The Betel Nut Tree Mystery Read online

  Two days later it was still raining. The storm was over but plump drops were falling, their steady drumming on the roof almost musical.

  I had pulled my desk and typewriter away from the wall where the paint was showing damp patches. It was worse across the road where brown water pooled in the construction site of the new police headquarters. It should have been completed at least a year ago but it looked like there would be more delays.

  Parshanti had come to visit me at the station. This suited me since it was another slow morning. Even criminals have a break during the monsoon season. Petty crime takes second place when the canals are full of fat fish, drowsy jungle fowl are easily caught, and durians and mangoes are ripening on the trees.

  ‘If you had been there, you would have seen it was just a joke!’ Parshanti was sulky because I wouldn’t walk to the hotel with her ‘just to look’ at the Christmas decorations. Parshanti Shankar was my best friend but there were times when I wanted to smack her. I yawned instead. It was the kind of weather that sends children out in search of tadpoles and puts grown-ups to sleep.

  ‘I’m so bored,’ Parshanti said.

  She tossed aside the latest Weekend World she had brought over from her father’s shop. I picked it up and put it safely in a drawer. I had already read the latest Pip’s Squeaks, but I wanted to go over it again.

  ‘Pip’ mocked moral hypocrisy, saying the domination of King Edward by Mrs Simpson perfectly reflected current relations between England and America. The column had so much high-society insider gossip from both sides of the Atlantic that I had once wondered if the playboy prince might not himself be the author. But not after I’d read Pip’s claim that Mrs Simpson’s control over Edward came from sexual practices she had learned in a Chinese brothel. Surely no man could write such things about the woman he loved. Even in jest.

  ‘Couldn’t you get your handsome boss to hire me too? He could start a women’s department. I’m sure I could do what you do.’ Parshanti poised her fingers over the typewriter on my desk. ‘I could learn to do this. And I could use forty-five dollars a month. Dash it, I could use the seventy cents a day I’d get working in a factory! What are you supposed to be doing now?’

  ‘I was going upstairs to check if the rainwater buckets need emptying. Do you want to do that?’

  ‘I’d have to get a suit made if I come to work here. My mother has a Simplicity pattern for a slim-cut skirt that would suit me perfectly. Won’t you ask the chief inspector for me? Please? We’d be colleagues. I could have a desk next to yours and it would be like being back in school.’

  ‘I’ll ask him once you learn to type,’ I offered. ‘You can use the typewriter pad I drew up. And if you want to study shorthand, I’ll give you the title of the book I used. The Mission Centre has two copies.’

  Parshanti made a face at me. ‘I’ve had more than enough of studying, thank you.’

  Parshanti was in what I called her ‘society’ mode, with any sense she had buried under a thick layer of silliness. She thought it was fashionable to flirt. I didn’t see the point. Though I had to admit it won over men – even police officers who should know better.

  Dr Shankar, Parshanti’s tall dark Indian father, and Mrs Shankar, her short plump Scottish mother, had somehow produced between them a Mata Hari. Parshanti was tall and slim, with honey-coloured skin, huge long-lashed eyes and thick curly hair usually pulled back into a thick plait but brushed loose over her shoulders for social occasions. Like wedding rehearsals, apparently.

  The way men looked at Parshanti made me feel even shorter and more handicapped than I was. Sometimes, so that I could go on being best friends with her, I had to remind myself that she couldn’t type or take shorthand and envied my ‘real job’.

  ‘Why were you at the wedding rehearsal?’

  ‘I was there for Mam. She’s making the bride’s wedding gown and going-away dress and they asked her to check none of the decorations would clash.’

  Mrs Shankar was a skilled seamstress popular with fashionable ang moh women. She could copy anything in the fashion magazines her husband brought in. Dr Rajan Shankar was an Edinburgh-trained doctor and surgeon, but Westerners in Singapore did not trust an Indian doctor and locals did not trust Western medicine so Dr Shankar operated a pharmacy that sold magazines and Kodak film, and developed photographs in a darkroom that was also Mrs Shankar’s sewing room. Mrs Shankar’s dresses were worn to all the top social events in Singapore, though being married to an Indian meant she was never invited to any.

  ‘Shanti, you hate sewing!’

  ‘No difference. Mam has no time to change anything but it got me in. You should have come with me! We could have told them you’re a dressmaker’s assistant’s assistant. It was full of people who don’t know them. Su, it’s going to be the event of the year, the most interesting thing that’s ever happened here! The hotel ballroom is enormous – they’ve put coloured streamers on a whole wall of fans and a row of Christmas trees in the corridor!

  ‘And it wasn’t even really a rehearsal,’ Parshanti looked dreamy, ‘more like a party. I didn’t see the bride but she wouldn’t be in her dress anyway. Mam’s still working on it. We tried the food for the reception and it was super top-notch! When I get married I want my reception to be at the Farquhar.’

  Parshanti might have found it fun but I didn’t see the point of a party unless I could write about it.

  To be honest, there wasn’t much point to most of my life right then. Until last year, staying at school long enough to get my General Cambridge Certificate had been my main goal. The ladies who ran the school at the Mission Centre talked about the GCC as if it were the Holy Grail. But when you get your grail home and find nothing changes, don’t you wonder if it’s really holy?

  Parshanti and I had been among the first five girls in Singapore to take the General Cambridge exam. But what good had it done us? I knew I wanted to do more with my life than fetch coffee and transcribe wireless communications. And Parshanti only wanted to get married.

  Parshanti’s parents were willing to pay the fees for her to attend a teacher-training course. They even said that if Parshanti or her brother wanted to go to university they would find the money somehow, but she wasn’t interested.

  Sometimes I was so jealous of Parshanti, with her brilliant father and her loud, cheerful and occasionally foul-mouthed mother – but, to be honest, I was jealous of most people with parents.

  After my parents had died, fortune-tellers advised my grandmother to send me far away or put me down a well. Otherwise the bad luck I carried as an orphan and polio victim would infect the rest of the Chen family. Instead, she enrolled me in the mission school to see if the Christian God could counteract my inherited bad luck. That was how I became the first member of my family to go to English school.

  I knew how lucky I was. I knew I was only alive because Ah Ma had broken traditional rules, which made it easier for me to bend and break rules myself. Please don’t get me wrong, I like rules. Rules make life easier. The problem is, everyone follows different ones, sometimes without even being aware of it.

  What I really wanted was to be a lady journalist like Henrietta Stackpole, who is by far the most interesting character in The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. That the woman who lent it to me turned out to be a murderess didn’t change anything. I still liked the book. I still wanted to be a journalist.

  His Final Trick

  ‘I say, I saw Nicole Covington yesterday evening. With a group of friends. I recognized one of them at the party – the rehearsal.’

  Parshanti’s deliberately casual voice drew my attention. I looked sharply at her. She picked up one of my pencils and drew a circle in my notebook. Then she surrounded it with petals and turned it into a daisy. All without meeting my eyes.

  Parshanti was the kind of girl who shrieked when she saw seagull droppings on a railing or a cat grab a rat off a sack of rice. She had been raving about Nicole Covington and Victor Glossop ever since their
wedding announcement. If she was that calm about meeting Nicole Covington it was because she was hiding even greater excitement about something much bigger.

  I looked around the office. Sergeant Pillay was standing in the doorway looking out at the rain with a cigarette and Sergeant de Souza was engrossed in the newspaper. I leaned in to her and asked, ‘What is it?’

  Parshanti’s eyes were shining. I recognized the look: she was in love. Again.

  ‘Who is it?’ I amended my question with a sinking feeling. ‘This time.’

  Parshanti’s mixed race and her unconventional parents meant both locals and foreigners found her unsuitable for their precious sons. But that didn’t stop her falling in love regularly.

  ‘Keeping the plate warm’, in her canny Scots mother’s words. Mrs Shankar had found true love in the brilliant Indian medical student boarding in her parents’ house in Edinburgh. She seemed confident that, in time, Parshanti would do similar.

  I found this naive. Yes, Dr and Mrs Shankar were probably the happiest married couple I knew. Once when visiting Parshanti I’d seen them waltzing in their tiny living room to music from the gramophone. But how often do you get so lucky? Thanks to my grandmother’s interest (and interference) in extended Chen family marriage arrangements and negotiations, I knew what a complicated business marriage was.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. They were getting out of a car in front of the Farquhar Hotel. I recognized Nicole Covington at once, of course – she’s even more beautiful in real life than in the magazines,’ Parshanti said. ‘So slim and smart and elegant – and her hair! I wish Mam would let me bob mine! Nicole was wearing a red dress and red shoes and she had a white scarf with black polka dots on her head. And the most fabulous sunglasses.’

  ‘You stood there and stared at her? Why was she wearing sunglasses in the rainy season?’

  ‘Nicole Covington is famous, silly,’ Parshanti said. ‘Celebrities have to wear sunglasses so they won’t be recognized and have people staring at them.’ She rolled her eyes.

  I thought wearing sunglasses without sun sounded like a very good way of attracting attention. ‘You recognized her,’ I pointed out. ‘And I’m sure you stared.’

  Parshanti waved that away. ‘I pay attention to what’s going on in the world. I recognize famous figures.’

  ‘That’s not true. You only read fashion and lifestyle pieces in the papers.’

  ‘Anyway, one of the young men stayed behind to pay the cabbie while Nicole and the others went into the hotel. I was just standing there, out of the way. And then he turned to me and said, “Can I buy you a drink, pretty lady?”’

  ‘Parshanti! He must have thought you were a—’

  ‘No! Don’t be absurd! He was totally respectful. Hadn’t he seen me at the rehearsal party, he asked, and was I staying at the hotel? I was so taken aback I couldn’t answer. I know! Stupid, stupid, stupid girl!’ She rapped herself lightly on the side of her head. ‘But he gave me his card and said, “Another time, perhaps.” Oh, Su Lin, he has the loveliest smile. And such a sophisticated name card!’

  I had a bad feeling about this. ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Suzy-Poozy, you have bad feelings about everything! I’m not going to tell you if you’re just going to warn me to stay away from him.’

  ‘It’s not safe, Parshanti. You saw the kind of things those people get up to.’

  ‘I don’t see why you’re being so stuffy. Even the boys agree it was a joke. Right, boys?’

  Le Froy and the other men had returned from the hotel without further incident. I soaked the betel-stained uniforms in a tub of carbolic soap under the zinc sheets behind the station, cutting up and adding several kaffir limes to the solution. Their acid helped release the stains from the khaki. No lasting harm had been done. But I knew we would not be so easily taken in again.

  Which might have been why, when word came that Victor Glossop had been found dead at the hotel, I thought it was another trick.

  A young and very wet boy burst into the Detective Shack. He was a message runner. ‘Urgent! Very urgent and very important, sirs! You must send many policemen immediately. To the Farquhar Hotel. To Mr Victor Glossop’s room. You must send Inspector Le Froy and many men. Right away.’

  ‘Find a constable on patrol or go to the callbox,’ Sergeant de Souza said. ‘This is the Detective Unit.’

  Neither Sergeant Pillay nor Sergeant de Souza moved. A summons from a hotel was always ‘urgent’ and ‘important’ but usually had to do with rich tourists losing their wallets, being cheated by rickshaw-pullers or demanding a police escort to go sightseeing.

  ‘I’ll telephone HQ and ask them to send a constable round,’ Sergeant Pillay said. ‘Go back and say somebody will come soon.’

  ‘Sir, you must all come now! Urgent!’

  ‘Someone will come soon. What are you waiting for? You want me to hantam you?’

  But the messenger stood his ground. He was young and skinny and clearly terrified but not of the policeman pretending to aim his baton at him.

  I felt sorry for him and went over to the doorway where he was standing in a growing puddle of water. ‘What happened at the hotel?’

  ‘There is a body. A dead body.’

  ‘A man? A woman?’ Sergeant de Souza was on his feet now.

  ‘Why didn’t you say so right away?’ Sergeant Pillay was already pulling on his raincoat. ‘I’m on the way.’

  ‘A man,’ the messenger boy said. He was shivering. ‘Ang moh man. I saw. Inside the room. All covered in red blood. He looked like a monster!’

  De Souza shook his head slowly. I saw him thinking he wasn’t going to be caught a second time by the same trick.

  ‘Wait, Pillay. Pull yourself together, boy. What exactly did they tell you to say? And where was the body found?’

  ‘I saw it myself, sir. I was called in to take a message. It was in one of the small outside rooms. The room is registered to Victor Glossop. Inside a dead man is covered in red blood!’

  The detectives exchanged looks.

  ‘It’s another trick,’ de Souza said. ‘You weren’t there that day. You don’t know what those men get up to.’

  ‘We can’t take the chance. I will go to secure the scene,’ Sergeant Pillay said. ‘De Souza, get HQ to send the constables over. Girl, find Le Froy and tell him.’

  ‘Please!’ Parshanti grabbed my arm. ‘The man I met, his name is Kenneth Mulliner. Please find out if he’s all right. Just let me know it’s not him!’

  Le Froy

  Chief Inspector Le Froy had not come into the office that morning. Recently he had been absorbed in some big secret project. He seldom shared his suspicions until he had proof. It was not that Le Froy didn’t trust the team – although Sergeant Pillay had once accidentally leaked information on an upcoming raid to a woman who asked why he couldn’t spend the evening with her – but that he observed and analysed better on his own.

  I suspected he had spent the night undercover in some opium parlour or gambling den. He always purged his system the morning after such immersions.

  Most ang mohs in senior government positions lived in large, luxurious black and white ‘colonial’ bungalows outside the city centre. Le Froy lived in town on a side street lined with local residences and noisy hawkers.

  Number 4 Street 51 was off the main road the Detective Shack stood on and it usually took me ten minutes to get there. Today I made it in seven but arrived panting and sweating so I stopped to catch my breath.

  From the outside, Le Froy’s narrow-fronted house with its bright yellow terracotta tiles looked just like its neighbours. Inside was a different story.

  ‘Sir? It’s Su Lin. Good morning, sir.’ I rapped on the door.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘There’s been a death, sir. At the Farquhar Hotel.’

  ‘Ah.’

  I waited. When no steps approached, I unlocked the front doors and pushed through the ornate pintu pagar, the wooden h
alf-doors. Le Froy had given me the key last year, when he made me his housekeeper: Uncle Chen had tried to persuade me, somewhat forcefully, to marry one of his employees, ‘Because a woman needs protection. And Chou Ning needs someone to take care of his old mother and five children.’

  My uncle meant well, but he was always pig-headed when trying to do good. Come to think of it, I hadn’t seen Uncle Chen for a couple of weeks now. Had he given up on marrying me off? I should have been glad, but strangely I was a little disappointed.

  Anyway, when Le Froy had given me a job at the Detective Unit, I’d suggested that keeping his spare key at the office might be a good idea. ‘You’re the chief inspector. What if someone breaks in in the night and attacks you?’

  ‘Then I would be dead.’

  ‘What if they only beat you up and cut off your hands?’

  ‘Then I would be half dead. Without hands.’

  But he had agreed.

  I shook my umbrella and stood it in the tin bucket by the door. In local homes, the reception hall is a showplace of the most expensive and uncomfortable teak furniture, the household altar and ancestral portraits. Le Froy’s hall was crammed with books and bizarre objects. One such object, stretched out between a pile of rolled-up maps and a stack of specimen boxes, was my boss.

  I could tell Le Froy had got home not long before. He slept little but intensely, having trained his system to adapt to his all-night reconnaissance sessions. For him, gathering and processing information didn’t stop with work. He took a scientific approach and each new fact had to be found a place within an existing theory. When new data didn’t fit, the master plan would be adjusted. To him facts counted more than theory, and theories and rules existed to organize knowledge and information, and generate improvements. Which didn’t always make him popular with the other expat colonials, who longed for the good old days and things ‘back home’. In fact, Le Froy seldom spoke of England and had not gone on home leave since he had taken up his posting.