Dead in the Dog

TWELVE

That Monday turned out to be an eventful day in BMH Tanah Timah, even apart from the colonel’s worsening mania. Lunch in the Officers’ Mess was brought to an abrupt end by the almost simultaneous ringing of telephones and the clatter of an approaching helicopter. Grabbing their caps and belts, the medical staff reached the landing pad just as a three-ton Bedford ambulance lumbered up the perimeter road to disgorge half a dozen medical orderlies. The RSM was with them and told the reception party of doctors and QA sisters, that the casualties were coming from an ambush and a firefight up near Grik, towards the border with Thailand. Tom recalled seeing the long convoy of vehicles leaving the garrison several days earlier and assumed that this incident was the result of the new operation to attack the CTs in that area.

As soon as the Westland Whirlwind dropped from the sky on to the whitewashed circle on the ground, the orderlies ran forward to pull out three stretchers while the rotor blades were still whirring over their heads. Peter Bright and Eddie Rosen hurried to make a quick examination of the wounded men and then motioned for them to be loaded into the first ambulance as it backed up nearer the helicopter. Three other ‘walking wounded’ clambered to the ground, two with arms supported in bloodstained slings, the other with a bandage around his chest. All were wearing jungle kit, with green lace-up boots and floppy wide-brimmed hats. They were helped solicitously into the large box-like ambulance, as the flight crew handed out their weapons to the RSM, who carefully checked their safety state before sending them to the arms kote. Before the senior surgeon clambered aboard the Bedford himself, he called out to the pathologist.

‘Looks as if we’ll need blood pretty soon, Tom. Can you get cracking on that?’

As the big ambulance lurched over the monsoon drain to get back on to the perimeter road, the pathologist hurried down to the laboratory, feeling for the first time that he really was in the army, rather than on a long tropical holiday.

As he marched off down the corridor, he could hear the whine of the helicopter rise to a higher pitch as it rose off the pad and curved away to go back to the battle area.

He could do nothing until the surgical team sent up samples for blood grouping, but he put his technicians on alert so that they could get all the kit ready. As soon as he had the groupings, he could check them against his prisoner list, then get some eager donors brought over to the transfusion basha.

The rest of the afternoon and early evening went in a flurry of activity, as the X-ray department and the operating theatre worked efficiently to deal with the wounds, dealing with fractures, digging out bullets and even screws and nails, as the terrorists, short of proper rifles and ammunition, had home-made weapons that fired these random metal fragments.

Six of Tom’s prisoners came willingly from the MCE to exchange pints of their blood for about the same volume of Tiger beer. He bled them straight from arm veins into bottles as they lay on bed frames in the palm-leafed hut, red-capped MPs standing at the entrance, glowering suspiciously at their charges who they considered had found yet another way to ‘swing the lead’.

By dinner time that evening, things had settled down and though Peter Bright, David Meredith and Eddie Rosen were still down in the wards checking the post-operative condition of the injured men, the rest of the residents were able to eat in comparative peace. Afterwards, over coffee in the anteroom, they had at least had something fresh to talk about, other than the murder of Jimmy Robertson.

Speculation was rife as to whether this latest operation by the Brigade had rooted out any CTs. The answer to this soon came in an unusual way, as Alf Morris was called away by Number One to answer the phone. When he came back, he dropped heavily back into his chair and turned to Tom.

‘That was the CO on the phone. A nice little trip for you tomorrow, Tom!’

The pathologist’s stolid face looked suspiciously at Alf.

‘I thought we were all doing physical jerks on the car park at half six?’ he grunted.

The Admin Officer grinned mischievously as he looked around the room. ‘I’ve got good news for you, chaps! The colonel, in that inimitable way he has of changing his mind, has decided to call off his scheme for getting you fit! Apart from this communal run up Maxwell Hill on Friday!’

There were cries of relief all round, but Tom still waited for Alf’s ominous message about the next day.

‘The CO has had a request from Brigade for the services of a pathologist to carry out post-mortems on three CTs who were killed in this operation up near Grik. Your predecessor was called out a couple of times for the same thing.’

Tom stared at Alf Morris, wondering if this was a wind-up, or another delusion on the part of their commanding officer.

‘What the hell for? Are they bringing the bodies down here?’ he asked incredulously.

The older man shook his head. ‘You’re going up there, lad! Flying out at eight in the morning, so take your knives with you.’

At the crack of dawn, Tom Howden was in his laboratory, where Cropper filled a haversack with the antique dissection kit, several pairs of rubber gloves, a clipboard and paper, a couple of big sack needles and a ball of twine. Tom had his little Voigtlander 35mm camera in his pocket and his heart in his mouth as half an hour later, a Land Rover dropped him at the grass airstrip behind the garrison compound and he saw the plane that was to take him into the unknown. The little Auster looked to him like a camouflaged Austin Seven with wings and, with some trepidation, he lugged his haversack across to the aircraft, where the Army Air Corps pilot was leaning against the fabric fuselage, complete with leather flying helmet like some latter-day Biggles.

After a laconic greeting, the pilot opened a door, dumped Tom’s bag into the fuselage, then squeezed the pathologist into the single backward-facing seat behind the driver’s position. He strapped him in, gave him a pair of large headphones and then climbed in himself. A moment later, there was a judder as the engine started and the plane began bumping across the rough grass of the old tin tailings. Through the perspex canopy over the back of the cockpit, Tom stared out in horrified fascination at the fragile tailplane as the rudder wagged as they turned upwind. The whole contraption appeared to be made of cloth, reminding him of the balsa and tissue-paper models he made as a boy. The tail rose, the bumping suddenly stopped and Tom realized that they were already off the ground. As they climbed and banked, he looked down at the garrison, the hospital and the little town of Tanah Timah, amazed that this machine was actually flying.

Soon he began to enjoy himself, in spite of the fact that the back of his head was touching the muzzle of an automatic rifle strapped behind the pilot’s seat — reminding him that this was part of a war, not a joyride.

Looking down again, he saw the road going past The Dog and within the regular pattern of rubber plantations he could make out the bungalows of the Gunong Besar estate, where James Robertson had lived. With a return of his feelings of unreality, he realized that within weeks of leaving Gateshead, he had performed an autopsy on a shot murder victim and was now on his way to repeat the performance on three communist terrorists. When he had arrived in Malaya, he was inclined to think that ‘terrorists’ was a pejorative imperialist title for freedom fighters, until he heard descriptions of the sadistic atrocities that Chin Peng’s men had inflicted on uncooperative countrymen and women in the villages.

Alf Morris had explained the previous evening that the War Office wanted information on the killing power of the Belgian-designed FN rifle that had been adopted by NATO and detailed reports on all fatal injuries inflicted by it were to be collected wherever possible, hence his present mission.

They flew over endless rubber and oil palm estates, rice paddies and dense jungle as they went north, Tom taking some photos to amaze his folks back home in Gateshead. All too soon, the fifty-minute flight came to an end, as the Auster glided in to land on another strip of grass alongside a narrow road. On one side was yet more rubber, on the other virgin jungle. A few tents were set up as a temporary camp at one end of the airstrip, where a collection of military vehicles was standing.

An infantry captain in jungle gear came up as Tom was hauling himself out of the cramped seat and helped him with the heavy haversack.

‘Just in time, doc,’ he said cheerfully. ‘They’re about to bring the bastards out of the ulu down there.’ As he waved a hand down the straight road, a corporal crouched over a radio pack called out to him.

‘They say they can see the edge of the trees, sir. Be with us in a few minutes.’

The West Berkshires officer gave a shrill blast on a whistle and beckoned to a group of squaddies waiting around a Ferret armoured scout car, a TCV and a pair of Land Rovers. As the men jogged towards them, the captain began striding down the road. ‘Come on, doc, duty calls!’

Tom slung his bag over his shoulder and sweating like a bull in the cloying heat, followed the men for a few hundred yards, until a soldier suddenly appeared through the lalang grass, holding up his rifle and pointing back into the trees.

A few moments later, a strange procession appeared out of the forest, which confirmed Tom’s impression that he was in a time-warp created by Somerset Maugham or some Edwardian writing about the last days of the British Raj. Some British and Gurkha soldiers appeared, followed by two Malay Regiment men carrying a long bamboo pole on their shoulders. From this hung a corpse, suspended by ropes tied around ankles and wrists. Tom had seen old photos of tigers being retrieved like this, after being slaughtered by some pith-helmeted colonial general, but he never expected to see the method used for humans.

As the two bearers thankfully dropped their burden on the wide verge at the edge of the road, two similar convoys came out of the jungle, this time carried by a pair of West Berkshires and another two locally enlisted Malay privates.

‘Right, doctor, they’re all yours,’ announced the cheerful young captain, as the troops set about untying the corpses from the poles. ‘Let’s know when you’re through, so I can send a few lads down with shovels.’

The men from the patrol went wearily up to the tents for food and rest, while the fresher men from the vehicles stood around to watch Tom do his stuff. The three bodies, dressed in ragged bloodstained clothing, were laid out a few feet apart and he began by taking photographs of them, which seemed a sensible thing to do, as he had no orders as how to proceed. Two of the corpses were men, the other a young woman, though it was hard to tell, as her head seemed to have been exploded from the inside.

‘Were they all shot with FNs?’ he asked the captain.

‘Two of them, doc. The other was traversed with a Bren.’

Tom set out his meagre equipment, the old box of instruments giving rise to a chatter of interest amongst the watchers. Pulling on a pair of gloves, he asked the officer if someone could jot down a few notes and the captain gave the clipboard to his sergeant. Squatting uncomfortably on his heels, Tom began his examination by pulling aside the soaked, tattered shirt of the first man, a young Chinese with blood dribbling from his mouth. There were two bullet entrance wounds on his chest and a large exit wound on his back.

After opening the thorax with one of Cropper’s ferocious knives, Tom dictated a short account of the chaos within the chest cavity and the destruction of the spine, rather similar to the injury to James Robertson. However, unlike the planter, there were no bullets inside the body, the high velocity of the FN having whistled them right through to lie somewhere out there in the deep jungle.

He had a cursory look at the other main organs, mainly out of interest, in case the privations of living for years on poor rations and with rampant infectious diseases and parasites, might have left some mark. He found nothing significant and went on to look at the second man.

This was a different situation altogether, as there was a line of eight bullet entrance rounds running diagonally across his chest and abdomen, as his life was blasted away by a moving hail of bullets from a Bren gun. One of the bullets was still in the body, one lodged under the skin of the back where it had run out of momentum after passing through a vertebra.

‘That will be a three-oh-three, doc,’ commented the helpful young captain. ‘We’ve still got some of the old Brens, before they changed the barrels to fire the NATO seven-point-sixes.’

Again, Tom was chillingly reminded of James Robertson, whose spine had arrested a similar.303 projectile.

The woman, though facially utterly unrecognizable, appeared from her shape and smooth skin to be young, perhaps even a teenager. After trying to roughly replace the exploded tissues of the head, he found that the single entrance wound appeared to be in the left ear, the projectile from the FN having gone down the canal until it struck the mass of dense bone in the base of the skull. The sudden transfer of kinetic energy had been more like a bomb than a bullet, but at least she could not have known anything about it, thought Tom, in an effort to find some consolation in the midst of this carnage. Even the soldiers standing around seemed muted, with none of the usual ribald humour that was commonly used to compensate for these grim situations.

He used the rest of his film in taking close-up pictures of all the injuries, then did his best to restore some dignity to the desecrated corpses which lay naked on the side of the road. He sewed up the fronts of the bodies, using the twine and needles that Lewis Cropper had provided. There was little he could do to restore the girl’s head, but as a gesture, he bound it together in several layers of clothing ripped from the men’s shirts.

A couple of West Berkshires had brought entrenching tools down from the three-tonner and set about digging a shallow grave in the soft, damp soil of the verge. The three corpses were lowered into it, side by side and as the men shovelled the red soil back into the hole, Tom could not help comparing this with the recent funeral of Jimmy Robertson, where a robed priest and floral tributes had marked his passing. He had seen pet dogs buried with more ceremony than this and realized yet again that war was a cruel, callous business.

Taking his notes from the officer, he walked in a subdued mood back to the tents for a promised cup of tea, before climbing aboard the Auster for the flight back to Tanah Timah.

Steven Blackwell was a worried man as he sat in his office in the police station. Another two days had passed without any progress in the Robertson investigation and as well as having had another nagging call from his Commissioner in Kuala Lumpur, he was concerned about a rumour that had filtered through to him from the garrison. Though he did not actually have any spies inside the military establishment, he knew so many people there that it was inevitable that gossip percolated down to him, not only at the bar of The Dog, but from Inspector Tan and other police officers, who were in daily contact with civilian servants and clerks working for the army. The current gossip concerned the Commanding Officer of the hospital there, purveying suggestions varying from the fact that the colonel had gone raving mad to the milder eccentricity of stalking the compound at night with a loaded pistol.

Steven had gone so far as to corner the hospital’s Admin Officer at the club the previous evening and ask him whether there was any problem with Desmond O’Neill. Major Morris was reluctant to say much, both because of his traditional loyalty to a superior officer and the plain fact that military secrets, if this could be called one, could not be divulged to civilians, even to the police, without very good legal reasons.

‘The old man is just his usual bloody-minded self, Steven,’ he countered evasively, before relating the strange business of the aborted physical exercise demand. The policeman suspected that Morris was keeping something back out of loyalty and discretion and he admired him for that, but sensed that there was more going on in BMH than just their commandant’s persecution of his medical officers.

‘Alf, you know I can’t exclude anyone from my investigations and that includes O’Neill. In fact, he’s got no satisfactory explanation for where he was at the time of the shooting. If there’s anything you think you should tell me that’s relevant to my enquiries, I should know about it.’

The Admin Officer looked uncomfortable at this.

‘Steve, it’s very difficult for me to talk about this. It’s an internal matter and I’m sure it has nothing to do with your investigation.’

The superintendent sighed at Morris’s unconvincing tone.

‘Look, I realize your problem, but if you want to keep in the clear, why not have a word with the legal bloke in Brigade and pass the buck to him?’

They were sitting at a corner table in the lounge of The Dog, almost deserted at this early part of the evening. Alf Morris gave an almost furtive look around, then leaned towards Blackwell.

‘The CO is acting more oddly than usual, but maybe that’s due to end-of-tour blues. He’s due to go home in about seven weeks’ time. The thing is, some of his dottiness seems to centre around the armoury. He’s always been obsessed with security there, but recently he’s suddenly posted two Malay Other Ranks out of the unit with no real reason. Both have been on night duty at the arms kote.’

Steven frowned, trying to make sense of this.

‘Why should that worry you?’ Then the possible relevance suddenly struck him. ‘Are any weapons missing?’ he hissed.

He relaxed a little when the other man shook his head.

‘No, I went up there today and checked through the record book. But the odd thing is that the colonel had withdrawn a rifle a couple of weeks ago — and returned it last Friday!’

Blackwell stared intently at Morris. ‘Can he do that? What the hell for?’

Morris shrugged. ‘He’s quite entitled to draw a weapon, if he wants. After all, he’s the Commanding Officer of the unit, so who’s going to query it? Maybe he wanted to practice his marksmanship on the garrison range. We are on active service, even though we’re a medical unit. All the MOs have to put in target practice at the Depot when they first join, God help us for their uselessness at it!’

As a former non-medical Regimental Sergeant Major, he couldn’t resist a dig at the doctors’ lack of military skills.

The policeman took up his beer glass with rather nervous fingers. ‘Alf, you realize that the period when he took the gun out, covers the date of Jimmy Robertson’s killing.’

Morris nodded. ‘It had occurred to me. But it’s ridiculous to think that O’Neill could have anything to do with that. Anyway, the previous shoot-up at Gunon Besar was outside the time when he had the rifle.’

Blackwell shook his head. ‘But those shots came from a different weapon. Had he taken out another gun previously?’

‘No, there’s nothing in the book,’ replied Alf, rather abruptly. He was becoming uneasy about this line of questioning

‘He could have badgered some little MOR to let him take one out without signing the book,’ suggested Steven. ‘Perhaps that’s why he posted the fellows away, so that they couldn’t be questioned.’

‘Oh come on, Steve! This is verging on the fantastic. Where would he get the ammunition from? There’s no record of any being issued with the rifle.’

The superintendent was unimpressed with this argument.

‘There’s plenty of spare clips knocking around the garrison, you know that as well as I do. And O’Neill was posted here from Korea, that place was awash with buckshee weapons and ammo.’

Alf Morris stared into his glass of Tiger, worried by the way things were going. ‘What are you going to do about it? I shouldn’t have told you, really, without authorization from a more senior officer — and my immediate superior is the colonel himself.’

Steven ran a hand over his tender sunburnt scalp. ‘Can you identify the actual rifle that he took out?’

Morris nodded. ‘The serial numbers are recorded in the armoury book.’

‘Then I must have a test-fired bullet from it to send to the laboratory in KL to compare with the one Tom Howden dug out of Jimmy. Can you arrange that on the quiet? If it doesn’t match, then no one will be any the wiser, but we can breath more easily again.’

Reluctantly, Morris agreed. ‘It will have be done within the garrison, no way can I let a weapon go outside without the Brigadier’s consent — and that would lead to a lot of awkward questions, especially as he’s one of our colonel’s cronies.’

Blackwell swallowed the rest of his beer and reached for his black uniform cap on the nearly chair. ‘Thanks, Alf. If I don’t make some progress soon, my senior officers are going to crap on me from a great height. It might come to test-firing all the weapons in the BMH arms kote, so doing one early might be a start.’

‘Did you get any results from the guns the planters had?’ Morris asked, as he rose to his feet with the policeman.

‘Just had the results from KL. None of the rifles that came from Gunong Besar or Les Arnold’s place up the road matched any of the bullets that were fired at the bungalows or the one that killed poor Jimmy.’

That rather prickly conversation had taken place the previous evening and now Steven Blackwell was in a dilemma as to how to proceed. Given the hostile attitude of Desmond O’Neill, he could hardly ask the colonel whether he had shot the Gunong Besar planter. Frustratingly, all he could do was to wait until Alf Morris had produced the promised bullet from a test-firing, presumably made by an armourer from the garrison. At least this would not give rise to any connection with the CO of the hospital, as it was common knowledge that a variety of weapons were likely to be examined for exclusion purposes.

As he had told Morris the previous evening, the barrel striations on the bullets fired through the rifles borrowed from Douglas Mackay, Les Arnold and even the one belonging to James Robertson, showed that none had been used in either incident at or near Gunong Besar.

As he sat sweating under the rotating overhead fan, Steven’s mind reverted to the other suspects, if such unlikely candidates could be thought of as such. He was convinced that a woman was at the bottom of this crime, as he could not bring himself to believe that any other motive was credible. There was no possible financial reason why Jimmy should have been shot — Doug Mackay would not benefit from Robertson’s death. Indeed, he stood to lose his job and bungalow if Gunong Besar was sold up. Perhaps Les Arnold might have a slight motive, if he wanted to add that estate to his own holdings up at Batu Merah, but it seemed unlikely that he would devise such an elaborate scheme just to get hold of extra land. With any terrorist involvement ruled out, as it must be given the dumping of Jimmy’s body outside The Dog, then some motive related to passion, sex or jealousy must surely be the answer.

His train of thought was interrupted by one of the Indian civil employees coming in with a tray containing his eleven o’clock grapefruit soda to wash down a Paludrine tablet, his daily defence against malaria. Behind him came Inspector Tan, with some statements about a recent serious wounding in a kampong a few miles away. Steven motioned to him to sit down on the other side of the desk. He had not told him of the business with Colonel O’Neill and the armoury as, if it was a total red-herring, the fewer people who knew about it, the better.

‘Tan, where do we go from here, eh?’ he began, wanting to see if the highly intelligent inspector had any new thoughts to offer about the impasse in which they found themselves. ‘Do you feel that it is at all possible that our culprit is from the hospital?’

The smooth-faced officer sat primly in his chair opposite his chief. ‘Anything is possible, sir. Who of us can ever tell what emotions are seething beneath the surface of any of our fellow men?’

Steven had a fleeting impression that he was listening to some saying of Confucius, but Tan soon became less philosophical and more practical.

‘Sir, we have the surgeon gentleman, Major Bright, who it seems is very enamoured with Mrs Diane. I came to learn that he would very much have liked her to divorce her husband so that they could marry — and time was running out, as he is soon due to return to England. That could be a motive for him to rid himself of Mr Robertson. He has no firm alibi for the time of the shooting.’

‘So he’s a favourite of yours for the killing?’

Tan gave a slight lift of the shoulders, his face remaining impassive. ‘It seems unlikely, but it is a possibility. Perhaps a better one than for his colleague, Captain Meredith, the anaesthetist. He too had a motive in that Mr Robertson appears to have captured the affections of one of the nursing sisters, who the captain had considered his own lady friend. But that seems a much weaker motivation than the first.’

Trust his inspector to lay out the facts in such a clear, if dispassionate way, thought Blackwell.

‘Any other suspects appeal to you, Tan?’ he asked.

‘I understand that the Commanding Officer has been acting somewhat strangely,’ replied Tan, again surprising his boss with his grasp of the local gossip from BMH. ‘Recently, he also seems to be unusually attentive to Mrs Robertson, though I fail to see the relevance of that.’

The Chinese officer paused for a moment. ‘Those are the military candidates, sir. But of course, there are the civilians, the planters. Mr Arnold has a rather dubious past, including using a gun to wound someone in Australia, but I see little motivation for shooting Mr Robertson. I have heard that he has expressed open admiration for Mrs Diane, but I doubt that he wanted to remove her husband in order to marry her.’

‘What about the Mackays?’ asked Steven, curious to hear what his inspector’s analytical mind felt about them.

‘From my interviews with them when I took statements, I felt that there was some unhappiness between them. I heard rumours from elsewhere that it was possible that Mr Robertson had carried on some adulterous relationship with Mrs Mackay, but that seemed in the past. I cannot believe that it would be in the best interests of Mr Mackay to kill his employer, unless he was consumed by an excess of outraged jealousy.’

Steven was secretly amused by Tan’s rather pedantic and prim phraseology, probably culled from classic English novels, but he appreciated his clear overview of the situation, which confirmed his own feelings.

He placed his Paludrine tablet on his tongue and washed it down with the fizzy grey juice.

‘We’ll just have to wait and see what happens next, I’m afraid,’ he said to his inspector, reaching across for the reports on the local assault.

They had not long to wait.