brought me up after my parents died,’ I said. I knew Ah Ma felt just as responsible for me as Dr Covington did for his grandson, although she would sooner have swallowed chicken droppings than make such a sentimental speech. ‘I owe her everything. She says that grandparents are as deeply invested as parents, but with more experience.’

  Dr Covington nodded. ‘I’m doing it as much for my son as my grandson. Junior is a bright boy. Nicole doesn’t seem to understand he has lost as much as she has. More, in fact. She may find herself another husband. Junior has lost his only father for ever.’

  Le Froy didn’t seem affected. ‘I gather Schumer changed his mind about Nicole after learning she depends on you for money?’

  Dr Covington shook his head. ‘I told Nicole he had been nosing into her affairs and she went and had a regular set-to with him. That’s a Southern belle for you. Can’t walk two steps in the sun to throw a ball with her little boy, but she’ll brawl in the street in front of strangers. I wasn’t there but, from what I heard, Nicole confronted Schumer over dinner. There was a scene in the restaurant, then on the street outside, and eventually she stormed off. No one can say what happened next. Nicole says she doesn’t remember.’ Again, he looked in Junior’s direction. ‘Eric Schumer was killed in a car accident that night.’

  I stopped scribbling. ‘Did he kill himself because of Nicole?’ I couldn’t help asking. Suicide was an offence against God, according to the mission ladies, and against your ancestors, according to my grandmother. I thought the worst thing about suicide was that you were giving up on life before you were forced to.

  ‘The police don’t think he killed himself,’ Dr Covington said, ‘Anyway, that’s when I decided it was time to get Nicole out of America for a bit. I’d always wanted to visit good old England and do the grand European tour. Nicole had never been out of America, and it would be an educational experience for Junior. So, I booked us a passage on the Cunard Line. That was how we ended up in Germany. The rally was just a bit of fun.’

  Radley Covington, Eric Schumer, Victor Glossop. I wrote in my notebook. Three dead men who were involved with Nicole Covington.

  ‘You can’t think Nicole had anything to do with any of those deaths,’ Dr Covington added quickly. ‘They were all accidents. Given the number of men interested in her, it’s not all that surprising.’

  ‘One accident, perhaps,’ Le Froy said. ‘With your son, that’s two “accidents”. And Victor Glossop makes a third.’

  ‘You do think Victor’s death was an accident, then?’ Dr Covington said, so quickly that I saw he wanted to know very much how the investigation was going. ‘Victor Glossop led a very sheltered existence until he came out east. He may not have been aware of some underlying condition, some fatal allergy . . .’ He reminded me of Kenneth.

  ‘I’m sure Dr Leask will appreciate any suggestions you can make. Is Mrs Covington feeling better? I still need to speak to her,’ Le Froy said.

  ‘You know how women are. When they feel they’re not looking their best they don’t want to be seen by anyone. Especially not by any man.’

  ‘Would she let me come and talk to her?’ I asked. ‘If I come to keep Junior company, it wouldn’t really count as her seeing anybody.’ I wasn’t pushing myself forward. This was only what Dr Covington had suggested that first day.

  ‘No,’ said Le Froy, automatically.

  ‘Come by the hotel tomorrow,’ said Dr Covington, ‘after breakfast.’

  ‘Eight thirty a.m.?’

  ‘If you want to talk to Nicole, noon would be a better bet.’

  Harry Palin

  There were times I would never cross Le Froy.

  And then there were the other times.

  After the Covingtons had left, Le Froy said, ‘I’m sending Sergeant Pillay to the hotel with you.’

  ‘That would leave Sergeant de Souza on duty here without back-up. What if there’s an emergency?’

  ‘HQ can loan us a corporal.’

  I didn’t think Sergeant Pillay would be much help with Nicole, but ‘If you do, will you ask for Corporal Wong Meng?’

  ‘Is he good?’

  ‘No. Not yet. But he wants to be a detective.’

  He shook his head in a gesture that incorporated recognition and resignation. I could identify it because I had seen that look on my grandmother’s face. I was doing what they would have done, not what they wanted me to do.

  There was just one person I wanted to talk to before I was done for the day. His interview was one of those noted as completed in the day’s report from HQ. There was no urgency, but if my plan was successful I would be spending the next few days at the Farquhar Hotel with Nicole.

  I didn’t wait for the trolley bus because there would still be a long walk after that. Singapore might have the largest trolley-bus system in the world, but trolleys only ran where Europeans wanted to go. I was lucky to find a mosquito bus heading west to Chua Chu Kang Village and Kampong Belimbing. It wasn’t full and the driver agreed to take me to Tengah, charging me only for the distance between his last stop and the air base.

  Still, it was evening by the time I banged on the door of Harry Palin’s quarters in the small kampong that had formed around the Tengah air base.

  ‘Nobody here. Go away!’

  I took that as an invitation. In any case the door was ajar, with the loop of the hook latch torn out of the wall.

  ‘Oh, it’s you. The chaps are off on night training. I got the evening off.’ Harry, sitting in his undershirt and shorts on a bunk bed with its sheet pulled half off, was unshaven and seemed not to have slept for some time. The room looked even worse than he did.

  ‘I heard you were in for questioning. How did it go? They took you to Headquarters?’

  Harry nodded. ‘Was there all day, all night and all day. Just got out. Being a murder suspect gets boring quite quickly. They even came and trashed my office and quarters here, looking for what I used to poison Victor Glossop. And if you’re here to ask, no, I didn’t. But I’ll confess to anything you want if you get me tea and something to eat.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They’re holding my wallet and “effects” till they get the paperwork saying I’m in the clear.’

  Oh, those stupid young corporals at Police Headquarters!

  ‘Sit.’ I went to the window to call down an order for fishball noodles to the bored looking tok tok noodle man across the road. ‘Soupy or dry?’

  ‘Dry. I’ll have to owe you for it. And I need a drink.’

  ‘I’ll take it out of petty cash.’ I was carrying it with me. It was what I bought our office lunches with and this was part of an investigation . . . sort of. ‘Coffee?’

  ‘Chrysanthemum tea, if there is any. With ginseng powder. My throat’s so sore.’

  I put money into the roped basket tied to the window and waited for the man to load it with change and food. Harry had become more local tha
n the locals.

  ‘I hear you’ve been going to see Dee Dee.’ Harry’s temper sweetened as the noodles disappeared inside him. He used chopsticks like a native.

  ‘Not as much as I’d like.’

  ‘She told me you’re very busy working, but you took her to do her Christmas shopping.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ I smiled. ‘We got you one sock each so please be surprised that they match. It was her idea.’

  ‘Thanks for spending time with her, Su.’

  ‘I like her,’ I said honestly. Once you accepted Harry’s sister’s condition, she was the sweetest seven-year-old anyone could know.

  ‘I thought I’d got past all this villain-outsider, prime-suspect stuff. But once something goes wrong, I’m the first person the bobbies haul in for questioning. I thought Le Froy trusted me.’

  ‘Le Froy wouldn’t have recommended you to the RAF if he didn’t trust you. And you know they had to question you because you were drinking buddies with Victor Glossop and got the girls and drink for his stag party.’

  Harry moaned and ran his fingers through his hair. ‘No girls, no booze. I’ve told your people so till my throat is raw. I wouldn’t know where to start looking. Victor wanted betel juice. He said Nicole wouldn’t leave the hotel because she was terrified someone would spit it at her and she’d catch some terrible disease. Victor wanted to dress up as a native and spit on her. Crazy guy. Stupid idea. But I figured, if she’s marrying the man, better she finds out what he’s like before the wedding rather than when it’s too late. There was nothing wrong with the betel quids I got Victor. I made sure of that. Unless he had an allergy or something. Some of the other guys chewed them too. I showed them how. They thought it a hoot. The minty tingle, spit like bloody orange juice.’

  ‘You packed the makan sireh yourself or bought them ready-made?’

  ‘That’s the kind of thing those bozos should have been asking me but didn’t. All they did was keep going at me about the girls who said I approached them. Me! Hah! Never thought I’d be glad that—’ He shook his head and popped a fishball into his mouth. I was glad I’d paid for extra fishballs as well as extra chilli.

  ‘I bought the quids off a street-seller. The boy said his grandmother prepared them, traditional style. He probably packed them himself, using roadside clay. But what’s a little dirt, right? We’re all made of dirt and to dirt we’ll return.’

  ‘Dust, not dirt, if you’re quoting Genesis or Ecclesiastes.’

  ‘Same thing.’ Harry had stopped eating.

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘Two days before he died. When they were planning the stag night. So even if he was poisoned by something in the betel juice, it wouldn’t have been the batch I got him. Those guys acted like I tried to kill him. I would never have given Victor anything that would hurt him.’

  ‘How well did you know Victor Glossop?’ I asked suspiciously. Harry was as prone to unlikely impossible crushes as Parshanti.

  ‘Not well at all. We had a few drinks together. That sly friend of his was always around, spying on him for Nicole. Made it impossible to talk. Say, do you people know what really killed him? I mean, could it have been his heart or a spider bite or something?’

  ‘We don’t know yet.’

  ‘You’ll tell me when you find out, won’t you?’

  I didn’t know if I would.

  I liked Harry Palin. And I trusted him more than any other ang moh I knew, excepting only Le Froy and Parshanti’s mother. But Harry could be impulsive and reckless.

  ‘Actually, I met Nicole first, you know.’

  ‘What?’ I hadn’t known he’d met her at all. ‘Where? At a bar?’

  ‘Oh, no. She came around to the air base with that friend of Victor’s.’

  ‘Kenneth?’

  ‘Kenneth the good-looking snob, yes. She was looking for someone to fly them out of Singapore.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Anywhere. Just out of here. Nicole said she was sick of being here and, after the trip out, didn’t want to be trapped on board ship again. Said she wanted to try flying. But I told her we didn’t take commercial passengers.’ Harry grinned wryly, ‘That offended her. I didn’t realize, when she was being so nice to me, that I was meant to fall in love with her and bend the rules for her. I said I was sorry I hadn’t noticed she was flirting and that made her even madder.’

  I could imagine. I almost felt sorry for Nicole, trying to make an impression on handsome, oblivious Harry.

  ‘She went off and told Victor I’d assaulted her. Insulted or assaulted, he wasn’t clear which. But he said Nicole had sent him to teach me a lesson.’

  ‘What did he – you didn’t—’

  ‘No way. Victor thought it was a huge joke. Said if I’d been a native he would have whipped me to death, but if I could fix him up with women for his stag do we’d call it even. I pointed him to Yap Pun Kai – Japan Street – because the Japanese working women want the money and it’s doing them a favour. I mean, if they want to earn it . . .’

  I ignored Harry’s awkwardness. I was thinking about Nicole, seeing her differently. Nicole had told the police she had not gone beyond the hotel grounds but it seemed she had been as far as the Tengah air base – with Kenneth Mulliner for company.

  ‘Kenneth told us you and Victor got into a fight on the street.’

  ‘Kenneth’s a good liar.’

  I remembered the dead Japanese prostitute found in Japan Street. ‘Do you know where Victor went in Japan Street?’

  ‘No. I don’t know anyone there. I just gave him directions.’

  ‘Did you tell the police all this?’

  ‘I tried to. But they only wanted me to answer the questions on their list. This wasn’t on their list. Did Nicole set them on me? Did she tell them I killed Victor?’

  ‘I can’t say.’ I really couldn’t.

  ‘That woman is a witch,’ Harry said. ‘If someone killed Victor, she’s the one I’d put my money on. Only . . .’

  ‘Only?’ I asked.

  ‘Only why didn’t she wait till after they’d got married to kill him?’

  That reminded me of Junior’s words. ‘Harry, what do you know about black widow spiders?’

  ‘I don’t know anything about spiders except to stay away from them. Why?’

  ‘Nothing.’ I turned and looked around the room. I had straightened what I could while he ate. The bed was made, the drawers closed and the clothes folded in the cupboard. ‘I must get back to town before the buses stop running,’

  ‘I’ll run you back on the bike.’

  ‘No. You need to go to bed, Harry. Thanks.’

  But at street level a yellow-top taxi cab was stopped in front of the building. Its front door was open and the driver, a dark Chinese man I didn’t recognize, was cutting his toenails. He put away his knife and stood up when he saw us.

  Harry stepped forward and pushed me behind him, his weary misery instantly gone. ‘We didn’t call a taxi. Who are you? What do you want?’

  The driver looked at me. ‘I am here to drive Big Boss Chen’s daughter,’ he said in Malay.

  ‘Big Boss Chen is dead. You won’t get any ransom money from him,’ Harry answered, also in Malay. The driver looked at him with more respect.

  ‘Small Boss Chen told me to bring his brother’s daughter home.’

  ‘Small Boss Chen’ was Uncle Chen. My late father had been ‘Big Boss Chen’.

  ‘Home where?’ I asked.

  ‘Back to the detective station in town. And to bring you and your ang moh boss to Chen Mansion to pay your respects to Chen Tai tomorrow afternoon.’

  ‘I will have to ask my boss first.’

  ‘Is your family spying on you?’ Harry was shaking his head in disbelief.

  ‘It’s all right. He’ll take me to the Detective Shack. Good night.’ I was used to my grandmother’s ways. And I was glad of the ride back into town.

  I was also glad to have seen Harry. And to learn the beautiful Nicole had
been trying to sneak out of Singapore with Kenneth. I felt sure she was involved in her fiancé’s death and thought she was going to get away with murder . . .

  Poisoned

  When I came down from my room the next morning, Le Froy was already in his office sitting over a contraption full of wires that hadn’t been there yesterday. He must have collected it himself from the post office.

  ‘Close the door,’ was all he said, when I looked in. I would find another time to broach the visit to Chen Tai.

  ‘Su Lin?’ Parshanti’s father was in the doorway, looking excited. Dr Shankar, normally so careful, had tracked in mud from last night’s rain.

  ‘Good morning, Su Lin. I’m here to see the chief inspector.’

  ‘He’s not had his coffee yet,’ I warned. Dr Shankar was one of the kindest, gentlest men I knew, and no match for Le Froy before his morning coffee, especially as the chief inspector might not have slept the night before.

  ‘He’ll want to hear this. Andrew asked me to double-check his test results. I ran them twice, just to make sure.’

  Dr Andrew Leask, the official medical examiner, was a young man who trusted and depended on the older and far more experienced Dr Shankar.

  ‘He couldn’t come himself this morning. You know how it is with maggots. Once you begin you have to go on till you get them all. But when I confirmed his results we both thought Le Froy should see them right away.’

  ‘What would I want right away?’ Le Froy’s voice came from his room. ‘What maggots? Get in here!’

  I followed Dr Shankar into Le Froy’s office.

  ‘Dr Leask is removing maggots from a woman’s leg,’ Dr Shankar explained. ‘She is a rubber-tapper with five children and no husband and she needs both her legs so he is doing his best to save it. But he said you ought to see this without delay.’

  Le Froy took the piece of paper that Dr Shankar held out to him.

  ‘I offered to take over the maggot extraction, but Andrew’s eyesight is far better than mine. His hands are steadier.’ Like a proud mentor, Dr Shankar praised Dr Leask’s skills every chance he got. ‘And I am not overly fond of maggots.’