The Singapore School of Villainy

by Shamini Flint

  ‘I really didn’t want to hurt Jagdesh,’ she whispered. ‘He was my friend.’

  David blanched white at the unlikely words – an assertion of friendship by a murderer for her victim.

  Annie continued, ‘Jagdesh was so close to death anyway. And if he was dead, I thought Inspector Singh would stop poking his nose into our business. Life would get back to normal.’ She smiled at David. ‘I was hoping that there might be something worthwhile between us…if only we could put the murder investigation behind us.’

  David flinched. Annie knew that the thought that he might have formed a part of her motive was too much for him to bear. She continued, desperately seeking a hint of understanding, ‘I didn’t know that he had an alibi. I just thought it would make the whole thing go away.’

  She reached out and touched David gently on the face. She said, ‘I’m really sorry about the way things turned out.’ Annie turned to the inspector with a crooked grin that failed to conceal her wretchedness. ‘What now?’ she asked.

  Singh said, ‘You’re under arrest for the murder of Mark Thompson and Jagdesh Singh…’

  Epilogue

  The presiding judge did not hesitate to impose the death penalty for the double murder. He ordered, in the language of statute and precedent, that the accused “be hanged from the neck until dead”. Annie had refused to appeal despite David Sheringham’s urgent pleas. Once she was on death row – in her thirty-square-foot cell with the sleeping mat and toilet – she had refused to see him, even after she was notified four days before of the Friday – it was always Friday – on which she would walk to her death.

  Singh, a reluctant emissary on behalf of David, was told by the guards while the prisoner was being escorted to the meeting room that she had also refused television privileges, special meals and to see her father. But she had asked to donate her organs, hoping, he guessed, to make amends for the lives she had taken.

  Now, they sat on chairs on either side of a clear glass window. Prisoners on death row were not allowed physical contact with anyone, not their families, friends, and certainly not arresting policemen.

  ‘David really wants to see you,’ explained Singh.

  She refused with a small shake of the head and the policeman noticed for the first time that her glossy hair had been cut short.

  Her manner was calm and there was a small smile on her lips. ‘There’s no point,’ she said. ‘It will only upset him.’

  Singh recalled the distraught young man who had begged him to visit Annie and could find no sensible response to this belated concern for David’s emotional state. They sat across from each other now, neither of them speaking. It was a friendly silence, a strange sensation in that small closed space. Singh guessed that, in many ways, Annie was relieved that her ordeal was almost over. The murder of Mark Thompson had not been pre-meditated. Everything else that had taken place had assumed a nightmarish quality of inevitability until she found herself holding a pillow to the face of an unhappy young man.

  ‘What’s happening with Quentin?’ she asked, and he was surprised that she had the energy to think of others.

  ‘After your arrest, I ordered that passports be returned to the other lawyers as they were no longer suspects. Quentin caught the first flight out of Singapore. I understand from David that he’s in rehab in London.’ He continued with a slow wink of his heavy eyelid, ‘I had forgotten, you see, that Quentin was wanted on drugs charges.’

  The woman across from him smiled with genuine heartfelt relief. ‘Good work,’ she said quietly.

  The inspector nodded. There had been hell to pay. Superintendent Chen had been apoplectic. But it had been worth it. There had been enough death already and Singh was not prepared to facilitate another.

  He changed the subject abruptly. ‘Why did you do it?’ he asked.

  She did not misunderstand the question. He was not asking about the murders. He wanted to know why a wealthy successful young woman would have used her own father to trade shares illegally for money.

  ‘It’s hard to explain. When we were growing up, we were always short of money. My dad, he was a risk-taker, always looking out for the next business opportunity, always willing to gamble everything on “making it big”!’

  Singh tried to remember his own father, a civil servant with the British administration who had worn a massive turban and starched trousers that would stand upright without him. The old man had always kept a careful record of the family’s every expenditure in a small notebook to ensure they did not exceed his income.

  ‘We were constantly in debt, there were bailiffs at the door and sometimes gangsters if Dad borrowed money through more informal channels…’ She looked at the policeman, meeting his eyes, seeking his understanding. ‘We were always afraid.’

  Singh nodded. Despite her elucidation, he struggled to fathom her motives. But he wanted to hear more.

  ‘One day, when I was about eleven, three men came to the house. My father owed them money. He was away – he was always away when things got unpleasant. They insisted we pay them. My mother gave them the cash we had in the house but it was a derisory amount, not enough to persuade them to leave. One of them grabbed Mum’s hand and yanked the wedding ring off her finger.’

  She was re-living the moment, he could tell from her hoarse, fear-laden voice. ‘I heard the bone in her finger crack, Mum screamed, I was crying, begging them to go away.’

  There were tears in her eyes now. ‘She had a gold chain around her neck – she always wore it. It was the one thing she never let my dad pawn. She would smile at me and say it was for a rainy day. One of the men grabbed the chain and yanked. At first, it didn’t snap. Mum’s hands were around her throat and I was afraid that she was going to choke. He twisted the chain and it broke. Mum fell backwards and hit her head on the corner of a table.’

  She fell silent. This time around it was a silence fraught with unshed tears and unfinished tales.

  ‘I tried to raise her up but she was too heavy for me. And then I saw that there was blood on my hands. The men, when they realised that Mum was injured, they ran away. By the time the ambulance arrived, Mum was dead.’

  She looked up, meeting his eyes. ‘It’s not an excuse. There’s no excuse for what I did. But I swore that day that I would never be short of money, never allow myself to be in such a position again.’

  Singh sighed deeply. ‘It’s not an excuse but I think it is, at least, an explanation.’

  She nodded her thanks. Perhaps, he thought, there was solace in a story told to a sympathetic listener.

  ‘May I tell David?’ he asked carefully.

  She nodded once, rose slowly to her feet and walked out of the room.

  The execution was scheduled to take place just before dawn – at six a.m. exactly. The executioner had visited Annie the previous day and taken her weight, in order to be sure to use the appropriate length of rope. Singapore used the “long drop” method of hanging, which causes a cervical fracture in the neck and almost instantaneous paralysis and unconsciousness. Singh knew that it was argued by proponents to be the most humane method of judicial execution. The inspector also knew that an inexperienced hangman could leave the victim asphyxiating in slow agony or decapitated.

  The hangman was an old acquaintance though, a seventy-year-old prison guard in knee-length shorts and a T-shirt, wearing long socks with trainers, who had carried out hundreds of executions, first for the British and then for the Singaporean government. Singh whispered to him to be extra careful and received a nod and a smile in return. When Annie arrived she was already hooded and Singh was glad – and ashamed of himself for being glad – that he would not have to look into her soft brown eyes once more.

  He had decided to attend the hanging, something he rarely did, to provide some comfort to David Sheringham, the young lawyer who had become his friend. He wanted to be able to tell him that someone she knew had been with the woman he cared about at the moment of her death. If Annie found some reassu
rance in his presence, he did not mind that either. It was cold comfort to him that she had earned her place on the platform by killing two people. Corporal Fong, clutching his letter of promotion in a firm grip, had offered to come along but Singh had refused the company. This was something he preferred to do alone.

  He watched as the chief hangman escorted Annie over the trapdoor. She went willingly and quietly. There was no struggle, no protest. The coroner and prison superintendent stood by him, both silent. They had all witnessed many executions in their time, but even to these hardened men there was something pitiful about this slim hooded figure.

  Annie Nathan stood very straight and very still as the noose was placed gently around her neck.

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  Inspector Singh is in a bad mood. He’s been sent from his home in Singapore to Kuala Lumpur to solve a murder that has him stumped. Chelsea Liew – the famous Singaporean model – is on death row for the murder of her ex-husband. She swears she didn’t do it, he thinks she didn’t do it, but no matter how hard he tries to get to the bottom of things, he still arrives back where he started – that Chelsea’s husband was shot at point blank range and that Chelsea had the best motive to pull the trigger: he was taking her kids away from her.

  Now Inspector Singh must pull out all the stops to crack a crime that could potentially free a beautiful and innocent woman and reunite a mother with her children. There’s just one problem – the Malaysian police refuse to play ball…

  Stop No. 2: Bali…

  INSPECTOR SINGH INVESTIGATES:

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  Inspector Singh is back, but this time on secondment to Bali. A bomb has exploded and Singh has been sent to help with anti-terrorism efforts. But there’s a slight problem: he knows squat about hunting terrorists. He’s much better suited to solving murder!

  So when a body is discovered in the wreckage, killed by a bullet before the bomb went off, Singh should be the one to find the answers – especially with the help of a wily Australian copper by his side. But simple murders are never as simple as they seem – and this one has far-reaching global consequences…

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  Shamini Flint lives in Singapore with her husband and two children. She began her career in law in Malaysia and also worked at an international law firm in Singapore. She travelled extensively around Asia for her work, before resigning to be a stay-at-home mum, writer, part-time lecturer and environmental activist.

  Shamini also writes children’s books with cultural and environmental themes, including Ten and The Seeds of Time, as well as the Sasha series of children’s books.

  Visit Shamini’s website at www.shaminiflint.com

  Acknowledgements

  For their ongoing support: Usha Cheryan, Dominique and John Richards, Matthew and Penny Burgess, Richard and Carol Barker and Sue and Roger Barbour.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  A THOMAS DUNNE BOOK FOR MINOTAUR BOOKS.

  An imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

  THE SINGAPORE SCHOOL OF VILLAINY: INSPECTOR SINGH INVESTIGATES. Copyright © 2010 by Shamini Flint. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.thomasdunnebooks.com

  www.minotaurbooks.com

  ISBN: 978-1-250-01479-5

  First published in Great Britain as a paperback original by Piatkus, an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group, an Hachette UK Company