The Betel Nut Tree Mystery Read online

  Startled, I jumped to my feet and spun around. Kenneth Mulliner had sneaked up and put his hands on the back of my chair. He was laughing – they all were, especially Junior, who was shrieking in delight.

  Chatting with Junior had made me forget the grotesque corpse. The shock of Kenneth’s sudden appearance brought it abruptly back. For an awful moment my head spun and the finger sandwiches that had gone down so sweetly threatened to reappear.

  ‘Su Lin.’ That was all Le Froy said, but it steadied me.

  ‘Kenneth! Pull up a chair. Here, sit next to Junior. He’s been waiting for you.’ Dr Covington shifted Junior’s to make room.

  ‘No, let me. I’ve got it—’

  ‘All right?’ Le Froy asked, low, as our suspects rearranged chairs around the table.

  ‘Sir, about me watching Mrs Covington . . .’ I seized my opportunity.

  ‘I thought the reason you wanted a job was to escape a lifetime of looking after children.’ At least it wasn’t a firm ‘no’.

  Interviewing Kenneth

  ‘I can do this! I want to!’ I whispered urgently to Le Froy, behind my napkin, as the others settled down, but he had already turned his attention to Kenneth.

  ‘I can’t stay. Nicole wants Junior.’ Kenneth waved aside the waiter who appeared with tea and the offer of more sandwiches. ‘Come on, Champ.’

  Junior seized his cocoa mug with both hands and started gulping fast.

  ‘Hey, slow down, sport!’ Dr Covington said. ‘Kenneth, you stay. Chief Inspector, you met Kenneth Mulliner upstairs. Kenneth was going to be Victor’s best man. If you want to know more about Victor, he’s the one to ask. I’ll take the boy up to Nicole. I want to check on her, anyway.’

  I noticed he told Kenneth what to do as though he were an employee. And that Kenneth didn’t like it.

  ‘Even if Victor was poisoned it was probably an accident,’ Kenneth said. ‘Like I already told your . . . assistant. It’s the Far East. Lots of things out here to poison a man.’

  ‘What makes you think he was poisoned?’

  ‘That Punjabi cop says you’ve ordered a chemical analysis of the betel juice found on Victor. And his stomach contents. What else could you be looking for?’

  ‘Sergeant Pillay is Tamil,’ Le Froy said, with polite precision. ‘His family is from Ceylon, not the Punjab.’

  ‘That’s a good one. As if it makes a difference!’ Kenneth snorted, as though Le Froy had told a joke.

  ‘It does. Punjabis are an ethnic group associated with the Punjab. Indians are people residing in India or of Indian origin. As an ethnic group, Punjabis are among the largest in the world, but while Punjabis are Indian, not all Indians are Punjabi.’

  I saw Le Froy was deliberately provoking the younger man to study his reaction. Whatever Sergeant Pillay’s origins, I meant to tell him off for sharing information with suspects.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be working out what happened to Victor,’ Kenneth demanded, ‘instead of sitting down to tea? Shouldn’t you be questioning the hotel staff?’

  Sergeant de Souza and the constables would already be questioning the hotel staff.

  ‘We’ll be speaking to the hotel staff too, of course,’

  Le Froy’s slight inflection on ‘hotel’ worked.

  ‘I’m not staff. I wasn’t working for Victor.’

  Kenneth’s quick resentment suggested this was a common mistake. But he did have the servile presence of an employee. Even I had assumed he was a secretary or tutor at first sight. ‘How is Mrs Covington?’ I asked.

  ‘She’s weepy at the moment, but she’ll get over it.’

  ‘When was the last time you saw Victor Glossop?’

  ‘Back to the interrogation, is it? You can’t seriously think you’re going to pin this on me? Sorry, you’ll have to find some other scapegoat.’

  Le Froy waited, not bothering to correct him. I slid my notebook onto the table and nodded silent thanks to the waiter who cleared Dr Covington’s and Junior’s places.

  We waited.

  Kenneth rolled his eyes and sighed exaggeratedly. ‘All right. Last time I saw Victor was at dinner last night. I don’t know what his plans for the evening were. All I know is there was some plan. I wasn’t a part of it.’

  ‘What kind of plan? What did he say?’

  ‘What he said was that he wasn’t feeling well and was going to turn in early. I guessed he was planning something to get back at Nicole.’

  ‘For what? Why?’

  ‘Who knows why Victor did anything? They’d had a row earlier. I wasn’t there but I know Nicole scolded him in front of the kid. Victor can never stand losing a fight. I mean he never could . . . so . . .’ Kenneth faltered, his voice cracking.

  Despite the front he was putting up, his friend’s death had shaken Kenneth.

  ‘Do you have any idea where he might have gone? Or what time he got back?’ Le Froy asked.

  I had already made a note to ask hotel staff for confirmation.

  Kenneth shrugged. ‘Who knows?’ He wiped his nose on his napkin and poured himself a cup of tea. ‘This is stone cold.’

  ‘We found a business card for an establishment at Japan Street among Victor’s things.’

  Kenneth nodded. ‘It’s a bar. Run by a White Russian. As soon as we landed here, Victor was back to his old tricks. He found this bar that doubled as a brothel. There were drug orgies, and the women were free as long as you paid for the powders and the booze. At least, that’s what I heard. I never saw the place. My job was to keep Nicole from suspecting anything.’

  Many White Russians, left stateless after the Russian civil war, had found their way out east. Because they were considered Europeans, they got away with bending laws designed to keep us locals in our place. White Russians, rumour had it, organized drug-fuelled orgies and held satanic rituals in the nude.

  Of course, these may just have been stories the Chinese and Japanese prostitutes told their customers to frighten them.

  I once met a White Russian girl at the Mission Centre. Ilya was very nice and neither she nor her mother showed any inclination to take off their clothes or add drugs to their tea.

  ‘You should talk to the guy who set up his stag night,’ Kenneth said. ‘They called it a wedding rehearsal but it was really Victor’s stag party. Nicole was livid when she found out he’d invited local girls.’

  ‘You were his best man. Didn’t you arrange it?’

  ‘Victor said I was useless here. No contacts, no knowhow. He connected with a local bloke, Harry Palin. Maybe they had a falling-out and Palin attacked him.’

  Sweet, awkward Harry Palin? I couldn’t believe it. I looked at Le Froy, who remained impassive as he asked, ‘So, you sat back and let a local man take over?’

  ‘I made the hotel arrangements,’ Kenneth said. ‘It was my idea to call it a rehearsal so the hotel let us have the ballroom without charging the earth. It was Victor’s last week of freedom, and he was just making the most of it. No naked ladies, if that worries you. But that was only because he couldn’t find any who were sporting or cheap enough. Victor turned up dressed as a native in a sarong. He was spitting that betel stuff at everybody. It was so disgusting, it was hilarious. Typical Victor.’ The memory brought a wry smile to Kenneth’s face and then he had to dash away tears. ‘It wasn’t just your men he picked on, Chief Inspector. He was spitting at everyone. Everyone was spitting at everyone else. It was just good fun.’

  It didn’t sound like fun for whoever did their laundry.

  ‘You should check on that Palin chap. Victor met him in the Long Bar. I’m sure someone there will know how to find him. He and Victor almost came to blows the first time they met. Maybe he held a grudge. Palin was involved in some other murder last year, wasn’t he? You can’t help hearing local gossip. Maybe he got away with it that time and he’s back to his old tricks now.’

  I liked Harry Palin. We were friends, though I had suspected him, wrongly, of murdering two women last year. But friendship
grows out of shared experiences and we had shared some truly bizarre ones.

  ‘What was the fight about?’ Le Froy prompted. ‘The fights. Between Victor and Harry Palin, and between Victor and Mrs Covington.’

  Another shrug. Kenneth helped himself to a thin bread and butter sandwich. ‘It was the day we docked. We were walking around, working off our sea legs. Victor was pretty fed up. We had just come out of a shop and he chucked a rock at it and said, “You can’t get Weber Menziken cigars anywhere on this God-forsaken island!” And Palin butted in and said, “If this is a God-forsaken island why don’t you get the bloody hell out of here?”’

  I recognized Harry’s growling Singlish-tinted Oxford accent. Kenneth Mulliner was a gifted mimic.

  ‘And there was this idiot girl with him.’ Kenneth, warmed up now, switched back to his own voice. ‘Not too hard on the eyes, I thought at first. A bit too fat to be fashionable, but I’m not fussy. Then I saw she wasn’t right in the head. She was giggling and going “You said ‘hell’, Harry! You said ‘hell’, Harry!” over and over.’

  Dee Dee, I thought, with a pang. Harry regularly visited his sister in town. Dee Dee was a sweet, loving child-woman. She boarded at the Mission Centre where she attended classes with seven- and eight-year-old girls, even though she was ten years older.

  ‘What about you?’ Le Froy asked. His voice was so quiet and conversational that it took Kenneth a moment to register that the question was directed at him. ‘Did you fight too?’

  He sneered, ‘Do you think everyone is like your day labourers, getting into drunken fights?’

  ‘On the contrary,’ Le Froy said. ‘Manual labourers are among the best disciplined of men. Those who work with their bodies have little choice as any weakness is immediately obvious.’

  ‘While those who work with their damaged minds can carry on for years?’

  Le Froy smiled and waited, watching him. Kenneth made a show of reaching for the (now refreshed) teapot. But his hand shook and he put it down again.

  ‘I didn’t do anything. I wasn’t feeling very well. It was so hot and so wet and so filthy. I didn’t like Victor picking on the girl. It’s just not done. Like you wouldn’t kick an old dog. Though Victor would have. He was looking to scrap, to let off steam. We were glad to be back on land but in that disgusting place, with what looked like bloodstains all over the walls? The locals were chewing and spitting, for God’s sake. That was what gave Victor the idea for the party. He liked getting drunk and having fun. But nobody had any reason to kill him.’

  ‘What did Victor and Nicole fight about?’ asked Le Froy.

  ‘Nicole was being Nicole.’

  ‘Specifically?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘I’ll go up and try to talk to her,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ Le Froy said automatically.

  He was being worse than Uncle Chen. He meant well, I suppose. If I had been attacked by a crocodile, nobody would be surprised if I wanted to avoid the mangrove swamps. But I didn’t.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘We will discuss this.’ Le Froy said. ‘Not now.’

  Background Research

  Back at the Detective Shack, I set out to compile and verify all the information we had on Victor Glossop, Kenneth Mulliner and the Covingtons – with Parshanti’s help.

  I told her that Kenneth Mulliner was alive and unhurt but nothing more. He was a suspect, after all.

  Actually, Parshanti was a big help. She brought over back copies of magazines and illustrated papers that mentioned the happy couple. Most articles focused on Nicole’s clothes, hair and admirers. Getting around the British news blackout on Mrs Wallis Simpson, Mrs Nicole Covington was discussed as one of the American women well-born Englishmen were ensnared by.

  According to Ladies’ Weekly, Mrs Nicole Covington was travelling to get over the death of her first husband. On learning that she was sailing for the Far East, Glossop had decided to join her on impulse and managed to secure one of the last berths on the RMS Queen Victoria.

  Victor Glossop was twenty-nine years old and would have been thirty on 30 December. Apparently that was why he wanted the wedding before Christmas. He was quoted as saying, ‘I want to be able to say I was first married in my twenties.’

  There was nothing on record to show what his first bride-to-be had thought of that.

  Photographs of the late Victor Glossop showed an elegant young man with a blasé look. He had blond hair that was slicked away from a high forehead, light-coloured eyes, and the thin moustache over his thin lips was as fair as the hair on his head. He had been slim and looked tall, though one of the photographs with him and Kenneth standing shoulder to shoulder showed Kenneth was at least half a head taller. They were laughing and scruffy in that picture and Victor was holding up a policeman’s helmet.

  Kenneth had said Victor was always full of ideas for jokes and pranks. Clearly Kenneth himself had been involved in the pranks.

  I thought Victor Glossop looked like the kind of young man schoolgirls and servant girls were warned against. Men like him would declare undying love to you but end up marrying someone of their own class, like Nicole Covington. And even after marriage such men would continue seducing girls with lies and meaningless promises.

  Victor had taken a house in London after coming down from Oxford. The Tatler had had him on its list of Most Eligible Bachelors for the last five or six years. People were starting to say he might be a confirmed bachelor, but since he wasn’t an eldest son, the family hadn’t pressured him.

  Anyway, the Glossops weren’t nobility, just very rich. Their money came from the distillery business. There were whispers that Sir Roderick Glossop and his brother-in-law, Colonel Oswald Mosley-Partington, were encouraging talk of war because distilling fuel for war machines would make them even richer.

  The name Colonel Oswald Mosley-Partington rang a bell. He had been involved in the case that had led to Le Froy being exiled to Singapore, which the chief inspector never talked about.

  Victor Glossop had asked Governor McPherson to help arrange things so they could marry in Singapore on Christmas Eve. As non-residents, they needed his permission to marry on the island without banns being called. The governor and his family had originally accepted an invitation to spend Christmas in Sarawak but had been obliged to cancel due to this unexpected wedding.

  ‘So romantic and so tragic.’ Parshanti sighed. ‘If only he hadn’t died. And if only Mrs Simpson was a widow instead of a divorcee . . . Isn’t love so sad?’

  I looked at her suspiciously. Parshanti came to the Detective Shack often enough and I had been too engrossed in my notes to pay much attention to her earlier. But now I saw that, instead of her usual workday dress, she was wearing a dark blue frock with a white belt and a flared hem I hadn’t seen before. And gloves. Gloves? In Singapore?

  I stared at them.

  ‘I had to carry all those magazines and papers over,’ Parshanti said defensively. ‘I was worried about paper cuts.’

  ‘And a new frock? On a weekday?’

  ‘I’m just trying it out to make sure it fits. It was from a new pattern.’

  But the eager way she looked around the Detective Shack told me she hoped to run into Kenneth Mulliner again. Being questioned as a murder suspect, perhaps. What can you say to a friend who is almost as smart as you most of the time but dumb enough to fall in love with a murder suspect?

  Parshanti peeled off her gloves and tucked them into her mother’s calfskin handbag. Yes, she was carrying her mother’s good bag instead of her usual woven straw basket.

  ‘Are we sure Nicole Covington is a widow, not a divorcee or a polygamist?’ Le Froy came out of his office.

  ‘Yes, sir. Her husband was killed in a car accident just after their son was born. It was less than a year after they were married.’

  ‘Still no news from the hotel?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  Nicole Covington remained too traumatized for an interview, but Dr
Covington had promised to let Le Froy know as soon as she was ready to talk. Le Froy had returned to the hotel that morning intending to interview her regardless. To no avail. We were surprised. Few witnesses could fend him off.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked.

  ‘She started undressing,’ Le Froy said. ‘Don’t have to put that in the official report. Just the working record. So the men know what to expect. She announced she would show she had nothing to hide and proceeded to remove items of clothing. Dr Covington stopped her, gave her some soothing powders and sent Mr Mulliner in to calm her down.’

  ‘She might have been hiding something,’ Sergeant de Souza said. ‘You should have let her finish.’ He looked as if he wished he had been there.

  ‘American women have such a flair for the dramatic,’ Sergeant Pillay said. ‘I can see why men find them attractive. If I were the king, I wouldn’t have abdicated. I would have kept that American woman as my concubine and gone on being king.’

  ‘He’s not just a king. He’s a man in love. Giving up his throne for her is the most romantic thing anyone could do.’ Parshanti sighed.

  Sergeant Pillay looked jealous, but Parshanti did not notice. When you are beautiful like her, you can ignore how men look because, chances are, it’s you they are looking at.

  ‘Mrs Simpson is too old for him,’ Sergeant Pillay said sourly. ‘The king should first marry a young woman who can give him sons. That’s his duty. Then once he has a son to become the next king, he can marry his Mrs Simpson. That’s what I would do. And I would arrest and execute all the newspaper people and ministers who say I can’t. That’s what the secret service is for, right?’

  Le Froy went back into his office with a snort. But he didn’t contradict Pillay.

  I was sure Nicole Covington was hiding something, but not under her clothes. Undressing in front of strange men was a stunt to distract. De Souza hadn’t even been there and he still had a glazed look in his eyes so it clearly worked.

  Nicole Covington struck me as a cross between Wallis Simpson, Scarlett O’Hara and the Whore of Babylon. Flirting with men was her way of broadcasting her femininity, like the tok-tok mee seller rattles his wooden clappers to announce that fresh-cooked noodles are available. And we still didn’t know what she and Victor Glossop had fought about on the day he died.