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- Herausgeber: Muswell Press
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Serie: An Inspector Low novel2
- Sprache: Englisch
Detective Inspector Stanley Low is having a bad day. His bipolar disorder is sabotaging yet another therapy session when two bodies are discovered at Marina Bay Sins, Singapore's most prestigious hotel: a murdered prostitute and a dead expatriate. Thrown back into the sordid underworld he desperately tried to escape, Low goes undercover in a city that refuses to acknowledge its dark side. Behind the gleaming facade of Asia's cleanest metropolis lies a corrupt world of gambling addiction, crime syndicates, international money laundering, immoral celebrities, and politicians on the take. Belligerent, bipolar, and brilliant, Low is a Chinese-Singaporean detective educated in London, with a foot in both cities and a mission to eradicate violent crime wherever he finds it. As he closes in on the truth behind the Marina Bay murders, he'll force Singapore to confront the uncomfortable questions it's been avoiding for far too long. Marina Bay Sins may be the sparkling embodiment of economic prosperity, but Low is about to expose the rot beneath the surface.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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MARINA BAY SINS
An Inspector Low Novel
Neil Humphreys
Contents
MARINA BAY SINS
Chapter 1
MADONNA pushed her cleaning trolley along the corridor and cursed. She hated one-night stands. They rarely left a tip and always made a mess. They knew they were only staying for one day. The sordid filth left behind wasn’t their concern. Swearing in Tagalog, she stopped outside room 4088. An ang moh and a prostitute had checked in the night before. She had seen them, giggling and fiddling, as they fumbled for the room key beneath the soft lighting. It was always the same with ang mohs and prostitutes; empty mini-bars and soiled sheets. Those girls let them do things that their wives never would. And they did them on Madonna’s sheets.
Biting her inner lip, she knocked on the door.
“Hello, housekeeping.”
She waited, listening for a response. She stood back impatiently. At her previous hotels, she always had an ear to the door. She knew immediately if the room was empty that way, but the Marina Bay Sands management did not tolerate such vulgar behaviour. Housemaids squeezed up against hotel room doors was an unseemly sight, unbecoming of such a reputable establishment. What guests got up to inside the rooms was of course their business.
“Hello, housekeeping. Is there anyone inside?”
Madonna had to call out three times before being allowed to enter. She looked at her watch. Check-out was an hour ago. These guys were not over-stayers. They were not even gamblers. They hadn’t dashed downstairs to the casino. He had obviously dashed home to the oblivious housewife and she had returned to the street. The last place they wanted to be seen together was inside a Marina Bay Sands hotel room.
“Hello, housekeeping. I’m here to clean the room. I’m opening the door now.”
Madonna swiped her card key and waited for the click. She pushed open the door. The room was only Deluxe, the cheapest available. She had 45 minutes to clean each room. She expected this one to take at least an hour.
The carpet was littered with empty mini-bottles, room service plates, bed sheets and underwear. But the smell was something else. Madonna sniffed. The odour wasn’t the usual leftover chicken rice and flat champagne. Eager to press on and forget about the stench, she busied herself with the carpet. Madonna picked up the stained duvet from the cluttered floor, rolled it into a ball and turned towards the sheets on the bed.
She opened her mouth, but her voice cracked. She dropped the duvet and covered her mouth to block the silence as tears ran over her fingers. She tried to move, but her frozen legs betrayed her. Finally she stepped forward, completely forgetting about the duvet. As her foot got tangled with it, she lost her balance and tripped, falling towards the bed. Her face brushed against a leg. She flew backwards in horror, crying hysterically, crawling blindly on her hands and knees towards the door. When she found the corridor, she found her voice. Madonna screamed and didn’t stop screaming until the police arrived.
*
Detective Inspector Stanley Low flicked the fake rubber plant. He loathed fake plants. They summed up his fake country. He lived in a fake country with fake plants in phony psychiatrists’ offices. He was supposed to get to his real feelings, find his real core. How the fuck was he supposed to do that sitting beside a fake plant?
Dr Tracy Lai watched Low flick her IKEA plant. She adjusted her skirt, checking that it still covered her knees. She was Chinese, an attractive woman for her age. With her long, straight, silky black hair and fondness for dressing for the boardroom, Lai had once been labelled a “MILF” by a patient with a colourful history of sexual deviancy. She was disturbed that she had found his description strangely comforting. She smiled at Low and spoke softly.
“You don’t like my plant, do you?”
“No, I don’t like your plant.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because it tells me you’re lazy lah, that’s why. It tells me you heck care about the environment. It tells me you cannot even take the time to water a plant once a day. It tells me this is why Singapore is so fucked up. We’re a plastic country now, basket.”
“It’s interesting that you lapse into Singlish when you get excited, animated or aggressive. Why do you think that is?”
“Oh, I don’t know, because I’m Singaporean? I mean, really? Is this where we’re at now? My speech patterns? If I speak standard English, I’m cured. If I speak Singlish, I’m fucked up? Is that the general psychiatric diagnosis?”
“No, you know your diagnosis. You have mild bipolar disorder with aggressive tendencies and we’re working on that through the treatment and these sessions.”
“No, you say I have bipolar. I say my job makes me angry sometimes and I get pissed off when people around me are always talking cock. Come on lah.”
“You have violent, episodic mood swings. You have detailed periods of prolonged energy and creativity and …”
“That’s what gets me through a case.”
“And you have admitted that there are days when you refuse to get out of bed or talk to anyone.”
Low smiled. “I’m an old-school detective what. You think my job is easy, is it? You think you could do my job is it?”
“No, I’m not saying that at all. I cannot begin to imagine what your job must be like.”
“No, you can’t.”
“But I am saying that your condition both helps and hinders your line of work. I agree it must help the investigative process, but you were referred to me because your superiors felt your relationships with your colleagues were being compromised by your behaviour.”
“Wah lau, you don’t listen is it? Look at me. I’m a skinny Chinaman. I look like a gangster, so I play the gangster. My bosses give me greasy hair, a white vest and some money and I go play Chinese gangster for six months. My kakis are pimps, prostitutes, gamblers, ah longs, kelong match fixers and a mad bastard with a knife.”
Low lifted his shirt to expose a line of ragged stitches across his torso. He glared at the psychiatrist. She chose not to speak, but the slight shuffle in the chair told the inspector all he needed to know.
“I know about your injuries. I read about them when you were referred to me,” Lai said firmly, sitting up straight, reasserting control.
“So what do you want me to say?”
“I don’t want you to say anything if you don’t want to.”
Low’s smile came out like a snarl. He sat back in his chair and opened his legs wide. Wearing shorts and a scruffy T-shirt, his physical belligerence was a practiced performance, but Lai had seen the routine too many times before. Low then sat up and leaned forwards. He stared at his psychiatrist.
“Look, I know that you’re only doing your best for me, OK? And if you say I have bipolar, OK, I have bipolar. I will say to you that I am a First Class degree holder, a government scholar from the London School of Economics who has spent much of my working life pretending to be an illiterate gangster, but OK, I have bipolar. What would you like me to do now?”
“What would you like me to do?”
Low slumped back into his chair, sighed and examined Lai’s office. The clean, sparse room was practically lifted from an IKEA catalogue.
“Well, you can get rid of that fucking plant.”
Detective Inspector James Tan nodded to a pair of uniformed officers as he passed them in the grand, opulent lobby of the Marina Bay Sands Hotel. The police presence was minimal, presumably at the hotel’s request. Like Singapore, the integrated resort was obsessed with calm exteriors. Little publicity was second only to no publicity. The casino buried within the bowels of the island’s biggest ATM machine planned to generate around 0.8 per cent of the entire country’s GDP in the near future. Police and publicity were bad for business. Marina Bay Sands courted neither.
As Tan passed beneath the baffling post-modern stainless steel installation that looked to him like a million wired coat hangers tied together, he thought about the recent cases around the resorts. There were always one or two, more around Chinese New Year, obviously, but this one was different. This one was messy. He was in no mood to lead another investigation and planned to palm this one off as soon as possible. But there were drugs involved. There always were in these glitzy, grotesque houses of hypocrisy.
Standing outside room 4088, Tan grunted a hello at a couple of plain-clothes officers he didn’t recognise. Hearing his boss’ voice, Detective Sergeant Charles Chan made his way through the crowded hotel room to join Tan in the corridor.
“There are drugs everywhere, boss, everywhere.”
Tan gestured for his breathless colleague to keep his voice down. A couple of hotel housemaids hovered nearby with their cleaning trolleys.
“Hello, ladies, don’t you have somewhere to be?” asked the portly policeman, kindly but firmly.
He straightened his crisp white shirt, making a point of smoothing the sides and tucking them inside the waistband of his freshly pressed black trousers, then followed his younger colleague.
Everyone in the hotel room was staring at the naked body. The Caucasian male was spreadeagled across the bed. Tan thought of that da Vinci drawing, the man stretched out with extra arms and legs. The corpse’s arms and legs almost reached the corners of the double bed.
“It’s an ang moh, boss,” said Chan.
“Yes, I can see that, Charlie.”
“It’s Charles, sir, please call me Charles. The other officers make fun of me when you call me Charlie.”
“Wah lau, not now ah, Charlie?”
Tan sidestepped the rubbish on the carpet to move closer to the bed. The cocaine was everywhere, on the bedside table and across the bedspread. The pillow and sheets had damp stains, certainly saliva on the pillow, possibly semen on the sheets. Two empty pill bottles were on the carpet beside the bed, next to an empty vodka bottle. Four other uniformed officers lingered in the background, waiting for their instructions. Tan sighed. They were typical Singaporean civil servants, always waiting to be led. Chan scribbled notes in a pad, writing furiously, always opting for quantity over quality.
Tan leaned over the bed and examined the corpse. The ang moh was obviously in his late thirties and had worked out. His biceps and pecs were well defined. Tan looked down at his own protruding stomach. His beer belly had appeared shortly after National Service and he made little attempt to conceal it. He was well-fed and contented. His plump gut was a sign of affluence.
The dead man had been vain, too. The pubic hair beneath his belly button had been shaved, as had his testicles. It wasn’t the first corpse with waxed testicles either. Tan struggled to understand his own world. He reached the foot of the bed and grimaced.
“Hey, Charlie … DS Chan.”
Chan cringed as the other officers chuckled.
“It’s Charles.”
“Where is that smell coming from?”
“From the guy lah.”
“Don’t talk cock. Cannot smell like that so fast.”
“Can what, after suicide. He’s dead already.”
“Wah, did you work that out all by yourself? Go get me the maid who found this guy and the hotel manager.”
“Yeah, I tried already. But the hotel staff said he’s very busy at the moment. They are at full capacity. Got the Singapore Grand Prix coming.”
As he crouched over the corpse, Tan glared up at the box-ticking rookie. The image was an incongruous one for the younger detective as his boss was still examining the dead man’s genitalia.
“OK, OK, I try again, I’ll ask him to hurry.”
The inspector stood up suddenly.
“No, no, don’t ask him. Get him. We’re the Singapore Police Force, I’m the investigating officer and I want to go for makan already. Tell him to come now or I’ll conduct the interview at the police station. And I’ll issue a press release. OK or not?”
“Yes, boss.”
“Hey, where are these guys’ details?” Tan shouted after the departing detective.
“Oh, I left them on that table by the balcony.”
The inspector pointed towards the closed sliding door that led to the balcony. “Has that been opened at all?”
“No, boss, locked when we came in.”
“Well, that’s a possible point of entry.”
“We’re on the 40th floor, boss.”
“Eh, don’t be a smart arse, OK. Balconies can climb one. Check who was staying in the rooms along this floor and maybe above and below this room. Now, where’s the ang moh’s stuff?”
“On that table.”
Tan ignored the wallet, phone and keys and went straight for the passport. Through the balcony door, he watched the cranes piece together the new developments to the right of Gardens by the Bay. Imperious monuments to money, they all jostled for a place in the South-east Asian sunshine. Manufactured gardens of today squeezed alongside glassy cash cows of tomorrow all built on reclaimed land. The only thing natural about the sweeping vista was the South China Sea, but Tan admired the view nonetheless. He couldn’t afford a view like that, not on his salary, but he was proud of it. It was a uniquely Singaporean view; modern, micromanaged and artificial.
He was surprised that the passport cover was Australian. With the shaved testicles, the inspector expected the corpse to be European—French or Italian perhaps. He found the ID page. The poor bastard was handsome. He was actually almost 40. His name was Richard Davie.
Tan pointed at the nearest officer, jabbing the passport in his direction.
“Hey hello, call CPIB. Get me Detective Inspector Stanley Low. Now.”
Chapter 2
LOW watched the ERP gantry crawl towards him on the East Coast Parkway. The ERP. Singapore’s electronic road pricing system set up to introduce congestion charges and minimise traffic. It didn’t minimise traffic, but it maximised revenue for the Government. Even the other police officers openly called it ‘Everyday Rob People’.
The three towers of Marina Bay Sands crept closer, moving across the left side of Low’s windscreen. Three packs of cards standing tall and ready to deal out fortunes for the country. Low had been there before, but as Ah Lian, never as himself. He went with Tiger. Someone owed the old ah long money. Someone always owed Tiger money. Low smiled at the memory. He enjoyed playing the gangster, the blur apprentice loan shark, far more than he would ever care to admit.
A BMW cut across the front of Low’s Toyota Prius, barely missing the paintwork along his right wing. Low honked loudly and repeatedly. The young Chinese driver gave him the middle finger. That was just what Low needed after the exorbitant session with Dr Lai—proper therapy.
Taking advantage of the traffic jam, Low cut into the left-hand lane before pulling up sharply beside the BMW. He put down his window and grinned at the Chinese guy, who was at least 10 years younger than Low and earned 10 times the salary, judging by the obvious car and the outsized horse prancing across his left nipple.
“Hey, man, what’s with all the aggression and the middle finger?”
The BMW driver lowered his front passenger seat window.
“Fuck you,” he hissed in heavily-accented English.
Low laughed. The driver was from Mainland China.
“Is that the best you can do, really? Has your English not improved at all since you arrived? OK, shit head, we’ll do it your way.”
Low applied the hand brake, stepped out of his car and strolled brazenly across the expressway. He tapped his police ID card on the window. He watched the man shrivel before him, disappearing into the leathery seat.
Low gestured for him to lower his driver seat window. Other cars honked their horns continuously. He turned and waved his police ID card at them all.
“Sit still, be patient and shut the fuck up,” he said, smiling. He was really enjoying himself now.
“OK, OK, sorry, ah,” replied the driver. “Sorry ah, officer, very stressed one, late for meeting already.”
Low leaned into the window. “Wah, your Singlish not bad, ah? Yes, I understand that. I can see why you did that. You think you damn garang one, cut across lanes, go past me, but the finger thing, that was too much. You are basically saying ‘fuck you’, and then, you actually said ‘fuck you’, which you really cannot do, not to a Singaporean police officer. This isn’t China, or Malaysia, or Indonesia. You can’t give me the middle finger. You can’t make this finger and then give me 50 bucks. This is Singapore. And here, I fuck you.”
Low called a colleague at CPIB, gave the driver’s personal and car registration details and asked for a complete background check: visa status, employment, property, investments, everything. He’d find something. He always did.
Chan struggled to get a word in with Pierre Durand. The hotel manager intimidated the young detective. Tall and handsome, the grey-haired Frenchman had a neutral Eurozone accent that was impossible to pin down but spoke of confidence with every crisp consonant and narrow vowel. He made box-ticking Singaporeans like the perspiring officer nervous, and he knew it.
“Look, I understand you have a report to complete, officer, but we are running at full occupancy and we really need to clear this room and prepare it for our new guests this evening,” Durand said, rudely peering over Chan’s shoulder to examine the horrid mess the other officers were making in his hotel room.
“Someone died in your room last night.”
Durand decided to look at the naive detective, if only to patronise him.
“People die in hotels all the time, every day. We have more than 2,500 rooms here. They are usually always occupied and the guests change frequently. We have more than 90 per cent room occupancy; it’s 100 per cent around major events and conferences. So we have tens of thousands of people going in and out of these rooms all the time, people of all shapes, sizes and ages. Of course, people die in hotel rooms.”
“Well, this gentleman died in here last night—or possibly this morning—and we need to find out how he died.”
“Judging by the empty pill bottles and the substances found around the bed, I should have thought that was obvious.”
Tan had heard enough. He had listened to Chan’s soft interview whilst examining the empty pill bottles on the coffee table. There had been 14 in each bottle, Valium, 10 mg, more than enough to kill a man, more than enough to kill a mammoth. He avoided the clothes, bottles and plates strewn across the carpet and joined the two men in the hotel corridor.
“Shall we leave the deductive reasoning to the police officers?” the investigating officer interjected.
Durand stared at the tubby, unkempt Chinese inspector. He often thought that the worst aspect of running a Singaporean hotel was dealing with bumbling Singaporean officials.
“I’m sorry, we haven’t been introduced. My name is Pierre Durand. I am the manager of Marina Bay Sands. Would you like my name card?”
“No, I’d like you to answer our questions.”
“I’m trying to be as helpful as I can.”
“Please lah, don’t waste my time. You are trying to get us out of your hotel room, so you can squeeze more gamblers into your hotel tonight.”
“No, I would like to settle this matter as quickly as possible so, yes, I can offer the new room guests the discretion and privacy that they value at Marina Bay Sands.”
“Wah lau, you guys really are full of shit.”
“I beg your …”
“You’ve got a dead ang moh in there with cocaine everywhere. So please, don’t bullshit me with your talk about privacy, luxury, quality. My narcotics guys come here so many times, I should put my desk inside your casino. Now, answer his questions, before I cordon off the corridor for the rest of the day and get my uniformed officers to knock on every one of your 2,500 stylo-milo rooms.”
Chan cleared his throat and said, “Now the maid said she saw two people go into the room yesterday—a Caucasian man and a Chinese woman—some time yesterday afternoon, but you say Richard Davie checked in alone.”
“That’s according to the staff on the counter. They are reasonably sure that he checked in alone.”
“Reasonably sure?” enquired Tan. “You just said you’ve got 10,000 people in and of this place every week. How can they be certain?”
“He … er … he wanted to pay by cash. He insisted on it. You see, the girls on the counter remembered that because you know, well, because …”
“He didn’t want his wife to see the credit card statement and realise he’d been sleeping with a prostitute. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but he had to give a credit card for anything in the room right?”
“For the incidentals? Yes, of course.”
“Right, give us all the credit card details please.”
Durand shifted the weight between his feet uneasily. He was aware that a couple of Filipino cleaners were lingering in the background, pretending to inspect the plush, leaf-patterned brown carpet in the corridor. As he caught his reflection in one of the corridor’s subtle mirrors, he felt a bead of sweat trickle down the back of his neck, which irritated him. Perspiration was an unprofessional image, even in Singapore’s equatorial climate. He was annoyed a little with himself, but more with the fat, sweaty inspector.
“Can’t one of my staff do that? Why do you need me to collect the man’s credit card details?”
Tan took a step towards the fidgety Frenchman.
“Because I can and because you are very irritating. Just as I can also say you’re not having anyone in this room tonight.”
Schooled in hospitality at Paris’ finest hotels, Durand found their lack of civility and extraordinary ignorance exasperating. Who paid these imbeciles their derisory salaries every month? Where did they think the money was coming from? The Frenchman had a greater grasp of Singapore’s basic cash flow than these bumbling gendarmes. He stared, open-mouthed, at both men, waiting for a sign; a reaction to suggest that this was all a misunderstanding; some earthy humour to distract from their distressing job.
“Now, look, you can’t do this. I don’t want to do this, but if necessary I will have no choice but to call …”
Tan’s mood changed suddenly. He looked menacingly into the Frenchman’s flawless face.
“Call who? Who are you going to call? Ghostbusters? Were you going to drop names then? You think you can drop names because you work for MBS, is it? Cannot be so blur right? You cannot be crazy to drop names to a detective inspector at the Central Narcotics Bureau. You weren’t going to do that? Cannot be right? But it’s OK. I can drop names also. I can say Singapore Police Force. Maybe it’s not as sexy as your name, maybe you know a towkay, very big gambler one, maybe you know some politicians, maybe even a minister. But they will not support you now, not when it involves the casino …”
“We are not the casino,” Durand interjected quickly.
Tan’s eyes bulged. “Did I look like I was finished? You are right. Your name is a big name. Marina Bay Sands is a big name. But my name can issue a press release in one hour saying you got a dead body with illegal substances all over your nice hotel room facing Marina Bay, OK or not? You want to drop any big-shot names?”
“No, no, I was just going to …”
“Get me the credit card details and then bring me your eye in the sky.”
Tan pointed at the round, black orb discreetly placed on the ceiling over Durand’s shoulder. Without looking up at the CCTV camera behind him, the Marina Bay Sands manager scuffed his polished loafer against some fluff on the carpet and nodded. The camera was far too close to room 4088 for his liking.
Low squeezed his hybrid into a VIP parking space between a Bentley and a Ferrari and slammed the door shut. A hefty concierge wearing an ill-fitting dark uniform shuffled towards the inspector. Shimmery metallic flaps on a sculpture fluttered behind him in the breeze, offering an incongruous sight. There were 260,000 of these flaps, knitted together by an artist to provide a facade, to deflect attention, to hide the resort’s unsightly bits. They defined Marina Bay Sands. The glamour was an illusion. Everything was flaps and mirrors.
“Hey, you, cannot park there ah, cannot, that one reserved for …”
“Me.”
Low turned and flashed his police ID card at the puffing hotel employee.
“Ah, you police, is it?”
“No, I’m a children’s entertainer. I just forgot the balloons. How do I get to the 40th floor?”
“Which tower?”
“The Tower of London. Don’t talk cock now, which tower.”
“Got three towers, sir.”
Low sighed and checked the message on his phone. “I want room 4088, it overlooks the gardens, not the city.”
The concierge’s spotless white gloves pointed towards some sliding doors where a tour party from China were listening impatiently to a guide explaining in Mandarin where the underpass to the casino was. “Go through there,” the concierge said. “Walk straight to the other side of the lobby, past the gift shop. Take the Tower 1 lift, the one next to the concierge counter. Get off at the 40th floor. But must need hotel room key to press button, one.”
“You think I’m staying here, is it?”
“But lift will not open without hotel room key.”
“OK, I’ll speak to security inside. Thanks man, you’ve been really helpful. Make sure no one steals my car, ah.”
The concierge swore under his breath, pulled his white gloves tighter and then abused some children for running across the taxi stand. He felt better.
Low spotted his old friend Tan speaking to a couple of hotel maids in the corridor. The old inspector had gained weight. That was the trouble with CNB work in Singapore; too much paperwork and not enough drugs. The CPIB was different. Corruption was a treadmill. Match-fixing alone kept Low on the streets. And then there were the internal cases, former bosses, the stat board tenders, the religious groups siphoning church funds and the sex-for-grades and the sex-for-tenders and the sex-for-contracts. He was buried in sex. No one had babies in Singapore because they were too busy having sex. And then there was the internal investigation, the undercover work to find the corrupt within the Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau. He was ordered to clean out his own house. He lost sleep, friends and dignity in one case. He couldn’t remember the order. He didn’t want to remember the order.
“Wah, you very fat ah,” Low shouted, rubbing Tan’s stomach. “Too much desk work, is it?”
Tan gestured for Chan to escort the maids along the corridor and ushered Low away from room 4088 and prying eyes.
“Are you sure it’s him?” Low asked.
Tan’s voice was low and controlled. “Yeah, definitely, his passport is there, his IC. It’s Richard Davie, your Australian guy.”
Low checked again that no one else was listening. “He’s not my guy, lah. He was just giving me data, insider stuff, betting patterns, he wasn’t one of them. He was a straight, typical ang moh, loved the expat life, shagged some Singaporeans, but he wasn’t one of them, didn’t have the balls for that.”
Tan chuckled. “Wah, how you know ah? He definitely never had the balls. Come and see.”
The elder inspector guided his old friend past the uniformed officers outside the door and into the hotel room. The police were chatting and squinting through the balcony door, looking down at the container ships dotting the Singaporean skyline, queuing up for the port that never slept. They were obviously bored, no longer interested in the corpse. Low walked around the bed slowly, stepping across the sheets that were draped around its four sides. Davie’s body was already turning blue. His Christ-like pose was unusual, but not disturbing. He was still in one piece at least. When he encountered fresh corpses, Low always thought of his illegal bookie found on Pulau Ubin. By the time he was discovered by one of the island’s residents at the back of her kampong, his remains were covered in red ants. Most of his face and torso had been eaten by wild boars. His arm was found weeks later in the boggy Chek Jawa swamp by a honeymooning couple from Germany.
Low pointed at Davie’s scrotum. The other officers in the room laughed.
“You see, I told you, right,” Tan cried. “He shaved his balls.”
“Well, I did not expect that. And he was Australian.”
“That’s why.”
“Unbelievable. The Aussies are shaving their balls now?”
Low squatted beside a sofa opposite the bed and scanned the room. He took in the empty pill bottles, Valium, the usual escape route, the vodka empties, the half-finished chicken rice, the semen stains, the shorts, the T-shirts and the underwear on the carpet. They obviously had sex immediately.
“What’s this?”
A piece of red silk was poking out from beneath a sheet hanging off the end of the bed. Low gently lifted the sheet.
“So no one saw these then?” The red silk knickers had a frilly black trim and were soiled. “Why would she leave without her panties?”
“Hey, come on, you know these girls lah,” Tan said. “These ones not Geylang girls, these are MBS girls. These ones always have extra panties, must change each time, cannot meet a new client with dirty panties from the last one, right or not?”
“Yeah, maybe.”
Low wandered into the spacious, marble-covered bathroom. The smell was stronger nearer the bathroom. Tan watched him go as a breathless Chan shouldered his way past the two officers at the door and waved his notepad at his boss.
“Sir, we’ve found the CCTV footage of them going into the hotel room. We haven’t found the footage of her leaving yet, but I’ve got them checking for it now, sir. We’ll find her.”
“She’s in here,” Low muttered.
All the officers in the room hurried past the forgotten corpse of Richard Davie. Standing in front of a storage rack between the bathroom and the bedroom, Low held up the top cover of a suitcase. A crumpled woman’s body was curled up inside. For a moment, Chan thought she looked peaceful in a foetal position. Then he saw her eyes, still open and frozen in terror. Her tongue was hanging out. And then he saw her bloodied and bruised neck.
He just made it to the sink before throwing up.
Chapter 3
PROFESSOR Chong was furious. He had missed both the end of the musical and the gin and tonic that he had ordered earlier at the Sands Theatre bar during the intermission. Marina Bay Sands had been a godsend to the pathologist. The musicals took him away from all that murder and suicide and sleaze.
The sleaze was the most nauseating aspect of his work. His Singapore crime scenes were rarely ghoulish or calculated. They were generally haphazard, spontaneous and clumsy. Serial killers were the stuff of CSI and American gun-nuts. Singapore specialised in decapitated motorcyclists and drunken Bangladeshis killing each other with beer bottles in puerile arguments over who should pay for the beer. And suicides. Singapore had so many suicides; more than most if truth be told. The island of rat racers laughed off their lowly position in the annual happiness index. Straw polls in the mainstream media usually disputed the research, but Chong’s findings were more scientific. He counted their body parts in the car parks beneath apartment blocks.
When the casinos went up, the bodies came down. Chong couldn’t prove that of course. He had no intention of trying, but he had examined them all—heartlanders who left their HDB flat on a baccarat table, love-struck Filipino helpers who handed their money over to disreputable boyfriends, the mainlanders who blew their savings over Chinese New Year—Chong had examined all their corpses back at the lab.
He heard Tan’s booming voice, so he moved quickly along the rows of mortuary drawers before stopping at a tray with “R. Davie” written on a white card. He pulled out the tray and then moved to the tray beside it; the one without a name scribbled on a white card.
“Well, fat man, what have you got.”
Chong ignored Tan’s rude greeting. They had worked together for years. Their paths had first crossed at Toa Payoh Block 11 back in 1981. Tan was still in uniform and Chong was a student shadowing the forensic pathologists. They were kids back then, rookies largely ignored by their superiors, but their attention to detail impressed each other. They became firm friends, and traded insults at crime scenes and mortuaries to underline that fact.
Tan was a strait-laced family man, a Chinese conservative and a fiercely proud patriot. Chong was gay and an effete socialite, but Tan was extraordinarily proud of the success of his oldest professional friend. Chong was the most respected pathologist in Singapore, if not the region, a highly sought-after public speaker and a bon vivant beyond compare. Tan treated him like a brother. His squad members knew not to make archaic homophobic jokes in either man’s presence. They waited for both men to leave the room.
“I’ll tell you what I haven’t got,” hollered Chong, his voice echoing around the cold, bleak mortuary. “I haven’t got a gin and tonic in my hand after giving a standing ovation at the Sands Theatre. You’ve dragged me away from a musical for this, you know. And it wasn’t a bad musical either, very good costumes, the book was patchy—didn’t come close to Jersey Boys—but the lyrics were top notch.”
“How does it compare with Oliver?”
“Oh, don’t be silly, man. Nothing compares to Oliver. There’ll never be a song as jaunty as Consider Yourself and there’ll be never be a performance that’ll make me weep like Nancy belting out As Long As He Needs Me. I watch it every Christmas and cry every time. Who’s this skinny chap?”
Chong prodded a manicured fingernail towards the officer standing beside his kaki. He was tallish and ruggedly handsome for a Chinese guy, Chong thought, but far too skinny to be taken seriously. He looked like a trainee gangster, the sort of scrawny runt that usually ended up laid out on one of Chong’s trays with his name scribbled on a white card.
“This is Inspector Low and this is Professor Chong.”
The two men shook hands quickly.
“I know all about your work, it’s an honour,” Low said sincerely. “You’ve been involved with every major case since I was in National Service.”
“And now you immediately make me feel like an old man. It’s strange that you’ve reached the rank of detective inspector and we’ve never met before. Which is it? Drugs like my tubby friend here? Vice? Murder?”
Low grinned and took a step towards the two corpses beneath the two sheets. Tan gestured towards the younger detective.
“This one ah, doesn’t like to blow trumpets. He covers all three. He’s CPIB, mostly undercover; not bad this one, thinks he’s a gangster. Look at him.”
“Yes, he does look rather malnourished.”
“You remember the Tiger case; destroyed the gambling syndicate.”
“Of course.”
“That was this one lah.”
Chong nodded approvingly. “That was a big corruption case wasn’t it?”
“Not bad ah,” Tan continued. “Anyway, I ask him to come down because he knows one of these guys.”
“Which one?”
Low stood over Richard Davie. “This one.”
“Ah, please do not touch the sheet, we cannot risk contamination. Keep your gloves on and touch nothing.”
“This isn’t my first rodeo.”
Chong drew back the sheet slowly and glanced up at Low. “Don’t those cowboys wear gloves when they take the bull by the horns? He’s touchy isn’t he?”
“You’ve got him on one of his good days,” Tan sighed. “What have you got so far?”
“Well, if you look, there are no visible marks or bruises on most of his body. He had been dead for several hours before the maid found him, around 12 in all likelihood. He’s all stiff from rigor mortis.”
Chong pointed at the torso as Low and Tan both made notes.
“The tox report has yet to come back of course, but the condition of the body and the absence of any distinguishable marks or features … oh, apart from the shaved scrotum, did you boys pick that up? He was Australian, right? You wouldn’t think that of Australian men would you? There appears to be some slight swelling there, which may well suggest drugs.”
“Yeah, there was enough cocaine around,” Tan interrupted. “But you’re thinking heroin as well?”
“Maybe. Anyway, at this very early preliminary stage, it does look like suicide, judging by the empty Valium bottles that were found beside his bed. How do they get hold of such quantities? I don’t know. OK, now for the good news … look at this.”
Chong lifted Davie’s right arm. There were scratches and light bruising on his hands and forearms.
“The other arm is just the same.” Chong sighed. “She was brave. She put up a fight. Even though she might have been drunk, she still tried to put up a fight. She did not go quietly. She was one brave lady. But the scratches are all centred around the hands, wrists and forearms, suggesting that was all she could reach.”
“She was strangled from behind,” Low commented.
“Quite possibly.”
Chong brushed past the two inspectors, his body language making the hierarchical structure clear; his mortuary, his kingdom. He pulled back the sheet of the female victim. The swelling around the woman’s neck had increased; it was black and blue and bulging. Her eyes were still open and staring at Low, yearning, pleading. She was not granted the peaceful, controlled death of Davie. She died scared and in heartbreaking pain.
“I say she was probably drunk, or at the very least mildly intoxicated, because of the empty bottles found in the room obviously, the strong smell of alcohol and because the poor girl didn’t have the strength to put up that much of a fight. In similar cases, stranglers are found with deep wounds in their forearms, fingernail marks like train tracks from here to here.” Chong ran his finger along his forearm. “The most depressing aspect of this job is discovering the inner strength that poor dying souls find when they are desperate to cling on to life. I have seen teeth puncture wounds reach the bone and chunks of flesh ripped from the arm.”
Chong placed his hands around his own neck and mimed biting his wrist. “But this girl tried, she really tried, as you could see from his arms, but she tired very quickly. I suspect he got her drunk first.”
Low cleared his throat and nodded towards the victim’s vagina. “Was she raped?”
Chong pulled the sheet back to the corpse’s ankles. He pointed at her genitalia. “On the contrary, no, but they certainly had sex, possibly more than once. There were traces of semen around his penis and in her vagina, mouth and anus. That, along with the injuries being sustained exclusively around the neck, would suggest at this stage that she was a willing participant in the sex acts. She was not coerced.”
Low was puzzled. “Couldn’t he have raped her whilst he was strangling her?”
“It’s possible. Anything can be just about possible. But how do you get someone to perform oral sex whilst you are strangling them?”
“Fucking hell,” Low muttered. “I knew this guy. He wasn’t … I can’t believe it. I mean, I don’t even know why.”
“Even anal sex rape can be difficult without pinning or tying the victim in some way. There are no physical marks to suggest that any excessive force was applied to the arms, the wrists, the hands, the thighs—the areas commonly vulnerable in rape attacks. Though I have to say, I’m at a loss to explain why it always seems to be the anus these days.”
“Too much pornography,” Low said. “I meet these girls all the time. They all say the same. The locals and the expats all want the same thing. They want what they see in the videos. They want what their wives won’t give them.”
Tan was eager to leave. He liked Low and really admired his work ethic. He swam deep inside Singapore’s underbelly, but at times sounded like he was drowning. Tan always kept his head afloat, always kept kicking. He refused to stop treading water. At every mortuary, every crime scene, his head stayed above the stench. He wouldn’t sink into the abyss. He loved his country and didn’t want Low’s downbeat pessimism to convince him otherwise.
“So, Chong, what do you think?”
“What do I think? I think I’m going back to where I should be in the first place, have a couple of gin and tonics at Ku De Ta and savour that cool Straits breeze. I think I’ve got to buy another ticket to catch the last act properly, without my bloody phone buzzing repeatedly, and I think you already know what I’m thinking. They had sex several times and got drunk and high. This one strangled this one and then this one, still in shock, killed himself with a Valium overdose. He obviously didn’t have the shaved balls to do what you’re going to have to do.”
“What’s that?”
“Tell his wife and daughter that he was booking hotel rooms at Marina Bay Sands to have anal sex with a Singaporean prostitute.”
“But why stick her in the suitcase first? What’s the point?”
“He panicked,” Low reasoned. “Remember the body parts killer, late nineties, ang moh from the UK, chopped up the tourists and stuffed the evidence in a suitcase? You know how many body parts have popped up in the Singapore River over the years. Davie was going to dump her body. And then he changed his mind. It might have been the family. He could’ve thought about his family and panicked, taken the coward’s way out. I’m not sure if that’s a good enough reason to kill yourself though.”
Tan nodded solemnly. “It would be if you were married to my wife.”
Chapter 4
LOW read the sign behind the pretty counter girl’s shoulder. Sports Watch. We specialise in sports data and analysis.
