A Most Peculiar Malaysian Murder Read online

  Singh seized the moment. He asked, ‘Did you kill him?’

  She looked at him as if seeing him with new eyes. She said firmly, ‘I didn’t kill him.’

  The inspector looked sceptical.

  ‘I did not kill him – although he deserved to die a thousand times.’

  ‘Why didn’t you kill him, if that’s how you feel?’

  Sergeant Shukor, standing quietly to one side, looked startled. Was the inspector advocating murder as a solution to marital difficulties?

  Chelsea Liew appeared to take the question quite seriously. ‘I considered it,’ she said.

  ‘Why didn’t you?’

  She smiled wryly. The first emotion other than anger she had shown to him.

  ‘Someone else got there first? No, I did not kill him because I did not want to end up here, like this – separated from my children.’

  Singh nodded. ‘Well, whoever did kill your husband hasn’t done you any favours. You need to help me find out who did it if you want to get out of here.’

  It was her turn to nod.

  Inspector Singh could see the glimmerings of the woman who had fought her powerful husband tooth and nail for custody of her children. He could see the woman who had the courage to take on the whole Malaysian establishment and challenge her husband’s conversion to Islam. But had this strength also led her, when other avenues were proving to be dead ends, to kill her husband?

  He asked now, ‘Why did you stay with him?’

  Again her bleak sense of humour showed. ‘You see me sitting here and you ask me that?’

  His lips curved a little – a small, unintended, answering smile.

  She sighed and continued, ‘At first I loved him, believe it or not. I was very young when we married. Twenty-one. He swept me off my feet. The newspapers and magazines at the time, I used to read them and think that for once, they did not have to exaggerate – it was a fairy tale. Rich man meets poor girl, showers her with gifts and flowers, takes her on exotic holidays, treats her like a queen. I was so naïve.’

  ‘And then?’ the inspector asked quietly as she fell silent, lost in her memories.

  ‘He started to hit me – even when I was pregnant.’

  The awareness of what her husband had been capable of still had the capacity to shock her.

  ‘Why didn’t you walk out then?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Why don’t women walk out? I used to read all the women’s magazines – full of good advice to women trapped in abusive relationships. I didn’t even really believe I was one of them. I remember thinking to myself, he might hit me once in a while but at least I’m not one of those battered wives. Of course, in reality, I was a textbook case. In denial, for my own sake, for my self-respect. For the sake of the children. I don’t really know. Alan’ – it was the first time since meeting the inspector that she had used her husband’s name and he duly noted it – ‘would always have some excuse – he was stressed with work and just snapped, I had spent too much time talking to some man at a party . . . He was always apologetic afterwards. He would bring me gifts, take me out, he would even cry with remorse. I doubted myself. Perhaps it was somehow my fault. He had seemed a good man when I married him. Perhaps I was a really lousy wife, a lousy person to have changed him into something so awful. Maybe I was a slut – talking to men at parties.’

  She tossed her head, a glint of pride. ‘It’s hard to believe now, but there was a time when men would seek my company.’

  He looked at her. Hair drawn back. Pale. Hollow cheeked. Defiant. Meeting his eyes – challenging him to disbelieve that the wreck she was had been a new model once.

  ‘I imagine men would seek your company if you walked out of this prison today,’ he remarked.

  She was embarrassed. A hint of pink, the first colour he had seen, flushed through the translucent skin.

  She said, ‘Oh! Those would just be the reporters.’

  He felt the first stirrings of genuine engagement with the welfare of this woman.

  A loud knock on the door put an end to the conversation. It was time for her to go back to her cell.

  They both stood outside the prison, young policeman and old. The inspector squinted against the sun. Sergeant Shukor pulled a pair of sunglasses out of his pocket and slipped them on. His wrap-around, ski-style, black shades added to his air of danger and competence. The inspector tried to recall if he had ever looked the part of a professional policeman in the way that the younger man did. He doubted it. He looked down at his sneakers, having to crane to see past his ample stomach. They were extremely grubby after a few days in the dust and grime of Kuala Lumpur. He looked around. The entire city had the feel of a place where contracts for upkeep and beautification were handed out to companies with connections rather than competence. The pavement on which he stood had been relaid with shaped tiles intended to create floral patterns. Most were cracked, some were missing – tiles were unevenly laid or had popped up under the intense sun. It was impossible to walk along and think – every moment had to be spent avoiding twisting an ankle. Instead of leafy trees to provide some shade, palms were planted at regular intervals. These were a recent addition, propped up with lengths of wood. Fairy lights were decoratively coiled around each trunk. The wires made the tree look like it was set up for death by electrocution.

  The inspector sighed and kicked at a protruding piece of pavement. ‘Whose bright idea was this anyway?’

  Sergeant Shukor shrugged, a gesture of resignation made powerful by the breadth of his shoulders. He was not going to defend the uneven pavements from criticism. No sense of misplaced national pride was called for – especially as he himself had just stubbed his toe.

  And yet, the inspector thought, Kuala Lumpur had a certain something. It was difficult to put his finger on what it was exactly. There was a sense of freedom perhaps, of anarchy even, that Singapore so sorely lacked. Perhaps it was the lack of deference to authority, the physical space, the ability to take a step back and enjoy a moment of quiet that lent Kuala Lumpur its atmosphere. Singaporeans were always adding to the list of reasons each one kept to hand, in case they met a Malaysian, of why it was so much better on the island than the peninsula. They ranged from law and order to cleanliness, from clean government to good schools, and always ended on the strength of the Singaporean economy. But in the end, the Malaysian would nod, as if to agree to the points made – and then shrug to indicate that they probably wouldn’t trade passports, not really. And if pressed for a reason they would fall back on that old chestnut which somehow seemed to capture everything that was wrong about Singapore – but your government bans chewing gum. The nanny state and the police state all rolled into one.

  Singh dragged himself back to the issue at hand and said, ‘OK, let’s start at the top. If Chelsea did not murder her husband, who did?’

  ‘You believe her, sir?’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ said Inspector Singh firmly.

  Shukor sighed. He could smell trouble. One blundering Singaporean policeman stampeding all over a cut and dried case was not what Inspector Mohammad had wanted when he assigned Shukor to babysit. He liked the policeman from Singapore – he was honest, direct and seemed to care about the people involved in the case. They were not just ciphers to him. But this bee in his bonnet about Chelsea’s innocence was unhelpful. They only had her denial to go on. How was it that was enough to convince the senior policeman? He came with a big reputation for success and a bad one for being his own man. He hadn’t got either by being gullible.

  Singh interrupted his train of thought. ‘Well? Who else do we have?’

  Shukor said, ‘I have no idea, sir.’

  ‘All right. There’s work to be done then. Let’s go find out who killed Alan Lee.’

  Six

  The lunchtime meal of the Lee family had evolved substantially over time. The staple of the early days, when the Lee patriarch used to preside over the table, was the mega-meal of the food-loving Chinese. In his day, the senior Lee w
ould arrive home for lunch in a chauffeured limousine, the Mercedes Benz so beloved for the status it conferred as well as its robust build. One of his two wives would have cooked. Numerous dishes would be served – all designed for general health and well-being. Judicious use of longevity herbs and a sprinkling of powders purchased from the apothecary – selected after careful consultation from the rows of jars behind the counter – would, when combined correctly, give the body the perfect balance of elements.

  Chelsea Liew, product of a different generation, would usually have a sandwich, carefully crafted by the maid – tuna mixed with onions and garlic diced fine, a hint of lime squeezed in – or perhaps a baked vegetable sandwich – aubergine and pumpkin taken out of the oven when softened to perfection, crispy round the edges, sprinkled with sesame seeds and served between two slices of brown bread, a far cry from her childhood meals of congee with fried anchovies.

  Alan Lee would usually eat at one of the high-end Kuala Lumpur restaurants – fine dim sum at the Mandarin Oriental Chinese restaurant with a view of the Twin Towers – tallest buildings in the world in the recent past, now superseded by the national equivalent of penis-envy in some other country with big ambitions. Or Alan would eat Western food, a sign of personal success, indicating to the world that he did not merely have wealth, but class as well, as manifested by his cosmopolitan tastes. Even French nouvelle cuisine was available to the new élite of Kuala Lumpur. Gone were the days when the only ‘Western’ dish available was the chicken chop and chips at the Coliseum café on Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman. Despite this, quite a few members of this select, wealthy club would stop at a stall on the way back to the office to purchase a top-up meal of laksa or roti chanai. Alan Lee himself had not been averse to substantiating a meal with a packet of noodles bought on the way back to his gleaming office.

  Kian Min, the workaholic, ate little and usually at his desk. His secretary would buy a packed lunch before she left for her own break. She had long since given up trying to work out what it was he wanted or liked. Now, keen that purchasing lunch for the boss should not encroach on her own free time, she usually bought him something from a nearby food court, her choice as to his meal based entirely on the length of the queues at the different outlets. Kian Min was indifferent and did not seem to notice if he was fed a leathery lamb steak, an oily biryani rice or fried noodles.

  *

  Much had changed recently in the dining habits of the Lee family. Chelsea was in prison, picking over a mess of white rice and unidentifiable gravy. The two younger children of Alan and Chelsea were being served bowls of congee with finely sliced ginger and fish cakes. The eldest, Marcus Lee, had refused lunch because he had a hangover.

  Jasper Lee, back from his fleeting visit to Borneo, was at a Chinese coffee shop. Since leaving the family business, he had managed on a shoestring budget, eschewing by choice his prior lifestyle. He sat on a stool at a brown, Formica-topped table. The four-legged stools were from Ikea. Their aluminium stools with plastic coloured seats were cheaper than the rattan or wooden ones that used to adorn cheap restaurants. Jasper paused to regret yet another casualty of globalisation, unnoticed and hardly regretted, but affecting some of the charm that had once been prevalent at food outlets, even those as grubby as this one.

  The smell of koay teow frying, the flames leaping around the wok, perched on a portable stove and attached by a rubber tube to a nearby gas tank, triggered an explosion of gastric juices in his stomach and sent a sharp stab of acidic pain towards his chest. The meal, with a glass of fresh icy soya bean juice, would cost less than five ringgit. Despite this, Jasper knew he would enjoy it far more than the expensive dishes of exotic, endangered species with self-consciously lyrical names that an expensive Chinese restaurant would offer him.

  The cook wiped the sweat from his brow and a few drops fell into the wok, sizzling against the hot sides. He said to Jasper, ‘Want extra chilli?’ and when Jasper nodded, scooped up a gob with a spatula from a large plastic container and flicked it in.

  Jasper tucked in heartily. In the old days, he would have been unable to eat under pressure as great as he was suffering now. But years on his own had taught him that a failure to eat regularly only exacerbated the nature of the problem he faced. He picked the mussels out of his food carefully. One slipped through his guard, filling his mouth with its stale metallic taste – like the warm iron taste of blood. He almost gagged but managed to spit it out, half chewed.

  A cat slipped out from a drain where it had been waiting for just such a moment. Heavily pregnant with large teats almost brushing the ground and a mangy coat through which ribs were visible, the cat was no different from the hundreds of other strays that lived in the vicinity of hawker centres and fought over scraps while avoiding the odd kick from a disgusted patron. Jasper felt sorry for the beast. Leaving money wedged under his empty glass, he quickly tipped his plate onto the floor. The cat barely waited for him to step away before attacking the food with the ferocity of a mother driven by a biological imperative to look after her unborn young.

  Crudely, it put him in mind of his brother’s wife, Chelsea. It was no hardship for anyone to believe that she had gunned down his brother to protect her children. He did not feel any anger towards this woman accused of killing Alan. Instead, he wondered what she had eaten for lunch. He had no idea what prison food in Malaysia involved. He shuddered and then steeled himself. He had made up his mind what to do. There was no turning back now.

  His father had accused him of being feckless and disloyal when he had walked out of the family home. He had always felt that it was the ounce of truth in those accusations which had made them so hard to bear. Perhaps his principled stand about the family business, his desire to wash his hands of what he saw as tainted money, tainted wealth, boiled down to his inability to live up to his father’s expectations. It was easier to walk away than admit failure.

  He would run away now if he could.

  ‘Let’s start at the beginning and do things the old-fashioned way,’ said Inspector Singh.

  Shukor hazarded a guess. He had begun to understand the other policeman’s elliptical references. ‘Who gains from the death of Alan Lee?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No will has turned up.’

  ‘So the kids get everything? How old are they?’

  ‘The oldest boy is seventeen, the others are twelve and seven.’

  ‘Three boys, huh? I suppose that the oldest might have fancied some spare cash if his father kept him short?’ The inspector did not sound convinced by his own accusation.

  Shukor said, ‘It’s more complicated than that, sir.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘If it is finally agreed that he died a Moslem, the Islamic laws on intestacy are not the same as for non-Moslems.’

  Singh rolled his eyes. ‘Give it to me straight. Who gets the incredible wealth of Alan Lee under Islamic law?’

  ‘To be frank, sir, I don’t know. But I think there will be shares for all the family – the brothers as well as the sons, maybe even Chelsea.’

  ‘Let’s not bring Chelsea back into it. She has motives to spare. But the brothers might get something?’

  ‘I’il check with a lawyer, sir – but probably, yes.’

  The inspector looked thoughtful.

  Shukor said diffidently, ‘There’s one more thing, sir.’

  ‘One more thing? What is it this time?’

  The younger man smiled. ‘The family holding in Lee Timber . . . It was placed in a trust by the father. Kian Min inherits after Alan.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Kian Min gets Lee Timber, sir. It is only the rest of the wealth, cash, property and so on, that is divided up amongst the rest of the family.’

  ‘You know something, Shukor? It sounds to me like Lee Kian Min had a damn good motive to do away with his brother.’

  Jasper Lee walked to his appointment concentrating on the here and now. He walked along the kerb in dusty shoes looking a
t his feet as he put one ahead of the other. He noticed that he walked with quick, small strides and consciously slowed down. There was no particular hurry. He noted the plastic bags and cans collected around the base of every tree. He listened to the horns blaring on the road beside him. He looked at the passengers interestedly, absorbing their uniform expressions of frustration and anger at the traffic jam they found themselves in. The fumes from revving cars with nowhere to go made him feel light-headed. He breathed deeply. Not even the perfect dawn air, deep in the jungles of Borneo, had filled him with such a lust for life as the whiff of carbon monoxide that afternoon. The evening sun’s rays, peeping through the forest leaves and turning everything to gold, did not have the same power to enchant him as the blazing afternoon sun on his bare head.

  Jasper understood now why people talked about their lives flashing before their eyes. In his case, it was not so much his whole life but a highlights reel. Peculiarly, he was neither seeing his past nor reliving it. It was the sensations associated with significant moments that flowed over him. He heard the door slam behind him as he left home for the last time, smelt the scent of the woman he loved the first time he met her, felt the wind rush through his hair as he piloted his little plane high above the rainforests. It was a mosaic of emotion and experience, a reward for doing the right thing.

  Jasper Lee walked into the Bukit Aman police station and cleared his throat to catch the attention of the duty sergeant, who was immersed in the sports pages of the afternoon tabloid, his half-eaten packet of rice and curry, wrapped in banana leaf and newspaper and tied up with a rubber band, on the desk in front of him. The policeman dragged himself away from his newspaper long enough to look up and ask grumpily, ‘Ya?’

  Jasper Lee said firmly, without hesitation, ‘I have come to confess to the murder of my brother, Alan Lee.’

  Seven