Moonrise, Sunset

by Gopal Baratham

  D’Cruz looked at my face and his voice softened. “There is one other thing which you had better get used to from the start. We uncover worms as fat as turds whenever we investigate the life of a murder victim. They need not have to be people like the evangelist with the flying twat. It would happen if the Pope got snuffed.

  “We may be a bunch of ruffians, we policemen, but if we understand one thing, it’s this: the dead are defenceless and we are careful with what we find out, and we go out of our way to protect the memories of murder victims.” His voice became hard again. “But we are not so considerate that we don’t dig for the facts nor do we operate any kind of cover-up if the evidence we uncover offends this or that person.” His eyes locked on to mine.

  Jafri intervened. “Let us assume that you are right. That Vanita was the killer’s primary target…” A thought struck him. “Why could How Kum not have been the one he was after? The girl was lying over him so he kills her, and…”

  “… with her out of the way, he gets bored with the whole business and pushes off to kill two people in another part of the park.”

  Jafri laughed. I did too, but a thought bothered me. “What makes you so sure that I am not the killer?”

  D’Cruz looked deliberately mysterious. “My nose, twenty-five years experience on the Force, knowing that half-breeds like you don’t kill on the nights of the full moon … You can’t get out of what you have to do that way, my friend. But, if you want facts, I’ll tell you the facts. The kind of facts policemen are supposed to dish out all the time.

  “Forensics are, for once, prepared to put their money where their mouth is and give us, to a matter of minutes, the times at which your lady and the loving couple were killed. We also know the time at which your call came in and the exact location of the box from which it was made. It would have been impossible for you to have killed your girlfriend, run four kilometres across the park, killed Esther and fiancé and then, in the time available, got back to the box from which you made your phone-call.

  “As we say in criminological jargon, ‘no washee, no wipee’. So you can cut out all this self-doubt horseshit.” His voice had become nasty and shrill. It changed slightly when he added, “I understand quite well, big fella. You’re lost without this girl and all these bloody self-doubts that you keep coming back to are ways to hide from yourself what you are missing terribly. You are fooling yourself if you think that, if you pretend hard enough you won’t have to do something positive: like helping find out who killed the lady.” Then his manner became confidential, almost gentle. “I know young people today think that it’s not cool to be inexperienced but I suspect, my friend, that the dead girl was your first woman. Right?” He looked at me, got his answer from my face and continued. “First for you, but I guess you know that she’s been around a bit?”

  I nodded. “How did you find out all this?”

  “My nose and from the autopsy, fella. Forensics tell me that she’s been pregnant but never had a baby. Ditto she’s had an abortion. And you, my friend, seem, especially on second inspection, to be the kind of bloke who’d marry a girl rather than put her through the horrors of getting a pregnancy terminated.”

  Jafri laughed. “I’ll say this for you, Oswald D’Cruz. You’ve got the facts and the psychoanalysis is dead right. But where is all this taking us in terms of solving these crimes?”

  “As I see it Jaf, we have two scenarios. Both bad. Scenario one: we are dealing with a nut case. A crazy killer like Son of Sam or the Boston Strangler. With that kind of situation there’s no way of knowing where to start. I have no great experience with this sort of thing, but I am told that this kind of killer can kill just once or again and again.

  “The trouble is, as with most of these psycho things, no one knows why he kills. Often we don’t even know if we are dealing with one person or a casebook of crazies. Even worse than the killers are the so-called psycho-detectives who claim to understand their minds. They’re the kind of con-men who would make you rush to consult the nearest calendar if they told you what day of the week it was.”

  He drew on his cigarette. “Scenario two: we have a really clever killer. One who has thought the whole thing through, knows what he’s after and is trying to bury his real objective under a mountain of murders. This man … person, realises that, as far as the police are concerned, all murders are of equal importance. That is to say, we are obliged to investigate each and every one down to the last detail. This not only means a helluva lot of work, it also means that we could get snowed under with information that public-spirited people send us. We could get a pile of shit so high we don’t know where the stink is coming from.”

  Jafri interrupted the inspector’s musings. “How do you plan to go about things, Ozzie?”

  “First, we follow my policeman’s nose.” He put a finger on the organ in question. “This tells me that Vanita Sundram was the one the murderer was after. Then we ask ourselves who wants the girl dead and why. To answer these questions we need to have someone on the inside. We need someone who not only knows the girl but also knew the people around her. We need someone like our friend here.” He poked me in the chest.

  “I think,” said Jafri, his voice even more controlled than ever, “that you two didn’t,” he raised his eyebrows, “hit it off the first time round.” D’Cruz choked on his cigarette and coughed violently. I shot Jafri a hurt look. “I am happy to help sort things out between you two and I am in an ideal position to do so. I have worked with you, Ozzie, for several years, and I know How Kum as well as I know anybody. What happened is over and done with and I am sure that How Kum is quite happy, now that the situation has been clarified, to…” he stopped to smile at what he had called the most preposterous expression in the world, “to help the police with their inquiries.”

  “OK big guy,” said the inspector, his fit of coughing over, “you tell me if you heard or saw anything that you think might have any bearing on the murders.”

  The noisy teenagers said nothing to me. Neither did the swinging of the ships at anchor, or the sounds that came to me from across the ocean. Apart from the moonrise, there was nothing that was alarming or terribly different. I recalled being surprised at Vanita’s hurry to make love a second time, being more sleepy than usual when we were done. Much more sleepy. I remembered being awakened by Vanita making noises in the night and thinking that she needed me again.

  “I thought I heard Vanita cry out in her sleep. I was more sleepy than usual. I didn’t wake up to investigate. I thought they were just…”

  “Dream comes I call them, but I am sure that sex manuals have discovered some highly technical explanation for what has been known from time immemorial.” He grinned and punched me in the chest. “Not surprising that she should dream about you having seen the kind of equipment you pack. Not surprising at all.”

  I knew what the sounds were; the sounds I had heard and ignored on the night of the full moon. “I know what I heard, D’Cruz. I heard a cry of pain and was too sleepy … didn’t bother to investigate. The woman I loved was bleeding to death beside me and I did nothing.”

  The inspector’s manner changed, became serious, bordered on the fatherly. He said, “I don’t know how often you, and your girlfriend actually spent nights together. I have been sleeping with my Philomena for nearly twenty-five years. Without thinking about it, I listen to her breathing and know she is there beside me. If for any reason this changes, if she stops breathing even for a moment, I am instantly awake.”

  How could I have forgotten the comfort of feeling her breathe as she slept beside me? I often woke a little before Vanita did and put my hand on her breast to enjoy the feel of it moving. Up down, up down, up down. I would catch a long nipple in my thumb and forefinger and watch it thin and lengthen as she breathed out, grow tight and squat as she inhaled. Sometimes I leaned my head against her nose to feel her breath whistling past my ear telling me that she was alive. Telling me that I was alive. How could I have been unaware
of it stopping?

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” I said. “I think of Vanita dying beside me in terrible pain and my sleeping on. I have horrible visions in my head. I can’t see things clearly nor can I get rid of them.”

  “I guess I’d best tell everything,” said D’Cruz. “You’re smart enough to see through any lies I make up and, if I leave you guessing, you’ll only imagine worse than actually happened.”

  Jafri nodded. “Tell How Kum all you know, Ozzie, and don’t spare him the details forensics gave you.”

  “I won’t,” he said. “The autopsy report says the girl was stabbed just below the left shoulder blade. The knife passed into the left atrium…”

  Jafri interrupted. “I am sure How Kum has forgotten the little biology he learnt at school, so it might be a good idea for you to explain the forensics as we go along.”

  “The atrium is the collecting chamber, where all the blood in the body winds up before it is pumped out again. It has no muscle in its wall to seal off any hole that is made in it. Bleeding from a wound in the atrium is massive and uncontrollable, so death is rapid. As near as one can get to immediate. I would say that your girlfriend cried out when the blow was struck, then she must have become unconscious very quickly from loss of blood.” I thought of the blood-red moon, of clouds that looked like old bruises. Remembered feeling the wound on Vanita’s back, realised that I had not looked at it, wondered if there was a bruise around it. I said, “Oh God. I really cannot forgive myself. I’m sure I could…”

  “There was nothing you could have done, big fella. Nothing anybody could have done. Only a cardiac surgeon equipped with a portable heart-lung machine and surgical equipment could have saved her life and these are difficult to find in East Coast Park at four in the morning.” His voice softened. “Listen, son. Die we all must and, when we do, haemorrhaging from the heart is as nice a way of going about it as any. There’s no great pain and you’re unconscious before you know what’s happening.”

  He stopped, poured himself more beer and lit another cigarette.

  Jafri wriggled around in his chair and fiddled with his glass of Coke. We were silent: trapped in the moment of Vanita’s death, wondering about our own.

  Jafri broke the spell. “Let me try and understand the sequence of events you are postulating, Ozzie. Someone, for reasons as yet unknown, wants the girl dead. This person either follows How Kum and Vanita to the park or knows exactly where they will spend the night. He watches them make love and waits till they fall asleep. It is dark, but somehow our murderer is able to confirm that it is the girl who is on top and, though she is covered by a sleeping-bag, stabs her accurately through the left atrium so she bleeds quickly to death without disturbing her lover.” He drew a breath. “Surely we can do better than that, Inspector D’Cruz.”

  “You’re a defence lawyer, Jaf, and it is your job to make policemen look like arseholes.” He added bitterly, “Don’t have to work up a sweat to do that with the types coming out of the Police Academy these days.

  “But, I’ll tell you why I think things happened the way I say they did, and big guy here can tell us how right or wrong my reconstruction is.” He waved for more beer.

  “First, it was the night of the full moon, and though the moon was low when the girl was killed, visibility wasn’t bad, especially if one kept one’s head at ground level.” He extended a finger. “Two. My policeman’s nose tells me that this is a carefully planned murder, not the work of some loony driven wild by the full moon. True, it looks like the work of a madman but that’s because whoever’s done it wants it to look that way. For my money, our murderer has overplayed his hand a bit. There’s too much drama. It’s too much like the work of a nutcase to actually be the work of a nutcase.

  “Let us accept, for a moment, that this murder was committed by a rational person. This would mean that the killer has probably been watching these two for some time. He knew that they did things in just about the same way whenever they spent an evening in the park.” He looked at me and raised an eyebrow.

  I nodded. “We did things the way we enjoyed them. Didn’t change our routine much…”

  He held up a hand. “That’s all I was asking, son. Three. Our killer didn’t have to guess where the girl’s back was. She wasn’t stabbed through the sleeping-bag at all. It had slipped off her body and she had a naked back…”

  “How on earth could you know that?” I remembered the bag tangled at Vanita’s feet as I tried to get out from under her.

  “As with most things in detection, it was obvious.” D’Cruz filled his glass. “There were no holes in the sleeping-bag.”

  “Since How Kum has not raised any objections,” Jafri said, “I guess that’s the way things could have happened.” He paused.

  “But what about the other couple. Were they killed in the way that Vanita was?”

  “Give or take a few minor details. They were both fully clothed. Perhaps they had no need to be otherwise for, as I said, our Esther had had her pussy fed elsewhere. Also, and for the aforesaid reason, they were not lying in each other’s arms. Both Esther and Lip Bin were stabbed in the chest. I think the boyfriend may have tried to fight or make a run for it for his body was found some distance from the girl’s.”

  I knew what his answer would be, but still I asked, “And the same weapon was used in all three murders?”

  The inspector’s head snapped round. “I thought I told you earlier that it was a stainless steel kitchen knife and that this was recovered from a garbage-bin.”

  I should have told him, at that point, that a knife such as this was missing from Ma’s kitchen. I didn’t. Kitchen knives go missing often enough and Ma could not possibly have anything to do with the murders. “Yes, you did, but it slipped my mind.” I picked up my Coke.

  “If there is one thing I know about murders it is this: the first victim is the one the killer was really after. Subsequent murders are usually committed because the killer has reason to fear discovery, has panicked, or wants to throw up a smokescreen. Sometimes murderers go on a killing binge. We don’t know why, but it serves to confuse the police.” He laughed. “I know I said all this before, but our friend here,” — he shot me a quizzical look — “seems to have developed some kind of a memory problem.”

  Jafri, who had been following the inspector closely, said, “Let us assume that you are correct, that these killings were not the work of a madman.” He paused. “I am, mind you, not agreeing with you, but will, for the moment, view things the way you want us to. What do we do now?”

  “We find out from big fella here who would want her dead.” He looked at me expectantly.

  This was a point in my relationship with the inspector that I had foreseen, feared. It was one of the myriad of binary branchings which can determine the course of events.

  What he was asking was simple enough. It was a request for information: the kind of thing the police routinely required. My agreeing to provide it was a different matter. What I said could supply that tiny shaft that altered the balance of things, the shake of the kaleidoscope that changed the pattern forever.

  In agreeing to investigate Vanita’s death, I would find out more about her than I had known in life. I could uncover unspeakable details of her life, come upon questions that could hurt me terribly but could not be resolved with her dead. And I would have to share all that turned up with a man I had every reason to hate. I hesitated.

  “I can’t think of anyone who would really want to kill her,” I said. “Vanita had, in many ways, a pretty unconventional lifestyle and she did rub it into the faces of those who hated the way she behaved.” I thought of Mary Magdalene Lourdes, dismissed the notion that her disapproval was strong enough to lead to murder, wondered about Mrs Loong, who may have wanted revenge for her husband’s infidelity. “Also, she may have hurt one or two people sufficiently for them to want revenge.”

  D’Cruz noticed me hesitate. “Balls,” he said. “Revenge, disapproval and th
at kind of thing are only motives for murder in TV soaps. In the real world people kill for money. Especially in Singapore where they do everything for money. Tell me who stood to gain by her death or, better still, who stood to lose by her being alive.

  “But tell it the way you see it. I want to see this case through your eyes.” His face hardened. “Spare me the bull about you yourself being the killer. Things are complicated enough without that kind of horseshit.” I looked doubtful as to where to begin and the inspector said, “Start with the folk in the office.”

  I began with Mary Lourdes, the least likely of my suspects. I told him of her religiosity, her disapproval of Vanita, of the advances she made to me. He pursed his lips, rocked his head about but said nothing.

  Then I told him about Symons and the passes he had made at me. I did not describe what had happened when I first joined Nats but did admit that my manager’s insistence that I was homosexual made me have doubts about my own inclinations.

  What D’Cruz said wasn’t reassuring. “Sometimes you smile and toss your head in a way that makes you look as gay as an arsehole with wings. Even I thought you might be a fairy when we first met.” He shrugged apologetically. “Anyway, tell me more about this faggot, Symons.”

  “He must be about fifty, Eurasian, good-looking…”

  “Is he a fem-type or is he a macho bum jumper?”

  “I don’t really know what you mean.”

  “Aw, come on, fella. Is he all mass, muscle and moustache or is he a pansy like you?”

  I ignored the insinuation and said, “He’s not thin but he’s not musclebound either. I don’t see him as a physically strong person.”

  Jafri said, “I can’t help noticing that you were not interested in the girl Mary Lourdes, nor can I ignore the fact that you seem suddenly fascinated by the muscular development of potential suspects.”

  “You are indeed perceptive, my learned friend,” said D’Cruz bowing slightly. “Muscular development may be of enormous relevance when we come to consider the identity of our murderer. In the case of the Sundram girl, the knife was slipped between the ribs. No great strength was needed for this. Esther and Lip Bin, however, were stabbed through the front of their chests, the blade cutting through ribs before it reached the heart. This required the kind of strength that your Mary Lourdes didn’t have. Neither, from your description, does the fairy, Symons, though I will look at him myself before I definitely make up my mind. What other offers do we have?”