She smiled. ‘Could I get into yours, if I did?’
I grinned back at her. ‘Maybe you just had a chance. We’ll never know.’
‘Let’s just say now is too soon,’ she said quietly. ‘I don’t know you well enough.’
‘Only one person ever really knew me.’ There was something about the girl that had me saying things without even thinking about them.
‘Your wife?’
‘My sister: half-sister.’ I said it naturally: I’d never think of Jan as a wife again. Our marriage was never legal, in the eyes of the law, at any rate. No, what we had was much more complex, much deeper than a marriage, even if I hadn’t known it at the time.
‘Where is she now?’
‘Her bones are in a cemetery in Scotland. Her spirit’s never far away.’
‘That’s what you didn’t want to talk about earlier?’ I nodded. ‘What happened?’
‘She was murdered.’
‘Aah.’ She sighed. ‘That’s why you can seem scary inside. And the man who did it?’
‘People. The man who did it was under orders. They’re dead; all dead.’
‘Did you. .?’
‘Ssh!’ I whispered. ‘Let’s not go there. It’s better that you don’t know about the feelings you have in your heart when something like that happens.’
‘Maybe not.’ She looked up at me again, as if she had closed one chapter and moved on to the next. ‘Do you leave Singapore, now that this Lee Kan Tong man is dead?’
‘Not yet. I didn’t come to find him, but the woman who’s with him. She has something that I need.’
‘Do you know where she is?’
‘No. But if I find out, I’ll go after her. I’ll know better tomorrow morning. . this morning.’ In a corner of my eye, I saw the traffic-lights change. A taxi with an illuminated sign came towards us: I flagged it down.
‘He’ll think I’m a prostitute,’ Marie said, laughingly, as it drew to a halt.
‘You’re too good-looking to be a hooker.’
‘You don’t know Singapore; I’m not good-looking enough.’
I raised an eyebrow as she slid into the cab. ‘Maybe I’d better check those guide-book ads again.’ Impulsively, I bent and kissed her. ‘I’ll call you later,’ I promised, ‘even if it’s only to tell you I’m leaving.’
28
I slept late next morning, late for me, that is. It was nine o’clock when I was wakened from a troubled sleep by a knock on the door of the suite, followed by the sound of it opening and a shrill cry of ‘Housekeeping!’
‘Later!’ I yelled. I’d hung out the privacy sign when I’d got back from seeing off Marie, but often that means nothing. Rita Rudner, the comedienne, who’s big in Vegas and spends a lot of her life in hotel rooms, once claimed that she was driven to creating her own ‘Do not disturb’ sign to get the message across. It showed a maid with her neck in a noose.
I’d probably have been more polite if it hadn’t been for the dreams. Several times that night I’d seen Tony Lee sitting across from me in the Next Page booth, then toppling forwards. On each occasion even more blood came my way, until finally I was drenched in the stuff. But that wasn’t the only vision I’d had in my sleep. I saw Maddy January’s darting, frightened eyes. I saw Jan, lying dead on our kitchen floor from a massive electric shock; I wasn’t there when it happened, but that doesn’t shield me from its full horror. I saw Susie and Prim, in the pool in Monaco, both of them naked and swimming towards me. I saw Jack Gantry’s maniacal, evil face lose all its colour as he realised he was going to die. And I saw Marie Lin, black hair spread on the pillow, long legs apart and stretched out as she lay beside me in another bed, in another room, in a place I couldn’t recognise. That was where I was when the maid opened the door and shouted. If she’d looked round the corner into the sleeping area she’d have seen the duvet on the floor and me with an erection that would have made Shergar feel inadequate.
I swung out of bed, feeling incredibly guilty, and snarled my way to the bathroom, where I took a long, cold shower, until I was back to something approaching my normal temper and size. I was shaved and dressed when I heard another knock at the door. I opened it, ready to apologise to the chambermaid for the delay, only to see Dylan standing there.
‘Who bit your arse?’ he asked, cheerfully. Clearly my temper still didn’t look as normal as I’d thought. ‘She’s not still here, is she?’
‘Don’t be a fuckwit,’ I growled. ‘It’s not like that, I told you. What do you want anyway? We haven’t missed breakfast, have we?’
‘Relax, we’ve still got half an hour before it closes. I’ve had Jimmy Tan on the phone; he’s found out where the late Mr Lee lived, and he’s willing to let us join him to look it over.’
I took a fresh look at him as he stepped into the room. Sometimes you don’t see people at all, no matter how well you think you know them. In Glasgow, my boiled-down opinion of Mike was that he was an amiable clown. (Come to think of it, that’s how I wanted people to regard me.)
‘You’re in deep with him, aren’t you?’ I asked.
He nodded. ‘When I was under cover, only four people out here knew who I was. Jimmy was one of them, but even he didn’t find out until the last operation, the big one in Thailand, was ready to go down. The DEA and Interpol set me up with an escape route through Singapore, so he had to know then. But that was a phoney: they pulled the Amsterdam thing again, and when the police and troops moved in to take down the drug runners they shot me too, only they didn’t use real bullets on me the second time. There were only two survivors from the gang; they both thought they saw me die. We know this because they spoke about it in jail, and they never did twig that I was an agent. When it was all done, Interpol told everybody that Martin Dyer was dead, including Jimmy. They flew me out to India on a freight plane and on to Europe from there, on a new passport.’
‘Was the Singapore Triad part of the network you brought down?’
‘They had people involved; not the top guy, though, he stayed out of the picture. I got the impression that everybody deferred to him, except maybe the Burmese warriors who control the poppy production.’
‘Tan’s right, Mike. You should not be around here. Why the hell did you agree to come with me?’
He grinned. ‘I never did make it to Singapore. I wanted to see the place.’
‘Is that right? It never occurred to you that I might get caught in the cross-fire?’
‘That’s what friends are for. Come on, let’s see if there’s any breakfast left, then go and meet Jimmy. He’s expecting us at ten thirty.’
As it turned out, the buffet had been devoured by an invasion of gluttonous Americans, who compounded the felony by commandeering the centre of the room and discussing, twice as loudly as was appropriate, their tactics for maximising the grant payable by the Singapore government towards whatever project had brought them there.
After the phrases ‘bottom line’, ‘hidden inducements’ and ‘participating bonus’ had been mentioned for the fourth or fifth time, Dylan leaned over the apparent ring-leader as we left the room and said, in what appeared to be a perfectly honed New York accent, ‘What makes America great, guys, is that the fucking IRS is everywhere.’
Having planted that seed of terror, we were grateful when a lift opened at the first touch of a button and took us down to the foyer. We pulled a taxi; as we got in Mike leaned towards the driver and said, ‘Makena Condo, Meyer Road, Katong.’
‘You know number Meyer Road?’ the driver enquired.
‘Afraid not.’
‘No worries, I find it. Meyer Road pretty straight.’ By this time I had discerned that there are two kinds of taxi drivers in Singapore, the Chinese (helpful and talkative) and the rest (neither). Ours headed west, out of the crowded heart of the city, past the enormous Suntec complex, then turned on to East Coast Parkway.
He didn’t fanny about: he took the first available turn-off for Katong, which wasn’t very far, then found Meyer Road. As he’d said, it was straight, but straight for a long way. He cruised along it, slowly, until finally he spotted a group of high-rise buildings, set within a secure boundary fence. ‘Ah, yes, I remember now,’ he chirped. ‘That the Makena.’