by Jake Needham
After tossing his cup away and wiping his hands on a handkerchief, Tay turned slowly in a full circle and examined the area where they were parked.
“The river is this way, sir,” Kang said, pointing helpfully between two buildings.
“I know where the river is, Sergeant. I was looking for somewhere you could get me more coffee.”
“Ah.”
Ah, indeed.
“There might be a place up at Robertson Quay, sir, but that’s about ten minutes away.”
“A nice afternoon stroll along the river will be most invigorating for you, Sergeant. Off you go now.”
Tay wasn’t in any hurry. Whoever he had come to see wasn’t going anywhere. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other and reflexively patted his pockets for cigarettes. When he remembered he had just checked and he didn’t have any, he sighed heavily, leaned back against the car with his arms folded, and idly followed Robbie Kang with his eyes as he walked toward Robertson Quay.
When he was being entirely honest with himself, Tay sometimes wondered why Kang had stuck with him so loyally all these years. He could be a shit and he knew it, but that never seemed to bother Kang, at least not in any way he could see. They had worked together for nearly five years now, and Tay had to admit that Robbie Kang’s unswerving loyalty was probably more than he deserved.
A lot of people underestimated Kang, Tay knew, but he was not one of them. People looked at Kang and saw a vanilla man living a vanilla life, but Tay knew Kang had a madness hidden deep within him. There were days on which Tay wished he could find the same kind of madness somewhere in his own soul.
Kang disappeared behind a building and Tay gave his pockets another delusory pat in the hope he might have overlooked some cigarettes, but of course he hadn’t. He was always promising himself he would quit smoking some day so maybe this was a sign. Maybe this was the day for him to deliver on that promise.
Who was he kidding? He was about to examine a dead body that had been in the river for several days and he was wondering if this might be a good time to quit smoking?
He was plainly becoming delusional. Doubtless driven out of his mind by a nicotine deficiency.
CHAPTER THREE
THE SINGAPORE RIVER isn’t much of a river. It certainly doesn’t bear any resemblance to the Thames, or the Seine, or the Hudson. It’s narrow and shallow and except for the occasional sightseeing boat it doesn’t even carry maritime traffic now.
Years ago, caught up in one of the fits of governmental sprucing up that periodically sweeps over Singapore, the entire channel of river was cemented and the banks closed off with railings. Tay thought all that tidying had left the Singapore River looking more like a big drainage ditch than a river, and he was pretty sure that’s what most visitors thought it was anyway. Maybe instead of the Singapore River they should just call it the Singapore Ditch and be done with it.
A hundred years ago, the river had run through a tough and gritty dock area. Fleets of lighters called bumboats shuttled back and forth from there to the sailing ships anchored offshore loading cargoes of rubber, rice, and jute bound for Europe. When containerized cargo put an end to the bumboats, the government decided to turn the river into a tourist attraction. They claimed they wanted to protect its historical charm, but of course Tay knew full well they wanted to do no such thing. What they really wanted was to create a cleaned up, idealized version of Singapore’s history, one that might cause future generations to forget about what the reality of it had been.
After a resolute scrubbing, the whole area around the river had been turned into an attraction that might have been constructed by Walt Disney. The crumbling warehouses were rebuilt and repainted in bright, cheerful colors, and the pathways between them were tiled and edged with perfectly matched palm trees. Stylish restaurants and bars now filled the old buildings, their tables spilling out under groves of palm trees that were crisscrossed with strings of white fairy lights. Most of the places were crowded almost every night, clogged with local yuppies, Australian tourists, and Caucasian expats.
Sometimes Tay felt like he wasn’t living in a real city now at all, but a Potemkin village populated with Potemkin people. No, that wasn’t really fair. Tay knew there were some real people in Singapore. Robbie Kang, of course, and…well, he was sure there were others, too, even if no names came readily to mind.
When he figured he had stalled as long as decency allowed, Tay sighed heavily, pushed himself away from the car, and set off walking in the direction of the Alkaff Bridge. He eyed the dark clouds gathering on the horizon. Maybe it would rain later, or maybe it wouldn’t. Either way Tay knew the humidity would leave him so drenched in sweat that it wouldn’t make any difference. When you were outdoors in Singapore, you got soaking wet whether it rained or it didn’t.
There was an appropriately ominous silence all around until he got close to the river and heard the cackle and crack of a radio in the distance. His colleagues had as usual been almost frighteningly efficient. They had already erected a small shelter about ten feet square at the near end of the bridge that was made out of a scaffolding of metal poles covered by blue plastic sheeting.
Uniformed patrolmen had sealed off the scene both on the bridge and along the promenade. They were there to keep spectators away, of course, but they didn’t have much to do. There weren’t any spectators.
This wasn’t a neighborhood in which people hung around outside, chatted with their neighbors, and congregated at the site of distasteful events. There was another reason no spectators were around, too, one which applied almost everywhere in Singapore, particularly in places where there was police activity. Singaporeans minded their own business when authority was present. They had a gift for not seeing unpleasantness, or at least pretending not to see it, even when it was right there in front of them.
Tay couldn’t see what was in the blue plastic tent from the direction he was approaching it, which he supposed was the whole reason for having it there in the first place. But he knew full well what was waiting for him.
Soon enough he would have a fine, close-up view.
When Tay approached the tent, the patrolman in front of it snapped off a salute.
“Good afternoon, Inspector,” he said. “It’s nice to see you again, sir.”
Tay didn’t remember ever encountering the young patrolman before and he had decidedly mixed feelings about being recognized by someone he didn’t know. While everyone’s ego twitched a little at discovering a stranger knew who he was, anonymity had its advantages, too. And given a choice between a twitching ego and those advantages, Tay would choose anonymity without the slightest hesitation. If it were left up to him. Which, of course, it wasn’t.
“Better watch your footing, sir.”
The young patrolman pointed at the paving stones covered by a thin film of water, probably from dragging the body out of the river. Yes, Tay thought, he would be careful. Falling on his ass before he even got to the body would only extend his fame within the department. As far as he was concerned, he was more than famous enough already.
“Do you have any cigarettes, patrolman?”
When Tay saw the alarmed look on the young man’s face, he had to smile. Clearly a senior officer had never before asked the kid for a cigarette. Now that one had, he had no idea what to do.
“Uh…what do you mean, sir?” the patrolman stammered.
Tay lifted a hand to his mouth and mimed himself smoking a cigarette. “You know.”
The kid cleared his throat and shifted his eyes nervously from side to side.
“I don’t smoke, sir.”
“No, of course you don’t.”
The patrolman hesitated. He looked away as if he was suddenly engrossed in studying a building on the other side of the river, but he leaned his whole body back toward Tay.
“If you want, sir,” he murmured out of the corner of his mouth, “I’m sure I could find—”
“That’s all right,” Tay interrupted. �
�Let’s just get on with whatever we’ve got here.”
Clearly relieved to be back on more comfortable ground, the patrolman reached for the flap covering the front of the tent, but he didn’t open it.
“This one’s a bit of a mess, sir,” he said. “They figure it was hit by one of those tourist boats that work this part of the river. Not much left below the waist.”
Wonderful, Tay thought to himself, just wonderful. Where’s my damn coffee?
He glanced down the promenade in the direction of Robertson Quay, but Kang was nowhere in sight.
As subtly as he could, Tay took a couple of deep breaths as a precaution against nausea and nodded to the patrolman. The man pulled open the flap and Tay walked inside.
CHAPTER FOUR
“GOOD AFTERNOON, INSPECTOR. I had no idea I was going to see you today or I would have worn something a little more fetching.”
Dr. Susan Hoi was a pathologist at the Centre for Forensic Medicine and Tay had first met her a couple of years back when he was trying to identify the body of a western woman murdered in a room at the Singapore Marriott. It had never occurred to Tay he would see Dr. Hoi today either. If it had, he would probably have broken into a trot in the opposite direction. Their last encounter had been a source of acute embarrassment for him and he had been doing his best ever since to avoid having another one.
Dr. Hoi began making her personal interest in Tay unmistakable almost as soon as they met. She even went so far as to tell him she had off-the-record information to pass along to him from the autopsy of the woman found at the Marriott and asked him to meet her for a drink at Harry’s Bar in Boat Quay. When he got there, she confessed she didn’t have any information at all. She had only said she did, she admitted, to get Tay meet her at Harry’s Bar.
Tay had been avoiding the woman ever since, but now in spite of his very best efforts here he was alone with her inside a little blue tent. At least they were alone if you didn’t count the dead body at their feet. Turning and fleeing wasn’t really a practical response to those circumstances no matter how unhappy Tay might be about them, although he did give the possibility one brief moment of consideration. So Tay stayed where he was. Sometimes life just screwed with you and there was nothing you could do about it.
“I’ve never seen you out in the field before,” Tay said, looking for safe ground.
“They’re starting to send me out quite a lot. Do you think it’s a promotion?”
Tay wasn’t sure so he merely bobbed his head and tried to appear as if he were considering the question thoughtfully.
Susan Hoi was a looker, no doubt about that, and a stylish one. The first time Tay met her was on a day she was cutting up dead bodies and she was wearing a little black dress and pearls. Her hair was black with highlights that appeared almost red, and she kept it cut short and shaped tightly to her head, which gave her an air of professional crispness Tay had to admit he rather liked. Eye color was something Tay seldom remembered, but the celadon green of Dr. Hoi’s eyes was impossible to forget. He could recall the first time they had met how her eyes seemed to gleam as if they were illuminated from within.
Tay just wished she hadn’t been so forward. It had made him jumpy as hell and he had reflexively taken off in the opposite direction. Then again, he knew he usually found a reason to take off in the opposite direction whenever he met a woman who showed interest in him, didn’t he? He supposed that explained why, at fifty, he still lived alone. Sometimes he asked himself if he was going to live alone for the rest of his life, but he didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about it anymore. He was pretty sure he knew what the answer to that question was.
This afternoon Susan Hoi wore a tight pair of low-slung jeans and a man’s white shirt with the sleeves rolled above her elbows. Tay thought her face looked drawn and tired, and at a glance she appeared older than her thirty-five or so years. For once Tay’s brain worked faster than his mouth and he very sensibly kept that thought to himself.
Tay made a throat-clearing noise to underscore that the personal part of the conversation was over, brief as it might have been, and the time had come to get on with business.
“So what have we got here?” he asked.
For the first time he glanced down at the corpse and he instinctively recoiled.
It was the body of a man dressed in khaki shorts and a white t-shirt, but below the bottom of his shorts most of the man’s left leg and part of his right leg were gone. Shreds of flesh hung from each stump like clumps of dangling vines. The corpse’s arms were intact, but the fingers were shredded away to the bone. His chest was dented and misshapen and his face had been cut off. The man’s shoulders were broad and well developed and Tay could tell he appeared to be in pretty good shape. Apart from being dead and having his legs ripped off, of course.
“Yes,” Dr. Hoi said when she saw Tay’s reaction. “He’s a real mess. It looks like a boat propeller tore him up. And of course the crabs have gotten to him.”
Tay involuntarily glanced over his shoulder in the direction of the river.
“Don’t worry, Inspector,” Dr. Hoi laughed. “Nothing you eat in Singapore came out of that water.”
Tay’s nodded slowly.
“You look a little green, Sam.”
Tay took a deep breath and nodded again. He kept his eyes well away from the corpse laid out on the plastic sheeting at their feet.
“Maybe we should talk outside,” Dr. Hoi suggested.
Tay didn’t even bother to nod. He just turned and pushed out through the flap of the tent.
They stood together at the concrete wall that ran along the river. Tay leaned on his forearms against the top of the wall and contemplated the dirty brown water creeping past. It looked sticky, and it flowed like maple syrup.
Susan Hoi reached into a back pocket of her jeans and produced a crumpled pack of Marlboros with a book of matches tucked inside the cellophane wrapper. She shook out a cigarette and offered it to Tay. He could have thrown his arms around her and hugged her, but he had the presence of mind to know that was probably a terrible idea. So he just accepted the cigarette with a small nod.
“I didn’t know you smoked,” he said.
Dr. Hoi shook a cigarette out for herself and struck a match, touching it first to Tay’s cigarette and then to her own.
“That’s exactly what you said the last time you saw me with a pack of cigarettes, Sam. You do remember something about me, don’t you?”
This can go nowhere good, Tay thought, so he drew on his cigarette and said nothing.
“How much do you smoke, Sam?”
“I don’t know. A few a day. Maybe half a pack.”
“Nonsense. I’ll bet you’re a pack a day man. Sometimes probably two.”
Tay raised and lowed his shoulders in a small shrug.
“Has anyone ever told you that smoking is a symptom of a self-destructive personality, Sam? Do you have a self-destructive personality? Is that who you really are?”
“Thanks for the cigarette,” Tay said, ignoring Dr. Hoi’s personal question. “You have officially saved my life. Now all I need is coffee and the world will be right again.”
“Right behind you, sir,” Sergeant Kang responded exactly on cue.
Tay turned to find Kang holding two large Starbucks cups.
“What is that?”
“It’s coffee, sir. I found a Starbucks down in Shell House.”
“You know I don’t like Starbucks.”
“Drink it, sir,” Kang said, holding out one of the cups. “You can pretend Starbucks isn’t American.”
Tay hesitated, and then he abruptly reached out and took both cups from Kang.
“Sir, one of those was for—”
“Thank you, Sergeant. Dr. Hoi and I are very appreciative.”
Tay turned his back on Kang and handed one of the Starbucks cups to Dr. Hoi. Then he took her by the elbow and tugged her along the promenade until they were more or less alone again. He popped the top off
his coffee, laid it on the wall, and drank deeply.
Dr. Hoi laughed. “That wasn’t very nice.”
“I’m the inspector and he’s the sergeant. That’s how it works.”
“Jesus, Sam, I’m glad I don’t work for you.”
Tay shrugged. He drew on his cigarette and drank more coffee. He could feel the caffeine and the nicotine building up nicely in his bloodstream. In another minute or two he would be back to normal.
“Okay,” Tay said, trying to assume his most professional tone of voice, “tell me what you’ve found so far.”
“A badly mangled body without a face and not a lot more.”
“Any guess yet as to how long it’s been in the river?”
“A while. Three days? Maybe longer.”
Tay waved a hand at the river. “You’re telling me a body floated around out there for at least three days and nobody noticed it?”
“Shit happens,” Dr. Hoi shrugged. “Life goes on. Nobody cares.”
“Jesus,” Tay muttered, “aren’t you cheerful today?”
“It’s the wrong time of the month. You want cheerful? Call me next week.”
Tay cleared his throat and looked away. He admired honesty in a woman, he really did, but only to a point. This was past that point.
“Anything about the body that would help us with an ID?” he asked, keeping his eyes on the river. “Tattoos? Birthmarks?”
“Nothing.”
“I suppose an ID card would be out of the question.”
“If he had a wallet, it’s in the river now.”
Tay peered at the dark water and shook his head. “We can forget about finding it down there.”
“And since we can’t get any prints for you, doing an identification isn’t going to be easy.”
“What do you mean you can’t—”
Suddenly Tay remembered and he stopped talking. You needed fingers to get fingerprints, and the corpse’s fingers had been eaten away by crabs. He sucked up some more nicotine and took another hit on his coffee. It helped. A little.
