by Ovidia Yu
‘Oh dear. Tell me more about Julietta,’ she said. ‘How did you two meet?’
Aunty Lee would have dearly loved to get Nina’s impression of Seetoh. No doubt Nina would distrust him on first sight. This was not really prejudice given Nina disliked and distrusted Singaporeans, Malaysians, expats, and the police on principle too. She had managed to get over her antipathy to Singaporeans and police for Aunty Lee and Salim. Or at least she seemed to have. But now Nina was gone and perhaps her biases had returned, strengthened.
But it was purely out of habit that she wanted Nina’s opinion because, no matter what Nina thought of Seetoh, Aunty Lee had already decided to trust him. This inclination was strengthened into conviction when Seetoh, after declaring he was not hungry and could not possibly eat anything, took a mouthful, then another, then finished the platter of stir fried beehoon (a double serving for most people) without seeming to notice. The man’s worry over Julietta had been enough to put him off his food but his body appreciated the nutrition in Aunty Lee’s simple good food. That was enough for Aunty Lee.
However, it might not be enough for anybody else looking for the missing foreign domestic worker, so Aunty Lee took him through his story, digging into all the tangles and unravelling loose threads till she traced them back to their source.
Seetoh had been seeing Julietta for over a year.
‘Only, after eight months I found out she was married! She has two daughters, you know.’
‘Still married?’ Aunty Lee worried that she might unleash another round of despairing self-recrimination but Seetoh only shook his head at Aunty Lee’s naïveté.
‘Divorced. Or she would be divorced if she wasn’t so Catholic. But the guy is not in the picture anymore. Would any real husband make his wife choose between letting her children starve and leaving them to go hundreds of miles away to earn enough money to keep them in school? Because no matter how shitty the work here is, Julietta refused to even consider leaving. Because she wanted her children to stay in school. Tell me, do you believe a woman like that would just leave her children behind and run off with some guy? No way.’
Aunty Lee read the message beneath the indignation. ‘You asked her to run away with you and she refused?’ And the indignation deflated. ‘So now what you really can’t understand is, if Julietta wouldn’t run away with you, why would she go off with somebody else.’
‘She wouldn’t.’
Aunty Lee heard a man trying to convince himself.
‘You must try my otak,’ she said.
There were few bad situations that could not be improved by a really good charcoal grilled fish cake.
Seetoh admitted he had been outside KidStarters the previous day and had followed Jonny to Aunty Lee’s Delights.
‘If you were following him, you must have seen what happened the day Fabian went to the house? The day that Julietta disappeared?’
‘Nah, lah. I only started watching him after that. Look, you don’t have to tell me she is no angel. Yes, she got taken in by that guy at first. That guy is a lousy bully. He took photos of her, you know. Sexy photos. When she tried to break up with him, he said she would show them to Miss Beth and Mrs Patty. And later he forced her to have sex with him again before he would delete the photos … and she believed him. But even though he let her delete her photos from his phone, he must have made copies, because he threatened to show them to her children. And she was not the only one. He had photos of other women on his phone!’
Aunty Lee could not help wondering what Seetoh’s first reaction had been. Now he was after Jonny Ho for seducing Julietta. But what if he had been angry with Julietta when she told him what happened? Had he been angry enough to do something to her?
‘Don’t worry. Where there’s life there’s hope,’ Aunty Lee said, stressing ‘life’.
‘More like where there’s money, there’s hope,’ Seetoh said with Singaporean pragmatism. ‘I got no money, so no hope.’
‘Look, I am going to find out where your Julietta went,’ Aunty Lee sounded more confident than she felt, ‘then you two can work it out between yourselves.’
‘All I want is to know what he did with her.’
That could mean many things, Aunty Lee thought. ‘You cannot force a woman to stay with you if she doesn’t want to. Can you drop me off at the police post? I show you where; it’s on the way out.’
Seetoh looked alarmed.
Aunty Lee thought taxi drivers assumed women only went to police stations to make complaints … about taxi drivers, among other things. ‘I got a friend working there,’ she explained. ‘I can go and see him, and then somebody there will drive me back home.’
Meanwhile, Nina was listening to Jonny Ho telling Beth about his visit to Aunty Lee’s Delights. She didn’t have to eavesdrop. She might have been a cat or dog or piece of wood for all the attention they paid to her.
From the way Jonny told it, he had Aunty Lee’s admiration and full support.
‘Did she say when she wants me to go back?’ Nina finally asked.
‘She doesn’t want you back,’ Beth said. ‘You must have talked back to her or something. She was paying you far above market rate. I told her she can train a new girl to do what you are doing for much less.’
Aunty Lee had done it for Salim, Nina thought. If Aunty Lee didn’t want her back in Binjai Park it was because, like Nina, she wanted to spare Salim from accidentally bumping into her.
‘If Aunty Lee doesn’t want me to work for her, I will go back to Philippines,’ Nina said.
‘No,’ Jonny Ho said. ‘You are working for us now. It’s about time you started doing something to earn all the money that old woman has been throwing at you.’ He looked at Nina, who was wishing she had not spoken up. ‘I have some very important things for you to do.’
CHAPTER TEN
Salim and Housebreaking
Inspector Salim Mawar did not know how else he could have put his case to Nina. He felt he had let her down by asking her to marry him. But before that he had felt he was letting them both down by not asking.
Why hadn’t he offered to leave Singapore with her? He had a law degree; he would manage to support them somehow, at least after he had served out his bond or paid it back. Interracial marriage had never been a big issue in Singapore. Inter-religious marriage could be a bit touchier but, unless the families involved wanted an excuse to make trouble, most people found a way around it … or went to live in Australia or Canada.
Salim did not really want to leave Singapore. He knew from his time abroad that he would be able to fit in almost anywhere. But there was no other place in the world to which he felt an equal commitment. He had a stake in the survival of the tiny struggling island city. Someday he hoped to pass this on to his sons and daughters. And he longed to share this love and commitment with the woman he loved.
It would have been easier for Salim if he could have thrown himself into his work, but there were no pressing cases at the moment. This was nothing new for Singapore, of course. And even more so at the Bukit Tinggi Police Post. The only high priority case was the still unsolved string of residential break-ins including some under their jurisdiction.
The rash of burglaries had started roughly three years before. Then, after a break, four more break-ins over three weeks. The newspapers had talked about a gang of burglars flying into Singapore, and social experts had frightened the populace further by talking about the rise of ‘organized crime’.
Going through all the reports, Salim suspected that at least two of the ‘robberies’ had been invented by homeowners jumping at the chance to get something back on their insurance policies. But he also knew it was possible that not all the break-ins had been reported. Some people preferred to suffer their loss in silence if they had things in their homes that should not have been there. All that added to the confusion, of course. But the biggest problem of all was that there was still so little to go on. All the houses targeted were free-standing bungalows, and there had been
no witnesses. It would have been a lot easier to find someone who had seen something in a Housing Development Board flat, or even one of the private condominiums with security guards, and gardeners, and maids walking dogs and babies in the grounds.
It was either remarkably bad luck for the police, or good planning on the part of the burglars. Each time, the burglars had managed to strike when no one was home. Salim was certain they had some way of getting information on the homeowners, but so far no links had come up.
He looked at the notes on his computer again. It was more complicated than just waiting for any children to go to school and any adults to go to work. Houses like these had gardeners coming in on different days, full-time and part-time housecleaners from Amahs On Wheels, and live-in maids who were in and out of the house doing the shopping or accompanying children from school and after school activities …
The housebreaking burglars had largely faded from the newspapers and public attention but the police … and therefore Salim … knew cases were still coming up regularly. Once every two or three months, scattered in different housing estates all across the island without any apparent reason, so not enough people had put them together to make it news.
There were comments online, of course; the exaggerations and speculations growing wilder in the ether as they always did. Was it an employment agency behind it, sending out maids to spy out potential houses to break into? Were the police in on it or had they been bribed into silence? One person even accused the Buddhist sisters and the Catholic nuns living in the Canossian Convent because the modest habits they wore could conceal the tools to get them in and the loot they carried out. Salim glanced over these forums occasionally, just in case something useful showed up. That was how desperate they were for leads. But still there were no witnesses. At least, because of the criminals’ good luck or good planning no one had been hurt.
He pushed his seat back. Part of him wanted to go over to the café, but there was no point.
Aunty Lee told him that Nina was away; she had gone away to help a friend. She would be gone for a week, possibly a little longer. Aunty Lee knew as well as he did that this was illegal, and also that he would not say anything. Salim should have resented the old woman for putting him in such a difficult position but he was grateful for the information. Even if Nina did not want to see or talk to him, Salim liked to know where she was, wanted to be certain she was all right. Which was why he had made Aunty Lee tell him who her friend was and where she lived.
He had looked closely at Beth Kwuan and her proposed child education centre. There was little on Beth, but her KidStarters shared an address with one of the houses broken into in the original rash of burglaries. The house break-in had been reported by a Mr and Mrs Jonny Ho. A little more time online informed him that the late Mrs Jonny Ho née Patricia Kwuan had been Beth Kwuan’s sister. And Jonny Ho, the bereaved husband, was Beth’s partner in the child education business. Some families were close, Salim supposed, though he could not imagine his mother going into business with any of his late father’s brothers. And it probably made sense to try to turn a house into a paying business. He turned back to the original report. The Hos had been out to dinner with their maid when the break-in occurred. They had returned a little after 11 p.m. to find the back door had been removed from its hinges and said the thieves had taken cash, the small house safe containing all Mrs Ho’s jewellery, and all the smartphones, laptops, and electronic tablets in the house. This followed the pattern of all the other burglaries except for one small detail … the Hos had only reported the break-in two weeks after it happened, after reading about a similar case in the newspapers.
‘We thought there was no point reporting it right away,’ Mr Jonny Ho had said in his statement. ‘The burglars were clearly gone, and we were tired and wanted to get some sleep. We know the police work hard, and there was no reason to disturb them at night. Who likes to be disturbed at night, right? And then the next day we thought it was not so serious after all. What’s the point? We’re not going to get anything back.’ Though not directly relevant this statement had clearly struck the transcriber enough to make a note of it.
Most people whose homes had been burglarized phoned the police right away, in alarm, indignation, and anger. However little faith they had in the police getting their things back they felt invaded and violated, and calling the police meant that they had handed their problem over to someone whose responsibility it was to protect them.
Curiously enough, Salim had read somewhere that the more the victims of a crime might rant and rail at the police officers who responded to a call for help (like a child raging at a parent who let it get hurt) the more likely they were to respond positively when asked their opinion of police first responders in later months. You had to trust the police to some degree before you dared to let your guard down in front of them. Then what did that say about the Hos who had come home to find they had been robbed and decided to wait a week and more before reporting the break-in?
But then, how the Hos reacted could have nothing to do with who had robbed them … and all that had nothing to do with Nina. Nina, who was the only reason why Salim had looked up the old case, had never even met the late Mrs Patty Ho. It was the late Mrs Ho’s sister, Beth Kwuan, who Nina was working for.
And despite Aunty Lee trying to blame it on her friend’s temporary renovation difficulties, Salim was certain Aunty Lee had arranged this with her friend because Nina wanted to get further away from him.
Well at least Nina was still in Singapore. Inspector Salim was glad of that. He would stay away, of course, given Nina had made clear she did not want to see him around. But he was glad she was still in Singapore.
The night before, Nina would have welcomed the sight of Salim Mawar. Or of anyone other than the furious Jonny Ho hunched over on her bed. Nina was standing in the corner, holding a hairbrush in one hand and a wooden stool in the other.
‘Don’t try to sell me your shit. To get the kind of money that old woman is paying you, you must have been screwing her husband, right?’
Jonny wasn’t even trying to keep quiet after the yell he let out when Nina woke to find him on top of her on her narrow bed and jammed her knee into his crotch.
‘What’s happening?’ Beth demanded sharply from the doorway.
‘She flirted with me and told me to come to her room after you were asleep,’ Jonny Ho invented glibly. He winced as he stood up. ‘She complained that you locked her in. I came to see what she had in mind, that’s all.’
‘He tried to rape me!’ Nina cried. She thought it was obvious.
Beth eyed her with distaste. For a moment Nina hoped she was going to order her out of the house immediately.
‘You are disgusting,’ Beth said. ‘No wonder Rosie doesn’t want you back. I thought it was only because you cost so much. I suppose you threatened to tell people you were sleeping with her husband. Well, that’s not going to work here.’
But Nina noticed that from then on Beth took the key with her after locking Nina in at night. And whenever Jonny was in the house, Beth kept suspicious eyes on either him or Nina. Her little comments were even more cruel but at least her jealousy kept Nina safe from Jonny Ho.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Researching Recipes
‘Nina is still busy. What do you need this time?’
Aunty Lee had picked up the phone to call Nina’s mobile as automatically as she turned to her helper several times a day. And when Nina’s mobile did not answer, Aunty Lee called the landline at the Jalan Kakatua house.
‘I think her phone is out of battery. It doesn’t ring,’ Aunty Lee told Beth.
‘Rosie, you know that Selina is worried that you are too much under Nina’s influence?’
Aunty Lee cackled in laughter. ‘That Selina worries about everything! Did she tell you not to let Nina talk to me? Don’t worry! Put her on the phone!’
‘Selina is not the one who’s worried.’ Beth’s voice was low and confidential o
ver the phone. ‘Look, I don’t know if you know this, Nina feels that you are controlling her life too much.’
‘Where got?’ Aunty Lee prided herself on how much she trusted Nina. ‘Let me talk to her!’ She would clear this up in an instant.
‘She says you are always checking up on her … I didn’t want to believe her, but you’ve been phoning her non-stop since she got here.’
‘Not non-stop, what. Only a few times.’ In fact Aunty Lee had not actually managed to talk to Nina since she moved to Jalan Kakatua. ‘I only want to make sure that she is all right.’
‘Nina is all right. Don’t you believe me? While she is staying with me, I will take care of her.’ With a little laugh Beth managed to imply she would make sure Nina was not bothered by old women with too much time on their hands, without quite saying it, so Aunty Lee could not protest.
‘Look, Rosie,’ Beth’s voice dropped lower still, as though she was afraid Nina might be listening in, ‘you’ve been good to Nina, and she doesn’t want to hurt your feelings. But she feels that you are trying to her control her and make her do things she doesn’t want to.’
A month ago, Aunty Lee would have laughed at this. But now Aunty Lee remembered her arguments with Nina over the past two weeks. Her arguments at Nina, rather, given Nina had never argued back beyond saying that she did not want to see Salim again and she did not want to talk about it. After Aunty Lee had made an appointment for Salim and Nina to talk to a relationship counsellor (which they had both refused), Nina had not talked to her for two whole days.
‘Why do you want to talk to her?’ Beth wanted to know when Aunty Lee phoned.
‘I just want to make sure she is all right.’
‘She’s fine! Don’t you trust me? Rosie, don’t let her fool you. That Nina of yours is too smart; the smart ones are always troublemakers. You got to watch them every minute. But the stupid ones are so stupid you sometimes just want to knock their skulls together!’
