Looking back at Josef, she observed how relatively uncreased were his shorts and shirt, how smooth his chin. He looked like a man come back from a meeting, or going out for the evening, dressed to impress.
She felt slightly ashamed to realise that they had not thought to offer the man who had given up his last free hours to drive them to Rinsey the opportunity to shave and refresh himself — and he had not asked.
Any good will Sturgess had notched up with her immediately evaporated as he stated, ‘Josef can keep watch at the front and I’ll take the back this time. Until first light, then I’ll drive you two ladies back to Bukit Kinta. I’m sure George won’t mind having you as house guests until we ... sort out your future plans.’
Liz was amazed at his audacity. ‘We’ve been here before, haven’t we?’
Chapter Four
‘We could have stayed with Josef!’
‘I think not,’ her mother denied shortly, obviously not willing to go over the debate she had settled to her own satisfaction the night before.
‘Josef could have arranged some security. We could have got some of the tappers to act as guards.’
‘What tappers? There’s no one working in the plantation this morning — and what do you propose?’ Blanche asked stonily as they walked towards the jeep, where Sturgess was loading the guns and ammunition. ‘That we throw chicken wire over the whole bungalow?’
Her mother was right about the tappers. The early hours of each working morning had always seemed to Liz a magical time. Tappers moving out between the dark lines of trees, the lights on their hats twinkling, disappearing, reappearing as men and women moved from trunk to trunk making the skilful, shallow cuts into the bark, balancing the cup in its wire hoop.
Once the heat of the day came, the latex ran less freely, so before dawn each worker started work on his or her section of trees. Soon afterwards her father would have been up, and often she was allowed to go with him on his rounds. All the old workforce had known her. Her wish to be a tapper when she grew up had been as keen as any boy’s ambition to be the proverbial engine driver. Even now she could remember the exact angle of the tapper’s curiously hooked knife and the amount of steady pressure it took to remove a slender portion of bark.
‘I could have stayed.’ She heard the petulant child lingering in her own voice. ‘But you don’t trust Josef.’
‘That is one reason,’ she agreed. ‘Another is you seem prepared to throw yourself into his arms.’
‘To balance your prejudices, perhaps.’
‘Hu-hu, probably.’ Blanche made a tiny assenting noise. ‘It seems to be how we work.’
‘Right!’ Liz agreed nevertheless taking the heavy bag of ammunition clips from her mother.
‘The main reason is I want to go to Ipoh and KL and mobilise the police and the military to help locate your father.’
‘Of course.’ Liz felt a little humbled and suddenly selfish in her wish to remain. ‘Another thing,’ she said, making amends, ‘while we’re driving through the villages we could ask when he passed through. Someone might remember.’
Sturgess helped stow the guns and ammunition. ‘Unfortunately I won’t have time to stop today,’ he reminded her.
‘I think we should buy a vehicle,’ Liz suggested. ‘Give us that bit more independence. I’ll need my own vehicle soon anyway. Then, when we drive back to Rinsey, we could make enquiries.’
‘I should leave such things to the professionals,’ Sturgess said, taking the last bag from her hands, ‘and it’s not a good time to begin driving around on your own.’
‘From what you say, “the professionals” already have enough on their hands,’ she snapped back and moved quickly past him into the jeep. ‘You have nothing good to say, do you?’
‘There is nothing good to say about this place at the moment.’ He started up and set off at some speed. She glared at his dour reflection in the rear-view mirror, and he glanced up. She lifted her chin in an abrupt challenge, which distracted his attention, and the vehicle lurched in and out of a deep water-filled pothole.
Sturgess swore silently. He must just drive like hell if he was to make KL in time, first leaving Daddy’s girl, as he had come to think of her, to George — perhaps he could talk sense into her. Getting them back to Singapore would be the best option. He thought of the two women as the equivalent of all reckless amateurs who climb mountains or lower themselves down potholes, so that good men have to risk their lives bringing them back to safety.
‘God! I shall be glad to stop rocketing around.’ Blanche braced her feet against the Jeep’s floor as once again Sturgess swept around the great outcrop of dripping fern-covered rock from the plantation service road to the wider thoroughfare.
‘Makes me wonder if we’ll ever catch up with each other,’ Liz complained, ‘if no one ever stays in one place.’
‘Josef is there. He’ll contact us if your father returns.’
‘What do you think George Harfield can do to help us make Rinsey secure?’ Liz raised her voice, feeling that Sturgess should not be allowed just to sit there and drive. It was mostly because of his total refusal to back her belief in Josef’s abilities to defend them that they were on the move again.
‘Barbed wire, I should think, lots of it — lights on tall poles all round the property.’
‘Like a prison camp’?’
‘You either have to create a secure zone, or move to one.’
‘We’re not being frightened out! I was brought up here. I know the people and how they think and work. We are not helpless women!’ she retorted.
‘I’ve never thought of women as helpless.’ His reply was so even in its flatness of tone, it was as if what he did think was far worse. It took her some moments to absorb the full implications and then it was too late to reply. She reflected, to the tune of a popular song, that it was not what he said but the way that he said it.
They fell into silence then as Sturgess drove back towards Bukit Kinta. The wider road was dry, exposed to the full sun, and they raised a cloud of red dust as they sped along.
Liz wondered if her father had gone to track down his missing tappers and been waylaid — ambushed somewhere. She became more and more concerned as she took note of the junctions where tracks led to nearby kampongs and others followed water pipes into jungle reservoirs — so many byways.
The jungle was a place of sunshine and shadows at the fringes but of wet, dripping dusk in its depths. It lent itself to lengthy games of hide and seek, as well as to sudden attack. The swift cruel strike, the step back into the jungle, as quick to do as tell. She didn’t need Sturgess continually spelling it out.
Grim thoughts of what could be so readily secreted in the depths were impinged upon by the sight of neat rows of pineapples growing by the side of the road, the first she had seen since she had been back. The Malay farmer was harvesting one lot of fruit and at the same time slicing off the top of the pineapple and planting this for his next crop.
There was a familiarity about this procedure, even about this section of road. She was suddenly more attentive, holding her breath as they passed a village shop where herbs and spices were the speciality. A cacao tree grew at the far side of the shop and nutmeg trees at the back — she couldn’t see any of that, but she remembered!
‘Stop!’ she shouted. As Sturgess jammed on the brakes, she added, ‘I mean, have we time?’