THE GIRL IN THE WINDOW (The Inspector Samuel Tay Novels Book 4) (17 page)

But someone found him anyway.

WHEN TAY OPENED his eyes, his first thought was to wonder what had disturbed his sleep. Everyone has similar thoughts when they are roused in the night, and in the blank space of the empty hours the explanations that crawl from our imaginations are seldom explanations that soothe us.

Had there been a sudden noise or an unusual burst of light? Tay sat up in bed and looked around. The watery glow behind his bedroom drapes looked exactly as it always did. He held his breath and strained his ears, but he heard no unexpected bump or creak. He glanced at his telephone lying on the nightstand next to him. It was not lit up with an incoming call.

Once he had eliminated the usual list of temporal events as possible causes for waking, that left only one explanation, and it was one he did not like.

For nearly a year his mother had been offering all sorts of unsolicited advice. Sometimes it concerned his personal life and sometimes it concerned the cases on which he was working. He would not have considered that remarkable since mothers had been giving their sons unsolicited advice more or less since the beginning of time, but the circumstances here were a little unusual. More than unusual, actually. They were downright creepy.

Tay’s mother had died a little over year ago.

“Please leave me alone tonight, Mother,” Tay called into the darkness. “I’m depressed and tired and I’m certainly in no mood for a conversation with you.”

When his mother was alive, they hardly ever talked. In fact, after she moved to New York and remarried following his father’s death, years had gone by without any contact at all between them. Since his mother had passed away, however, she simply couldn’t shut up. She appeared quite regularly to him now, always at some God-awful hour in the middle of the night, and gave him all sorts of advice about whatever he might have on his mind at the time. It was driving him mad.

On the first few occasions his mother appeared, he was convinced he was simply being victimized by a particularly acute case of indigestion, but eventually he began wondering if there were not more to it than that. Perhaps in the silence of the night his subconscious was making itself heard. And if that were true, he probably ought to be listening more carefully. As a detective, he had always counted on his intuition to show him the way through the forest, and his subconscious coming to him in his dreams was nothing more than a tangible expression of intuition.

At other times, however, he viewed the whole phenomenon less happily. Those were the times when he wondered if he wasn’t simply lonely. He had always been a solitary man and he was generally happy to be one, but he had to admit honestly it was also true that he was sometimes lonely. He thought of his loneliness as a faint and distant ache, like a bruise on the back of his hand. It was not a thing he noticed until he banged it into something, but when he did it hurt like hell.

What else could these imagined manifestations be but his subconscious or his loneliness? After all, he certainly was not a man who normally fraternized with ghosts. He did not see spirits in the street or anywhere else. In the whole of his life, he had only encountered one ghost: that of his mother.

What bothered him a bit, however, was that his mother’s occasional appearances did seem…well, terribly real. Tay was not a spiritual man, but sometimes her presence felt so authentic that he wondered in spite of himself if her presence might not actually
be
real.

Still, he could say with absolute certainty that he did not believe in ghosts. When he sat in the garden on a sunny morning with a cup of coffee in his hand and thought about his mother, the idea that she was manifesting herself from beyond the grave to give him advice seemed laughable. In the darkness and the loneliness of his bedroom, however, the idea was far less amusing. Of course, that changed nothing. Daylight was reality. Darkness was not.

When it seemed as if he were speaking to the ghost of his mother, Tay understood perfectly well he was not. No matter how real the conversation might feel, he knew he was simply looking in a mirror and speaking to himself. There was no other rational explanation.

Except, of course, the possibility he wasn’t looking into a mirror at all, but through an opening of some sort into a spiritual dimension so profoundly unfathomable that it called into question everything he understood, or thought he understood, about the whole phenomenon of human existence. But Tay was not a spiritual man, so he knew that could not be.

To be entirely fair, he did have to admit his mother’s advice sometimes proved quite useful. Tay had once read a magazine story about the American actor, Jack Nicholson, in which Nicholson said something that summed up Tay’s feelings on the whole matter quite nicely.

I know the voices in my head aren’t real, but they have such damn good ideas I listen to them anyway.

Tay fell back against his pillow and closed his eyes. He knew it wouldn’t do him any good, but he did it anyway. He had tried more times than he cared to remember simply to ignore his mother’s appearances, but it never worked. She wasn’t the kind of woman who tolerated being ignored.

“Go away, Mother.
Please
go away.”

“I don’t know why I even bother sometimes, Samuel.”

Tay knew that if he opened his eyes he would see a light glowing somewhere in his bedroom. His mother’s voice generally emerged from a light. At least it did most of the time. Occasionally his mother appeared to him in human form sitting at the end of his bed and she would chat to him in the way he vaguely remembered she had back when he was a small child. But that didn’t happen very often. Generally it was just a light, or perhaps several lights.

Tay had never been able to work out the connection between his mother’s messages and the manner of her appearance. He thought it stood to reason the way in which she manifested herself had something to do with the message she delivered, but he had never been able to nail down the correlation.

Who was he kidding? Why would he assume a ghost would behave like a rational human being when it was neither rational nor a human being?

“Open your eyes, Samuel. You’re being childish.”

Tay said nothing and he clenched his eyelids even more tightly together.

“You know you’re going to open your eyes eventually, Samuel. You always do. Just do it now and save us both a lot of wasted time and effort.”

“Why can’t you ever show up at a civilized hour, Mother? Why must it always be at some God-awful hour when I’m exhausted?”

“I come when you need me most, Samuel. That is my job as a mother, to be here when you need me.”

“I don’t need you tonight, Mother. I really don’t.”

“Oh yes you do, son. Now open your eyes and sit up.”

Tay cracked one eye open in the direction from which his mother’s voice was coming and saw her sitting on the end of his bed. She was wearing a black dress of no style to which he could put a name and a round hat he thought was called a pillbox, also black. Her legs were crossed at the knee and her hands were linked around her knee with her fingers interlocked.

So instead of the conventional light show, this was a night for full body manifestation. That couldn’t be good.

“Do you have any idea how much effort is required for me to make these little appearances, Samuel?”

“No, Mother, but I get the feeling you’re about to tell me.”

“It’s not as if I can casually drop in on you anytime I feel like it. Arrangements are required.”

Tay was intrigued by that in spite of himself. He sat up, both eyes now open, and jammed his pillow behind him to support his back against the headboard.

Was his mother telling him there was some sort of spiritual travel agency through which she had to book passage when she came over to the other side? So what was travel like for a ghost? Did they need to deal with passports and visas and other kinds of paperwork like the sort that was required for temporal travel? Did they have to take off their shoes and put them through an X-ray machine along with their carry-on luggage?

“And yet every time I go through it all so I can come here and tell you something you need to know,” his mother continued, preventing Tay’s increasingly deranged meditations from getting entirely out of hand, “you act as if I’m imposing on you.”

“You
are
imposing on me, Mother. This is been a very difficult day. I can’t remember a worse one. And I need to sleep. That was why I asked you very politely not to bother me tonight.”

“Yes, I heard you, but I already had everything organized and it seemed such a shame to waste all that effort.”

“Yes, well, thank you anyway, but—”

“I’m sorry about Robbie Kang. He was a nice man.”

“You didn’t know Robbie Kang, Mother.”

“Of course I did. I never met him, but I knew him.”

Tay’s mother uncrossed her legs and crossed them back in the opposite direction. When she did, the bed rocked slightly and Tay wondered about that, too.

His mother was not a large person, and of course she was dead as well, there was that to consider, but she still weighed enough to move his mattress slightly when she shifted her weight. He had always assumed ghosts were spectral, or he would have assumed that if he believed in ghosts, which he didn’t, but when his mother sat on the end of his bed it made him think ghosts had weight just like living human beings. How could that be?

“And I do want to tell you, Samuel, that girl seems very nice.”

“What girl, Mother?”

“The one you’re working with.”

“Sergeant Lee?”

“Yes. She’s very attractive. Does she cook?”

“I have no idea.”

“You should find out. You’re not getting any younger, Samuel. You should be married. You may not have many more chances.”

“Yes, Mother. Is there anything else? As much as I’m enjoying this conversation, I really do need to get back to sleep.”

His mother’s figure seemed enveloped in light for an instant, then the light dimmed and she leaned toward him.

“Listen to me, Samuel, I have something to tell you that is very important.”

“What is it?”

“Ah-ha! Got your attention now, don’t I?”

Tay looked away and sighed. What good would it do him to get mad at his mother? She wasn’t there in the first place so getting angry wasn’t likely to make her go away.

“Just tell me what you need to tell me, Mother.”

“You are in great danger, Samuel.”

“What kind of danger, Mother? Do you have another girl to introduce me to?”

“Please stop making jokes and pay attention. Are you paying attention?”

“Yes, Mother, I am paying attention.”

“I know what you are going to do.”

“How do you know?”

“Oh for Pete’s sake, Samuel, I’ve told you over and over. I know everything. I have universal knowledge. It’s one of the few advantages of being dead.”

“Do you know I’d rather sleep than have another one of these stupid conversations with you?”

“Always with the jokes, huh? Always the jokes.”

“That was not a joke, Mother.”

“You know, Samuel, sometimes I think I’m just going to give up trying to help you and leave you to whatever happens.”

“That’s what I wish you would do, Mother. At least that way I would get a hell of a lot more sleep.”

All at once his mother began pacing up and down at the end of his bed with her arms folded tightly across her body.

“I know you are going to try to find the man who killed Robbie Kang,” she said, “but everything is much more complicated than you think.”

“Complicated in what way?”

“There are things at stake you know nothing about, things so big that people will stop at nothing to prevent you from exposing them. Think about that poor man they pulled out of the Singapore River.”

“What are you talking about, Mother? What does that have to do with Robbie's murder?”

Tay’s mother ignored his question. “And what about the other body?”

“What other body?”

“You know, the man who…oh wait, never mind. You haven’t found that one yet.”

“You’re scaring me, Mother.”

“Don’t get involved. Did you hear me? Don’t get involved. It will only put you in danger.”

“I am involved, Mother. I wish I weren’t, but I am.”

“If you pursue this, your own life will be at risk.”

“And why is that, Mother?”

“That is not completely clear.”

“I thought you knew everything.”

“I know everything that can be known, but there are things which cannot yet be known.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Mother. You sound like a fucking fortune cookie.”

“What language, Samuel. I didn’t raise you to use language like that.”

Tay sighed again and rubbed his eyes. “You didn’t raise me at all.”

“Such bitterness. It really doesn’t become you.”

“Are we done here, Mother? Can you go back now to wherever it is you come from and let me go to sleep?”

“Just heed my warning, Samuel. Promise me you won’t pursue Robbie Kang’s death. Will you do that?”

“It wasn’t a death, Mother, it was a murder. And I investigate murders. It’s what I do. I find redress for the dead.”

“Oh, that’s a fine phrase. Very high-sounding. Maybe a little pretentious, but quite grand really. I just hope you don’t start thinking you’re going to find redress for me.”

“I wasn’t talking about you, Mother. You’re just a figment of my imagination anyway. I was talking about Robbie Kang. You cannot expect me to forget about a friend who was murdered and died right in front of me.”

“Of course I can. Let someone else deal with him. You don’t have to solve every crime in Singapore, do you? You are not the only policeman in the country.”

“May I go back to sleep now?”

“You will thank me for my guidance someday, Samuel.”

“Does that come from your universal knowledge, or are you just feeling optimistic?”

“Now you are being tedious. And boring.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way, Mother.

“I do feel that way, Samuel. And I think I’ve had enough of you for tonight.”