Suddenly at Singapore

by Gavin Black

  “My dead brother is giving you a great richness of motives?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “It would be foolish to deny that my brother and I have enemies, Inspector.”

  “Both private … and what shall we say … public?”

  “All private.”

  Inspector Kang smiled then. It made him look younger.

  “Not the general view, Mr. Harris.”

  “It’s a statement. I won’t alter it.”

  “If we are going to co-operate in finding a murderer the utmost frankness is necessary.”

  I looked at him. There was no use underestimating the inspector because of his quietness. If you underestimate a Chinese for that you can end up with your throat cut.

  “I’ve made my statement, Inspector Kang. Now I’d like to hear yours.”

  He drew on that cigarette.

  “I didn’t expect to find you quite so composed, Mr. Harris. You seem to have recovered from shock.”

  “I think so.”

  “Your wife was afraid that you would be … broken.”

  “I didn’t say that, Inspector.” Ruth was angry.

  “Implied, perhaps, madam. I was going to take my leave when you came, Mr. Harris. I expected nothing useful from you to-night.”

  “If you’ve changed your mind on that do stay.”

  Inspector Kang’s eyes were very cold. I think mine were, too, they were meant to be. It wasn’t just that latent hostility between a policeman and the ordinary citizen, but something that went much deeper at once, that moved into zones of feeling which knocked out reason in both of us. I didn’t like the world into which Kang was fitting so nicely thank you. And he thought my world should be liquidated, that it was only a matter of time until it was.

  “Mr. Harris, what would you say to my suggestion that to-morrow a great many people will be saying not only that your brother’s death was no surprise, but also that it was something in the nature of a political assassination?”

  I smiled at him.

  “I’d say that you police were already looking for a good excuse not to have solved another murder.”

  Kang got up. His face was quite set.

  “That is all you have to say?”

  “It’s my answer to your question. I’m still willing to assist you in any way you wish.”

  “Will you assist me by a full statement of all the business activities in which you and your brother have been engaged?”

  “Certainly. Come down to my office to-morrow morning and you’ll learn anything you want to from my head clerk.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Harris. But I have no need for any of the information your head clerk would give me. Good night. It is actually good morning.”

  He bowed to Ruth. She unwound her legs and stood. We heard Kang striding over the teak boards of the hall. A servant let him out. The police car snorted away from us.

  “Are you crazy?” Ruth said behind me. “What were you trying to do to that little man?”

  “I’m going to try to ignore him,” I said.

  She came towards me, and caught my arm. Her voice, in distress, became more Southern.

  “Paul. Oh, my poor dear. You’re just about out of your mind.”

  “Yes, you’re right. I have felt just about like that.”

  “Come and sit down, honey, you come on. Or better, get to bed.”

  “No, I don’t want to go to bed. Get me another whisky, Ruth. I’m sorry I was so long in getting here.”

  “You came pretty quick for you. Travelling to me, that is.”

  “It’s no night to talk about us, is it?”

  “It never is.”

  I watched her there at the cabinet pouring for me. She held the decanter as though it was heavy, her head bent forward a little as she watched what she did. Her slim neck was very white, she kept the sun from her magnolia skin, always. You never saw her lying at the edge of any pool. And she liked this garden because of the trees, the thick shade you could find on any path.

  I thought about a love that any man can start up easily enough with a girl who looks like Ruth. It’s the making the pattern later that isn’t easy.

  She came towards me carefully, carrying the decanter.

  “Put your feet up, honey.”

  She was claiming this moment and I let her, I put my feet up. She stood looking down at me.

  “Are your eyes tired? After all that night driving? They’re bloodshot, a little.”

  “Sit down, Ruth. What did you talk to Jeff about at the club?”

  “Oh, nothing special. He saw me come in alone, though I was there to meet Elsie Barnes. I guess he thought he had to do something about me. Anyhow, we went out on the terrace until Elsie arrived. He bought me a drink. I can’t say we talked about anything special.”

  “Why did you say that about his Chinese cuties … in front of Kang?”

  “I’m sorry. I saw you didn’t like that. I just never thought. Everyone round here knows how Jeff made out. He never hung a wife around his neck like you.”

  “Cut that out!”

  “All right. I’d like to tell you more about what Jeff said, but honestly I can’t remember. It may even have been the weather. We never found it terribly easy to talk.”

  Suddenly she was crying.

  “Oh, Paul, I’m so tired and scared.”

  It always hit me when she cried, as though I’d been abusing a weakness she couldn’t help.

  “I’ll take you to bed.”

  I picked her up, she was light to carry, a girl with small bones. She kept her head down, against the front of my shirt. Her room was cool, sealed against the tropic night and air-conditioned. There was a thin blanket on the bed, and I got her under it, draping her housecoat over a stool. She was wearing pyjamas to match the housecoat, pale green. I pulled open a drawer of the bedside cabinet and saw the collection of bottles in there.

  “Which of these are you taking now?”

  She shook her head.

  “I don’t want anything. I’ll sleep.”

  “Ruth, you need something to-night.”

  She looked at me.

  “Kang said he was putting guards on the house. I was to tell you.”

  “What?”

  “Paul, he’s afraid. He let me see that he doesn’t think it’s going to stop at Jeff. Neither do I.”

  “You haven’t told me about his questions.”

  “Oh, he asked a lot, about us. I told him everything. I mean how we lived. And that you were in Kuala Lumpur on business.”

  “He asked what I was doing up north?”

  “Yes, but I couldn’t tell him, of course. I just said I never really knew what you were doing. And that’s true enough, isn’t it?”

  “I could tell you about what I’m doing if it would really interest you.”

  “Thank you, Paul, but we’d better go on the way we always have. I guess I’m too stupid to be the little wife who shares everything. I’ve just enough sense not to try and take that on. Will you get me a cigarette?”

  I put an ash tray handy and sat down. She smoked, propped up in bed, not looking at me, but I couldn’t leave her yet. Somehow it was always like this when we were alone together these days, both of us self-conscious, as though neither of us could get away from the sum total of what our marriage had become.

  “I dreamed about Booney,” she said suddenly.

  I sat very still, waiting.

  “He’d grown bigger, Paul. Just about as big as he would be now. I dreamt that last night.”

  My stomach closed tight with pain. It was three years since either of us had spoken of Booney. And the last time it had been me. Ruth hadn’t wanted to then, it was something I tried to force, and she cried out to stop me. So I’d stopped.

  Booney was Richard Jeffrey Harris, our son. He was dead for nearly four years, and at three years old. It was leukaemia. We flew with him to a clinic in Switzerland and then one in Chicago. The doctors told us to take him home, that it was
n’t anything the tropics had done, and that we might keep him alive for a while with blood transfusions. I didn’t want to do that. Ruth made me. He died more slowly, watching us.

  It was Ruth who cut all that there had been of Booney out of our life, she never mentioned him, there wasn’t a thing left in our house that had been his.

  “Paul, I did wrong. I shut that door, didn’t I? I shut it on Booney and you and locked it. It was my fault. Only I couldn’t help myself then, I just couldn’t. It was as though I hadn’t the strength to do anything else.”

  “I know.”

  “That tore us apart, didn’t it?”

  “Ruth, it’s something that was over, long ago.”

  She shook her head.

  “I don’t think it will ever be over. I don’t seem to have ever made anything good for anyone. But I want to try again, Paul. Come to America with me! And don’t just say you can’t. You could if you wanted to. You’ll have all Jeff’s money now. We could live anywhere we wanted to. I wouldn’t mind where so long as it isn’t here. Can’t you see what all this is doing to me? I’m going to be living with plain naked fear, getting up with it and going to bed with it.”

  “You could go to the States. I think maybe you should.”

  “Without you? Wouldn’t that be wonderful? A nice hotel somewhere and I’d just sit and wait, wondering when they were going to get you, too.”

  I went over and sat on the bed. Ruth’s hand was lying on a gold thread Kelantan bedspread. I covered it. There was no movement of her fingers inside mine. She was looking at a wall. In a little I said good night and went out. She didn’t say anything.

  Ruth always locked her bedroom door because she was afraid of burglars, even though my room was just opposite. I didn’t hear her get out of bed to do that, but I knew she would. In a little I lay in blackness and thought, not of my wife, though I should have done, or of Jeff, whom I had loved. I remembered Booney, the child whose hair was as dark as mine, and whose eyes were much bluer.

  You commit yourself a few times in this life. I’d been committed, to plan and scheme and shape, to the old dream of making a straight road for a son, with the errors … your errors … marked plain to be avoided. Booney had been going to walk like that, on a clear road, in the sun.

  CHAPTER III

  SYLVIA FLORES had been my secretary for twelve years and I still called her Miss. It was that kind of impeccable relation, which had matured, but in which the partitions were still high. She was thirty-eight and unmarried, with faint traces of that brief flowering of looks which might have even been beauty. At twenty-six, when she first came into our office, the best had somehow gone, you felt you would have liked to have seen her at nineteen. Her father had been more Portuguese than Chinese and her mother was more English than South Indian.

  Mrs. Susannah Flores, to whom I took a Christmas present every year, had been ailing for as long as I could remember, looked after with great devotion by her only daughter, and I tried at least once a week to ask after Mrs. Flores’s arthritis which was never any better because, as the daughter explained, the damp heat of Singapore was the worst possible climate for this complaint. Mrs. Flores wanted to get “home” and it had long ago been made clear to me that this was England.

  Miss Flores was extremely sensitive and three days after my brother’s death her face still bore the traces of shock, as if the lines of this were scored on and could only be expected to fade slowly. Miss Flores had herself spoken to me of time as the great healer.

  I dictated to her whenever possible and time permitted and she would on occasion correct my grammar. She sat still in a posture that had been taught as correct at her commercial school, very upright in a stiff chair, her pad on her knees, and taking shorthand with a pencil, not a pen.

  “The Kubat Palm Oil Company,” she read back, “23 Sundarah Road, Surabaya, Java. Dear Sir …”

  I went on with the letter, slowly. I had swung my chair around and sat looking out through huge windows to Singapore roads. It was a view that had always excited me, the little ships and the big, the little ones more interesting. They lay at anchor over an arc of two miles, their variety infinite, their purposes when they left here sometimes strange and even melodramatic. On many a morning Jeff and I had been able to look out and see our own ships resting there, two, three and sometimes four.

  Miss Flores was waiting for me with a look.

  “Yes?”

  “I wonder about that sentence, Mr. Harris. Do you mean to suggest here that they make their claim for damages to insurance only after further consultation with us?”

  “No. Let them go to the insurance company right away.”

  “I can make that stronger then?”

  “You can indeed.”

  She took a little time off to make it stronger, dabbing down the words. I was vaguely conscious of her disapproval. She didn’t like me looking at the view during business hours.

  The phone rang. She took it.

  “Harris and Company here. Mr. Paul Harris’s office.”

  She frowned.

  “I can’t seem to make any sense of this. Someone did ask for you.”

  I took the receiver.

  “Paul Harris here.”

  I heard distinctly an indrawn breath, as though the man at the other end had the mouthpiece pressed against his lips.

  “Kuantan,” a voice said. “Kuantan.”

  There was a kind of hoarse, almost rasping urgency in that voice. Then the line clicked.

  “Must be a wrong number, Miss Flores.”

  She reached for the receiver, but I put it back on its hook as though I hadn’t seen her hand coming out. She disapproved.

  “Is that all?”

  “Yes, for this morning.”

  The pad was fitted into a little case with the pencil. Miss Flores stood and moved towards the door. Then she halted.

  “Mr. Harris, forgive me saying this. But I think it’s wonderful. We all do. I mean the way you … the way you’re carrying on as though that was the thing to do.”

  I felt a funny little glow of warmth towards her.

  “It’s the only thing I can see to do, Miss Flores. But thank you. You’ve all been a great help, too, you know.”

  “It’s like … a presence gone, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, you could say that.”

  She went out and shut the door very gently. I looked back at the view, and into the square of my window was moving slowly a new ship for that morning, a freighter, about three thousand five hundred tons at a guess, flying what we used to call the fried egg flag. She had the rakish bow of modern Japanese building, a squat funnel and a glistening white superstructure.

  In a lower desk drawer were binoculars; I read the name Misuni Maru. I turned back the Straits Times to the shipping intelligence and there it was: Misuni Maru, fr. Trieste, arr. S’pore 22, Lv 23 for Hong Kong, Manila, Kobe & Nagoya. The Misuni Maru was going to make one unscheduled stop, with a cargo for us.

  The buzzer went on the desk box.

  “Mr. Harris? Inspector Kang is here to see you.”

  I had the binoculars away by the time he came in. The inspector stood just inside the door for a moment, unwrinkled, calm and with the kind of politeness he could afford.

  “Mr. Harris, I try to avoid calling on business men at this time of day. But sometimes it is unavoidable.”

  “I’m not really very busy, Inspector. I can’t pretend it’s easy to get into a rhythm of work again.”

  “Of course not. What a wonderful view.”

  I stood and he came to stand beside me. The view meant we didn’t have to look at each other.

  “My brother chose these offices, Inspector. He had the sentimental notion that it was good to be able to look out and see our own ships sometimes.”

  “But not this morning?”

  “No, not this morning. We haven’t anything in harbour.”

  “All your fleet scattered over the Indies, Mr. Harris?”

  �
��You might put it like that. But to talk about our fleet makes it sound like the P. & O. It’s just a collection of junks.”

  “Powered junks. And you have two steamers, oil burning.”

  I looked at him and smiled. His face was very smooth, an early morning freshness about the man.

  “I see you’ve been checking up on us. Yes, two steamers. One three hundred and fifty tons, the other five hundred.”

  “With radio communication?”

  “The steamers have, the junks don’t.”

  “Really. May I smoke, Mr. Harris?”

  “But do. Have one of these.”

  “Thank you, I prefer mine. A coarse Chinese blend. Very cheap. We’ve all taken reductions in salary, you know. To help the new régime. The gesture is voluntary.”

  He laughed. We had started off this contact on a new tone, as though our last meeting in my house was put neatly to one side. We stood together at the window with a kind of applied amiability, as if a few days had put everything into perspective for both of us. I suspected, however, that Kang had been very busy during the interval. The industry of the Chinese, in anything they do, makes Western complacence the saddest kind of folly. The Chinese expect to rule the world in a century or two and if they don’t manage that it won’t be for want of trying very hard indeed.

  The inspector’s cigarette was not aromatic. I chose a cigar from a box on my desk and trimmed it carefully. He watched me while I got it going.

  “How are you getting on with your hunt for the murderer?” I asked.

  “Very slowly,” he said, as though he didn’t mind that. “I’m still at the stage of looking for motive. The difficulties press down on me. I must congratulate you, Mr. Harris.”

  “Why?”

  “I mean about the way you conduct your business. You and your late brother. So little appears on the surface. As a Chinese I am bound to approve even when it is a nuisance to me.”

  “I’ll be delighted to tell you anything you want to know.”

  Kang smiled.

  “The last time you referred me to your head clerk.”

  “I apologise for that. I was under considerable stress.”

  “Certainly. It’s good to find you co-operative now. And there are some points on which I am troubled. I find, for instance, that as a company you operate twenty-three junks.”