by Ovidia Yu
“And Inspector Salim wants to talk to you when you’re ready. Shall I tell him that we’ll meet him at the café at twelve for lunch? It’s so much easier to talk when there’s food around, don’t you think? Or would you prefer to talk to him here, in private?”
Vallerie had already put away a substantial breakfast, but she nodded. “Lunch at the café would be best. I think it’s safer to stay in a public place. Is your servant getting the car out or do we have to walk all the way?”
They had not been in the café long (Nina driving them over) when the bells over the café door jangled, announcing Salim’s arrival. Aunty Lee rose from her seat and waved her stick happily in his direction. “Salim! How nice to see you. I thought you were coming over later, to join us for lunch?”
“Please sit down, Aunty Lee. I was hoping I could speak to Miss Vallerie before lunch?”
“Vallerie is going to be having lunch here first so you may as well join us. Just to make her feel comfortable. She’s in the toilet now.” Aunty Lee felt quite sure Salim already knew that Vallerie had headed for the ladies’ as soon as her mobile phone buzzed. Though no one would have accused the Singapore police of listening in on phone conversations, people generally assumed that they had every access to all information. “Vallerie doesn’t know anybody else in Singapore so maybe I better stay with her today. What do you want to speak to her about? Yesterday she already told you everything she knows, right?”
“I just want to ask her more about the threats she said her sister received. And then we need the identification.”
“Come here, better eat lunch.” As Aunty Lee spoke Nina put a large platter of seafood noodles in the center of the table. “I made your favorite lemongrass and garlic sauce. If you eat with us you can talk to Vallerie and ask her questions without frightening her.”
Nina set another place for Inspector Salim Mawar without saying anything. She did not approve of policemen eating with people they were supposed to be questioning. In fact Nina did not approve of policemen in general, though she had come to appreciate that police in Singapore generally were not bullies and did not accept bribes unless they were steamed, baked, or deep-fried. But still she worried—both for them at the shop and for this policeman who ought to have been treating them as suspects.
“Madame, Salim should pay you for asking all his questions for him!” Nina said. But she made a point of picking out several of the largest prawns and juiciest bamboo clams and setting them aside on his plate. She knew Salim was fond of their flat rice noodles fried with seafood—what aficionados knew as Aunty Lee’s Super Seafood Hor Fun.
“If you are questioning us,” Aunty Lee said, “sit down and do it properly. You should put us at our ease, which means you should come and eat with us. Do you know yet exactly when that woman was killed? Do you want pickled green chilies?” She was dying to know what else he had learned but did not forget her hostess duties. “And how?”
“Yesterday morning between nine and eleven A.M.,” Inspector Salim told Aunty Lee. “When the sister left, Allison was lying down with a headache. Then later the receptionist put through an outside call and Allison answered, so we know she was alive then.”
He stopped as Vallerie emerged. She had clearly thought about what she wanted to say. “The Animal ReHomers are the only people who had any reason to attack Allison. Allison was filing charges against them because their campaign of cyberbullying and harassment gave her a nervous breakdown and destroyed her marriage. Her ex-husband was working with them to destroy her so that he won’t have to pay alimony. You should check up on him too. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s also in Singapore plotting with them against her.”
“But her encounter with the Animal ReHomers happened five years ago,” Salim said. “Do you have any idea what made your sister decide to come back to Singapore to file the lawsuit now?”
“All that Allison wanted was to get what these people owed her for what they had done to her. They wrecked her life and got away with it. She had rights. And that husband of hers was on their side. I’m sure he followed her to Singapore. He was probably stalking her. Isn’t there any way you can check? Passport or flight records or something?”
“Of course we can check,” Salim said. “Now, about the identification—”
“I’m hungry,” said Vallerie. “Why are all of you just sitting here? I don’t know about you but I haven’t had any lunch. How do you eat this stuff? Don’t you have any normal food like a steak or a pie or fish and chips?”
It might be escapism through eating, but it was better than those people who tried to solve their problems by starving themselves, Aunty Lee thought. “After lunch,” she told Salim. “We eat first.”
9
The Body in the Morgue
It was a good thing Aunty Lee’s ankle injury had shown her that Nina and Cherril could be trusted to run Aunty Lee’s Delights in her absence, even with Selina’s well-meant interference. But if she hadn’t had anyone to leave in charge, Aunty Lee would likely have put up a CLOSED DUE TO SUDDEN DEATH sign rather than miss accompanying Vallerie Love to the morgue at the Singapore General Hospital. This was a matter of national pride as well as curiosity. How long would Singapore remain a number one tourist destination if visitors like Vallerie were left to find their own way around dead bodies?
There was little reason to think the dead woman in the hotel room could be anyone other than Allison Love, but Aunty Lee approved of having systems in place to make sure of this. No matter how much she trusted her suppliers, Aunty Lee always sniffed and tasted her ingredients before using them.
The identification at the morgue of the Singapore General Hospital turned out to be a mere formality. It being a Sunday (Salim having had a word with Commissioner Raja), there was no one else around apart from the technician on duty who had clearly been told to watch out for them.
Vallerie Love glanced at the body laid out on a trolley under a sheet and wailed. For a moment the hysterics of the previous day threatened to return. Fortunately Aunty Lee had come equipped with a bottle of her strongest Chinese medicinal oil and waved it under Vallerie’s nose. The whiff of camphor, menthol, and eucalyptus shocked Vallerie into silence, and when the morgue attendant briefly pulled back the sheet from the head of the corpse she nodded and said, “That’s her,” and signed the identification form without further drama. Indeed there was not much of her face left to be identified. It looked as though someone had tried to smash the woman’s face in, and Aunty Lee felt an irrational urge to straighten the nose that now lay on one cheekbone.
When Aunty Lee asked, “How was she killed?” she was making morgue small talk, without expecting to hear anything beyond “blunt force trauma to the head.” Instead the morgue technician looked awkwardly at Salim and said, “Sorry, I cannot discuss that.” That made Aunty Lee perk up and she also looked at Salim but got nothing more. She asked about the clothes the dead woman had been wearing, whether she had been in bed, et cetera, without learning anything more useful. It was enough to make anyone suspicious, she thought. Usually when there was nothing interesting the technicians were only too happy to relate pointless details at great length. If this young woman was saying nothing it was either because she was not feeling well or because she had been told not to say something . . . Aunty Lee studied the morgue attendant, who was the picture of health, apart from a slight fragrance of formaldehyde. Her eyes were bright with secrets kept and her mouth stayed firmly closed.
“Can you lift the cloth farther?” This was clearly not for the benefit of the bereaved Vallerie, who had already headed for the exit.
After a glance at Salim, who shrugged, the technician obliged, lifting from the bottom. A towel discreetly shielded the torso and private parts. Aunty Lee observed that despite superficial differences (Allison’s corpse showed the woman had clearly been toned and fit compared with Vallerie’s heavier and flabbier body), the sisters were of similar build and coloring. It reinforced her feeling that Vallerie was a
stress binge eater—and her sister’s death would not do her any good!
And though she was no expert, the discoloration around the neck suggested the woman had been strangled. But why the official reluctance to say so? Was it purely to spare Vallerie’s feelings? Probably not, given the technician was explaining that they would be running the standard tests even if it was obvious how she had died. Standard autopsies were probably exercises for new doctors, Aunty Lee thought.
Inspector Salim had arranged to speak with Vallerie Love in the little waiting room after the identification viewing.
“We haven’t been able to contact your sister’s ex-husband yet,” Inspector Salim said. “He doesn’t answer any of the numbers you gave us. We’ll go on trying, of course. Our contacts in the UK are also trying to get in touch with him. But in the meantime you can sign these documents—they are just to say that we have taken your sister’s body and effects, which will be returned to you after you decide what you want to have done—”
“No!” Vallerie’s voice rose. “Haven’t you heard anything I said? I’m not responsible for Allison. I signed your identification papers but I’m not going to sign for anything else. I can’t make any decisions about her. You have to get that husband of hers to decide. That’s what she would have wanted. Allison wouldn’t want me to decide anything. She would have left it to him. Allison always let him take care of everything. That’s how we were brought up. Leave it to the man to take care of everything. The separation wasn’t her idea. She believed in marriage forever as long as you both shall live and she was right! The least that man can do is take care of her now for the last time!” She sat down so hard on the dirty lounge sofa that its back creaked away from the seat.
“Oh my god. Even the furniture here is out to get me. I hate this goddamn place!”
Vallerie got up with some difficulty and whacked the offending sofa hard with her purse. She was laughing and crying and swearing. Salim wondered whether she was having a breakdown. He should have had a female officer present. But the officer who was supposed to have accompanied him, SS Panchal, had called in sick at the last minute. Salim suspected Panchal was sussing out a change of job. That was why it had not taken much to persuade him to accept Aunty Lee’s pressing offer to come with Vallerie Love, somewhat to her delight and surprise. But Staff Sergeant Neha Panchal was not his immediate problem right now. Right now his problem was the large, plump woman with pinkish-white skin and a lot of very black hair that was popping out of the huge knot she had tied on the back of her head with many small decorative pins. Perhaps Aunty Lee could say something—
“I like your hairpins,” Aunty Lee said. “Where you buy them from?”
Vallerie stopped in mid-wail. “What?”
“Your hairpins are very nice,” Aunty Lee repeated in the low, slow, authoritative voice she had heard Anne Peters use on Tammy when the young dog got overexcited. Anne had picked it up from a television dog trainer who taught people to manage their dogs by directing focus and often said she wished she had known of this method when her children were young. Aunty Lee did not see why something that could effectively calm and distract an intelligent dog like Tammy should not work on a not too intelligent human. “Peranakan women like to use special hairpins when putting their hair up, but I haven’t seen any like yours. Where did you buy them?”
“Online, I think,” Vallerie said, raising a hand to touch her hair. “I don’t usually buy things online, but they were nice and cheap so I thought why not . . .” Her voice was still tense and defensive, but at least she was talking rather than wailing. Salim looked at Aunty Lee with surprised appreciation.
“Best to get cheap things for everyday use.” Aunty Lee nodded approvingly. “Here in the old days you had to wear expensive hairpins to show people your family had money. I remember my mother had diamond-encrusted sets. You know intan diamonds, those rough-cut diamonds from Kalimantan. That was before they started bringing in faceted diamonds from Europe and then those became all the rage. But do you know, nowadays the old intan jewelry is so rare it has become more valuable. But then after my father died my mother could not wear her diamond hairpins during the mourning period. He was the only son of an eldest son, so the mourning period was three years. She could only wear jade and emeralds and pearls. And then she died just before the three years were up so she never wore her diamond hairpins again. I can show them to you one day, if you like?”
Vallerie Love hesitated, then nodded. She was playing with a couple of hairpins she had pulled from her head and looked slightly mesmerized by Aunty Lee’s jewel talk.
“People don’t wear mourning nowadays,” Vallerie said. “At least normal people don’t. But I would like to, I think. I should get some more of these hairpins here as souvenirs, to remember my sister by.”
She tried to reattach the hairpins and straighten another, but succeeded in detaching it and a clump of hair that pulled several other pins out of place. “And I was meaning to get my hair done here. It’s all grown out, I know. Hairstyling and manicures and massages are all so much cheaper here than at home. But then after all this I can’t just go and get my hair done. It wouldn’t feel right after what happened to poor Allison, you know what I mean?”
“Of course you must get your hair done,” Aunty Lee said. “As soon as you have answered Inspector Salim’s questions we will go and collect all your things from the hotel and then I will bring you to see my hairdresser. Salim, that’s all right, right?”
Salim understood the need to stress normality and normal concerns after a traumatic event and nodded.
“I just have a few more questions. I won’t keep you long. Did your sister have any other family—other than you and her ex-husband, who we are still trying to reach?”
“Apart from me, Mike and the children are the only family Allison had left. No matter how badly he treated her, she was still the mother of his children and he owes her something for that. Once you have children together you are a family forever. Divorce papers and restraining orders are all a load of rubbish. You have children together, you are a family forever. If you’re looking for someone to take responsibility now, Mike Fitzgerald is the one you should be looking at. I wasn’t even in England for years. I hadn’t even seen her for years until she turned up and asked me to come to Asia with her.”
Salim nodded, wondering whether it was her religious or social beliefs that made it so difficult for Vallerie Love to accept the breakup of her sister’s marriage. He knew from his reports that Vallerie was unmarried and had not been back to the United Kingdom since moving to Long Beach, California, in the United States. Was it just sisterly love that made it so difficult for her to accept her sister’s divorce? But Salim remembered that Vallerie’s sister was just over twenty-four hours dead. As for her sister, the confidential personnel records on Allison Fitzgerald (as she had been then) which he had of course looked up warned that she was highly volatile and always ready to make calls to the police about noisy neighbors, over crying babies, maids who stopped by her gate to chat with her maid, and the cars that crowded their cul-de-sac during a neighbor’s funeral wake. The Fitzgeralds had been equally ready to complain about the ineffectiveness of the Singapore police to the British High Commission in Singapore.
“So you didn’t keep in close contact with your sister?”
“We were close without being in touch, if you know what I mean. I grew up in England but I’ve been living in America for years now, since before Allison got married. I didn’t even go back for her wedding though I know I should have. I didn’t know Allison wanted to file that lawsuit until we got here. I thought we were just coming over here for a holiday together, for her to get some closure on what happened, she said. I thought coming to Singapore sounded like a good idea because I’ve never been here and Allison always said she had liked Singapore until all that terrible business came up.”
“And the threats your sister received. Did she say who they came from?”
“It�
�s obvious, isn’t it? The only people who knew she was coming are those Animal ReHomers people. They sent threats to scare her away, and when it didn’t work they killed her. Unless it was Mike. Oh god, it was probably Mike working with them. He’s connected with them, you know. He’s hooked up with one of those sluts. Oh god—that was probably her plan right from the start. And that slut didn’t just want to steal herself a husband. She got that bastard husband of Allison’s to follow her here and kill her!”
10
Mike in Singapore
Once given a name, pointed in the right direction, and released, nothing can beat the Singapore system for efficiency. By Monday morning an airline booking, immigration and credit card records, and an observant hotel doorman placed Mike Fitzgerald in Singapore and proved he had been in Singapore the day his ex-wife was murdered.
“And now poor old Vallerie is stuck in Singapore staying with Aunty Lee.” It was early morning in Singapore but she had no idea of the time where Mike was. Lying on her side in bed, Josephine carefully focused her carefully lined eyes on the camera on her iPad Air rather than looking at the image of Mike on its screen. She recorded all her Skype conversations with Mike so she could study his face and responses all she wanted to—later. But while online it was more important to give Mike the impression she was looking directly into his eyes. Josephine understood the importance of making people feel they were the single focus of your attention.
“And of course—poor Allison. I mean, I can’t say I liked her, but nobody deserves to die like that . . . Still, I’m not sorry her stupid lawsuit is off.”
