At mid-morning on Tuesday, a battered Ford pick-up stopped outside and two men rushed into the bank, another two overpowering the startled Sikh before he could even raise his gun. They hit him on the head and lashed him to his chair, before joining their accomplices inside, where amid much screaming from both robbers and customers, the threat of a pair of sawn-off shotguns made the terrified staff scrabble together as much money as they could muster. Though the police headquarters was only a few hundred yards away, it was beyond the other end of the street and out of earshot of the fracas in the bank.
Within minutes, the thieves had grabbed all they were likely to get and rushed out of the bank. By now the very angry jaga had freed one of his arms from the rope and as the men were scrambling aboard their stolen truck, he managed to reach his twelve-bore and let off a blast which peppered several of the robbers. As they revved away, one them fired a shot in return, which hit the Sikh in the legs. At that distance, the discharge was not crippling, but the guard’s roars of pain and outrage were added to the cacophony coming from the bank.
The sound of shots brought the police racing down the street and soon there was a full scale pursuit in operation. The Ford had vanished in the direction of Ipoh, but was soon found abandoned near a patch of secondary jungle halfway to Kampong Kerdah. Steven Blackwell and many of his officers were busy for the rest of the day organizing a search through the heavily forested land nearby, but without success.
The superintendent was concerned that this might be a terrorist-linked incident, especially as the witnesses confirmed that the attackers were all Chinese. Though this was by no means conclusive, it was known that the Malayan Communist Party sometimes resorted to robbery to get funds to sustain its desperate campaign.
At the back of his mind, Steven also worried about the possibility of a connection with the attack on Gunong Besar and the Robertson murder, even though all common sense indicated that Chin Peng’s men could have nothing to do with James’s corpse arriving at The Dog.
By Thursday, this enquiry had fizzled out for lack of any more evidence and Blackwell’s attention was once more drawn back to the Robertson case. As a result of making some early phone calls, the afternoon again saw him at the garrison headquarters, meeting this time in Major Enderby’s office in one of the ‘spiders’, the long wooden huts that jutted from the central roadway. The SIB sergeant from Ipoh and the tubby intelligence officer, Captain Preston, were there again to discuss the situation.
As he was on his home ground, Enderby, the head of the Brigade’s military police, appointed himself chairman and shuffled some papers on his desk as the other three men pulled up chairs. He stared at them fiercely, this being his usual expression, which he felt obliged to maintain as the local upholder of Queen’s Regulations.
‘As you rightly said on the phone, superintendent, in this rather isolated town, we cannot disregard the possibility that the perpetrator is a member of Her Majesty’s Forces.’
Steven smiled disarmingly at Enderby, as the latter continued.
‘As we’ve decided that it seems unlikely that any of the local native inhabitants did this, then statistically there are far more Service people around here than the relatively few planters.’
Preston, the Intelligence man, bobbed his moon face, yet immediately qualified his agreement.
‘Can’t dismiss them entirely, though. After all, Jimmy Robertson was an estate man himself.’
The craggy-faced staff sergeant scowled down at his gleaming boots as he spoke. ‘In my experience, sir, any bugger can commit any crime!’
Markham always managed to give the impression that he thought all commissioned officers were ineffectual prats, though nothing he ever said could be construed as open criticism.
Steven Blackwell opened a thin manilla folder and laid it on Enderby’s desk. ‘I’ve had the first report up from the Government Chemist’s laboratory in KL,’ he said briskly. ‘James Robertson had a moderate amount of alcohol in the blood sample taken at the post-mortem. It was just over a hundred and forty milligrams per hundred millilitres.’
‘What’s that in English?’ demanded Enderby, his cigarette-stained moustache bristling.
‘Certainly shouldn’t be driving a car, but given Jimmy’s capacity for drink, I’d say it was about average for a night in The Dog.’
‘No surprise there, then,’ grunted the major. ‘Anything more helpful?’
Blackwell turned over a page in his slim folder.
‘Those half-dozen bullets my inspector dug out of the walls of Gunong Besar — they were all.303s and all came from the same weapon. From the rifling pattern, it was a Lee-Enfield, not a Bren.’
None of the others looked impressed.
‘Doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t expect, does it?’ grunted Markham, adding ‘sir’ as a reluctant afterthought.
‘Were they from the same weapon as the one that killed Jimmy?’ asked Preston.
The policeman shook his head. ‘Don’t know yet. These went down to the lab first, after that attack on the bungalow. I hope to hear more tomorrow.’ He picked up another piece of paper.
‘Dr Howden in BMH has had a look at the leaves and grass that Tan collected from the roadway on the way up to the estate. He confirms that the staining was blood and that it was human, but he’s got no facilities for telling if it was Robertson’s blood group. I’ve sent it down to the Petaling Jaya lab, but I see no reason to doubt that it marks the spot where he was shot.’
Major Enderby turned his watery eyes on to the SIB man.
‘Did you hear anything yet about those cartridge cases?’
Markham pulled a folded paper from the top pocket of his starched jungle-green jacket. He opened it and scanned down the page.
‘I’ve just had this signal from Command Ordnance HQ in Singapore, where I sent half a dozen of the shell-cases from Gunong Besar. It seems that.303 ammunition is a hell of a mixture, some of the stuff still in use going back to 1942! The date stamped on it is when the casing was made, but not necessarily when it was filled with propellant.’
The three other men looked at him blankly.
‘So what?’ growled Enderby.
‘Well, if we wanted to know if this was stuff dropped to the CTs when they were fighting the Japs — or if it was pinched from the army recently, there’s no way the date stamping can help, unless it was, say 1954. And none of these were, they were all ’44 or ’48.’
There was a silence. ‘So we’re none the wiser about when they were made?’ asked Preston.
The staff sergeant’s dour face almost cracked into a smile.
‘The clever sods in Singapore tested the residues in the shells, sir,’ he said smugly. ‘Seems until about five years ago, all.303s made by the Greenwood and Batley factory were filled with cordite, but after that, they used nitrocellulose, even into empty cases dated years before. Some of these shells were made by Kynoch, but again they could have been filled later.’
‘What are you trying to tell us, sergeant?’ asked Preston rather irritably.
‘Some of the cartridges had been filled with nitrocellulose, so they can’t be earlier than the late forties, early fifties.’
Again there was a silence. ‘Does that help us at all?’ asked Steven Blackwell.
The SIB man shrugged indifferently. ‘Only that it makes it a lot less likely that these rounds were fired by bandits, sir. Unless there’s been a fairly recent capture of munitions by them, most of their stuff is left over from the Jap occupation, when we supplied the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army with masses of weapons and ammunition.’