by Jean Chapman
Inside there was only debris — the broken staves of a chair, the disconnected telephone, which lay, receiver and rest wide apart, on the floor. She stepped forwards to look at a calendar hanging on the wall above the telephone, but the pages had been rendered illegible and welded together by the humidity. She thought it looked like 1941, but it was a guess. It was all guesses — she felt sick with a sudden, desperate loneliness — for nothing was the same.
She had come to Rinsey to find her father but instead she had lost a friend, her childhood hero and sweetheart. She had lost Josef not just because he was not there, but because she had found out his lie. He had not been living here. And if the Japanese had commandeered their bungalow, where had he lived in the war? If his father had been killed, where had his mother and Lee gone — or had they been taken away?
Walking through the rooms, she remembered how it had been. She recollected the great solid furniture that Mr Guisan had imported, huge wooden beds like decapitated four-posters, chairs with knobs on their arms like cudgels to an unwary child’s elbows or knees. They had been specially commissioned and treated to withstand the tropical weather and termites. They could not have just disappeared. Even if Josef had.
She stood in the silent house feeling like one in the immediate aftermath of an awful accident, uselessly wishing time back on itself — so that all could be as before. That was how she wanted Malaya, Rinsey, Josef. Now it seemed no more than the petulant wish of a child. She watched a black bootlace snake in the corner of the room: each was wary of the other and anxious to leave the other alone. The only thing she felt would absolve Josef was if he came with news of her father.
She walked slowly back along the overgrown path, hands clenched tightly by her sides. She remembered the joy of first seeing Josef, remembered being held in his arms, the warmth of his chest against her shoulder during the attack. But how had he managed to arrive so smartly turned out that first evening? What was his game?
Josef had always laughed in a kind of maniacal fit of jubilation when he won at one of their games, even if he had cheated. She and Lee had hated him then, with all the fury of childhood.
She thought of George Harfield’s Malayan headman, and of the Chinese stranger holding Anna’s grandson — this was life and death, not children’s games. Childhood was soon over.
The sight of a man coming along the path towards her made her think belatedly that she should have carried her revolver or that she might be wise to dive for cover. He approached half trotting, as if eager to come up to her, and when she could see him properly he raised a hand in greeting.
‘Miss Hammond,’ he called with a slight bow of his head, ‘Mr Harfield says you go to the house at once.’
‘Does he!’ She slowed her pace so she could talk to the very dark-skinned native, but turning back she saw he was continuing in the opposite direction.
She was surprised but hurried on. Where the old path divided, she took the one leading to the rear entrance, but as she did so a movement caught her attention. A tall figure was standing in the trees.
‘Josef!’ She practically hurtled through the trees towards him. He was absorbed in something in the tops of the trees.
‘Josef!’ Even as she said the name she knew she was wrong, for though the man was as tall, he was not so broad and the clothes were a soldier’s jungle green.
He started, turned, dropped a length of wire he was carrying and snatched off his wide-brimmed hat. ‘Miss!’
‘I thought you were someone else. Sorry! Did I startle you?’ She smiled both because she recognised him and because her words and his actions were ludicrous, more like a couple bumping into each other in a peacetime English lane than a tropical track in terrorist country.
‘Don’t tell my commander I took my hat off to you. I mean,’ he said, screwing the hat in his hands and smiling ruefully at his own supposed failure, ‘I should really have shot you — well, challenged you.’
It was a relief to laugh. With his wry expression and his military-cropped, sandy hair exposed, he looked much younger than when she had seen him last. ‘You’re the boy from the lorry.’
‘Lorry, yes. Boy — well?’ He cocked an eye. ‘Just because I didn’t shout after you? I was better brought up, but it wasn’t that I didn’t appreciate … ’
She found herself both blushing and laughing under his approving look. ‘Why are you here?’
He displayed the wire he was holding. ‘I’m looking for a friendly native to shin up one of these trees and fix my aerial to the top. I’m stationed here for the time being.’
‘Really? That seems too good to be true.’
‘Thanks!’ The closed-mouth grin and twinkling brown eyes were so full of good spirits she did not qualify the remark. ‘So you’ll be the daughter of the house, Miss Hammond?’
‘Liz.’ She held out her hand, then found herself swallowing hard as his hand enveloped hers. Looking down at her he stood many inches nearer than he needed.
‘Alan Cresswell. Until now I thought I was going to hate it here by myself.’
They both turned, still holding hands, as Chemor came back along the path portering a heavy coil of new rope. ‘Here’s someone who might help you. He’s one of George Harfield’s men.’
The native glanced at Liz as if questioning the fact that she had not obeyed his employer’s summons. ‘You come now,’ he said.
‘Is something wrong at the bungalow?’ she asked.
‘Something found.’ He smiled and with a gesture indicated that someone else was coming. ‘All going now to look.’
‘What is it?’ she demanded as her mother and George Harfield came into sight, alarmed at their sombre expressions and the fact that George was strapping on his gun and holster as he walked.
‘Themor — ’ he paused to nod to her companion — ‘has found a vehicle in the jungle. A jeep.’
Consternation and anguish fought to take her breath, and though her lips parted the doubts and fears were too many to be put into words.
‘We are going to see,’ Blanche said, her face, her lips, absolutely without colour.
Liz turned like an automaton to accompany them.
‘Can I help?’ Cresswell asked. ‘Come with you?’
‘I’d rather you stayed here and looked after my men,’ George told him. He hitched his revolver in the holster. ‘You’d best show us what you’ve found, Chemor.’
The scout turned and led the way in the direction of the manager’s bungalow, but after about thirty yards he turned abruptly to the right through part of the plantation. He pointed to the ground, parting ferns so they could see the tracks of a vehicle.
Here and there it looked as if dead vegetation had been deliberately pulled over the tracks. For some distance they walked straight into the trees, then turned abruptly left. Looking round, Liz for the first time really understood how confusing these plantings could be. The rubber trees were set some twelve to fifteen feet apart and whichever way you looked they formed lines, radiating away from you like a fiendish maze. You could go only a short distance into the trees before becoming totally disoriented.
She did remember that in the direction they were going, to the southeast of Rinsey, were a number of rocky waterfalls cascading from the hills and culminating in a steep, jungle-clad ravine. She glanced at her mother’s back as they walked in line — the scout, her mother, herself, George last. Her mother looked like one travelling in a nightmare, dragging her feet wearily free of the encumbering undergrowth, moving only because compelled.
Liz wondered if Blanche remembered the one time they had brought their daughters this way for a picnic. It had come to a premature end as Wendy had ventured too near the edge of the falls. Liz had also found herself the target of parental wrath and anxiety — because she had wanted to stay.
If her father’s vehicle had been hidden, it was by someone who knew the area well. She could think of no other place where it would be possible to drive through the trees and find flat rock
s and a convenient ravine on the other side.
Once they came to the edge of the rubber trees they were on solid slabs of rock where water gushed down in wide and pleasant falls — until the fourth downward step was reached, where land and water fell steeply away, down into a deep midnight green mass of dense jungle. Against the dark panorama, parrots in hues of brilliant white, red and unnatural green flashed across like players in an airy theatre.
It was noisy standing above the crash of the water and alarming to see where Chemor had found the continuation of the tyre tracks. Losing them at the edge of the plantation and across the hard table of rock, he had found them again at the lip of the ravine.
‘I can see nothing down there,’ Blanche said, shielding her eyes, then exclaiming, ‘Oh, as the wind moves the bushes … ’
Liz knelt on the rock. She could just make out the back wheels and undercarriage of a vehicle, which seemed to be almost standing on its nose some hundred feet below.
‘Have you been down?’ Liz asked Chemor, who shook his head.
‘No, need rope to climb back up,’ he answered.
‘That — whatever it is — could be from the war?’ George suggested.
Chemor shook his head, pointing to the narrow stretch of earth and vegetation. ‘Tracks through plantation same as here.’
Liz could see where the tyres had dug into the lip, then where the vehicle must have fallen clear and free — down. ‘It could have been an accident?’ She turned an agonised look up to George. ‘My father could be ... ’ She swallowed and turned back, peering down, her ears suddenly singing; she felt very sick. George gripped her shoulders.
‘You stay here with your mother.’ He began unbuckling his holster to leave his gun with her. ‘Chemor and I will go down.’
‘There’s a way down the other side of the falls,’ Blanche said, her voice almost matter-of-fact in its control. ‘It’s not that far, actually.’
‘Would we be able to reach where the vehicle is?’
She nodded at George. ‘Neville and I often came here and explored these falls, long before we had the children.’
Blanche and Chemor changed places and she led them across and down the first two shallow slabs of rock to the other side. The route led down a narrow gully which the falls would wash out when in full spate during the monsoons. The noise of the water grew louder as they proceeded and the path was certainly slippery and dangerous for the unwary. Liz adjusted her view of her mother’s concern for the tiny Wendy.
The gulley the water had cut fell back so the light came to them through a curtain of water, blue at the top of the slope when they could still see the sky but greener and darker as they descended down the rocky course. Liz could imagine her parents younger, carefree with no children to hamper their explorations, discovering this strange and rather awesome pathway with the wonder of living water before them.
A sharp turn to the right and a level stretch of rock, amazingly quite dry behind the falls, made her realise they were actually at the bottom of the ravine. They had crossed the falls at the top through the water, now at the bottom they walked back to the side they started from, this time underneath the falls.
Chapter Seven
The last hundred yards from the falls were the most hazardous. None of them was dressed for pushing through this mass of growth and Chemor unsheathed his machete.
‘Don’t catch hold of anything if you can help it,’ George advised, and, as the slope grew steeper once more, gripped Blanche’s hand and supported her down.
Sliding and slipping, Liz remembered from her childhood that the most beautiful plants and flowers usually had the biggest, sharpest thorns. Under the massed jungle canopy the gloom increased. Perspiration poured from them as they negotiated each step, while Chemor worked with steady rhythmical sweeps of his machete from head height to ground level to clear a way large enough for them to pass through. Roots, ferns, tortuous vines and creepers climbing up to the light, wonderful pale ghostlike sprays of orchids, and butterflies that looked like flowers until they moved, inhabited this dripping, drowned world.
Liz wished she could stop dwelling on the thought that anyone who had gone over the edge in that vehicle would, even if they survived, never have made this climb back up. Then again, they might still be there in the jeep ... A gasp of alarm came with the thought and the consequent stumble. She raised an arm to sweep away both tears and the perspiration which was running into and stinging her eyes.
Chemor heard and paused to look at her. Then they both turned to look farther back to George, who, progressing at her mother’s pace, was some way behind.
‘Your mother a brave lady,’ Chemor said. ‘This is bad jungle.’
Liz nodded, too breathless to speak.
‘You too.’
She shook her head with conviction. She was terrified of what they might find — a bloated body cooked in a metal jeep for two tropical weeks. Oh, God, stop it! Stop it!
‘Go on!’ she urged.
They battled on for another half an hour. She felt as if they had travelled to the far side of the peninsula, but calculated they had probably only gone about a hundred yards. She suddenly had a different fear, of not finding the vehicle after all. Once they had descended into the ravine they could no longer see where they were heading. George had taken sightings from the sun and the steep escarpment, but once in the jungle proper they could see neither sun nor rock face.
In another quarter of an hour, George hailed from the back for a halt. It was not until Liz’s laboured breathing had eased that the two caught up. George swept his boot and then his hand along a wet but substantial fallen branch where the two women could sit down.
‘I think we’ve come too far,’ he told Chemor. ‘I feel we’ve veered too far from the rock face.’
‘You stay with the ladies, tuan, I’ll go back to see.’ Chemor immediately began to retrace their steps along the path he had cut. George too wandered back some paces, then a low birdlike whistle made him go more urgently after his man.
Listening, the two women could hear more jungle being cleared and with tacit agreement both rose and went towards the sound.
Chemor was chopping into the side of their original path. He stopped as they reached the two men. ‘You smell something here, tuan?’ he asked.
They all sniffed the air. George pushed his head into the new way. ‘Perhaps ... oil? Or … ’
‘Rust,’ Chemor said. ‘I think jeep this way.’
It took ten minutes and the vehicle lay within some five yards of the path he had first cut.
‘Be careful, look around.’ The anxiety in George’s voice matched a sudden concern in Liz’s mind as the machete, willingly wielded, swung high and to ground level.
‘Let me,’ George said, taking the machete. ‘Stay well clear, it might move as we cut closer.’
He worked a little more slowly, with more regard to what might be lying around, then reported, ‘I don’t think it’ll move. It’s wedged between rocks like something stuck fast in a pair of scissors.’
They watched with terrible fascination as George worked his way near enough to climb on to a wheel and peer into the vehicle. ‘I can’t see anyone — and I would have thought I could here.’ He glanced up to the canopy, which was thinner here, the plants merely reaching across, for the rocks below gave no purchase for roots. He leaned back, pulling at the closed door. It gave and he had to reclose it hastily to keep his balance. He climbed down and reached the handle again, letting the door fall open.
Liz’s hand flew to her mouth. Blanche got slowly to her feet as Harfield climbed back on to the wheel and half got inside the vehicle.
‘There’s no one in here,’ he reported.
‘Thank God!’ Blanche breathed.
Chemor, who was by his side, concluded, ‘No one in it when it fell.’
‘No ... ’ George was right inside the vehicle now, peering and running his hand over surfaces, looking at the damage. ‘I agree with you.’
<
br /> ‘So you think it was pushed over?’ Liz asked.
‘Not pushed — look at this, Chemor.’ The two men partly disappeared into the bowels of the nose-dived car, then reappeared with a length of rope. ‘The engine was set running and the jeep kept on course for the edge by tying a rope around the seat stays and the bottom of the steering wheel. Whoever sent it over was probably quite unlucky it didn’t burst into flames.’
Liz, glancing at her mother, saw the bleakness. ‘But do we know it’s my father’s?’
‘I’m afraid we do,’ George answered. ‘Between the rocks at the other side is part of the front number plate — enough to be sure.’
George and Chemor scoured all around the vehicle, but found nothing else. ‘No one has been to or from since it fell,’ Chemor was confident.
‘So his jeep was deliberately hidden ... ’ Blanche addressed herself to George.
‘We must tell the police.’
‘And assume that Neville was … ’
‘Kidnapped — otherwise … ’
‘Where is his body?’ Blanche added the words George was reluctant to say, then asked, ‘Will the police fingerprint the jeep?’
‘Two weeks in the jungle, already red with rust — the only prints would be inside. Chemor said he will have another look round at the top of the falls. He may learn something more.’
Liz immediately stood, ready to move off; Blanche rose only as George offered his hand to pull her up.
It was hardly with any feeling of success that they climbed back up into the light. One mystery solved, another deepened. ‘The jungle keeps it secrets,’ Anna had told Liz when Wendy had been born and, feeling neglected, the elder sister had packed doll, drawing book and crayons to leave home. And it will keep you if you run away.’