‘Funny place to start, the QA’s dormitory,’ grunted the quartermaster.
‘He’s been trying doors and windows, to see if they’ve been locked at night, that’s all,’ said Alf defensively.
‘What, is he afraid that Chin Peng is going to nick the ashtrays from the Sergeants’ Mess?’ asked Alec Watson. ‘I saw him snooping around there after midnight when I was duty officer last week. Then he went up to the armoury and started yelling at the poor little Malay corporal through the door.’
‘What was that about?’ asked Alfred, curious in spite of his ingrained loyalties.
‘Dunno, I kept well clear!’ replied Alec. ‘But his obsession with the armoury has got worse since these shootings.’
The debate about the foibles of their chief was interrupted by the arrival of the surgeon and his anaesthetist who both dropped wearily into chairs and called for beers. As he took their orders, Number One asked solicitously if they wanted him to find them a late meal.
‘No thanks, night sister rustled up sandwiches for us in theatre,’ answered Peter Bright. ‘We had a late start because Sherlock Holmes came again with a list of questions.’
‘Which one of you confessed?’ demanded the irrepressible Percy.
Dave Meredith ignored him, but had a gripe of his own.
‘Damned cheek. Steve Blackwell wanted to know all about my ability as a marksman. How the hell would he know that, I haven’t so much as touched a rifle since I joined the army!’ He omitted to say that the police superintendent had also asked some pointed questions about his relationship with Lena Franklin, Robertson’s latest paramour.
‘He must have had sight of our Service records,’ complained Peter. ‘Some of the things he was asking me, not even you nosy devils know anything about.’
He failed to elaborate on this, but most of his colleagues had a fair idea that Diane Robertson’s name would have featured in Blackwell’s questions.
The Mess seemed to slide into gloomy silence after this, until their Admin Officer made a suggestion intended to raise the mood a little.
‘I’ve been looking at the duty rosters for next weekend, chaps,’ said Alf earnestly. ‘Quite a few of you are free, so why don’t we organize a trip to Pangkor? I know the colonel’s going down to Kinrara to meet the ADMS, so we could get away early on Saturday morning and come back on Sunday.’
There was a stir of interest, except from those who were tied to the hospital that weekend.
‘Be a nice change, we could see if a few of the QAs wanted to join us,’ said Alec, always with an eye to female company. During the buzz of discussion that followed, a mystified Tom Howden asked Alec what this was all about.
‘Pangkor? It’s a tropical island just off the coast. Smashing place, only about fifty miles away. We leave the cars at Lumut, then get a small ferry across. The accommodation’s a bit primitive, just a row of wooden chalets above the beach, but it’s better than this place. You must come, Tom, it’s great! Swimming, boozing, flirting!’
Alf winked across at the pathologist. ‘See if you can get that nice Lynette to come, Tom. Swaying palm trees under a tropical moon, do your love life no end of good!’
It seemed that several other officers had the same idea, as when they got around to discussing which cars to take, David Meredith announced that his passenger seat would doubtless be occupied by Lena Franklin. Then Peter Bright effectively stopped the chatter by rather gruffly indicating that he intended asking Diane Robertson if she would like to join the party.
‘She needs something to take her mind off things, poor woman!’ he said defiantly, making it clear that he was personally intending to provide that something. He got a few knowing looks from his fellow officers and a leer from Percy, but no one pursued the matter and the conversation drifted on to details of the trip, Alf volunteering to contact the beach hotel and make the bookings.
Outside, the storm finished as abruptly as it had begun and gradually the crowd in the Mess began to drift away. Some of those not on duty went out to the cinema or visit other messes in the garrison, while a few sloped off to their rooms to write letters, read or listen to their record players.
An hour later Tom was left alone in the anteroom, apart from Eddie Rosen, who was snoring peacefully in one of the chairs.
The pathologist browsed through his thick dog-eared copy of Muir’s Pathology, but his attention span was limited, even though he told himself that he must keep bashing the books, as he intended taking the Diploma when he got back home. Too many diverting thoughts marched through his mind, from puzzling about Jimmy Robertson’s gunshot wound to the sounds and aromas of a tropical night that wafted through the doors. A recurring diversion was the face and figure of Lynette Chambers. He knew that she was not on duty tonight, but the promised weekend with her on this fabled island was a tantalizing prospect, with which Professor Muir’s book had no chance of competing. He gave up the attempt at study and earlier than needs be, grabbed his hat and belt and went off down to the hospital to do his rounds.
Checking first with the orderly sergeant down at the front, he began working his way back up the corridor, stopping at each ward in turn. At Ward Five, his path crossed that of the night sister and they stopped for a cup of coffee in the office. Tonight QA Captain Joan Parnell was in charge and sitting in close proximity in the small room, he was aware of what an attractive woman she was. Glossy auburn hair peeped from beneath her white linen head-cloth and her smooth features always seemed to hold a slightly mischievous expression.
‘You’ve made quite a hit with young Lynette, Captain Howden,’ she said archly. ‘Fast workers, you Geordies!’
Tom grinned sheepishly. She was an easy woman to talk to as they had no flirtatious hang-up to contend with. He had his eye firmly on Lynette and Joan was intent on prising Peter Bright away from the new widow woman.
‘There’s a plan afoot to make up a party for this Pangkor place next weekend,’ he observed. ‘Will you be able to come?’
‘Is Peter going, d’you know?’ she asked. ‘Maybe we could drive down together.’
Tom felt that he was treading on sensitive ground here, but he could hardly avoid a direct question. ‘He said that he was, but I think he’s giving a lift to Mrs Robertson.’
Joan’s luscious lips tightened at this.
‘Then I’m definitely damned well going!’ she exclaimed. ‘I’m not letting her have him all to herself for a whole weekend.’
Tom wisely avoided any comment and tried to change the subject.
‘Eddie Rosen and Alec both said the CO had been acting strangely the past few nights. Have you seen anything of him?’
Joan Parnell pulled her mind away from the prospect of their surgeon cavorting with a blonde on a tropical island and nodded.
‘It’s the talk of the Sisters’ Mess this week. Matron said she’s going to have a word with him, as he’s been poking about the buildings until God knows what hour – including the QA’s Other Ranks billet. The man’s mad!’
‘Have you seen him tonight?’
‘I caught a glimpse of him in the distance about an hour ago, going up the corridor towards the armoury. I’m sure it was him, you can tell by that funny up-and-down walk of his.’
The pathologist drained the last of his Nescafé from a mug advertising a new lotion for treating scabies. ‘Let’s hope I can keep clear of him tonight. He seems to have taken an instant dislike to me.’
Joan gave him a glowing smile and reached out to touch his hand.
‘Don’t take it personally, Tom. He’s like that with everyone, unless they’ve got boobs and long legs! The latest one to hate him even more than usual is Robbie Burns.’
‘I’ve heard they don’t get along, to put it mildly,’ said Tom. ‘But is this something new?’
‘The colonel gives all the QM people a hard time, but now he’s threatened to arrest Robbie and have him court-martialled,’ explained Joan.
‘This place is nothing like Newcastle’
s RVI, where I worked,’ said Tom ruefully. ‘What’s he supposed to have done?’
Joan shrugged her slim shoulders indifferently.
‘Some fuss over a fiddled Board of Survey, they say. Nothing out of the ordinary.’
Tom Howden had already been instructed in the art of handling Boards of Survey by Lance Corporal Cropper. Every department had to have its inventory of equipment checked every so often by an officer and a member of the QM staff. Any deficiencies had to be paid for out of the pocket of the officer-in-charge. Where the lab was concerned, the crafty Cropper informed Tom that all his predecessors had wangled their way out of debt by calling a ‘Board of Survey’ to condemn items allegedly worn or unserviceable. These were supposed to be destroyed immediately, but in fact, after replacements were obtained, the old ones were quietly brought back to replace anything missing from the inventory.
‘In this man’s army, you can get away with writing off a truck or a tank with no more than a ticking-off,’ the corporal had confided. ‘But break a bloody thermometer worth five bob and there’s hell to pay!’
It seemed that the luckless quartermaster had fallen foul of the eccentric Commanding Officer over something to do with this time-honoured tradition.
‘Apparently, Captain Burns is livid!’ went on Joan. ‘It seems the colonel has been persecuting him for months and now Burns has been heard to say that he’s willing to swing for Desmond O’Neill! Let’s hope they don’t meet on one of our nights on duty!’
With this cheerful thought, the two went about their business and after finishing his pilgrimage to the other wards, Tom made his final trip to the arms kote. As he went, he kept a wary eye out for the CO, but thankfully the only thing he saw at the top end of the hospital was a cat slinking along a monsoon drain. The excursion to the arms blockhouse also went peacefully, though again there was another new Malay OR locked inside, one Tom had not seen on his previous visits.
By midnight, he was back in his own bed, as the air-conditioned ward was occupied by a gunner with malaria. As he stared up in the gloom at the dim wraith of his mosquito net, he thought of the coming weekend. Visions swam into his mind of nubile maidens in grass skirts dancing on a palm-fringed moonlit beach – and they were all wearing the starched headdress of the Queen Alexandra’s Royal Army Nursing Corps.
NINE
The next meeting of the investigators into the killing of James Robertson was held in the Police Circle building, partly because Steven Blackwell wanted to emphasize that this was primarily a matter for the civil police, rather than the military. The same people attended halfway through Thursday morning, gathering over Fraser & Neave grapefruit sodas in the superintendent’s room upstairs. Inspector Tan was present, sitting in his usual self-effacing way with an open notebook on his knee. This time it was Blackwell who sat behind his desk as chairman and he opened the proceedings by pulling a sheet of paper from the now slightly thicker file on Robertson’s murder.
‘The first thing is another report from the lab at Petaling Jaya,’ he announced. ‘The blood on those leaves from the road up to Gunong Besar was the same blood group as the dead man’s. It was a moderately common group, but I see no reason to think that it was anyone else’s but his.’
He shuffled out another sheet and laid it on his desk.
‘Perhaps more significantly, there is report on the bullet that the doctor here removed from James’s chest.’
There was a palpable silence as the faces opposite waited for the result.
‘It was not fired from the same weapon as that which peppered the estate buildings the previous week.’ He emphasized the negative, to impress the fact on the others, who broke into a confused murmuring.
‘So where does that leave us?’ demanded Enderby, the major from the provost marshal’s section.
Steven shrugged. ‘Either the same guy using a different rifle – or two different villains!’
‘Pity we don’t have the shell-case from James’s shooting,’ offered tubby Major Preston, the Intelligence Officer.
‘Wouldn’t help much,’ retorted the SIB sergeant. ‘The ones from the previous shoot-out were a complete mixture of ammunition from after 1948. Unless this one was a cordite-filled shell which greatly pre-dated the others, we couldn’t say it was from a different source.’
‘And it still wouldn’t tell us who fired the damned thing,’ added the superintendent, wearily.
Tom kept quiet through the ensuing silence, as the others digested this latest unhelpful information. He felt that after carrying out the post-mortem, he had nothing more to offer these professionals.
‘So what’s the next move?’ asked Alfred Morris, mindful of the questions that Desmond O’Neill would be barking at him when he got back to the hospital.
‘I’ve now got statements from virtually all the people who might either be involved or might know something useful,’ said Steven Blackwell. ‘These, together with the information kindly provided by the garrison on the military personnel, will have to be gone though with a fine toothcomb. We need to know who was where and when they were there, on that night.’
Morris stroked his bristly moustache in a gesture of concern.
‘That’s a hell a wide net to fling, Steven. Theoretically, it could be any of us – even me! I was in bed, but I can’t prove it. Captain Howden is the only one of us who has a cast-iron alibi!’
Tom pushed his chair back, grating it on the concrete floor.
‘Maybe I should leave now, if you are going to discuss colleagues of mine,’ he offered.
Blackwell waved him down. ‘I wouldn’t be concerned about that, Tom. We’re hardly likely to accuse anyone this morning! And we may need your advice if anything crops up about the actual shooting.’
Having made his point, the pathologist settled back, admitting to himself that he was intrigued by this business of detection. Maybe he would take up this forensic game when he went back home. The senior police officer shuffled his papers once again and picked out one to lay on top.
‘I’ll go through each of the people in turn, just to lay out the basic plot. The first is Major Peter Bright, your senior surgeon. He says he went to the usual Friday night dance at The Dog, left about ten forty-five and drove downtown to the Rest House, where he sat alone and had a few beers, before driving back to the hospital soon after midnight. He arrived in time to see all the action outside the Casualty Department and we know that he came in at that point.’
Blackwell raised his head and looked enquiringly around at the others. Again Tom kept his mouth shut, but the staff sergeant felt no such inhibitions about an officer unknown to him.
‘Why leave the club and go drinking alone in a local bar late at night?’
It was hardly accurate to call the Rest House a ‘local bar’, of which there were several in Tanah Timah. The Rest Houses were a chain of rather austere hostels originally meant for government officials to stay in when they were travelling on official business, but anyone could book in if there was a vacancy, and they were usually open for food and drink. However, the SIB man’s question was still valid.
‘I asked him that myself,’ replied Steven. ‘He was a little reluctant to be precise, but said that he got fed up with The Dog and felt like a change.’
He smoothed his bald head thoughtfully. ‘I think we all know a little about his personal attachments and it seems probable that these were at the root of it,’ he added delicately.
‘And he says he was alone, not with a woman?’ demanded Preston.
Blackwell nodded. ‘I suspect the woman he would have liked to have been with was otherwise engaged. Anyway, he’s got no alibi for the crucial hour.’
‘The Rest House servants – do they confirm he was there?’ asked the SIB sergeant.
‘There was only one Indian boy on duty at that time of night. He said that a tall man with yellow hair was there, but was hopelessly vague about times.’
‘What do we know about Major Bright that’s relevant?’ g
runted Enderby, pointing a finger towards the files.
Steven Blackwell looked across at Alfred Morris. ‘You must know everything that’s in here, being the Admin Officer at BMH.’
Alf nodded. ‘An exemplary military record. He’s a Regular Officer, a Senior Specialist in Surgery, in line to be pushed up to half-colonel when he finishes this tour in Malaya. Upper-class chap, his father’s also a doctor, I understand. Hunting, shooting and fishing types.’
‘What about personal character?’ enquired Enderby.
‘Divorced a couple of years ago when he was in Germany. No children. Don’t know what else to say about him,’ ended Alf loyally.
Steven nervously tapped a pencil on the desk. ‘Let’s not beat about the bush, chaps. It’s common knowledge that Peter Bright was more than a little friendly with Diane Robertson.’
Alfred Morris bridled a little at this. ‘A small place like Tanah Timah is naturally a hotbed for gossip. But we don’t actually know that there was anything between them.’
Major Enderby snorted. ‘Come off it, Alf! I’m not even in BMH, but even I know that Peter had the hots for the lovely blonde.’
‘You’re not suggesting that he shot her husband just to make her available?’ said Morris indignantly.
‘Stranger things have happened,’ grunted the more cynical SIB man. ‘A few drinks inside a fellow and a sense of grievance, anything can happen.’
‘And a little bird told me that Diane might have been playing away lately,’ added Preston, mischievously.
‘I don’t believe it for a moment,’ huffed Alf Morris. ‘Peter Bright is a real gentleman, murder would never enter his head!’
The police superintendent shrugged and turned to another sheet from the file on his desk.
‘Captain David Meredith, your anaesthetist. What about him?’
Alf shook his head. ‘A complete non-starter, I’d say. Having designs on Diane Robertson was the last thing he was interested in – he was dead keen on one of the QAs, Lena Franklin.’
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