“I don’t see how your son’s academic prowess or, to judge by what you say, his lack of it is something that I can help you with.”
Loong’s voice was hoarse, pleading. “En Lai is eldest son. En Lai have to carry the family name. The one who carry family name must succeed. If En Lai fails to get into Singapore University means must be found to send abroad to good-quality western university for higher education. He is eldest son, Menon, and must excel in chosen career.” He stared into my face to make sure I understood his predicament. “Good quality foreign education is expensive and father’s salary inferior.” His face twisted with bitterness. “But very good fortune fall on Loong family. Mrs Loong comes from family with successful business background. Recently, Mrs Loong’s old father die and leave fortune to only daughter. But only daughter very conservative and will harden her spirit of generosity if suspicion of scandal finds way into family home.”
I suspected what he was building up to but was enjoying the proceedings and wished to prolong them. “I still can’t see what all this has to do with me.”
“You and dead preset girl become close friends. Maybe she speaks of Loong and little playful mischief with her, yes?”
The enjoyment I was beginning to feel was replaced by pain. I thought of long afternoons in the Changi Meridien, of making love in air-conditioning, of calling room-service while they rested.
“You and your traditional Chinese ways make me sick, Loong. You may not be able to understand that I love Vanita and I was going to marry her. I don’t care what she did with you or what she did with anyone else.”
His eyes narrowed and he looked extremely cunning. “You are a wise and forgiving man, Menon. You still have wish to have the Sundram girl for your wife though she has passed through many hands. But my wife, Mrs Loong, has not such spirit of generosity. If she hears of husband’s little mischief she will not provide funds for En Lai’s education or, worse trouble; she will prevent father’s access to son after son has become success.” His expression became hangdog. “I must beg of you, Menon, for complete secrecy in matter of preset girl.”
Suddenly, all I wanted was to get rid of the man. “I have no intention whatsoever, Loong, of telling your wife what kind of hanky-panky you get up to in the office.”
I was confident that the inspector and I were working to the same plan. Even then, it did seem strange that what D’Cruz suspected had so quickly been confirmed. It seemed almost as though Loong were offering me a motive for the murder, one that though obvious, I mustn’t take seriously. He could only be doing this to throw me off the scent, to distract me from a course that might lead me to the real motive for the killings. I did in the end discover what it was he wanted to hide. This did not, except in a very roundabout way, tell me the killer’s identity. It did, however, bring me closer to the woman I loved and so helped me come to terms with the eternity I had to spend without her.
It was difficult to pursue the thoughts passing through my head with the supervisor pumping my hand as vigorously as he was doing. “You may not be full Chinese, Menon, but you are a true oriental,” he said, beaming, his voice suddenly genial. As he left he called over his shoulder, “And one hundred per cent trustworthy in all respects I am sure.”
I was disturbed by the supervisor’s visit. I would have liked him to hang for Vanita’s murder. I had read somewhere that a man ejaculates as his neck snaps and this was the only kind of orgasm I wished for Loong.
I began to move things around in my head so that I could see Loong as the killer. He had presented me with the motive. He was a martial arts expert and it wouldn’t be difficult for him to stab people through their chest walls or to break their necks. And I guess he had opportunity enough. None of us seemed to have thought of asking him what he had been doing on Friday night. I could see Loong as the kind of person who would unhesitatingly dispose of one human being who had become a threat to him. I could not see him committing five murders in a frenzy of bloodlust. Nor was he the kind of man who had the imagination to conceal one important murder under a mass of bodies. I had to look elsewhere.
I began with Vanita’s family.
Sundram was not high on my list of suspects. Conventionally religious, he must have disapproved of the way in which his daughter carried on. It must have also caused him some embarrassment in the Hindu community of which he was a respected elder. Disapproval of her sexual conduct, however, was not a good reason for murder. If it were, most young women would not live to become mothers. What was more, Sundram loved his daughter intensely. This was obvious from the way in which he had transferred his affection to me after her death.
I began thinking of her brother.
He was an enigma. He claimed to have achieved the detachment from worldly things that Hinduism requires. It was not clear how far this went. Would he be detached enough not to mind being excluded from his father’s will? Knowing that his sister would inherit when his father died was one thing; killing her because of it was another. And if money was the motive, killing Vanita would not secure the Sundram fortune for Mohan. Heart attack or no heart attack, his father was very much alive and could easily leave all he had to someone other than the son of whom he seemed to disapprove.
My mind wandered away from the Sundrams and I began to think of Ma and Oscar. My intuition had earlier told me that any suspicions I might entertain about their being responsible for the murders would be distractions, asides to the main theme. I still believed this, but something that D’Cruz had said caused me to examine that situation again. It was impossible that Ma or Oscar could have done the killings themselves. But as the inspector had pointed out, Oscar had money and enough influence in the criminal world to have them done for him. And there may have been reasons for him to arrange Vanita’s death.
From just about the time I had reached puberty, I can remember Ma going on about my finding the right girl and settling down. She did not, I recall, seem to mind my taking such a long time to find such a person and wasn’t in the front row applauding when I did.
A burning in my stomach distracted me from my musings. It was near lunchtime. Usually Choy, one of the cooks, sends a tray round to my room around one. I was about to phone and ask for it early when I remembered Kishore’s injunction. The prospect of existing on milk and water till the seance was an unhappy one made more so by the fact that I didn’t seriously believe in spirit raising or the mumbo-jumbo that went with it. Nevertheless, I was reluctant to prejudice the venture. I called Choy and told the cook to send me a large glass of milk instead of my usual tray. It had just arrived when the phone rang.
“Could you pop upstairs for a minute, HK?” said Symons. “I’m having problems with one of our preset girls.”
I laughed. “Decided to go straight, have you?”
“You must know that I never mix business with pleasure, How Kum,” he retorted, his voice prim and formal.
“Don’t you now,” I said thinking of our first meeting in his office.
“Come at once,” he ordered.
“I don’t have your facility…” I began, then tiring of the game asked, “What kind of problem?”
“I think that one of the preset girls, a young woman called Anita Chew, may be infecting the food trays.”
Anita was standing in a corner of Symons’s room. She was subdued and quite a different girl from the one who had cheeked me in the morning. I guessed that Symons had threatened her with dismissal. Speaking in his most prissy voice, Symons said, “We have reports of three cases of food poisoning from food which appears to have originated in our kitchens. I have checked the schedules, and in all cases the only common factor I can find is the fact that this preset girl was working the line at the time, and could have infected the trays.” He was clearly in a bullying mood.
I said, “I take it you have only the reports of flight stewardesses. No doctor’s certificates, no microbiological reports.”
He shot me a black look. “None will be necessary if I have proof,
if you can tell me, that this girl did not, to your knowledge, comply absolutely with the very explicit rules of hygiene laid down by the management.”
Anita turned a tear-stained face in my direction. I said, “I have on no occasion found this preset girl to do anything but comply exactly with our rules.”
“I don’t think we need to detain this person any longer,” said Symons.
I was about to step out of the room when he said, “A moment, HK.” His manner had gone back to being casual and he indicated a chair. “There’s another matter which I feel we should discuss.”
“I hope it doesn’t concern my sex life.”
He laughed. “Only peripherally, in that it involves the Sundram girl.”
“What the hell did you ever have to do with Vanita…?” I began.
“Hang on HK,” he interrupted, laughing. “You know I don’t mix my metaphors. Nor is it anything to do with what that beastly fellow D’Cruz suggested to Mamma.” He shook his head. “The scoundrel had the nerve to insinuate that I may have killed the girl because we were going for the same fellow. Upset Mamma terribly. Thank God she had already had several of her medicinal brandies when he made his appearance.
“The damned impudence of the man. He went on to suggest that, not only were we after the same man, but that I may be,” his voice became shrill with indignation, “bisexual and interested in the slut myself. Confused the dear old Mamma by talking about people being AC-DC. For a while Mamma thought he was an electrician being impertinent.”
“What else did the inspector get up to?”
“Just about called Mamma a liar to her face. Said that her word about my being home on Saturday night would not be enough. ‘Needed corroboration’ were his exact words. Mamma’s spirits were fortified enough to tell him where he could put his corroboration.” He looked slyly at me. “Did the girl ever say anything to you about me?”
“Why in heaven’s name should a normal girl like Vanita want to talk about an out-of-date fairy like you?” I knew I was losing control and this is the last thing I wanted. “You were aware of her liaison with Loong, the supervisor?”
“Listen, Symons,” I said, doing my best to keep the tremor out of my voice. “I wanted to marry Vanita and spend the rest of my life with her. I was interested in her future, not her past.”
“Cool down, HK, and get off the horse.” I looked confused. He smiled and added, “The high and moral kind. And tell me if the girl ever mentioned some kind of arrangement that Loong and I had with our meat suppliers?”
The air-conditioning at Nats is absolutely silent. Suddenly, the compressors began to hum, whispered a warning, told me to look where I walked and to place my feet carefully or I would find myself somewhere other than where I wanted to be. Less than an hour had passed since I talked to Loong and I was being offered another motive for Vanita’s murder.
When I first joined Nats, Symons had given me an impressive-looking file. This was marked STAFF ONLY and he insisted that I read it and return it to him as soon as I had done so. Mostly it contained boring information on how the organisation worked. It did, however, tell me something about our system of tenders. Every three years we advertised for meat suppliers. We provided specifications of the type of meat that was to be supplied, the amounts, and how often deliveries were to be made.
None of the merchants knew what their rivals were bidding. This information was considered top secret. Tenders were decided upon by a board made up of several of our directors as well as some of the city’s eminent businessmen. None of them knew much about the meat business or the airline servicing industry. Anyone who had inside information on the price range the board were thinking of could win the tender. Having won it, he could possibly increase his profit margin by providing meat of inferior quality to that described in our specifications.
In making their award, the selection board was strongly influenced by what the manager of Nats advised. It was the duty of the supervisor to ensure that the meat supplied conformed to specifications. Nats ordered millions of dollars of meat each year. I remembered the inspector’s words about looking to money first as a motive for murder.
Symons had asked his question almost as an afterthought. I wasn’t deceived by his casualness and repeated it to give myself time to think. “You want to know if Vanita mentioned an arrangement you and Loong may have had with our meat suppliers?” I looked up and smiled at him.
“Yes, HK. Did the girl say anything at all along those lines?”
“Vanita did say there was talk about leaks in the tender system that favoured one of the suppliers in town.” His face froze and I decided to chance my arm. “She also said that perhaps Loong had a hand in things, for some of the specs were not quite right…”
“Oh God, oh God,” he said, banging his fist against his head. “I told the idiot not to get the girl involved. Now he’s told the girl and she’s told you and God knows who else.”
He hung his head. “I guess it’s only a matter of time before the police begin one of those horrid investigations and, I know, those corruption squad thugs are only too pleased to expose all the details of one’s private life.” He began to rock backwards and forwards like a crying child. “If anything is made public, Mamma will certainly have a heart attack.”
If the brandy doesn’t get her first, I thought, as I left the room, but could not help but feel a little sorry for the man. The Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau, called the CPIB, was well known for its thoroughness and the ruthlessness of its officers. If Symons were guilty of corruption involving our national airline, he would certainly spend some time in jail, and he would risk murder to avoid this.
But the whole business of Vanita knowing anything about irregularities in the meat tenders had been a lie. What was more, Symons had not thought that she would talk till I lied that she had. Vanita’s involvement with Loong and Symons was not the cause of her death. It was nevertheless something that I wanted to find out more about.
I walked out of the building and round by the hangars.
The murders were the main theme. There were several subsidiary themes which were different but were related to the main. These appeared, altered the score a little, then disappeared only to surface somewhere else later. Vanita’s involvement with the meat tenders was one of these.
I let the themes, major and minor, drift slowly through my head. It would be a while before they would come together to produce the kind of rush one experiences at the end of a symphony. But I could wait, for I could smell the sunlight glinting off the grass and hear the sweat trickle down the bodies of the men in boiler suits as they worked on the engine of a jumbo jet. The world was right again.
I entered my office and was happy to find it empty except for the glass of milk standing on my table. I had just finished drinking this when the phone rang. It was Kishore. He asked me to be at Cairnhill Circle by five forty-five as the seance was scheduled to begin precisely at six. The time had been determined by various astrological parameters. The same parameters had decided that it should end at eight.
Perhaps it was the lack of food, perhaps a confusion induced by the day’s events, but I kept telling myself that, in addition to other things, I must not forget to ask Vanita’s ghost what Loong and Symons had been up to.
I WANTED TO make sure that I got to the Sundrams early. Instead of bussing all the way as I usually do, I travelled overland from Changi to Eunos and there caught the MRT into town. It was near the rush hour but the train was empty. Most people were at this time travelling away from the city rather than into it and for most of the journey I had the compartment to myself. I was glad of this for I wished to be alone with my thoughts.
Vanita had not been in the office when I got back to it. This seemed only right for I expected her to be waiting for me at Cairnhill Circle.
I must have been foolish with hunger for I was becoming increasingly convinced that Kishore could actually summon Vanita’s ghost. What was more, I was certain that the
presence he invoked would be capable not only of answering my questions, but of otherwise responding to me. It was difficult to believe, even in my present lightheaded state, that I would be able to see and touch her but I was sure that I would speak to her and, who knows, even get to smell her body. Anticipation made me dizzy. I was breathing heavily and was in a state of high sexual excitement. A middle-aged woman entered the compartment. I didn’t realise that my state was obvious to her till she looked over her shoulder when she left the train. She seemed relieved to see the doors close behind her.
I got off at Orchard. It had been sunny when I left Changi and I was surprised by the change in the weather. The sky was black and a premature dusk had fallen on the city. I could smell the lightning suspended in the clouds, taste the slight panic as people scurried about, clutching shopping bags or brief-cases, bumping into each other in their hurry to get home before the storm broke. I joined them and rushed along Orchard Road and got to Cairnhill Circle at five-thirty. It was dark. Night had fallen early to hide the entry of Vanita’s spirit into the world.
Kishore let me in. Behind him stood Leela. She glowered at his back but gave me a conspiratorial smile and followed this with a nod. As I followed Kishore in, she nodded again. I thought there was something she wished to say to me. She had been Vanita’s confidante. The warmth I felt for her was included in the longing I had for Vanita. I must, I told myself, find time to speak to the old lady alone after the seance.
“You, sir, have concurred with the constraints I prescribed as necessary for invocation of the girl’s spirit?”
“Of course, Mr Kishore. I have had only a glass of milk all day and as to the other thing…”
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