the event, O’Neill never mentioned it.
As OMO, Tom had to deliver his report, keeping it as low-key as possible. After describing the satisfactory condition of the only patient on the SIL, he gave a sombre account of how Mr James Robertson had been brought in dead, then finished up with the usual. ‘The arms kote was inspected at eleven hundred hours and all was found to be in order, sir.’
He sat down, but jumped up again as the CO barked at him.
‘I’ve already heard from the police, Howden. The coroner wants you to carry out a post-mortem this morning.’ He glared at the pathologist over his Himmler glasses, which he always wore at these meetings. The skin over his high cheekbones appeared stretched more tightly than usual, giving his face a skull-like appearance.
‘Have you ever seen a gunshot wound, captain? I suppose you do know how to perform an autopsy?’
Tom tried to ignore the insulting tone. ‘Yes, sir, I’ve been with my consultant when he dealt with a firearm death. And yes, sir, I’ve done at least twenty coroner’s cases back home.’
With the abrupt changes of mood that seemed characteristic of this strange man, the CO seemed to lose interest and went on to harangue the quartermaster about some delay in delivery of medical stores. The unfortunate Captain Burns offered feeble excuses about inefficiency in the Base Supply Depot down in Singapore. Robbie Burns was another officer who, like Alf Morris, had come up through the ranks and was fervently hoping that he would reach retirement less than a year away, without being court-martialled for strangling the Commanding Officer, who made his life a permanent misery. He was a short, corpulent Scouse, always sweating profusely and incessantly mopping his red face with a handkerchief.
The meeting stumbled through its usual nerve-racking course, with a dozen officers sitting edgily on their chairs, waiting for their colonel to suddenly turn and attack them for some imagined misdeed. Eventually they were released into the mounting heat and went their various ways to heal the sick.
When Tom Howden got back to his laboratory, he found a mug of milky, sweet tea ready on his desk and a solicitous lance corporal hovering around him. Lewis Cropper’s long, sallow face regarded him with spaniel-like concern. A Regular soldier, he was the despair of a series of sergeant majors across what remained of the British Empire, having been posted hither and thither merely to get rid of him. In spite of the fact that he was an excellent laboratory technician, his stubborn refusal to conform to authority kept him in almost continual trouble. He was nosy, garrulous, obsequious and generally bloody-minded to all except his pathologists, for whom he always seemed to have an embarrassingly doglike devotion.
‘Hear there’s to be a pee-em this morning, sir!’ he offered, making Tom marvel at the speed and efficiency of the hospital bush-telegraph.
‘That’s right. Ask Sergeant Oates to come in, will you?’
He sipped at his tea and flinched at the combination of condensed milk and three spoonfuls of sugar. But Cropper made no move to obey.
‘Won’t do any good, sir,’ he answered mournfully. ‘Sarge can’t stand the morgue. Last time, he threw up, then fainted. Says he’s never going to set foot in there again.’
Tom stared at the lance corporal over the rim of his mug. Was he pulling his leg or working up to some scam of his own?
‘I’ll have a word with him – I have to have some help in there.’
‘Well, Derek Oates won’t be any use, I can tell you! The last pathologist, Captain Freeman, said the sarge was to be permanently excused on medical grounds, on account of his puking all the time.’
‘What about one of the Malays, then?’
Cropper made a derisory noise, suspiciously like a verbal raspberry.
‘No chance, cap’n! It’s against their religion or some such.’
He leaned over the desk in an attitude of unwelcome familiarity.
‘S’alright, sir, I’ll help you out. I’ve already sharpened up the tools.’
Like a conjuror, he produced an old box the size of a small briefcase, made of dark hardwood and with the historic broad arrow of the ‘War Department’ carved into its varnished lid. Cropper opened it and displayed the contents to Tom with the proud air of a Kleeneze salesman on a housewife’s doorstep.
‘Pre-war, these are! Don’t know which war, but there’s a lovely bit of steel in them.’
Inside was a fearsome array of instruments, worthy of the worst excesses of the Spanish Inquisition. Nestled into faded blue velvet slots were several large knives, which would have looked perfectly at home in a slaughterhouse. An amputation saw, a steel mallet and several chisels jostled for space with scissors, forceps and a gadget that consisted of two half-hoops hinged together, like a folding crown.
‘What the devil’s that?’ demanded Tom.
‘A coronet, sir. Captain Freeman was very fond of that. You open it out and put it over the skull. Screw those spikes into the bone to hold it firm and you’ve got a nice straight guide for sawing off the top of the head.’
The pathologist grunted, thinking that he could manage without such medieval devices. The corporal’s importuning was interrupted by the telephone and Tom picked it up to hear the police superintendent on the line.
‘Would midday suit you for this post-mortem, captain?’ asked Steven Blackwell. ‘The SIB chap from Ipoh would like to be present as well as the major from the provost marshal’s office in the garrison.’
Tom agreed, then asked about identification of the corpse.
‘I was much too junior to do any police cases back on Tyneside,’ he explained. ‘But I know my boss always had to get someone to officially confirm who the body actually was.’
Blackwell said he had this organized and that he would be bringing James’s widow to BMH immediately before the examination.
Ringing off, Tom Howden saw with relief that Cropper had taken his box of instruments back into the main lab, perhaps for a final honing of the wicked knives. Sitting behind his desk, staring into space, Tom sipped his sickly tea and pondered at the sudden responsibilities that the Army had thrust upon him. Already he was doing work and offering expert opinions on medical matters that would have been considered far above his status in civilian life. After only one year’s apprenticeship in NHS pathology, he was now examining tissues removed by the surgeons and reporting on them, a task which only seniors did back in the UK. It was true that the younger, healthier military patients rarely had the tumours and difficult diagnostic problems seen at home, but there were some gynaecological conditions among the wives which could be potentially serious. Apart from this histology, the bulk of the work was detecting bacteria and parasites, from malaria to hookworm, from tuberculosis to occasional cases of leprosy, as many of the patients were Malays or Gurkhas, who suffered a different range of diseases from the British troops. The jungle patrols were susceptible to Weil’s disease contracted from water contaminated by rats, a dangerous condition which was sometimes fatal. Though Howden’s limited civilian experience had hardly prepared him for all this, his technicians gently carried him along and he was learning fast.
But now, he ruminated, he was being pitchforked into a murder investigation and had to make the best of it. Where tumours and complicated medical conditions were concerned, he could always get an expert opinion by sending the material back by air to the Royal Army Medical College in Millbank, but there was nowhere he could get rapid help over a civilian shooting.
Shrugging philosophically, he swallowed the rest of his tea, realizing that he was in danger of becoming used to the taste of the cloying liquid. Glancing at his watch, he saw it was almost time for him to attend to another of his varied duties, this time the sick parade in the military prison next door. Jamming his cap on his head, he went into the main lab to speak to his sergeant. The room occupied most of the building, only Tom’s little office and the tissue-cutting lab being partitioned off the back of it.
Wooden benches lined most of three walls, the other wall being filled with a kerosene-powered refrigerator, an incubator and a sterilizer. The entrance was opposite these, directly on to the concrete strip that ran under the overhang of the corrugated asbestos roof. Slatted windows, all wide open, fed as much air as possible to the pair of whirling brass fans in the ceiling, as there was no air conditioning. The centre of the laboratory was occupied with another large island bench, with a central raised shelf covered with a profusion of reagent bottles and odd bits of apparatus. This was the sergeant’s province, as he did most of the chemical testing, though like the others, he could turn his hand to anything. Derek Oates was there now and Tom waited whilst he sucked up some blood into a glass pipette and blew it into a tube to carry out an analysis for urea in a patient from the Australian battalion, whose kidneys had been damaged by Weil’s disease.
In another corner, Embi bin Sharif, one of the MORs, was quietly chanting some mournful Malay song as he
