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.
Steven had gone so far as to corner the hospital’s Admin Officer at the club the previous evening and ask him whether there was any problem with Desmond O’Neill. Major Morris was reluctant to say much, both because of his traditional loyalty to a superior officer and the plain fact that military secrets, if this could be called one, could not be divulged to civilians, even to the police, without very good legal reasons.
‘The old man is just his usual bloody-minded self, Steven,’ he countered evasively, before relating the strange business of the aborted physical exercise demand. The policeman suspected that Morris was keeping something back out of loyalty and discretion and he admired him for that, but sensed that there was more going on in BMH than just their commandant’s persecution of his medical officers.
‘Alf, you know I can’t exclude anyone from my investigations and that includes O’Neill. In fact, he’s got no satisfactory explanation for where he was at the time of the shooting. If there’s anything you think you should tell me that’s relevant to my enquiries, I should know about it.’
The Admin Officer looked uncomfortable at this.
‘Steve, it’s very difficult for me to talk about this. It’s an internal matter and I’m sure it has nothing to do with your investigation.’
The superintendent sighed at Morris’s unconvincing tone.
‘Look, I realize your problem, but if you want to keep in the clear, why not have a word with the legal bloke in Brigade and pass the buck to him?’
They were sitting at a corner table in the lounge of The Dog, almost deserted at this early part of the evening. Alf Morris gave an almost furtive look around, then leaned towards Blackwell.
‘The CO is acting more oddly than usual, but maybe that’s due to end-of-tour blues. He’s due to go home in about seven weeks’ time. The thing is, some of his dottiness seems to centre around the armoury. He’s always been obsessed with security there, but recently he’s suddenly posted two Malay Other Ranks out of the unit with no real reason. Both have been on night duty at the arms kote.’
Steven frowned, trying to make sense of this.
‘Why should that worry you?’ Then the possible relevance suddenly struck him. ‘Are any weapons missing?’ he hissed.
He relaxed a little when the other man shook his head.
‘No, I went up there today and checked through the record book. But the odd thing is that the colonel had withdrawn a rifle a couple of weeks ago – and returned it last Friday!’
Blackwell stared intently at Morris. ‘Can he do that? What the hell for?’
Morris shrugged. ‘He’s quite entitled to draw a weapon, if he wants. After all, he’s the Commanding Officer of the unit, so who’s going to query it? Maybe he wanted to practice his marksmanship on the garrison range. We are on active service, even though we’re a medical unit. All the MOs have to put in target practice at the Depot when they first join, God help us for their uselessness at it!’
As a former non-medical Regimental Sergeant Major, he couldn’t resist a dig at the doctors’ lack of military skills.
The policeman took up his beer glass with rather nervous fingers. ‘Alf, you realize that the period when he took the gun out, covers the date of Jimmy Robertson’s killing.’
Morris nodded. ‘It had occurred to me. But it’s ridiculous to think that O’Neill could have anything to do with that. Anyway, the previous shoot-up at Gunon Besar was outside the time when he had the rifle.’
Blackwell shook his head. ‘But those shots came from a different weapon. Had he taken out another gun previously?’
‘No, there’s nothing in the book,’ replied Alf, rather abruptly. He was becoming uneasy about this line of questioning
‘He could have badgered some little MOR to let him take one out without signing the book,’ suggested Steven. ‘Perhaps that’s why he posted the fellows away, so that they couldn’t be questioned.’
‘Oh come on, Steve! This is verging on the fantastic. Where would he get the ammunition from? There’s no record of any being issued with the rifle.’
The superintendent was unimpressed with this argument.
‘There’s plenty of spare clips knocking around the garrison, you know that as well as I do. And O’Neill was posted here from Korea, that place was awash with buckshee weapons and ammo.’
Alf Morris stared into his glass of Tiger, worried by the way things were going. ‘What are you going to do about it? I shouldn’t have told you, really, without authorization from a more senior officer – and my immediate superior is the colonel himself.’
Steven ran a hand over his tender sunburnt scalp. ‘Can you identify the actual rifle that he took out?’
Morris nodded. ‘The serial numbers are recorded in the armoury book.’
‘Then I must have a test-fired bullet from it to send to the laboratory in KL to compare with the one Tom Howden dug out of Jimmy. Can you arrange that on the quiet? If it doesn’t match, then no one will be any the wiser, but we can breath more easily again.’
Reluctantly, Morris agreed. ‘It will have be done within the garrison, no way can I let a weapon go outside without the Brigadier’s consent – and that would lead to a lot of awkward questions, especially as he’s one of our colonel’s cronies.’
