Scare Me

by Richard Parker

  Will’s family had watched as the gull relentlessly repeated the process, shards of shell and legs pinging off the crab as its body was battered by each new impact. Will hadn’t been consoled by his father’s assurances about the food chain and had frantically waved the gull away before rescuing its prey.

  He’d emptied out one of the many paint pots that he’d confiscated from the garage to make sandcastles with and had dropped the crab inside it in the hope that it could convalesce there. His father had told him he was wasting his time and that it would have been more use as feed for the gull. He was sure it had been his father’s indifference to the animal’s fate that had made him want to save it.

  As the wind had picked up and the rain started hammering the beach, his mother had packed away their picnic. His father had loitered behind him, puffing on his pipe and peering into the pot. Will hadn’t wanted to return its injured body to the sea and had been determined that the ugly gull wouldn’t snatch it. The clouds gushed rain and the broken crab had scratched its circuits, froth pouring from its mouth. Will had stood guard.

  The pot had filled with rainwater. The bird had kept circling, as had the helpless crab.

  He rubbed the image out of his eyes again and thought of the predator biding her time in his present. Will’s attention returned to the screen. Clicking back to the home page of the website he found a new message above the houses. She’d made time to send him a warning.

  LEAVE THE AIRPORT AS SOON AS WE LAND

  DON’T LOOK BACK FROM ARRIVALS

  Will obeyed the instruction as he left passport control at Changi International and limped through the pristine décor of Terminal Three. He paused for breath under a decorative palm tree and hoped she wouldn’t pass him.

  If the phone remained in her purse he would know exactly where he was being sent before she told him, but if he wanted Libby back he was still effectively powerless to prevent what would happen there. He felt a desperate need to be out of the airport before her. If he watched her leave, he would feel even more complicit. He inhaled sweet air and felt dizziness swell as he looked up at the shutters in the ceiling. The humid climate made him feel like he was wearing a hot face towel and he hadn’t even stepped out of the air-conditioned building.

  He’d changed his watch to local time as he’d got off the plane. Even though it was just before three in the morning, when the sliding doors opened, he walked into cloying heat. As he approached the polished, blue taxis under a row of orange lights, he called Carla.

  “Will? She’s only just appeared on the GPS.”

  “I know. She was on the same plane as me.”

  A smart, Chinese driver in his fifties grinned and opened his back door for Will.

  He didn’t wait for Carla’s reaction. “So much for the phone giving us a jump on her, she’s right behind me.” He dropped onto the leather seat and the impact felt like he’d fallen a hundred feet.

  “I should have monitored her closer at the airport, but I was…dealing with an emergency.”

  “Emergency?”

  “Dealt with now so forget it. I’ve sent a request to start tracking your new phone.” A wary pause. “Did she speak to you?”

  He gulped the pain down. “Hardly. But then she doesn’t need to.” Will recalled the moment he’d met her raptorial eye. “She knows we’ll be obedient.”

  The driver slid in front of the wheel and turned the key in the ignition.

  “Are you heading straight there?”

  “Going to find somewhere to wait.” He grimaced as he pulled the door closed.

  The driver turned to him, beaming emptily. There was a deep scar across his chin that looked as if it had been carved there with a blade.

  “Serangoon, please.”

  “You want Serangoon Central?”

  Will registered it sounded similar to the woman’s voice. “How long to get there?” He tried to find a comfortable posture.

  “Twenty minutes, but because you’re with me – fifteen.”

  Will nodded and spoke into the phone with a lowered voice again. “I have to check into a hotel. I don’t feel so good.”

  “What’s wrong, are you sick?”

  “I just need to lie down properly.” He let his head loll back on the seat.

  “Did you sleep at all?” She didn’t sound as if she had.

  “It’s just been a bad flight.”

  “I can take you to a hotel in Serangoon. Cheapest rate.” The driver assured him as they dropped down a ramp.

  As the taxi jolted him, Will grimaced with pain. “OK. Did you catch that? I’ll call you when I’m there.” He rang off. His eyes swam.

  Outside the cab window the sprays of spotlit flowers hiding the ugly new buildings became impressionistic blobs.

  “Just enjoy the ride.” The driver’s smiling mouth was hidden below the edge of his mirror.

  Pope and Weaver monitored the red GPS dot on the iPad they’d propped up on a stack of brochures. It was positioned on the low table they were seated around in the lounge area of their Wintershore suite.

  “Do we really believe that’s her? That could so easily be Frost.” Weaver chewed hard, a vein jutting out on his forehead.

  “We’re about to find out.” Pope checked the afternoon daylight at the window, looked at his watch and did a calculation. They were twelve hours ahead so it was early morning there.

  They’d been in the hotel room for less than twenty-four hours, but it looked like he’d been holed up with Weaver for a week. Bottles from the mini-bar and empty food trays were dotted around and the whole place smelt of armpits. They’d both slept and taken showers, but neither of them had a change of clothes.

  They had NBC on and, just over an hour ago, the police had announced they were making headway in relation to the suspect wanted for the murders of the Ambersons, the Stricks and the Monros. More details were about to be released. Weaver was right, the website was fast becoming a record of the past.

  “Surely she should have landed earlier than this. Frost should be there by now.” Weaver stretched in his armchair and his spine cracked.

  They had the website open as well as a detailed Google map of Serangoon positioned beside the GPS coordinates. They could follow its progress street by street. Pope zoomed the display with his fingers. The dot was halfway along the Pan Island Expressway that led from the airport. Was it Frost?

  All the information Mrs Frost had submitted to him when she’d given up the password for the GPS seemed too bizarre to be faked: where Frost had planted the phone, the killer being a woman. He’d asked her if she had anything else that could help him tie Ingram to the victims and she’d answered flatly that she didn’t. That seemed extremely suspect but, after eighteen hours ransacking the Internet had yielded nothing, he was beginning to believe she was telling the truth.

  The cops certainly hadn’t named Frost as a suspect so it looked like his evasion of suspicion so far and the fact they hadn’t heard about anyone else discovering the website ruled out any obvious link. Was Mrs Frost lying about anything? If the phone was a ploy to stall them she knew that would run out at the next address.

  If the GPS was actually pinpointing the woman’s location that also troubled Pope. Why should she be present if the victim had already been murdered? There was only one reason for her to be there. Somebody was very probably about to die and they were going to sit by and allow it to happen from nine thousand miles away.

  He’d made a promise in return for the live information they were now in possession of. It was Libby’s life if they interfered now.

  Serangoon was in the northeast region of Singapore. It was the sort of place that was changing every day, its own redevelopment casting new shadows over its inhabitants as it rapidly grew upward and outward. The streets were spotless and, as they passed under the boxy high-rises, it felt like they were driving through an architect’s model.

  Will got the driver to call at an all-night pharmacy and bought the strongest painkillers
he could obtain without prescription. He chewed a mouthful while they took a straight, tree-lined road to the Ambrosia Hotel. He just needed to get horizontal, however briefly.

  The driver pulled them into a car park at the back of an unlit, green tower block that glowed luminously against the smog-choked stars. He pointed to the small entrance.

  “Tell them Shoushan sent you. Better room that way.”

  Will paid him and the taxi purred away. He headed for the door, the noise of traffic and his footsteps muffled by the night’s thick heat.

  Inside reception the smell of damp caught in his throat. Shoushan’s name didn’t stir the compressed features of the old woman hunched over the tiny desk. A single lamp angled down at the guest book allowed her to duck out of his scrutiny. He signed and paid in cash and her shadowed head nodded towards the fire exit.

  “Floor three. Elevator not working.”

  He climbed the concrete steps and wondered how long he’d have before he was summoned. As he turned the handle of room 39, the fresh paint sucked at his knuckles. The bedside lamp came on automatically. Will was in a tiny cell with a silver blind closed against the window. He opened the laptop. No update in the box. On the GPS site he could see she was moving through the east quarter of Serangoon. At least he knew she hadn’t followed him. Will collapsed on the mattress.

  Lying flat didn’t alleviate the pain. He closed his eyes and gritted his teeth against it then scrabbled the phone out of his inside pocket. It rang before he could hit Carla’s number.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Carla rewound the news and read the crawl again. “His body was discovered in a Gold Coast apartment.” She heard bed springs as Will sat upright.

  “I don’t have a TV, but I’ll find it online. Could it be the one in East Went Street?”

  “It’s the only information they’ve released. That and the fact he was in Chicago to attend a charity ball for Alper’s Research. There’s a photo of him on MSN.”

  She heard Will stabbing the keys on his laptop. There was a long pause.

  “Will?”

  “It’s him,” he said, both words empty of emotion.

  Carla studied the picture on her own computer and then the one on TV. It was the same publicity still of a moustachioed Franks beaming from the centre of his square jaw. Will had been the last person to see him alive. She knew the image would be an echo of whatever he’d witnessed in the apartment. “You’re sure?”

  His breathing was his only response.

  Carla studied her two triangulation maps. “So, you got a room at the Ambrosia.”

  He answered eventually. “Looks like she’s settled for the rest of the night as well.”

  The other red dot had stopped moving in the Fortuna Gardens district. She was in one of two hotels that were next to each other, the Mercure or the Fantasia.

  “Senator…” He sounded distant.

  Carla knew it was pointless trying to persuade Will to sleep. She opened up another window. “Jacob Franks’ bipartisan efforts have secured meaningful legislation for Illinois and the first increase in fuel economy standards for more than a decade.” She quickly read it aloud from his official bio. “Franks serves on three Senate Committees providing him with multiple channels to benefit Illinois. He currently serves on the Financial Services and General Government Committee, the Energy, Natural Resources and Infrastructure Committee and the Senate Ethics Committee.” Her eyes glided down the details of his working class background. “Graduated Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.” She could hear Will’s fingers at the keyboard again.

  “Let’s see if he has any connection to the Business and Human Rights Summit. What’s this Alper’s Research organisation?”

  Carla lodged the handset further into the crook of her neck to free her hands. “He’s a patron. Alper’s is a neurological disease.” She opened another window.

  “Is a member of his family a sufferer?” His syllables were slurred.

  “There’s no mention of a family in his bio.” She found the website for the charity and heard Will suck in air through his teeth.

  “What happened to you?” She didn’t anticipate a straight response.

  “No mention of Franks in relation to the summit, let’s see what we can both find on him. I’m going to try and stay awake, but call me if we get an address on the site or if she moves from the hotel.” He rang off. He obviously didn’t want to speculate about where he was headed next.

  She glanced at the clock on her taskbar – 8.47pm. Carla had secured the blinds at the partition window now. She had the whole wing of the floor to herself.

  Tam’s belly felt like it had started to eat itself. No food had passed his lips since the dinner he’d had with his parents and grandmother. His home seemed like a make-believe place now. He didn’t know how long he’d been in the cage with the girl. He tried counting every time he woke, but he couldn’t even get past a hundred before he lost track. His aching head made him confused, made him lose his place. Acid rinsed through his gut. He was too dehydrated to wet himself.

  The girl had been fed. He’d pretended to still be unconscious as somebody had entered the cage, lifted the hood and pushed food into her mouth, but there had been nothing for him. He’d seen her face and she wasn’t hideous. No missing jaw, just a glimpse of a pretty nose.

  Who was she? The only thing he was sure of now was that it was the men who were bad and not the girl. He’d been scared of being punished for the secret he’d kept, but saw that what the men were doing was something much worse than his trespass in the factory. What was it they wanted from girls like her and his sister? Was it the same thing Songsuda had allowed them to have that his father had never forgiven her for?

  He recalled his father striking his sister, remembered the sound it had made when Skinny Man had used the back of his hand on the girl’s face. He felt as if he would never understand cruelty, even if he got to be grown-up. Why would they want to hurt this girl? Had she lied to them like his sister had lied to him?

  Every time Tam moved and dared to peer out of the cage he saw Skinny Man sitting in his chair. But he couldn’t risk giving away his only escape route through the unstapled wire until he was sure he was gone. He had to stay as still as he could, make them think he was dead.

  Maybe they were still deciding what to do with him, or perhaps Skinny Man was just going to watch him die anyway. He remembered the way he’d smiled when he was suffocating the girl.

  He tensed his legs in the ropes again, gently moved his ankles in a saw motion, so indiscernibly he was sure Skinny Man couldn’t see. It was like his nightmare, being chased but unable to move his feet, but Tam thought that if he kept on gently running he could loosen the ropes.

  He heard the cage door unlock and closed his eyes. A weight was on his legs, somebody leaning their whole body on him. He tried not to cry out even as the needle went in his arm and it felt like his head was filling with warm water. He exerted pressure on his nail to repel the drowsiness, but the pain rapidly diminished until it was nothing but a distant beacon in a jet black sea.

  Poppy surveyed the nondescript office, examining the diploma on the wall. Bachelor of Medicine degree, Guangzhou Medical University, China; she assumed it had been paid for. Leaning against the portable air con unit was a bag of golf clubs. She pictured Dr Ren wheeling them down the fairway of the Serangoon Hills Country Club.

  Her presence meant the police would soon dissect everything in the room. Every physical item and then every background detail of Ren’s fifty-three-year history would be scrupulously combed through. There was more than enough for them to work with. The celebrated herbalist’s counterfeit qualifications were as good a place to start as any.

  No family. No dependants. People like Ren never accumulated others, only fed on them. She examined the photos of him at balls and charity drives, stood grinning with various social luminaries. Was this all it amounted to? Was a one-bed apartment over his surgery and these framed moments of syc
ophancy all he’d scrambled to the top of the pile for?

  She heard footsteps in reception. Poppy strolled to the window and opened it.

  Will came violently awake as if he’d just been resuscitated. The lamp was still on, but its yellow light had been neutralised by the day glowing through the blind. He clicked away the laptop’s screensaver and was relieved to find he hadn’t missed an update. The GPS told him the woman was no longer at the hotel, but somewhere behind Serangoon Stadium.

  He checked his mobile. No messages from Carla. He’d asked her to call him when she moved from the hotel. She’d obviously let him sleep. 6.22am. He’d been out solidly for nearly three hours. He couldn’t remember losing consciousness, must have blacked out moments after he’d spoken to her. God knows what sort of painkillers he’d taken.

  He wondered if her research into Franks had yielded anything. He punched up her number, but had second thoughts about dialling. If there’d been a vital development, she would have called him. If he spoke to her now, they’d do nothing but unnerve each other.

  The sensation in his stomach had altered. It wasn’t so intense, but the area of dull discomfort had expanded to his diaphragm. He knew that wasn’t good and chewed a few more tablets.

  He couldn’t wait in the room. He had to get away from the cloying smell of damp and paint. Will took the laptop with him.

  Once out of the building he waded through the heat and along several quiet lanes towards the sound of cars. He clamped his jaw as he tried to stem the pain. He opened the website and GPS map on the laptop and headed towards the stadium.

  Pope had observed the dot of the GPS move across town and then halt.

  Weaver came out of the bathroom naked from the waist up, dabbing hotel shaving soap from his face. “Still static?”

  “Yeah. In Yio Chu Kang Terrace. Maybe she’s stopped for breakfast.”

  “Or Frost’s stopped for breakfast.” Weaver draped the towel on the back of his armchair and seated himself next to Pope.