TENDER DECEIT (Romantic Suspense Mystery Novel): First Love Series ~ Book 1 (17 page)

“And if my father
didn’t
get rid of it—if he’s hidden it somewhere, like the USB stick—then it would be the perfect, irrefutable evidence of Warne’s crime! It would have his prints, his DNA all over it—as well as the ladyboy’s blood and DNA.” Leah jumped up with excitement. “There’s no way Warne could wriggle out of that one.”

Toran turned to the computer again and rapidly navigated to a new site on the browser.

“What are you doing?” asked Leah, as she and Dieter watched him type in a password.

“Checking the Pan Asia Media image database,” said Toran. “It’s not one hundred per cent proof that he no longer had it, but if there’s a picture of Warne taken last Thursday which shows him without his dagger…
Bingo
,” he said softly, as he pulled up an image.

It showed Warne standing outside a building in downtown Singapore, posing for a formal handshake with another man in a suit. On the wall of the building behind him was a brass plaque, engraved with writing. A small crowd of people stood around them, smiling and clapping. The time stamp showed that it had been taken last Thursday at 2:07 p.m. Leah leaned in to look closer. Warne was definitely not wearing his dagger. The usual spot along his waistband was empty.

“The problem now is working out where your father might have hidden it,” said Toran.

“Maybe we should go back to the villa,” said Leah slowly. “I’m positive that there was nothing else in the
concealed safe. But maybe there’s some other hiding place that I might have overlooked.”

Toran stood up. “Let’s go.”

Dieter smiled. “
Viel glück
,” he said again.

Leah was unable to repress a shudder as they arrived back at her father’s villa. She still couldn’t remember everything that had happened here last night, but she remembered enough. She followed Toran as they slipped through the side gate into the gardens and entered the house through the broken study window.

“It looks like the police have been here,” said Leah, glancing at the fingerprint powder on various surfaces. She wondered if they had gotten anything aside from her own prints. She doubted Warne’s men would have been so careless as to leave fingerprints—they must have worn gloves during their search. She paused by her father’s desk. The inventory that Stanford Lim had given her was still there—she must have forgotten it by mistake when she had left in such a hurry.

She looked out the window, remembering the feeling of being watched. Had Warne’s men been in the garden that day, watching her through the glass? The thought made her squirm, as if an insect had crawled under her clothes and was now moving slowly against her skin.

Leah shook the feeling off and looked across at Toran, who was stepping carefully over the items strewn on the floor, his eyes darting thoughtfully around. It was strange seeing him here, in her old house, in her father’s study. His tall figure dominated the room. In spite of the years that had passed, in spite of the fact that she was an adult now and her father was dead, she still felt like they were doing something forbidden—being here together.

He looked up and met her eyes and Leah had the strangest feeling that he knew what she was thinking. But the only thing he said was, “Where’s the
concealed safe?”

Leah crossed the room and crouched in front of the antique gramophone cabinet. Quickly, she showed Toran the secret lever which opened the hidden safe at the back.

He stared at the empty space inside. “There must be another hiding place.”

“I’ve been trying to think,” said Leah, chewing her bottom lip in frustration. “I just don’t remember any other safe.”

“Maybe it’s not here in this house. Would there be any other place your father might hide something?”

Leah shrugged. “His office? But that would be the first place that Warne’s men would look.”

Toran shook his head. “Your father was a clever man. He would never have made it that easy.” He glanced up at the other safe—the conventional one on the wall that had been covered by a painting. He walked over to it and swung it open. “What about in here? Do you know if anything has been taken from here?”

“I thought you said he wouldn’t make it easy?” said Leah, going over to stand next to him. Her shoulder brushed his and she was very aware of Toran’s body next to her. Somehow, with breakfast, the excitement of watching the video footage, and then the discussion with Dieter on how to incriminate Warne, their sizzling attraction had been pushed to the background. But she felt it there, simmering just below the surface. Sooner or later, they were going to have to address what had nearly happened last night.

“I’m just being curious,” said Toran, his eyes scanning the contents of the wall safe. “And being thorough. It’s the good journalist’s mantra: be thorough.”

Leah shrugged. “Well, I don’t really know what might have been taken because I don’t know what was in there in the first pla—wait!” She smacked her head. “How stupid of me! He gave me the inventory!”

“Sorry?” Toran looked at her, puzzled.

Leah rushed back to her father’s mahogany desk and snatched up the piece of paper she had left there the last time. “This! Stanford Lim, my father’s colleague, gave me this. It’s an inventory of valuable items in his study, including the wall safe. Stanford told me that my father dropped into his office last Thursday to add this extra sheet to his will. I never thought about it at the time, but now I wonder if my father was preparing, just in case…”

Leah walked back to Toran, her words coming in a rush. “He knew I would probably remember the concealed safe, so that’s not included in the inventory, but the contents of
this
safe are. Why? Unless he put something important in here too and wanted to make sure that I would know if it went missing.” She scanned the list, then hurried back to the wall safe. “Cash: euros, pounds, dollars… the gold Rolex… documents… certificates… bonds… passport… keys—wait, where are the keys?”

“What keys?” asked Toran.

Leah pointed to the inventory. “It says here there should be a ring of household master keys in the safe. They’re not here.”

Toran lifted everything out of the safe to be sure. There were no keys.

“Warne’s men took them,” said Leah urgently. “They must have thought one of the keys was important. Maybe they thought my father put the evidence in a safe deposit box or something—something that required a key to open it.”

“Your father would never use a standard safe deposit box,” argued Toran. “It would be too obvious. Warne could easily use his contacts to check and see if your father opened a new safe deposit box or accessed any existing ones the day after the murder.”

“No, you’re right; Stanford Lim didn’t mention any safe deposit boxes to me either,” said Leah, thinking hard. “The important key on the ring must open something else.”

“Why don’t we have a look around the rest of the house?” suggested Toran.

Leah followed him obediently. She was a bit reluctant to go back into the kitchen—the memory of the drug-induced terror from last night was still fresh—but she squared her shoulders and walked in after a moment’s hesitation. A big paper bag sat on the kitchen counter—obviously Warne’s man had accepted the takeaway in the end. She wrinkled her nose at the smell of congealed Indian food.

“Eeuww,” Leah said, picking up the bag and throwing it into the kitchen bin. She glanced over at the big fridge humming in the other corner of the kitchen, her childish crayon drawing of the lion in Singapore Zoo looking incongruous on its gleaming stainless steel surface. “I guess I should look through the fridge as well and chuck out everything that’s spoilt or might spoil,” she said without much enthusiasm.

Toran seemed to barely hear her. He had prowled around the room and was now heading back out into the hallway again. Leah hurriedly followed him. She found him down the other end of the house, peering into the bedrooms. Two guestrooms, the beds pristine, then her father’s bedroom, decorated in masculine accents of leather and mahogany. They went through all the drawers and cupboards in there. Nothing.

They stood before the last door in the hallway. Leah’s old bedroom. She hadn’t been in there since that fateful Sunday when her father had told her about her immediate enrolment in boarding school. Leah hesitated, her hand on the doorknob, then she turned it and stepped inside.

It was just as she had left it. Oh, it wasn’t dusty and covered in cobwebs in a creepy Miss Haversham kind of way—someone, her father’s weekly cleaner, had kept it neat and dusted—but it was almost as if her fourteen-year-old self had just walked out and might return at any moment. The Backstreet Boys and Heath Ledger posters on the wall, her favourite drawings stuck up on the corkboard next to a giant horoscope chart, the stack of old school textbooks on the desk, her ancient iPod lying in a tangle of earphone cords, a half-finished friendship bracelet on the bedside table… Leah found herself walking in as if in a dream. She went over to the bed and sat down, picking up the friendship bracelet.

“I was making this for Julia…” she whispered, a lump coming to her throat.

Toran sat down on the bed next to her. His hands closed over hers and Leah felt strength in their warm clasp. He was very close—she could smell the faint mixture of soap and a clean, masculine scent. She looked down at their hands entwined together. A part of her mind was remembering all those times, so many years ago, when she had lain on this bed and dreamt of Toran. Of Toran smiling at her, Toran taking her hand, Toran kissing her…

Leah raised her eyes to Toran’s brilliant green ones. Again, she got the feeling that he knew exactly what she was thinking. Somewhere she could hear a loud pounding. She realised it was her own heart. She swallowed and licked suddenly dry lips. She saw his gaze drop to her mouth and her heart raced even faster.

Toran’s arms slid slowly around her. Half of her wanted to jerk back and the other half of her—the wanton, treacherous half—wanted him to pull her even closer. Then he lowered his head and his lips found hers and all she could do was feel, breathe, taste as her senses were filled with him.

The kiss became hungrier, more insistent. Leah felt herself being pushed gently backwards and then the bed dipped as she was pressed into the soft pillows, Toran’s body lying on top of hers like a heavy heat. One of his hands tangled in her hair while the other one slid down over her ribcage, caressing the curve of her hip, lingering on the bare skin of her thigh where her shorts ended. The touch of his fingers on her flesh made her shiver. He grabbed her leg and pulled it hard up against him, wrapping it around him. There was something shockingly erotic about the forcefulness of his gesture.

His lips left hers and trailed a path across her cheek, then down her neck to the sensitive hollow at the base of her throat. Leah sighed softly and clung to him, dropping her head back. The room spun around her. Her eyes flew upwards and she saw, upside down, the posters on the wall, her childhood drawings, the horoscope chart—Aries, Capricorn, Leo…

Leo
.

“The lion!” she gasped, pushing Toran back.

“What?” Toran rolled back on one elbow, staring at her, breathing hard.

“The drawing… my drawing of the lion at Singapore Zoo, the one on the fridge—he did it—he knew, the day we went, I’d remember…” said Leah, speaking too fast. She struggled to untangle herself from Toran and sit up. She took a deep breath. “I know where my father’s hidden the weapon.”

Toran sat up slowly. “You think you know where your father’s hidden the dagger?”

Leah nodded eagerly. “He left that picture up on the fridge on purpose.”

Toran ran a hand distractedly through his dark hair. “You think he was trying to leave you a coded message?”

“I know he was!” said Leah. “That picture—I drew that the day after my father took me to Singapore Zoo. I was six and it’s one of the few memories I have of doing something with him.”

Toran frowned. “So I don’t understand how—”

“I had insisted on taking my favourite stuffed toy,” interrupted Leah. “This giant teddy bear t
hat was practically as big as I was, and when I got there, I realised that I didn’t actually want to lug it around with me. So we stored it in one of the zoo lockers. And my father gave me the key and told me to keep it safe. But I lost it. And we couldn’t get my teddy bear out—we had to leave without it and I cried all the way home. They did eventually get it out and returned it to me the next day. They had to get a locksmith out to undo the lock.” She looked at Toran excitedly. “That’s where my father has hidden the weapon. In a locker at the zoo. I’m sure of it. The first day I came to the house, I wondered why he had stuck that picture up in the kitchen… it was weird, I hadn’t seen it in years. We never had it up when I was actually living at home. This must be why. It was his way of telling me, because he knew I would remember. And in fact…”

Leah sprang up and ran out of the bedroom, back along the hallway, to her father’s study. She heard Toran following her. She sat down at her father’s desk and pulled his diary towards her. It was open to the previous week. She ran her finger along to Thursday. In her father’s dark, slanting handwriting were the words “Zoo Patrons AGM” in the time slot for 9 a.m.

“He was a Zoo Patron,” Leah explained. “It’s something he’d been for years. He must have had a meeting there the morning after the murder—which is probably what gave him the idea. It would have been simple for him to slip away and hide the weapon in one of the lockers. Warne’s men would never have suspected.”

“But why not put the key somewhere special?”

Leah shut the diary. “I guess he thought the same way you did. Poe’s trick. Hiding in plain sight. What safer place for a special key than on a big ring with a bunch of other keys?”

“How do you know Warne’s men haven’t been out to the zoo already?” asked Toran.

“I don’t,” Leah admitted. “But I’m willing to bet anything you like that they haven’t. The key doesn’t have any identifying logos. It’s just a small, plain key with a number. They might know that there’s a key that’s important on that ring, but I’ll bet they have no idea which one it is or what it opens. It’s just not the first place you’d think of to store something secret, is it—the public lockers at the zoo?”

Toran shook his head. “It sounds so crazy that you might just be right.” He heaved a sigh and ran a hand through his hair again. It was now looking like an unruly mess, reminding Leah of the way it used to look when they were at school. He gave her a lopsided smile. “This is great, but couldn’t you have worked this all out a little later?”

Leah flushed, remembering what they had been doing in her bedroom. Her body still tingled with desire yet the whole thing felt a bit scandalous now, although she didn’t know why. Maybe because her bedroom had been the place for so many of her innocent, girlish dreams and what she had felt in there with Toran just now was neither innocent nor girlish.

Leah looked at the man in front of her. In some ways, so much the boy she used to love, and in some ways, a complete stranger. A dark, enigmatic, exciting stranger. She searched his eyes, wondering what he had been thinking when he kissed her. Well, okay, she knew what part of him had been thinking. She had been more than aware of how much he had wanted her. But was that all it was?

Toran looked away. The moment was broken. He glanced at his watch and said, “Well, the zoo will be shut now. So we should go to Orchard Towers first and try to find the murdered ladyboy’s friend.”

Shutting her father’s diary, Leah got up and followed him, forcing her mind away from what could have happened in her bedroom if they hadn’t been interrupted.

Going back to Orchard Road felt surreal. Had it only been yesterday morning when she had been walking down the wide pavement, admiring the things on sale in shop windows? Leah looked at the familiar malls she had walked past and wondered if all those tourists and shoppers happily wandering about had any idea of the dark undercurrents around them.

Orchard Towers was an innocuous, rather bland-looking shopping centre at the top end of Orchard Road. If it wasn’t for the garish red neon signs flashing from the second-floor windows and the cluster of scantily clad girls hanging around on the pavement outside, you would have hardly thought that it could be a den of sex. She scanned the faces of the girls outside carefully and saw Toran doing the same, but they found no one resembling the ladyboy in the video.

Toran went confidently up the front steps into the shopping centre and Leah hurriedly followed. Inside, the shopping centre had the ubiquitous atrium with escalators winding upwards and Leah could see signs for innocent businesses like electronic stores and tailor shops. But they were all shut up now and the shop fronts that stood out with bright neon lights and suggestive images were the sex shops and Thai massage parlours and, of course, the various bars and nightclubs.

They wandered into one bar after another, checking out the crowds. It was hard to see through the crush of bodies in the dim lighting and Leah found the loud, throbbing music and the aggressive, sexual atmosphere slightly intimidating. She was also taken aback at how difficult it was to tell the ladyboys from the normal “ladies of the night”. Somehow, she had naively expected to be able to pick up something—some suggestion of masculinity, perhaps—in the lines of the face or body, but she soon discovered that it was impossible to tell. In fact, the more beautiful and feminine a woman looked and the more perfect her figure, the more likely she was to be a ladyboy.

At the third club they entered, Toran fought his way over to the bar, ordered two drinks, and struck up conversation with the barman, a hunky Australian with tattoos snaking down his arms. Toran showed him the printout from the computer.

“Yeah, I know her, mate,” said the barman. “Name’s Pranee. And this here’s her friend, Sumalee.” He made a face. “Bad business about Sumalee. Found in the river.”

“Any ideas what happened to her?” Toran asked, shouting above the pounding music.

The barman’s face closed. “No idea, mate. Round here, you learn not to ask too many questions.”

“What about the friend, Pranee? Do you know where I can find her?” asked Toran. “I really need to speak to her.”

“She’s usually here around this time,” said the barman. “But I haven’t seen her in the last couple of days. You could try The Naughty Minx on the top floor. Not as busy as down here—not so much traffic—so most of the girls prefer hanging out here on the lower floors. But I know Pranee goes there sometimes.”

Toran nodded his thanks and they pushed their way out of the club again. Outside, Leah breathed a sigh of relief as the club doors shut behind them and blocked out the pounding music. She could hear herself think again.

“Do you think Warne’s men might have got to her?” asked Leah. “If no
one has seen her for a few days—”

“No,” said Toran. “I don’t think Warne got a chance to view the footage so he wouldn’t have necessarily seen Sumalee’s friend with her on video. He gave the evidence straight to your father and just assumed that it would be destroyed. Pranee might just be keeping a low profile. You heard the barman—everyone knows about Sumalee’s body ending up in the river. That might be enough to scare Pranee into lying low for a while.” He looked up at the ascending floors in the atrium. “But a working girl still has to work—so I’m hoping that she might be in the quieter bar.”

The Naughty Minx had a very different atmosphere to the clubs downstairs. Quieter music, less raucous laughter, fewer girls hanging around the bar. Leah was about to walk up to the bar counter when she noticed that Toran had stopped in his tracks.

“Over there.” He nodded, his eyes riveted to a table in the corner.

Leah followed his gaze. Sitting by herself, looking bored and sulky, was a beautiful Asian woman. She was wearing a tight top and a mini-skirt that left very little to the imagination, and she had her legs crossed, swinging one bare leg up and down, dangling the platform stilettos from her toes. Even in the dim light of the club, Leah recognised the face from the video clips. It was the dead ladyboy’s friend, Pranee.