Wooden benches lined most of three walls, the other wall being filled with a kerosene-powered refrigerator, an incubator and a sterilizer. The entrance was opposite these, directly on to the concrete strip that ran under the overhang of the corrugated asbestos roof. Slatted windows, all wide open, fed as much air as possible to the pair of whirling brass fans in the ceiling, as there was no air conditioning. The centre of the laboratory was occupied with another large island bench, with a central raised shelf covered with a profusion of reagent bottles and odd bits of apparatus. This was the sergeant’s province, as he did most of the chemical testing, though like the others, he could turn his hand to anything. Derek Oates was there now and Tom waited whilst he sucked up some blood into a glass pipette and blew it into a tube to carry out an analysis for urea in a patient from the Australian battalion, whose kidneys had been damaged by Weil’s disease.
In another corner, Embi bin Sharif, one of the MORs, was quietly chanting some mournful Malay song as he dried thick drops of blood on glass slides to look for malarial parasites under his microscope. Embi was a smooth-faced lad, unfailingly smart and polite, with almond eyes and sleek jet-black hair. He came from even further north in Perlis, the small state next to the border with Thailand.
At the other end of the bench, another private soldier was happily playing ‘postman’, rhythmically banging a rubber stamp from ink pad to a pile of pathology request forms universally known as ‘F-Med Tens’. Aziz Ismael was a fat, cheerful fellow with a mass of curly hair, unusual in a Malay. He was from nearby Kuala Kangsar and he was a fount of local information on almost any subject.
When Derek Oates’s mouth was free of his tube, the pathologist broached the subject of the post-mortem.
‘I gather you’re not too keen on the mortuary, sergeant?’
The trim young man looked somewhat abashed. ‘Sorry, sir, I’d be no use to you. I can’t understand it, because when I have blood in a tube, I’m fine!’
He gestured towards the bijou bottles and universal containers filled with the red fluid which were arrayed before him on his bench.
‘But when I see it on a dead body, I just fall apart. I feel rotten about it, sir, it’s something I just can’t beat.’
Tom nodded at him, it was something not worth pursuing. Oates was such an excellent worker that he saw no point in making an issue of the fellow’s unfortunate phobia. ‘Cropper says he’ll give a hand, as I gather the other lads are not keen on the job.’
‘They won’t go near the place, sir. Malays seem to have all sorts of superstitions, especially about the dead. Aziz will probably give you a run-down on that!’
‘Right, sarge, I’m off to see the naughty boys in the nick, then I’ll be doing this post-mortem at twelve. Everything under control here?’
Oates assured him that there were no problems and Howden set off up the main corridor, conscious again of the sticky heat as the day warmed up. He passed the operating theatre which lay opposite the X-ray Department and the Officers’ Ward before coming to another pair which housed the long-term tuberculous patients. These were mostly Gurkhas, who were prone to many infectious diseases, including potentially fatal measles and mumps. Coming from their remote Himalayan fastness in Nepal, they lacked the resistance acquired by most other races.
Beyond the last pair of wards, were two odd structures before the corridor ended opposite the arms kote. On one side was a large khaki tent, which was Percy Loosemore’s stamping-ground, the ‘STD’ or Special Treatment Department, a euphemism for the VD clinic. Across the corridor was another part of Tom’s domain, the blood transfusion ‘basha’, an open-sided shed with a large attap roof, made of neatly laid palm branches. This was where blood donors gave their contributions when needed, though so far he had not been called upon to officiate there. The hospital had no ‘blood bank’ — at least not in refrigerated bottles — as the precious fluid was kept ‘on the hoof’ inside the donors until needed.
Tom reached the perimeter road and turned left towards the open gate into the main garrison. As he walked, he thought with some apprehension about the post-mortem he was soon to carry out. He was not bothered about the actual procedure itself, though in spite of his earlier response to the CO, he had virtually no experience of gunshot wounds, having only once watched his boss in Newcastle deal with a shotgun suicide. However, he had got up early to read the relevant chapter in his well-thumbed copy of Glaister’s Forensic Medicine and reckoned that he could just about flannel his way through.
No, it was the prospect of having the widow there to identify James’s body that worried him. Back home, he had several times been present when grieving relatives had to view the bodies of their loved ones and he still remembered the sobbing, the wailing and even the odd faint, even though most people seemed to be overtaken by a numbed silence as they looked through the glass panel into the viewing room of the mortuary. He wondered how Diane Robertson would take it. There were all the rumours about the Robertsons’ marital discord and she seemed a pretty hard character, he mused — but one never really knows how someone will react.
These thoughts occupied him until he reached the inner gate to the garrison and once inside he turned right to reach another smaller compound. This occupied the furthermost corner of the stockade, divided off from it by another high double fence. The outer layer was of chain-link, topped with coils of barbed wire and just inside was a tall palisade of corrugated iron to screen the inmates from the rest of the garrison. A lofty gate of similar material had a small steel-mesh door set into it, beyond which a red-capped MP corporal stood on guard.
When he saw the officer approaching, he stamped his shiny boots across to the door and gave a cracking salute, which Tom returned in the half-embarrassed way that most newly enlisted doctors employed.
‘Morning, sah! Identity card, please, sah!’
Though he came every morning, the pathologist held up his ID to the wire and with a rattling flourish of keys, the redcap let him in and locked the gate behind him. There was a single road running up the middle of the two-acre site, with the familiar long, low huts placed at right angles on each side. The first on the left contained the guardroom, Commandant’s office, mess room and stores, while on the other side of the lane was the sickbay with other unidentifiable rooms beyond it. A dozen drooping figures stood on the verandah outside, with another MP corporal stalking up and down the line, his chest stuck out like a turkeycock.
When he saw the officer approaching, he slammed himself to attention and screamed at the patients to do the same. All hauled themselves upright, except for one, who seemed to be bent in half from some back trouble.
The corporal gave Tom a vibrating salute, which he again returned half-heartedly and went into the sickbay. It was a bare room, with a table and chair for the doctor, a spartan examination couch and a white bench with a cupboard above for the meagre medical supplies. Hovering near this was an elderly RAMC corporal, seconded from the 38th Field Ambulance at Taiping.
Sid Hooper was a burly, impassive man, with a row of medal ribbons on his tunic, half-hidden by the creased white coat he wore as his badge of office. He gave the weary impression of having seen it all before and that none of these bloody shirkers outside were going to put one over either on him or his doctor.
‘The usual bunch of lead-swinging layabouts today, doc,’ he announced. ‘One of ’em might possibly have something wrong with him.’
Tom took off his hat and dropped it on to the table, before sitting down.
‘Wheel them in, corporal. Let’s make it quick, I’ve got a lot to do this morning.’
The corporal went to the door and after some more screaming from the MP outside, a man charged in, his nailed boots clattering on the floor at the tempo of a double-quick march. With a final crunch, he stopped in front of the table and stared fixedly at the wall beyond Tom’s head. Hooper came across with a tattered document in his hand.