Jake Needham - The Ambassador's wife

“Then why did he beat her so badly first?”

“He didn’t.”

`”What are you talking about?” Tay asked. “Her face looked like hamburger.”

“The beating occurred postmortem,” Dr. Hoi said. “As you have already pointed out, there was relatively little bleeding. If the decedent had been alive at the time she was beaten, she would have bled a great deal.”

Dr. Hoi paused for Tay to frame another question, but when he didn’t she continued.

“Your killer handcuffed this woman’s wrists and ankles, put an assassin’s handgun against her right ear, fired one shot, and then used some sort of club to crush her face. The facial marks are consistent with the butt of a gun so I’d guess her killer shot her in the head and then used the same revolver to beat her face in.”

“Why would the killer beat her after she was already dead?”

“Rage?” Dr. Hoi shrugged. “That would be my guess, but you’re the detective here, Inspector. I just cut up dead bodies and try to find out what made them dead.”

Dr. Hoi leaned back and waited a few moments for Tay to speak again. When he didn’t, she fiddled briefly with her pen, then abruptly pushed herself away from her desk and stood up.

“That’s about all I have now, Inspector. I should get back to the report. I ought to have it completed by Monday and I’ll see that you get it immediately. Now unless there’s something else…”

“No, I don’t think so,” Tay said as he rose slowly to his feet. “Nothing else. Thank you.”

Dr. Hoi offered her hand and Tay took it. It was cool to the touch. He was suddenly seized by a wild impulse to pull it toward him, open her fingers, and press her palm to his forehead, but he resisted.

“Take a left outside and go through the door,” Dr. Hoi said.

“Follow that corridor all the way to the end and you’ll be back in reception.”

“Thank you, yes,” Tay said.

Tay sensed Susan Hoi was waiting for him to say something else, but he couldn’t think what it might be.

“Have a nice weekend,” she eventually said when he remained silent.

“Thank you.”

And then he left, closing the door behind him.

Tay followed Dr. Hoi’s instructions and before long found himself outside the mortuary, standing on a concrete walkway next to a lawn that was mowed as smooth and tight as a putting green. He got his bearings and began to walk back to his office, taking it slow.

That’s the ticket, Tay thought to himself. Take it slow. Take it all slow.

The afternoon was hot and clear and the sky was a dense, crystalline blue. It looked as perfect as the inside of a ceramic bowl.

This time Tay remembered to bring the letter from New York home with him, but when he called that evening he was unable to reach the lawyer named Rosenthal. A secretary told him that Mr. Rosenthal was at his house at the shore and wouldn’t be in the office again until Monday morning. Tay left both his home and his cell phone numbers, suppressing his annoyance at finding himself a supplicant to a man who not only could take his Fridays off but also had a house at some shore. He hung up wishing he had never made the call in the first place.

It rained all day Saturday and Tay did nothing but read the Martin Cruz Smith novel, smoke, and think about the murdered woman. He felt as if he were becalmed in the eye of a hurricane. All around he could hear the wind howling and feel the storm coming, but he had no way to guess when or from what direction it might strike. Major cases were like that, he knew. Periods when nothing happened followed by periods when everything happened. Something would come up. He had no idea what it would be, but he had no doubt he would be off and running again soon. It always worked that way. At least it always had.

His mother was a different matter entirely. There Tay lacked any experience of value to him in trying to assess the future. Assuming what Rosenthal told him in the letter was true, what did it all actually mean? More to the point, although he flinched from the nakedness of the question, he knew he was really wondering what effect it would have on his own life.

He simply had no idea at all.

ON Sunday morning Tay rose late, made toast and coffee, and then thought about what to do with the final day of his weekend. He knew a lot of people claimed Singapore was boring. ‘Singabore,’ tourists sometimes called it. Usually that annoyed him, but sometimes he thought those people might well have a point. Still, he realized there was another possible explanation for his lethargy, and he liked that one even less. Maybe it was he who was boring, not the city. Perhaps he was just turning into an old fart, cranky and tedious, and that was that.

When Tay finished breakfast, he considered starting on the three-volume Graham Greene biography he had bought on Friday at Borders, but it had stopped raining and the air had turned mild and dry. The day looked promising and it did seem a shame to spend it inside with his nose in a book. Graham Greene would go down better some other day, perhaps one when a tropical rainstorm was soaking the city or maybe when the air was so hot and heavy with humidity you had to haul yourself through it hand over hand. That was Graham Greene territory, not a pleasant summer’s day when people were outside enjoying themselves.

Instead of reading, Tay thought, perhaps he ought to go for a ride on his new bicycle. After all the whole idea of buying the thing was because he thought he should be getting more exercise. He could stand to lose some weight, and he might even find himself feeling better in a general sort of way. Actually, to tell the truth, he was a bit vague on the effects of exercise, but he was certain there were many and that they were all good.

Buying the bicycle had actually been suggested to him by Cindy Shaw, a woman who lived two doors up Emerald Hill Road. She was either a widow or divorced, Tay wasn’t sure which, and she had made her interest in him so plain it was slightly embarrassing. Ordinarily he would have been flattered at almost any woman’s attention. This was an exception, and not just because Cindy Shaw had long flat hair and a long flat face, although she did and he found neither characteristic particularly appealing. He had some trouble putting his finger on exactly what it was about Cindy Shaw that annoyed him so much, but the matter of the bicycle was as good a case in point as any.

Tay was unlocking his gate one evening when Cindy came out of her house on her way to somewhere and stopped to talk. When he mentioned he had been feeling tired lately, he was just making polite conversation, but Cindy seemed to take his comment as a cry for help and immediately launched into a long list of prescriptions for his malaise.

One of Cindy’s prescriptions was for him to buy a bicycle and start getting more exercise. He gave the idea no more thought until he had been whiling away a rainy Saturday afternoon walking around Suntec City and saw a display of bicycles in the Royal Sporting House. They were all Chinese-made and not too expensive and he had to admit they looked pretty sharp. All at once the idea of biking by the sea out along the East Coast Parkway or maybe through the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve seemed quite enticing, even sexy. On a whim, he bought one of the bikes, a red one, but it had been sitting in a spare room upstairs ever since. He had been afraid to ride it for fear Cindy Shaw might think he had taken her advice and who knew where that would lead?

Tay took a sip of coffee, now gone cold, and gave the largely novel notion of physical exercise careful consideration. Would his smoking be a problem? He had heard that smoking reduced your lung capacity or something like that, but he had no idea what his lung capacity was supposed to be so he wasn’t sure what that meant. Of course, he realized that he couldn’t smoke and ride a bicycle at the same time — that would be too unseemly even to consider — but he could always ride slowly, and he could stop every now and then and take a smoke break somewhere discreetly out of view. That was starting to sound like a plan.