A Calamitous Chinese Killing Read online

  Shamini Flint

  Malaysia, 1969

  A Calamitous Chinese Killing

  Inspector Singh Investigates #6

  2013, EN

  Inspector Singh is on a mission to China, against his better judgment. The son of a bigwig at the Singapore Embassy has been bludgeoned to death in a back alley in Beijing. The Chinese security insist that he was the victim of a robbery gone wrong, but the young man’s mother demands that Singapore’s finest (in his own opinion) rides to the rescue. But solving a murder in a country that practices socialism ‘with Chinese characteristics’ is a dangerous business, and it soon becomes apparent that getting to the bottom of this calamitous killing will be his toughest case yet.

  Prologue

  Justin Tan stood at the main junction of the old hutong, a neighbourhood of old courtyards dating from Imperial times, and stared down narrow alleys that disappeared quickly into darkness. It was after midnight and the street lighting was limited in such a poor neighbourhood. The lanes were too narrow for cars so no headlights lit up the gloom. Households had gone to bed but a few lamps glowed at courtyard entrances, little bubbles of light that deepened the dark around them. The air had cleared somewhat after a particularly unpleasant Beijing day, where the pollution index was off the charts, children were kept home from school and adults wore ineffectual face masks. Justin drew a deep breath and decided that he could still smell the soot particles mixed with rotting food from a nearby dustbin.

  The young man reached for his mobile and dialled a number.

  “Professor Luo?”

  “Justin, is that you? What is it? Do you know what time it is?”

  “I’ve made my decision about what to do…”

  “What is it?” asked the professor.

  Justin hesitated and looked around. Had he heard something? Soft footfalls in the darkness?

  “Justin, are you there?”

  “I’ll call you back.”

  “Wait! Where are you?”

  “At the hutong…I needed to see, needed to think, but now I know what I have to do.”

  “I’m so sorry I dragged you into this,” said the professor. “There’s something I need to tell you,” he continued, but Justin had terminated the call.

  The young man stood still and strained his ears. It was not his imagination, he could hear footsteps in the distance. It sounded like more than one person, maybe two or three. He tried to dismiss the cold fear that settled in his chest. He was being silly, paranoid, it was just some workers heading home after a late shift. Or maybe Wang Zhen was making good on his promise to exact revenge. Justin turned and hurried away towards the main road, there would be people there even at such a late hour, and traffic – safety in a crowd, in numbers. He wasn’t sure but he thought the people behind him had escalated their pace too. Justin broke into a run, panic taking hold. He was fit, he was fast, would it be enough? He’d sprinted fifty yards when he came to an abrupt halt. There were three men strung across the alley in front of him. Two of them were holding truncheons. He thought he could make out a dark sedan behind them, parked to block the narrow exit, the front window wound down and a pale face looking out. Impossible to identify from such a distance but Justin didn’t doubt who it was; the net was closing.

  He thought he caught sight of a shadow in the darkness and he shouted, “Is anyone there? Can you call for help?” There was no answer, his desperation was providing him imaginary would-be rescuers. The three men started towards him with a calculated, deliberate step. His hand went to his pocket and he pressed a few buttons on his phone at random but it was too late to call for help. One of the men shone a torch into his eyes and, for a few seconds, he lost all vision.

  Justin turned and ran again, feet pounding on pavement, heartbeat keeping frantic time. This time there was no mistaking their intent. As he glanced over his shoulder, all three were in hot pursuit. He was back at the junction where he’d started. He stopped, panting, trying to decide which way to go. It was no use. The original pair were waiting in the shadows. They stepped out and started closing the distance. Behind him, the other men arrived. He whirled round, turned back, knew he had nowhere to go.

  “What do you want? Why are you following me? Do you want money?”

  The front man slapped the truncheon into his palm. “When the dog chases the mouse, there are always consequences.”

  One

  “Chinese!” said Mrs Singh.

  The inspector, her husband, suspected that this was not merely an observation. No one above the age of fifty in Singapore, who was not ethnically Chinese, ever uttered the word without implied criticism. It was inevitable in a country the size of a pocket handkerchief where the Chinese dominated every aspect of business and politics. The other races foraged around the fringes for an identity and, if they were like Mrs Singh, sniped from the sidelines.

  “These ‘made in China’ things don’t even last for one day before they break!” His wife held up a cracked plastic bucket as evidence. Maybe she thought a policeman would not be satisfied with her uncorroborated testimony. She’d be right about that too. Inspector Singh, plump pursuer of the truth, did not find his wife a credible witness. She was too prone to exaggeration, imagination and misplaced conviction. The sort of person who picked suspects out of a line-up with certainty even though they’d only had a fleeting glimpse of a perpetrator on a dark night.

  “Why do you buy it if you think the quality is so poor?”

  “Cheaper,” she responded.

  Singh scowled and thrust out his pink full lower lip. His upper lip was obscured by the moustache that skirted his mouth and then expanded into a full beard, now liberally speckled with grey. “You get what you pay for,” he pointed out.

  “That’s what my father said when I complained about you.”

  She was referring, of course, to the dowry her family had paid all those decades ago when he married her. Singh decided to ignore her remark. It was his default position and for good reason. Despite his successful battles of words with senior police officers, hardened criminals, high court judges and highly paid lawyers, he’d never won a verbal encounter with his wife.

  Besides, he was not in the mood for generalised criticism of China, the Chinese or ‘Made in China’ products. Singh had just returned from a harrowing trip to India. Say what you liked about the Chinese, at least they made something other than Bollywood movies, babies and skin whitening cream. Even the statues of Hindu gods and goddesses sold outside temples in Mumbai – Ganesh with his elephant head and Kali with her surfeit of limbs – were all made in China. Furthermore, one could walk down the street in Beijing without tripping over the bodies of the homeless, the destitute and, on occasion, the dead. Or so Singh assumed anyway. The foremost criminal investigator in the Singapore police department, in his own, but not his wife’s or boss’s estimation, had never been to China.

  “You know what else they did?” continued his wife, taking victory in her stride and opening up a new flank.

  Who were ‘they’, wondered Singh? The Chinese? The government? Mrs Singh was a great believer in conspiracy theories. Nothing bad ever happened, as far as she was concerned, that did not have the guiding hand of the rich and the powerful.

  Singh felt a mild stirring of curiosity, like the taste of cumin in fish curry, just enough to whet the appetite. What grievous historical event was Mrs Singh going to lay at the door of China or the Chinese? He was in a relatively placid mood, just after luneh and before he had to drag himself back to the office. He was prepared to be amused.

  “What have the Chinese done to provoke your ire aside from manufacturing low quality buckets?” he asked.

  “They’re all coming her
e!”

  “All?” He had a sudden vision of a billion Chinese citizens queuing up at Changi Airport. A sight that might be visible from the moon, like the Great Wall.

  “Yes, the government is letting them all in – permanent residence, citizenship – whatever they want they can get.”

  Singh thought he understood. He clasped his hands and rested them on his belly and adopted his familiar ‘Buddha-in-repose’ attitude. “You’ve been talking to Mrs Chong?”

  “She says that they’re all coming here. You know, taking jobs, stealing husbands.”

  Mrs Chong was the neighbour on the right side of the Singh residence if you stood on the porch and faced out towards the road. The two houses were separated by a bright green chain-link fence. An attempt to imitate nature’s colour on the cheap – Mrs Singh made Scrooge look like a philanthropist – had resulted in a shade that suggested the sort of toxicity usually associated with a nuclear accident. A very large heavy mango tree that grew against the boundary provided a rich carpet of fermented rotting fruit underfoot.

  Mrs Chong spent her days worrying. Firstly, whether her children were coping with Mandarin, and maths in school and secondly, whether her husband was secretly maintaining another family on the side, sucking much needed funding away from extra Mandarin and maths tuition for the kids. She spent a good part of each morning communicating these fears to Mrs Singh across the garden fence.

  “You shouldn’t believe everything Mrs Chong says,” said Inspector Singh.

  This was a mistake. Mrs Singh was prepared to put up either with unconditional support or a position of Swiss neutrality from her husband but not a contradiction of any of the views she or Mrs Chong held dear. She straightened her skinny back and trained a basilisk glare at her husband.

  “Not just Mrs Chong – everyone knows!”

  “Everyone knows that all the Chinese are coming here?”

  “Maybe not all,” she conceded. Mrs Singh trying a new role, the voice of reason. She wouldn’t get past the first audition.

  The Sikh policeman knew that his wife was merely expressing a widely held opinion. The citizenry was convinced that the government, determined to boost population numbers, was handing out residency permits like free chopsticks at a Chinese restaurant.

  “The China girls come here pretending to work but actually they’re only looking for husbands. And they don’t care if they’re married already or not.”

  China girls. Not Chinese girls. A convenient way for the Singaporean population of nervous wives to maintain pride in their Chinese roots while distinguishing themselves from these brash, husband-snatching newcomers.

  “Is that what Mrs Chong says? I’m sure most of the girls are just trying to find a better life…”

  Mrs Singh’s grimace suggested she had suddenly bitten into a piece of lime pickle. “It depends whether the plan for a better life is to quickly catch a Singaporean man. You know what Mrs Chong says about the China girls? ‘Up to no good until proven otherwise!’”

  Singh sighed, inserted a finger under his turban and scratched above his ear. “Up to no good until proven otherwise.” It could have been the slogan for the entire nation. It was certainly the attitude of the police towards anyone who strayed from the norm, whether it was to appear un-shirted in public or graffiti a wall. Banksy wouldn’t have lasted a week in Singapore. The Singaporean equivalent – a young woman who had painted the words, ‘My grandfather’s road’, on a few thoroughfares in Singapore – had been arrested. As a man on the street had said on the news at the time, “Our society has no place for such impromptu creative acts.”

  The rotund detective’s gut compressed as he leaned forwards, reaching for his white sneakers, and he gasped for air like a fish in a bucket. Slowly, he put the shoes on – another new pair – he’d been unable to face wearing the ones he’d brought back from India. Singh liked his trainers comfy and clean. A couple of weeks tramping through Mumbai suburbs had left him very suspicious of the undersides of his footwear and he’d binned them the moment he made it home.

  “I’m going back to work,” he muttered.

  “Chasing criminals? Should be chasing those China girls.”

  “I thought the problem was too many Singaporean men chasing China girls.”

  “I’m not worried about you,” snapped Mrs Singh. “They only want Chinese men. Or at least men with a good job for good money.” She rose to her feet, collected his mug of half-drunk tea and marched off to the kitchen, colourful caftan billowing like a main sail in a high wind.

  Inspector Singh levered himself out of his chair with both arms and headed to the car that was waiting outside to ferry him back to work although he would be the first to admit that his wife was quite right – it could not exactly be described as ‘a good job for good money’. He experienced a moment that hinted at regret, his rotund form was indeed safe from the attentions of the China girls.

  ♦

  The beatings were the worst he had ever experienced which, he acknowledged quietly, was ironic. After all, he was the son of a man denounced as a capitalist running dog during the Cultural Revolution. But the Red Guard had consisted of enthusiastic amateurs while the prison guards at the correctional facility were experts at hitting a man to inflict maximum pain. And yet they broke no bones and the next day always pronounced him fit to work. Professor Luo Gan shuffled along towards the quarry with his fellow inmates, wearing the regulation grey uniform and rubber shoes, scratching at welts from the bed bugs in the crowded dormitories, grateful that he could still walk.

  One of the other detainees whispered to him, “Why do you provoke them? You know how they will answer you. It is better to be prudent.”

  “Is it provocation to stick to one’s values and principles?” he retorted, carefully pushing to the back of his mind the reason he was there in the first place.

  His response was met with a shrug from the intellectual, shakily adjusting his fragile glasses. The young drug addicts were indifferent to his actions while a couple of middle-ranking Party officials, arrested no doubt for some act of petty corruption, gave him a wide berth. There were so many ways to end up on the wrong side of the security apparatus in China that his companions were a cross-section of the entire population.

  “It is remarkable that you reached such a ripe old age before ending up here!” said another fellow, recently interned, who still had some spirit left.

  At the quarry, Luo broke rocks using a heavy hammer that he swung over his shoulder in a uniform excruciating rhythm. Breaking big rocks into little rocks and little rocks into rubble and carting the debris away in wheelbarrows. A metaphor for what he was experiencing – this so-called ‘re-education through labour’? He doubted it. The Chinese authorities tended to be very literal minded. ‘Re-education through labour’ had been one of Mao’s favourite forms of control and punishment. But it had been maintained long after Mao was laid in state at Tiananmen Square as a convenient way to deal with the discontented and the rebellious.

  Deep down, the professor had always known, always feared, that he’d end up in one of these black holes of the Chinese state. He straightened his back and felt it creak like the wooden slats of his bed back home. He shut his eyes tightly – it was important not to think of home or the little strength he had left would drain from his body like dirty water down a sinkhole.

  He looked around, trying to regain his composure. The quarry presented a bleak, ravaged landscape but the surrounding mountains were covered in lush greenery and silhouetted against a pristine blue sky untainted by the yellow filter of smog that hung over Beijing. It reminded him of the delicate brush stroke paintings of a master calligrapher. He had no idea where he was although the landscape put him in mind of the area around the Mutianyu section of the Great Wall, absent of course, the thin snaking line of ancient defences that followed the contours of the hill. He doubted he was that close to Beijing. It was an incongruity really, that China’s greatest architectural feature, designed to repel
enemies of the state, was now of no use whatsoever. He glanced at the guards standing along the perimeter of the quarry, dark silhouettes against a bright sky. How could it be when the greatest threat to China now came from within?

  ♦

  Superintendent Chen was ensconced in Singh’s chair and fiddling with his BlackBerry. He did not look pleased. As Singh sauntered in, reeking of the cigarette he’d stopped to have in the car park, the boss looked at his watch – Rolex, of course – and then back at Singh.

  “You’re late!”

  “I would be if there was a fixed time that I was supposed to be here,” said Singh, sitting down in the plastic chair fronting his own desk. He wondered why his boss was making himself comfortable in the seat that Singh had spent so many years shaping to fit his own ample contours.

  “I thought you were desperate to get back to work after your Indian adventure,” growled Chen.

  “I am…but the citizenry has become strangely law-abiding in my time away,” complained the inspector. “Not a single juicy murder all month.”

  “Low crime doesn’t mean no crime,” retorted the chief, quoting one of the Singapore police department’s posters.

  “Low crime does mean no work. Which is why I can be late – I have nothing to do.”

  “I can fix that for you,” said the superintendent.

  Singh sat up straighter, a glint in his eye, nostrils flaring. “We have a murder?”

  The other man paused.

  “We don’t have a murder?”

  His superior remained silent.

  “You’d like me to commit a murder?”

  Superintendent Chen’s expression suggested an outpouring of gastric juices had made contact with the resident ulcers in his stomach. Ulcers, he assured anyone who would listen, that were not caused by the criminal underclass but by his recalcitrant Sikh inspector. “I don’t think you’re the man for the job.”

  “You never do,” Singh pointed out. He left unsaid that he still had the best solve rate in the department. Probably even better than the numbers suggested if you took into account the possibility that his colleagues frequently incarcerated the innocent.