Suddenly at Singapore Read Free Page B

Sumatra. Would you follow it there?”
    “Kate, that’s not the sort of question I can answer now.”
    She knew I was pushing her away, but I couldn’t help doing that.
    We went over the Causeway which years ago had been blown up to stop the Japs from reaching Singapore. I could remember seeing that Causeway not so long after I was a prisoner, from a tin cattle truck, Jeff and me peering through a crack in the door of that mobile oven and thinking that our side had only managed to make a very little hole. The Japs had soon patched it up. That hole in the Causeway had become one of their jokes.
    In a sense it was a joke we’d been trying to deal with ever since. We’d come back to a people who pretended to welcome us, but who remembered how easy it was to push us out of the way. And this was something that went a little sour on you when it was your country, not just a place you took money out of.
    When I have a few drinks and the company is British who expect things to last their time, but not much longer, I sometimes get talking on a line that would shock the enlightened Colonial Office bods if they hadn’t a classification all neatly waiting into which to pop me … the local reactionary. All right, I’m a local reactionary, living in a country that was made by us, not by the Chinese or the Malays or the Tamils, but by us, our brains and our sweat. That’s the fact, and though not many people look at it these days, it’s still the fact.
    I could imagine what the official reaction was going to be to Jeff’s death on this island Kate and I had now reached. There would be quite a number of people in fairly high places who wouldn’t mind thinking to themselves that it was a good thing … even though they wouldn’t say it at a bar counter. They might even go on beyond that to wish the gunmen had done a better job and dealt with the two brothers at the same time. The fewer reactionaries you have around in a new democracy the better, for reactionaries tend to hold up the settling of the dust which is so important if business is to get back to normal.
    I wasn’t going to have many allies in Singapore, but then we’d never had many allies down there, not amongst the powers that make a noise.
    “Will you just take me straight to my hotel?” Kate said quietly.
    She might have been playing the role I’d assigned her in the first act of our relationship, the girl who doesn’t make a fuss.
    I took her to her hotel in a quiet part of the city and got her bags out of the back and we went up a flight of steps. We had to ring for the porter, waiting there, and Kate didn’t stand looking at me, as though she knew I wouldn’t want that.
    “You’ll ring me when you can, Paul?”
    “Of course.”
    When a sleepy-eyed Chinese opened the door she just went through it, not looking back. I went to the car Jeff had given me and drove through nearly empty streets to his apartment building, which had the lobby of its kind of place all over the world, the nobody-ever-dies-here feeling, with lighting that stays on all night and plants that are whipped out at the first sign of anæmia and replaced by others fresh from a high vitamin diet. The lift was silent and then I got out into a passage where a Chinese policeman sat on a chair taken from Jeff’s sitting-room.
    “I’m the brother,” I said in Cantonese. “I want to get in.”
    “The body isn’t here,” he told me. “It’s in the mortuary.”
    “I didn’t think the body would be here. I still want to get in.”
    “You can’t.”
    “There’s a phone just inside the door. We’ll use it.”
    In the end I got into that little hall. It was neat and neutral, an hour or two with the cleaners and the flat would be ready for the next tenant. There was quite a lot of shouting at both ends of the wire, but finally I got my way, with the policeman on duty breathing down my neck. I wasn’t to touch anything, not even a door handle.
    I wouldn’t have believed Jeff’s