His eyes strayed to the top of the piece of furniture and he gave an exclamation. ‘Hah! Is this a suicide note she’s left?
Picking up a single sheet of airmail paper by a corner, he quickly scanned the message. It was a suicide note, but not Rosa’s. Tom suppressed his natural curiosity, but Arnold had no such inhibitions.
‘What’s it say, Steve?’
The superintendent had humoured the planter so far, but now began to put on the brakes. ‘Look, Les. This is police investigation – might even turn out to be another murder. I have to play it by the book from now on, but I can tell you that this appears to be a suicide note written by Douglas Mackay. I can’t say more, I’m afraid.’
Rather surprisingly, Arnold accepted the mild rebuff.
‘Sure thing, Steve. I’ll leave you and the doc to it. I suppose you’ll want some sort of statement from me?’
Blackwell nodded. ‘I’ll send Inspector Tan up to Batu Merah to see you. Thanks for all your help.’
Just before he left the room, the rangy Australian took a last look at the body lying pathetically between the beds.
‘Poor Rosa, she was a nice woman,’ he said with rare compassion. ‘Reckon she couldn’t carry on when she heard that she’d lost Douglas. It’s a tough old world, mate!’
When he had vanished, Steven turned to Howden.
‘He doesn’t know the half of it, Tom! Mackay confesses in this letter to killing Jimmy Robertson – and shooting up the bungalows a few weeks back!’
The pathologist, still crouching alongside Rosa’s corpse, looked up in astonishment at the police officer. ‘That’s extraordinary, Steve! But as you said to Les – should you be telling me this?’
Blackwell turned up his palms in almost Gallic gesture.
‘You’re part of the team now, Tom, whether you like it or not. You’re our expert medical witness, though hopefully this will end at a coroner’s inquest, not the High Court.’
His ‘expert’ felt rather proud at being so valued, but a little overwhelmed at all that had happened to him professionally in the last week or two.
‘What are we going to do with the bodies?’ he asked. ‘Our colonel will go spare if we try to dump a couple more civilians in the BMH mortuary!’
Blackwell’s own grapevine had told him that moves were afoot to deal with the commandant of the hospital, but this was no time to stir up more aggravation there.
‘I’ll check with Alf Morris, but if there’s any hassle, I’ll get our police van to take them down to Ipoh General Hospital.’
Tom nodded and looked down again at the body of Rosa Mackay.
‘There’s nothing more I can do here. There needs to be either a post-mortem or at least an analysis of the vomit and blood for paraquat, just to confirm things. I’d better have a quick look at her back, just to make sure she hasn’t been shot or stabbed – it would be damned embarrassing to miss them!’
He pulled on one shoulder and the small body of the Eurasian lady lifted easily on its side so that he could see the back. There were no injuries there, but something else was immediately obvious.
‘Look at this! Another note, by the looks of it.’
He picked up a pale blue sheet of flimsy Basildon Bond notepaper, similar to the one that Blackwell held in his hand.
‘You’d better have this, Steven. It’s none of my business.’
Letting the corpse subside to the floor again, he handed the paper up to the policeman. Once again, the superintendent rapidly scanned it to get the general sense of the message. Though not normally given to blasphemy, this was too much for his usually restrained vocabulary
‘Jesus H. Christ! Come back all I said just now!’
An hour later, Tom was again sitting in the Admin Office at the front of the hospital. As before, the police superintendent was with them, as he had come to regularize the situation between the civil and military authorities.
‘There’s two sides to this, Alf,’ he began. ‘First, we don’t have a government pathologist nearer than KL and it would take me a day to get him up from there. So having Tom here on the spot is a godsend, as long as we can use his expertise without your CO blowing his top.’
‘He’s still down at Kinrara,’ replied Morris. ‘So you picked a good day for your two deaths.’
‘The other aspect is putting your mind at rest about any suspicion hanging over anyone at BMH,’ continued Steven seriously, putting his swagger stick on the corner of the desk. ‘Let’s not beat about the bush, Alf. For a time, several of your officers were in the frame as suspects for Jimmy Robertson’s murder. That’s why I feel it right to tell you in confidence what we know.’
The RAMC major brushed up his bristly moustache with a slightly nervous gesture. ‘If you think it’s OK, Steve. I don’t want to drop you in the mire for breaching some legal protocol.’
The police officer shook his head. ‘I’ve been on the phone to the coroner and explained the situation. As far as he’s concerned, as long as there’s no likelihood of anyone being charged with murder, he’s prepared to run a combined inquest on all three victims. He’s also happy for me to disclose enough information to clear up any lingering suspicions that involve this hospital.’
‘Thank God for that! We’ve already got enough problems here of our own,’ murmured Morris, half to himself. ‘But I’m still not clear what the hell has happened up at Gunong Besar. It’s still hard to believe all that’s gone on up there.’
Steven mopped his sweating brow with a large khaki handkerchief.
‘If they hadn’t left those notes, I wouldn’t have known what the hell happened, either! I’d better not show them to you, but the gist of Douglas’s letter was that he claimed to have killed James Robertson for seducing his wife, having first shot up the bungalows to lay a smokescreen for his murder plan, by suggesting that both were the work of terrorists.’
Tom Howden had already heard the content of the notes, so it was only Alf who was still in the dark.
‘You said “claimed”,’ pointed out Morris. ‘Does that mean he didn’t do it?’
‘Douglas certainly fired all those rounds at the two bungalows a few weeks ago. He says he also intended killing Jimmy later, but decided he couldn’t go through with it. I suspect his strong religious conscience got the better of him.’
‘But you said his suicide note indicated that he had shot Robertson,’ objected the Admin Officer.
‘He was lying, for reasons that became clear later. Most of his note was an explanation of how he had hated Jimmy for years, after he discovered that he had been having it away with Rosa for so long. He put none of the blame on her, by the way. He claimed that the lascivious Jimmy made all the running.’
‘What about the attack on the bungalows? How did he manage that? I understood that the bullets didn’t come from any of the rifles up at Gunong Besar – nor were they the same as the one that killed Robertson.’
Blackwell again wiped the sweat from his face. It was time he went back home to Britain, he thought suddenly. Even after years in the Far East, he seemed to suffer even more from the climate as time went by. He jerked his attention back to Alf’s question.
‘Mackay said he had a couple of extra rifles hidden away, in addition to the weapons that he and Jimmy gave us for test firing. When he came up from Johore some years ago, he brought them with him. There was a lot of CT trouble down there then, and guns were easy to come by, especially by planters intent on defending themselves.’
Tom Howden threw in another question. ‘I wonder how he managed to arrange that mock attack on his own?’
The superintendent shrugged. ‘I assume he waited until Rosa was asleep in bed, unless she was aware of what he was up to. Then he went out, ran around firing almost at random, until James appeared, then pretended to join him in hunting for the non-existent attackers.’
Alf Morris frowned at a few of the words he had just heard.
‘Are you suggesting that Rosa might have known what her hu
sband was up to?’
Steven tapped his tunic pocket where he had the two notes from the estate bungalow. ‘Her note doesn’t say so, but I suspect she knew. It was her note that upset everything that was in the one left by her husband. He must have written his the previous night, after he had decided to hang himself. Rosa then found it in the bedroom long before the amah came to wake her up – and then wrote her own note.’
Alf shook his head slowly in disbelief that such things could be going on in Tanah Timah.
‘So you reckon she then decided to commit suicide? And it wasn’t just because she’d lost her husband?’
Blackwell shook his head sadly. ‘No, it was guilt and remorse for murdering James Robertson. She makes no bones about it in her letter, she says that Douglas had been acting very strangely lately and when she tackled him about it, he told her that he had intended to kill Jimmy, but couldn’t go through with it.’
‘So she knew that her husband was aware that she’d been unfaithful to him with his boss?’ put in Tom.
‘Sure, she went on about her sins and that although James had pestered her for a long time, it was her fault that she gave in to him. When Douglas confessed that he couldn’t go through with it, she decided to finish the job herself. She knew all about Douglas’s hidden pair of rifles and took one when he was asleep. That night, she went down the road and flagged down Jimmy when he was coming home from The Dog. He stopped on the road and she shot him when he got out. Then she drove the car back to the club and hurried home on foot.’
‘Didn’t her husband know?’ asked Alf, incredulously.
‘Not then, she says – but later she broke down and told him what had happened. They agreed to sit tight, but she says that Douglas became more and more guilt-ridden and afraid that my investigation would eventually narrow down to Rosa. To save her, he wrote that false confession in his note, then hanged himself.’
Tom’s brow was furrowed with doubt. ‘But if she had continued to sit tight, it would be assumed that Douglas’s confession was true and the matter would have been cleared up?’
Steven shrugged. ‘But she didn’t! She says that she herself had been considering suicide for some time, which was why she had taken a bottle full of paraquat from the stock in the estate sheds. When she read Douglas’s note, taking the blame for her murderous action, she wrote her own letter, then drank the stuff, poor woman!’
The three men sat silently for a while, each thinking what mayhem had been caused by a randy planter.
Four weeks later, Tom Howden was lying on his stomach on the warm sand of Batu Ferringhi beach, on the north coast of Penang Island. Alongside him, Lynette Chambers was dozing with a straw sun hat over her face and nearby a dozen other members of both the RAMC and QA Messes were lounging about, enjoying a leisurely weekend. Penang was a couple of hours’ drive from Tanah Timah, but due to the car ferry from the mainland, it was easier to reach than Pangkor. An old-fashioned hotel, The Lone Pine, sat amongst the palm trees almost on the edge of the beach, and after one of its famous Sunday curries eaten at tables under the trees, lying down was obligatory!
Tom stared out at the blue sea under a blue sky, still bemused that it was not the grey Tyne under rain clouds. He mulled over all that had happened in the past few weeks, as now life was returning to normal at BMH. The coroner’s inquest on the three victims from Gunong Besar had been held in the Police HQ on the previous Wednesday. The lawyer-coroner from Ipoh played down the drama as much as he could and rapidly brought in verdicts of murder by Rosa Mackay on James Robertson and suicide ‘while the balance of their minds was disturbed’ on the two Mackays. As to the suicide notes, he declined to make them public, but stated that he was satisfied that their contents confirmed the conclusions of the court.
Desmond O’Neill had returned two days after the dramatic events up at Gunong Besar, but was in a silent, withdrawn mood and Tom’s involvement in the affair was never even mentioned.
A week later, the CO vanished and belatedly, Alf Morris was able to inform the Mess that he had been suddenly recalled to the UK to take up a desk job at the Medical Directorate of the War Office. A new Commanding Officer was on his way out by air and until he arrived, Major Peter Bright was acting as temporary CO.
It was all rather mysterious and those few in the know, who included Morris and the physician John Martin, maintained a discreet silence, though they hinted that as O’Neill was so near the end of his tour and as his wife had refused to stay any longer in the Far East, compassionate grounds were involved. The whole of the hospital took this excuse with a large pinch of salt, but made no complaint about the marked improvement in the atmosphere that resulted. The business about the arms kote was also swept under the carpet, with vague murmurings from Alf Morris that O’Neill had been obsessed with security at the hospital.
Peter Bright was very relaxed in his new role as CO, and he used his new authority to award himself plenty of free time, shooting off to Penang in his sports car at frequent intervals. Undoubtedly, he was visiting the fair Diane in the Eastern and Oriental Hotel, Penang’s equivalent of Singapore’s Raffles. The efficient gossip system reported that she had passed up her intended passage on the first UK-bound ship, as she suddenly found the attractions of Penang much to her liking.
Similarly, David Meredith, the gloomy Welsh anaesthetist, was seen to smile on several occasions, obviously having been reconciled with his own lady love, Lena Franklin.
As to Gunong Besar itself, Les Arnold announced that Diane Robertson had accepted an offer he had made to buy the estate. He magnanimously offered to supervise the rubber production there until probate and other legal matters allowed him to move in. All in all, things had worked out well in the end, albeit after three tragic deaths, for which Tom suspected that James Robertson would have had some tough questions to answer from Saint Peter when he arrived at the Pearly Gates.
He rolled over on to his stomach and smiled happily at Lynette, whose pleasant face was only a few inches from his own. He had the feeling that even after only two months in Malaya, his life had taken a turn that would last for the rest of his life.
Risking the eagle eye of the Matron, who sat in a deckchair twenty yards away, Captain Howden RAMC craned his neck towards Lieutenant Chambers, QARANC and gave her a quick peck on the cheek.
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