Tom stared at Alf Morris, wondering if this was a wind-up, or another delusion on the part of their commanding officer.
‘What the hell for? Are they bringing the bodies down here?’ he asked incredulously.
The older man shook his head. ‘You’re going up there, lad! Flying out at eight in the morning, so take your knives with you.’
At the crack of dawn, Tom Howden was in his laboratory, where Cropper filled a haversack with the antique dissection kit, several pairs of rubber gloves, a clipboard and paper, a couple of big sack needles and a ball of twine. Tom had his little Voigtlander 35mm camera in his pocket and his heart in his mouth as half an hour later, a Land Rover dropped him at the grass airstrip behind the garrison compound and he saw the plane that was to take him into the unknown. The little Auster looked to him like a camouflaged Austin Seven with wings and, with some trepidation, he lugged his haversack across to the aircraft, where the Army Air Corps pilot was leaning against the fabric fuselage, complete with leather flying helmet like some latter-day Biggles.
After a laconic greeting, the pilot opened a door, dumped Tom’s bag into the fuselage, then squeezed the pathologist into the single backward-facing seat behind the driver’s position. He strapped him in, gave him a pair of large headphones and then climbed in himself. A moment later, there was a judder as the engine started and the plane began bumping across the rough grass of the old tin tailings. Through the perspex canopy over the back of the cockpit, Tom stared out in horrified fascination at the fragile tailplane as the rudder wagged as they turned upwind. The whole contraption appeared to be made of cloth, reminding him of the balsa and tissue-paper models he made as a boy. The tail rose, the bumping suddenly stopped and Tom realized that they were already off the ground. As they climbed and banked, he looked down at the garrison, the hospital and the little town of Tanah Timah, amazed that this machine was actually flying.
Soon he began to enjoy himself, in spite of the fact that the back of his head was touching the muzzle of an automatic rifle strapped behind the pilot’s seat – reminding him that this was part of a war, not a joyride.
Looking down again, he saw the road going past The Dog and within the regular pattern of rubber plantations he could make out the bungalows of the Gunong Besar estate, where James Robertson had lived. With a return of his feelings of unreality, he realized that within weeks of leaving Gateshead, he had performed an autopsy on a shot murder victim and was now on his way to repeat the performance on three communist terrorists. When he had arrived in Malaya, he was inclined to think that ‘terrorists’ was a pejorative imperialist title for freedom fighters, until he heard descriptions of the sadistic atrocities that Chin Peng’s men had inflicted on uncooperative countrymen and women in the villages.
Alf Morris had explained the previous evening that the War Office wanted information on the killing power of the Belgian-designed FN rifle that had been adopted by NATO and detailed reports on all fatal injuries inflicted by it were to be collected wherever possible, hence his present mission.
They flew over endless rubber and oil palm estates, rice paddies and dense jungle as they went north, Tom taking some photos to amaze his folks back home in Gateshead. All too soon, the fifty-minute flight came to an end, as the Auster glided in to land on another strip of grass alongside a narrow road. On one side was yet more rubber, on the other virgin jungle. A few tents were set up as a temporary camp at one end of the airstrip, where a collection of military vehicles was standing.
An infantry captain in jungle gear came up as Tom was hauling himself out of the cramped seat and helped him with the heavy haversack.
‘Just in time, doc,’ he said cheerfully. ‘They’re about to bring the bastards out of the ulu down there.’ As he waved a hand down the straight road, a corporal crouched over a radio pack called out to him.
‘They say they can see the edge of the trees, sir. Be with us in a few minutes.’
The West Berkshires officer gave a shrill blast on a whistle and beckoned to a group of squaddies waiting around a Ferret armoured scout car, a TCV and a pair of Land Rovers. As the men jogged towards them, the captain began striding down the road. ‘Come on, doc, duty calls!’
Tom slung his bag over his shoulder and sweating like a bull in the cloying heat, followed the men for a few hundred yards, until a soldier suddenly appeared through the lalang grass, holding up his rifle and pointing back into the trees.
A few moments later, a strange procession appeared out of the forest, which confirmed Tom’s impression that he was in a time-warp created by Somerset Maugham or some Edwardian writing about the last days of the British Raj. Some British and Gurkha soldiers appeared, followed by two Malay Regiment men carrying a long bamboo pole on their shoulders. From this hung a corpse, suspended by ropes tied around ankles and wrists. Tom had seen old photos of tigers being retrieved like this, after being slaughtered by some pith-helmeted colonial general, but he never expected to see the method used for humans.
As the two bearers thankfully dropped their burden on the wide verge at the edge of the road, two similar convoys came out of the jungle, this time carried by a pair of West Berkshires and another two locally enlisted Malay privates.
‘Right, doctor, they’re all yours,’ announced the cheerful young captain, as the troops set about untying the corpses from the poles. ‘Let’s know when you’re through, so I can send a few lads down with shovels.’
The men from the patrol went wearily up to the tents for food and rest, while the fresher men from the vehicles stood around to watch Tom do his stuff. The three bodies, dressed in ragged bloodstained clothing, were laid out a few feet apart and he began by taking photographs of them, which seemed a sensible thing to do, as he had no orders as how to proceed. Two of the corpses were men, the other a young woman, though it was hard to tell, as her head seemed to have been exploded from the inside.
‘Were they all shot with FNs?’ he asked the captain.
‘Two of them, doc. The other was traversed with a Bren.’
Tom set out his meagre equipment, the old box of instruments giving rise to a chatter of interest amongst the watchers. Pulling on a pair of gloves, he asked the officer if someone could jot down a few notes and the captain gave the clipboard to his sergeant. Squatting uncomfortably on his heels, Tom began his examination by pulling aside the soaked, tattered shirt of the first man, a young Chinese with blood dribbling from his mouth. There were two bullet entrance wounds on his chest and a large exit wound on his back.
After opening the thorax with one of Cropper’s ferocious knives, Tom dictated a short account of the chaos within the chest cavity and the destruction of the spine, rather similar to the injury to James Robertson. However, unlike the planter, there were no bullets inside the body, the high velocity of the FN having whistled them right through to lie somewhere out there in the deep jungle.
He had a cursory look at the other main organs, mainly out of interest, in case the privations of living for years on poor rations and with rampant infectious diseases and parasites, might have left some mark. He found nothing significant and went on to look at the second man.
This was a different situation altogether, as there was a line of eight bullet entrance rounds running diagonally across his chest and abdomen, as his life was blasted away by a moving hail of bullets from a Bren gun. One of the bullets was still in the body, one lodged under the skin of the back where it had run out of momentum after passing through a vertebra.
‘That will be a three-oh-three, doc,’ commented the helpful young captain. ‘We’ve still got some of the old Brens, before they changed the barrels to fire the NATO seven-point-sixes.’
Again, Tom was chillingly reminded of James Robertson, whose spine had arrested a similar .303 projectile.
The woman, though facially utterly unrecognizable, appeared from her shape and smooth skin to be young, perhaps even a teenager. After trying to roughly replace the exploded tissues of the head, he found that
the single entrance wound appeared to be in the left ear, the projectile from the FN having gone down the canal until it struck the mass of dense bone in the base of the skull. The sudden transfer of kinetic energy had been more like a bomb than a bullet, but at least she could not have known anything about it, thought Tom, in an effort to find some consolation in the midst of this carnage. Even the soldiers standing around seemed muted, with none of the usual ribald humour that was commonly used to compensate for these grim situations.
He used the rest of his film in taking close-up pictures of all the injuries, then did his best to restore some dignity to the desecrated corpses which lay naked on the side of the road. He sewed up the fronts of the bodies, using the twine and needles that Lewis Cropper had provided. There was little he could do to restore the girl’s head, but as a gesture, he bound it together in several layers of clothing ripped from the men’s shirts.
A couple of West Berkshires had brought entrenching tools down from the three-tonner and set about digging a shallow grave in the soft, damp soil of the verge. The three corpses were lowered into it, side by side and as the men shovelled the red soil back into the hole, Tom could not help comparing this with the recent funeral of Jimmy Robertson, where a robed priest and floral tributes had marked his passing. He had seen pet dogs buried with more ceremony than this and realized yet again that war was a cruel, callous business.
Taking his notes from the officer, he walked in a subdued mood back to the tents for a promised cup of tea, before climbing aboard the Auster for the flight back to Tanah Timah.
Steven Blackwell was a worried man as he sat in his office in the police station. Another two days had passed without any progress in the Robertson investigation and as well as having had another nagging call from his Commissioner in Kuala Lumpur, he was concerned about a rumour that had filtered through to him from the garrison. Though he did not actually have any spies inside the military establishment, he knew so many people there that it was inevitable that gossip percolated down to him, not only at the bar of The Dog, but from Inspector Tan and other police officers, who were in daily contact with civilian servants and clerks working for the army. The current gossip concerned the Commanding Officer of the hospital there, purveying suggestions varying from the fact that the colonel had gone raving mad to the milder eccentricity of stalking the compound at night with a loaded pistol.
Steven had gone so far as to corner the hospital’s Admin Officer at the club the previous evening and ask him whether there was any problem with Desmond O’Neill. Major Morris was reluctant to say much, both because of his traditional loyalty to a superior officer and the plain fact that military secrets, if this could be called one, could not be divulged to civilians, even to the police, without very good legal reasons.
‘The old man is just his usual bloody-minded self, Steven,’ he countered evasively, before relating the strange business of the aborted physical exercise demand. The policeman suspected that Morris was keeping something back out of loyalty and discretion and he admired him for that, but sensed that there was more going on in BMH than just their commandant’s persecution of his medical officers.
‘Alf, you know I can’t exclude anyone from my investigations and that includes O’Neill. In fact, he’s got no satisfactory explanation for where he was at the time of the shooting. If there’s anything you think you should tell me that’s relevant to my enquiries, I should know about it.’
The Admin Officer looked uncomfortable at this.
‘Steve, it’s very difficult for me to talk about this. It’s an internal matter and I’m sure it has nothing to do with your investigation.’
The superintendent sighed at Morris’s unconvincing tone.
‘Look, I realize your problem, but if you want to keep in the clear, why not have a word with the legal bloke in Brigade and pass the buck to him?’
They were sitting at a corner table in the lounge of The Dog, almost deserted at this early part of the evening. Alf Morris gave an almost furtive look around, then leaned towards Blackwell.
‘The CO is acting more oddly than usual, but maybe that’s due to end-of-tour blues. He’s due to go home in about seven weeks’ time. The thing is, some of his dottiness seems to centre around the armoury. He’s always been obsessed with security there, but recently he’s suddenly posted two Malay Other Ranks out of the unit with no real reason. Both have been on night duty at the arms kote.’
Steven frowned, trying to make sense of this.
‘Why should that worry you?’ Then the possible relevance suddenly struck him. ‘Are any weapons missing?’ he hissed.
He relaxed a little when the other man shook his head.
‘No, I went up there today and checked through the record book. But the odd thing is that the colonel had withdrawn a rifle a couple of weeks ago – and returned it last Friday!’
Blackwell stared intently at Morris. ‘Can he do that? What the hell for?’
Morris shrugged. ‘He’s quite entitled to draw a weapon, if he wants. After all, he’s the Commanding Officer of the unit, so who’s going to query it? Maybe he wanted to practice his marksmanship on the garrison range. We are on active service, even though we’re a medical unit. All the MOs have to put in target practice at the Depot when they first join, God help us for their uselessness at it!’
As a former non-medical Regimental Sergeant Major, he couldn’t resist a dig at the doctors’ lack of military skills.
The policeman took up his beer glass with rather nervous fingers. ‘Alf, you realize that the period when he took the gun out, covers the date of Jimmy Robertson’s killing.’
Morris nodded. ‘It had occurred to me. But it’s ridiculous to think that O’Neill could have anything to do with that. Anyway, the previous shoot-up at Gunon Besar was outside the time when he had the rifle.’
Blackwell shook his head. ‘But those shots came from a different weapon. Had he taken out another gun previously?’
‘No, there’s nothing in the book,’ replied Alf, rather abruptly. He was becoming uneasy about this line of questioning
‘He could have badgered some little MOR to let him take one out without signing the book,’ suggested Steven. ‘Perhaps that’s why he posted the fellows away, so that they couldn’t be questioned.’
‘Oh come on, Steve! This is verging on the fantastic. Where would he get the ammunition from? There’s no record of any being issued with the rifle.’
The superintendent was unimpressed with this argument.
‘There’s plenty of spare clips knocking around the garrison, you know that as well as I do. And O’Neill was posted here from Korea, that place was awash with buckshee weapons and ammo.’
Alf Morris stared into his glass of Tiger, worried by the way things were going. ‘What are you going to do about it? I shouldn’t have told you, really, without authorization from a more senior officer – and my immediate superior is the colonel himself.’
Steven ran a hand over his tender sunburnt scalp. ‘Can you identify the actual rifle that he took out?’
Morris nodded. ‘The serial numbers are recorded in the armoury book.’
‘Then I must have a test-fired bullet from it to send to the laboratory in KL to compare with the one Tom Howden dug out of Jimmy. Can you arrange that on the quiet? If it doesn’t match, then no one will be any the wiser, but we can breath more easily again.’
Reluctantly, Morris agreed. ‘It will have be done within the garrison, no way can I let a weapon go outside without the Brigadier’s consent – and that would lead to a lot of awkward questions, especially as he’s one of our colonel’s cronies.’
Blackwell swallowed the rest of his beer and reached for his black uniform cap on the nearly chair. ‘Thanks, Alf. If I don’t make some progress soon, my senior officers are going to crap on me from a great height. It might come to test-firing all the weapons in the BMH arms kote, so doing one early might be a start.’
‘Did you get any results from the guns
the planters had?’ Morris asked, as he rose to his feet with the policeman.
‘Just had the results from KL. None of the rifles that came from Gunong Besar or Les Arnold’s place up the road matched any of the bullets that were fired at the bungalows or the one that killed poor Jimmy.’
That rather prickly conversation had taken place the previous evening and now Steven Blackwell was in a dilemma as to how to proceed. Given the hostile attitude of Desmond O’Neill, he could hardly ask the colonel whether he had shot the Gunong Besar planter. Frustratingly, all he could do was to wait until Alf Morris had produced the promised bullet from a test-firing, presumably made by an armourer from the garrison. At least this would not give rise to any connection with the CO of the hospital, as it was common knowledge that a variety of weapons were likely to be examined for exclusion purposes.
As he had told Morris the previous evening, the barrel striations on the bullets fired through the rifles borrowed from Douglas Mackay, Les Arnold and even the one belonging to James Robertson, showed that none had been used in either incident at or near Gunong Besar.
As he sat sweating under the rotating overhead fan, Steven’s mind reverted to the other suspects, if such unlikely candidates could be thought of as such. He was convinced that a woman was at the bottom of this crime, as he could not bring himself to believe that any other motive was credible. There was no possible financial reason why Jimmy should have been shot – Doug Mackay would not benefit from Robertson’s death. Indeed, he stood to lose his job and bungalow if Gunong Besar was sold up. Perhaps Les Arnold might have a slight motive, if he wanted to add that estate to his own holdings up at Batu Merah, but it seemed unlikely that he would devise such an elaborate scheme just to get hold of extra land. With any terrorist involvement ruled out, as it must be given the dumping of Jimmy’s body outside The Dog, then some motive related to passion, sex or jealousy must surely be the answer.
His train of thought was interrupted by one of the Indian civil employees coming in with a tray containing his eleven o’clock grapefruit soda to wash down a Paludrine tablet, his daily defence against malaria. Behind him came Inspector Tan, with some statements about a recent serious wounding in a kampong a few miles away. Steven motioned to him to sit down on the other side of the desk. He had not told him of the business with Colonel O’Neill and the armoury as, if it was a total red-herring, the fewer people who knew about it, the better.
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