The voice sent a shiver of ice along her spine, echoed a boy’s voice from ten or fifteen years ago. The same words. ‘Mrs Hammond. Mrs Hammond. Please listen. I did not do it. I am not responsible.’
‘I am all alone, Mrs Hammond.’
She heard him move nearer but still could not see him. She wanted to ask if Neville had been all alone when he shot him. She lifted her rifle to hold it in both hands.
‘Don’t do anything rash, Mrs Hammond. You’ve nothing to fear from me, Mrs Hammond.’
It had grated on her nerves even when he was a child, a deceitful, spiteful child, the way he repeated her name as if it was some special charm against punishment.
‘You say you are alone. Let me see you.’
‘You never did take just my word, did you?’
‘And wasn’t I wise?’
‘Most times.’ He laughed and she saw him emerge from just beyond the cleared jungle and steadily approach the wire. He held his rifle sighted on her, while she held hers loosely in front of herself.
She wanted him nearer.
‘Josef Guisan,’ she said as if she had sought him a long time. ‘So why should I trust you now?’ She repeated the question and waited for the repeated pleas of innocence just the same as when he was a boy. Guilty as hell but prepared to argue that black guilt was white innocence until the last trump.
‘Mrs Hammond, believe me, I mean you no harm — ’
‘You look threatening, Josef, your gun pointing straight at me.’
‘Oh, it’s habit,’ he said and lifted the rifle in one hand, but she could see that his finger was still curled in the trigger. She just had this one chance ...
‘Bad habits die hard, Josef,’ she said as she lifted her rifle a little and compressed the trigger on the upwards swing in one smooth, slick movement, and shot him in the heart, ‘... like rogue dogs.’
The force of the impact knocked him backwards as if struck by a Titan’s hammer blow. For a split second she saw his face registering surprise and fury, then as he fell he all but disappeared back into the undergrowth. He was undoubtedly dead and the smell of fresh blood was in the warm breeze.
The sound of the shot reverberated through the jungle and the hills and for a moment there was peace. She expelled the spent cartridge case while searching her soul for any sense of guilt. She looked up to where the sun emblazed the sky a deep blood red. ‘I feel better for that, Joan darling,’ she breathed, ‘much, much better.’
The silence was shattered now by shouts and men coming running and the sound of a car horn blowing at the main gates.
Men came from their huts, the guards running along the wire. There was a babble of questions and many pointing fingers. Blanche led the way towards the front gate, meeting Inspector Aba, who had rushed from his riot at Ipoh bringing two guards for Rinsey.
‘I’ve just shot Josef Guisan,’ she told him, moving out and around the wire to where the body lay.
She had shot him in cold blood, she knew that. Murder, she supposed. She thought about George in prison. Lovers in prison, one for rape, one for murder. What about that? And what about Liz and Wendy? She watched Inspector Aba as he took over the lead; she doubted he would let the matter go without an inquiry.
They approached the fallen man with caution. But there was absolutely no doubt, the shot had hit the heart with pinpoint accuracy. The stain on the chest looked black now and the inspector ordered a man back for a lamp. Anna came too from the house and stood by Blanche, gripping her hand as the inspector raised the light.
‘Aaah!’ She greeted the sight of Josef’s body with a cry that expressed justice done. By her side a small voice piped, ‘that’s good thing! He hurt my grandmother many times.’ He pushed himself between Anna and Blanche and took both their hands. Looking up at Blanche, he added, ‘You like mongoose, kill bad things.’
Blanche regarded the inspector, whose officiousness seemed to waiver at Datuk’s judgement. He went back to bend over the body. As he moved the rifle the hand was lifted too, and in death the finger was still curled in the trigger guard.
‘It is fortunate thing he did not have time to fire first,’ Inspector Aba concluded.
Chapter Twenty-Three
There was a feeling of extreme peace all around. There had been a voice before, but now blessed stillness. Alan felt on the very lip of heaven. He had only to bequeath his breath to the wind and be gone.
And yet ... and yet ... it felt like a dream, half remembered, something in life half yearned for even while not properly recalled.
There was a voice that came again and he remembered the same voice had called before. A siren voice, luring him away from this blankness that was oblivion. A siren voice, but it paused and he knew he could decide to go now.
The voice came again louder, as if it yearned for him. He wondered, wavered — siren voices invited disaster, sang sailors on to rocks.
He thought he heard another sound, as if he gasped — was he trying to swim away? Then there was much activity around him. Was this the final surge over treacherous reefs to the calm lagoon beyond?
Be still, leave me, leave me. His brain inside his skull felt too big, too much to be poured back in. ‘Quarts into pint pots,’ he heard his father say, adding with a familiar, weary acceptance, ‘but you’ll always try!’
‘Alan, Alan,’ the urgent voice said close by his ear, ‘come back to me.’
How could he? He didn’t know where he was.
Something like panic stirred at the base of his spine and ran like uneasy fingers up to his head. Sensation flooded back, awareness like all-over pins and needles assailed him and he felt as if his body was unbalanced, as if he swam or floated in some strange substance like ... like the warm wobbly wallpaper glue his father’s decorator used.
He remembered his father always had the firm’s decorator at home. ‘I like to see a good professional job,’ he would say, then add as an aside just to Alan, ‘and I don’t want to have to do it.’ Memory came crushing back. His father was dead. The hurt of his death came sharp on the recollection. His father was dead; his mother? She had cried the last time he had seen her, cried about him, because of him. What had he done? It all seemed so sad.
Was it his mother speaking to him? It was a woman’s voice, he thought. Like his mother, always asking him to do things. ‘Take your father’s lunch to him.’ Go and tell your father the carpenter’s not able to come today.’ But his father was dead and his mother had cried because he had sailed far away, to the other side of the world.
He supposed he could open his eyes, though it seemed like quite an undertaking. Like someone shut up inside a difficult box of tricks with booby traps on all sides, he cautiously ordered his eyelids to go up a little. Nothing happened, only after a time the quality of colour seemed to have altered — black had become a kind of gingery brown.
It took him some time to realise that his eyes were parted a fraction and what he could see was hair — it could be a beard. He didn’t know he had a beard. A small quaking laugh formed somewhere as he wondered if he was Rumpelstiltskin.
Something moved across his vision, a hand, and he felt something being soothed on his lips, moist, sweet, nice. He was hungry, he realised, very hungry.
‘Alan!’ the voice was urgent. ‘I thought your lips moved. Alan?’ The fingers that had brought moisture before now played along his lips as if testing for some reverberation of life.
Then the moisture and the sweetness came on his lips again.
He could see no one.
Then another sensation blotted out all others. Someone was moving a finger along the line of his ribs. This had happened to him before — and this was a different memory. This was something he wanted. This was the voice. He wanted to see, and he forced his eyelids higher like a child reborn with an urgent instinct to view his world.