Dead in the Dog (3 page)

As the doctor hesitantly touched his cap in return, he was conscious of the sweat-blackened areas of fabric under his arms and over the whole of his back. He heard the vehicle roar away behind him, but kept his eyes fixed on the deserted huts, a feeling of almost desperate loneliness engulfing him.

As Tom Howden was staring despondently at his new home, Diane Robertson sat alone in hers, the late afternoon sun striking through the open doors. The silence was broken only by her sniffs of petulant self-pity, until a small voice asked, ‘Mem want anything now?'

The face of her
amah
, Lee Mei Mei, appeared timorously around the door to the dining room, half scared, half intrigued by the domestic dramas that were becoming more frequent in the Robertson household. Mei was a slight, fragile Chinese girl of twenty, with an elfin face that always looked slightly startled. Her glossy black hair was pulled back into a ponytail held with a rubber band, the end hanging down the back of her blue floral pyjama suit.

‘Yes, May. Tell Siva to bring me a stinger, will you? A large one.'

Diane sat alone in the wide, lofty room, the big brass fan whirling slowly over her head, trying to waft the cloying air into a draught. She thought of Norfolk now, at the beginning of December, cold and perhaps wet, but not with the all-pervading dampness they had here, where there was an electric light bulb in every wardrobe to keep the mould off the shoes and where the camera had to be kept in a sealed biscuit tin with a bag of silica gel.

She wished to God she had stayed in England and not been seduced by both James's body and his glowing descriptions of life on a Malayan rubber estate. Twenty-six years old, she was the third daughter of a minor squire from Norfolk, rejoicing in the name of Henry Blessington-Luke. After an expensive and largely wasted education at Cheltenham, she had done little but ride, party and hunt for both foxes and a husband. Three years earlier, at a Hunt Ball near Newmarket, she had met James Robertson, home on leave – and three months later, had married him in the cathedral in Singapore.

The bastard! She gingerly touched her face again and wondered how well she could cover up any marks by tomorrow night, when there was the weekly dance at The Dog.

A slim Tamil came in through the dining room, carrying a tray bearing a bottle of Johnnie Walker, a tumbler and a jug of iced water.

‘A big one, Siva,' she murmured, still shielding one side of her face with a scarlet-nailed hand, though the
amah
had already given him a blow-by-blow account of the fracas. He poured a liberal shot of whisky into the glass and added an equal amount of water – the famous ‘stinger' was a corruption of the Malay ‘
stengah
', meaning ‘half'.

He lowered the tray for her to take the glass, but she gestured to a small table at the end of the settee. ‘Leave it, Siva. I may want another.'

He put the tray down and stepped back.

‘Mem want anything else? Sandwich, curry puff?'

She shook her head, managing to give him a wan smile. He was a good-looking fellow of about her own age – but of course, he was Indian. Not that that seemed to bother her bloody husband!

The cook-cum-butler padded silently to the door but stopped there to throw a look back at the woman sipping her drink. Though he considered her no more attractive than most of the sleek girls of his own race, the contrast between their dark beauty and her startling blondeness always intrigued him. Slim but full-breasted, her long pale neck was framed by the silky swathe of hair the colour of light honey that came down to her shoulders. He knew that some English women got their colour from a bottle, but this was surely natural. With a little sigh at such forbidden fruit, he padded off to his kitchen hut behind the house, to sit over a cup of tea with the
amah
and gossip about the latest domestic developments at Gunong Besar Estate.

On the settee, the blonde drank her first stinger quickly and poured herself a stronger one. She lifted her shapely legs up on to the cushions and leaned back against one of the padded arms, cradling the drink in her hands. Her temper had cooled, but it was replaced by a steely determination to do the swine down as effectively as she could.

‘Two can play at that game,' she whispered to herself, then smiled into her whisky. The game had already started, though James didn't know it. She didn't care if he did, she thought with uncertain bravado. But there were problems – she was still his wife and though she had a small allowance of her own from Daddy, this damned plantation was their livelihood. If she blew the whistle on him with Douglas Mackay, what would happen to the place? James was too dependent on his manager to survive on his own and even if their marriage was becoming decidedly rocky, she didn't want to divorce a bankrupt and have to go home penniless. And she certainly didn't want to be divorced by him and go home both penniless and with her tail between her legs, so she had to watch her mouth and her step.

Diane mixed a third drink, resolutely deciding that it would be her last before dinner. There were magazines on the little table, but after riffling through the curled pages of a six-month-old
Vogue
, she threw it petulantly on to the polished floor and stared aimlessly around the room, which took up the full width of the bungalow. It was large and bare by British standards, the walls lined with darkly varnished planks that carried a few conical Malay straw hats and a set of framed hunting prints. There was no ceiling, the inside of the high peaked roof being wood-lined like the walls. The furniture was equally sombre, a locally made wicker suite with a large settee and four armchairs.

A ponderous teak sideboard, an old-fashioned piano left from the twenties, and a sandalwood chest on which sat a radiogram, completed the decor.

‘God, what a dump!' she murmured, self-pity washing over her. After a moment, she rose restlessly to her feet and took her glass across to the verandah. The front wall of the lounge had three pairs of slatted doors designed to let in air, but keep out the sun. The centre ones were open and Diane walked out on to the wide verandah which extended the full width of the big bungalow, furnished with some rattan chairs and a couple of small tables beneath the overhang of the tin roof. It was railed in by a varnished fence, except at the centre, where wide wooden steps went down some eight feet to the ground, the whole building being raised high on brick piles. Her Austin Ten was sheltered underneath, alongside the mud-spattered Land Rover that James used around the estate, though he rarely bothered to park his old armoured Buick under there.

She leaned on the rail, with her glass gripped in both hands, as she had done hundreds of times before and looked out over the estate. Though Norfolk became increasingly desirable with every passing month, she had to admit that the view from here was spectacular. The bungalow was built on a small knoll above the dirt road that led down on the left to Tanah Timah, three miles away. It was at the foot of an isolated hill about a thousand feet high, hence the name
Gunong Besar
– ‘big mountain' – though it was a mere hillock compared to the peaks ten miles behind them, on the border between Perak and Pahang States. The bungalow faced west and looked over their acres of rubber down into the distant valley. On rare clear days, they could see as far as the towns of Sungei Siput and Kuala Kangsar and even imagine that they could see the Malacca Straits on the far horizon, over which there were often fantastic sunsets.

She dropped her eyes to the road at the bottom of the knoll fifty yards away, made of the red laterite soil that was dust when it was dry, but usually was a tenacious mud that stuck to wheels and bodywork. There was very little traffic on it, as only one small village, Kampong Kerbau, lay a few miles up to the right. Police patrols and a few military vehicles were the main users, apart from a couple of Chinese trucks and the twice-daily bus to the village.

The whisky was getting warm and Diane tossed down half of it and walked to the right-hand end of the verandah to lean on the side rail. Here her elegant features, with the cornflower blue eyes and enviable bone structure, seemed to darken as she stared past the flowers of a large Flame-of-the-Forest tree down towards another bungalow a few hundred yards away. Built nearer the foot of the knoll, it was smaller than theirs, but of the same general appearance, though all she could see through the trees was the red tin roof and the end of their verandah.

As she watched, trying to project hatred across the space, a battered pre-war Plymouth pick-up came from the latex-processing sheds on the other side of the road and crossed into the drive to the next-door bungalow. The trees obstructed most of her view, but she could just see the driver get out and run up the verandah steps. After spending most of his life in the East, Douglas Mackay seemed impervious to the heat, which made most Europeans slow-moving. She had no quarrel with Douglas, more a mild pity for his weakness in dealing with his domestic life – though she was in no position to criticize in that direction, she thought cynically.

As she leaned on the varnished rail, one of her fingers found a deep scar in the tropical hardwood. It had recently been painted over, but her gaze automatically moved up the planked wall of the bungalow at the end of the verandah. Here were a row of similar marks and she knew that Douglas's bungalow had even more. They were bullet holes, a legacy of the last terrorist attack on Gunong Besar, earlier that year. Thank God she had been away on a shopping trip in Singapore – at least, that's what she had told James.

If she had been here and survived, nothing would have stopped her from getting the next Blue Funnel boat home from Penang. As it was, her dear husband had had a tough job persuading her to stay, even though no one had been hurt – apart from a couple of rubber-tappers being killed down in the worker's lines across the road. A pity that bitch next door hadn't stopped a bullet, she thought vindictively. If the CTs hadn't been disturbed by the chance arrival of an armoured patrol on night exercises from Brigade, maybe she would have been. So might James and Douglas, she supposed, but somehow that possibility didn't tug too much at her heart strings.

As it was, the attackers must have been a pretty small bunch, as they scarpered as soon as the Aussies poured out of their Saracens – she had thanked the good-looking captain personally a week later, in the back of his car behind the club. The two planters had blasted off a few rounds into the darkness just before the troops arrived and certainly James had basked for weeks afterwards in The Dog, as the hero of Gunong Besar – fighting off the Communist hordes like some gunslinger in a Western film. Secretly, when her initial terror had subsided, she rather admired him for a while, until she saw the extra attention that his fame gained him from the women in the club, which soured her back to her normal dislike of her husband.

Downing the last of her tepid drink, she walked barefoot back into the lounge to retrieve her shoes, one from under the settee, the other from near the unused piano, where it had come to rest after bouncing off her husband's neck.

Going through another door at the rear of the lounge, Diane went into a corridor which led to the dining room, guest bathroom and two spare bedrooms. She turned left to reach their own at the farther end. Like the rest of the rooms, it had no ceiling, the partition walls stopping eight feet up. The high, raftered roof was common to all the rooms, to allow as much circulation of air as possible – though privacy was a problem on the rare occasions when they had visitors staying, especially ones who became vocally amorous in bed.

She dropped her shoes on the floor and walked past the white tent of their mosquito-netted bed to reach the bathroom at the back. Inside there was a white-tiled floor and a washbasin against one wall. Opposite were three doors, one to a toilet, the other to a cubicle with a chipped cast-iron bath and the third a shower. Anxiously, Diane went to the damp-spotted mirror over the basin and stared at her face while she fingered her cheek. No doubt about it, there was faint blue bruising within the reddening – she could even make out two lines where the swine's fingers had struck her. As the sarcastic bastard had suggested, tomorrow would require some careful adjustment of her make-up, before she went to the club that evening.

With a sigh, she stripped off her dress of cream raw silk and dropped it into the straw laundry basket, along with her white bra and pants, ready for the
dhobi-amah
to collect. Going to the shower door, she opened it cautiously and stared at the bare cement floor, which sloped down to a drain pipe in the centre, emptying on to the ground beneath the house. Once she had been confronted by a snake which had crawled up the pipe – her screams had brought Siva running, who had been greatly impressed by her nudity, especially the blonde pubic hair, which he could hardly believe. As she dived for a towel to cover herself, the Tamil had calmly picked up the serpent and thrown it through the window.

‘Only wolf snake, Mem. Not poisonous,' he had said, but ever since she had peered suspiciously around the door before venturing in to stand under the lukewarm spray that came from a tank of rainwater behind the roof.

When she had finished, Diane put on a light dressing gown from one of the wardrobes and went to get another drink. She flopped back on to the settee to sulk and wonder if that bastard would come home in time for dinner that evening.

Sometime after six o'clock, that particular bastard was sitting on a bar stool in the Sussex Club, drinking his fourth Tiger beer and reading yesterday's
Straits Times.
He concentrated on the rubber prices and the reports of CT activity, topics which were studied here as seriously as the football results and weather forecast were in Britain. Turning back a page from the commercial news, he read that two days ago there had been an abortive attack on a train down south in Johore which had been fought off by the escorts, but thankfully there had been no incidents up here in Perak for over a week. Maybe Chin Peng was getting the message, thought James, as the supply lines of the terrorist chief were being progressively strangled by General Sir Gerald Templer's policy of fencing-in all the villages in the Black Areas, depriving the CTs of food and local aid.