A Most Peculiar Malaysian Murder

by Shamini Flint

  But Chelsea Liew pleaded with him, urged him to believe that he was the only one who could help, that if he turned his back on her she would have nowhere else to go. She appealed to his dormant masculinity. It was a long time, the inspector thought, since any woman had made him feel needed. Chelsea explained her concerns in hushed, heartfelt tones. The Malaysian police were not going to look any further for a killer. They were embarrassed at having charged the wrong person once. She could not turn to any private investigator. She could not be certain that they were on her side. They would be in it for her money and the kudos of such a high-profile job. Probably they would sell any dirt they dug up to the tabloids.

  She needed a professional. And he was it. After all, she pointed out, he had been sent to help her in the first place. She did not realise perhaps the large element that politics had played in the decision of the Singapore government to send him – corpulent knight to the rescue. Singh had no doubt that she sensed that he was emotionally embroiled in her affairs. Finally, he agreed. He could not quite remember the point that the conversation ceased to be about whether he would help but about how he would help.

  She put a slender hand on his arm and said, ‘Thank you. You have no idea how much this means to me.’

  And he could see both that she meant it and that he was trapped.

  Singh had no idea how he was going to proceed. He had no locus to ask questions. He had Chelsea’s support which might open a few doors but not many. And he would certainly need the cooperation of the Malaysian police if he was going to try snooping around. He did not even know if Jasper would be willing to see him.

  ‘Mum, is Uncle Jasper in jail?’

  Chelsea looked at her eldest son. Marcus was a thin and wiry seventeen-year-old with a teenager’s quick passions. But of late the feisty, combative youth had become quiet – his eyes always on the ground in front of him. She told herself that it was inevitable that recent events had taken their toll. Marcus had been very unhappy with his father – coming to her defence when he had started to hit her. He would pit his strength against the grown man and be brushed aside. But when Alan had died it had still hit Marcus hard. She had not understood his reaction, fluctuating between despair and anger. But she had tried to give him the confidence that they could carry on, that time would make them whole again – until she was arrested for murder and dragged away from her children. She had no idea how the boys had coped. The wounds were so raw that she had refrained from discussing her ordeal or theirs but just tried to compensate them with love.

  She had not answered his question and Marcus asked again, ‘Is Uncle Jasper in prison?’

  She nodded and tried to put her arms around him but he resisted and pulled away.

  ‘For killing Daddy?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘Do you believe he did it?’

  She shook her head emphatically.

  Marcus punched a door, hard.

  Chelsea looked at him, her face creased with intense concern. It was a fleeting snapshot of what she would look like as an old woman.

  Of her three sons, it was Marcus she was most worried about. The other two, with the resilience of children, were recovering from their ordeal. They were insecure, clinging and demanding – punishing her for having left them. But she did not doubt that time would restore their equilibrium. Marcus was another matter. He was the one who had understood a little of what she had gone through being married to Alan Lee.

  It had started to affect his behaviour well before the divorce. Seventeen years old, with a driving licence and the Mercedes sports car his father had bought him as a birthday present over Chelsea’s angry protests, he was always out or locked in his room. She knew he went clubbing. She could smell the stale cigarettes and old beer on his clothes and his breath in the morning. She knew he had girlfriends, impressing them with his fast car, moneyed background and devil-may-care attitude. She could see the hatred he felt for his father, as well as a burning anger at her, Chelsea, because she was his mother and she had let herself be hurt and there was nothing that he could do.

  As the divorce had approached, Marcus calmed down – relieved perhaps that his mother was finally taking steps to leave his father. He was still out of the house at all hours but seemed calmer and happier. Chelsea had wondered if he had found a serious girlfriend. Marcus needed all the affection he could get. Chelsea knew that a mother’s love was not proving enough to stop her firstborn from losing his way.

  But during the custody hearings, Marcus had reverted to his old ways. She had found bottles of alcohol in his room. He never washed or changed his clothes. She had asked him whether he was worried that his father might get custody, assured him that she was going to win.

  He had laughed bitterly and said, ‘I’m seventeen, Mum. Neither of you has any control over me – it doesn’t matter a damn which of you has “custody”.’

  She had not been able to work out what was upsetting him. She could not find a way through the wall her son had erected around himself – to keep her out.

  She tried again. ‘Marcus, what’s the matter?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Don’t shut me out. Let me help you.’

  ‘You? You can’t even help yourself!’

  Inspector Singh still had the file on the murder. It was time to look at it again – this time with a view to exonerating Jasper. He sat down at the desk in his hotel room.

  Three hours later he stood up, felt his knees creak with the effort, and left the hotel in one of the red and white taxis that spread like a rash across Kuala Lumpur. Any plans to think about the contents of the file he had just read were soon lost in the important business of hanging on to his seat as the driver weaved his way through traffic, missing each motorbike by inches and every car by less.

  He stopped some way from the scene of the murder. Singh told himself this was in order to understand the general environment of the crime better but it was actually because he was starting to feel carsick. He got out, gave the driver a few ringgit and looked around him.

  In every direction, rows of terraced houses stretched. Each one had started identical but the owners had used the many years since their homes were built to express their individuality. In Singapore, house renovation had only one goal – to convey wealth. He had seen houses that appeared huge, with a vast amount of road frontage, only to pass by another day using another route and discover that the same house was narrower than a long boat.

  In Kuala Lumpur, thought the inspector, the personalities expressing themselves in architecture were unique.

  In many of the homes, charming well-tended gardens were the owners’ innocuous way of stamping personality on their abodes. Rows of heliconia, pots of hibiscus and hedges of bougainvillea adorned many houses. Large mango or guava trees, sometimes outgrowing their small gardens, loomed large and dark over the road. Other householders had decided bricks and mortar were the best way to assert themselves and had built a puzzling array of additions to their tiny houses. Roof tiles had been swapped from the traditional rust to blue or green. Balconies with balustrades protruded. Ponds with carp and complex water features took up all the available garden space. Gates were wrought iron and picked out in gold. One house had stone elephants on the roof. Another had ceramic peacocks. An otherwise normal home had chickens pecking about in the garden. Bird flu was apparently less of a concern in Kuala Lumpur than back in Singapore.

  Despite the poor architectural judgement, the streets had a certain charm. Singh supposed it was because, however peculiar, each addition was designed to reflect the owner’s taste, rather than his wealth. Besides, many of the houses were rundown and needed a coat of paint. The brightest colours on the street were still the flowers, not paint jobs that looked like cake icing, as would have been the case in Singapore.

  Inspector Singh got his bearings in consultation with a road map and set off towards the murder scene. It was a quiet part of the morning. There was not much traffic on the road.
The school and work rush was over and the lunch rush had not started. He would have to come back in the evening and gauge the traffic. Was it likely that nobody had seen anything or were witnesses reluctant to come forward and be associated with this notorious case?

  It took him five minutes to reach the spot where Alan had been shot. Here it was easier to imagine that the murderer had gone unnoticed. It was a quiet cul de sac. The crowded terraced houses had given way to individual bungalows hidden behind high walls and security cameras. The blue from swimming pools could be seen through front gates. Balinese-style villas complete with stone gargoyles and frangipani trees stood next door to mansions that had evidently used the White House as their design inspiration.

  Inspector Singh dragged himself away from an awed perusal of the houses to contemplate the crime that had taken the life of one of its residents. According to his chauffeur’s testimony, Alan Lee had alighted from his car, waved his driver away and turned to walk up the hill along the broad, quiet road leading to his unhappy home. He had not gone further than fifty yards when he met the person who had shot him. The murder weapon had not been recovered although the police had scoured the drains and the rubbish tips over a five-hundred-yard radius. Alan Lee’s valuables, from his watch to his gold cufflinks, were left untouched. The murderer had wanted the only thing that a man of his wealth could not replace – his life.

  The inspector stood silently, looking around him. Trying to understand, trying to visualise the murder. He was convinced, based on the forensics, that Alan Lee had known his killer. It was possible that the perpetrator had been frightened off before he had completed the robbery. But it struck the inspector as improbable. It was such a risky murder. It seemed farfetched that robbery was a motive or, if it was, that the killer would have abandoned his crime before completing it.

  Singh walked all the way up to the gates of Alan Lee’s residence. He did not know if Chelsea was home and he did not seek to find out. He had nothing to report. There would be time enough to visit the widow when he had made some progress in the investigation into the murder of her ex-husband. She wanted him to exonerate her brother-in-law, Jasper Lee. The inspector did not conduct murder investigations based on who he most wanted to exculpate. He conducted investigations to find a murderer.

  In his heart he knew he would be pleased if he could find proof, contrary to the widow’s wishes, that implicated Jasper Lee. If he could prove to Chelsea that Jasper had done it, his confession was in earnest, she would abandon this effort to prove him innocent and get on with her life. Inspector Singh was not of a mind to contemplate the alternatives. If Jasper had not done it, the prime suspect would once again be the ex-wife of the victim.

  Singh decided he needed access to Jasper Lee. He dug out his mobile phone and called Sergeant Shukor.

  He said without preamble, ‘Singh here. I need to see Jasper Lee!’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Chelsea has asked me to look into the murder. Find some mitigating circumstances if I can.’

  He decided the complete truth – that he was seeking to absolve the eldest brother – would be too much for the young sergeant to stomach.

  There was hesitation at the other end. At last the policeman said, ‘I can get you in. But if Inspector Mohammad finds out, I’ll be in big trouble.’

  ‘I won’t tell him if you don’t.’

  The men sitting around the polished wood table, made from the cross-section of a single massive tree, were pleased. Things were going well. China’s need for wood products was inexhaustible. Ever since the severe flooding around the Yangtze River a few years back, the Chinese government had cracked down hard on excessive or illegal logging on the mainland. But this had not in any way dampened the demand for wood for the massive ongoing construction site that was modern China. And the authorities, so belatedly mindful of the degradation to their own environment, turned a blind eye to wood sourced from overseas. As a result, primary forests across Asia, from Papua New Guinea to Borneo, were being denuded at a rate that would soon see the end of the great jungles of Asia.

  None of these things were a concern to the men in the room. They were at the profitable end of the destruction. The four of them were fellow directors of Alan Lee’s timber company. The boss was dead but the men were still doing their best to make money for the company under the guidance of their new boss, Lee Kian Min. Besides, Kian Min had been running the show for years. It would have been much harder to carry on if he had been the one killed.

  Kian Min walked into the room, took the seat at the head of the table, received their respectful greetings and said, ‘We are increasing our production out of Borneo.’

  There were nods of approval all around.

  ‘How come? I thought we had logged all the non-reserve land?’ asked one of the men with nonchalant curiosity.

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Kian Min. ‘We have found new areas.’

  The others understood the implications of this. They had been in the timber trade their whole lives and their fathers before that. New areas after generations of intense logging could only mean wildlife reserves and protected forests.

  ‘You need to be careful – there is a lot of concern. Those Penan are in the news every day,’ said one of the men worriedly.

  ‘I said no need to worry about it. I have everything under control.’

  ‘What about the bio-fuels project?’

  ‘That is also under control.’

  Inspector Singh’s sister was hanging clothes out to dry on the washing line attached to two iron T-shaped poles at the back of her house. She had a clothes dryer indoors. Her son had bought it for her as a present. She loved showing it off to people. ‘That clothes dryer, my son bought for me as a present. He is doing very well, you know, and doesn’t want his old mother to work too hard.’

  But she never actually used it. Baljit was not convinced that clothes squashed into a dryer would get a proper airing. She was sure that the dark recesses of the machine’s gaping maw contained mould and germs. The sun and wind had dried her family’s clothes for generations and she was not going to change that. But she was very proud of the modern equipment taking up space in the laundry room and the son who had bought it for her.

  Across the fence, her neighbour was also hanging clothes so it was natural to gravitate to the boundary to exchange words as they had done for the past twenty years.

  Baljit opened the conversation with her usual directness. She had something to boast about. ‘My brother got that Chelsea Liew out of jail, you know.’

  ‘What brother?’

  ‘Singapore brother, lah. He’s a very senior policeman!’

  ‘That fat one is your brother, ah?’

  ‘Yes. He got that girl, the one who killed her husband, out of jail.’

  ‘I thought someone else confessed what?’

  ‘Yes, yes. But why so suddenly – after my brother came from Singapore?’

  ‘You think he made him confess? But in Singapore, police are not allowed to beat people.’

  Baljit nodded her head. ‘I still think the wife did it. Maybe she bribed the police to let her out?’ She added as an afterthought in case this should reflect badly on her brother, ‘Malaysian police, I mean. Singapore police cannot bribe, also.’

  They both stopped to ponder this incorruptibility.

  The Chinese woman across the fence said, ‘My son says very easy one to bribe when you are caught in a speed trap.’

  This sentiment drew no censure from the policeman’s sister. ‘Ya, you are right, but speeding . . . murder, different, lah!’

  Ten

  ‘Chelsea does not accept that you killed your brother.’

  ‘And you believe her rather than me?’ Jasper’s question to the inspector seemed reasonable.

  ‘Actually, no,’ said the inspector.

  ‘Then why are you here?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ the inspector confessed with a sigh, rubbing his eyes with stubby fingers. ‘I am go
ing to lose my job when my bosses get wind of this . . . I guess I could never resist the request of a pretty woman!’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ said Jasper. ‘Chelsea can be very persuasive.’

  The inspector was quick to latch on to this. ‘Are you saying that she persuaded you to confess?’

  Jasper looked pained. ‘Don’t be ridiculous! She would never do that. She didn’t try. And anyway, why would I agree?’

  The inspector changed tactics. ‘Look, I accept you murdered your brother. At least tell me why. Then I can convince Chelsea you did it and go home. She does not seem to be prepared to accept your word for it.’ He added a sweetener. ‘Maybe I can find some mitigation – save you from hanging at least!’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I don’t know. I came here from Singapore last week, for God’s sake! Anything – self-defence, provocation, accident. Anything!’

  Jasper looked at the inspector long and hard.

  The policeman could see that prison was taking its toll on the man. He was pale. He had lost much of the colour of the outdoorsman in a few short days. His skin sagged, the weight loss too sudden for the elasticity of his skin. In prison clothes, his tragicomic face emphasised the tragic.

  At last, he seemed to come to a decision. He took a deep breath, squared his shoulders and said, ‘There is something.’

  ‘Well, that’s nice,’ said the inspector dryly.

  The prisoner ignored the sarcasm. He sat in the plastic chair, elbows on the table, deep in thought.