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.