‘We’ll hear all about it endlessly tonight at The Dog,’ he said. ‘No doubt James Robertson will be there, playing the hero.’
In spite of the heat, the atmosphere in the Robertsons’ lounge that afternoon was decidedly frosty. The ice was provided in full measure by the two women present, the wives of the owner and his manager.
Rosa Mackay sat stiffly on the edge of one of the rattan easy chairs, with Diane slumped on the settee as far away as possible on the other side of the room. Douglas Mackay hovered uneasily in front of one of the verandah doors, while James stood with his back to the rear wall, his hands clasped behind him. The third man in the room thought whimsically that if the climate had allowed for a large fireplace, James Robertson would have stood like this in front of it, to emphasize his dominance as squire of the household.
Steven Blackwell was the Superintendent of Police, based at Tanah Timah, but responsible for a huge tract of country, much of it uninhabited. He was a burly, short-necked man of forty-five, almost completely bald above a rim of iron-grey hair running horizontally around the back of his head. Steven suffered severely from the sun, his face, head and neck always bright pink above his crisply starched khaki uniform. He wore shirt and shorts, with long black socks, black shoes and black peaked cap, which now lay on the piano, along with his leather-covered stick. A black ‘Sam Brown’ belt and diagonal cross-strap supported a holstered revolver.
‘I don’t know what to make of this, James,’ he was saying with a worried frown. He had a deep, pleasant voice, still with a trace of a Midlands accent. ‘It’s not like the last time they had a go at you. That was a much more determined effort.’
‘Well, eight bullet holes in my wall is hardly a Christmas greeting, Steven!’ retorted Robertson. ‘We had two fellows killed six months ago. It only takes one bullet to kill me, determined or not!’
He sounded aggrieved that any doubt should be cast on his heroic role as the besieged planter. Blackwell held up a conciliatory hand.
‘Good God, James, I’m not trying to play down what happened! But it’s so out of character for the bastards to turn up, fire a few shots and then slope off! Last time, we were all very lucky that a patrol happened to catch them in the act. We even managed to shoot one of the sods that time.’
Douglas Mackay spoke for the first time. He was a thin, stringy man in his late forties, a widow’s peak on his forehead where his sparse fair hair had receded at the temples. Douglas seemed all arms and legs in his shorts and bush shirt, the exposed skin still showing a slightly yellowish tinge from his years as a prisoner of the Japanese. His soft Scottish voice was a contrast to Robertson’s usual bluster.
‘D’you not think it could have been one or two of Chin Peng’s boys doing a bit of freelance work – or even a couple of local guys with Commie sympathies, maybe from one of the kampongs?’
James made derogatory noises under his breath at this attempt to downgrade his ordeal, but Blackwell thoughtfully rubbed his pink jowls.
‘It’s a possibility, though I don’t know where anyone outside the CT organization would have got weapons. We’ve clamped down so hard on the villagers now.’
‘They make their own bloody guns,’ objected James. ‘A piece of water-pipe, a handful of rusty nails and they’re in business!’
The police superintendent shook his head,
‘Not this time. These were no country guns. Inspector Tan has dug a few bullets out of the woodwork for me. They’re all three-oh-threes, good military hardware.’
Robertson had an answer for everything. ‘The CT’s have stacks of those. We Brits supplied them with thousands of the things when we wanted them to kill Japs with them a few years ago.’
Steven Blackwell nodded. ‘Sure, but the local loonies don’t have them. It has to be a CT unit – yet why should they bother to make such a feeble attempt? I don’t get it.’
‘It didn’t sound damned feeble to me in the middle of the night!’ snapped Diane, tremulously indignant. ‘I was terrified, I felt sure I was going to die!’
She had been all for driving to Penang that morning to stay in the Eastern and Oriental Hotel, until she could get a passage back to Britain on one of the regular Alfred Holt passenger ships, but her husband had persuaded her to stay. He was in something of a cleft stick, as even though things were deteriorating between them, his pride didn’t want her to go, leaving him with the ignominy of being branded as a dumped husband. Yet to play down the incident to reassure her, would devalue his own Errol Flynn image amongst his male cronies and female admirers.
As usual, he solved his dilemma by calling for drinks. Yelling for Siva, he got Blackwell and Mackay to sit down while gin, whisky and orange juice were dispensed, the policeman and his manager refusing anything alcoholic.
‘Let’s go through this once again, though I know Inspector Tan has taken it all down earlier,’ said the superintendent.
He looked across first at the manager’s wife, Rosa, who had sat silently on her chair. She was a small but beautiful woman, as dark as Diane was fair. Black glossy hair was cut in a rather severe pageboy, with a fringe across her forehead. Large brown eyes looked out rather fearfully from a smooth oval face, with full lips that needed far less cosmetics than Diane’s. Though she looked European, with the complexion of an Italian or Spaniard, Blackwell knew that she was Eurasian, though she would have passed for any nationality around the Mediterranean. She was not the daughter of an Asian and a European, but the daughter of two other Eurasians. Her father came from Goa, the son of a Portuguese merchant and an Indian mother and he had married a woman with similar ancestry. He had emigrated after the war to Malacca, originally a Portuguese settlement in southern Malaya, setting up a furniture and curio business. His daughter Rosa, now twenty-six, had been educated in a Catholic convent in Goa and after coming to Malacca, worked as a receptionist in a beach hotel. Here she had met Douglas Mackay on a weekend leave from his plantation job in Johore. When James offered him the post of manager in Gunong Besar, he had married Rosa and brought her up to Perak. Now the superintendent turned to her to get her account of last night’s drama.
‘I know nothing more than I told the inspector, Steven,’ she said in her low, soft voice, keeping her eyes well away from the glowering Diane. ‘I was fast asleep when shots woke me up and I heard splintering of wood when some must have hit the front of the bungalow. Then Douglas dashed in from the lounge and told me to hide low down in the bathroom, while he went out with a gun. I saw nothing, I was too frightened to move until it was all over.’
‘Can you remember how many shots you heard?
‘Not exactly, but there must have been at least a dozen, I think. They became quite distant after the first few.’
Blackwell turned to Robertson’s wife.
‘What about you, Diane? Does much the same apply?’
She glared first at Rosa, then turned to the policeman.
‘The shots woke me too, but the distant ones were first, then they came nearer. I had to wake him up, he was out for the count. Too much beer at The Dog.’
James scowled at this slur on his heroics. ‘Come on, Diane, I was out of bed like a shot!’
‘Well, anyway, eventually he staggered up after I’d started screaming, and told me to lie on the floor next to the bed.’
‘To be furthest away from the walls – bullets can knock holes right through that old woodwork,’ grunted her husband.
‘Then he went out – to get his gun, I suppose. But then it all went quiet. That’s all I can tell you.’
‘Except that you were wailing like a bloody banshee for ages!’ muttered James. ‘It took three stengahs and a gin and tonic to calm you down.’
‘D’you blame me, after that!’ she flared. ‘Why the hell did I let myself come to a place like this, where I might get raped and shot and God knows what?!’
The policeman hastily turned to the estate manager to dampen a return of Diane’s hysteria.
‘Douglas, you were the first to get outside, according to what you told Tan?’
The calm voice of the manager was in counterpoint to the woman’s panic.
‘Yes, I was working late on the accounts when it started. From the sound of the shots, they attacked our bungalow first, then went down to the worker’s lines, before coming up to James’s place here. I grabbed my pistol and rifle and went down the servant’s steps at the back, as I didn’t want to risk the front porch. There were more
