Dead in the Dog

ONE

He was hot, tired and slightly bewildered. His fibre suitcase, lashed with a strap that had once been his father’s belt, was in the back of the Land Rover. Alongside it was the new holdall that he had bought in Singapore to carry the overflow of his belongings. They said that the cabin-trunk he had packed so carefully in Gateshead wouldn’t arrive for another six weeks.

Tom had come by air-trooping, four days’ flight from Stansted Airport, cooped up in a Handley-Page Hermes that seemed only slightly faster than the Wright Flyer. His heavy baggage was allegedly on its way by sea, but as he slumped in the passenger seat of the olive-green vehicle, he had his doubts whether he’d ever see the trunk again.

Tom Howden was a pessimist by nature, as he had learned that it was the best way to avoid disappointment. Still, as he was going to be stuck out here for years, he supposed he had to make the best of it. He wondered for the hundredth time, what temporary insanity had led him to sign on for three years, when he could have got away with two as a National Serviceman? Was an extra pip on the shoulder, better pay and the promise of a three hundred quid gratuity at the end, worth another twelve months in this saturated sweat-box?

With a resigned grunt, he shook off the mood of near-desperation and forced himself to look at the scenery — though already he had decided that one Malayan road looked much the same as the next. All bloody trees, thatched huts, scruffy shophouses and fields that looked like rectangular swamps.

The driver was a skinny lance corporal in a faded jungle-green uniform that looked as if it had been tailored for a Sumo wrestler. He took a covert look at the officer alongside and with the smug euphoria of someone who was only three weeks away from his ‘RHE’ — Return Home Establishment — date, he diagnosed a new recruit to Her Majesty’s Far East Land Forces. He saw a sturdy, almost squat young man with a round, plain face sporting a few old acne scars. It was a face that seemed to glare out at the world as if defying it to do its worst, with a downturned mouth and a brow too furrowed for someone in his mid-twenties. The corporal, a philosophical Cockney with an abiding curiosity about his fellow men, reckoned that this officer was a ‘prole’ like himself, different from the usual toffee-nosed, chinless wonders from the Garrison. But then, he wasn’t a proper officer, was he? He was an MO, according to the brass RAMC tabs on his shoulders.

‘Train a bit late, sir? They’re usually pretty good out here.’

The doctor jerked himself out of his weary reverie.

‘On time leaving Kuala Lumpur. Then one of those tortoise things broke down and delayed us.’

The driver nodded sagely. Those ‘tortoise things’ were armoured railcars that ran ahead of the trains, escorting them through the Black Areas on the long run up from Singapore.

‘They’ve been very quiet lately, the CTs,’ chirped the soldier.

‘The what?’ grunted the new arrival.

Gord, a right one here! thought the driver. Needs to get his knees brown pretty quick.

‘CTs, sir,’ he said aloud. ‘The communist terrorists. That’s why we’re all out here, innit?’

He stole another look at his passenger, taking in the new green bush jacket and shorts, tailored in one day in Singapore. Though they were all issued with ill-fitting rags at their Depot near Aldershot, he knew that officers were supposed to look smart and had to cough up for tailor-mades at their own expense.

‘How much further is it?’ grunted Howden, lifting his new cap to rub off the sweat that had gathered under the leather hatband. The Londoner managed to decipher the marked Geordie accent.

‘Another six miles, sir. It’s a twelve-mile run from Sungei Siput railway station to the gates of Brigade — and BMH is slap next door.’

Howden was beginning to accept that the Army ran on acronyms and ‘BMH’ now held no mystery for him, though he thought it could just as well stand for ‘Bloody Miserably Hot’ as for ‘British Military Hospital’.

The road began to climb gently from the flat plain that stretched for many miles back to the sea and the new doctor began to take more interest as the hills and high mountains of Perak State rose in front of them. The road this far had been fairly straight, running on causeways built a few feet above padi fields and banana plantations, but now it started to curve in repetitive bends as it passed between low hills. Regimented rows of rubber trees lined the road, all decorated with parallel diagonal scars running down to little pots to catch the latex. As he passed, Howden could see the rows were ruler-straight, millions of the slim trunks marching away from the road to cover thousands of acres, providing the world with the rubber for everything from bus tyres to condoms. Small houses roofed with attap, a palm-leaf thatch, or with red-painted corrugated iron, were scattered alongside the road, with grinning urchins, some stark naked, playing in the muddy water in the ditches outside. To someone brought up in the terraces and council estates of Tyneside, it was still as strange as the planet Mars, even though Tom had spent three days on Singapore Island and travelled almost the whole length of the Malayan Peninsula to get here.

‘First time in the East, sir?’ persisted the corporal.

‘First time out of bloody England,’ growled Howden. He preferred to forget the trip to Lille with the Newcastle Medicals’ rugby team in ’forty-nine, when they were beaten thirty-six to five.

There was silence for another mile and the doctor felt he should say something to avoid being thought snooty.

‘You from the hospital as well?’

‘Nossir, I’m Service Corps, from the Transport Pool in the garrison. Don’t do no soldiering, thank Christ! Not like them poor sods in the battalions.’

Tom Howden thought it was an opportunity to find out more about the place that was to be his home for most of the next three years — unless the mysterious ways of the Royal Army Medical Corps found somewhere even more obscure to send him. His knowledge of the military machine was rudimentary, as six weeks’ basic training in Britain had only taught him how to march badly, miss every target with a revolver and learn a little about intestinal parasites and numerous types of tropical lurgy.

‘What’s this Brigade you talk about, then?’

The driver sighed under his breath. They shouldn’t let virgins like this out alone, he thought.

‘You’re part of it now, sir!’ He squinted at the pristine green oblong sewn on to his passenger’s sleeve, portraying a yellow lion alongside a palm tree.

‘That dog-and-lampost flash’ll have to come off pretty quick, sir. Your CO will spit tacks if he sees it. That’s Singapore Base District, but we’re Twenty-First Commonwealth Independent Infantry Brigade. Different flash altogether — you need one like mine.’

Tom looked at the dhobi-faded patch on the corporal’s uniform — a blue shield and crossed red swords below the figures ‘21’.

‘Is the hospital part of that, then?’ he asked dubiously.

‘Well, you’ve got your own CO, a half-colonel. Queer bugger, he is too. . oh, sorry sir!’ The driver had the grace to look sheepish at his gaffe. ‘But the big chief is the Brigadier, runs the whole outfit.’

The explanation was cut short as the Land Rover rounded a bend and came into a village, where they were forced to crawl along behind an ox-cart heaped with dried palm fronds for roofing. The driver swerved to avoid mangy pi-dogs, men on high bicycles, wandering chickens and assorted children scattered across the road. Ramshackle stalls selling fruit and Coca-Cola stood on the beaten earth in front of a few two-storied shophouses, from which taped Chinese pop songs blared out at ear-splitting volume. Malay girls in sarong-kerbayahs, colourful tunics over long skirts, swayed gracefully through the hubbub, resisting the raucous invitations of the shopkeepers to buy tin alarm clocks, dried fish or plastic toys. A dilapidated bus was coming the other way and they were forced to stop for a moment behind a grimy truck, from which several emaciated men were unloading heavy sacks of rice. Across the tailboard large Chinese characters were painted and underneath, Tom read a presumed translation in Roman lettering proclaiming the owner to be ‘Wun Fat Tit’, which left him wondering if it could possibly be true or was just some oriental leg-pull.

As the bus passed, blaring its horn raucously and belching black diesel smoke, the Land Rover pulled out, but almost immediately, the driver had to brake to avoid a Chinese woman wearing a samfu, a kind of floral pyjamas, leading a skinny cow on a length of rope.

‘This is Kampong Kerdah, sir, the last village before our place. Tanah Timah is a proper town, not like this ’ere dump,’ said the soldier, with an almost proprietorial air.

As Howden was thinking that most places in Malaya seemed to have alliterative names, the driver twisted the wheel again and squeezed past the ox cart and accelerated out of the village on to more curves between more rubber estates.

‘Where’s this road go to?’ he asked.

‘It forks at Tanah Timah — or ‘TT’ as everyone calls it. Straight on it goes up a few miles to Kampong Jalong, then fizzles out against the mountains. Big buggers they are, some go up to six thousand feet. The other track just goes through the rubber up past Gunong Besar, with a village at the end called Kampong Kerbau. Damn-all beyond that for ’undreds of miles across the jungle and mountains, until you hit the China Sea. All Black Area that, real bandit country, very nasty!’

He said this with morbid glee, as if he had daily experience of hunting terrorists, though in fact he had never heard a single shot fired in anger during his two years up at this ‘sharp end’ of the campaign.

‘Is this a Black Area?’ Howden looked uneasily at the deserted plantations, where the rubber trees stood in endless ranks, reminding him of the war graves he had seen on his rugby trip to Flanders.

‘Nossir, but this White Area stops just beyond TT. If it was Black here, we wouldn’t be allowed out without an escort — and have to carry a weapon.’

He bent his head towards the officer as if to impart some great secret.

‘Best not to carry a pistol, sir. You only get a ticking off for not having one, but if you lose the bloody thing, it’s a court martial.’

Tom had no intention of carrying anything more lethal than a syringe, especially as Aldershot had proved that he could barely hit a house at ten paces. The vehicle suddenly slowed to a stop and he looked around in alarm.

‘Just thought you’d like to see the view, sir,’ reassured the corporal. He leaned on his steering wheel and pointed through the windscreen.

‘That’s TT down there, you can see the garrison and BMH next to it.’

Howden saw that they had stopped at the crest of a hill and were looking down on a bowl-shaped area a couple of miles across. It was open on the left where a broad valley went back towards the railway and the far distant sea. On the right, above the rubber estates, green jungle-covered hills climbed towards remote blue mountains, their tops wreathed in clouds. Below, the road snaked down for another mile to a small town, little more than a main street with a few parallel lanes of buildings. A little further on, there was a large rectangular complex of huts and other buildings, with many vehicles parked in rows, the sun glistening on their windscreens. Next to it was a smaller compound with more regular lines of low buildings, which the doctor took to be the hospital.

‘Dead flat down there, sir. It used to be a tin mine, before the Army bulldozed it to build the garrison.’

It was almost like an aerial view or a map and Tom was intrigued by the geography of what was to be his home for the foreseeable future. He saw that the road that passed through Tanah Timah forked at the further end of the main street. The left branch crossed a small bridge over a brown river that ran behind the little town, then climbed a rise on the other side of the valley before vanishing into the ubiquitous rubber. Just beyond the bridge was a large bungalow-style building, perched on a grassy mound. It had a wide green-painted tin roof and there was a tennis-court and a small swimming pool behind it.

‘What’s that place — the school?’

‘Nah, that’s ‘The Dog’, sir. It’s the posh club, white planters and officers only. They don’t let no wogs in there — nor ORs like me.’

Howden’s meagre stock of Army lore told him that ORs were ‘Other Ranks’, but ‘The Dog’ was beyond him. He asked his driver, but the corporal shrugged.

‘Search me, sir! I think the proper name’s the Sussex Club.’ He pointed again, this time slightly to the left.

‘Alongside them big hills in the distance, there’s another valley, see? It’s all Black country, goes up to Chenderoh Dam and a lake. The road goes all the way to Grik and the Siamese border, they say, but it’s bloody dangerous up there. Chin Peng himself hangs out in that area.’

Tom twisted further to his left, looking at more mountains on the other side of the flat plain below. ‘What’s over there, then?’

‘That’s Maxwell Hill, above Taiping. Decent town, is that. Another hospital there, BMH Kamunting, bigger than this one here. I drives a truck up there now and then, for stores and stuff.’

He decided that sightseeing was over and coasted down the long hill towards TT, his passenger looking sideways at the changing vegetation as the rubber gave way to oil palm and then bananas, before the rice padi appeared again on the flat land at the bottom. Black water buffalo trudged through the mud pulling crude ploughs, thin farmers urging them on from behind. Women in colourful sarongs and head cloths stood up to their knees in water, planting rice seedlings. As the Land Rover passed, they giggled and quickly turned their faces away in case a camera should appear.

As they came downhill, a long convoy of green military vehicles passed them in the opposite direction, three-tonners and Land Rovers grinding up the slope, shepherded by armoured cars in front and behind. As they passed, Tom saw scores of soldiers sitting in the trucks, some wearing bush hats with one side of the brim turned up.

‘What’s all that about?’

The driver shrugged nonchalantly. ‘Going off on a sweep of the “ulu” to chase out some of the little yellow sods. Some of those in the TCVs were Aussies.’

The Tynesider knew what Aussies were, but it was another day or so before he added ‘Troop Carrying Vehicle’ to his list of acronyms. ‘God knows what “ulu” might be,’ he muttered to himself.

As they approached some buildings, the corporal pointed ahead.

‘Here’s the town, sir. Don’t blink or you’ll miss it!’

Tanah Timah was about four hundred yards long, a straight wide road lined on each side by ‘shophouses’, two-storied terraces of sun-bleached cement. The upper floors overhung a continuous arcade supported by pillars, known as the ‘five-foot way’ behind which were a multitude of colourful shops, selling everything from refrigerators to Nescafe, from paraffin stoves to rolls of silk brocade. Some were workshops and the glare of welding and the hammering of bicycle repairs spilled out into the arcades and across the ramps that crossed the deep monsoon drains that fronted the buildings.

There were people everywhere — old ladies squatting behind piles of fruit for sale, men chopping firewood, girls selling fried rice from huge woks, cobblers sitting cross-legged at their lasts and shoppers and loungers wandering across the road, oblivious of the traffic. Bicycle trishaws carried gaily dressed Malay women holding up paper umbrellas against the sun and barefoot labourers pushed bikes piled high with green fodder or crates of live ducks. Ungainly local trucks belched fumes, competing in noise and pollution with the battered bus that came up from Sungei Siput three times a day. An occasional green Army vehicle passed through, but the town seemed to be ignoring the fact that they were on the edge of a vicious terrorist war that had been going on for years.

As his driver had warned, they passed through the town in less than two minutes and as the shops ended, the new arrival saw the side turning off to the left, leading towards the bridge and the mysterious ‘Dog’. Facing the road junction was a solid-looking building, freshly painted in white, with radio aerials on the roof. It was set in a compound behind a high perimeter wall topped by a barbed-wire fence. A barrier at the entrance was guarded by a Malay in a smart khaki uniform, with a black peaked cap and a pistol holstered on his belt.

‘That’s the Police Circle HQ — dunno why they call it a Circle, but they always do,’ volunteered his oracle.

Another half mile along the dead flat road brought them alongside what seemed to be a huge Mississippi riverboat made from rusted corrugated iron. It was sitting forlornly in a few feet of dirty water, which appeared to be the remnants of a dried-up lake.

‘What the hell’s that?’ asked Howden.

‘The old tin dredge, that is. Abandoned after the Japs came. Like I said, the garrison and hospital are built on the old tin tailings. And here we are, sir.’

Not far beyond the dredge, on the left side of the dead straight road, Tom saw the corner of a formidable fence. A double line of ten-foot high chain-link formed two barriers, with coiled barbed wire in the space between. A large square of about fifty acres was filled with barrack huts, low brick buildings, workshops, vehicle shelters and at the back, some houses and a few bungalows. As they drove along the front, separated from the road only by a deep monsoon drain, they passed the main gate, made of steel bars. It was open, but a counter-weighted pole barred the entrance, outside a fortified guardroom where two red-capped Military Police stood scowling at the world.

‘Bastards, they are!’ muttered the corporal under his breath, obviously giving vent to some private hatred. Things were much more relaxed at the next gate, another three hundred yards down the road. The double fence continued around the smaller hospital compound and a similar gate stood open in the centre, also with a striped pole across the entrance. A lance corporal in a navy-blue beret and white-Blancoed belt stood outside a small guardroom, a rifle clutched in one hand, the stock resting on his boot. Tom half-expected a challenge, with a ‘Halt, who goes there?’ and a demand for their identity cards. Instead, the sentinel leaned on the counterweight, lifted the pole and as the Land Rover passed, raised a derisory two fingers at the driver.

‘Up yours, Fred!’ yelled the cockney and accelerated into the front vehicle park, turned right in front of the Admin huts and then sharp left on to the perimeter road that ran all around the hospital compound. The new doctor had a blurred view of a series of long huts that seemed to come off a central open corridor, like ribs from a spine. On the other side of the road, next to the outer fence, was a barrack block, then a series of smaller buildings before an open space appeared where a camouflaged Whirlwind helicopter was waiting. Some distance beyond this, standing lonely and isolated in the furthest corner of the compound, were two parallel asbestos-roofed huts, joined at the near end by a short open corridor, forming a ‘U’. Wide eaves projected from each building, supported on wooden pillars to form austere verandahs. A series of louvred doors down the sides of the huts had been painted green, now bleached by the sun. Some sparse grass formed a central lawn between the two buildings and, around the entrance, some scraggy flowering plants tried to survive amongst the gravel of the tin tailings. A short path led from the road to the concrete strip beneath the cross-corridor and alongside it was a faded wooden sign bearing the legend ‘RAMC OFFICERS’ MESS’ in the Corps colours of blue, yellow and cherry red.

The Land Rover jerked to a stop.

‘Here we are, sir. Home sweet home!’ sang out the driver.

He hopped around to the back and took out the officer’s two bags which he dumped on the concrete. Tom Howden climbed out more slowly and looked with dismay at his new domicile. It looked more like a chicken farm set down in a desert, than the residence of holders of the Queen’s Commission. As the corporal passed him on the path, he gave a salute worthy of the Grenadier Guards.

‘Best of luck, sir!’

As the doctor hesitantly touched his cap in return, he was conscious of the sweat-blackened areas of fabric under his arms and over the whole of his back. He heard the vehicle roar away behind him, but kept his eyes fixed on the deserted huts, a feeling of almost desperate loneliness engulfing him.

As Tom Howden was staring despondently at his new home, Diane Robertson sat alone in hers, the late afternoon sun striking through the open doors. The silence was broken only by her sniffs of petulant self-pity, until a small voice asked, ‘Mem want anything now?’

The face of her amah, Lee Mei Mei, appeared timorously around the door to the dining room, half scared, half intrigued by the domestic dramas that were becoming more frequent in the Robertson household. Mei was a slight, fragile Chinese girl of twenty, with an elfin face that always looked slightly startled. Her glossy black hair was pulled back into a ponytail held with a rubber band, the end hanging down the back of her blue floral pyjama suit.

‘Yes, May. Tell Siva to bring me a stinger, will you? A large one.’

Diane sat alone in the wide, lofty room, the big brass fan whirling slowly over her head, trying to waft the cloying air into a draught. She thought of Norfolk now, at the beginning of December, cold and perhaps wet, but not with the all-pervading dampness they had here, where there was an electric light bulb in every wardrobe to keep the mould off the shoes and where the camera had to be kept in a sealed biscuit tin with a bag of silica gel.

She wished to God she had stayed in England and not been seduced by both James’s body and his glowing descriptions of life on a Malayan rubber estate. Twenty-six years old, she was the third daughter of a minor squire from Norfolk, rejoicing in the name of Henry Blessington-Luke. After an expensive and largely wasted education at Cheltenham, she had done little but ride, party and hunt for both foxes and a husband. Three years earlier, at a Hunt Ball near Newmarket, she had met James Robertson, home on leave — and three months later, had married him in the cathedral in Singapore.

The bastard! She gingerly touched her face again and wondered how well she could cover up any marks by tomorrow night, when there was the weekly dance at The Dog.

A slim Tamil came in through the dining room, carrying a tray bearing a bottle of Johnnie Walker, a tumbler and a jug of iced water.

‘A big one, Siva,’ she murmured, still shielding one side of her face with a scarlet-nailed hand, though the amah had already given him a blow-by-blow account of the fracas. He poured a liberal shot of whisky into the glass and added an equal amount of water — the famous ‘stinger’ was a corruption of the Malay ‘stengah’, meaning ‘half’.

He lowered the tray for her to take the glass, but she gestured to a small table at the end of the settee. ‘Leave it, Siva. I may want another.’

He put the tray down and stepped back.

‘Mem want anything else? Sandwich, curry puff?’

She shook her head, managing to give him a wan smile. He was a good-looking fellow of about her own age — but of course, he was Indian. Not that that seemed to bother her bloody husband!

The cook-cum-butler padded silently to the door but stopped there to throw a look back at the woman sipping her drink. Though he considered her no more attractive than most of the sleek girls of his own race, the contrast between their dark beauty and her startling blondeness always intrigued him. Slim but full-breasted, her long pale neck was framed by the silky swathe of hair the colour of light honey that came down to her shoulders. He knew that some English women got their colour from a bottle, but this was surely natural. With a little sigh at such forbidden fruit, he padded off to his kitchen hut behind the house, to sit over a cup of tea with the amah and gossip about the latest domestic developments at Gunong Besar Estate.

On the settee, the blonde drank her first stinger quickly and poured herself a stronger one. She lifted her shapely legs up on to the cushions and leaned back against one of the padded arms, cradling the drink in her hands. Her temper had cooled, but it was replaced by a steely determination to do the swine down as effectively as she could.

‘Two can play at that game,’ she whispered to herself, then smiled into her whisky. The game had already started, though James didn’t know it. She didn’t care if he did, she thought with uncertain bravado. But there were problems — she was still his wife and though she had a small allowance of her own from Daddy, this damned plantation was their livelihood. If she blew the whistle on him with Douglas Mackay, what would happen to the place? James was too dependent on his manager to survive on his own and even if their marriage was becoming decidedly rocky, she didn’t want to divorce a bankrupt and have to go home penniless. And she certainly didn’t want to be divorced by him and go home both penniless and with her tail between her legs, so she had to watch her mouth and her step.

Diane mixed a third drink, resolutely deciding that it would be her last before dinner. There were magazines on the little table, but after riffling through the curled pages of a six-month-old Vogue, she threw it petulantly on to the polished floor and stared aimlessly around the room, which took up the full width of the bungalow. It was large and bare by British standards, the walls lined with darkly varnished planks that carried a few conical Malay straw hats and a set of framed hunting prints. There was no ceiling, the inside of the high peaked roof being wood-lined like the walls. The furniture was equally sombre, a locally made wicker suite with a large settee and four armchairs.

A ponderous teak sideboard, an old-fashioned piano left from the twenties, and a sandalwood chest on which sat a radiogram, completed the decor.

‘God, what a dump!’ she murmured, self-pity washing over her. After a moment, she rose restlessly to her feet and took her glass across to the verandah. The front wall of the lounge had three pairs of slatted doors designed to let in air, but keep out the sun. The centre ones were open and Diane walked out on to the wide verandah which extended the full width of the big bungalow, furnished with some rattan chairs and a couple of small tables beneath the overhang of the tin roof. It was railed in by a varnished fence, except at the centre, where wide wooden steps went down some eight feet to the ground, the whole building being raised high on brick piles. Her Austin Ten was sheltered underneath, alongside the mud-spattered Land Rover that James used around the estate, though he rarely bothered to park his old armoured Buick under there.

She leaned on the rail, with her glass gripped in both hands, as she had done hundreds of times before and looked out over the estate. Though Norfolk became increasingly desirable with every passing month, she had to admit that the view from here was spectacular. The bungalow was built on a small knoll above the dirt road that led down on the left to Tanah Timah, three miles away. It was at the foot of an isolated hill about a thousand feet high, hence the name Gunong Besar — ‘big mountain’ — though it was a mere hillock compared to the peaks ten miles behind them, on the border between Perak and Pahang States. The bungalow faced west and looked over their acres of rubber down into the distant valley. On rare clear days, they could see as far as the towns of Sungei Siput and Kuala Kangsar and even imagine that they could see the Malacca Straits on the far horizon, over which there were often fantastic sunsets.

She dropped her eyes to the road at the bottom of the knoll fifty yards away, made of the red laterite soil that was dust when it was dry, but usually was a tenacious mud that stuck to wheels and bodywork. There was very little traffic on it, as only one small village, Kampong Kerbau, lay a few miles up to the right. Police patrols and a few military vehicles were the main users, apart from a couple of Chinese trucks and the twice-daily bus to the village.

The whisky was getting warm and Diane tossed down half of it and walked to the right-hand end of the verandah to lean on the side rail. Here her elegant features, with the cornflower blue eyes and enviable bone structure, seemed to darken as she stared past the flowers of a large Flame-of-the-Forest tree down towards another bungalow a few hundred yards away. Built nearer the foot of the knoll, it was smaller than theirs, but of the same general appearance, though all she could see through the trees was the red tin roof and the end of their verandah.

As she watched, trying to project hatred across the space, a battered pre-war Plymouth pick-up came from the latex-processing sheds on the other side of the road and crossed into the drive to the next-door bungalow. The trees obstructed most of her view, but she could just see the driver get out and run up the verandah steps. After spending most of his life in the East, Douglas Mackay seemed impervious to the heat, which made most Europeans slow-moving. She had no quarrel with Douglas, more a mild pity for his weakness in dealing with his domestic life — though she was in no position to criticize in that direction, she thought cynically.

As she leaned on the varnished rail, one of her fingers found a deep scar in the tropical hardwood. It had recently been painted over, but her gaze automatically moved up the planked wall of the bungalow at the end of the verandah. Here were a row of similar marks and she knew that Douglas’s bungalow had even more. They were bullet holes, a legacy of the last terrorist attack on Gunong Besar, earlier that year. Thank God she had been away on a shopping trip in Singapore — at least, that’s what she had told James.

If she had been here and survived, nothing would have stopped her from getting the next Blue Funnel boat home from Penang. As it was, her dear husband had had a tough job persuading her to stay, even though no one had been hurt — apart from a couple of rubber-tappers being killed down in the worker’s lines across the road. A pity that bitch next door hadn’t stopped a bullet, she thought vindictively. If the CTs hadn’t been disturbed by the chance arrival of an armoured patrol on night exercises from Brigade, maybe she would have been. So might James and Douglas, she supposed, but somehow that possibility didn’t tug too much at her heart strings.

As it was, the attackers must have been a pretty small bunch, as they scarpered as soon as the Aussies poured out of their Saracens — she had thanked the good-looking captain personally a week later, in the back of his car behind the club. The two planters had blasted off a few rounds into the darkness just before the troops arrived and certainly James had basked for weeks afterwards in The Dog, as the hero of Gunong Besar — fighting off the Communist hordes like some gunslinger in a Western film. Secretly, when her initial terror had subsided, she rather admired him for a while, until she saw the extra attention that his fame gained him from the women in the club, which soured her back to her normal dislike of her husband.

Downing the last of her tepid drink, she walked barefoot back into the lounge to retrieve her shoes, one from under the settee, the other from near the unused piano, where it had come to rest after bouncing off her husband’s neck.

Going through another door at the rear of the lounge, Diane went into a corridor which led to the dining room, guest bathroom and two spare bedrooms. She turned left to reach their own at the farther end. Like the rest of the rooms, it had no ceiling, the partition walls stopping eight feet up. The high, raftered roof was common to all the rooms, to allow as much circulation of air as possible — though privacy was a problem on the rare occasions when they had visitors staying, especially ones who became vocally amorous in bed.

She dropped her shoes on the floor and walked past the white tent of their mosquito-netted bed to reach the bathroom at the back. Inside there was a white-tiled floor and a washbasin against one wall. Opposite were three doors, one to a toilet, the other to a cubicle with a chipped cast-iron bath and the third a shower. Anxiously, Diane went to the damp-spotted mirror over the basin and stared at her face while she fingered her cheek. No doubt about it, there was faint blue bruising within the reddening — she could even make out two lines where the swine’s fingers had struck her. As the sarcastic bastard had suggested, tomorrow would require some careful adjustment of her make-up, before she went to the club that evening.

With a sigh, she stripped off her dress of cream raw silk and dropped it into the straw laundry basket, along with her white bra and pants, ready for the dhobi-amah to collect. Going to the shower door, she opened it cautiously and stared at the bare cement floor, which sloped down to a drain pipe in the centre, emptying on to the ground beneath the house. Once she had been confronted by a snake which had crawled up the pipe — her screams had brought Siva running, who had been greatly impressed by her nudity, especially the blonde pubic hair, which he could hardly believe. As she dived for a towel to cover herself, the Tamil had calmly picked up the serpent and thrown it through the window.

‘Only wolf snake, Mem. Not poisonous,’ he had said, but ever since she had peered suspiciously around the door before venturing in to stand under the lukewarm spray that came from a tank of rainwater behind the roof.

When she had finished, Diane put on a light dressing gown from one of the wardrobes and went to get another drink. She flopped back on to the settee to sulk and wonder if that bastard would come home in time for dinner that evening.

Sometime after six o’clock, that particular bastard was sitting on a bar stool in the Sussex Club, drinking his fourth Tiger beer and reading yesterday’s Straits Times. He concentrated on the rubber prices and the reports of CT activity, topics which were studied here as seriously as the football results and weather forecast were in Britain. Turning back a page from the commercial news, he read that two days ago there had been an abortive attack on a train down south in Johore which had been fought off by the escorts, but thankfully there had been no incidents up here in Perak for over a week. Maybe Chin Peng was getting the message, thought James, as the supply lines of the terrorist chief were being progressively strangled by General Sir Gerald Templer’s policy of fencing-in all the villages in the Black Areas, depriving the CTs of food and local aid.

James Robertson folded his paper and stared at his tall glass, the condensation running down the sides on to the polished teak of the bar. He was trying to decide whether or not to stay here all evening and get blind drunk — or to go home and read the Riot Act to that stupid bitch of a wife. Just because she suspected him of getting his leg over another woman, gave her no right to throw things at him — even if her suspicions were correct.

James was not a very intelligent man, using bluster and his powerful physical presence to swagger his way through life. He depended heavily on his manager, Douglas Mackay, to keep the business solvent. After four Tigers, he was feeling rather sorry for himself and the nagging suspicion that Diane was also playing away did nothing to put him in the mood for reconciliation.

He gulped down the ice-cold lager and slid the glass across the wide bar, rapping with his knuckles for service. A short, chubby Eurasian hurried over, wearing a black bow tie on his white shirt.

‘Another beer, Daniel,’ demanded James. ‘Where’s your barman tonight?’

‘His day off, Mister Robertson. The other silly fellow, who should stand in, fell off his bicycle today, so I have to be bloody barman.’

The manager of the Sussex Club was the son of an Indian mother and a British sergeant, who had been posted home in 1922 and had not been heard of since. Though he had mid-brown hair and fairly pale skin, he had been brought up by his mother and had the sing-song accent of that side of the family. He had worked in a large hotel in Penang for some years and had landed the job of running The Dog when it reopened after the war.

After getting his new beer, James swivelled round on the high stool to look around the club. It was early and almost deserted. A fat Education Corps captain was fast asleep in one of the big armchairs that were dotted around the large room like islands in a lake. The doors to the terrace were open and under a Coca-Cola umbrella at one of the white tables outside, a young man was almost nose to nose with a pretty girl. James recognized her as one of the sisters from the military hospital. The only other patrons were a bridge four, playing with grim determination in a distant corner.

‘Damned quiet in here tonight,’ complained the planter, as if it was a personal insult to him not to have company in his hour of need.

‘Thursday always quiet, Mister Robertson. But later, we get more from garrison, after the officers have eaten their makan.’

Daniel spoke good English, but had the habit of throwing in words of Malay, Hindi and even Hakka or Cantonese, which annoyed James — though almost everything annoyed James, apart from alcohol and an attractive woman.

He began to wonder how long he would stick it out here in Malaya. Though in some ways he enjoyed himself, with this superficially superior lifestyle that suited his snobbish upbringing, the place was beginning to pall, especially since his three-year-old marriage was beginning to crumble. He ate well enough, drank plenty and enjoyed a succession of sexual adventures — but he was beginning to miss English county society, with its pubs and golf and upper-class gossip.

James had actually been born near Cork into a Protestant ‘planter’ family. His father had been an Anglicized gentleman farmer and horse-breeder, but dislike of the founding of the Irish Free State had made him move in 1923 to Norfolk, where he established a successful stud farm. James was sent off to a minor public school in Cambridgeshire, then to agricultural college, where he finished in 1937 at the age of twenty-one. He worked for his father for a year, but they failed to get along and he began looking for a farm manager’s post. However, with war imminent, James volunteered for the navy in ’39, spent a year at sea, then was posted to Ceylon and spent the rest of the war as an undistinguished lieutenant at HQ Trincomalee. Demobbed in 1946, he got a job as an estate under-manager in Gloucestershire, but became restless and wanted to emigrate and set up on his own somewhere. His father had died a couple of years earlier and when his mother sold up the stud farm, she funded his purchase of Gunong Besar. Though he would have preferred going back to Ceylon, the place was cheap, having been run down during the war and in 1948 he moved in. Advertising for a manager, he was lucky enough to have got Douglas Mackay up from Johore, who had long experience of the rubber trade, of which James knew little apart from what he had picked up in Ceylon.

Now he sat turning his beer glass around in his fingers, ruminating about the future and wondering if he should pack up and go back to Britain or try Kenya or New Zealand — but whether with or without Diane was the question?

It was beginning to get dusk outside and the manager switched on the lights in the club-room — large, rather dim glass globes hanging from the beams high up in the ceiling, from which also dangled the half-dozen big fans that turned endlessly above them. The nearness of the equator, just south of Singapore, meant that it got dark at about seven o’clock all year round — just as there were no noticeable seasons, as the long, thin peninsula got monsoons from both sides, so it rained at some time on almost every day of the year.

As the lights came on and the darkness deepened outside, so members began to drift into the club, chattering in a variety of accents, from a Home Counties drawl to the abrasive rasp of Alice Springs. Soon the line of stools filled up and Daniel was scurrying back and forth with gin and tonics, stengahs and the ubiquitous Tiger and Anchor beers. Robertson’s mood lightened, as he knew almost everyone and nodded and exchanged greetings in his usual loud and hearty style, concealing his aggrieved chagrin beneath his habitual bonhomie.

Les Arnold, an Australian planter from the next estate beyond Gunong Besar, plumped himself down on one side, giving James a playful punch on the arm in greeting, as he yelled for his beer. A lean, wiry fellow, he was unmarried, as far as anyone knew, and was the ultimate extrovert. Sometimes the suspicious James wondered if his habitual flirting with Diane was a cover for more serious lechery with her, but Les behaved like that with everything in a skirt.

On the other side, an older man with a toothbrush moustache and a bald patch sat himself down more decorously. Alfred Morris, a major in the Medical Corps, was the Administrative Officer from BMH. He was a trim, erect man, who had come up through the ranks and been commissioned from Warrant Officer during the war. A popular figure in TT, he seemed like everyone’s uncle, with his calm, amiable manner and his ability to pour oil on the frequently troubled waters in both the hospital and the club. James knew that this was his last tour before retiring to grow roses at his cottage in Kent. After making signs to the harassed manager for beer, Alfred turned to Robertson.

‘James, let me introduce you to a prospective new member. Just out from home, only arrived today.’

He leaned back to reveal Tom Howden on the next stool and allow the ritual of exchanging of names and handshakes. However surly and objectionable Robertson could be to his family and employees, his public school education and snobbish upbringing had given him an almost exaggerated sense of good manners where new acquaintances of an acceptable social standing were concerned and he greeted the medical man almost effusively.

‘Tom’s our new pathologist,’ explained Alfred Morris. ‘About time, too, as Dickie Freeman was RHE a month ago. Went home on the Empire Fowey.’

Although technically a guest of Major Morris, Tom’s application to join was a formality, the club committee accepting any officer on the nod. A few others gathered around with their drinks to inspect the new member. Though officers came and went fairly frequently, it was always a novelty to meet someone new, especially one fresh from home, who may have actually seen a recent International or who had perhaps been to the races at Kempton Park. Tom could oblige them on the first count, as he was a keen rugby fan, though he had never seen a horse race in his life.

He felt much better this evening, as his earlier bout of acute homesickness had passed. Standing here with a glass of beer amid convivial company in this bizarre kind of pub, he decided that he was going to enjoy his time in Malaya. An ardent devotee of Somerset Maugham, he felt as if he was reliving some of his favourite stories. At the moment, it was an all-male gathering at the bar. Although everyone was in civilian clothes, they were in virtually another kind of uniform. All stood in trousers and white shirts and all wore ties, as it was a club regulation that no shorts were allowed after six o’clock and that ties would be displayed. In fact, Daniel kept a few spares behind the bar for members who turned up without one. Long-sleeved shirts were required — the Army demanded this everywhere after seven o’clock, the rationale being to reduce the area available for malarious mosquitoes to feed on! The only exception to these rules was on Sundays and when there was a fancy-dress dance. Who had made these peculiar demands, no one remembered, just as the origin of the Sussex Club’s nickname was shrouded in mystery. Tom raised this question after a few more beers and James, whose browbeating personality usually monopolized the conversation, delivered his opinion in his loud, plummy voice.

‘Damned club’s been here since the ’twenties! Started by a few chaps most of whom happened to come from Sussex.’

‘But why “The Dog”?’ asked the doctor.

‘I think a couple of the fellows came up from KL and had been members of the Selangor Club on the padang there. Everyone in the bloody world knows that that’s nicknamed “The Dog”, so they borrowed the name to make them feel more at home in this God-forsaken hole.’

No one volunteered any reason why the Kuala Lumpur club should have carried the odd name, but the conversation careered off in a different direction and Tom went with it, enjoying himself more with every glass of cold lager. He was introduced to a dozen more people and promptly forgot every name, though there seemed to be twice as many military as civilians.

The faces along the bar came and went, as some left for their evening meal at home or in the various messes in the Garrison — and others arrived to eat in the club dining room, which lay through a door at the end of the room. At seven thirty, Major Morris tapped his arm and pointed to the big clock above the bar.

‘Time to get back to the Mess, lad. Number One will give us the evil eye if we’re late for his soup.’

Tom had learned a lot in his first few hours at BMH Tanah Timah. ‘Number One’ was the title of the Officers’ Mess Steward — an emaciated Chinese of indeterminate age whose real name was Lim Ah Sok, and who ruled the inmates with a rod of iron concealed behind a deferential manner. He was assisted by his ferocious, if diminutive wife Meng, who wielded her iron rod without any pretence of deference.

The two officers climbed into Morris’s 1939 Hillman Minx and drove the mile back to the hospital. As they crossed the little bridge and came to the junction with the main road, Tom asked about drinking and driving regulations.

‘Good God, lad, the way the locals drive here, the coppers could never spot a drunk driver, unless they noticed he was doing better than the others!’

As the old car ground its way past the ghostly bulk of the old tin dredge, the major offered some further advice.

‘When you get a car — and you can’t get anywhere without one — take my tip. If you hit anyone, for God’s sake don’t stop or the locals will beat you half to death! Just drive like hell to the next village with a police station and report it.’

As Tom silently digested this new variation on the Highway Code, the Hillman turned in through the gates of BMH, the driver getting a ragged salute from the sentry, who sprang erect from his habitual slouch when he saw his Admin Officer behind the wheel.

They drew up outside the Mess and as he walked in, the new doctor had another look at the place in the light of the bare bulbs hanging under the verandahs. The left-hand hut was given over to the dining room and beyond it the lounge, rather grandly called the ‘anteroom’. The kitchen was this side of the dining room and the ablutions were at the far end. The other hut opposite contained about ten small rooms for the resident officers, their row of slatted doors reminding Tom of the changing cubicles in a swimming pool. His room was near the middle, a plywood cell with a single bed inside a sagging mosquito net, a clothes locker, a washbasin, a desk and a ‘chair, easy, officers for the use of, one’, as it was described in the inventory.

For fear of incurring the steward’s displeasure, they went straight to the dining room and sat at the long table just as Number One came in from a door at the other end, where the cooking was being done by his tiny wife. He bore a tureen of soup which he put down between the place settings, then padded out, his flip-flops slapping on the linoleum.

‘Bit thin on the ground tonight, aren’t we?’ said Alf Morris, looking across at the other pair of diners. One of them was Percy Loosemore, a major who specialized in skin and venereal diseases. He was a bony man of about forty, with sparse fair hair, a long nose and a waspish nature.

‘Some panic in theatre, apparently. The sawbones and the gasman are dealing with some MT accident — a REME squaddie who stuck his hand in the fan of a Saracen’s engine.’ He ladled some tomato soup into a bowl and slid the tureen towards Alfred.

Tom’s vocabulary of acronyms was already wide enough to gather that some accident had occurred to a private in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers from the Motor Transport section. What a ‘Saracen’ was, he had no idea.

The younger man was Alec Watson, a fresh-faced, gingery Scot only eighteen months out of medical school, who added his two-pennyworth to the conversation.

‘They say that an alternative cap badge for REME should be a crown surmounting a crossed screwdriver and a condom, with the motto “If you can’t fix it, f- it!”’

Major Morris grinned, but then wagged a finger at the lad.

‘That’ll cost you a dollar in the box, laddie. You know the rules.’

Their Commanding Officer had instituted a strict no-swearing regime in the Mess, the penalty being putting a Straits dollar in the swear-box for the Red Cross. There was even a faded list of words pinned on the anteroom wall, listing the proscribed oaths. There was also a ‘no-treating’ rule, which meant that though a member could invite another to have a drink, each had to sign a chit to go on their own mess bill.

Alec Watson grinned ruefully and promised to fork out later. He was a mere GDMO — a General Duties Medical Officer — which meant that he was too junior to have a speciality and was a medical dogsbody in the hospital. He ran the Casualty Station during the day, as well as the Families Clinic, though there were relatively few of those, apart from the dependants of the Malay-enlisted Other Ranks and some Gurkhas.

They ploughed through the soup course, which came straight out of Campbell’s tins, then a tough piece of local chicken that the sardonic Percy claimed must have died of senility. The best part was the dessert, which was a fruit salad of fresh mango, papaya and pineapple, the first two being a totally new experience for Tom Howden.

After the meal, they went through the door at the other end into the anteroom, which like the dining room, was across the width of the long narrow hut, louvred doors running down each side. Most of these were open, letting in the heavy scent of the tropical night, along with the incessant twitter of the cicadas and monotonous burp of a bullfrog lurking in a nearby monsoon drain.

Number One glided in with a tray of coffee which he put on one of the low tables within the rectangle of easy chairs that filled the centre of the room. Another table at one side carried outdated magazines, the Lancet, British Medical Journal and a few copies of the airmail edition of the Daily Telegraph, as well as the Straits Times. Apart from a faded picture of the Queen on one wall, a clock and a shelf of books abandoned by former residents on the other, the room was bare. All the furniture was uniform Barrack Store issue, plain no-nonsense wood with anaemic fabric on the foam cushions.

There was a sleepy silence while they all sipped their coffee, which was blatantly Nescafe with a dash of Carnation tinned milk. When they had finished, Number One came to collect the tray and take orders for drinks. They all ordered a beer, except for Alec Watson who regretfully shook his head.

‘Sorry, I’m OMO tonight, Number One.’

Two days ago, Tom might have thought that the young Scot was confessing to being queer, but now he knew that it stood for ‘Orderly Medical Officer’, the doctor permanently on duty overnight — which explained why he was the only one in uniform.

Alec must have read his thoughts.

‘Soon be your turn, Tom! Everyone under field rank has to go on the rota. As there’s only five of us lieutenants or captains, it comes round more than once a week.’

Howden grinned. ‘Don’t know that I’ll be of much use. I haven’t seen a live patient for over a year.’ After qualifying, he had been able to delay his call-up for National Service by getting deferment for another twelve months. This allowed him to get a pathology training post in Newcastle’s Royal Victoria Infirmary and come into the Army as a junior specialist on a Short Service Regular Commission.

When the Tigers arrived, there was another long silence. Percy Loosemore, the wiry Essex man with the long, leathery face, studied the Appointments Vacant section of the Lancet, while Alfred Morris dozed in his chair with a handkerchief spread over his upturned face.

The young Scot, who to Tom looked about sixteen, sat immobile, staring out through an open door into the velvet darkness, listening to the cicadas and thinking inscrutable thoughts. The new arrival began to think that the main danger of Active Service was not being shot by terrorists, but dying of boredom. It was hardly eight thirty, but everyone seemed ready for bed. The only socializing influence in TT seemed to be The Dog and in an effort to break the ennui, Tom brought up the subject.

‘Who exactly can be members?’ he asked. ‘That chap with the loud voice said it had been there since the nineteen-twenties.’

Alf Morris, who was not asleep after all, gave a snort of amusement.

‘That was James Robertson — self-appointed squire of Tanah Timah! Though at least he’s a planter and it was that lot who started the club. But if it wasn’t for the Army, it wouldn’t have had all those facilities like a swimming pool and squash court. It’s only our membership fees that keep it afloat.’

‘And the bar profits!’ said Percy. ‘Very exclusive, The Dog — only officers and white men, very pukka!’ Tom wondered if dealing every day with scores of men with the clap had made him cynical about human nature.

‘What about women?’

The magic word brought Alec out of his trance. ‘Women? Well, the QA sisters are officers, so they qualify, but not their Other Ranks, of course. The only others are the wives of the members, though there’s a civilian English teacher seconded to the Garrison who they let in as a special favour.’

Tom thought that the GDMO had picked up a lot of local gossip in the few months that he had been here — though he supposed there was little else to do except absorb all the tittle-tattle.

‘That James Robertson — he seems a pretty forceful chap.’

‘He’s full of bullshit!’ snapped Alec. ‘And that’s not on the swear-word list, Alf, so don’t look at me like that!’

‘A colourful character, James,’ mused Percy Loosemore. ‘We could tell you a lot about him.’

Alf Morris pulled off his handkerchief and sat up.

‘Now watch what you say, Percy, especially around here.’

Intrigued, Tom’s jug-handle ears almost wagged in anticipation.

‘Tom should know the basics of the situation, Alf,’ said Percy. ‘It might stop him innocently putting his foot in it.’

‘And now’s as good a time as any, when the other fellows aren’t here,’ suggested Alec Watson. With Morris still looking uneasy, Percy, the venereologist, launched into a tutorial on the local scandals.

‘The plain fact is that our beloved senior surgeon, Peter Bright, has had a bit of a thing going with Robertson’s wife. A real cracker, is Diane, a blonde gorgeous enough to make your eyes water! Everyone seems to know about it except the damned husband.’

‘I’m not so sure about that, Percy,’ grunted Alf Morris. ‘So don’t go mouthing it about or there’ll be hell to pay.’

Alec Watson seemed to be looking forward to some High Noon drama in TT.

‘If Jimmy Robertson does find out, there’ll be a shoot-out. Plenty of guns up at Gunong Besar, I’ll bet!’

‘There’ll be a shoot-out if he hears you calling him “Jimmy”, my lad,’ snapped Alfred. ‘Our James is very touchy on that point — even “Jim” isn’t posh enough for him.’

There was a pause while Percy rang a small brass bell that stood on the table. Number One padded in to take orders for more beer, offering his pad of chits and a pen for the drinkers to sign their pay away. As they waited, Tom recalled the object of the gossip, whom he had met briefly over a cup of tea that afternoon. Peter Bright was a Major, the senior of the two surgeons at BMH. A tall, good-looking man in his mid-thirties, Tom felt he was the sort of man that appeared on the covers of Mills amp; Boon hospital romances. Swept-back fair hair, blue eyes and an aristocratic nose gave him a head start in the lady-chasing stakes, to say nothing of his Oxbridge accent.

After the drinks had materialized, Percy Loosemore was off again.

‘Our Peter got divorced a couple of years ago, when his missus did a runner with some German chap at BMH Munster, so now he’s casting around for a new wife. And as the Robertsons are having a stormy passage these days, maybe he’ll get lucky.’

The Administrative Officer clucked under his breath. ‘You really are a proper old washerwoman when it comes to gossip, Percy!’

‘Well, the new lad here needs to know what subjects to avoid in the club — and in the Mess here. It could be embarrassing.’

‘Not only Pete and Diane,’ cut in Alec. ‘Best not to mention Lena Franklin and James Robertson in the same breath, if our gasman is within earshot!’

The new pathologist’s brow wrinkled as he tried to keep track of who they were talking about. A ‘gasman’ was an anaesthetist, so that must be David Meredith, a Short-Service captain like himself. He was a dark, intense Welshman, to whom Tom had also spoken briefly at teatime. Percy continued to develop the theme.

‘Lena’s one of the juiciest QA sisters, if you like the arty, passionate type. Dave Meredith is ass-over-head in love with her and was working himself up to pop the question, but then last month, it suddenly cooled off. The clever money is on James as the cause, so Dave is seriously pissed off!’

He leered at Morris.

‘And that’s not on the list, either, Alf!’

At midnight, the Buick roared up the road to Gunong Besar, its headlights cutting a bright tunnel through the darkness. The pale trunks of young rubber trees flicked reflected light as it passed, until they gave way to elephant grass and crumbling red rock at a cutting where the track sliced between high banks on either side.

The heavy American sedan was even heavier than when it was made in Detroit in 1942, as steel plates had been welded inside all the doors. A metal flap was hinged over the windscreen, a lever inside enabling it to be lowered in an emergency. The glass of the side windows had been replaced by heavy-gauge steel sheets with just a small slot cut in the panes, so that the driver could see a little to the side. The rear window was similarly blanked off, so that the mirrors perched on the fronts of the wings provided the only view backwards. James Robertson had acquired the car seven years ago, as part of the deal when he bought Gunong Besar. The previous owner had had the armour fitted and James thought it added glamour to his image, especially since the attack on the estate a few months back. The police and army patrols along the road had been increased since then and there was little danger during daylight. However, James continued to parade up and down from The Dog in a two-ton saloon that guzzled petrol, as he was loath to give up his pose as the fearless planter, careless of any danger.

The old car seemed to know its own way, helped by the grooves cut by traffic in the soft laterite of the single track road. With a good many beers and whisky chasers inside him, James was sleepy rather than drunk and took little notice of the three miles of gritty track. He certainly had no way of noticing the figure crouching on top of the right-hand side of the cutting, a rifle trailing from one hand, staring intently down at the lone car passing below him.

Half a mile further on, James turned into the short side track leading to his bungalow and noisily revved the engine to climb the slope up the side of the knoll. He swung on to the flat area in front of the verandah in a spray of gravel and hoisted himself unsteadily out of the driving seat. Slamming the car door, he tramped up the steps and clumped across the hollow boards, careless of disturbing anyone. Marching through the bedroom, he jerked open the bathroom door and switched on the light. After tearing off his clothes and throwing them vaguely in the direction of the dhobi basket, he got rid of some of his beer in the toilet, then sluiced cold water over his face at the basin.

Stumping back across the echoing boards of the bedroom floor, he hauled out his side of the mosquito net from under the mattress and crashed naked on to his side of the bed, ignoring the slim figure under the single sheet. Within minutes, he was snoring, but on the other edge of the bed, Diane lay with her eyes open, weighing up the pros and cons of the men currently in her life.

Not far away, the figure with the rifle had come down from the cutting and was loping through the rubber by the light of a pale half moon.