Umbrella Man (9786167611204)

by Needham, Jake

  Tay flipped through the next couple of folders and found more of the same. It would take him hours to go through every sheet and he wasn’t sure he would know anything even after he had. Sergeant Kang had always told him he had the soul of an accountant and, if he actually did, that might stand him in good stead with all this stuff, but he needed to take it somewhere and study it carefully. He wasn’t going to figure out what the sheets contained shuffling from foot to foot in HSBC’s safety deposit room. What he really needed was a comfortable chair, a good lamp, and his cigarettes.

  Mr. Lee wasn’t going to let him take anything, he was sure of that, and he didn’t blame him. On the other hand, he hadn’t said anything about not making copies. Maybe, Tay mused, if he wove an enthralling tale of terrorists, bombers, and shadowy go-betweens, then spiced it up with a little violence — all constructed from the purest of horseshit, of course — he could convince Lee to let him make copies of all this stuff to take home and study.

  ***

  Tay figured his performance must have been adequate. A couple of hours later he was walking out of the bank with two old briefcases Lee’s secretary had found for him. The briefcases were filled with crisp copies of every single sheet of paper that was in box A386. Tay had also stuffed into the briefcases the printouts Mr. Lee had given him of the box’s access records and what the bank had on Paraguas Ltd. Altogether, it was quite a haul.

  After Tay was comfortably settled in the back seat of a cab headed for Emerald Hill, he tried to remember how many packs of cigarettes he had at home. This was going to be a long and tedious job and he didn’t want to run out right before he was done.

  SEVENTEEN

  BY SIX O’CLOCK, Tay had smoked half a pack of Marlboros and read everything he had hauled away from HSBC in those two old briefcases.

  And he had learned very little.

  Paraguas Ltd seemed to be an ordinary enough company. It was a Guernsey corporation formed by three people with Guernsey addresses, whom he had no doubt would turn out to be a local solicitor and two of his clerks.

  For the last three years, the only person who had accessed the box was someone named Joseph Hysmith, who was identified on the box application as an assistant company secretary. Mr. Hysmith had routinely visited the box every few months, which was consistent with someone occasionally filing away copies of the financial records which Tay had found. It appeared as if Mr. Hysmith was probably nothing more than the company clerk his title implied and had simply been the person charged with carting documents to HSBC and storing them away.

  But charged by who? And carted from where?

  ***

  Tay got up and poured himself a glass of water. Then he came back, put the glass on the table next to his cigarettes, and started looking through the files again.

  This time he spotted something he hadn’t noticed before.

  One of the files had no date on the tab, and the ledger sheets inside were written in a hand that was clearly different from the sheets in the other files. What’s more, the handwriting on those three sheets was dimmer, faded perhaps. If he had the originals he could immediately tell for sure, but his impression from the copies was that the sheets in that file could be significantly older than the sheets in the other files.

  But even if that were true, what did it mean? He couldn’t even work out what kind of data the most recent sheets contained. What hope did he have trying to decipher older sheets he could barely read?

  Not only were the older sheets — if that’s what they were — faded and dim, they were messy, with all kinds of changes and corrections written over the original accounts. Whoever had made the changes had even initialed some of them.

  Tay removed the small stack of sheets from the file. He turned them first one way and then another, shifting their angle under his lamp and letting the light play across them from different directions.

  All at once he could read the initials of this long-ago accountant who had made all these messy changes, and he felt a jolt of pure electricity surge through his body.

  Surely not, he thought. That’s just not possible.

  ***

  Tay put the sheets down and rubbed his eyes. Probably he was just tired.

  He finished the glass of water, then shook out another Marlboro and lit it. He took a long, slow pull, exhaled unhurriedly, and only after that did he allow his eyes to shift back to the pieces of paper he had abandoned on the table.

  Tay lifted one of the ledger sheets and examined the scribbled initials again with a skeptical eye. But try as he might to convince himself he was looking at something other than what he thought he was looking at, he could not.

  Written next to most of the changes on the ledger sheets were three initials: DST.

  DST were the initials of Duncan Samuel Tay.

  Duncan Tay was Inspector Samuel Tay’s father.

  ***

  When the doorbell rang, Tay welcomed the interruption.

  His head was spinning and the world was tilting crazily around him. He really didn’t care who was at the door. He would have even been happy to find Cindy Shaw making one of her generally unwelcomed appearances on his doorstep. Anyone was welcome as long as they distracted him from those damn ledger sheets long enough for him to clear his head.

  Tay’s father had been an accountant in Singapore, but he had been dead for forty years. And now Tay thought he might be looking at his father’s initials on ledger sheets that were probably old enough to date back to before his father died. But if those really were his father’s initials, what were they doing on papers in a safety deposit box, the key to which he had found up the ass of a dead guy neatly laid out a couple of weeks ago in Woodlands Housing Board flat?

  Tay asked himself that over and over as he walked to his front door, but he found no answers.

  ***

  Tay didn’t bother to check who was at the door. Flipping open the lock, he reached for the handle.

  But he had barely begun to turn the knob when the door crashed open. He caught the full force of it against his body and slammed backward into the wall.

  Later, Tay would wonder how he could have missed getting a clear look at the man who forced his way in and jumped him. He stumbled and fell when he hit the wall, of course, and the man had been on him so quickly he hadn’t been able to get his head around. But still, he was a policeman. He shouldn’t have been taken by surprise. Even if he had, he should have kept his wits about him well enough to resist, or at the very least to register exactly what his attacker looked like.

  The only impressions he could recall later were that his attacker was big and a Caucasian, although Tay had to admit he wasn’t absolutely certain about that last part. He did remember clearly the flash of pain just before he passed out. The man had hit him with something. Tay thought the weapon might have been a flashlight. A heavy, black flashlight.

  One that looked a good deal like a Maglite.

  EIGHTEEN

  WHEN TAY WOKE up he was back in the hospital and Dr. Gupta was leaning over him.

  “Miss me?” Gupta asked.

  Tay was in no mood for clever banter with a doctor.

  “What happened?” he snapped.

  “You’ll have to ask your sergeant. All I know is he brought you in. Maybe he attacked you and then was overcome with remorse.”

  Tay hated doctors, and he particularly hated doctors who tried to make jokes rather than giving direct answers to the questions their patients asked them.

  “What I can tell you for sure, Inspector, is you have a concussion and a nasty bump on your head.”

  Now Tay registered the throbbing. He reached up and cautiously touched his fingers to the part of his skull from which he thought it was coming. It was like mashing on a bruise and immediately he jerked his hand away.

  “Yes,” Dr. Gupta nodded, “it’s going to hurt for a while.”

  “Can’t you give me something for it?”

  “I can give you something for the pain, but
I can’t give you anything for the concussion. All you can do is rest and wait for your brain to get better by itself. You’ve got to be careful. You’ve had two concussions in the last week. One more and I’m taking you out of the game.”

  “What game?”

  “That was just an expression, of course. But your concussion isn’t just an expression. It’s serious. And you need to be careful.”

  “What did he hit me with?”

  “Who?”

  “How the hell should I know who? The man who attacked me. What did he hit me with?”

  Gupta looked annoyed at Tay’s sharpness. For his part, Tay didn’t give a shit whether Gupta was annoyed or not as long as he didn’t make any more jokes.

  “Something round and heavy, I’d say. Maybe a club or bat of some sort?”

  As soon as Gupta said that, Tay remembered seeing a flash of what he thought was a Maglite. Was that just a coincidence? No, of course it wasn’t.

  “How long have I been out?” Tay asked.

  “Not long.” The Dr. Gupta consulted the clipboard hanging at the foot of Tay’s bed. “Your sergeant brought you in at just before seven and it’s nearly nine now.”

  “Can I leave?”

  “No. You’re staying overnight whether you want to or not. I’ve added something to your drip to help you sleep.”

  Tay’s eyes shifted to the plastic bottle hanging from a stainless steel stand at his bedside. Then they traced the plastic tubing all the way from the bottle to where it entered his arm.

  “We’ll see how you are tomorrow,” Dr. Gupta finished, “and then we’ll talk about when you can go home.”

  “Where is Sergeant Kang?”

  “He’s right outside. I’ll get him.”

  Dr. Gupta started to turn away, but then he stopped.

  “I was serious about you taking it easy, Inspector,” he said. “Concussions are tricky things. Treat yours with respect. If you don’t, it might kill you.”

  Tay would have nodded, but the effort required was just too great to consider.

  “Thank you,” he said instead, and Gupta nodded and left.

  ***

  “You’re looking a lot better, sir.”

  Sergeant Kang settled himself on the straight-back aluminum chair next to Tay’s bed.

  “What were you doing at my house?” Tay asked him immediately.

  “You’re welcome, sir. Your expressions of profound gratitude to me for finding you and getting you to the hospital have touched me deeply, but they are entirely unnecessary. I’m sure you would have done the same for me.”

  “I would also tell you why I had turned up at your house one night when I had no reason to be there.”

  “I’d been trying to call you for nearly two hours and you didn’t answer. I was worried about you.”

  “Maybe I just didn’t feel like answering my phone. Maybe I was in the shower. Maybe I had picked up a girl.”

  “And maybe you’d had a stroke brought on by stress, bad temper, and old age.”

  Tay looked away and tried not to smile.

  “Do you know what happened to me, Sergeant?”

  “Not really, sir. When I walked up to your front door, it was half open and I saw you lying just inside. It looked like you’d been knocked out. I didn’t want to wait for an ambulance so I carried you to my car and brought you straight here.”

  “Thank you, Sergeant.”

  “Don’t mention it, sir.”

  “I won’t. Certainly not again.”

  “Dr. Gupta says someone knocked you out with a club. Why would anyone attack you, sir? Like that, I mean.”

  For Kang’s benefit, Tay pretended to think about it. “No idea,” he said after a few moments.

  But, of course, that was complete nonsense. He had a very good idea.

  He was just curious how many of the ledger sheets from the HSBC safety deposit box would be gone when he got home.

  ***

  They were all gone. Every last one of them.

  This time he had let Sergeant Kang drive him home from the hospital rather than taking a taxi. To tell the truth, he would rather have taken a taxi, but Kang was enjoying the role of rescuer so much that Tay didn’t have the heart to say so. That would have been downright cruel.

  When they got to Emerald Hill, Tay had insisted Kang leave him outside and go home. Just in case the ledger sheets were still where he had left them, Tay didn’t want to have to explain to Kang what they were. And if Kang came in and spotted them, Tay had no doubt he would ask.

  He need not have worried. He stared at the table in his living room where he had left the stack of files when he went to answer the door, but they were gone. All of them.

  Tay found a pack of Marlboros, sat down, and lit one.

  He knew he smoked way too much, and he kept telling himself he was going to quit soon, very soon, but he never did. The truth was he simply liked the damned things. He missed cigarettes like crazy when he was stuck somewhere he couldn’t have one.

  Perhaps he should ask Dr. Gupta if there was a hospital in Singapore that allowed smoking. It would be good to have one in mind, just in case things like this kept happening to him.

  ***

  At least he still had the key to the safe deposit box, it occurred to him as he was finishing his cigarette. He had put it into the little safe he had upstairs where he usually left his side arm rather than carrying it with him.

  Tay didn’t much like carrying a gun. It wasn’t that he harbored high-minded scruples that prevented him from shooting people. He had never actually shot anyone, but he had a long list of people in mind he thought could use shooting. Maybe it was more a matter of not wanting to be tempted.

  Just to be certain, Tay stubbed out his cigarette and went upstairs. He opened the safe and found both the key and his gun exactly where they ought to be. He started to close the safe again, but he hesitated. Then, in spite of the feeling that he was probably overreacting, he took out his revolver and relocked the safe.

  Tay’s choice of duty gun marked him as even more of an old fart than everyone already thought he was, which was really saying something. He still had his old-fashioned wheel gun, a Smith and Wesson .38, five shots with a two-inch barrel. The gun was practically an antique. Carrying it was pretty much the same thing as making telephone calls with a rotary dial phone.

  Policemen these days all carried semiautomatics, or perhaps one of the big Taurus revolvers chambered for a .44 magnum. Both of those were a lot more gun than Tay had any use for, so he just stuck to his old Smith and Wesson .38 and endured the jokes. It’s a great weapon if you get into a gunfight in an elevator, Kang chuckled on those rare occasions Tay still bothered to carry it.

  Tay figured it didn’t matter all that much. He had no intention of getting into a gunfight anywhere. To tell the truth, if he did somehow end up in a gunfight, he was such a lousy shot one gun would be about as useless to him as another.

  He unsnapped the safety strap and slid the little gun out of its holster. Spinning the cylinder to make certain it was fully loaded, he slid it back into its holster and snapped the safety strap. Then he laid it on his bedside table and went back downstairs.

  NINETEEN

  ACCORDING TO TAY’S alarm clock, the numerals of which were glowing in a shade of green that some idiot apparently thought was soothing, it was 3:00 am exactly.

  Tay woke up with a conviction at the forefront of his mind that he now knew something he had not known before. He just didn’t know what it was.

  He rolled onto his side to get away from the sickly green glow coming from his alarm clock and tried to go back to sleep, but he soon realized that wasn’t going to happen. His mind was racing to bring something into focus. But like a dream, it hung somewhere just out of reach.

  A dream?

  It flashed across Tay’s mind that perhaps his mother had appeared to him again and slipped him one of those cheat sheets she kept pushing at him, but he didn’t think so. He generally
remembered when he dreamed about his mother, and he always remembered when she claimed to be tipping him off about something. Unless, of course, he hadn’t remembered at all, in which case he wouldn’t know he had forgotten, would he?

  Tay’s head was spinning so fast he thought he might never sleep again, so he pushed himself upright in bed, propped his back against the headboard and tried again to focus on whatever it was that was working at him.

  He thought for a minute more about his mother…

  And, suddenly, there it was.

  ***

  Tay jumped out of bed and put on a robe. Pulling the belt tight around him and tying it in a bow, he went downstairs to the kitchen and got the pitcher of cold water from the refrigerator. He poured himself a glass and sat at his kitchen table. Before he had finished drinking the water, he knew exactly what was on his mind.

  Up in one of the spare bedrooms where he never went anymore, were two old trunks filled with things his mother had left behind when she moved to New York. For years Tay had been telling himself he would throw them out, but he never did. Eventually, he more or less forgot all about them.

  Until about twenty minutes ago. When he was fast asleep.

  And that was when he remembered the things his mother had left included some photographs he hadn’t looked at in nearly forty years. Photographs of his father, the place he used to work, and the people he worked with.

  If he could find a way to identify any of those people, if they were still alive, if he could locate them now, they might have some idea why his father’s initials were on those ledger sheets in the HSBC safety deposit box.

  A lot of if’s.

  But it was a place to start.

  He wondered briefly if his mother had tipped him off about the photos in a dream, but he quickly dismissed the whole concept as far too wobbly to think about at 3:00 am and decided to make some coffee and get to work.

  ***

  Tay measured coffee into the filter of the coffeemaker, poured in some water, and went upstairs while it was dripping. He changed into a t-shirt and a wrinkled pair of khakis and, by the time he got back downstairs, the coffee was ready. He filled up a white ceramic mug, drank half of it straight down purely for medicinal purposes, then refilled the mug and trudged upstairs again.