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Part 1

Introducing Death and Detectives

Prologue

First Body

It was early morning and the rain had stopped. The grass was still wet. They walked across it to the sand and then right up to the water’s edge. The beach was not private to the hotel but there was no one else there at that hour. The combination of dawn and low-tide debris gave the impression of old secrets washed up, ready to be revealed. A light breeze came across the water, bringing the smell of salt and distant decay as well as --- this being Singapore --- whiffs of industrial chemicals being fired and antimosquito fogging.

Tired as they were, being so close to the water cast its spell on them. Even if the sea before them was blocked from the ocean by Indonesia and East Malaysia and crowded with tankers and cruisers, it was still a boundary and a reminder that somewhere in the beyond surrounding them there was a vital ocean and living planet. Like many other cityand computer-bound people, the two were unfamiliar with the experience of being exposed to the wind, the waves, and physical space.

Holding hands and their footwear, they walked barefoot along the shoreline talking about the past and their future. They were not yet twenty-four hours into their newborn marriage and found it fascinating. The Sentosa beach might have been artificially constructed but it was all the more romantic for that, with the best-quality, daily swept sand and line of carefully placed shallow rock pools marking low-tide boundaries.

“Look, a hermit crab!”

“I already noticed you in Junior College, you know . . .” “I noticed you before that. Why do you think I decided to go to Anglo-Chinese Junior College with Hwa Chong at my door step? My parents thought I was crazy!”

“Do you think we’ll ever be here like this again?”

“We can come back every year if you like. Every anniversary.”

“It won’t be the same. You’ll be playing golf and busy and maybe there’ll be children --- I mean, maybe not but—” She broke off awkwardly, embarrassed to have mentioned children. But he was equal to the subject.

“Of course there’ll be children. Lots of children. Your parents and my parents can fight over who gets to look after them, but once a year, every year, we’ll come back here, just the two of us, okay?”

“There’s something over there!” she said then, squinting over the beach. It was the most romantic thing he had ever said and she did not want to spoil it just yet by pointing out that she expected anniversary trips far further abroad --- Europe, or America, maybe. “Over there. It looks like a jellyfish; is it? It’s huge!”

“It’s not a jellyfish. It’s just a plastic bag . . .”

“Yes, it’s a jellyfish --- I can see its body and its legs and everything. Can’t you see? I think it’s dead. Are there poisonous jellyfish around Sentosa?”

They smelled it before they saw it was no jellyfish.

She screamed. He was sick on the sand. Then they put on their gritty sandals and ran back to the hotel to call the police.

1

Aunty Lee’s Delights

“Now they are finding bodies on the beach! I tell you, that place is bad luck! Do you know it used to be called Pulau Blakang Mati? That means ‘Island of Death.’ Before your time, of course, but everybody in Singapore will remember. Crazy, right? Go and build a tourist resort in a place called Island of Death.”

“But now it is called Sentosa, right? And the meaning of Sentosa is ‘happy peacefulness’?” Nina kept her eyes focused on her work. Now she was efficiently threading thin, diagonally cut slices of chicken thigh meat onto bamboo skewers, pressing them well together before returning them to their marinade.

“So? They can call it whatever they want—they still found a dead body there, true or not?”

“Ma’am, they also find dead body in the HDB water tank, in the Singapore River, in Serangoon Reservoir. You cannot say all these places got bad luck.”

“I would say all those people had bad luck. But at least we know who they were, right? This one is supposed to be unidentified!”

News that an unidentified woman’s body had been found washed up on a Sentosa beach in a plastic bag had not made it into any of the Singapore morning papers, but it had been the hottest news online and over the radio all day. For once, the radio in Aunty Lee’s Delights had been turned on all day, switching between local stations for updates.

Aunty Lee’s Delights was a small café shop in Binjai Park, less than five minutes’ walk from Dunearn Road. It was well-known for good traditional Peranakan food and famous for the achar and sambals Aunty Lee had been selling out of her house for years. Aunty Lee’s Delights was also equipped with the latest modern equipment. Though she was revered for cooking the traditional standards, strange dishes occasionally popped up because Aunty Lee loved experimenting. In her view, anything cooked with local ingredients was local food. In fact the shop was very like Aunty Lee herself. Another passion of hers was reverse engineering dishes (and occasionally people) to figure out how they had come about and how they might be better adjusted. She called her kitchen her laboratory for DI YCSI, the television in there testifying to her two passions, for food and news.

Aunty Lee was a short, precise Peranakan lady of certain age and even more certain girth. The image of her fair, plump, kebaya -clad form smiling on jars of Aunty Lee’s Amazing Achar and Aunty Lee’s Shiok Sambal was familiar to most Singaporeans and probably anyone else who had been on the island for any extended length of time. Today Aunty Lee was wearing a turquoise kebaya top with matching pants so flared that she looked like she was wearing a skirt when not in motion. Her sneakers that afternoon were turquoise with bright yellow laces. Aunty Lee believed in tradition but even more in comfort.

Aunty Lee was also well-known and a bit of a headache to many of the island city’s food suppliers. Through letters to the Straits Times, she had exposed several cases of food fraud (“organic” kailan that had been sprayed with insecticide, “free-range” chicken with the flaccid thigh meat of cage-bound animals). All thanks to her unerring ability to pinpoint when something was “off,” in food or in life, and being kiasu enough to fixate on it. Kiasu, or fear of losing out, was a typical Singaporean characteristic and one that Aunty Lee embodied to the extreme.

All day Aunty Lee had been following news reports on radio and television and had even sent Nina round to the

7-Eleven to pick up the afternoon papers, but she hadn’t learned any more about the body that had been found.

 

She and Nina had overdosed on DJ chatter and music (which Nina had quite enjoyed when Aunty Lee was not changing channels hoping for more news), but all she had gotten were news updates without new information and speculations from phone-in callers. Was it the body of a gambler from the casino? An illegal immigrant dropped off a boat who had failed to swim in to shore? Or an unlucky sailor? Had it been an accident, a suicide, or --- most exciting of all --- murder?

Naturally Aunty Lee was all in favor of suicide or murder. She did not find accidents very interesting. To her, accidents were the result of carelessness and poor planning, and she had very little interest in or patience with careless and lazy people. She found them boring.

“They should let us know what is happening!” Aunty Lee said. “How can they keep people in the dark like that. It’s not as though they are preparing for an election or something—a body on Sentosa is serious, it affects all of us. What if tourists start to worry and stop going to the Integrated Resort there to gamble? It’s going to affect all of us!”

“They can also go to the other resort to gamble, ma’am,” Nina said practically. very little upset Nina Balignasay. “Anyway, nowadays they find dead bodies in Singapore quite often.”

“Do you think they’ve found any more bodies? Turn on the Tv again. Go to CNN. Sometimes, if it’s big enough, Singapore news comes out there before it reaches Singapore.”

“If they find more bodies, then it is more likely accident, ma’am. Maybe it is a boat sinking.”

“Or a mass murder!” Aunty Lee said with relish. “One of those serial killers. After all, if you are going to go through all the trouble of arranging to throw somebody into the sea, why stop at one body, right?”

As she spoke, Aunty Lee was rapidly cutting up cucumbers with all the attention she normally paid to cooking, which was not much. She cooked the way some people drove --- while carrying on conversations, applying lipstick, and texting messages --- trusting the instinct that came with long practice and only focusing on the main task when something unexpected came up or went wrong.

Fortunately Aunty Lee did not drive.

“Who do you think it was? The news said unidentified female body. That means nobody reported her missing, right? What kind of relatives don’t report a missing girl!”

“Her relatives may not know she’s missing yet,” Nina observed calmly.

In many ways Nina Balignasay was the opposite of Aunty Lee. Nina was slim, dark, and generally prided herself on minding her own business. Though she had not known how to cook or drive when she arrived in Singapore, she had since learned to do both proficiently, thanks to Aunty Lee’s help-others-to-become-good-at-helping-me philosophy. And since keeping Aunty Lee comfortable was her main business, Nina’s own powers of observation had also sharpened considerably.

 

She had also learned not to worry that her employer would lose a finger or an eye as she speed-sliced and waved her knife around to emphasize whatever point she was making. After all, Nina was nothing if not adaptable. She had been trained as a nurse in the Philippines (even if her nursing degree was not recognized in Singapore) and would have been able to stanch the bleeding. And she had learned it was dangerous --- and pretty much impossible --- to try to stop Aunty Lee from doing what she wanted to.

“You think so? How can relatives not know?” “How often do you see your relatives, ma’am?”

Aunty Lee paused in thought. Though equipped with an extensive social network, she had few close relatives left alive.

“Call Mark,” she said to Nina. “Call Mark and ask him whether that wife of his is around.”

Mark Lee was the son of Aunty Lee’s late husband and his first wife. Aunty Lee had gotten along fairly well with both M. L. Lee’s children for years. Mark was already studying in Australia and Mathilda in the UK when their widower father finally remarried, and they had appreciated the energy Aunty Lee brought into their father’s home and life even if the richness of her cooking gave him gout in two years. As Mathilda said, their mother had been dead for over fifteen years, so neither she herself nor Mark had showed any antagonism toward the plump, fair “aunty” who began appearing by their father’s side at family and social functions. Indeed, when M. L. Lee married Rosie Gan, as Aunty Lee had been called before the marriage, his two children had congratulated themselves that there would now be someone to keep their father fed and occupied, thus freeing them to focus on their own families. “We don’t have to feel bad about not staying in Singapore to keep an eye on poor old Pa!” as Mathilda said.

Mathilda had married an Englishman and settled in Warwick not long after the wedding, comfortably assured that her father was taken care of. However, things had changed after Mark married and M. L. Lee died of a heart attack --- unrelated events that had taken place in the same month almost five years ago. Mrs. Selina Lee had never forgiven her late father-in-law for interrupting her Italian honeymoon by dying (they had been in the Prada café in Montevarchi waiting for her turn to enter the factory outlet when they got the news of his death) or for leaving all his earthly possessions to his second wife.

Aunty Lee privately believed that if Mark had married anyone other than Selina, M. L. Lee would probably have left a great deal more to his son than he did. The late M. L. Lee had had a bias against women with loud shrill voices like his new daughter-in-law. This was perhaps unfair to Selina, who had been deliberately louder (and shriller) in M. L. Lee’s presence since his habit of not answering her convinced her that the old man was going deaf. Selina Lee was also convinced that Aunty Lee had stolen her Mark’s inheritance from him. Aunty Lee knew that Selina had already been to two different law firms to try to find someone willing to help her contest the will. Aunty Lee might have told Mark that she would leave M. L. Lee’s property to him and Selina, which would have made things much more peaceful, but she had not. Instead, she had already agreed to make several loans, of considerable amounts of money, as requested, which Selina now referred to as “presents” and which Mark had already lost in previous business ventures. Running a wine import business was his latest attempt at entrepreneurship.

“What do you want to say to Ma’am Selina?” Nina continued with what she was doing, making no move toward the phone.

“I don’t want to talk to that Silly-Nah. I just want to make sure she’s still alive. You are the one who said I don’t know whether my relatives are missing or not!”

“I never say that, ma’am. Anyway, they will be coming here soon. And if Ma’am Selina is missing, Sir Mark will call the police, right?”

“Who knows?” Aunty Lee grouched. “If she’s not there to tell him how to pick up the phone and how to dial, you think he’ll know how to do it?”

But she left the subject. Of course, Aunty Lee would have done everything in her power to comfort her stepson if it turned out to be his wife’s body that had just floated up onto that Sentosa beach. Aunty Lee would probably miss poor dead Selina, if such were the case --- Selina made life more interesting, in the same way as chili padi spiced up a dish. But it was all wishful thinking. Selina, very much alive and still bossy, would soon arrive with Mark for that evening’s wine dining event.

It was the dining portion of that evening’s wine dining that Aunty Lee and Nina were currently preparing. Usually dinner was not served at Aunty Lee’s Delights. The café specialized in lunches with an all-day snacks and tea menu that covered everything from late breakfasts to high tea, but it closed at six to allow Aunty Lee to get home for her own dinner. In the old days, dinner had been prepared throughout the day in the shop kitchen and collected, along with herself, by M. L. Lee on his way home from work. M. L. Lee had worked right up to the day of his death. Their Binjai Park bungalow, deeper in the estate, was a fifteen-minute walk from the shop. But even a fifteen-minute walk was not easy in the Singapore evening heat, especially with tingkats full of dinner.

Aunty Lee had not realized how much she missed cooking those dinners till the wine dining sessions began. Serving Aunty Lee’s local Peranakan dishes accompanied by fine wines chosen by Mark had been Selina Lee’s idea. But in spite of this, Aunty Lee enjoyed them very much indeed. She had cut herself off from social life after her husband’s death, preferring to cook small dishes rather than make small talk. But she was looking forward to tonight’s session; with an unidentified body, there would be more than small talk around the table.

“It could be some foreign diplomat got drunk and ran over somebody then dumped her body into the sea,” Aunty Lee mused. “Do you know if the Romanian embassy sent over a new guy yet?”

“Even if the newspapers say ‘unidentified,’ it could mean that the police know but didn’t tell them, right?” Nina suggested calmly. “Maybe they want to inform the family first.”

“Maybe.” Undeterred, Aunty Lee branched off on a new track. “And now also, just before Chinese New Year --- must be somebody on drugs or on holiday . . . that’s why nobody reported her missing yet. They didn’t say where this woman is from, right? Tell you what, Nina. Go and phone them and ask whether it is somebody you know. Tell them a friend of yours is missing, then maybe they will tell you whether the woman is Chinese or Indian or ang moh . . . but make sure you sound upset, otherwise they will want to get information from you instead . . . Phone now before people start coming for the dinner.”

“Ma’am. My hands are dirty now. And I got to finish making dinner before the people come.”

“Maybe she went to Sentosa to gamble and lost all her money and she was running away from loan sharks and fell into the sea . . .”

“Yes, ma’am. Do you want me to put the pork on the sticks also?”

“Yes, Nina. Are there enough sticks? Good. Those loan sharks can be so terrible. But they should realize that if they go around killing people, they won’t get their money back, right? Unless, of course, they killed her as a warning to other people who owe them money. But if I were a loan shark, I wouldn’t kill somebody who really owed me money --- I would pick somebody who didn’t and just tell everybody she did. That would be enough to frighten them. So that poor girl could be a total stranger to them . . . but maybe it wasn’t loan sharks at all. Maybe it was those expat traders who get drunk and beat up taxi drivers. Maybe it was a female taxi driver and she jumped into the sea to get away from them.”

Aunty Lee was happy again, Nina thought. Aunty Lee was usually happy when she cooked, but today, despite the frustration of having no details about the body found, she was even happier than usual. Aunty Lee was bored, Nina realized. It was to occupy her mind that she had thrown herself into Aunty Lee’s Delights after her husband died. Running the café and keeping the shop counter stocked up with Aunty Lee’s “specials” had succeeded in distracting her for a while, but now that routines were established and running smoothly, Aunty Lee was clearly getting bored. Boredom was all very well. Everyone felt bored at times. But a mind that worked with the speed of Aunty Lee’s meant boredom would be followed very soon by action and change.

Nina sighed inwardly; she did not want things to change. She was very happy working for Aunty Lee. There were far worse employers to work for. Nina knew that very well, having worked for some of them herself. And it had been Aunty Lee who rescued her, offering to take over her employment contract. “I could report them for what they did to you, of course. But then such things take a long time to get to court and then you won’t be able to work or go home --- why don’t you come and work for me?” It had worked out for both Aunty Lee and Nina . . . and for Nina’s former employers, who escaped being fined and blacklisted by maid agencies.

The menu for that night’s wine dining gathering was chicken and pork satay, luak chye (mustard greens that had been pickling in vinegar, ginger, and sugar since yesterday --- Nina had only to remember to mix in the mustard powder just before serving . . .), and the hee peow or fish maw soup made with prawn, fish, and meatballs. Of course the whole point of the wine dining dinners were for Aunty Lee’s stepson, Mark, to introduce people to wines that could “go” with local food, but Aunty Lee had gleefully seized the opportunity to fire up her favorite recipes. Most visitors who came to Aunty Lee’s Delights were there to shop for her sweet and savory kueh, fried delicacies, and, of course, the bottles of Aunty Lee’s Shiok Sambal and Aunty Lee’s Amazing Achar and Krunchy Kropok, which sold out as fast as Aunty Lee and Nina could produce them.

Aunty Lee’s hand phone rang. It was on the counter and Nina, correctly interpreting Aunty Lee’s “On it for me --- make it loud-loud!,” answered and switched it to speakerphone.

“Rosie, ah --- are you there? Busy or not --- ” Nina recognized the grainy voice of Mrs. AwYong, an old friend of Aunty Lee’s.

“Jin, how are you? Cooking lah. What’s up?”

“Rosie, you were right! I found my watch --- some more I found an earring and a part of a necklace and a bangle I didn’t even know were missing!”

“I told you I was right!” Aunty Lee smirked. Nina smiled to herself. Aunty Lee knew she was usually right but she never tired of hearing others admit it. She grumbled (at least on the surface) when her friends jokingly gave her their challenging little problems to solve to “keep her brain active,” but the truth was she adored them. These little problems were a legitimate way of putting what the late M. L. Lee described as his wife’s outstanding talent for being “kiasu, kaypoh, em zhai se! ” Nina could remember the old man saying kaypoh, meaning minding the business of others with as much energy as kiasu devoted to their own. Em zhai se literally meant “not scared to die” and effectively described how Aunty Lee drove everyone around her to despair through frustration as she pursued some triviality no one else could see any point in.

It was a good thing old Uncle Lee had been so fond of his little wife. Where any other man would probably have been irritated, M. L. Lee had been entertained. But then Aunty Lee, with her knack for understanding people (through the way they eat, she said), had probably known him better than anyone else. Nina guessed that Aunty Lee had seen he needed someone. That would go some way to explaining why she had chosen to marry a man so much older than she was. Because despite what people whispered, and what M. L. Lee’s daughter-in-law frequently said aloud, Aunty Lee had had money of her own when she married her widower. Not as much as he had, of course. Few people in Singapore belonged in his class. But after years of catering for special events, Aunty Lee had been comfortable financially and her prowess in the kitchen was unchallenged. What woman could ask for more? Watching Aunty Lee now, Nina wished she knew.

“They were all in the bushes!” The voice coming through the phone shrieked with laughter. “I was so sure the maid took my watch --- I even scolded her already --- and all along it was the stupid dog! He was taking all my things out to chew. Now all so dirty and smelly already! Hey, did you hear about the dead woman they found on Sentosa? Must be somebody murdered their maid and tried to hide the body, that’s why not reported missing!”

“Jin, you imagine such crazy things! I hope it’s not your maid that they found there!”

Aunty Lee said little more, ending the call soon after that. Nina knew her well enough to guess her boss was turning over Mrs. AwYong’s suggestion. And probably wishing she had thought of it herself.

“That woman always blames the maid first,” she said to Nina. “Lost her things, blame the maid. Unidentified body found, must be the maid.”

 

There was a note of apology in Aunty Lee’s voice for Mrs. AwYong. But Nina knew only too well that most employers in Singapore regarded their live-in domestic help with great suspicion. That was another reason Nina constantly reminded herself how lucky she was to work for Aunty Lee. “Did you taste the satay sauce yet?” Nina reminded her boss. Though Nina did most of the food preparation now,

Aunty Lee still calibrated the final seasonings.

Aunty Lee moved across to taste the peanut sauce again. It was in the sauces and seasonings, as she constantly reminded Nina, that the real art of cooking was to be found. And it was no use asking for exact measurements either. There were no exact measurements; it was more a matter of training your taste to recognize the perfect pitch so that you could always rely on yourself to adjust the ingredients to hit precisely the right note. What good were recipes that gave you pounds and ounces --- or worse, grams and liters --- when how much a dish required depended on the quality and age of your ingredients?

Nina watched as Aunty Lee added a dash of coriander and a spoonful of tamarind pulp before giving the sauce a good stir. Selina had tried to suggest that Aunty Lee serve up more bland dishes, ones less likely to overwhelm the wines that were, after all, the whole point of the exercise. Aunty Lee had pointed out that true Peranakan food was always spicy --- and suggested Selina phone in an order for delivery pizzas instead --- with all the earnest, bland helpfulness of an old lady who was only trying to be helpful . . .

 

“They should be here soon,” Nina said. “Shall I set the table first or wait for Sir Mark?”

“Put out the plates but not the glasses. He’ll want to fuss with the glasses himself like he always does. I’m surprised he isn’t here already, to let his wine ‘settle and breathe’ and whatever nonsense.” Aunty Lee brightened. “Maybe he’s late because that Silly-Nah is missing.”

Nina, laying out the heavy white plates, did not answer. She suspected Aunty Lee would lose interest once the poor dead woman’s identity was revealed. It would probably be in tomorrow morning’s newspapers, which was why Aunty Lee was milking the mystery for all it was worth now. Again she thought it was probably because she was bored.

“Aunty, you should play mah-jongg,” Nina said. “Or go on a cruise.”

“She may have been on a cruise!” Aunty Lee agreed. “And fell overboard. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t murder. We should take note of any of the women who registered for tonight’s dinner and don’t show up . . .”

Going by the previous week’s wine dining event, Nina would not have been surprised if at least one of the guests did not return. This was no reflection on the food, which had been good. Selina had worried about how spicy the food was but Mark had not seemed to mind, and all their paying guests had enjoyed their dinner. It was only after dinner that things had got interesting, as Aunty Lee had put it. Laura Kwee, the friend whom Mark and Selina had brought in to help serve the wine, had drunk enough to be embarrassingly chatty. Nina had been rather uncomfortable. But at least Aunty Lee was looking forward to today’s dinner with all the relish of a child getting ready for school after a long, dull vacation alone.

And why shouldn’t she? Nina reflected, taking her feelings out on the flattened sticks of satay before putting them in the enormous fridge in the back storeroom to await their grilling. Aunty Lee had been very nice to Laura, even letting her leave her things in the storeroom of the café that night because she had clearly been in no shape to get them as well as herself home. Laura had not returned to collect her bag either. Nina would not be surprised if Laura Kwee did not show up that night.

“I’m going to keep the TV on during tonight’s dinner,” Aunty Lee said. “Doesn’t matter what the show is. Sometimes they have those breaking news announcements.”

“Sir Mark doesn’t like that.” Nina knew Mark planned the music that accompanied his wines as carefully as Aunty Lee planned the serving dishes that presented her food.

“It’s still my shop,” Aunty Lee said firmly. “Besides, if we don’t pay attention to what’s happening, who is going to?”

 

Selina Khaw-Lee, wife of Aunty Lee’s stepson, Mark, had not heard anything about the unidentified body found on Sentosa and would not have admitted it if she had. As Selina said disparagingly to anyone who invited her to their online networking sites, exercise classes, or volunteer work, “I have a life, you know!” After all, Selina had already started preparing to be a model mother. She had decided on names for her future children long before she had decided whom their father would be. And it was precisely for the sake of these future offspring that she took so much interest in her husband’s business and prospects. The Lees were old money. In a young nation like Singapore, old money was anything that had been in a family for more than twenty years. Their lifestyle was one that Selina, the daughter of two teachers comfortably anchored in the middle of Singapore’s respectable middle class, had always aspired to --- she saw herself living the life of a Tai-Tai, wearing designer clothes and going for manicures and overseas holidays. Unfortunately her husband was also living a Tai-Tai lifestyle. Mark Lee had grown up with that comfortable nonchalance toward money that a financially privileged childhood confers. It didn’t seem to matter to him that all his father’s money had been stolen by his second wife. But it mattered to Selina.

“I don’t think you should let Laura Kwee have any wine tonight. She’s obviously not used to it.”

“It’s a wine-tasting dinner,” Mark Lee said mildly. Mark was generally mild, especially where his wife was concerned. “Besides, Laura is helping me with the serving, right?”

“She didn’t say she isn’t coming. I texted her a reminder to give her a chance to back out if she wanted to --- it would be just like her to back out at the last moment --- but she just said ‘see you there.’ Not a word of apology. After carrying on like a drunken alcoholic!”

 

“Laura already apologized, right?” Mark slowed down to join the queue of cars waiting to cross the Bukit Timah Canal. The younger Lees lived in a condominium across the canal from Binjai Park. It was not a great distance --- if not for the trees, you could see Aunty Lee’s Delights from their ninth-floor apartment --- but given the large canal and two main roads that separated them, only the servants walked in between. “Laura’s not used to wine, that’s all. If she was any kind of alcoholic, a few glasses of wine wouldn’t have had any kind of effect on her.”

Mark seldom disagreed with his wife, but he knew Selina was only venting in advance because she was steeling herself to keep up her social persona for the rest of the evening. Selina worried so much about what people were thinking of her that she was always uncomfortable in public. Mark was looking forward to the evening as he waited for traffic to clear. He was a patient driver. Selina was not patient about anything.

“Why did you let that car cut in like that? He has no right! Did you see what he did? If you didn’t stop he would have caused an accident!” No response from Mark. “Did you remember to bring over all the wine yesterday?”

“All except the Albarino. I thought at first Chianti for the satay but then last night I thought about it, and I think the 2009 La Cana that just came in would do better. And I can talk a bit about Spanish wine. We’ve been having so much French and Australian lately.”

“You want to open it because it just came,” Selina said sourly. “Is it expensive? I told you not to waste expensive stuff on these people. Anyway, that old woman’s food is going to drown out all your wine as usual. They won’t notice what they are drinking.”

Mark did not answer.

“There’s no point wasting that,” Selina said sharply. “You know Aunty Lee can’t tell the difference anyway. You could just get her some old bottle from the supermarket and she wouldn’t notice.”

“She likes it that I bring her something special,” Mark said. “We’re partners in this, after all.”

Selina snorted. “You can wrap up any old bottle. She won’t be able to tell the difference. If you ordered that specially, you should be able to sell it for more. Don’t waste it.” It would not be a waste, Mark thought. Selina thought that wrapping a bottle in brown paper or a coat of aluminum foil would be enough for Aunty Lee. But the wine would not be wasted because he was really doing it for himself, and he appreciated it.

“They shouldn’t notice what they are drinking. They shouldn’t notice what they are eating. They shouldn’t even notice how good they feel. Then we’ll have got the pairing right.”

Perhaps Mark could be a food critic --- or a poet --- if this latest venture of his failed like all the previous ones, Selina thought. Not for the first time she wondered whether she could still make it as a derivatives trader or real estate agent. If she made her own fortune, she could forget about pushing her husband into succeeding. But she wanted Mark to stay with this, she reminded herself. The Lee fortune was there for the taking even if Mark did not make a profit. And this latest brainwave gave her a chance to keep an eye on Aunty Lee’s Delights. Even if Aunty Lee claimed she only ran the café as a hobby, it was clearly raking in cash. And since it had been set up by the late M. L. Lee with money that should have been Mark’s, clearly Mark should be benefiting from the profits as well.

Selina conveniently forgot Mark’s sister, who seemed quite happy with how things were. Anyway, Mathilda had never shown much interest in what was happening in Singapore.

“I hope Laura pulls herself together today.” Selina returned to her current peeve. “Even before she turned into a lush, she was getting all the glasses mixed up.”

“Maybe she won’t turn up.” Mark turned into Binjai Park. The row of shophouses, which housed a pizzeria and several antiques shops as well as Aunty Lee’s Delights, stood on a side street to their left, separated from the main estate road by a decorative grass verge with the usual trees, shrubbery, and a metal prayer bin. “How many people signed up for tonight, anyway?”

“Why do you say that?” Selina asked, ignoring his question. “Do you think Laura won’t be here tonight? She’s supposed to come and help with every session. That’s why we gave her a discount. What did she tell you?”

“Nothing. I can set up everything myself, that’s all I meant.” Mark concentrated on parking. He stopped the CD player to concentrate, and the system switched automatically to radio.

Even if it wasn’t a murder case, so gruesome to think of all those people enjoying themselves in the holiday resort while there’s someone lying dead on the beach, don’t you think?

Maybe it’s a publicity stunt by the resort. Next they’ll announce there’s a murder mystery competition --- dead body washed up on Sentosa, did the ghosts of murdered dolphins do it?

“I hate those radio commentators, they’re so stupid!” Selina said. “Mark, what are you waiting for?”

Mark kept the engine on. He wanted to hear what else they had to say. But there was nothing more.

 

Harry Sullivan had arrived early, as he always did. He liked being on time. “Singapore time” --- which could run up to thirty minutes behind any set appointment --- was one of the things he disliked most about Singapore, and so, while he expected local people to be late for appointments, he himself refused to be late. Harry had never been particular about punctuality before; but here in Singapore, he was an expat, an ang moh and a man to be noticed.

Back in Oz, he had been stepped on and pushed aside by the greedy, grabbing new immigrants invited in by a soft government, but over here the tables were turned. He was aware that people looked at Mr. Harry Sullivan differently here and the change in him had come naturally in response to that. Harry liked what he had become in Singapore. He was full of new project ideas, his conversation sparkled and impressed even himself, and he was a hit with local women, who loved being seen with a white man. It almost made up for the humid, equatorial heat.

This evening he was wearing a red batik shirt (considered formal wear in the tropics) unbuttoned over a white T-shirt and Bermuda-length cargo pants. It was the third wine dining he was attending. Not that he didn’t prefer beer to wine, but he was expected to maintain certain standards here in Singapore and he tried to live up to those expectations. He guessed the old Caucasian couple coming slowly along the five-foot way peering into shop windows and squinting at shop numbers had signed on for the same event at Aunty Lee’s Delights as he had. They looked like retirees who were traveling to see the world and had chosen Singapore as their first stop because of its clean, safe, English-speaking reputation. Both with fuzzy-ginger-turning-gray hair and in matching Merlion T-shirts, they also looked new to Singapore and Southeast Asia. Harry Sullivan, with six months’ residence behind him, could afford to be generous to these newcomers.

“Hey there. Here for the wine-and-local-food do?” Frank and Lucy Cunningham were glad to see him.

They were early, as Lucy explained. They had expected to get lost but they had not. Lucy was doing most of the talking, and Harry guessed the dinner --- perhaps their whole trip --- had been her idea.

“How many people attend these things?” Frank Cunningham wanted to know.

“First time ten people showed up,” Harry answered. “Second time only six. I have no idea how many people will be turning up tonight, but the food is good. It’s definitely an experience you won’t get anywhere else.”

“Oh goody,” Lucy Cunningham said. She peered in through the window, but though she could discern two women pottering around inside, no one came to the door. “Doesn’t look like they’re going to be ready for a while. We’ll go look around first. We saw an antique shop.”

Typical tourist types, Harry Sullivan thought.

 

“So who is coming tonight?” Mark asked again.

Selina thought that her earlier silence should have made clear that this was not something she wanted to discuss. For a moment she wondered whether Mark was deliberately trying to provoke her, but one glance at him made her dismiss the thought. He looked as blandly uninvolved as that stepmother of his . . . which was good because Selina didn’t know who was going to turn up that night. Laura Kwee was in charge of taking down the names and collecting payment. In the run-up to the previous two dinners, she had called or texted Selina every time someone called with an inquiry. Selina had made it very clear that this had to stop --- “If you’re going to bother me with every detail, I might as well do it myself!” --- and since then, there had been no word from Laura Kwee.

Selina felt a quiver of foreboding that she tried to suppress. Perhaps she had spoken more sharply to Laura than she need have. Maybe she’d offended her. But that woman could be so dense sometimes. The shiver she felt was not exactly in her gut --- more in her bladder. She wondered if there was time for Mark to drive her up to Aunty Lee’s house to use the toilet. Selina did not use public toilets, not even the one at the wine café that was maintained daily by contract cleaners, supervised by Nina. It was not just a matter of cleanliness but of privacy. Selina could not bear the thought of any stranger using the toilet after she did. No matter how carefully one cleaned up, there were bound to be some traces left --- it seemed to her the grossest invasion of privacy. But as Selina decided to get back in the car, Mark finished securing the travel case holding his precious wine bottles onto its wheeled trolley and locked the vehicle.

“Mark, I have to use the ladies’.”

“No problem. You’ve got lots of time.” “Mark!”

Mark continued toward the entrance of the wine café without waiting for her or offering her his arm, as he used to do during their courtship and the early days of their marriage. Absurdly perhaps, she was now angry with her husband for not waiting for her to answer the question she had been angry with him for asking.

“I don’t know,” Selina called after him. “I have no idea who’s turning up tonight. I don’t even know how many people are coming --- or if anybody is!”

It was ridiculous that she tried so hard to help him, she thought, when he was so ungrateful. Well, not exactly ungrateful; Mark was programmed with a reflex that made him say thank you, even to people like waiters and servants whom Selina did not notice. But at the same time he was so blindly unaware of how much Selina did for him all the time and every day. One day she would drum it into him in a way that he would never forget. It would be so satisfying to see him taken aback. And one day soon she would hit him with the information that would make him realize exactly how well she knew him and he’d never take her for granted again. But for now she hugged her delicious secret to herself. Some people could not keep a secret to save their lives. Selina Lee knew and had benefited from that failing. She held her own information close to her, enjoying the potential power it gave her. Feeling better, she followed Mark.

The back door to Aunty Lee’s Delights was held open for them by Aunty Lee herself.

“We don’t know how many people are coming for dinner tonight,” Selina told her. “Laura Kwee was supposed to handle it and she never got back to me, it’s not my fault.”

 

“Ah, Silly-Nah!” Aunty Lee said. “Good, you are here. Laura Kwee already gave us thumb drive with info last week for all the sessions. Eight people for dinner tonight, nobody paid yet --- ha ha --- except you and Mark no need to pay of course! Did you hear about the body they found on Sentosa? Don’t you think that the poor girl must have been murdered?”

“Oh no!” Mark said, stopping abruptly. “Mark? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing --- just . . . the wineglasses are all wrong. And the circles on paper haven’t been numbered.”

“Laura will do that.” Selina snapped out of her reverie. “She’ll be here any minute now. I’ll just give her a call.”

“I don’t think she’s coming,” Mark said. “Can you just --- ” “She said she would do it!” Selina snapped. She turned away from him. It was no use trying to get a connection inside the shop. Selina was sure Aunty Lee’s equipment was jinxing her phone signals.

Her phone bleeped a message announcement just as she reached the door. She pulled it out (she would have to remember to switch it to “silent” later --- Mark hated being interrupted). Once she saw whose phone it was from, Selina already guessed the message. “You two go ahead, I have to take this,” she said to Mark and Aunty Lee. They had already gone on to discuss glasses and marker pens with Nina.

The message was from Laura Kwee’s phone.

Sorry not feeling well, can’t make it tonight. Marianne said she can’t come either. It was signed with Laura’s usual smiley face.

It looked as though Laura Kwee, dense or not, had taken offense after all. Selina’s lips tightened. She did not have time to play Laura’s stupid games.

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