Inspector Singh Investigates (7 page)

Twelve

Sharifah looked frightened. 'What do you mean?'

'I am not interested in your sordid affair with my ex–husband. I want to know about your ... relationship with my son.'

'How do
you
know about it?' Sharifah's hair was tinted with a hint of auburn and she pulled at strands of it nervously.

Chelsea waved the question aside with a well–manicured hand. 'Tell me the truth.'

Sharifah's voice, when she spoke, was the merest whisper. She said, 'Marcus and I were at school together. We started going out. He didn't want to tell anyone because I'm a Moslem and he was afraid we would get into trouble. For a while, we were very happy.' She looked up defensively. 'I don't mean that we were making long–term plans or anything – just that we hung out and had a good time, that's all.'

'Then what happened?'

'Once, when the driver came to pick him up from school, I got in too. We were planning to go to the movies. Marcus never wanted to go home so he was always making plans.'

Her words hurt but Chelsea gave no outward sign of it. She listened impassively.

Sharifah continued, 'His dad was in the car. It was just a coincidence. He had a meeting nearby or something. He chatted to me a little bit. Not much. Marcus was always telling me how much he hated his dad but he seemed all right to me.'

Chelsea knew just how good Alan Lee had been at dissembling. Few people would suspect him capable of the cruelty he had shown her on meeting him for the first time.

'I guess he must have found out who I was ... he pursued me.'

'And you swapped the son for the father?'

'Marcus was just a boy. Alan seemed so grown up. I didn't know what to do.'

Chelsea was silent.

Sharifah said, 'When Alan was killed, I was so worried that Marcus had done it. But then they arrested you ... and now you say his brother has confessed?'

It was a prosaic escape. Mrs Wong led him downstairs – he stayed behind her, hidden from view by her wide girth and floral skirts. On the ground floor he fell to his knees, scurrying after her on all fours like a dog on heat. She did not say a word but marched down the corridor to the kitchen. There they both ignored the bemused stare of the toothless old man who washed the dishes. She opened the shutters. Rupert Winfield climbed out of the window, only standing up when he was outside and on the opposite side of the building to the watchful policeman.

He said through the open window, 'Thank you!'

She was more practical. 'Money, passport?'

He patted his breast pocket to reassure her and himself. 'Yes, I'm OK. I have everything.'

'Don't go to airport, lah!'

It was good advice. He nodded. She put up her hand in a tentative gesture of goodbye. He clasped the raised hand in both of his, bringing them close to his chest. She understood that his thanks were heartfelt.

The airport was out of bounds but he had to get back to Kuala Lumpur. In Kuala Lumpur, he knew people who knew people. He would get in touch with that wildlife activist, Jasper Lee. He was a good guy and he was related to the Lee family. He was pretty sure it was them who were behind the shocking events he had witnessed. Jasper might have some idea who was ultimately responsible for the attack on the Penan. But first he had to get there. And it was not going to be easy with a crooked policeman on his tail. He had no illusions. He was a threat to a multi–million dollar industry. They feared he would approach the newspapers with his story or seek out policemen and government servants who had not been bought. He could spread the story of the treatment of the Penan at the hands of the logging industry and allege indifference and corruption on the part of the police in Borneo.

The policeman who had tried to ambush him at the bed and breakfast was not pursuing him for a chat. If he disappeared here in Borneo, it would just be one more tale of a white man who had mistakenly believed he could tame the jungles. The Englishman slipped on a pair of shades. With his blue eyes obscured, his race was indistinguishable to the casual observer. It was his best chance of escape.

Rupert flagged down a taxi and headed to a fishing village a few miles outside Kuching. The men were out to sea. In the distance he could see boats bobbing up and down on a fractious ocean. There was only one boat tethered close to the river mouth. The fisherman on board was cleaning his nets and whistling through the gap in his teeth. It was a cheerful vessel, gleaming with a coat of fresh paint. It looked reasonably seaworthy as well. A Malaysian flag fluttered merrily at the helm. Rupert asked the man in broken Malay, 'Why you not go out today?'

The fisherman shrugged. 'Engine no start!'

'Is it working now?' The fisherman looked confused. 'Engine OK now?' he asked again.

The man grinned. 'Yes, OK now!'

'You want some money?' asked Rupert, taking off his glasses so that the man could see that he was foreign. In the eyes of the locals, most foreigners were wealthy tourists.

The fisherman gazed out to sea, looking at his compatriots making their way slowly back to shore with the day's catch on board, a shiny, silvery mass of fish wriggling against each other in tanks on board each boat.

'Every day I go to sea. There is so little fish left. I got five children. Of course I want money!'

'Good.'

He was back again, the young policeman. Mrs Wong was not surprised.

He asked, 'Where is he?'

She feigned ignorance. 'What do you mean?'

'Rupert Winfield – in Room one, one, five?'

'He not in one, one, five, he in one, one, seven. He check out already!'

The policeman hit her. The blow was so unexpected that she staggered backwards and sat heavily in her chair, holding her jaw. Leaning forward towards her shrinking form, he said, 'If I cannot find this man, I will come back for you.'

It was not difficult to work out what had happened. He guessed that his prey had slipped out the back – with the help of the fat woman. His lip curled. If he failed to track down his quarry, he would go back and make her understand that it had not been prudent to get in his way. The policeman thought hard. He knew because he had warned the airport that Rupert Winfield had not escaped that way. The only other possibility was a boat. The policeman climbed on his motorbike and headed out of town on the coast road. He stopped at the first fishing village. The men were just coming in to shore and denied seeing any
Mat Salleh,
a local term for white man, around their village, let alone taking him out to sea. Their wives, tying up their sarongs and getting ready to help with the fish, backed up this story. They had no reason to lie to him. It seemed likely that Rupert had either gone further up the coast looking for a ride out of Sarawak or he had headed out of town in the opposite direction, east rather than west. There was no way to know for sure. The sergeant shook his head. He was not getting the breaks. At this rate, he might be too late. Forewarned, Rupert Winfield undoubtedly recognised the need for urgency. It seemed doubtful that he had bothered to go further up the coast without at least stopping at this village first to seek a way out. The policeman decided. He would go back the way he had come.

He struck gold immediately. A small boy skipping stones into the water at the pier agreed at once that a white man had passed that way.
^l
Mata biru macam
David Beckham!' Blue eyes like David Beckham, he said in awe. The sergeant handed him a coin.

'Where did he go?'

The boy nodded nonchalantly in the direction of the sea. '
Pergi sampan Pakcik!'
He left on the old man's boat.

'Ke mana?'
Where to?

The boy shrugged. He did not know and did not care.

The policeman headed back to town. He would have to report failure.

Sergeant Shukor knew that it would be best for his career to maintain a distance from the maverick Sikh. Instead, he was getting involved in the details of the case against Jasper Lee. His official remit was to shadow the troublesome policeman from across the border. His unofficial mandate was to encourage him to leave as soon as possible by any means, including being obstructive. But he found himself actively helping out. He had already got the inspector in to see Jasper Lee on a number of occasions.

He had listened in on the interviews – admiring the way the inspector had mastered the use of silence as a weapon. He just sat there quietly in the cell, patiently waiting for Jasper Lee to start filling the empty spaces with words. There were no threats, no brutality expressed or implied. Just a gradual getting under the skin of an imprisoned man until he talked to pass the time or distract himself from the loneliness of certain death. And from this idle conversation had come nuggets of information. The most peculiar of which was this assertion that Jasper had killed his brother to stop his destruction of the environment. It was a lesson in interview technique that Shukor looked forward to testing the next time he was asked to interrogate a suspect or a witness. And the more the young man learned, the more he felt compelled to return the favour by arranging access for the Singaporean policeman. He knew that, when his superiors got wind of it, as they inevitably would, he would be in a difficult position, but he hoped by then something concrete would have resulted from their efforts.

He and the inspector sat in what was now their favourite restaurant, sipping hot sweet tea and watching the street vendors flog their wares that ranged from prayer mats to holy beads. All the products were geared towards the Friday prayer crowd who would soon be overflowing from the mosque, forming lines on the pavement facing Mecca and chanting praise of God.

Shukor was deep in thought.

At last he said, 'It is possible.'

'What?'

'It is possible that he killed his brother because of what he was doing in East Malaysia, especially Sarawak.'

'What makes you say that?'

'I've been looking at his history,' replied Shukor.

He seemed to hesitate for a moment but then slipped a folder across the table to the inspector. Another breach of protocol, handing over confidential police files. It was the haul from Jasper's second–floor shophouse office in Chinatown. The police were thorough. They did not want the prosecution of Jasper for his brother's murder to end in failure. They had a confession. They wanted background information as well. After all, he would not be the first accused to retract a confession at the eleventh hour and insist it was provided under duress –whether true or not.

The inspector looked through the file with interest. The majority of papers were innocuous enough. They indicated an interest in conservation issues in Malaysia. There were World Wide Fund for Nature reports printed off the Internet, various flyers pleading for logging to be stopped in Sarawak, newspaper cuttings on the plight of every animal, from the orang utan to the pygmy elephant, as a result of deforestation. A draft research paper on a nomadic tribe in Borneo – the Penan – was written by one Rupert Winfield. There was also correspondence between Jasper and Rupert Winfield on the problems faced by the indigenous peoples as their symbiotic relationship with nature was thrown out of kilter by the logging industry.

'I guess it shows he genuinely cared about these issues, but that is a long way from murder,' remarked the inspector.

'That's because I haven't shown you the best part,' was Shukor's response.

'What do you mean?'

Another folder was slipped across the table.

The inspector picked it up and flipped it open inquisitively. He started leafing through the pages, his bending posture indicating his progressive interest in the contents.

At last he looked up at the young man across the table. Shukor was looking a trifle smug. It was not often in their relationship that he was one up on the fat policeman.

'Where did you get this?'

'At his office as well.'

'Well, it is not quite a smoking gun but it does lend some credibility to his claims about his brother.'

Sergeant Shukor nodded.

They both looked down at the papers in front of them. It was a miscellaneous collection of company annual reports, government survey maps, handwritten notes, printouts of commodity prices and columns of numbers. It was difficult to see at first what Jasper had been driving at with his careful highlighting of maps and scribbled margin notes. But a careful look made it clear that by putting together the company returns and estimating the volume of wood that had been sold over the various years, more wood was sold by Lee Timber than appeared in their books. They had systematically inflated the prices they received for the timber and processed wood they exported to justify the large income flowing in. This combined with survey maps showing logging areas, conservation areas and marked with the results of Jasper's own aerial reconnaissance showed that logging had encroached deep into protected areas.

There were also letters written by Jasper to various authorities in Sarawak pointing out these findings, but the appended responses were always polite denials that there was a pattern of illegal logging going on under their noses. Their officers had checked out the allegations and found no truth in them.

In the margin of one of these replies, Jasper had scribbled angrily, 'How much did you get for this?'

'It was certainly a subject he cared about,' remarked Inspector Singh.

Shukor nodded. 'I can almost believe that he killed his brother for this.'

'A man on a mission?'

'Yes, if he had proof that his own family company was involved in the activities. You know what these Chinese are like – it's all family honour and saving face.'

'Surely he would have confronted his brother, not killed him!'

'Maybe he did.'

It was a pertinent point and well made, thought the inspector. It was quite possible that Jasper had confronted his brother and been given short shrift. What was the next step? Murder? Surely, trial by publicity first.

'Wouldn't he have gone to the newspapers?'