For The Death Of Me

by Jardine, Quintin

  ‘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 ‘Café 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-fax-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.

  ‘Don’ know.’

  ‘Who did she dive with?’

  ‘Don’ know either. She never tell me; Miz Maddy never tell me much, only ’bout Mr Tony.’

  ‘What did she tell you about him?’ Tan snapped at her, as if he was annoyed that he hadn’t extracted that piece of information.

  ‘Not so much tell, more ask. She ask me if I ever answer phone to women looking for Mr Tony.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I say once or twice woman call for him, young woman, Singaporean.’

  ‘Did she give a name?’ I asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Leave any messages?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What did you tell Ms Maddy?’

  ‘That what I tell her, same as I tell you.’

  ‘When did she ask you this?’

  Somehow, the maid managed to shrug her face. ‘I don’ know,’ she mumbled. ‘A few times, maybe over last month, six weeks or so.’

  ‘And that’s why she tailed him with her camera,’ I said to Jimmy Tan, ‘and got herself into this fucking mess.’

  ‘Looks like,’ he agreed. ‘What you find back there? Anything to help you?’

  ‘Nothing. Tony’s cleaned the house pretty efficiently; don’t know why he needed a maid.’

  ‘You look at garbage?’

  ‘No.’

  He chuckled. ‘That why you actor not cop, Mr Blackstone. We always look in garbage.’

  ‘What did you find?’

  ‘Go back and see, in kitchen.’

  We did as he said; what we’d overlooked was a green bin-bag. We unfastened the wire that closed it and peered inside. What we saw was a mess of wet ash and melted plastic. We resealed it and went b
ack to Tan. ‘Lee had a fire,’ he told us. ‘She says that yesterday in the evening, before he went to meet you, he burned all his papers and Ms Maddy’s photographs in the shower in the second bathroom. She cleaned it this morning and was going to dump the bag down garbage chute when we come in.’

  ‘So what do you think, Jimmy?’ Dylan asked him.

  ‘I think she not a threat to Mr Blackstone’s brother-in-law any more. I think she maybe dead, and that Lee tried to get money from Mr Blackstone to help him go on run himself from Triads. Or maybe they run together. I don’t care: the photograph of the Triad top man doesn’t exist any more, so there nothing in this for me. The Triads can have them both, if they catch them . . . and they usually do.’

  29

  Jimmy gave us a lift back into the city. He was going to take us to the hotel, but Dylan asked him to drop us in Orchard Road instead. The wise old guy knew where we were headed: he took us straight to the vehicle entrance at the back of Ngee Ann City.

  It’s quite a place, a bloody great edifice of red granite and marble, which has managed to attract some of the world’s leading names in consumer and luxury products. They look after the ladies too. We found the Philip Kingsley Trichological Centre on level five. It’s world-famous and its published client list includes Barbra Streisand, Cher and Mick Jagger; Maddy had been mixing in exalted company and, into the bargain, enjoying a lifestyle beyond the means of your average theatre-company director.

  It was a dead end, though . . . or maybe that should be a split end. Philip Kingsley is not your average barber shop: it’s a highly specialised place, which focuses on the health of its customers’ hair rather than on cutting it into attractive shapes. It’s not a business where the ladies go for an hour’s chat under the dryer, and if they do, anything they say is treated with the confidentiality of the confessional. That’s more or less what they told us; the head trichologist didn’t even confirm that Maddy had been one of their clients. I wound up buying a stack of remoisturising products and telling them they could add my name to their celebrity client list, if they chose.

  We didn’t have time to shop, or I could have done some damage to my credit card. Instead, we found the taxi rank; we had interviewed and rejected four drivers before we found one who convinced us that he knew for sure where Café Narcosis was. (Note for Singaporean cabbies: knowing the address of the place to which you’re taking your passengers helps to reassure them.) He took us downtown past Clarke Quay and across the river, stopping almost at once in front of a building called Riverside Walk. ‘In there,’ he said. ‘Next to Friendly Waters.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Friendly Waters; they organise diving trips. Okay-lah? That seven dollar fifty.’

  I gave him ten and we stepped out into the rising heat. The early-morning cloud had gone: it was going to be seriously warm. I led the way up a few steps to the second level of the building; at the top, a sign faced us, ‘Friendly Waters Seasports Services’ with an arrow, pointing to a shop-front. ‘FW,’ I whispered.

  The place had a glass door, and this time I could see inside. It was small and crammed with dive gear. I tried the handle and stepped inside; when I say ‘small’ I mean that there wasn’t room for both Dylan and me. There was an equally cramped office to the right, with a Singaporean guy, in his thirties, sitting at a cluttered desk tapping away at a laptop keyboard.

  He looked up; dark hair, brown skin. ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘You run this place?’

  ‘Yeah. My name’s Dave. How can I help? You want to book a trip?’

  ‘That depends. I’m looking for a friend, her name’s Maddy January, I can’t find her. I know she dives with you, so I’m starting here.’

  He nodded. ‘She does. Reason you can’t find her is she isn’t in Singapore. She’s on Aur.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Pulau Aur, off Mersing. It’s where we have our divers’ lodge. Maddy headed up there on her own last night; she came in around five and booked in for a week, said she’d drive straight up there and catch the supply boat on its way back from dropping off the weekend dive party. She was lucky: normally I’d have been with them and this place closed, but my buddy took this group up for me. She told me a man would be joining her, paid for him too, but I thought he was going up last night. You him?’

  When I nodded, his eyes narrowed a little, his face became a little less friendly. ‘Then you’ve got competition. Another guy ask after her this morning. What’s going on?’

  That was not the news I’d expected or wanted to hear. I fixed him with a stare. ‘Believe me, I’m the person she wants to see.’

  He looked a little harder, then the light came on. ‘Hey, you’re the guy in the movies; you tore up that creep Mai Bong last night. You’re in Straits Times this morning.’

  ‘How do I get to Mersing quickly?’ I asked.

  ‘You need to drive, I reckon.’

  ‘How far?’

  ‘Little over hundred and fifty kilometres.’

  ‘And to Aur?’

  ‘You need to wait for a boat going out there, unless you charter. The islands are around sixty kilometre offshore.’

  ‘You got a map?’

  ‘Sure.’ He picked one up from the morass on the desk and handed it to me. ‘You going to dive?’

  ‘Only if I have to. Don’t worry, I’ve got my PADI advanced open water, and rescue.’

  ‘Okay then; we got stuff in the lodge you can hire if you need it.’ He reached out a hand; we shook. ‘On you go, enjoy and say hello to Maddy for me. You find the other guy, tell him not to take the piss from Davey again.’

  30

  We went back to the hotel and asked the concierge to rent us a car, as quickly as possible. For once Hertz tried harder than Avis and a Mondeo was delivered to the front door at one thirty. Mike insisted on driving; he said he’d done a police advanced driving course early in his service. That did nothing for my confidence, for I’ve seen some of those maniacs behind the wheel, but I didn’t argue the point because I preferred to navigate.

  We took the Seletar Expressway heading north. I had the knapsack with the money; I didn’t know what the police would say about that if they searched us at the border crossing, but if push came to shove I was prepared to use Jimmy Tan’s name to get us through.

  As it happened, my British passport and Benny Luker’s US version got their respect, and opened the gateway for us, no problem. We crossed the causeway into Johor Baharu, then went east on Highway Three, heading for a place called Kota Tingii. It’s a fine old road, built by the British in the 1930s. Unfortunately they were so self-assured, or naïve, in those days that they forgot to take the elementary precaution of mining the bridges, and the Japanese were able to use it to great effect in 1942.

  The drive was straightforward; the only exciting moments were provided by local nutters who seemed to think that a Proton is a racing car. We let them get on with it and arrived at Mersing jetty just before three thirty. We found a secure park for the Mondeo, then went in search of a vessel to take us to the islands. There were all sorts there, but none had a scheduled sailing.

  Finally we found a quayside office with a sign in English saying ‘Charter’. The boat on offer looked sleek and fast; it was a thirty-foot cruiser, extravagantly named Malay Goddess and modern, unlike most of those moored next to it, which resembled the river taxis in Singapore. I did a deal with the guy behind the counter, and paid him with Visa for twenty-four hours’ hire.

  ‘When will you be ready to leave? I asked him.

  ‘You leave any time you like, boss. It’s self-drive.’

  ‘Jesus!’ Dylan shouted. ‘What the fuck have you got us into?’

  The prospect didn’t faze me too much; I’m no sailor but, as I told you, I’ve cruised with Miles on his yacht, and taken my turn at the wheel. The owner gave me a run-down of the controls, and told me that reaching Aur was pretty easy, in daylight at least. All I had to do was cruise past Pulau Tioman, and it would b
e in sight, a large island with some smaller ones dotted around. Finding Tioman, he assured me, would be no problem.

  He was right: we could see it in the distance as soon as we cleared the harbour. It was bigger than I’d realised, though, and further away. The sea was choppy but not too bad; still, I made Mike lie down in the cabin to ward off any seasickness. Eventually he called up to me, ‘Ever seen South Pacific?’

  ‘Of course. It was my mum’s favourite.’

  ‘She’d have liked this, then. According to the magazine I’m reading, Tioman Island is what they used for Bali fucking Hai.’

  Fortified by that useless piece of information I cruised on, at three-quarter speed to conserve fuel. The guy had assured me that there would be enough to get us there and back, but I wasn’t taking any chances.

  It took us three hours, but finally I found myself piloting the Goddess into a strait, towards the landing-stage on Pulau Aur where three boats were moored already. As our guide had said, there was another island, much smaller, on our left . . . Sorry, on the port side. It had a jetty too, but it was deserted.

  I slung two fenders over the side and eased alongside, while a grateful Dylan tossed a rope to a lad on the quay. He tied us off, fore and after, I cut the engine and we scrambled ashore.

  ‘We’re looking for the Friendly Waters Lodge,’ I told the youngster. He was fresh-faced and looked about sixteen.

  ‘That’s me,’ he replied. ‘Or, at least, I work there. None of other guys around, though, and no divers. You only ones here.’ He peered into the boat. ‘Where your gear? You need hire?’