The policeman ignored Annie’s scrutiny, beckoned to his men and issued a few quick instructions. Two of them set off down the corridor and started peering into individual rooms. A third took up position outside Mark’s door.
‘Is there anywhere these men can wait?’ Inspector Singh asked Annie, gesturing at the two men in white. ‘Ambulance personnel. We won’t need them for a while.’
Annie led them to a conference room and, as an afterthought, invited them to sit down. Jagdesh and Quentin trailed after her, unsure of what to do and glad of a temporary purpose.
‘Wait here, all of you.’ Inspector Singh issued commands with the calm certainty of one accustomed to being obeyed.
‘Where are you going now?’ asked Jagdesh as the inspector headed for the door.
‘None of your business,’ was the inspector’s offhand response.
‘What about his family? Should we notify them?’ This time it was Quentin with the question.
‘You haven’t called them yet?’ asked the inspector.
‘No,’ said Annie, wondering why they had not done so. That should have been their first instinct after phoning 999. What had held them back? The reluctance to be the bearers of bad news?
‘We haven’t had time – we were waiting for you,’ Quentin clarified.
It was a plausible explanation, thought Annie, but not accurate. There had been time if they had wished. But individually and collectively, consciously or unconsciously, they had chosen to ignore the immediately bereaved.
Inspector Singh did not cavil at their explanation. He merely inclined his head briefly in agreement. A man of few words apparently. ‘I will see to it. There’s a wife?’
‘And two kids, both in school in England. His address is #15-04, Tanglin Vista Apartments,’ explained Jagdesh and gave him the telephone number from memory. Jagdesh had phenomenal recall that assisted his performance as an outstanding commercial lawyer and was the envy of his less gifted colleagues.
‘She’s his second wife,’ blurted out Annie.
The inspector gave no sign of having heard. He did not inquire further and left the room.
‘Why’d you tell him that?’ asked Jagdesh, frown lines chasing his hairline across a broad forehead.
‘Prepare him for the surprise, I guess.’
The next few hours took on the unreal quality of a waking nightmare for Annie; one of those dreams where the circumstances are too unlikely to be real and there is a measure of subconscious scepticism. But here there was to be no relief upon awakening. Men in white bubble suits wandered up and down the corridor. Blue-uniformed personnel stood around. There were sharp barks of command. Light bulbs flashed as photos were taken. Voices were heard on the telephones. Strips of yellow tape were used to cordon off parts of the office. Annie felt as if she was a bit-part actress in a television crime series.
A turban appeared around the door and a crooked finger summoned the lawyers. They glanced nervously at each other and traipsed out of the room obediently. As Singh led the way down the corridor, Annie noted again his peculiar shape – pointy head and small feet in white sneakers with a massive girth in between. He looked like a character from a children’s cartoon – one of the Teletubbies. She suppressed a slightly hysterical giggle.
She noted that Jagdesh, his fellow Sikh, towered over the inspector, but it was the shorter man who was the band leader. Jagdesh trailed in his wake like a ten-year-old being led to the headmaster’s office. Quentin might as well have been invisible. His shoulders were hunched and his gaze lowered. His aftershave failed to mask a faint smell of dried sweat.
Singh waved them into chairs and Annie’s two colleagues sat down on either side of her. Her index finger went to her mouth and she chewed on the end vigorously. When it came away, a red droplet of blood oozed out of the tip. Her mind replayed the picture of Mark Thompson lying dead in his office. She gritted her teeth – the nausea was almost overwhelming.
Inspector Singh looked at them in turn, his expression enigmatic. At last, he asked, ‘So, any guesses who killed your boss?’
He noted the young female lawyer, Annie Nathan, steal a quick glance at the other two and filed away her reaction.
‘He had no enemies that we were aware of, sir,’ Jagdesh answered calmly. His physical stature gave his words a convincing air of credibility.
‘Business rivalries?’
Quentin spoke up. ‘Sure – we all have those! It was just professional. No one hated Mark. Not enough to kill him.’
Singh eyed the lawyer who spoke with certainty but whose voice was shaking with doubt. What he had said was patently absurd. Mark’s body was a tangible contradiction of Quentin’s insistence that he had no enemies.
Jagdesh said aggressively, ‘If he had any enemies, we certainly didn’t know of them.’
The other two lawyers maintained a determined silence. Singh deduced that this was the unspoken consensus. No one wanted to be the first to break ranks and start naming suspects. They knew full well that any omissions would hinder the policeman in forming an accurate picture of the dead man. But for now they were keeping their secrets.
Jagdesh wondered aloud, ‘Reggie and Ai Leen haven’t turned up. That’s strange – they said they were on their way.’
‘And what about the others?’ asked Quentin. ‘Presumably all the partners were invited to this mysterious meeting.’
‘Some of them are here, in another room,’ was Inspector Singh’s deadpan response.
He was pleased with the widening eyes and sudden inhalation of breath that this remark produced. The lawyers were smart – short of clapping them in irons, he could not have emphasised his authority over them more clearly. He was the policeman. Information was in his gift, to be distributed or withheld at his discretion. And now they knew it.
‘Why are you keeping them away from us?’ asked Quentin, his tone betraying a fear that the murder was going to embroil them in an experience going well beyond the immediate horror of sudden death.
He did not receive a response from the taciturn policeman.
Jagdesh’s well-shaped lips were pursed with displeasure. ‘I don’t understand why you’re hassling us anyway. It must have been some stranger who killed Mark!’
‘That’s your honest opinion – that some stranger killed your boss?’ asked Singh.
Jagdesh and Quentin both nodded immediately. Again, the policeman noted that Annie was not so quick to assert a position. She opened her mouth to protest, then shut it again.
Inspector Singh pounced like an overweight cat on a rubber ball. ‘What do you know?’
She bit her lip.
‘I’m bound to find out – you don’t want me to think that I don’t have your full cooperation.’ His manner was quietly authoritative – more effective than mere insistence.
Singh noted out of the corner of his eye that Quentin’s Adam’s apple was bobbing like a rubber duck in a bath.
The silence grew until it filled the room. Singh had been in the same position many times before. His witnesses were hiding something – within each of the three lawyers an internal debate raged. It was visible in their eyes; each one of them wore a slightly fixed stare, desperately trying to keep their features from hinting at any unpleasant truths.
It was Jagdesh who spoke first, his voice at a higher and more penetrating pitch than normal. The policeman concluded that he had made a conscious decision that Singh was certain to find out whatever it was they were keeping from him – and obfuscation would just reflect badly on all of them. ‘After eight in the evening, the lifts can’t be operated except with a swipe card or by filling in a visitors’ book and being escorted by a security guard to the correct floor.’
‘Who has a card to this floor?’ asked Singh immediately, not slow to see the implications of what he was saying.
‘Only the partners,’ confessed Quentin reluctantly.
The other two looked as if they wished they could contradict him but it was the simple truth.
>
‘Where is the visitors’ book kept?’ demanded the inspector, ignoring the undercurrents of tension and dismay.
‘In the lobby, with the security guards.’
Singh beckoned a uniformed policeman who scurried off to do the inspector’s bidding. He needed to retrieve the visitors’ book and question the security guards. He looked at the lawyers. He guessed they were all desperately hoping that some suspect would emerge – it would suit them down to the ground if some stranger had left his name and address with security downstairs. Singh shook his great head. The survival instinct was always quick to show itself, he thought, leaving the dead ignored and unmourned when the living felt threatened.
Jagdesh interrupted his train of thought to ask sheepishly, ‘Excuse me, sir – I hope you don’t mind me asking – but I was supposed to have dinner with an Inspector Singh and his wife this evening. My mother arranged it – it wasn’t you by any chance, was it?’
Singh slapped his palm on the table. ‘I knew your name sounded familiar – you’re the thirty-something in need of a wife!’
Jagdesh laughed out loud, exposing large, even white teeth. ‘That’s what my mother believes, sir. I think she’s asked Mrs Singh to introduce me to all the unmarried Sikh girls in Singapore!’
Singh could understand his amusement. If his fellow Sikh, an imposing hulk of a man, with liquid eyes and an attractive, slightly melancholy manner, was unable to find a wife without the help of Mrs Singh, their race would soon be extinct.
Singh groaned suddenly and the trio around the table gazed at him in surprise. ‘I forgot to tell my wife I’d been called out for a case,’ he explained.
There were murmurs of feigned sympathy around the table.
The Sikh policeman said, ‘I’ll need your passports. Bring them into the station by lunchtime tomorrow. The address is on my card.’
There was an audible gasp from Quentin. His eyes were bloodshot and red-rimmed from the tension of the last few hours and he repeatedly blew his nose on a handkerchief. Every few moments he would shut his eyes, in an action somewhere between a blink and a conscious action. It came across as a nervous tic. But what was he nervous about?
Jagdesh was the first to acquiesce. The big Sikh was bearing up well, at least physically, appearing no more bemused and tired than if he had stayed up an extra couple of hours watching television. The whites of his eyes were still as clear as Singh’s starched white shirt. He said, ‘Yessir!’ in a theatrically cooperative tone. Singh wondered whether Jagdesh thought he’d have an easy ride because he was a family acquaintance. If he did, he was in for a disappointment.
Maria Thompson sat half upright, half lying on a red velvet couch. A figure with less poise would have been described as slouching. She wore a silk kimono dressing gown with a dragon embroidered on the sleeves and back. Smooth unblemished legs with child-like bare arched feet were hooked over a sofa arm and her almond-shaped eyes were fixed on a widescreen plasma television, the sound turned down to the point of inaudibility. Maria Thompson’s oval face, with its smooth flat planes of cheek, was expressionless. She appeared mesmerised by the silent figures on the screen.
On the mantelpiece, a few silver-framed photographs of Maria and a smiling white-haired man with a shaggy dark moustache, at least thirty years older than her, were neatly arranged. In one, the couple stood side by side formally, not touching. In another, he was smiling down at her in a close-up of their faces. The photos were in black and white and had all been taken on the same occasion. The clothes, an elegant body-hugging white satin gown and a black tuxedo, were the same in each. A stranger might have assumed from the artificiality of the teeth-exposing smiles that the pictures had come with the frames.
Someone pressed the doorbell and she heard the chiming of electronic bells. Maria Thompson stirred instinctively, then remembered herself and lay back. The clicking heels of sensible shoes marked the progress of the Filipina maid as she walked down the hallway to the main door. She returned a minute later and stood respectfully at one end of the room, an older woman with wiry grey hair. Maria Thompson had no intention of employing young attractive domestic help – after all, who knew better than her, her husband’s predilections? The maid’s uniform, a black dress with a frilly white bib and apron – a pastiche of the costumes in a Victorian period drama – was carefully starched and ironed.
‘Ma’am, there is a visitor to see you.’
‘Who is it?’
The maid paused for a moment, her elderly face aging ten years in an instant. ‘He come from the police, ma’am.’
Maria Thompson sat up a little straighter although her face remained bored.
‘Why is he come here, ma’am? I have done nothing wrong, I swear it!’
The Filipina maid found the courage to voice her fears, although her papers were in order and she had never supplemented her income in Singapore by working in more than one home or moonlighting as a prostitute.
The mistress of the house, who had done both before marrying Mark Thompson, senior partner at Hutchinson & Rice and her erstwhile employer, went out to meet the police.
Jagdesh Singh lay in bed staring at the corniced ceiling. He had his hands folded behind his head and was resting on a soft pillow. The bedclothes were rumpled and his quilt was bunched up over his legs. He rubbed his feet together. They felt cold – as if his heart had become bored with pumping blood through his large body and decided to abandon the task before reaching the extremities. It was past midnight but he couldn’t sleep. He was as wide awake as if he had an intravenous caffeine drip.
He wished he had gone to that dinner with the Singh family and ignored Mark’s urgent summons. None of the problems he was facing would have come to a head if he had just done that. It seemed that this was yet another fork in the road where he had taken the wrong path. He paused to wonder how the Sikh inspector felt about having a distant relative involved in one of his cases. He had not seemed bothered – treating him with the same casual rudeness as he had the other lawyers. Family, or not, he was a suspect in a murder investigation. The chubby policeman did not look like someone who played favourites.
His mother had told him, when insisting that he accept an invitation to the Singh home for dinner, that the Sikh policeman was famous throughout Singapore for his incredible knack for solving murders.
‘He is very high up in the police force,’ she had said. ‘They cannot manage without him.’
He picked up Singh’s calling card from a side table and examined it in the dim light of a bedside lamp. He was only an inspector, the fat man with the traditional headgear, hardly “very high up”. It didn’t surprise him that his mother had exaggerated – it was a common Sikh pastime to puff up the importance of relatives. His parents were delighted to bask in the reflected glow of their Sikh family – and happy to claim as close relatives the most distant connections by blood or marriage if they thought it would add to the family pride.
It was one of the reasons they were so anxious to get him a wife. His mother was keen to parade her son, the successful lawyer working for an international law firm in Singapore, before the Sikh community in New Delhi. It would be her crowning glory. His younger sister was getting married in a couple of weeks but that did not provide the oldies with the same satisfaction. In their traditional society, only the marriage of a son could do that. Jagdesh arched his head so that it pushed against the downy pillow. The back of his neck was sore – the tension of the last few hours, he supposed. It felt as if his head was too heavy a burden for it. He touched his throat – his glands were swollen. He was coming down with something. He felt tired – more than tired, completely drained of energy. Quentin had been sniffling too – he’d probably caught something from him. Jagdesh closed his dark lids and felt a few unexpected pinpricks of self-pity. He wondered whether he should just bite the bullet and let his interfering relatives arrange a marriage for him to some nice Sikh girl. It was the most practical solution to his difficulties.
�
��I am Inspector Singh from the Singapore police. Are you Mrs Mark Thompson?’
Maria gave a brief, suspicious nod.
‘I’m afraid I have some bad news, Mrs Thompson.’
A simple form of words that was generally understood to be a herald of death. Maria Thompson was no exception.
She whispered, ‘My family?’
Her voice was trembling, emotion-charged, the face starting to crumble. It was like a mannequin coming to life, thought Singh.
He nodded, somehow conveying both firmness and sympathy in the simple gesture.
‘What has happened to them? Tell me, please. Oh God! Tell me!’
‘It’s your husband, Mrs Thompson. I’m sorry to have to tell you that he’s dead.’
‘My husband?’ she repeated after him blankly.
Inspector Singh put out a hand, an involuntary gesture of comfort.
The second wife of the dead man fell to her knees, as if in prayer.
The police officer could not make out the words she was saying over and over as she rocked back and forth. Then he heard her. The words were indeed in the manner of a prayer. She was on her knees repeating, ‘Thank God!’
The usually impassive face of the inspector betrayed his complete surprise.
Ten minutes later, Mrs Mark Thompson was again on the velvet couch, this time sitting bolt upright, kimono folded decorously over both knees. She clutched a mug of hot chocolate close to her chest. For comfort or to give her hands something to do, wondered the policeman. He sat across from her, stiff-backed in a stiff-backed chair, at a slight angle so that the woman had to turn to gaze at him directly. For a while they did not speak. His eyes took in the genuine antique Chinese rosewood furniture, buffed to gleaming, and the brushstroke paintings of mountains, fields and blossoms. A highly polished grand piano stood in the corner, lid down. Two vases filled with green bamboo shoots stood on either side of a gilt-framed mirror. The room had all the passion of a shop display.
The Singapore School of Villainy Page 3
