Aunty Lee's Delights Read online

“Oh no. I didn’t see her outside. If I had, of course I would have asked her to come in!”

  “Then how do you know she hadn’t just arrived?”

  “We didn’t hear a taxi. And she was sweaty but breathing slowly. As though she had been standing still in the heat for some time, not like somebody who had just walked in from the main road. And when she came inside to talk to us, I could see that right away she was looking at the women to see which of them was Laura Kwee. That showed that she didn’t know who Laura Kwee was and that she already knew how many women were in the room. Therefore she must have been watching for some time, to know who came in.”

  All that made sense. “Thank you. I will keep it in mind,” SSS Salim said.

  “But you shouldn’t waste time suspecting her,” Aunty Lee said firmly. “Why I want you to take note of her now is because if Carla Saito was outside the shop for a while, she might have noticed whoever put the phone into the burning bin—if that’s when they did it.”

  A police officer in most other countries would probably have dismissed this (politely or not) as the view of an old woman who knew nothing. But SSS Salim was a Singaporean before he was a policeman and he had been brought up by a grandmother who had kept him all too well aware that systems were most efficiently run on the experience of those who had been running them the longest. He also knew it was vital to differentiate facts from prejudice.

  “Do you think the phone was put there at some other time? Not right after the text was sent? Why?”

  “Because that fat Australian man always likes to stand there and smoke until the last minute. He always puts his cigarette butts inside the bin. I don’t know how he can still taste my food after all that smoke. But if anybody put the phone in, then he would have seen, right? Afterward also, he didn’t go off right away. He went to smoke there again.”

  “That’s not very respectful,” SSS Salim said.

  Aunty Lee laughed. “Don’t worry. I expect the ghosts can enjoy burned cigarettes as much as they enjoy burned paper money.” Then, as a thought struck her, she looked sober again. “It’s the attitude that matters, right? Not what you give to the dead but what you want to give them.”

  SSS Salim saw the old woman’s maid look alarmed. But it seemed to him purely the alarm of a nursemaid concerned that the child she was looking after was toddling into the path of danger. There were portraits of an august-looking gentleman all over the house—both alone and with Aunty Lee—but no other sign of him. Still, the presence and positioning of those portraits said more about how the man was remembered than any amount of flowers and joss sticks could have done.

  “I will have to send someone to take your statement formally,” SSS Salim told Aunty Lee. “Thank you. You have been very helpful. If you don’t mind, I will keep this paper, and if you give us permission to examine your shop space, we will be very careful—”

  “Keep it, keep it. I have my own copy.” Aunty Lee dismissed the paper. “You can come and look around my shop, but you won’t find anything. If anything was left there, Nina would have found it already. Nina can find anything. But come, we can all go down and look now. I want you to show me where you found the phone.”

  As Aunty Lee started off, Nina gave SSS Salim a sympathetic look.

  “Your boss is very energetic, eh?” Salim said.

  “Slowly, slowly you will get used to her,” Nina said. She waited for Salim to go after Aunty Lee, then followed them both out. “You don’t suspect her, do you?”

  “We have to suspect everybody. Tell me, are you familiar with the other members of your boss’s family?”

  Something in the way he said this made Nina pay attention. “Who are you asking about? Why?”

  “The phone. There are ways of tracing calls and messages that I am not at liberty to discuss. But several of the messages on Laura Kwee’s phone came from the phone belonging to Mrs. Lee’s stepson, Mark. And there was a message from him telling her there was no need for her to come back.” He paused and Nina waited.

  “Sometimes there are things that family members do not notice or cannot say,” Salim said. “But if you notice anything . . .” It was his turn to wait.

  “I don’t know anything,” Nina said firmly. She held the door open for him.

  Suddenly it was important to him to let her know that he was not just a policeman following routine.

  “Very nice plants,” he said. Then, feeling that this had sounded lame, he added, “I can’t keep plants alive. Everything I try to grow dies.”

  “You are worried about Marianne Peters, aren’t you?” Aunty Lee was standing in the driveway. Officer Pang had gotten out of the car and had positioned himself between her and the gate. He looked as though he was not sure if he would be called to stop her should the old lady decide to make a run for it.

  “Whoever sent that message didn’t know whether it was Laura’s body you people found. Let’s say it was whoever killed the poor woman and threw her into the sea. Obviously he was hoping the body would not be identified and wanted to throw you off the scent. But why would he add that Marianne said she wouldn’t be there? Did he throw more than one body into the sea off Sentosa? That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?”

  “Ma’am,” said SSS Salim. “I cannot comment on that.”

  The way he spoke told Aunty Lee that if he had not thought of the possibility she’d just suggested, he would certainly be considering it now, but she felt little triumph. Carla Saito might seem relieved that it was not Marianne’s body that had surfaced, but Aunty Lee felt she would not be comfortable till she saw Marianne in person. There was still something Carla Saito was hiding. And even if Carla did not want to tell her what this was, Aunty Lee would have to get it out of her somehow.

  In the meantime . . .

  “You should speak to Marianne Peters’s family. Find out more about this holiday she’s supposed to have gone on. I’m not saying they have anything to do with the murder, but it seems very strange that they seem to have no worries at all about not hearing from Marianne!”

  Part 2

  Middle

  8

  Waiting for Police Interviews

  It was a pleasant enough room. Rectangular with a row of seats facing a long counter, it could have been the waiting area of a neighborhood dentist. But it was not. The Bukit Tinggi Neighbourhood Police Post was not where the Cunninghams had expected to be spending any of their time in Singapore. But Frank and Lucy were making the best of it. Lucy caught up on her e-mail and daily Bible verses on her MacBook Air while Frank took photographs of the station. The officer behind the counter looked uncomfortable but did not try to stop him. However, when Frank pointed the camera in her direction, she said, “No, no, cannot.”

  “It’s just for a souvenir,” Frank Cunningham said. “To show where we’ve been.”

  “No, sorry, sir. Photo taking is not allowed.”

  “Frank, don’t bother the poor woman,” Lucy said without looking up from her reading.

  “In case you’re never seen again, they don’t want any proof you’ve been here!” Harry Sullivan said. He laughed to show that he was joking, but his laughter was not very convincing. It was plain to the Cunninghams, and probably to the police officer as well, that Harry was not happy about where he was.

  The neighborhood police post was not an unpleasant place to be waiting. At least there was air-conditioning. Despite her son’s tirades against power consumption and global warming, Lucy Cunningham felt like a functioning human only in an air-conditioned room. And the nice officer had told her she was welcome to plug her computer into the station’s outlet, so she was quite content to catch up on her reading and e-mails. Traveling with Frank had left her very little time on her own. He didn’t like to see her sitting quietly because he thought she would worry and brood about the matter that was looming so painfully over both of them. Frank knew that getting anxious about how things might work out never changed anything. But knowing this didn’t always stop the worryin
g, and that was why anything, even this local inconvenience, was a welcome distraction. But though she appreciated Frank’s good intentions, Lucy sometimes wished they could talk about it. She wanted to wallow and be miserable, even if it did not help. She wished she could let herself go and have a good cry, but she did not want to upset Frank, so she went on reading the selected Bible verses on her little computer.

  “How long do you think this will go on?” Harry Sullivan asked. “I mean, we didn’t even know the poor girl; it’s nothing to do with us!”

  “You met her, didn’t you? What was she like?” Harry might just have been venting his frustration but Frank Cunningham was always ready to talk.

  “Not a real good looker. A bit too much flesh on her, but she knew how to dress to catch a man’s eye, if you get what I mean. If you ask me, that’s what got her into trouble. She was looking for the wrong sort of attention and she found it.”

  Frank Cunningham nodded. He knew the type. “I’m okay with women dressing to please themselves. That said, some girls today forget there is also the need to dress appropriately because of how others will see you. Otherwise they’ll just attract sex predators and perverts.”

  “Hear, hear,” Harry Sullivan agreed.

  Frank Cunningham warmed to him and to his subject.

  “Look, from an honest man’s point of view, if a woman dresses like a slut, the probability of her getting sexually assaulted rises, am I right? We call ourselves civilized, but the animal, carnal nature of man is still very real today and you cannot deny sexual attractions are for real. So how a woman dresses does affect the probability of attack. Here we’re not discounting her right to dress as she pleases. It is her safety we’re concerned about. Talk all you like about women’s rights, we can’t fight sinful human nature!”

  Harry Sullivan was a bit put out by the tirade he had unwittingly unleashed. He looked at Lucy Cunningham, whose attention remained fixed on her computer. Apparently this kind of outburst was nothing unusual for Frank.

  “Then you support women wearing head scarves and long skirts?” the police officer behind the desk asked conversationally. Frank looked at her with some suspicion. She was in uniform, of course. He could not tell what race she was, but she was not wearing a head scarf.

  “If you are married, then as long as your husband accepts how you dress, you won’t go wrong. Don’t get me wrong, miss. I believe women have the right to wear what they want. Except there is this reality check a woman needs to understand. Psychologically a man is attracted by what he sees, which leads to arousal and to desire. It’s in the male DNA, they can’t help it.”

  “No matter what a woman is wearing, sexual assault is a criminal offense,” the officer said, still in a neutral conversational tone.

  Harry Sullivan had dropped out of the conversation and was pointedly reading public information posters on the wall. Perhaps Frank Cunningham was hoping to reclaim his new friend’s attention when he raised his voice slightly and continued.

  “Officer, if you read The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris, who is an eminent anthropologist, you’ll see he says that civilized man has lost his sense of smell. Nowadays sexual arousal is activated by sight. Women are aroused by emotion and touch, so they don’t understand such things. Wearing head scarves doesn’t help because that is also a trigger. When a woman is completely covered, the mystery excites the man’s imagination like the forbidden fruit syndrome. My point here is that ‘don’t tempt the man’ should apply.”

  “Should women dress like men, then? Do away with temptation?”

  Lucy Cunningham looked up when the officer said this. She recognized the trigger and hoped Frank was not going to go off on another of his tirades, not in a police station in a foreign country, but—

  “Even the public restroom doors use the symbol of a man in pants and a woman in a dress,” Frank Cunningham said. “If you have women dressed as men, everybody is going to get confused about everything! Pants-wearing women will soon forget how to act like ladies!” He looked toward the desk.

  By now the police officer was intently studying a pamphlet on volunteering for the neighborhood watch and refusing to meet his eye.

  “You tell what’s in a book by its cover, and in the same way you can see what is in a woman by how she dresses. If you dress like a man, you disgrace your husband and dishonor the name of Jesus. It is these pants-wearing women that kindle the fire of adultery in the hearts of men!”

  Lucy wanted to warn her husband that there were probably Buddhists and Muslims and other heathens listening, but she said nothing. There was no point. Her husband lived his whole life as a good man should and nothing she said would change him, because by his definition, good men were not guided by their wives.

  Seeing his words go unchallenged, Frank looked disappointed.

  “Short-haired women in pants . . . it’s just not right.”

  Harry Sullivan gave him a wink. “If you’d seen that other missing girl—Marianne Peters—you could have given her some advice there. All you ever saw her in was pants. Don’t think she even owned a skirt. But short-haired or not, you couldn’t mistake her for a guy! Do you have daughters back home?”

  “No. Only a son.”

  “Well, that’s easier, isn’t it?” Harry said. He was taken aback by the look in the other man’s eyes—impossible to tell whether it was pain or rage, but whichever it was, it was strong. And then, when he looked around, he was struck by the fear in Lucy Cunningham’s.

  “How much longer is this going to take?” Frank demanded. “We were asked to be here at eleven and it’s already half past.”

  “I cannot say, sir. Please be patient. They will be ready for you soon.”

  “Can’t you ask them?”

  “Please be patient. They will be ready for you soon,” the officer repeated.

  “You can’t treat us like that!” Frank complained. “I know what you’re trying to do, this is your one chance to be the big shots over the decent Christian people, right? What are you trying to do, sweat a confession out of us? It’s not going to work, you know, because we’ve got nothing to hide!”

  The doors behind the counter opened just then and Carla Saito emerged, Officer Pang showing her out.

  “Harry Sullivan?” Officer Pang said.

  “Why don’t you two go in first,” Harry suggested to the Cunninghams. “That’s all right, isn’t it? I don’t mind waiting.”

  The walls of the Bukit Tinggi Neighbourhood Police Post were not soundproof.

  Carla Saito did not have much to say and Senior Staff Sergeant Salim believed in giving people with nothing to say plenty of time not to say it. So they, along with Officer Pang, stationed by the dormant recording equipment, had been able to follow Frank Cunningham’s speech in the waiting room very clearly. Indeed Officer Pang had made a move toward the door, meaning to ask them to quiet down, but the smallest gesture from SSS Salim stopped him. He saw it was not just the conversation that interested Salim but the effect Frank Cunningham’s loudly expressed opinions were having on Carla Saito. Officer Pang was a quick learner. He settled back to watch Carla Saito too. The woman was not only withholding information from them, as SSS Salim clearly suspected . . . she was also a very angry woman.

  “You want to go out there to talk to that man?” SSS Salim asked, suddenly and casually. “You look like you got a lot of things to say to him.”

  “Oh, I have things to say to him all right!” burst out Carla Saito. “But someone like him wouldn’t want to hear anything I say!”

  “But I do,” SSS Salim said agreeably. “Say what you want to say. Then I can put it down and say we’ve done the interview.”

  Carla Saito hesitated, still suspicious.

  “You can look over your statement,” SSS Salim offered. “Read it over before you sign it. If you don’t like it, don’t sign.”

  “It’s no big deal,” Carla Saito said. “I never met Laura Kwee, so I can’t say anything about how she dressed. But no man has a
right to say it’s how women dress that gets them attacked by men. If men feel so excited by women wearing short skirts or so threatened by them wearing pants, then they’re the ones that have a problem!”

  “I agree,” said SSS Salim.

  “Is there anything else?”

  “You didn’t see anyone else loitering outside the café before you went in?”

  “I didn’t say I was loitering there. But okay, I was outside for a while, deciding whether to go in. Laura Kwee had been sending Marianne messages about the wine dining events and I thought she would be there. I thought I could have a quick word with her before she went in, that’s all. But I didn’t see her.”

  “Did you see anybody else? Using a phone maybe?”

  Harry Sullivan stopped Carla Saito before she got to the door. “We met—briefly—the other night at the café. Don’t suppose you remember. You were a bit upset. You came looking for Laura Kwee.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I was just wondering if you’re all right. I mean, we all got thrown into this. Turn up for a dinner and a bit of a drink and end up in a police station. I’m not saying it’s never happened to me before, but I didn’t expect it to be happening here! Did they tell you not to leave the country? Have you got someplace to stay?”

  Carla managed a laugh. “I suppose I’m as free to go as I could be. They haven’t told me I can’t leave the country.”

  “How has your stay in Singapore been, otherwise?”

  She looked at him curiously. “If you were there that night, you’ll have gathered this isn’t exactly a tourist holiday for me.”

  When it was finally his turn, Harry Sullivan told SSS Salim he had come to Singapore in search of work. “I found I couldn’t settle down to retirement. I had enough to live on, but that’s not everything, is it?”

  SSS Salim had not even gotten to his questions about Laura Kwee and her phone, and here the man was already nervous. Not that either Salim or Officer Pang seemed to notice this. Foreigners were often apprehensive on first encounter with the Singapore police; some might have had unpleasant encounters with the authorities in their own countries, and others—like Mr. Sullivan, SSS Salim thought—probably believed police-state propaganda.