TENDER BETRAYAL (Mystery Romance): The TENDER Series ~ Book 3 Read online

  Toran nodded thoughtfully. “That might explain Black Buddha’s reason for helping me too.”

  Dieter looked at him. “What do you mean?”

  Toran shrugged. “It all seems a bit too easy. I agree with you—I don’t trust Black Buddha either and I could never figure out why he was helping me at all.”

  “I thought you made a deal with him?” said Dieter. “Didn’t you say he accepted your offer?”

  Toran shook his head impatiently. “That’s just it. It wasn’t actually my offer. To be honest, I bluffed my way in to see Black Buddha, but I wasn’t really in a position to negotiate. I guess I thought I’d play it by ear—ask him some questions and see if I could catch him off-guard. But he surprised me by readily agreeing to help me. All he wanted in exchange for any information he gave me was a promise.”

  “A promise?” Dieter looked at him quizzically.

  Toran gave a cynical laugh. “Yeah, you’re right—you wouldn’t think someone like Black Buddha deals in promises. But that’s exactly what he asked me for. He wanted me to agree to investigate a certain case, the details of which he would send me in the future.”

  Dieter raised his eyebrows. “Sounds to me like Black Buddha has a rival he’d like to get rid of. Maybe someone he can’t get at himself or doesn’t want to risk retaliation by attacking himself—so he thinks he can use the Law to remove this competitor.”

  “Yes, but why me?” asked Toran. “Surely someone like Black Buddha would have connections in the government or even the police. He could simply put them onto his rival. Why involve me?”

  “I think you underestimate your abilities,” said Dieter. “I’m sure the Singapore underworld is still reeling from the repercussions of Bentley Warne’s arrest and the destruction of his empire. You were instrumental in that. Look how long the authorities had been after Warne and they couldn’t pin anything on him until you spearheaded the investigation. You don’t realise it, Toran, but you are a force to be reckoned with. There are things that you can do that the police might not be able to—and there are certainly ways you think and tackle a problem which the police aren’t able to,” said Dieter with a chuckle.

  “Maybe…” Toran looked doubtful.

  “I’m not surprised, actually, that Black Buddha wants to involve you. I’m sure he sees it as a win-win: he would be getting rid of an enemy with minimal personal risk or cost, and you would be motivated since you’d be doing your usual job as an investigative journalist and exposing a criminal. The motivations might be different, but in this case, the goals would align.” Dieter frowned. “The only thing that worries me is that you are now in his debt. He is buying your future cooperation in exchange for information.”

  “No he’s not,” said Toran. “I have promised nothing. In fact, that was my counter ‘offer’: I told him I couldn’t guarantee that I would take anything on. I’m not a hack for hire and I will not be his mouthpiece. But I said I was willing to consider the case and if I felt that there was merit in the investigation, I would do my best to bring them to justice. But I gave no promises—and he accepted my offer.”

  “In that case…” Dieter frowned. “That does seem like very little to ask for in exchange. It does make you suspicious…”

  “Not if he has some other motive—such as setting up this thug,” said Toran.

  “What do you mean?” asked Dieter.

  “Black Buddha is renowned for punishing those who try to double-cross him. Maybe this thug tried something on and it amuses Black Buddha to feed him to me. That’s why he’s helping me track this driver down. But nobody expected Mr Greedy in there—” Toran jerked his head back towards the hawker centre—“to start sticking his fingers in the pie and muddling things up even more…”

  “You think he’ll get a counter-offer then?” asked Dieter.

  Toran shrugged. “We’ll find out tonight.”

  Leah had to admit that she felt much better after she spoke to Julia. Somehow, the Singaporean girl’s bubbly confidence and no-nonsense “can do” attitude always made things look more positive, problems less overwhelming. She didn’t follow Julia’s suggestion of going shopping, but after hanging up, Leah threw herself into an orgy of house-cleaning—vacuuming, dusting, ironing, scrubbing, washing… just anything to keep her hands busy, to feel like she was doing something productive. It wasn’t until she felt a wave of faintness come over her that she paused and glanced at the clock. She had been cleaning for several hours, she realised, and it was already late in the afternoon. She hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast, before she went to Ah Song’s offices. No wonder she was feeling light-headed!

  Leah made herself a small sandwich and sat eating it alone at the counter in the kitchen. She wondered where Toran was, what he was doing. Would he come back tonight? She wondered if she should pack her things and move back to her father’s villa…

  Despite her hunger, Leah didn’t have much appetite and, in the end, threw away most of the sandwich uneaten. Then she took a shower to wash off all the grime from cleaning—shampooing her hair twice and taking extra time to soap and exfoliate her body. They were all just displacement activities, she knew. Finally, she ran out of things to do and sat down on the sofa, her hair still damp. All the turmoil from the morning came rushing back.

  Remembering Julia’s other suggestion, Leah retrieved the bundle of letters from her father and started going through them again. Most of them were simply the drunken ramblings of a broken man, mourning for his dead wife and apologising to the daughter he had neglected. Leah felt her heart being pulled as she read her father’s words—she still wasn’t sure how she felt about him and she wasn’t sure she was ready to forgive him for being such a cold, distant father all her life—but more and more, she was beginning to feel compassion for him, to think that perhaps he was simply a broken man who had tried his limited best.

  After an hour, Leah sat back, sighing in frustration. Her shoulders were stiff and her neck ached from bending over the letters for so long. She rubbed the back of her neck. If there was some other hidden message or clue in these letters, she couldn’t find them. She leaned back and tilted her head onto the sofa cushions, staring at the ceiling as she tried to think of another way that she could find the information. Julia was right that everything revolved around her father, but there was obviously nothing in these letters. Where else could she look?

  His study, she thought suddenly, sitting up. His study, with all its cabinets and drawers, filled with files and papers… She had never gone through them in detail. When she had come to Singapore the first time and searched his study, she had been too wrapped up in the Bentley Warne case and only looked for evidence of a specific murder. But there might still be other information held in his papers—information that could help Toran.

  Leah sprang up from the sofa. She was grateful for something to do. She couldn’t face the thought of just sitting here alone all night. She would go to the villa now and search through her father’s study again. She grabbed her handbag, slipped on her shoes, and left the apartment.

  The villa smelled musty as Leah opened the front door and stepped into the darkened hallway. She was instantly engulfed by memories of her childhood growing up in this house. She had thought that she had laid all the ghosts to rest the first time she came back to Singapore, but it seemed like they were always there, waiting to catch her unawares.

  She shut the door firmly behind her and shrugged off the oppressive feeling as she walked through the house and headed for her father’s study. Leah switched on the light and paused uncertainly inside the doorway. She walked over to the mahogany desk and sat down in the executive leather chair. A photograph of herself at 14 smiled shyly from a silver frame on the desk. She had been surprised when she returned to Singapore the first time, after her father’s death, and found that picture on his desk. Somehow, with his usual coldness towards her, she had never imagined him as the kind of father who would have wanted her image close by. Ah Song’s words sudd
enly came back to her: “Father love you a lot. Even if cannot say. Sometimes difficult, you know? Cannot always say what is inside heart.”

  Leah swallowed painfully and looked away from the picture. She stood up and stepped out from behind the desk, her eyes roving over the room, wondering where to start. She knew there was a safe in the wall, behind one of the paintings, but she had looked there already the first time she came to Singapore. There was also the second, concealed safe that she had found—but that had simply contained a few mementoes of her mother and the bundle of letters. She had emptied it anyway.

  So that left the rest of the study… Most of the bookcases were filled with law books and other thick tomes covering her father’s interests in world politics, history, and antiques. A quick look through the cabinets underneath the bookshelves showed that they were filled with more books, stationary, and other paraphernalia. She rifled half-heartedly through some of them, but came up with nothing.

  Next she went back to the desk and looked through the drawers, flipping through his cheque-books, sorting through the other documents. And again came up with nothing. She glanced at the computer, wondering if she should turn it on and trawl through the hard drive. Then her eye caught sight of the filing cabinet tucked away in the corner, almost hidden by a large potted bamboo plant. She walked over and pulled out the drawers one by one. They were filled with various legal papers, files pertaining to his cases, certificates, and documents. Then, in the very bottom drawer, she came across several folders containing bank statements and credit card records.

  Carrying them to the desk, Leah spread them out and looked through them. She had no idea what she was looking for—her eyes scanned the entries desultorily. She sighed. Most of the local transactions went to account numbers she didn’t recognise, a few went to accounts that obviously had business names. She would have to contact Stanford Lim, her father’s young colleague and acting solicitor, tomorrow and cross-reference many of these names and account numbers with him, to check who her father had been paying. But she didn’t hold out much hope. Then her eye caught something.

  They were a series of payments—wire transfers to a foreign account—made every month on the same date. She scrabbled through the pages, going back through the years until she found the month in which Toran’s parents had had their car accident.

  The payments started that month.

  Leah felt a flicker of excitement. She flipped through the statements again, lining them all up and checking the entries against each other. They were all for exactly the same amount. £2000. Presumably to a U.K. bank account. And as far as she could see, not a business account. No, these were payments going to an individual.

  Leah straightened up, her thoughts spinning. Her father had never spoken of family or even close friends in the U.K. So who was he paying such large sums of money to each month? And was it a coincidence that the payments had started the same month that Toran’s parents were killed?

  CHAPTER 10

  Toran stopped at the intersection on Raffles Quay and narrowed his eyes, looking across the street. Lau Pa Sat loomed in front of him, lit up like an octagonal-shaped spaceship, surrounded by a thin fog of smoke. The buzz of laughter and conversation drifted across the road. It was nearly midnight, but for many of the stall holders, the night was still young. Tourists and late-night revellers would be drifting in for their midnight snacks for many hours yet and the hawker centre wouldn’t officially close until around 4 a.m. in the morning.

  From where he was standing, Toran could see Boon Tat Street, a road on the south side of the hawker centre which had been closed off as usual at 7 p.m. every day and transformed into “Satay Street”. Rows of satay food carts had been rolled out and lined the sides of the alley, whilst people huddled around the plastic chairs and tables, gnawing their skewers of grilled beef, chicken, and mutton, or—for lovers of the more exotic—barbecued stingray and baby squid. The air was thick with the smell of smoke and charred meat, and the fragrant aroma of the spicy peanut sauce that accompanied the satay.

  Toran and Dieter crossed the road and made their way through the crowds, heading for the hawker centre itself. Inside, it was much quieter, with many of the stalls shut up for the evening. There were a few customers lingering at the food court tables, but most of the action had moved to Satay Street outside. The place had an empty, echoey feel about it, with the lights dimmed in several corners. The sugar cane juice stall, however, was brightly lit as Toran and Deiter approached it. Its neon sign flashed above the counter, advertising “Sweet, Refreshing Sugar Cane Juice” but there was no one in sight.

  Toran paused beside the counter and looked around, frowning. He leaned over and looked behind the counter. There were several stalks of sugar cane lying on a chopping board and a few flattened stalks could be seen protruding from the juicing machine, which was still dripping juice from its spout. The cash register was unlocked and the whole place looked like someone had just temporarily stepped out.

  “Think Beng’s gone to the toilets or something?” asked Deiter.

  Toran shrugged. “Guess we’ll wait for him.”

  They waited, but as the minutes ticked by, Toran began to feel restless. He glanced behind the counter again. Something just didn’t feel right.

  “You know, it seems strange that he would leave things like that…” Toran said. He nodded towards a dark doorway leading into the back of the store. “I’m going to check in there.”

  Pushing the swing door open, Toran eased himself into the space behind the counter. The ground felt sticky beneath his shoes, probably from spilled sugar cane juice. He paused just outside the doorway, some instinct making him suddenly tense his muscles. Raising his hands defensively in front of him, he shifted his weight onto the balls of his feet. Slowly, Toran stepped into the room. He held his breath and listened.

  Silence surrounded him.

  As far as he could tell, there was no one else here in the darkness with him. A sliver of light was spilling into the room through the doorway and, as Toran’s eyes gradually grew accustomed to the dark, he recognised shapes around him. Another juicing machine. Bundles of sugar cane. Cartons of cardboard boxes.

  And then he saw the huddle on the floor.

  He clenched his fists reflexively. Turning, he slid his gaze along the wall until he found what he was looking for: a light switch. Using his elbow so that he would not contaminate any fingerprints, he flipped the switch and light flooded the room.

  It confirmed what he had already suspected. In the centre of the room lay Beng Chew Hoon. He was sprawled across the floor, his legs twisted in an unnatural position, as if he had been running and collapsed on the spot. His face was frozen in a mask of agony and his front arms were stretched out, as if clawing desperately for something. And buried in his chest was a gleaming cleaver. The pool of blood around him showed that he had probably died very quickly.

  Toran stepped back just as Dieter entered the room behind him. He heard his friend’s sharp intake of breath.

  “We’re going to have to call the police,” said Toran grimly.

  Dieter eyed the dead man. “Looks like he didn’t find a better offer.”

  “Yes.” Toran cursed. “And now the information has died with him.”

  CHAPTER 11

  “What do you mean the U.K. bank wouldn’t tell us anything?” asked Leah. She had come to see her father’s colleague first thing and they had spent a largely fruitless morning going through David Fisher’s banking transactions. As she had thought, there had been nothing suspicious, aside from the mysterious payments she had discovered last night. And now it was looking like she might have hit a dead end there too.

  Stanford Lim inclined his head apologetically. “I’m afraid, as a civilian, you have no rights to access that information. Banks will not divulge the name and addresses of account holders—”

  “But my father was paying money to them!” said Leah.

  “Yes, I know,” said the young Singaporean
lawyer. “But unfortunately, they just won’t hand out details of personal banking customers.”

  “Is it because it’s not a joint account, between my father and me?” asked Leah.

  Stanford Lim shook his head. “It wouldn’t have made a difference. In any case, you are his next-of-kin and the named beneficiary in the will, so any remaining funds would be transferred to you and you would have authority over these payments. But that isn’t the problem here. It’s accessing the information of the recipient on the other side. Even if it was my own account—if I were to make a payment to someone—I wouldn’t be able to obtain their address from their bank.”

  “But… surely the bank can give us something!” said Leah in frustration. “All I need is a name and address—I just want to find out who he was sending this money to!”

  Stanford Lim shrugged helplessly. “I’m afraid you won’t be able to get that information. Not unless you can convince the police to start an investigation—but in that case, you would need some kind of evidence of a crime. I don’t know if you have any basis here for applying to access the account.” He hesitated. “You could possibly try doing this through the civil courts—perhaps via probate—but that could take months. You would have to find a probate solicitor who specialises in the U.K. legal system to advise you. I can ask around my colleagues, if you like.”

  Leah shook her head impatiently. “No, never mind—I don’t have months. I need the information now.” She sighed. “Thank you anyway. And thanks for checking all those other transactions for me.”

  She tried not to show her disappointment at the dead end. These payments were the best lead she had at the moment. They were the only ones that had started at exactly the same time that Toran’s parents had been killed and continued until her father’s death. That alone was worth investigating, aside from the fact that they were all for the same amount and always sent on the same date. Were they some kind of pay off? Leah’s heart sank. Did this mean that her father was somehow involved after all?