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yet another of its citizens was about to be hanged in another Asian country for trafficking drugs. It was promising to be yet another controversial execution in Singapore that brought down the wrath of many foreign countries and abolitionists - including those of Dutchman Johannes van Damme, Filipina maid Flor Contemplacion, Nigerian Amara Tochi, and Singaporean Shanmugam Murugesu and Malaysian Vignes Mourthi. It would also put the spotlight again on the German citizen Julia Suzanne Bohl, a high profile drug trafficker, and Briton Michael McCrea, a double killer, who miraculously escaped a grisly, ignominious end on the gallows by circumstance or political machinations and economic power. I was taking pot luck that I was at the right place and also that he would be at home.
    I was on the tenth floor - or tenth drawer as a wag once described Singapore's maze of uniform apartment blocks as being more like giant filing cabinets. I pressed the doorbell. It was 11.30 a.m. There was no sound from within. Ten, twenty seconds or so passed. I pressed again, this time a little more firmly. Then rustling sounds and muffled footsteps and the jangle of a bunch of keys came from within. I waited anxiously holding my breath, wondering what kind of reception I would get if, indeed, this was the man who bore the ominous title: chief executioner. I was accompanied by a young Singaporean photographer, Kian Yan Law, and I had prepared a little speech of introduction. Of course, I've never taken for granted what to expect in such situations. The worst experience during my long career as an investigative journalist was having a bucket of water thrown over my head from an upstairs window by a person of interest who did not want to talk to me.
    From then on I would always instinctively look up whenever I approached the front door of any potentially reticent quarry. In this case there was no window above the front door to worry about. But there were at least a dozen Darshan Singhs in the records I found with addresses from one end of the island to the other. I muttered to myself, coining a new phrase, it would be like finding a Singh in Singapore or a Smith in England. It also occurred to me that none of the addresses I found could possibly be the home of the hangman simply for security reasons alone. Such a man in such a job might be advised not to have such an easily accessible address. If I could find it, so could many others less well-intentioned. Being such a potentially vulnerable public servant he might well have been provided with a government security flat close to the prison and well protected by his armed colleagues on and off duty .
    Hangmen are not the most beloved creatures in any society and there is always the risk of a grieving, maddened relative exacting some form of retribution on them. I also recalled stories about Britain's most famous hangman Albert Pierrepoint having a police escort whenever he turned up at a prison to carry out an execution. Sometimes he was armed with a hidden revolver just in case things got out of hand especially when he went to Germany to hang a Nazi war criminal. There were always angry scenes at the prison gates as infuriated campaigners gathered to protest at the latest killing. So I took pot luck, using my lucky number and stuck a proverbial pin in the seventh 'Darshan Singh' in the list and made the Woodlands address my first port of call.
    I knew also that trying to interview Singapore's hangman would bring me into conflict with Singapore's Official Secrets Act. Many years earlier I tried to interview Britain's last executioner, Harry Allen, who ran a pub near Manchester at a time when abolitionists were finally getting the upper hand. Change was coming. Allen knew his days were numbered, too. Genial pub host though he was, he always refused to talk about his 'other job' adhering to the Official Secrets Act which, by that time, had been torn to shreds by his predecessor Albert Pierrepoint who had