‘About twenty to one, I believe — not that it can matter in the slightest! I found a messenger at my quarter, telling me what had happened, so I drove down here.’
‘They failed to contact you earlier by telephone at your house, I believe. Could you tell me where you had been, colonel?’
Desmond O’Neill scowled at the superintendent. ‘What the devil has that got to do with anything?’
‘All part of the routine, sir. You may have seen something or someone which might complement the rest of our evidence.’
The skull-like face looked balefully at Blackwell. ‘I had been to the AKC cinema in the garrison, if you must know. They were showing The Way Ahead, a wartime favourite of mine, if you need to check on my alibi!’ he added sarcastically.
‘The AKC show always finishes by ten thirty, colonel. May I ask where you were between then and the time you arrived at your quarter?’
O’Neill’s sallow face developed a slight flush. ‘I consider that question impertinent, Blackwell. I didn’t rush off from my billet as soon as I had the message, you know.’
Steven remained polite and impassive. ‘But the attempts to phone you there were not made until after midnight, sir. You couldn’t have been home by that time.’
The CO jumped from his chair and stood ramrod straight, glaring at the police officer. ‘Dammit, are you accusing me of anything?’
‘I just want answers about timing, colonel, that’s all. It’s essential to know where everyone was, and at what time that night.’
O’Neill subsided into his chair. ‘I drove around for a while to get some air, if you must know. The cigarette smoke in that damned cinema was so thick you could hardly see the screen. I had a headache and smarting eyes, so I went and sat in the car up on the Sungie Siput road for a while and looked at the valley in the moonlight.’
Blackwell managed to avoid raising his eyebrows at this unlikely tale. He had thought it unwise to bring his inspector on this particular interview, so he had his own notebook at the ready and as he jotted down the colonel’s words, he wondered how much air O’Neill had needed to keep him out alone in his car for almost two hours in the middle of the night.
‘You met no one during that time, sir?’
‘Are you doubting my word, officer!’ snarled O’Neill.
‘All policemen have to seek corroboration for everything, colonel,’ said Steven imperturbably. ‘I take it the answer is “no”?’
‘I saw no one and spoke to no one!’ snapped the other man. ‘Now if you have no more sensible questions, I would like to get on with my work. We are fighting a war here, you know!’
He spoke as if he were General Sir Gerald Templer, not the administrator of a small hospital. Considering that the police superintendent had more than once been personally involved in a shoot-out with the CTs, his remark bordered on the offensive. However, Blackwell let it pass and after a few more unprofitable questions, he left the irate colonel to become more bad-tempered as the day went on.
TWELVE
That Monday turned out to be an eventful day in BMH Tanah Timah, even apart from the colonel’s worsening mania. Lunch in the Officers’ Mess was brought to an abrupt end by the almost simultaneous ringing of telephones and the clatter of an approaching helicopter. Grabbing their caps and belts, the medical staff reached the landing pad just as a three-ton Bedford ambulance lumbered up the perimeter road to disgorge half a dozen medical orderlies. The RSM was with them and told the reception party of doctors and QA sisters, that the casualties were coming from an ambush and a firefight up near Grik, towards the border with Thailand. Tom recalled seeing the long convoy of vehicles leaving the garrison several days earlier and assumed that this incident was the result of the new operation to attack the CTs in that area.
As soon as the Westland Whirlwind dropped from the sky on to the whitewashed circle on the ground, the orderlies ran forward to pull out three stretchers while the rotor blades were still whirring over their heads. Peter Bright and Eddie Rosen hurried to make a quick examination of the wounded men and then motioned for them to be loaded into the first ambulance as it backed up nearer the helicopter. Three other ‘walking wounded’ clambered to the ground, two with arms supported in bloodstained slings, the other with a bandage around his chest. All were wearing jungle kit, with green lace-up boots and floppy wide-brimmed hats. They were helped solicitously into the large box-like ambulance, as the flight crew handed out their weapons to the RSM, who carefully checked their safety state before sending them to the arms kote. Before the senior surgeon clambered aboard the Bedford himself, he called out to the pathologist.
‘Looks as if we’ll need blood pretty soon, Tom. Can you get cracking on that?’
As the big ambulance lurched over the monsoon drain to get back on to the perimeter road, the pathologist hurried down to the laboratory, feeling for the first time that he really was in the army, rather than on a long tropical holiday.
As he marched off down the corridor, he could hear the whine of the helicopter rise to a higher pitch as it rose off the pad and curved away to go back to the battle area.
He could do nothing until the surgical team sent up samples for blood grouping, but he put his technicians on alert so that they could get all the kit ready. As soon as he had the groupings, he could check them against his prisoner list, then get some eager donors brought over to the transfusion basha.
The rest of the afternoon and early evening went in a flurry of activity, as the X-ray department and the operating theatre worked efficiently to deal with the wounds, dealing with fractures, digging out bullets and even screws and nails, as the terrorists, short of proper rifles and ammunition, had home-made weapons that fired these random metal fragments.
Six of Tom’s prisoners came willingly from the MCE to exchange pints of their blood for about the same volume of Tiger beer. He bled them straight from arm veins into bottles as they lay on bed frames in the palm-leafed hut, red-capped MPs standing at the entrance, glowering suspiciously at their charges who they considered had found yet another way to ‘swing the lead’.
By dinner time that evening, things had settled down and though Peter Bright, David Meredith and Eddie Rosen were still down in the wards checking the post-operative condition of the injured men, the rest of the residents were able to eat in comparative peace. Afterwards, over coffee in the anteroom, they had at least had something fresh to talk about, other than the murder of Jimmy Robertson.
Speculation was rife as to whether this latest operation by the Brigade had rooted out any CTs. The answer to this soon came in an unusual way, as Alf Morris was called away by Number One to answer the phone. When he came back, he dropped heavily back into his chair and turned to Tom.
‘That was the CO on the phone. A nice little trip for you tomorrow, Tom!’
The pathologist’s stolid face looked suspiciously at Alf.
‘I thought we were all doing physical jerks on the car park at half six?’ he grunted.
The Admin Officer grinned mischievously as he looked around the room. ‘I’ve got good news for you, chaps! The colonel, in that inimitable way he has of changing his mind, has decided to call off his scheme for getting you fit! Apart from this communal run up Maxwell Hill on Friday!’
There were cries of relief all round, but Tom still waited for Alf’s ominous message about the next day.
‘The CO has had a request from Brigade for the services of a pathologist to carry out post-mortems on three CTs who were killed in this operation up near Grik. Your predecessor was called out a couple of times for the same thing.’
Tom stared at Alf Morris, wondering if this was a wind-up, or another delusion on the part of their commanding officer.
‘What the hell for? Are they bringing the bodies down here?’ he asked incredulously.