The Angsana Tree Mystery

Book 8: Su Lin Series

by Ovidia Yu

Genres: International Crime & Mystery

Synopsis

'One of Singapore's finest living authors' South China Morning Post

'Simply glorious. Every nook and cranny of 1930s Singapore is brought richly to life' CATRIONA MCPHERSON

'Charming' RHYS BOWEN

'One of the most likeable heroines in modern literature' SCOTSMAN
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The next book in the Mystery Tree series, exploring Singapore after the Japanese retreat and in the aftermath of WWII.
Singapore 1949

When all the angsana trees on the island bloom at the same time it's a glorious fragrant display that lasts only one day... and the next morning Su Lin comes across an old friend laughing hysterically while holding her dead lover on the thick carpet of yellow flowers by the quarry pool that was their childhood haunt. She instantly realises her friend could not be the killer as she could not have sliced so cleanly through the man's throat with no weapon in sight.

As she tries to help her friend, Su Lin has to figure out where her own loyalties lie. Angsana blossoms aren't the only things disappearing overnight in post-war Singapore as the newly returned British-increasingly on edge because of anti-colonial uprisings in nearby Indonesia-rush to change laws and revoke permits and positions.

But more pressingly, Su Lin has to prove her friend's innocence and stop a calculating killer from murdering again...

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Praise for Ovidia Yu:

'Chen Su Lin is a true gem. Her slyly witty voice and her admirable, sometimes heartbreaking, practicality make her the most beguiling narrator heroine I've met in a long while' Catriona McPherson

'Charming and fascinating with great authentic feel. Ovidia Yu's teenage Chinese sleuth gives us an insight into a very different culture and time. This book is exactly why I love historical novels' Rhys Bowen

'A wonderful detective novel . . . a book that introduces one of the most likeable heroines in modern literature and should be on everyone's Must Read list' Scotsman

'Unassuming, brilliantly observant' SCMP

'Ovidia Yu's writing helped me peel back the layers to understand Singapore. The story and Chen Su Lin's initiative and tenacity, set against a backdrop of wartime Singapore, intrigued both the historian and the mystery lover in me' Kara Owens CMG CVO, British High Commissioner to Singapore

Release date: June 6, 2024

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 80000

Sample

‘Aiyoh, where is that driver?’ my grandmother grumbled. ‘Maybe he got lost. Don’t know why they want to go and change road names. Now everybody is getting lost! Ask me my address, I also don’t know! Hiyah!’

She was grumbling because, as of today, Saturday, 1 June 1946, British officials had decreed the road in front of our house would be renamed Mountbatten Road. It was cheaper and faster than building a monument to Lord Louis Mountbatten, though I suspected a repainted road sign wouldn’t have the cachet of a new park or monument. Clearly the British were serious about keeping costs down.

The grand unveiling of the new road sign would take place at nine a.m., and Mountbatten Road, formerly Grove Road, would be blocked off from eight, which was why I was leaving so early.

‘It’s not yet seven o’clock, Ah Ma,’ I said, ‘and Hakim’s been here a hundred times.’

Chen Mansion stood where it had always been, despite the address change. And even though I was twenty-six years old, I was back there with my grandmother, Uncle Chen and Little Ling, his daughter. While the rest of the world was moving forward, I kept being pulled back there. I wasn’t sorry to be getting away for a bit today.

I stifled a yawn and pulled the light shawl more closely around me against the early-morning chill. I was wearing a light green and red print frock: green and red are lucky colours for Dragon Boat Festival and I was on a dragon boat mission, a week early.

‘Maybe you shouldn’t go,’ Ah Ma said. ‘Go so far alone and for what? When Hakim comes, just give him the food and her precious container and tell him to deliver it to the Pangs’ place. No need to waste your time.’

I really didn’t want to go. But if I wanted to succeed in making a point with my grandmother I had to see it through. ‘I said I would go so I’m going,’ I said. ‘You know Pang Tai will be offended if you send back her tingkat with a driver. You should really come with me.’

Ah Ma snorted. ‘In my old tai chi clothes? That would really offend the woman.’

Why was I heading out in the early morning in Dragon Boat Festival colours to visit the Pangs with a bunch of Ah Ma’s bak zhang – sticky rice dumplings wrapped in bamboo leaves and tied with string into triangular parcels – made especially for the festival, as well as two bottles of Ah Ma’s achar – turnip, cucumber, carrots and pineapple pickled in vinegar, sugar and salt with lots of sesame seeds and crushed roasted peanuts? Because this was the formal return of Pang Tai’s food container. The beautiful three-layered traditional blue-, pink- and green-painted enamel tingkat had been brought to us at Chinese New Year. Normally, all gift containers would have been filled with lucky food and given back when my family paid the obligatory return visits, but this year my family hadn’t paid any return visits.

Most people were understanding. Chen family issues over Chinese New Year must have provided good gossip. But last Friday Pang Tai had asked for her container.

‘So rude!’ my grandmother said. ‘Telling me to just wash and return empty! As though I have no food to give her!’

‘Maybe she needs it?’ I said. ‘Maybe she doesn’t know Uncle Chen’s wife died.’

‘Ha! Of course she knows. You think she wants her tingkat back? What she’s after is your uncle.’

‘Ah Ma!’

‘That woman is dangerous. She treats her workers like slaves, and she has too many daughters.’

That was what set me off. As a woman who’d raised a polio-crippled bad-luck granddaughter (me) against the advice of family and fortune-tellers, you’d think Chen Tai wouldn’t hold a woman’s daughters against her.

‘How can you say that?’ I said. ‘Women shouldn’t put other women down.’

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Ah Ma’s standard defence.

‘Pang Tai has three daughters and Danny,’ I said. This time I did know what I was talking about. Mei Mei, a sweet, silent woman, was ten years younger than Uncle Chen. Pang Tai had mentioned it several times on her last visit. The younger ‘children’, Girlie, Sissy and Danny, were about twelve, ten and eight years older than I was.

‘I will bring her tingkat to Bukit Batok with bak zhang especially made for the Dragon Boat Festival. There’s no point in offending people. You don’t know when you might need to buy granite from them.’

I was only repeating to Ah Ma what she had said many times to me while I was growing up: be nice to people even if you don’t like them. One day you might need to work with them. Given that the Pangs ran Singapore’s largest granite quarries, surely it made sense to stay on good terms with Pang Tai.

‘If you insist on going, I will call Hakim to drive you.’ In other words, she knew I was right even if she would die before she said so. ‘Better go early so you won’t need to stay for lunch.’

I knew Hakim Harez from when he had driven Ah Ma about to collect rents before the war. He’d doubled as her security guard and babysitter, playing tutup botol, or bottle caps, with me while we were waiting.

Now Hakim was driving one of the pirate taxis that had sprung up to supplement limited public transport. They were a lifesaver for those living beyond the tram lines and bus routes and charged per person per ride. They were also illegal, and it was understood that, if asked, you were merely ‘taking a lift from a friend’.

‘All the way to Bukit Batok to return a tingkat,’ Ah Ma grumbled. ‘So ulu. I don’t know why anybody wants to live there.’

Ulu meant primitive or undeveloped. It was how people in the east of Singapore liked to see the area west of Bukit Timah Hill, the highest point on our island. When your entire island measures just over thirty miles from east to west, you make the most of tiny differences. Much of western Singapore was still plantations and primary forest – and quarries, of course.

What did Ah Ma have against Pang Tai? They were both widows who’d succeeded in keeping their families together. Shouldn’t that have forged a bond between them? No. I’d seen Ah Ma’s dislike in the way she politely pressed delicacies on her guest while praising her son’s brains and her daughters’ beauty. Danny wasn’t clever and his sisters weren’t pretty, and if the two women had liked each other, they’d have been gossiping and cackling while cracking pumpkin seeds in their teeth.

Uncle Chen wasn’t any better. Pang Tai had asked if he could spend some time at her place. ‘Now my husband is gone, I need something to bring masculine energy to the house.’

‘Think about getting a pig,’ Uncle Chen said. Pang Tai looked aghast, perhaps trying to decide if she’d been insulted. Maybe she just didn’t like pigs. ‘A good boar is better than any guard dog. It will keep burglars and monkeys away. And if you lend it to neighbours with sows, you can eat suckling pig all year.’

To be fair, Pang Tai wasn’t the only one. Just months after his wife’s death, Uncle Chen was showered with gifts and invitations and had refused to pay visits to any households with unmarried women. He and his wife had visited the Pangs on Ah Ma’s behalf, often taking me with them, because Ah Ma claimed the long drive over the bad roads to Bukit Batok made her feel sick. ‘And not just the roads. The air there is so dirty. Just drive through there and you’re coughing for a week. Why do you think it’s called Bukit Batok?’

While ‘batok’ meant ‘coughing’ in Malay, it meant ‘coconut’ in Javanese, which was the more likely origin of the name.

Of course, what Uncle Chen or Shen Shen had said was, ‘Our mother wanted to come to see you but she’s too busy/can’t leave the house/has relatives visiting. He wasn’t very good at lying but Shen Shen had been an expert. I would miss that side of her. But the excuses, like the visits, were just formalities to show our families were on good terms.

‘No need to stay too long, ah,’ Ah Ma said.

‘You don’t have to wait to see me off, Ah Ma.’

‘Who wants to see you off? I want to do my morning tai chi. Just waiting for you to go.’

Ah Ma had practised tai chi for as long as I could remember. I’d always thought it was an excuse to be outside on her own, though sometimes she made the servant girls practise too. She’d tried to persuade me to join her, but I found the slow movements boring and pointless. These days she used the walking stick Dr Shankar had designed for her tai chi rod exercises. It was useful in other ways too. There was a ring below the handle that held Ah Ma’s keys and the cloth pouch with her reading glasses. And the metal spike in its foot was good for poking at ripe fruit in trees and for stability on slippery or stony ground. Indoors the spike was protected by a cap ending in a wide rubber stopper, which Dr Shankar had also provided.

‘It’s a martial art that develops the qi. Good for self-defence,’

I preferred a more active kind of self-defence, but I was glad she could still do the movements. Her spiked walking stick was also useful for dismantling cigarette ends (which were just paper and dried leaves) and threatening miscreants who threw rubbish over the wall.

Hakim arrived punctually just before seven a.m. in a nice, fairly well-kept though not new car.

‘Salaam, Mr Hakim, how are you today?’

Hakim Harez got out, grinning widely and bowing with a hand over his heart. ‘Very good, thank you, Chen Tai. Miss Chen, how are you? Just a minute, ah, let me get ready the seat for you.’

He started spreading newspapers in the back. I sniffed. I smelt blood and fresh meat.

‘Sorry, ah. I brought wife to market to sell chicken.’

Judging by the leafy fragments on the newspapers and the piece of cardboard he handed me to put on top of the newspapers, Puan Hakim had also harvested daun kelor, moringa leaves, and bayam merah, local spinach, for the market. I brushed off a scattering of soil from the vegetables as Ah Ma and Hakim chatted. A little dry earth was better than blood.

‘Sorry to ask you to drive so far to so ulu place, Mr Hakim,’ Ah Ma said. ‘I give you eight dollars. Enough?’

She was being generous. The fifteen-mile journey would have cost about six dollars by trishaw, but that would have taken much longer and been far less comfortable.

‘I cannot take money from you, Chen Tai.’ I guessed Ah Ma had helped Mr Hakim to pay for his car. She was always helping people, and they all tried to pay her back, not always in cash. ‘But why you want to send your granddaughter to Bukit Batok? Young girls should go to town, go Robinson’s. Nice dresses there, imported from England.’

‘Of course I must pay you. This is your business. My granddaughter has to pay family visit for me,’ Ah Ma’s mouth turned down at the corners to signify grief, ‘now I am too old to go myself.’

‘Of course you are not old, Chen Tai,’ Hakim Harez said quickly. He returned two notes to my grandmother. ‘Six dollars enough. If she needs to come back I’ll take her for free.’

‘Maybe you can drop me in town afterwards,’ I said quickly. ‘Can you give me about half an hour at the Pang quarry, then pick me up and drop me in town?’

I could tell Pang Tai that I had several visits to make and couldn’t stay long. She would probably be as glad of that as I would. I could easily take the tram home from town.

‘Where are you going?’ Ah Ma asked.

I was tempted to say Robinson’s, but Ah Ma knew me too well. With a crooked hip after childhood polio, I’d never enjoyed shopping for clothes I knew wouldn’t suit me. And I knew she suspected I would try to see Le Froy.

I’d had an understanding with former Chief Inspector Thomas Le Froy: until we married at some unspecified point in the future, I would work as his assistant on the Public Health Services Bureau funds.

But Le Froy’s duties had been abruptly suspended two weeks ago, pending an official investigation into the PHSB. ‘Pending investigation’ is what the British say when they’ve decided you’re guilty and need time to decide what you’re guilty of. The only reason I wasn’t worried was that Le Froy didn’t seem concerned.

I hadn’t seen him since the office was closed. In fact, one of the points the investigation had already brought up was my lack of qualifications: I didn’t have a secretarial certificate from an approved British institution.

I could almost hear Ah Ma thinking, Ang mohs don’t like girls older than sixteen, but she saved us a good fight by not saying it out loud. I didn’t need her feeling sorry for me: I could do that for myself. What had happened to me?

Before the war I’d been a promising top student whose teachers believed I could go on to university instead of getting married. Now it seemed I was too old to do either. Ironically, my work prospects were worse now than they’d been under the Japanese. During the Occupation, my Japanese language skills had been in demand. Now I couldn’t get work as a teacher or as the reporter I had once been without qualifications.

‘I want to go to town to see Parshanti,’ I said.

Hakim looked at Ah Ma.

‘Say hello to her mother for me. And tell her father I’m using his stick.’

‘I drop you anywhere you want, Miss!’ Hakim said. He helped me to settle the tingkat and food on the floor beside me and closed the door.

‘Whatever you do, don’t invite them for Dragon Boat Festival. That woman may come anyway but don’t invite them,’ Ah Ma called, as Mr Hakim put the car in gear and drove away.



‘Your grandma is a good woman,’ Hakim said. ‘She always makes for me and my wife no-pork bak zhang for Dragon Boat Festival. I know all about Festival – last time in China one poet jumped into the river because the government is bad. So all the men row dragon boats to save him and all the women throw bak zhang into the river so the fish will eat it instead of the poet.’

‘Yah,’ I said, only half listening. Hakim had been telling me this story since I was a child. I had to remind Ah Ma to send some bak zhang to Hakim and his wife. The sticky rice dumplings I was carrying contained braised pork belly, mushrooms, dried shrimp and chestnuts, so couldn’t be given to Muslims, like Hakim and his wife.

After almost two weeks of heavy rain, angsana trees all over Singapore had burst into bloom yesterday. It had been a glorious sight, people posing with flowering branches and taking photographs. It was a pity photographs aren’t in colour, like paintings, to capture all that glorious yellow. Today there were yellow carpets on many roads, still beautiful, but in a few days the withered flowers would be a nuisance, clogging the drains.

It was nice being in a car. I thought again about learning to drive. I wanted to, but I’d been in the car with Parshanti driving and had seen the effort it took to manage the clutch pedal and the brake, especially for her many sudden stops. I was afraid my withered leg might not be up to it. But I wanted the independence it gave her. Also, I could help Uncle Chen.

Uncle Chen hadn’t reopened his little shophouse in town after the war. Now Ah Ma had him driving merchandise around the colonial homes, especially the black and white houses in the north near Sembawang Shipyard and in the east near Seletar Airbase. The returning British wives were eager to buy the curtain material, pillows, pillow cases and sheets that Ah Ma imported from China, and Uncle Chen did good business selling the items door to door. That meant he was always home for dinner and sometimes Little Ling rode along with him, which they both enjoyed.

‘Nowadays, if people jump into the river because the government is bad, no more people left to row boats or make bak zhang.’

‘What?’ I looked up and saw Hakim studying me in the rear-view mirror.

‘How much did Chen Tai lose to those opium licences?’

The Japanese had banned opium on the island, but the returning British had auctioned opium-processing licences. Opium products, being heavily taxed, would generate funds to rebuild post-war Britain. The problem was, just two weeks after those licences had been paid for, the British had declared opium processing illegal. Now the government would not refund the money they’d collected for those licences, and anyone caught making or selling opium products would be subject to criminal prosecution.

It was whispered that the authorities had intended to ban opium all along. Auctioning licences was just their way of figuring out who was in the business . . . while pocketing some cash on the side.

‘She didn’t,’ I said. ‘My grandmother wasn’t in the opium business.’

‘Your ang moh boyfriend tipped her off because they are going to clamp down?’

‘No! She was never in the opium business.’

‘Huh.’

I don’t think Hakim believed me, but my grandmother had seen the damage opium did, especially to the Chinese, and said no profits were worth that. Le Froy had been trying to get opium production banned since before the war.

‘What’s your ang moh boyfriend doing nowadays?’

We were moving fairly fast. I put my face out of the window and closed my eyes to enjoy the breeze, pretending I hadn’t heard him. Hakim was a great one for gossip: he probably knew more about what Thomas Le Froy was doing than I did.

Le Froy and I had admitted to ourselves and to each other that we were in love when we’d thought we were going to die. But we didn’t die, which made things awkward. I’d always sworn I’d never marry an ang moh, and I’d learned later that he’d sworn never to marry after his fiancée had died during his first posting out of England. I didn’t deny or regret the joy I felt thinking of him. We just had to decide how to live with it.

At least Le Froy’s position managing the PHSB fund gave him employment in Singapore after he was invalided out of the police force – at least until Jack Wilson was brought in by the British Military Authority to conduct his official inquiry into the fund’s accounting.

I couldn’t help thinking Governor Evans had set it up. He’d been biased against Le Froy ever since, as chief inspector with the police, he had applied the same laws to ang mohs and locals. Apparently that was discrimination against any British who had made the sacrifice to come out east.

I knew from Le Froy that the British were on edge. Now that the Japanese were gone, India and Indonesia wanted to shake off British rule, and Britain didn’t want ‘anti-colonial unrest’ to spread to Singapore. But with all that going on, why were they worrying about a fully funded health-improvement project?

Unfortunately I could guess the answer to that. Over the last forty or fifty years, being male and British had been enough to guarantee a well-paid post almost anywhere in the Empire, other than Britain. Now that was changing. Those who hadn’t yet made their fortunes were scrambling to remedy that. ‘Guaranteed’ investment schemes and dodgy ‘big payout’ companies were proliferating. Someone, resentful of Le Froy’s refusal to invest public-health funds, must have accused him of making off with the money.

I knew nothing would come of the investigation. However much he scorned official protocol, Le Froy had been punctilious when it came to dispensing funds. I’d typed up all the transaction reports myself, with double carbons, one set for the governor’s office, the other to the British Military Authority.

Even if Ah Ma didn’t think Le Froy guilty of stealing money, guilt by association was enough for her. ‘Since you’re not working there any more, better you don’t go near that place,’ she had said. ‘What happens if they go there, find something wrong and your fingerprints are everywhere?’

‘Of course my fingerprints are there,’ I said. ‘That is where I work!’

When the motor-car slowed behind a moving bullock cart, I pulled my face in to avoid the smell.

‘You know what they say about Le Froy?’ Hakim Harez said, as though continuing a conversation. ‘People say he’s the one behind the opium ban.’

‘Opium is bad for people,’ I said. Why was that so hard to understand? Even the Japanese knew that.

It was understandable that those who’d paid for the last batch of licences were upset. Who could have seen this coming? Opium trafficking had been one of Britain’s greatest generators of revenue for years.

‘Nah. Ang mohs don’t care what is bad for locals. The only reason they banned legal opium cooking is because the Chen family is taking over the opium monopoly.’

‘What?’

‘That is the marriage condition, right? Le Froy gives Chen Tai the opium market and Chen Tai gives him her granddaughter.’

I saw Hakim watching me in the rear-view mirror. If I got worked up, he would go, ‘Joking, lah!’ then tell everyone I wouldn’t have been upset or annoyed if there hadn’t been some truth in the rumours.

‘Ha-ha,’ I said lightly. ‘Very funny.’ Then I turned back to the window and the passing scenery. I wasn’t annoyed with Hakim, who was only reporting to me what others were saying behind my back. Gossip was as much a part of his pirate taxi business as the driving. My grandmother always said, ‘Let other people waste energy talking about you. Don’t waste energy worrying about them.’

I wondered what she would say about this, though. Ah Ma hadn’t been happy to learn Governor Evans had put Le Froy in charge of the health-services fund. ‘Giving away money is not so easy. Those you give to say it isn’t enough. Those you don’t give to say you’re crooked. And they all say you put it in your own pocket.’

Well, the official investigation would clear that up, wouldn’t it? All that Le Froy had granted funds for were water pipes and sanitary sewage disposal, and that only after requesting tenders from several companies and picking a local contractor. Very likely this had upset the newly returned British. . .