Bernard Knight - Dead in the Dog

Alf Morris had explained the previous evening that the War Office wanted information on the killing power of the Belgian-designed FN rifle that had been adopted by NATO and detailed reports on all fatal injuries inflicted by it were to be collected wherever possible, hence his present mission.

They flew over endless rubber and oil palm estates, rice paddies and dense jungle as they went north, Tom taking some photos to amaze his folks back home in Gateshead. All too soon, the fifty-minute flight came to an end, as the Auster glided in to land on another strip of grass alongside a narrow road. On one side was yet more rubber, on the other virgin jungle. A few tents were set up as a temporary camp at one end of the airstrip, where a collection of military vehicles was standing.

An infantry captain in jungle gear came up as Tom was hauling himself out of the cramped seat and helped him with the heavy haversack.

‘Just in time, doc,’ he said cheerfully. ‘They’re about to bring the bastards out of the ulu down there.’ As he waved a hand down the straight road, a corporal crouched over a radio pack called out to him.

‘They say they can see the edge of the trees, sir. Be with us in a few minutes.’

The West Berkshires officer gave a shrill blast on a whistle and beckoned to a group of squaddies waiting around a Ferret armoured scout car, a TCV and a pair of Land Rovers. As the men jogged towards them, the captain began striding down the road. ‘Come on, doc, duty calls!’

Tom slung his bag over his shoulder and sweating like a bull in the cloying heat, followed the men for a few hundred yards, until a soldier suddenly appeared through the lalang grass, holding up his rifle and pointing back into the trees.

A few moments later, a strange procession appeared out of the forest, which confirmed Tom’s impression that he was in a time-warp created by Somerset Maugham or some Edwardian writing about the last days of the British Raj. Some British and Gurkha soldiers appeared, followed by two Malay Regiment men carrying a long bamboo pole on their shoulders. From this hung a corpse, suspended by ropes tied around ankles and wrists. Tom had seen old photos of tigers being retrieved like this, after being slaughtered by some pith-helmeted colonial general, but he never expected to see the method used for humans.

As the two bearers thankfully dropped their burden on the wide verge at the edge of the road, two similar convoys came out of the jungle, this time carried by a pair of West Berkshires and another two locally enlisted Malay privates.

‘Right, doctor, they’re all yours,’ announced the cheerful young captain, as the troops set about untying the corpses from the poles. ‘Let’s know when you’re through, so I can send a few lads down with shovels.’

The men from the patrol went wearily up to the tents for food and rest, while the fresher men from the vehicles stood around to watch Tom do his stuff. The three bodies, dressed in ragged bloodstained clothing, were laid out a few feet apart and he began by taking photographs of them, which seemed a sensible thing to do, as he had no orders as how to proceed. Two of the corpses were men, the other a young woman, though it was hard to tell, as her head seemed to have been exploded from the inside.

‘Were they all shot with FNs?’ he asked the captain.

‘Two of them, doc. The other was traversed with a Bren.’

Tom set out his meagre equipment, the old box of instruments giving rise to a chatter of interest amongst the watchers. Pulling on a pair of gloves, he asked the officer if someone could jot down a few notes and the captain gave the clipboard to his sergeant. Squatting uncomfortably on his heels, Tom began his examination by pulling aside the soaked, tattered shirt of the first man, a young Chinese with blood dribbling from his mouth. There were two bullet entrance wounds on his chest and a large exit wound on his back.

After opening the thorax with one of Cropper’s ferocious knives, Tom dictated a short account of the chaos within the chest cavity and the destruction of the spine, rather similar to the injury to James Robertson. However, unlike the planter, there were no bullets inside the body, the high velocity of the FN having whistled them right through to lie somewhere out there in the deep jungle.

He had a cursory look at the other main organs, mainly out of interest, in case the privations of living for years on poor rations and with rampant infectious diseases and parasites, might have left some mark. He found nothing significant and went on to look at the second man.

This was a different situation altogether, as there was a line of eight bullet entrance rounds running diagonally across his chest and abdomen, as his life was blasted away by a moving hail of bullets from a Bren gun. One of the bullets was still in the body, one lodged under the skin of the back where it had run out of momentum after passing through a vertebra.

‘That will be a three-oh-three, doc,’ commented the helpful young captain. ‘We’ve still got some of the old Brens, before they changed the barrels to fire the NATO seven-point-sixes.’

Again, Tom was chillingly reminded of James Robertson, whose spine had arrested a similar.303 projectile.

The woman, though facially utterly unrecognizable, appeared from her shape and smooth skin to be young, perhaps even a teenager. After trying to roughly replace the exploded tissues of the head, he found that the single entrance wound appeared to be in the left ear, the projectile from the FN having gone down the canal until it struck the mass of dense bone in the base of the skull. The sudden transfer of kinetic energy had been more like a bomb than a bullet, but at least she could not have known anything about it, thought Tom, in an effort to find some consolation in the midst of this carnage. Even the soldiers standing around seemed muted, with none of the usual ribald humour that was commonly used to compensate for these grim situations.

He used the rest of his film in taking close-up pictures of all the injuries, then did his best to restore some dignity to the desecrated corpses which lay naked on the side of the road. He sewed up the fronts of the bodies, using the twine and needles that Lewis Cropper had provided. There was little he could do to restore the girl’s head, but as a gesture, he bound it together in several layers of clothing ripped from the men’s shirts.

A couple of West Berkshires had brought entrenching tools down from the three-tonner and set about digging a shallow grave in the soft, damp soil of the verge. The three corpses were lowered into it, side by side and as the men shovelled the red soil back into the hole, Tom could not help comparing this with the recent funeral of Jimmy Robertson, where a robed priest and floral tributes had marked his passing. He had seen pet dogs buried with more ceremony than this and realized yet again that war was a cruel, callous business.

Taking his notes from the officer, he walked in a subdued mood back to the tents for a promised cup of tea, before climbing aboard the Auster for the flight back to Tanah Timah.

Steven Blackwell was a worried man as he sat in his office in the police station. Another two days had passed without any progress in the Robertson investigation and as well as having had another nagging call from his Commissioner in Kuala Lumpur, he was concerned about a rumour that had filtered through to him from the garrison. Though he did not actually have any spies inside the military establishment, he knew so many people there that it was inevitable that gossip percolated down to him, not only at the bar of The Dog, but from Inspector Tan and other police officers, who were in daily contact with civilian servants and clerks working for the army. The current gossip concerned the Commanding Officer of the hospital there, purveying suggestions varying from the fact that the colonel had gone raving mad to the milder eccentricity of stalking the compound at night with a loaded pistol.