Dead in the Dog

THIRTEEN

The next couple of days seemed relatively placid in BMH Tanah Timah, though various things were going on under the surface. Major Morris went discreetly to the arms kote and identified the rifle that his commanding officer had taken out. Through his many contacts in the garrison, he arranged to have it test fired over there, taking it personally in his car to one of the Brigade armourers. He brought it back almost immediately, together with the spent bullet and took the latter over to Steven Blackwell, to be sent down on the night train to the forensic laboratory in KL. He knew he was taking a chance over this, as if the colonel ever learnt of it — assuming that he did not eventually turn out to be the guilty party — then he was likely to face a court martial and the end of his career and pension.

Desmond O’Neill was also unaware of another matter concerning himself, as Major Martin, the senior physician, had had a covert telephone conversation with a friend and colleague in BMH Singapore, another major who was the Command Psychiatrist. After hearing what Martin had to say, he promised to come up to Tanah Timah the following week, in the guise of one of his routine visits to the physicians in the other four military hospitals.

The more junior medical staff, including Tom Howden, knew nothing of these machinations. The pathologist was quite content to get on with running the laboratory, the novelty of having his own place for the first time keeping him as happy as a sandboy. He spent half a day writing up a full report of his examinations of the shot terrorists. The film he had exposed up near Grik was developed by the photographic unit in the garrison and he was glad to see that his amateur efforts had resulted in clear, if horrific, pictures. These were duly sent down in the official mail to GHQ in Singapore and presumably would eventually find their way to the War Office and their gun experts in Woolwich. He carefully excluded the aerial shots he had taken from the Auster, which he airmailed home to his parents, to be shown around the rest of the family and neighbours to proudly demonstrate how their young Tommy was fighting to keep back the Communist hordes!

On Friday, after a nine-o’clock cup of pale fluid which his corporal alleged was Nescafe, he was at his microscope studying the first batch of blood films, two of which his technician Embi bin Sharif said were positive for malaria. In the middle of this peaceful exercise, he heard a sudden clatter of ammunition boots on the concrete floor of the main laboratory and a moment later the blond head of Sergeant Oates appeared around his door.

‘Sorry to disturb you, sir, but a guardroom runner is here with a message for you to go down to Major Morris’s office at once. He says it’s really urgent.’

The pathologist grabbed his cap and hurried after the runner, who had no idea what the panic was about. When he reached Alf’s office, he found Steven Blackwell sitting in front of the Admin Officer’s desk, both men looking extremely grim.

‘I didn’t use the phone, Tom, you never know who’s listening on that switchboard. This is a very sensitive issue.’

Howden wondered if the colonel had gone completely berserk or perhaps the Third World War had started, but Alf rapidly explained, speaking quietly as the slatted shutters offered little privacy on the front verandah of the hospital.

‘The superintendent here has been told that two bodies have been found up at Gunong Busar this morning. He thought it would be as well if a doctor went up there with him and you seem the obvious choice, as there isn’t a civvy doctor nearer than Sungei Siput.’

Tom looked at the superintendent. ‘Two more dead? Who are they?’

‘I only have third-hand information, but I’m afraid it seems likely that they are Mr and Mrs Mackay. I had a phone call from Les Arnold, who was phoned by the Robertson’s head servant. Les was going down there straight away, but he rang me first.’

‘Better get going, Tom,’ said Morris. ‘The police Land Rover is waiting outside.’

‘What about the colonel?’ asked Tom warily. ‘Has he given it the OK?’ He recalled the fuss that O’Neill had made when Jimmy Robertson’s body was brought in to ‘his’ hospital.

‘He’s not here, he was summoned down to Kinrara for some meeting, thank God!’

‘You’re not coming with us?’

Alf shook his head. ‘I’ve got to mind the shop, when the CO’s away. And anyway, it’s not Army business, this. You happen to be the only doctor around here used to seeing corpses! Now be off with you.’

Tom climbed into the back of the blue police vehicle and they shot off, the Malay constable who was driving being obviously delighted to have an emergency as an excuse for putting his accelerator foot flat on the floor.

As they zoomed out into the road and accelerated past the garrison gates, Steven half turned from the front seat.

‘I know no more about this than you heard from Alf. I suppose the servant in Gunong Besar rang Les Arnold as he was the nearest. All Les knew was that for a change, this time it was not a shooting.’

The Land Rover turned up past The Dog on to the laterite road to Kampong Kerbau and within a few minutes was roaring up the steep entrance drive to the Robertson’s bungalow. As the driver skidded to a halt on the gravel, Steven half expected to see Diane leaning over the balcony holding a glass of gin and a cigarette. But she was gone, staying at the best hotel in Penang until the coroner’s inquest was held on her late husband — and until the arrival of the next Blue Funnel ship bound for Britain.

When they clambered out, Tom saw a battered ex-US army jeep parked at the bottom of the steps. He knew this belonged to Les Arnold, but there was no sign of the Australian. The superintendent made to climb up to the verandah, but a Chinese girl appeared above him, with a Tamil woman hovering anxiously behind her. The amah pointed away to the other bungalow, just visible behind the trees and bushes.

‘Siva took Mister Arnold down there, sir!’ she cried.

Steven raised his swagger stick in acknowledgement and with Tom and the driver in tow, hurried between exotically flowered bushes to the driveway of the Mackay bungalow.

Here they found the Australian sitting on the steps up to the house, smoking a cigarette while waiting for them to arrive. He stood as they came near, dressed in khaki shirt and shorts, with a wide canvas bush hat on his head. His usual laconic, sarcastic manner was missing and his long face was solemn.

‘Bad business, this. The damn place must be cursed!’

A few paces away stood Siva, the senior servant in the Robertson household and Arnold waved a hand towards him.

‘The boy here phoned me less than an hour ago — just before I rang you, Steve,’ he said. ‘So I came down here bloody quick to see what was up.’

‘And what was up, Les?’ demanded Blackwell.

‘Come and see for yourself — under here, first of all.’

He loped away down the slope which ran around the further side of the bungalow. The house was built up on a number of brick columns which, due to the uneven slope of the ground, were higher on the end further away from the Robertson house. Here the underside of the floor was eight feet off the ground, giving plenty of height for the two cars which were parked underneath.

Towards the back of this undercroft, a sombre sight awaited them. Hanging by the neck from a rope suspended from a beam supporting the floor above, was the body of Douglas Mackay. His feet were just touching the ground, his legs slightly bent at the knees and his head was tilted acutely sideways. Nearby was an overturned wooden crate.

‘Siva says this is exactly how he found him,’ said Les Arnold. ‘Nothing’s been touched.’

The grave-faced Indian servant nodded. ‘I just went near enough to make sure Mr Mackay was dead, sir. I knew I could do nothing for him, so I phoned to Mr Arnold.’

‘How did you know he was here? You live next door.’

‘The sweeper found him, sir. He goes around the place every morning to clean up. He ran to tell me.’

Blackwell decided to check on the body before things got even more complicated.

‘Tom, let’s have a quick look here first.’ The three whites advanced on the body, which hung in frozen stillness, its contact with the earthen floor preventing any swinging in the slight breeze.

The pathologist had attended three hangings dealt with by his boss during his year of pathology in the UK and as far as he could see, this one was a classical self-suspension. The thin woven rope had cut deeply into the neck, a slip knot riding high beneath the left ear. The skin above it was purple and the face was red and suffused, with small pinpricks of blood under the skin.

The eyes were half open and he could see more small bleeding points in the whites. Tom used the back of his hand to test the temperature of Mackay’s bare forearm. Even given the warmth of the climate it felt cool, and when he gently tried to lift the wrist, there was firm resistance from rigor mortis.

‘How long d’you reckon he’s been dead?’ barked the Australian, heedless of the superintendent’s presence.

‘God, I’m no forensic expert,’ exclaimed Tom. ‘And it’s hard enough for them at home. Here the climate makes a nonsense of temperature calculations, but he’s certainly cooled down a bit.’

‘It looked as if he was in rigor mortis when you moved his arm,’ said Steven, reclaiming his investigative role from Les Arnold.

Howden nodded. ‘He’s still very stiff. I’ve read that rigor comes on and goes off much quicker in hot climates, but he must have been dead for at least some hours. There’s no sign of decomposition or of insects laying eggs on his eyelids, so at a wild guess, I think he must have died sometime during the night or early this morning.’

Blackwell gave him a very worried look.

‘Anything about it that suggests he didn’t do it himself?’

Tom shrugged, reluctant to give too many opinions about things he was not really qualified to pronounce upon.

‘He’s certainly died from having his neck squeezed by that noose. There’s that crate that presumably he stood on to tie the rope around that beam. Then he must have stepped off it!’

‘But his feet are still on the ground,’ objected the planter.

Tom had read many of the forensic textbooks, partly from a morbid interest and he had an answer to that.

‘No problem, the weight of the body leaning into the noose is enough. I’ve seen pictures of people who have hanged themselves from a door knob.’

‘Could anyone else have croaked him and made it look like a suicide?’ demanded the irrepressible Aussie.

Tom was getting out of his depth. ‘I’ve no idea, Les. But I’ve also read that murder by hanging is very rare, unless the victim is drunk, drugged or physically restrained.’

The police officer turned to the servant from next door. ‘Now, what’s the situation about Mrs Mackay? Where is she?’

‘Upstairs in her bedroom,’ cut in Arnold, once again. ‘I just had a quick look from the doorway. I didn’t go in, she was on the floor, obviously dead.’

They began hurrying up the steps to the verandah, Steven Blackwell still questioning the Tamil servant.

‘How did you learn about it, Siva?’

‘After Mister Mackay was found, they sent to next door for me, as their houseboy is very young chap. I told the amah to go wake his wife. She does not get up very early these days. I thought it better that a woman broke the news first. Then the girl came screaming down to tell me what she had found.’

They marched through the open doors from the verandah into the lounge and Nadin led the way into the back corridor, from which the bedrooms opened. At the second door, he stood back to allow the others to look inside. The bare room with its wooden walls and slowly rotating fan had two single beds each with high mosquito nets. The single sheet on the further bed was undisturbed and it had not been slept in, but the one nearer the door was crumpled and the net was thrown up on one side.

‘Where is she?’ demanded Steven Blackwell, always hesitant to barge into what might turn out to be a crime scene. Back in Manchester, he had dealt with several cases where a husband had hanged himself after killing his wife.

‘Between the beds, lying on the floor,’ supplied Les Arnold, more subdued now in the presence of a dead woman.

‘Tom, have a quick look first, will you,’ directed Blackwell. ‘I don’t want us all trampling over everything until we know what’s what.’

The pathologist trod delicately over to the foot of the nearest bed and peered into the space between them. Rosa Mackay was lying sprawled on the planked wooden floor, face up, arms and legs splayed out. She wore thin cotton pyjamas, the jacket stained with vomit, which was also smeared over the floor, as if she had been thrashing about. Her face was contorted and a pinkish froth was issuing from one corner of her mouth.

Tom went nearer and crouched alongside the body. As with her husband a few moments earlier, he touched the skin and tested the rigidity of both an arm and her jaw.

‘Still a bit of warmth there,’ he reported. ‘And she’s just starting to get stiff. I reckon she died quite a bit later than her husband, probably not more than a few hours ago.’

‘But died of what, Tom?’ asked the policeman, in a sepulchral voice.

‘I suppose poisoning is the most likely cause, given the circumstances. But I don’t know what poison!’

Les Arnold surprised them by giving them the answer.

‘Reckon I know what it was. Can’t you smell it?’

He gave some exaggerated sniffs as his eyes roamed around the room.

Tom bent nearer the body and followed his example.

‘Smells like paraffin — and the vomit’s a bit greenish.’

‘There you are, then! Got to be paraquat, ain’t it?’

Steven Blackwell cut back into the dialogue. ‘Paraquat? That’s that herbicide, isn’t it?’

The Australian nodded. ‘Yep, used by the gallon around the estates these days. A couple of years ago, one of my tappers, a young girl, topped herself with it after some broken love affair. That’s how I remember the smell, she sicked up this stinking stuff as well. The chemical is dissolved in kerosene for spraying.’

Blackwell was looking around the room and walked over to a chest of drawers on which was what appeared to be an empty Coca-Cola bottle. Without touching it, he looked closely at it and then cautiously sniffed the open top.

‘This smells strongly of paraffin. There’s still some oily green liquid in the bottom.’

His eyes strayed to the top of the piece of furniture and he gave an exclamation. ‘Hah! Is this a suicide note she’s left?

Picking up a single sheet of airmail paper by a corner, he quickly scanned the message. It was a suicide note, but not Rosa’s. Tom suppressed his natural curiosity, but Arnold had no such inhibitions.

‘What’s it say, Steve?’

The superintendent had humoured the planter so far, but now began to put on the brakes. ‘Look, Les. This is police investigation — might even turn out to be another murder. I have to play it by the book from now on, but I can tell you that this appears to be a suicide note written by Douglas Mackay. I can’t say more, I’m afraid.’

Rather surprisingly, Arnold accepted the mild rebuff.

‘Sure thing, Steve. I’ll leave you and the doc to it. I suppose you’ll want some sort of statement from me?’

Blackwell nodded. ‘I’ll send Inspector Tan up to Batu Merah to see you. Thanks for all your help.’

Just before he left the room, the rangy Australian took a last look at the body lying pathetically between the beds.

‘Poor Rosa, she was a nice woman,’ he said with rare compassion. ‘Reckon she couldn’t carry on when she heard that she’d lost Douglas. It’s a tough old world, mate!’

When he had vanished, Steven turned to Howden.

‘He doesn’t know the half of it, Tom! Mackay confesses in this letter to killing Jimmy Robertson — and shooting up the bungalows a few weeks back!’

The pathologist, still crouching alongside Rosa’s corpse, looked up in astonishment at the police officer. ‘That’s extraordinary, Steve! But as you said to Les — should you be telling me this?’

Blackwell turned up his palms in almost Gallic gesture.

‘You’re part of the team now, Tom, whether you like it or not. You’re our expert medical witness, though hopefully this will end at a coroner’s inquest, not the High Court.’

His ‘expert’ felt rather proud at being so valued, but a little overwhelmed at all that had happened to him professionally in the last week or two.

‘What are we going to do with the bodies?’ he asked. ‘Our colonel will go spare if we try to dump a couple more civilians in the BMH mortuary!’

Blackwell’s own grapevine had told him that moves were afoot to deal with the commandant of the hospital, but this was no time to stir up more aggravation there.

‘I’ll check with Alf Morris, but if there’s any hassle, I’ll get our police van to take them down to Ipoh General Hospital.’

Tom nodded and looked down again at the body of Rosa Mackay.

‘There’s nothing more I can do here. There needs to be either a post-mortem or at least an analysis of the vomit and blood for paraquat, just to confirm things. I’d better have a quick look at her back, just to make sure she hasn’t been shot or stabbed — it would be damned embarrassing to miss them!’

He pulled on one shoulder and the small body of the Eurasian lady lifted easily on its side so that he could see the back. There were no injuries there, but something else was immediately obvious.

‘Look at this! Another note, by the looks of it.’

He picked up a pale blue sheet of flimsy Basildon Bond notepaper, similar to the one that Blackwell held in his hand.

‘You’d better have this, Steven. It’s none of my business.’

Letting the corpse subside to the floor again, he handed the paper up to the policeman. Once again, the superintendent rapidly scanned it to get the general sense of the message. Though not normally given to blasphemy, this was too much for his usually restrained vocabulary

‘Jesus H. Christ! Come back all I said just now!’

An hour later, Tom was again sitting in the Admin Office at the front of the hospital. As before, the police superintendent was with them, as he had come to regularize the situation between the civil and military authorities.

‘There’s two sides to this, Alf,’ he began. ‘First, we don’t have a government pathologist nearer than KL and it would take me a day to get him up from there. So having Tom here on the spot is a godsend, as long as we can use his expertise without your CO blowing his top.’

‘He’s still down at Kinrara,’ replied Morris. ‘So you picked a good day for your two deaths.’

‘The other aspect is putting your mind at rest about any suspicion hanging over anyone at BMH,’ continued Steven seriously, putting his swagger stick on the corner of the desk. ‘Let’s not beat about the bush, Alf. For a time, several of your officers were in the frame as suspects for Jimmy Robertson’s murder. That’s why I feel it right to tell you in confidence what we know.’

The RAMC major brushed up his bristly moustache with a slightly nervous gesture. ‘If you think it’s OK, Steve. I don’t want to drop you in the mire for breaching some legal protocol.’

The police officer shook his head. ‘I’ve been on the phone to the coroner and explained the situation. As far as he’s concerned, as long as there’s no likelihood of anyone being charged with murder, he’s prepared to run a combined inquest on all three victims. He’s also happy for me to disclose enough information to clear up any lingering suspicions that involve this hospital.’

‘Thank God for that! We’ve already got enough problems here of our own,’ murmured Morris, half to himself. ‘But I’m still not clear what the hell has happened up at Gunong Besar. It’s still hard to believe all that’s gone on up there.’

Steven mopped his sweating brow with a large khaki handkerchief.

‘If they hadn’t left those notes, I wouldn’t have known what the hell happened, either! I’d better not show them to you, but the gist of Douglas’s letter was that he claimed to have killed James Robertson for seducing his wife, having first shot up the bungalows to lay a smokescreen for his murder plan, by suggesting that both were the work of terrorists.’

Tom Howden had already heard the content of the notes, so it was only Alf who was still in the dark.

‘You said “claimed”,’ pointed out Morris. ‘Does that mean he didn’t do it?’

‘Douglas certainly fired all those rounds at the two bungalows a few weeks ago. He says he also intended killing Jimmy later, but decided he couldn’t go through with it. I suspect his strong religious conscience got the better of him.’

‘But you said his suicide note indicated that he had shot Robertson,’ objected the Admin Officer.

‘He was lying, for reasons that became clear later. Most of his note was an explanation of how he had hated Jimmy for years, after he discovered that he had been having it away with Rosa for so long. He put none of the blame on her, by the way. He claimed that the lascivious Jimmy made all the running.’

‘What about the attack on the bungalows? How did he manage that? I understood that the bullets didn’t come from any of the rifles up at Gunong Besar — nor were they the same as the one that killed Robertson.’

Blackwell again wiped the sweat from his face. It was time he went back home to Britain, he thought suddenly. Even after years in the Far East, he seemed to suffer even more from the climate as time went by. He jerked his attention back to Alf’s question.

‘Mackay said he had a couple of extra rifles hidden away, in addition to the weapons that he and Jimmy gave us for test firing. When he came up from Johore some years ago, he brought them with him. There was a lot of CT trouble down there then, and guns were easy to come by, especially by planters intent on defending themselves.’

Tom Howden threw in another question. ‘I wonder how he managed to arrange that mock attack on his own?’

The superintendent shrugged. ‘I assume he waited until Rosa was asleep in bed, unless she was aware of what he was up to. Then he went out, ran around firing almost at random, until James appeared, then pretended to join him in hunting for the non-existent attackers.’

Alf Morris frowned at a few of the words he had just heard.

‘Are you suggesting that Rosa might have known what her husband was up to?’

Steven tapped his tunic pocket where he had the two notes from the estate bungalow. ‘Her note doesn’t say so, but I suspect she knew. It was her note that upset everything that was in the one left by her husband. He must have written his the previous night, after he had decided to hang himself. Rosa then found it in the bedroom long before the amah came to wake her up — and then wrote her own note.’

Alf shook his head slowly in disbelief that such things could be going on in Tanah Timah.

‘So you reckon she then decided to commit suicide? And it wasn’t just because she’d lost her husband?’

Blackwell shook his head sadly. ‘No, it was guilt and remorse for murdering James Robertson. She makes no bones about it in her letter, she says that Douglas had been acting very strangely lately and when she tackled him about it, he told her that he had intended to kill Jimmy, but couldn’t go through with it.’

‘So she knew that her husband was aware that she’d been unfaithful to him with his boss?’ put in Tom.

‘Sure, she went on about her sins and that although James had pestered her for a long time, it was her fault that she gave in to him. When Douglas confessed that he couldn’t go through with it, she decided to finish the job herself. She knew all about Douglas’s hidden pair of rifles and took one when he was asleep. That night, she went down the road and flagged down Jimmy when he was coming home from The Dog. He stopped on the road and she shot him when he got out. Then she drove the car back to the club and hurried home on foot.’

‘Didn’t her husband know?’ asked Alf, incredulously.

‘Not then, she says — but later she broke down and told him what had happened. They agreed to sit tight, but she says that Douglas became more and more guilt-ridden and afraid that my investigation would eventually narrow down to Rosa. To save her, he wrote that false confession in his note, then hanged himself.’

Tom’s brow was furrowed with doubt. ‘But if she had continued to sit tight, it would be assumed that Douglas’s confession was true and the matter would have been cleared up?’

Steven shrugged. ‘But she didn’t! She says that she herself had been considering suicide for some time, which was why she had taken a bottle full of paraquat from the stock in the estate sheds. When she read Douglas’s note, taking the blame for her murderous action, she wrote her own letter, then drank the stuff, poor woman!’

The three men sat silently for a while, each thinking what mayhem had been caused by a randy planter.

Four weeks later, Tom Howden was lying on his stomach on the warm sand of Batu Ferringhi beach, on the north coast of Penang Island. Alongside him, Lynette Chambers was dozing with a straw sun hat over her face and nearby a dozen other members of both the RAMC and QA Messes were lounging about, enjoying a leisurely weekend. Penang was a couple of hours’ drive from Tanah Timah, but due to the car ferry from the mainland, it was easier to reach than Pangkor. An old-fashioned hotel, The Lone Pine, sat amongst the palm trees almost on the edge of the beach, and after one of its famous Sunday curries eaten at tables under the trees, lying down was obligatory!

Tom stared out at the blue sea under a blue sky, still bemused that it was not the grey Tyne under rain clouds. He mulled over all that had happened in the past few weeks, as now life was returning to normal at BMH. The coroner’s inquest on the three victims from Gunong Besar had been held in the Police HQ on the previous Wednesday. The lawyer-coroner from Ipoh played down the drama as much as he could and rapidly brought in verdicts of murder by Rosa Mackay on James Robertson and suicide ‘while the balance of their minds was disturbed’ on the two Mackays. As to the suicide notes, he declined to make them public, but stated that he was satisfied that their contents confirmed the conclusions of the court.

Desmond O’Neill had returned two days after the dramatic events up at Gunong Besar, but was in a silent, withdrawn mood and Tom’s involvement in the affair was never even mentioned.

A week later, the CO vanished and belatedly, Alf Morris was able to inform the Mess that he had been suddenly recalled to the UK to take up a desk job at the Medical Directorate of the War Office. A new Commanding Officer was on his way out by air and until he arrived, Major Peter Bright was acting as temporary CO.

It was all rather mysterious and those few in the know, who included Morris and the physician John Martin, maintained a discreet silence, though they hinted that as O’Neill was so near the end of his tour and as his wife had refused to stay any longer in the Far East, compassionate grounds were involved. The whole of the hospital took this excuse with a large pinch of salt, but made no complaint about the marked improvement in the atmosphere that resulted. The business about the arms kote was also swept under the carpet, with vague murmurings from Alf Morris that O’Neill had been obsessed with security at the hospital.

Peter Bright was very relaxed in his new role as CO, and he used his new authority to award himself plenty of free time, shooting off to Penang in his sports car at frequent intervals. Undoubtedly, he was visiting the fair Diane in the Eastern and Oriental Hotel, Penang’s equivalent of Singapore’s Raffles. The efficient gossip system reported that she had passed up her intended passage on the first UK-bound ship, as she suddenly found the attractions of Penang much to her liking.

Similarly, David Meredith, the gloomy Welsh anaesthetist, was seen to smile on several occasions, obviously having been reconciled with his own lady love, Lena Franklin.

As to Gunong Besar itself, Les Arnold announced that Diane Robertson had accepted an offer he had made to buy the estate. He magnanimously offered to supervise the rubber production there until probate and other legal matters allowed him to move in. All in all, things had worked out well in the end, albeit after three tragic deaths, for which Tom suspected that James Robertson would have had some tough questions to answer from Saint Peter when he arrived at the Pearly Gates.

He rolled over on to his stomach and smiled happily at Lynette, whose pleasant face was only a few inches from his own. He had the feeling that even after only two months in Malaya, his life had taken a turn that would last for the rest of his life.

Risking the eagle eye of the Matron, who sat in a deckchair twenty yards away, Captain Howden RAMC craned his neck towards Lieutenant Chambers, QARANC and gave her a quick peck on the cheek.