by Jean Chapman
Liz glanced round to make sure they could not be overheard before asking, ‘Is this the sortie the major and Alan will have gone on now?’
She felt sure he remembered seeing Alan and herself together in the hut, remembered putting his hand on Alan’s shoulder, as he gave the briefest of nods. It precipitated her into a torment of anxiety. A camp of terrorists that large! How many guardsmen would have gone in? Sorties as far as she could gather were small units of five or six men, with large operations spoken of when five or six such units went into an area at the same time. A camp that could hide five hundred was something quite different. She felt a terrible premonition that she might never see Alan again.
‘I wish I were with them!’ She jumped as George put his hand over hers as it lay on the table between them and repeated what he had said. ‘I wish I could be with them.’
‘But this trap?’ Blanche insisted. ‘George, our time will be short, I expect. We can’t do anything about Sturgess in the jungle, but we might be able to help you if you tell us all about it.’
‘Right!’ George was reminded of his own desperate situation. ‘I had a message I thought was from the police to say that my worker’s daughter had been found in the hands of a brothelkeeper who was holding her by force to use her for prostitution. I was to go to Room 21 at this particular boarding house to help the police identify the girl during a raid they were planning to make.
‘I went to this kind of rooming house; there was no one about. I went up to the first floor and found the room. I listened at the door and could hear a girl crying. I knocked and went in. It was dark and the girl was whimpering like a whipped puppy. I called her name and she answered from the bed.
‘I went over and sat down on the bed, put my hand out and touched her shoulder.’ He paused and swallowed at the recollection. ‘Then all hell broke loose. The light went on in the room, there was the noise of boots pounding up the stairs and from under the sheet this thing ... this girl emerged. Her nose was pouring with blood, her eye and mouth were split and bleeding, her blouse had been ripped from her shoulders, her trousers torn away. She shouted, “Rape! Help me! Rape!”
‘Rape,’ he repeated quietly, shaking his head, ‘but what I shall never forget is her eyes. They didn’t shout rape, they were like the slogans on some of their posters, they glittered and shouted, “Revenge! Death to the running dogs!”’
He finished the whisky. ‘Then the police were in the room, the girl curled into a sobbing ball on the bed — and the rest, as they say, is history.’
‘But who had attacked her?’ Liz asked, remembering the photographs.
‘It has to have been one of her own,’ George said solemnly. ‘There is no way such a trap could have been sprung so neatly otherwise.’
‘You mean she let someone do that to her?’
‘She’d volunteer,’ George said and his eyes were hard with certainty.
‘One of your workers’ daughters,’ Blanche commented.
‘I obviously have communist sympathisers in Kampong Kinta — fanatical activists would be a better description, remembering little Li Min’s eyes.’
Liz remembered her visit to Bukit Kinta, and the creeping aura of fear she had felt at the mine. ‘But I thought many of your workpeople were related?’
‘Bad apples in every barrel,’ he said.
Chapter Fourteen
Having looked through a sketchbook Elizabeth Hammond had left in the lounge at Rinsey, John Sturgess was sure the picture drawn inside the book of poetry was her work.
What he doubted was that the book really belonged to Guardsman Alan Cresswell. He searched through the pages but there was nothing written anywhere to indicate ownership, nor, he thought cynically, was the way some of the pages were stuck together indicative that the book contained favourite works of either one.
The only thing he was sure of was that the drawing portrayed just a plain run-of-the-mill guardsman, there were no insignias of rank on his jungle green kit and he held a rifle. Where the man was supposed to be standing was quite unknown to him and seemed quite meaningless.
He felt no guilt at taking the book from the envelope and scrutinising it — he had censored many men’s letters in his time, and this seemed no different to him. Cresswell was under his command; his life, so to speak, was his to order.
Sturgess closed the book slowly, calculating that he could draw immediate lines of Cresswell’s life with more ease than he could seemingly order his own. The course he had really wanted his own life to take was, he bitterly admitted, beyond his own powers. Elizabeth Hammond could, on the other hand, be an excellent secondary objective, a compensation. He slipped the book of poems into his locker drawer.
Liz was so like his wife, his lost wife, in looks. She had some of the same qualities too, he mused, some he’d have to be careful of. They both had a certain meekness of appearance, like the proverbial mouse, yet both had proved to have remarkably sharp little teeth. Elizabeth could more than hold her own in private conversation — but marriage brought a man authority. He was sure that had the war not come along he would still have had Audrey by his side and sons of his own by now.
He lit a cigarette and walked out. It was marginally cooler at night and the huge moon reflected in the water in the deep monsoon ditch made a natural guiding line for his stroll — towards his only half-acknowledged objective.
He turned to look at the camp, rows of rectangular tents, most with their sides rolled up to take advantage of any breeze. He could see his sergeant writing to his family as usual, a man who would be totally destroyed, he imagined, if his wife ever played fast and loose. Most of the men were lying on their beds, the legs of which all stood in round cigarette tins filled with insect repellent.
He walked on, cupping his cigarette so its glowing end should not be seen, until he could see Cresswell. He was reading. He watched the young man sprawled on the bed, one knee crooked, book tilted to catch the best light from the Tilley lamp tied to a tent pole.
Sturgess felt envy and could no longer ask himself what a girl might see in such a man, he knew. He even felt a stir of a forbidden attraction. Stripped almost bare, the guardsman’s body had the lithe attraction of a girl’s. Sturgess was forty years old and knew it could be argued that he was too old for Elizabeth Hammond.
He straightened his shoulders; he had never failed as a soldier, an officer ... He did not intend to let one of his own men beat him in this competition.
Tactics, that’s what I need, he thought, having been trained to figure out the way to win. He convinced himself that this girl was a better catch than his lost wife, the daughter of an impoverished Hampshire village schoolmaster, had been. For one thing, he could not see Blanche Hammond staying on their Malaysian rubber estate without her husband.
He felt better when he planned things, it alleviated the ache. Stooping to extinguish his cigarette under his heel, he moved nearer to watch Cresswell as he put down his book, yawned and stretched.
‘Have the sides down now, shall we?’ Cresswell’s voice came sleepily, almost seductively into the night, irritating Sturgess. He turned and walked away. Then he turned again and silently appraised Cresswell of his situation. I have the ordering of you, he thought, visualising the man as if he stood before his desk for reprimand on company orders. Even after this major sortie, even should you survive everything I put you to, I’ll make sure you never go near the Hammonds’ plantation again.
‘Goodnight, sir.’ The soldier standing smoking outside a neighbouring tent made him start.
‘Goodnight,’ he responded sharply, then, realising it was one of his own picked group and they would all be together the following day and for some considerable time, living, sleeping, risking their lives together in the jungle, he added, ‘Time for your beauty sleep, Babyface.’ He needed the rest of his team on his side.
‘Right, sir.’
He thought of making it an order when the man did not move immediately, but remembered that the last word
s his wife had said to him had been, ‘You were always good at orders, John, but my life is no longer yours to order.’
Before that she had gone on a lot about the way he had ordered every second of her existence and that the Japanese might have overrun Singapore and captured the whole of the island and peninsula, but they had set her free! Preposterously sharp little teeth!
He gritted his own at the memory and moved restlessly on through the tents. Somewhere he could hear the slap of cards and some quiet, good-humoured banter as men had a final game before sleep. He envied their easy companionship. This he had never had, from lonely childhood to bullied schoolboy to strait-laced cadet.
When they were first married, Audrey had said he was at his best when in a position of power, in control — alone. He had taken it as a compliment.
Once begun on this trail, his mind slid easily back to 1942, to the agonies he had undergone when his young wife had been torn from his side. The six intervening years seemed sometimes no more than days, so vividly did he recall the noise, heat and panic all around them.
He had queued with her on the quayside, pushing her ever nearer the gangplank of the ship with other wives, women and girls who had lingered on working in essential jobs or caring for children, their menfolk all desperate to get them away from Singapore.
There had not at the end been a real moment of parting for she had been swept from him by the tide of anxious embarkees as yet again Japanese warplanes bombed and strafed the harbour. For a second he had seen the top of her brown hair, a raised arm, finally just a hand, as if she was drowning in the sea of people pushing relentlessly towards the ship.
The moment had only recently been refocused and magnified under the clear lens of hindsight. Since his journey to the Blue Mountains of Australia, the memory was more harrowing with each recall. Before there had been so much hope, now it was a repeated bereavement.
The truth had taken so long to learn. Immediately after the fall of Singapore he and many remaining men who had trained for just such an eventuality had retreated into the jungles of the peninsula. All through the war they had struck at the Japanese in any way they could. He had eventually learned that the ship she had embarked on had been sunk, and had agonised over the lifted arm as if it had been some omen of a drowning.
That was the first time he had thought he had lost her for good.
Then he’d heard survivors had boarded another vessel bound for England. But though there had been coded messages sent from the secret jungle radios asking for news, there had been no reports of anyone landing in England by the name of Audrey Rosalind Sturgess.
He had had to wait until the war was over and he could travel back to England to learn that some of the people on that first stricken ship had been transferred to one going to Australia.
Walking back to his own tent, he let down the sides, opened his locker and looked at the book inside. Then he closed it and locked it away again. It was time he had his chance, time for a counterattack on life.
He saw again the bungalow on the banks of a river, the mountains blue with the aura of gumtrees in the distance. He was irretrievably bitter. He had spent the war years pining and mourning for her, then two years looking for her, as well as hundreds of pounds — and the worst thing of all had been finding her.
*
‘Hope you all behaving yourself in ‘ere.’
Alan lifted his head to see Babyface’s cratered face grinning in at the tent flap.
‘Clear off and go to bed!’ Alan told him.
‘That’s what the major just told me to do,’ he said with a jerk of his head in the direction of the night as he went to sit on Dan’s bed.
‘What’s he snooping about at?’ Ben Sutherland asked, but Babyface was watching Alan as he drew himself up to a sitting position.
‘Watching you.’ He nodded in Alan’s direction. ‘Watching you like a bloody hawk.’
Alan scowled but did not speak.
‘So what’s so special about you?’ Babyface obviously thought there was a possible source of entertainment here. ‘You did know we’d got enough signallers without you being fetched back from that plantation? What you done to him? Why does he want you in the ulu with ‘im?’
The other five men in the tent all looked for his answer. Explaining was something Alan had been pressed to do ever since he found himself reunited with the men who had been at Rinsey. For it seemed what Babyface said was true; a signaller from Headquarters Company had found himself sent on unexpected furlough to Penang Island. There was no way, though, Alan was going to try to explain his real suspicions about his cavalier removal from Rinsey.
‘Perhaps he couldn’t get on with the other chap.’ Dan tried valiantly to be on Alan’s side. ‘After all, an officer has to work pretty closely with his signaller in the jungle.’
Alan still did not respond and Dan went on, ‘I’m bloody scared of going back into the ulu, I don’t mind telling you.’
‘Everybody is,’ Alan answered, thinking that the heat made Dan’s freckles look almost black against his cameolike complexion.
‘It’s not the ulu that’s worrying our Al, it’s leaving the girlie behind at that plantation. Ideas above his station, that’s what he’s got!’
‘That’s not true!’ Dan sprang to his aid with the devastating remark, ‘If anyone fancies that Miss Hammond it’s the major. I saw him looking at her when he thought nobody knew.’
‘Sounds as if you’d better watch your back, Cresswell!’
‘Aye! Strange things can happen on jungle patrols.’
‘Aye.’ Dan again sought to be on Alan’s side. ‘And it wouldn’t be the first officer who’d been shot by his own men.’
‘Thanks, Dan,’ Alan said mildly. ‘that’s a great help.’
‘Well, you know what I mean.’ Dan protested his good intentions. ‘You know as well as I do that officers can’t afford to throw their weight about so much when they’re having to muck in with you and we’ve all got live ammunition and that ... ’
Alan raised his eyebrows, remembering his admiration for Sturgess in action at the village, but there were murmurs of agreement from several throats.
‘I’ve known a time-serving drill sergeant I wouldn’t have minded walking behind with a loaded rifle,’ Sinclair, the elder of the Sutherland brothers, muttered.
‘Hey!’ Dan asked in an excited whisper, ‘and have any of you lot seen the amount of top brass we’ve had in this camp the last three days?’
‘The Smiths reckon it’s something big this time,’ Babyface said with a resigned sigh, quoting the other two members of their group, no relation, but always together.
‘I’m sure it’s different,’ Alan agreed. This was one thing he was quite prepared to talk about. ‘For one thing there’s a lot more men going in.’
‘Yeah! And there’s a lot more dropping zone tape and maps around. We’re going after something specific.’
‘Or someone?’ Alan wondered. ‘Heng Hou perhaps.’
‘Christ!’ Babyface blasphemed vehemently. ‘Don’t want anything to do with that bastard. You heard what he did to that Seaforth sergeant!’
They had but it didn’t stop him refreshing their memories.
‘Threw him down a pit lined with sharpened bamboos all pointing downwards from the sides.’ Babyface stood up so he could better display the arrangement of the trap. ‘He was impaled in the bottom and if he tried to get out he spiked himself worse. Every time he moved he — ’
‘Very heartening!’ Sergeant Mackenize had come and stood unobserved in the doorway. ‘If that’s the last bedtime story, I’d say get your bleeding heads down before it’s time to get up again. Otherwise I’ll tell you a story that’ll really make your toes curl. Now stop your yapping and get to your own tent, Babyface.’
‘Well, we won’t be able to talk much once we get into the jungle, will we, Sarge?’ Dan, everybody’s champion, commented. ‘It’ll be all hush and hand signals.’
‘Very true
, Veasey.’ The sergeant made a few meaningful jerks of his thumb towards Dan’s bed.
As he made the gestures, ‘Lights Out’ was sounded by the trumpeter and all over the camp the Tilley lights were extinguished. As Dan slid into the bed nearest the door, the sergeant pulled down the mosquito netting for him.
Alan thought it a kind act to close his eyes upon, and soon the camp was threaded by the assorted snores of men who were too exhausted to be worried, while others lay staring into the darkness and into their own particular thoughts and fears.
Alan lay thinking of Liz and Rinsey, then of tomorrow’s mission. It all suddenly felt so different for him. If he believed what was said, he had really not been needed. He need not be going. The thought needled, made him nervous and resentful. He hoped the camp cook would be prompt in posting his letters — to Liz and to his mother. There seemed so much that was not quite right, so much plotting, lots of rumours being spread.
By the light of the moon he could see his pack and wireless all ready for the morning. An early breakfast, porridge, perhaps even fried bread dipped in egg and bacon, then into the jungle.
Rumour again had it that they were to be gone some time because of the amounts of stores and ammunition that had been shared among the loads to be carried. Then someone said the patrol was being delayed because George Harfield has been arrested in Ipoh for raping a Chinese girl and the major had been to see about it.
Alan had found this rumour so outrageous that he had hopes that some of the others were false too.
*
Nearly two weeks into the jungle operation Alan felt he had never been out. The few days in between had been mere illusion and the time at the derelict bungalow sheer fantasy.
Sight bleared with the sweat he had no free hand or energy to wipe away, he moved after smeared green figures in a green and brown world booby-trapped with rocks, ground creepers and those damned vicious thorns.
