THE GIRL IN THE WINDOW (The Inspector Samuel Tay Novels Book 4)

by Jake Needham

  “Meet me there in half an hour.”

  Tay sighed and said nothing. He just went back to reading the Wall Street Journal.

  “Well, are you coming or aren’t you?”

  “Make it an hour, Goh. I want to finish my burger.”

  Tay could only think of one good thing about meeting on a bench in Fort Canning Park rather than having a normal conversation back at the Alley Bar like most people would. At least he could smoke there.

  Fort Canning Park was one of Singapore’s major landmarks. It had seen much of what passed for history there and had been everything from a resort for the Malay kingdoms in the fourteenth century, to the site of the residences of the colonial governors, to the place where the British surrendered to the Japanese in World War II. Now it was a lush, green public garden in the center of the city crisscrossed with meandering walkways shaded by long rows of tall, broad-leafed mahogany trees.

  Tay got out of the taxi at the Hill Street entrance to the park and walked west on a winding, brick-paved walk. The glow from the city cast the park in shades of gray, and a warm breeze rattled the trees.

  The bench where he and Goh had met before was behind the old Hill Street Police Station. The British built the station back in the thirties and for some reason designed it in the Italianate style. That made it a bit of an oddity in tropical Singapore, but Tay thought its balconies and arcades and courtyards were lovely. Considerably less lovely was the history of the place.

  In the thirties, when Singapore was still a British colony, the British fought a nasty little war against the anti-colonialist guerrillas trying to drive them off the Malaysian Peninsula. A good deal of that war had been run out of the Hill Street Station. When the Japanese defeated the British in World War II and took over Singapore, they turned the Hill Street Station into an interrogation center for prisoners. And in the sixties, Singapore’s fledgling government dominated by ethnic Chinese made the building the heart of its bloody battle against the Muslim insurgents in Malaysia.

  The Hill Street Station was abandoned as a police facility in the eighties and converted into what the government called an arts center. Tay saw that less as a genuine effort to create a public facility of civic worth than it was another fumbling attempt by the faceless men who ran Singapore to sanitize its past. He supposed the truth was it didn’t really matter what anyone said the building was now. Singaporeans knew what it had been before.

  A lot of Singaporeans even believed the building was haunted. They avoided being anywhere near it, averting their eyes if they were forced to drive past it on Hill Street. Tay knew people who swore that late at night you could hear screams coming from the basement where prisoners had been tortured by first one conqueror and then the next. He had never heard the screams himself, but he had no difficulty imagining them.

  Some cities were proud of their past. Others talked mostly about their future. Tay knew Singapore liked to think of itself as being all about the future, but he had always believed Singapore was mostly about the past.

  Tay had no difficulty finding the right bench. The first time he and Goh had met there he had wondered whether Goh’s choice of a bench right behind the Hill Street Police Station was meant as a subtle touch of irony or if it was only coincidence. He still wasn’t certain.

  The park was dim and quiet. Off in the distance Tay could hear the traffic on Hill Street. No one else was in sight, not even the occasional dog walker. He was just starting to wonder how wise he was to be meeting an ISD man in a lonely, darkened park when he saw Goh coming up the path from the opposite direction.

  Did he really think that Goh might do him harm? No, of course he didn’t. At most, Goh would toss out a few threats and that would be that. It might almost be fun. Tay lit a cigarette, shook out the match, and dropped it on the ground.

  “You’re littering,” Goh said after he sat down. “Just like the last time we were here. You’re really an anti-social prick, aren’t you?”

  “I’m not a big fan of yours either, Goh. So can we cut the bullshit? Why am I here?”

  “I was sorry to hear about your sergeant.”

  “I’m sorry to hear about anyone being murdered. I’m even sorrier when he leaves behind a pregnant wife. That he happened to be a friend of mine doesn’t really make it any worse.”

  “I’m not the villain here, Tay.”

  “You’re not?”

  “I just want you to know that.”

  “Then who is?”

  Goh chewed at his lip and looked away. “I could guess.”

  “Guess.”

  So Goh did.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  “THE SURVEILLANCE OPERATION at the Temple Street Inn was bullshit,” Goh said.

  “No kidding.”

  “They wanted to keep our attention there because something they didn’t want us to know about was happening someplace else.”

  “Our attention?”

  “Yeah, Tay, our attention. They were running me around just as much as they were running you around.”

  “Who is this they you keep talking about?”

  Goh bobbed his head and appeared to think about the question, but Tay doubted he really was. He was certain Goh had already decided exactly what he was going to tell him, and what he was not going to tell him.

  “My instructions to set up the surveillance operation on the Temple Street Inn came from the top,” Goh said after a moment.

  “The top of ISD?”

  “The very top.”

  Tay thought Goh looked a little uneasy saying that. Goh was not a nervous man, and his uneasiness got Tay’s full attention.

  “You’re saying that—”

  “For Christ’s sake, Tay, you’re going to have to let me tell this my way. I’m not going to sit here and be interrogated by you.”

  Tay raised both hands, palms out.

  “I didn’t know what to make of it when I got a call from the Minister’s office telling me to include CID in the operation, not at first,” Goh went on, “but now I’m guessing they wanted to keep you focused on the Temple Street Inn, too.”

  Goh looked at Tay and raised one eyebrow. “I should’ve known you would go off on your own and fuck everything up.”

  “What did I fuck up?”

  “The meeting between Suparman and his sister, if she was his sister, and I’ve got to tell you I’m not absolutely sure about that.”

  “You don’t believe the woman was really his sister?”

  “I sure as hell don’t think she was sick. That was just a horseshit story somebody dreamed up. And if she wasn’t sick, she may not have been his sister either.”

  “You’re losing me, Goh.”

  “I don’t think so. I’d bet both of those things have already occurred to you.”

  Tay said nothing.

  “Here’s what I’m trying to tell you. Somebody in Singapore is protecting Suparman. Suparman thought his sister was really sick and he demanded his protectors arrange for him to see her. Some genius decided the best way to hide their meeting was to tell all of us it was going to occur, but point us to the wrong place. Then the sister would slip away and go to a different place to meet Suparman. That way, if you ever need them, you’ve got a list of witnesses as long as your arm swearing they never met.”

  “Who’s protecting Suparman?”

  “There are people in ISD who know it’s happening, but not many. Most of us don’t have a clue. It goes higher than that.”

  “Higher than ISD?”

  Goh said nothing.

  “Higher than the Minister of Home Affairs?”

  “You’re not going to get me to say any more than I have, Tay. Use your imagination.”

  Although the Minister of Home Affairs presumably supervised ISD, it was widely assumed in many quarters that the director of ISD actually answered only to the Prime Minister. If that were the case, no wonder Goh didn’t want to say any more.

  “I still don’t understand what you’re telling me h
ere, Goh. Why in God’s name would anybody here in Singapore be protecting Suparman?”

  Goh tilted his head back and took a couple of deep breaths.

  “Let’s say that somewhere in ISD somebody started running Suparman as an asset—"

  “Can we drop the spy movie bullshit, Goh? What does that actually mean?”

  “It means Suparman was feeding information to ISD on Muslim radicals in Malaysia and Indonesia, giving them warnings of impending attacks. At least they thought he was. Can I go on now?”

  Tay nodded.

  “And let’s also say they started doing it well back before the Bali bombings, and finally let’s say what they were doing was cleared at the high level of government. So all those folks are sitting behind their big desks in their big offices and Bali gets hit and other places get hit and they slowly start to realize that their prize asset may be shoving one up their ass. So somebody goes out and has a heart to heart with Suparman and he tells them, not me, brother, you’ve got this all wrong. And they decide to believe him.”

  “And the somebody who believed him was high up in ISD.”

  “Very high up.”

  “And he cleared his decision to believe Suparman all the way to the top.”

  “I have no doubt a decision like that would have been discussed at the highest levels of government.”

  Tay nodded. “Go on.”

  “So they keep running Suparman and, because he’s been linked to all of these big events and because he feeds them just enough about each one to make them believe him, ISD keeps telling these high levels of government they’ve got a prize asset on the inside and he’s giving them the good stuff. No matter what happens, they keep saying that. If they ever admit they’ve been burned, half the people at the top of ISD will go down and take some of the people above them down, too.”

  “So they protect Suparman no matter what he does, and they keep hoping the intelligence they get will be worth more in the end than the damage he does.”

  “See, Tay, you’ve figured it out already. I knew you were a smart guy.”

  Tay thought back to the ISD men he had seen at the Fortuna hotel. Even then, they looked to him like close protection, which would make sense if what Goh was telling him now was true. But then who was the woman who had apparently shot Suparman? And how was the guy from the Australian High Commission involved?

  Tay felt like he had been asked to assemble a giant jigsaw puzzle with a thousand little pieces, but someone had thrown the box away and he had no idea what it was supposed to look like. He could have been trying to put together a picture of the Eiffel Tower or one of a pot of petunias.

  “Why are you telling me all this, Goh?”

  “Because this is fucked up and it’s got to be stopped. I hate to admit it, Tay, but you have a better chance to stop it now than I do.”

  “How am I supposed to do that?”

  “I have a lot of confidence in you, Tay. Now that you know your sergeant died because a bunch of bureaucrats are trying to cover their ass, you’ll figure it out. There’s just one other thing.”

  Tay looked at Goh and waited.

  “Be careful, man. They’re in so deep now they won’t hesitate if they think you’re getting too close. They will drop you without a second thought. You have to find a way to get to Suparman before they see you coming.”

  “And what am I supposed to do if I do get to him?”

  “You’ll have to decide that for yourself, Tay. I don’t have any doubt what I would do, but then you’re not me.” Goh scratched at his neck and looked away. “You see what I’m getting at here?”

  Tay saw what Goh was getting at all right, but he didn’t see what use there was in acknowledging it. So he didn’t.

  “I’ve got something else to ask you,” Tay said instead. “Is it possible ISD had the Fortuna Hotel under surveillance?”

  Goh looked exasperated. “Haven’t you been paying attention to anything I said, Tay? I’m telling you the people there with Suparman were protecting him, and they were ISD.”

  “I don’t mean them. I mean somebody else. Somebody watching the hotel from another building.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “There was a woman in a building across the street. She was watching the Fortuna Hotel when all this happened.”

  “Across the street?”

  Tay nodded.

  “Did she make contact with the ISD team covering Suparman?”

  “Not that I saw.”

  “Or the so-called sister?”

  Tay shook his head.

  “Fucking hell,” Goh laughed, shaking his head. “You mean somebody else is involved in this thing, too?”

  “Then you’re saying she wasn’t yours?”

  “She sure as hell wasn’t mine, and it doesn’t sound to me like she was anybody else’s at ISD either. I don’t see why anybody at ISD would want a witness when they had just gone to such elaborate lengths to get rid of all the witnesses.”

  “Then who was she? Who else could have possibly known something was going down at that hotel?”

  Goh chuckled. “It sounds to me, Tay, like you’ve got yourself another player somewhere out there.”

  “Any ideas?”

  “Nope. This just gets better and better, doesn’t it?”

  Tay shook out a cigarette and lit it. Goh didn’t seem to be in any hurry to leave, but he didn’t say anything else either.

  Tay smoked quietly for a while, then asked, “Is that it, Goh?”

  “That’s it.”

  “You’re not going to give me anything else to go on?”

  “I got nothing else for you to go on.”

  Tay thought about that briefly, and then he stood up and nodded at Goh. He turned and strolled away up the bricked pathway. He didn’t say anything, and he didn’t look back.

  When he got out to Hill Street, he flicked away his cigarette butt and started looking for a taxi.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  THE NEXT MORNING Tay drank far too much coffee and ate a couple of pieces of toast while standing over the sink to keep the crumbs from falling on the floor. After that, he walked through Preranakan Place to Orchard Road and got in the first taxi he saw.

  “The Fortuna Hotel,” he said to the driver.

  “On Serangoon Road?”

  Tay nodded and the driver started the meter.

  He was missing something. He was sure of that now. And whatever he was missing was important. He was sure of that as well.

  He needed to go back over everything and think it all through from the beginning. That was why he was doing this alone. Thinking, he had learned long ago, was always best done alone.

  Tay got out of the taxi across the street from the Fortuna Hotel and stood there looking around. The vegetarian restaurant from which he and Kang and Lee had watched the hotel was closed. A steel shutter had been pulled across the front and secured on both sides by heavy padlocks attached to U-bolts sunk into the concrete walls of the building. He went into a few of the neighboring businesses, but his inquiries as to why the vegetarian restaurant was closed were answered with shrugs that varied only in their intensity. After ten minutes, he was back on the sidewalk and no wiser than he had been before.

  Was it just a coincidence that the restaurant was closed, or was that too somehow connected with the events of the week before at the Fortuna Hotel? He couldn’t see the connection, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t one.

  Tay leaned back against the metal shutter, folded his arms, and contemplated the Fortuna Hotel on the other side of Serangoon Road.

  The traffic was heavy. Serangoon Road was a major traffic artery and now that artery was in full thrombosis, clogged with so many trucks, buses, and passenger cars Tay could barely see across it. It was well after rush hour, but these days the city seemed to be jammed with traffic regardless of the hour. He wondered if he drove around at three o’clock in the morning whether the traffic might be lighter. It probably
would be, but he wasn’t going to drive around at three o’clock in the morning just to find out.

  The older Tay got, the less pleasant he found many things. He knew most people would dismiss such thoughts as nothing but evidence of a man growing crotchety in his old age, but that was unfair. It wasn’t him. The world really was less pleasant than it used it be.

  Tay’s eyes roamed over the scene. He tried to see it as it was the evening they had watched the hotel from the vegetarian restaurant. He picked out the spot near the intersection with Owen Road where Kang first noticed the two men sitting in the dirty white Toyota. He pictured the silver blue Hi-Lux van, unmarked and without windows, pulling up behind the Toyota and the three men getting out. He pictured the two men from the Toyota going into the hotel, then the other men getting back in the van and rolling up to the entry before getting out again with the fourth man and going into the hotel, too. But none of that told him anything he didn’t already know.

  So Tay started over at the beginning and worked his way methodically through each of the events again, trying to recall exactly what each of them had said at the time. And this time he added in the piece of the puzzle about which he had the least understanding.

  “Now who the hell is that?”

  Tay glanced at Kang to see what he was talking about. Kang pointed at the apartment building across Owen Road from the hotel.

  “Third floor, sir. The corner window.”

  Tay counted up to the third floor and his eyes found the corner of the building where Owen Road and Serangoon Road met.

  “Do you see her, sir? The girl in the window?”

  Tay did see her. She was standing close to the glass and appeared to be watching the same men he and Kang were watching.

  “If those men are ISD,” Kang said, “who is the girl watching them? She’s not one of ours, is she?”

  Tay shook his head.

  “Okay, so we’re CID and she’s not ours, and they’re ISD and she not theirs since she’s watching them. So who is she?”

  It was a good question. A very good question. Tay had no answer for it so he said nothing.