‘They make their own bloody guns,’ objected James. ‘A piece of water-pipe, a handful of rusty nails and they’re in business!’
The police superintendent shook his head,
‘Not this time. These were no country guns. Inspector Tan has dug a few bullets out of the woodwork for me. They’re all three-oh-threes, good military hardware.’
Robertson had an answer for everything. ‘The CT’s have stacks of those. We Brits supplied them with thousands of the things when we wanted them to kill Japs with them a few years ago.’
Steven Blackwell nodded. ‘Sure, but the local loonies don’t have them. It has to be a CT unit — yet why should they bother to make such a feeble attempt? I don’t get it.’
‘It didn’t sound damned feeble to me in the middle of the night!’ snapped Diane, tremulously indignant. ‘I was terrified, I felt sure I was going to die!’
She had been all for driving to Penang that morning to stay in the Eastern and Oriental Hotel, until she could get a passage back to Britain on one of the regular Alfred Holt passenger ships, but her husband had persuaded her to stay. He was in something of a cleft stick, as even though things were deteriorating between them, his pride didn’t want her to go, leaving him with the ignominy of being branded as a dumped husband. Yet to play down the incident to reassure her, would devalue his own Errol Flynn image amongst his male cronies and female admirers.
As usual, he solved his dilemma by calling for drinks. Yelling for Siva, he got Blackwell and Mackay to sit down while gin, whisky and orange juice were dispensed, the policeman and his manager refusing anything alcoholic.
‘Let’s go through this once again, though I know Inspector Tan has taken it all down earlier,’ said the superintendent.
He looked across first at the manager’s wife, Rosa, who had sat silently on her chair. She was a small but beautiful woman, as dark as Diane was fair. Black glossy hair was cut in a rather severe pageboy, with a fringe across her forehead. Large brown eyes looked out rather fearfully from a smooth oval face, with full lips that needed far less cosmetics than Diane’s. Though she looked European, with the complexion of an Italian or Spaniard, Blackwell knew that she was Eurasian, though she would have passed for any nationality around the Mediterranean. She was not the daughter of an Asian and a European, but the daughter of two other Eurasians. Her father came from Goa, the son of a Portuguese merchant and an Indian mother and he had married a woman with similar ancestry. He had emigrated after the war to Malacca, originally a Portuguese settlement in southern Malaya, setting up a furniture and curio business. His daughter Rosa, now twenty-six, had been educated in a Catholic convent in Goa and after coming to Malacca, worked as a receptionist in a beach hotel. Here she had met Douglas Mackay on a weekend leave from his plantation job in Johore. When James offered him the post of manager in Gunong Besar, he had married Rosa and brought her up to Perak. Now the superintendent turned to her to get her account of last night’s drama.
‘I know nothing more than I told the inspector, Steven,’ she said in her low, soft voice, keeping her eyes well away from the glowering Diane. ‘I was fast asleep when shots woke me up and I heard splintering of wood when some must have hit the front of the bungalow. Then Douglas dashed in from the lounge and told me to hide low down in the bathroom, while he went out with a gun. I saw nothing, I was too frightened to move until it was all over.’
‘Can you remember how many shots you heard?
‘Not exactly, but there must have been at least a dozen, I think. They became quite distant after the first few.’
Blackwell turned to Robertson’s wife.
‘What about you, Diane? Does much the same apply?’
She glared first at Rosa, then turned to the policeman.
‘The shots woke me too, but the distant ones were first, then they came nearer. I had to wake him up, he was out for the count. Too much beer at The Dog.’
James scowled at this slur on his heroics. ‘Come on, Diane, I was out of bed like a shot!’
‘Well, anyway, eventually he staggered up after I’d started screaming, and told me to lie on the floor next to the bed.’
‘To be furthest away from the walls — bullets can knock holes right through that old woodwork,’ grunted her husband.
‘Then he went out — to get his gun, I suppose. But then it all went quiet. That’s all I can tell you.’
‘Except that you were wailing like a bloody banshee for ages!’ muttered James. ‘It took three stengahs and a gin and tonic to calm you down.’
‘D’you blame me, after that!’ she flared. ‘Why the hell did I let myself come to a place like this, where I might get raped and shot and God knows what?!’
The policeman hastily turned to the estate manager to dampen a return of Diane’s hysteria.
‘Douglas, you were the first to get outside, according to what you told Tan?’
The calm voice of the manager was in counterpoint to the woman’s panic.
‘Yes, I was working late on the accounts when it started. From the sound of the shots, they attacked our bungalow first, then went down to the worker’s lines, before coming up to James’s place here. I grabbed my pistol and rifle and went down the servant’s steps at the back, as I didn’t want to risk the front porch. There were more shots, well ahead of me, then silence! I kept hopping from tree to tree and worked my way around to the front of James’s bungalow, but there was no one to be seen. By then James had come out, so I went back to phone your police station and the guardroom at the Garrison.’
‘And you saw nothing at all?’
‘Not a thing. If it hadn’t been for the others hearing it — and the holes in the woodwork — I might have dreamt it all!’
Steve Blackwell sipped his orange juice as he turned to Robertson.
‘What about you, James? Anything to add?’
‘I’ve told you all this before — and your inspector chap. Like Douglas, I grabbed my rifle, then crouched down on the verandah, peering through the struts. Couldn’t see a thing, all the shots had been fired before that. I went down the steps and hid behind a bush, then hollered for Douglas. He shouted back that he was going to phone for help, so I went around the whole place to see what the hell was going on. By that time, the servants and the tappers had crawled out of their holes and were jabbering fit to burst, so I had to calm them down. By that time, your boys and the army had arrived.’
‘Have they found anything?’ demanded Diane, pouring herself another gin, without offering one to anyone else.
‘Not so far, but they’re widening out into the rubber and the ulu on both sides of the road.’
A platoon of the Royal West Berkshires were at that moment tramping through the estate behind the scatter of buildings that lay beyond the bungalows and across the road, where the tappers and labourers were housed. The house servants lived in huts immediately behind the two dwellings, already the subject of intensive searching by half a dozen constables under Inspector Tan and his Malay sergeant.
‘We’ve found fifteen spent cartridge cases, all standard three-oh-three calibre, no surprises there,’ added the superintendent.
‘What about footprints?’ asked Douglas Mackay.
Blackwell shrugged dismissively. ‘Pretty hopeless, it rained like hell early this morning. Plenty of smeared prints about, but they could be anyone’s. I doubt if even the Rangers could make anything of them.’
He was referring to the Sarawak Rangers, Ibans similar to Dyaks, recruited from Borneo as trackers. Heavily tattooed all over below the neck, these little men were superb at following terrorist trails in the jungle.
‘So what happens next?’ demanded James Robertson.
‘I’ve got men turning over every house up the road as far as Kampong Kerbau and the army is searching each side of the road all the way from there back to TT. Then I’m going back to see the Director of Operations in Brigade to decide if we need to widen out the search into the hills. I haven’t got enough men for that, it’s up to the Brigadier to decide if he wants to turn this into a major operation.’