Umbrella Man (9786167611204) (13 page)

“A386 is one of our largest boxes,” Lee said.
He moved around the room checking numbers until he found it.

Tay handed over his key and Lee produced a
master key from a ring in his pocket. Lee first inserted his master
key, then the key Tay had given him. He turned both at the same
time and opened the door, leaving it standing ajar without removing
the box.

Lee stepped back and cleared his throat. “I’m
happy to cooperate, Sam. I know these are dangerous times. But I
have to repeat that I cannot permit you to take any of the
contents—”

“I understand perfectly, Mr. Lee. I have no
intention of removing anything. I merely need to inspect the
contents of this box in connection with…well, I’m sure you
understand by now what it is in connection with.”

Lee looked considerably relieved. And he
began nodding vigorously as he backed toward the door.

“I’ll be right outside if you need me,
Sam.”

When Lee had closed the door, Tay bent down
and tugged box A386 out of its slot. It was a large box just as Lee
had said. About twelve inches wide by twelve inches high and at
least twice as long, it was made of dark gray steel. Tay lifted the
box up, swung around, and put it on the table that stood against
the opposite wall. The box was heavy and it made a metallic clunk
when Tay put it down.

***

Tay had been a detective for a long time, but
he still felt a little fission of excitement as he stood there
looking at the lid of the box. He figured he would have to have
been pretty much dead not to. All he knew for certain was that his
dead guy had left the key for someone to find and Dr. Hoi had found
it and given it to him. There could be almost anything in the box.
Money, weapons, even another body. Well, that was ridiculous, of
course.

“Okay,” Tay murmured, “let’s see what we’ve
got here.” He pulled the lid open.

What he saw was perhaps the least romantic
thing he could have imagined: a large stack of files.

He got his hands underneath the whole pile,
lifted it out, and put it on the table. At a glance, it looked like
there were twelve or fifteen separate file folders, each thick with
paper. He flipped through the pile and examined the tabs.

Each folder was labeled with a year and the
labels began with current year and went backward. He lifted the top
folder off the stack and opened it. The folder contained
spreadsheets tracking financial data of some kind. The horizontal
rows were identified with numbers that looked to Tay like they
could have been account numbers and the vertical columns contained
dollar amounts. But the columns were labeled with numbers, too, not
names, so it wasn’t immediately obvious what the sums were or what
they were connected to.

Tay flipped through the next couple of
folders and found more of the same. It would take him hours to go
through every sheet and he wasn’t sure he would know anything even
after he had. Sergeant Kang had always told him he had the soul of
an accountant and, if he actually did, that might stand him in good
stead with all this stuff, but he needed to take it somewhere and
study it carefully. He wasn’t going to figure out what the sheets
contained shuffling from foot to foot in HSBC’s safety deposit
room. What he really needed was a comfortable chair, a good lamp,
and his cigarettes.

Mr. Lee wasn’t going to let him take
anything, he was sure of that, and he didn’t blame him. On the
other hand, he hadn’t said anything about not making copies. Maybe,
Tay mused, if he wove an enthralling tale of terrorists, bombers,
and shadowy go-betweens, then spiced it up with a little violence —
all constructed from the purest of horseshit, of course — he could
convince Lee to let him make copies of all this stuff to take home
and study.

***

Tay figured his performance must have been
adequate. A couple of hours later he was walking out of the bank
with two old briefcases Lee’s secretary had found for him. The
briefcases were filled with crisp copies of every single sheet of
paper that was in box A386. Tay had also stuffed into the
briefcases the printouts Mr. Lee had given him of the box’s access
records and what the bank had on Paraguas Ltd. Altogether, it was
quite a haul.

After Tay was comfortably settled in the back
seat of a cab headed for Emerald Hill, he tried to remember how
many packs of cigarettes he had at home. This was going to be a
long and tedious job and he didn’t want to run out right before he
was done.

BY SIX O’CLOCK, Tay had smoked half a pack of
Marlboros and read everything he had hauled away from HSBC in those
two old briefcases.

And he had learned very little.

Paraguas Ltd seemed to be an ordinary enough
company. It was a Guernsey corporation formed by three people with
Guernsey addresses, whom he had no doubt would turn out to be a
local solicitor and two of his clerks.

For the last three years, the only person who
had accessed the box was someone named Joseph Hysmith, who was
identified on the box application as an assistant company
secretary. Mr. Hysmith had routinely visited the box every few
months, which was consistent with someone occasionally filing away
copies of the financial records which Tay had found. It appeared as
if Mr. Hysmith was probably nothing more than the company clerk his
title implied and had simply been the person charged with carting
documents to HSBC and storing them away.

But charged by
who
? And carted from
where
?

***

Tay got up and poured himself a glass of
water. Then he came back, put the glass on the table next to his
cigarettes, and started looking through the files again.

This time he spotted something he hadn’t
noticed before.

One of the files had no date on the tab, and
the ledger sheets inside were written in a hand that was clearly
different from the sheets in the other files. What’s more, the
handwriting on those three sheets was dimmer, faded perhaps. If he
had the originals he could immediately tell for sure, but his
impression from the copies was that the sheets in that file could
be significantly older than the sheets in the other files.

But even if that were true, what did it mean?
He couldn’t even work out what kind of data the most recent sheets
contained. What hope did he have trying to decipher older sheets he
could barely read?

Not only were the older sheets — if that’s
what they were — faded and dim, they were messy, with all kinds of
changes and corrections written over the original accounts. Whoever
had made the changes had even initialed some of them.

Tay removed the small stack of sheets from
the file. He turned them first one way and then another, shifting
their angle under his lamp and letting the light play across them
from different directions.

All at once he
could
read the initials
of this long-ago accountant who had made all these messy changes,
and he felt a jolt of pure electricity surge through his body.

Surely not
, he thought.
That’s just
not possible.

***

Tay put the sheets down and rubbed his eyes.
Probably he was just tired.

He finished the glass of water, then shook
out another Marlboro and lit it. He took a long, slow pull, exhaled
unhurriedly, and only after that did he allow his eyes to shift
back to the pieces of paper he had abandoned on the table.

Tay lifted one of the ledger sheets and
examined the scribbled initials again with a skeptical eye. But try
as he might to convince himself he was looking at something other
than what he thought he was looking at, he could not.

Written next to most of the changes on the
ledger sheets were three initials: DST.

DST were the initials of Duncan Samuel
Tay.

Duncan Tay was Inspector Samuel Tay’s
father.

***

When the doorbell rang, Tay welcomed the
interruption.

His head was spinning and the world was
tilting crazily around him. He really didn’t care who was at the
door. He would have even been happy to find Cindy Shaw making one
of her generally unwelcomed appearances on his doorstep. Anyone was
welcome as long as they distracted him from those damn ledger
sheets long enough for him to clear his head.

Tay’s father had been an accountant in
Singapore, but he had been dead for forty years. And now Tay
thought he might be looking at his father’s initials on ledger
sheets that were probably old enough to date back to before his
father died. But if those really
were
his father’s initials,
what were they doing on papers in a safety deposit box, the key to
which he had found up the ass of a dead guy neatly laid out a
couple of weeks ago in Woodlands Housing Board flat?

Tay asked himself that over and over as he
walked to his front door, but he found no answers.

***

Tay didn’t bother to check who was at the
door. Flipping open the lock, he reached for the handle.

But he had barely begun to turn the knob when
the door crashed open. He caught the full force of it against his
body and slammed backward into the wall.

Later, Tay would wonder how he could have
missed getting a clear look at the man who forced his way in and
jumped him. He stumbled and fell when he hit the wall, of course,
and the man had been on him so quickly he hadn’t been able to get
his head around. But still, he was a policeman. He shouldn’t have
been taken by surprise. Even if he had, he should have kept his
wits about him well enough to resist, or at the very least to
register exactly what his attacker looked like.

The only impressions he could recall later
were that his attacker was big and a Caucasian, although Tay had to
admit he wasn’t absolutely certain about that last part. He did
remember clearly the flash of pain just before he passed out. The
man had hit him with something. Tay thought the weapon might have
been a flashlight. A heavy, black flashlight.

One that looked a good deal like a
Maglite.

WHEN TAY WOKE up he was back in the hospital
and Dr. Gupta was leaning over him.

“Miss me?” Gupta asked.

Tay was in no mood for clever banter with a
doctor.

“What happened?” he snapped.

“You’ll have to ask your sergeant. All I know
is he brought you in. Maybe he attacked you and then was overcome
with remorse.”

Tay hated doctors, and he particularly hated
doctors who tried to make jokes rather than giving direct answers
to the questions their patients asked them.

“What I can tell you for sure, Inspector, is
you have a concussion and a nasty bump on your head.”

Now Tay registered the throbbing. He reached
up and cautiously touched his fingers to the part of his skull from
which he thought it was coming. It was like mashing on a bruise and
immediately he jerked his hand away.

“Yes,” Dr. Gupta nodded, “it’s going to hurt
for a while.”

“Can’t you give me something for it?”

“I can give you something for the pain, but I
can’t give you anything for the concussion. All you can do is rest
and wait for your brain to get better by itself. You’ve got to be
careful. You’ve had two concussions in the last week. One more and
I’m taking you out of the game.”

“What game?”

“That was just an expression, of course. But
your concussion isn’t just an expression. It’s serious. And you
need to be careful.”

“What did he hit me with?”

“Who?”

“How the hell should I know
who
? The
man who attacked me. What did he hit me with?”

Gupta looked annoyed at Tay’s sharpness. For
his part, Tay didn’t give a shit whether Gupta was annoyed or not
as long as he didn’t make any more jokes.

“Something round and heavy, I’d say. Maybe a
club or bat of some sort?”

As soon as Gupta said that, Tay remembered
seeing a flash of what he thought was a Maglite. Was that just a
coincidence? No, of course it wasn’t.

“How long have I been out?” Tay asked.

“Not long.” The Dr. Gupta consulted the
clipboard hanging at the foot of Tay’s bed. “Your sergeant brought
you in at just before seven and it’s nearly nine now.”

“Can I leave?”

“No. You’re staying overnight whether you
want to or not. I’ve added something to your drip to help you
sleep.”

Tay’s eyes shifted to the plastic bottle
hanging from a stainless steel stand at his bedside. Then they
traced the plastic tubing all the way from the bottle to where it
entered his arm.

“We’ll see how you are tomorrow,” Dr. Gupta
finished, “and then we’ll talk about when you can go home.”

“Where is Sergeant Kang?”

“He’s right outside. I’ll get him.”

Dr. Gupta started to turn away, but then he
stopped.

“I was serious about you taking it easy,
Inspector,” he said. “Concussions are tricky things. Treat yours
with respect. If you don’t, it might kill you.”

Tay would have nodded, but the effort
required was just too great to consider.

“Thank you,” he said instead, and Gupta
nodded and left.

***

“You’re looking a lot better, sir.”

Sergeant Kang settled himself on the
straight-back aluminum chair next to Tay’s bed.

“What were you doing at my house?” Tay asked
him immediately.

“You’re welcome, sir. Your expressions of
profound gratitude to me for finding you and getting you to the
hospital have touched me deeply, but they are entirely unnecessary.
I’m sure you would have done the same for me.”

“I would also tell you why I had turned up at
your house one night when I had no reason to be there.”

“I’d been trying to call you for nearly two
hours and you didn’t answer. I was worried about you.”