Inspector Singh Investigates (18 page)

Twenty

When he saw on the news that Jasper had been released, Rupert called him. They agreed to meet at the hotel lobby. They almost didn't recognise each other although it was no more than a week since Rupert had visited Jasper in prison. Jasper, who had been cheerful and relaxed, was crushed and tired, still wearing the same clothes he had gone to see Chelsea in the previous day. Rupert Winfield, who had spent a good part of the last five years living the life of a nomad in the jungle, was conspicuously well–kempt, only his golden brown tan looked too deep to be of the sun–bed variety.

The men shook hands and sat down. They ordered coffees, black for Jasper and a cappuccino for Rupert.

The latter said, as he sipped his frothy hot drink with the slowly melting sprinkle of chocolate, 'I swear, Jasper, the only thing between me and perfect happiness in the jungle was a coffee machine.'

Jasper said ruefully, 'I felt the same way about prison.'

'What was that about, anyway?'

'If it's all right with you, Rupert, I'd prefer not to talk about it.'

Rupert nodded his understanding.

He changed the subject with a forced casualness that would not have fooled most people. But he was talking to a man so lost in a mental maze of his own creation, it passed unnoticed. 'I was just wondering about the office set–up at Lee Timber,' he said.

'Oh? Why?'

'You remember you mentioned that Alan had never been the brains behind the company – it was your dad and, when he died, your other brother, Kian Min?'

'Yes, Alan was just a figurehead – he was too busy playing around and beating his wife to have time for business.'

It was Jasper's turn to ask, 'Are you still disappointed that Alan is dead?'

'It sounds like he deserved a bullet,' said Rupert and then glanced quickly at Jasper to see if he found such strong sentiment misplaced. Rupert was finding it harder to control his emotions than he had expected. He was making mistakes.

Jasper shrugged. 'That's why the police are having such a tough time. People were queuing up to have a go at him.'

'Well, you know why I was so upset. I wanted to make sure he paid for what he did – evicting the Penan, causing the death of that woman. I had big plans to confront him, force him to acknowledge what he had done.'

'I suppose he did pay for what he did,' said Jasper.

Rupert nodded a half–hearted acknowledgement of the correctness of what Jasper had said. Alan had, after all, been gunned down on the street where he lived.

Jasper grinned at the other man, affectionate but mocking. 'I know, I know – it's not the same unless you get to shoot him yourself!'

He was surprised to see how badly Rupert took his attempt at humour.

'That's not right, Jasper.' He was stuttering. 'Th–that's not r–right. Why would you say such a thing?'

'Damn it! Give me a break, Rupert. I've been in jail for ages. I was just trying to be funny. God knows, I don't feel like being funny. My brother is dead, his wife thinks I'm a fool, my nephew is in hospital, Kian Min is making sure that the Lee legacy is safe, Lee Timber continues to destroy everything I've sought to preserve ... '

He buried his face in his hands and Rupert patted him awkwardly on the shoulder.

'I'm sorry, mate. I'm just a bit touchy myself.'

There was no response from Jasper, so he continued hesitantly, 'I'm going to see Kian Min. I've an appointment next week.'

Jasper looked up, sipped his coffee and grimaced. 'I need something much stronger than that.' He waved a waitress over and ordered whiskies for both of them. He looked at his companion and said, 'What are you hoping to achieve?'

Rupert shook his head. 'I have no idea. I just want to explain what's going on in Borneo.'

'You think he doesn't know? He'd have ordered the attacks himself.'

Rupert looked at Jasper, his blue eyes glowing with a curious intensity. 'You really believe that?'

'Of course! But how are you going to get in anyway? Kian Min is not stupid enough to let a Penan sympathiser into his office to harangue him.'

Rupert fingered his suit. 'What do you think this is? I'm not
laki Penan
any more, I'm Jonathan Hayward, representing the European Commission. I want to buy bio–fuels to meet European Union emissions targets.'

'I wondered at the new look. Jungle metrosexual, I thought of calling it.'

Rupert laughed but then asked with sudden, absolute seriousness, 'But can it work?'

'It's a good plan,' acknowledged Jasper reluctantly. 'Kian Min's greatest weakness is his greed. I like it. You give him hell!'

'I plan to,' said Rupert. 'I certainly plan to.'

He drained his whisky in one gulp, feeling the warmth descend until he had a literal fire in his belly.

'There's one more thing ...' Rupert reached into his pocket and took out a sealed envelope. 'Can you hang on to this? Open it if ... you'll know when to open it if it becomes necessary.'

Jasper looked at him quizzically. 'What is this? Your last will and testament? Kian Min is not going to shoot you in the middle of his office in downtown Kuala Lumpur!'

Rupert leaned back in his chair. 'Better safe than sorry and all that.'

Chelsea Liew developed a routine. Get the boys ready for school and send them on their way with cheery smiles and reassurances about the condition of their older brother. Have a quick breakfast, or perhaps a sandwich in the car, and head for the intensive care unit. Sit down in the chair next to her son, talk to him, read to him or be lost in her own scattered thoughts. Head back in time to meet the younger boys when they got home from school. Spend the afternoon with them while Jasper or Sharifah took over at the hospital. It tore her apart to be away from Marcus but she felt that she had to provide the younger kids with a semblance of normality. If she disappeared from their lives again, it might be too much for them so soon after the death of their father, her incarceration in jail and the hospitalisation of Marcus. So she played Lego and did puzzles and listened to their tales of school and helped them on the monkey bars and with their homework – and all the while she hung on to her mobile with a sweaty palm and worried about Marcus.

When the boys sat down to dinner she would go back to the hospital and spend a fitful night in a hard chair – mostly awake but occasionally chased across a dreamscape by her worst nightmares. In the morning, she would make sure she was home again before the boys realised she had spent the night away.

That was the routine. It was punctuated with hushed telephone confrontations with lawyers, her eyes restlessly peering back into the ward, as her legal team warned her that developments were not good, she was not getting anywhere in the courts. She had urgent, difficult conversations with all the specialists that she brought in for second and third and fourth opinions of Marcus's case – elderly types proceeding on instinct born of experience and young swots quoting the latest medical research. None of them could reassure her that Marcus would be all right. None of them, despite much humming and hawing, could suggest a different or better course of treatment than to keep him asleep, let his body rest and recover from the trauma of his injuries and cross their fingers that there would be no permanent brain damage. Her schedule was interrupted by the moments of blind panic when a machine would bleep or she would suddenly fear that Marcus's deep sleep had slipped over the border into perpetual night without her noticing.

The sight of him no longer upset her as much as it had. She was accustomed to the bandages and the tubes to help him breathe, to collect his urine, to intravenously feed him drugs and food and whatever else the nurses in their starched white uniforms took into their heads to add to those soft clear plastic bags of liquid hanging from metal poles. The bruises peeking out from behind bandages, like a canvas of modern art, were slowly moving through the colour charts, red and raw, then blue and purple and, eventually, orange like the rising sun. Some of the swelling had gone down too – she could see that when dressings were changed. The long centipedes of stitches crawling across Marcus's body were no longer traversing their individual fleshy hills of swollen tissue. He was actually getting better. His young body was fighting for his life – ignoring the desire for death that had caused him to drive his car off a bridge in the first place.

But Chelsea still had to worry about the state of his mind. Although she dreaded his waking up still resolute in his desire to put an end to his troubled existence, she was much more afraid that he would recover consciousness and be unable to form a desire whether to live or to die, a human vegetable, with no capacity for decision making.

Through it all, Sharifah was her companion and Jasper was her support. If she had time to think thoughts that were not related to the welfare of her children she might have appreciated the irony – but her thoughts, like a candle spluttering under a ceiling fan, pulled in one direction and then another but, never straying from the wick, were tethered to a single spot.

The women grew thinner but Jasper gained weight. Chelsea and Sharifah were barely able to swallow morsels of food, their stomachs were so shrivelled and twisted with anxiety. But Jasper, who would not have admitted it to anyone in the world, was happy. He had never previously been able to be of service to the woman he loved. His big attempt had backfired. He had, in the clutches of a monster of jealousy, recanted his confession. But now, finally, he was of real use to her.

He did not see Chelsea much. Quite often when he arrived at the hospital it was time for her to go home to the boys. They would exchange a few brief words about Marcus's condition, whether the doctors had made any cryptic remarks about his state, whether his eyelids had quivered, had he seemed in pain, had the nurses topped up his sedation efficiently. She would tell him if she had spoken to the lawyers, if there were any developments in their efforts to convince the civil courts to rule that Alan was a fraud or the Syariah courts to determine that he was the least convincing Moslem they had ever come across. Sometimes Jasper would drop in and play with the boys. He always told Chelsea when he was going to do that – he did not want her to doubt his motives or to imagine that he was trying to ingratiate himself with the children to find a spot in her family.

Once, he came in and found her sobbing quietly, but with such intensity that her shoulders, wrapped in a pashmina to keep her warm in the freezing temperatures of the ICU, were visibly shaking. He put a hand on her shoulder and looked at Marcus, numb with fear. But the boy was still alive, his condition unchanged. He knelt down by the chair and wrapped his arms around her and she whispered through her heartbreak that it was Marcus's eighteenth birthday. He had come of age in a medically induced coma. But then she wiped her eyes on the corner of her wrap and squared her shoulders. Jasper got to his feet and gave her arm a quick squeeze of comfort and fellowship and she smiled at him, her eyes distant, lost in other thoughts.

It was the closest he got to providing her with emotional support instead of practical help – but Jasper was happy.

The police were at a loose end. Singh was running out of leave. They each had a different preference for the murderer. Mohammad was convinced it was Marcus. Singh was sure it was Kian Min. Shukor thought that Ravi had tried to ensure his meal ticket by murdering the wealthy husband of his lover. But despite his best efforts, Shukor had not been able to find any evidence linking Ravi to the crime. And a motive, however persuasive, was not enough for an arrest, especially when the two senior policemen were both convinced that Ravi was too protective of his own skin to risk committing a murder.

Nobody was pointing a finger at Chelsea. Singh, because he acknowledged to himself he was prejudiced in her favour, Shukor because he took his lead from the inspector from Singapore and Mohammad because he could not face arresting the same woman twice. But they all acknowledged that having favourites was utterly irrelevant because they did not have any compelling evidence against any of them. The only suspect against whom they previously had a cut and dried case on the evidence of his confession – Jasper – was a free man. Motives abounded, but evidence was thin on the ground.

Mohammad even wondered out loud if the murderer could have been the proverbial stranger –perhaps scared off before he had robbed the body. Singh was dismissive of the possibility. For a man with as many enemies as Alan Lee to be finally bumped off by a stranger would require a divine providence with a sense of irony and that was not a possibility that Singh was prepared to give credence to – not even if it got Chelsea off the hook for good.

The police were not being idle. They had launched an appeal for witnesses again. The foot soldiers were sent to comb a wider area for the murder weapon. The Lee family home was searched once more as well as Marcus's locker at school and the library. Sharifah's flat was ransacked – although no one really thought she had anything to do with it. Their friends and acquaintances were questioned. Mohammad especially was convinced that Marcus, the wealthy son of a timber magnate, might be able to buy himself a gun but would lack the experience to cover his tracks adequately and they might be able to track down his supplier. But so far he had not been able to find even a whiff of evidence, perhaps, as Singh had suggested snidely, because there was none to find. Even Kian Min's offices and bachelor flat in Ampang were searched. Shukor had reported back that the apartment was modern, stylish and soulless, a perfect habitat for the man. But there was no physical evidence tying him to the murder.

'The thing is, the only really useful evidence would be the gun,' said Mohammad impatiently.

'And with a bit of time and a cool head it could be almost anywhere.'

Singh rubbed his eyes with his knuckles like a child. 'And hardly anyone with a television would throw the gun away within the vicinity of the crime scene – let alone with something useful on it like fingerprints.'