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to be shrouded in mystery and something to fear rather than a gory spectacle to enjoy with the family. Hangmen were made to sign the Official Secrets Act forbidding them to talk or write about what they did and the horrors that inevitably took place during the execution ceremony. Until they became brave enough to defy it, newspaper editors came under the same Act and faced fines and even jail. But the postwar era saw a more vociferous and powerful revival of the anti-hanging lobby and emergence of human rights activists, who finally achieved their aim in 1965 just as Singapore gained its independence and Darshan Singh was well into his career executing people at the rate of about twelve a month.
    And now I was in Singapore. It was the first time since capital punishment was abolished in Britain that I had lived in a country where the death penalty seemed to be universally accepted as a matter of fact save for a handful of brave human rights activists. I happened to switch on the television one afternoon in late September 2003.1 was suddenly jolted from the nineteenth into the twenty-first century. The then Singapore prime minister, Goh Chok Tong (now senior minister) was being asked by BBC interviewer Tim Sebastian how many people had been executed so far that year. He looked surprised and said he 'believed' it was in the region of 'about 70 to 80'. Asked why he did not know the precise number he replied curtly: 'I've got more important things to worry about'. Two days later his office issued a statement revising the figure down to ten. Singapore does not normally release statistics on the people it hangs. Amnesty International estimates that more than 400 were hanged from 1991 to 2001, mostly for drug trafficking and murder. At the time of publication of this book - 2010 - the figure is estimated to verge on 550. But since Darshan Singh got the job back in 1959 the grand total is actually closer to 1,000 or even more, although six years of that time was during British rule. Only the government's well-guarded archives could reveal the actual figure and frequent requests by me and other interested parties remain ignored.
    Most executions are carried out in complete secrecy and only occasionally acknowledged in the government-controlled media - or when pressured to do so when a foreigner is involved. Only those in the know are aware that on any given Friday, someone could be on their way to the gallows. But no one, except the hangman, the prison governor, a doctor, a priest, and a team of hopeful organ transplant surgeons standing by, knows for sure. So I knew I was treading on dangerous ground when I embarked on an attempt to extract some of Singapore's most carefully guarded secrets. If my information were correct, I was about to meet the most secretive hangman in history in one of the most secretive nations on earth where the topic of hanging people is as obsessively guarded as all those gold bars at Fort Knox. Was I on the verge of obtaining yet another major scoop in my long career as an investigative journalist? Or would I be arrested for attempting to suborn a public servant to break the Official Secrets Act? It would be a major, if dangerous, coup that would make worldwide headlines. I also knew I could end up in jail, a news item myself!

                            4
    At Home with the Hangman
     
     
    I had no idea what to expect when I rang the doorbell. I was just hoping that this was the home of Singapore's unknown but much-feared hangman, Darshan Singh. Not just hoping I was at the right address but musing humorously that he would kindly invite me in for a cup of tea and a chat - and tell me some secrets of the gallows he'd been in charge of for close on half a century. More important, I wanted to talk to him about his next 'job' as he was to call it later: the execution of the Australian citizen Nguyen Van Tuong was only weeks or days away. Australia was slowly waking up to the fact that