THE GIRL IN THE WINDOW (The Inspector Samuel Tay Novels Book 4) (11 page)

Tay went back to his chair and picked up his book, but he didn’t open it.

Three days was a long time to hang around an abandoned travel agency doing very little but watching a door through which almost no one either came or went, listening to false alarms over the radio. You ending up thinking about a lot of things at times like that, and Tay didn’t really want to.

Surveillance was simply mind-numbing. Gloom and boredom were your unremitting companions because nothing happened.

Until it did.

“I may have something here, sir.”

KANG’S VOICE WAS a merciful interruption to the plummeting spiral of Tay’s increasingly dreary meditations. He got up and stood behind Kang who was bent forward bracing his elbows on his knees to steady the field glasses.

“I think it’s her. The sister.”

Kang handed the glasses back over his shoulder. Tay lifted them and studied the woman leaning on the wall next to the green door. Her arms were folded and she was looking up and down the alleyway.

“She just came outside,” Kang said. “Maybe she’s there for a smoke like that old woman we saw before.”

Old woman?
Tay lowered the glasses and looked at the back of Kang’s head. He thought about telling Kang the
old woman
was only about ten years older than he was, but he knew he would sound ridiculous saying that so he didn’t.

“What do you think, sir? It’s her, isn’t it?”

Tay swallowed his annoyance and went back to studying the woman.

Was it the same woman ISD identified as Suparman’s sister? He wasn’t sure.

Sergeant Lee came over to have a look and Tay handed her the glasses. “What do you think?” he asked.

Lee studied the woman. “She looks better than she does in the photographs,” Lee said. “But I think Sergeant Kang is right. It’s her.”

“At least we know now that she’s really here, sir,” Kang said. “Do you want me to put it on the radio?”

“Not yet,” Tay said. “Let’s see what she does.”

The woman hadn’t taken out a cigarette so she hadn’t come outside for a smoke. Besides, she was a guest at the hotel, not an employee, and in four hours of watching they hadn’t seen a single guest use the emergency exit for any reason. What was this woman doing? She was just standing there looking up and down the alleyway.

Like she was waiting for someone.

Tay took the glasses back from Lee and trained them on the woman. She was wearing a light gray golf shirt, long black shorts which came to the center of her knee, and white athletic shoes. In her left hand she held a straw purse large enough to park a Volkswagen. She looked a little heavier than in photographs ISD gave them. Her skin was more sun-browned, and she even appeared a little younger. The longer Tay studied the woman, the more it seemed to him something here was not right.

Goh told them Suparman was slipping into Singapore to visit his sister because she was dying from cancer. Tay knew he ought to be cautious about offering a medical diagnosis from fifty yards away after watching the woman through field glasses for a few minutes, but there simply was no doubt in his mind.

This woman leaning against the wall outside the emergency exit wasn’t dying from cancer or from anything else. At least not anytime soon. From what Tay could see, he was willing to bet she would outlive him.

Tay handed the glasses to Lee.

“Does she look sick to you?” he asked.

Lee studied the woman again and Tay waited, curious as to what she thought.

“I don’t know, sir. She looks okay to me, but what do I know?”

Kang glanced back over his shoulder at Tay. “Why would they lie to us about that, sir?”

“Because it’s what they do.”

Kang looked puzzled. He didn’t understand exactly what Tay meant by that. Tay didn’t blame him. He wasn’t absolutely sure what he meant either.

“What do you want to do, sir?” Kang asked.

“We are supposed to be watching for Suparman, not for her, so I suppose we do nothing.”

“Maybe she came outside to wait for Suparman.”

Tay nodded. That was exactly what he was thinking.

For a long while after that nothing at all happened. Tay, Kang, and Lee passed the glasses back and forth and watched the woman, but she only leaned against the wall next to the door, glancing up and down the alleyway.

The sun had reappeared and the alley was again filled with swirling hordes of people, which meant they occasionally lost sight of the woman. Singapore was usually a quiet, uncrowded city, except in tourist areas like Chinatown. Tay had observed that western tourists in particular had a way of walking that commandeered a lot of space in a crowd. He didn’t know why that was, but it was clearly true.

“She’s talking to someone, sir.”

Tay took the glasses from Kang. The woman was still leaning against the wall next to the door, but now a man was standing directly in front of her. They looked as if they were carrying on a conversation.

“Where did he come from?”

“I’m not sure, sir. Just out of the crowd.”

“Not from the hotel?”

“No, sir. I’m certain of that.”

The man’s back was to them and Tay couldn’t see his face. He looked to be of average height with short black hair, and he was wearing dark slacks and a white, short-sleeved shirt with the tail out. He could have been anybody. Every man in Singapore was of average height with short black hair, and an untucked, short-sleeved white shirt over dark slacks was the standard male uniform.

“Do you think it’s Suparman, sir?”

Tay said nothing. He simply had no idea.

“I don’t think so,” Lee offered. “He’s not tall enough, is he?”

Tay said nothing. He just stared at the man’s back through the glasses, willing him to turn around.

“Shouldn’t we put it on the radio, sir?”

“And how is it we see what we’re seeing, Sergeant Kang? Had you forgotten we’re actually back at the Santa Grande Hotel watching television and waiting for our pals in ISD to give us a call?”

“Yes, sir, but—"

“Forget it. We say nothing unless we’re absolutely sure we’re looking at Suparman.”

The problem was that Tay had no idea how they were going to do that unless the man cooperated by turning around and giving them a look at his face. If the conversation finished and the man walked away without them seeing his face, Tay knew he would feel like a real idiot.

“Go downstairs, Robbie. See if you can walk past them at an angle that will give you a good look at him without being obvious about it.”

Kang picked up the radio. “If it’s Suparman, sir, should I–”

“Just telephone me. But be absolutely sure
before
you telephone me. I don’t want to be responsible for another false alarm.”

Kang nodded, put the radio back on the desk, and headed downstairs.

THE WOMAN ABRUPTLY pushed herself away from the wall. It looked to Tay like the conversation was over. 
He also thought the man might have handed the woman something, but his view was blocked and he had no idea what it was, if it was anything at all. 
The woman and the man started walking slowly away together and for one tantalizing moment the man turned his head slightly. Tay was sure he was about to get a look at his face, but he didn’t turn it quite far enough and all Tay saw was a flash of his profile. It wasn’t nearly enough.

When Kang stepped out into the alleyway, he saw what was happening and called Tay.

“They’re moving so slowly I think I can walk past them and come back. I ought to be able to see his face that way.”

But before Tay could say anything, everything changed.

All at once the woman turned around and came directly toward Kang. The man speeded up and walked away in the opposite direction.

“Sergeant Lee and I are coming down, Robbie. You and Lee stay with her. I’ll take him.”

Tay and Lee left the radio, the backpack, Tay’s books, and everything else, and ran for the stairs. When they stepped into the alleyway, Tay saw Kang’s back disappearing into the crowd. He gathered Kang had eyes on the woman and she was somewhere in front of him. Back to his left, the news was not so good. The crowd had already swallowed up the man.

“Go,” he snapped at Lee. “Don’t lose her.”

Turning in the opposite direction, Tay weaved through the throngs of tourists trying to catch sight of the man. He dodged a pushcart from which an elderly woman was selling ice cream and stepped out of the end of the alleyway into Pagoda Street.

The crowds were a bit thinner there and he swept his eyes back and forth. Then he had a stroke of luck. A flash of red caught his eye and he glanced toward a little girl who was jerking a balloon up and down by its string. About twenty feet beyond her, walking west toward New Bridge Road, he spotted the man. Something about the posture and the body language left Tay with no doubt he was looking at the same person he had seen in the alleyway.

That part of Pagoda Street had been blocked off to vehicles and turned into a walking street for tourists. Strings of hokey red and white paper lanterns fluttered overhead and carts displaying every imaginable kind of tourist junk stood shoulder to shoulder along both sides. Tay plowed into the crowd and hustled forward to keep the man in sight.

Following someone undetected when you are working alone is an almost impossible task, even for an expert. Tay understood that, and he also understood all too well that he was no expert. About all he knew about street surveillance was what he had picked up from reading John le Carré novels. Which suddenly gave him an idea.

Scanning the vendors’ stalls, Tay spotted a middle-aged man looking at baseball caps that said
Singapore!
across the front. The man appeared to be having a hard time deciding between a blue one with white lettering and a red one with blue lettering, and he had taken off his own cap to try on first one and then the other and examine each in a little mirror hanging on the side of the stall. The man was concentrating on his image in the mirror and the stall’s owner was concentrating on his customer to be sure he didn’t steal anything, which gave Tay an opportunity to scoop up the man’s old cap from the place he had momentarily set it aside.

Sliding back into the crowd, Tay glanced at the front of the light green hat he had just stolen.
Dolphins
, it said across the front beneath a cartoon of a large fish.

Why would anyone put the name of a fish on the front of a baseball cap?

Tay had absolutely no idea. He shook his head, jammed the cap down to his ears, and kept walking.

If the man he was after checked behind him for surveillance, he would see a man in a green cap that said
Dolphins
. After that Tay could ditch the cap and his appearance would be different if the man checked behind him again. It wasn’t much, Tay knew, it might not be anything really, but the trick usually worked in spy novels and it was the only idea he had.

All of a sudden Tay lost sight of the man altogether. Three large Caucasian women in bulging shorts and t-shirts were walking very slowly right down the middle of the street with their arms linked and Tay couldn’t see past them. As long as he could remember, the rotund nature of the city’s Caucasian tourists had been a source of wonder and amusement for the locals. Did all the thin tourists go some place else, Singaporeans asked each other, or were the Caucasian tourists everywhere that fat?

Tay cut left between two t-shirt stalls, trotted through a scattering of small metal tables surrounded by white plastic chairs, and rejoined Pagoda Street on the other side of the three bovine woman. He was certain he had lost the man, but he moved back and forth through the crowd a few times and then a space opened in front of him and he found the man again. He was about fifty feet ahead and making straight for New Bridge Road.

But was it Suparman? Tay still had couldn’t tell.

“Turn around, you son of a bitch,” Tay muttered. “Give me a look at your face.”

The man apparently wasn’t feeling cooperative. Heedless of Tay’s plea, he kept walking.

When he reached New Bridge Road, he jogged up the steps of a pedestrian bridge, crossed over the busy double roadway to the northbound lanes, and took the steps back down to a taxi stand in front of the People’s Park Complex. A blue Comfort taxi pulled up when Tay was still forty feet from the stand and the man got in. Tay looked around frantically and was amazed at his luck when he saw another Comfort taxi just turning in. The cab hadn’t even stopped rolling when Tay jerked open the door, ripped off his stolen baseball cap, and dived into the backseat.

“Follow that taxi, the blue one right in front of you,” he snapped.

The driver turned his head and stared at his passenger, his eyes wide. He was an elderly Chinese man with a heavy black glasses and a bad haircut.

“I drive taxi more than thirty year,” he said. “I always dream somebody say that to me.”

Tay fumbled in his pocket, pulled out his warrant card, and held it up.

“This is police business. Get moving.”

“Yes, sir!”

The rear tires spun as the driver gunned the engine and shot out of the taxi stand into New Bridge Road.

“Don’t get too close,” Tay snapped. “Just keep that taxi in sight and don’t lose it.”

“I no lose,” the driver said. “I see
Fast and Furious.”

Wonderful,
Tay thought
. I learned about surveillance from spy novels and this guy learned about driving from car chase movies. What could possibly go wrong?

The traffic heading north on New Bridge Road was light and they had no difficulty keeping the other taxi in sight. They crossed the Singapore River on the Coleman Bridge and passed the Old Hill Street Police Station without slowing down.

Before they reached Raffles, the little convoy turned west on Stamford Road, passed Fort Canning Park, and headed toward the hotels and malls of Orchard Road. It seemed unlikely to Tay that Suparman had been seized by an impulse to do some shopping, and even more unlikely he was staying in one of the very public five-star hotels in the area. Tay began to feel some serious doubts creeping in. Maybe this wasn’t Suparman he was following. Notorious international terrorists didn’t stay at the Four Seasons, did they?