THE WOODLANDS HDB estate is on the far north edge of Singapore right up against the narrow Jahor Strait that separates Singapore from Malaysia. The jungle is so thick monkeys emerge from it and sit by the side of the road waiting to be fed.
Singaporeans have an expression for those parts of their tiny island state that are like the Woodlands, places far removed from the tourist and financial districts most of the world recognizes. They call them the heartland. Tay had never liked the expression very much. He always thought it sounded patronizing.
Tay looked out the window and thought about the distance between where they were going and where he lived. It took less than an hour to drive to the Woodlands from Emerald Hill, but it was really a lot further away than that.
A government agency called the Housing Development Board has been relentlessly throwing up pre-planned, pre-packaged villages all over Singapore for as long as Tay could remember, and every one of them looks more or less the same. Identical apartment towers are designated by block numbers and clumped into groups with community facilities between them. Every estate has a mosque, a Chinese temple, a Christian church, a community club, a coffee shop, a mini-mart, and a school.
Everything is immaculate. The buildings are all freshly painted and the landscaping is perfectly trimmed, mostly by Indian and Bangladeshi workers permitted into the country on short-term work visas to do the manual labor Singaporeans won’t do.
Well planned and perfectly maintained, Tay thought the make-believe villages of the heartland had nearly everything, everything that is except a heart. They were storehouses for people, not real places where the daily messiness of bona fide human life was found. Tay hated them.
***
Sergeant Kang turned off Woodlands Avenue at the Shell Station onto Woodlands Street. He followed it to Woodlands Drive, then turned into Woodlands Circle. A few hundred yards up, he pulled to the curb behind a blue and white fast response car parked at one of the apartment buildings.
The building was about a dozen stories tall and looked absolutely identical in height, color, and design to all the other buildings Tay had seen from the car window over the last ten minutes. The concrete facade was painted in alternating colors of gray, yellow, and green, the color of each level having been chosen at what appeared to be random, but if the idea behind either the colors or the apparent randomness of their distribution was to try to make the buildings appear more cheerful, Tay thought that was stupid. It was laughably typical of what he would expect from the sort of people who seemed to plan everything in Singapore these days.
“Where are we going?” he asked Sergeant Kang.
“There, sir.”
Kang pointed to the building closest to them. On the fourth level at the corner was a large sign that said 374. That was the block number of the building and Tay wondered if that meant there were at least 374 identical apartment buildings in the Woodlands. He certainly hoped not, but he knew it was at least possible.
Tay got out of the car and stood for a moment waiting for Sergeant Kang to lock up. They were parked in a circle surrounded by eight identical high-rise buildings. There were half a dozen cars and a few motorcycles parked on the street, but there was no sign of human activity anywhere. No music on the breeze, no conversation in the distance, no flashes of movement. The place was as barren and sterile as anywhere Tay could ever remember being. If it hadn’t been for the laundry drying on a few of the metal poles extending horizontally above each balcony, Tay would have wondered if anyone lived here at all.
If the heartland has a heartland, he thought, this is it.
***
Two uniformed patrolmen were waiting outside the door to the seventh floor apartment. One had a notebook and pen and appeared to have been allotted the responsibility of maintaining a list of everyone attending the scene. That couldn’t have been a very difficult task since Tay heard no sound from beyond the doorway to indicate anyone else was there. The other patrolman had an even easier job. His role was to keep the curious away from the crime scene, but since the hallway contained not another soul, curious or otherwise, he didn’t have anything to do either.
Tay reminded himself they didn’t actually know yet whether this was a crime scene at all. Perhaps some poor bastard had simply arrived at the end of his allotted time on earth exactly as everyone eventually did. He supposed he would find out soon enough.
“Who discovered the body?” Tay addressed the question to the air about halfway between the two patrolmen and allowed himself a moment of private speculation as to which would respond.
“Two kids, sir.”
It was the one on the left holding the notebook who answered his question. Tay had guessed wrong.
“Kids?”
“Yes, sir. They live down there.” The patrolman point at another apartment near the end of the hall. “They said they were playing out here and found the door open. So they went in. Their mother called us when they told her what they’d found.”
“They just went in?”
The patrolman shrugged. “Kids. What can you do?”
“Have you interviewed the mother?” Kang asked.
“Yes, sir. She phoned it in after her kids told her what they’d found. She hasn’t been in the apartment.”
“Does she know who lives here?”
The patrolman glanced at his notebook. “She says it’s owned by a man named Ching Wo Hin. He’s eighty-three.”
“Which probably explains why he passed away.”
“It’s not Mr. Ching in there, sir. At least not according to the woman down the hall. She says his wife died about a year ago and he’s been staying with his daughter in Los Angeles ever since. The daughter had all his personal things packed and shipped to LA. The neighbor says the apartment is empty.”
“Apparently not,” Tay said. “Has Forensic Management Branch been here yet?”
“No, sir.”
Tay reached out and took the patrolman’s notebook. He glanced at the page where he had listed all the people who had attended the crime scene so far. It was blank.
“No one has been here?”
“No, sir. You’re the first.”
Tay handed the notebook back to the patrolman.
“What time did the call come in?” he asked.
The patrolman flipped back a page in his notebook. “I’m not sure, sir, but we got the radio call at 8:08 am.”
Kang immediately looked at his watch. Tay didn’t bother.
“Good Lord, sir,” Kang blurted, “that was almost two hours ago.”
The second patrolman, the one who had yet to speak, cleared his throat. “It’s the bombings, sir. There’s nobody left for things like this but us. Everybody who’s important has been thrown into that case.”
Then the young cop realized what he had said. He fell silent and examined his shoes.
“I’m sorry, sir,” he mumbled, “ I didn’t mean…well, I wasn’t saying that—”
“Never mind, patrolman,” Tay interrupted. “You’re absolutely right, of course. No reason to be embarrassed for saying it out loud.”
Tay looked at Kang. “Okay, let’s see what we’ve got here.”
***
The apartment was a small, shabby, and sparsely furnished one-bedroom. Tay’s first thought was it was a sad place to die, but then his second thought was there probably wasn’t a happy place to die.
Opposite the front door just underneath the windows, two worn easy chairs upholstered in some kind of rough brown fabric faced each other over a low wooden table that was empty. On the left wall was a sagging couch upholstered in a matching fabric with two small wooden tables in front of it which were duplicates of the table between the two chairs. The couch faced a black metal television stand across the room, and on the stand was an old-fashioned tube-type television with a coil of black cable snaking its way to a plug in the corner.
The room had been searched. Tay had no doubt about that. He could feel it in the air. But there wasn’t much there and whoever had done it hadn’t spent much time at the job. Maybe they found what they were looking for right away and didn’t need to take any longer. Or maybe they just weren’t very good at searching a room.
The bedroom door was next to the television and opposite the couch. Tay eyed it warily.
It was well known around CID that Tay avoided dead bodies whenever he could, which was an uncommon trait among men who investigated homicides. Tay’s distaste for encountering corpses had embarrassed him for many years, but he had discovered to his surprise that aging came with at least one worthwhile benefit: he didn’t give much of a toss what anyone thought about him anymore. Tay had seen all kinds of dead bodies during his more than twenty years in CID and he couldn’t stand to look at them anymore. It was just that simple. The sight of dead bodies made him nauseous.
Tay stood for a moment looking at the door to the bedroom. It was closed and God only knew what was beyond it. Sergeant Kang waited quietly and said nothing. He knew exactly what Tay was thinking. They had been at a lot of crime scenes together and Tay had thought pretty much the same thing at every one of them.
Were they about to confront some new horror that would finally master him, Tay wondered? Would this be the day his nausea would finally overcome him and he would endure the embarrassment of throwing up right there at the crime scene?
He should have asked the patrolman to tell him the state of the deceased. At least then he wouldn’t be suffering like this wondering what he was about to see. But then he had been so annoyed at the truth of what the young patrolman had said about everyone who was important having been assigned to the bombings that he forgot. And he could hardly turn around now and go back outside and ask, could he? No, of course he couldn’t.
Inspector Tay took a deep breath, stepped over to the bedroom door, and pushed at it with the knuckles of his right hand.
He and Kang stood quietly as the door swung open.