Dead in the Dog (29 page)

‘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.

T
hat 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.

The older man shook his head. ‘You're going up there, lad! Flying out at eight in the morning, so take your knives with you.'

At the crack of dawn, Tom Howden was in his laboratory, where Cropper filled a haversack with the antique dissection kit, several pairs of rubber gloves, a clipboard and paper, a couple of big sack needles and a ball of twine. Tom had his little Voigtlander 35mm camera in his pocket and his heart in his mouth as half an hour later, a Land Rover dropped him at the grass airstrip behind the garrison compound and he saw the plane that was to take him into the unknown. The little Auster looked to him like a camouflaged Austin Seven with wings and, with some trepidation, he lugged his haversack across to the aircraft, where the Army Air Corps pilot was leaning against the fabric fuselage, complete with leather flying helmet like some latter-day Biggles.

After a laconic greeting, the pilot opened a door, dumped Tom's bag into the fuselage, then squeezed the pathologist into the single backward-facing seat behind the driver's position. He strapped him in, gave him a pair of large headphones and then climbed in himself. A moment later, there was a judder as the engine started and the plane began bumping across the rough grass of the old tin tailings. Through the perspex canopy over the back of the cockpit, Tom stared out in horrified fascination at the fragile tailplane as the rudder wagged as they turned upwind. The whole contraption appeared to be made of cloth, reminding him of the balsa and tissue-paper models he made as a boy. The tail rose, the bumping suddenly stopped and Tom realized that they were already off the ground. As they climbed and banked, he looked down at the garrison, the hospital and the little town of Tanah Timah, amazed that this machine was actually flying.

Soon he began to enjoy himself, in spite of the fact that the back of his head was touching the muzzle of an automatic rifle strapped behind the pilot's seat – reminding him that this was part of a war, not a joyride.

Looking down again, he saw the road going past The Dog and within the regular pattern of rubber plantations he could make out the bungalows of the Gunong Besar estate, where James Robertson had lived. With a return of his feelings of unreality, he realized that within weeks of leaving Gateshead, he had performed an autopsy on a shot murder victim and was now on his way to repeat the performance on three communist terrorists. When he had arrived in Malaya, he was inclined to think that ‘terrorists' was a pejorative imperialist title for freedom fighters, until he heard descriptions of the sadistic atrocities that Chin Peng's men had inflicted on uncooperative countrymen and women in the villages.

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.