Dead in the Dog

TWO

‘The old man wants to see you before Daily Orders,’ announced Alf Morris, as Tom Howden appeared in the dining room. ‘The colonel’s back from his leave in the Cameron Highlands, so it’s business as usual. Get to his office at eight sharp, OK?’

It was seven fifteen on Friday morning, the new boy’s first full day at BMH. Six other officers were at the table and nodded a greeting, though this early in the day, no one was in much of a mood for conversation. They were all in newly laundered jungle greens in various stages of fading, depending on how long they had been out from home. Some wore a tailored shirt and shorts, others the longer bush jacket and trousers, but all had brass or dark red pips or crowns on their shoulders and the regulation cherry red lanyard around the left armpit. All had the green and purple ribbon of the ‘General Service Medal with clasp Malaya’ on their breasts, though some like Alf Morris, had a few more campaign markers alongside. Even Tom had his GSM ribbon, as they were issued within two days of arrival in FARELF. It was claimed that some chaps in Hong Kong had the Malaya Medal, because their troop plane had been delayed in Singapore by engine trouble for twenty-four hours, which qualified them for being on active service!

Morris filled a bowl with cereal at a side table and went to sit down with the others. As Tom followed his example and spooned up some limp cornflakes, the swing door from the kitchen crashed open and a small tornado emerged, carrying two plates of fry-up which she banged on the table in front of Percy and Alec. On the way back, she planted herself in front of the pathologist and scowled at him ferociously. He looked down at the small, squat Chinese woman, who had a frizz of jet black hair above her round face.

‘You wan’ egg?’ she demanded loudly.

‘Please — and bacon and beans.’

‘OK, I bring! Now siddown!’ She jabbed a finger at the table and marched back to the kitchen, her morning ritual accomplished.

Tom took his bowl and sat opposite Alf Morris, who grinned.

‘I see you’ve made a hit with Meng. She’s as good as gold, really.’

‘What’s this about seeing the colonel? What do I have to do?’

Morris poured more diluted Carnation on to his cornflakes.

‘March smartly into his office and stand in front of his desk. Give him a salute, then stick your hat under your left armpit and stand at attention.’

Tom stopped his spoon halfway to his mouth. ‘Bloody hell! I thought the medics were a bit more relaxed than that?’

‘Dollar in the box, lad,’ said Alf automatically. ‘No, our CO is a bit of a stickler for the traditions, I’m afraid.’

‘Colonel O’Neill thinks he should have been in the Household Cavalry, not the RAMC, old chap.’

Peter Bright, the subject of last night’s gossip, spoke for the first time. Again Tom noticed his aristocratic profile and the immaculate uniform. He never seemed to sweat like the rest of them.

‘Should have been in the Waffen SS, not the Household Cavalry,’ muttered the man next to him, a thin, beetle-browed Welshman. He was so dark that he always looked as if needed a shave, but David Meredith was handsome in a melancholy sort of way.

Tom was rapidly getting the impression that their Commanding Officer was not the flavour of the month in the Mess. As the colonel had been on leave for a few days, the new arrival had not yet met him and looked forward to the event with some unease.

‘What’s wrong with him, then?’

The loyal Administrative Officer, with twenty-six years of unswerving deference to rank behind him, jumped in ahead of any other replies.

‘Nothing’s wrong with him. He’s just a rather strict disciplinarian.’

There were derisory snorts from around the table, but no one ventured to enlarge on the subject, though one or two looked rather uneasily over their shoulders.

Meng smacked a plate in front of him and the others peered at it.

‘Fried bread and a tomato as well, eh?’ observed Percy. ‘She’s taken a real shine to you, Tom.’

At ten to eight, he was out on the road from the Mess to the hospital. It ran all around the site, parallel to the chain-link perimeter, the wards being inside it. Various other buildings such as the two Officers’ Messes, the ORs’ barracks, Casualty, Sergeants’ Mess, Quartermaster’s stores, mortuary, dental unit and armoury, all lay between it and the boundary fence. The inner square was bisected by the main corridor that ran up from opposite the front gate to the little armoury that lay at the back, between the RAMC Officers’ Mess and that of the Queen Alexandra’s Royal Army Nursing Corps. Cynics had long claimed that they needed the guns to keep the two sexes apart.

Tom Howden walked in the already-warm morning as far as this armoury, watching the steam rise off the wet ground as the sun began to make itself felt. When he looked beyond the hospital fence to the edge of the valley, he could see the jungle-covered hills less than a mile away, wraiths of mist winding through the tops of the trees. The air smelled so different from Tyneside, a cloying mixture of flowers, humid vegetation and stagnant water.

He turned sharp left into the long corridor that was the main artery of the hospital, a place where sometime during the day you could meet every inhabitant of the place. It was a concrete strip edged with deep monsoon drains, each side completely open, with a gabled asbestos roof supported on green-painted posts all the way down to the front of the hospital. On each side, every twenty yards or so, were double doors to the wards, which stuck out like ribs from a spine. They were long green-painted huts, similar to those of the Mess, with slatted doors down most of their length on each side. Just inside the front doors were the sisters’ and doctors’ offices and at the far end, the sluice-rooms.

Halfway down the corridor, he saw that one of the buildings was different. It was shorter, built of concrete and had a few glass windows, which had several air conditioning units sticking out. This was the operating theatre, the domain of the amorous pair, Peter Bright and David Meredith. On the other side of the corridor was the X-ray Unit and further down the corridor was his own bailiwick, the pathology laboratory, opposite the dispensary.

Beyond these, he had to dodge a group of barefoot Tamil labourers, who were energetically scrubbing the concrete with brooms, slopping soapy water from buckets carried on a trolley. Just past them, he came to the end of the corridor, where the first two ribs on the spine were offices, fronting the car park and entrance gate with its guardroom. On the right were the RSM’s cubbyhole and the general office, where several Indian and Chinese clerks filed records and banged away on old typewriters. To the left were the rooms of the QA Matron and the Admin Officer, with the Holy of Holies on the far end — the CO’s office.

Feeling like a fourth-former going to see the headmaster, Tom pulled up his long khaki socks with the red garter tabs, adjusted the lanyard around his shoulder and straightened his cap. Striding to the middle door, he tapped and waited.

A harsh voice commanded him to ‘Come!’

Inside, he found himself in a bare office with a dozen hard chairs lined up against two walls, like a vet’s waiting room. Opposite the door, was a large empty desk, on which were a cap and a bamboo swagger stick, lined up with meticulous accuracy to face the entrance. Behind the desk was Lieutenant Colonel Desmond O’Neill, Commanding Officer of BMH Tanah Timah.

Tom marched across the wide empty space to stand in front of the desk, gave his best salute and whipped off his hat.

‘Captain Thomas Howden reporting for duty, sir.’ He thought this sounded about right for the occasion.

The colonel looked up at him impassively. He was a trim, stiff-backed man of average height with dark short-cropped hair, greying at the temples. His face was thin, the skin stretched tightly over his high cheekbones. Darkly handsome in a horrible sort of way, thought Tom. As a keen cinema-goer at home, he immediately compared the CO with either Stewart Granger or Michael Rennie, the sardonic heroes of many an adventure film. But it was the eyes that made him uneasy, piercing pale globes that never seemed to blink, the kind that inept police artists drew on wanted axe murderers. The colonel now covered them with a pair of steel-rimmed glasses to stare at his new officer.

‘Pathologist, is that what you claim to be, Howden?’

The harsh voice had a strong Ulster accent.

‘Yessir, one year’s experience as a Senior House Officer in Newcastle.’

Tom had hoped for some kind of welcome to the new unit, but it seemed that O’Neill was above such pleasantries.

‘Well, you’ll have other duties here as well — take your turn as Orderly Officer, act as the Hygiene Officer and run the blood transfusion service. That means you also have to act as the medical officer to the MCE next door, that’s where you get your blood.’

This was one acronym he’d not come across yet and he had no idea where he was to get his blood, but had the sense not to query it from this peculiar man.

‘Yessir, of course, sir.’

O’Neill continued to glare at him, his narrow lips compressed into a thin line. Then he spoke again, the Belfast accent strange to Tom’s Geordie-tuned ears.

‘Short-Service man, aren’t you? Well, you’ll have to be a good example for these National Service fellows! Smartly-dressed, strict discipline, understand? Then you’ll not fall foul of me too often.’

He sat with his hands on his empty desk, fingers flat on the wood, with an immobility that reminded Tom of a snake, ready to strike. The new arrival stood stiffly, unsure whether to make any response, but the decision was made for him.

‘Right, Howden, dismiss. Daily Orders at eight fifteen, every day except Sunday.’

The skull-like face gave a jerky nod of dismissal and Tom managed one of his salutes again, which he had been practising before the mirror in the washroom — ‘hand furthest way up, shortest way down’, as they had been instructed in the Depot at Crookham.

He swivelled to his left and marched out, closing the door behind him. Outside, he sagged against the adjacent wall and took off his cap to wipe the sweat from his brow, generated both by the heat and the stress of meeting the man who theoretically had the power of life and death over him for the next few years.

‘Good morning, captain, are you our new pathologist?’

A gentle voice came from behind him and he turned to find that he had been leaning against the edge of the open window of the next office.

Inside, standing against a table on which she was arranging bright tropical flowers in a vase, was a large woman dressed in grey-blue QARANC uniform with a triangular headdress of starched white linen hanging down her back. Her scarlet shoulder tabs carried a Major’s crown, so this must be the Matron, he thought. Uncertain of protocol, he slapped on his cap and gave her a salute, but she smiled benignly.

‘Only need do that when he’s around,’ she hissed in a stage whisper, jerking her head towards the office he had just left. Coming to the low window sill, she offered her hand.

‘Welcome to the madhouse. Hope you’ll be happy here. Keep your sense of humour and you’ll survive.’

He shook her hand and introduced himself, glad to find someone who made him feel welcome. She was almost motherly in her manner and Tom felt a sudden pang of homesickness again, as she was almost as old as his mother. Large and rather ungainly, she had a big, placid face and a ready smile. Her upper lip carried a faint moustache and he suspected that this was her last tour before retirement.

‘Are you married, captain?’ she asked, unashamedly gathering essential gossip to carry back to the Sisters’ Mess.

Tom grinned and shook his head. ‘Got a girl or two back home, but nothing serious yet.’ He thought he’d better keep his options open for a bit.

After a little more chit-chat, he wandered away to wait for this mysterious Daily Orders. His wristwatch told him there were a few minutes left and he stood at the bottom of the main corridor, watching hospital life pass by. Vehicles came and went through the gate. A Bedford ambulance lumbered up to Casualty, which was a large hut over on the right-hand side of the parking lot. The driver and an orderly from Casualty went to the back door and helped out a dishevelled trooper in high jungle boots, one arm in a bloodstained sling.

Next was a ramshackle Chinese truck delivering to the Quartermaster’s Stores further up the perimeter road. A Land Rover with the flash of a New Zealand battalion sped out after delivering patients to the STD, the ‘Special Treatment Department’ which was a euphemism for Percy Loosemore’s ‘clap and pox’ clinic, housed in a large khaki tent on the open area beyond the ward blocks. Next to this was a small shed-like structure with another mysterious acronym painted above the door — PAC. Later Tom learned that this was the unit’s Personal Ablutions Centre, where squaddies going out for a night on the town could obtain a free condom and a tiny tube of mercuric chloride; if they had signed the record book to prove their attendance, then they escaped being disciplined for ‘self-injury’ if they later reported sick with ‘a dose of the clap’.

From the other side of the hospital frontage, the RSM appeared, a burly red-faced man, who seemed all chest and boots. His Warrant-Officer’s badge of rank was on a leather wristlet, the same hand holding a cane with which he approached the quaking private on gate duty outside the guardroom. Tom couldn’t catch what the problem was, but the private seemed to shrink at the same rate as the RSM appeared to get larger.

At that moment, a clutch of medical officers appeared at the end of the corridor and swept up Tom on their way to the colonel’s office, Alf Morris joining them from his own room. There were several that Tom had never seen before and headed by Peter Bright, they all filed into the CO’s room. After saluting, each went to stand by one of the chairs against the side walls. Tom followed suit and at a barked command from Desmond O’Neill, they all sat down, with their caps on their knees, peak facing forwards.

‘Orderly Medical Officer’s report!’ snapped the colonel, his cold eye fixing on Alec Watson. The youngest officer shot to his feet and consulted a piece of paper, on which were recorded his activities during his twenty-four hour shift.

‘Two patients on the SIL, sir, no change in their condition. No one on the DIL. Three minor injuries treated in Casualty, nothing else to report, sir.’

O’Neill continued to fix him with his cobra-like stare. ‘What are these men on the SIL, Watson?’

‘One leptospirosis, one malaria, sir. The malaria came off the DIL on Tuesday.’ Tom was to discover later that these new initials meant ‘Dangerously and Seriously Ill Lists.’

The colonel swivelled his eyes to an older man whom Tom had never seen before. ‘Major Martin, what about these patients?’ he snapped.

Martin rose to his feet. He was a big man with a bright pink complexion and a fair bushy moustache. Tom assumed he was the senior physician, the medical equivalent of surgeon Peter Bright. As he had never appeared in the Mess, he presumably lived in the Married Quarters in the Garrison compound. He explained in a deep voice how the malaria victim was from 22 SAS in Sungei Siput and the leptospirosis or Weil’s disease sufferer was from a jungle patrol of the West Berkshires who had had to sleep in rat-infested swamp water.

‘Both are improving, they should pull through well enough,’ he ended.

This is how the meeting went for the next fifteen minutes, with the gimlet eyes of the colonel transfixing each officer in turn, demanding to know what he had been up to during the last day. He left the pathologist until last.

‘Well, Howden, any problems in the laboratory?’

‘Nossir, just settling in,’ answered Tom cautiously, as in fact he had yet to set foot in the place.

‘Better be up to speed by tomorrow, you’ve had almost a day here already!’

He stood up suddenly, the signal for everyone to lumber to their feet, put on their caps and salute, before filing out in silence.

As the door closed behind them, Tom heard Major Martin comment to Peter Bright. ‘The old man was very benign this morning, his few days’ leave must have mellowed him.’

Bloody hell, thought the new boy, what’s he like when he’s in a bad mood?

It was past noon before the news first reached the Officers’ Mess. Most of the residents had drifted back there for their pre-lunch drink and even some of the married officers had forsaken their domestic gin and tonics for a gossip with their colleagues. The table just inside the open doors of the anteroom was scattered with caps and webbing belts, as mess rules demanded that they were not worn inside. Most of the chairs were occupied and Number One was padding about with beers and fresh lime drinks, the drinking of hard liquor being frowned upon in the middle of the day. A couple of doctors were hidden behind newspapers or magazines, but most were lying back, letting the ceiling fans blow some of the sweat off them.

‘The damned Engineers in Garrison have installed air conditioning in their mess,’ complained Eddie Rosen, another Short-Service captain who worked in the surgical wards under Peter Bright. A small Jewish doctor from London, he had done a year’s ‘midder and gynae’, so was the nearest they had to a woman’s specialist, though a senior gynaecologist could be flown in at short notice from BMH Kinrara, near Kuala Lumpur.

‘Well they would, wouldn’t they,’ drawled Clarence Bottomley, a National Service lieutenant, known to all as ‘Montmorency’ for some obscure reason. He was a rather posh young man who, when in civvies, always wore a Marlborough tie and let everyone know that he was a Cambridge graduate. Though he seemed an amiable enough chap, Tom classed him amongst the ‘chinless wonders’ and the garrulous Percy had already reported that Montmorency was only marking time in BMH, until he was posted out to one of the more elite Guards’ battalions as a Regimental Medical Officer. He said they always wanted doctors who knew which fish knives to use at Mess Dinners and the correct direction in which to pass the port.

Before the ventilation iniquities of the Garrison Mess could be debated further, there was an interruption from near the door. Alfred Morris had arrived and after dropping his cap on to the table, rapped on it with his short swagger stick.

‘Chaps, listen a moment, please!’

The blunt authority of his voice was a reminder that he had once been a Regimental Sergeant Major. ‘The Commanding Officer wants me to tell you that more vigilance is required regarding security, especially outside the camp.’

There was a silence, as this was a new one, even given the eccentricities of their colonel.

‘What’s all this about, Alf?’ demanded the physician, John Martin.

‘Looks as if the lull in CT activity around these parts may be over,’ replied Morris. ‘There was an attack on one of the estates last night, only a few miles from here.’

A buzz of interest and concern went around the anteroom. If the area was returned to being a Black Area, it would interfere with their travelling, which meant problems with golf and weekend trips, to say nothing of the possibility of being shot. There was a clamour for more details as the members got up and advanced on the Admin Officer, who held up his hands for some quiet.

‘It seems that in the early hours of this morning, shots were fired at both bungalows and the workers’ lines at Gunong Besar. No one was hurt, but they drilled a few holes in the walls again, smashed the windscreen of Diane Robertson’s car and scared the shit out of some of the Indian labourers.’

Alf forgot his own swear-box penalty in the babble that followed his announcement.

‘Is that all that happened?’ demanded Percy Loosemore, who had been in TT the longest and remembered the previous more serious terrorist attacks.

‘Seems to be! Couple of dozen shots fired, then they melted away into the ulu.’ Tom had already gathered that this was the common name for the dense secondary vegetation around the edge of the jungle.

‘James Robertson and Douglas Mackay rolled out of their beds and grabbed their guns, but it was all over by then.’

‘The state James was in, in The Dog last night, it’s a wonder he even woke up at a mere few dozen gunshots!’ observed Peter Bright, sarcastically.

‘Where were you in the early hours, Pete?’ asked Percy provocatively, but no one laughed.

‘Did our lot find the bandits?’ asked David Meredith, his dark eyes brooding over the rim of his tankard.

‘Not a sign of anyone by the time the police got there, just ahead of a squad from the garrison. Douglas rang them and they were there within twenty minutes.’

‘Odd, that!’ ruminated Percy Loosemore. ‘The CTs usually cut the phone wires before they go on the rampage. They did last time they hit Gunong Besar, about six months ago.’

Peter Bright looked desperately worried. ‘Alf, are you sure no one was hurt?’

‘The lovely Diane must be OK, or we’ve had heard,’ said Percy, with a look of innocence, as he slipped in what all the others were thinking. With her husband at home, poor Peter would be unable to ring up the estate to see how his beloved was bearing up. The way Diane had reacted after the last attack, when she had been miles away in Singapore, suggested that she would be frantic now that she had actually been on the wrong end of gunfire.

The Admin Officer slumped into the last vacant chair and signalled to Number One for a beer, as the others settled back to listen and debate.

‘We’ll hear all about it endlessly tonight at The Dog,’ he said. ‘No doubt James Robertson will be there, playing the hero.’

In spite of the heat, the atmosphere in the Robertsons’ lounge that afternoon was decidedly frosty. The ice was provided in full measure by the two women present, the wives of the owner and his manager.

Rosa Mackay sat stiffly on the edge of one of the rattan easy chairs, with Diane slumped on the settee as far away as possible on the other side of the room. Douglas Mackay hovered uneasily in front of one of the verandah doors, while James stood with his back to the rear wall, his hands clasped behind him. The third man in the room thought whimsically that if the climate had allowed for a large fireplace, James Robertson would have stood like this in front of it, to emphasize his dominance as squire of the household.

Steven Blackwell was the Superintendent of Police, based at Tanah Timah, but responsible for a huge tract of country, much of it uninhabited. He was a burly, short-necked man of forty-five, almost completely bald above a rim of iron-grey hair running horizontally around the back of his head. Steven suffered severely from the sun, his face, head and neck always bright pink above his crisply starched khaki uniform. He wore shirt and shorts, with long black socks, black shoes and black peaked cap, which now lay on the piano, along with his leather-covered stick. A black ‘Sam Brown’ belt and diagonal cross-strap supported a holstered revolver.

‘I don’t know what to make of this, James,’ he was saying with a worried frown. He had a deep, pleasant voice, still with a trace of a Midlands accent. ‘It’s not like the last time they had a go at you. That was a much more determined effort.’

‘Well, eight bullet holes in my wall is hardly a Christmas greeting, Steven!’ retorted Robertson. ‘We had two fellows killed six months ago. It only takes one bullet to kill me, determined or not!’

He sounded aggrieved that any doubt should be cast on his heroic role as the besieged planter. Blackwell held up a conciliatory hand.

‘Good God, James, I’m not trying to play down what happened! But it’s so out of character for the bastards to turn up, fire a few shots and then slope off! Last time, we were all very lucky that a patrol happened to catch them in the act. We even managed to shoot one of the sods that time.’

Douglas Mackay spoke for the first time. He was a thin, stringy man in his late forties, a widow’s peak on his forehead where his sparse fair hair had receded at the temples. Douglas seemed all arms and legs in his shorts and bush shirt, the exposed skin still showing a slightly yellowish tinge from his years as a prisoner of the Japanese. His soft Scottish voice was a contrast to Robertson’s usual bluster.

‘D’you not think it could have been one or two of Chin Peng’s boys doing a bit of freelance work — or even a couple of local guys with Commie sympathies, maybe from one of the kampongs?’

James made derogatory noises under his breath at this attempt to downgrade his ordeal, but Blackwell thoughtfully rubbed his pink jowls.

‘It’s a possibility, though I don’t know where anyone outside the CT organization would have got weapons. We’ve clamped down so hard on the villagers now.’

‘They make their own bloody guns,’ objected James. ‘A piece of water-pipe, a handful of rusty nails and they’re in business!’

The police superintendent shook his head,

‘Not this time. These were no country guns. Inspector Tan has dug a few bullets out of the woodwork for me. They’re all three-oh-threes, good military hardware.’

Robertson had an answer for everything. ‘The CT’s have stacks of those. We Brits supplied them with thousands of the things when we wanted them to kill Japs with them a few years ago.’

Steven Blackwell nodded. ‘Sure, but the local loonies don’t have them. It has to be a CT unit — yet why should they bother to make such a feeble attempt? I don’t get it.’

‘It didn’t sound damned feeble to me in the middle of the night!’ snapped Diane, tremulously indignant. ‘I was terrified, I felt sure I was going to die!’

She had been all for driving to Penang that morning to stay in the Eastern and Oriental Hotel, until she could get a passage back to Britain on one of the regular Alfred Holt passenger ships, but her husband had persuaded her to stay. He was in something of a cleft stick, as even though things were deteriorating between them, his pride didn’t want her to go, leaving him with the ignominy of being branded as a dumped husband. Yet to play down the incident to reassure her, would devalue his own Errol Flynn image amongst his male cronies and female admirers.

As usual, he solved his dilemma by calling for drinks. Yelling for Siva, he got Blackwell and Mackay to sit down while gin, whisky and orange juice were dispensed, the policeman and his manager refusing anything alcoholic.

‘Let’s go through this once again, though I know Inspector Tan has taken it all down earlier,’ said the superintendent.

He looked across first at the manager’s wife, Rosa, who had sat silently on her chair. She was a small but beautiful woman, as dark as Diane was fair. Black glossy hair was cut in a rather severe pageboy, with a fringe across her forehead. Large brown eyes looked out rather fearfully from a smooth oval face, with full lips that needed far less cosmetics than Diane’s. Though she looked European, with the complexion of an Italian or Spaniard, Blackwell knew that she was Eurasian, though she would have passed for any nationality around the Mediterranean. She was not the daughter of an Asian and a European, but the daughter of two other Eurasians. Her father came from Goa, the son of a Portuguese merchant and an Indian mother and he had married a woman with similar ancestry. He had emigrated after the war to Malacca, originally a Portuguese settlement in southern Malaya, setting up a furniture and curio business. His daughter Rosa, now twenty-six, had been educated in a Catholic convent in Goa and after coming to Malacca, worked as a receptionist in a beach hotel. Here she had met Douglas Mackay on a weekend leave from his plantation job in Johore. When James offered him the post of manager in Gunong Besar, he had married Rosa and brought her up to Perak. Now the superintendent turned to her to get her account of last night’s drama.

‘I know nothing more than I told the inspector, Steven,’ she said in her low, soft voice, keeping her eyes well away from the glowering Diane. ‘I was fast asleep when shots woke me up and I heard splintering of wood when some must have hit the front of the bungalow. Then Douglas dashed in from the lounge and told me to hide low down in the bathroom, while he went out with a gun. I saw nothing, I was too frightened to move until it was all over.’

‘Can you remember how many shots you heard?

‘Not exactly, but there must have been at least a dozen, I think. They became quite distant after the first few.’

Blackwell turned to Robertson’s wife.

‘What about you, Diane? Does much the same apply?’

She glared first at Rosa, then turned to the policeman.

‘The shots woke me too, but the distant ones were first, then they came nearer. I had to wake him up, he was out for the count. Too much beer at The Dog.’

James scowled at this slur on his heroics. ‘Come on, Diane, I was out of bed like a shot!’

‘Well, anyway, eventually he staggered up after I’d started screaming, and told me to lie on the floor next to the bed.’

‘To be furthest away from the walls — bullets can knock holes right through that old woodwork,’ grunted her husband.

‘Then he went out — to get his gun, I suppose. But then it all went quiet. That’s all I can tell you.’

‘Except that you were wailing like a bloody banshee for ages!’ muttered James. ‘It took three stengahs and a gin and tonic to calm you down.’

‘D’you blame me, after that!’ she flared. ‘Why the hell did I let myself come to a place like this, where I might get raped and shot and God knows what?!’

The policeman hastily turned to the estate manager to dampen a return of Diane’s hysteria.

‘Douglas, you were the first to get outside, according to what you told Tan?’

The calm voice of the manager was in counterpoint to the woman’s panic.

‘Yes, I was working late on the accounts when it started. From the sound of the shots, they attacked our bungalow first, then went down to the worker’s lines, before coming up to James’s place here. I grabbed my pistol and rifle and went down the servant’s steps at the back, as I didn’t want to risk the front porch. There were more shots, well ahead of me, then silence! I kept hopping from tree to tree and worked my way around to the front of James’s bungalow, but there was no one to be seen. By then James had come out, so I went back to phone your police station and the guardroom at the Garrison.’

‘And you saw nothing at all?’

‘Not a thing. If it hadn’t been for the others hearing it — and the holes in the woodwork — I might have dreamt it all!’

Steve Blackwell sipped his orange juice as he turned to Robertson.

‘What about you, James? Anything to add?’

‘I’ve told you all this before — and your inspector chap. Like Douglas, I grabbed my rifle, then crouched down on the verandah, peering through the struts. Couldn’t see a thing, all the shots had been fired before that. I went down the steps and hid behind a bush, then hollered for Douglas. He shouted back that he was going to phone for help, so I went around the whole place to see what the hell was going on. By that time, the servants and the tappers had crawled out of their holes and were jabbering fit to burst, so I had to calm them down. By that time, your boys and the army had arrived.’

‘Have they found anything?’ demanded Diane, pouring herself another gin, without offering one to anyone else.

‘Not so far, but they’re widening out into the rubber and the ulu on both sides of the road.’

A platoon of the Royal West Berkshires were at that moment tramping through the estate behind the scatter of buildings that lay beyond the bungalows and across the road, where the tappers and labourers were housed. The house servants lived in huts immediately behind the two dwellings, already the subject of intensive searching by half a dozen constables under Inspector Tan and his Malay sergeant.

‘We’ve found fifteen spent cartridge cases, all standard three-oh-three calibre, no surprises there,’ added the superintendent.

‘What about footprints?’ asked Douglas Mackay.

Blackwell shrugged dismissively. ‘Pretty hopeless, it rained like hell early this morning. Plenty of smeared prints about, but they could be anyone’s. I doubt if even the Rangers could make anything of them.’

He was referring to the Sarawak Rangers, Ibans similar to Dyaks, recruited from Borneo as trackers. Heavily tattooed all over below the neck, these little men were superb at following terrorist trails in the jungle.

‘So what happens next?’ demanded James Robertson.

‘I’ve got men turning over every house up the road as far as Kampong Kerbau and the army is searching each side of the road all the way from there back to TT. Then I’m going back to see the Director of Operations in Brigade to decide if we need to widen out the search into the hills. I haven’t got enough men for that, it’s up to the Brigadier to decide if he wants to turn this into a major operation.’

‘And what happens if those bastards come back tonight — or tomorrow?’ snapped Diane, with nervous anger.

‘We’re running a permanent patrol after dark, up and down between TT and Kampong Kerbau,’ reassured the superintendent. ‘The police will use an armoured Land Rover and there’s a scout car coming from the Garrison.’

He drained his orange juice and picked up his hat and stick.

‘I wouldn’t worry too much, I’ve got a gut feeling that this was some spur-of-the-moment shoot-up by some crazy devil. Go down to the dance at The Dog tonight and take your mind off it.’

‘I’ll use the Buick, at least that’s got some protection,’ glowered James.

‘More than my poor Austin,’ snapped his wife. ‘I’ll have to send Siva to Ipoh tomorrow, to get a new windscreen fitted.’

As Steven Blackwell turned to leave, Douglas rose to follow him, Rosa almost scurrying to his side to take his arm. The Robertsons offered a surly farewell to the trio and as the manager and his wife walked away across the coarse grass of the knoll towards their own bungalow, Diane went out on to her verandah to glower after them, reserving a specially poisonous glare for the trim figure of Rosa Mackay.