The inspector settles the bill, redeems his parking ticket and drives to the High Court. At the registry, he asks for the dates of the trial of the Ministry of Housing staff and contractors, and the names of the defendants.
TEN
MATTHEW RICHARDS STEPS into the lift and is assailed by the stench of urine and sweat. The army of cleaners for the HDB estates cannot remove the deep-seated stains of frustration vented by the denizens of cramped three-room flats. Matthew, an ethnic Indian whose grandfather converted to Catholicism and changed his Tamil name to an anglicised one when he migrated to Singapore from southern India, holds his breath. He presses the button for number 12 with a piece of tissue paper wrapped over his finger.
To put his mind off his ordeal, he counts the number of doors on the ground floor of the block and mentally multiplies that by the number of storeys: 280 households or 1,000 people living in this block of flats. Including visitors, itinerant sales people and debt collectors, he estimates that 1,200 people use and abuse the four lifts daily. Thinking of his own experience with public housing, he is surprised the lifts have not broken down more often.
He remembers when, in the late 1960s, the housing ministry embarked on a massive human relocation from slums and kampongs to high-rise apartment buildings, his family moved into a three-room flat in Queenstown. They were disappointed they did not get one on the ground floor or first floor so they would not need to use the lifts. His mother warned his sisters when coming home late at night not to get into the lift with strangers. His granny would pray to the good Lord every time she returned from the wet market that the lift didn’t break down. She would not suffer the indignity of being carried up the stairs. Her worst fear was being trapped inside the lift. She had heard about other people, especially kampong folks, fainting due to lack of air or from claustrophobia.
The lift door opens and he is greeted by loan sharks’ threats and profanities and the names of borrowers scrawled with spray paint on the walls of the lift landing. He walks down a long corridor lined on one side with aluminium louvred windows and wooden doors. The other side of the corridor opens to the sky, barricaded by a low wall that does not discourage people from jumping. Human odour and the nourishing aroma of fried garlic ooze through the half-closed windows. A few families leave the doors open to let in some air. Bicycles, shoe racks, slippers, potted plants, old newspapers, incense burners and empty and inhabited bird cages are strewn along the length of the corridor. Matthew keeps his eyes over the parapet on the highway a hundred feet below him, so as not to appear to be intruding into other people’s affairs. Cantonese pop blares from a hi-fi, drowning out a Malay matinee on television. He reaches the end of the corridor and knocks on the last door.
“Hi.”
“Hi.” Chow Ling pushes open the unlocked gate and lets him in.
“When did you come back?”
“Couple of months ago. Want a drink?”
“Sure. Iced water?”
“Thought you always liked your Fanta orange.”
“Middle age is approaching. Have to watch my figure.”
Chow Ling gives his thickening body a once-over and walks through an arched doorway to the kitchen. Matthew despairs to see the tiny lounge furnished with a 1970s chintz settee, an old 14-inch TV, dusty bookshelves, overflowing ashtrays and newspapers spilling out from the shelf below the coffee table. He is grateful that Ling tells him he can leave his shoes on (a habit she acquired in Australia) for he notices that the ceramic-tiled floor has not been swept for weeks, let alone mopped.
“You’re renting this place?” Matthew asks when Ling hands him his drink.
“Yeah.” She goes to the open window and tries to draw the blind to cut out the traffic noise below.
“Nice place you’ve got here.” He watches her struggle with the blind’s slats that refuse to fall evenly.
“Uh huh.”
He waits for her to give up on the lopsided blind. “You’re not thinking of coming back to live?”
“Dunno.”
He watches her looking out of the window at the traffic below.
Matthew attempts a tone of nonchalance but the effect is like reproach. “I suppose if it wasn’t for your father, you wouldn’t have come back.”
“Maybe.”
“What about me?” The undertone of disapproval gets more apparent. He watches her freeze her gaze on a faraway spot.
“What about you?” She moves to the coffee table, tidies up the newspapers below it and empties the ashtray into a bin next to the couch.
“Well, why did you call me?”
“To say hello to an old friend.” Ling bends over for her cigarette pack next to the ashtray and looks around for a lighter.
“After eight years of silence? Can you sit down so I don’t have to strain my neck?”
“What do you want me to do?” She sits opposite him and gropes in the crevices of her armchair. She finds the lighter and flicks it several times before the flame lights.
“Don’t make yourself out to be a victim. You left without a word, except to ask me to wait for you. What was I supposed to do?”
“I was caught in a very difficult situation.”
“You were caught by your father’s threat to throw you out if you continued to be with me.”
She smirks at the thought of her father’s tragicomic matchmaking parties held in her honour. Chow Sze Teck had smarted when he saw his daughter, who held a masters degree, was going out with a dark stallion, while young and qualified ethnic-Chinese studs in his ministry were marrying their secretaries. He commanded all single male officers with at least a post-graduate qualification in his ministry to attend his daughter’s parties at plush hotels, to “come and have a good time.” Women could attend at their leisure, to disguise the real objective of the parties. Ling did not think such parties beneath her. She showed up and even brought Matthew along to a few, enticing him with free grub and grog. But instead of the meat market she had expected, it felt like she was in an IBM computer room.
“You think I cared about his money?”
“Then why did you leave me?”
She takes a long drag and waits for the chemical stimulus to produce a vision that does not come. “My father ordered me to leave the country—because I found out something that I shouldn’t have.”
“What was it? Why didn’t you tell me then?”
“It’s all so long ago.” She stubs out the cigarette, lights another and returns to the window.
“What the hell was it that made your father pack you off to Siberia?”
“Are you still at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs?”
“Jesus Christ, you have a conspiracy theory or what? Don’t I have a right to know why I was dumped?”
“I did not dump you. I thought if I went away for a while, Pa would calm down a bit. But a few weeks after I’d arrived in Sydney, I heard from my brother that you were working at the ministry.”
Matthew almost raises his voice. “I needed a job.”
“With lots of perks and travel.”
“You think I enjoyed doing that? Your father was a Chinese supremacist. He called us slime balls and cheats and said that in a jungle he would sooner run away from an Indian than a snake.”
“So why did you have to work for him?’
“I am not so lucky as you. You have lobster for breakfast while I eat roti prata even on my birthday. Just because your father helped me get the job didn’t mean I was beholden to him. But you, you cut me off completely after I was posted to Saudi Arabia.”
“I lost heart. My family thought I would ruin my father if I stayed around. Only Yang called me occasionally from England.”
“I don’t believe this. You dropped me because I was trying to make a living?”
“You have a degree. Why did you have to go to him?”
Matthew moves to the window and puts a hand on her shoulder. “I didn’t go to him. He came to me.”
She lowers her gaze to the flo
or.
He snatches the cigarette from her hand and throws it out of the window. “Dammit. What did you want of me?”
She looks up and faces him for the first time in eight years. He sees a brow furrowed with a thousand questions, eyes churning with fury. But her body softens momentarily at his touch. He realises he is holding a different woman from the girl at those meat market parties. He looks into her pupils for any stirring of tenderness, but like someone looking into the dark bottom of a well, he is overcome by vertigo. He closes his eyes and loosens his grip on her shoulder; his hand slides down to hold hers.
“Maybe I’ve been too harsh with you. But it doesn’t matter anymore now, does it? We were both young.” She frees her hand from his and leans against the wall next to the window so she is at a comfortable distance from him.
Matthew continues to stare, hoping to see through the mist of her father’s spectre to get to the woman. “So…what are we going to do now?”
In the smokeless silence, she marshals her thoughts and her brow smoothens. “You didn’t meet anyone else?” she asks gently.
“I’m still single, if that’s what you are asking.” Taking that as a sign of detente, he moves a step closer and notices her heavy breathing. Their two years together at university loom in his head. She was an MA student while he was in his second year buried, under an avalanche of words by Joyce, Conrad and James, whom he detested most for his verbosity. He didn’t like reading arts but with his mediocre grades, it was the only course available to him. She became his personal tutor and she often had kinky ways of interpreting those literary texts that did not always help him get through the exams. But he looked forward to the private tuition in his hostel room where they lived out the passions repressed in the Victorian novels. A union of two bodies that could not have been more different, in terms of culture and class. But love conquered all the complexes he developed before her. Every time they made love, he noticed only her heavy breathing, her hairless skin and small breasts, all of which he has come to associate with Chinese women. He considers the fall of her father the greatest equaliser between them, removing all obstacles ever after.
“You could be fined and jailed for throwing that cigarette out of the window.” She smiles that don’t-give-a-damn smile.
“Since when did you pick up that filthy habit?” He bends and kisses her tentatively on the lips. “Your mouth stinks.”
She smiles that smile again. “You have to go soon. Someone from the CID is coming at 3.30.”
“When can I see you again?”
“Give me some time.”
*
The inspector arrives soon after Matthew has left. The small and unruly flat puts him at ease. He smiles kindly at the ashtray, like an unctuous priest forgiving the little peccadilloes of his flock.
Ling returns with a cup of strong black tea and sits opposite the inspector, across the tidied-up coffee table. “So what does your investigative mind say about the CPIB report?”
“Erm, I can’t comment on another department’s investigation. I’m here to talk about your father’s death.”
“A blind man can see that the two are connected. The high court is going to convict my father for graft and the coroner’s court is going to decide my father’s death was suicide. And a reasonable person will put two and two together.”
“You think the government wants the public to think like that?”
“You should know better than I.”
“I’m only a government servant. I have to think that the court makes its decision based on the evidence in front of it.” He looks around the flat as inoffensively as possible.
“I’m not saying my father was entirely free from blame. But the CPIB investigation is just a charade,” she sneers.
“So what’s your theory?”
“I have no evidence, of course.”
“To prove what?”
“To prove it wasn’t suicide.”
“Why do you think it wasn’t?”
“I’m his daughter. I know.”
“Your father had thrown you out because of your Indian boyfriend, and cut you out of his huge estate. Didn’t you harbour some ill will towards him?”
“Where’s the connection to my theory?” She looks at him and doubts he is capable of deductive thinking.
“I’m just throwing up the possibility that you could be the one who killed your father…according to your theory.”
Ling bursts into unselfconscious laughter. “Sure, I could be the one. But just for your enquiring mind, my father did not send me to Australia because of my old boyfriend.” She pauses and looks at the inspector like a mine detector looking for booby traps. “It’s…because I knew too much,” she lets slip in spite of herself.
“What was it that you knew?” The inspector suddenly feels a click after two weeks of groping in the dark.
Ling lights a cigarette and inhales deeply. “I won’t tell you because I know you’re not from the CID. I’ve rung the CID. They don’t know of you. But I wouldn’t tell you all the more if you were from the CID.”
“Well, why didn’t you get the police onto me?”
“I’m still interested in you.”
“Thank you for entertaining me even when you know I’m a fake.”
“Well, I don’t know who you are, but if you’re an investigator worth your salt, you should find out what transpired when the PM’s personal assistant summoned my father to his office the day before he died.”
“That will no doubt be a vital lead, but the evidence will also self-destruct as soon as the meeting ends.”
“Isn’t that what your paymaster wants you to find out?” She sits back and puts her right foot up on her left knee. The cigarette in hand completes the picture of mock cool.
“You’re not concerned who my paymaster might be?”
“The CIA? KGB?” She waves her hand about, the cigarette forming whorls of white haze.
“I take it as a compliment that you didn’t suspect me to be from the ISD. But if I were you, I would be more careful.”
“Who’s talking? You are the one who should be more careful.”
“Okay, both of us should be more careful.”
A long pause follows. Ling stubs out her cigarette.
“Since your return from Sydney, did your father talk to you about his…problems?”
“Here and there.”
“What about that secret you both shared? Did he warn you again not to talk?”
Ling feels a hollow in her bowels, and grabs another cigarette hoping to fill the cold space. “It’s gone now.”
“What’s gone?”
“You’d better go. The heat is giving me a headache.” She rubs her temples perfunctorily with her thumbs, knowing that it will not relieve the pain. She feels the blood vessels to her brain contract then dilate. Lim feels he has found the key to unlock the enigma and then dropped it into a covered drain. “Unlike your oldest brother and sister, you’re not an admirer of the government.”
“That’s not fashionable in the West.”
“You’re hardly fashion-conscious, otherwise you would not be living in this place.”
“It’s hip to be poor and untidy.”
“You despise your father’s wealth?”
“Not wealth per se, but how he got it.”
“And how was that?”
“None of your business.”
“What do you think the PM’s personal assistant could have told your father?”
“He couldn’t have asked my father to play golf that weekend. Have you found out where those drugs came from?”
“I have tried but this is not like in the movies where the police find a neat little plastic bag with the name and address of the dispensary.”
“And you are not even from the police.”
“Sarcasm won’t get us anywhere.”
“Well, we’re stuffed. Until we find something concrete, our theory is only a theory.”
“You think
the PM’s personal assistant gave him those drugs?”
Ling shrugs and rubs her right temple.
“It has something to do with the secret you know?”
Silence.
“And it’s now gone with your father’s death?”
“Listen, I think you’ve caught quite a bit on this expedition. Why don’t you fish elsewhere?” She stands up and exhales profusely.
Lim Siew Kian gazes wistfully at Ling as if she is an obstinate child refusing some avuncular advice. Not wishing to strain the goodwill extended to him so far, he thanks her warmly and leaves.
At the bottom of the block, he looks up at the many repeating units, with their washing on bamboo poles sticking out below the kitchen windows. Some households also hang their dripping mops outside. The lift lobby is strewn with litter and discarded mattresses and furniture. Lim asks himself what could have driven her to live in this urban slum instead of her father’s palace. Is it mere reverse snobbery or is she still running away from something? What you do not know cannot harm you. The opposite is also true: that the knowledge she has is dangerous to herself. He feels his hair on his arms standing on end despite the sodden heat, though little does he know that the next time he meets Ling, it will be under very macabre circumstances. He goes to a public phone booth to make an international call, as he does with all other calls relating to the case.
ELEVEN
THE CORONER’S COURT announces the verdict for the inquest into the death of Chow Sze Teck: suicide by ingesting a lethal dose of morphine and diazepam. Based on the evidence obtained through the autopsy and the investigation by the CID, the coroner’s court does not suspect any foul play.
The newspapers report the court’s verdict in as many words. In contrast, the column space given to official comments is substantial. The minister for housing regrets the loss of an outstanding administrator and colleague. Without making any direct allusion, the minister is quoted in the newspapers to have said, “But we must always remain vigilant for the corruption of power, otherwise we would have learnt nothing from the tragedies of once-wealthy countries. Which is why our government has an uncompromising precept to which all civil servants must adhere. Anyone found falling out of line will be dealt with without fear or favour, whether he is a minister or an office peon…”
Death of a Perm Sec Page 6