The Claire Tham Collection

I understand you have spoken to Mr Alan Johnson at our Bangkok office. I am writing to notify you officially that the body of your brother-in-law, Mr Scott Ransome, was discovered in Room 217 of the Pattaya Golden Hotel last Tuesday, the 26th of May. The Thai police were alerted and an autopsy will be performed shortly to discover the cause of death. There is no suggestion of foul play.

Apparently Mr Ransome had been dead for several days before he was found, as the body was in an advanced state of decomposition. I say this not to cause you any further distress but because I have been informed by the undertaker that, under the circumstances, it may be disturbing for Mr Ransome’s next of kin to view his remains. I understand from Mr Johnson that Mr Ransome left a wife and three children in Singapore. If they intend to fly to Thailand for the funeral, a closed coffin affair would probably be best. Alternatively, we can also make the necessary arrangements to cremate the body and courier the ashes back to Mrs Ransome.

I should be grateful if you could let me have your instructions as soon as possible. I would also need to know your intentions regarding Mr Ransome’s personal effects...

The High Commission has also written to the Lockwood Shipping Company, Mr Ransome’s employer, to inform them about his death...

Schedule of Scott Ransome’s personal effects

British passport

One thousand Thai baht

Fifty Singapore dollars

Wallet containing Singapore work permit and Visa credit card

Letter from Lockwood Shipping Company regarding shore leave

One Samsonite suitcase containing three shirts, three pairs of trousers

We have received your instructions regarding the cremation of Mr Scott Ransome’s body. This can only be done after the coroner’s office releases the body, which is expected to be within the next few days. I am informed that the cost of cremation and of flying the ashes back to Singapore will be approximately____baht. I should be grateful if you could arrange to wire this amount to the British High Commission in Thailand as soon as possible.

The official autopsy report has not been released yet but it appears that Mr Ransome, although only thirty-seven, died of catastrophic liver failure.

Strange, the Reverend Stephen Mullins thought, what a life can be reduced to. Personal effects in an impersonal hotel room. A practical problem as to the disposal of one’s remains. Ashes in an urn. And yet, even through the dry officialese of Her Majesty’s servant in Bangkok, it was possible to glimpse the shadowy departed figure of Scott Ransome. Not the individual, but the prototype to which he belonged. Ransome was a merchant seaman after all. Not academically-inclined, probably none too bright, but sturdy and with a strong practical bent. One of those restless young men the British Isles had always produced, who set out in search of adventure and never returned. A hundred years ago he would have been striding forth in a pith helmet under a colonial sun, his restlessness dignified in the name of Empire. Now they were called expatriates, staggering from one alcoholic watering spot to another around the world, a world which paradoxically looked more and more the same the more they travelled.

His reflections interrupted, he looked up from the two letters he held in his hand into the face of Ms Tan seated across the desk from him. Tan Shu Meng. Senior Vice President of Corporate Planning at the country’s largest shipping line. She had made an appointment to see him that morning, in his capacity as the resident chaplain of the Mission to Seafarers in Singapore. From her rather low, husky voice over the phone, he’d formed the impression of an older, heavier woman, not the professionally elegant woman in her early forties who sat before him in a well-cut pearl-grey suit and well-trimmed bob.

Handing the letters back to her, he said, not for the first time, “Please, call me Stephen.”

She ignored this. She was, he could see, a stickler for protocol. Her slightly broad face was strong rather than pretty, the make-up a touch heavy, possibly to hide teenage acne scars just visible beneath the powder. Good figure, though. He imagined that she worked out. No wedding ring, though that might not mean anything these days. Her gaze was disconcertingly direct, holding his eyes without a trace of vulnerability or embarrassment, even as she’d handed him the two letters to read. And he wondered now why she had done so, because she did not seem particularly confiding or upset, and he would have imagined, looking at her, that face mattered to her. Her English was almost accentless, without the local nasal intonation that he sometimes found hard to follow.

“As I was saying,” she said, with a touch of reproach at his inattention, “we wanted a memorial service for Scott because there was no funeral. That’s something my mother can’t get over. And it’s hard for the children—my sister’s children—to understand their father’s gone if there’s no funeral. They keep asking about him.”

“Yes, it’s always hardest for the children, isn’t it?” He had learnt, in such situations, to stick to well-tried, innocuous statements.

She said, surprising him, “That’s what everybody says, but I don’t think it’s true. Children forget and adapt faster than we think. It’s the adults who brood and don’t let go. But then—” and here he saw the glimmer of a smile; she’d been resolutely poker-faced so far—”I could be wrong. I don’t have children of my own.”

“Mrs—?” For a moment, she seemed at a loss. “Oh. My sister.” He heard again that ambiguous tone which she’d used earlier in relation to her sister. “She’s upset. Naturally. That’s why she couldn’t come today.” She was doing it again, he noticed; explaining things unnecessarily, revealing more than she had to.

“Will she be able to manage financially? Was Mr Ransome the sole breadwinner?”

“Yes, yes, he was. It’s a worry ...” her voice trailed off. “He had an insurance policy that he took out a year ago. I made him do it. But you know you can’t claim on it if—”

He completed the sentence for her; it was instinctive: “—he committed suicide.”

She flashed back, “The autopsy report was inconclusive.” She’d obviously found his response wanting; her glance was now very distinctly a glare.

“I’m sorry.” He felt some sort of explanation was due: “I used to be a policeman. I’m afraid the training is harder to get rid of than I thought it would be.” The observant—too—clinically observant—eye; the ability to file away trivial details about a suspect that would come in useful later; the tendency to treat people as guilty until proven innocent.

She asked, genuinely curious now, “You were a policeman? How did you become a priest?”

He corrected her, “I’m not a priest in the Catholic sense,” but saw that these nuances were lost on her. He added, smilingly, so as not to appear rude, “It’s a long story.” Uncapping his pen, he went into professional mode. “Right. A memorial service. Just some details, if you could. Was Mr Ransome an Anglican?”

“I don’t know. I never saw him go to church. I think,” and he heard the dryness in her tone, “the pub was his church. But he was married in one.”

“That’s fine. I have to ask, that’s all.” And he felt again that prick of loneliness, of being the last defender of an obsolete faith in a foreign land. In the pecking order of fashionable religions and denominations, the Church of England was right at the bottom. He was used to it; it was, ironically, what had attracted him. The hard, solitary grind. The mining of a difficult lode. But when he passed the packed congregations of the Pentecostalist churches that had sprung up like wildfire in this region, it was hard not to feel a pang. “What about Mr Ransome’s family—will they be flying out for the service?”

She shook her head. “Mr Ransome’s mother is too ill to fly and his father can’t leave her.”

“So are we.” She glanced at her watch. “I have a meeting soon. What other details do you need? My sister’s name? Jonquil Ransome nee Tan Shu Lin. The children—Belinda Ransome, aged five, Brenda Ransome, aged three, Mary Ransome, aged one. Scott’s parents? Mr and Mrs Peter Ransome.”

She reeled off the facts with the precision with which she must have conducted her meetings and he thought in some amusement that he would not want to cross her. His pen scratched rapidly.

“She calls herself Jonquil.” There was a waspishness in her voice she couldn’t entirely disguise. She is angry at her sister, Stephen thought. Curiosity stirred in him. “My mother didn’t give either of us English names. She’s a Taoist. I’m a freethinker and so’s my sister, although she got married in church.” All this was said with a touch of aggressiveness, as though he’d tried to convert her. “But it’s the fashion to use English names. If you’ve noticed.” He said, mildly, as though her little outburst had never occurred, “Very well, then—next Wednesday, three P.M.

“My mother, myself, my sister and my nieces. My sister”—again, he heard that quick, angry inflection—”might invite some of Scott’s friends. If you can call them friends. I don’t think there’ll be many of them.”

Jerusalem, wasn’t there, in the film Chariots of Fire?” (A film he couldn’t stand for its sepia-tinted view of England.)

She stood and he stood as well, feeling for a moment as though he were the one being dismissed. He wasn’t quick enough getting out from behind his desk and it was she who preceded him through the door of his office and into the hallway of the Mission to Seafarers, with its colonial high timbered ceiling, and faded lithographs of ships dating back to the Cutty Sark (pride of place among the lithographs went to a stained-purplish photograph of Princess Anne visiting the Mission back in 1974 and wearing a white hat—or what had once been a white hat—with feathers). He saw Ms Tan look round again and register the worn armchairs, the chipped coffee table and the unpainted staircase banisters with that faintly incredulous look that all Singaporeans, with their mania for newness, brought to bear on objects that were not in mint condition. He had not mentioned financial terms, but he felt certain that a donation—a generous one—could be expected from her.

They shook hands at the front door. The roar of the rushhour traffic outside engulfed them like a wave; he raised his voice to make himself heard. Once, this had been a sleepy road with a backpackers’ hotel round the corner; many mornings he’d thrown open the doors to find a group of young people lounging on the steps, expecting to be given coffee or tea as a matter of course, and he’d been happy to oblige. Now the hotel was gone and the young people too. He knew he wasn’t supposed to complain about ‘progress’. He was a guest in this country, a white man in a place where, for all the lip service paid to the skills of ‘foreign talent’, resentment of the colonial past could flare up in sudden, unexpected quarters.

He said, “If your sister would like to call me—any time, any time at all.”

She said, with a sudden fierceness that he couldn’t account for, “I’m doing this for Scott, you know. Poor man. He didn’t have a chance.”

He watched her trip across the road in her high, murderous heels until a bus blocked his view of her and then he retreated into the safety of the Mission.

“Well, if it isn’t the Reverend Mullins.” That insistence on using his job title again, though the inflection this time was ironic, the irony a defensive mechanism against—God forbid—taking religion seriously. “What can I do for you?”

“I’ve been asked to hold a memorial service for an Englishman who worked for the Lockwood Shipping Company. Said Englishman was found dead in a hotel room in Pattaya in a bad state of decomposition. Left a wife and kids in Singapore. Know anything?”

“Always pithy, always to the point, aren’t you, Stephen? As a matter of fact, I do. Colleague of mine met the grieving widow. If you can call her that. Very calm, very beautiful, didn’t turn a hair. Apparently, she wanted to know if her husband was really dead, because no-one had made a positive identification of the body. The Thai police just assumed it was—what was his name?”

“—because of the circumstances in which his body was found. Grieving widow says, I need to know this before I can claim on the insurance. Then, realising that this might sound just a mite heartless, she puts on her sunglasses and her lower lip trembles on cue.”

“How did you know? The kind of female that can easily run an army and put the fear of God into every man?”

“Sister did all the talking. Made the arrangements. Even suggested that Mrs Ransome might like to ship some of the ashes to Mr and Mrs Ransome senior back in old Blighty. But grieving widow shoots sister such a look of murderous contempt that sister drops the idea at once.”

“He’s a happily married man with two children but he says that if the grieving widow had given him even the tiniest encouragement—”

“The subject never came up.” A slight pause. “Anything ... untoward? That I should be mentioning to the police? Here or in Thailand?”

“Not at all. Just an ex-policeman who can’t help asking too many questions.”

Another pause. “Haven’t seen you for some time, old man. You must come round. My wife will be glad to see you.” Stephen had difficulty recalling Smithy’s wife: he had the impression of a faded woman in a floral print dress and a shapeless haircut with grey bangs. Smithy was an ex-army officer. Stephen had met him at a garden party at the British High Commission and the two had hit it off, cautiously. As Smithy said, it was the short back and sides sported by both men that did it. You don’t look like a clergyman, I must say, had been Smithy’s first encouraging observation.

“Thanks. I’m up to my ears.” This was said mechanically; he wasn’t up to his ears, far from it. He had been used to fourteen hour days as a policeman and then at his first posting in a parish in south London; this job was a sinecure by comparison, though he knew it was wrong to think of it in those terms. The point is, you’re serving God, his bishop back in England had said to him, and he had agreed, doubtfully.

“I turned it down.” There was nothing for him in England. His parents had died long ago; he had one sister, but she was very married and houseproud and though he was fond of her he found her very domesticity stifling. They had little in common. He had an ex-wife, whom he had not seen in years and whose features were beginning to dim in his memory. The friends he had from the police force—used to have—belonged to another life. Once they had learnt of his new vocation, they had begun treating him with a peculiar stiffness, born of the sudden belief that they had to mind their p’s and q’s around him, and so he had mostly avoided them, to spare them (or himself?) the embarrassment.

He could sense tiny tendrils of concern beginning to unfurl across the telephone connection. This was hugely ironic—he the clergyman supposed to dispense succour, Smithy the agnostic bracing himself to buoy Stephen up. “I won’t keep you, Smithy. Many thanks for your time.” And he hung up before Smithy could invite him formally to dinner.

There was a pool of regulars at the Mission: English, South African, Australian and the odd Canadian or United States citizen who plied the South-east Asian-routes and never failed to pay a visit when they got shore leave. Stephen did not recall meeting a Scott Ransome. That night, as he watched a game of snooker being played in the converted games room on the second floor of the Mission, he asked one of the players if he’d ever heard of Ransome.

“Scott? Scotty? ‘Course I know him. He’s gone native, Scott has. Married a local girl. Lives with the mother-in-law in some place I can’t pronounce. Ang Mo Kow—”

Stephen said, though his own pronunciation was not much better, “Ang Mo Kio.”

“Yeah, that’s it. Painted the mother-in-law’s flat too, he told me. Old lady was terribly chuffed.”

“Only once. It was the night the tree knocked down the gate. You remember.”

And now Stephen did remember. Last year’s Boxing Day, the night of the memorable storm. A combination of the North-East monsoon and a low-pressure system causing the rain to fall for two straight days without a break, while winds gusted up to thirty-five miles an hour. (You remembered these things in the balmy weather of the tropics. It was the lack of seasons and the consequent difficulty of tracking the passage of time that he’d found hardest to adjust to.) He’d just finished bolting down everything that could be bolted down when the most enormous crash sounded. The few men in the Mission that night dashed out into the driving rain to find that the giant angsana tree that used to stand just outside the Mission had fallen in the tiny garden, wrecking the gate in the process. “Leave it,” he’d shouted to the men, “I’ll call the contractor in the morning.” But one man, rather drunk, had insisted on trying to shift the tree from the pathway. Nobody, he explained, could get in or out, though they tried to persuade him they had no problem climbing over the trunk. He would not be dissuaded; he applied his big, red hands to the trunk and heaved and heaved, making no impression. There had been something comic in his futile endeavour; that, and the rain plastering his straw-yellow hair to his head and dripping off the edge of his nose. The men could not help laughing, until it passed the point of being comic and became merely the obsessive, pathetic behaviour of a drunk and two men plunged into the rain and yanked him back forcibly. Soaked through, shedding water like some newly-emerged creature from the deep in the hallway of the Mission, he’d towelled himself off and apologised to Stephen: “Got a bit carried away.” There had been nothing remarkable about him: a big man, about five feet ten, mid-thirties, large, pale, slightly protruding eyes, skin ravaged by teenage acne and still cratered, at his age, like the surface of the moon. A front tooth in his lower jaw was missing; it gave him the lopsided grin of a child. And it was a child that he’d reminded Stephen of, a big, overgrown, unhappy one.

The man was a ship’s engineer, with red, bristly hair and the aspect of a friendly fox. His name was Jones; at least, that was how he introduced himself. He seemed to have no first name that anyone had heard of. He was prepared to be loquacious but Stephen was suddenly disinclined to discuss Ransome further. “Scott died in a hotel room in Pattaya,” he said briskly. “Three days ago. His family’s arranging a memorial service next Wednesday. You might like to attend.”

The man’s jaw fell open. “Died? Oh Christ—sorry, Stephen. Poor bastard.”

To escape the man, Stephen made an excuse about having some letters to write and made his way downstairs to his office again.

He wanted to look for the speech that he always used at memorial services. He used “speech” for want of a better word: sermon sounded too pompous. It was not a speech he had to make too often; at most, two or three times a year, and he needed to refresh his memory. There was no reason to look for it now—Wednesday was a week away—but he liked to be prepared. (The religious life was, after a time, a job like any other, one that you had to organise with a certain amount of efficiency if you wanted to get anything done.) That, and the thought of Scott Ransome lying in a pool of his own vomit and bile in a hotel room in Pattaya, undiscovered for days. Twenty years as a policeman had taught him that people generally do not die in hotel rooms in squalid circumstances unless they intend to do so or unless they are on an inexorable downward course that ends in such a death.

He was reaching up to retrieve a file from behind the filing cabinet when he felt the old, familiar stabbing pain in his chest again. Oh Christ—sorry. His hand groped, blindly, for his chair and he fell into it with a gasp. There were whole days when he could almost forget the fact that he’d been beaten half to death at his first parish in south London—one femur shattered, one lung ruptured—by a group of boys who had been part of his youth group, until something as simple as taking a deep breath or raising his arm could bring it all back: the teenage cries of get him, the smooth possessed faces of the boys milling round him, the black iron rod silhouetted like a snake against the glow cast by the study lamp on the ceiling before it came crashing down on his chest. Before they struck him, he’d almost succeeded in fighting them off, and he took some unChristian satisfaction in the fact that he’d broken several of the little buggers’ ribs.

It had transpired that, in his former incarnation as a murder detective, he had locked up one of the boys’ brothers for manslaughter and the boy had simply been exacting revenge. The episode had taught him a useful lesson about hubris. He had thought he was making progress with the youth of the parish (deprived, sullen, frankly sociopathic). He’d avoided wearing the dog collar; he’d asked them to call him Stephen; he’d talked to them about pop music and their hopes and fears. Now, at least, he could look back on that time with a kind of grim amusement, even though it had cost him the rude physical health he had always taken for granted. There had been no question of his going back to his parish: too strenuous, the doctors said, overriding his objections. And so he’d accepted the posting to the Mission to Seafarers instead.

He no longer expected to work miracles. The kind of muscular Christianity he’d envisaged when he’d entered his new life had given way to an altogether paltrier desire simply to take things one at a time. “I hope you’re not disillusioned,” his bishop had said to him in hospital. “I’m not a defeatist,” Stephen had replied. But not wanting to be seen to give up easily and ploughing ahead because of unshakeable belief—those were two different things and he knew it. The trouble was that there were days—and there were more and more of them—when he had difficulty distinguishing between the two.

“Reverend?” One of the men was in the doorway, looking at him with some concern. Stephen felt again that surge of irritation he’d experienced while on the phone with Smithy. He did not like being pitied, helped; it was one of his failings. “Everything all right?”

“Thought you might like to join us for a beer.” He knew that the men liked him. There was some consolation, was there not, to be obtained from that? He was tired; he didn’t want to think anymore. He would look for the speech tomorrow. He shut the door of his office behind him.

It was the usual story (said Jones, when he sought Stephen out the next night and insisted on telling him what he knew about the dead man). Man comes East in search of some adventure, man meets pretty little thing and shacks up and next thing man knows is that the pretty little thing is leading him down the aisle and he’s dandling some Eurasian infant on his knee less than the regulatory nine months later. Man is snared, well and good. Except that in this case Scotty had seemed to be genuinely in love with his pretty little thing. He’d met her in a bar (don’t they all) a bare two months after leaving England. She was a waitress. He’d pulled playfully on the knot of the frilly apron she was wearing, causing her to trip and spill her drink over him. The manager had bustled over, threatening the pretty little thing, and Scott in an excess of chivalry had knocked him to the ground and fled with the girl. That was the end of her stint in that bar.

No-one knew anything about the girl. All right in the looks department, but hardly a knockout, not drop-dead gorgeous, nothing of the sort. (Recalling the words of Smithy’s colleague, Stephen wondered if Jones could possibly be talking about the same woman.) Bit on the quiet side. Everyone had urged caution on Scotty. Go slow. Take it easy. Plenty of fish in the ocean. Even if she’s got a bun in the oven, don’t buy her line that it’s yours. But Scott wouldn’t listen. Became indignant, in fact, if anyone impugned the purity or virtue of the beloved. They’d taken to calling her VM after that (short for the Virgin Mary). She called herself Blossom or Hibiscus or some such name—

Yeah, right (said Jones, obviously not liking this interruption). Knew it was something fanciful. Well, you’ve met Scott. He wasn’t exactly Adonis. Not ugly, not handsome, just ordinary beyond belief. In England, he was heading precisely nowhere until he signed up with a shipping company and they sent him out East. The East went to his head. Everyone talks about how the world’s getting exactly the same, y’know, globalisation and all, but that’s not really true. The women in the East are different from the women in England and that’s a fact. In England, women wouldn’t give Scott the time of day. Here, out East, there’s a certain type of woman for whom the sun has never set on the Empire and if your skin’s white, Bob’s your uncle. You know, Stephen. Oh, sorry, you wouldn’t, would you? Though to be fair to Jonquil she didn’t seemed the type. Seemed more educated, less showy, than the usual sarong party girl.

So they got married back in England. White wedding, the works. Girl was rather keen on living in England, but it was Scotty who wanted to return East. He hated the cold. So back they came and because the wedding had nearly bankrupted Scott they had to live with her mother in her government housing flat. Old lady was a lamb, Scott had no problem with her. There was a sister, though, one of those super-achieving unmarried females that manage to cast a chill whenever they enter a room. A good woman in her own way, no doubt, but absolutely no fun and that was a fact. Hard to believe that she and Jonquil were sisters, really, they were like chalk and cheese. The sister was one of those who always know their duty; she doled out the cash and they took it, unblushingly, because Scott was rotten at money management and Jonquil was even worse. Never mix money with family relations; any fool knows that, but it wasn’t clear if Scott did. Then the babies started arriving. Jonquil got pregnant at the drop of a hat, and if she wasn’t actually having one she was either miscarrying or aborting it.

Those were the facts of Scott’s existence. His thoughts, his state of mind, about those facts was less clear because Scott wasn’t the most articulate of men. And he was too much a gentleman to say anything against the ladies, the harem he was stuck with; you had to read between the lines. Scott with a beer in his hand, propping up a bar and grinning, a second too late, at some idiotic joke that someone had just regaled him with—that was the image of Scotty they all had. Oh yeah, one other thing. He’d adored his children. His duchesses, he called them, though they took after the mother and looked remarkably little like him. He used to carry their pictures around in his wallet and talk about them to anyone who would listen and his face would light up so that it was almost painful to watch him.

But now the man with the red, bristly hair and the aspect of a friendly fox was feigning deafness, or ignorance, or forgetfulness, or all three. Death had transfigured Scott Ransome and all those related to him; it was part of its exasperating, terrible power. He simply shook his head.

The first person to arrive for the memorial service on Wednesday afternoon was not Ms Tan, as Stephen had expected, but a stocky, dark-haired man with a neatly-trimmed moustache. “Hans Fuchs,” he said, shaking Stephen’s hand. His accent was South African.

“You could say that,” Hans said and he stood to one side with his hands in his pockets, looking short and glum.

A bunch of people came all at once. Jones, uncomfortable in a tie; a couple in late middle age with the telltale nutbrown wrinkled skin of the Caucasian who’s spent too many years pickled in the sun, the man bald as an egg, the woman wearing a smock, her long grey hair pinned up in a straggling knot; a young couple, the man a tall, good-looking Indian, his companion a Chinese woman in black low-slung pants. “Welcome,” Stephen said, “welcome,” motioning them into the hallway of the Mission. Jones and the middle-aged couple brightened at the sight of each other: “... spent the week plastered in Sydney,” the bald man could be heard braying, until his wife poked him in the ribs and he guiltily re-assumed the solemn expression with which he’d entered.

Stephen motioned to Ronald Chan, his assistant, to take the attendees up to the small chapel on the first floor. (Ronald was twenty-seven, good-natured and blessedly free from introspection. Faith came to him as easily as accountancy, which was to say that he was eerily adept at both and could have become a partner in one of the big accounting firms had he chosen to. That he had not chosen to was a sore point with his parents and Stephen never failed to feel a stab of guilt whenever he met them for having been partly responsible for Ronald’s lapse.)

He looked at his watch. Three ten. The main protoganists were still missing. Unpunctuality did not seem typical of Ms Tan; he would have credited her, if anything, with Swiss precision timing. He was debating whether to call her when the front door opened.

His first impression was of a swirl, a gaggle, of women. Ms Tan herself, elegant as ever, supporting an elderly woman—her mother—clad in the kind of traditional black pants and samfoo that was dying out with the older generation. Darting in and around them, like a shoal of tiny restless fish, were three girls in identical sleeveless blue dresses. They brought with them a cloudburst of femininity that the Mission had not seen in years.

The old lady smiled tremulously at Stephen and said something in the Hokkien dialect.

Ms Tan translated: “She says Scott painted her flat for her.” The high colour in her cheeks told Stephen that it would be prudent to skip the pleasantries. Turning to her nieces, she said sharply, “Belinda, Brenda, Mary, stand still.”

The darting stopped; six large light-brown eyes, set in similar heart-shaped faces tapering to slender chins and ringed by identical bell-like bobs, stared up at Stephen. Their gazes had the same disconcertingly direct quality as their aunt’s, and something else as well, a kind of unchildlike knowingness. They would be stunning later on; Scott’s only legacy was in their colouring and their last name.

He said, “How d’you do,” to the girls, which was the signal for them to run and hide behind their grandmother.

He was just about to ask where the last member of their sextet was when a slightly-built woman stepped in and shut the door behind her. She seemed young, far too young, to be the girls’ mother, but the resemblance was unmistakeable. In her, the girls’ features had taken on a kind of high-Orientalism: her hair was very black, very sleek and very long, twisted into a rope that skimmed her waist; her skin was very fair and slightly translucent, its fairness accentuated by the thick vividness of her eyebrows and the dark red lipstick that she wore. Beneath her black slip dress, she was pregnant, the slight bump of her belly just visible. It was not an obvious beauty—it was haughty; it depended on the contrast in her colouring; it required a certain kind of taste (and Stephen could not help feeling surprised that Ransome—poor, maligned Ransome—had tastes that ran in this direction)—and Stephen could see why Smithy’s colleague and Jones had differed on the subject of her looks. It was also possible to guess—even without the look of exasperation that Ms Tan directed at her sister, even without the sublime obliviousness that Jonquil Ransome manifested towards Ms Tan—the family history of those two siblings. What rotten luck it must have been for Ms Tan to have had this late, lovely intruder muscling into her world and claiming all the attention that had once been hers: she must have decided early on to parlay her only trump card—that of the clever hardworking girl—into unimpeachable career success and financial clout. As for Jonquil Ransome, her enigmatic, slightly blank expression gave nothing away—was meant to give nothing away except her shifting beauty and the corrosive sense of entitlement that good looks bring.

At her entrance, the children eddied round her and she picked up the youngest expertly and hoisted her on her hip, while holding the hands of the other children. And it was in this manner, festooned with children, that she ascended the rickety stairs to the chapel on the first floor.

The low murmur of voices in the chapel died down as he entered. The chapel, a converted store room, was ridiculously small—three pews arranged on either side of a narrow aisle and within spitting distance of the altar—and had the slightly musty smell of a room that is opened up only once a day. The ferocious afternoon sunlight pressed itself unavailingly against the windows, which had been closed to prevent the air-conditioned air from escaping.

Ms Tan had settled herself, the mother and the children in the front row; Jonquil Ransome was exchanging kisses, ceremoniously, with the bald man and his wife. Hans Fuchs was seated in the back row by the door, his hands clasped in his lap; there he was to remain, never moving a muscle, as far as Stephen could tell, during the service. The young Chinese woman was checking the numbers on her handphone.

At the lectern, Stephen looked down at his speech, the one he always gave at memorial services. He had worked on it, painstakingly, for the very first such service he had ever given and he’d mastered the rhythms of the language since then. He knew it was not a bad speech of its type, a comforting, uplifting parable about an oak tree and of how in the midst of death we are in life. Yet it seemed too easy, too practised, for this occasion. In the few seconds before he cleared his throat and began speaking, he realised that he was not going to use it. The thoughts that had been germinating at the back of his mind ever since the morning crowded to the fore: he decided to wing it.

“I won’t pretend,” Stephen said, “that I knew Scott Ransome well. In fact, I didn’t know him at all. It’s always awkward when you have to hold a memorial service for someone you don’t know. So I won’t waste your time or mine talking about the kind of man he was. But I do know that he is important to you because you have taken the time to come here on this Wednesday afternoon, a working day, to pay homage to his memory. I know he is important to his wife and his children, his sister-in-law and his mother-in-law. And to his parents, who cannot be here today. He was a more fortunate man than most in having this at least. The comfort of friends. The love of family.”

The grieving widow, as Smithy had called Jonquil Ransome, had put on a pair of sunglasses. Silver-rimmed, small, incongruously glamorous in those sombre surroundings.

“I want to talk about something else. Most of you know how Scott died. It was not a pretty death from what I understand. I’m sorry if mentioning this brings pain to anyone. But it is pertinent to what I’m going to say. Scott Ransome was also a relatively young man who should have been in the prime of life. He was ten years younger than I am. Some of you may ask, where was God when he allowed this to happen? Why wasn’t Scott Ransome allowed to grow old and die a peaceful death like many of us do?

“I don’t know the answers. But I do know that even in the midst of the most dire distress, at our darkest hour, at the scene of the worst atrocity, God is there. I know, because I was a policeman once. I investigated murders. I knew nothing of God and yet he was there.”

He had seen bodies stabbed, shot, strangled, drowned—in one case decapitated—all the myriad ways in which it is possible to dispose of a human being intentionally. How many times had he stood over the battered body of some man, woman or child and thought to himself that this was just one more piece of forensic evidence for the case, already overwhelming, that God did not exist?

“I accommodated myself to the absence of God. I felt it as a void, a force sucked out of the universe, yet I thought it was normal. Part of the bleak fabric of life. I was a policeman and I dealt in facts, not speculation. My motto was get on with it and don’t whinge, and that was what I did. I held nothing sacred.” Certainly not his marriage, which had ended after five years when he came home one day to find a short scrawled note from his wife: I’m leaving you in case you happen to notice. Her divorce petition cited, among other things, his inability to communicate and his emotional repression; she was a youth counsellor and her language was peppered with the jargon of her profession. He instructed his solicitor not to contest the petition: he was not going to fight this kind of airy-fairy nonsense. Fortunately, they’d had no children.

He’d become aware of a series of snuffles, like the scrabbling of mice, from the front row, where Scott Ransome’s daughters sat with unchildlike decorum. Their aunt produced a tissue, which was passed down the line. Jonquil Ransome’s gaze seemed to be trained directly in front of her, though behind those impenetrable shades her eyes could have been pinwheeling for all Stephen knew.

“What I was living with was the absence of hope. Of love. The possibility of redemption. Of course I didn’t know this at the time. I was forty years old before I realised this. And it took a dead child to make me see it. I’ll spare you the details but she was another victim in a very busy year.” A ten-year-old girl, the victim of a horrific sexual assault in a field less than a mile from her house. The killer was a paedophile who had progressed from molesting small children to acting out violent sexual fantasies; the cover-up was clumsy, the capture swift and satisfying. “We caught the killer in a guesthouse literally in bed. He was very ordinary-looking, a man you wouldn’t have looked at twice in the street. And I remember I was outraged—that he was so very ordinary—and I was hitting him with a rage I hadn’t known I’d possessed”—a rage that was like a cloud of black flies swarming around his head, blinding him—“until I heard a nasty cracking sound and I knew that I’d broken his arm.”

A cough sounded from the back pew. Jones took out a large handkerchief and tugged at his nose. In the front row, Ms Tan wore a little frown that suggested she was not entirely happy with the way the service was proceeding. Perhaps, Stephen thought, he should have stuck with the oak tree. But it was too late now. He plunged on.

“Whatever you may have heard about police brutality, we’re not encouraged to hit suspects. I think once I started, I didn’t know how to stop. I remember the man’s scream of pain. Then my police officers were grabbing me and dragging me headfirst into the corridor. I did the only possible thing possible under the circumstances. I went to a pub and drank myself blind and passed out in the street.”

A muffled guffaw erupted from the back. The bald man’s wife dug him in the ribs again. At the periphery of Stephen’s vision he was aware of a shift in the angle of Jonquil Ransome’s gaze, so slight as to be almost imperceptible were it not for the fact that he had been preternaturally conscious of her black-clad presence ever since the service began.

“The next morning I woke to a pounding head. And a message on my answering machine that my superintendent wanted to see me asap. But it wasn’t the disciplinary action that I feared. It was the loss of control, the chink in my unflappability. It had never happened before, it wasn’t supposed to happen, and I was afraid. I decided to walk to work, thinking that the winter air would clear my head. But every step I took was like a jolt of pain through my head. I knew I had to sit, or I was going to faint. So I turned into the first building I came to. It happened to be the small church down the street.” A hideous late Victorian gothic chapel sandwiched incongruously between a stationer’s and a deli. “I had passed the church every morning for years without ever having gone in and I had no idea what denomination it represented. It was empty at that hour of the morning.” No, not quite true. There had been an old woman, sweeping the aisles. She’d paid him no attention and so he’d sat in the last pew, staring blankly at the cross plastered to the wall behind the altar and the dust dancing in the weak sunlight slanting in through the narrow windows.

“It was very quiet, though the rush hour traffic was hurtling past just outside the doors. I was just glad to sit.” After a while, he began to be aware, as never before, of the shape of his thoughts: pulpy and unformed at first, then assembling themselves themselves with a rapidity, a rush that began to resemble a waterfall and he leant forward and buried his face in his hands.

“I thought of what had happened the night before. And I realised that the rage I’d felt at the killer was actually rage at God. Rage that he’d looked away once again while the killer went on his rampage. What kind of God was it who allowed this kind of thing to happen? I knew the theological answers, of course, because I’d been educated at a parish school, but the answers never made any sense. Still didn’t. What was different, that morning, was that for the first time in my life I was acknowledging that He existed. I’d got tired of denying His existence. It struck me that I had been clinging to non-belief with as much strenuousness and fervour as a believer might have clung to his beliefs. Somewhere along the line, although I couldn’t pinpoint the moment, that non-belief had turned itself inside out, like a pocket that seemed empty but wasn’t, to reveal what lay hidden.” Belief had caught him unawares that evening in the guesthouse while he was assaulting the man; his anger had been quicker than his brain, fastening with an almost personal venom on God.

A belief born in rage did not sound propitious, at least not to the head of the theological college that Stephen applied to join, after resigning from the police. (His boss had said, “Are you mad?” and advised him to take a month off to go to Ibiza.) The head had made various token objections. Stephen was not young. Stephen might be better off joining one of the more fire and brimstone denominations (“not my cup of tea,” Stephen said doggedly). He was patient but persistent, in the way that he’d learnt to be in the interrogation room and the head had finally relented, probably thinking that Stephen would drop out of his own accord. He hadn’t, though there had been days when he wondered what he was doing, when the old unbelief, the blankness, would descend again with the old familiar flatness. It was in part a fear of failure that saw him through the course and to his first posting in south London.

“The rest is just a matter of detail. How I joined the church, how I happen to be standing here in front of you today. My story is a message of hope. Of the good that can come out of great evil and great unhappiness. Of course you may ask what consolation my conversion—my redemption—brought to the family of the dead child. The brutal answer is: none whatsoever. It didn’t make her parents sleep better, it didn’t lessen their grief or their bitterness. Yet, if her death managed to bring peace even to one person, I believe that she did not in the larger scheme of things die in vain.”

Yes, now she was staring at him all right through those sunglasses, its small oval shades resembling the black unwinking eyes of some malevolent statue. He licked his lips. Almost there, he thought; he could see the elusive punchline beckoning him, tantalisingly.

“I don’t claim to know what good if any will come out of Scott Ransome’s death. And you may be outraged at the very idea—of the dead as sacrificial victims for the living. But it’s a natural human instinct to try and make some kind of sense out of his death. Of any death. Of course some deaths are easier than others to accept. For the man who dies in his own bed, surrounded by his children and grandchildren, having lived a long and useful life, there is no sense of waste. For the believer—any kind of believer—there is a ready answer. There is a theological framework in which you can put things. But even if the death is not easy to accept, even if you are not a believer, still you must try. For the dead man’s sake if nothing else. For the children that Scott Ransome had. For the child that his wife is going to have. If Scott made you laugh—hang on to that memory. If he once did you a service—lent you money, consoled you when you were down—remember that. If his untimely death teaches you that life is all too short and that you have to make the most of every minute—well and good. In their own way, the dead tell us, the living, how to live. Please rise.”

Ronald broke into Jerusalem, the CD player grinding out its karaoke musical accompaniment. Ronald had a fine tenor voice, carrying the high notes easily. The hymn brought Stephen back, as it always did, to those sleepy Sunday morning services in his childhood church, where his barrister’s clerk father had been a verger for thirty years. How interminable those services had once seemed; how cold the air within the vaulting confines of the church, no matter how cheerily the sun shone outside. He was aware now of an overwhelming feeling of disappointment, and exhaustion. He had used the story of his own conversion for cheap theatrical purposes and still he had not nailed the ending: it had drifted away from him on a tide of platitudes and a strained, confused striving for significance.

The hymn had ended. The small gathering of mourners was looking at him expectantly.

“Please help yourself to the tea,” Ronald was saying. “There’s also coffee if you prefer.” Boh tea and Nescafe instant granules—he made them sound like the lap of luxury. The young couple accepted cups from him gratefully; they were friends of Shu Lin, they said, and Stephen had to stop and think for a minute whom they meant. Ms Tan took hers absently. “What are they all doing outside?” she asked, they meaning Jones, the bald man and his wife and Hans Fuchs, who had all disappeared into the tiny garden of the Mission after the service with the air of escaping prisoners.

“No, please don’t.” Ms Tan peered into her cup, as though surprised to find it still empty. “That was—an interesting speech.”

“No, no. The only thing is, I don’t know how much of it the girls understood. We haven’t told them how their father died, you know. They think it was some sort of accident. The younger ones don’t even really understand the concept of death. I just hope they don’t get any ideas from what you were saying.” That direct, piercing look of hers again. This sidelong thrust was her way of reproaching him for not sticking to the anodyne; he saw, with resignation, the generous donation that she might have made slipping away forever.

“I think,” he said, apologetically, “I was trying to do justice to Scott Ransome.” But now he wondered whether he had gone too far in this quest to be fair to the memory of the dead man and whether it had been at the expense of the living. “This was an unusual case and I’m afraid I might have got a bit carried away.” Damned if he was going to apologise anymore; for the first time in a long time, he felt the old angry defensiveness that had marked every day of his life as a policeman rise to the surface. He changed the subject: “Can I get you or your mother anything? Tea?”

The old lady and her granddaughters had arranged themselves on the sofa in the sitting room, the little girls sunk unmoving into the deep dusty cushions. Jonquil Ransome was nowhere to be seen.

“Would you like anything?” he said to the mother. “Tea?” She smiled at him uncomprehendingly. “Girls? Would you like anything?” I’m beginning to sound like a bloody waiter. Very slowly, the eldest girl shook her head. He could still see the shiny patches on her cheeks where the tears had dried.

Clumsily, he patted her head—he had never been good with children—and opened the front door with a growing feeling of hopelessness.

Outside, as he’d expected, Jones and the bald man were puffing away on cigarettes with greedy gulps. Hans Fuchs again stood to one side, hands in pockets, not smoking, just standing, always somehow apart.

“Reverend,” Jones said. Now he was Reverend again. “Never knew you were a copper.”

“Must be a damn sight more interesting than this God business, anyway,” the bald man said. He had a thick Scottish accent.

Stephen said, “There’s tea, coffee, inside ... and beer,” he added in a moment of inspiration.

He was wondering where she could have gone when she answered his unspoken question by unlatching the gate and coming up the short path to the front door where he stood like a parent waiting for an errant child to return. And, like an errant child, she said, “I needed some air,” though he had not uttered a word. It was the first time he had heard her speak. Her voice, like her sister’s, was very low. She was still wearing her sunglasses.

“You mean this?” Her fingers stroked, absently, the black cloth stretched over her belly. “No, I don’t get morning sickness.”

He said, formally, “I haven’t had the opportunity to tell you how sorry I am about your husband—”

She listened with her head slightly cocked as though trying to decipher a code and his words petered out.

She admitted, “Yes,” a smile suddenly escaping the confines of her resolutely straight mouth and he could see now why Scott Ransome had fallen for her that night in the bar. It was a smile hinting at both aloofness and vulnerability, a Giaconda-like quality that Ransome might have mistaken for Oriental inscrutability. For the first time in years he felt a slight quickening of the blood. He thought, This is insane, and damped down the impulse as hastily as a man in a leaky boat might have battened down the hatches.

They stood there on the front step in silence for some seconds. He could feel the perspiration begin to pool around his dog-collar. They ought to have gone in; it was hot; she was pregnant. Yet she continued to look cool and immaculate, as though nothing would melt her. She did not seem particularly grief-stricken, he thought, recalling Smithy’s words, but that might mean nothing. It was too easy to confuse heartlessness with a failure to mimic the emotions that convention demanded.

She said, suddenly, “I have to tell you, I didn’t really go out for some air. I went out for a cigarette. I had to go round the corner so my sister wouldn’t see me or she’ll go crazy.” She added, “I thought you would understand,” and all of a sudden he was back in the interrogation room again with a murder suspect who, weary and in turmoil after hours of relentless questioning, was leaning towards Stephen Mullins, his accuser and saviour, repeating the self-same words. I thought you would understand. And the battle-cry would go round the department: Mullins does it again. It was how he had secured most of his convictions. He was never entirely sure himself what prompted the suspects to break down: they must have seen something in his face or heard something in his voice that gave them the comforting illusion he empathised with them, and he never did anything to disabuse them of the confidence trick he was perpetrating. Except that he was not soliciting a confession now and he was suddenly on his guard.

“Well, no-one’s going to blame you for one cigarette in your circumstances.”

“I didn’t want this memorial service, you know. My sister insisted. She thought Scott was an idiot when he was alive but now he’s a saint. Untouchable.”

“I imagine your sister is the sort that always wants to do the right thing.”

“Oh yeah, she’s always been good. She always does the right thing. She makes me sick. But I can’t say anything because she has the money.”

Oh yes, she was in full flood now. How many times had he seen that reckless, heady unburdening in the interrogation room, the need to unload overwhelming the instinct for self-preservation, even as the suspect’s solicitor repeatedly warned his client that every word he was saying was incriminating him? In those days, he had simply turned on the tape recorder and let it run.

“Oh, come now,” he said, irritated. “That’s too facile. Easy,” he added, unnecessarily.

“That I’m unintelligent? But I did drop out of school at seventeen, you know. So you see. I am unintelligent.”

“You’re being disingenuous,” he said, and resisted the impulse to explain what this meant too. “You’re clearly not stupid. In fact, I’d say you were trying to manipulate me, though I don’t know to what purpose.”

She seemed, if anything, pleased by his laying all his cards on the table. “I met Scott. In a bar, where I was working part-time. I wasn’t supposed to be working there—in fact, I told my parents I was going for night classes. He was sweet. Not handsome, not even very bright. But he had a strange kind of decency. I ran away with him. I got pregnant. That’s why I left school.”

“I knew a lot of men. I met a lot of them in that bar. White men. I know what they call women like me, but Asian men are so dull. Especially Chinese men. They don’t know how to have fun ... I was going out with an American, a married man with two children. He would cry about his wife whenever he was with me and then he would want to tie me up ... Scott was different.”

“He was genuinely in love with you.” In spite of himself, he was falling into the rhythms of the interrogation room: goad and counter-goad, prodding her on to the next level of self-incrimination.

She flashed him a quick look of dislike and in spite of himself he felt a small, perishable sense of triumph. She did not answer him directly. “I have fun. I do what I want. I smoke when I’m expecting. I love my children but I’m a bad mother. I get bored easily. I’m a bad daughter. I steal money from my mother when I need to. I take money from my sister but I don’t like her. I married my husband because he said he would die if I didn’t marry him and he was crying and I felt sorry for him and after we were married I kept wishing he was dead. I didn’t love him. I was a bad wife. Eight years is like eternity if you don’t love someone. Then he was dead. Maybe—” and now he could hear clearly the mockery, like a silvery undercurrent of laughter, running through her voice—“you can help me.” Her fingers still stroking, rhythmically, the black cloth shielding her stomach. He blinked; the contrast between her demure appearance and what she was saying was like a disjointed dream.

“You were trying so hard back there. To give some meaning to Scott’s death. Trying to make something out of nothing. I thought you’d want to know the truth. You’re a policeman. You work with facts. You said so yourself.”

And suddenly the illusion that he was back in the interrogation room snapped; he was standing on the front step of the old pre-World War I shophouse that housed the Mission where he was the resident chaplain and his black short-sleeved clerical shirt was drenched through with perspiration and clinging unpleasantly to his skin. He registered the slip she’d made about him being a policeman but did not correct her. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his face. “I’m not your father confessor. This is not a confessional. You don’t have to tell me anything.”

“I didn’t murder him. If that’s what you’re thinking. I just wanted to let you know what he was doing in that hotel room in Pattaya.”

He placed his hand on the doorknob. “He wasn’t a saint. He went there for some R&R during his shore leave. I think we all know that.”

“I told him I wanted a divorce. He wouldn’t give me one. He said no way he was going to give up the children. So I told him I wasn’t expecting his child. I was expecting another man’s baby.”

How persistent she was, how relentless the drip drip drip of poison that was her voice. He wished he could shut it out, but instead he asked, mechanically, as she clearly wanted him to, “Whose baby is it?”

He was aware of a fleeting, insane sense of jealousy, that the short, unimpressive South African should have claimed her attention at all. “Stop,” he said, violently. “I don’t want to hear anymore.”

“The doctors had warned him to stop drinking. His liver was already damaged.”

At last she was finished and she removed her glasses and perched them on her head, blinking in the bright afternoon sun. Her face looked briefly naked without her glasses, and he saw now that she was not as young as she’d first appeared. He wondered when Ransome had first realised what he’d fallen in love with. How long had he managed to preserve his illusions through that dead-eyed arid remorselessness of hers? From all accounts, he’d been a man unable to bear too much reality. And he, Stephen, stood implicitly accused of the same sin of sentimentality. Of trying to raise Ransome, metaphorically, from the dead. Well, it was his job, wasn’t it, to spin the fairytale. All the same, he should have stuck to the oak tree.

Somehow he had found the strength of will to turn the doorknob he’d been clutching: the door yielded an inch. He heard the rustle of voices inside like the twittering of birds in an aviary. He had never wanted to get away from someone so badly in his life, but even as he prepared to turn his back on her, something that she’d said earlier came back to him.

She looked startled for a moment then her eyes narrowed in appreciation at his astuteness. She gave a tiny vulnerable shrug of the shoulders. “I’m not sure. I’m not sure of the dates.”

He shut the door on her and on the merciless afternoon sun. The cool air-conditioned air of the interior came as a slight shock and he thrust his handkerchief back into his pocket. He noticed absently that his chest was hurting again; it was not the stabbing pain of the other day but a discomfort like a muscle ache.

“Reverend,” Jones called somewhere from within. “We were wondering where you’d gone.”

“Just taking a breather,” he said. “That’s all.” And he crossed the narrow hallway of the Mission to join them.

In Memoriam