The Ambassador's Wife (6 page)

Yesterday he had so little to do he was spending his lunch hour browsing through the paperbacks at Sunny’s. Today there was a bloody goddamned maelstrom howling around him and his mother was in a hospital room halfway around the world with possible brain damage.

Jesus H. Christ on a motherfucking crutch. Good night, Irene. Put out the lights, will you?

SIX

ON
Thursday morning Inspector Tay tried to telephone the number on the letter from New York and got no answer. After thinking about it for a few minutes and counting back and forth on his fingers, Tay realized that he had miscalculated the time change. The International Date Line was a real bastard. He would have to call at night, Singapore time, in order to get through during business hours in New York, so he made a mental note to try again when he got home that evening.

The rest of Thursday was no more productive for Tay than had been his effort to call New York. The FMB report was put over until Friday and Sergeant Kang’s men continued working their way through the list of female visitors Immigration had provided without finding anyone who was missing. Tay could feel the case going dead around him and it wasn’t even forty-eight hours old. He was going to have to do something to get it moving, but what? Without knowing who the woman was, the investigation wasn’t going to go anywhere, and how were they to identify her with no papers, no clothes, no jewelry, nothing at all to work with? All they had was a set of fingerprints and so far they couldn’t match them to anyone.

Hoping to clear his head and start thinking about the case from a new perspective, Tay left the Cantonment Complex about five o’clock and walked up New Bridge Road all the way to the Singapore River. He cut through the Merchant Court hotel and found a table alongside the river at the Brewerkz where he had two gin and tonics and some kind of chicken dish, but he was unable to conjure up even a single novel idea as to how to identify the murdered woman at the Marriott. He sat for a while after he finished eating and drank two cups of coffee. Then he took a walk along the river and very slowly smoked three Marlboros, one after another. When night came on as suddenly as if a blanket had been dropped over the city, he found a taxi and went home.

A couple of hours later, just after nine, Tay remembered he had intended to call the lawyer in New York that evening, but then he realized he had left the man’s letter in his office and didn’t have the telephone number. Awash in his own foolishness and his failures of the day, Tay turned on the television and sat staring at it for two hours with only the dimmest realization of what he was seeing. Then he turned it off, brushed his teeth, and went to bed.

Tomorrow, he promised himself, would be a better day.

Or maybe it wouldn’t.

ON
Friday morning Sergeant Kang brought Tay a copy of the FMB report. Just as Kang had predicted, there wasn’t a thing in it of any use.

“Any progress on the ID, Sergeant?”

“We’re almost through the visitor list, sir. Nothing at all yet.”

“This woman didn’t parachute in. If she’s not a local, she’s a visitor. There are no other possibilities.”

“Maybe she was in some kind of special group and isn’t on the regular visitor list.”

Tay thought about that. “What kind of group would that be?”

“I don’t know, sir. It was just an idea.”

“Well, I doubt that’s the answer, but maybe you’d better ask Immigration if that’s possible.”

“Right, sir.”

Sergeant Kang started out of Tay’s office, but suddenly stopped and turned around again.

“I almost forgot, sir. The autopsy is scheduled for two o’clock. Since it’s right after lunch, and with the facilities being so conveniently located just across the street from here and all, I assume you’ll be popping over after you polish off a nice big plate of chicken curry?”

Tay had no intention of rising to the bait.

“Who’s the forensic pathologist assigned?” he asked instead.

“Don’t know, sir. You want me to find out so you’ll be sure to knock on the right door?”

“Get out of here, Sergeant.”

“Yes, sir.” Kang grinned and disappeared.

Tay’s lunchtime routine on Fridays had become for him a ritual of some significance. Today, especially today, he had absolutely no intention of altering it.

Instead of eating lunch on Fridays, he took a taxi to one of two places: Borders in Wheelock Place or Kinokuniya in Ngee Ann City. They were the two biggest bookstores he had ever seen and browsing through them without any specific purpose in mind was about as much fun as he had these days. Sometimes he bought some fiction. Sometimes he bought some nonfiction. Once, seized by a fit of something he was still unable to identify, he had even bought a book called
Living and Working in France
, but that had been an aberration.

Regardless of what books Tay bought, however, he was happy to know that he would have their company over the weekend. He didn’t drink much, he wouldn’t go shopping except perhaps at gunpoint, and he loathed golf. That left nothing much for him to do in Singapore on the weekends other than read books, and it was that pursuit that kept him going back either to Borders or Kinokuniya almost every Friday at lunchtime.

Tay had long ago decided that his custom of spending his Friday lunch hours in a bookstore had two particular benefits: one mental and one physical. The mental benefit was that the ordered ranks of books tidily subdivided into categories and subcategories testified to the existence of mankind’s thirst for understanding, and prompted Tay to contemplate there might be order and meaning in the universe after all. The physical benefit was that it forced him to skip a meal. He could stand to lose about five pounds. Maybe ten. He really could.

This particular Friday, it was Borders’ privilege to bask in Tay’s patronage. Trying to take his mind off the image of the battered body propped up on the bed at the Marriott, he splurged a little and loaded up. He bought the British edition of
Esquire
, which he thought far superior to the American version of the magazine, a breathtakingly expensive three-volume biography of Graham Greene, and a paperback copy of a Martin Cruz Smith novel set in Japan that he had intended to read when it first came out but had never gotten around to.

Tay was pleased with his purchases and when he spotted an empty table in the outdoor area of Borders Café he plunked himself down without giving a thought to the time. He ordered a cappuccino that was served to him in a white ceramic cup the size of a cereal bowl. He wasn’t certain whether smoking was allowed there, but there had to be some benefit in being a policeman so he said to hell with it and smoked two Marlboros fired up with his brand new lighter anyway. When he was done, he tucked the lighter carefully away in his pocket. This time he had no intention of abandoning it in some idiotic gesture intended to purge his guilt over smoking.

By the time Tay returned to the Cantonment Complex it was very nearly three o’clock. There were no messages of any consequence waiting for him and he gathered his long lunch hour had gone completely unnoticed. He was just trying to decide whether that amounted to good or bad news when his telephone rang.

“Yes?”

“Inspector Tay?”

It was a woman’s voice, a very nice voice, but one that Tay didn’t recognize. Nevertheless, its agreeable quality prompted him to admit his identity without undue delay.

“This is Susan Hoi,” the woman said.

That was no help. Tay was reasonably certain he had never heard of anyone named Susan Hoi.

“Yes?” he said as noncommittally as possible.

“I’ll have a preliminary report by the end of the day, but there are several things I thought you would like to know now.”

Tay found it terminally annoying when people started talking on the telephone as if you already knew exactly what they were talking about when you didn’t, even women with very nice voices. One thing pretty much cancelled out the other as far as he was concerned, and he felt completely relieved of any inclination he might normally have toward courteous behavior.

“Who the hell are you?” he asked the woman.

“I’m sorry?”

“I asked who you are. I’ve never heard of you. And I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”

There was a lengthy pause. Just when Tay had decided that the woman had hung up either out of embarrassment or anger — and, frankly, he didn’t really give a damn which one it might be — she spoke up again.

“Is this the Inspector Samuel Tay who is the investigating officer in case E/1225/09?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“I am Dr. Susan Hoi and I have just completed autopsying the deceased Caucasian female found yesterday in a room at the Marriott Hotel who is the subject of that case.”

A protracted silence followed during which Tay wallowed richly in his embarrassment.

“Oh, God,” he eventually sighed, not able to think of anything better to say. “I’m so sorry, but nobody told me—”

“Are you the investigating officer in that case?” the woman snapped. “Or just some asshole who happened to answer his phone?”

Inspector Tay cleared his throat. “Actually,” he said, “I think I’m probably both.”

The woman laughed -- thank Christ, Tay thought -- and the sound of it was unexpectedly warm and musical.

“I really am very sorry,” Tay said, trying to regain his footing. “I just get unreasonably annoyed when someone calls me and just assumes I know what they’re on about. No one told me who was doing the autopsy and you didn’t really say what report you were referring to.”

“Yes, when you’ve been absorbed in something like this for a while you do rather just assume that everyone else in the world is thinking about it, too.”

“I
am
thinking about it,” Tay said, “but right at that moment—”

“Look,” the woman interrupted again. “Let’s just start over. Shall we do that?”

“Yes. Fine. Let’s do that.”

“The reason I’m calling, Inspector, is that I thought you would like to come over and look at this before I close.”

“Look at what?”

“The deceased, of course. The woman from the Marriott.”

Tay cleared his throat yet one more time. “Thank you, doctor. It’s good of you to offer, but I have no doubt your report will cover everything quite satisfactorily. It won’t be necessary for me to view your work personally.”

“Oh, but I think it is. You do need to see this, and anyway you’re just across the street. You know where we are, don’t you? I’ll send someone out to wait for you in reception. Shall we say fifteen minutes?”

“Really, doctor, I can’t—”

“Fifteen minutes then,” Dr. Hoi interrupted again. “I’m looking forward to meeting you, Inspector.”

And with that she hung up.

Inspector Tay sat looking at the receiver for a long moment before he slowly replaced it in its cradle. He rubbed his eyes and slapped his forehead with his palm a few times. He knew he was trapped. He would rather have a root canal than to go over there and peer at that poor woman sliced open from neck to pelvis, but what was he going to do now? Call this doctor back and tell her he tended to throw up at the sight of dead bodies? No, that was out of the question.

The Centre for Forensic Medicine was located in a building called Block Nine of the Singapore General Hospital just on the other side of New Bridge Road behind the National Heart Centre. The building itself was a nondescript, modern two-story structure that looked to Tay like it could shelter almost any kind of commercial activity. But of course he knew all too well what actually took place inside Block Nine. Equipped as he was with that knowledge, the otherwise unremarkable structure with the aluminum chimney pipes poking out here and there took on a genuinely creepy appearance. Normally it would take him no more than five minutes to walk from his office in the Cantonment Complex to Block Nine. On this day, however, he wondered if he might be able stretch it out a little, perhaps even a lot.

Like, maybe, to a year or so.

SEVEN

A
man was waiting for Tay in Block Nine’s tiny reception area. He was wearing a starched lab coat with a breast pocket full of ballpoint pens and shifting from foot to foot. He seemed very young, too young to be a doctor, and Tay wondered if he was. He also wondered briefly whether it was really that this man in particular looked so young or if everyone was starting to look young to him; and of course, if that was so, he knew full well what
that
meant.

“Are you Inspector Tay?”

“Yes, although I’m not particularly happy about it right now.”

“Pardon me?”

“Never mind.”

The man looked doubtfully at Tay and pushed his gold-rimmed glasses up the bridge of his nose. Finally, he gave a little half shrug, which apparently signaled the end of his interest in whatever Tay may or may not have said.

“This way, please.”

Tay followed the young man through a door, down a long, white corridor, and through another door. Beyond the second door was yet another long, white corridor, but the man stopped abruptly and knocked lightly at an unmarked door on the right. Without waiting for an answer, he opened it and tilted his head to indicate that Tay should go through.

The prospect of dealing with whatever was on the other side of that door was decidedly unappealing and Tay tried to catch the young man’s eye hoping to see there some possibility, however slight, of a reprieve. The man wouldn’t look directly at him and Tay didn’t know exactly what to make of that, but he doubted it could be anything good. There seemed to be only two alternatives open to him. Fling up his arms and flee, or take a deep breath and walk through that door.

Tay took the coward’s way out. He walked through the door.

To his considerable surprise, the door did not open into some kind of Frankenstein laboratory where rows of partially dissected corpses were laid out on steel tables with unidentifiable fluids draining out of them. Instead, he found himself in an institutional looking office not all that different from his own. Behind the gray metal desk, a woman who appeared to be in her mid-thirties was writing in a file.