Shadow Play

by Barbara Ismail

  Osman was beaming, relief and anticipation emanating from him in equal quantities. He ordered his staff around with authority, arranging to speak to his suspects in Kuala Krai. He assumed Maryam would come with him, but she didn’t want to lessen his glory in any way. Besides, she’d seen enough of Kuala Krai to last several lifetimes. He insisted. “I’ll need you there to help with the questioning,” he advised. “Please.” She acquiesced with as much grace as she could muster, and then hoped for the monsoon to wash out the roads.

  Osman bounded up the stairs to the Kuala Krai police station in great good humor. He pictured himself the young, vital chief of the Kota Bharu police: the man who’d cracked the case, a debonair yet intrepid figure from the big city. He was greeted by his colleagues with cries of congratulations, and warm slaps on the back, and plied with question about how he did it.

  “It was mostly theoretical work,” he instructed them modestly. “We had very little in the way of hard evidence to go on.” They nodded attentively. “It was psychology,” he added. “You know, as a policeman, you’re really got to understand the criminal mind and how it works. And of course, the local culture. Otherwise, how can you understand what they’re doing?”

  Osman wondered briefly if in his expansiveness he had gone too far. But his audience still seemed enthralled. “In this case, I had to think about how a second wife might feel. It wasn’t easy, I’m not even a woman.” They laughed, and Osman was quietly rapturous. “But with psychology, you can put yourself in someone else’s place and anticipate their next move.”

  Maryam watched him with both amusement and pride. It’s as though he’s my son, she thought to herself: young and sometimes stupid, but I can see at last he’s growing up.

  Moments later, Osman and Maryam were ushered into the small interrogation room to meet with Faouda. She sat stonily in her seat, watching Osman from under beetling eyebrows. “Who are you?” she asked.

  “I’m the police chief from Kota Bharu.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I wanted to talk to you about Aisha’s death.”

  “Aisha’s dead?”

  Osman thought her face had lost a little colour. “She died a few days ago. Poisoned.”

  “Really?” She’d recovered her poise and her colour, and affected to be utterly disinterested in the information.

  “You’re in a difficult situation, Faouda.”

  “Me? Why?”

  “Well …” Osman floundered. The language defeated him. He worried if they ever got beyond monosyllables, he might not even understand her answers.

  Maryam smoothly took over. “You were her husband’s second wife.”

  “For a week, maybe.”

  “Second wives have very difficult relationships with first wives.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” she replied airily. “I was only a second wife for such a short time,” she pointed out. “It’s not like I had a whole life there, or had kids, or anything like that. It was just for fun.”

  “For fun?” Maryam was appalled. “You wreck people’s lives for fun?”

  Faouda glared at her, and then silently accepted the cigarettes and tea served by a junior policeman. She leaned back, hanging her arm over the back of the chair. She said nothing, but her lower lip began to stick out. Maryam was tempted to slap her: Faouda and her husband aroused her desire to do so each time she’d seen them, and she wondered if everyone they met felt the same. She thought it likely. They were an unpleasant pair: sullen, selfish and snotty. Maryam remembered her own experience being hit, and knew it would be counterproductive, though extremely satisfying – to wipe the insolence from Faouda’s face. .

  “You planned to get rid of Aisha before you met her. You’ve caused a lot of misery. But as I was saying to my cousin Rubiah,” she took a ladylike sip of tea and flicked her ashes into a waiting dish, “taking a second wife is always a disaster for everyone. I don’t really blame you; after all, you never forced Ghani to marry you. But after all this is over, Ghani’s dead, Aisha’s dead, and it’s all because of you.” She stayed quiet, as though deep in thought.

  “I didn’t kill anyone,” Faouda said nastily. “I certainly didn’t kill Ghani. Or Aisha,” she made sure to add. She looked increasingly sulkier.

  “I think even if you didn’t kill Ghani, he still died because he married you.”

  “That’s what you think.”

  “I know it.” Maryam drank her tea again. “If you’d stayed in Kuala Krai, Ghani and Aisha would still be alive, and you’d be legally married to Johan. Why did you come here?”

  Faouda was becoming irritated. “Ghani asked me to marry him. This isn’t my fault alone, you know.”

  “Well, Ghani’s dead now, so it’s hard to blame him. And besides, he’s a man! You know they don’t think. If we women don’t think, well, guru kencing berdiri, anak murid kencing berlari: if the teacher pees standing, the students will pee running. It all goes to hell.” She paused. “Like it did.”

  “You know,” Faouda sounded increasingly aggrieved, “I don’t like the way people are blaming me for what happened. I got hurt, too, you know. You forget, Mak Cik: I got thrown out of Ghani’s house, and his grandmother’s house. I got divorced the day after I got up here. What about me?”

  “What about you?” Maryam snapped. “Are you dead, too?” Faouda just answered with a sneer.

  “Be grown-up for once: If you hadn’t come up to Kota Bharu to kill your rival – yes, your rival – ” Maryam insisted as she saw Faouda’s face contort into a smirk, “Aisha would be here still, taking care of her children. If you hadn’t come up here, Ghani would still be alive. Don’t you have any shame at all?” Maryam’s frustration was growing by the moment: she really wanted to shake this girl. “You came here with your poison and gave it to Aisha the first and only night you were here at her house.”

  “I never.” Faouda insisted flatly. “Never.” She folded her arms across her chest.

  “Stop wasting my time. I hate it when you lie to me.”

  “I’m not!” Faouda tried to conjure up an expression of injured innocence, but failed. “Why are you here, anyway?”

  “Because you killed Aisha. You’ll be tried for it, of course.”

  Faouda leapt from her seat, knocking over the wooden chair. The noise brought Osman to his feet. “What are you doing?” he demanded of Faouda.

  Maryam waved him away. “We’re fine, thank you. A small accident.”

  Faouda stood next to her fallen chair, her hands shaking. “This isn’t right!”

  “Why? Did you think you could kill someone and never be caught? Did you think after you’ve killed someone, we should speak carefully and politely to you?” Maryam leaned over the table. “Just for my own curiosity, had you already planned to kill Mak Cik Maimunah?”

  “Oh, please,” Faouda scoffed. “I never wanted to kill Maimunah. I never wanted to kill anybody. And I never did.” She picked up her overturned chair and sat down with a flourish. She crossed her arms and looked pugnacious while Maryam regarded her with increasing distaste

  “I know you used kecubong.” Maryam told her flatly.

  “What?”

  “You got it yourself in the jungle there, didn’t you? Hard to find up here, but in Kuala Krai it’s everywhere. Put it in her tea, did you?” This was a long shot, but Maryam thought it the most likely method.

  Faouda’s head snapped up to watch Maryam. She stayed silent.

  Maryam kept her eyes on her sarong, slowly tracing out the design on her thigh, ignoring Faouda for the time being. After she felt the silence heavy enough, she turned to Faouda with a thin smile. “I think the police will just go ahead with this. After all, we know about the tea, and we know Aisha died of kecubong poisoning. It’s clear enough.” Maryam stood slowly. “Goodbye, Faouda. Good luck. I’m sure the judge will be that much angrier with you to hear you never admitted what you’ve done.”

  “What does that mean?” Faouda looked more frightened now, les
s nonchalant.

  “It means you’re a killer without a conscience, and you think you can get away with it. You can’t. You’ve already been caught.” She turned towards the door, feeling worn out by Faouda. Osman held the door for her.

  “What do you think?” he asked Maryam as they sat down in another office. “I think she’s getting nervous,” he continued without waiting for Maryam’s opinion. “She can see we’ve figured it out.”

  “Do you think so? She seemed determined to stick to her story. But I can’t help but believe she killed Aisha. It just makes so much sense to me. Ghani, I don’t know.”

  Osman exited the office, leaving Maryam to think without interruption. She was finishing her cigarette when Faouda was pushed through the door, looking somewhat more disheveled than she’d been only minutes before. Perhaps she’d been running her hands through her hair: it was standing up in clumps all over her head. ““What is it now?” Maryam asked tiredly.

  “I thought you wanted to ask me questions,” Faouda fought to regain her desirability in Maryam’s eyes. “You were dying to talk to me.”

  “That was then. Now I’m sick of you,” Maryam answered bluntly, indeed, rudely. “If you want to talk, go ahead.”

  “Will it help me?”

  “Help you what?”

  “With the judge,” Faouda said impatiently. “If I talk to you, will it help my case?”

  “I guess so,” Maryam said with little enthusiasm.

  “We need to make sure,” Faouda ordered. “I want to know for certain.”

  Maryam got up slowly, as though her knees hurt her. It wasn’t her knees, though: she was mentally pained by Faouda’s manoeuvrings. She’d been so anxious to get a confession just a few moments ago, and now, after she’d thought about it for a few minutes, she no longer cared. Convinced of her guilt, Maryam was now prepared to let the police talk to her, or the judge, or anyone other than Maryam herself.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m going home.” She turned to Faouda. “I can’t play your games anymore. Call someone else.”

  “But Mak Cik,” Faouda rose to follow her to the door, “I want to talk to you now, I’m ready.”

  “Then talk. Or I’m leaving.”

  Faouda pouted for a moment, and seeing it did no good at all, sat down looking more cooperative. “I’m ready. Will you tell them …?”

  Maryam’s expression stopped her in mid-sentence. She picked up a cigarette instead and waited for Maryam to sit down.

  “OK,” Faouda began, a wary eye on Maryam. “You’re right.”

  “Wait!” Maryam ordered. She went to the door and called for Osman. “I want him to hear this too.”

  Faouda looked as though she might argue, but then thought better of it, and subsided into silence until Osman was settled. “OK,” she began again, “You were right, Mak Cik. I did think to make Aisha sick. Not to kill her, mind. It wasn’t me who killed her, but I did make her sick.”

  “Go on,” Maryam ordered her.

  “I had some … stuff. You know,” Faouda started.

  “Kecubong?”

  She nodded. “Yeah. I had it when I came up here.”

  “How long had you had it?” Maryam asked.

  Faouda saw where she was leading, but saw no way to avoid it. “Well, I had it for a while.” Maryam raised her eyebrow. “OK. I prepared it when I was still married to Yahya. You don’t know how tough it is to be a second wife,” she burst out. “The first wife always looks down on you. I was sick of it: she looked at me like I was dirt.

  “And then, you know, this Yahya wasn’t all that generous. How was I going to live when he was giving all his money to her? He really wanted to marry me,” she directed this confidence to Osman, who was scribbling furiously. “But when he did, after a while he didn’t want to give me enough money to live on. God forbid I had a baby! Who knows what would have happened then?”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “The kecubong? It grows in the jungle, you know. It’s not that hard to find.”

  “I’m surprised there’s anyone in Kuala Krai left alive.”

  Faouda gave her a sour look. “Yeah. Well, I got it. But then I started “thinking, ‘What’s the point?’ I couldn’t see staying with him forever.”

  “Is that when you met Johan?” She nodded and looked uncomfortable.

  “So?”

  “So I decided not to do anything. I wanted a divorce from Yahya and I knew it wouldn’t be any trouble. He was tired of having two wives by then. I could see that. So I never used it. But I still had it.”

  “And then you met Ghani,” Maryam prodded her.

  She nodded. “We fell in love so quickly. We got married right away, just carried away by being in love.” Maryam tried not to gag. “Now, I thought I’d want to stay with Ghani forever. I really believed it then.” It was hard for Maryam to remember that this was really not so long ago: Faouda spoke as though eons had already passed.

  “So when I went up to Kota Bharu, I brought my powder with me. I wasn’t going to kill her, honest.” She opened her eyes as wide as she could and looked into Osman’s face. He didn’t react. “I thought …” She took a deep breath. “I thought if she just got sick, you know, she’d go back to her parents or something and Ghani would forget about her. It happens, you know. I’ve heard about things like that working out.”

  Maryam shrugged. “She gave you a cup of tea when you showed up at her house, didn’t she?”

  “She did. She had one too. She wanted to choke me, but she was really very polite. Wonderful manners,” she offered a grudging complement. “So while she was preparing something, I put it in her tea. She didn’t taste it.”

  “All of it?” Maryam was suddenly struck by a thought. “Did you put all of it in her tea?”

  “No.” Faouda clamped her mouth shut.

  “What did you do with the rest of it?”

  “I threw it away.”

  Maryam shook her head. “No, you didn’t. What did you do with it?

  Faouda hung her head. “I put it in the box of tea she had.”

  “Where was she that you could get to the box of tea?”

  Faouda looked ashamed. “Getting cakes.”

  “Getting cakes for you!” Maryam was astounded.

  “Really,” Faouda shook her head. “I couldn’t believe it either! She was so polite.”

  Chapter XXVI

  The doctor met them in his dilapidated office at Kota Bharu General Hospital. His small office featured a depressing colour scheme of dirty cream and faded green and was furnished with a battered desk covered with files and four equally battered chairs. The doctor waved for them to sit, and took his own seat behind the desk. He brought a grimy ash tray out from his top drawer and set it at the summit of the sturdiest pile. He offered cigarettes all around, assured them the tea lady was on her way, and settled down to business.

  He was an older man, with a lined face and bright eyes, his grey hair bearing the marks of his hands running through it. He looked rumpled but kindly, and when he smiled, Maryam could easily see why people trusted him with their lives.

  “Aisha binte Ramli, you say,” he asked them, shuffling though files perched on the window sill behind him. It took him a while to find the file, and he opened it in front of him, taking care not to drop ashes on it. Maryam and Osman waited patiently.

  “A sad case,” he commented. “Poisoning. I hate that.”

  Maryam agreed. “What kind of poisoning, Tuan Doctor?”

  He looked again. “Kecubong. Kind of strange. It looks as though it had been going on a while. I mean, she’d been taking the poison over a period of days or weeks, not all at once.”

  “Was she given opium as well?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “The bomoh in my kampong …” Maryam suddenly wondered whether doctors cared to hear what bomoh thought, but it was too late. “He said he thought there might be opium mixed in.”

  The doctor no
dded. “It’s hard to tell. The kecubong was obvious. You could see it in tests. We weren’t looking for opium right away, and the family forbade an autopsy. They took her body right away. So, you can see, there isn’t any way for me to confirm that.”

  They nodded. “But if it was kecubong only, Doctor, would it have led to the same outcome?” She put it as delicately as she knew how.

  He thought for a moment. “Probably. Let me put it this way: if there was opium involved, it would be consistent with the symptoms, but I can’t prove there was. I can prove kecubong.”

  Maryam looked over at Osman. He cleared his throat, not having prepared to speak during this meeting. “If it goes to trial, Doctor, would you be prepared to testify to that?”

  The doctor nodded. “Yes, of course, I would. Poor thing. She was so young. She left young children, too, I see. What will happen to them?”

  “Her brother’s taking them,” Maryam told him, feeling very proud of Ali. “He’s getting married and they’re taking the kids as their own.”

  “Wonderful.” He stood up. “Is there anything else?”

  “No, thank you so much, Tuan Doctor,” Maryam said gratefully. “You’ve been such a help to us.”

  “Thank you, Doctor,” Osman extended his hand. “We will be in touch for the trial.”

  The doctor smiled and walked them to the door. He walked away down the corridor, running his hands through his already disheveled hair, his mind focused on his work ahead.

  Chapter XXVII

  It was late afternoon. The air became cooler as shadows covered more of the ground. Maryam and Rubiah revisited Ali in his parents’ home. Grief now hung heavy on the house.

  Azizah greeted them spiritlessly, and called to Ali to speak to them. He came onto the porch in a clean sarong and T-shirt, his hair still wet from a recent bath. “Mak Cik,” he greeted them, inviting them to sit in the shade of the porch

  He waited for them to start. In the silence, his sister came quietly with coffee and cakes and served them with a polite smile. Maryam and Rubiah exchanged glances – was no one speaking here anymore? Ali seemed to rouse himself: had he seen their looks? He waved his hand over the cups and plates. “Please,” he said.