The Singapore School of Villainy

by Shamini Flint

  Singh escorted Sarah Thompson to the door with all politeness and then sat down in his cushioned chair. He spun around a couple of times, enjoying the sensation of mild dizziness it prompted until he noted Fong looking at him askance.

  Planting his large feet in their spotless white sneakers firmly on the floor, he stopped mid-spin, leaned back comfortably and clasped his fingers over his large belly. ‘Hmmm – the ex-Mrs Thompson claims to have an alibi. Pity! Ex-wives always make such good suspects.’ He brightened up. ‘Unless she’s lying, of course.’

  ‘Why would she have waited this long to murder her ex-husband?’ asked Fong. ‘It’s been more than six months since Mark Thompson ran off with Maria.’

  Singh pondered the woman who had just left. She was not the first middle-aged woman whose husband had left her for a nubile young Asian beauty. Many men were drawn to the gentle air of submission that characterised so many of these pretty young things. He remembered that his own wife had been quietly domestic for the first few months of their marriage before her natural assertiveness had emerged. The majority of relationships between older white men and young local women ended in tears – the critical question was whether the one between Mark Thompson and his Filipina bride had also ended in death.

  ‘What next, sir?’ asked Corporal Fong timidly when Singh didn’t respond to his remarks.

  ‘I’m going to go and see that good-looking young woman, Annie Nathan.’

  ‘Would you like me to come along?’

  Singh grinned. ‘Don’t worry – I don’t need a chaperon!’

  Annie noticed a dark sedan draw up at the front gate. The short yet dignified figure of Inspector Singh emerged from the front passenger seat. He was dressed, as always, in black trousers and a long-sleeved white shirt that was starting to wilt after a long day. He wore his trademark snowy sneakers and had, as before, a breast pocket full of pens. The weight had caused the pocket to sag and a blue stain had developed where a pen had leaked.

  The inspector walked over at a leisurely pace, glancing about him at the two-door convertible in the driveway, the black and white colonial-era bungalow and the glint of blue from the pool. Annie felt a stab of guilt at the luxury that her life as an expatriate in Singapore allowed her. She noticed that Singh’s trousers were faintly shiny on the thighs and around his ample posterior – it was obviously a well-worn pair. Perhaps Singaporean policemen were poorly paid. Certainly they were unlikely to earn as much as a junior partner at an international law firm. However, Inspector Singh showed no reaction to her home, either of envy or enthusiasm, although Annie did detect evidence of a mild pleasure in the curvature of the plump pinkish lower lip when he accepted her offer of a beer. Apparently he was willing to drink on duty. She got an icy Carlsberg from the fridge and a glass of water for herself. He took a healthy swig, draining a third of the glass immediately.

  ‘I’d like to ask you a few questions,’ he said, wiping the froth off his beard with the back of his hand.

  ‘Of course,’ said Annie. ‘Although I’m not sure how I can help you.’

  ‘An investigation is a process of elimination. All information is useful,’ he said ponderously.

  ‘Well, if you eliminate me as a suspect, I’d be delighted.’

  He did not respond to this attempt at light-heartedness and it was her turn to have a quick gulp of her drink.

  ‘Tell me about the office.’

  ‘What sort of thing do you want to know?’ she asked.

  ‘Anything – the organisational structure, the people.’

  ‘It would be better to get that sort of detail from Stephen Thwaites. He’s the most senior person in Singapore, after Mark.’

  ‘I’d like to hear it from you.’

  Acquiescing, Annie told him what she could, trying to stick to the facts and keep her opinions to herself. ‘There are seven partners – including Mark, that is – twenty-five associates and about thirty staff including all the secretaries and accountants – and the tea lady.’

  ‘And only the partners have keycards that allow access after hours?’

  ‘We felt it was necessary to protect client confidentiality. Others need to be escorted up to the office by the security guards.’

  Singh steepled his fingers thoughtfully but made no comment.

  ‘Did anyone sign the visitors’ book that evening?’ Annie asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you can’t think that one of the partners killed Mark. I mean, why would any of us do that?’

  ‘That’s what we’re trying to find out,’ the inspector said.

  ‘What about Mark’s key? Did he have it on him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Annie’s hope that an outsider might be a viable suspect flared.

  ‘Although Mark wouldn’t have let just anyone in, especially if he had just called a meeting of the partnership,’ Singh continued.

  Annie’s crestfallen face reflected her disappointment.

  The policeman added, ‘The wife and the ex-wife are possibilities, I suppose.’

  Annie remembered the last time she had seen Sarah Thompson. Mark Thompson’s wife had stormed into the office, crying and shouting – hysterical. Stephen had gone to Sarah, tried to calm her down and, more importantly, quieten her down. Annie, in a meeting with clients, had apologised hurriedly and slipped out of the conference room.

  When Mark had finally appeared at the door of his office, Sarah Thompson had attacked her husband, swinging and kicking at him, screaming incoherently. It had taken a few moments for Annie to discern individual words in the abuse. ‘You’re sleeping with her – my God, you’re having an affair with Maria.’

  Mark had managed to get a grip on his wife’s arms, preventing her from hitting him again. The lawyers and staff had been standing around, uncertain what to do, desperately conscious of the clients littering the office.

  Annie waited for Mark to deny having an affair. She had no idea whether he was or not but it seemed the prudent thing to do. Instead, Mark had asked, his voice breathless from the physical task of holding his wife at arm’s length, ‘How did you find out?’

  Annie had seen her own dismay reflected on the face of the other lawyers – the office foyer was no place for confessions of adultery.

  ‘How did I find out? How did I find out? She told me! My maid’s just told me that she’s been sleeping with my husband.’

  There was a collective gasp as the identity of the mysterious Maria became known. Mark had broken the ultimate taboo of the Singapore expatriate community.

  Sarah was sobbing, her shoulders heaving, like a child lost in a supermarket – anger giving way to despair. Mark dragged her into his office and shut the door but snatches of conversation had still been audible. Annie had never liked Sarah, a large-boned, sunbed-tanned woman with a braying laugh and a condescending attitude. But an alcoholic, philandering husband was a high price to pay for an expatriate entitlement complex.

  ‘You should tell me.’

  Annie stared at the inspector leaning comfortably back in his chair, hands entwined on his belly. She had a sudden premonition that it was a pose she would see often in the coming weeks.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ she asked.

  ‘You should tell me what you were thinking. From your expression I would deduce that it has a significant bearing on the investigation.’

  Annie pressed two hands to her hot cheeks. She was blushing like some character out of a Jane Austen novel. She decided immediately that there was no way she was going to get into the blame game. Let the inspector find out about Mark’s infidelities from one of the other partners. She, Annie, would keep her nose clean. In any event, Mark was unlikely to have escorted Sarah up to the office so she was not a credible suspect despite her cast-iron motive.

  ‘Mark must have escorted his killer upstairs,’ she insisted. ‘Nothing else makes sense!’

  ‘It’s possible,’ agreed Singh. His tone, however, was sceptical.

  ‘What about
Quentin’s key?’ asked Annie, casting around for anything that might distract the policeman from his focus on the partnership.

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘He didn’t have it that day. He must have lost it.’

  ‘Mr Holbrooke hasn’t mentioned this to me. I’ll raise it with him.’

  ‘Yes, do ask him,’ said Annie insistently. ‘That must be the explanation.’

  ‘Why would a stranger coming across a lost key use it to murder your senior partner?’

  Annie’s optimism that Quentin’s lost key would provide a convenient solution evaporated like a rainwater puddle on a sunny Singapore afternoon.

  The inspector drained his glass. He stood up, a short figure with a gimlet eye, nodded to Annie and made his way up the driveway. Annie watched him go, noticing how carefully he placed his feet to avoid soiling his pristine sneakers in muddy patches on the gravel. She was uncertain what the visit had been about. She felt rattled. Why had he come? He had asked her for information that he could easily have obtained from any one of the more senior partners. She shook her head and ran a hand through her glossy dark hair. She could not avoid the sensation that his visit had been some sort of test. Had she passed? Or failed?

  Annie watched the police car reverse out of her driveway, going over her conversation with the inspector in her head. Then she fetched her mobile phone and rang Quentin.

  He picked up at once. ‘Hello?’ he said, in a tentative voice.

  ‘It’s me, Annie.’ She automatically tried to sound reassuring.

  ‘Oh! I was expecting the good inspector,’ he replied, the relief audible. ‘He called me and the line got cut.’

  It was Annie’s turn to be surprised. ‘He rang you? But he’s just been here.’

  ‘Why? What did you tell him, what’s going on?’ Quentin’s voice moved up an octave as he barked questions at her.

  ‘Nothing important,’ she said, trying to calm her friend. ‘I just mentioned that you didn’t have your keycard that evening.’

  ‘Jesus Christ, Annie!’ Quentin exclaimed. ‘I didn’t tell him about the key. Now he’s going to think I’ve been lying to him.’

  ‘But why didn’t you tell him?’

  ‘Because he would assume that the only reason I would claim to have lost my key would be to create some doubt…there’s no way that some stranger picked up the key and killed Mark. Why the hell would they?’

  ‘You’re reading too much into this, Quentin.’

  ‘Don’t be so damned naïve!’ he snapped and hung up.

  Corporal Fong waited patiently in the lift lobby of his apartment tower block. A couple of small children were playing in a corner, kneeling down to roll their marbles. Loud whoops of laughter punctuated their game. Fong glanced up uneasily – flowerpots had been known to fall off balcony ledges, killing unwary people below.

  The lift door slid open and he stepped in. A plastic bag of garbage in the corner emitted the rancid smell of garlic and rotting seafood. One of the residents had obviously been too lazy to ride down to dump the rubbish in the skip under the building and had left it neatly in the corner of the lift, hoping someone else would take it out. Fong usually did. Today he couldn’t be bothered. He had already spent the whole day dancing to the inspector’s tune. He would be damned if he did anyone else’s dirty work.

  He ran a frustrated hand through his neatly cut black hair, feeling the rigidity of the gelled strands. This was his first assignment and it was a complex case full of political under-tones as the privileged expatriate class found itself under investigation. There was plenty of room to shine. Unfortunately, the inspector appeared to believe he was good to shine shoes and not much else.

  He had not been near a witness or a crime scene all day. Fong slammed his fist into his palm, an unexpectedly overt display of temper. When he was ordered to join the team investigating the murder of Mark Thompson, his head had been filled with dreams of glory. He had pictured himself nabbing a suspect as he made a desperate attempt to escape. The renowned Inspector Singh would have gripped his hand and pumped it up and down, almost teary with relief that Corporal Fong had saved the day – and his reputation. The reality had been far different. The senior policeman had hardly uttered two words to him. It was not an auspicious start to his career. He almost wished that he had been sent to the airports as a glorified security guard. At least there was less room for humiliation. And now the lard-bucket claimed that he knew who the murderer was, based on “human nature”. That was a likely story. He, Fong, would continue to rely on good old-fashioned evidence like fingerprints and CCTV tape, not on a fat man’s unreliable understanding of the behaviour of murderers. Not that there was any hard evidence so far; the fingerprints at the scene of the crime were susceptible to a hundred innocent explanations, the searches of the lawyers’ residences had turned up squat – no sign of the blood-stained, rolled-up T-shirt of Inspector Singh’s fantasies – and they were still waiting for bank statements.

  Fong let himself into his home, unlocking the iron grille and the wooden door irritably. It was not as if they had any possessions worth stealing. Home was a tiny two-bedroom subsidised Housing Development Board flat that he shared with his parents. His mother was watching a Cantonese serial on cable television. She guffawed loudly, her carefully primped and curled grey hair askew. She barely acknowledged his entrance.

  His father lay on a thin mattress on the living room floor. He had been hurt in an industrial accident a couple of years before retirement and was paralysed from the neck down. Corporal Fong saw that the old man had not been moved that day. He went over to him and, smiling reassuringly, turned his father on his side. If he was too long in one position, he developed bed sores. His mother hardly bothered to care for his father these days. Any love she had borne for her husband had long since been destroyed by the enforced intimacy of that living room, where she stared at the television and he stared at the ceiling. She still spoon-fed the old man a thin soup twice a day but from the stains on his mouth and down his chin, even this was done impatiently. Fong sighed and wished once more that he had the money to hire a nurse and move them all into a larger place. As it stood, his small constabulary salary was barely enough to cover the essentials.

  Quietly, he sat down next to his father. The old man blinked at him. His head reminded Fong of a newly hatched bird, bald and crinkled, big wet eyes staring at him in quiet misery. He wiped the old man’s face with a wet towel and fluffed up his pillows.

  Singh gently closed the file that had been waiting for him on his desk when he returned from his interview with Annie. He very much feared that this was not going to be one of those murders solved through the convenient discovery of some incontrovertible piece of evidence. So far, searches of the lawyers’ homes had been disappointing. The office computers had yielded nothing of interest, not even the usual downloads of sport and porn – the firm’s firewalls were the most effective money could buy and the lawyers had been well protected from their own unsavoury proclivities. It had always been a long shot, but Superintendent Chen would be disappointed.

  There was a cursory knock on the door and the superintendent marched in as if summoned telepathically by his thoughts. Singh decided immediately that he would buy himself a steel helmet to replace his turban if that was indeed the case.

  ‘Any developments yet?’

  Singh scowled. He ignored the question and instead asked, his tone sharp, ‘Why did you agree to hold the interviews at the law offices?’

  ‘To keep the lawyers happy.’

  ‘We’re looking for a murderer, not running a babysitting service!’

  ‘And when you find your murderer you can drag him or her back here with my blessing – in the meantime, I want those expats treated with kid gloves.’

  Singh’s lips formed a thin, stubborn line – he didn’t like where this was going.

  Superintendent Chen leaned forward, two hands splayed on Singh’s desk. ‘Let me be crystal clear – I don’t want comp
laints about police tactics circulating in the expat community. There’s no point solving this murder if we drive these people away. Do you understand me, Singh?’

  The inspector hesitated for a long moment and then nodded, a curt dip of his turban. If he wanted to stay on the case he would have to humour the higher-ups. And he most definitely wanted to stay on the case, not to preserve Singapore’s reputation as a safe haven for wealthy foreigners but to find some justice for an unsuspecting old man who had been beaten to death at his desk.

  Chen was prepared to appease his subordinate now that he sensed a victory. ‘Keep up the good work,’ he said in ringing tones, as if he was addressing a parade ground filled with enthusiastic rookies instead of a solitary bad-tempered policeman, and hurried out of the room.

  Seven

  Annie arrived at the office early; she had lain awake half the night dreading the moment when she would have to step onto the premises again. She was out of bed before the sun had cast its light tendrils into her lush garden, sending the nightjars winging their way to bed and signalling to her cat that it was time to come home after a long night marauding through the neighbourhood.

  She was the first to get in. Perhaps the rest had not suffered from her sense of nervous disquiet, she thought, although the last time she had seen the partners – when visiting the widow – they had all been exhibiting various degrees of tension.

  Annie felt uneasy in the semi-darkness. She flicked on as many light switches as she could, bathing the office in fluorescent light. She was determined that no corner should remain shadowy and fearsome. After putting her briefcase in her own room, she went to the pantry to get a cup of coffee, and saw Mark’s room at the end of the corridor. Memories of Mark washed over her; laughing, officious, dogmatic, drunk. Then – sprawled over his table, red blood staining his white hair like a cheap dye.

  She made her way along the corridor. It was as deserted as it had been on the evening of the murder. She wondered whether Mark’s office had been cleaned. She doubted that the police cleared up when they were done with their forensic analysis although they had informed the partners that their offices were no longer off-limits despite it having been three short days since the events of Friday. Like everything else in Singapore, efficiency was the paramount consideration. Presumably, however, this speedy approach did not extend to the actual murder inquiry. Inspector Singh, at least, seemed to have a painstaking approach to the investigation.