by A. M. Stuart
“And your part in the plan? The statues you were forging on your property?”
He didn’t answer for a long moment and then sighed deeply. “You know about those?”
“Yes, and so do the police.”
“They’re good, aren’t they?” She detected a note of pride in his voice. “Whatever my other failings I always had an aptitude for art. Maybe I should have stuck to the forgery business. Newbold had them cast in Rangoon and shipped to me—only enough for every consignment. I did the work of making them look authentic.”
“If there were only enough for each shipment, how did you end up with a spare one?”
“I just told him I needed a few spares. There were some breakages.”
“So Newbold had the rubies and you put them in the statues?”
Lawson seemed quite happy to talk. “The VOC couldn’t flood the market with rubies or suspicions would be raised, so they have been filtering them out over the last two years. Newbold would give me rubies and I would hide them in the statues and then bring them into town with the rubber shipments. Newbold had a godown on Clarke Quay that he used for different business interests and the box with the statues would be stored there as just another shipment of antiquities.”
Harriet tried to rally her tired mind to recall a recent conversation about antiquities. “Cornilissen?” she ventured.
Lawson shifted in his seat and his silence gave her the answer.
C for Cornilissen?
If O was Newbold and C possibly Cornilissen, then who was V?
Visscher was dead, probably killed by this gang. Van Gelder? He had connections to both Cornilissen and Newbold. Had Newbold been killed by the members of his own syndicate? She screwed her eyes shut. The key to this was V. Like the insignia of the VOC, V controlled everything.
She turned to the window, trying to make out something . . . anything in the glimpses between the shutters. They were in the country and through the darkness she had a sense of palm trees rustling and the tang of sea. She had not been in Singapore long enough to be familiar with the geography outside of the township and she wondered if they were traveling east or west.
The pace of the carriage had slowed over the rougher road and her gaze fell on the handle of the coach door, but even as she had the thought, she heard a click and glancing around she had the sense that Lawson had raised his revolver.
The coach lurched to the right onto an even rougher track.
Out of the dark, the stark horrifying image of Sir Oswald’s bloodied corpse came into her mind and she stifled a gasp.
“Surely they won’t kill your son?”
“Yes, they will.” Lawson’s voice twisted in pain. “They’re ruthless. They’ve killed before. After the Visscher boy’s death I realized I had to send Will away but I was too late. They came last night. They told me they had Will and that they would hold him until I agreed to give them the sapphire. I’m so sorry, Mrs. Gordon. Oh God, my life is a mess.”
Harriet regarded the man. She found herself unable to muster any sympathy for John Lawson. She had her own worries.
The carriage came to a jerking halt and the door swung open. Harriet peered out into the dark, seeing the looming outline of a bungalow against the night sky. No lights burned in the windows.
The driver let down the steps and stood holding his weapon, the sleek modernity of the revolver at odds with his native dress and the knife tucked into his waistband.
He didn’t speak, just jerked the revolver, indicating they were to alight from the carriage. Lawson climbed out first, holding out his hand to assist Harriet but she ignored it, jumping lightly to the ground. She looked around her, trying to take in as much detail as she could. They had stopped in the compound of a modern house. Probably one of the many seaside villas being built by the wealthy of Singapore, be they Chinese, English or Armenian, along the east and west coasts.
“What now?” Lawson asked the driver.
For reply, the man swung his revolver to aim at Lawson and snapped out a command in the same language he had used before.
When Lawson protested in the same language, the man drew the hammer back with a click. No more words were needed. Lawson handed over his revolver. The man tucked the second weapon into his waistband and Harriet knew that the VOC now had a third hostage. Despite the warmth of the night, she shivered.
At an abrupt gesture by their captor, she and Lawson walked up to the front door. It stood slightly ajar and Harriet pushed it open.
The man barked out what sounded like a command.
“Inside, Mrs. Gordon,” Lawson said.
“What language is he speaking?”
“Burmese.”
In the dark passageway, they stumbled past shut doors, coming to a halt against a firmly closed door of some solidity. The Burmese man pushed past her and opened the door, ushering the two captives into a large room.
He pushed Lawson down onto a dining chair, indicating with a grunt and wave of his revolver for Harriet to do likewise. She complied while he lit a kerosene lamp, its soft light spilling out across a pleasant room furnished with well-padded sofas and chairs and elegant Chinese furniture. The long front windows stood open, letting in a soft sea-tinged breeze. In normal circumstances it would have been a lovely room, one in which Harriet could happily have passed the time with a good book.
Lawson gave a sharp cry as his wounded right arm was wrenched behind the back of the chair. The Burmese man ignored Lawson’s cries as he used a curtain cord to fasten the man’s wrists to the chairback. Lawson looked up at her, his face gray and drawn even in the warm light thrown by the lamp.
“This man is hurt. Let me see to his arm,” she said, attempting to rise only to be pushed back into her chair.
The chair chosen for her was a carver, and unlike Lawson, her captor contented himself with tying her wrists to the arms of the chair. Harriet flexed her hands but the knots did not give.
An elegant French clock on a side table chimed midnight as their captor, grunting with exertion, turned the chairs with his captives so they stood side by side facing the door. He sat down cross-legged on the floor facing his captives, his weapon across his knee.
“We wait,” he said in English.
Lawson raised his head and glanced at Harriet, despair written in the line of his shoulders but Harriet had little pity for him. He had drawn this trouble down on himself and ensnared the boy and her in a web of his own device.
She swallowed, desperate for a drink of any description.
“Excuse me, my good man,” she addressed their captor. “Could we have something to drink?”
The man didn’t move. She tried the question in Malay but he didn’t even glance at her. Lawson addressed him in Burmese but the man remained implacable.
“It’s no good, Mrs. Gordon,” Lawson said. “We just have to wait.”
“Wait for what?”
“The VOC,” he mumbled, and his head fell forward.
TWENTY-FOUR
St. Tom’s House was in uproar. In the kitchen, Tan was interviewing the hysterical servants who had been found locked in the pantry, and outside, Sergeant Singh was dressing down an embarrassed and contrite police constable. In the living room Dr. Mackenzie tended to the bump on Julian Edwards’s head.
Curran stood in Harriet’s bedroom looking down at her dressing table. The jumble of hair- and hatpins in the china bowl made him smile. He liked the disorder; it lent a humanity to the private Harriet Gordon that she hid so very well in public.
Three photographs in well-polished silver frames had been pushed to the back of the table. The first was of a broad-faced, ruggedly handsome man with sandy hair and wearing a kilt, taken in a setting that had to be the Scottish Highlands. Her husband, he supposed. The second was a family group, a middle-aged couple and their three grown children wearing tennis clothes and posed
around a tea table in a well-ordered garden, a respectable Victorian home visible in the background. He recognized a much younger Harriet and Julian, who wore a university striped blazer, with a heavy lock of fair hair falling across his eyes. The third, older girl must be a sister, he thought. He picked up the last photograph. A chubby, smiling child on the lap of a thin-faced Indian woman wearing a sari.
“They called him Thomas,” Julian said from the doorway. “Her son.”
“She lost a child?” Curran stared at the photo of the happy child. He knew she had been widowed but not about the child. How did she live with that grief?
Julian nodded. “Thomas and her husband, James, died of typhus in India about two years ago. Harriet couldn’t stay in India and went back to England.” He straightened. “Curran, I fail to see what an examination of Harri’s personal effects has to do with finding her?”
Curran set the photograph back amidst the clutter.
“You’re right, it has nothing to do with it,” Curran admitted. He glanced down at the open trunk on the floor. “It was definitely Lawson?”
Julian removed his glasses and ran a hand across his eyes. “Yes. He was in a bad way. Looked like he’d been in a fight and his right arm had a rough bandage tied around it, over his shirtsleeve. The other man, a native. Not Chinese but not Malay. He’s the one who clocked me.” He rubbed the back of his head and flinched.
“We found blood at the house in Kranji. Looks like his friends paid him a visit out there,” Curran said. He didn’t add that since he had left Kranji, Lawson’s house servant had been found hiding in the ulu. He had been outside in the kitchen when Lawson’s visitors had arrived and when he had heard the sound of fighting, he had fled.
“Shouldn’t you be doing something other than standing in my sister’s bedroom?”
If Julian sounded terse, no one could blame him, Curran thought.
“Edwards, I have every able-bodied constable on the lookout for a dark carriage. There is nothing I can do until I start to get the reports in from the outlying police posts.”
“I’m sorry.” Julian slumped against the doorframe. “I just feel so . . . useless.”
Curran walked over to him and put a hand on his shoulder.
It was pointless telling the man to go to bed, despite the fact he looked dead on his feet. He left him in the care of Mac and left St. Thomas House with a promise to send word as soon as he heard anything.
He returned to South Bridge Road but no reports of any substance had come in. Tempted as he was to sit and wait, he would be no good to anyone in the morning if he didn’t try to get some rest, so he left Singh in charge and returned to his bungalow, so exhausted he could barely put one foot in front of the other.
Li An met him, as she always did, at the front door. He dropped his hat on a table and folded her in his arms, burying his face in her hair. She wrapped her arms tight around him as if she would shield him from the outside world.
“Are you hungry?” she asked at last.
He shook his head, but she led him into the living room, sitting him in his favorite chair while she busied herself in the kitchen. The simple mee goreng she produced revived him, and while he ate she poured water into a tin bathtub in the bedroom. He let himself be led into the haven of their bedchamber and Li An undid the silver buttons of his uniform, slowly divesting him of his clothes until he stepped naked into the tub, shivering slightly at the tepid water.
She knelt beside him and plied a loofah, sloughing away the dirt and care of the day. Her slender fingers slid down his torso, lingering on the scar just above his right hip, a parting gift from her murderous brother. He erupted from the bath, seizing her in his arms. She responded, soft and compliant beneath his questing hands and seemingly oblivious to the water that streamed from his body and hair. He needed her. In her arms he could forget, even for a little while. And he needed to forget.
But he lay awake long into the night, in the stuffy darkness of the mosquito net, thinking about Harriet, Lawson and the boy, lost somewhere out there in the dark on this benighted island.
He thought of Newbold and Visscher, dead in their graves. If only he could make the pieces fit. Rubies . . . it was the rubies. Ruby mines . . . Burma . . . The connection between Lawson and Newbold loomed clear in the darkness. An illicit ruby trade . . . the same one Maddocks had mentioned. But where did the sapphire fit into the puzzle?
Holding that thought, Curran drifted into a fitful sleep.
TWENTY-FIVE
The tick of the little clock marked every second, every minute and every hour of the interminable wait, driving Harriet to distraction as she tried to counteract the pins and needles in her fingers. As the clock chimed the second hour, Harriet glanced at her captor, who had not changed position once in the long wait. She had thought him in some sort of trance or asleep but he returned her gaze with unblinking eyes and a countenance that told her nothing.
Across the sigh of the wind, the rustle of dry palm fronds and the gentle swoosh of waves breaking on the shoreline that seemed to echo around the silent room, Harriet heard distantly at first, but growing stronger, the whine of a motor vehicle’s engine, followed by the hiss of the gravel as it drew to a halt.
The Burmese man heard it too. He rose from the floor and opened the door, revealing the dark corridor beyond. With a quick backward glance at his prisoners, he slipped into the darkness, leaving the door slightly ajar.
Across from Harriet, Lawson seemed to have fallen asleep, or more worryingly, to have lapsed into unconsciousness. Harriet straightened in her chair and, stretching out a foot, she found she could just reach him. She nudged Lawson and he stirred, opening bleary eyes.
“Lawson,” she whispered. “A motor vehicle has just arrived.”
Voices, too distant to make out the words, drifted in on the night air.
Lawson, wide awake now, flexed his shoulders and winced.
“Your arm?”
He nodded with tight lips. She didn’t like the look of his face, pasty beneath the grime and bruises.
There were footsteps in the corridor, floorboards creaking as they passed. One of the doors along the corridor opened on protesting hinges and Harriet squeezed her eyes tight shut, trying to make out the voices from the room next door. A man . . . no, two men, but no recognizable words drifted out.
“Can you understand what they’re saying?”
Lawson shook his head. “My Burmese is not that good.”
“They are all talking in Burmese?”
“I think so.”
Then a voice, higher than the other two. “The fool!”
Harriet’s breath caught in her throat. “A woman.” She glanced at Lawson. “Who is she?”
Lawson shook his head. “I don’t know, believe me, I don’t.”
In the list of possible suspects she had been compiling in the time Harriet had been tied to a chair, not one woman had made an appearance. Her world shifted slightly on its axis as she reeled through the women she had encountered since Newbold’s death. Surely not that vapid Cornilissen woman?
The door opened and Harriet held her breath.
She didn’t know who she had been expecting, but the young man dressed in a sweat-stained, open-necked shirt had not appeared on her list of suspects either.
The clerk from the Van Wijk, Paar, held a struggling Will Lawson firmly by the collar. Will’s face, streaked with the track marks of tears through dust, lit up when he saw his father.
“Papa!” Will’s tremulous voice broke the silence of the room.
“Let the boy go.” The words came from Lawson, forced out between tight lips. He strained against his bonds with a renewed vigor. “Have they hurt you, Will?”
Will glanced up at Stefan Paar and shook his head.
Harriet strained to see past Paar but the woman, if it had been a woman, did not appear. I
nstead she heard the front door slam shut and the distant sound of a motor vehicle starting up.
Paar looked at Harriet and frowned.
“You were sent to get the stone and you bring the woman. Why?”
Lawson glanced at Harriet. “She makes a better hostage than Will. You can let the boy go now.”
Paar glared at Harriet. “Is it true, the police have the stone?”
“Yes,” she replied.
Paar looked up at the ceiling and his Adam’s apple moved as he swallowed. “They’re not pleased.”
Lawson glanced at Harriet. “For God’s sake, man, she only did what was right. What I should have done in the first place. You’ve got the rubies, surely that’s enough?”
Paar flung Will away from him into the arms of the Burmese man, who had followed him into the room, and advanced on Lawson, leaning over him, so close that Lawson had to lean his head back.
“It’s a little late to develop a conscience, Lawson.”
Lawson snorted. “No honor among thieves, Paar. You should know that.”
Paar responded by spitting in Lawson’s face. Restrained as he was, Lawson could do nothing to wipe the spittle away from his eyes.
Paar turned to Harriet. She shrank back against the chair, her stomach churning.
“What are we supposed to do with you?”
“I told you, she’s a better bargaining tool, Paar.”
“I agree. Let the child go,” Harriet said.
Paar glanced across at Will, who hung limply in the Burmese man’s grasp, and shook his head. “I have no authority.”
“From whom?” Harriet demanded. “Who is behind this mess?”
Paar snorted. “You will find out soon enough,” he said. “They had to return to Singapore to finish off some business but they’ll be back in the morning.”
Harriet strained against her own bonds, trying to ignore her spinning head. “At least give us something to drink,” she murmured. “We’ve been here hours.”
“Are you going to faint?” Paar inquired.