Nury Vittachi - The Feng Shui Detective

Sinha raised one long, bony index finger to make a point. ‘But wouldn’t that be very disruptive to the restaurant, to have staff tramping in and out all the time?’

‘Not necessarily. Staff arrived in the kitchen well before lunch time, to prepare the food. The customers rarely arrived before noon and ninety per cent of them go by 2.30 p.m. The kitchen staff would clear up and leave for their fifteen-minute breaks, which were staggered between three and four o’clock.’

‘What about the fire escape?’ This was Madam Xu.

‘Yes, the fire escape. This would be the perfect exit for a murderer on the run. It goes straight from the kitchen to a corridor on a lower floor which leads right out to the back gardens. A murderer using that route could have made a speedy exit, and gone from the kitchen to the back garden in less than a minute. Except for one thing. He or she didn’t.’

Joyce asked: ‘Was that locked as well?’

‘No. The fire escape wasn’t locked. But it was wired to an alarm, as are all the fire exits in that hotel. You cannot go in or out of a fire exit without tripping the alarm. The security desk confirmed that the door had not been tampered with, nor had the alarm gone off. Therefore, the murderer did not use that exit, you see.’

Joyce spoke indistinctly with her mouth full of surprisingly delicious onion cake. ‘So he killed the guy and then went out through the coffee shop. Sorry, Mr Sinha. I didn’t mean to spray you.’

Madam Xu lowered her tumbler to the table with a dramatic thud, slopping brown bo lei onto the table cloth. ‘Unless,’ she said, dramatically, ‘he had not left.’

The police officer smiled. ‘Yes. A definite and frightening possibility, which did occur to the officers, as they stood in the kitchen. After all, the body was freshly murdered. But remember the security guards. Sik had been guarding the door throughout that first hour, and Shiva and the first of my men who arrived checked the kitchen carefully. There are not that many places to hide in a small kitchen like that, and all of them were checked carefully. There was no one there.’

‘Air-conditioner vent?’ asked Sinha.

‘Checked,’ said the Superintendent. ‘It was too greasy to climb out of. Even if you had done it, you would have left lots of evidence.’

‘So the murderer must have left through the café door,’ said Joyce. ‘Must have been a waiter. He said it was a waiter.’

Madam Xu said: ‘What exactly were the dead man’s last words? And you said he made a gesture. What was his gesture?’

‘He said, “It was that stupid waiter,” and tried to wave his hand towards the washing area-but by that time, there was no one standing on that side of the kitchen. And there are no doors or windows in that part.’

‘So you questioned the waiters?’ said Madam Xu.

The Superintendent finished chewing a mouthful of orange vegetable before replying. ‘Of course. We interviewed all the waiters. But remember, several people saw him alive after all the waiters had gone. The last people to see him alive were a waitress, a junior cook and the sous chef. None of these can technically be described as a “waiter”. On the other hand, if you are dying, you may be a bit muddle-headed and may be not too accurate about your words, agree or not? Maybe he meant the waitress or some other staff member.’

‘Birth date? Of the dead man?’ This was Wong.

‘Ahhhh…’ Tan leafed through his papers. ‘Twentieth of September, 1957. Born in… ah, Sacramento.’ He used his chopsticks to fill his mouth with rice and spoke out of the side of his teeth. ‘Anyway, you know what police procedure is. We were pretty thorough. All the lunch-time staff were interviewed, and they all said Peter Leuttenberg was alive and well when they last saw him. Naturally, suspicion fell most heavily on the last person to leave the kitchen. It was a young man named Wu Kang, who was a junior assistant chef, birth date 4, 9, 1976, Singapore. Ms Chen-the witness I mentioned right at the beginning of my story-she remembers seeing one young kitchen assistant re-entering the kitchen while she was clearing the last table, you remember I said before? That was Wu. He says he was only there for a few seconds. His story seems to stand up-and to help us time the event.

‘You will also remember that Chen says she popped into the kitchen for a moment a few minutes after seeing Wu enter, and she saw Leuttenberg alive and Wu gone. Wu’s story was the same as that of the other staff. He said he left the kitchen, popped back in a few minutes later to pick up his hat, and left almost immediately. He said he had said goodbye to Leuttenberg, who was preparing a tiramisu for himself. He said he recalls seeing Ms Chen tidying table forty-three as he left. It all tallies, time-wise.’

Sinha asked: ‘Tiramisu? At three in the afternoon?’

‘Mr Leuttenberg was in the habit of eating tiramisu every afternoon at about this time. No one begrudges the senior chef his little quirks. And there’s something else that was strange.’

‘Yes,’ said Wong. ‘The murder weapon.’

‘How did you know?’

‘You have not mentioned it yet, so I knew.’

‘Well, you are right, Wong, the murder weapon is a factor here.’

‘What was it?’ asked Joyce. ‘A saucepan, I suppose? Or a leg of lamb, like in the story?’

‘No, Miss,’ said the Superintendent, with a laugh. ‘I have read Roald Dahl too. There was no leg of lamb to be used as a murder weapon and then consumed by the investigating officers. They do not eat on duty. Nor drink. This is a rule. This is Singapore. We do things properly here. The murder weapon was a problem. We weren’t able to find it. It was something big and heavy, like a saucepan-the dent in Leuttenberg’s head was evidence of that. But where was it? We examined everything in that kitchen. We looked at every moveable object, trying to find hairs or tissue or fresh blood that matched Leuttenberg’s. It was difficult, because kitchen utensils are always covered with fingerprints and almost always have microscopic bits of blood on them. Anyway, it was a tough job that took several of our best people many, many hours. We found nothing. Not a sausage.’

‘You were looking for a sausage?’ asked Wong. ‘You think it was a sausage?’

‘Not a sausage,’ said Joyce. ‘It’s just an expression. It means, well, like if you have some place that is completely bare, and there is absolutely like, nothing at all there, you go: Not a sausage.’

‘Why?’

There was silence. Joyce usually felt compelled to be the chief apologist of the English language, but this one foxed her.

The Superintendent, too, was stumped. He absently stirred the food on his plate with his chopsticks. ‘Never really thought about it. Helluva strange. It’s just what you say.’ He looked vaguely annoyed, then continued: ‘Anyway, the murder weapon must have been removed from the kitchen, or it had been scrubbed clean and returned to its normal place.’

‘You searched the hotel?’ asked Wong.

‘We did all the things we could think of. Wu, the young assistant, had been seen by several witnesses walking towards the main kitchen. He was carrying nothing, although he could theoretically have had some small item hidden within his clothing. But nothing big enough to have done the damage that was done to Leuttenberg’s head, you see? Chen was in the coffee shop throughout lunch, right up to the time when we interviewed her. There was no murder weapon visible in the café. Pascal von Berger, the sous chef who found the body, arrived in the café carrying nothing, and had nothing in his hands until the time we interviewed him.’

Joyce put her elbows on the table. ‘Perhaps it could have been something small but heavy like a lead pipe, which he could have hidden in his clothes? You know, like “Colonel Mustard in the study with a lead pipe.” You know the game?’