Dead in the Dog
Knight, Bernard
Severn House Publishers (2012)
* * *
Rating: ★★★★★
Tags: Crime, General, Mystery Detective, Fiction
Crimettt Generalttt Mystery Detectivettt Fictionttt
A fifties murders mystery set in Malaya from author of the ‘Crowner John’ books. - Arriving in Singapore, newly-qualified pathologist Tom Howden is still questioning his decision to sign on for three years in Her Majesty's Far East Land Forces. As he settles in, he discovers that his new home is a hotbed of scandal and intrigue. When an English planter is attacked one night, the finger of suspicion naturally points at local bandits, rather than a fellow Englishman. It soon becomes clear, however, that the situation is rather more complicated – and deadly – than it first appeared. Tom Howden’s newly-acquired forensic skills are about to be put to the ultimate test.
About the Author
Bernard Knight is the author of the Crown John Mysteries series and is a member of The Medieval Murderers.
Table of Contents
A Selection of Titles by Bernard Knight
Title Page
Copyright
Author’s note
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
A Selection of Titles by Bernard Knight
The Crowner John Series
THE SANCTUARY SEEKER
THE POISONED CHALICE
CROWNER’S QUEST
THE AWFUL SECRET
THE TINNER’S CORPSE
THE GRIM REAPER
FEAR IN THE FOREST
THE WITCH HUNTER
FIGURE OF HATE
THE ELIXIR OF DEATH
THE NOBLE OUTLAW
THE MANOR OF DEATH
CROWNER ROYAL
A PLAGUE OF HERETICS
The Richard Pryor Forensic Mysteries
WHERE DEATH DELIGHTS
ACCORDING TO THE EVIDENCE
GROUNDS FOR APPEAL
DEAD IN THE DOG
Bernard Knight
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
First world edition published 2012
in Great Britain and in the USA by
SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of
9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.
Copyright © 2012 by Bernard Knight.
All rights reserved.
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Knight, Bernard.
Dead in the dog.
1. Pathologists–Fiction. 2. Singapore–Social
conditions–20th century–Fiction. 3. Detective and
mystery stories.
I. Title
823.9'14-dc23
ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-269-6 (Epub)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8161-8 (cased)
ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-424-0 (trade paper)
Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.
This ebook produced by
Palimpsest Book Production Limited,
Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
None of the characters portrayed existed in real life and every effort has been made to avoid suggesting the identity of people who were in North Malaya in the nineteen-fifties. In particular, the portrayal of characters in the Armed Forces, especially the Royal Army Medical Corps and Queen Alexandra’s Royal Army Nursing Corps, is utterly fictitious. The three years the author spent there as an Army doctor were the most interesting of his whole career, but none of the events in this novel actually took place. However, he hopes that he has captured some of the ambience of the last years of the British military presence in that fascinating country.
The campaign against the Communist Chinese insurgents led by Chin Peng, in which 519 British and over 1,300 Malayan troops and police lost their lives, was one of the longest on record, lasting from 1948 until 1960. It was also the only successful one, thanks to the painstaking efforts of British and Commonwealth forces in fighting the terrorists virtually hand-to-hand in the jungle. Yet in spite of more than a decade of strife, few now remember this vicious ‘Forgotten War’, without which modern Malaysia would not exist.
The Federation of Malaya was not known as ‘Malaysia’ until 1963 and place names are given here as they were in the nineteen fifties – ‘Melaka’ was ‘Malacca’, ‘Pulau Pinang’ was ‘Penang’ and so on.
PROLOGUE
Perak State, Malaya, December 1954
The shoe flew across the room, its high heel catching James hard on the side of his neck, leaving a red mark on the skin.
‘You bitch, what d’you think you’re doing!’
With a roar he launched himself at his wife and caught her a resounding smack across the face that made her teeth rattle. James was a big, powerful man and the imprint of his fingers immediately began to appear across her cheek. But Diane was a woman of spirit and instead of collapsing into a sobbing heap on the rattan settee, she hopped on her one bare foot, trying to pull off the other shoe to throw at him.
‘Bastard! You dirty, rotten bastard!’ she screamed. ‘I’ll tell Douglas! I will, this time!’
To avoid more shoe-throwing, he grabbed her bodily and threw her down on to the cushions.
‘Look, cut it out, you silly fool! I doubt it’ll be any surprise to Douglas, so you can save your breath.’
Suddenly aware that she had no chance against his physical strength, Diane began to cry, though they were more sobs of frustrated rage than real distress. She held a hand to her face, which was stinging from his blow.
‘I’ll have a bruise there now, you swine!’ she blubbered. ‘Everyone at The Dog will know that you’ve been knocking me about again.’
‘Then put some more Max Factor over it, you daft cow! You wear so much, a bit more won’t be noticed!’
He turned and stalked out of the lounge on to the verandah of the bungalow, then clattered down the steps outside. She heard a car door slam, then the Buick started up and with an angry roar, accelerated away with a crunching of gravel. The blonde rocked back and forth on the settee, hissing through the fingers that were held across her aching cheek.
‘You bastard, one of these days, I’ll kill you!’
ONE
He was hot, tired and slightly bewildered. His fibre suitcase, lashed with a strap that had once been his father’s belt, was in the back of the Land Rover. Alongside it was the new holdall that he had bought in Singapore to carry the overflow of his belongings. They said that the cabin-trunk he had packed so carefully in Gateshead wouldn’t arrive for another six weeks.
Tom had come by air-trooping, four days’ flight from Stansted Airport, cooped up in a Handley-Page Hermes that seemed only slightly faster than the Wright Flyer. His
heavy baggage was allegedly on its way by sea, but as he slumped in the passenger seat of the olive-green vehicle, he had his doubts whether he’d ever see the trunk again.
Tom Howden was a pessimist by nature, as he had learned that it was the best way to avoid disappointment. Still, as he was going to be stuck out here for years, he supposed he had to make the best of it. He wondered for the hundredth time, what temporary insanity had led him to sign on for three years, when he could have got away with two as a National Serviceman? Was an extra pip on the shoulder, better pay and the promise of a three hundred quid gratuity at the end, worth another twelve months in this saturated sweat-box?
With a resigned grunt, he shook off the mood of near-desperation and forced himself to look at the scenery – though already he had decided that one Malayan road looked much the same as the next. All bloody trees, thatched huts, scruffy shophouses and fields that looked like rectangular swamps.
The driver was a skinny lance corporal in a faded jungle-green uniform that looked as if it had been tailored for a Sumo wrestler. He took a covert look at the officer alongside and with the smug euphoria of someone who was only three weeks away from his ‘RHE’ – Return Home Establishment – date, he diagnosed a new recruit to Her Majesty’s Far East Land Forces. He saw a sturdy, almost squat young man with a round, plain face sporting a few old acne scars. It was a face that seemed to glare out at the world as if defying it to do its worst, with a downturned mouth and a brow too furrowed for someone in his mid-twenties. The corporal, a philosophical Cockney with an abiding curiosity about his fellow men, reckoned that this officer was a ‘prole’ like himself, different from the usual toffee-nosed, chinless wonders from the Garrison. But then, he wasn’t a proper officer, was he? He was an MO, according to the brass RAMC tabs on his shoulders.
‘Train a bit late, sir? They’re usually pretty good out here.’
The doctor jerked himself out of his weary reverie.
‘On time leaving Kuala Lumpur. Then one of those tortoise things broke down and delayed us.’
The driver nodded sagely. Those ‘tortoise things’ were armoured railcars that ran ahead of the trains, escorting them through the Black Areas on the long run up from Singapore.
‘They’ve been very quiet lately, the CTs,’ chirped the soldier.
‘The what?’ grunted the new arrival.
Gord, a right one here! thought the driver. Needs to get his knees brown pretty quick.
‘CTs, sir,’ he said aloud. ‘The communist terrorists. That’s why we’re all out here, innit?’
He stole another look at his passenger, taking in the new green bush jacket and shorts, tailored in one day in Singapore. Though they were all issued with ill-fitting rags at their Depot near Aldershot, he knew that officers were supposed to look smart and had to cough up for tailor-mades at their own expense.
‘How much further is it?’ grunted Howden, lifting his new cap to rub off the sweat that had gathered under the leather hatband. The Londoner managed to decipher the marked Geordie accent.
‘Another six miles, sir. It’s a twelve-mile run from Sungei Siput railway station to the gates of Brigade – and BMH is slap next door.’
Howden was beginning to accept that the Army ran on acronyms and ‘BMH’ now held no mystery for him, though he thought it could just as well stand for ‘Bloody Miserably Hot’ as for ‘British Military Hospital’.
The road began to climb gently from the flat plain that stretched for many miles back to the sea and the new doctor began to take more interest as the hills and high mountains of Perak State rose in front of them. The road this far had been fairly straight, running on causeways built a few feet above padi fields and banana plantations, but now it started to curve in repetitive bends as it passed between low hills. Regimented rows of rubber trees lined the road, all decorated with parallel diagonal scars running down to little pots to catch the latex. As he passed, Howden could see the rows were ruler-straight, millions of the slim trunks marching away from the road to cover thousands of acres, providing the world with the rubber for everything from bus tyres to condoms. Small houses roofed with attap, a palm-leaf thatch, or with red-painted corrugated iron, were scattered alongside the road, with grinning urchins, some stark naked, playing in the muddy water in the ditches outside. To someone brought up in the terraces and council estates of Tyneside, it was still as strange as the planet Mars, even though Tom had spent three days on Singapore Island and travelled almost the whole length of the Malayan Peninsula to get here.
‘First time in the East, sir?’ persisted the corporal.
‘First time out of bloody England,’ growled Howden. He preferred to forget the trip to Lille with the Newcastle Medicals’ rugby team in ’forty-nine, when they were beaten thirty-six to five.
There was silence for another mile and the doctor felt he should say something to avoid being thought snooty.
‘You from the hospital as well?’
‘Nossir, I’m Service Corps, from the Transport Pool in the garrison. Don’t do no soldiering, thank Christ! Not like them poor sods in the battalions.’
Tom Howden thought it was an opportunity to find out more about the place that was to be his home for most of the next three years – unless the mysterious ways of the Royal Army Medical Corps found somewhere even more obscure to send him. His knowledge of the military machine was rudimentary, as six weeks’ basic training in Britain had only taught him how to march badly, miss every target with a revolver and learn a little about intestinal parasites and numerous types of tropical lurgy.
‘What’s this Brigade you talk about, then?’
The driver sighed under his breath. They shouldn’t let virgins like this out alone, he thought.
‘You’re part of it now, sir!’ He squinted at the pristine green oblong sewn on to his passenger’s sleeve, portraying a yellow lion alongside a palm tree.
‘That dog-and-lampost flash’ll have to come off pretty quick, sir. Your CO will spit tacks if he sees it. That’s Singapore Base District, but we’re Twenty-First Commonwealth Independent Infantry Brigade. Different flash altogether – you need one like mine.’
Tom looked at the dhobi-faded patch on the corporal’s uniform – a blue shield and crossed red swords below the figures ‘21’.
‘Is the hospital part of that, then?’ he asked dubiously.
‘Well, you’ve got your own CO, a half-colonel. Queer bugger, he is too . . . oh, sorry sir!’ The driver had the grace to look sheepish at his gaffe. ‘But the big chief is the Brigadier, runs the whole outfit.’
The explanation was cut short as the Land Rover rounded a bend and came into a village, where they were forced to crawl along behind an ox-cart heaped with dried palm fronds for roofing. The driver swerved to avoid mangy pi-dogs, men on high bicycles, wandering chickens and assorted children scattered across the road. Ramshackle stalls selling fruit and Coca-Cola stood on the beaten earth in front of a few two-storied shophouses, from which taped Chinese pop songs blared out at ear-splitting volume. Malay girls in sarong-kerbayahs, colourful tunics over long skirts, swayed gracefully through the hubbub, resisting the raucous invitations of the shopkeepers to buy tin alarm clocks, dried fish or plastic toys. A dilapidated bus was coming the other way and they were forced to stop for a moment behind a grimy truck, from which several emaciated men were unloading heavy sacks of rice. Across the tailboard large Chinese characters were painted and underneath, Tom read a presumed translation in Roman lettering proclaiming the owner to be ‘Wun Fat Tit’, which left him wondering if it could possibly be true or was just some oriental leg-pull.
As the bus passed, blaring its horn raucously and belching black diesel smoke, the Land Rover pulled out, but almost immediately, the driver had to brake to avoid a Chinese woman wearing a samfu, a kind of floral pyjamas, leading a skinny cow on a length of rope.
‘This is Kampong Kerdah, sir, the last village before our place. Tanah Timah is a proper town, not like this ’ere dump,’ sai
d the soldier, with an almost proprietorial air.
As Howden was thinking that most places in Malaya seemed to have alliterative names, the driver twisted the wheel again and squeezed past the ox cart and accelerated out of the village on to more curves between more rubber estates.
‘Where’s this road go to?’ he asked.
‘It forks at Tanah Timah – or ‘TT’ as everyone calls it. Straight on it goes up a few miles to Kampong Jalong, then fizzles out against the mountains. Big buggers they are, some go up to six thousand feet. The other track just goes through the rubber up past Gunong Besar, with a village at the end called Kampong Kerbau. Damn-all beyond that for ’undreds of miles across the jungle and mountains, until you hit the China Sea. All Black Area that, real bandit country, very nasty!’
He said this with morbid glee, as if he had daily experience of hunting terrorists, though in fact he had never heard a single shot fired in anger during his two years up at this ‘sharp end’ of the campaign.
‘Is this a Black Area?’ Howden looked uneasily at the deserted plantations, where the rubber trees stood in endless ranks, reminding him of the war graves he had seen on his rugby trip to Flanders.
‘Nossir, but this White Area stops just beyond TT. If it was Black here, we wouldn’t be allowed out without an escort – and have to carry a weapon.’
He bent his head towards the officer as if to impart some great secret.
‘Best not to carry a pistol, sir. You only get a ticking off for not having one, but if you lose the bloody thing, it’s a court martial.’
Tom had no intention of carrying anything more lethal than a syringe, especially as Aldershot had proved that he could barely hit a house at ten paces. The vehicle suddenly slowed to a stop and he looked around in alarm.
‘Just thought you’d like to see the view, sir,’ reassured the corporal. He leaned on his steering wheel and pointed through the windscreen.
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