Crime Scene: Singapore

by Stephen Leather

  The earth was flying out. Thump, thump … it was ready. A bit shallow perhaps, but it was tiring work and it would probably do.

  Now here was the problem: her father was rich. She was used to a certain lifestyle. I couldn’t supply the lifestyle. I was useless and what’s more, I’d asked her to go back to work. We’d talked about none of this before our marriage. After all, I saw now, talking wasn’t really what I wanted her mouth to be doing most of the time. Well, that particular pleasure went right out the window.

  Reality set in. Marry in haste, repent at leisure. My lord, how true are those words.

  And there you have it. We dragged the marriage around like a dead cat. She went back to work, and we stopped having sex. Not immediately, but inevitably, like a train rapidly running out of steam. Her temper got worse. Her contempt for me was obvious. Going home was the last thing I wanted to do. I think she was seeing someone else behind my back. I began to hate her.

  Finally, that was it. I’d had enough. Actually, it was only this evening that I’d really, truly had enough. Such a short time ago, and the events of five minutes had led here, into this jungly space with a large hole in the ground big enough to put a body inside. No one was more surprised than me.

  Divorce. I’d flung the word at her like a knife. Her face had been a picture of appalled dismay. I loathed her and wanted her to suffer. Divorce. Even in this dissolute age, in her family it meant disgrace. It did in mine too, but I no longer cared. I needed to get out, get out, get rid of her.

  I left her standing in the kitchen and went to take a shower. I’d expected the usual show of incandescent temper, but she had said nothing. Maybe we were finally there: she had seen the sense of it and she wanted out too. Get on with our lives. I’d sleep on the sofa tonight and move out tomorrow.

  Ah, but that was not the way it was to be. When I came downstairs, she was gone. Out to cry on the shoulder of one of her rich friends, doubtless. The new boyfriend? I just didn’t care. I called her name but I seemed to have the house to myself.

  The shallow grave was filling up fast. Much easier to fill in than dig out. Each shovel of earth meant only one thing. I would never have to see her again.

  Without warning, she’d come out of the darkness, hand raised, knife flashing. I fought off her flailing arms, twisting and turning. Then there was blood everywhere … and silence. Instant divorce.

  It was done. The last of the earth fell into place. Pat, pat. The rustle of leaves. Calm fell on the moonlit clearing.

  She walked away. A car started up. The earth felt warm and as I settled comfortably into this final sleep, I thought, she’ll never get away with it.

  But it didn’t matter.

  I was rid of her. I was free.

  Singapore-based DAWN FARHAM is the author of three historical novels set in Singapore, The Red Thread, The Shallow Seas and The Hills of Singapore, published by Monsoon Books, and an Asian-based children’s book, Fan Goes to Sea, published by Beanstalk Press, Kuala Lumpur. She is working on a crime fiction series set in Western Australia, as well as several screenplays, for which she has received grants from the Singapore Film Commission. Website: www.dawnfarnham.com.

  ‘The Corporate Wolf’ by Pranav S. Joshi

  On that Monday morning, CEO David Quek did not summon his managers to his Jurong office for a weekly progress review meeting. Today was not his day, he had realised.

  And today was not the day to leisurely sip piping hot latte in his leather armchair, read The Business Times, hug his BlackBerry or comb through his appointments with his beautiful secretary, Pearl Ow.

  April sun, freshly liberated from a prison of clouds, was peeking through a window blind in his spacious office with its eternal warmth, trying to enliven his mood. But the atmosphere in his office was filled with tension. Escalating. Unusual. Unnerving.

  In front of David sat Mr Yeo, the purchasing manager of David’s company, Lov-Ely Face Pte Ltd, which manufactured cosmetics and personal care products for the retail market in Singapore.

  Yeo was a fifty-eight-year-old, lanky man with thinning grey hair, drawer-like mouth and yellow teeth. Dressed in a badly ironed shirt, he looked as though he had not slept for a few days and was witnessing the fulfilment of a Nostradamus’ catastrophic prediction.

  ‘Wh-what do you mean?’ David nearly yelled, his face morphing into a picture on a poison warning label.

  ‘As I said, our company is going to kill about a thousand women. Thousand!’ Yeo whispered, urgency dripping from his voice. He glanced at the closed door of the office and made a laid-in-a-coffin gesture using his hands. ‘In fact, some may have already died!’

  ‘Oh-h!’ David straightened his posture with a violent jerk. His chair hummed with a little bounce.

  ‘I came back from China yesterday. My wife is—’

  ‘I know. She’s having some health problems,’ David interjected and tapped his finger on his desk. ‘Look, I’m not interested in your personal matters. Let’s focus on the main, killing issue.’

  Yeo swallowed a gulp of spit. He hated being insulted by his new boss who was thirty years younger than he was. But this was not the time to register his displeasure. ‘Do you remember, in January, you’d told me to change the supplier of nano-minerals that we use in our anti-aging cream?’ he asked.

  ‘Which one?’

  Yeo dug his hand into his trousers’ pocket and brought out a fifty-gram, saucer-shaped bottle. ‘This one, super strength revitalizing nano-energy cream. For ladies.’

  ‘Umm, that supplier? Oh ya!’ David nodded, remembering the incident in which he had lectured Yeo about the techniques of best sourcing and instructed him to buy raw materials from a supplier who had quoted the lowest price. ‘Because the other Chinese company offered us a heavy discount.’ He defended his decision.

  ‘Ya, but do you know why?’ Yeo jabbed his pen at the quotation of that company, kept in his file. ‘They sabo us. Their ex-production manager, Mr Tsoi, met me secretly in Guangzhou. He said the clay that his company had used to manufacture nano-minerals came from a site which was polluted with toxic industrial waste.’

  ‘How’s that possible? It was an ISO 9001 company.’

  ‘Mr Tsoi said some monkey business was going on.’

  David’s MBA trained mind tried to digest the information. OK, calm down, calm down, he said to himself, taking deep breaths. He then decided to buy some time to think over the whole issue. ‘Give me a full report on this matter, so that I can do an in-depth analysis,’ he said, a frown pulling his brows together.

  Usually, in his report, he would ask for details encompassing ‘5 Wives and 1 Husband’, or ‘5 Ws (When, What, Why, Who and Where) and 1 H (How)’ as a part of the information gathering exercise, followed by root cause analysis, lessons learned and action plan to prevent such an incident in future.

  ‘No point preparing any report, meh.’ Yeo, who was not academically inclined, shrugged with his coarse mannerisms, trying hard to comply with David’s instruction not to use lah, meh and other Singlish words while talking to him. He continued, ‘According to Mr Tsoi, those cheap nano-minerals contained toxic heavy metals and pesticides in some activator matrix that would allow them to be absorbed deep inside the skin, without producing any burning sensation. From there, the nanoparticles would enter the blood stream.’

  ‘So, are you saying that all those women who have used our cream need to go for blood purification?’

  ‘No, it’s not as simple as that. The nanoparticles will accumulate in vital organs like the liver, kidney, heart or even brain, and then poison them over time.’

  ‘Then how come we haven’t heard any complaints so far?’ Memories of a Hollywood movie scene showing a massive pile of women’s corpses flashed in David’s mind. He shuddered.

  ‘Because those particles are very small. They won’t show up in the routine pathological tests or body scans due to their small size, and so the doctors won’t be able to diagnose accurately. Besides, the nano size at
which they exist, their toxicity is much higher than if they were absorbed in their normal size. The person will ultimately die.’

  ‘Why should Mr Tsoi tell you this, after four months? That’s absurd!’ David threw his hands up in the air angrily.

  ‘It’s a long story. His ex-company has silenced him. A big cover-up!’ Yeo’s eyes narrowed to slits.

  ‘How? How did they silence him?’

  ‘By stuffing his mouth with money.’

  ‘Oh!’ The corners of David’s mouth drew back in a snarl. He quickly recomposed and grabbed his pen. ‘How much?’

  ‘He didn’t tell me the exact figure, but he said he got a few million yuan to keep his mouth shut.’

  ‘So much money!’ The pen dropped out of David’s hand.

  ‘One Singapore dollar is about 4.8 yuan.’

  ‘But still, it’s a lot of money.’

  ‘It was his price, because of the seriousness of the matter. Several old ladies had died after they’d used the company’s nano-mineral clay.’ From his file, Yeo brought out a newspaper clipping showing a woman’s photo in the obituary column. ‘One of their victims!’

  David glanced at the woman’s tormented face, which looked puffy. A thought came to his mind that in future, he would be looking at photos of Singaporean women in obituary columns, with an underlined remark that David Quek’s company had poisoned them. The media, sensing an easy meat, would tear apart his company’s reputation, calling the episode ‘The Ugly Face of Lov-Ely Face Pte Ltd’. He sighed.

  ‘Two other staff of that company also knew about the problem—their CEO and QA manager.’

  ‘How they discovered the problem?’

  ‘The QA manager was the one who first came to know that the site was polluted with toxic waste. That was why they were getting the high-mineral clay from their supplier at a dirt-cheap price. She ran the necessary tests and confirmed that the nano-minerals produced from that clay by their company were also contaminated. But the contamination wouldn’t show up in routine tests. She alerted Mr Tsoi who then alerted the CEO.’

  ‘Then why didn’t the CEO inform us?’ David loosened his tie. ‘Horrible!’

  ‘It was a small company just like ours. The CEO, who owned the company, quickly sold it off after learning about the deaths. Now it’s a part of a big organisation. The clay which they sell to us now is of high quality.’ Yeo took out a paper from the file and showed it. ‘The new management had informed us about the change in ownership.’

  ‘So, now what?’ David was frustrated. He pressed his head with his palms as if he had developed a severe headache. ‘How many bottles of cream had we manufactured using that contaminated batch?’

  ‘One thousand. I’ve checked with our sales department. The retail shops have sold all the bottles by now.’

  ‘That means we’re in deep trouble!’ David shook his head. ‘Have you talked to our sales staff and the production manager about this problem?’

  ‘No, I thought I should first talk to you. Right now, just like the Chinese company, only three persons in our company know about this problem. You, me and Madam Poh, our QC manager.’

  ‘Poh! The one we’re going to retrench?’

  After taking over the reigns of the traditionally run company, David had begun to introduce sweeping changes in its operations to do a complete makeover of its corporate DNA. Paradigm shift, brand differentiation, New Age thinking, human capital … the industry buzzwords had entered its old-fashioned world and created a commotion among the employees. To resize and right-size the company, David had prepared a list of ‘old timers’ whom he deemed frogs in the well who were incapable of thinking out-of-the-box. His plan was to gradually get rid of those staff and hire younger, better educated staff, the best of the breed. In fact, a few frog-employees had already been replaced. Madam Poh and even Yeo, who had been with the company for the last thirty-one years, were on his list.

  ‘Ya, I had no choice.’ Yeo nodded. ‘I had to tell Madam Poh to analyse the samples that we’ve kept for traceability purposes, under the GMP system. She confirmed that the batch contains toxic compounds. She couldn’t test all of them, but she’s sure that it’s full of nasty stuff!’

  ‘Will she leak the information to anyone?’

  ‘Nay, she’s very loyal to our company.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Ya, very sure.’ Yeo nodded vigorously. ‘She has promised me that she won’t tell anyone about the problem. She has access to our confidential product formulation database, but never ever she has leaked any such information.’

  ‘That gives me some comfort.’

  ‘But the problem is, my wife Siew Eng, and Poh both have been using the same batch of cream. They bought from the market, after you stopped the staff from buying our company’s products directly, at a discount. They paid about $22 each. And now, both of them are sick. Their livers are affected.’ Yeo pointed at his abdomen and then at the bottle. ‘This is Siew Eng’s bottle. She has already used half of it.’

  ‘I see!’ David understood why Yeo had earlier talked about his wife. ‘Have you told her that the cream is toxic?’

  ‘No, otherwise, she’ll create a storm and will become even more sick. Besides, I’ve my own rule. I don’t discuss company matters with my family members. It’s not ethical.’

  ‘Hmm. But I’m surprised that Mr Tsoi met you secretly to expose his ex-company, even after being paid to shut his mouth. That means he’s not ethical.’ David made a sharp observation.

  ‘Oh no, actually he was not going to meet me. Just by coincidence, we bumped into each other in the hotel lobby. He told Siew Eng that she was looking younger than she had looked when we met the last time, in Singapore. So, she proudly said that she was using our company’s anti-aging cream.’

  David stared at the offending bottle, his hand absently rubbing his cheeks as if they had come into contact with the cream.

  ‘Afterwards, when Mr Tsoi learnt that we were going to consult a TCM expert in Guangzhou for her liver treatment, he thought that it was his duty to alert me, before it was too late.’ From his breast pocket, Yeo brought out a name card of a TCM professor associated with the Guangzhou University of Traditional Chinese Medicine. ‘Siew Eng’s local TCM physician had recommended her to consult this professor.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry to hear about your wife’s problem.’

  David’s half-hearted ‘sorry’ did not impress Yeo. ‘It’s OK. Our fate, what else to say?’ He sighed. ‘Now, the question is, do you want to recall all the bottles from the consumers and inform the Health Sciences Authority?’

  David’s body shook as though it was electrocuted. ‘I … I need to think about the consequences.’

  ‘Frankly, a recall will be very difficult, because according to the sales staff, many tourists buy our products as well. That means we’ll have to advertise the recall not only in the local, but also in the foreign media.’

  ‘What if some women have already died, huh? Their families will sue us, accusing us of being negligent. No, I don’t think our sales staff can handle this. Some more, we don’t even have a PR manager, unlike those big companies.’

  ‘This is going to be a tough challenge.’

  ‘Have you heard of the cockroach theory?’

  ‘About those cockroach fighting competitions in Beijing?’

  ‘No, no.’ David pointed at the floor. ‘When a person sees a cockroach in any place, the person will think that there’ll be many more cockroaches hiding and breeding in the crevices. In this case, if such news will come out, people will think that there are many more bad news that we’re hiding. Our pots are not clean!’

  ‘This is not a cockroach. It’s like a dinosaur!’ Yeo stretched his arms apart. ‘Actually, the whole company will collapse and become extinct. Some of us may even land up in jail. People will call us murderers. And we’re not only talking about just the death. What about the pain and suffering of the victims, like what my wife is experiencing? And those
expensive medical treatments? Some families will go bankrupt, I tell you.’

  David stared at the ceiling. He had worked on a number of problem-solving and decision-making assignments during his MBA, using techniques such as SWOT Analysis and Decision Grid. But this real life problem in the dog-eat-dog world hit him with an impact for which he was not prepared. In fact, the situation had already escalated from being a problem into a crisis. It was now a question of the company’s survival.

  ‘Could we cover up?’ he asked after a long pause. He justified his question: ‘I’m just exploring various options, so don’t get me wrong.’

  ‘It’s up to you.’ Yeo pointed at a photo of David’s father, whom they called towkay or, simply, Mr Quek. ‘I’ve served your father since the day he started this company. You were not even born at that time. He loved this company from his heart. It’ll be very painful for me to see his lovely face baby dying so fast after his departure.’

  David’s father had died suddenly during a heart attack last year, in December 2009. The incident had forced David to return to Singapore from New York, where he had just completed his MBA.

  ‘Hmm.’ David sighed. Yeo’s last sentence knifed him. If he opted for a recall and caused the company to collapse, the whole industry would think of him as an incompetent son of a competent father. Now, the only option was to cover up the matter like the CEO in China had done. It was either sink or sail.

  Yeo continued his assault on David’s abilities. ‘That’s why I’d told you not to just focus on price while buying raw materials.’

  ‘I know.’ David bit his lips. ‘Now don’t do blamestorming. Let’s focus on the crisis management.’

  ‘There’s a Chinese saying, “The sheep has no choice when in the jaws of the wolf.” I think we’re already in the jaws.’ Yeo coughed.

  David thought for a while. Then with his innate shrewdness, he asked, ‘Let’s say if we want to “silence” Madam Poh, will she agree to it?’

  ‘In what way? The way they did in Guangzhou?’