The Trailing Spouse

by Jo Furniss

  Chapter 18

  Amanda watched on the security camera as a woman buzzed from the lift lobby for a second time. The maid agency had sent a candidate straight around—only an hour after Ed staged his “intervention.” Amanda hauled on a smile as the lift arrived.

  Magdalene introduced herself, her intricately painted fingernails clutching a schedule of interviews. They both knew good help was hard to find. Amanda wondered who was interviewing whom. Magdalene was two decades older than Awmi and a Filipina: likely part of an established community of maids who supported one another, the lore of their unique lifestyle passing down the female line the way other women’s crafts—midwifery, natural remedies, ceremonial rites—were once inherited. Her gaze was steel, forged by hard knocks.

  “You have nice home, ma’am. Not too bad.”

  “And you have great references.”

  Magdalene proved to be pleasant company, but throughout their conversation, Amanda was distracted by images popping into her head as though downloading from the phone hidden under the helper’s mattress and merging with real life. She saw Magdalene’s lips closing around the rim of a cocktail glass, her nails scratching the elm-wood table that was the same tan color as Ed’s skin, her toes massaging the marble—a foot as petite as Camille Kemble’s. Amanda couldn’t focus on a single question about cooking or laundry. Instead, the maid chatted about former employers, American ang mohs who were overly generous and British ones who weren’t. Spoiled children. Hard-drinking women. The family who broke her heart when they left Singapore with kids she helped raise for twelve years. And a wife who offered “headache money.”

  “Headache money?”

  “You know”—Magdalene covered her mouth with her hand as she spoke—“to be with the husband.”

  “I don’t understand . . .”

  “When the wife has headache and the husband needs special attention, she pays me to go to him.”

  “The wife paid you to have sex with her husband?”

  “Stop him taking a mistress.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Very young. But not dumb. One time, I told her I’m pregnant and need to go to Philippines to lose the baby. So she took my passport from the safe and I go to the agency instead. They find me longtime family, good employer.”

  Nice bluff, thought Amanda. She detailed the duties, salary, and benefits, and gave an assurance that there would be no headache money. Magdalene asked to see the living quarters. Images from the phone filled Amanda’s head again, so she left her to go alone.

  If she had to take someone on, this woman seemed like she could shoulder her own baggage. But Josie should meet her first. Amanda called the girl’s number, which went to voice mail. While the phone was still in her hand, an alert popped up from the SOWs Facebook page.

  From the administrators: Please share this appeal from one of our members. Her 18-year-old niece is missing in Tokyo. Laureline Mackenzie was working as a hostess, but hasn’t been seen for two days. Yesterday she missed her scheduled flight home to Australia. Her family are flying to Tokyo. Please read the details in the attached police statement and SHARE!!!

  Amanda clicked through and scanned the statement. Star student. Multilingual. Blonde beauty. Last seen at the Golden Girl, an upscale hostess bar in the Roppongi district specializing in Western women. No contact with family or friends for two days. And she missed a flight home for her mother’s fiftieth birthday.

  When Amanda looked up from the screen, she found that she had walked through to her bedroom. Why am I here? After a second’s hesitation, she knew the answer. She dropped the phone onto the bed and went into Ed’s bathroom. In the trash can, as expected, were his credit-card receipts from Tokyo. Taxis. A bottle of water and the Financial Times. A thick envelope containing his hotel bill—the Grand Hyatt in Roppongi.

  Amanda kneeled at Ed’s side of the bed to spread out the papers. She grabbed her phone and went to Maps, plotting the hotel with a pin. Then she typed in “Golden Girl.” The second pin overlapped the first. Amanda finger-pinched the map to zoom in. The unfamiliar streets jigsawed into place. But the pins pressed together like an amorous couple. The Golden Girl was located one block from the hotel where Ed had stayed on the night Laureline Mackenzie was last seen.

  “I’m finish, ma’am.” Magdalene’s voice came from the hallway.

  Amanda stuffed the Grand Hyatt bill into its envelope. I’m not bringing another woman into this house, she thought, however hard Ed pushes for it. Get out, she thought, get out while you can.

  Chapter 19

  Camille strolled along the waterfront, which was busy with tourists and locals on a Sunday evening, to meet Edward Bonham. Night fell with equatorial haste, and then, like a current through a string of fairy lights wrapped around the bay, the city sparked back to life one blazing tower at a time. As she left the throng, the promenade turned to a secluded boardwalk, and she reached a half flight of steps that led to a terrace atop an old jetty. She stopped at the top of the stairs. The lighting in the café was low, both literally and figuratively: avenues of glowing ice cubes illuminated her ankles and little else.

  “Do you have a reservation?” came a voice from the dark. Female. Young. Camille blinked a waitress into focus.

  “I’m meeting Mr. Bonham?”

  “He’s not here, but we have the reservation. Please mind the step.” The waitress produced a tiny torch and showed Camille to a table overlooking the water. Camille chose to face the bar. The Old Quay Cafe had no more than twenty seats and was attached to the most prestigious hotel on the island. One of those in-the-know places. Every table was occupied, and the unobtrusive music was just loud enough to cover clients’ discreet mutterings. The air swelled with intrigue: a dodgy business deal, a spot of espionage, an illicit affair. She thought of the white bottles of clonazepam. This was a perfect place to slip someone a roofie, wait a few minutes for it to take effect, and then direct the victim’s unsteady legs—Oops, get the door please, waitress, one too many—into a lift toward a hotel room . . .

  “Camille Kemble, I presume?”

  She recognized his voice from the phone: London, with a well-traveled hint of mid-Atlantic.

  “Don’t get up,” he said. “I’m just checking I’m not accosting some poor woman in the dark.” As he sat down, Edward Bonham’s face entered the glowing orb of light that hung over the table. His wedding ring glinted as he gave his thick hair a ruffle and hunched forward in an exaggerated attempt to see her.

  She held out a hand. “Hello, Ed. I appreciate you agreeing to meet like this. Especially on a Sunday.”

  They shook. Cool palm. Firm grip. One pump. Their hands retreated to the darkness, but she still felt his imprint. She had the same feeling as when she’d seen his photos: a tinge of recognition that translated into familiarity.

  “Drink?”

  It wouldn’t be wise to get overfamiliar. “I’m fine with water.”

  “Unless you’re a recovering alcoholic—you’re not a recovering alcoholic, are you, Camille? At your tender age?”

  “No . . .”

  “Well, then, will you have a drink with me? I have a policy never to drink alone.” He unleashed a smile that popped like a flashbulb. The waitress reappeared, and he turned away to order, his smile burning an afterimage onto the night.

  “So.” Ed rearranged his chair closer. “Needless to say, I’m intrigued. Did I understand right? You’re looking for your parents?”

  She nodded. “It’s a long story, but in a nutshell . . . we lived in Singapore in the ’90s. My parents took me to boarding school in the UK in September 1999. My brother too. They said they needed to travel for business; they ran a yacht charter.”

  “Tough times. The Asian financial crisis was, what, ’97?”

  “Exactly. They didn’t say much about it—not that I remember anyway, I was only ten when they disappeared—but I sensed there was trouble.”

  Two drinks slid into the spotlight. Ed pulled celer
y from his Bloody Mary and clinked his glass against hers without interrupting.

  “So Collin and I started our respective schools on September 5, 1999. And then . . . we never heard from them again.”

  “They disappeared?”

  “They were never reported missing. As far as I know, my headmistress alerted the police. She called Interpol, which I think was probably the most exciting thing that ever happened to her.” Camille reached for the Bloody Mary. The cold drink was shot through with fiery spice, a startling blend of opposites.

  “And you were ten?”

  “I was ten.”

  “So what next?”

  “They must have taken the yacht—”

  “I meant for you. What happened to you?”

  “Me? Stayed at school. After a year, my parents were pronounced dead, so we could claim a trust fund and pay the fees. My mother was estranged from her family. The grandparents on my father’s side were elderly and died within six months of each other. We bounced around friends and relatives. Went to university. Grew up.”

  “And now you think you can find them?” He drained his glass.

  “I’m a realist.” She tipped her drink and ice slammed into her teeth. “But I’d love to know what happened.”

  “You think there’s such a thing as closure?”

  “Do you?” she asked.

  Ed picked up the celery stick, snapped it in two. Camille realized she’d said too much, alluding to his own recent experience with death. But he stroked his lips with a thumb. “I think the concept is used too lightly.” He gestured at the dark water below. “You can’t lock up grief any more than the tide.”

  “With respect, I don’t even have grief. I don’t know if my parents are dead or alive. What I mean by closure is more a start than the end. I’d like to be free to start grieving.” Camille reached for her glass, but it held only red-stained ice.

  “Happy hour is about to close, sir,” said a woman’s soft voice in the dark.

  “Two more.”

  Across the bay, an outdoor concert started up, sending scrambled melodies over the water. Screaming girls sounded like seagulls.

  “Bloody K-pop.” Ed leaned forward into the light. Behind his head, a Ferris wheel changed its colors. “How can I help?”

  “You didn’t happen to know them? Patricia and Magnus Kemble, lived at Tanglin Green, two kids?”

  “Afraid not.”

  Camille gave a one-shoulder shrug. Long shot.

  “I left Singapore toward the end of ’99. About this time of year, actually.” He paused to recall dates. Camille could have told him: his employment pass was canceled on October 31 and he exited the country on November 2. “Must have been October, November, something like that ’cause I met my first wife—Josie’s mother—at some awful Christmas party in London.” And Josie was born in 2000? Fast mover.

  “I hoped there might have been some overlap between your business and theirs—yachts and planes?”

  “I didn’t get into aircraft until later. No, I was a trader then. Didn’t end well.” He toasted her with his fresh drink. “I went bankrupt. Hence my departure from Singapore. Between me and you and the gatepost, my current wife is not aware of that fact, and I’d rather she didn’t learn about it anytime soon.”

  “Your secret’s safe with me.”

  “It’s not a secret. I just haven’t told her the details. It’s a matter of trust.”

  “Trust?” She broke a leaf off the bushy stem of celery.

  “You came to Singapore for a job, right? You’re independent. But my wife gave up everything to follow me. Home, friends, social life. Would she have taken a punt on some ex-bankrupt? Don’t think so. Especially because—well, it’s a long story—but her father went bankrupt in a public scandal when she was a girl.”

  That explains the media intrusion, Camille thought.

  “So she craves stability. But my business was solid and everyone loves Singapore. We hadn’t known each other long, but”—Camille noted again his unseemly haste—“I needed her to trust me.”

  Lying to gain trust. She could feel her mind cruising away on a tangent of Edward Bonham’s personal intrigue. All the questions she wanted to ask about her parents had gone up in the air like ticker tape. Ed’s glass was empty again. She slid her untouched Bloody Mary forward into the lamplight.

  “You sure?” he asked, fingers ready to dispose of the greenery.

  “Go ahead.” The celery was flung into the darkness. “To get back to my parents. I’m trying to explore their networks. This happened pre-Facebook, so it’s hard.” She saw the corners of Ed’s mouth rise, the tips of his canines emerge, and she realized how young she sounded, how naive. “Everything got cleared from their house by the landlord—address books, Christmas cards, business files—any record of their lives, basically.” Fresh screams from the concert. Neon strands of light webbed the bay. “I was thinking that maybe there were places where expats hung out back then? Where long-termers might remember them?”

  Ed blew out his cheeks. “Have you checked the clubs? There’s a British Club, Dutch Club, Tanglin—loads of them—American Club. And I assume you’ve tried the yacht club?” He mirrored her nodding. “Hang on”—he leaned forward into the light—“your parents weren’t known at the yacht club?”

  Camille shook her head.

  “Don’t you think that’s strange?” Ed said. “For people in the yacht business?”

  Down below, the painted prow of a wooden bumboat bobbed alongside the floating boardwalk, out of sync with its rise and fall.

  “I do have a theory.” Camille watched three stocky men in black suits choose the right moment to jump to shore. The lit points of their cigarettes danced like fireflies. “I think my parents didn’t tell us everything.”

  Ed laughed soft and low. “Parents do that. It’s called parenting.”

  “What I mean is, I think they had another source of income.”

  He drained the last of the drink, his eyes luminous, fixed on hers. “Such as?”

  The movement of the waitresses in the dark brought to mind a shadow from the past: the slim figure of her mother, framed in Camille’s bedroom doorway at the house in Tanglin Green, summoned by her daughter’s cries in the night. Pale and weary, forcing kindness, she switched on the light and exposed Camille’s recurring fears for what they were—ideas in dark corners. A peck on the forehead. There’s nothing there. And now Camille was crying out to this man about her parents’ secrets. With a spotlight trained on her grand theory, it felt like the monster under her bed: insubstantial and faintly silly. She couldn’t bring herself to say “spies.”

  “Nothing criminal,” she said at last. “There’s no evidence of that, anyway.”

  “Good. You don’t want to get mixed up with crime in Singapore.”

  “I should have shown you this straight away.” She rummaged in her bag for the Filofax and opened it to the photo of her parents in the kopitiam. Ed used the torchlight from his phone to inspect the image. He handed the picture back.

  “And your parents were called?”

  “Patricia and Magnus.”

  “It was a long time ago . . .” He hesitated as though he might say more. The bar, the boats, the neon lights, all receded.

  “What was?”

  “I don’t recall those names.” He switched off his phone and it became too dark to read his face. She waited, but he didn’t say any more. On the waterfront, tourists moved in a syncopated dance along the quay. Everyone in motion. Ed would move on too if she didn’t get her questions in first.

  “How is your family recovering, after the incident with your helper?”

  “Incident? That’s a delicate way to refer to a suicide.”

  “It’s a delicate subject.”

  Ed leaned into the light and his eyes were stone. “It’s brutal.”

  “Awmi’s death was particularly violent.”

  “At least she didn’t chuck herself off the balcony, I suppose. T
he whole condo didn’t have to witness her, sitting on the edge while she made up her mind. Kids watching, wondering what it’d look like if she jumped. And then finding out. Suicide is fucking inconsiderate.”

  His strength of feeling startled Camille, and it made her wonder what happened to his first wife, but she tried to focus, to steer him now that he was in motion.

  “Did the police suggest any motive? I’m curious because—”

  “You volunteer for HELP. Josie told me. Don’t look so surprised: I travel, but I’m still her father. We talk. It’s another reason I wanted to meet tonight, actually.” He pushed his drink aside, and Camille noticed his shoulders brace as he started talking about his daughter. His voice like a dart, sharpened into a warning. “I think it’s a bit much, you turning up at her school like that.”

  Camille took a gulp of water. “I’m sorry if I overstepped the mark. There’s been a spate of suicides. Helpers from Burma are especially vulnerable.”

  “I wouldn’t know much about that. And nor would Josie.”

  Ed made a scribble sign in the air to the waitress. Camille was losing him.

  “She mentioned that your helper asked for money? Was it for loan sharks? I only ask because debt is one of the most common reasons we hear for suicide—”

  “You can’t apply logic to the decisions people make. She came to me with a problem, and I gave her a solution. She had money. She had options. The choice she made next was inexplicable. I don’t want my family publicly humiliated because of her decision.” When he leaned forward to sign the drinks chit, the half-light picked out the first white hairs at the peaks of his cheekbones. He handed it off to the waitress and smiled at Camille, but now it was less flashbulb, more tea light, the warmth flickering. “I don’t mean to sound cruel. I’m tired.”

  “HELP isn’t planning to publicize the case at the moment.”

  For a long moment, they held eye contact. She felt a warmth on her thigh and looked down to see his hand. She watched seconds tick by on his wristwatch. When she didn’t return eye contact, he peeled his fingers from her skin. “You look like you need another drink.” He fished in a pocket for a note and laid the tip under one of the glasses. “Happy hour’s finished. Do you fancy going somewhere less classy?”