The pathologist’s eyebrows rose on the part of his face still visible above his glass. ‘You really are a wicked young gossip,’ he grated, when he came up for air. ‘I don’t know how much of your slander is true and how much you invent!’
The young doctor, who looked almost angelic in spite of his genius for trading scandal, shrugged off the criticism. ‘I just keep my ears open, that’s all. And I’ve got a good memory!’
He finished his drink and stood up. ‘I’m off for a pee, then a couple of turns around the floor again, before heading for bed.’
‘And no listening at the bog windows tonight, Alec!’ chastised Tom, as he looked around to see if Lynette was available now.
FOUR
Next morning, Steven Blackwell sat alongside his Malay driver as the dark blue police Land Rover turned into the gates of the garrison. The barrier went up and the superintendent raised his stick to return the stiff salutes of the two red-capped MPs outside the guardroom. Unlike the hospital compound, the much larger enclave of the Twenty-First Commonwealth Independent Infantry Brigade had a central road passing straight up from the main gate, with a number of side lanes reaching across to the perimeter track that ran round inside the wire. The Headquarters was near the centre, an untidy collection of brick, concrete and wooden buildings set around a parade ground, where the Union Jack and the blue flags of Australia and New Zealand hung limply from a tall flagpole.
The driver, wearing his songkok, a black boat-shaped cap, pulled up at the side of a flat-roofed two-storey brick building, which should have been the despair of any self-respecting architect. Telling him in Malay to wait in the car park along the road, the police officer climbed a metal staircase to the upper floor and went into a short corridor. Familiar with the place from many previous visits, he tapped on the second door and went in unbidden. It was an outer office, with some spartan desks behind which a couple of corporals were working. A staff sergeant in the far corner turned from a filing cabinet.
‘Colonel Flynn’s expecting you, sir.’
He tapped on an inner door and stood aside to let Blackwell enter. The inner office was almost as dreary, but large maps pinned to the walls brightened it up a little.
Three men were sitting around the solitary desk and rose as he came in. He knew them all well and after a handshake and a few pleasantries, they all sat down again, with the colonel in his own chair behind the desk. The Director of Operations was a tall, lean man with slight stoop, a pair of intelligent eyes peering out from beneath bushy fair eyebrows. Each shoulder carried the crown and pip of his rank and he wore the flash of the Airborne regiment from which he had been seconded. He was a military planner, who with the more senior brass in the Brigade, coordinated the campaign against the terrorists in that area, subject to the directions — or what he often felt was the interference — of Command Headquarters down south in Seremban, and their bosses at GHQ FARELF in Singapore.
The other two soldiers were a rather plump captain from the Intelligence Corps and a burly SIB staff sergeant from Ipoh, who looked every inch the Coventry detective he had been before joining the Special Investigation Branch of the Military Police. Though a non-commissioned officer, he had a ponderous presence that made him seem a peer of the senior men. The office sergeant brought in mugs of tea and when he had left, they got down to business.
‘We have to decide what this damned affair at Gunong Besar was all about,’ began Flynn. ‘We’ve got a big operation planned up towards Grik and I don’t want it to be sidetracked by a wild goose chase nearer home.’
‘Yet we can’t shrug it off completely,’ said Steven Blackwell. ‘The planters are entitled to all the protection we can give them. Someone has to grow the bloody rubber and one of Chin Peng’s objectives is to damage the economy in Malaya.’
The colonel nodded abruptly. ‘I couldn’t agree more! I’m damned if I’d like to sit out in some lonely bungalow with my wife and be shot at by some murderous bastards.’
‘But the point is, sir,’ growled the SIB man, ‘which lot of murderous bastards was it?’
The Intelligence officer, Captain Preston, wiped some sweat from his pink forehead with a khaki handkerchief.
‘That’s what we must try to decide, isn’t it? Was this a CT escapade — or some local Johnny banging away with a three-oh-three?’
‘So you tell us, Willy,’ retorted the colonel, rather shortly.
‘There’s nothing to indicate that any of the known Commie cells is active around here at the moment, though of course, that can change overnight. The sods can trek through the hills and appear next day twenty miles away from where we last spotted them.’
The police superintendent added his own knowledge.
‘The last activity I know of through police channels was a fortnight ago near Sauk where they tried to blow up a sub-station on the hydroelectric grid coming down from Chenderoh dam. Otherwise, it’s been pretty quiet up here for a couple of months. They seem to be concentrating more down south in Johore and Negri Sembilan.’
‘The point is, gentlemen, am I to recommend to the Brigadier that we send patrols out into the hills beyond Gunong Besar? He won’t like that, as he wants the West Berkshires and the Gurkhas to get prepared for this push up around Grik. The alternative is to write this off to some local thuggery and let it ride?’
‘With some extra protection up around the estates, I would hope,’ cut in Blackwell. ‘I’ve increased the police presence along the road, but there’s only so much I can offer with the manpower I’ve got.’
The Director nodded curtly. ‘We’ve promised that already — and we’ll certainly keep it in place for a number of weeks. I’ll get some of these dozy soldiers off clerking and painting flagpoles and truck ’em up and down to Kampong Kerbau every few hours.’
The raw-boned sergeant joined in, to justify his drive up from Ipoh.
‘If it’s not the CTs, sir, what’s the alternative? Why should any local Malay or Chinese want to shoot up a couple of bungalows?’
‘Or an Indian, as it could be a disaffected tapper or latex worker,’ Blackwell reminded them. The two policemen began a dialogue, leaving the Army men out of it for the moment.
‘There’s no suggestion that any of the workers at Gunong Besar have been sacked or victimized lately,’ replied Blackwell. ‘Though the owner certainly isn’t loved by one and all up there, I’ll admit.’
‘No possibility of any Europeans having it in for him, is there, sir?’
The superintendent smiled rather wryly. ‘There might be a few who’d like to take a swing at Jimmy Robertson, but I doubt they would want to shoot him!’
Colonel Flynn’s laugh was more like a bark.
‘I wouldn’t be too sure about that, Steven! But spraying two bungalows and the workers’ lines with bullets is hardly an effective way of going about an assassination!’
‘What about these bullets, sir?’ asked the humourless SIB man, who had a craggy face with a lantern jaw. ‘Have they been identified? And what about the cartridge cases?’
They looked at the local police chief for information.
‘We’ve got them all, they were all standard three-oh-three to fit either Lee-Enfields or Brens, but I don’t see what they can tell us, with no chance of getting any weapon to test. I’ve sent some of them, together with bullets that my inspector dug out of the woodwork, down to the Government Chemist’s place in Petaling Jaya, just in case.’
This was the nearest they had to a forensic laboratory, in the suburbs of Kuala Lumpur.
‘Maybe the Ordnance Corps boffins could tell us when they were manufactured or issued,’ suggested the Intelligence Corps officer.
‘They’d probably have to send them back to the UK for that, but it’s worth trying,’ said the sergeant. ‘Trouble is, there’s so much of that stuff knocking around. The CTs have stolen some and a lot is still left over from when they were fighting the Japs.’