It was better than I’d expected: I’d envisaged having to weigh in with Miles myself at the end of the day, to win him over. Prim had done a good job. I called her mobile to tell her as much. It was the middle of the night in Auchterarder, and it was switched off, so I left her a voice message saying, ‘Well done, Benny owes you one,’ and hung up. Then I rang Mike’s room to give him the good news, but when he answered he sounded like a Martian, so I told him I’d see him downstairs at midday, and went off to the club room for breakfast.
Once I had eaten, I picked up a map of the city centre. It told me that the Esplanade theatre complex was located in two hedgehog-shaped buildings I could see from the club windows. I asked the concierge, a pleasant girl whose name-tag said she was called Polly, whether they were easy to reach. She told me that there was a walkway which led straight there from more or less under the hotel.
I found it easily enough, at the foot of the escalator leading to the City Hall MRT station. (The MRT is Singapore’s subway; it is to the London Underground as the classic Cadillac in the Monaco motor museum is to the nearby East German Trabant.) The walkway turned out to be a shopping mall. I hadn’t sussed this out at that time, but Sing is a very, very serious retail place. Eventually I was glad that Susie didn’t make the trip, because there wouldn’t have been enough suitcases on the island to carry back the stuff she’d have bought.
It took me ten leisurely minutes to reach the Esplanade, and when I did I found that the walkway led me into an underground car park from which another escalator raised me up into a vast modern marble foyer.
Bear in mind that it was still well short of eleven on a Sunday morning, but there were other visitors, sightseers in the place, and there were two blue-suited receptionists on duty. One of them looked like an even further upmarket version of one of the tall Chinese waitresses we had seen briefly (at least I had seen them: Dylan’s eyes had been crossing by that time) in the New Asia the night before.
She approached me and welcomed me, with a smile that said she meant it, to the Theatres on the Bay. She gave me a rundown on some of their recent performances, including the Sadlers Wells ballet (Ali, my irreverent grocer pal in Edinburgh, used to call ballet ‘poofs’ football’, and may well still do so) and on some of their forthcoming attractions. She told me that the following night there would be a performance by the University of Florida Wind Symphony. You know me well enough by now to read my mind: I tried to keep the smile off my face, but I failed. We both wound up laughing; I liked this girl.
The burst of early visitors had come to an end, so we were able to talk. She told me that her name was Marie Lin, and that she was an actress, supplementing her income by doing shifts in the complex. She was Singapore-born, but she had the ambition to leave the island and work either in Britain or America.
‘Not Australia?’ I asked her.
‘Fewer opportunities for Chinese people,’ she replied.
She hadn’t appeared to recognise me, so I told her that I was an actor too. She asked my name, and I gave her one of the cards I carry, with my personal contact details. She was a little embarrassed when she read it, but in an attractive way. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Blackstone,’ she said. ‘I should have. .’
‘I’ve had a long flight and a hard night in the Crazy Elephant,’ I replied. ‘My wife wouldn’t have recognised me this morning.’
I handed her another card and told her to note her mobile number on the back, then I had her write down Roscoe Brown’s address and invited her to drop him a line with my endorsement; I gave her another card to include with it as proof we’d actually met, to make sure that Roscoe’s secretary didn’t bin it.
I’m sure she must have wondered whether there would be strings attached. There weren’t, as it happened, and even if there had been, Marie Lin seemed like the sort of girl who’d have cut them off with a very sharp knife. In fact, I was thinking ahead: Blue Star Falling had a part for a Chinese girl and she looked as if she’d be perfect for it.
I reckoned that I could rely on her. ‘While I’m here,’ I said, ‘I’m trying to track someone down. Are you familiar with a theatre group called Heritage?’
‘I’ve worked with them,’ she told me, ‘not recently, but last year I had a part in one of their productions.’
Direct hit: well done, Oz. ‘Do you know the director, Tony Lee?’
‘No, I don’t. The man who was there then, he left or, rather, was fired by the Arts Ministry. But his replacement’s name is Lee Kan Tong.’
‘Yeah, but he was Tony Lee in London.’
‘That doesn’t surprise me. It’s quite usual for young Singaporeans to adopt English names; not just actors, all people. Me, I am Lin May Wee; you see why I change it for the stage.’
I smiled at her. ‘Nice one. Do you know where I could find Lee Kan Tong?’
‘I’m sorry, Mr Blackstone.’
‘Oz.’
She gave a little bow of acknowledgement. God, but she was attractive; I made a mental note not to tell Dylan about her. ‘I’m sorry, Oz. The Heritage Theatre Company had an office behind Boat Quay, but they moved early this year. I think it’s in Riverside Point now. It won’t be open today, though.’ That was a bit of a bugger: I wanted to pin down Maddy January as quickly as I could, and preferably that day.
‘I don’t suppose it will, Marie,’ I agreed. ‘Still, I can always take a run out there just to check where it is.’
‘Take a water taxi,’ she suggested.
‘What?’
‘A water taxi. You go out to the front of the building, past the open-air theatre and you’ll find a jetty. You talk to the man there and he’ll call you a boat.’ She paused. ‘Wait,’ she said, then turned to her colleague. I heard them speaking quietly in Chinese, then the other woman glanced at me and her brown eyes widened; she smiled and nodded.
‘I’ll take you there,’ Marie announced. ‘Anna says you’re a VIP, so we have to look after you. She’s the front-of-house manager, so if she says it’s okay, it’s okay. Come on.’
She went behind her counter and picked something up. I assumed it was a handbag, but when I looked I saw that it was a collapsible umbrella. ‘Are we due a storm?’ I asked.
She smiled. ‘We don’t use umbrellas for rain here: usually it goes straight through them. This is for the sun.’
As it transpired, when we went outside, she found she didn’t need it. A layer of light cloud hung over the city, killing the glare that had welcomed the day: the humidity was full blast, though. There were several people waiting at the jetty on the esplanade, but Marie had a word with the man, I gave him ten dollars and, as if by magic, within three minutes a boat cruised towards us.
It was a long wooden craft, one of many on the river, with an open-sided cabin hung with red lights. The night before, from Clarke Quay, they’d all looked like floating brothels, but by day, this one at least was revealed as an ancient craft that must have seen and survived invasion, restoration and a million tourist bums in the sixty years since. Marie gave me the river tour as we went, past the statue of the Merlion, a mythical beast (which I suspect, although I can’t prove it, was invented by an advertising agency), the former GPO building, which is now the Fullerton Hotel, the bars and restaurants of old Boat Quay, bustling as they got ready to open for the day, and Clarke Quay itself, which, by the light of day, I saw was much newer and purpose-built.
Finally we pulled up at the Riverside Point jetty. The boatman had a simple approach: he didn’t tie up, he simply jammed the prow of the vessel into the landing-stage, and revved the engine to keep it steady as we jumped off.
We didn’t have far to walk. Riverside Point was a complex of offices and restaurants, which also seemed to be the temporary home of the Singapore History Museum. (It wasn’t very big, but I don’t suppose Singapore’s had a hell of a lot of history.) One of the restaurants included a micro-brewery. . something else Dylan would be avoiding; we stepped past it and into the foyer, looking for the usual list of tenants.