Aunty Lee's Delights (14 page)

“It might have been a complete stranger—to the dinners, I mean. Obviously it had to be someone Laura Kwee knew. Maybe he or she wanted to see whether Laura would be missed and wanted to delay the alarm being raised till he could leave the country or something like that.”

SSS Salim seemed to think that this was a good point. “But wouldn’t it be more important for the person who sent the message to make sure her colleagues at work, her family, and so on didn’t miss her?”

“Maybe he did. Maybe he’s just a very thorough person, who believes in covering all bases.”

That was true too. But though SSS Salim did not say so, thoroughness was not a term he would have chosen to describe whoever had put Laura Kwee into the sea.

“You were outside for some time smoking, I hear—”

“So? That’s not a crime, is it?”

“Actually it is. But that’s not the issue right now. Did you see anyone while you were there? Man, woman, anyone who seemed to be watching or hanging around?”

“No. And no offense, but I still have some trouble telling people apart here. Right now they all still look the same to me.”

Neither Harry Sullivan nor the Cunninghams had added anything substantial to SSS Salim’s information. All they could say was that Laura Kwee had definitely been expected until the arrival of her text message. And that Selina had been so angry that the anger could not have been put on.

Frank Cunningham had said, “There was something not quite right that night, but I can’t put my finger on what it was. Part of the problem of growing old.”

SSS Salim did not make much of that. People were always sensing something strange after something strange had already happened. He did not really think any of the people he had spoken to that day had anything to do with Laura Kwee’s death. All he was trying to do was establish where Laura Kwee had been last seen or heard from. A neighbor had seen her arriving home in a taxi the night of the previous wine dining. Thanks to this neighbor and the taxi company, they had managed to trace the driver of the taxi, who remembered Laura but could not remember her saying or doing anything that would be helpful to the investigation. The next morning Laura had phoned her office to say she was down with the flu and taking two days off. SSS Salim double-checked that the colleague Laura called had spoken to her in person.

“Yes, it was her for certain.

“No, she didn’t sound funny or anything. I mean she sounded really sick. I told her to be sure to go to the doctor because she sounded really sick. Do you know what happened to her yet?”

So Laura had been alive then. “Did she call you from her home phone or her mobile phone, do you know?”

“Laura only had a mobile phone because she was the only one living there. She took her phone everywhere with her, so she didn’t see any reason to pay for another line.”

And Laura had taken her phone home with her. But then, if Laura had taken her phone home, how had it gotten into the burning bin outside Aunty Lee’s Delights?

SSS Salim was still waiting to hear back from Laura’s parents in Malaysia. They said they wouldn’t be able to make it down to Singapore but would send a family representative and gave permission for the police to go through the things in Laura’s flat. They didn’t know anything about a boyfriend or problems or whether anyone had threatened Laura recently.

“She was a very good girl,” her mother said on the phone. “She would phone us once a month. And every time she would tell us not to worry about her. We wanted her to settle down. Get married. We wanted to find her a good husband. But she enjoyed her independence too much. Especially after—” The gentle voice broke off.

“Especially after what?”

“I’m sorry. Nothing. We knew she was seeing some man.”

Laura’s father’s voice cut in. “She never had any time to come back and see us. She used to phone once a month but lately we never heard from her. If her mother tried to phone her, she would get angry because she was so busy, had no time to talk. I knew that she must be seeing some man. So serious about him she had no time to talk to her own parents. What is the point of having children? I ask you. When they grow up they all have no time for their parents!”

Whether or not Laura Kwee had been involved with someone in Singapore, she had certainly lost touch with her family in Penang. That was the sad thing about chances that can lead to a better life, SSS Salim thought, remembering the scholarships that had opened doors for him. If you succeeded in creating a new life for yourself, what happened to the people who had been a part of the old one? On an impulse he picked up his cell phone and called his mother. As it rang he wondered whether he had time to make it back to her flat for dinner; she was sure to invite him.

“Call from Central on line one,” Officer Song opened the door to say. “Sounds like bad news. And there’s something strange about Miss Laura Kwee’s apartment. It looks like somebody broke into it, but it must have happened after she disappeared, according to the neighbors.”

SSS Salim cut off his own phone before it was answered. He knew what the bad news was before he heard it. In fact, ever since speaking to old Mrs. Lee, he had been expecting it. There was no way he would be making it home to see his mother that night.

In spite of a dampening weather prediction of “scattered showers over some parts of Singapore,” it was crowded on Sentosa, the resort island off Singapore, over the Chinese New Year. This year the first day of the lunar new year fell on a Thursday. Many local people would be visiting relatives or Chinese friends and colleagues while those less socially or traditionally inclined took advantage of the nine-day holiday stretch that materialized if one judiciously applied for just three days of leave between weekends. Because of that, most of the people who had crossed over to Sentosa from Singapore that day via causeway, boardwalk, cable car, monorail, or ferry were tourists. For the most part they were looking for ways to occupy themselves since the Chinese New Year was the one time of year when Singaporeans focused more on themselves and families than on pleasing tourists and other visitors.

It was a visiting Canadian couple who got tired of crowds and giant rabbits, crafted out of plastic, plants, and soda cans for the incoming Chinese zodiac year, the Year of the Rabbit. They went off the beaten track. The husband was an amateur botanist interested in tropical flora and his wife was sufficiently in love with him not to find his passion tedious. Plunging muddily through the mangroves, they found themselves at last at the junction of waters where debris washed up by the incoming waves lurked till the tides changed their direction again.

“Look at all the garbage. All that plastic—think of the poor sea creatures. It’s terrible.”

“And the smell—there is a dead fish somewhere. Or maybe it’s a dead dog . . . Look, over there—there’s something in a bag—”

But it was not a dead dog. It was the body of a very dead woman.

9

Marianne Peters

Aunty Lee slept deeply but restlessly. She was sitting facing M. L. Lee and he was smiling as he said to her, “Can I take your hand?” And Aunty Lee felt so overwhelmingly happy, wanting to say so many things at the same time, from “Yes! Yes!” to “Do you remember those are the words that you proposed to me with? And every time you say them to me, I feel as though you are proposing to me again?” and “That is what I miss about you most of all—now I can look at you all the time but I can never touch you,” and she was a young woman again; the young girl M. L. Lee had proposed to.

And then she saw Nina. For a moment she was angry with her. Nina of all people should have known how little time Aunty Lee had with her husband now that he was dead. Nina was approaching them, walking toward them from a great distance across the
padang
with a piece of paper—Aunty Lee knew at once that it was a telegram carrying bad news; apart from the one announcing the birth of a child, most telegrams brought news of death. Aunty Lee decided she and M. L. Lee would run away from Nina. She already knew what the bad news was, but as long as Nina did not deliver the telegram, it did not have to be true. But M. L. Lee did not run with her. He was already fading and insubstantial and Aunty Lee could not feel the hands she tried to take in her own desperate fingers. The knowledge she was trying so hard to deny was already more substantial around her than the man she so longed to keep alive by her side.

“Wouldn’t you rather know the truth?” M. L. Lee asked her without speaking.

“No. I don’t want to know it. I don’t want it to be true!” Aunty Lee thought desperately at him.

“That
ang moh
man asks very funny questions,” M. L. Lee said to her. “You should see what he has written about you so far in his notebook. He is writing about you for that magazine, you know.”

Aunty Lee said desperately, “I don’t care what anybody writes as long as you stay alive.” But it was no good. She had lost him again. The downside of hope was how rapidly and miserably you crashed each time you lost it. Again.

Then Aunty Lee realized that Nina was not telling her that M. L. Lee was dead. They had moved back into the present (she knew, as she noticed the liver-colored age spots on her hands) and Nina was saying, “They found another body. They think it is Marianne Peters,” and Aunty Lee looked around to see that she was not the only one who did not want to hear the news. Carla Saito was sitting curled up on the ground, scrunched up into a ball with her hands covering her ears to shut out the news. Beyond her, standing close together, Aunty Lee could see Marianne Peters’s family: her father and mother, her brother and his wife, and, next to them, Mathilda, M. L. Lee’s daughter, who was saying, “Aren’t you glad I’m safely far away in England?”

“Should we tell her?” Nina said, now standing over Carla Saito. “You should tell her. Her friend is dead. She will want to know.”

No, she wouldn’t, Aunty Lee thought. She would certainly not want to hear. But Nina was going to tell Carla and Aunty Lee knew she had to stop her. This was not news you could just break to someone. Aunty Lee knew this because she knew what it was like to be given “news” you already knew but were doing all you could to shut out. But Nina and Carla Saito were suddenly miles away, though Aunty Lee could still see them clearly, the way one can see only in dreams, and even as Aunty Lee struggled to shout out to Nina, she could tell it was too late.

And then Aunty Lee woke up. It was still dark in her bedroom. Her morning tea was not yet on her bedside table. That meant it was not yet six-thirty in the morning and that M. L. Lee was long dead. Aunty Lee lay savoring her regret for a moment, then she remembered the events of the previous evening and she was instantly wide-awake.

Aunty Lee pressed the buzzer for Nina. It was just past six but Nina appeared within minutes with her tea and the newspapers. Aunty Lee fumbled through the books and papers on her bedside table looking for her reading glasses.

“Did Salim find out anything else?” Aunty Lee asked Nina. “Anything that’s not in the papers?” Not finding her spectacles, she reached for the newspapers anyway.

“Drink your tea, ma’am,” Nina said. Deftly she stacked the things on the bedside table, retrieved the reading glasses from behind the table lamp, and handed them to her employer.

Something in Nina’s manner made Aunty Lee stop fussing to watch her. “Tell me,” she said.

“Ma’am, they found the dead body of Marianne Peters.”

“Identified?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Without saying anything further, Aunty Lee put on her spectacles and read the article for herself.
SECOND MURDER VICTIM FOUND ON SENTOSA
, the headline screamed. After saying the body had been identified as that of Marianne Beatrice Peters, aged twenty-eight, it went on to say that this second female body was less decomposed than Laura Kwee’s had been. Though this body was similarly packed in plastic wrap, it seemed to have been more meticulously wrapped and taped, which might have been why it had taken longer for enough decomposition gases to bloat it up enough to bring it to the surface. Preliminary tests suggested that this victim probably died several days before Laura Kwee, who had been found on Sunday morning.

“Ma’am, you want me to bring your soft egg and toast up here?” Nina was also shocked by the news, but feeding her employer was her responsibility.

“No. I’ll get up and go downstairs. We’re going out and I want to prepare some things first.” Aunty Lee swung her legs off the bed, startling Nina. She had her own responsibilities as she saw them.

“Are we going to see Professor and Mrs. Peters, ma’am?”

“No. I want to drop off a note, thank you for reminding me, but I think they will have enough on their minds right now—”

SSS Salim studied the report. Two bodies of young women found in four days—this was something that belonged on television, not on the beaches of law-abiding Singapore. Press and public opinion would be all over them for not doing anything to catch the killer before he struck again.

It was not that Salim was afraid of being blamed—he was a very small fish in this pond. What surprised him was that this information had been sent to him at all. It was true that one of the dead women had lived in his jurisdiction, but because of the family concerned, he had not even had to take on the task of notifying them. It turned out that the commissioner of police was a family friend of the Peterses’ and was taking care of it personally. Salim had no doubt that everything would be taken care of by senior, experienced officers.