Inspector Singh Investigates (15 page)

Seventeen

'So who did Kian Min serve up to save his own skin?' asked Singh.

'A businessman from Hong Kong,' replied Mohammad evenly.

'What was his reason?'

'Quite complicated. This Chinaman from Hong Kong – Douglas Wee – fronts for some Chinese conglomerate looking for bio–fuels.'

'So?'

'Lee Timber has been considering diversifying into bio–fuels, partly because this syndicate, or Douglas Wee anyway, promised to buy whatever they can produce.'

'I read in the papers that they had decided to go ahead with it?'

'Yes, that's right – now that Alan Lee is dead. Apparently, he was standing in the way of the project while Kian Min was in favour of it. Alan's dying made it happen.'

'So why should this Donald or Douglas, or whatever his name is, have killed Alan?'

'According to Lee Kian Min, he needed to land the deal for his Chinese masters or wear knee–cap protectors.'

'It's possible, I suppose,' said Singh doubtfully, scratching his nose.

Mohammad laughed. 'There's no need to be polite. I know it's farfetched. But we can get this guy in. He's in Malaysia apparently, tidying up loose ends.'

Singh nodded. 'And if it does turn out to be a load of bollocks, we'll have more to harass Lee with.'

Mohammad raised a warning finger. 'Let me make it quite clear – under no circumstances are you or Shukor to go anywhere near Lee Kian Min. He's a petty, vindictive bastard. If you annoy him again, I won't have the influence to protect you – and nobody else will give a damn.'

Singh held up a pudgy, stubby–fingered hand with only moderately clean nails. 'I hear you,' he said.

'Good,' said Mohammad.

Chelsea heard her. Back early from the jail when Jasper had refused to see her, she had walked into the house and followed the sound of voices. Marcus was talking to someone. She wondered who it could be. He was morose and alone most of the time. He never invited friends home. It was odd that he should have a guest. The voice sounded familiar as well – a low, musical tone with that slightly lyrical cadence of the Malay. Who could it be?

To her utter amazement it was Sharifah. Chelsea was speechless with shock. Was no place sacrosanct? How dare that woman set foot in her house? Alan was dead. Did she think that she had any rights in his conjugal home? And then she heard the sentence that drove all other thoughts from her mind, 'Marcus, the police think you killed your father!'

She was at the door now, unseen by the two of them. They were engrossed in each other. It was the perfect stage entrance. There were overtones of tragedy with perhaps a hint of farce. All she knew was that she was not the main character in the unfolding play. That role now belonged to her son.

Instead of throwing Sharifah off the premises with all the raw rage she could summon, she found herself asking quietly, 'How do you know? How do you know they suspect Marcus? What about Jasper?'

She might as well have yelled. Her words fell on the silent tableau like oversized hailstones. The pair whirled to look at her. They were of different ethnicities, the pair of them, but their expressions – pale and frightened, eyes wide and mouths slightly open – gave them such a strong similarity of appearance that they might have been siblings.

Marcus spoke automatically. 'This has nothing to do with you, Mum.'

Sharifah said, 'I'm so sorry. I wouldn't have come here. But I had to warn Marcus.'

Chelsea barely heard them, barely registered their surprise to see her. She ignored the dismissal and apology with equal indifference. She said again, 'How do you know they suspect Marcus?'

Sharifah turned to Marcus for guidance but he was looking at his mother. His expression revealed how he was torn between a desperate desire to lean on her strength and a reluctance to expose her to more pain.

Sharifah said quietly, opting for full disclosure, 'The police came to see me.'

'What did they say?'

'That they were no longer certain of Jasper's guilt – they didn't say why – and their next best bet was me or Marcus.'

'Why you?'

'They thought I might have quarrelled with Alan. That perhaps he dumped me and I was angry or jealous.'

'And were you?'

Chelsea's questions were staccato and to the point. She wanted to understand fully what they were up against. She forced the fear that welled up in volcanic waves back down through a sheer effort of will. She visualised the terror and compressed it into a small black ball and placed it neatly at the bottom of her stomach. There would be time for that later. Right now she had to question this woman until she fully understood the danger that Marcus was in. He was her eldest son. Whatever information Sharifah had, whether it was hurtful or exculpatory, she needed to know it.

Sharifah said, 'No. I still believed we were going to get married.'

'Still believed? What does that mean?'

The younger woman hung her head, unable to look at either of them in the eye as she was forced to discuss her relationship with the husband of one and the father of the other. 'I'm beginning to realise now that Alan never had any intention of marrying me. That was not the sort of man he was.'

Chelsea dismissed this as irrelevant. She tucked a tendril of hair that was escaping its pins back behind her ear and asked, 'How did the police know about your relationship with Marcus?'

Sharifah shrugged. 'I'm not sure. From the way they talked, they seemed to have some sort of tape.'

Chelsea sat down suddenly. 'My God,' she whispered to herself, completely forgetting the presence of the others. 'I forgot to send the money.'

'What are you talking about, Mum?' asked Marcus.

Chelsea's hands were shaking. She put them on the arms of the chair, trying to steady herself. Had she brought this catastrophe down on them?

'A private investigator – I hired him during the divorce and custody hearings to dig up some proof of adultery to help my case against your father. He turned up the other day with a tape. It had all three of you on it – at some club.'

From their worried faces she could tell that they knew immediately which occasion it must have been – and they both knew it would not have looked good.

'But how would the police have got a copy?' asked Sharifah, confused.

'I forgot to send the money. The investigator asked for two thousand ringgit. I came to see you.' She looked at Sharifah. 'And I just clean forgot to pay him. He must have decided to teach me a lesson.'

Marcus guessed how much his mother was suffering from the thought that she had led the police directly to him. He sat down on the arm of her chair and gave her a hug. 'They would have found out about Sharifah and me somehow. It's not your fault, Mum.'

Chelsea shook her head. 'I don't know, son.'

Sharifah interrupted them. 'I didn't finish. I said I was with you, Marcus – when your . .. when Alan was shot. But I didn't really know when that was so I wasn't very convincing. I'm not sure they believed me.'

'You alibied me?'

Sharifah nodded, a little sheepishly.

'Why?'

There was a pause while she considered her answer. Her young, fresh face was thoughtful, like a student pondering an exam question, not an adulteress considering an alibi.

At last, she said, 'They think you did it because of me. I guess that makes it my fault that you're in trouble. I just wanted to try and make things better.' She trailed off.

Chelsea guessed that she was longing to make things better, not just in the context of the suspicion the police had about Marcus, but with everything else she had done in the last few months. This was a young, smart woman who had somehow come adrift and made some truly appalling decisions. Chelsea might have found it in her heart to feel just a tiny bit sorry for her if it wasn't for the fact that the consequences of her actions were about to engulf her son.

'Do you think I did it?' The question was blurted out more stridently than Marcus intended. He was looking at her but she suspected the tension in his body was for fear of Sharifah's answer.

Chelsea said immediately and as reassuringly as she could, 'Of course not, darling. I
know
you had nothing to do with it. You've told me so and I believe you.'

Sharifah did not say anything and Marcus, unable to bear her non–committal silence, said almost roughly, 'What about you?'

'No,' she said quietly, 'I don't think you did it.'

Marcus sat down suddenly. He said, 'That means a lot.'

Sharifah said briskly, 'I guess it's not what we think that's important. It's what the police believe that counts. So let's get this alibi straight.'

Marcus said, 'I don't want you to have to lie to protect me.'

Chelsea said sharply, 'Don't be ridiculous, Marcus. Sharifah is trying to help – and you're in no position to refuse.'

'But she could really get into trouble ... '

'You could hang,' said Chelsea.

There was a silence after Chelsea had so brutally pointed out Marcus's fate if he was found guilty of murder. In their imaginations, all three could picture Marcus at dawn, a hood over his head, with only a couple of policemen and a doctor for company, waiting to drop through the trapdoor with the thick, rough rope wound around his neck.

Sharifah realised that her instinctive attempt to protect Marcus would have to be carried through in earnest. This could not be limited to a lie told under the pressure of circumstances.

She said, 'Your mother is right, Marcus.'

He was white faced but resolute. 'I still don't like it.'

Chelsea brushed a greasy strand of hair away from his forehead and said gently, 'We understand that, Marcus. I don't think we're looking at Sharifah testifying in court or anything like that. But if you have an alibi, the police will keep looking for the murderer and not stop with you. Once they've found someone else, we won't have to pretend any more.'

'I wonder why they don't think Uncle Jasper killed Dad? Why haven't they released him if he didn't do it?'

Chelsea shook her head ruefully. 'That may be my fault as well. I persuaded the policeman from Singapore to keep looking into things. I just didn't believe Jasper murdered Alan. I had no idea there was evidence out there that would implicate you.'

'It was a Sikh policeman who came to see me,' said Sharifah. 'He was pretty unpleasant – really aggressive and accusing.'

'It could be that they still think Jasper did it. But thanks to my kicking up a fuss, they're looking around a bit as well.' Chelsea turned to her son and said with something approaching bleakness, 'I'm so sorry, Marcus. Everything I've done seems to have gotten you into more trouble – it was the last thing I intended.'

Marcus shrugged. 'Let's not concentrate on what we could have done different, Mum. It's water under the bridge.'

Sharifah said practically, 'Someone needs to tell me when Alan was killed. And we need a good story about where we were at the time and what we were doing.'

The three sat down, wife, son and girlfriend of a murdered man, and tried to concoct an alibi.

The newspapers the next morning caught them all completely by surprise. Singh saw them first. He was up early – unable to sleep – which was very unusual for him. He normally slept, not like a baby, awake every few hours, but like a tired six–year–old, completely and utterly knocked out by a day's exertions. Contrary to what his sister suspected, he had no difficulty sleeping through his own snoring. But he had drunk too much coffee the previous night, his sister had annoyed him with a tedious nag about some wedding that he should have attended but didn't, the mattress in the room was filled with lumpy cotton and the small bedroom was either unbearably stuffy or, if he turned on the air–conditioning, an icebox. So he got out of bed just as dawn was breaking, wandered around the house looking for the source of coffee and heard the thump of the newspaper landing on the front porch.

It was a thick wad of newsprint tied up in a rubber band that snapped against his hand the minute he picked it up. Singh grimaced. It was going to be one of those days.

To his relief, his sister appeared at the door, bleary–eyed but instinctively hospitable. 'Coffee?'

He nodded curtly and sat down at the small table outside. A few potted plants provided the only hint of green to the tiled 'garden' and in the distance he could hear birdsong as well as the guttural cooing of pigeons. The day was still cool. The tropical sun was just a sliver on the horizon. Singh felt almost relaxed. He took the coffee his sister proffered with a muttered thanks and unfolded the paper.

It was the lead story on the front page. Three large, slightly grainy, but immediately recognisable faces were side by side looking out at the reader. Sharifah looked beautiful and worried, Marcus looked distraught and Alan was smug. Singh recognised the photos as being lifted from the disc. He wondered how the papers had got hold of it. The same place the police had got it, he supposed. Not content with earning brownie points with the police, the source of the disc had cashed in as well. It really didn't matter now. The cat was out of the bag and far away.

There were so many font sizes on the cover –headlines, by–lines, sub–headings – it was difficult to take in at first. 'Alan Lee's Girlfriend', 'Night Club Rumpus', 'Father, Son and the Woman Who Came Between Them'. There was more inside. 'See pages 3–12 for more details.' Singh read the articles slowly. The newspaper had extrapolated wildly from the facts at its disposal. It was interesting that within the same newspaper, individual columnists had put a different spin on where the blame should lie for the sordid turn of events. There were articles that painted Sharifah as a
femme fatale
and others that had her as the exploited sweet young thing. Some journalists laid the blame squarely on Alan Lee –implying it was hardly surprising that he was murdered. It had only been a matter of time. Others pointed out that the Moslem girlfriend was evidence that Alan had intended his conversion to Islam and those who had suggested it was a cynical ploy to gain custody of his children had been proven wrong once and for all.