Jake Needham - The Ambassador's wife

He walked out into the garden in his stockinged feet and lit a Marlboro. He smoked quietly until the cigarette was finished and then flicked away the butt. Upstairs he went to the toilet and washed his face, and then he changed into a pair of khaki chinos and a blue denim work shirt and left the tails hanging out over his trousers.

Tay kept his service revolver in the top drawer of the bedside table. It was an old-fashioned wheel gun, a Smith and Wesson.38, five shots with a two-inch barrel. Uniformed officers and some of the younger detectives these days mostly carried big Taurus revolvers chambered for a.44 magnum. Tay had never even bothered to qualify with one so he just stuck to his little.38. It’s a great weapon if you ever get into a gunfight in an elevator, his colleagues joked, but he almost never carried a gun anyway so it didn’t particularly matter to him what it was. To tell the truth, he was such a lousy shot he figured that one gun was pretty much as useless to him as another.

He took the.38 from the drawer, unsnapped the safety strap on the holster, and slid it out. He lifted the hammer and spun the cylinder to make certain it was fully loaded, and then he carefully lowered the hammer and returned the gun to its holster. Snapping the strap and slipping the holster onto his belt, he slid it around until it was nestled in the small of his back. Then he pulled the tails of his shirt down and smoothed them over it.

Tay stood there for a moment feeling the uncomfortable lump of the.38 against his back. Carrying a gun at all made him uneasy and the physical discomfort just made it worse. He hoped he would be able to keep the damned thing in its holster where it belonged, but he didn’t know whether he would or not.

If it really did come to something like that, would he have the courage? He didn’t know. He would just have to see.

There was nothing else to think about. It was time to go.

Tay picked up the two pictures that Kang had printed out for him and was slipping them into a manila envelope when something in them that he had not noticed before caught his eye. He held the two photographs under his bedside reading lamp side-by-side to get a better look.

The figure walking alongside the Hoover Hotel in both photographs was in such deep shadow it was unrecognizable. Tay could not even tell if it was a man or a woman. Still…what was there about it? Something tickled his memory. The figure reminded him of something, or someone. Tay pushed the photographs closer to the light, turning them first one way and then the other, but nothing came to him that made the slightest sense.

Eventually he gave up. He pushed the photographs into the envelope. Then he picked up his cigarettes, put them in his shirt pocket, and turned out the reading light.

Tay had parked the car he checked out from the Cantonment Complex up on Hullet Road and he walked the two blocks to it quickly, listening to his footsteps echo hollowly in the empty street. Lighting another Marlboro, he started the car and turned west.

Tay had never been to DeSouza’s house before, but from the surveillance reports he knew exactly how to find it. It was one of the classic old bungalows up Ridley Park Road just behind the Tanglin Park Condominiums.

He also knew from the surveillance reports that DeSouza lived alone. It was a pretty ritzy address. What was a single man doing living all by himself in a big house in an expensive neighborhood instead of in a condominium? All at once it occurred to Tay that he was a single man and he too lived all by himself in a big house in an expensive neighborhood instead of in a condominium. Did that mean he was like DeSouza in some way? No, that was not possible. He was not like DeSouza in any way.

The further Tay got from Orchard Road, the more traffic thinned and by the time he passed the darkened windows of the Tanglin Mall it pretty well disappeared altogether. Tanglin was not a neighborhood in which people drove around late at night. The tree-lined roadways, the neatly trimmed lawns, and the widely spaced street lamps gave the whole area an aura of order to the point of artificiality. He hoped Sergeant Kang had pulled the surveillance off DeSouza as he had told him to. If anyone were still watching DeSouza’s house, Tay would have a hard time explaining what he was doing driving by it in the middle of the night.

Just beyond the British High Commission, Tay started watching the street signs. The Chinese embassy appeared and disappeared in the darkness and his headlights swept the neatly trimmed lawns of the elegant low-rise condominium complexes that lined Tanglin Road. When he saw the sign for Ridley Park Road, he turned right.

A hundred yards beyond the Tanglin Park Condominiums, Ridley Park narrowed into two lanes. The trees closed in and the vegetation thickened, but Tay could still see houses far up the circular driveways behind big iron gates. The houses all looked more or less alike: two stories tall with white walls, black-painted beams, red tile roofs, grassy green lawns, and wide front porticos. The area made Tay think of a deserted stage set for some play based on a Henry James novel.

Tay knew from the surveillance reports that DeSouza’s house was on the corner just around the curve he was approaching. He slowed and scanned the road cautiously. To his relief, he saw no evidence of surveillance. When he made the curve, he spotted the house immediately.

There was a black iron gate suspended between two white brick pillars and beyond the gate a short driveway crossed a tightly trimmed lawn to a covered portico at the front of the house. There was a light in the portico and lights in several upstairs windows. At a glance Tay thought all the downstairs windows were dark, but he couldn’t be certain without examining the house carefully. He didn’t want to make himself conspicuous, at least not yet, so he drove on.

Just past DeSouza’s house, Ridley Park Road narrowed further and thick vegetation crowded in on both sides. Tay kept a close eye out for surveillance vehicles along the road or off to the sides of it, but he saw none.

On the right side of the road, a high wire fence caught Tay’s eye. It was topped with coils of concertina wire, a sight that suited the Tanglin area about as well as a herd of grazing reindeer. He was just wondering what the significance of the fence could be when what looked like lines of military barracks appeared out of the night on the opposite side of the road. They were long, low whitewashed buildings with tile roofs and green shuttered windows and they looked ghostly and abandoned.

He used a roadway between two of the barracks to turn his car around. He sat for a moment with his headlights illuminating the deserted buildings and half imagined armed sentries rushing to challenge him, demanding to know what he was doing there. If any had, he would have had difficulty giving them a coherent explanation. He was even having difficulty giving himself a coherent explanation. After a bit, he stopped thinking about it, reversed out into Ridley Park Road, and turned his car back toward DeSouza’s house.

Tay parked on the grass at the side of the road. He chose a place where his car was screened by a thick stand of trees and would not be noticed if DeSouza happened to look out a window. He picked up the envelope with the photographs of the Hoover Hotel and got out, closing the car door quietly behind him.

The night was almost unnaturally calm. There was no wind at all. Moisture hung in the air like globs of powdered sugar. Tay stood for a moment on the grass, listening. Hearing nothing, he walked to DeSouza’s gates and examined them in the dim light of a street lamp up the road. He was pleased to see that they were unlocked. He gave the right one a small push and it swung open.