Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 23, No. 12, December 1978

A Grave on the Indragiri by Alvin S. Fick

The investigation was sending Pine to Singapore again, and beyond...

“Why bother after all this time? 1909, you say? Three years ago. I should think you’d be satisfied to let it lie.”

The man behind the dark oak desk seemed hesitant to answer. He passed a meaty red hand over his shaven skull.

Alex Pine looked at him through half-closed eyes, assessing the muscle beneath the middle-age fat. Colter’s huge hands with scarred knuckles and wedge-shaped fingers protruded from a conservative business suit. Here was a man of great strength, perhaps a product of the docks. Maybe those shoulders came from tossing forkfuls of hay and manure on a Sussex farm, or from early years in a peat bog.

With his toe Pine hooked a chair close to his own in front of the desk, crossed his ankles, and placed his feet on its red cushion. In other offices in other parts of London he would not have done that. The gesture was a simple one, not calculated insolence but intended to move the business at hand out of the drawing room into the alley, or at least into the carriage house.

Colter seemed unwilling to make the concession. He stared at Pine’s feet on the chair, a barely perceptible shrug of his massive shoulders rippling the dark material of his coat.

“Because I want to know, that’s all.” He aimed a forefinger at Pine. “Twenty pounds a day and expenses. Take it or leave it.”

Through the open window Alex Pine could hear the clop of hooves in the street below, the creak of wheels on ungreased axles a counterpoint to the rumble of lorries with hard rubber tires carrying freight to the docks down by the river. Now and then a freshet of breeze brought in the mingled odors of the shipping district.

“A thousand pounds at the finish if you bring me conclusive evidence that my brother was murdered.”

“Not for five thousand unless I’m satisfied with your answers to my questions,” Pine said. “I agree it seems a little odd that your brother Kevin would drop dead at thirty-eight when he seemed to be in prime health. But you being in the rubber business yourself know conditions in Sumatra are not conducive to long life.

“So what if his wife says it was a heart attack brought on by heat and overwork? What difference does it make if she is wrong and he was shoved into his grave by some little-known tropical disease? There aren’t any medical examiners a hundred miles up the Indragiri River-Why does it matter to you now? What’s over is over, and you say yourself neither his wife nor the company he worked for stood to gain anything by his death. Why push it?”

“If your brother—” Colter began.

“I haven’t a brother, and I still don’t understand why you delayed, but I acknowledge the point. Tell me more about your brother’s wife.”

“She’s a Dutch girl Kevin met while she was attending school here in England. At first I thought he was a bloody fool. He hadn’t a quid in his trousers when he met her, all his money having gone for the clothes of a dandy. He borrowed a great deal of money from me. He spent most of it on a diamond ring and wining and dining her.

“Not long after they were married, he stopped by to tell me he was going to be made overseer of a rubber plantation in Sumatra. Marie, his wife, has a father who is a member of the firm, Benskoten Rubber Company, which owns several plantations there. That’s the last time I saw him. He died at Benskoten’s Plantation Number Three.”

“Did you hear from him after he went there? Any letters?”

“Not a one, although his wife wrote to my wife a couple of times.”

“Then he never repaid the money he owed you?”

There was disgust in Colter’s negative grunt. “The closest I got was a wink on his wedding day — like a man who just had a long-odds winner at Ascot.”

“This would be expensive, Mr. Colter. There’s time involved in the travel as well as the investigation. And what if I find evidence that your brother died of natural causes?”

“In that case I will pay you two hundred pounds.”

Pine whistled softly. “You’re that anxious to prove it was murder? What makes you think I won’t fake some evidence for eight hundred pounds?”

“Because I checked thoroughly into your background before I asked you to come here, Mr. Pine. Your little investigations business comes highly recommended. Compared to such a reputation, the money is a paltry sum. Besides, I would not take kindly to being fleeced.”

He picked up a pencil from his desk and snapped it between thumb, forefinger, and middle finger, then turned in his chair and threw the pieces out the window.

“Thirty pounds a day,” Alex said. “Mogging about in the jungle is unhealthy — fever, tigers, and all that.”

Colter nodded reluctantly, then extended his hand across the desk. Surprise was evident in his lifted eyebrows when he felt the strength in the detective’s grip.

He summoned an ascetic-looking clerk in striped pants from the outer office and issued instructions in a low voice.

He turned to Pine. “I would like you to leave by the end of the week. Humes here will give you a draft on my bank for three hundred pounds, also an address in Singapore where you will be able to draw more money as needed. But I will expect reports regularly.”

“No.” Pine’s voice was flat, unarguable. “No reports until my work is finished. I’m going to be too busy to write letters home like a boy away at boarding school.”

Jason Colter came out from behind his desk. “I urge you to be discreet.”

Pine ran a hand through a thatch of hair the color of a rusty bucket.

“It has been my experience,” he said, “that blabbering about one’s business does little to further it.”

Papers, packing, and transportation arrangements took little time for Pine, since the packing was all he did himself. The rest was handled with her usual quiet efficiency by Jennifer Hemming in his Chelsea office beneath his living quarters.

“Oh, dear, Mr. Pine,” she said when he told her of the trip, “you’ll be gone so long.” She bent her grey head quickly over a desk drawer so he would not see the moisture glistening behind the silver-framed glasses, but the mothering in her voice was inescapable.

“Maybe not so long, Miss Hemming. I think this Colter fellow is angling in a pond that has no fish. And I’m hanged if I know why.”

She smiled up at him. “Oh, but you will find out.”

What could be better than having Jennifer Hemming as office factotum, proxy mother for the one he never knew? Nothing, aside from a wife.

Before he left on Friday, he rode many vehicles and stretched his long legs over what seemed to be half the streets of London. He spent some of the three hundred pounds’ advance money in pubs whose clientele preferred its darker recesses to the sunshine outside. He bought uncounted rounds of ale and stuffed pound notes into pockets of scruffy jackets, all the while adding information to his leatherbound pocket notebook. Some facts he learned in better restaurants from business acquaintances whose Regent Street clothes and distinguished looks were scarcely in keeping with the type of information they disclosed.

Now he knew why Jason Colter wanted proof that Marie Colter had murdered her husband. With that information, he would be able to blackmail her to extract vital favors from her father, favors that could ultimately lead to a virtual monopoly of England’s rubber-importing business. What had burned in those hungry little eyes was not a zeal for justice, but greed.

Pine was not surprised. Sometimes he did not like the flavor of his work, and this was one of the times. But if he backed off it would leave a void that Colter more than likely would fill with someone who might not share Pine’s scruples about manufactured evidence. And besides, the pay was good.

On the morning of his departure he stopped at a bookstall near Fleet Street where he bought a thick packet of old boys’ papers. He stood at the rail clutching the package beneath his arm as the Sutton Victor edged away from its berth below High Bridge and slipped into the stream for the crossing to Le Havre and on to Singapore. He could think of nothing more pleasant or diverting on the long hours of the voyage than to revisit the pages that had put so much ginger into his youth. He looked forward to a reunion with Pluck, Chums, The Boy’s Own Paper, and The Bull’s-Eye. Indeed, it was reading the exploits of Sexton Blake that had lured him into a career in detection.

During the nearly two-day passage of the Suez, Pine sat on deck in the shade of an awning, alternately reading and watching the passing ships slide by, steel fish cleaving the desert that stretched away on both sides. He mixed little with the other passengers, spending some time rereading his notes. Folded into the notebook were two letters, both obtained from Mrs. Jason Colter. That had been a coup, but it would remain so only as long as she kept silent about it.

“Oh, I hope I am doing the right thing,” she had said when he visited her in London the day before he left. “If you don’t mention these letters to Jason, he won’t know. He knows I received them, but he never expressed the slightest interest in their contents. And in view of his intense feelings about his brother, I never said much other than to pass along the gossip Marie wrote.”

“Did you know your brother-in-law’s wife well?”

“Not terribly. I saw her several times just before the wedding, but almost immediately she and Kevin went to Holland to visit Nikolaas and Beatrice Berchem — her parents. But I like her. She is a lovely girl.”

She hesitated before going on, apparently satisfied that as long as she was surrendering the letters, and inasmuch as the conversation was to remain confidential, expression of her own intuitions could do no harm.

“I never liked Kevin, Mr. Pine. He had a charm and attractiveness that I can see would have overwhelmed poor Marie. But it seemed to me a veneer over something hard and cruel.”

Again she paused. “I don’t know why I’m saying this to a stranger, but I think hardness is the strongest bond Kevin and my husband had. Jason is the same way.”

“And I gather it was on that visit to the Berchems that Kevin Colter was appointed plantation manager.”

“Yes, the two of them left for Singapore without coming back here.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Colter, for letting me take these letters and for speaking freely. I’m sure you see it’s best that neither of us mention any of this to your husband.”

Mrs. Colter touched his sleeve.

“You couldn’t possibly think that Marie—” Her face was pale. “If I thought you would think such a thing I never—” Pine could see the trembling in her throat.

“Please, don’t torture yourself. It’s far from my mind, especially since I suspect it’s the one thought your husband cherishes.”

Singapore hadn’t changed much since Alex’s last time there four years before when an admiralty case had taken him through the city on his way to the naval base at Seletar near Johore Bahru. It came to him as he was paying the ricksha driver in front of the King’s Arms Hotel that that was in 1908, at about the same time Kevin and Marie Colter were on their way to Sumatra. Perhaps they had stopped here in this very hotel.

The manager of the Singapore office of Benskoten Rubber, Anders Van der Neer, was cool at first, then deferential, then confiding and friendly. Pine thought that if he stayed another ten minutes the man would become positively obsequious.

“That’s the story, Mr. Van der Neer. I’ve been seeing these ads in The Times for months offering investment opportunities for private individuals in this remarkably fast-growing rubber industry. I thought I would stop off on my way home from Hong Kong to check into the possibilities.”

The slowly revolving ceiling fan stirred Van der Neer’s thinning straw-colored hair. He dabbed with a handkerchief at the perspiration on his shiny round face.

“We’re so pleased you have selected Benskoten Rubber for consideration.” Van der Neer started to rub his hands together, then quickly changed the motion and pressed his fingertips together.

“But you understand that I will not make a heavy commitment until after I see the nature of your plantation operation.”

“Of course. You are an astute businessman, after all.”

“Then it’s settled? You will arrange a trip upriver to a plantation? I would prefer to visit one that has been operating three or four years, not less, and preferably not much more. That’s the perspective I want to see.”

“Certainly, Mr. Pine. Tomorrow at ten o’clock I will send over one of my most trusted associates to accompany you on the coastal steamer to Tambilahan. From there a company boat will take you up the Indragiri to Benskoten Three. I can’t think of a more representative plantation for you to see.”

Pine was reviewing his good fortune the next morning in his hotel room while packing a small bag when there was a knock on the door.

Kiri Sembawa, the Benskoten representative, was young, probably in his mid-twenties. His English was impeccable, with a hint of Oxford.

“I grew up in an English home here in Singapore,” he explained. “I was a combination house boy and gardener for the people who raised me. They sent me to England to be educated. Both of them died of fever five years ago.” The smile which had lighted his nut-brown face flickered out.

“A moment ago I was congratulating myself on my good luck in getting to see a Benskoten rubber plantation with no delay. Now I see this has been enhanced by having the best guide possible. I am most fortunate.” Pine shook Sembawa’s hand with warmth.

Later they sat together on packing cases as the company boat nudged inland against the current of the Indragiri. Pine smoked a disreputable-looking pipe, which helped some against the mosquitoes. Kiri Sembawa sat close enough to indicate the pipe fumes were preferable to the insects.

“Who is plantation manager at Benskoten Three?” Pine asked.

“A man named Keeling. He’s Dutch. He speaks a little English, but I can translate for you if you like.”

“I have a smattering of Dutch and German, but I will be grateful for any help you can give.” Pine tamped the pipe with the head of an iron spike that had been cut off an inch and a half down the shank.

“Who preceded him?” Pine watched the handsome brown face for any change in expression. There was none.

“A man named Kevin Colter, an Englishman.”

“Colter.” Pine stared off at the jungle crowding the water’s edge. “I know a family named Colter in London. Different family, probably. Still, the man I know is in some aspect of the rubber business, I think.”

“Mr. Colter was married to a Dutch woman.”

Pine turned slowly and his ice-blue eyes locked with Kiri Sembawa’s dark ones. “Surely not a woman named Marie?”

Surprise flickered across Sembawa’s face but it was gone in an instant.

“Yes, Marie,” he said. “It must be the same Colter.”

Pine’s pipe clattered to the deck and he leaned over to retrieve it. “What did you mean when you said he was married to a Dutch woman?”

“Mr. Colter is dead. He died nearly three years ago. His wife went back to Holland. Her father is one of the owners of Benskoten Rubber.”

“Well, I wouldn’t have believed it possible. That must be the brother of the Jason Colter I know. I seem to recall he mentioned a younger brother. He died, eh? He couldn’t have been over — what would you say?”

“I would guess mid- to late thirties. No more.”

“Was it an accident?”

“Heart attack.” Sembawa paused. “They say heart attack brought on by overwork, fever, the heat, all the things that kill men in a tropical climate.”

“I suppose it wasn’t easy to get a doctor to such a remote place to confirm the cause.”

It was a long time before Sembawa answered.

“No, there was no doctor.” Then after an even longer pause: “I don’t think he died from a heart attack.”

Alex Pine dropped his pipe again, only this time it was not a piece of stage business.

It crossed his mind that he was at a decision point in his investigation. By Anders Van der Neer’s assertion, this was a “most trusted employee.” Would a revelation of Pine’s true purpose result in a closing of channels to him? Was someone in Benskoten covering a murder? Or was Sembawa’s suspicion groundless? If he was right, weren’t chances good that this would lead where every instinct told him he did not want to go to find a killer, to Marie Colter?

He remembered the anguish in the letters back in the hotel safe in Singapore. Damn! He did not like where he was headed.

“I’m not an investor, Kiri.” It was the first time he had spoken Sembawa’s first name. “I’m a private detective. I have been misleading Benskoten Rubber and you. I don’t care that much about my duplicity where the company is concerned, but I apologize for doing it to you. Now, we can go back downriver on the next available boat if that’s what you want, if that’s what your loyalty to Benskoten tells you to do. Or we can work together to unravel this thing. I don’t know where it will lead. Helping me may cost you your job, although I promise to do everything I can to protect your interests. It’s up to you.”

The only sound above the hum of mosquitoes was the gurgle of water against the side of the boat and the chuffing of the small engine that powered it.

“I will help.” Kiri Sembawa spoke firmly. “I think we should try to find out what happened.” He hung his head. “What happened beyond what Mrs. Colter told me.”

“Good!” Pine thrust out his hand. “I’m relieved to be able to tell you what I know. I have been retained by Kevin Colter’s brother to investigate the circumstances of his death. Back in the safe at the hotel are two letters written by Marie Colter to her sister-in-law. From them it is quite clear that her life at Benskoten Three with Colter was pure hell. It’s not all spelled out, but obviously her husband was drinking heavily, and apparently he was consorting with women from the native quarters. He was beating the workers, and it seems to me that this, combined with the abominable conditions suffered by the laborers, was of even greater concern to her than her own health and safety.”

“Yes,” said Sembawa. “Some of this she told me during our one meeting before she left Singapore. How bad it really was I learned during my trips to the plantation in the months that followed.”

“Then there’s every chance he might have been killed by a native, or one of the imported laborers — a Javanese, a Chinese, anyone. There would have been many with a motive.”

“They were the only white people on the plantation. All of the mandoers — foremen — are Sumatrans or Javanese. Oh, yes, and a couple of Batak foremen.”

“Batak?” Pine knocked the ash from his pipe into the river. “I read somewhere that they are the mountain people — cannibals, perhaps. Is that so?”

“No doubt they used to be. I know they will only work for a Batak foreman. Independent, you might say.”

When they arrived at Benskoten Three it was still daylight. From the dock Pine could see the kampong, a huddle of huts and shacklike buildings on stilts. In the filth beneath them children played in the shade. He wrinkled his nose over a stench he did not care to analyze.

“Some of what you smell comes from the drying sheds in the clearing behind those trees. Some of it comes from the bullock pens. And of course a lot of it is human. It helps keep the mosquitoes at a bearable level.”

Pine’s impression was one of unremitting squalor and he said so.

“Yes, it is bad. But it was much worse before Mrs. Colter. She did much while she was here. Once Mr. Van der Neer told me Mr. Colter returned some supplies — extra food and medicine, I think — that Mrs. Colter had ordered. He said Mr. Colter was trying to hold down expenses to show a good profit margin.”

Sembawa led the way upriver to a slight rise where the jungle had been cleared. There in a small fenced enclosure was a log cross. They stood a few moments in silence at Colter’s grave site.

They were walking back downriver toward the plantation manager’s cottage where they were to stay when Sembawa spoke again.

“Mrs. Colter gave me a rather large sum of money to be spent on screening, food, and medicine for the kampong before she returned to Holland. Over the past three years she has sent smaller sums, always with instructions not to reveal the source.”

Before they mounted the steps to the manager’s cottage Pine touched Sembawa’s arm.

“We are agreed that I am an investor?”

“An investor.” The response was soft, reflective in tone.

The manager, Keeling, was only as cordial as he had to be. He was short, thickset, and his hair was cropped close. He used little English. His Dutch was laden with low German derivatives. Pine was increasingly grateful for Sembawa’s presence since Keeling’s conversation was limited to an occasional grunt or belch between vast draughts of beer during supper. A bachelor, who arose before sunrise and lived only for the plantation work, he retired early after pointing out two cots on the screened porch.

Alex Pine sat on his cot and watched the most spectacular sunset he had ever seen.

During the following day it was not difficult to maintain the subterfuge of being a potential investor in Benskoten Rubber Company. Keeling ignored him. Pine was fascinated by his tour of the plantation, during which Sembawa pointed out a large stand of trees ruined by bark cancer — brown bast — from cutting too much and too deeply into the latex channel.

“That was done while Mr. Colter was in charge,” Sembawa said. “He was trying to increase production.”

They watched gangs of Chinese laborers clearing brush and trees for new plantings of hevea. Much of the planting was done among old growth with little more than token clearing by machete.

In the afternoon Pine asked to see the spot where Colter died.

“It was in one of the small cottages just north of the kampong. The native foremen live in them with their families.”

Kiri led the way. “Here,” he said, “this one. It’s empty. Usually one or two are unused. Since Mr. Colter died here, none of the foremen will use it.” He opened the door on the screened porch for Pine.

“Everything is quite the same as it was three years ago?”

“Exactly. Nothing has changed. You might think someone would have taken the gin bottle from the table, but people are afraid to come into the building.”

“Birds have nested here.” Pine pointed to the droppings on the floor and at the shreds of rusted screen around the porch. “Where was Colter’s body found?”

“Here.” Sembawa placed a hand on the back of a bamboo armchair, frightening a small rodent, which scurried from beneath the half-rotten and moldy cushion.

Pine nodded, then strolled slowly around the room, brushing away cobwebs, seeing as much with the tips of his sensitive fingers as with his eyes. He sniffed at the empty gin bottle without touching it, knowing as he did that the move was futile. His hands slid down the legs of the small round table. He looked at the underside of it, then gave the chair the same careful scrutiny. Always he was touching, touching. He seemed to have forgotten his companion.

On the third circuit of the perimeter of the room his fingers touched something just above head height at the juncture of the screen-door frame and the wall. He stopped. He blew away a dusty shred of cobweb. A shaft of the late-afternoon sun shone on his hand as the long sinewy fingers worked at the small protrusion. And then he held out his hand to Sembawa. In his palm lay a small object with a sharp point. “That lump on the end is a pith air stop. It’s a dart. Poisoned, I would guess,” he said.

He walked to the opposite side of the porch where he looked down to the ground, then turned and sighted along his outstretched arm.

Kiri Sembawa was impassive. The smile Pine expected to see on his face did not materialize.

“I did not think you would find anything. I looked several times, but I missed seeing it.” Sembawa walked over to the door and stood looking past the kampong, out over the river. He looked shriveled and shrunken, now less than shoulder height to the tall Englishman.

“You don’t seem pleased that I did.”

“I hoped you would not.” He turned. “Now I tell you something I prayed I would not have to tell you. I hoped you would go back to your man in London and say there is nothing, that his brother died like it was said — of a heart that failed from too much work, too much drink, too much heat, too much fever.” Sembawa paused, reluctant to continue.

“He died from being too much the kind of person he was,” Pine said. “That includes the things you said and a couple of others. It should surprise no one that a Batak he had beaten crept up to the cottage one dark night and popped him with a poisoned dart. There’s no lamp here but maybe the one on the table inside was lighted. That means the light would be dim here, accounting for him missing the first time on such short range.”

“I don’t think that happened.”

“Kiri, there’s no need to make trouble for any of your people here. Colter s dead. I know of no one who wished him back. Going out without an apparent mark on him from some kind of substance that stopped his heart seems better than he deserved.”

“I don’t think a Batak killed him, or a Sumatran, or a Javanese or Chinese. I think Mrs. Colter killed him.”

“Granted she had reason. I was half trying to find a way to determine if she slipped something into his drink. I think now there’s no need to pursue that line of thought.” Pine took his notebook from his pocket and inserted the dart between the leaves.

“Are you returning directly to London from here, to report to your Jason Colter?”

“No. I’m going to Holland first to see Mrs. Colter.”

“Then I must say what I must say and perhaps it will change your mind. But first I must apologize even as you did on the boat. I did not tell you everything. I saw Mrs. Colter just once, in a room in the same hotel where you are staying. Mr. Van der Neer sent me there to pick up the money I told you she gave me for supplies for the plantation. When she asked me into her suite I could see she had all her belongings in a corner of the room, ready to be taken to the ship for her return to Holland.” He seemed to lose his continuity of thought. After a while he said, “She was a lovely lady.”

“That’s all?” Pine said.

“Among her bags and boxes of things in the corner was a long tube. It was a blowgun.”

A lovely lady. Alex Pine agreed. In Mrs. Jason Colter’s living room he had seen a photograph of Kevin and Marie Colter. Marie’s was the bright-eyed, cream-skinned, blonde beauty of the Nordic. He remembered the firm stance of her figure, the hint of the kind of strength that will do what must be done, that endures.

Now he knew why Jason Colter had sent him here. The man surely had read those anguished letters, in spite of his wife assuming he had not. And it had taken him three years to get his business affairs to the point where he could take maximum advantage of his suspicions — suspicions that were uncannily correct.

On their way back down to the river both were silent. They stood a while on the dock watching two elderly men fishing. Small clusters of insects danced above the water in the rays of sunlight shafting through the trees. After a while they sat on pilings a little distance from the fishermen. Pine filled his pipe, holding the match a time before addressing it to the tobacco, his attention diverted by a strikingly attractive girl who had come down from the kampong and walked out on the dock to talk to one of the fishermen.

She was dark and lissome, and as she leaned over to talk to the old man something on a chain around her neck swung out from between her breasts. It flashed in the sunlight.

“That is Kusu,” said Sembawa.

“She’s beautiful,” murmured Pine, firing another match with his thumbnail. When the girl walked past them, she smiled shyly at Kiri. Although she couldn’t have been more than sixteen, the full-bodied grace of womanhood was in her stride.

They watched until she disappeared into one of the huts in the kampong. He started to ask Sembawa a question, changed his mind, then turned his attention to the pipe, which he relighted.

They left Benskoten Three just before noon on the following day and returned to Singapore.

It was several days before Pine could find passage to Holland. Singapore, with all its attractions, had begun to pall, and he missed London.

He had no plan for handling his meeting with Marie Colter. During the long sea trip he reread her letters with a growing feeling of intrusion. Referring to his notes did not improve his mood. When he began to dislike himself thoroughly, he put the matter out of his mind.

The brief letter he sent her the morning following his arrival in Rotterdam was carried by a messenger, who brought back an affirmative reply.

On the following morning Pine rented a bicycle and pedaled the six miles from Rotterdam to a pleasant brick home on the outskirts of Schiedam on the road to Vlaardingen. It was sunny and warm, and he enjoyed the exercise.

A maid answered his summons at the door. The bell control intrigued Pine with its brass chain and ring that hung down from a brass tube through the door jamb and activated a chime within. He regretted that the plump young woman in the pink apron chose to lead him around rather than through the house, thus depriving him of an opportunity to see the interior mechanics of the device.

Marie Colter was in a back arbor arranging flowers. She came out to meet him, her hand extended.

“Forgive me for meeting you here. Katje should have taken you into the house and called me.”

“No, no. It’s too lovely a day to be inside.” Pine returned the smile that lighted the woman’s face. The white of her even teeth against her tanned face, her blonde hair slightly askew and gently riffled by a breeze, moved Pine in a way he was not prepared for — in spite of having seen her picture.

“Shall we sit here?” She motioned toward a small bench beneath the arbor.

Pine sat. He had had weeks to prepare for this moment but now that it was upon him he felt like a tongue-tied schoolboy. He studied her face intently, in a manner unconsciously developed over eleven years of investigative work. “I don’t know why you carry matches for that pipe,” his friend Fletcher of Scotland Yard had once said to him. “You could ignite it with a burning glance.”

Marie Colter’s hazel eyes met his without flinching. In them he saw a pain that abided.

She helped him. “I know why you’re here,” she said.

“You do?” He waited. Then: “Of course, your sister-in-law. Do you mind telling me what she wrote to you?”

“She only said you were coming because Jason wanted you to ask me something about my husband’s death. I have told everything.” She bit her lip. “I told him in a letter that went with the report sent to him by the Benskoten Rubber Company. But what now, after nearly three years? Helen seemed nervous in her letter.”

Pine thrust his hands into his pockets searching for the familiar reassurance of his pipe. He had forgotten it. It was on the bedside table in the hotel in Rotterdam.

“I am frightened too.” Her voice was a whisper.

“Do you know I have been to Sumatra, to Benskoten Three?”

She tried to speak but could not get the words loose from the roof of her mouth. She shook her head no. “I feel that you know much.” She pressed her hands into her lap to keep them from trembling.

“I know much, but not all. I can guess at some. I’m here to try to learn what is hidden, not to judge you. I haven’t decided what to tell Jason. Before I left London I spent nearly three days learning things about him that would set his sainted mother spinning in her grave — if that’s where she is and if sainted is the word.”

“Do you think I murdered my husband?”

“I think there are things that might indicate you did — motivation, opportunity, perhaps even a witness.”

“I did kill him, but I didn’t mean to. It was an accident. Kevin was so hard on those poor people. I could have stood nearly anything except the sadistic way he used the plantation workers.”

She clasped and unclasped her green-stained fingers. “We had a terrible argument one evening about my going into the kampong where I tried to help care for the sick and aid the women giving birth — that sort of thing. He had been drinking, as he always did, only this time he beat me. He was a big man and it’s a wonder he didn’t kill me. He left the cottage to meet a girl, he told me. I had begun to have horrifying nightmares, and that night, around eleven, I awoke screaming.

“I remembered the blowpipe and darts given to me by a Batak father whose fever-stricken son I had cared for and given medicine to. He had taught me to use the pipe, just as an amusement. I had become quite adept. I decided to go down to the empty cottage where Kevin met his women. I got the blowgun and some darts from a storage room off the kitchen.”

“The darts, Mrs. Colter. Tell me about the darts.”

“They had no poison on them — I swear they were harmless. The Batak man told me there was no danger without the poison. I crept up to the cottage. There was a lamp burning inside with enough light shining on the porch for me to see. He — there was a girl there, Kusu, a very young girl I knew from the kampong. Mr. Pine, how can I tell you? She was not more than thirteen, a child. I don’t know why he didn’t take her inside, off the porch. He was in the chair. His back was toward me. I only wanted to frighten him, to make him realize that if he continued in his abuse of all of us his life was in danger.”

She held out her forefinger to show how she had enlarged a small hole in the screen and inserted the blowgun. “I don’t see how I could have missed, but I blew a second dart at him because I was sure the first missed. Then I ran.”

The two of them sat for a while, Pine listening to the birds in the trees at the back of the garden, Marie Colter hunched up and pale beneath her tan.

“I think that’s the one thing I miss most when I’m at sea,” Pine said, “the sound of birdsong. I didn’t realize it until just now.”

“I only wanted to frighten him,” she whispered.

“The darts and pipe — do you still have them?”

“No. I brought them home as a kind of souvenir, but they haunted me so that I burned them. But before I did I had a chemist in Rotterdam check the darts for poison. He said there wasn’t a trace. I think someone may have exchanged poisoned darts for the harmless ones I had.”

“And switched them again in the confusion afterward? Did anyone know where you kept them?”

“The houseboy, a gardener — both natives. My husband treated both of them worse than animals. But there were others. Kusu was not the first young girl from that family that he—”

Pine studied her face, now wet with the tears of released tension.

“For three years — you have been tormented by the idea that you killed your husband.”

“What difference is it really?” She looked up at him. “Nothing changes the fact that I killed him. Even knowing I did not intend to or want to doesn’t lessen it for me.”

“And what if I tell you that you did not kill him, hot even accidentally, that he died precisely the way you told the Benskoten office in Singapore and just the way you wrote to the Colters in London, that he died from drinking and fever and heat and wenching, that he did in fact die from a heart attack? It happens, even at his age.”

“Would to God I could believe that.”

“You can, Mrs. Colter, you can.” He put his hand on her arm. “I searched the porch of that cottage with great care. I found two darts stuck in the wall opposite where your husband was sitting. Both of your shots missed.”

Pine got up to leave. “Of course, I could be wrong,” he said. “It is possible that someone else came by after you ran back to the cottage and did what you failed to do — hit the target.”

“Then I did not kill him? You are certain?”

“Not a chance. Unless you haven’t told me the truth about how many darts you used.”

“Two!” She half shouted it. “Two only — and you found them! What can I say to thank you for lifting me up from this pit?”

“There is no need to. I am rewarded by the sight of the relief on your face.”

He declined to stay for lunch, but was ravenous by the time he had pedaled back to the hotel. While he ate, he wrote a carefully composed letter to Kiri Sembawa.

The ship from Rotterdam to London was well out into the channel chop, pointed toward the mouth of the Thames. Alex Pine stood alone at the lee rail watching the wind feather the tops of the waves into the white spoondrift. He felt inside his jacket for his notebook and took out a slip of paper that had the name and address of a Singapore laboratory printed at the top. He read it again.

He tore the paper into small pieces that the wind carried away. Then he opened the notebook and let a single innocent-looking dart flutter down to the water. He watched until a wave rolled over and engulfed it.