For The Death Of Me (26 page)

We spent three hours there, getting to know every part of the place. There was a sound commentary on the tram, but Marie overrode it, acting as my personal guide. As you'd expect, the orang-utan, a near native, is the star of the show, but there was just about every other species of mammal on display, or so it seemed. The only part I didn't like was the polar-bear enclosure; as I watched the poor bastard parading back and forward, forward and back, oblivious to the gawpers on the other side of the glass screen, I knew, instinctively and beyond doubt, that it had been driven quite insane.

When we were done there, I took her for lunch. I expected her to choose a fish restaurant, but she took us to an Italian place called Al Dente, on Boat Quay, where she said they did a killer lasagne. It looked pretty good, but I passed and chose a shark steak, and a nice bottle of well-chilled Frascati to go with it.

Our table was by the river, shaded by an umbrella but still hot. That was okay by me: too much air-con is bad for you, and probably explains why half the people in Singapore seem to suffer from fairly noisy sinus conditions.

‘Are you serious about the film part, Oz?' she asked, after we had eaten and were staring into a couple of cappuccinos.

‘Of course. Why would I not be?'

Her answer was a smile and a raised eyebrow.

I replied in kind. ‘And when will you have known me long enough?' I asked.

She looked at me with honest open eyes. ‘I don't know; maybe never. Or maybe this afternoon. I'm a very careful girl. I don't know how to be impulsive, but maybe I can try.'

I took her hand, drew her across the small table and kissed her. ‘Marie,' I told her, ‘you go on being careful. Impulsiveness is for guys like me, not girls like you, and now even I avoid it like the plague. It can get you into a hell of a lot of trouble.'

I said that, yet I confess that my impulse was to take her back to the hotel and make love to her until it was time to go to the airport. The harder I resisted it, the more I found myself wondering what it would be like. Resist I did, though.

‘The movie part is yours,' I promised, ‘without conditions before or after the event. You give me an address where I can write to you.'

‘I have a post-office box,' she replied. ‘It's best here.' She wrote the number on the back of a restaurant card and gave it to me. ‘Thanks, Oz. It's been wonderful to meet you. I will think about everything, I promise.'

I parted from her there; she said she wanted to catch the MRT, so I walked her to the Clarke Quay station. We kissed goodbye . . . it was meant to be just a friendly peck, but it wound up going on for a little longer than one of those. The last I saw of her, she was waving, as the escalator took her down and out of my sight.

33

I was still thinking about Marie when Dylan and I met in the foyer at five thirty, as arranged. I went through the check-out procedures and paid the bill. Then we dumped our cases with the valet, who would look after them till ‘Go to Changi Airport' time. I'd arranged for Hertz to collect the car.

We were waiting to cross Bras Basah Road, heading for Raffles, when my mobile sounded. It was Ricky Ross.

‘Can you speak?' he asked, as the green man showed.

‘Yes, but it'll be cooler once I get into the shade.'

‘What time is it with you?'

‘Tea time.' I stepped into the shadow of Raffles and leaned against the wall. ‘Do you have something?'

‘Too right. This guy you met, his real name's Sammy Goss and he is well and truly on the run. He did indeed leave Scotland eight years ago, but not from Maryhill. He escaped from custody on his way to a committal hearing; he was due to stand trial on two counts of murder in Glasgow, and after that he was going to London for a third. All three of them were gang-related.'

‘Any Chinese connections?'

‘Why do you ask that? As it happens, two of the victims were Chinese. The London case was a guy who'd upset some people in Chinatown. When Goss was picked up in Glasgow, the gun he'd used in one of the killings there was matched to that one.'

‘What did he use in the third?'

‘A knife. He was linked to several other hits, but those were the only ones they could proceed on. Are you telling me he's in Singapore?'

‘Not any more.'

‘Oz, I've pulled some strings for this information. The people I've talked to want to know why I'm asking.'

‘Tell them to cross him off their list. He's dead.'

‘How do you know?'

‘I have the word of a reliable witness,' I told him. ‘It seems Sammy underestimated somebody and took one in the back of the head.'

‘Will the Singapore police confirm this?'

‘It happened in Malaysia, not Singapore, but nobody's going to confirm it, because there isn't going to be a body.'

‘Fucking hell, Oz,' Ricky gasped, ‘what have you got yourself into?'

‘Nothing at all. I'm catching a plane in a few hours and I'm heading back home, clean as a whistle. Did Goss have any family? He told me he had a mother, a sister and two nephews and that he went home every couple of years or so.'

‘He was kidding: his father died in a pub fight twenty years ago and his mother boozed herself to death. No sister, only a granny; the police check her out every so often, but he's never shown up there. Do you know who killed him?'

‘You didn't ask me that; just tell your former colleagues on the quiet that they can stop staking out his granny's. If they ever see anything of him again, it'll be in a can of fucking tuna.'

‘You wouldn't like to tell me what brand, would you?'

‘That's a hard one. If you like the stuff, I'd build up a big stock now, if I were you, before Sammy's had time to get into the human food chain.'

‘Jesus, Oz. You definitely hung around with Dylan for too long, d'you know that?'

34

With the time difference, I made it home to Monaco for a late breakfast on Wednesday. Dylan and I had parted in Frankfurt, since I had done a complicated ticket transfer to see him back home to New York, through Paris.

If I said that the kids were pleased to see me again, I would be guilty of the sort of understatement that I abhor. They were ecstatic, at least the two older ones were, and wouldn't let go of me not even after I'd given them the toys I'd bought for them in the Raffles shop and in a place in the Citylink Mall that had just about everything for kids.

Even with the melatonin I was running on empty, but we spent a couple of hours on the pool, and then I took them to the Cousteau Institute aquarium . . . again . . . and to the motor museum, of course. I had to tell them about Singapore too; as much as I could, at any rate. By the time I'd finished I'd promised to take them there as soon as their mum said they were old enough to go, although to be honest, after what I'd seen, I was glad that would be a right few years away.

Susie was pleased to see me too, you understand, although she kept her ecstasy under control better than they did. The fact that I was twenty-four hours late might have helped her in that. In fact, she kept it to herself until they had gone off with Ethel to start the getting-ready-for-bed process.

Afterwards, as we lay side by side looking out at the blue sea and at the red ball of the sun as it began to dip towards the horizon, she nudged my shoulder with her head. ‘That was pretty good, considering the trip you've had, and the time it took you to get back, and the fact that you haven't been in touch since Sunday. Are you going to tell me now? Did you get Harvey's pictures? Did you pay the woman off?'

‘No.'

‘What did you get?'

‘I got my Siegfried and Roy T-shirt ruined and I nearly got arrested twice.'

She propped herself on an elbow, eyes wide, ‘What for?'

‘Murder.'

‘Murder!'

‘Don't shout, for Christ's sake, the kids will hear you. I didn't do it, either of them, honest.'

‘Who did?'

‘A wee Scots guy called Sammy did the first one: he knifed Maddy's boyfriend just before I was due to meet him in that bar on Sunday night. Then Maddy killed him. That was self-defence, though: he was going to cut her head off and take it to the Triad chieftain because she'd upset him.'

She put a hand on my forehead. ‘Oz, are you feeling all right? You haven't got malaria, have you?'

‘It doesn't take effect that quickly.'

‘Has Mike Dylan been trying out his next book on you?'

‘No, he hasn't, and you must be very careful never to call him that again, not where anyone can hear you. There are people out there who would kill him with a blowlamp if they thought he was alive.'

‘Are you trying to tell me you're serious?'

I pointed across the bedroom. ‘See that knapsack on your dressing-table stool?' She nodded. ‘Go and get it, there's a girl.'

‘Why don't you get it yourself?'

‘Because I like watching you in the buff.'

‘Oh. That's fair enough, then.' She got up from the bed, skipped across the room, fetched the bag, then sat back down beside me.

‘Open it.'

She did, and looked inside. ‘Oz! What's this?'

‘Fifty thousand of Uncle Sam's dollars,' I told her, ‘drawn from Amex to give to Maddy, only she sent Tony Lee, her renegade Triad boyfriend instead. They must have been watching him, for his account got closed off before we got there.'

‘We? You mean Mike went with you to that bar, and him in danger there?'

‘He insisted, but it wasn't a risk for him. Only one guy in Singapore knows about his Interpol work, and he's on our side. Thank Christ, I might add, because he cleaned up the mess.'

She sat for a while, frowning as she took it all in. ‘So Harvey's ex is on the run from these diehards . . .'

‘Triads.'

‘Why?'

‘She took a photograph of their top man, and they found out. His identity's the biggest secret in South East Asia, apparently.'

‘Why did she do that?'

‘She thought Tony was shagging him. As it turned out, he worked for him.'

‘So she's out there, with these desperadoes after her, and you're back here? You're her only hope and you've abandoned her.'

‘That's how it looks, but we'd nowhere else to go.'

‘Bollocks! There's always somewhere else to go; you're always telling me that. Get out there and find her.'

I smiled at her. There is no greater motivator than my lovely wife. ‘I was hoping you'd say that,' I told her.

35

Where do you begin looking for a woman you don't really know who's missing on the other side of the world? At home seemed to me to be a good place to start. Next morning I called Harvey: there was no answer from his mobile, so I had him paged at the Advocates' Library.

‘Oz,' he said, slightly breathlessly, when he came on line, ‘where are you?'

I told him. ‘But I'm empty-handed,' I added.

‘She wouldn't co-operate?'

‘No, to be fair to her, it's more a case of not being able to. Remember I told you that things had gone sour for her out there?'

‘Yes.'

‘Well, that was maybe understating it a little. She's got herself mixed up with some very bad people and now she's on the run.'

‘Where?' Harvey's a naturally unflappable guy, but this time he was flapping good style. He'd forgotten about photographs, and everything else. I'd guessed right about his reaction: Maddy was a bitch, but for a while she'd been his bitch.

‘Her last known location was an island off Malaysia. From there she headed back to the mainland, but that's it.'

‘What do these people want from her?'

‘Same as you, some photographs, but I don't think they exist any more. Now they just want her.'

‘But what are they going to do with her?' He sounded bewildered; this was a man who had spent part of his career prosecuting and occasionally defending a succession of fairly vicious criminals . . . if Sammy Goss hadn't escaped, he might well have been on the list . . . yet he didn't get it.

‘They're going to kill her, Harvey.'

‘My God! Oz, what can I do? Have you reported this to the police out there?'

‘The police know about it, but there's nothing they can do. If she gets out of the region she's got a better chance, but we still need to find her. Once we've done that we can keep her safe . . . or try to.'

‘How do we do that?'

‘Through the other side of her life. Sooner or later she'll contact someone she knows. Friend, relative, maybe even you. Tell me what you can about her family, her friends, those you can remember at any rate.'

‘Her father's dead; his name was Luke Raymond. He was quite an eminent photo-journalist, but he was killed in the Lebanon twenty-five years ago. Madeleine takes her adventurous side from him. Janine, her mother, is the opposite, a vicar's daughter from Uxbridge. I'm still on her Christmas-card list, but I doubt if Madeleine is. There's one sister, Theresa, three years older. She was a career academic, a reader in philosophy at Cambridge when Madeleine and I were married. And there's a younger brother, Trevor, who was in the army last I heard.'

‘Did the sister have a husband?'

‘No. A wife would be more likely. As for friends . . . Maddy didn't have any close female friends that I knew of. She hung around the theatre company in Edinburgh, at the expense, eventually, of our marriage, but you know that. She may have had some there.'