The Betel Nut Tree Mystery

by Ovidia Yu

  ‘Dr Covington, my name is Le Froy.’

  ‘You must be Chief Inspector Le Froy. Roderick Glossop spoke of you.’ Dr Covington looked mollified. He glanced at the bed but made no move towards it. He had entered through the connecting door, not from the outside, and he kept his distance from the corpse.

  ‘I heard what the servants are saying. I suppose there’s no mistake? Victor Glossop is really dead? Nicole’s Victor?’

  ‘The dead man has not yet been formally identified,’ Le Froy said. ‘I must talk to Nicole Covington as soon as possible. Unfortunately, we don’t have women officers on the staff, but my associate Miss Chen will assist me in the interview.’

  Dr Covington took another look at me. He seemed surprised. ‘You employ locals?’

  ‘All staff are local residents, whether short- or long-term.’

  ‘Of course.’

  My role was news to me too. Fortunately, I was prepared. I always carried a notebook and pens in my bag. With my camera, I could even photograph the witness. I nodded like I thought a police associate would nod.

  Dr Covington was a large, heavy man with thick hair the rich orange colour of cooked yams. He was perhaps in his late fifties. The sheen of sweat on reddened skin showed he had not been out east very long, and the yellowness in his eyes indicated an overworked liver. I could tell from his manner he was used to being in charge and obeyed.

  He inclined his head slightly and said, in passable Mandarin, ‘Ni hao.’ I appreciated the gesture, though his Mandarin was possibly better than mine. In my grandmother’s house I had learned Malay and Hokkien and picked up marketplace Cantonese, Teochew and Tamil. At school, we had learned English and a smattering of French and German, but not Mandarin.

  ‘Xie xie,’ I replied. ‘I can speak English, sir.’

  ‘Glad to hear that.’

  I know better than to judge on first appearances and decided to try to like Dr Taylor Covington. You shouldn’t dislike people just because they startle you by popping up in a room with a dead body.

  Le Froy looked at the carpet and the shoes Van Dijk and Dr Covington were wearing, but I could tell he was studying Dr Covington with attention.

  ‘Shall we move into the corridor?’ Le Froy suggested. The other men agreed and I followed them.

  I knew Le Froy’s method of working. At the starting gate, he considered every person a suspect, then factored in motives, personality and opportunity, and adjusted the odds accordingly. He would have the hotel staff on his list too, Van Dijk included.

  Le Froy’s next question was addressed to the general manager. ‘Your guests have rooms upstairs as well as down here? Is that routine?’

  ‘Just the two,’ Van Dijk murmured. ‘By special arrangement.’

  ‘One is for my young grandson,’ Dr Covington said. ‘We play games and do lessons, and down here he can work off his energy. We can get in and out without disturbing the other guests. When Victor heard about it, he got a room down here too. Nicole thought it a grand idea till they told her it was for men only. Then she kicked up such a fuss—’

  He stopped abruptly. There was acute discomfort on his face. He passed a hand distractedly through his hair. ‘Please forgive me. I am an old fool under stress and, God’s truth, I have not felt stress like this since losing my boy, Radley. Good of you to come, Chief Inspector and Miss Chen. I appreciate it. Le Froy, you must do all you can to clear this up.’

  Le Froy nodded, acknowledging his pain. ‘What was the fuss about?’

  ‘Normal for Nicole, really. She is quite, quite . . .’ He shook his head but no description emerged. ‘Please understand. Nicole hasn’t had an easy life. She’s very highly strung and, as you can imagine, this is a terrible shock to her.’

  ‘Nicole is your daughter?’

  ‘My daughter-in-law.’ There was a twitch of impatience in his voice. As though he suspected Le Froy was making fun of him. ‘She was married to my son Radley – my late son, Radley. She was engaged to marry Victor—’

  ‘I want to talk to her as soon as possible,’ Le Froy said again. ‘Now.’

  Le Froy once told me (after I accidentally killed someone who was trying to kill me) that immediately after a shock is both the best and the worst time to interview someone. You can learn a great deal even if you don’t get a single answer out of them. I wondered if he suspected Nicole Covington of killing her husband-to-be.

  ‘Nicole’s suite is on the third floor.’ Dr Covington started for the broad central stairwell, a hand on Le Froy’s shoulder. ‘This hotel believes in propriety with a capital P. They could have packed all of us into one of their damn suites but they insisted the bride-to-be had to bunk in on a different floor. No complaints from Nicole, though. The Farquhar put her in rooms usually reserved for visiting royalty and only VIPs get to camp there.’

  I glanced at Van Dijk, who remained diplomatically impassive. ‘Fortunately, December is low season for travellers, due to the monsoon winds,’ he remarked, to no one in particular.

  Perhaps I had judged Van Dijk too hastily. It is harder to figure out the living than the dead.

  Following them up the stairs to the third floor, I noticed Taylor Covington had a slight limp. Earlier, I had seen him studying my limp and now I knew why. But he had said nothing. If you don’t have to think twice about going up or down a staircase you won’t understand. It’s like seeing another Straits-born person in a room full of ang mohs: it brings the comfort of knowing someone ‘like me’ is present even if you don’t exchange a single word. Unless you were hoping to blend in, in which case you resent him or her for reminding you of how impossible it is.

  I didn’t think Dr Covington was embarrassed about his limp. But maybe that was because I was extrapolating from the only other doctors I knew – Dr Leask, who was socially awkward and stammered unless he was talking about his studies in blood infections and poisons, and Dr Shankar, Parshanti’s father. I have seen Dr Shankar jump off a moving bus to ask a roadside vagrant if he could reset his broken leg for free, not out of pity or charity but because he wanted to test a bone-setting frame he had developed.

  ‘Seems to be obvious what happened in there,’ Dr Covington was saying, as I finally joined them on the third-floor landing, ‘going by the state of the room. Some local addicts must have broken in or been brought in by Victor. You can see they treated the place like a spittoon. Addicts are all over the island, chewing that ghastly stuff. Victor tried it and had a bad reaction.’

  No.

  Soldiers and sailors often got drunk on their nights out. But I was sure local betel addicts were not responsible for the murder. Men who can afford alcohol don’t need sireh. Betel-chewing was a temporary sop for pain and hunger. Everyone knows that in the long run it causes more trouble than it cures – bad teeth and raw throats coughing up bloody phlegm for a start. Especially among the poorest, who chew the dregs discarded by others. The best thing that can be said for betel is that it costs less than rice when you are starving.

  ‘Mrs Nicole Covington?’ Le Froy prompted.

  Dr Covington knocked on the door of the suite.

  ‘Go away!’ a woman shouted.

  Nicole

  ‘Nicole, the police want to speak to you,’ Dr Covington said. He knocked again and pushed open the door to her suite without waiting for an answer. Le Froy and I followed him in.

  There were three people in the large sitting room. The walls were creamy white with framed watercolours and black-lacquered beams across the high ceiling. There was a large Agra rug on the polished floor, and the standard lamps, wooden cabinets and upholstered furniture looked of better quality than I had seen in the governor’s mansion.

  Nicole Covington was lying on the sofa with a small plump boy, who looked about six years old. A man sat on the upright chair beside them. He got to his feet as we entered but stared and said nothing. He was much younger than Dr Covington and his deferential attitude gave me the impression he was a secretary or assistant.

 
I had seen so many pictures of Nicole Covington in the illustrated papers that it felt like meeting a movie star. She must have been wearing the new pancake make-up Parshanti had raved about because her face looked porcelain smooth and without pores. At first sight, I thought her the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.

  Her dress was made of some soft flowing material, dark blue sprinkled with white flowers, and had a prim white lace collar. And she was wearing a necklace of pearls and blue stones that might have been sapphires or lapis lazuli. Perhaps she sensed me looking at her necklace because her hand reached up to play with it as she spoke.

  ‘Victor’s dead, isn’t he? And it’s all because of me.’ She swung her feet gracefully to the floor and stood up. She was smaller than I’d expected, not much taller than I was. Her lips and fingernails were crimson, brighter than blood against her very fair skin. I knew she was twenty-six years old, but she might have been a teenage girl, with her dark brown hair shining in a fashionable bob.

  Then she cried, ‘It’s my fault. I killed him, like I killed all the others! If you’re really the police, you must arrest me at once!’ She held her wrists together and thrust them in Le Froy’s direction as she tilted her head back and wailed like a child.

  I gaped.

  ‘Please pull yourself together, Nicole.’ Dr Covington looked grim.

  ‘Is that a statement?’ Le Froy asked calmly. ‘Who are the others you killed?’

  ‘It’s the shock,’ Dr Covington said quickly. ‘She doesn’t know what she’s saying. It’s much worse for Nicole, of course, she being a woman. You’ll hear her say all kinds of things but I wouldn’t set too much store by any of it until she calms down some. Come, Nicole. Sit down and stop talking rubbish!’

  We stood awkwardly around the weeping woman. The quiet young man looked pained but didn’t move. The dark-haired little boy was standing almost at attention by his mother’s side.

  ‘Hello,’ I said to him.

  ‘How do you do?’ he said formally. ‘Pleased to meet you.’ He had a high, sweet voice, which was all the more striking because of the care with which he enunciated.

  ‘Oh, you are a sweetheart!’ I cried, forgetting I was an associate with the Detective Unit. The serious little boy in his pale blue sailor shirt and grey shorts was enchanting. Like a talking doll with perfect manners. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘My name is Radley Covington Junior. My father was Radley Covington. He is dead.’

  ‘My grandson. We call him Junior,’ Dr Covington said. He was smiling. A glow softened his face when he looked at the child. ‘He’s dark like his mother, but he’s the spitting image of his father at the same age.’

  Grandfather and grandson exchanged a smile. They were clearly close. This made me warm to Dr Covington even more. Asian men seldom spend time with their children and grandchildren.

  Now our attention was fixed on Junior, his mother stopped wailing. She looked a little put out.

  ‘A charming boy,’ Le Froy said, studying Nicole. ‘He must be a great comfort to you.’

  Generally Le Froy kept his distance from society ladies and young children, finding them irrational and unpredictable. Did he suspect Nicole? How could this tiny woman have overpowered and murdered her much larger fiancé?

  I looked at Nicole, trying to see what Le Froy saw.

  ‘Don’t stare at me like that, girl. Take your jealous eyes off me.’

  It took me a moment to realize she was talking to me. I snapped my eyes away. Was I jealous? I wasn’t normally a jealous person. If I were, I would have been jealous of everyone with two live parents and two straight legs, which would have meant being jealous all the time. But something I didn’t understand made me want to stay close to Nicole and go on watching her.

  There was something fascinating about Nicole Covington. I saw Le Froy felt it too. I had seen that expression on his face when he was trying to find the false bottom on a smuggler’s sampan.

  Nicole didn’t seem to mind him looking at her.

  ‘Victor gave this necklace to me.’ Her fingers dipped into the neckline of her dress and drew out the full length. She held the threaded stones towards Le Froy between two fingers. ‘We were going to get married on Christmas Eve. This was his engagement present to me. That’s why he’s dead too. They all die because of me. Don’t you see? Victor died because he was going to marry me. I’m cursed!’

  She spoke in a breathy little girl’s voice with an edge of hysteria, but her head tilted upwards towards Le Froy, as though she were inviting a kiss. ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen to me now.’ Her voice rose, half wailing, half moaning prettily, as she closed her eyes and rested her beautiful face on Le Froy’s shoulder.

  Dr Covington snorted as I felt, rather than saw, Le Froy stiffen.

  Any gentleman would have wrapped his arms around the distraught woman to comfort and protect her. Le Froy always said that, on duty, he was no gentleman. His arms remained by his sides as he asked, ‘Do you have a recent photograph of Mr Victor Glossop?’

  ‘Why would I keep a photograph of Victor?’ Nicole snapped, with a flare of irritation. ‘He was following me around saying he was in love with me. He should have been carrying my photograph around with him, not messing with other women.’

  ‘Dear Nicole,’ Dr Covington put an arm around her and steered her away from us, ‘don’t upset yourself. Everything is going to be all right. Chief Inspector Le Froy needs a photograph of Victor, that’s all. I’m sure Kenneth can find one somewhere. Kenneth?’

  ‘Of course,’ the quiet young man said.

  So he was Parshanti’s Kenneth Mulliner. He didn’t look like a man who would go around seducing local girls. But, then, he didn’t look like a man who would play tricks on policemen either and he had certainly been among that group. I didn’t trust him. To be honest, I had decided not to trust him even before I saw him.

  At least I could tell Parshanti he was still alive.

  ‘The chief inspector wants to ask you some questions, Nicole. Then you can leave him to take care of everything.’

  ‘Take care of what? Is he going to bring Victor back from the dead?’ Nicole wrenched herself away from Dr Covington and flung herself back on the sofa. I hoped she wasn’t going to wail again, but she pursed her lips sulkily. It didn’t look to me like great grief.

  ‘Is she taking any medicines?’ Le Froy asked.

  Dr Covington nodded vigorously. ‘I gave her a light sedative, just to help her over the shock. It’s been very difficult for her. Not just this but the previous year ever since— I should really get her to bed. She should rest before she strains herself.’

  His voice was steady and professionally caring but I noticed that Dr Covington’s shoulders had squared and his neck tensed when he was talking to Nicole or even about her. It’s not surprising to be fonder of a grandchild than an in-law but I wondered at the man travelling halfway across the world with someone who made him uncomfortable.

  ‘Nicole’s not strong and—’

  ‘Talk sense, you old fool! Strength has nothing to do with it. My fiancé is dead! I’m all alone again!’ Nicole grabbed her son and folded her arms around him, ‘My precious baby Raddy is all I have left in the world. My poor fatherless boy!’

  ‘Nicole, calm down.’

  ‘Why? What good will that do? What good will anything do? Just tell me that! Get these people away from me! Can’t I have any privacy? Kenneth! Do something useful for once and get these people out of here.’

  The little boy watched her with serious eyes. He did not seem upset by his mother’s tears. Were there tears? Nicole’s eyes had not looked red or swollen when we came in. Indeed, they were still beautifully rimmed in black, with a dusting of blue powder.

  Dr Covington was exasperated but calm. ‘Perhaps you could come back to speak to her tomorrow when she’s calmer. In the meantime, if I can be of any help . . .’

  Le Froy turned to him. ‘I would appreciate your observations as a medical man, s
ir. If you would give me an hour of your time we could go down to the station to talk.’

  ‘I’ll bring Junior with me.’ Dr Covington seemed glad to agree to this, ‘We’ll see if they can find us some cocoa, eh?’

  ‘Yes, Grandpa!’ The child brightened.

  ‘No,’ Nicole said. ‘Raddy stays with me. I need him. My life has just been destroyed and I want my boy with me. And I told you to stop calling him Junior. He’s the only Radley Covington alive on this earth right now and that’s his name. And his place is here, beside his loving mama.’

  Dr Covington winced and his eyes closed briefly, as though in sudden pain.

  ‘I’ll bring you some cocoa,’ I promised the little boy. ‘I’ll see if the kitchen can send up some biscuits too. You stay here with your mother while she’s upset.’

  ‘Thank you. My mother is a black widow spider,’ Junior explained in a clear, high voice. ‘That’s why all the men in her life keep dying.’

  His loving mama slapped him. Hard.

  What struck me was how the child reacted. His head snapped sideways and he fell to his knees on the carpet but picked himself up without fuss. Any other child would have cried at the unprovoked attack. Did his mother hit him so often he thought it was normal?

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.’ Nicole looked horrified. ‘I’m such a bad mother, I know I am. I’m a danger to my own child.’

  Spanking may be part of discipline but taking out your bad temper on a child is bullying. That is something no child should have to live with.

  I stepped forward and took Junior’s hand. ‘We are going downstairs for cocoa. Now.’ Junior seemed willing enough.

  It was only when I closed the suite doors behind us that I realized I had no idea where to go.

  Promise of Cocoa

  We were standing in the corridor when the doors to the suite opened again and Kenneth Mulliner slipped out. ‘It might have been an accident,’ he said.

  ‘She hit him on purpose.’

  ‘Please don’t fight.’ Junior tugged at Kenneth’s arm. He was clearly at ease with the man, whose accent was British rather than American. I wondered if he was Junior’s tutor.