by Onbekend
‘Nothing to do with the colour of your skin, old boy. I just need to debrief Third Officer Killigrew, and I can’t very well do that with me in the cab and her in the back, can I?’
They headed back towards Singapore Town with White at the wheel, Varma beside him in the cab and everyone else in the back.
‘Sorry I couldn’t arrange a more comfortable means of transport to the harbour, Mr al-Jawziyya,’ Hamilton told the sultan. ‘Rest assured we have a stateroom waiting for you and Miss Polyakova on board the Queen of the Orient.’ He doffed his panama to Irina, then pulled a gold watch from the fob pocket of his waistcoat. ‘We should be just in time.’
The sultan smiled thinly. ‘Even now, you cannot bring yourself to address me by my proper title.’
‘My dear fellow, as a functionary of His Majesty’s Government, I can only recognise you by your legal title. Titles and genealogy not my bailiwick.’ Hamilton turned to Kitty. ‘Japs give you much trouble?’
‘That depends on your definition of “trouble”,’ she replied drily. ‘Four good men died rescuing Mr al-Jawziyya.’ She glanced down to where Gibson lay on the floor at her feet. ‘Maybe five.’
‘I’m truly sorry for their deaths,’ said the sultan. ‘I would rather it had been me that died than any one of them. I fear I am a poor exchange for the British government.’
‘To hell with the British government,’ said Kitty. ‘And you mustn’t blame yourself, Alex.’
Hamilton started bombarding her with questions. She replied tersely. Yashiro’s name came up a few times: Hamilton seemed to know all about him. Torrance was not interested: he had just lived through it, he did not want to hear Kitty’s edited highlights. As soon as he was aboard the Hsiu T’ung he was going straight to his cabin to sleep on his bunk all the way to Batavia. He glanced out of the back of the tilt. They were driving down Thomson Road. It seemed like an aeon had passed since he had driven this way with MacRae and a lorryload of hooky nylons. When had that been? Sunday? No, Monday morning… four days ago, in fact. He pulled the front of his bonnet down over his eyes and leaned his head back against the canvas tilt to try to grab some kip on the way to the hospital…
The lorry lurched, the front end dropping sharply. Torrance was thrown against the back of the cab and Shapiro, sitting next to him, was thrown against Torrance’s shoulder. Torrance braced himself, waiting for it to lurch back as the rear wheels made the same drop, but it never happened: the lorry had come to a halt with its front wheels three feet lower than the rear wheels. Gears grated as White threw the engine into reverse, and Torrance could hear the motor whine: the wheels were turning, but meeting no resistance, presumably because they were stuck up in the air. Then the engine sputtered and died. ‘Bloody hell! Has that nit Blanco crashed us into the river?’ he wondered out loud.
Kitty pulled herself up to the tailgate and peered over. ‘What on earth…?’
Torrance squeezed out from under Shapiro and clambered up the sloping floor beside the wounded Gibson to join Kitty at the tailgate. Looking down at the road – more than seven feet below the tailgate now – he saw only water.
‘Blimey! He has crashed us into the river!’
Looking about, Torrance saw they were halfway down Serangoon Road, except this stretch was no longer a road but a canal, with water between the pavements where the tarmac should have been. Here and there islands of debris – sometimes great mounds of rubble, sometimes a single, solitary brick – stood proud of the flood. The water was the same colour as tarmac, and since the pavements – high and dry on either side – were only a couple of inches high, Torrance was willing to bet that meant the water was only a couple of inches deep.
Most of the Chinese shops were boarded up; those which were not had their windows broken, either by bomb blasts or looters. He could hear the shriek of Japanese howitzer shells being lobbed into the city; thankfully, most of them seemed to be falling in the city centre, further to the east.
He jumped from the tailgate, splashing into the water. At least, the soles of his boots did: the rest of him stayed above the surface. Looking back at the truck, he saw the bottom of the tailgate was level with his chin and the rear wheels hung more than a foot above the water. Moving cautiously around the side, he saw the front wheels and the bonnet were completely submerged and the water lapped at the bottom of the windscreen.
White and Varma tried to open the doors of the cab. White’s only opened part of the way before it banged against the rim of the submerged crater, but it was enough to allow the water to pour into the lower half of the cab. White swore, and squeezed out through the narrow gap to step onto the flooded tarmac. Varma performed a similar manoeuvre on the other side.
‘Well done, Blanco,’ said Torrance. ‘You managed to sink a three-tonner in one inch of water.’
‘It didn’t seem very deep, I thought I could drive straight through.’
‘And you didn’t wonder why the road was flooded? That maybe the water came from a water main ruptured by bomb which, in the process of rupturing said main, might also have made a crater? What the bloody hell were you doing driving down Serangoon Road anyway? Didn’t the Prof tell you we’re headed for the Alexandra Hospital, not the city centre?’
‘Who?’
‘He means me.’ Varma turned to Torrance. ‘The police have blocked off Newton Road and we didn’t like the look of the traffic headed for New Cemetery Road. I thought this would be a shortcut.’
‘You’ve got a bloody funny idea of a shortcut.’ Torrance made his way back to the rear end of the lorry.
Kitty had managed to lower the tailgate. ‘Help me down!’
‘You sure you wouldn’t rather go down with your command, Admiral?’
She scowled. ‘You’re hilarious.’
Varma joined Torrance at the back of the lorry. As Kitty jumped down, he caught her around the waist. Hamilton, Irina and the sultan followed. Quinn and Shapiro were about to jump down under their own steam when Torrance stayed them with an upraised hand. ‘D’you want to pass Hoot down to me and the Prof? Maybe we can flag down another vehicle to take him to the hospital…’
‘There’s no hurry now,’ Quinn said grimly.
‘Oh.’ Suddenly all the humour drained out of the situation. ‘Well, we can’t leave him here.’
‘You’ll have to come back for him.’ Hamilton glanced at his pocket watch. ‘By my reckoning the Queen of the Orient sails in an hour and a half, and we’ve still four or five miles short of Keppel Harbour.’
‘You don’t still need us, do you?’ asked Torrance.
‘I’d appreciate a military escort.’
‘What, for Chinatown?’
‘Things have changed in Singapore Town while you were rescuing the sultan.’ Hamilton doffed his panama and ran a hand over his thinning hair. ‘There are a lot of stragglers in town, and… well, let’s just say the military police rather have their hands full. Also, we’ll need your help when we reach the docks.’
‘Help with what? You can see His Majesty doesn’t have any luggage.’
‘Crowd control.’
Torrance sighed. He had been planning to go to the Alexandra Hospital on his way to the harbour to make sure Kay Sheridan had got away. The hospital was not that far from the docks: perhaps he would have time to see Irina and the sultan on board the Queen of the Orient, slip away to the hospital to ask after Kay, and then return – with or without Kay – to board the Hsiu T’ung.
‘All right,’ he told Hamilton. ‘Blanco!’
‘What?’
‘Get Hoot back to Tyersall Park. Maybe the padre can arrange for him to have a decent burial.’
‘Howay, man! How am I supposed to get him back to barracks on me own?’
‘Use your bloody initiative, you Geordie twerp! Hire a rickshaw.’
The flooding came to an end where the water drained over the pavement into the Rochor Canal, which was choked with bloated, putrefying corpses of people, mules and dogs, all jumbled together
and covered in a film of oil. Torrance and his companions crossed the canal via the bridge by the Kandang Kerbau police station. A nearby sewage main had burst in the bombing and the vile stench made them gag.
Everywhere they looked, flames rose from the shells of bombed-out buildings, casting a hellish glare across the rubble-strewn streets of Singapore. Acrid traces of smoke in the air stung their eyes, their tears streaking the grime on their faces. Abandoned cars, army trucks, lorries and buses littered every street, many of them on fire. Some still had bodies in them and the stench of death was everywhere. On Selegie Road a team of volunteer firemen had parked their fire engine and were trying to tackle a blaze, but there was insufficient water pressure for their hoses. Torrance and his companions had to pick their way over fallen lamp posts and broken telegraph poles whose wires had become entangled with the overhead tramway lines. Occasionally they saw Chinese or Malay families huddled in doorways, women and children with smut-stained faces who watched the five Allied soldiers and the people they were escorting anxiously, clearly regarding them less as protectors than an additional threat in a world already torn apart by strafing bombers. Such people were outnumbered, however, by the corpses no one had time to clear up any more. The dead sprawled on pavements and in gutters, their blood mingling with the water from burst mains to run into the monsoon drains.
The broad boulevard of Dhobi Gaut was crowded with Allied soldiers, some standing in groups, some sitting, a few lying down on the pavements, too exhausted to do anything but sleep. Most of them had thrown away their arms and equipment; many of them had surrendered much of their uniforms too. Smoke poured from the glowing windows of the eleven-storey Cathay Building. On the ground floor, the cinema where Torrance had spent many happy hours watching James Cagney struggle in vain to stay one step ahead of the law had now been converted into a first aid post for civilians injured in the bombing.
Hearing a barking voice amplified by a loudhailer, Torrance turned to see an Austin 10 utility vehicle drive slowly through the crowds, an officer standing in the open back exhorting the men to return to their units. ‘Singapore must not fall! Singapore will not fall!’
‘Can you tell us where we can find the Second Twenty-Sixth?’ an Australian soldier asked the Austin’s driver.
‘Don’t ask me, mate, I only work here.’
‘Remember you’re British!’ barked the officer.
‘We’re not, we’re fuckin’ Aussies, mate!’ came the inevitable response.
‘Bugger off!’ shouted someone else, and lobbed an empty beer bottle at the officer’s head. It missed by a couple of feet, smashing on the pavement, but he got the message. He rapped his swagger stick on the roof of the cab and the driver got his foot down, disappearing up Penang Road.
Torrance and his companions skirted Fort Canning and made their way down Clarke Quay, crossing the Singapore River by Read Bridge. In the glow of the flames from a burning barge, Torrance saw more corpses amongst the detritus drifting with the current below. On Tanjong Pagar Road, they passed a bomb site where a crowd of people pulled dead and injured from the rubble.
For the final half a mile, they hobbled footsore down Main Entrance Road where a traffic jam of vehicles – mostly civilian cars – all going in the same direction as them tailed back as far as the eye could see. Middle-class men in white cotton duck suits smoked briars tensely behind the wheels of stationary black sedans, while their wives sat beside them in sun frocks and pearls, complaining in cut-glass accents about the unreliability of native servants. Sometimes children fought on the back seats, or laughed, or sat in anxious silence, depending on whether or not they had picked up on their parents’ anxiety. Torrance’s group had to push their way through less well-to-do crowds of people pushing handcarts or pulling rickshaws piled high with luggage.
A huge crowd of people clamoured at the dockyard gates. The people trying to get in shouted at the military police guards, who shouted back; couples who had become separated shouted to one another over the heads of the crowd; children shouted for the sake of shouting; and an enterprising street food vendor who always saw opportunity in any crowd cried his wares.
‘Isn’t there a back way in?’ asked Torrance.
‘Several,’ said Hamilton. ‘All of them just as crowded as this.’
Torrance, Rossi, Varma, Quinn and Shapiro formed a cordon around Hamilton, Kitty, Irina and the sultan and began to burrow into the crowd. As they pushed their way in, the crowd pushed back and Torrance was shoved and jostled from all sides. Feeling anger well up within him, he made a conscious effort to control it. These people were frightened; it was no wonder they were behaving like this.
‘Pretend your arm’s broken,’ he murmured in Irina’s ear.
‘What?’
‘Hold it as if it’s broken. Your left hand holding your right wrist.’ He took her arms, positioned them for her. ‘Like that, hold it like that,’ he said, before shouting at the crowd in general. ‘Make way! We got an injured woman here! Let us through!’
Miraculously, the crowd seemed to simmer down, parting sufficiently to allow Torrance’s group to the front, where a couple argued with a young naval lieutenant in tropical whites.
‘My daughter!’ the woman was screaming. ‘She’s already inside! She’s on her own, you can’t let her board a ship without her parents. She’s only four!’
‘We have tickets!’ said the father, showing them to the naval lieutenant. ‘Please, for the love of God, let us through!’
‘I’m sorry,’ insisted the lieutenant. ‘I can’t let you through without a permit signed by the deputy director of civil defence.’
‘But I was told you would be expecting me. Avery’s the name: George Avery, plus two.’
‘I’m sorry, sir. You could be Winston Churchill himself and I couldn’t let you through without a signed permit.’
Hamilton produced some kind of document from inside his jacket and showed it to the lieutenant through the bars of the gate. ‘I believe we’re expected?’
The lieutenant nodded and murmured an order to the redcaps. They at once opened the gates, just enough to let one person through at a time. ‘These people are with me,’ Hamilton explained, making a gesture which encompassed the rest of the group.
Torrance made sure he was the last person through. He wedged himself between the gates, thrusting them a little further open and trying to pull Mr and Mrs Avery through with him.
‘These people are with us,’ he told the redcaps.
‘No, they’re not!’ said the lieutenant.
Shapiro put a meaty hand on the lieutenant’s shoulder and squeezed. ‘You sure about that, mate?’
‘Let them through!’ squawked the lieutenant.
The Averys rushed ahead of Hamilton and the others in their desperation to find their missing child. Even as Torrance followed them into the dockyard, the crowd surged forward behind him, the ones at the front trying to squeeze through in his wake, the ones behind trying to force the gates open. One of the redcaps fired a burst from his Thompson over their heads, and the crowd squatted, women shrieking, children grizzling. It was enough of a distraction to buy the redcaps enough time to slam the gates shut and bar them.
‘Jesus!’ Torrance gazed over his shoulder. ‘Don’t need the Japs to beat us: at this rate the whole island will tear itself apart before the week is out!’
Many of the warehouses lining the docks were on fire, the huge clouds of black smoke they sent spiralling upwards into a sooty sky matching dwarfed by the awe-inspiring billows boiling up from red flames at the oil refinery on Bukum Island, a shimmering image of which was reflected on the waters visible through the Dragon’s Teeth Gate, the gap between Berlayar Point and the western end of Pulau Blakang Mati Island.
Closer to the wharves, a large ocean liner steamed away from the dockside to reveal the harbour littered with the masts and funnels of ships sunk in the harbour by Japanese bombs. Although there was a little more room to breathe within the dockyard,
there were still plenty of people milling about in the hope of getting on board a ship by hook or by crook, including many soldiers. Those with tickets queued in a more or less orderly manner at the numerous desks in a large, hangar-like customs shed passengers had to pass through to approach the gangplank of their ship.
Hamilton bypassed the desks, snapping his fingers over his head and waving his malacca cane to catch the eye of a young naval officer who waved them to a side gate. He met them there, unlocking it with a key he had on a lanyard and letting Hamilton and his companions through before locking it again behind him.
‘Colonel Hamilton,’ said the lieutenant.
‘Mr Prendergast,’ said Hamilton. ‘Where’s the Empress of the Orient?’
Prendergast indicated the liner already pulling away from the quay.
‘I say, that’s deuced inconvenient. Can’t you call it back? I have a couple of passengers for it here.’
Prendergast goggled at him. ‘Call it back?’
‘But there must be… whatdyecallem…?’ Hamilton snapped his fingers. ‘Can’t you have a launch or a tender carry a couple of passengers out to her?’
‘I’m sorry, sir. I’m afraid your passengers have missed the boat.’
‘Never mind,’ the sultan said with resignation. ‘I never did much care for ocean voyages anyway.’
‘You might be able to get a couple of berths on another ship,’ said Prendergast. ‘I mean, people with tickets don’t always turn up. Surely a man with your pull… it must be worth asking?’
Torrance felt sick to the pit of his stomach. All they had gone through to get the sultan safely out of Singapore… Piggott, Zulkifli, MacRae, Cochrane and Gibson: all dead. All for nothing. There was a simple solution, of course, a way to ensure those men had not died in vain. If this had been a movie and he had been played by Leslie Howard, he would simply have given Irina and the sultan his own tickets for the Hsiu T’ung, nobly sacrificing his own chances of getting out of Singapore for the greater good.