Aunty Lee's Delights Part 4

"What about your colleague?"

"He's all right. Mrs. Lee, you called our head office to say that a woman was missing-a Miss Laura Kwee?"

Aunty Lee threw a guilty look in Nina's direction. As SSS Salim followed the look, Nina kept her face impa.s.sive. She hoped the policeman would recognize that she had no control over her boss's actions and not hold her responsible.

"I only said maybe it's her-if you still don't know the ident.i.ty of the body you found in the sea. But I have a new name for you now: Marianne Peters is also missing."

The two policemen exchanged glances. This time it was Officer Pang who answered.

"We have already received several calls concerning Marianne Peters. A friend of hers is concerned."

"And?"

"And we have spoken to her family, who a.s.sured us there is nothing to worry about. In fact her brother, who is an NMP, informed us she is out of Singapore, traveling with friends." It was clear from his tone that the word of a member of parliament, even if nominated rather than elected, was sacrosanct and therefore no further queries would be made.

"Oh yes, of course. That is what she said she was going to tell them. But do they know where she really is? Have they spoken to her? Can you ask them who are those friends she is supposed to be traveling with?"

SSS Salim dismissed Aunty Lee's suggestions with a vague gesture that could have meant either that he would get onto their trail as soon as this interview was over or that he didn't know and didn't care. This ability to be respectfully vague had served him very well throughout his studies and was proving useful within the force as well.

"It is Laura Kwee that we are concerned with right now, ma'am. Can you tell us how you know her? And how you came to believe that she was missing?"

Aunty Lee looked at him for a long moment. She was not refusing to answer, just studying him; SSS Salim got the feeling that she was reading his mind. In reality, Aunty Lee was engaged in putting together all the facts she had so far-including the appearance of a police vehicle at her doorstep-and also studying Officer Pang, who was standing soberly by the entrance.

"You aren't just here to follow up on my phone call," she said finally. "You came to tell me that Laura Kwee is dead."

The handsome policeman looked startled enough to confirm it.

"Of course we try to follow up on every tip we get," SSS Salim explained. "But most of the time it doesn't come to anything."

"This time it did!" In spite of the horror of the news, Aunty Lee was clearly fascinated by it. She waved to Nina and hot tea (ginseng and Cordyceps this time to strengthen them against the shock) was made and brought out for all of them along with some of Aunty Lee's peanut biscuits.

"What we want to ask you . . ." As SSS Salim spoke he nodded to Officer Pang, who produced a small recorder that he placed on the coffee table. This was obviously the start of the official interview. "What alerted you to the fact that Miss Kwee was missing?"

"But she was killed, wasn't she? Or are you not sure whether it's her? I don't think I have any photographs of Laura Kwee . . . Nina, can you look up Laura Kwee's Facebook page for the officers? Or would you like Nina to go with you to the mortuary to identify her body? I can come with you also, but my eyes are not so good already now."

"We are certain it is Miss Laura Kwee," SSS Salim cut in hurriedly before Nina could follow up on any of Aunty Lee's instructions. He was still calm and still authoritatively patient, but he was starting to show signs of the bemused stress that affected most people when they were first taken over by Aunty Lee. "I mean we are certain of her ident.i.ty. We don't need to identify her. What I would like to know is what made you report her as missing."

"I read in the newspapers this morning that you were trying to identify the body that was found," Aunty Lee explained. "Or rather Nina read it to me. And yesterday already we heard it on the radio. So I thought I should help if I could."

"When did you phone, ma'am?" Nina usually had to dial the numbers for Aunty Lee.

"Yesterday. When you were at the back setting up the grill, before all the other people arrived," Aunty Lee admitted. "I didn't want to worry you. Nine-nine-nine is such an easy number to tap-tap-tap, I thought I would just take care of it without bothering you."

"None of her colleagues or family members reported her missing." SSS Salim was not to be diverted. "In fact, when we spoke to them, most of them said they thought she had gone off on holiday over Chinese New Year and taken leave to extend her trip. And when we checked-we found she had taken leave. So what alerted you to the fact that she was missing?"

Nina was beginning to feel irritated. Shouldn't these policemen be out running after whoever had killed Laura Kwee and thrown her into the sea rather than cross-examining Aunty Lee about her phone call?

"We didn't think that Laura Kwee is missing," Nina said. "In fact we were sure she was not missing because just before dinner last night she phoned Ma'am Selina to say she not coming."

This was of interest to both policemen. "You say last night someone called Selina says she got a phone call from Laura Kwee?" SSS Salim asked for the benefit of the recording even as Officer Pang glanced at his watch to carefully note the time this nugget of information had been handed to them. "Do you know what time this call came through? And can you tell me how to get in touch with this Selina? What is her full name?"

"Selina Lee. She's married to my late husband's son, Mark. You are trying to narrow down the time of death, right? Selina told us about the call around seven p.m. That means Laura Kwee must have phoned her earlier than that. That means she must have been killed between-" Aunty Lee stopped abruptly.

"You found a body yesterday morning," Aunty Lee began again. "You are saying that is the same body that you have now identified as Laura Kwee-even though Laura Kwee was alive yesterday evening."

"And that has probably been in the water for at least three days. That is why we would like to talk to Selina Lee," said SSS Salim.

"Ma'am Selina is going to be angry," Nina suggested after the two police officers left with their information. That was not saying much, given how often Selina found something to be angry about.

"I'm sure we'll hear all about that soon enough," Aunty Lee said. "Invite those two over for dinner tonight. Tell them I want to cook for them because they will be too tired after talking to the police. And then phone that Carla Saito for me. Tell her it is not the body of her friend Marianne, but I want her to come and talk to me. If she doesn't want to come here or go to the shop to talk to me, I will go to her hotel to talk to her there. Quick, do it now!"

5.

Carla Saito's Story Carla Saito chose to meet Aunty Lee back at the cafe.

"Marianne didn't go diving with friends," she told Aunty Lee. "She just told her parents she was going to be with friends they knew so they wouldn't worry about her. She took extra time off work because she was going to spend time with me. We had a lot to talk about."

Marianne Peters and Carla Saito had met the year before when Marianne visited Was.h.i.+ngton for an IT conference. They had instantly clicked, despite being from such different backgrounds. Carla had shown Marianne around Was.h.i.+ngton. Even though it was not her hometown, she knew her way around better than Marianne, who was on her first visit to the States.

"And I know what you're going to say, but it wasn't just a holiday thing. We spent all our time together there; she skipped all her final sessions so that we could take a quick trip to the mountains. And after she went back to Singapore-I mean came back here-we talked every day on Skype-"

"You became very good friends very fast," Aunty Lee observed sweetly.

Carla Saito looked at her for a moment, but there was nothing but curiosity in Aunty Lee's expression.

"Yes, we did," Carla said quietly. "And we planned this for a long time. Me coming out here to join her, I mean. I had to sell my apartment and hand in my notice-"

"What do you do? For work, I mean."

"Well, to put it simply, I work with computers. I'm in IT security."

"But you can't go on staying at the Frangipani Inn. That kind of place is not good for a single girl staying alone. Why don't you come and stay at my house? I have a lot of room in my house. Nina, you can make the bed in the side room for her, right? You can have your own toilet, and then if you want to go and talk to Marianne's family tomorrow, you can walk over. They are just nearby, just further up the road and up the hill. If it's not too hot, you can easily walk. I can show you where to go or I can go with you. I know her parents very well."

"I don't know-"

"Don't worry." Aunty Lee sensed her alarm. "If you are happy in your room there, then that is fine."

"Well, it's not so bad. But the main thing is, Marianne booked the room for us. She put down the deposit and I just had to check in when I got here. She was going to meet me there so that we could talk. Plus it's cheap because it's a backpackers' haunt and n.o.body her family knows would ever go near there, so it was safe."

"You must be glad Marianne is all right," Aunty Lee said to Carla. "I mean now that you know she is not the body that they found."

"Of course I am. I just don't understand why, if she's all right-and why, if she could call someone else-she didn't call me."

Aunty Lee nodded, understanding. Even a tragedy was easier to understand than abandonment. "As long as there is life, there is hope," she said. "Tell me why you came here to look for Laura Kwee. How did you know that Marianne would get in touch with her about not coming?"

"I didn't. But Marianne told me Laura got her brother interested in this place and he got her and his wife to go too. And then there was some fuss at the first dinner, right? Laura was trying to match Marianne up with some guy? But Laura called her afterward and they talked and she explained things to her, and then she said Laura was getting someone to help us."

"Help you? What do you mean?"

Carla Saito shrugged. "I don't know. It was going to be some big surprise for me. All I know is she was pretty excited about it. She said we could have some time together to work things out in peace without really leaving Singapore. Anyway, I should be going. It's really late. Thank you very much. For the food and for listening."

"Would you like me to come with you to Marianne Peters's house and ask her mother where she is?"

"No! I mean there's no point. I know what she'll say. She thinks that Marianne is off on a travel vacation with friends. Marianne was only telling them that because she wanted us to have some time together. I don't want to tell them she was lying. If she comes back and finds out I told them she lied, she's going to be so mad."

"Then why not just meet her somewhere else? Why come to Singapore?"

"Because if we managed to figure out what we want to do, then we could have gone to tell her family together. I mean, if I managed to persuade her to see things my way," Carla Saito said quietly. "I wanted everything to be clear and open and honest from the beginning. This way, even if her family wasn't happy about it, at least they would know how we felt and what we wanted and they could take their time to come around to the idea-but they would never have to think that we lied to them. Of course, it didn't quite work out that way. Marianne said I didn't understand what traditional Asian parents were like."

"You have to tell her parents," Aunty Lee said. "They have a right to know Marianne is not away with her friends."

"No. I mean . . . just wait. Please. If she just took some time off to think about things and I've gone and talked to her parents-"

"If you don't want to talk to her parents, at least tell her brother. Mycroft is a nice boy. He won't say anything-"

Carla Saito shook her head. "No. I know all about Mycroft Peters. He's the worst of them all."

6.

Family Dinner Though she was far from convinced, Aunty Lee agreed not to say anything to Marianne's family-at least for the moment. In contrast to Carla Saito's relief to find out that Marianne was not the body found on Sentosa, the news left Aunty Lee feeling even more worried. There was a problem with the phone call no one else seemed to have noticed. If Laura Kwee had already been murdered, how could Marianne have left a message with her? And if the message had not come from Laura, why had Marianne been mentioned at all unless . . .

Aunty Lee did not want to follow that thought through till she was forced to. Fortunately having Selina and Mark come to dinner provided ample distraction.

For once Selina was paying more attention to her own plate than what Mark was or was not eating. And she was eating Aunty Lee's food with gusto. Mark watched his wife helping herself to sambal squid and black-bean fish without a word about cholesterol and preservatives, and helped himself as well. It was about time Selina had a good meal without worrying about what she was eating. It seemed as though being questioned by the police had improved both her mood and her appet.i.te.

Aunty Lee had been half afraid that Selina would blame her for talking to the police. But Selina was surprisingly good-natured about the experience. She and Mark had had to go to the Bukit Tinggi Police Post for an interview with SSS Salim and had spent almost four hours there.

"I told them I had no idea whatsoever that Laura was missing. I expected her to turn up like we arranged, she texted me to say sorry she couldn't make it-that's all I knew. But they kept asking all these questions about how well I knew Laura, had she said anything about boyfriends or stalkers-and they took my phone. I think they are going to try to trace where her text came from. All I can say is they better get it back to me soon! What am I going to do without a phone-I'm running a business, you know! What if my clients try to call me?"

"I blame SingTel," Mark said. "I told them, sometimes messages don't get through until hours later."

"But actually answering their questions didn't take so long," Selina continued. "Yes, give me just a bit more rice, Nina-they wrote down all our answers in first person as though we wrote them down ourselves, and frankly speaking, their English isn't very good. But I wasn't going to sign my name on the statement until they got it right."

"Sel gave them an English lesson," Mark commented. "I said they should just have let us write our own statements, they could read them over, and that would be that." Mark looked tired and more stressed than his wife. But then he had never liked confrontations.

"I did not," Selina said. "But they said I was very helpful-that we were very helpful. They didn't know about that woman coming to look for Laura that night."

"Carla Saito didn't come to look for Laura. She was trying to find Marianne Peters," Aunty Lee pointed out.

"That's not true. When she came in she was asking for Laura Kwee. Anyway, the police aren't interested in Marianne. Marianne isn't even missing, she's away on holiday. That woman came in and asked for Laura Kwee. We all heard her. You heard her, didn't you, Aunty Lee? Why didn't you tell the police about her? They were very interested in how to get hold of her, so I told them I thought I heard her say she was staying at the Frangipani. I think they're going to talk to her too."

Something in the way Selina said this made Nina wonder what exactly she had told the police about Carla Saito. Aunty Lee could guess. She changed the subject.

"I wonder whether this is going to change the way people see Sentosa. It can't be very good for the resort there."

"I remember going to Sentosa during school holidays," Mark said, surprising his stepmother. "I remember the mangrove swamps. Dad had a friend who was crazy about the mangrove swamps. Uncle Bian said they were like natural water filters. Can you imagine, he did his thesis on wave patterns in artificial mangrove swamps."

Aunty Lee was uncharacteristically quiet during the meal. Nina recognized it as her a.n.a.lyzing mode; the one that appeared when she was trying to reverse engineer a dish or when she was trying to decide whether some variation in taste was good or bad.

"They refused to say if poor Laura was definitely murdered," Mark said. "I asked if they had any leads or any suspects, but they wouldn't say." Talking about murder and suspects came naturally enough, thanks to forensic crime thrillers on cable television.

Selina usually put a damper on gruesome speculations, but now she said, "But you can see they think it is murder, don't they? And the worst thing is-I think they took my phone because I may have been the last person Laura talked to!"

The concentration on Aunty Lee's face grew deeper, if possible. She stared at the unfinished rice on her plate, but Nina knew she was really trying to untangle events. Nina could guess what was on Aunty Lee's mind. Though SSS Salim had not told them how long Laura Kwee had been dead, it was clear that her body had been found before Selina received that last text from her. The same thought had occurred to Mark.

"If it wasn't a SingTel glitch," he said, "it might have been the murderer that sent you that message. Laura was already dead yesterday evening, you know. They said she's probably been dead for at least a week."

"Don't be ridiculous," Selina said. "They said they couldn't be certain of the time of death. Anyway, the message was definitely from Laura. She signed off with that silly smiley face she always uses. The phone must have been out of range or something. You know how sometimes messages just don't go through until hours after you send them?"

Aunty Lee looked up and saw Nina watching her. "You can clear my plate," she said. "There are ways to track mobile phones these days, right? Go and ask that nice staff sergeant are they tracking Laura's phone."

"I am sure he is already doing that, ma'am." Nina deftly cleared Aunty Lee's half-eaten dinner plate. That there was food left over was an indication of how concerned Aunty Lee was. "Ma'am, don't worry. The police will know what to do."

After Mark and Selina left, Aunty Lee continued brooding.

"What is the matter, ma'am?"

"That message didn't come from Laura. Whoever it was wanted to make people think Laura was still alive. What I'm worried about is why did the message mention Marianne-but no need to go into all that. Go and phone that nice staff sergeant or that handsome young a.s.sistant of his and tell him that you heard a phone ringing somewhere outside the shop but you could not find it."

The excitement of giving a statement to the police was not all that was making Selina happy that night. Mark had finally read the piece in the Island High Life reviewing the recent wine dining at Aunty Lee's Delights. "They don't mention the wine at all," Mark said, peeved, but Selina thought he should have been glad. After all, the writer of the article had not been impressed by Aunty Lee's supposedly cla.s.sy food-the anonymous reviewer made fun of the fact that dinner had been served on two-dollar Daiso plates. Selina had complained about those plates repeatedly, but Aunty Lee had done nothing, saying no one noticed such things. Well, that was no longer true.

"I tried to get her to read it because of the plates. But you know what she's like. You should bring it up. She has to change those plates now if she doesn't want to be a laughingstock."

"Sel, you didn't write that comment, did you?" Mark asked.

"Don't be stupid, of course I didn't. But print it out for me, okay? I want to show it to Aunty Lee. And make it large print. She won't admit how bad her eyesight is and I suspect Nina only reads her what she wants to hear."

She had to repeat this twice before Mark answered, and even then he only said, "Maybe."

"What's wrong with you? If you go on like that, people are going to suspect there was something going on between you and Laura Kwee!" It was not clear from her tone whether this was a joke or a threat.

Mark knew his wife. One of her rules of life was not to make threats she was not prepared to follow up on.