Suddenly at Singapore Read Free Page A

babbling to-night. He could tell me a little more, not much, just that my brother had been shot about six, the police thought, at sunset.
    Jeff had lived in a service flat, one of a luxury block. His boys didn’t actually stay in the rooms, they had quarters for themselves in another building at the back. I had never liked this arrangement much, I thought he ought to have a man in the place the whole time, the way we lived and the things we did. I’d even found the man for him once, something of a tough, but Jeff had got rid of him. He hadn’t wanted protection, he said.
    “Paul!” Ruth’s voice was a kind of wail. “Where have you been? You didn’t phone.”
    “I’m sorry. I just drove, that’s all. As soon as I knew. I’m half-way home. I’ll soon be there.”
    “I’m so miserable! I wanted to hear your voice.”
    “I’m sorry,” I said again. It was like an echo of Kate in the bedroom, an apology for helplessness. “Listen, dear, I’ll be right back. Go to your room and take a sedative.”
    “It could have been you,” Ruth said.
    “Now stop that, please!”
    “Well, it could! That’s what makes me … sick. That thought.”
    “Ruth, you’re holding me up. I want to get home.”
    “You’ll come here first?”
    “I must go to the flat.”
    “No! No, don’t!”
    “Ruth, help me now, please. You’ve got to help me.”
    “Oh, all right.” She sounded a child, weary, frightened. “But you won’t be long?”
    “No, of course not.”
    We drove again, Kate and I.
    “Was Ruth very upset?”
    “She sounded that way.”
    “Surely she’s got someone with her? A friend?”
    “I don’t think so. Just the houseboys. Ruth’s never turned to women friends like that. It’s always been me.”
    “I see,” Kate said, in a very quiet voice.
    We were in the jungle again, hurtling towards Johore, before Kate spoke.
    “One of the things that makes it harder for me is that I can’t help having a lot of sympathy with your wife. I get to thinking what it would be like waiting around for you in a house.”
    I didn’t say anything to that, because I knew what Kate meant. There was a lot of truth, too, in this business of compartments into which you shut away separate pieces of your living. Most men do it, and perhaps I did it more than most because of things to which we had been committed for a long time, Jeff and I. It was true enough, also, that I had provided my wife with a nicely padded world in which there wasn’t a great deal demanded of her. I didn’t need her help much, except as a hostess, and though there had been a bond once that had seemed firm and binding, it had snapped, and we’d never found a replacement. Perhaps neither of us had tried hard enough for that replacement.
    I knew that the thing which had drawn me to Kate from the first was the feeling you had about her that she didn’t need a man to make her world, that she could make it on her own. Even our love was something she came to from a life of her own, when we could both find the time. It had never occurred to me that Kate did any waiting around to see me. Now I wasn’t so sure about that. It was disturbing to have her seeing things through Ruth’s eyes.
    I had thought they were poles apart, Ruth and Kate, in the way they faced living, but that might not be so.
    “Paul, do you think the police in Singapore are going to be able to find the man who killed your brother?”
    “I rather doubt it.”
    “And if they can’t?”
    “I’ll have to start a hunt on my own.”
    “I see. That’s going to be dangerous.”
    “It needn’t be, all that. Not if I don’t rush it. Tonight I feel like bashing in for any kind of action. But I mustn’t do it. Jeff would say, take it easy. Wait for your chance. I can hear him saying it, like he’s done a hundred times. And I know he’s right. If I wait and don’t get excited the lead I need will show up. I’m sure of that.”
    “That lead might take you to General Sorumbai in