Blackwell swallowed the rest of his beer and reached for his black uniform cap on the nearly chair. ‘Thanks, Alf. If I don’t make some progress soon, my senior officers are going to crap on me from a great height. It might come to test-firing all the weapons in the BMH arms kote, so doing one early might be a start.’
‘Did you get any results from the guns the planters had?’ Morris asked, as he rose to his feet with the policeman.
‘Just had the results from KL. None of the rifles that came from Gunong Besar or Les Arnold’s place up the road matched any of the bullets that were fired at the bungalows or the one that killed poor Jimmy.’
That rather prickly conversation had taken place the previous evening and now Steven Blackwell was in a dilemma as to how to proceed. Given the hostile attitude of Desmond O’Neill, he could hardly ask the colonel whether he had shot the Gunong Besar planter. Frustratingly, all he could do was to wait until Alf Morris had produced the promised bullet from a test-firing, presumably made by an armourer from the garrison. At least this would not give rise to any connection with the CO of the hospital, as it was common knowledge that a variety of weapons were likely to be examined for exclusion purposes.
As he had told Morris the previous evening, the barrel striations on the bullets fired through the rifles borrowed from Douglas Mackay, Les Arnold and even the one belonging to James Robertson, showed that none had been used in either incident at or near Gunong Besar.
As he sat sweating under the rotating overhead fan, Steven’s mind reverted to the other suspects, if such unlikely candidates could be thought of as such. He was convinced that a woman was at the bottom of this crime, as he could not bring himself to believe that any other motive was credible. There was no possible financial reason why Jimmy should have been shot – Doug Mackay would not benefit from Robertson’s death. Indeed, he stood to lose his job and bungalow if Gunong Besar was sold up. Perhaps Les Arnold might have a slight motive, if he wanted to add that estate to his own holdings up at Batu Merah, but it seemed unlikely that he would devise such an elaborate scheme just to get hold of extra land. With any terrorist involvement ruled out, as it must be given the dumping of Jimmy’s body outside The Dog, then some motive related to passion, sex or jealousy must surely be the answer.
His train of thought was interrupted by one of the Indian civil employees coming in with a tray containing his eleven o’clock grapefruit soda to wash down a Paludrine tablet, his daily defence against malaria. Behind him came Inspector Tan, with some statements about a recent serious wounding in a kampong a few miles away. Steven motioned to him to sit down on the other side of the desk. He had not told him of the business with Colonel O’Neill and the armoury as, if it was a total red-herring, the fewer people who knew about it, the better.
‘Tan, where do we go from here, eh?’ he began, wanting to see if the highly intelligent inspector had any new thoughts to offer about the impasse in which they found themselves. ‘Do you feel that it is at all possible that our culprit is from the hospital?’
The smooth-faced officer sat primly in his chair opposite his chief. ‘Anything is possible, sir. Who of us can ever tell what emotions are seething beneath the surface of any of our fellow men?’
Steven had a fleeting impression that he was listening to some saying of Confucius, but Tan soon became less philosophical and more practical.
‘Sir, we have the surgeon gentleman, Major Bright, who it seems is very enamoured with Mrs Diane. I came to learn that he would very much have liked her to divorce her husband so that they could marry – and time was running out, as he is soon due to return to England. That could be a motive for him to rid himself of Mr Robertson. He has no firm alibi for the time of the shooting.’
‘So he’s a favourite of yours for the killing?’
Tan gave a slight lift of the shoulders, his face remaining impassive. ‘It seems unlikely, but it is a possibility. Perhaps a better one than for his colleague, Captain Meredith, the anaesthetist. He too had a motive in that Mr Robertson appears to have captured the affections of one of the nursing sisters, who the captain had considered his own lady friend. But that seems a much weaker motivation than the first.’
Trust his inspector to lay out the facts in such a clear, if dispassionate way, thought Blackwell.
‘Any other suspects appeal to you, Tan?’ he asked.
‘I understand that the Commanding Officer has been acting somewhat strangely,’ replied Tan, again surprising his boss with his grasp of the local gossip from BMH. ‘Recently, he also seems to be unusually attentive to Mrs Robertson, though I fail to see the relevance of that.’
The Chinese officer paused for a moment. ‘Those are the military candidates, sir. But of course, there are the civilians, the planters. Mr Arnold has a rather dubious past, including using a gun to wound someone in Australia, but I see little motivation for shooting Mr Robertson. I have heard that he has expressed open admiration for Mrs Diane, but I doubt that he wanted to remove her husband in order to marry her.’
‘What about the Mackays?’ asked Steven, curious to hear what his inspector’s analytical mind felt about them.
‘From my interviews with them when I took statements, I felt that there was some unhappiness between them. I heard rumours from elsewhere that it was possible that Mr Robertson had carried on some adulterous relationship with Mrs Mackay, but that seemed in the past. I cannot believe that it would be in the best interests of Mr Mackay to kill his employer, unless he was consumed by an excess of outraged jealousy.’
Steven was secretly amused by Tan’s rather pedantic and prim phraseology, probably culled from classic English novels, but he appreciated his clear overview of the situation, which confirmed his own feelings.
He placed his Paludrine tablet on his tongue and washed it down with the fizzy grey juice.
‘We’ll just have to wait and see what happens next, I’m afraid,’ he said to his inspector, reaching across for the reports on the local assault.
They had not long to wait.
THIRTEEN
The next couple of days seemed relatively placid in BMH Tanah Timah, though various things were going on under the surface. Major Morris went discreetly to the arms kote and identified the rifle that his commanding officer had taken out. Through his many contacts in the garrison, he arranged to have it test fired over there, taking it personally in his car to one of the Brigade armourers. He brought it back almost immediately, together with the spent bullet and took the latter over to Steven Blackwell, to be sent down on the night train to the forensic laboratory in KL. He knew he was taking a chance over this, as if the colonel ever learnt of it – assuming that he did not eventually turn out to be the guilty party – then he was likely to face a court martial and the end of his career and pension.
Desmond O’Neill was also unaware of another matter concerning himself, as Major Martin, the senior physician, had had a covert telephone conversation with a friend and colleague in BMH Singapore, another major who was the Command Psychiatrist. After hearing what Martin had to say, he promised to come up to Tanah Timah the following week, in the guise of one of his routine visits to the physicians in the other four military hospitals.
The more junior medical staff, including Tom Howden, knew nothing of these machinations. The pathologist was quite content to get on with running the laboratory, the novelty of having his own place for the first time keeping him as happy as a sandboy. He spent half a day writing up a full report of his examinations of the shot terrorists. The film he had exposed up near Grik was developed by the photographic unit in the garrison and he was glad to see that his amateur efforts had resulted in clear, if horrific, pictures. These were duly sent down in the official mail to GHQ in Singapore and presumably would eventually find their way to the War Office and their gun experts in Woolwich. He carefully excluded the aerial shots he had taken from the Auster, which he airmailed home to his parents, to be shown around the rest of the family and neighbours to proudly demonstrate how their young Tommy was fighting to keep back the Communist hordes!
On Friday, after a nine-o’clock cup of pale fluid which his corporal alleged was Nescafe, he was at his microscope studying the first batch of blood films, two of which his technician Embi bin Sharif said were positive for malaria. In the middle of this peaceful exercise, he heard a sudden clatter of ammunition boots on the concrete floor of the main laboratory and a moment later the blond head of Sergeant Oates appeared around his door.
‘Sorry to disturb you, sir, but a guardroom runner is here with a message for you to go down to Major Morris’s office at once. He says it’s really urgent.’
The pathologist grabbed his cap and hurried after the runner, who had no idea what the panic was about.
