‘And what do you think?’ her mother was persisting.
Harfield drew in a deep breath, held it for a couple of seconds, then exhaled in a great gusting sigh. ‘I’m worried. You expected him in Singapore, I expected him in KL or Singapore, demanding help from the authorities. It doesn’t add up ... ’
‘Because?’ Liz prompted.
‘Because this lot are into terrorism. They want to create mass panic. They’re not into the business of hiding crimes.’
‘So people are not just disappearing?’
‘Quite the opposite,’ Harfield emphasised. ‘The atrocities are warnings to all workers not to help the British. We’ve had strikes and disruption, now we have murder. You two could be playing right into their hands by going to Rinsey without proper protection.’
‘If Neville has run into ... difficulties,’ Blanche said with admirable control, ‘you could be right.’
‘This brings me to Robbo’s proposition — ’
A proposition from Major Sturgess! Liz thought it highly unlikely to be anything to which either she or her mother would agree. But whatever George Harfield might have said next was obliterated by the scream of the train’s brakes suddenly and fiercely applied. Metal screamed on metal as the train lurched backwards and forwards like a clockwork toy in the hand of a fractious child.
Gripping the edge of her seat, Liz for a fleeting moment felt half annoyed yet half amused as she thought she had expected turbulence in the air, not on the train. Then she was jerked from her seat. They all tried to protect themselves and each other as pieces of luggage fell from the racks. Liz gave one glance towards the window, preparing for greater disaster should the green horizon slant as the train left the tracks, but they came to a standstill upright, the three finding themselves like a little prayer ring in the middle of the floor.
George was up first to push back Blanche’s large case, which was teetering precariously above their heads. he was helping the ladies to their feet when the door of the compartment was swept aside and John Sturgess came in.
‘George! You’re here — good! Keep down, away from the windows. There’s something on the line.’ He crouched by the window and raised the shutter a fraction, scanning the bordering jungle with rapt concentration.
Towards the front of the motionless train a shrilling escape of excess steam stopped. A child crying fretfully farther along the corridor was stilled so abruptly it sounded as if a hand had been clamped over its mouth. Then an eerie silence and stillness fell over the train and the beluka, the jungle fringes. In every compartment the breath-held tension of people listening intently could be felt.
She watched Sturgess, as much intrigued as frightened as she realised that this was probably an ambush, not a rail accident. He had immediately taken charge, motioning George to keep her and her mother well down in the middle of the compartment. The distant manner had vanished and with his jacket off, his short-sleeved shirt revealed a lean and muscled man with the alertness and suppleness of a fighter, a jungle fighter, like a tiger she had once seen — swift, quiet, deadly. There was nothing starchy about him now. He looked, she thought, almost hungry for action.
She started as he went unexpectedly from complete immobility, staring out of their window, to swift, smooth action as he moved back towards the corridor.
‘Stay here, I’ll go and see what’s happening,’ Sturgess said. ‘Don’t want anyone doing anything damned silly.’ His glance took in the two women. ‘Stay down!’ he ordered and motioned his friend to his former post by the window.
‘Remember the tricks we got up to in the war,’ George warned as he left.
Sturgess nodded abruptly. ‘Don’t panic,’ he told Liz in passing.
I wasn’t intending to, Uncle Robbo, she thought and wished she dared say it aloud. Women brought up in wartime, who had practised air-raid precautions since they were in their teens, did not panic! Her heart might be thumping a bit but that was it, and her mother looked breathless but quite calm.
They heard the major going quickly away towards the front of the train, then silence, then a shout, and silence again. ‘What’s he doing?’ Liz asked.
George drew in a hissing breath. ‘He’s out to the left and beyond the train now, weaving, running.’
‘Pushing his luck,’ Liz conjectured.
‘Not his style,’ George answered.
Liz lifted a small case from the floor to the seat and felt she could have argued the opposite about his treatment of herself and her mother.
‘Nothing happening,’ George reported. ‘He’s dropped in the bushes for another recce.’ He half rose as if he wanted to follow.
‘We’d be all right,’ Blanche assured him.
‘No, better do as I’m told,’ he said, resuming his post at the window.
‘Do you always?’ Liz was really curious about their relationship. ‘Was he your officer?’
George nodded, not once turning from his observations as he added, as if to himself, ‘And he should remember all about booby traps on roads and railway lines — we laid plenty.’
Along the train one or two anxious voices began questioning and it sounded like the same fretful child complaining again. The next moment Harfield reported Sturgess walking back along the tracks.
‘No trouble,’ he called, reassuring people who, responding to the flat, even sweep of his hands, pushed up their shutters and leaned out of the carriages. ‘Water buffalo on the line. All clear now.’
There were some huffs of exasperation as the calming message was relayed, some puffs of irritation and much relieved, nervous laughter.
‘Water buffalo?’ Blanche queried when he re-entered the compartment. ‘Why didn’t the driver just hoot or something, instead of throwing everyone all over the place?’ She brushed irritably at the knees of the beige slacks she was wearing.
‘I seem to remember he did, but in any case the animal was stuck. It had been tethered to a small tree at the edge of some paddy, pulled to reach better grazing and dragged the sapling along until it became entangled with the track. The driver thought it was a trap. The farmer was hiding in the beluka, terrified because his animal had stopped the train.’
Liz reflected she was not the only one giving herself over to imaginings of the worst kind; the whole country was jumpy.
‘It shows how unprepared we all are,’ George said, slapping the dust from his own trousers. ‘I come here with green coconuts — ’ he picked up the shells from the floor — ‘but my gun’s in my hand luggage.’
‘Mine’s strapped in my case,’ Sturgess admitted.
‘And ours are at home.’ Liz watched Sturgess for reactions as she mentioned their destination.
‘Which is why you must be accompanied to Rinsey — if you insist on going,’ he said immediately but without looking directly at either woman. ‘I have twenty-four hours before I must report to my unit.’
‘Thank you.’ Blanche accepted.
Liz wondered if they would ever be rid of the man — Harfield at least smiled occasionally.
Whatever objections they might have made about Sturgess driving them on from George Harfield’s mine had somehow all been cancelled by the incident. Nothing had really happened, Liz reassured herself, and yet so much had been revealed by everyone’s reactions.
George had a jeep at Ipoh station and drove them to his bachelor bungalow on the slopes of Bukit Kinta, the hill after which the mine was named. His home was comfortable with cane easy chairs and low tables, though sparsely decorated. A small fridge stood in the corner of his lounge.
‘You do like your cold drinks,’ Blanche commented.
‘It’s a necessity for me these days,’ he agreed and dispensed them all cold beers. His Chinese cook-cum-houseboy came to greet them all and was soon off again to make hokkien mee, a quickly prepared meal of rice with fish, prawns and vegetables. There was little time if they were to be anywhere near Rinsey before six o’clock, when night-time would come like a slow theatrical curtain drop.