‘Old news. Sedative for cats. That’s all.’
‘Chin says you never gave any to the cats.’ Pause. ‘Harry says you baked the pie and gave it to Bernard. Harry says you went out for half an hour before 10 o’clock.’
‘Bollocks! Wong would never tell Tom.’
According to his theory, K has to break Agnes’ power to lie rationally by banging her up as close as possible to the heights of climax without quite ringing the bell. His words become as hard as the treatment he’s giving Agnes. ‘You’d better believe it! Chin wants to get rid of both of us.’
‘Harry won’t damn himself. He knows … I won’t sit quiet … if things come out.’
‘If what comes out? That you and Chin both drugged Bernard and hanged him on the fan?’
‘I did not hang him … I wanted to call an ambulance.’
It sounds like K is working hard. The momentum must have been broken and he has to get it back. In spite of the noisy fan on full over his head, I can hear him snort – I can picture the sweat running down his face. He must be giving the show of a lifetime. Sitting beside me he is clearly pleased with his own performance. But Agnes has admitted nothing other than wanting to call an ambulance – and I’m glad.
‘Save yourself, Agnes. Scarper back to your folks in Ipoh.’
‘There’s no evidence.’ Agnes hits the nail on the head.
‘There is evidence,’ K sounds brutal.
‘Don’t stop. Faster. Harder.’
K’s words are laboured but clear. ‘You bake pie. Put in drug. Give Bernard. You. True or no?’
‘Yes! No. Yes.’
‘True or no? You baked the pie. Chin stole the manuscript.’
‘Yes! Yes!’
‘Chin made you bake it?’
‘Yes! Don’t stop. Oh my god, yes!’ A long scream drives the Uher needle beating against maximum. The groans subside, the Uher needle retreats.
K stands and takes a bow.
Another pause in which Agnes must be dressing. Then I hear the wardrobe door open and K speak. ‘It’s all there, all recorded. The confessions of an acting dean’s wife. I can give the tape to the police or to your husband or maybe broadcast it though the Guild House speaker or I can give it to you. What would you prefer, Agnes dear?’
‘Bastard,’ yells Agnes. The sound of scuffling. Agnes grabbing for the tape spools. Sounds as if they are fighting.
Apology is clearly not in K’s deck of cards. It sounds like he is restraining Agnes by force. ‘Agnes, we do not want to use this tape but we will if we have to.’ I wish he had not used we. ‘There is no reason at all to think you killed Bernard. All you did was bake a pie. If Bernard died by pie, there is no reason you should hang for it or spend the rest of your life in Changi Prison. You get the tape and our lips are sealed. All you have to do is give me the manuscript that Harry stole from Bernard. Chin can be dean if that’s what you want. He can even go ahead and publish his book. For you, nothing need change – not even our afternoon meetings. With the manuscript, I’ll confront Chin and get my contract renewed. That’s all that’s important. I’m offering you a deal: the manuscript for our silence. Now, I’m going to let you go.’ K remains calm. Agnes must be sitting quietly on the bed as K continues. ‘As I was saying, Agnes, you give us the manuscript, we give you the tape. Simple as that.’
Agnes speaks with surprising composure. ‘That tape would not be acceptable in court. But it would ruin my reputation. It would also ruin your reputation. What about your life and your wife?’
‘My wife has no grand ambitions. She’s happy as a university wife as you say. She will forgive a man’s transgressions. More important for her is to have a home and for me to have a job; she’s giving birth soon. I’ve been at Singapore University for six years: I should be getting tenure, for Christ’s sake. Getting the sack instead will not help my reputation. Just jog off home, stuff the manuscript in your shorts and get it back here. Five minutes and it’s all over.’
‘I’d give you that damned manuscript. But I don’t know where it is.’
‘Look for it when Chin’s out of the house.’
‘Harry won’t leave it lying around. Anyway, there are piles of papers in his study, I wouldn’t know it if I saw it.’
‘Can you let us into the house when Chin’s away? Haddock would recognise the manuscript sure enough.’
‘It would do no good. Harry would have hidden it well and his maid will be onto you in a shot. She never leaves the house. She’s Harry’s maid, nothing to do with me and she doesn’t like me.’
‘Okay, Agnes. We need a rethink on this one. I hope we don’t have to ask Chin to make the exchange. I hope we can spare you that. But if the manuscript gets destroyed, you can be sure we will be inviting Superintendent Wong to listen to the tape. So, not a word to Chin and no tricks.’
K opens another beer as if we are celebrating. I don’t see that anything has been achieved. And there will now be no more ice cream with Agnes.
‘So, having failed to get the manuscript the easy way,’ I say, ‘we go ahead with plan B?’
‘No choice, Haddock. But one change. Agnes is now warned and who knows what she’ll do. It has to be tonight. Off you go to the Guild and phone Venus and David. The caper’s on.’
25
Men in Stockings
DAVID IS INTO stockings but K prefers balaclava helmets. He insists balaclavas are more professional. Toshi asks what a balaclava is. ‘Ninjas wear them,’ David tells him. This exciting news inspires Tosh to venture a rare opinion and say David will look nicer in a stocking and K in a balaclava; very diplomatic.
‘The question,’ K states authoritatively as leader of the caper, on the basis we are in his house and in his junk room, ‘is not how nice we look but how functional the alternatives are.’
‘Well, if it’s a question and not a royal decree,’ says David, speaking confidently on the topic of men in stockings, ‘stockings are better in the tropics than balaclavas. Bleeding obvious. You’d sweat to death in a wooly helmet. Really, K, when was the last time you saw anybody wearing a balaclava?’
‘This morning – as it happens,’ K sneers. ‘A line of chaps swinging their arms around like windmill sails with sickles on the end of long sticks, cutting the university grass. Balaclavas keep out the sun and soak up the sweat. So, quite appropriate for the tropics – as it happens. When was the last time you saw a line of chaps in stockings?’
David responds by mimicking K’s sneer. ‘Early this morning – as it happens.’
‘The difference, David, is the men I saw wore balaclavas on their heads.’
I intervene to get down to the crime at hand. ‘I’m sure you each have experience of stockings in your own way and I doubt either of you has experience of balaclavas. I also doubt we have any balaclavas. If we don’t, this discussion seems pitifully academic.’
K curls his lips. ‘And what’s wrong with academics having an academic discussion? Don’t say you’ve joined the anti-academic academics?’
‘Any moment now Venus will call us with the signal. Then we’ve got to move fast. So, do you or do you not have any balaclavas?’ K and David look at me as if I am constantly out to turn life into something less than a game.
‘So, stocking-tops it is,’ says David triumphant. ‘If we have any, of course.’
And, of course, we don’t. The closest K comes up with is his long-suffering wife’s only pair of tights, worn once. He cuts off the feet with scissors. David and K get a foot each; the toes stick up like a cock’s crest on the top of their heads. I get an open-ended thigh. Toshi gets nothing on the grounds he’ll be outside keeping watch and should not look more suspicious than he normally does. He looks confused but does not seem too disappointed.
With stockings rolled down we look at each other. I complain about getting the thigh and K rebukes me. ‘When a chap invites you to get inside his wife’s thighs, it’s not done to complain, old man. Anyway, thigh suits you. You look like a melon with a
crêpe cushion cover in the supermarket.’
Looking in a mirror, I would not like to turn a dark corner and bump into any of us. Even David looks like a stop-at-nothing thug. Barnaby growls. ‘There you are,’ K says, ‘even Barnaby can’t recognise us.’
‘Gawd, even me Mum won’t know me,’ agrees David and no more is said about balaclava helmets like what ninjas wear. We roll the stockings up onto foreheads as crooks do in movies and Barns calms down.
K reveals his apprentice burglar’s tool kit: a six-inch cold chisel, a sledge hammer, a torch with fading batteries and an old Swiss Army knife with compass. K’s plan for getting in is brilliant in its simplicity. He will smash open the door.
‘What about gloves?’ David suggests. ‘So’s we don’t leave fingerprints.’
‘Good point,’ K acknowledges and holds up a pair of wicket keeper’s gloves with the flexibility of a Singapore judge pronouncing a death sentence. He looks at them respectfully but declares them out of play. An island on the equator is not the place to hoard gloves.
‘What about condoms?’ suggests David.
‘David,’ K says in avuncular tones. ‘The problem reposes on the finger not the dong. Mankind, even yours truly, has yet to perfect the art of swinging sledge hammers using only the male member.’
‘K, you don’t need the sledge hammer,’ jokes David.
‘Well, it might have opened a few doors in its time but never by force.’
There being no time to dash off to Fitzpatrick’s for latex gloves or finger-size condoms, we decide it is enough to go equipped with a K neckerchief to wipe anything that has to be touched and might retain a print. K disappears for a few minutes to select from his stock. These he ties onto our wrists. Toshi will not enter the scene of the crime and will not therefore be dabbing his prints about. He stands awkwardly kerchief-less, disappointment on his face. We are beginning to understand the sensitivities of David’s Japanese appendage. Toshi doesn’t mind about the stockings but feels left out over the kerchiefs. K generously ties a rather spiffy one onto Toshi’s wrist and his face brightens.
The acceptance of K’s prized bandanas, the anthropologists among us are well aware, marks acceptance of K’s symbolic leadership of the tribe. However, when K suggests locking up Barns on the grounds she might make a noise if Chin’s cats come into view, I concede the possibility but insist Barnaby be with us. If anybody can sniff out Bernard’s manuscript, it’s Barnaby.
K drops the tools in a black bag and we repair to the sitting room and its dress mirror, stockings on heads and kerchiefs on wrists. ‘Oh me gawd,’ David exclaims. ‘The Neckerchief Gang. We look like blooming Morris dancers. Got any bells, K?’
K’s wife, who melts away when visitors call, waddles in looking as if she is about to give birth but won’t do so just yet as she doesn’t want to be a nuisance. She doesn’t blink at the stockings on our heads and the kerchiefs on our wrists. K’s Drama Society exploits have granted her immunity. ‘There’s a lady on our telephone who won’t give her name but wants to speak to you. Says it’s urgent.’ The resignation in her voice suggests this is not the first time she has carried similar messages to her wayward husband. We crowd the earpiece.
‘The celebrity couple has arrived.’ Venus speaks.
‘Roger, over and out,’ says K and hangs up.
And off we go to the scene of the crime-to-be.
26
The Caper
‘A SINGLE BLOW, like a single gunshot, will be impossible for any listener to locate.’ K informs us as we huddle in coven outside Chin’s back door. Not that there are any listeners. It would take a lot more than a bang to disturb the chattering Tamils in the serious drinking room at Guild House. The quarters of Chin’s maid are nicely distant from Chin’s house and no light shines from her window. All is deadly quiet.
K raises his arms to strike at the lock and freezes, hammer high, like a proletarian statue on a Soviet traffic circle. Loud and clear, a wench wails the first lines of a Chinese song about unrequited love. Poor peasant girl deceived by glib talker. Can’t be Agnes bemoaning K’s treatment of her, Venus had insisted she accompany her husband to the recording studios of the Singapore Broadcasting Corporation, leaving the house empty and waiting for a cool, clean break and enter … at least, that’s the plan.
I tiptoe around the corner of the house towards the lamenting. A light in the bathroom. I look through window bars that protect Chin from people like us and see a young girl under the shower. Very svelte. K is quickly by my side and raises eyebrows in appreciation. The girl turns towards us, curls long hair up on top of her head, allowing water to splash onto her face and into her open mouth before dribbling down her neck to drip from tiny nipples. Chin’s maid is taking advantage of her mistress’s absence to soap and perfume herself like the lady of the house. We withdraw into the darkness.
‘I see now where Chin gets his jollies,’ K breathes into my ear. ‘This means mission aborted. If we smash our way in, she’ll scream the place down.’ We return to the back door where David and Toshi and Barnaby are waiting. ‘It’s off,’ K says simply, ‘the maid’s in the bathroom.’
Barnaby, one of the very few beings who could give K lessons in obstinacy, does not give up easily. She has her nose stuck into the cat-flap and is snorting the Chin air. ‘Good try Barns, but I’m afraid what’s big enough for your snout is too small for the rest of you, no matter how you try.’ K’s voice holds the bitter disappointment we all feel.
‘What we need is a cat burglar.’ David makes an attempt at humour in the face of adversity – what the British like to think of as their innate ability to rise above the dumps and the rest of the world considers evidence of genetic deficiency.
‘We steal cat?’ asks Toshi, logic straining at the leash.
K is as reluctant to leave as Barnaby. He shines the torch into the door lock then down at the cat flap. ‘There’s a key in the lock, all we’ve got to do is turn it from the inside. Who has a long enough, thin enough arm …?’
We all look at David. The longest, thinnest arm in Singapore.
David gets down to cat-on-ground level and inserts his arm through the cat flap. Toshi is sent around to look at the girl and warn us if she starts to leave the bathroom. David’s head is pressed against the door’s foot. ‘Another inch, that’s all I need, just another inch and I’ll be there.’
‘That’s what they all say, David. Not your fault. Stop straining, you’ll not make it an inch longer by straining.’
David yelps and whips out his arm as if it has been scratched by the devil, which in a manner of speaking it has. Chin’s Siamese tom flies out, setting the flap bouncing on its springs. Barns pounces and sinks her teeth into that wretched foreign tail. The cat screams, turns, spits, slashes at Barns’ snout and flies off into the darkness. Barns lets it go, chuckling to herself. First blood to Chin’s cat, second to our dog. The humans have yet to score.
Four nasty trails of oozing red mark the place on David’s arm where a bicep might have been had the arm not been David’s. K shines the torch on the wound and makes a sucking noise between his teeth. I think for a moment he is going to kiss it better. Even in the dark, I can sense David’s shame. He let us down by not having an arm one inch longer. We all feel annoyed. Not with David. Not with the maid. Just with our rotten luck. The British spirit is foundering and Japanese ingenuity is busy looking at a little girl’s tits and perhaps wondering why they don’t turn him on. In frustration, K rattles and curses the handle. The door swings open.
‘It was open all the time,’ our leader states as if David and I are cretins. Masks down we creep in. ‘We go room by room,’ K instructs. ‘Study first, then bedrooms, then living room and kitchen. Stay together in one room. If the girl comes out, she might leave by the back door without noticing us. She’ll deadlock the door after her and we’ll have to smash our way out. That’s why I brought the hammer.’ We roll the stockings, already uncomfortably hot and sticky, up onto our foreheads. B
y torchlight I can see the excitement in the eyes of my comrades. I feel it too. The caper is on.
While it spurs the adrenaline, fading torchlight is not the best way to search a littered study for a manuscript; it would take a week to go through the mounds of papers that lie in tied-up bundles around the room, reminding me of Tambiah’s Chambers. The windows are shuttered; K turns on the light.
I can hear singing and running water from the bathroom; the girl seems set for a deep clean. If Toshi’s not enjoying the view, at least it might help him out of the closet. Precisely how he is to warn us if the girl looks about to leave has been left to Japanese resource. We keep ears open for an unknown warning signal. K fiddles with his Swiss army knife in the locks of Chin’s desk drawers. ‘The bugger’s locked every one of them,’ he whispers. ‘Must be more paranoid than I thought.’ Light sledge-hammer taps on a cold chisel are enough to destroy the mahogany veneer forever and reveal the contents of each drawer to be nothing worth locking up. While K and David use a similar approach on the cupboards, I go quickly through the bundles of what turn out to be exam papers. It’s the work of minutes to see Chin has not slipped Bernard’s fat manuscript into the neatly-tied piles of thin scripts.
‘Nothing here,’ K decides. ‘To the bedrooms.’
Barnaby is before us, her nose into a basket of dirty washing. ‘Not much to interest you there, Barns. Unless you’re a more perverted dog than I thought.’ K lifts up a pair of knickers and curls his lips. ‘I remember these. Yellow with little red hearts.’ David tut-tuts that we are not here to sniff the underwear.
The bedrooms yield nothing. We leave behind a trail of broken locks on our way to the heart of the house, the most vulnerable point in the topography of larceny, a large living room with doors all round. If the girl leaves the bathroom, she cannot help but see us.
The living room cupboards are not locked. David looks behind a picture of the Great Wall of China and discovers a family of cockroaches. K scatters piles of magazines from the coffee table. I look under the Persian carpet and feel the lining of the curtains. Nothing. The telephone rings twice. The singing stops. The telephone stops. The singing starts again. The telephone rings again. The bathroom door opens.
Waiting for Venus - A Novel Page 21