She smiled. ‘Could I get into yours, if I did?’
I grinned back at her. ‘Maybe you just had a chance. We’ll never know.’
‘Let’s just say now is too soon,’ she said quietly. ‘I don’t know you well enough.’
‘Only one person ever really knew me.’ There was something about the girl that had me saying things without even thinking about them.
‘Your wife?’
‘My sister: half-sister.’ I said it naturally: I’d never think of Jan as a wife again. Our marriage was never legal, in the eyes of the law, at any rate. No, what we had was much more complex, much deeper than a marriage, even if I hadn’t known it at the time.
‘Where is she now?’
‘Her bones are in a cemetery in Scotland. Her spirit’s never far away.’
‘That’s what you didn’t want to talk about earlier?’ I nodded. ‘What happened?’
‘She was murdered.’
‘Aah.’ She sighed. ‘That’s why you can seem scary inside. And the man who did it?’
‘People. The man who did it was under orders. They’re dead; all dead.’
‘Did you. .?’
‘Ssh!’ I whispered. ‘Let’s not go there. It’s better that you don’t know about the feelings you have in your heart when something like that happens.’
‘Maybe not.’ She looked up at me again, as if she had closed one chapter and moved on to the next. ‘Do you leave Singapore, now that this Lee Kan Tong man is dead?’
‘Not yet. I didn’t come to find him, but the woman who’s with him. She has something that I need.’
‘Do you know where she is?’
‘No. But if I find out, I’ll go after her. I’ll know better tomorrow morning. . this morning.’ In a corner of my eye, I saw the traffic-lights change. A taxi with an illuminated sign came towards us: I flagged it down.
‘He’ll think I’m a prostitute,’ Marie said, laughingly, as it drew to a halt.
‘You’re too good-looking to be a hooker.’
‘You don’t know Singapore; I’m not good-looking enough.’
I raised an eyebrow as she slid into the cab. ‘Maybe I’d better check those guide-book ads again.’ Impulsively, I bent and kissed her. ‘I’ll call you later,’ I promised, ‘even if it’s only to tell you I’m leaving.’
28
I slept late next morning, late for me, that is. It was nine o’clock when I was wakened from a troubled sleep by a knock on the door of the suite, followed by the sound of it opening and a shrill cry of ‘Housekeeping!’
‘Later!’ I yelled. I’d hung out the privacy sign when I’d got back from seeing off Marie, but often that means nothing. Rita Rudner, the comedienne, who’s big in Vegas and spends a lot of her life in hotel rooms, once claimed that she was driven to creating her own ‘Do not disturb’ sign to get the message across. It showed a maid with her neck in a noose.
I’d probably have been more polite if it hadn’t been for the dreams. Several times that night I’d seen Tony Lee sitting across from me in the Next Page booth, then toppling forwards. On each occasion even more blood came my way, until finally I was drenched in the stuff. But that wasn’t the only vision I’d had in my sleep. I saw Maddy January’s darting, frightened eyes. I saw Jan, lying dead on our kitchen floor from a massive electric shock; I wasn’t there when it happened, but that doesn’t shield me from its full horror. I saw Susie and Prim, in the pool in Monaco, both of them naked and swimming towards me. I saw Jack Gantry’s maniacal, evil face lose all its colour as he realised he was going to die. And I saw Marie Lin, black hair spread on the pillow, long legs apart and stretched out as she lay beside me in another bed, in another room, in a place I couldn’t recognise. That was where I was when the maid opened the door and shouted. If she’d looked round the corner into the sleeping area she’d have seen the duvet on the floor and me with an erection that would have made Shergar feel inadequate.
I swung out of bed, feeling incredibly guilty, and snarled my way to the bathroom, where I took a long, cold shower, until I was back to something approaching my normal temper and size. I was shaved and dressed when I heard another knock at the door. I opened it, ready to apologise to the chambermaid for the delay, only to see Dylan standing there.
‘Who bit your arse?’ he asked, cheerfully. Clearly my temper still didn’t look as normal as I’d thought. ‘She’s not still here, is she?’
‘Don’t be a fuckwit,’ I growled. ‘It’s not like that, I told you. What do you want anyway? We haven’t missed breakfast, have we?’
‘Relax, we’ve still got half an hour before it closes. I’ve had Jimmy Tan on the phone; he’s found out where the late Mr Lee lived, and he’s willing to let us join him to look it over.’
I took a fresh look at him as he stepped into the room. Sometimes you don’t see people at all, no matter how well you think you know them. In Glasgow, my boiled-down opinion of Mike was that he was an amiable clown. (Come to think of it, that’s how I wanted people to regard me.)
‘You’re in deep with him, aren’t you?’ I asked.
He nodded. ‘When I was under cover, only four people out here knew who I was. Jimmy was one of them, but even he didn’t find out until the last operation, the big one in Thailand, was ready to go down. The DEA and Interpol set me up with an escape route through Singapore, so he had to know then. But that was a phoney: they pulled the Amsterdam thing again, and when the police and troops moved in to take down the drug runners they shot me too, only they didn’t use real bullets on me the second time. There were only two survivors from the gang; they both thought they saw me die. We know this because they spoke about it in jail, and they never did twig that I was an agent. When it was all done, Interpol told everybody that Martin Dyer was dead, including Jimmy. They flew me out to India on a freight plane and on to Europe from there, on a new passport.’
‘Was the Singapore Triad part of the network you brought down?’
‘They had people involved; not the top guy, though, he stayed out of the picture. I got the impression that everybody deferred to him, except maybe the Burmese warriors who control the poppy production.’
‘Tan’s right, Mike. You should not be around here. Why the hell did you agree to come with me?’
He grinned. ‘I never did make it to Singapore. I wanted to see the place.’
‘Is that right? It never occurred to you that I might get caught in the cross-fire?’
‘That’s what friends are for. Come on, let’s see if there’s any breakfast left, then go and meet Jimmy. He’s expecting us at ten thirty.’
As it turned out, the buffet had been devoured by an invasion of gluttonous Americans, who compounded the felony by commandeering the centre of the room and discussing, twice as loudly as was appropriate, their tactics for maximising the grant payable by the Singapore government towards whatever project had brought them there.
After the phrases ‘bottom line’, ‘hidden inducements’ and ‘participating bonus’ had been mentioned for the fourth or fifth time, Dylan leaned over the apparent ring-leader as we left the room and said, in what appeared to be a perfectly honed New York accent, ‘What makes America great, guys, is that the fucking IRS is everywhere.’
Having planted that seed of terror, we were grateful when a lift opened at the first touch of a button and took us down to the foyer. We pulled a taxi; as we got in Mike leaned towards the driver and said, ‘Makena Condo, Meyer Road, Katong.’
‘You know number Meyer Road?’ the driver enquired.
‘Afraid not.’
‘No worries, I find it. Meyer Road pretty straight.’ By this time I had discerned that there are two kinds of taxi drivers in Singapore, the Chinese (helpful and talkative) and the rest (neither). Ours headed west, out of the crowded heart of the city, past the enormous Suntec complex, then turned on to East Coast Parkway.
He didn’t fanny about: he took the first available turn-off for Katong, which wasn’t very far, then found Meyer Road. As he’d s
aid, it was straight, but straight for a long way. He cruised along it, slowly, until finally he spotted a group of high-rise buildings, set within a secure boundary fence. ‘Ah, yes, I remember now,’ he chirped. ‘That the Makena.’
He swung through a gate, nodded his way past the security guys in a booth to the left, and dropped us in front of the first building. He got a respectable tip. He glanced at it and said, ‘Thanks. I hope I get you guys again.’
I waved him goodbye, then glanced upwards. The Makena towers weren’t in the same league as the Stamford when it came to height, but they were taller than anything I’d seen in my home country, even in Glasgow, where for a while the city fathers seemed to be conducting an experiment to determine how many unhappy people they could cram into a single structure. There seemed to be nothing unhappy about this place, though, as Mike, who seemed to know where he was going, led us along the entrance driveway and round a corner.
Jimmy Tan was waiting for us, standing in the shade of the building. The black gear from the night before had been replaced by a white linen suit. The jacket was loose-fitting, the sign, once you learn to read it, of the plain-clothes policeman everywhere. Behind him, unconcerned by the fact that they were in the morning sunlight, stood half a dozen dark-uniformed troopers, wearing flak jackets, Kevlar hard hats and carrying automatic weapons. I looked beyond them to a central courtyard area surrounded by five apartment blocks. Most of it seemed to be taken up by the biggest swimming-pool I had ever seen, but since the community probably contained, at first glance, more individual residences than my home town of Anstruther, maybe that wasn’t surprising. For all that it was vast, it was almost deserted: this wasn’t a tourist hang-out but a working community, so the parents were at work and the kids were at school. I could see maybe half a dozen people in and around the pool, but only a couple of them were aware of what was going on.
‘What the fuck is this, Jimmy?’ Mike barked, as we approached. ‘Why the SWAT team?’
‘This is a Triad house we go into,’ Tan replied. ‘Best these boys in first.’ I had no objection to that.
‘What about Lee?’ I asked.
‘What about him?’
‘He was murdered, remember?’
Tan shook his head. ‘He had heart-attack, like I said last night.’ The look on my face must have merited some further explanation, for he continued: ‘Listen, Lee was Triad member, that wasn’t just a story. My sources confirm it. He was senior guy, quite near the top, involved with drug distribution and prostitution, as he was in London. He the sort of guy we never catch with anything on them; the boys and girls on Death Row are all mules, well down the chain. I’m not going waste time investigating; we never catch who did it anyway. Fuck him.’
I nodded: it made sense, in a cynical sort of way, and he was the guy with the local knowledge.
We rode the lift together to the seventh floor. When we got out, Tan told us to stay where we were until he called to us, then led his batter squad round a corner to the left. A few minutes later we heard some shouts; whatever the Chinese is for ‘Armed police!’ I guess that’s what it probably was.
It didn’t take long, only a couple of minutes, before one of the squad, a corporal, returned and signalled to us to follow. Tony Lee’s apartment was quite something: the floors were marble, and the main living space was split level, with dining furniture topside, and a couple of steps down to a sitting area with two leather chairs facing a big plasma television, and a unit which housed the best music system that Mr Bang and Mr Olufsen produce. The main attraction of the upper level was an aquarium, which seemed to cover most of the wall opposite the door. Jimmy Tan stood in front of it, with his hand on the shoulder of a very frightened woman in a black tunic.
‘Maid,’ he said. ‘Filipina; she says she doesn’t speak English, but I don’t buy that. We find out for sure later.’ The woman flinched, proof enough that she understood him.
‘Maddy January?’ I asked.
‘Not here, alive or dead.’
‘Can we look around?’
‘Be my guest, but what you looking for? We won’t find drugs here, or anything else that ties to Triads.’
‘I don’t know what I’m looking for. Anything that gives us a clue to where Maddy might have gone, I suppose.’
‘Okay. She’s nothing to me; you want to look for her, Mr Blackstone, that’s fine.’
He dismissed the troopers as Dylan and I moved off to search the place. We started in the kitchen: it was as well equipped as the living areas had been. All the appliances were state-of-the-art. We opened cupboard after cupboard and found nothing but food, drink and cleaning products; the place was well stocked, though. ‘Look at this,’ said Dylan, waving a piece of paper he had picked up from the counter. ‘It’s a supermarket till receipt. Somebody did a big food shop on Thursday. The shit must have hit the fan after that.’ Calamity had fallen on Maddy and Tony suddenly.
Beyond the kitchen we found a small back room, with a bed, a small hanging wardrobe, and a dressing-table with a couple of drawers. ‘Maid’s room,’ I said. ‘Look at that.’ There was a magazine on the bed: English language.
Dylan wasn’t listening: he had opened a door that seemed to lead out on to a small, shaded balcony. (Shade is difficult to find in Singapore, because it’s almost on the equator, so the midday sun’s directly overhead but the architect who planned the Makena had built it in wherever possible.) It housed a big condenser unit for the air-conditioning system, and more than that: a wetsuit, black and blue in colour, mask and flippers, lay there. There was other scuba equipment too, a tank and a regulator. I’ve done some diving, so I was able to recognise them all as top quality, and I realised something else: the suit belonged to Maddy. Tony Lee hadn’t been a giant, but he’d been too wide to fit into it.
I logged the fact away as we moved through to the rest of the apartment. There were three bedrooms; we looked in the master with its en-suite, then moved into another that was furnished but appeared to have been used only as a store. We checked what had been Maddy’s wardrobes, her drawers, her cosmetics table; they were all well stocked, but we had no way of telling if anything was missing. There was a Tampax box in the bathroom. It was almost full, but I read nothing into the fact that it was still there: Susie carries a couple of the things in her handbag like she carries lipstick. If the woman had done a runner, she’d have taken what she needed and no more.
Next we checked Tony’s space. There were two empty hangers that might have held suits; the one he’d been wearing when he’d been killed, and maybe he’d packed another. He’d been ready for flight, I reckoned that was for sure. Somewhere in the city there was a BMW that would be attracting parking tickets, unless Jimmy had found it and had it towed.
‘Look,’ said Dylan, pulling the hanging clothes apart. Behind them, set into the wall, there was a safe, open, and empty, ‘I’d guess Maddy’s got some cash. He had some in his wallet last night, but less than you’d bother to keep in the safe. My bet is that he sent her on ahead with most of their stash, then went to do the trade with you and follow her.’
‘Or rob me. He had a gun, and he was a criminal.’
‘Maybe, but I doubt it. You’re high-profile: robbing you could have drawn attention to him and that was the last thing he wanted.’
The third bedroom had been converted to an office, with a desk, a filing cabinet and a message board on the wall. It was covered in yellow message stickers. I read a few. ‘Tony: lunch 1.30 Rubino’s.’ ‘Hairdresser: 11 a.m.’ ‘FW, Riverside, 7 Friday.’ Nothing signified: there was nothing, for example, about meeting me on Siloso the day before. However, there was a photograph, pinned to the board. It showed Maddy and Tony, smiling in the midst of a group of people in a bar; a sign in the background read ‘Cafe Narcosis’. That told me at once that it was a hang-out for divers. Who else would use a bar called after the clinical name for the bends?
There was an HP computer in a separate housing unit, with an all-in-one printer-fa
x-scanner attached, and also a docking device for a palmtop. The screen was blank, but the soft hum of the tower unit, and the warmth of the room, told me it was running; whoever had used it last had neglected to switch it off. I moved the mouse and waited as the screen came to life. I spotted an AOL start-up icon on the task bar and hit it. I grinned as it started up: automatic log-on is very convenient, but in certain circumstances it can be very silly. It took me straight in there without my having to know a password or anything else. I stopped smiling pretty soon, though: the mailbox contained two spam stock tips and one Viagra ad. The ‘old’ and ‘sent’ e-mail files were empty, wiped. There was a Messenger icon as well, I hit that and, again, was signed in automatically, but there was nothing there either, not even an address book.
I closed the applications and turned to the hard disk. For a moment I got a buzz when I saw three folders: ‘Tony’, ‘Maddy’, and ‘Maddy’s pix’. But that evaporated pretty quickly too. They had been emptied, then flushed away by clearing the waste basket. I checked the Adobe Photoshop software I found among the programs, but that had been cleaned out as well. Chucking the thing into a car-crusher would have been less efficient than the wiping job that had been done.
We looked in the desk drawers: we found stationery, and two cameras, a very expensive Nikon 35mm SLR job, and a pocket-sized Pentax digital. They worried me: would a keen, professional-class photographer have left them behind? Maybe, I told myself, if she wanted people like us to think she was dead.
We went back through to the living area. Jimmy Tan was still there with the maid, who had remembered her English. ‘She says she know nothing. The woman left on Friday, is all she tell me.’
‘Who was her hairdresser?’ Dylan asked her. ‘You want to find what a woman’s been up to,’ he murmured to me, ‘ask her hairdresser.’
‘She go to a place in Ngee Ann City, up Orchard Road; Kingsley, I think it called.’
‘What’s FW?’ I tried, remembering the name on the message slip.
For The Death Of Me ob-9 Page 17
