Bernard Knight - Dead in the Dog

‘The colonel looked as if they had just got engaged, not just walking her in off the car park!’ he grunted. ‘Think he’s got a crush on her?’

‘God knows what goes on in that twisted mind of his!’ grumbled the Scot. ‘He’s certainly loosened up since his missus went home. She kept him on a pretty short leash, that’s why he took it out on everybody at BMH, we reckon.’

The beers had loosened Tom’s tongue a little beyond the point of discretion and he told his friend about the assignation he had seen between Diane’s husband and Lena Franklin. ‘Sounded as if he was trying to fix up a dirty weekend, the lucky devil!’

Alec nodded. ‘Good job it was you that heard them and not Dave Meredith. There’d have been blood on the badminton court if he had!’

He leaned a little closer with a conspiratorial air. ‘It was my turn last Friday to overhear Jimmy Robertson. I was in the Gents, standing at attention below that high-up window. He was outside, getting a right earful from his wife, something about her finding a hotel bill. I couldn’t hear the rest, as they moved away, but from the tone of her voice, if she’d had a knife, she’d have stuck him there and then!’

Tom shook his head in wonderment as he reached forward for his tall glass of Anchor. ‘We don’t need a war out here, there’s enough “aggro” going on between the residents!’

He looked across the room to where Rosa Mackay was sitting bolt upright, looking very Latin in a lacy white blouse and a black skirt. She was holding a glass of Pimm’s and though exotically immaculate, looked very unhappy. Her scrawny husband, looking old enough to be her father, sat alongside her, both of them silent and withdrawn.

‘How the devil did those two get together?’ asked Tom. ‘They seem totally unsuited to each other.’

As usual, Alec Watson had the answers — the pathologist decided that the Army would have been better off drafting him into the Intelligence Corps, rather than the RAMC.

‘I heard that he was working on an estate down in Johore before the war. He was interned in Singapore by the Japs and apparently had a hard time in Changi Prison. His first wife died of dysentery in an internment camp in Sumatra. Douglas met Rosa in a hotel in Malacca, where she was the receptionist. It seems that the manager was pestering her and Douglas’s interest was a means of escape.’

‘He’s not exactly love’s young dream, is he? Not for a cracking-looking woman like her?’ objected Tom.

Watson shrugged. ‘What! A Eurasian with no better prospects than slaving in a fleapit beach hotel with the manager trying to pinch her bum all the time? A European husband, her own bungalow far away — not a bad catch. And he’s Scots,’ added Alec with a grin.

Looking across the room at the smooth-faced woman from Gunong Besar, Tom had his doubts about her contentment, which the ruthless Watson soon confirmed.

‘Of course, they say that Jimmy Robertson has been servicing her for years, probably ever since the Mackays came up here in 1950.’

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.

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.’