The kitchen. An extended wooden drainboard covered most of the side wall, and moonlight washed in through a window above it, giving substance to the shadows of an icebox, a stove, a dinette table, a row of storage cupboards. There was another door directly across from me. I went to it without hesitation, pushed it open, and looked into a short hallway. At its far end, an arch gave on a room filled with shadows.
It seemed likely that that was the living area, and that Marla King had made her call to me from there. I stepped through and traversed the hallway, passed under the arch. It was a large room containing several rattan chairs, a rattan settee, a writing desk, and huge brightly colored batik pillows whose hues seemed almost phosphorescent in the darkness. I moved deeper into the room. The floor was comprised of blocks of what looked like Ipoh marble but was probably some ersatz composition.
The smell of blood was thick and brackish in there.
Near the bamboo-shaded front windows, I could see the outlines of a low Chinese table. On its top I thought I could make out the form of a telephone through the gloom. I started in that direction-and an inert shape materialized in the shadows behind one of the large chairs, took on the contours of a female body.
I saw as I reached her that she was dressed in a thin silk robe. It had fallen away from her legs and upper thighs, and one of her breasts was exposed. The whiteness of her skin had an eerie, unreal quality. I knelt beside her, turned her a little. The back of her head was crushed, and her butter-yellow hair was streaked with black ribbons that would be dried blood. There was blood on the floor, too, a coagulated blot of it like a Rorschach form on the whiteness of the ersatz marble. She had fallen or been thrown to the floor, and had struck and caved in the back of her head that way; or Dinessen had knocked her down and straddled her and battered her head repeatedly against the unyielding surface. Judging from the amount of damage to her skull, it had happened the latter way.
I searched her body and the area near it as efficiently as I was able in the darkness; I couldn’t take the chance of putting on a light, or even of striking a match. There was nothing for me to find-nothing that linked me with Marla King’s death, nothing that Dinessen had planted there. I felt a return of the impotent rage I had known earlier. It looked now as if the bastard had been planning to frame me for his murder, all right, but only after he had finally killed me too. He hadn’t planted any evidence to link me originally, he had simply gone foxy on me in the office in an attempt to pry loose the location of the Burong Chabak. Well, I’d let him convince me it was the truth, but in one way I wasn’t sorry I had come here to find out it was a lie. There was still the problem of Marla King’s body, and I knew that I had to try to get her out and hidden somewhere, buried somewhere. That would buy me more hope and continued freedom and time to figure a way out from under once and for all; otherwise, Tiong would have me jailed, and the possibility existed that he’d find some way to put the murder on my neck despite previous co-operation and lack of evidence…
I ran into the kitchen again, caught up a dishtowel, wet it in the sink, and took it back into the front room. I spent a precious minute cleaning the blood off the floor. Maria King’s skin was cold when I touched her, and her limbs had stiffened in rigor mortis. I pulled at her, sweating, cursing my flopping right arm, and finally managed to get her into a sitting position. Her face was flaccid in death, and yet she looked sixty years old and completely ugly.
I wrapped the bloodied towel around her head, and then struggled with her body, maneuvering her and myself so that I could get her up onto my shoulder. My eyes stung with inpouring sweat, but I could see the dial of my wristwatch; it was 8:48. I got her onto my shoulder at last, gathered strength, and heaved up, staggering under the deadweight, sidestepping a chair. I regained my balance, turned, started for the archway.
And froze.
There were footsteps outside, footsteps on the gravel path leading up to the porch, footsteps on the wooden stairs and on the floor of the porch. Two sets, maybe three. For some reason of his own, Tiong had decided not to wait for Van Rijk at all. He was moving in early, without taking any chances; he’d had whatever cars he’d brought parked down the street, and he and his men had come up silently on foot.
Fists hammered against the wood paneling of the door.
Tiong’s voice, demanding and officious, called out, “Open this door. We are the polis.”
I stood there with the body of Maria King draped across my shoulder, motionless, trapped. Time had finally and abruptly run out, and there was no way I could get free with the dead girl. The panic came in a spiraling rush, and before I could fight it off with cold reason, it had taken me beyond the point of commitment. I dumped Marla King brutally onto the settee, heard her stiffened form hit the back, heard the settee tilt up and crash over backward under her weight-and I was running.
Chapter Fourteen
Voices rose in excited shouts on the porch outside, and I heard Tiong yell something in Malay. A heavy shoulder thudded against the wood of the front door. I fled down the hall, through the kitchen, and out onto the rear porch. The wind bells tinkled like crazed laughter as I hit the screen door head on, sent it wobbling and banging open, and tumbled down the steps onto the spongy ground beneath the willow tree.
A khaki-uniformed, white-turbaned Sikh constable came running around the side corner of the bungalow. He had a riot club in one hand, and when he saw me he came on in a rush, the club upraised, blowing shrill blasts on a police whistle. I ran toward him instead of away, and the movement surprised him enough to throw him off-stride. He swung the club awkwardly at my head, but I ducked under it and hit him across the chest with the stiffened edge of my left arm. Air spilled out of his mouth and nose in a muffled gasp of pain, and he went over on his back with his legs kicking like a beached sea turtle.
I veered away from him, under the drooping branches of the willow toward the rear perimeter of the property, my right arm fluttering at my side and as worthless as the dangling sleeve of a coat. A low stone wall stretched out in front of me, dividing the rear yard of the bungalow from another yard on the opposite side. I jumped it without breaking stride, but when I came down I lost my footing, staggered to one knee, and sprawled out face down on a cushion of leaves and grass.
I heaved up onto my knees, my feet. The rear door of the cottage facing me burst open, and a half-naked Chinese stood momentarily silhouetted against an oblong scintilla of yellow light. Then he shouted something in an angry, unintelligible dialect-Hokkein or Cantonese-and hurried down his rear steps. I pivoted away from him to the left, toward Jalan Tenah, but he was either one of these heroic types or drunk on rice wine.
He tried to head me off as I threaded my way between several canted chamadora palms, still yelling at me in Chinese. I let him get in front of me, stepped up beside him before he could contain his momentum and set himself, and kicked his legs out from under him. He went to his knees, bawling. I swiped at the back of his thick neck with the edge of my palm and left him face down in the weeds, his hands scrabbling at the earth like fat spiders.
The whistles seemed closer, louder, as I stumbled out onto Jalan Tenah. I took a step to my left, looking for the Citroen. It was fifty or sixty yards away, and a constable was abreast of it on the roadway, running toward me, blowing his goddam whistle. I reversed direction and went across the street in a diagonal trajectory, and each breath was the sharp jab of a needle in my lungs as I ran.
Before I reached the far side, headlamps made a wide turn onto Jalan Tenah from Tampines Road, sweeping cones of light. I heard the accelerated whine of the car’s engine, and I knew Tiong, or one of his constables, had gone back for pursuit wheels. The headlights stabbed brilliance at me as the car bore down. I gained the edge of the road, dodged into another yard and the protective shadows cast by a casuarina tree.