answer his phone?”
Inspector Tay cleared his throat. “Actually,” he said, “I think I’m probably both.”
The woman laughed — thank Christ, Tay thought — and the sound of it was unexpectedly warm and musical.
“I really am very sorry,” Tay said, trying to regain his footing. “I just get unreasonably annoyed when someone calls me and just assumes I know what they’re on about. No one told me who was doing the autopsy and you didn’t really say what report you were referring to.”
“Yes, when you’ve been absorbed in something like this for a while you do rather just assume that everyone else in the world is thinking about it, too.”
“I
“Look,” the woman interrupted again. “Let’s just start over. Shall we do that?”
“Yes. Fine. Let’s do that.”
“The reason I’m calling, Inspector, is that I thought you would like to come over and look at this before I close.”
“Look at what?”
“The deceased, of course. The woman from the Marriott.”
Tay cleared his throat yet one more time. “Thank you, doctor. It’s good of you to offer, but I have no doubt your report will cover everything quite satisfactorily. It won’t be necessary for me to view your work personally.”
“Oh, but I think it is. You do need to see this, and anyway you’re just across the street. You know where we are, don’t you? I’ll send someone out to wait for you in reception. Shall we say fifteen minutes?”
“Really, doctor, I can’t-”
“Fifteen minutes then,” Dr. Hoi interrupted again. “I’m looking forward to meeting you, Inspector.”
And with that she hung up.
Inspector Tay sat looking at the receiver for a long moment before he slowly replaced it in its cradle. He rubbed his eyes and slapped his forehead with his palm a few times. He knew he was trapped. He would rather have a root canal than to go over there and peer at that poor woman sliced open from neck to pelvis, but what was he going to do now? Call this doctor back and tell her he tended to throw up at the sight of dead bodies? No, that was out of the question.
The Centre for Forensic Medicine was located in a building called Block Nine of the Singapore General Hospital just on the other side of New Bridge Road behind the National Heart Centre. The building itself was a nondescript, modern two-story structure that looked to Tay like it could shelter almost any kind of commercial activity. But of course he knew all too well what actually took place inside Block Nine. Equipped as he was with that knowledge, the otherwise unremarkable structure with the aluminum chimney pipes poking out here and there took on a genuinely creepy appearance. Normally it would take him no more than five minutes to walk from his office in the Cantonment Complex to Block Nine. On this day, however, he wondered if he might be able stretch it out a little, perhaps even a lot.
Like, maybe, to a year or so.
SEVEN
A man was waiting for Tay in Block Nine’s tiny reception area. He was wearing a starched lab coat with a breast pocket full of ballpoint pens and shifting from foot to foot. He seemed very young, too young to be a doctor, and Tay wondered if he was. He also wondered briefly whether it was really that this man in particular looked so young or if everyone was starting to look young to him; and of course, if that was so, he knew full well what
“Are you Inspector Tay?”
“Yes, although I’m not particularly happy about it right now.”
“Pardon me?”
“Never mind.”
The man looked doubtfully at Tay and pushed his gold-rimmed glasses up the bridge of his nose. Finally, he gave a little half shrug, which apparently signaled the end of his interest in whatever Tay may or may not have said.
“This way, please.”
Tay followed the young man through a door, down a long, white corridor, and through another door. Beyond the second door was yet another long, white corridor, but the man stopped abruptly and knocked lightly at an unmarked door on the right. Without waiting for an answer, he opened it and tilted his head to indicate that Tay should go through.
The prospect of dealing with whatever was on the other side of that door was decidedly unappealing and Tay tried to catch the young man’s eye hoping to see there some possibility, however slight, of a reprieve. The man wouldn’t look directly at him and Tay didn’t know exactly what to make of that, but he doubted it could be anything good. There seemed to be only two alternatives open to him. Fling up his arms and flee, or take a deep breath and walk through that door.
Tay took the coward’s way out. He walked through the door.
To his considerable surprise, the door did not open into some kind of Frankenstein laboratory where rows of partially dissected corpses were laid out on steel tables with unidentifiable fluids draining out of them. Instead, he found himself in an institutional looking office not all that different from his own. Behind the gray metal desk, a woman who appeared to be in her mid-thirties was writing in a file.
“Give me a second before I lose my thought,” she said, not looking up.
“Take your time.”
At the sound of Tay’s voice the woman shifted her eyes toward him without lifting her head and, although she continued to write, he saw her examine him with evident curiosity.
“Please sit down,” she said, moving her eyes back to the file she was working on. “I’ll just be a moment.”
Tay sat on a straight chair in front of the desk and took the opportunity to make his own assessment of Dr. Susan Hoi. She was a looker. He had not been prepared for that. Her hair was short and stylishly cut and, although mostly black, there were highlights that appeared almost red under the fluorescent lights of her office. Beneath her white lab coat he could just see what looked like a square-necked black dress and a single strand of pearls. Pearls and a little black dress to cut up dead bodies? Who would have thought?
The woman sat very straight in her chair, her shoulders back and squared to her work, and wrote quickly with long, fluid strokes. There was something about her posture that Tay found very attractive, enticing even, but how could that be? When encountering a beautiful woman, surely not many men found themselves attracted to her posture. Legs, of course; breasts, yes; face and eyes, naturally; even occasionally arms and hands. Tay had heard there were some men who were attracted to women’s feet, but he couldn’t see Susan Hoi’s feet under her desk and doubted he was one of those men in any case. But to be attracted to a woman’s posture? What in the world did that say about him?
Before he could decide, she closed the file, adjusted its position on her desk in an unconscious gesture of tidiness, and smiled at him with what seemed to be genuine warmth.
“I’m glad you could manage the time, Inspector.”
“It wasn’t time I was short of.”
“Oh, I see.” Dr. Hoi readjusted the position of the file, although it was obviously unnecessary. “Actually, no, I don’t see.”
Tay nodded a couple of times while he was trying to decide what to say. He could make some kind of idiotic excuse, he supposed. Or perhaps he could just tell her the truth. If he did that, he would no doubt either get high marks for honesty or come off as a complete jerk. Unfortunately, right off the top of his head he couldn’t think up a convincing lie so it looked like he was stuck going with the truth by default.
“It’s just that I don’t like looking at dead bodies,” Tay said. “The sight of them makes me nauseous.”
