Dead in the Dog

SIX

As the police superintendent was asking the question, Diane was driving fast up the lonely road towards her bungalow. The Austin was going well in the cooler night air and she had her shapely foot flat on the floor, urging every extra bit of speed from the little car. Her face was grim as she peered down the bright cone of her headlights that cut a tunnel through the darkness of the endless trees.

She had drunk quite a lot, but no more than usual on a Friday night and had the usual delusion of drinking drivers that their performance was that much better with a few gins inside them. She threw the small saloon around the bends, veering a little from edge to edge of the rutted red road and within minutes had covered the few miles to Gunong Besar without seeing a single vehicle. At that time of night, it would have been extraordinary if anything else was on that road, apart from the occasional police or military patrol, which as had been promised, were now more frequent.

At the estate, Diane swung up on to the slope of the knoll and drove straight under the house, stopping in an abrupt scuffing of gravel. She slammed the door and ran up the front steps to the verandah. With servants on the premises, the doors to the lounge were never locked and she hurried inside, stepping out of her heels and throwing her evening bag on to the settee as she went straight to the side table to pour herself a large gin and tonic. Her hands were shaking with a variety of emotions and the ice she had spooned out of a vacuum jug rattled against the side of the glass as she raised it to her lips.

After a couple of gulps, she calmed down and walked back out to the verandah, to lean on the rail with her glass cupped in her hands. Ironically, she wondered how many boring hours she had spent in exactly this posture since she came to Malaya. Taking another mouthful, she looked out into the velvety night, seeing only a few distant points of light far away in the valley. Somehow, she thought, it’s going to be Norfolk I’ll be looking at before very long. Now down to the bare ice in her glass, she was debating whether to get another, when a sound caught her attention that penetrated the turmoil in her mind. The sound of engines came rapidly closer and even her slightly fuddled senses recognized that more than one vehicle was approaching. Almost at once, headlights flickered through the trees and moments later, a Land Rover tore up the drive, followed by an armoured car and a three-ton truck. The last two were in army drab, but the first was a blue police vehicle. A dozen soldiers in jungle green scrambled from the truck and dispersed themselves and their weapons into the trees on either side of the drive.

Two men cautiously emerged from the Land Rover, one in officer’s uniform, the other in civvies. Both held revolvers as they stared up warily at the bungalow. In the light escaping from the lounge, they saw a figure leaning over the verandah — a figure with blonde hair.

‘Diane? Are you alright?’

The woman recognized his voice, even though the starlight was too dim to see his face. ‘Steven? What the devil are you doing up here at this time of night?’

There was some murmuring down below and the officer peeled off and went back to his men, as the policeman began climbing the steps. As he reached the top, the armoured car revved away and vanished up the road towards Kampong Kerbau. Holstering his pistol, Steven Blackwell walked across towards Diane Robertson, anxious to carry out this unwelcome task as best as he could manage.

‘What’s going on, for God’s sake? Anyway, come in and have a drink!’

Her bright, brittle voice rang out as she went into the big room and he followed her with a heavy heart.

‘Diane, forget the drink for a moment. Come and sit down, I have to tell you something.’

Hardened policeman that he was, he had been dreading this moment on the drive up from Tanah Timah, but in the event it was almost an anticlimax.

The new widow heard the news of her husband’s death with what at first seemed incredulity, then amazement tinged with curiosity. Diane neither fainted, nor screamed, nor sobbed. What she did do was go across the room and refill her glass, insisting against Steven’s protests that he have a drink as well. She came back to the settee and sat down, looking up at the superintendent. Her face was pale, but otherwise she seemed unmoved.

‘I don’t understand this, Steve. I have to believe it, if you say so! But I can’t understand it.’

He found that he needed the whisky after all and sat down rather heavily opposite the blonde, bemused by her reaction — or the lack of it.

‘We don’t even know where it happened yet, Diane. He just drove up to The Dog — God knows from where!’

She sipped her own drink, staring at him over the rim.

‘So I’m a widow now. I don’t even have a suitable black dress.’ She looked down at the slinky blue model that she was wearing. It must be shock, he thought. Soon, the facts will sink in and she’ll break down.

‘You can’t stay up here on your own. Is there someone who can stay with you? What about Rosa next door?’

Her eyebrows went up about an inch. ‘Rosa! Like hell she will! That bastard was screwing her, didn’t you know? Sorry, I suppose I mustn’t speak ill of the dead.’

Slightly tipsy now, she jumped up and staggered slightly, then went across to get more gin. She held the bottle up and waggled it at Blackwell, but he shook his head uneasily. He didn’t want a drunken witness on his hands, bereaved or not. He stood up and beckoned to her.

‘Diane, come back and sit down, please! You do realize what’s happened, don’t you? James has been killed and we have to find out how and where, urgently.’

She padded over in her bare feet and dropped heavily on to the settee.

‘I hear you, Steve, I’m not numbed with shock. You may as well know, I’d decided to leave him anyway. I was planning to go home to England, I’d had enough of his bloody nonsense.’

She took a deep drink, downing almost half the glass. ‘So if I’m shocked, it’s because of the surprise, not grief. I’m sorry, you’re thinking I’m a hard bitch, but that’s the way it is. But what the hell am I going to do now, with the bloody estate and all that?’

There’s a lot more to be done before those problems need to be faced, he thought grimly, but he kept his mouth shut for the present. He suddenly realized that she had not even asked where James had been killed or who killed him!

Diane suddenly dropped her empty glass to the floor, where it rolled under the settee. She put both hands up to her head and groaned, rocking back and forth. But it was not sudden grief, but frustrated bewilderment.

‘This is unbelievable, Steven! I’m suddenly a damned widow, but I couldn’t care less about bloody James. I know I’m supposed to and from here on, everyone will call me an unfeeling cow! Yet everything has been turned upside down. I just can’t take it in yet, I’m afraid.’

The policeman in him rapidly came back to the surface.

‘I know, Diane, and I’m desperately sorry. But before we settle you somewhere, I have to ask a few things. We still don’t know if this was another terrorist attack, like the previous two. When did you last see James?’

She smoothed her hair back and consciously pulled herself together, sitting more upright on the cushions.

‘Of course you must get on with your job. I’m sorry, Steve.’ Groping in the bag that she had thrown down, she found cigarettes and a lighter. Rather shakily, she lit up, then began speaking.

‘We went to the club separately tonight. As you’ve heard, we haven’t been on the best of terms lately. I took the Austin down at about eight thirty, James was already there.’

‘What time did he go?

‘No idea, he went off this afternoon to Taiping, said he had to see about some repairs to the latex machinery, though for all I know he was meeting some woman there. He didn’t come back here, so I suppose he went straight to The Dog. He was there when I arrived, anyway.’

‘Did he tell you anything about where he had been — or anything else relevant?’

Diane crushed out the almost intact cigarette in an ashtray with a force that suggested that it could have been her husband’s neck.

‘I told you, we weren’t exactly on gossiping terms these past few days. I got mad at him earlier tonight, as he was dancing with that bitch from the hospital half the evening, deliberately leaving me stuck with a gang of old biddies.’

Blackwell found it hard to say ‘Which bitch?’ but Diane sensed his problem and added ‘That Franklin woman, the nurse he’s been having it off with lately.’ Her voice was getting slightly slurred.

‘So when was the last time you saw him? I need to get some idea of when this might have happened, as well as where.’

She rocked slightly and Blackwell was afraid that she might fall over, but she pulled herself together and steadied herself with a hand on the arm of the settee. ‘We had a row later on, after the buffet. When the room was empty, I cornered him and gave him a piece of my mind. Then I walked out and that’s the last I saw of him.’

‘What time would that be?’

‘I told you, after the supper had finished. About half ten or a bit later, I suppose.’

Almost like an automaton, Diane walked over to the sideboard and poured herself yet another drink, before coming back to flop heavily on to the settee. She lifted the glass to her lips, where it rattled momentarily against her teeth as she gulped at the gin. Her lipstick was smudged, half of it on the rim of her glass.

‘And when did you leave the club?’ asked Steven.

‘Soon after that, I’d had enough of his nonsense. I left him picking at what was left of the buffet.’

The superintendent ran a hand nervously over what remained of his hair, as the next questions would have to probe into sensitive territory. He was conscious again of the difficulties of being a policeman in a small European community, where almost everyone he had to interrogate would be a close acquaintance.

‘Can you tell me what the row was about, Diane?’ he said gently.

He need not have been so worried about embarrassing her, as she merely gave a derisive snort.

‘Need you ask, Steve? I’ve just told you, everyone in TT knows that he has been getting his leg over that bitch from the hospital, but he needn’t have flaunted it in The Dog when I was there!’ She waved an unsteady hand in the general direction of the next bungalow. ‘Though at least he wasn’t playing quite so near home as usual.’

‘So you don’t know what time he left the club?’ Blackwell knew from the club steward that Robertson had left soon after eleven, but he always liked to cross-check when he could. She shook her head, the golden hair swirling across her shoulders.

‘I wouldn’t be surprised if he went off somewhere to roger that bloody woman in the back of his car. The rear seat is the size of a double bed!’ she added bitterly, thinking of the cramped space in her own little Austin.

‘And did you leave The Dog alone?’ asked Steven cautiously, prodding to see if there was any way of confirming her movements. He had no real reason for this, but from his days as a CID man back in England, he still kept the habit of building up a mental picture of where everyone was at what they called the ‘material time’.

Diane peered at him over the rim of her glass. For the first time, the brittle nonchalance over her sudden bereavement seemed to falter and she answered rather defensively. ‘I gave one of the guys from Garrison a lift back to the gates, as the fellow who had brought him had gone off with some popsy.’

Blackwell nodded encouragingly. ‘Who was that, then? Do I know him?’

‘Oh, Gerry something-or-other,’ she answered evasively. ‘One of the West Berkshires, a lieutenant, I think. I hardly know him.’ She neglected to mention that the half-mile journey took them almost an hour.

He thought of pushing her harder, then decided it could wait, if it ever needed to be followed up. The fact was that her husband had been shot in circumstances which suggested it was part of the civil insurgence that dominated life in Malaya — and yet, like the attack the week before, it seemed at odds with the usual run of terrorist activity.

He stood up and looked across at the very attractive woman who was hunched over her drink on the settee. ‘Diane, I must get back to TT and see if there’s any more news. The army’s out in strength looking for any CTs in the area and I need to check with them. But what are we going to do with you? You can’t stay here on your own!’

She made a visible effort to pull herself together, putting her now empty glass on the table and standing up, brushing back her hair from her forehead.

‘I’ll be fine, Steven, really I will. I’ve got my amah and Siva at the back of the house — and Douglas is only a few yards away.’

He noted that she pointedly avoided any mention of Douglas’s wife.

‘I’ll have to talk to him first thing in the morning,’ she went on. ‘About the running of the estate — not that it will make much difference, he did all the real work around here, anyway.’

Reluctantly, the superintendent had to accept her decision. There seemed little alternative to Diane staying in the bungalow that night — there were no decent hotels nearer than Penang and the government rest-houses in the smaller towns were hardly suitable for an unaccompanied young woman. He could not think of any female companion who would be willing to come and stay with the new widow, given her reputation and the remoteness of Gunong Besar. If only his wife had not gone back to England, she could have sorted this out — Margaret was good at mothering people.

Again reassuring Diane that the police and the army were thick on the ground around the estate and promising to come up again first thing in the morning, Steven Blackwell went out to his vehicle, leaving another Land Rover with two armed constables parked ostentatiously outside the bungalow.

By the time Steven Blackwell got back to BMH, the place was buzzing with activity, mostly centred around the Casualty hut at the end of the car park.

Pushing past two red-capped Military Police standing in the doorway, he found that the Matron had joined the throng and was deep in conversation with Alfred Morris and the night sister. Tom Howden was talking in a corner with Peter Bright, who had seen all the activity when he had driven in a few minutes earlier and come to investigate. Although Morris was his equal in rank, Alf was non-medical and in the absence of the Commanding Officer, the surgeon was assumed to be top dog when it came to a medical problem, which apparently included sudden death. It was not a responsibility he welcomed.

‘So where the hell is O’Neill?’ he demanded irritably, in his cut-glass accent. ‘Did you try his quarters again?’

‘Three times, but nobody answers the phone,’ grunted the pathologist. ‘Alf has just sent a runner up there now, to knock on his door.’

He looked curiously at Peter Bright, who seemed to be in a fever of excitement, more than even these unusual circumstances warranted. The surgeon was agitated, running his fingers through his fair, wavy hair and nervously nibbling at his lower lip. Even Tom’s superficial knowledge of the intrigues in Tanah Timah was enough to set him wondering if Peter’s thoughts were now dominated by the fact that the love of his life had suddenly become a widow.

The major from the garrison was on the telephone, but now slapped it down and came across to the police superintendent. ‘We’ve had patrols up and down that damned road as far as Kampong Kerbau, but there’s not a sign of anything out of the ordinary. I just don’t understand it, the bandits don’t just loose off a single shot, they usually set up an ambush and blast hell out of whatever comes up the road.’

‘That’s if it did happen on the estate road,’ replied Steven. ‘At the moment, we haven’t a clue where the shooting took place.’

Everyone in the room gravitated towards the speakers, forming a circle around them. The QA corporal, her orderly and the pharmacy staff sergeant stood on the periphery, a captain from the provost marshal’s unit pushing in front of them. He was in charge of the military police, though the nearest investigators, the SIB, were in Ipoh. Speaking to Steven, who he knew well both professionally and socially, he voiced what was in most people’s minds.

‘Why the hell poor old Jimmy? And where did it happen?’

A confused chatter began filling the room and Blackwell saw that the whole affair was in danger of becoming a circus, with so many people milling about, most of whom had no real need to be involved. He held up his hands and called for quiet.

‘This is a police matter until we learn otherwise,’ he said loudly. ‘Mr Robertson was a civilian and he suffered his fatal injuries somewhere out there.’ He waved his hand at the rest of Malaya, before turning to Peter Bright and Alf Morris who were now standing together.

‘Could I suggest that the body is taken to your mortuary, as we’ve nowhere else to put him nearer than the ones at the civil hospitals at Ipoh or Taiping. I’ll contact the coroner first thing in the morning, but I’m sure he’ll want a post-mortem carried out.’

The coroner for this area of Perak was an Indian lawyer in private practice at Kuala Kangsar and Steven knew from experience that he would agree to almost any suggestion made by the police.

‘It’s almost one thirty,’ he continued. ‘My men and the army are still combing the area, but there’s nothing more we can do here until the morning, so I suggest we all get back to our duties or to our beds.’

There was a general shuffling as people began moving, but they halted abruptly as a harsh voice suddenly barked at them from the doorway.

‘What’s the meaning of this? Major Bright, what’s going on here?’

It was the Commanding Officer, Desmond O’Neill, dressed in a dark blazer and striped tie, with grey flannels above black shoes. His bony face glowered at them, lips compressed into a thin line.

‘What are all you people doing in my hospital at this hour of the night?’ Even at this tense moment, Tom Howden noticed the colonel’s proprietary attitude towards the BMH.

‘There’s been a tragedy, sir.’ Peter Bright chose his words carefully, being well aware of his senior officer’s peculiarities. ‘James Robertson has been shot dead. Outside somewhere, but he was brought here in case he could be resuscitated.’

‘He’s a civilian,’ snapped O’Neill. ‘He should have been taken to a general hospital.’

No one wanted to point out to him that the nearest was more than twenty miles away but Steven Blackwell was in no mood to be obstructed by some military martinet.

‘He wasn’t actually certified dead until he was on army premises, colonel — and the death may well be due to enemy action. I’ll clear it with the Brigadier in the morning, but I’ve asked if we could have the use of your mortuary in these urgent circumstances. As you will know, bodies go off rapidly in this climate and we’ll need an examination to help our investigation, as this is a murder.’

The cold eyes of the colonel roved aggressively around the room, then his mercurial moods changed into an almost benign state.

‘Of course, superintendent, of course!’ He turned on his heel like a marionette and glared at Tom.

‘Howden, you’re supposed to be a pathologist! Get the corpse to the mortuary and perform a post-mortem in the morning.’

He swung back to the others and his ferocity returned. ‘This is a Casualty Department, not a peep show. Everyone who has no business here can clear out — now!’

With a last glare at the discomfited faces, he vanished and they heard his car start up and accelerate away.

‘Cheeky bugger,’ muttered the garrison major to Alf Morris. ‘If I had another pip on my shoulder, I’d have told him where to get off!’

The faithful Admin Officer murmured something about O’Neill’s bark being worse than his bite, but the major had joined the general exodus and soon only the RAMC staff remained with the policeman.

‘In the morning, I’ll have to come and take statements from everyone who was in The Dog tonight,’ said Blackwell. ‘I’ll contact the coroner as early as I can and get his authority for you to carry out a post-mortem, Captain Howden.’

Alf Morris gave an indrawn whistling noise to indicate his concern at this.

‘You’d better get back to the colonel to get his consent for that, Steven.’

‘But the bloody man has just ordered him to do it!’ protested the police officer.

‘Our beloved leader can be very fickle,’ warned Peter Bright. ‘What he says tonight, he might flatly deny in the morning.’

Blackwell gave a small sigh of exasperation and after making his farewells, went wearily out to his waiting Land Rover, the surgeon following him to his own sporty MG. By now, the orderly sergeant had got two RAMC privates to bring a trolley from the Families Clinic next door and with the others watching with sombre expressions, they covered James Robertson’s body with the sheet from the examination couch and hauled him across on to the trolley. As they pushed the sad burden away to the mortuary, Tom Howden had a sudden thought, as he had inspected the place only a couple of days ago. The morgue was part of his domain as the pathologist, a hut little larger than a garden shed on the edge of the helicopter landing pad, incongruously next to the badminton court.

‘There’s no refrigeration there. He’ll go off pretty fast in this heat,’ he said to Alf Morris.

As usual, the imperturbable Admin Officer had the answer. ‘That’s under control, we get blocks of ice brought in to put all around them. There’s a Chinese contractor in the town who supplies it, I’ll organize it first thing in the morning.’

With this bizarre image in his mind, Tom went off to scrounge a last cup of tea from the night sister, before going back to his bed in Intensive Care for what remained of the night.

Morning Prayers went off quite mildly, in spite of the fears of several officers that the Old Man would be ranting about their failure to notify him about the shooting, ignoring the fact that he was nowhere to be found. In the event, O’Neill never mentioned it.

As OMO, Tom had to deliver his report, keeping it as low-key as possible. After describing the satisfactory condition of the only patient on the SIL, he gave a sombre account of how Mr James Robertson had been brought in dead, then finished up with the usual. ‘The arms kote was inspected at eleven hundred hours and all was found to be in order, sir.’

He sat down, but jumped up again as the CO barked at him.

‘I’ve already heard from the police, Howden. The coroner wants you to carry out a post-mortem this morning.’ He glared at the pathologist over his Himmler glasses, which he always wore at these meetings. The skin over his high cheekbones appeared stretched more tightly than usual, giving his face a skull-like appearance.

‘Have you ever seen a gunshot wound, captain? I suppose you do know how to perform an autopsy?’

Tom tried to ignore the insulting tone. ‘Yes, sir, I’ve been with my consultant when he dealt with a firearm death. And yes, sir, I’ve done at least twenty coroner’s cases back home.’

With the abrupt changes of mood that seemed characteristic of this strange man, the CO seemed to lose interest and went on to harangue the quartermaster about some delay in delivery of medical stores. The unfortunate Captain Burns offered feeble excuses about inefficiency in the Base Supply Depot down in Singapore. Robbie Burns was another officer who, like Alf Morris, had come up through the ranks and was fervently hoping that he would reach retirement less than a year away, without being court-martialled for strangling the Commanding Officer, who made his life a permanent misery. He was a short, corpulent Scouse, always sweating profusely and incessantly mopping his red face with a handkerchief.

The meeting stumbled through its usual nerve-racking course, with a dozen officers sitting edgily on their chairs, waiting for their colonel to suddenly turn and attack them for some imagined misdeed. Eventually they were released into the mounting heat and went their various ways to heal the sick.

When Tom Howden got back to his laboratory, he found a mug of milky, sweet tea ready on his desk and a solicitous lance corporal hovering around him. Lewis Cropper’s long, sallow face regarded him with spaniel-like concern. A Regular soldier, he was the despair of a series of sergeant majors across what remained of the British Empire, having been posted hither and thither merely to get rid of him. In spite of the fact that he was an excellent laboratory technician, his stubborn refusal to conform to authority kept him in almost continual trouble. He was nosy, garrulous, obsequious and generally bloody-minded to all except his pathologists, for whom he always seemed to have an embarrassingly doglike devotion.

‘Hear there’s to be a pee-em this morning, sir!’ he offered, making Tom marvel at the speed and efficiency of the hospital bush-telegraph.

‘That’s right. Ask Sergeant Oates to come in, will you?’

He sipped at his tea and flinched at the combination of condensed milk and three spoonfuls of sugar. But Cropper made no move to obey.

‘Won’t do any good, sir,’ he answered mournfully. ‘Sarge can’t stand the morgue. Last time, he threw up, then fainted. Says he’s never going to set foot in there again.’

Tom stared at the lance corporal over the rim of his mug. Was he pulling his leg or working up to some scam of his own?

‘I’ll have a word with him — I have to have some help in there.’

‘Well, Derek Oates won’t be any use, I can tell you! The last pathologist, Captain Freeman, said the sarge was to be permanently excused on medical grounds, on account of his puking all the time.’

‘What about one of the Malays, then?’

Cropper made a derisory noise, suspiciously like a verbal raspberry.

‘No chance, cap’n! It’s against their religion or some such.’

He leaned over the desk in an attitude of unwelcome familiarity.

‘S’alright, sir, I’ll help you out. I’ve already sharpened up the tools.’

Like a conjuror, he produced an old box the size of a small briefcase, made of dark hardwood and with the historic broad arrow of the ‘War Department’ carved into its varnished lid. Cropper opened it and displayed the contents to Tom with the proud air of a Kleeneze salesman on a housewife’s doorstep.

‘Pre-war, these are! Don’t know which war, but there’s a lovely bit of steel in them.’

Inside was a fearsome array of instruments, worthy of the worst excesses of the Spanish Inquisition. Nestled into faded blue velvet slots were several large knives, which would have looked perfectly at home in a slaughterhouse. An amputation saw, a steel mallet and several chisels jostled for space with scissors, forceps and a gadget that consisted of two half-hoops hinged together, like a folding crown.

‘What the devil’s that?’ demanded Tom.

‘A coronet, sir. Captain Freeman was very fond of that. You open it out and put it over the skull. Screw those spikes into the bone to hold it firm and you’ve got a nice straight guide for sawing off the top of the head.’

The pathologist grunted, thinking that he could manage without such medieval devices. The corporal’s importuning was interrupted by the telephone and Tom picked it up to hear the police superintendent on the line.

‘Would midday suit you for this post-mortem, captain?’ asked Steven Blackwell. ‘The SIB chap from Ipoh would like to be present as well as the major from the provost marshal’s office in the garrison.’

Tom agreed, then asked about identification of the corpse.

‘I was much too junior to do any police cases back on Tyneside,’ he explained. ‘But I know my boss always had to get someone to officially confirm who the body actually was.’

Blackwell said he had this organized and that he would be bringing James’s widow to BMH immediately before the examination.

Ringing off, Tom Howden saw with relief that Cropper had taken his box of instruments back into the main lab, perhaps for a final honing of the wicked knives. Sitting behind his desk, staring into space, Tom sipped his sickly tea and pondered at the sudden responsibilities that the Army had thrust upon him. Already he was doing work and offering expert opinions on medical matters that would have been considered far above his status in civilian life. After only one year’s apprenticeship in NHS pathology, he was now examining tissues removed by the surgeons and reporting on them, a task which only seniors did back in the UK. It was true that the younger, healthier military patients rarely had the tumours and difficult diagnostic problems seen at home, but there were some gynaecological conditions among the wives which could be potentially serious. Apart from this histology, the bulk of the work was detecting bacteria and parasites, from malaria to hookworm, from tuberculosis to occasional cases of leprosy, as many of the patients were Malays or Gurkhas, who suffered a different range of diseases from the British troops. The jungle patrols were susceptible to Weil’s disease contracted from water contaminated by rats, a dangerous condition which was sometimes fatal. Though Howden’s limited civilian experience had hardly prepared him for all this, his technicians gently carried him along and he was learning fast.

But now, he ruminated, he was being pitchforked into a murder investigation and had to make the best of it. Where tumours and complicated medical conditions were concerned, he could always get an expert opinion by sending the material back by air to the Royal Army Medical College in Millbank, but there was nowhere he could get rapid help over a civilian shooting.

Shrugging philosophically, he swallowed the rest of his tea, realizing that he was in danger of becoming used to the taste of the cloying liquid. Glancing at his watch, he saw it was almost time for him to attend to another of his varied duties, this time the sick parade in the military prison next door. Jamming his cap on his head, he went into the main lab to speak to his sergeant. The room occupied most of the building, only Tom’s little office and the tissue-cutting lab being partitioned off the back of it.

Wooden benches lined most of three walls, the other wall being filled with a kerosene-powered refrigerator, an incubator and a sterilizer. The entrance was opposite these, directly on to the concrete strip that ran under the overhang of the corrugated asbestos roof. Slatted windows, all wide open, fed as much air as possible to the pair of whirling brass fans in the ceiling, as there was no air conditioning. The centre of the laboratory was occupied with another large island bench, with a central raised shelf covered with a profusion of reagent bottles and odd bits of apparatus. This was the sergeant’s province, as he did most of the chemical testing, though like the others, he could turn his hand to anything. Derek Oates was there now and Tom waited whilst he sucked up some blood into a glass pipette and blew it into a tube to carry out an analysis for urea in a patient from the Australian battalion, whose kidneys had been damaged by Weil’s disease.

In another corner, Embi bin Sharif, one of the MORs, was quietly chanting some mournful Malay song as he dried thick drops of blood on glass slides to look for malarial parasites under his microscope. Embi was a smooth-faced lad, unfailingly smart and polite, with almond eyes and sleek jet-black hair. He came from even further north in Perlis, the small state next to the border with Thailand.

At the other end of the bench, another private soldier was happily playing ‘postman’, rhythmically banging a rubber stamp from ink pad to a pile of pathology request forms universally known as ‘F-Med Tens’. Aziz Ismael was a fat, cheerful fellow with a mass of curly hair, unusual in a Malay. He was from nearby Kuala Kangsar and he was a fount of local information on almost any subject.

When Derek Oates’s mouth was free of his tube, the pathologist broached the subject of the post-mortem.

‘I gather you’re not too keen on the mortuary, sergeant?’

The trim young man looked somewhat abashed. ‘Sorry, sir, I’d be no use to you. I can’t understand it, because when I have blood in a tube, I’m fine!’

He gestured towards the bijou bottles and universal containers filled with the red fluid which were arrayed before him on his bench.

‘But when I see it on a dead body, I just fall apart. I feel rotten about it, sir, it’s something I just can’t beat.’

Tom nodded at him, it was something not worth pursuing. Oates was such an excellent worker that he saw no point in making an issue of the fellow’s unfortunate phobia. ‘Cropper says he’ll give a hand, as I gather the other lads are not keen on the job.’

‘They won’t go near the place, sir. Malays seem to have all sorts of superstitions, especially about the dead. Aziz will probably give you a run-down on that!’

‘Right, sarge, I’m off to see the naughty boys in the nick, then I’ll be doing this post-mortem at twelve. Everything under control here?’

Oates assured him that there were no problems and Howden set off up the main corridor, conscious again of the sticky heat as the day warmed up. He passed the operating theatre which lay opposite the X-ray Department and the Officers’ Ward before coming to another pair which housed the long-term tuberculous patients. These were mostly Gurkhas, who were prone to many infectious diseases, including potentially fatal measles and mumps. Coming from their remote Himalayan fastness in Nepal, they lacked the resistance acquired by most other races.

Beyond the last pair of wards, were two odd structures before the corridor ended opposite the arms kote. On one side was a large khaki tent, which was Percy Loosemore’s stamping-ground, the ‘STD’ or Special Treatment Department, a euphemism for the VD clinic. Across the corridor was another part of Tom’s domain, the blood transfusion ‘basha’, an open-sided shed with a large attap roof, made of neatly laid palm branches. This was where blood donors gave their contributions when needed, though so far he had not been called upon to officiate there. The hospital had no ‘blood bank’ — at least not in refrigerated bottles — as the precious fluid was kept ‘on the hoof’ inside the donors until needed.

Tom reached the perimeter road and turned left towards the open gate into the main garrison. As he walked, he thought with some apprehension about the post-mortem he was soon to carry out. He was not bothered about the actual procedure itself, though in spite of his earlier response to the CO, he had virtually no experience of gunshot wounds, having only once watched his boss in Newcastle deal with a shotgun suicide. However, he had got up early to read the relevant chapter in his well-thumbed copy of Glaister’s Forensic Medicine and reckoned that he could just about flannel his way through.

No, it was the prospect of having the widow there to identify James’s body that worried him. Back home, he had several times been present when grieving relatives had to view the bodies of their loved ones and he still remembered the sobbing, the wailing and even the odd faint, even though most people seemed to be overtaken by a numbed silence as they looked through the glass panel into the viewing room of the mortuary. He wondered how Diane Robertson would take it. There were all the rumours about the Robertsons’ marital discord and she seemed a pretty hard character, he mused — but one never really knows how someone will react.

These thoughts occupied him until he reached the inner gate to the garrison and once inside he turned right to reach another smaller compound. This occupied the furthermost corner of the stockade, divided off from it by another high double fence. The outer layer was of chain-link, topped with coils of barbed wire and just inside was a tall palisade of corrugated iron to screen the inmates from the rest of the garrison. A lofty gate of similar material had a small steel-mesh door set into it, beyond which a red-capped MP corporal stood on guard.

When he saw the officer approaching, he stamped his shiny boots across to the door and gave a cracking salute, which Tom returned in the half-embarrassed way that most newly enlisted doctors employed.

‘Morning, sah! Identity card, please, sah!’

Though he came every morning, the pathologist held up his ID to the wire and with a rattling flourish of keys, the redcap let him in and locked the gate behind him. There was a single road running up the middle of the two-acre site, with the familiar long, low huts placed at right angles on each side. The first on the left contained the guardroom, Commandant’s office, mess room and stores, while on the other side of the lane was the sickbay with other unidentifiable rooms beyond it. A dozen drooping figures stood on the verandah outside, with another MP corporal stalking up and down the line, his chest stuck out like a turkeycock.

When he saw the officer approaching, he slammed himself to attention and screamed at the patients to do the same. All hauled themselves upright, except for one, who seemed to be bent in half from some back trouble.

The corporal gave Tom a vibrating salute, which he again returned half-heartedly and went into the sickbay. It was a bare room, with a table and chair for the doctor, a spartan examination couch and a white bench with a cupboard above for the meagre medical supplies. Hovering near this was an elderly RAMC corporal, seconded from the 38th Field Ambulance at Taiping.

Sid Hooper was a burly, impassive man, with a row of medal ribbons on his tunic, half-hidden by the creased white coat he wore as his badge of office. He gave the weary impression of having seen it all before and that none of these bloody shirkers outside were going to put one over either on him or his doctor.

‘The usual bunch of lead-swinging layabouts today, doc,’ he announced. ‘One of ’em might possibly have something wrong with him.’

Tom took off his hat and dropped it on to the table, before sitting down.

‘Wheel them in, corporal. Let’s make it quick, I’ve got a lot to do this morning.’

The corporal went to the door and after some more screaming from the MP outside, a man charged in, his nailed boots clattering on the floor at the tempo of a double-quick march. With a final crunch, he stopped in front of the table and stared fixedly at the wall beyond Tom’s head. Hooper came across with a tattered document in his hand.

‘Gunner Andrews, sir. Crime sheet as long as your arm. Sunburn.’

The man was dressed like most of the prisoners, wearing only green shorts above heavy boots and socks. The upper half of his body was bright red from the sun, as most of the men were sent out on working parties to cut grass or clear monsoon drains around the large garrison enclave.

‘S’me back, sir,’ was his only complaint and within seconds, the sickbay sergeant had slapped the paperwork before Tom, on which was already written the word ‘calamine lotion’, obtained a signature and harried the patient out through the door to wait for his treatment after the doctor had left. As he went, Tom saw that the blistered skin across his shoulders was peeling off in strips, but he was given no time to make any other examination.

The rest of the sick parade went in a similar fashion. For sunburn they had calamine, for foot rot they had anti-fungal powder or were ‘excused boots’ in favour of plimsolls for a few days. For alleged stomach ache they had magnesia, for headaches they had aspirin and for the ‘runs’ they were prescribed kaolin-and-morph mixture. All this was decided by Hooper and only if the medical officer suspected something more sinister were they examined more closely. Any really suspect conditions meant that they would have to be sent over to Casualty in BMH, a procedure which raised frowns from the prison staff, as it meant finding them an escort and disrupting the iron regime of the Military Corrective Establishment.

This morning, there was nothing to suggest any mortal conditions amongst the supplicants, most of whom used the sick parade to wangle an hour off grass cutting. Even the man with the bent back seemed to recover when screamed at loudly enough by the MP corporal.

As he walked back to the hospital, Tom wondered whether he had really needed five years in medical school for the sort of practice in which he now seemed to be involved. Even the prospect of a post-mortem seemed more attractive than signing chits for calamine lotion and ‘excuse boots’.

Back in his office, he spent what was left of the morning in checking the positive blood films for malaria and looking at the bacterial cultures which had grown overnight in the incubator. Sergeant Oates was equally as proficient at recognizing them and diplomatically speeded the process by gentle remarks such as ‘I think this one is Staph aureus, sir, don’t you?’ The malarial films had already been screened by Aziz, who only sent in the positive ones for the officer to check. In fact, the MOR had already confidently written the type of parasite on the form and Tom found later that he was never to catch Aziz out in all the time they were at BMH.

After another infusion of sweet tea, he sat signing report forms and waiting for the phone to ring, heralding the arrival of the autopsy delegation. At eleven thirty, the guardroom rang and he went down to the front of the hospital where he found Steven Blackwell and Inspector Tan waiting in Alf Morris’s office with Diane Robertson.

She wore a black skirt, perhaps as a concession to mourning, topped by a white silk blouse, but otherwise looked her usual glamorous self.

‘You’re the new pathologist — it’s Captain Howden, isn’t it?’ she said brightly. ‘I’ve seen you in The Dog once or twice.’

Tom mumbled something about being sorry to have to meet in these sad circumstances, but Diane appeared unfazed by the fact that he was shortly going to dissect her husband.

‘The Army police chaps will be along by twelve,’ volunteered Blackwell, intending to cover up any awkwardness in the situation.

‘So shall we get this over with first?’

As they left the office, Tom whispered quickly to the Admin Officer.

‘Alf, is the colonel coming to this?’

Morris shook his head. ‘Not as far as I know, though you never can tell with him. He’s told me to make sure everything is laid on. As a former public health wallah, I don’t think he’s too keen on dead bodies.’

They followed the two policemen and the widow up the main corridor, Diane taking Steven’s arm. Tom suspected that she was feeling that she ought to put on some sort of show of being a bereaved widow for the many curious faces that peered out of ward doorways as they went. She was never one to miss the chance to hold on to a man, even if he was a bald, middle-aged married policeman. At one point, Diane turned around and gave Tom a dazzling smile and asked if he was settling down well. In spite of the bizarre circumstances, he felt a twitch of desire as he appreciated again what a gorgeous woman she was.

At the point in the corridor level with where the mortuary lay, Lance Corporal Cropper was standing at attention. Tom Howden groaned at the sight, as the self-important technician had obviously appointed himself as guide. After he had jerked his hand up to his crumpled beret in salute, he marched in front of the posse across the stunted grass and the perimeter road. Tom felt that Cropper only needed a black top hat with a crepe band to look like an undertaker’s mute leading a funeral. When they reached the isolated hut, the corporal ceremoniously threw open the door and stood aside.

Alf Morris had seen to it that a couple of orderlies had brought the body out of the post-mortem room and arranged it on a ward trolley in the tiny anteroom just inside the door. Covered with a couple of clean sheets and with a vase of flowers temporarily borrowed from a ward placed on a nearby shelf, the scene was at least innocuous, if not actually dignified.

‘We’ll make this as quick as possible, Diane,’ said the superintendent gently. ‘It’s a legal requirement, I’m afraid. All I want you to do is to confirm to me and Dr Howden here, that this is the body of James Robertson, OK?’

He led her through the door and though Tom tried to block Lewis Cropper, the corporal dodged past him and advanced to the head of the trolley, taking the ends of the sheet in both hands.

Tom and Alf Morris stood at the foot and the stringy Inspector Tan hovered behind, as Steven Blackwell nodded at Cropper, who reverently folded back the sheet to expose the face of the dead man. There was a tense silence as they all looked at Jimmy Robertson, who even in death seemed to have a bad-tempered look on his face.

Tom waited for sobs, screams or moans, but Diane surprised them all.

‘I’ve never seen a dead person before,’ she observed conversationally. ‘But yes, that’s certainly my husband.’

As she turned and walked out into the brilliant sunlight, Diane asked Alf Morris about funeral arrangements. ‘I’ve no idea what to do. I’ve sent a cable to his brother in England, he’ll tell my mother-in-law.’

As they walked away, Tom heard the Admin Officer telling her that once the coroner had completed his formalities, the Church of England padre from the garrison was the best person to help her. He should have been here this morning, said Alf, but was on a long weekend leave in the Cameron Highlands.

The two policemen went to see her to her car at the front of the hospital, saying that they would be back in a few minutes and Tom was left with his officious corporal, though in truth, he was now quite glad of his help. They wheeled the corpse into the inner room, which was half filled with a white porcelain slab on a pedestal fixed to the concrete floor. A column of soldier ants was marching from somewhere in the corner, up the pedestal and down the other side, causing Cropper to pump energetically at them with a Flit gun, filling the air with a mixture of paraffin and DDT insecticide.

A large kitchen sink against one wall had a single brass tap, with a long wooden draining board attached to one side. A small table stood under the slatted window and a broom, a long-handled squeegee and two buckets stood in a corner. A pair of rubber aprons with chains around the neck and waist hung from a nail on the wall.

‘We had to move the ice to get him on to the trolley,’ explained Cropper, pointing at a dozen chunks of cloudy grey ice, each the size of a breeze block, which now lay on the floor in a spreading pool of melted water.

They folded up the sheets, slid the now naked cadaver on to the slab and Cropper pushed the trolley out again, so that there was some space left in the small room for spectators. He had put his precious instrument box on the table and laid the weapons out in a row on the draining board.

A few minutes later, the two police officers returned, as smart as ever in their pristine khaki uniforms, though Tom noticed that the back of Steven’s shirt was as black with sweat as his own.

‘I think the main object of the exercise is to retrieve the bullet for forensic examination,’ said Blackwell. ‘Though I suppose knowing the range it was fired from might be a help, too.’

Taking off his uniform jacket, Tom hung the red rubber apron around his neck and hooked the chains around his waist, then put on some thick rubber gloves. The corporal did the same and by then, the clump of boots in the outer room heralded the arrival of the military men, Sergeant Markham from the SIB and Major Enderby from the provost marshal’s department. They had brought a photographer with them, a sergeant from the Intelligence Corps, who proceeded to take a series of pictures of the body with a rather large and clumsy MPP Press camera. The pathologist wisely got him to take some of the bullet entry wound from as close as he could possibly get the lens.

‘No burning, smoke or powder marks on the skin around it,’ he pointed out to the spectators, carefully checking all the points he had mugged up in ‘Glaister’ that morning. ‘Nor were there any on the shirt, so it wasn’t a close discharge.’

The two civilian police seemed immune to the proximity of a corpse, having seen plenty during the years of the ‘Emergency’, as it was euphemistically called. The SIB sergeant seemed to have a similar indifference, but the major, who had been a lawyer before entering the service, and the photographer, were looking rather pale about the lips.

‘You’ve got the clothing safe, superintendent?’ asked the sergeant.

‘All packed up, though I can’t see it’ll be of much use. The lab in KL isn’t all that hot on some aspects, they’re really a chemical analysis outfit rather than forensic, though they’re trying to expand. We may have to send the shirt down to Singapore if necessary, but it’s the bullet that really interests us.’

While they were talking, Tom got on with his examination, examining every square inch of the body, though he found nothing out of the ordinary apart from the small hole in the chest. He helped Cropper to lift the shoulders while they slipped a thick block of wood under them, then opened the body with one of the murderous-looking knives. He had to admit that his technician had done a good job of sharpening them and the dissection went ahead with no hitches.

‘What about the size of the gunshot wound, doc? Can you tell what weapon was used?’ asked Blackwell.

Tom shook his head. ‘I’m not even going to guess, superintendent. I’ve read that the skin can stretch and shrink, so that the diameter is not the same as the bullet. The hole is seven millimetres across, that’s all I can say.’

‘What the hell is that in English, captain?’ asked the major, a khaki handkerchief close to his mouth. Enderby was a burly, red-faced man in middle-age, with a large walrus moustache stained with nicotine. He had trained as a solicitor but on being called for wartime National Service, had stayed on as a Regular in the provost marshal’s department.

‘Just over a quarter of an inch,’ grunted Howden, forgetting to say ‘sir’.

The bloody part of the autopsy began and the three army men abruptly decided to go outside for a smoke.

‘No exit wound, so thankfully the bullet must still be inside him, Tom,’ said the superintendent, now putting them on first-name terms.

‘If it was a rifle, then it must have hit bone, as far as I can understand from the textbooks,’ agreed Howden. ‘Unless it was fired from a great distance, when it may have lost much of its punch.’

‘If it was a military weapon, like a three-oh-three or an FN, it could still kill someone a mile away,’ said Inspector Tan primly, speaking for the first time. He was a mild, reticent man, speaking only when he had something worthwhile to say. Steven had considerable respect for Tan’s intelligence and always listened carefully to his ideas.

A few minutes later, the question of the calibre of the fatal missile was solved, as Tom finally held it in his hand. Mindful of Professor Glaister’s admonition not to damage the rifling marks, he carefully groped around inside the chest with his fingers, to avoid using hard tools which could scratch the missile. He found the front of the spinal column shattered in the middle of the chest and lying alongside was a deformed metallic lump, which he carefully drew out and placed in the palm of his other hand. Going across to the sink, he washed the blood away and with Cropper peering over his shoulder, he offered it to the two police officers. ‘Here we are! One bullet, distorted to blazes.’

They all looked at it as if it was the Holy Grail, a dull metal nodule about the size of a hazelnut. The base was still circular, but the upper part was crumpled, like a witch’s hat that had been folded back, then stamped on.

‘Looks like a standard.303 rifle to me,’ observed Steven Blackwell.

His inspector nodded agreement, but Tom took up a small plastic ruler that he had brought from the laboratory and carefully put it across the base of the bullet. Though slightly out of shape, he could see that it was about a third of an inch across.

‘Better give the army chaps a shout,’ he suggested. ‘That sergeant probably knows most about firearms.’

Tan went to the door to call them in, but the pathologist went to the outer room to show them the trophy, not wanting to subject them unnecessarily to the sights and smells of the mortuary.

Sergeant Markham, a veteran of Normandy and Korea, agreed that the bullet was the same calibre as that used in the standard British rifle.

‘Must send it to the experts, though,’ he advised. ‘Needs to be checked against those you dug out of the wall at Gunong Busar last week.’

Lewis Cropper found a small screw-top specimen bottle and padded it with cotton wool to nest the bullet in, preventing it from rattling against the glass and blurring the rifling marks from the barrel of whatever weapon had fired it. The superintendent carefully labelled, dated and signed it and stowed it away in his pocket.

‘I’ll send it down to KL on the night train — if needs be, I’m sure your army boffins can get it back for any further work on it.’

‘We can get it sent to Singapore — or even flown back to Woolwich if necessary,’ said Major Enderby, his colour now recovered. ‘That’s where all our Ordnance experts hang out.’

‘The cartridge case would be more valuable, if we could find it,’ grunted the big SIB man. ‘The origin of the ammunition could be traced through that.’

Steve Blackwell looked a little irritated. ‘We don’t even know where the bloody shooting took place. Could be anywhere within ten miles of here. That’s one of our first priorities.’

Half an hour later, Tom had finished the rest of his dissection, finding nothing more of significance. He took some samples for Blackwell to send to Kuala Lumpur for blood grouping and alcohol analysis, telling Cropper to get them packed in ice in a Thermos flask for the long journey down-country. The spectators left, promising a conference later that day to discuss the sparse results of the post-mortem, leaving Tom and his corporal to restore the body as best they could. They sewed it up again, washed it, then covered it again with a sheet around which they packed large fragments of ice, broken from the blocks with the hammer from the surgical instrument set.

After washing down the mortuary, Tom doing his full share in unconscious defiance of the Officer-Other Ranks convention, the two laboratory men left James Robertson in peace under a whirling fan and a shroud of melting ice.