Bernard Knight: Dead in the Dog

She wished to God she had stayed in England and not been seduced by both James’s body and his glowing descriptions of life on a Malayan rubber estate. Twenty-six years old, she was the third daughter of a minor squire from Norfolk, rejoicing in the name of Henry Blessington-Luke. After an expensive and largely wasted education at Cheltenham, she had done little but ride, party and hunt for both foxes and a husband. Three years earlier, at a Hunt Ball near Newmarket, she had met James Robertson, home on leave — and three months later, had married him in the cathedral in Singapore.

The bastard! She gingerly touched her face again and wondered how well she could cover up any marks by tomorrow night, when there was the weekly dance at The Dog.

A slim Tamil came in through the dining room, carrying a tray bearing a bottle of Johnnie Walker, a tumbler and a jug of iced water.

‘A big one, Siva,’ she murmured, still shielding one side of her face with a scarlet-nailed hand, though the amah had already given him a blow-by-blow account of the fracas. He poured a liberal shot of whisky into the glass and added an equal amount of water — the famous ‘stinger’ was a corruption of the Malay ‘ stengah ’, meaning ‘half’.

He lowered the tray for her to take the glass, but she gestured to a small table at the end of the settee. ‘Leave it, Siva. I may want another.’

He put the tray down and stepped back.

‘Mem want anything else? Sandwich, curry puff?’

She shook her head, managing to give him a wan smile. He was a good-looking fellow of about her own age — but of course, he was Indian. Not that that seemed to bother her bloody husband!

The cook-cum-butler padded silently to the door but stopped there to throw a look back at the woman sipping her drink. Though he considered her no more attractive than most of the sleek girls of his own race, the contrast between their dark beauty and her startling blondeness always intrigued him. Slim but full-breasted, her long pale neck was framed by the silky swathe of hair the colour of light honey that came down to her shoulders. He knew that some English women got their colour from a bottle, but this was surely natural. With a little sigh at such forbidden fruit, he padded off to his kitchen hut behind the house, to sit over a cup of tea with the amah and gossip about the latest domestic developments at Gunong Besar Estate.

On the settee, the blonde drank her first stinger quickly and poured herself a stronger one. She lifted her shapely legs up on to the cushions and leaned back against one of the padded arms, cradling the drink in her hands. Her temper had cooled, but it was replaced by a steely determination to do the swine down as effectively as she could.

‘Two can play at that game,’ she whispered to herself, then smiled into her whisky. The game had already started, though James didn’t know it. She didn’t care if he did, she thought with uncertain bravado. But there were problems — she was still his wife and though she had a small allowance of her own from Daddy, this damned plantation was their livelihood. If she blew the whistle on him with Douglas Mackay, what would happen to the place? James was too dependent on his manager to survive on his own and even if their marriage was becoming decidedly rocky, she didn’t want to divorce a bankrupt and have to go home penniless. And she certainly didn’t want to be divorced by him and go home both penniless and with her tail between her legs, so she had to watch her mouth and her step.

Diane mixed a third drink, resolutely deciding that it would be her last before dinner. There were magazines on the little table, but after riffling through the curled pages of a six-month-old Vogue , she threw it petulantly on to the polished floor and stared aimlessly around the room, which took up the full width of the bungalow. It was large and bare by British standards, the walls lined with darkly varnished planks that carried a few conical Malay straw hats and a set of framed hunting prints. There was no ceiling, the inside of the high peaked roof being wood-lined like the walls. The furniture was equally sombre, a locally made wicker suite with a large settee and four armchairs.

A ponderous teak sideboard, an old-fashioned piano left from the twenties, and a sandalwood chest on which sat a radiogram, completed the decor.

‘God, what a dump!’ she murmured, self-pity washing over her. After a moment, she rose restlessly to her feet and took her glass across to the verandah. The front wall of the lounge had three pairs of slatted doors designed to let in air, but keep out the sun. The centre ones were open and Diane walked out on to the wide verandah which extended the full width of the big bungalow, furnished with some rattan chairs and a couple of small tables beneath the overhang of the tin roof. It was railed in by a varnished fence, except at the centre, where wide wooden steps went down some eight feet to the ground, the whole building being raised high on brick piles. Her Austin Ten was sheltered underneath, alongside the mud-spattered Land Rover that James used around the estate, though he rarely bothered to park his old armoured Buick under there.

She leaned on the rail, with her glass gripped in both hands, as she had done hundreds of times before and looked out over the estate. Though Norfolk became increasingly desirable with every passing month, she had to admit that the view from here was spectacular. The bungalow was built on a small knoll above the dirt road that led down on the left to Tanah Timah, three miles away. It was at the foot of an isolated hill about a thousand feet high, hence the name Gunong Besar — ‘big mountain’ — though it was a mere hillock compared to the peaks ten miles behind them, on the border between Perak and Pahang States. The bungalow faced west and looked over their acres of rubber down into the distant valley. On rare clear days, they could see as far as the towns of Sungei Siput and Kuala Kangsar and even imagine that they could see the Malacca Straits on the far horizon, over which there were often fantastic sunsets.

She dropped her eyes to the road at the bottom of the knoll fifty yards away, made of the red laterite soil that was dust when it was dry, but usually was a tenacious mud that stuck to wheels and bodywork. There was very little traffic on it, as only one small village, Kampong Kerbau, lay a few miles up to the right. Police patrols and a few military vehicles were the main users, apart from a couple of Chinese trucks and the twice-daily bus to the village.

The whisky was getting warm and Diane tossed down half of it and walked to the right-hand end of the verandah to lean on the side rail. Here her elegant features, with the cornflower blue eyes and enviable bone structure, seemed to darken as she stared past the flowers of a large Flame-of-the-Forest tree down towards another bungalow a few hundred yards away. Built nearer the foot of the knoll, it was smaller than theirs, but of the same general appearance, though all she could see through the trees was the red tin roof and the end of their verandah.

As she watched, trying to project hatred across the space, a battered pre-war Plymouth pick-up came from the latex-processing sheds on the other side of the road and crossed into the drive to the next-door bungalow. The trees obstructed most of her view, but she could just see the driver get out and run up the verandah steps. After spending most of his life in the East, Douglas Mackay seemed impervious to the heat, which made most Europeans slow-moving. She had no quarrel with Douglas, more a mild pity for his weakness in dealing with his domestic life — though she was in no position to criticize in that direction, she thought cynically.