I had kept him to the last. I hated him most. Wanted him to be guilty. The shapes moving around in my head told me I was wrong. I defied them, forced myself to think of him as the killer.
“There’s a bloke in the office who is strong enough to have done the kind of killing you describe.”
The inspector did not miss the change in my voice. “And you think or want to think that he is guilty.”
“He’s a shortish, muscular fellow who’s a great one for his martial arts.”
D’Cruz put down his cigarette, grasped my chin with his fingers and turned my face towards his. “Tell me, tell me eyeball to eyeball, why you so much want this man to be the killer?”
I told him about Loong’s affair with Vanita, about the afternoons spent at the Changi Meridien, of how painful the knowledge had been to me. I told him of how the duty roster had been fixed so Vanita worked nights and was free in the afternoons. I described Mrs Loong, prudish and unattractive, and their obnoxious children. As methodically as I could, I built up a case against the supervisor. The more I forced the pieces together, the less convincing did the picture become. I had to wind up saying, “All in all, I don’t think that he would murder to keep his affair from coming to light.”
For a while the policeman was intent on his cigarette. Then he said, “I am never quite sure with the traditional Chinkos, big fella. They put a great premium on keeping up appearances, ‘face’, as they call it. They do the darndest things on the quiet but nothing is out in the open. I know a towkay who has a yen for fucking children. But this tycoon, as is not uncommon with such types, also donates vast sums to orphanages.
“You may see this as hypocritical. But not John Chinaman. He honestly sees it as having a private face and a public face. They are quite separate things to him and public face does not know about private face. But God help anyone who shits on his public face. And that is what your girlie may have been threatening go do.”
I was not convinced. Vanita didn’t die to protect some bigot’s sense of respectability. The way I looked at the world would be meaningless if this was so. I could accept her being murdered by a madman. That would make it an accident. Part of the mindlessness that goes to make up so much of the universe. If her death was premeditated, if it was something that would in time become part of a pattern, there had to be better reasons for it than the ones I was offered.
So much did I want the supervisor to be guilty that I chose to ignore the voices in my head. I asked, “What are you going to do about Loong?” The inspector looked sharply at me and I rephrased my question. “What are you going to do about the two men, I mean?”
“Find out what our heroes were doing on the night of the murders.” He laughed. “I don’t go in much for alibis, though. In my experience a cast-iron alibi is almost proof of guilt. Who but a guilty person would go to the trouble of having one?” He shrugged. “My own feeling is that these two, with or without alibis, don’t seem to have enough motive for the murders.”
Jafri asked, “What happens when they turn out to be innocent, as I am certain they will be?”
“We look elsewhere,” the policeman replied.
“Like where?” Jafri persisted.
D’Cruz looked at me. “Like who gains moneywise by the girl’s death.”
“I don’t really know…” I began, not understanding till his next question the direction his interest was taking.
“What do you know about this Sundram family, big fella? I met the father and brother when they I-D’d the girl’s body. I made the usual sympathetic noises and asked routine questions. Didn’t get much out of them. Certainly didn’t get a feel of things and they didn’t do anything to offer me a backstage seat at the play.”
I told him as much as I knew about the Sundrams.
Vanita’s grandfather was a small time businessman who had migrated to Singapore from Sri Lanka before the second world war. He had in the fifties invested wisely in real estate. No one knew where his capital had come from. Gossip had it that he had been a spy for the kempeitai, the Japanese secret police, and that he had been responsible for the torture and death of several Chinese businessmen whose fortunes had been confiscated and given him. Nothing, however, was proven and he was not involved in the War Crimes Tribunals held immediately after the war. I added that, even if the rumour was true, it could not have no bearing on his granddaughter’s murder half a century later.
“I’m not sure about that,” said D’Cruz.
I was puzzled. “I thought you said that revenge was not a good motive for murder.”
“It is when money’s been lost,” he retorted. “But move on and tell me about the girl’s father.”
Vanita’s father, K.S. Sundram, had been a minor official in the Ministry of Labour. Sundram was a man of the utmost respectability and was highly regarded in the Hindu community in Singapore. He was a prudent soul who saw to it that his inheritance grew in the sixties and seventies. He had retired from the Civil Service in the mid-eighties a wealthy man.
“What about his wife?” the inspector asked.
“She died when Vanita was five.”
“And where’s the old geezer been sticking it all this while?”
“Nowhere I know of. Sundram is very much into religion and doesn’t have mind for that sort of thing. He does a lot of work for the temple and various charity organisations.”
“I’m not at all sure that stops a man from waving the wick. On the contrary…”
“If there had been anything like that, Vanita would not have hesitated to tell me about it. As I said, she was not a girl to hide things.”
D’Cruz shrugged. “OK, tell me about this brother then.”
Vanita’s brother Mohan was a bit of a mystery. He was twelve years older than she and, though into his thirties, remained unmarried. He taught A-level physics at a government school but his driving passion was yoga. His speciality was hatha yoga which taught mastery over the body and its processes. He had, from time to time, tried to engage me in a discussion of what he called “true Hinduism” but I had never been sufficiently interested to find out what he meant by the term. Whatever else, his interest seemed to distance him from his family and Vanita did not look on him as close.
“What’s the relationship between father and son?” D’Cruz snapped.
“Cool, at best,” I replied. “The old man thinks of himself as being quite religious but Mohan feels that all the observances that Sundram puts himself through have nothing to do with the kernel of the religion. He once told me that his father ‘lives on a diet of spiritual chaff, having thrown away the wheat’. The old man, for his part, has made it clear that all he wants from Mohan is for him to marry and settle down.”
The inspector snorted and examined his cigarette. “What happens to the dough, when the old man unites with the Godhead or whatever Hindus do when they snuff it?”
“I’m not sure. Sundram loved Vanita above anything else. If he was allowed his way, I think he would leave the money to her. I understand though that it is a custom, virtually unbreakable in the Hindu community, for the eldest son to inherit.” I considered brother and sister as dispassionately as I could and added, “Vanita took life as it was. Mohan was happy to contemplate the Infinite and practise yoga. Neither seemed to have a great use for their father’s money.”
D’Cruz looked as though he very much doubted this but said nothing. A change had come over the policeman and he seemed to be in two minds about speaking. “There’s something I gotta say, Menon. It’ll tear me apart to get it out but get it out I will.”
Jafri interrupted. “I called Ozzie after you phoned me. It seemed appropriate that you and he should straighten out the personal problems you had at the start of this investigation. I told Ozzie that you were an accommodating person with a forgiving disposition.” He raised a hand before I could interrupt. “I also stressed that no one, however good-natured, could remain unaffected by the kind of treatment that you had been subjected to.”
D’Cruz had screwed his eyes up tightly and bit his lip before speaking. “Jafri says that he told you something about Tessie…” His voice was strained, his face that of a child about to cry. I should have felt sorry for him. I didn’t.
I remembered the knotted rope around my penis, the same rope crushing my ankle. My face still burned at the thought of bending over and letting a man shove a finger up my arse. “I don’t care what the fuck made you do it, D’Cruz. You assaulted me, you humiliated me. I was innocent and you treated me like…”
Jafri cut in, holding together forces that tended to pull apart. “All you say is true, How Kum, and the inspector here is not going to deny it. It looks to me, however, that you two will have to see this thing through together and it might be a good idea for you to hear him out.”
“Why?”
“Because I have worked with Ozzie for several years. I have no doubt that he is the best investigator we have on the force.”
“I must solve this crime, Menon,” said D’Cruz, in a voice that shook slightly. “I kicked off wrong, fucked up before I got properly started. Which is all the more reason why you must give me a chance to get things right and hang the bastard who did it.”
“What does it matter to me whether or not Vanita’s murderer is caught? Will hanging her killer bring her back to life? Will his dangling from a rope make it possible for me to make love to her one more time?”
I asked the questions but I knew I had to find out who her murderer was. I had waited all my life for Vanita. When she came I recognised in her the missing piece to a picture. Now she had been snatched away, there was again the incompleteness. I needed more images, more facts, more fancies, if I was to put together a new picture.
My face must have betrayed what was going on in my head for D’Cruz’s voice had become a little more confident. “No, Menon. Nothing can bring her back. But unless we find out who and why, the girlie’s ghost will never rest. I am sure you get the feeling that she is still with you. Talking to you, seeming to get into the action as though she were still alive.”
He continued without acknowledging my nod. “It’s that way with my Tessie, though fifteen years have passed since she was raped and murdered.” He took a big sip of his beer and drew deeply on his cigarette. “She was my baby sister. Came to live with us when the old folks died. We can’t have kids, me and the wife. We thought that God had sent us the child we couldn’t have.
“Tessie was a happy little soul and popular with everybody. She sang, played the piano, made people laugh. Then, when she was sixteen, some animal raped and strangled her. The killer was never found. The Commissioner says that the case is closed. Thirty per cent of murder-rapes are unsolved, he tells me, so let the case rest. But the case stays open in my head. I think of the child’s terror as the brute ripped his way into her. I think of her screams choked off as he strangled her, strangled her with her panties.
“That is not all. Sometimes I come home and find the old piano open and a note hanging in the air. You see, my friend, the poor child can’t even die properly, because the bastard that killed her is still walking around.”
He finished the beer in his glass and lit a cigarette from the stub of the old one. I looked into his face. Beer and cigarette smoke make the eyes water terribly.
THE NEXT TWO days were uneventful. In the office I worked at routine jobs with the zeal of a novice in a nunnery. As soon as I got home, I locked myself in my bedroom and stayed there for as long as possible. Ma controlled her urge to interfere. Even she guessed I needed time: to come to terms, to shuffle things about and make some kind of sense of what was happening.
Oscar understood and, I suspect, had much to do with Ma’s restraint.
As though to confirm what D’Cruz had said, Vanita was always with me. Her presence was, at certain times, stronger than others, but she never quite went away. She followed me about and watched what I was doing. Like all ghosts she could read my thoughts, smiled when she did, but always silently. Only in the quiet of my room did she speak. That too only when the lights were out and darkness drew us together.
She told me things I didn’t know or only half remembered. She spoke of her loneliness when her mother died, of the bond between her and the maid Leela who had become like a mother to her. She told me of her father and how he had come to dote on her. Confessed how much she feared this love that wanted to control everything she did, that wished to possess her completely and make her what she could never be: a traditional Indian daughter. She talked of Mohan too. This brother from whom she was separated by more than the differences in their ages. Of the protectiveness he had offered, which she had at first accepted but later rejected. She told me of how Mohan had become more aloof and enigmatic over the years.
We talked in long silences. Had, usually, no need for words. Sometimes, when her presence became overpowering, I felt her weight on the bed, smelled her body. At such times I heard her voice, lilting, two-toned. Then it seemed right that I too should speak out. And when she made jokes, said outrageous things about people we knew, I laughed out loud.
I don’t know if Vanita was influenced by what D’Cruz had said about his sister Tessie’s singing but she often sang to me. Alive, she had done so. She sang in the afterglow of lovemaking or as we nursed desire and watched it grow till it could not be contained. They were strange songs, my Vanita sang. Long chants. Sequences that had no words but seemed to yearn for something beyond words.
Long, long ago I had asked her what these love-songs were about.
“They’re not love-songs, dumbo. They’re bajans, Hindu hymns.”
“How come you know these bajans?”
“My father taught me them when I was a little girl.”
“I hear sounds but I can’t make out words. What do their words say?”
“How would I know what the words say, dumbo? They’re in Sanskrit.”
And so Monday passed.
Tuesday too went the same way.
I was content being with my dead love and, try as I might, I couldn’t persuade myself that I needed more than a ghost for company. I realised that I hadn’t yet talked to Vanita’s father and Mohan. It was unforgivable not to have done so. Vanita had been killed early on Sunday morning. It was already Wednesday.
Nevertheless, as soon as I got home from work, I locked myself in my room and began communing, as I had come to think of it, with my dead love. I spent two hours in my room after getting home on Wednesday, then came out to join Ma and Oscar at dinner. Vanita had been pretty boisterous that day and had made many jokes.
Ma looked worried as I took my place at the table. “You feel all right, son?” she asked.
“I’m fine, Ma. Fine.” Anxiety was her customary prelude to inquisition.
Oscar toyed with his glass, his face expressionless. “Sometimes the dead don’t seem to want to go away. They don’t even seem to be actually dead. Sometimes our minds seem to need more than proof to understand that they are really gone.”
“What are you trying to tell me, Uncle Oscar?”
“That perhaps you should see someone who misses the girl as much as you do…”
“I’m OK. Actually…”
“Then why do you talk to yourself?” Ma asked. “And laugh like a madman when you are all alone?”
“Sorry, old chap.” Oscar shook his head over his glass. “You were carrying on so loudly that we couldn’t help overhearing. No intention of eavesdropping, mind you.”
“To be honest, Uncle Oscar, I do feel Vanita’s presence quite strongly and have been allowing myself to do so for the past few days. I don’t want the situation I’m in to last forever so I have been toying with the idea of visiting her father and brother.”
“A capital idea,” said Oscar, finishing his brandy. “Propriety demands no less and it will get you out of yourself.” He replenished his drink. “Cliché has it that a sorrow shared is a sorrow halved. I’m not at all sure that is the case but grief does bring us a littl
e closer to each other.” He laughed and looked at me for encouragement. “Perhaps that’s really what’s meant by ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’. We grow fonder of each other, not of the person that is missing.”
Oscar was playing his favourite game of finding new ways of interpreting hackneyed sayings. I ate my dinner without saying anything. If I spoke, he would expect me to join the game and I wanted to be on my way to the Sundrams.
In less than an hour I was on Orchard Road, where people rushed in and out of cinemas, fast-food joints, department stores; crowds bustled everywhere. Orchard Road is a bustling place. But to me it is more than this.
My own memory of the street does not go back very far but I have access to Oscar’s, which merges with that of his grandfather and goes back to the turn of the century. The MRT now runs under the road, but I knew steam trains once ran on a bridge over it. Traffic stopped when they did, for people were afraid to pass beneath the chariot of steel and fire. I still think I see cars hesitate when they come to a bridge that is no more. But the traffic was different then: pedestrians were pigtailed or turbaned, carriages drawn by horses or, in the case of the humble, by men between the shafts of a jinriksha.
I used to tell Vanita how I could see the street as it used to be, hear the babble of tongues as street-hawkers called out their wares, pause at the honk of an air-horn as a de Dion or Daimler glided past. There were moments when I moved further back in time; when I could smell the nutmeg from the orchards at the north end of the street. I told Vanita this too. Told her because she listened and did not laugh or think me mad. I told her because I loved her and wanted her to see Orchard Road as I could see it. Now there was no one to tell.
Moonrise, Sunset Page 8
