Suddenly at Singapore

by Gavin Black

  “That’ll be restful,” Kate said bitterly.

  As soon as we went into the hotel lounge a little man came forward from the desk.

  “Mr. Harris? Mr. Paul Harris?”

  “Yes.”

  “There is a message for you from Singapore. An urgent message. You are to phone this number, sir, and quickly. They make it most important.”

  “Who?”

  “The police, sir.”

  “Kate, sit down over there and order a drink, will you? Beer for me.”

  Kate turned away at once. I went to a little booth and shut myself in.

  When I came out it was with my world broken around me, blown up, shattered. I felt sick and old. Kate saw me coming and slowly she stood.

  “Paul …!”

  “It’s Jeff. He’s dead. Murdered. Shot in the back of his head.”

  CHAPTER II

  IT WAS KATE who got me up to my room. I went to the bed and fell on it, face down in the pillow. I couldn’t look at her or anything, anything in the world. She moved about the room, I heard her, but it didn’t mean anything, even having her there. Then she came over.

  “Try and drink this.”

  “No.”

  “Oh, Paul. I know what it means to you. When he talked about you I had the feeling you were his only concern …”

  “Please stop!”

  “Sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  She went away again. She must have sat down. After a time I pulled myself up and sat on the bed, my feet on the floor.

  “Thanks, Kate. It was a kick in the stomach. It would have been worse without you here.”

  She nodded. She was smoking a cigarette, looking at a wall, not me. I went into the bathroom and washed my face. My mouth seemed to have a fuzz in it and I cleaned my teeth. I had only once before felt grief physically like this, weakness as though all your strength had been drained away.

  Jeff. Oh, my God, Jeff!

  Standing above the basin I began to retch. Kate heard and came and held my head, her hand on my forehead. Then it was over, that part, and I was in control again.

  In the bedroom Kate watched as I started to throw things into my bag.

  “You shouldn’t drive back,” she said. “You’re not fit to.”

  “I’m all right. I can drive.”

  “Oh, Paul. There’s a train in an hour.”

  “I’ll beat the train.”

  “But what good will it do now?”

  “I’ve got to get back, that’s all. You’d better go to your room. And thanks. Thanks so much.”

  “Why do you have to thank me? I’m not a stranger.”

  “I know. I just had to say something, that’s all.”

  “I’ll come with you and do the driving. I’ll go fast.”

  “No!”

  “Well, I’m coming.”

  She turned and went out. I wasn’t long in getting to the car, but Kate was beside it, her bag on the pavement.

  “I can’t stay here alone now,” she said. It was an appeal.

  “All right, get in.”

  The jungle roads were lit by hard clear light shivering down them. We had the windows lowered and it was cool. We went through villages and towns, slowing to ease a way through night clamour, Tamil boys walking hand in hand, fat Chinese women wobbling. We seemed to tunnel through laughter and talk at these times, snatches of it coming in to us, words. People peered at the low, sleek little car. We smelled cooking, spicy and hot.

  Jeff’s country and mine. Maybe we were wrong, maybe they were strangers out there, for all that I could talk to them so that behind a screen none of them could have guessed I didn’t belong, that my skin wasn’t the colour of theirs. Maybe in desperation we’d clung to the only thing we knew, fooling ourselves about it, calling it our world. Kate didn’t believe it was really my world.

  She didn’t say anything at all, just sat there beside me. Sometimes she lit a cigarette and put it between my lips. Then at Gemas I remembered. I braked the car into a pavement.

  “I didn’t phone Ruth. I must do it now. The police will have told her.”

  Ruth didn’t come for a long time, it was the second houseboy on the line, a Hainamese, who wasn’t always easy to understand. He seemed to be babbling to-night. He could tell me a little more, not much, just that my brother had been shot about six, the police thought, at sunset.

  Jeff had lived in a service flat, one of a luxury block. His boys didn’t actually stay in the rooms, they had quarters for themselves in another building at the back. I had never liked this arrangement much, I thought he ought to have a man in the place the whole time, the way we lived and the things we did. I’d even found the man for him once, something of a tough, but Jeff had got rid of him. He hadn’t wanted protection, he said.

  “Paul!” Ruth’s voice was a kind of wail. “Where have you been? You didn’t phone.”

  “I’m sorry. I just drove, that’s all. As soon as I knew. I’m half-way home. I’ll soon be there.”

  “I’m so miserable! I wanted to hear your voice.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said again. It was like an echo of Kate in the bedroom, an apology for helplessness. “Listen, dear, I’ll be right back. Go to your room and take a sedative.”

  “It could have been you,” Ruth said.

  “Now stop that, please!”

  “Well, it could! That’s what makes me … sick. That thought.”

  “Ruth, you’re holding me up. I want to get home.”

  “You’ll come here first?”

  “I must go to the flat.”

  “No! No, don’t!”

  “Ruth, help me now, please. You’ve got to help me.”

  “Oh, all right.” She sounded a child, weary, frightened. “But you won’t be long?”

  “No, of course not.”

  We drove again, Kate and I.

  “Was Ruth very upset?”

  “She sounded that way.”

  “Surely she’s got someone with her? A friend?”

  “I don’t think so. Just the houseboys. Ruth’s never turned to women friends like that. It’s always been me.”

  “I see,” Kate said, in a very quiet voice.

  We were in the jungle again, hurtling towards Johore, before Kate spoke.

  “One of the things that makes it harder for me is that I can’t help having a lot of sympathy with your wife. I get to thinking what it would be like waiting around for you in a house.”

  I didn’t say anything to that, because I knew what Kate meant. There was a lot of truth, too, in this business of compartments into which you shut away separate pieces of your living. Most men do it, and perhaps I did it more than most because of things to which we had been committed for a long time, Jeff and I. It was true enough, also, that I had provided my wife with a nicely padded world in which there wasn’t a great deal demanded of her. I didn’t need her help much, except as a hostess, and though there had been a bond once that had seemed firm and binding, it had snapped, and we’d never found a replacement. Perhaps neither of us had tried hard enough for that replacement.

  I knew that the thing which had drawn me to Kate from the first was the feeling you had about her that she didn’t need a man to make her world, that she could make it on her own. Even our love was something she came to from a life of her own, when we could both find the time. It had never occurred to me that Kate did any waiting around to see me. Now I wasn’t so sure about that. It was disturbing to have her seeing things through Ruth’s eyes.

  I had thought they were poles apart, Ruth and Kate, in the way they faced living, but that might not be so.

  “Paul, do you think the police in Singapore are going to be able to find the man who killed your brother?”

  “I rather doubt it.”

  “And if they can’t?”

  “I’ll have to start a hunt on my own.”

  “I see. That’s going to be dangerous.”

  “It needn’t be, all that. Not if I don’t rush it. Tonight I
feel like bashing in for any kind of action. But I mustn’t do it. Jeff would say, take it easy. Wait for your chance. I can hear him saying it, like he’s done a hundred times. And I know he’s right. If I wait and don’t get excited the lead I need will show up. I’m sure of that.”

  “That lead might take you to General Sorumbai in Sumatra. Would you follow it there?”

  “Kate, that’s not the sort of question I can answer now.”

  She knew I was pushing her away, but I couldn’t help doing that.

  We went over the Causeway which years ago had been blown up to stop the Japs from reaching Singapore. I could remember seeing that Causeway not so long after I was a prisoner, from a tin cattle truck, Jeff and me peering through a crack in the door of that mobile oven and thinking that our side had only managed to make a very little hole. The Japs had soon patched it up. That hole in the Causeway had become one of their jokes.

  In a sense it was a joke we’d been trying to deal with ever since. We’d come back to a people who pretended to welcome us, but who remembered how easy it was to push us out of the way. And this was something that went a little sour on you when it was your country, not just a place you took money out of.

  When I have a few drinks and the company is British who expect things to last their time, but not much longer, I sometimes get talking on a line that would shock the enlightened Colonial Office bods if they hadn’t a classification all neatly waiting into which to pop me … the local reactionary. All right, I’m a local reactionary, living in a country that was made by us, not by the Chinese or the Malays or the Tamils, but by us, our brains and our sweat. That’s the fact, and though not many people look at it these days, it’s still the fact.

  I could imagine what the official reaction was going to be to Jeff’s death on this island Kate and I had now reached. There would be quite a number of people in fairly high places who wouldn’t mind thinking to themselves that it was a good thing … even though they wouldn’t say it at a bar counter. They might even go on beyond that to wish the gunmen had done a better job and dealt with the two brothers at the same time. The fewer reactionaries you have around in a new democracy the better, for reactionaries tend to hold up the settling of the dust which is so important if business is to get back to normal.

  I wasn’t going to have many allies in Singapore, but then we’d never had many allies down there, not amongst the powers that make a noise.

  “Will you just take me straight to my hotel?” Kate said quietly.

  She might have been playing the role I’d assigned her in the first act of our relationship, the girl who doesn’t make a fuss.

  I took her to her hotel in a quiet part of the city and got her bags out of the back and we went up a flight of steps. We had to ring for the porter, waiting there, and Kate didn’t stand looking at me, as though she knew I wouldn’t want that.

  “You’ll ring me when you can, Paul?”

  “Of course.”

  When a sleepy-eyed Chinese opened the door she just went through it, not looking back. I went to the car Jeff had given me and drove through nearly empty streets to his apartment building, which had the lobby of its kind of place all over the world, the nobody-ever-dies-here feeling, with lighting that stays on all night and plants that are whipped out at the first sign of anæmia and replaced by others fresh from a high vitamin diet. The lift was silent and then I got out into a passage where a Chinese policeman sat on a chair taken from Jeff’s sitting-room.

  “I’m the brother,” I said in Cantonese. “I want to get in.”

  “The body isn’t here,” he told me. “It’s in the mortuary.”

  “I didn’t think the body would be here. I still want to get in.”

  “You can’t.”

  “There’s a phone just inside the door. We’ll use it.”

  In the end I got into that little hall. It was neat and neutral, an hour or two with the cleaners and the flat would be ready for the next tenant. There was quite a lot of shouting at both ends of the wire, but finally I got my way, with the policeman on duty breathing down my neck. I wasn’t to touch anything, not even a door handle.

  I wouldn’t have believed Jeff’s sitting-room could look the way it did. He had a filing cabinet prettied up by a Chinese carpenter, but still looking utilitarian behind the grand piano that nobody played. The cabinet had both doors open and every drawer pulled out. There were papers strewn in front of it. All the drawers in the room had been pulled out and the contents just dumped on the floor.

  “Was it like this, or did the police do it?” I asked.

  My policeman showed anger.

  “It was like this!”

  Then I saw a stain on the teak flooring, a big stain, just under the piano. There was a broken decanter there, too, with slivers of glass all about. Jeff served his drinks from the end of the piano, the boy putting the tray there. He must have been pouring a drink when the shot came. He could have been pouring for himself alone or for a visitor he knew. The killer could have been let into the flat by Jeff or could have been waiting here, hidden, someone who knew his habits, the pattern of the way he did things. Jeff expected that tray to be on the piano when he came home and the chances were that he’d gone to it pretty quickly.

  I didn’t touch anything. I knew that before long I was going to have to go to a place and see the Jeff they had taken away. I didn’t want to do that. I had to get home to Ruth, and if I hung around here a sergeant or someone might come down from headquarters to check up on what I was doing. I told the policeman where I was going and went out.

  I had bought for Ruth a big house beyond the Botanic Gardens, got it fairly cheap because it was outsize for the contemporary pattern and spent a lot on it. There were about four acres of grounds that were like a miniature Botanic in themselves. From the gate the trees were so thick you couldn’t see the house until you rounded a bend in the drive. When I did that I saw what looked like all the lower floor glowing with light. There was also a police car under the old-fashioned projecting portico. It was half-past two in the morning.

  Ruth was in the living-room, a vast place we used less than the oldfashioned verandas beyond it. She was wearing a housecoat of pale green Chinese silk and in it she still looked a child with red hair, though she was thirty-two. She came running to me, and I held her, and her arms fumbled around my back, meeting there, holding on. She hadn’t been crying but she began to cry now, miserably, as though woken from a dream of horrors. Over her head I saw the policeman, a stranger to me, sitting quietly in a chair waiting.

  “It’s all right, honey, it’s all right.”

  “It’s not,” Ruth said. “It’ll never be.”

  I tried to soothe her. Suddenly she looked up.

  “Will you stop it?”

  She broke away from me and went to a table. She had tiny hands and small fingers, groping now over the lid of a cigarette box. She picked one up and lit it.

  The policeman rose then. He was a smooth young man in a white sharkskin suit which looked as though he’d put it on only a few hours before. He was thin and cool, Chinese acclimatised by a generation or two, with a polite manner, a good man for the transition period. He could talk to a distraught woman for quite some time and keep any hint of hysteria at bay.

  “This is Inspector Kang,” Ruth said, with her back to me.

  “How do you do, Inspector.”

  “I am sorry, Mr. Harris, that I had to come at this hour.”

  “It’s all right. Sit down again.”

  He did. His politeness was contained and composed. There was no hint of the deference in it that there would have been once, in my father’s time. Only he wouldn’t have been an inspector then. Almost certainly the inspector’s grandfather had come as an indentured coolie from South China, but you wouldn’t think it from the grandson’s manner. He had learned his English well, and used it casually, as though its perfection was a minor achievement.

  Now looking at him, I realised he wasn’t so youn
g, probably in his late thirties like me, only bearing it better, an ivory face unlined, jet hair that was thick and oiled smooth. I wondered what he had been doing while the Japanese romped about his country.

  “This will have been a great shock to you, Mr. Harris.”

  “Yes.”

  “I understand you’ve been to the flat.”

  “How did you know?”

  “It was phoned to me here. Also, your wife said you would be going. While you were there did you … ah … gain any impression that might be of use to us?”

  “I saw a mess, Inspector.”

  “Yes. A search obviously.”

  “I’d rather you didn’t talk about it in front of my wife.”

  Ruth turned.

  “Why shouldn’t he talk about it? What do you think we’ve been doing for the last hour? The inspector came to see if I could help. I must have been the last person to talk to Jeff.”

  I stood quite still looking at her.

  “We had drinks at the club,” she said. “Just before he went home.”

  “Did he tell you anything about his plans for the evening?”

  “No. Why should he? I expect it was one of his nights for his latest cutie.”

  “Ruth, for heaven’s sake!”

  “A Miss Feng,” the inspector said, looking at me. “She was indeed expecting him. She is now prostrate.”

  “Ruth, will you please leave us?”

  “No. Why should I be sent away?”

  I went over to a cabinet and poured myself a whisky. The inspector declined. I didn’t ask Ruth, I just mixed it and took it to her. She looked up at me and there was a kind of appeal in her eyes, suddenly. I went and sat down on a settee and she came and took the other end of it. She put her feet up, tucking them under her, holding the glass with both hands. She looked the child allowed up late, and clinging to the opportunity.

  Inspector Kang was smoking one of his own cigarettes. He had inserted it into a short black holder. Like so many Chinese he had beautiful hands. He looked incapable of violence of any kind.

  “There are two kinds of killings,” he said, “which present particular difficulties to the police. The one appears to have no motive, the other a great many possible motives.”