by Ovidia Yu
“It’s none of your fucking business.” He would go to sleep for a while, he decided. Then, when he woke up, he would kill this old woman who was standing in front of him taking things out of her bowl and putting them onto the chopping board. He told her so. “Because she’s just like you. Fucking busybody bitches. What are you doing?”
“Pig’s foot,” Aunty Lee said sweetly. “You want to know what human beings taste like, all you have to do is eat pork.” She lifted a chopper and expertly whacked the long, pale-skinned leg. “Very sweet. You and the pig are both red meat. Your muscles about the same size. You eat your junk food, the pig eats what is left over from making your junk food, so same taste, same texture, only difference is your meat is juicier.”
He stared at her blearily, trying to work out what she was saying.
Aunty Lee brought her chopper down and cleanly dismembered a section of the pig’s foot. “I tell you, most people cannot tell the difference whether they are eating pig meat or human meat—” She peered at the meat through her spectacles, poked at something, then reached for an enormous pair of tweezers. “Nina is supposed to pull out all the hair for me first. But sometimes they are extra hairy—like you. Look at your hands!”
“Nothing wrong with my hands.” He stretched out his hands and looked at his good strong fingers with their curly ginger hair.
“Do you know how long it would take me to get all that hair off your fingers?” The thwack of Aunty Lee’s chopper startled him. “Same like people’s hands, you see—” Thwack. “If you chop at the right place, you can cut up the fingers clean through. No chips. People don’t like to bite into bits of bone. But very hard to teach people to chop nowadays. Hard to get fresh meat to practice on—”
He curled his fingers protectively in his palms as Aunty Lee thwacked again.
“Why did you kill Laura Kwee?” she asked again, holding up the chopper.
“You’re mad,” he said. He tried to get up, but his legs seemed strangely detached from the rest of his body.
“You don’t need to be very strong. You don’t even need a very sharp knife as long as you know where to chop.”
“She’s the one that was coming after me,” he whined. “I didn’t want to have anything to do with her.”
Aunty Lee came around the table and moved toward him, nonchalantly hefting her chopper. She picked up one of his limp hands and shook it as he watched helplessly.
“Really? What happened?”
“She was trying to blackmail me. She was saying how she saw me and Marianne together, how well we got along. She kept asking if Marianne told me where she was going. I know her type. She was trying to scare me out of everything I had, then after that, she would have sold me out. I know her type! I was only trying to stop her, that’s all. It was self-defense!” He could barely speak, but what was left of his conscious brain told him to say whatever he had to in order to get this madwoman away from him.
Just then, SSS Salim, Nina, and Carla Saito appeared from the inner pantry, Nina flying to Aunty Lee’s side so fast that Aunty Lee almost did not notice the quick, grateful look she gave the police officer. “Ma’am! Can already!”
“Did you get it?” Aunty Lee asked. “Can you use it as evidence? Can you make copies?”
“I can but I won’t,” Carla Saito said. “I’ve already put it on YouTube. The police can get it from there.”
“She insisted on coming,” SSS Salim explained. “Are you all right, Mrs. Lee?”
“I’m not all right!” Harry Sullivan moaned. “She put something in my tea, she drugged me. I could be dying—do something!”
“What did you put in his tea?” SSS Salim asked Aunty Lee.
Aunty Lee shook her head in innocent wonder. “Tea—pu erh—but I added some licorice bark and some fennel seeds and some dragon-eye berries . . . I know it’s an unusal combination, but he was looking a bit under stress and I was feeling sleepy myself, so I thought—”
“She’s lying!” the man wailed wetly. “Make her tell you what she put in my tea!”
“I may have accidentally switched our cups,” Aunty Lee said steadily. “Maybe you should ask him what he put into my cup?”
Harry Sullivan moaned.
“I didn’t mean to,” Harry Sullivan said. “It was all a terrible accident, a terrible mistake. I’m not a murderer.”
“So you accidentally tried to put poison in my tea?” Aunty Lee said, as though trying to understand his point of view. “Luckily my tea counteracts the effects. You should be grateful you did not get as big a dose as you gave those poor girls. You drugged them like you drugged Selina, didn’t you? Laura Kwee wasn’t drunk that night. She was sitting next to you, you slipped something into her cup.”
Harry Sullivan stared blearily at Carla Saito. “If you hadn’t come to Singapore, everything would have been fine.”
“Here. Make him drink this.”
“What is it?” Salim hesitated.
“Mustard and water. He’ll get over the effects faster. And hold him over that basin. It’s all going to come up. Better now than later. Did you call your people to come and collect him yet?”
“On their way.”
“Good,” Aunty Lee said, then to Harry, “Drink up, then. Better get it out of your system now rather than in the police car.”
Aunty Lee went on with her chopping and tweezing as Harry Sullivan purged himself.
Harry Sullivan tried to bluster. “She was threatening me. I have my rights. I want my lawyer. You can’t hold me. I thought I was dying. Of course I said whatever she wanted!”
This last was directed at SSS Salim, who only looked at him curiously before asking Aunty Lee, “What about Mrs. Selina Lee?”
“I think we’ll let her sleep it off.”
“According to his documents, Harry Sullivan would be eighty years old now. Immigration didn’t notice. They must have just glanced at the younger Harry, at the photo. Probably assumed it was a bad photo and didn’t bother noticing the age.” Anyway, age was so difficult to tell with Caucasians. They liked to sit in the sun and make their skin look older.
“I believe he didn’t mean to kill Marianne. He took her over to Sentosa to see the cabin he booked. I suppose that’s the cabin you told her you would let her have for a week or two. Only she didn’t want to stay in it with you, did she?”
“I was only trying to help her,” Harry Sullivan said. “Look, Officer, man-to-man, you can see that. I was trying to give her a chance, help her change. Even her family would have seen it would be good for her to be with a real man.”
“Let me kill him.” Carla Saito started toward him. “You can hang me after. It’ll be worth it—”
“And Laura Kwee?” Aunty Lee asked calmly.
“Laura Kwee—she knew about Sentosa. She kept going on about the Sentosa cabin, how ‘fun’ it must be, how she just wanted to see it. In the end I just brought her over and gave her what she wanted.”
“Laura was flirting with you, you know. That’s how she flirted. She just wasn’t very good at it.”
Aunty Lee finished chopping her pig’s foot with a last satisfying thwack. “Fingers,” she said. “If you slice through the joints, no chips.”
Salim would not be the only one not eating pork for a while.
18
Aunty Lee’s Wrap-up
One of Aunty Lee’s Delights’ greatest catering successes was the commitment celebration of Otto Thio and Joseph Cunningham on the Sentosa beachfront not far from where everything began. As Aunty Lee always said, you can’t cut out bad memories without removing part of your heart, but you can always create good memories to override them.
Harry Sullivan—or Sam Ekkers, as he was really named—was charged in Singapore with the murders of Marianne Peters and Laura Kwee. This triggered an extradition stalemate because according to the records, Sam Ekkers had never entered Singapore, Harry Sullivan was dead in Australia, and these nations held different views on the death penalty.
But as far as Aunty Lee was concerned, the case was over. The man would not be hurting any more women. She went to watch The Bodies on Sentosa, a local musical based on the events of the case and written by Joe Cunningham’s husband, Otto, which opened at the Esplanade Theater. The show was a great success, but it was overshadowed (in Aunty Lee’s opinion) by the incredible food at the show’s opening night party—catered by Aunty Lee’s Delights.
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to the wonderful people at William Morrow: associate publisher and marketing director Jen Hart, creative director Mary Schuck (who created the lovely jacket), marketing coordinator Alaina Waagner, production editor Joyce Wong, publicist Joanne Minutillo, international sales directors Samantha Hagerbaumer and Christine Swedowsky, and especially to my editor Rachel Kahan and assistant editor Trish Daly. Big thanks also to Jayapriya Vasudevan, Priya Doraswamy, and Helen Mangham, my cheerleaders/coaches/agents from Books@Jacaranda.
With them doing the real work, I had fun writing and any faults in the book are mine alone.
Aunty Lee’s Amazing Achar
(easy home version)
Singapore achar is a sweet and spicy vegetable pickle eaten with everything from hot curries to plain rice and even bread and butter. Some commonly used ingredients include sambal belachan, blue ginger, lemongrass, home-dried limes, and tamarind pulp, but the point is really to use whatever you have on hand!
Prepare at least a day in advance. The longer it stays in your fridge the better it will taste.
Ingredients:
2 cups vegetables, chopped into thick matchsticks and bite-sized morsels. Use what you have and more of what you like. Traditional vegetables include cucumbers, carrots, Napa cabbage, red onions, hot peppers, cauliflower, and green beans. Leave the skin on the cucumbers and carrots but remove the seeds from cucumbers and hot peppers. For crunchier pickles rub a tablespoon of salt into your cucumber sticks and leave them to sweat.
Blanching Solution:
½ cup your best vinegar (can be white vinegar, rice vinegar, or wine vinegar. Remember: the better the vinegar the better your pickles!)
½ cup water
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar
For Rempah (Spice Paste):
1 red onion (chopped)
1 clove garlic
1 nub fresh ginger
1 nub fresh turmeric
2 dried hot peppers
1 tablespoon toasted belachan (fermented shrimp paste) Or use 1 teaspoon each of ginger and turmeric powder and 1 tablespoon of red chili pepper flakes, and substitute 1 tablespoon of anchovy paste for the belachan.
Final Touch Ingredients:
½ cup vinegar (see above)
Fresh juice of one large lime (or half a lemon)
Dash of salt and pepper
Small can of pineapple chunks
Crushed roasted peanuts
Toasted sesame seeds
How to Prepare:
Turn on your radio or television and turn off your phone.
Bring your blanching solution to a boil. Blanch all your chopped vegetables (except for the cucumbers) and lay them out to dry on kitchen towels, where the cucumbers can rejoin them. The more you dry them here the better they will absorb your marinade later.
Blend all your rempah ingredients into a paste. If using powders you may need a few drops of oil to bind them. Heat a pan with a little oil and stir-fry your spice paste over low heat until it smells good. This will take 10 to 15 minutes.
Add ½ cup vinegar, the lime juice, and a teaspoon each of salt and sugar. Bring the mixture to a boil then remove from heat immediately.
In a glass or ceramic bowl, add your pineapple chunks, peanuts, sesame seeds, and all your vegetables and mix well, pressing them down in the bowl. The marinade won’t cover the vegetables at this stage but the level will rise as your vegetables pickle.
If not eaten immediately, your achar should be stored in a glass container in the fridge. Stir thoroughly each time you help yourself.
P.S.
About the Author
Meet Ovidia Yu
About the Book
A Conversation Between Ovidia Yu and Louise Penny
Reading Group Guide
About the Author
Meet Ovidia Yu
OVIDIA YU is one of Singapore’s best known and most acclaimed writers. Since dropping out of medical school to write for the theater, she has had more than thirty plays produced in Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, including the Edinburgh Fringe First Award–winning play The Woman in a Tree on the Hill.
The author of a number of mysteries that have been published in Singapore and India, Ovidia Yu received a Fulbright Fellowship to attend the University of Iowa’s International Writers Program, and has been a writing fellow at the National University of Singapore. She speaks frequently at literary festivals and writers’ conferences throughout Asia.
Despite her writing career, when she is recognized in Singapore it is usually because of her stint as a regular celebrity guest on Singapore’s version of the American television game show Pyramid.
http://ovidiahistorymystery.wordpress.com
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About the Book
A Conversation Between Ovidia Yu and Louise Penny
Louise Penny: You’ve outed yourself as a lifelong Agatha Christie fan—does Rosie Lee owe her existence to Miss Marple, or any of Agatha Christie’s other sleuthing heroines?
Ovidia Yu: I’m sure she does, not directly as an “old-lady detective” figure, but because I owe my existence as it is to Agatha Christie’s books. It was through her books that I first fell in love with reading, and I thought I was in love with the world she set her books in. For a long time I thought that “world” was English country villages . . . in the ’50s and gone forever. But then I got that same feeling—that people in terrible situations struggling to solve real problems were in spite of everything still trying to be human and good—from your books (sorry to drag you in—just in this one answer, I promise!) and realized it was a way of seeing the world that wasn’t found only in vintage England. That you could create that same magic in books set in contemporary Canada gave me “permission” (which I had not realized I’d been denying myself!) to write about Singapore. Actually, my lightbulb moment didn’t happen till after you visited Singapore with your husband. You were the first real-life writer I’d met—till then I’d thought some pact with the devil was necessary to succeed in writing; but I saw that you were as in love with life as with writing, and that’s when I decided to allow myself to write what I wanted to read—set in Singapore.
But to get back to Agatha Christie very quickly, Miss Marple isn’t my favorite lady sleuth. I think that would be a tie between Henrietta Savernake (The Hollow) and Lucy Eyelesbarrow (4:50 from Paddington). Henrietta is the artist I would love to be, or, failing that, love to create. She’s good with people, intelligent, artistic, knits well, and survives heartbreak: “Grief, in alabaster” . . . diehard Christie fans will know what I mean. Carla Saito owes something to her, I think. And Lucy Eyelesbarrow, who cooks fantastically, works for a living but sets aside private time for herself and solves mysteries with practical humor—I like to think Aunty Lee owes something of her genesis to Lucy Eyelesbarrow!
LP: Thank you! Like Rosie Lee, you’re a native-born Singaporean and also Peranakan. Can you explain Peranakan culture to readers who might not have heard of it? Is Aunty Lee a typical Peranakan lady, or something of an iconoclast in her community?
OY: Oh dear—I’m not a true Peranakan. My late mother was Shanghainese, not Straits born, but in Singapore once you accept yourself as Singaporean, that means having access to all the cultures here. Aunty Lee is a typical “Peranakan Aunty” because like so many of them (whether truly Peranakan or not) she is a great cook and very good at running her own business as well as everyone
else’s. Peranakan aunties have very strong practical streaks and very strong wills. But they can also be flamboyant, funny, and fond of luxury.
LP: Singapore has a reputation for being almost fantastically clean, well-run, cosmopolitan, and tourist-friendly. Are there hidden depths to its glossy exterior?
OY: I hope so! Singapore reminds me of the house I grew up in. My parents had a carefully maintained foyer and lounge for visitors—designed to look good and be easy to clean—but our real “living” took place elsewhere, in the playroom or out back where there were rabbits and chickens. Singapore is a very, very small place and for those of us who live here it sometimes feels like it is getting smaller and smaller. But the clean, well-run side of things is the schoolroom side. The teachers running the schoolroom are a bit authoritarian at times, but I think as we grow up as a country and earn their trust, they will ease up on what is allowed and we’ll be able to draw on the roots in the “hidden depths” and grow wider and wilder branches in unhidden heights! Yes, there’s the side of us that’s clean, competitive, and cosmopolitan, but that’s just our on-show side.
LP: Aunty Lee’s secret weapon seems to be her home cooking; is this based on your own love of cooking, or do you know aunties like her?
OY: Sadly, I am a survival cook. But that just makes me love people who can cook all the more, and, yes, there are many, many “cooking aunties” in Singapore. My Aunty Lian, for example, is (in my humble opinion) one of the best cooks alive and single-handedly maintains harmonious family relationships thanks to her hosting of family dinners! As someone who loves to eat I’d say I owe these cooking aunties a lot. It’s not just the food they put on the table but all the preparation (and, yes, they will be only too happy to tell you about it!) that goes into it. If you want to test this, the next time you are in Singapore in the vicinity of a genuine Peranakan aunty, ask her how she prepares her Buah Keluak (Buah Keluak are a type of nut that are difficult to eat as well as to prepare, so you’ll have lots of time to listen to her answer). She will probably start talking about symptoms of cyanide poisoning and ash and banana leaves, and you’ll see how naturally the conjunction of cooking and murder occurs. But I love these nuts. They grow in mangrove swamps and are eaten by wild pigs but are poisonous to humans unless prepared perfectly. Sadly, Singapore has few mangrove swamps left and even fewer wild pigs, so I believe most of our nuts come from Indonesia now.