by Onbekend
Well, I ain’t Leslie Howard, he told himself. I’m Charlie Torrance, and Charlie Torrance looks out for number one!
He saw Rossi looking at him, and knew at once the same thought had occurred to him.
‘Don’t say it!’ snarled Torrance. ‘Don’t you dare bloody say it!’
‘I never said a word!’ protested Rossi.
‘Fuck!’ said Torrance. ‘Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!’
‘What on earth is the matter, Corporal?’ demanded Hamilton. ‘Is it really necessary to use such unseemly language? And in the presence of ladies, too?’
Despising himself for his weakness, Torrance took the tickets from the breast pocket of his shirt and proffered them to the sultan.
‘What are these?’ asked the sultan.
‘Two berths on board the Hsiu T’ung,’ said Torrance. ‘You’ll find her tied up at Pier Seven. She sails for Batavia at ten p.m. tonight.’
‘That’s very generous of you,’ said the sultan. ‘But I couldn’t possibly accept. Don’t you need them yourself?’
‘Me?’ said Torrance. ‘What use could I have for them? That’d be desertion, right?’
‘Right.’ Hamilton glared at Torrance as if torn between pumping his right hand and saying ‘jolly good show’ a lot, or reporting him to the military police for desertion and possible black marketeering.
‘Take them,’ insisted Torrance. ‘Before I think better of it. They’re no use to me. I doubt the accommodations would be quite what you’d expect on the Queen of the Orient, but she’ll get you to Java.’
‘Did you say the Hsiu T’ung?’ asked Prendergast.
‘That’s right.’
‘Only, you won’t find her at Pier Seven.’
‘Oh? Where is she?’
Prendergast pointed to where a dirty, rusty funnel thrust up above the waters of the anchorage.
‘The Hsiu T’ung?’ asked Torrance.
Prendergast nodded apologetically.
‘Of course it is.’
‘The Japs were bombing the ships in the harbour when she steamed in yesterday,’ explained Prendergast. ‘Only one bomber dropped any bombs on her: there were plenty more tempting targets in the harbour then. A stick of six bombs, and five of those missed. For a few seconds it looked as though the sixth one would miss, too, but instead it went straight through the afterdeck. She sank in less than five minutes.’
Torrance sighed, tore the two tickets in half and half again, and scattered the eight pieces from his fingers, letting the evening breeze carry them off the quayside. They fluttered down to the oily waves below. ‘Friday the thirteenth!’ he remarked bitterly.
Sixteen
Friday 2105 – Saturday 1100
Air-raid sirens wailed. The faces of everyone on the dockside – evacuees, soldiers, sailors – turned anxiously towards the pall of black smoke hanging over the harbour. This was not London: there were no air-raid shelters to run to. As the last echoes of the siren faded, a new sound filled the air, the drone of aero engines, faint at first but rapidly getting louder. Then the familiar thump of bombs landing: a couple of miles away from the sound of it, Chinatown getting another pasting. The people on the dockside relaxed a little.
Torrance took some consolation in the sight of Mr and Mrs Avery reunited with their daughter, a golden-haired moppet. The three of them stood in a queue leading to the foot of a gangplank leading up to the side of a freighter moored at the dockside. Motor launches were ferrying parties of evacuees out to other vessels anchored in the roads.
‘You won’t be able to take all that luggage on board,’ the man standing in the queue in front of the Averys warned them, indicating their suitcases. ‘It’s one case per adult passenger.’
‘We’ll have to leave two behind.’ Mr Avery put down one suitcase and pushed it away from the queue with the sole of one foot.
‘Wait a minute.’ Mrs Avery crouched down, opening another suitcase and extracting what looked like a jewel case. She made room for it in another by discarding a couple of blouses. The quayside was already littered with suitcases, many of them open with the clothing they contained spilling out.
A detail of soldiers in Brodie helmets and khaki drills pushed abandoned cars off the dockside. Appalled, Torrance watched as a Triumph Dolomite followed a Wolseley Hornet into the harbour. When they advanced on a Lagonda LG6, however, he felt he had to intervene.
‘You’re not chucking this in the harbour, mate!’
‘Got no choice. The owner doesn’t want it.’
‘But look at it! It’s a thing of beauty! Better to let it fall into the hands of the Japs than to push it into the harbour.’
‘It’s not a question of keeping it out of the hands of the Japs. There’s no room on the dockside for it.’
‘Couldn’t you flog it to someone?’
‘Who to? No one in Singapore’s in the market for a new car. We ain’t got time to hold an auction. Hell, my sergeant would probably pay you to drive it out of the dockyard.’
‘All around you, human tragedy wherever you turn,’ Kitty remarked to Torrance, ‘and the only thing that moves you is a car?’
‘But it’s a Lagonda!’ wailed Torrance.
Lagonda or not, the sergeant took off the handbrake, and then he and three of his men pushed it off the dockside after the other cars.
A bomb landed just outside the dockyard, the explosion startlingly sudden, close enough for Torrance to see a great plume of smoke and dust mushrooming behind the burning godowns.
‘Out of the boat!’ A gang of half a dozen Australian soldiers stood at the top of a set of stone steps leading down to where a motor tender full of women and children was moored. An Australian corporal menaced the evacuees with his Thompson. ‘We’re taking this tender. You can get the next one.’
‘Women and children only, chum,’ said the merchant seaman at the tiller.
The corporal turned the Thompson’s muzzle on him. ‘What did you say?’
The seaman blanched. ‘Nothing.’
‘I should bloody well hope not!’
‘You should be ashamed of yourselves,’ said a middle-aged woman. ‘Cowards! Turning women and children out of a tender to make room for yourselves.’
‘You’ve got no bloody right to judge us, lady,’ said the corporal. ‘Me and my mates spent the last four days fighting. I’ve seen too many mates die defending this bloody island for rich cows like you.’
Quinn stepped up to intervene. ‘What mates, Lynch? Don’t lie to the lady. You never had any mates.’
‘We’re getting off this island while we still can,’ said the corporal. ‘Don’t try and stop us, Bluey.’
‘You’re not gonna turf women and children off a tender to make room for your own worthless arse.’
‘I bloody am, mate. Just you try and stop me!’
Quinn smiled. ‘That wasn’t a question, Corp.’ He aimed his rifle at Lynch. The five men with Lynch all aimed their guns at Quinn. Torrance, Rossi, Varma and Shapiro aimed their guns at Lynch’s comrades.
‘You wouldn’t dare!’ snarled Lynch.
‘With as much compunction as I’d step on a black widow,’ said Quinn. ‘Tell your blokes to drop their guns.’
Blanching, Lynch let his Thompson fall, beads of sweat breaking out on his grimy face. ‘Do what he says, lads.’
‘Fuck you!’ An Australian lance corporal swung the muzzle of his rifle towards Quinn. There was a loud bang, but it was Rossi who had fired. The lance corporal dropped his rifle and clutched at a bloody left hand.
Rossi worked the bolt of his rifle. ‘The next time I pull the trigger, I shoot to kill.’
Shapiro grabbed another man’s rifle and jerked it out of his hands. The man whirled, fist clenched for a punch, then saw how big Shapiro was, and thought better of it. The other deserters dropped rifles and Thompsons.
‘Get out of here,’ Kitty called to the seaman at the tender’s helm. He nodded, casting off the mooring rope and starting the engine. The tende
r motored away towards one of the ships anchored in the roads.
‘Thanks, Bluey,’ Lynch spat bitterly. ‘You just signed all our death warrants.’
‘I’d rather die here on Singapore than live a full life with the knowledge it was bought by leaving women and children for the Japs.’
A twin-engined bomber appeared abruptly, bursting through the smoke rising from the godowns, so low it was in danger of colliding with the funnels of the freighter moored at the quayside. Machine guns chattered, kicking up fragments of chipped concrete from the dockside. The crowd scattered in search of cover, but there was no hiding place. Even as the bomber roared away over the harbour, a stick of bombs exploded. With a crash, a great column of dark-grey smoke blossomed like a genie bursting from a bottle. Torrance caught Irina and threw her to the ground. Afterwards he could not say if he threw himself on top of her to protect her, or was simply thrown over her by the blast: it all happened so quickly, there was no time for conscious thought. A wall of hot air swept across the dockside and he was aware of debris buzzing past him.
‘Get off me, you clumsy oaf!’ she protested.
‘I was trying to protect you from the explosion.’ Pushing himself to his feet, he pressed a hand to his hip. Something had hit him there, something with a sharp corner, and he looked down expecting to see blood, but his Bombay bloomers were not even torn. Still, he knew he was going to have a beauty of a bruise there tomorrow. He looked down at Irina, who was checking the contents of her handbag. He looked around, trying to work out what had hurt him, but saw only men, women and children killed or injured by the blast. He knew at once he should do something, but he had no idea where to begin and could only stand there in a daze. Not so a gang of women in the starched uniforms of the Australian Army Nursing Service: they went to work at once, stanching wounds and tending to the unconscious.
A child’s grizzling suddenly sounded across the dockside. Torrance turned to see the Averys’ daughter wailing over the blood-soaked corpse of her mother. White-faced, Mr Avery stood at the foot of the gangplank, gazing across to where his wife’s body lay.
‘Come on if you’re coming,’ a ship’s officer told him.
‘My wife…’
‘Nothing more you can do for her. We can’t wait. I’m sorry.’
His face wet with tears, Mr Avery swept his daughter up in his arms. ‘Come on, sweetpea.’
‘Mummy, mummy, mummy!’ the child shrieked. As her father bore her up the gangplank to the freighter’s deck, she reached over his shoulder to where her mother lay.
‘Hey, you!’ a redcap shouted. Torrance turned guiltily. The redcap was not looking at him, however, but at Lynch. The Australian corporal was shinning up one of the freighter’s mooring cables, trying to reach the crowded deck without passing the seamen at the foot of the gangplank. ‘Get down from there!’ The redcap drew his Webley from its holster and aimed. ‘I won’t warn you again! Climb down, or I’ll shoot!’
Ignoring him, Lynch continued to shin up towards the hawse hole above. The redcap fired, twice. Torrance could not tell if either bullet reached its target, but Lynch dropped from the cable, landing with a splash in the water between the ship’s hull and the quayside.
Torrance made another effort to find something useful to do. He noticed Hamilton amongst a knot of figures crouching over one of the injured, the white cotton duck of his suit besmirched with a bloody handprint. He realised the other figures with him were Rossi, Varma, Quinn, Shapiro, Kitty, Irina, and one of the Australian Army nurses. Hurrying across, he saw the injured man was the sultan. He was unconscious, a wound on his temple oozing blood, and more blood on a ragged sleeve. He showed no signs of life.
‘We need to get this feller to a hospital,’ said the nurse.
The nearest hospital was the Alexandra, and even that was a couple of miles away. If they tried carrying him, he would be dead by the time they got there. What they needed was transport, and that was something Torrance could help with.
He glanced back to where the soldiers were still tipping cars over the quayside. A Chevrolet AK series pickup truck – the kind of thing the Indian Army used as the basis for its ambulances – was parked behind a black-and-cream Rolls-Royce Wraith. Torrance hurried across to commandeer it.
‘Is there any petrol in that?’
‘I don’t know,’ said the sergeant. ‘Why?’
‘I’ll take it off your hands.’
‘I don’t know about that. I can’t just let you take this vehicle.’
‘Why not? You’ll just tip it in the harbour otherwise. We’ve got an injured man over there, he needs to be taken to hospital.’
The sergeant thought about it, then held the door open. Torrance slid behind the wheel, started the engine, listening to her purr with an expression of beatific ecstasy. Glancing at the fuel gauge, he saw there was more than enough petrol in the tank to get them to the Alexandra Hospital. He gave the sergeant the thumbs up, and the sergeant slammed the door. Twisting in the driver’s seat to look out of the back, Torrance reversed across the dock to where Hamilton and the others crouched over the sultan.
‘What the bloody hell is this?’ asked Rossi.
‘It’s a Rolls.’
‘Why did ye no’ get the pickup?’
‘He’s a sultan. Would you put a sultan in the back of a Chevvy?’
Rossi thought about it. ‘Help me lift the sultan in the back,’ he told Quinn and Shapiro.
‘Where will you take him?’ Hamilton asked Torrance.
‘The Alexandra.’
‘Isn’t that an army hospital? Will they treat him there?’
‘I don’t think they’re insisting on such distinctions any more,’ said Torrance. ‘When Lefty and me got back to Johore one step ahead of the Japs, just before the Causeway was blown, we had a wounded Yank doctor on our hands, a civilian. They took her to the Alexandra, and that was two weeks ago now. I don’t reckon things will have improved in the meantime.’
‘Very well, then, we’ll look for you at the Alexandra.’
Once the sultan was stretched out on the back seat, Rossi sitting on the floor beside him to tend to him en route, Irina got in the passenger seat. Quinn closed the door for her and Torrance drove to the nearest dockyard gates as swiftly as the crowds of people would allow, using the Wraith’s horn extravagantly. Once out of the dockyard, he turned left onto Keppel Road. The traffic was bad – more cars arriving with evacuees every moment, and the growing crowds spilling off the pavement where they found themselves denied entrance to the docks – but things improved once he passed the point where Keppel Road became Telok Blangah Road. He turned right onto Alexandra Road, and a couple of minutes later the hospital hove into view. Beneath the porte-cochère at the main entrance, ambulances queued to unload patients injured in the latest air-raid. Torrance did not want to snarl things up any further by abandoning the Wraith there, so he pulled up and told Rossi to get out. ‘Commandeer a stretcher and I’ll meet you on the other side of those gardens.’
‘And hurry, for heaven’s sake!’ pleaded Irina.
Rossi nodded, jumping out of the car and dashing across to disappear into the crowds of orderlies bustling under the porte-cochère. Torrance put the Wraith in gear and drove back onto the main road, pulling up in front of a public garden where a Bofors stood in a sandbag emplacement. Irina got in the back to check on the sultan, and Torrance got out and leaned against the bonnet with a proprietorial air, smoking a cigarette. He could hear the distant crackle of small-arms fire coming from somewhere to the west, not much more than a mile away from the sound of it.
When Rossi arrived with a stretcher rolled over one shoulder, he looked ashen. ‘It’s like a vision of hell in there.’
‘What d’you mean?’ demanded Torrance.
‘Total pandemonium. Too many injured people and no’ enough medical staff to cope with them, that much is obvious.’
‘You think maybe we should take him to the General?’
Rossi sh
ook his head. ‘I don’t think that will be any better. I’m just warning ye so it disnae come as too much of a shock for ye. And mebbe the lady would be better off no’ coming inside…’
Irina shook her head. ‘I stay with Alex.’
Rossi unrolled the stretcher on the pavement and they got the sultan out of the back of the car and laid him on it. Torrance and Rossi lifted the stretcher between them, and they carried the sultan through the gardens, dodging between the ambulances on the loop road, entering the hospital via the main entrance.
The stench slapped Torrance in the face the moment they entered the foyer: a vile cocktail of rotten meat, shit, piss and the sickly-sweet stench of gangrene. The floor was carpeted with injured people, soldiers and civilians alike, many of them unconscious, the lucky ones lying on mattresses. There were even people nursing relatively minor injuries – broken bones, lacerated limbs – sitting on the stairs. An RAMC orderly carrying two demijohns of water upstairs had to pick his way through them.
‘We’ve got an injured man here, he needs immediate attention,’ Torrance told an Indian orderly.
‘Very well, sahib. Put him with the others.’ The orderly gestured to where a couple of dozen men, women and children lay on stretchers at one side of the foyer.
‘Didn’t you hear me? I said he needs urgent attention!’
‘They all need urgent attention. Put him with the others and we’ll get to him as soon as we can.’
Torrance thought about making a fuss. There were injured women and children who had been waiting longer than the sultan. Did his status give him the right to jump ahead of them in the queue? On the basis of what little Torrance had learned of the sultan’s character, he was fairly sure that even the sultan himself would not have wanted that.
‘There’s nothing more we can do here,’ said Rossi. ‘We’re only getting in the way.’
‘I’ll stay with him,’ insisted Irina.
‘I’ll meet you out front in a few minutes,’ Torrance told Rossi. ‘I want to find out if Kay’s still here.’
Rossi nodded and headed for the door. Torrance picked his way through the bodies to the reception desk. ‘I’m looking for Dr Sheridan?’ he told the orderly on duty there. He could only see orderlies and doctors; presumably all the female staff had already been evacuated, or were on their way off the island, like the Australian nurses he had seen at the docks.