The Singapore School of Villainy (27 page)

Annie's hair was tied away from her face. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. She looked much younger than Singh had ever noticed before, shorn of the uniform, make-up and manner of a corporate lawyer. Stephen had told him, when he had gone to the office looking for her, that Annie had resigned from Hutchinson & Rice – apparently unwilling to be associated with the tainted reputation of the law offices any more. He had finally tracked her down at home, having coffee on the verandah with David Sheringham, their sunny mood dampened by the unexpected presence of the fat policeman. Annie sat across from Singh and clutched David's hand possessively. The contrast between her brown hand – a product of her parentage – and his tanned one was less a matter of colour than of tone, Singh noted with interest.

She said, after she had served them all steaming cappuccinos, ‘I heard that you arrested Ai Leen for Mark's murder!'

He nodded. ‘I'm guessing it was some sort of conspiracy between the two of them – Ai Leen and Reggie – when they realised Mark knew their secret. She's denying it, of course.'

Annie gazed at the inspector with friendly brown eyes. ‘She'd be bound to do that,' she pointed out. ‘It doesn't mean anything.'

Frown lines appeared in neat parallels on David's forehead as if someone had drawn them in with a dark felt pen. ‘Are you sure it was them?'

‘I agree with Annie,' said Singh comfortably. ‘Ai Leen will still be protesting her innocence to the gallows. She's not the sort to give up or give in.' He tapped his forehead with his forefinger. ‘After all, who else could it be?'

‘Quentin?' asked Annie doubtfully. Her wrinkled nose lent her the air of someone reluctantly pointing out an alternative.

‘No
motive
,' explained Singh.

‘What do you mean?' demanded Annie. ‘What about the insider dealing to fund his drug habit?'

‘That wasn't him,' said Singh cheerfully, the curve of his lip matching the curve of his belly.

Annie asked, and her voice was as calm as a windless day, ‘It was someone from Trans-Malaya then?'

The girl had courage, thought Singh. She was trying to brazen it out – only a sudden rigidity in her body suggested that she was afraid.

He said, ‘No – it was
you
.'

Annie's bruises from her altercation with Quentin were fading but they were thrown into stark relief by her sudden pallor. David's hand tightened around Annie's convulsively but Singh noted with interest that he did not look surprised.

She faced the inspector with her jaw thrust out. ‘How dare you accuse me of such a thing?'

‘The Malaysian police tracked down a brokerage account in the name of one Colonel Nathan – your father,' he added unnecessarily. ‘And it seems that he was very lucky, very clever or well furnished with inside information when it came to trading shares in Trans-Malaya.'

Her head was bowed.

Singh waited patiently for her next gambit. He had the greatest admiration for this woman's ability to finesse the truth.

‘I had nothing to do with it. My father must have based his trades on our conversations. My God – I trusted him!'

‘Curiously, that's exactly what he said. He tried very hard to protect you, you know.'

She looked up at this, eyes wide. Her father's willingness to sacrifice himself for her had caught her by surprise.

‘But there is no way that any supposed casual conversations would have contained the detailed information needed for the insider dealing,' pointed out Singh. ‘You have, very carefully and very systematically, been using your inside knowledge to instruct your father to carry out various trades in the shares of Trans-Malaya for personal, illegal profit.'

Annie's head had dropped, a curtain of hair obscuring her features.

The policeman added, ‘I won't charge you with
that
crime. It's not my remit. I just want to know for my own peace of mind.' He sighed – a fat man with troubles. ‘You know how I hate loose ends.'

Annie relaxed on hearing this and her hunched shoulders straightened slightly. But she still did not respond to the accusation.

Inspector Singh asked, turning his attention to David, ‘How did
you
know?' His voice had a petulant edge, as if they were schoolboy friends and one of them was keeping secrets.

David held his gaze for a moment and then his eyes dropped. It was not an unexpected response. Singh had seen many a decent man discover that they could not – when push finally came to shove – lie to the authorities. At most, they could maintain an unhappy silence while regretting the chain of events that had led them to a place where extemporising or evasion were their only viable alternatives. Singh's back curved like a bow. Extra folds emerged between his chest and stomach. It never ceased to amaze him what an honest man was prepared to do for a woman. And in the end, they were the only ones who got hurt.

David addressed his answer, when he could finally find the words, to Annie. ‘I heard the end of your conversation with Quentin that night he attacked you…and if it wasn't him insider dealing, it had to be you.'

‘Why didn't you say anything?' Singh guessed that she knew the answer but wanted to hear it directly from David.

David held up his hand so that they could both see their interlocking fingers. He smiled at her a little sadly. ‘I wanted to protect you.'

 

‘There's more, isn't there?' Singh asked the question gently, his tone that of a kindly, elderly relative.

Annie's face was impassive, but Singh knew it was a mask so fragile that any hint of pressure would crack it like an eggshell – if he could find the right pressure point.

She asked, ‘What do you mean?'

‘
Murder!
'

David sat up, his movements wooden with distress. ‘What are you trying to say?' he demanded.

‘That your girlfriend here killed Mark Thompson, and Jagdesh Singh.'

Annie's voice, however, was as close to normal as Singh had ever heard from a suspect accused of murder. ‘Don't be ridiculous!' she snapped.

David spoke, and his voice was the embodiment of fear. Fear for Annie? Fear of the truth? Singh was not sure. ‘But Annie wouldn't
kill
anyone! That's just nonsense.'

If Singh noticed that the denials were being issued by David, not the woman who stood accused, he did not point it out.

Instead he turned to Annie. ‘Tell us what happened,' he said quietly.

‘I have no idea what you're talking about.'

Singh sighed. It was a gentle sound tinged with genuine regret. He felt truly sorry that it was this girl; he would so much rather it had turned out to be one of the others. He knew he was being sentimental because Annie was female and young and beautiful and had her whole life ahead of her. But Singh was not about to shirk his duty. He understood what had led Annie to such terrible deeds but he could not excuse it.

He said, ‘I can appreciate why you killed Mark – you were in a complete panic that the insider dealing had been found out. Mark insisted that the partnership had to know. It must have seemed, in that instant, that murder was the only solution. But I can't forgive you for holding a pillow over Jagdesh Singh's face. That was a cold-blooded, pre-meditated,
cruel
murder.' He spat out the adjectives like an angry English teacher.

She shook her head, unable to form words.

‘He was defenceless! In a coma.'

The memory of the big man lying as still as the dead was crystal clear in his mind's eye. Singh knew he would carry the burden of Jagdesh's death for a long, long time.

David removed his hand from Annie's. Perhaps he too was remembering the young homosexual lawyer who had died to keep a secret. It was a small gesture of rejection that Singh suspected would be the final straw to break this young woman's defiance. Annie did not seek his hand again. She tucked a tendril of hair behind her ear. Her forefinger went to her mouth and she began to nibble on a nail. Singh recognised the gesture – he had seen it so many times over the last couple of weeks.

He said evenly, ‘It hasn't been that hard to find evidence, once we knew what we were looking for. Corporal Fong has been busy since we found out about the insider dealing. It seems you rang for a taxi from the phone box down the road from your home to take you to the office. You took another cab back, the driver has been traced – apparently you were agitated and wouldn't respond to his overtures of conversation. I'm not surprised, you had just killed a man. But then you pulled yourself together, had a shower, drove your car into the office and sent Quentin Holbrooke ahead to discover your dirty work.'

There was no response from either Annie or David.

‘I suspected you at the beginning, you know. It was just that so many of your colleagues were determined to draw my attention to their own shortcomings, I started to doubt my own mind.' Singh could not keep the complacent note out of his voice at his own genuine, albeit ignored, foresight.

‘What do you mean? How did you know?' David was trying to create reasonable doubt. But his voice was too hesitant, it revealed his own reservations.

‘The log of Mark's phone calls from the office the evening he was killed…'

‘What about them?' demanded Annie, finally finding her voice.

‘Mark called you
last
.'

‘So?'

‘It's human nature to put off to the last the most unpleasant thing we have to do. When I saw the list of calls, I
knew
you must have murdered Mark. But there didn't seem to be any motive. Your colleagues were competing for my attention – determined, it seemed, to prove themselves capable of murder. I wish I had arrested you then, not doubted my own conclusions. It would have saved Jagdesh Singh's life.'

 

Annie didn't need to be an expert on human nature to know that David Sheringham believed she was a murderer. Singh had been convincing. The unlikely rotund self-proclaimed expert on human nature had persuaded a man she was beginning to care for deeply that she was a killer. He was sitting back in the chair, staring at her, the worry lines on his face underlining his dismay.

He asked, and his voice was a whisper – as if he had to force the words out, did not really want an answer to his question – ‘You killed Jagdesh? My God! Annie, why?'

She remembered how he had held her in his arms the afternoon of Jagdesh's attempted suicide. She had known at that moment that she could not risk losing him, that she needed the murder investigation to be resolved quickly.

‘I really didn't want to hurt Jagdesh,' she whispered. ‘He was my friend.'

David blanched white at the unlikely words – an assertion of friendship by a murderer for her victim.

Annie continued, ‘Jagdesh was so close to death anyway. And if he was dead, I thought Inspector Singh would stop poking his nose into our business. Life would get back to normal.' She smiled at David. ‘I was hoping that there might be something worthwhile between us…if only we could put the murder investigation behind us.'

David flinched. Annie knew that the thought that he might have formed a part of her motive was too much for him to bear. She continued, desperately seeking a hint of understanding, ‘I didn't know that he had an alibi. I just thought it would make the whole thing go away.'

She reached out and touched David gently on the face. She said, ‘I'm really sorry about the way things turned out.' Annie turned to the inspector with a crooked grin that failed to conceal her wretchedness. ‘What now?' she asked.

Singh said, ‘You're under arrest for the murder of Mark Thompson and Jagdesh Singh…'

The presiding judge did not hesitate to impose the death penalty for the double murder. He ordered, in the language of statute and precedent, that the accused “be hanged from the neck until dead”. Annie had refused to appeal despite David Sheringham's urgent pleas. Once she was on death row – in her thirty-square-foot cell with the sleeping mat and toilet – she had refused to see him, even after she was notified four days before of the Friday – it was always Friday – on which she would walk to her death.

Singh, a reluctant emissary on behalf of David, was told by the guards while the prisoner was being escorted to the meeting room that she had also refused television privileges, special meals and to see her father. But she had asked to donate her organs, hoping, he guessed, to make amends for the lives she had taken.

Now, they sat on chairs on either side of a clear glass window. Prisoners on death row were not allowed physical contact with anyone, not their families, friends, and certainly not arresting policemen.

‘David really wants to see you,' explained Singh.

She refused with a small shake of the head and the policeman noticed for the first time that her glossy hair had been cut short.

Her manner was calm and there was a small smile on her lips. ‘There's no point,' she said. ‘It will only upset him.'

Singh recalled the distraught young man who had begged him to visit Annie and could find no sensible response to this belated concern for David's emotional state. They sat across from each other now, neither of them speaking. It was a friendly silence, a strange sensation in that small closed space. Singh guessed that, in many ways, Annie was relieved that her ordeal was almost over. The murder of Mark Thompson had not been pre-meditated. Everything else that had taken place had assumed a nightmarish quality of inevitability until she found herself holding a pillow to the face of an unhappy young man.

‘What's happening with Quentin?' she asked, and he was surprised that she had the energy to think of others.

‘After your arrest, I ordered that passports be returned to the other lawyers as they were no longer suspects. Quentin caught the first flight out of Singapore. I understand from David that he's in rehab in London.' He continued with a slow wink of his heavy eyelid, ‘I had
forgotten
, you see, that Quentin was wanted on drugs charges.'

The woman across from him smiled with genuine heartfelt relief. ‘Good work,' she said quietly.

The inspector nodded. There had been hell to pay. Superintendent Chen had been apoplectic. But it had been worth it. There had been enough death already and Singh was not prepared to facilitate another.

He changed the subject abruptly. ‘Why did you do it?' he asked.

She did not misunderstand the question. He was not asking about the murders. He wanted to know why a wealthy successful young woman would have used her own father to trade shares illegally for money.

‘It's hard to explain. When we were growing up, we were always short of money. My dad, he was a risk-taker, always looking out for the next business opportunity, always willing to gamble everything on “making it big”!'

Singh tried to remember his own father, a civil servant with the British administration who had worn a massive turban and starched trousers that would stand upright without him. The old man had always kept a careful record of the family's every expenditure in a small notebook to ensure they did not exceed his income.

‘We were constantly in debt, there were bailiffs at the door and sometimes gangsters if Dad borrowed money through more informal channels…' She looked at the policeman, meeting his eyes, seeking his understanding. ‘We were always afraid.'

Singh nodded. Despite her elucidation, he struggled to fathom her motives. But he wanted to hear more.

‘One day, when I was about eleven, three men came to the house. My father owed them money. He was away – he was always away when things got unpleasant. They insisted we pay them. My mother gave them the cash we had in the house but it was a derisory amount, not enough to persuade them to leave. One of them grabbed Mum's hand and yanked the wedding ring off her finger.'

She was re-living the moment, he could tell from her hoarse, fear-laden voice. ‘I heard the bone in her finger crack, Mum screamed, I was crying, begging them to go away.'

There were tears in her eyes now. ‘She had a gold chain around her neck – she always wore it. It was the one thing she never let my dad pawn. She would smile at me and say it was for a rainy day. One of the men grabbed the chain and yanked. At first, it didn't snap. Mum's hands were around her throat and I was afraid that she was going to choke. He twisted the chain and it broke. Mum fell backwards and hit her head on the corner of a table.'

She fell silent. This time around it was a silence fraught with unshed tears and unfinished tales.

‘I tried to raise her up but she was too heavy for me. And then I saw that there was blood on my hands. The men, when they realised that Mum was injured, they ran away. By the time the ambulance arrived, Mum was dead.'

She looked up, meeting his eyes. ‘It's not an excuse. There's no excuse for what I did. But I swore that day that I would never be short of money, never allow myself to be in such a position again.'

Singh sighed deeply. ‘It's not an excuse but I think it is, at least, an explanation.'

She nodded her thanks. Perhaps, he thought, there was solace in a story told to a sympathetic listener.

‘May I tell David?' he asked carefully.

She nodded once, rose slowly to her feet and walked out of the room.

 

The execution was scheduled to take place just before dawn – at six a.m. exactly. The executioner had visited Annie the previous day and taken her weight, in order to be sure to use the appropriate length of rope. Singapore used the “long drop” method of hanging, which causes a cervical fracture in the neck and almost instantaneous paralysis and unconsciousness. Singh knew that it was argued by proponents to be the most humane method of judicial execution. The inspector also knew that an inexperienced hangman could leave the victim asphyxiating in slow agony or decapitated.

The hangman was an old acquaintance though, a seventy-year-old prison guard in knee-length shorts and a T-shirt, wearing long socks with trainers, who had carried out hundreds of executions, first for the British and then for the Singaporean government. Singh whispered to him to be extra careful and received a nod and a smile in return. When Annie arrived she was already hooded and Singh was glad – and ashamed of himself for being glad – that he would not have to look into her soft brown eyes once more.

He had decided to attend the hanging, something he rarely did, to provide some comfort to David Sheringham, the young lawyer who had become his friend. He wanted to be able to tell him that someone she knew had been with the woman he cared about at the moment of her death. If Annie found some reassurance in his presence, he did not mind that either. It was cold comfort to him that she had earned her place on the platform by killing two people. Corporal Fong, clutching his letter of promotion in a firm grip, had offered to come along but Singh had refused the company. This was something he preferred to do alone.

He watched as the chief hangman escorted Annie over the trapdoor. She went willingly and quietly. There was no struggle, no protest. The coroner and prison superintendent stood by him, both silent. They had all witnessed many executions in their time, but even to these hardened men there was something pitiful about this slim hooded figure.

Annie Nathan stood very straight and very still as the noose was placed gently around her neck.