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.
THREE
Although the Friday night function at the Sussex Club was nominally a dance, the majority of the members never set foot on the floor, which was a small area of the big lounge cleared of tables and chairs. The occasion was hallowed by tradition at The Dog, being the main social function of the week, where people came to meet their friends and catch up on the week’s gossip. They came to see and be seen, the men to ogle the younger women in their posh frocks and the older women to indulge in some righteous envy and to complain about their husbands.
In such an isolated community as Tanah Timah, the club provided virtually the only social diversion for the wives, who had not even the workplace or the Mess to relieve the boredom. There were not many Army wives there, as the place was still on the fringe of a brutal war, but as the terrorist threat had receded somewhat in this part of Perak, more of the senior officers’ wives were coming out from home. The planters’ wives had little choice but to stay, though some took extended leave back in Britain, often with the excuse that they had to see their children settled in boarding schools or colleges.
The younger women were almost all commissioned QA sisters from the hospital and being by definition unmarried, were the target of every military bachelor in the Brigade, as well as a few unaccompanied husbands and unmarried planters. Tonight, it was these ladies who monopolized the dance floor, being badgered by subalterns, lieutenants, captains and even the odd major, to gyrate with them on the polished boards, which a houseboy ritually lubricated with French chalk every Friday afternoon.
Tom Howden arrived at about eight fifteen, driven up by Alec Watson in his battered and rusty Morgan sports car. Dinner in the Mess was always brought forward on a Friday, so that they could get to the club reasonably early – a practice almost universal throughout the garrison. At about ten o’clock, the record player was switched off so that the assembled members could adjourn to the dining room, where Daniel always laid out a light buffet to keep them going until midnight, when the revellers drifted back to their mosquito nets.
Alec parked on the tarmac in front of the club, finding a space between the Austins, the Morris’s, the MG’s, the Land Rovers and a few big American gas-guzzlers, several of them armour-plated like the Robertsons’. Inside, there was already hardly an inch left free at the long bar, which ran across the full width of the lounge. A score of low tables fringed the dance floor, each with its circle of cane chairs. They were filled with people and the Indian servants were performing miracles of gymnastics with trays loaded with glasses and bottles, as they threaded their way through the obstructions. Half a dozen couples were swaying to a smoochy Sinatra number, generated by a Decca radiogram in the corner, operated by a fat Tamil houseboy who was worriedly studying a list of records supplied by Daniel, but constantly amended by the demands of the dancers.
The music was almost drowned by the buzz of chatter, which tonight was a good few decibels louder than usual. The inevitable topic was the new attack on Gunong Besar and as soon as Tom came in, he could see that the focus of attention was on James Robertson. He was perched on a stool at the centre of the bar, holding court amongst a cluster of acquaintances, all of whom had their own pet theory of what had happened. As Alec pushed his way to the bar for a couple of Tigers, Tom moved further along to be in earshot of the James’s clique.
‘Bloody bullets were coming like hailstones,’ brayed the planter, waving his gin like a flag. ‘Pushed the memsahib on to the floor out of the way, then took off over the verandah with my shooter!’ He stopped for a gulp of Gordon’s, then carried on with his elaborated saga.
‘But it was too late, the sods had all vanished. They’d shot up Douglas’s place first, then had a pop at the natives around the back.’
‘Sounds a bloody queer attack to me, Jimmy,’ drawled Les Arnold, the Aussie from the next estate beyond Gunong Besar. He was not actually part of the inquisitive circle around James, he had been sitting at the bar before they descended on his neighbour and had been enveloped by them.
‘What’s queer about being shot at, Les?’ demanded a captain from the West Berkshires, rather indignantly.
‘Not like the CTs to fire off a few rounds, then bugger off!’ objected the Australian. ‘Even in Jimmy’s last attack they killed a couple of blokes.’
Robertson flushed, both at being repeatedly called ‘Jimmy’ and at the insinuation that his latest moment of glory had not been all that glorious.
‘An attack’s an attack, Les!’ he snapped petulantly. ‘What d’you think all those holes are in the walls – giant termites?’
There was a guffaw from the group at this witticism, but Arnold just grinned.
‘Good on you, mate! I’m glad they didn’t call on me, just up the road from you. I need my beauty sleep every night.’
Alec came back with the beers and he and Tom leaned against one of the pillars that supported the high roof while they looked around at the talent in the room. The disc jockey had found one of the request records and now Tony Bennett was crooning about a ‘Stranger in Paradise’, giving the swaying couples the excuse to cling together as if they had been welded front-to-front, their feet hardly moving.
‘Some nice-looking birds here, Alec,’ murmured the pathologist. Stuck in his laboratory all that first day, he had so far hardly laid eyes on a QA, apart from their motherly Matron, Doris Hawkins. ‘Who’s the dark-haired one, in the slinky blue dress?’
Watson grinned. ‘You got it in one, Tom! Everyone notices her first. That’s our in-house femme fatale, Lena Franklin.’
Howden looked across to the centre of the dance floor and saw a slim, sexy-looking woman in her late twenties, with dark hair in what he called a Gina Lollobrigida style. Her eyes were enhanced catlike with make-up and her glossed lips were in a slight pout as she rested her chin on her partner’
s shoulder. Her dress was a westernized version of the Chinese cheongsam, a skin-hugging sheath of blue silk with a high collar and a slit up each side to the thigh. Tom could almost see the disapproval coming off some of the older wives, like a black cloud ascending to the fans overhead. Lena was certainly a dish-and-a-half, he thought. No wonder David Meredith was brassed off at the prospect of losing her to someone else.
‘Who’s the guy she’s with? That her new bloke?’
‘Nay, he’s some prat one-pipper from the Hussars. Looks as if she’s using him to fire up our master gasman – to say nothing of Jimmy Robertson.’
Looking around the crowded room, they found their anaesthetist standing with Peter Bright against the opposite wall, an untouched beer in his hand, scowling at the pair on the dance floor. As they watched, a handsome redhead in a white dress rose from a nearby table where she was sitting with several more nurses and a couple of young men. Going up to Peter Bright, she said something, but he smiled and shook his head.
‘That’s another factor in the equation, Tom,’ said Alec, who seemed to be a mine of information on the scandals and intrigues of Tanah Timah.
‘Who’s she?’ Tom asked, as he watched the auburn-haired girl talk animatedly to the surgeon.
‘That’s our Joanie . . . Joan Parnell, QA sister on Medical One. She’s like a rash!’
‘What d’you mean – like a rash?’
‘She’s all over you! Especially if you’re Peter Bright, she’s got the hots for him even though everyone knows he’s after Diane Robertson.’
Joan had now wrestled the glass from Peter’s hand and putting it down on a shelf, was dragging him to the dance floor, leaving David Meredith alone and even more darkly morose.
‘I’m getting confused over all this,’ muttered the pathologist. ‘It’s like one of these Whitehall farces, with people popping in and out of bedroom doors.’
‘You won’t get that, at least not on hospital premises,’ said young Watson. ‘Both the Matron and our Old Man keep their beady eyes firmly on the bedroom doors in BMH.’
Dead in the Dog Page 6