Jake Needham - The Ambassador's wife

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 Cafe 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-”