The front of the Next Page was not what I would have called welcoming: its blue-painted doorway and small obscured windows made it look like a stretch Tardis. Doctor Who’s assistant was seated on a stool at a tall desk by the entrance; she had taken the form of a fat Malaysian girl. ‘Twenty dorrah,’ she said, as we made to enter.
‘This is a pub, dear,’ Dylan pointed out.
‘Sure, but twenty dorrah. You get a drink and there’s a free draw.’
‘Are we sure to win the free draw?’
‘No.’
‘Then it’s hardly a bargain, is it, dear?’
We weren’t there to haggle: I thrust a couple of notes at her, took the two tickets she offered me and led the way through the door. Inside, a man in a suit wanted to search my bag. I told him to fuck off. We had a small stand-off until Dylan whispered in his ear; he stepped aside and let us past.
‘What did you say to him?’ I asked, above the thumping sound of the inevitable music, as we made our way towards the bar; the Bose speakers were proving their excellence once again. The place wasn’t as busy as Maddy had led me to believe; maybe the cover charge wasn’t such a good idea after all, I thought, but in the circumstances I wasn’t bothered about that.
He leaned close to reply. ‘I told him we were the special police, and that if he didn’t get out of the way we’d take him out back and kick the shit out of him. Works every time; I told the taxi driver much the same.’
I looked around the bar: I’d been expecting old Singapore, and the Next Page was trying to be that. It was a designer boozer, all themed up with hanging lanterns and Oriental carvings, the sort of classy hang-out you’ll find in every modern city. It was one long room; at the far end, beyond a central light well, I could see a blue-covered pool table, and just before it, a series of booths.
I gave Mike the tickets to exchange for drinks, and was about to head for the back area when I heard a voice that had become familiar. ‘Hey, boys.’
I stopped. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’
‘Ach, Harry’s was like a tomb and the band was shite, so I thought Ah’d come here and catch up wi’ you guys.’
At that point in time, I did not need him around; in fact, he came very close to having his head bitten clean off, until Dylan’s hand fell on his shoulder and hauled him towards the bar. ‘Sammy, wee man,’ he drawled, ‘let us get you a drink. What’s best in this fucking palace of sin?’
I didn’t hear the reply: by that time I was heading in the direction of the pool table with the blue cloth; I was happy to see that no one was playing that night. (If I was God I would remove all pool tables from pubs with a single flick of My Finger, but that’s just another quirk of Mine.)
As I approached I saw four booths on my right, very dimly lit, each with a table and a bench on either side: I checked them one by one. The first three were unoccupied, but a man sat in the fourth on the bench that faced me. Even with the lack of wattage, it took me half a second to recognise him: I’d seen him before, larger than life, in a poster on the door of the Heritage Theatre Company office at Riverside Point.
He didn’t react as I slid on to the seat opposite him. ‘I don’t like this, Mr Lee,’ I murmured. ‘My meeting was with Madeleine. You may have decided to come along in her place, but that isn’t all right with me.’ I touched the bag on my shoulder. ‘You get nothing until I see that she’s all right.’
Tony Lee said nothing. He simply stared at me across the table. I’d heard of inscrutable Orientals but this bloke was an extreme case.
I wasn’t having it: I reached across and poked him with my right forefinger, hard, in the chest. ‘Do you hear me?’ I snapped.
He didn’t. The force of my prod sent him back into the wooden divider. He recoiled from it and pitched forward, slowly, across the table. As he did, a fountain of blood exploded from his mouth, and much of it splashed over me. Siegfried and Roy’s white tiger would never be the same again.
Startled is not the word to describe my reaction. You know, because I’ve told you, that I’ve encountered a couple of stiffs in my time, but this one took me completely by surprise. ‘Fucking hell!’ I yelled, and dived inelegantly from the booth, tripping in the process and falling on to the floor.
The music drowned my shout for most of the crowd, but Dylan had been looking in my direction. By the time I’d picked myself off the floor, he was by my side, and Sammy Grant was by his. His Glaswegian eyes widened as he saw Lee’s glazed eyes, and my ruined shirt.
‘Oh, my Christ,’ he squealed, as Dylan reached across the body, going through the vain formality of trying to find a pulse in the neck.
By this time we had attracted an audience: people were watching us from the busier end of the place, and one or two, including a couple of girls, started to wander in our direction to see what was up.
Dylan stepped towards them to head them off. As I watched him, still slightly numbed by the shock, Sammy grabbed my elbow. ‘Oz, you’ve got to get the fuck out of here before the polis arrive.’ His voice was insistent, and sounded more than a little scared. ‘You don’t want tae get involved wi’ those boys. They’re no’ nice.’
‘No, pal,’ I told him. ‘I do want to get involved with them; that’s exactly what I intend.’ I glanced at Lee. ‘Now, what’s happened to him, that really is not nice. You get the fuck out of here, Sammy, if you’d rather; I’ll keep you out of it. In fact, there’s something you can do for me. Go back to the Stamford and wait for Marie Lin; tell her I’m sorry I’ve been delayed and that I’ll call her whenever I have a chance. Go on, scoot; get your arse out of here.’
He looked at me gratefully and scooted. His arse was through the nearest emergency exit in under ten seconds.
By then, Dylan seemed to have the situation in hand. The manager had appeared, down a spiral staircase that led from the office area, the doormen had been ordered to keep any potential gawpers back from the booth, and the police were being called by the barman. The music had been switched off.
‘What’s happened?’ a wide-eyed American girl asked, her question aimed at nobody in particular.
‘A man’s died,’ I told her.
She stared at me and then at the bloody tiger on my chest. ‘How?’ she mouthed.
‘I’m no doctor,’ I replied, ‘but I have done advanced first aid. A perforated ulcer looks like a possibility.’ That was true, but as far as I was concerned it was an outside chance: I reckoned that the cause of death had a lot to do with a small tear I had spotted in the side of Lee’s powder blue jacket as he lay across the table.
Dylan grabbed me and pulled me away from the small throng. There was an air of authority about him that I hadn’t seen for a long time. When he told the barman to go to the door and let nobody in but the police, the guy obeyed without hesitation. ‘What happened?’ he asked me quietly.
‘Nothing. I sat down beside him and spoke to him, till I realised something was up. Then he fell forward and gobbed blood all over me.’
‘Don’t go and look or anything, but there’s a long-bladed knife on the floor under the table. You didn’t touch it when you fell off the bench, did you?’
‘No. At least I don’t remember touching it. I was too busy hauling ass out of that booth, just like Jackie out of the car in Dallas.’
‘I’ll leave it there in that case. If your prints do show up on it we can explain them away by saying you grabbed it by accident when you hit the floor. If they don’t, someone else’s might; although I doubt it. This is a real pro job. Someone just slid into the booth beside him, spiked him, dropped the blade and slid out again without anyone noticing.’ He glanced at the crowd. ‘He could still be here. She for that matter, this didn’t need strength, just skill and the ability to get a blade past the doormen . . . and as we’ve seen it isn’t too difficult to get something past them.’
He stopped, as a commotion at the door indicated the arrival of the police. ‘Go along with what I say here, Oz,’ he hissed, ‘no messing
.’
There were three of them, a sergeant and two corporals, one a woman. The manager stepped forward, but Dylan beat him to it. ‘Are you guys Criminal Investigation Branch?’ he asked.
‘No,’ the three-striper replied. ‘We’re Patrol: we were told this was a sudden death.’
‘It’s that all right, but it’s murder; a Triad hit, I would say.’ He didn’t pause, didn’t give the man time to think about anything. ‘Call your CI people at once, and keep that area of the bar sterile.’ The sergeant nodded, then opened his mouth as if to ask who was giving the fucking orders. But Dylan cut him off again. ‘One more thing, and this is very important. Have someone contact Superintendent Tan, wherever he is, and tell him that Martin Dyer is here. That’s Martin Dyer,’ he spelled it out, ‘and tell him that he’s here, looking after Mr Oz Blackstone.’
The copper looked at me for the first time, and his eyes widened; the female corporal had already clocked me, knew who I was. ‘Sah!’ he barked, and reached for his radio.
I pulled Dylan to one side. ‘Who is Superintendent Tan?’ I hissed at him. ‘And who, the fuck, is Martin Dyer?’
25
He was, of course. It was the name, the new identity, they had given him after the Amsterdam débâcle, when he had come back from the dead and had been more or less conscripted as an Interpol agent. He reckoned that calling him Dyer had been someone’s idea of a joke.
Superintendent Tan Keng Seng (known universally as Jimmy) was, he told me, the head of the state-security section of the Singapore Police, the sort that every force has but doesn’t like to talk about. He worked in association with his opposite numbers in the neighbouring countries and with various international agencies. He reeled off a list that made my eyes water: Interpol, the American DEA, the CIA, occasionally the FBI, (apparently the Americans didn’t share information with each other unless ordered to), our own Secret Intelligence Service and the Russian SVR.
Wherever the superintendent had been, getting word to him must have been given top priority for he arrived before the detectives. He walked in like God; he had a presence that parted crowds like the bow of a ship cuts through water. He was aged somewhere in his fifties, with baggy eyes and a yellow complexion. His grey-flecked brown hair was parted roughly on one side, and he was dressed all in black, a collarless silk shirt with slacks and slip-on shoes.
He stared at Dylan for a long time, then ushered both of us ahead of him into the area that had been sealed off. ‘Jesus, Martin,’ he said, when we were out of earshot, ‘they told me you were dead for real, that you’d been wasted in that big drug operation in Bangkok. What for the hell you show yourself here? It’s crazy, man. If these Triad boys find out you’re alive, they’ll work out who set them up. They chop you to pieces. What you do now, private security for Mr Blackstone here?’
‘I’m a friend of Mr Blackstone, Jimmy. My name is Benedict Luker now, and I’m an author. I’m here because Oz has private business, and he’s asked me to come along to help him.’
‘Tell me rest later.’ He looked towards the booth. ‘What is this? Mr Blackstone’s shirt tells me that you know.’
‘His name is Lee Kan Tong,’ Dylan replied, ‘known as Tony Lee, when he was in London. He’s the head of a theatre company called the Heritage, but our information is that he’s a member of a Triad society, in Singapore.’
‘Ah,’ said Tan. ‘I get it. He saw you and recognised you, so you killed him. Don’t worry, son. The autopsy will say it’s a heart-attack.’
‘No, Jimmy, that’s not what happened. Oz, tell him the story.’
And so I explained to the most powerful secret policeman in South East Asia, that I, one of the most recognisable faces in the Western world, had come to his country on a fool’s mission to get my brother-in-law out of a situation which now, in the light of all that had happened, looked very trivial indeed. I told him I had come to meet Lee’s girlfriend, not him, and I showed him the fifty grand in the knapsack. ‘But he turned up instead. He’s probably killed her already, and thought he’d collect fifty grand from me for Harvey’s photographs. The big problem for him is that the Triads had him under observation instead. My guess is that they thought he’d come to sell me Maddy’s pictures of their top guy, and they got to him first, maybe in a way they hoped would incriminate me.’
‘And they fucking would do that,’ Jimmy Tan exclaimed. ‘We know just about everything about Triad in Singapore, but for one thing. We don’t know who top man is, not his name, not what he looks like, not nothing. These boys don’t ride in Popemobile waving to crowds, although they have same influence in Chinese communities; they ride in cars with windows blacked out. This one, this Lee Kan Tong, I don’t know, but if he’s new back from London, that would explain why. Let’s see what he’s got on him.’
Two more police had arrived; I guessed they were the detectives. Tan shouted to them, ‘Clear the place. Get everybody outside, take names and addresses, and see ID, then let them go. Quick now.’ He watched as his orders were obeyed.
As soon as the bar was cleared, he turned. ‘Let’s see what we’ve got,’ he exclaimed, then walked over to the booth, reached in and grabbed the body under the armpits. ‘Wait,’ he muttered, as if he was talking to it, then looked over his shoulder at me. ‘Mr Blackstone, you a big guy and you got blood on you already. Can you do this?’
‘You mean haul him out?’ What about scene-of-crime technicians and such? I used to be a copper too, I should tell you.’
‘But now you a movie star you don’t want to get your hands dirty?’
Mockery has always got to me. ‘Shift,’ I told him, then leaned over and pulled Tony Lee’s body out from the bench seat, awkwardly, because I really didn’t want to get any more of the gore on me. The trouble with blood is that you never know where it’s been, or what’s in it. He hadn’t been a big man; even dead and flopping he didn’t weigh all that much, so I didn’t have any trouble holding him up. ‘What do you want me to do with him?’ I asked.
‘Put him on the pool table.’
I hefted him across to the blue baize; it wasn’t full size but it looked to be just about big enough. It was racked for a game and Mike had to sweep the balls into the pockets before I could lay him out. As soon as I had, Jimmy Tan stepped past me and began to search him. He found keys, to a BMW, and I guessed to his home, in the right trouser pocket, and some change in the left. The inside pockets of the jacket held a wallet, stuffed with Sing dollars and Malaysian ringit, and a Singaporean passport. A compact Beretta Cheetah automatic sat in a holster strapped to his right ankle. But nowhere did the superintendent find any film or prints.
‘Whoever killed him came for pictures and he got them. He’s in for big surprise when he looks at them.’ Tan laughed. ‘He expect top man in Triad, he get Scotsman’s bollocks. You no worry now,’ he said to me. ‘Your brother-in-law is okay. They won’t understand those, they’ll throw them away.’
But I was worried, and I’d continue to be worried until I knew for certain what had happened to Maddy January. It worked on two levels: I didn’t trust that lady as long as there was breath in her body, and yet, having met her, I found that I wanted to reassure myself that there still was.
‘I need more assurance than that,’ I replied. ‘I still need to know what happened to the woman.’
Tan shrugged. ‘What matter? Fuck her, she’s in the sea.’
‘The Triads will want to make sure as well,’ I pointed out. ‘If she’s still alive, and maybe still has the pictures, she’s a threat.’
‘Then let them have her, and for sure she won’t be a problem any more.’
‘And you still won’t have identified the top banana.’
‘True,’ he conceded. ‘What you wanna do? Got any ideas?’
‘I want to see where this guy lived. If we find her there, dead, okay; if not, maybe there’ll be something that’ll give us a pointer to where she might have gone.’
Jimmy Tan picked up the keys from the po
ol table . . . that cover was never going to be the same again . . . and tossed them in the air. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I can find out his address no problem . . . and we have no problem getting in either.’
He grinned at me. ‘Now I take you back to your hotel, but first we better fit you into one of those T-shirts on show behind bar. You can’t turn up for your girl in that one.’
I stared at him: secret fucking policemen. ‘How did you know about that?’ I demanded.
He laughed out loud. ‘Mr Blackstone, you forget: you made your date on television.’
26
Fuck! Live television! That stuff gets everywhere these days; no bookie in the world was going to give me odds against Susie switching on Chris Tarrant one night, and looking at footage of me trashing Mai Bong and his show, and picking up the beauty in the front row into the bargain.
Confession may or may not be good for the soul, but it can be a wise precaution. I decided that as soon as I got back I’d phone Susie and fill her in on every detail of my exciting evening, including my fixing up a meet with Marie Lin to talk a deal about a part in the movie of Blue Star Falling.
That’s what I’d planned, honest; Susie would believe me . . . of course she would.
It was eleven thirty by the time Mike and I got back to the Stamford. It hadn’t occurred to me for a moment that Marie would still be there, but she was, at a table in the foyer bar, close to the waitress station. I nodded good night to Dylan and headed towards her.
‘Hey,’ I said, as I approached, ‘what are you doing? A woman on her own at this time of night? There’s flight crew coming in and out of this place all the time. You don’t want anyone to get the wrong idea.’
She laughed quietly, as if she was amused by my concern. ‘They only get the wrong idea if I give it to them, and I won’t do that. I waited because your friend said there had been trouble at the Next Page.’ She looked me up and down, as if she was checking that I had no bits missing. ‘Are you all right?’
For The Death Of Me Page 16
