A clear plastic bag fell out and landed on the table. It was packed full of a fine white powder just as Sergeants Chung and Hassan had reported.
‘Quentin Holbrooke, I hereby arrest you for trafficking approximately forty grams of cocaine!’
Corporal Fong led a dazed Quentin Holbrooke away, leaving the two lawyers and Inspector Singh alone in the room.
‘I don’t understand,’ whispered Annie.
‘It’s quite straightforward, isn’t it?’ remarked Singh. His tone was jovial.
‘What do you mean?’ growled David. Annie thought she had never seen him so enraged.
‘Your lawyer friend, Quentin Holbrooke, is a cocaine addict – and he does a bit of trafficking on the side. Mark Thompson found out. Mark Thompson is dead.’ Inspector Singh enunciated each word carefully as if he was a teacher to young children.
‘You have no evidence that Mark knew about Quentin’s cocaine habit!’ insisted David angrily.
‘Did you?’ Singh whirled around on the balls of his feet and snapped the question at Annie.
She shook her head. ‘I had no idea – none at all.’
‘And Quentin and Annie were good friends. That just proves that Mark couldn’t possibly have known,’ interjected David.
‘Mark Thompson was not a naïve young thing…’
Annie bristled but Singh carried on. ‘He might well have spotted the signs of an addiction – it was all there to see, the nerves, the mood swings, the running nose.’
David said, with an air of forced patience, ‘If Mark had known about Quentin’s addiction to drugs, he would have tried to get him medical help. Not called some sort of big meeting to announce it to the partners! Why would he?’
‘I agree with you – if Quentin was just an addict. But he might have done some peddling on the side.’
‘He must have had it for his own use. He wouldn’t have been trafficking,’ insisted David, his voice as unsteady as Annie’s legs.
‘There’s no way you could know that,’ pointed out the inspector. ‘Besides, it doesn’t matter!’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Section 17 of the Misuse of Drugs Act – anyone who has an amount of cocaine in excess of three grams “shall be presumed to have had that drug in possession for the purpose of trafficking unless it is proved that his possession of that drug was not for that purpose”.’
Annie turned pale. What was this tiresome policeman trying to say?
Singh sat down, hesitantly at first and then more quickly as gravity took over. He leaned back in Quentin Holbrooke’s chair and folded his arms over his belly. Annie realised that this was a policeman who was confident that he had the evidence and the law on his side.
‘Your friend had almost forty grams in that bag. You should know that unauthorised trafficking of more than thirty grams of cocaine means the mandatory death sentence. Quentin Holbrooke is going to swing.’
The two lawyers stared at him in open-mouthed horror.
‘The only question’, he continued, ‘is whether he swings for the murder of Mark Thompson as well. It doesn’t make a huge amount of difference to me. We can only hang him once.’
Fourteen
Quentin, alone in a holding cell, remembered the first time he had snorted cocaine. He had been pub-hopping along Boat Quay. A friend had suggested a party – one of those expat functions where people brought other people and the champagne cocktails flowed. It was a great place to pick up sarong party girls, as the young Singaporean women on the hunt for a rich white husband were colloquially known. The same friend had produced a neatly folded white packet, like a home-made envelope, full of a substance that looked like fine sugar. He had offered Quentin a try and Quentin, flushed with drink and success, had agreed at once. He remembered the burning sensation in his nose and the temporary sense of dislocation which had been followed by a rush of euphoria such as he had never felt before. It wasn’t long before he was scoring coke every night. His friend introduced him to a dealer who knew better than to provide his rich young clients with anything except the best – Quentin’s little packets were never adulterated with talcum powder or sugar. He lost weight. He had no appetite for anything except the sensation of wellbeing that the cocaine provided. His nose was always raw and runny. He needed more regular fixes so his purchases from the supplier increased and his pay cheque no longer seemed to stretch till the end of the month. He was behind on his rent as well but, the truth was, he felt wonderful.
Quentin lay back on his cot in the single cell. He felt an intense craving for a fix and knew he would not be able to find the solace of sleep. Every muscle in his body was aching for the sense of release and power that a shot of cocaine provided. He could feel his heart fluttering like a small bird trapped in a cage. He rose to his feet and stumbled to the front of the cell. His lips were pulled back from his teeth as he screamed for the guards.
One of them sauntered over. ‘What’s the problem?’
Quentin rattled the bars furiously. ‘I need to get out of here!’
‘Not for a long time…if ever,’ said the guard to the sound of general laughter from his fellow inmates and the other guards.
‘So did Quentin Holbrooke kill Mark Thompson?’
Singh and Fong were back at the police station. Corporal Fong looked at the fat man nervously and the inspector guessed he wasn’t sure whether it was a rhetorical question or a genuine request for input. He realised that he wasn’t sure himself.
He, Singh, was not happy – not happy at all – with the way this case was progressing. He tried to form a picture in his mind of Mark Thompson, not as he had seen him that one time, slumped forward on his desk, but alive and well. To his annoyance, the mental images that formed were of the black-and-white still photos on the victim’s living room mantelpiece. He felt like shouting out loud, ‘Will the real Mark Thompson please stand up!’ He really needed to understand the dead man’s character if he was to find his killer. Which was he: the womaniser who had an affair with his maid, the romantic who believed he had found true love with a Filipina woman, the gregarious senior partner who was useful at kick-off meetings, the ethical partner who wanted to pull out of a transaction because a director was insider dealing, the suspicious husband who tramped around brothels looking for his wife, or the diligent company man who called a meeting late on a Friday night? Singh strongly believed that until he knew the man he would not know his murderer.
He had Quentin Holbrooke in the lock-up – the case against him for drug trafficking was cut and dried. The bag of coke had the lawyer’s fingerprints all over it and young Sergeant Chung had distinguished himself by arresting Quentin’s supplier after a brief frantic struggle in which the younger man had prevailed. It was now apparent that the large cash outlays from Quentin’s bank account had been to purchase the cocaine. He thumbed through the bank statements again – the sums had grown larger and the intervals between purchases smaller. Quentin Holbrooke had followed the lead of countless others before him and progressed quickly from casual user to serious addict. Singh had thought at first that the blueprint indicated blackmail but a drug habit would reveal exactly the same spending pattern.
He cleared his throat – Corporal Fong’s attention had wandered as he wrestled with the case in his own mind. ‘Quentin Holbrooke has a secret that he might have been prepared to kill to preserve. But there is one major flaw in the case!’
Fong looked at him inquiringly. Singh noticed for the first time that the corporal’s eyes were unusually far apart. He remembered reading somewhere that herbivores had wide-set eyes so they could look out for danger in all directions at once while carnivores had eyes in the front of their heads to spot and stalk prey more effectively. It was typical of his luck, he thought. He needed an aggressive sidekick with a predatory instinct for the truth. Instead, he had this wide-eyed grass eater.
‘What is the flaw, sir?’
‘Why don’t you tell me for a change? This isn’t some academy classroom
where I can spoon feed you the answers all the time!’
Fong flushed.
‘Well?’ snapped Singh, knowing he was being unreasonable in taking out his aggravation on the rookie but unwilling to stop. After all, he had to do something to maintain his reputation as an impossible taskmaster.
The young policeman said slowly, ‘We don’t have any evidence that Mark Thompson knew about the drugs…’
‘Exactly!’ barked Singh. ‘Mark Thompson has probably taken that information to his grave.’
‘But even if Thompson had found out somehow, do you think he would have called a partners’ meeting to tell them about Quentin Holbrooke?’ asked Fong, his tone diffident.
‘There’s the rub,’ complained Singh. ‘These expats, they don’t think much of someone being a drug addict, it’s all rehab at swanky medical centres with celebrities. I just can’t see Mark Thompson calling a big meeting to reveal a drug addiction to his partners.’
‘Was Quentin Holbrooke the one you suspected earlier, sir? You know – based on your analysis of…errm…human nature?’ asked Corporal Fong.
Singh didn’t like the way Fong had enunciated the words “human nature” as if the senior policeman had resorted to voodoo investigative methods. The corporal made it sound as if he had brought in a psychic to pluck a murderer’s name out of the ether after sensing vibes from the murder weapon. But he had to admit that Fong had a point. Singh shook his head decisively in answer to the young man’s question. Quentin Holbrooke hadn’t even been a blip on his radar before Sergeants Chung and Hassan had called him with the news of the drugs bust.
‘If it wasn’t Quentin, than it must have been Maria Thompson, sir. She had a motive – she needed money for her children. Her marriage was on the rocks because of the anonymous letters; you said yourself it doesn’t matter if the allegations were true, only that Thompson believed them. Mark Thompson would have had no qualms escorting her to his office…it must have been her, sir!’ Fong was uncharacteristically assertive.
Singh rubbed his cheeks with the palms of his hands, giving them a ruddy tinge. This case was not so much going nowhere as going in all directions at once. His superiors wanted a speedy resolution. But Singh felt he was further away from identifying a murderer than when he had first seen the dead man sprawled across his desk. His corporal was still looking at him with a combination of dread and hope, like a stray mutt hoping for scraps but fearing a kick.
‘I don’t believe it was Maria!’ said Singh stubbornly.
He rested his bearded chin in his cupped hands, elbows on the table, and gazed pensively at his neatly turned out colleague. Fong was right, of course. Singh knew full well that Maria Thompson was the most likely culprit, but he wanted to believe that her concern for the future of her children would have prevented her from taking such an extreme step as murder. Unfortunately, he’d just poked holes in his own case against Quentin. The fact remained that an alcoholic philanderer like Mark Thompson was unlikely to have called a meeting of the partnership to discuss a drug habit. Even if he had known about Quentin’s addiction, and it was a big “if” unsupported by any tangible evidence, Mark would not have assumed – unlike the law of the land – that Quentin was trafficking. And he, Singh, was still convinced that the partners’ meeting was crucial to the murder.
He sat up suddenly and his white shirt stretched taut over his belly. He wagged a finger at his subordinate. ‘Drugs – that’s the first step. What’s next?’
Fong looked blank.
‘Money! A drug habit like Quentin Holbrooke’s costs money, more than he earned even as a fancy-pants lawyer to rich crooks. We know that from his bank statements. Maybe – just maybe – there was some financial hanky-panky going on at the firm of Hutchinson & Rice and Mark Thompson found out about it.’
Annie stood at the door of the Raffles Place police station and felt an almost uncontrollable desire to turn away. If she had not already been terrified of the turbaned policeman, she would be now, after this afternoon’s performance, where he had produced the drugs from Quentin’s bag like a magician conjuring a rabbit out of a hat. She imagined the fat inspector sitting in a dingy office, files at right angles to each other, rows of pens neatly arranged and him leaning back in his chair with his hands folded over his belly and his eyes closed in thought.
Dismissing her unwillingness to enter the building as a weakness she could ill afford, Annie took a deep breath and marched in. It was a brightly lit foyer, cool compared to the outside, with an inquiry desk at one end and posters on the walls bearing messages from the Singapore police like “Low crime doesn’t mean no crime!” Surely, thought Annie, a message like that was possible only in the largely crime-free state of Singapore, the place where Mark Thompson had defied the statistics and been murdered.
‘Ms Nathan?’ The ubiquitous figure of Corporal Fong materialised at her elbow.
‘Inspector Singh sent me down to wait for you,’ he explained, ‘so that I can take you directly upstairs.’
As they hurried up, she asked him, ‘What’s happening with Quentin? Have they charged him?’
‘Um…the inspector did not tell me to say anything.’
It was on the tip of her tongue to retort that Fong had not been instructed to breathe either. But she saved the energy for their ascent up another flight of stairs and arrived breathless outside a door with the words “Inspector Singh” in white plastic on black. Corporal Fong knocked and entered with Annie hard on his heels.
Inspector Singh nodded a welcome. ‘You wanted to see me?’
‘Yes, I have something I need to tell you.’
Annie’s long wavy hair was combed away from her face and pinned behind her ears with two plain black clips. Despite her diffident tone, her mouth was set in a stubborn line, underlining her determination to proceed with her chosen course of action.
‘Well, what is it?’ Singh hoped she had not come all the way to his office to harangue him about Quentin’s innocence or the brutality of Singapore’s drug laws. He was already dreading the reaction of the international press when they discovered that he had a foreign lawyer behind bars for presumed drug trafficking.
She repeated, ‘There’s something I need to tell you.’
‘Go on.’
There was a further hesitation. Singh straightened up in his chair. Anything that could turn a cocky young lawyer into someone secretive and uncertain was worth hearing. He just wished she would get on with it.
‘You remember the Malaysian file?’
‘Yup – what about it?’
‘I got a call a few days ago from the boss of Trans-Malaya.’
Singh gritted his teeth. She needed to get to the point. He had a murder on his hands. ‘So?’
Annie’s voice strengthened, as if she was finding a residue of courage. ‘He said someone was insider dealing, using information from the takeover process.’
Singh waited for more. This wasn’t anything new – Sheringham had already told him about the insider dealing. He’d even asked this woman about it during her interview. Mark’s reluctance to continue with a transaction tainted with illegality had given him a belated respect for the dead man, but it hadn’t helped him find his killer.
Annie continued, ‘Tan Sri Ibrahim is sure that the insider dealing originated in Singapore, with one of the lawyers at Hutchinson & Rice.’
Singh sighed. ‘I see.’ And he did – the chickens were coming home to roost.
‘There’s more.’
Singh maintained his silence. He could sense Annie’s disinclination to continue her tale but he was not going to prompt her with questions. He wanted to hear what she had to say, in her own words. At the same time, his mind was working furiously, exploring the implications of Annie’s information like a chess grandmaster anticipating moves ten steps ahead of the game.
Finally Annie mumbled, ‘Mark knew. The Tan Sri called him that Friday, the day he was killed.’
Singh closed his eyes. His dark lids looked
like two hollows – as if they were the eyes of the blind. And he had been blind. He had not suspected for a moment that the insider dealing might have originated at the law firm. Like a typical Singaporean, he had been prepared to believe the worst of a Malaysian director. He deserved a solid kick on his ample posterior for falling into such an obvious cultural trap and no doubt Superintendent Chen would be first in line to administer it.
‘Who did it? Who was insider dealing?’ the inspector asked.
The answer drifted to him, a whisper riding on a sigh. ‘Quentin.’
Fifteen
Inspector Singh sat on one of two stainless steel chairs in a small windowless room. Quentin Holbrooke, drug addict, was huddled in the other. Wan, unshaven, uncombed, wearing grubby clothes – he looked to Singh like a shadow of the young, brash, confident lawyer that he must have been before the drugs had taken their toll on his health and long before he found himself in a small holding cell at a Singapore police station.
‘How are you holding up?’ asked Singh. He felt strangely sorry for this young fool who had turned to insider dealing to fund his drug habit and found himself on an unmapped road to murder.
Quentin did not reply. He buried his face in his hands and his shoulders started to shake. The inspector sat quietly and let the storm of despair wash over his suspect. Finally, when he thought that the young man was more collected, he asked, ‘Is there anything you want to tell me?’
Quentin looked up, his pale-blue eyes shining with unshed tears.
‘What is there to say? You found the drugs…’
‘Were you trafficking?’
Singh would not have thought it possible but Quentin seemed to grow paler, almost translucent. ‘Of course not – I wouldn’t do that!’
The Singapore School of Villainy Page 16
