‘I’ll tell your man you’re ready.’ Aubrey went to find the crack-shot Malay tapper they had brought with them as guard.
‘Remember, don’t stop for anyone or anything,’ Joan reiterated the emergency code of safety, ‘and, darling — ’ she caught Liz’s hand — ‘I’ll make him get through to KL as soon as you’ve gone, and the second I find out anything I’ll let you know.’
Aubrey went to the barbed-wire gates and helped his guard open them, waving their guests on their way. Joan stood on the verandah waiting. Aubrey came and slipped his arm around her waist.
‘Two unhappy people,’ she commented.
‘Umm. Neville, bad show, coming out and never seeing him again.’
‘Don’t think I meant Neville, really, darling. Young Liz has a crush on that young guardsman, the signaller you remember they had billeted on them at the time Neville’s body was found. Could be a problem if her mother has to know.’
‘Not sure it will,’ Aubrey said thoughtfully. ‘He’s either the one killed or the one missing. I particularly remember Sturgess mentioning his signaller, seemed to be preying on his mind a bit.’
‘Oh; dear!’
‘I tell you something else, Blanche is going to have a shock about that Harfield chap. He’s going to go to prison for a long time.’
‘You don’t think he’s guilty!’
He shook his head but said, ‘All the evidence points that way — and no other. If they’ve set him up they’ve made a damned good job of it.’
*
Liz drove the Ford at speed as the twilight was swiftly replaced by darkness.
‘We should have left earlier,’ her mother stated.
Liz might have retaliated if she could have found room in her mind for anything else but Alan. One missing, one dead. What had Joan said, ‘so I presume you would say two dead’? Two dead out of ten that had stayed so briefly at Rinsey, two dead in one unit out of the whole operation. That couldn’t be fair.
‘Liz! For God’s sake, take your time. There’s no point in us killing ourselves!’
‘You worry too much, Mother.’
‘You’re frightening our guard to death.’ She turned round to the Malay who, while gripping his rifle, was endeavouring to stay still long enough on the back seat to keep a lookout for possible roadblocks or people trying to flag them down. ‘He’s pale yellow around the gills now. And it’s not going to get any darker now it is dark.’
‘You begin to sound like George Harfield and his clichés!’
‘He’s certainly on my mind,’ Blanche admitted, gripping the overhead panic handle as they hurtled around another corner. ‘Liz! keep a sense of proportion or we’ll all either be travelsick or dead!’
Liz had to make a real effort to drive more slowly, consciously making her foot lift from the accelerator a little — and then feeling they were creeping along. Speed seemed the only thing that made any impact on her sensibilities, a kind of consolation for not being able to take any action that might help. Until she knew ... what could she choose to do?
She supposed she could make assumptions, use logic. She could work from what she knew. She knew she loved Alan totally. She knew that to be without him would be to know the rest of her life was over, useless.
It seemed unbelievable to her that he could possibly have been killed and she had not known, had not had some premonition. She remembered darkly that Alan himself had said he felt doom-laden from the moment he had left England, then he had met her and obviously the feeling had been all nonsense. She blinked, bit her lip as tears welled.
The lights of the car picked up something or someone at the jungle edge. Was it a figure of a man? Tall, hefty, wearing a peaked cap, carrying a rifle. He was gone in the same second, so she was not sure.
The next moment she was jamming on the car brakes as she was confronted by a torrent of water over a huge rock. She looked up at the curtain of falling water as they hurtled towards it, and remembered being under the waterfall with Alan.
‘For God’s sake!’ Blanche cried, while in the back their guard gave out a whimpering cry of relief as the car stopped a hand’s span from the outjutting rock indicating the turn for Rinsey.
‘All I can say is I’m glad we’re nearly home. You totally oversteered there. We’re no use to anybody dead.’
Not sure I’m much use to Alan alive, she thought.
‘Did you see anyone on the corner?’ she asked. ‘I thought ... ’
‘No!’ Her mother’s stony response seemed to indicate she thought her daughter was just looking for an excuse.
‘No, missy,’ a shaky voice came from the back of the car. Some instinct, some premonition stopped her from saying more. Perhaps it had after all been some trick of the light on wet leaves, the shape of trees or ferns?
She restarted the car with shaking hands and went at a cautious twenty miles an hour the rest of the way to Rinsey’s barbed-wire gates.
She was relieved to find all quiet, the gates properly manned, even pulled a face at her mother as the guard literally fell out of the back of the car with comic haste — while inside the telephone was ringing.
Anna greeted her in the hall on the way to answer the telephone.
‘I’ll get it,’ she said, asking, as John had done when he arrived home, ‘Everything all right here? Your little one safely tucked in?’
Anna nodded and went to the door to greet Blanche. Liz picked up the telephone.
‘Liz?’ Joan Wildon’s voice asked. ‘I promised to ring as soon as I knew. I’ve just spoken to John Sturgess on the telephone.’ She paused as if apologising for doing it all so quickly, then asked, ‘Is your mother there?’
‘Yes,’ and Liz with the same unmoving tone her mother had used only minutes before, and clamped the handset harder to her ear.
‘I’m afraid, darling, the two guardsmen lost were among those who stayed with you.’ Joan went on, ‘The man killed was a Daniel Veasey and the one missing ... is your Alan Cresswell.’
There was a pause as Liz stood rigid, knowing but not accepting.
‘Liz! Darling! Are you all right?’
She made some kind of murmur of confirmation.
‘Let me speak to your mother.’
Without a word Liz passed the telephone to her mother.
Blanche, who had followed her daughter in and watched as she took the call, took the receiver quickly and asked, ‘Who is this? Joan?’
Liz walked away into the kitchen. She heard Anna and her mother exchange a few words, then she supposed her mother was listening intently to all Joan had to say. She guessed that because Joan would be concerned for her she might tell her mother everything.
There was something she had to do and quickly.
She went to her bedroom and took the torch she had used to go through the escape tunnel from her bedside table. Hurrying to the kitchen, she took a box of matches from the kitchen drawer, then left the bungalow by the back door before anyone should try to stop her.
She could do nothing for Alan but grieve, but she could stop Josef, the traitor, the murderer, the man she was convinced she had seen momentarily in the jungle opposite the rock, from finding any sanctuary near Rinsey.
She started the fire in the room where they made love. It began with the symbol of their passion for she fed the first match strike with the dried red frangipangi blossoms and the stalks of the orchid sprays. They made a brave, quick show. Anxious that they should not go out, she ran to fetch the twigs and dried leaves that still lay in other rooms, then she carefully applied the raffia mat so she did not exclude the air from the flames. When that was well established, pyre-shaped and blazing, she added the cushions.
‘Only the butterfly escapes,’ she said as the room blazed around her. She felt the heat of the flames easier to bear than the new sorrows life had brought. The opposite wall suddenly caught fire in a sheet, lapping hungrily, roaring out of the windows and up, up into the butterfly sky. She lifted her face and listened; she could hear the timbers of the roof crackling over her head. It felt like a cleansing. Now Josef would never sully this place with his presence.