Aunty Lee's Delights (13 page)

Harry Sullivan was a bit put out by the tirade he had unwittingly unleashed. He looked at Lucy Cunningham, whose attention remained fixed on her computer. Apparently this kind of outburst was nothing unusual for Frank.

“Then you support women wearing head scarves and long skirts?” the police officer behind the desk asked conversationally. Frank looked at her with some suspicion. She was in uniform, of course. He could not tell what race she was, but she was not wearing a head scarf.

“If you are married, then as long as your husband accepts how you dress, you won’t go wrong. Don’t get me wrong, miss. I believe women have the right to wear what they want. Except there is this reality check a woman needs to understand. Psychologically a man is attracted by what he sees, which leads to arousal and to desire. It’s in the male DNA, they can’t help it.”

“No matter what a woman is wearing, sexual assault is a criminal offense,” the officer said, still in a neutral conversational tone.

Harry Sullivan had dropped out of the conversation and was pointedly reading public information posters on the wall. Perhaps Frank Cunningham was hoping to reclaim his new friend’s attention when he raised his voice slightly and continued.

“Officer, if you read
The Naked Ape
by Desmond Morris, who is an eminent anthropologist, you’ll see he says that civilized man has lost his sense of smell. Nowadays sexual arousal is activated by sight. Women are aroused by emotion and touch, so they don’t understand such things. Wearing head scarves doesn’t help because that is also a trigger. When a woman is completely covered, the mystery excites the man’s imagination like the forbidden fruit syndrome. My point here is that ‘don’t tempt the man’ should apply.”

“Should women dress like men, then? Do away with temptation?”

Lucy Cunningham looked up when the officer said this. She recognized the trigger and hoped Frank was not going to go off on another of his tirades, not in a police station in a foreign country, but—

“Even the public restroom doors use the symbol of a man in pants and a woman in a dress,” Frank Cunningham said. “If you have women dressed as men, everybody is going to get confused about everything! Pants-wearing women will soon forget how to act like ladies!” He looked toward the desk.

By now the police officer was intently studying a pamphlet on volunteering for the neighborhood watch and refusing to meet his eye.

“You tell what’s in a book by its cover, and in the same way you can see what is in a woman by how she dresses. If you dress like a man, you disgrace your husband and dishonor the name of Jesus. It is these pants-wearing women that kindle the fire of adultery in the hearts of men!”

Lucy wanted to warn her husband that there were probably Buddhists and Muslims and other heathens listening, but she said nothing. There was no point. Her husband lived his whole life as a good man should and nothing she said would change him, because by his definition, good men were not guided by their wives.

Seeing his words go unchallenged, Frank looked disappointed.

“Short-haired women in pants . . . it’s just not right.”

Harry Sullivan gave him a wink. “If you’d seen that other missing girl—Marianne Peters—you could have given her some advice there. All you ever saw her in was pants. Don’t think she even owned a skirt. But short-haired or not, you couldn’t mistake her for a guy! Do you have daughters back home?”

“No. Only a son.”

“Well, that’s easier, isn’t it?” Harry said. He was taken aback by the look in the other man’s eyes—impossible to tell whether it was pain or rage, but whichever it was, it was strong. And then, when he looked around, he was struck by the fear in Lucy Cunningham’s.

“How much longer is this going to take?” Frank demanded. “We were asked to be here at eleven and it’s already half past.”

“I cannot say, sir. Please be patient. They will be ready for you soon.”

“Can’t you ask them?”

“Please be patient. They will be ready for you soon,” the officer repeated.

“You can’t treat us like that!” Frank complained. “I know what you’re trying to do, this is your one chance to be the big shots over the decent Christian people, right? What are you trying to do, sweat a confession out of us? It’s not going to work, you know, because we’ve got nothing to hide!”

The doors behind the counter opened just then and Carla Saito emerged, Officer Pang showing her out.

“Harry Sullivan?” Officer Pang said.

“Why don’t you two go in first,” Harry suggested to the Cunninghams. “That’s all right, isn’t it? I don’t mind waiting.”

The walls of the Bukit Tinggi Neighbourhood Police Post were not soundproof.

Carla Saito did not have much to say and Senior Staff Sergeant Salim believed in giving people with nothing to say plenty of time not to say it. So they, along with Officer Pang, stationed by the dormant recording equipment, had been able to follow Frank Cunningham’s speech in the waiting room very clearly. Indeed Officer Pang had made a move toward the door, meaning to ask them to quiet down, but the smallest gesture from SSS Salim stopped him. He saw it was not just the conversation that interested Salim but the effect Frank Cunningham’s loudly expressed opinions were having on Carla Saito. Officer Pang was a quick learner. He settled back to watch Carla Saito too. The woman was not only withholding information from them, as SSS Salim clearly suspected . . . she was also a very angry woman.

“You want to go out there to talk to that man?” SSS Salim asked, suddenly and casually. “You look like you got a lot of things to say to him.”

“Oh, I have things to say to him all right!” burst out Carla Saito. “But someone like him wouldn’t want to hear anything I say!”

“But I do,” SSS Salim said agreeably. “Say what you want to say. Then I can put it down and say we’ve done the interview.”

Carla Saito hesitated, still suspicious.

“You can look over your statement,” SSS Salim offered. “Read it over before you sign it. If you don’t like it, don’t sign.”

“It’s no big deal,” Carla Saito said. “I never met Laura Kwee, so I can’t say anything about how she dressed. But no man has a right to say it’s how women dress that gets them attacked by men. If men feel so excited by women wearing short skirts or so threatened by them wearing pants, then they’re the ones that have a problem!”

“I agree,” said SSS Salim.

“Is there anything else?”

“You didn’t see anyone else loitering outside the café before you went in?”

“I didn’t say I was loitering there. But okay, I was outside for a while, deciding whether to go in. Laura Kwee had been sending Marianne messages about the wine dining events and I thought she would be there. I thought I could have a quick word with her before she went in, that’s all. But I didn’t see her.”

“Did you see anybody else? Using a phone maybe?”

Harry Sullivan stopped Carla Saito before she got to the door. “We met—briefly—the other night at the café. Don’t suppose you remember. You were a bit upset. You came looking for Laura Kwee.”

“What do you want?”

“I was just wondering if you’re all right. I mean, we all got thrown into this. Turn up for a dinner and a bit of a drink and end up in a police station. I’m not saying it’s never happened to me before, but I didn’t expect it to be happening here! Did they tell you not to leave the country? Have you got someplace to stay?”

Carla managed a laugh. “I suppose I’m as free to go as I could be. They haven’t told me I can’t leave the country.”

“How has your stay in Singapore been, otherwise?”

She looked at him curiously. “If you were there that night, you’ll have gathered this isn’t exactly a tourist holiday for me.”

When it was finally his turn, Harry Sullivan told SSS Salim he had come to Singapore in search of work. “I found I couldn’t settle down to retirement. I had enough to live on, but that’s not everything, is it?”

SSS Salim had not even gotten to his questions about Laura Kwee and her phone, and here the man was already nervous. Not that either Salim or Officer Pang seemed to notice this. Foreigners were often apprehensive on first encounter with the Singapore police; some might have had unpleasant encounters with the authorities in their own countries, and others—like Mr. Sullivan, SSS Salim thought—probably believed police-state propaganda.

Officer Pang was painstakingly listing details of Harry Sullivan’s passport (already photocopied) on a form, and as SSS Salim waited for him to finish he asked: “So, how do you like Singapore so far?”

“Fine. It’s good. Of course, it may not be my thing, but I’ll give it a fair chance.”

“And your line is?”

“I was in the import-export business. And dealing with oil products. So I have all the contacts, you see.”

“Sorry you got mixed up in this business. We just have a few question and then—”

“Officer, I know I’m here to talk about the message supposedly sent from the dead girl’s phone. But there’s something I think you should know. The background. What happened at the previous dinner. That’s when I first met them. Laura Kwee and the other girl that’s supposed to be missing—you’ll have heard all about it if you were talking to her friend that just came out. Have you found her yet, by the way?”

“Marianne Peters? Not yet.”

“Pity. I really liked Marianne. I had hoped to get to know her better, in fact. That was the first time we met. We talked about having a drink together sometime, but that night she said she had to meet someone . . .” Harry sensed both officers become more alert at this. The officer with the notepad stopped writing and the one sitting opposite Harry Sullivan checked that the recorder on the table was on and edged it closer to him.

“Did Marianne Peters mention who she was going to meet?”

“I don’t think so. No, she didn’t. But I got the impression it was someone special.” He lowered his voice. “But better not mention it to that young woman who just left. I got the impression there’s something going on between them. Or so one would like to think, anyway.”

This was noted, though the senior officer did not remark on it. “Marianne Peters didn’t give you any idea who she was meeting? Male or female . . . family member perhaps?”

The way he had picked on that point for further questioning made Harry Sullivan certain that the police knew something had happened to Marianne. “Do you mean she’s really missing? I thought it was just that woman overreacting. If you asked me, I would have said Marianne probably chose to duck out of the way because that woman was being a stalker.” Again he triggered a spike in interest. And again they said nothing.

“That first week was so long ago. I think Laura went back in to talk to Selina. She was pretty upset about what happened, I remember. We all were a bit. I thought it was a big joke, but you know how people are here.”

“What happened?” the officer asked. Of course he knew, Harry Sullivan thought, he just wanted to hear another side of the story. Well, since he was there, he would give them all the help he could.

“Laura Kwee had some trouble holding her liquor. She wasn’t used to it. She was drinking and talking loudly, you know how they are. The ones that aren’t used to it are the worst. She had made cupcakes. She was going on about decorating them, how she planned to make her own engagement and wedding cakes herself out of cupcakes because decorating them was an art form. Gave me the impression she had a bit of a crush on our chief instructor, if you ask me. His wife saw it too. I think she was more put out than he was.

“Selina, is that right? Mrs. Selina Lee. She was still in there with the drunk woman and Marianne went back in there to talk to them. Her brother and his wife had already gone off. I got the impression Marianne wanted to smooth things over before anything got too out of hand. She was that kind of girl, very peace loving. A peacemaker. Selina was going to call a taxi to get Laura home and Marianne said she could share it with her, but Selina said that was ridiculous because Marianne lived five minutes away. But that was the kind of thing Marianne would offer to do. She was a really nice girl. Not that anything serious could have worked out between us, of course. I’m happy being on my own right now. No sense rushing into anything, right? Much better to settle down, see where I am and where I’m going first.”

SSS Salim thought the man was protesting too much. He guessed Harry Sullivan had asked Marianne Peters out and been turned down.

“The woman who got drunk—that was Laura Kwee, wasn’t it?”

Harry Sullivan nodded. “I didn’t like to say—with how things ended up and all. But she was pretty much plastered.”

“And you thought that she might be having an affair with someone there? Like Mark Lee?”

Harry shook his head. “I think she had a thing for him. And from the way he was reacting, I’d say he’d done her a couple of times. But affair—no way. I know people, you know what I mean? I sense things that are going on. I think Laura Kwee had something on with her friend’s husband and he was trying to dump her. It was all the tension there. That night she was all over him, saying it was stupid to hide his feelings from her when everybody already knew and so on. How she loved baking and his wife wouldn’t even fry him an egg. It was clear his wifey didn’t like it. I don’t know if she was aware the two of them were carrying on before, but after that she sure did. We all did. If I were you, I would look into that. You should go and find out more about her.”

SSS Salim made a mental note to ask Mark Lee and his wife about this. He had already spoken to both of them earlier, but neither had mentioned it—not surprising, perhaps. Officer Pang made a note. Attempts to meet them again had been fended off with the excuse that they were both very busy all the time. But that was how it was with most people in Singapore unless they were tourists or retired. SSS Salim was all for respecting the residents, but if Mark and Selina Lee did not make time to see him soon, he was going to have to insist.

“So do you have any thoughts on what might have happened that night after Laura left? Or who may have sent that text if not her?”

Harry Sullivan paused before speaking. He had not expected the police to ask his opinion, though he should have. After all, he had been present when the message came through.