When he reached Alf’s office, he found Steven Blackwell sitting in front of the Admin Officer’s desk, both men looking extremely grim.
‘I didn’t use the phone, Tom, you never know who’s listening on that switchboard. This is a very sensitive issue.’
Howden wondered if the colonel had gone completely berserk or perhaps the Third World War had started, but Alf rapidly explained, speaking quietly as the slatted shutters offered little privacy on the front verandah of the hospital.
‘The superintendent here has been told that two bodies have been found up at Gunong Busar this morning. He thought it would be as well if a doctor went up there with him and you seem the obvious choice, as there isn’t a civvy doctor nearer than Sungei Siput.’
Tom looked at the superintendent. ‘Two more dead? Who are they?’
‘I only have third-hand information, but I’m afraid it seems likely that they are Mr and Mrs Mackay. I had a phone call from Les Arnold, who was phoned by the Robertson’s head servant. Les was going down there straight away, but he rang me first.’
‘Better get going, Tom,’ said Morris. ‘The police Land Rover is waiting outside.’
‘What about the colonel?’ asked Tom warily. ‘Has he given it the OK?’ He recalled the fuss that O’Neill had made when Jimmy Robertson’s body was brought in to ‘his’ hospital.
‘He’s not here, he was summoned down to Kinrara for some meeting, thank God!’
‘You’re not coming with us?’
Alf shook his head. ‘I’ve got to mind the shop, when the CO’s away. And anyway, it’s not Army business, this. You happen to be the only doctor around here used to seeing corpses! Now be off with you.’
Tom climbed into the back of the blue police vehicle and they shot off, the Malay constable who was driving being obviously delighted to have an emergency as an excuse for putting his accelerator foot flat on the floor.
As they zoomed out into the road and accelerated past the garrison gates, Steven half turned from the front seat.
‘I know no more about this than you heard from Alf. I suppose the servant in Gunong Besar rang Les Arnold as he was the nearest. All Les knew was that for a change, this time it was not a shooting.’
The Land Rover turned up past The Dog on to the laterite road to Kampong Kerbau and within a few minutes was roaring up the steep entrance drive to the Robertson’s bungalow. As the driver skidded to a halt on the gravel, Steven half expected to see Diane leaning over the balcony holding a glass of gin and a cigarette. But she was gone, staying at the best hotel in Penang until the coroner’s inquest was held on her late husband – and until the arrival of the next Blue Funnel ship bound for Britain.
When they clambered out, Tom saw a battered ex-US army jeep parked at the bottom of the steps. He knew this belonged to Les Arnold, but there was no sign of the Australian. The superintendent made to climb up to the verandah, but a Chinese girl appeared above him, with a Tamil woman hovering anxiously behind her. The
‘Siva took Mister Arnold down there, sir!’ she cried.
Steven raised his swagger stick in acknowledgement and with Tom and the driver in tow, hurried between exotically flowered bushes to the driveway of the Mackay bungalow.
Here they found the Australian sitting on the steps up to the house, smoking a cigarette while waiting for them to arrive. He stood as they came near, dressed in khaki shirt and shorts, with a wide canvas bush hat on his head. His usual laconic, sarcastic manner was missing and his long face was solemn.
‘Bad business, this. The damn place must be cursed!’
A few paces away stood Siva, the senior servant in the Robertson household and Arnold waved a hand towards him.
‘The boy here phoned me less than an hour ago – just before I rang you, Steve,’ he said. ‘So I came down here bloody quick to see what was up.’
‘And what was up, Les?’ demanded Blackwell.
‘Come and see for yourself – under here, first of all.’
He loped away down the slope which ran around the further side of the bungalow. The house was built up on a number of brick columns which, due to the uneven slope of the ground, were higher on the end further away from the Robertson house. Here the underside of the floor was eight feet off the ground, giving plenty of height for the two cars which were parked underneath.
Towards the back of this undercroft, a sombre sight awaited them. Hanging by the neck from a rope suspended from a beam supporting the floor above, was the body of Douglas Mackay. His feet were just touching the ground, his legs slightly bent at the knees and his head was tilted acutely sideways. Nearby was an overturned wooden crate.
‘Siva says this is exactly how he found him,’ said Les Arnold. ‘Nothing’s been touched.’
The grave-faced Indian servant nodded. ‘I just went near enough to make sure Mr Mackay was dead, sir. I knew I could do nothing for him, so I phoned to Mr Arnold.’
‘How did you know he was here? You live next door.’
‘The sweeper found him, sir. He goes around the place every morning to clean up. He ran to tell me.’
Blackwell decided to check on the body before things got even more complicated.
‘Tom, let’s have a quick look here first.’ The three whites advanced on the body, which hung in frozen stillness, its contact with the earthen floor preventing any swinging in the slight breeze.
The pathologist had attended three hangings dealt with by his boss during his year of pathology in the UK and as far as he could see, this one was a classical self-suspension. The thin woven rope had cut deeply into the neck, a slip knot riding high beneath the left ear. The skin above it was purple and the face was red and suffused, with small pinpricks of blood under the skin.
The eyes were half open and he could see more small bleeding points in the whites. Tom used the back of his hand to test the temperature of Mackay’s bare forearm. Even given the warmth of the climate it felt cool, and when he gently tried to lift the wrist, there was firm resistance from rigor mortis.
‘How long d’you reckon he’s been dead?’ barked the Australian, heedless of the superintendent’s presence.
‘God, I’m no forensic expert,’ exclaimed Tom. ‘And it’s hard enough for them at home. Here the climate makes a nonsense of temperature calculations, but he’s certainly cooled down a bit.’
‘It looked as if he was in rigor mortis when you moved his arm,’ said Steven, reclaiming his investigative role from Les Arnold.
Howden nodded. ‘He’s still very stiff. I’ve read that rigor comes on and goes off much quicker in hot climates, but he must have been dead for at least some hours. There’s no sign of decomposition or of insects laying eggs on his eyelids, so at a wild guess, I think he must have died sometime during the night or early this morning.’
Blackwell gave him a very worried look.
‘Anything about it that suggests he didn’t do it himself?’
Tom shrugged, reluctant to give too many opinions about things he was not really qualified to pronounce upon.
‘He’s certainly died from having his neck squeezed by that noose. There’s that crate that presumably he stood on to tie the rope around that beam. Then he must have stepped off it!’
‘But his feet are still on the ground,’ objected the planter.
Tom had read many of the forensic textbooks, partly from a morbid interest and he had an answer to that.
‘No problem, the weight of the body leaning into the noose is enough. I’ve seen pictures of people who have hanged themselves from a door knob.’
‘Could anyone else have croaked him and made it look like a suicide?’ demanded the irrepressible Aussie.
Tom was getting out of his depth. ‘I’ve no idea, Les. But I’ve also read that murder by hanging is very rare, unless the victim is drunk, drugged or physically restrained.’
The police officer turned to the servant from next door. ‘Now, what’s the situation about Mrs Mackay? Where is she?’
‘Upstairs in her bedroom,’ cut in Arnold, once again. ‘I just had a quick look from the doorway. I didn’t go in,
