TAY HADN’T EVEN been in his office long enough to throw away the accumulated flood of junk — The featured lunch in the cafeteria today is chicken rice! — when his door opened a few inches and Sergeant Kang’s head appeared.
“Have a minute, sir?”
“You’ve got an ID on the Woodlands body?”
“Uh…no, sir. No ID.” Kang hesitated. “There’s something else I need to talk to you about.”
Kang looked uneasy, which tickled Tay’s curiosity so he waved him into a chair.
“What’s on your mind?”
“That’s what I really wanted to ask you, sir.”
Tay thought about that for a moment. “You wanted to ask me what’s on your mind?”
“No, sir, I want to know what’s on your mind. Something’s going on that you’re not telling me.”
Suddenly Tay was glad his desk was covered with a fresh accumulation of paper because fiddling with it gave him something to do while he was trying to decide how to answer Kang.
If he had been at home, he would have lit a cigarette, of course. The whole ritual was generally good for a solid minute or more of downtime when he was stuck for what to say. But even Tay wasn’t enough of a social misfit to contemplate lighting a cigarette in the Cantonment Complex. He wasn’t certain what would happen if he did, but he wouldn’t have been surprised if the prime minister showed up personally and threw a bucket of water over him, then confiscated his passport and exiled him to Indonesia. Assuming Indonesia would have him.
“What do you mean?” Tay eventually asked Kang when he ran out of pieces of paper to move around his desk.
Kang didn’t even dignify that with a response. He just sat and looked at Tay and waited for him to say something that wasn’t completely stupid.
So Tay tried again.
“Look, I’m sorry if I’ve been hard to get along with recently, Robbie. I know everyone is under a lot of stress, but being cut out of the bombing investigation has been hard on me and—”
“Sir, I’m not a moron. You know perfectly well that’s not what I’m talking about. Ever since we walked into that apartment and you saw that man’s body lying on the floor, you’ve been keeping something from me. You acted like you knew who he was right off, but you’ve still got me running around like an idiot trying to identify him.”
“I don’t know who he is.”
“You may not know exactly, but you know something about him. What is it, sir? What is it you don’t trust me enough to tell me?”
Tay leaned back in his chair and knitted his hands together behind his neck.
“It’s not a matter of trust, Robbie, it’s…”
But then Tay realized it probably was a matter of trust, at least of a sort, and he trailed away into a slightly embarrassed silence.
“You’ve never really trusted me, have you, sir? Even when you were on your own and needed help and I got it for you. Danny Ong, Sergeant Lee, and I worked half the night on our own time, week after week, until you apparently had what you wanted. But you didn’t trust us enough to tell us what you did with what we found.”
A year or so back, Tay had been trying to find the killer of an American woman whose body had been found in a suite at the Singapore Marriott. But he had run into a wall. Neither his bosses in CID nor the Americans seemed to want him to succeed. He had gone behind their backs and done it anyway, and Sergeant Kang and two other cops who were friends of Kang’s had done the legwork. He would never have pulled it off without them.
“I couldn’t tell you, Robbie. I couldn’t tell anyone.”
“Yes, you could have, sir. You could have if you wanted to, but—”
“So what are you asking me for now? A confession?”
“I guess what I’m asking, sir, is—”
“When people confess to you, Robbie, sometimes they tell you things you don’t really want to know.”
“Then you’re saying I’m good enough to do the grunt work, but not important enough to be in on the finish?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Robbie, let it go. They almost got away with what they did to that poor woman, but because of what you did they got the punishment they deserved. Believe me, that’s all you want to know.”
“We worked eighteen hour days to help you, sir,” Kang repeated doggedly. “And when you had what you wanted, you shut us out.”
Most of the time Tay wished he didn’t have to ask for help from anyone, but that simply wasn’t possible. Except in the movies, Tay knew lone wolves didn’t solve cases. Blinding flashes of insight did occur, Tay had had quite a few in his career, but mostly police work was dogged and detailed. It took manpower to get almost anything done.
“Do you ever wonder what makes people like us do what we do, sir?”
“I’ve wondered about very little else for twenty years now.”
“It’s because we believe what we do matters. Because we believe the law matters.”
“I used to believe that, but I don’t anymore.”
Kang couldn’t keep the surprise and puzzlement out of his voice. “You don’t, sir?”
“Last year I found out something about myself that changed a lot of things.”
Tay reached out and picked up a stack of inter-office memos and moved them carefully from the left side of his desk to the right.
“I found out I care about the law a lot less than I thought. But I care about justice a lot more than I thought.”
“I don’t know what you mean, sir.”
“That’s okay, Robbie. Sometimes I don’t either.”
***
A silence fell after that. It was a companionable silence, and Tay found something lurking in it that he liked quite a lot.
After a while, Kang cleared his throat.
“I admit you’re the best we’ve got, sir. The very best. But you’re not all we’ve got.”
Tay said nothing.
“You’re not in this by yourself, sir. Some of us stuck out our necks for you before and we’d do it again. I told you back then you’ve got a lot of friends here, but you didn’t seem to hear me. Or maybe you just didn’t want to hear me. Maybe you want to see yourself as being in this by yourself and I’m just spoiling it by telling you you’re not.”
“Look, Robbie, I appreciate what you did then, but that doesn’t mean—”
“I trust you, sir. Because I know you’ll do the right thing. But I’m entitled to something in return. I’m entitled to your trust. And I’m entitled to your respect. I’ve earned it.”
Kang was right. And Tay knew it.
So why had he withheld so many things from him about this investigation?
He knew the answer to that perfectly well, too, of course. He had started withholding things from Kang after they found the dead man at the Woodlands because the things he was withholding felt somehow personal to him, even if he still couldn’t figure out exactly how they could be.
He was withholding things because he didn’t want Kang to know too much about him. He didn’t want anybody to know too much about him. He didn’t share personal things, not with anyone. Perhaps he should, but he didn’t.
He was convinced there was a connection between the dead man and the bombings. He couldn’t explain the feeling to anyone, he couldn’t even explain it to himself, but he was as sure of that being true as he had ever been of anything.
If he was right, if there was a connection between the dead man and the bombings and the dead man was also somehow connected to his father, then there was a line of some sort that ran from his father’s grave to the rubble of the Hyatt and the Hilton and the Marriott.
How much time did he really have to put all this together before something else happened that might be even worse than what had already happened?
Tay was afraid the answer to that question was simple enough.
Probably not much time at all.
So he took a deep breath and unhooked his hands from behind his head.
“You’re right, Robbie. I’m sorry.”
Then Tay told Sergeant Kang about the safety box key. He told him about Paraguas Ltd. He told him about the ledgers with his father’s initials on them. And he told him about the photographs the ledgers had eventually led him to.
He told Sergeant Kang everything.
Well, almost everything.
***
When Tay finished, Kang just looked at him for a minute.
Then he said, “Do you have the list of names with you, sir? The ones on the back of the photographs?”
Tay took the list from his shirt pocket, unfolded it, and pushed it across the desk to Kang.
Kang picked it up without reading it.
“Sixteen names, you said, sir?”
Tay nodded.
“I’ll get right on it. If any of them are still alive and here in Singapore, we’ll know where they are by the end of the day.”
Tay noted Kang had used the pronoun we, but Tay didn’t see any reason to acknowledge it. So he just nodded again and went back to rearranging the stacks of paper on his desk.