Tay sat for a while after that with his face perfectly still. He reached for the open box of Marlboros again and shook out another cigarette.
“Her killer posed her, Sergeant. He posed her after he was done with her and stripped away her dignity. He wanted to degrade her. He wanted to tell us just how worthless she is.”
Tay picked up the lighter and flipped it open. He watched the flame burn, but he didn’t touch it to his cigarette.
“How about a drink, Robbie?”
“I’m afraid I can’t, sir. My wife and I are going out tonight. She organized something with this friend of hers and if I show up late she’ll murder me.” Sergeant Kang paused and looked down at his hands. “Sorry, sir. I didn’t mean any disrespect to-”
“I know you didn’t, Sergeant. Go on home. We’ll see where we are tomorrow morning. At least we ought to have the preliminary-report from FMB and maybe we’ll even have an ID on the body by then.”
“I hope so. Thank you, sir. Good night.”
After Sergeant Kang had gone, Inspector Tay lit the Marlboro and sat smoking it in silence. He watched the street and the crowds passing on the sidewalk and he wondered not for the first time what the hell he was doing there with a police warrant card in his pocket and the stink of death on his clothes.
The only child of an American-born Chinese man and a Singaporean-born Chinese woman, Tay had lived the whole of his life in Singapore. His father had been an accountant, a careful man who insisted that his family live modestly. When he died suddenly of a heart attack, Tay’s mother was shocked to discover she and her son had inherited a small fortune in real estate. She hadn’t even known her husband had been buying properties for two decades, let alone that his investments would leave her and her son quite comfortably off for the rest of their lives.
Regardless, she had quickly adjusted to the concept. Within a year, she moved to New York and acquired what she described to Tay as a Park Avenue duplex, although Tay noticed her address was actually on East Ninety-Third Street. When his mother married a widowed American investment banker who was a senior partner at some investment firm the name of which Tay could never quite remember, Tay was at the National University. He didn’t go to New York for the wedding. Actually, he couldn’t quite recall having been invited to New York for the wedding, but he supposed that was beside the point. He told himself he would have stayed in Singapore even if he had been invited.
By the time Tay graduated from university, he had chosen to his mother’s complete horror to make his career in police work rather than living the life of the idle well off she preferred for him. Looking back later on that decision, Tay could not for the life of him remember exactly why he had made it, but he had stuck with it regardless. As a brighter-than-average recruit who was dutiful and conscientious, he was soon promoted, first to general investigative work, then to the Criminal Investigations Department, and finally to the elite Special Investigations Section of CID.
After all this time, Tay thought he should have become accustomed to carnage and brutality, but he hadn’t. Each time he was called to a murder scene he still recoiled; and when he thought about it honestly, he knew exactly why that was.
It was not the violence Tay saw before him that caused the bile to rise in his throat at crime scenes. It was the violence he feared he had not yet seen, the violence that might even be hiding deep within himself. He had wondered many times if he could consciously bring about the death of another person and he had always answered that he could not. But he was not absolutely certain that was true. Whenever he was in the presence of unreasoning brutality, Tay found himself driven to examine his own soul; and he did not much like what he found there. He did not know exactly what it was, but he was sure of one thing. It made him afraid.
When Tay was done with his cigarette, he stubbed it out in the ashtray and pocketed both the box he had been smoking and the unopened one. On impulse, he left the purple lighter on the table next to the ashtray. He wasn’t entirely certain why he did that. Perhaps it was some sort of gesture of atonement for his weakness.
When Tay got outside he waved away the hotel doorman and stood for a moment watching a jagged, gray- green cloud rise in the west. It looked like a mountain range on the move, dark and dense and frightening. It seemed to be on the verge of overwhelming the city.
The sun was setting behind that seathing mass of clouds and it looked to Tay as though it would never come up again.
FIVE
The first and most important truth about Singapore is this. It is hot. It is nasty, stinking, sweaty hot.
Although it was barely six the next morning when Tay opened his front door and stepped out onto his small porch, he could already feel the heat rising. The air was so heavy that the moisture was draining right out of it. Or maybe it was raining. In Singapore, sometimes it was hard to tell the difference.
Tay had been born in Singapore and he would no doubt die in Singapore, but he had never come to an accommodation with the savage heat and the sadistic humidity. If he owned both Singapore and hell, he would rent out Singapore and live in hell. How had people managed to survive there before air conditioning was invented; and why had they even tried? He had wondered about that for as long as he could remember and he still had absolutely no idea.
A storm had hit early in the morning hours and wakened Tay from a sleep so uneasy he almost welcomed the intrusion. The thunder made it sound as if massed cannon were shelling the city and the banana trees in his small garden had bent back and forth in the swirling winds, swishing over his bedroom windows like huge brushes against a snare drum. Sometime around six o’clock he gave up trying to sleep and got up and dressed.
Samuel Tay was not an early riser. He did not greet the new day cheerfully, anticipating the delights it might hold in store for him. Instead, he welcomed it warily, resigned to the new frustrations and the fresh disappointments it would surely bring.
Coffee generally improved his disposition in the morning, but this time it was so early that he doubted even it would help. Nevertheless, he made some anyway and drank two cups while he watched the BBC news channel on television. When he got bored with the news and shut it off, he saw that he had been absolutely right. The coffee hadn’t improved his disposition one damn bit.
For nearly a half-hour, Tay successfully avoided lighting a cigarette to go with his coffee, but then he began to wonder who he was trying to impress with his restraint. He found the trousers he had dropped on the floor the night before and fished the open pack of Marlboros out of a front pocket. That was when it came back to him he had abandoned the lighter in the Marriott coffee shop in a gesture of moral atonement.
Why on earth had he done an idiotic thing like that? Exactly whom was he trying to convince of his sincere remorse and good character? Tay wondered briefly if he had matches somewhere in the house, but knew he didn’t. He had thrown them all away along with his cigarettes the last time he had quit smoking.
He finally gave up, both on the cigarette and on trying to make himself feel better, and decided just to get dressed and go to work. Maybe he would even walk part of the way and stop somewhere for breakfast. Eat a nice greasy banana fritter. Maybe two. Yes, that sounded good. A sugar fix and another hit of caffeine. That might be just the ticket.
Standing now on his front porch, he saw the storm had passed and it had stopped raining. Or maybe it hadn’t. Tay eyed the sky with mistrust and took an umbrella out of the stand next to his door. Still, if this was rain, it had none of the drive, none of the interest it had shown during the night. The clouds seemed old and tired. Tay knew exactly how they felt.
He walked down to Orchard Road, crossed over, and followed it west toward the Mandarin Hotel until he came to a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf. He bought a double espresso and two banana fritters and sat down at a table on which someone had thoughtfully abandoned a copy of that morning’s
Four schoolgirls in green skirts and while blouses giggled and squealed in a back corner as they exchanged
