THE GIRL IN THE WINDOW (The Inspector Samuel Tay Novels Book 4) (2 page)

But she wasn’t going to try it that way either.

LESS THAN TWO miles away from the apartment overlooking Serangoon Road, a white Toyota idled in a
No Standing
zone on Orchard Boulevard.

Inspector Samuel Tay had been passing a pleasant afternoon browsing the stacks of the Kinokuniya bookstore that occupied a large part of the top floor of the massive Ngee Ann City shopping mall when his telephone rang. The Toyota was waiting for him. He had to go back to work.

Tay opened the Toyota’s passenger door and got in. Sergeant Robbie Kang handed him a large Styrofoam cup with a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf logo printed on the side.

Kang had long black hair and a fair complexion. He was tall and gangly for a Singaporean, and he wore his usual short-sleeved white shirt, the button-down collar open at the neck, with a pair of dark chinos. The heavy black frames of his glasses were slightly crooked on his narrow face.

Neither man spoke. For his part, Tay had nothing to say. Kang simply knew what was good for him.

Kang waited for a break in traffic, signaled, and eased the car slowly out into Orchard Boulevard. Several years back, he had taken a speed bump a little fast when Tay was in the passenger seat with a cup of coffee. The necessity of driving cautiously when coffee was present had been indelibly imprinted on Kang’s memory ever since.

As Tay watched Singapore sliding by outside the passenger window, he thought about how much he had once loved the city. He wanted to love it like that again, but he doubted he ever would.

When he had been a young man, Singapore was a magical place. The streets were wide and uncrowded, the people warm and unhurried, and the hot tropical winds riffled the palm trees with a whispering sound that infused the very air he breathed with almost intoxicating feelings of romance and allure.

Sam Tay had loved his city then with a sentimentality so unrestrained it now embarrassed him to think about it. But somewhere that love had quietly stolen away and left him all alone. Ever since, he had been asking 
himself 
the same 
two questions nearly every day.

What the hell had happened to his city?

And what the hell had happened to
him
?

He had as yet 
found no satisfactory answer to either question.

Tay suddenly realized Kang was driving in the direction of the Singapore River.

“Please don’t tell me the body's in the river,” he said.

“Yes, sir. It is.”

Tay groaned.

“They say it’s probably been in there for two or three days,” Kang added.

Tay groaned louder.

A corpse that had been fished out of the Singapore River after two or three days in the water?

Dear God.

Having not much liked the answer to the only question he had asked so far, Tay asked Kang nothing else. He went back to sipping his coffee and staring out the window
, and 
he tried very hard not to think about what he was thinking about.

Kang crossed the river on Saiboo Street, turned right into Mohamed Sultan Road, and almost at once pulled into a driveway leading to the loading bays of two of the nearly identical-looking buildings which lined that part of the river.

Tay eyed the buildings as Kang drove toward them. They were all seven or eight stories high and constructed mostly of gray-brown granite and glass. He had always thought of this as a particularly featureless and depressing part of the city, but he never remembered it looking more featureless and depressing than it did right at that moment.

Kang stopped in the driveway behind two fast response cars, shut off the engine, and looked at Tay.

“Do you want to hear about this now, sir?”

Tay said nothing. He tilted his coffee cup up to his mouth and was disappointed to discover it was empty.

What he really wanted was a cigarette. He hadn’t taken his cigarettes when he went to Kinokuniya because he knew he couldn’t smoke there. There was hardly anywhere in Singapore they did let you smoke anymore, of course, other than at home. The people who ran the city, the bastards, had long ago banned smoking in public. Tay figured it was only a matter of time before the little pricks tried to ban it in private as well.

Kang cleared his throat. “I’ll take that as a yes, sir. They didn’t tell me very much when they called us out. Nothing at all about the cause of death, not even whether the deceased is a man or a woman. They just said a body had been found hung up on a drain outlet underneath the Alkaff Bridge.”

Of course it had. Tay had always hated the Alkaff Bridge and he could already see this wasn’t going to do anything to change his mind about it.

The Alkaff Bridge wasn’t even much of a bridge. It was only a narrow pedestrian walkway that would have been ignored by everyone if he hadn’t been for one thing. In what had apparently been a desperate effort to brighten up the neighborhood, some urban planning genius had decreed that it be painted in bright pink, iridescent blue, and puke green with scribbles all over it which looked like drawings done by a kid who had flunked out of kindergarten.

The whole undertaking had been a disaster. Not only did the bridge look hideous, but the neighborhood was so bleak almost no one ever walked across it anyway. What Singapore got for all the money it had poured into the project was a pedestrian bridge that was both ugly and useless. Chalk up another one for the boneheaded bureaucrats who dictated nearly every detail about the appearance of his city.

They got out of the car and Tay looked around for a place to dump his empty coffee cup. There was a trash barrel not more than ten feet away. Of course there was. That was one thing for which you could always count on the bureaucrats of Singapore: trash barrels.

After tossing his cup away and wiping his hands on a handkerchief, Tay turned slowly in a full circle and examined the area where they were parked.

“The river is this way, sir,” Kang said, pointing helpfully between two buildings.

“I know where the river is, Sergeant. I was looking for somewhere you could get me more coffee.”

“Ah.”

Ah, indeed.

“There might be a place up at Robertson Quay, sir, but that’s about ten minutes away.”

“A nice afternoon stroll along the river will be most invigorating for you, Sergeant. Off you go now.”

Tay wasn’t in any hurry. Whoever he had come to see wasn’t going anywhere. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other and reflexively patted his pockets for cigarettes. When he remembered he had just checked and he didn’t have any, he sighed heavily, leaned back against the car with his arms folded, and idly followed Robbie Kang with his eyes as he walked toward Robertson Quay.

When he was being entirely honest with himself, Tay sometimes wondered why Kang had stuck with him so loyally all these years. He could be a shit and he knew it, but that never seemed to bother Kang, at least not in any way he could see. They had worked together for nearly five years now, and Tay had to admit that Robbie Kang’s unswerving loyalty was probably more than he deserved.

A lot of people underestimated Kang, Tay knew, but he was not one of them. People looked at Kang and saw a vanilla man living a vanilla life, but Tay knew Kang had a madness hidden deep within him. There were days on which Tay wished he could find the same kind of madness somewhere in his own soul.

Kang disappeared behind a building and Tay gave his pockets another delusory pat in the hope he might have overlooked some cigarettes, but of course he hadn’t. He was always promising himself he would quit smoking some day so maybe this was a sign. Maybe this was the day for him to deliver on that promise.

Who was he kidding? He was about to examine a dead body that had been in the river for several days and he was wondering if this might be a good time to quit smoking?

He was plainly becoming delusional. Doubtless driven out of his mind by a nicotine deficiency.

THE SINGAPORE RIVER isn’t much of a river. It certainly doesn’t bear any resemblance to the Thames, or the Seine, or the Hudson. It’s narrow and shallow and except for the occasional sightseeing boat it doesn’t even carry maritime traffic now.

Years ago, caught up in one of the fits of governmental sprucing up that periodically sweeps over Singapore, the entire channel of river was cemented and the banks closed off with railings. Tay thought all that tidying had left the Singapore River looking more like a big drainage ditch than a river, and he was pretty sure that’s what most visitors thought it was anyway. Maybe instead of the Singapore River they should just call it the Singapore Ditch and be done with it.

A hundred years ago, the river had run through a tough and gritty dock area. Fleets of lighters called bumboats shuttled back and forth from there to the sailing ships anchored offshore loading cargoes of rubber, rice, and jute bound for Europe. When containerized cargo put an end to the bumboats, the government decided to turn the river into a tourist attraction. They claimed they wanted to protect its historical charm, but of course Tay knew full well they wanted to do no such thing. What they really wanted was to create a cleaned up, idealized version of Singapore’s history, one that might cause future generations to forget about what the reality of it had been.

After a resolute scrubbing, the whole area around the river had been turned into an attraction that might have been constructed by Walt Disney. The crumbling warehouses were rebuilt and repainted in bright, cheerful colors, and the pathways between them were tiled and edged with perfectly matched palm trees. Stylish restaurants and bars now filled the old buildings, their tables spilling out under groves of palm trees that were crisscrossed with strings of white fairy lights. Most of the places were crowded almost every night, clogged with local yuppies, Australian tourists, and Caucasian expats.

Sometimes Tay felt like he wasn’t living in a real city now at all, but a Potemkin village populated with Potemkin people. No, that wasn’t really fair. Tay knew there were some real people in Singapore. Robbie Kang, of course, and…well, he was sure there were others, too, even if no names came readily to mind.

When he figured he had stalled as long as decency allowed, Tay sighed heavily, pushed himself away from the car, and set off walking in the direction of the Alkaff Bridge. He eyed the dark clouds gathering on the horizon. Maybe it would rain later, or maybe it wouldn’t. Either way Tay knew the humidity would leave him so drenched in sweat that it wouldn’t make any difference. When you were outdoors in Singapore, you got soaking wet whether it rained or it didn’t.

There was an appropriately ominous silence all around until he got close to the river and heard the cackle and crack of a radio in the distance. His colleagues had as usual been almost frighteningly efficient. They had already erected a small shelter about ten feet square at the near end of the bridge that was made out of a scaffolding of metal poles covered by blue plastic sheeting.

Uniformed patrolmen had sealed off the scene both on the bridge and along the promenade. They were there to keep spectators away, of course, but they didn’t have much to do. There weren’t any spectators.

This wasn’t a neighborhood in which people hung around outside, chatted with their neighbors, and congregated at the site of distasteful events. There was another reason no spectators were around, too, one which applied almost everywhere in Singapore, particularly in places where there was police activity. Singaporeans minded their own business when authority was present. They had a gift for not seeing unpleasantness, or at least pretending not to see it, even when it was right there in front of them.

Tay couldn’t see what was in the blue plastic tent from the direction he was approaching it, which he supposed was the whole reason for having it there in the first place. But he knew full well what was waiting for him.

Soon enough he would have a fine, close-up view.

When Tay approached the tent, the patrolman in front of it snapped off a salute.

“Good afternoon, Inspector,” he said. “It’s nice to see you again, sir.”

Tay didn’t remember ever encountering the young patrolman before and he had decidedly mixed feelings about being recognized by someone he didn’t know. While everyone’s ego twitched a little at discovering a stranger knew who he was, anonymity had its advantages, too. And given a choice between a twitching ego and those advantages, Tay would choose anonymity without the slightest hesitation. If it were left up to him. Which, of course, it wasn’t.

“Better watch your footing, sir.”

The young patrolman pointed at the paving stones covered by a thin film of water, probably from dragging the body out of the river. Yes, Tay thought, he would be careful. Falling on his ass before he even got to the body would only extend his fame within the department. As far as he was concerned, he was more than famous enough already.

“Do you have any cigarettes, patrolman?”

When Tay saw the alarmed look on the young man’s face, he had to smile. Clearly a senior officer had never before asked the kid for a cigarette. Now that one had, he had no idea what to do.

“Uh…what do you mean, sir?” the patrolman stammered.

Tay lifted a hand to his mouth and mimed himself smoking a cigarette. “You know.”

The kid cleared his throat and shifted his eyes nervously from side to side.

“I don’t smoke, sir.”

“No, of course you don’t.”

The patrolman hesitated. He looked away as if he was suddenly engrossed in studying a building on the other side of the river, but he leaned his whole body back toward Tay.

“If you want, sir,” he murmured out of the corner of his mouth, “I’m sure I could find—”

“That’s all right,” Tay interrupted. “Let’s just get on with whatever we’ve got here.”

Clearly relieved to be back on more comfortable ground, the patrolman reached for the flap covering the front of the tent, but he didn’t open it.

“This one’s a bit of a mess, sir,” he said. “They figure it was hit by one of those tourist boats that work this part of the river. Not much left below the waist.”