Singapore Sling Shot - Andrew Grant [4]
Eventually, the guides started to become suspicious of the pair’s continued presence. Lu’s two thugs left the fort. One kept watch at the main entrance while the other returned to the hotel to face the wrath of their master.
2
In Singapore General Hospital, Stanley Loh was given sedatives and steroids which gradually got his asthma under control. Despite the admonishment from the attending physician, he managed to get a telephone brought to his bed. He made the call to his brother, but encountered only the computerised voice of the answer service. Loh quickly detailed everything that had happened.
At a few minutes to four that afternoon, Stanley Loh left Singapore General Hospital by taxi. Still under the influence of strong sedatives, he was not tempted to return to Sentosa to attempt to retrieve his car. He would have someone do that for him.
On the ride back to his home on Goodwood Hill, Loh went over the events of the day and those leading up to it. The one fact that kept coming back to him, and the one he silently cursed himself for, was that he knew he should have seen it coming. The final attempt at bribery and the attempt on his life. Perhaps if Thomas Lu had not seen the recording device, he may have managed to stall his answer and perhaps even walk free from the hotel. However, once Lu had seen the recorder, knowing full well what was on it, there was no way that he, Stanley Loh, would be able to leave the deserted hotel alive—other than by doing what he had done and thrown himself off the patio.
At the ornate iron gate leading into his house, Loh paid the cab driver, giving him a generous tip. As the taxi pulled away, he fumbled to key in the gate’s digital combination. Normally, when he was in one of his three cars, a remote sensor opened the gate as the vehicle approached it.
The van was parked thirty metres down the road. The vehicle was dark in colour and almost invisible in the shade of the late afternoon sun and the dense jungle fringe.
Whether it was the sedatives still at work in his system, combined with his distraction at trying to recall his gate combination, or not, Stanley Loh did not register the alien vehicle. He did not recognise it as the same van that had been parked in the Silver Sands Hotel car park.
On legs that were still a little unsteady, and with the grinding pain in his right hip, dulled only slightly by the painkillers he had been given, Stanley Loh walked through the double gate. The heavy metal leaves automatically clanged shut behind him as he started down the driveway.
The wide asphalt vehicle access curved away down the gentle slope to the four-car garage set between the house and the servant’s quarters beyond. Rather than follow the driveway, Loh chose the more direct route. He started down the path that ran through the beautifully tended shrubs and flowers of the formal garden.
He was part way down the concrete path when he saw the boot lying in a bed of flowers. Loh frowned. The boot was made of green rubber. It was the sort of boot that his gardener Cheah Kah Hin usually wore. Moving further down the pathway, he then saw Cheah. The old man, with one foot bare and one wearing a green rubber boot, was lying on his back behind a small hedge.
Loh’s first thought was that perhaps his gardener had succumbed to a heart attack. But as he stooped stiffly over the body, he saw a trickle of blood that had escaped from the black hole between the old man’s eyes. He knew this had been no heart attack.
“Of course it’s not a heart attack,” Loh snarled to himself as he desperately tried to shake off the drug-induced fog he had been wallowing in. “My family!” He said aloud as he started towards the house at a run. His tired and painful limbs were uncoordinated from the strong sedatives and further unbalanced by the pure terror