The Singapore School of Villainy Read Online Free PDF Page B

appearing no more bemused and tired than if he had stayed up an extra couple of hours watching television. The whites of his eyes were still as clear as Singh’s starched white shirt. He said, ‘Yessir!’ in a theatrically cooperative tone. Singh wondered whether Jagdesh thought he’d have an easy ride because he was a family acquaintance. If he did, he was in for a disappointment.
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    Maria Thompson sat half upright, half lying on a red velvet couch. A figure with less poise would have been described as slouching. She wore a silk kimono dressing gown with a dragon embroidered on the sleeves and back. Smooth unblemished legs with child-like bare arched feet were hooked over a sofa arm and her almond-shaped eyes were fixed on a widescreen plasma television, the sound turned down to the point of inaudibility. Maria Thompson’s oval face, with its smooth flat planes of cheek, was expressionless. She appeared mesmerised by the silent figures on the screen.
    On the mantelpiece, a few silver-framed photographs of Maria and a smiling white-haired man with a shaggy dark moustache, at least thirty years older than her, were neatly arranged. In one, the couple stood side by side formally, not touching. In another, he was smiling down at her in a close-up of their faces. The photos were in black and white and had all been taken on the same occasion. The clothes, an elegant body-hugging white satin gown and a black tuxedo, were the same in each. A stranger might have assumed from the artificiality of the teeth-exposing smiles that the pictures had come with the frames.
    Someone pressed the doorbell and she heard the chiming of electronic bells. Maria Thompson stirred instinctively, then remembered herself and lay back. The clicking heels of sensible shoes marked the progress of the Filipina maid as she walked down the hallway to the main door. She returned a minute later and stood respectfully at one end of the room, an older woman with wiry grey hair. Maria Thompson had no intention of employing young attractive domestic help – after all, who knew better than her, her husband’s predilections? The maid’s uniform, a black dress with a frilly white bib and apron – a pastiche of the costumes in a Victorian period drama – was carefully starched and ironed.
    â€˜Ma’am, there is a visitor to see you.’
    â€˜Who is it?’
    The maid paused for a moment, her elderly face aging ten years in an instant. ‘He come from the police, ma’am.’
    Maria Thompson sat up a little straighter although her face remained bored.
    â€˜Why is he come here, ma’am? I have done nothing wrong, I swear it!’
    The Filipina maid found the courage to voice her fears, although her papers were in order and she had never supplemented her income in Singapore by working in more than one home or moonlighting as a prostitute.
    The mistress of the house, who had done both before marrying Mark Thompson, senior partner at Hutchinson & Rice and her erstwhile employer, went out to meet the police.
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    Jagdesh Singh lay in bed staring at the corniced ceiling. He had his hands folded behind his head and was resting on a soft pillow. The bedclothes were rumpled and his quilt was bunched up over his legs. He rubbed his feet together. They felt cold – as if his heart had become bored with pumping blood through his large body and decided to abandon the task before reaching the extremities. It was past midnight but he couldn’t sleep. He was as wide awake as if he had an intravenous caffeine drip.
    He wished he had gone to that dinner with the Singh family and ignored Mark’s urgent summons. None of the problems he was facing would have come to a head if he had just done that. It seemed that this was yet another fork in the road where he had taken the wrong path. He paused to wonder how the Sikh inspector felt about having a distant relative involved in one of his cases. He had not seemed