Islands.

I'm dead.

This is being dead.

A life's worth of wondering suddenly solved.

Floating.

Soft movement, darkness.

What now, how long have I been here?

What happens to me now?

Why can't I feel anything?

Darkness.

 

Chapter One.

Inspector Jack Merion was confused and annoyed. He had not slept for two days since the incident, and was contemplating another sleepless night whilst sifting through the collected evidence before him at his rapidly disappearing desk top.

Not quite at the top of the tree as far as important policemen go, Merion still commanded respect throughout the Singapore police force, and if he needed it, he knew that more than one officer would back him without question.

With twenty-five years experience under his belt, many others called upon his judgement to help solve a difficult case or just to bounce ideas off his vast knowledge.

But now he was stumped.

Gazing up at the stained ceiling, he threw another pencil straight up. Instead of bouncing back to him like the previous thirty, this one stuck! Well, stuck in an empty hole from an earlier pencil, but he would take it. He would take anything at the moment, and one lonely pencil stuck where many others had been before the cleaners knocked them down was one little victory that pleased him for the first time in two days.

Nicknamed (and he liked it) 'The Lion' because of the closeness of his name to Singapore's talisman Merlion, he was known for resolving unpleasant crimes quickly with little fuss. But this one was driving him mad.

A terrorist attack in the middle of the CBD, that was bad enough, the body count was atrocious, as the location could not have been worse; whoever planned this one made sure to inflict maximum casualties at that time ion day, that was for sure.

But there were too many unanswered questions for his liking. Why was there no trace of explosive? What made the building go up? I t certainly was not a gas main as there were no fire or burning injuries. Why was it only one building? Most neighbours remained un-touched, only flying debris had caused damage. But most worrying of all was the question given over the directive given to him to allow four strange men to remove one body and search the rubble before he could even lodge a protest. A crime scene was a crime scene and his men had secured this one well, and then they had trampled all over the precious evidence making it harder to solve this nasty crime.

Maybe he was not meant to solve it?

Some kind of corruption perhaps?

Not from his boss, Ling was a good man, and the conversation that they had on the other side of the police tape while his crime scene was being violated told him all that he wanted to know. Ling had been silenced; he would not give anything away except the unspoken look that was exchanged between the two men...

Leave it alone.

He knew that Ling was not messing around and did not protest further, that one look had warned him during a sting on a fellow officer, he was getting too close and almost compromised the whole operation. Ling explained to him that he would use the peculiar facial expression only when an explanation was not possible.

A narrowing of the eyes was all it took.

So who were they?

CIA?

Special Police?

Interpol?

He guessed that he was too small a fish to be told.

But that would not stop him from solving it.

If he could.

Tipping his chair over to it's correct vertical position, he could see into the coffee cup and decided it was time for a pick me up.

Merion hated the taste of coffee, he thought that if someone came up with a better tasting drink that worked as well, they would be rich. Even less a fan of fizzy drinks like Red Bull and all of the other caffeinated ones, he had to have his fix in this form, black with four sugars to take the edge off.

Waiting for the kettle to boil, he looked at the brown stained cup and wondered if his insides were getting the same treatment.

A minute later he sipped the bitter hot liquid and felt the first rush invigorating his senses, his mind saw it as the scene in the Close Encounters movie, where lights in the city are switched back on and you can see the power gris stretching out for miles, just like his imagined nervous system.

Back to work now.

Photographs of the building before and after the explosion were no help at all. As it seemed that the insides of the building had been blown out minutes before the walls imploded and witness statements corroborated this. But how does a solid building destroy itself in two stages without some kind of explosive?

His forensics team after consulting engineers had no answer also, and that frustrated him the most as he thought of them as a secret weapon, or the perfect tool to tell him all of the facts.

all he had to use were the bodies left inside the tangled remains of the building, except the one that was taken away, a man he adjudged by the brief look he managed to get before being removed.

So, he had the owner of the building, Harry Chu, well known to all in local  law enforcement, but an elusive little bastard, but not that elusive as it turned out though, as his squashed remains had shown. Alongside, two of his men, both equally squashed and found in various pieces amongst the wreckage. Those three accounted for, no problem but where are the others?Chu's operation needed to be cracked and they were close…before this.

The mystery woman's remains also, what was she doing in there? And who was she? Not Asian, European perhaps, well…not unusual for this place, as just about every nationality found a slot in Singapore.

She had no papers and her only possessions seemed to be the clothes that she wore. He decided to wait for the autopsy report before making a judgement on that one. Where was that anyway? He decided to call the slow prick that worked down there and find out. Reaching for the phone, he jumped back when it rang before he could pick it up.