Dead in the Dog

He hopped around to the back and took out the officer’s two bags which he dumped on the concrete. Tom Howden climbed out more slowly and looked with dismay at his new domicile. It looked more like a chicken farm set down in a desert, than the residence of holders of the Queen’s Commission. As the corporal passed him on the path, he gave a salute worthy of the Grenadier Guards.

‘Best of luck, sir!’

As the doctor hesitantly touched his cap in return, he was conscious of the sweat-blackened areas of fabric under his arms and over the whole of his back. He heard the vehicle roar away behind him, but kept his eyes fixed on the deserted huts, a feeling of almost desperate loneliness engulfing him.

As Tom Howden was staring despondently at his new home, Diane Robertson sat alone in hers, the late afternoon sun striking through the open doors. The silence was broken only by her sniffs of petulant self-pity, until a small voice asked, ‘Mem want anything now?’

The face of her amah, Lee Mei Mei, appeared timorously around the door to the dining room, half scared, half intrigued by the domestic dramas that were becoming more frequent in the Robertson household. Mei was a slight, fragile Chinese girl of twenty, with an elfin face that always looked slightly startled. Her glossy black hair was pulled back into a ponytail held with a rubber band, the end hanging down the back of her blue floral pyjama suit.

‘Yes, May. Tell Siva to bring me a stinger, will you? A large one.’

Diane sat alone in the wide, lofty room, the big brass fan whirling slowly over her head, trying to waft the cloying air into a draught. She thought of Norfolk now, at the beginning of December, cold and perhaps wet, but not with the all-pervading dampness they had here, where there was an electric light bulb in every wardrobe to keep the mould off the shoes and where the camera had to be kept in a sealed biscuit tin with a bag of silica gel.

She wished to God she had stayed in England and not been seduced by both James’s body and his glowing descriptions of life on a Malayan rubber estate. Twenty-six years old, she was the third daughter of a minor squire from Norfolk, rejoicing in the name of Henry Blessington-Luke. After an expensive and largely wasted education at Cheltenham, she had done little but ride, party and hunt for both foxes and a husband. Three years earlier, at a Hunt Ball near Newmarket, she had met James Robertson, home on leave – and three months later, had married him in the cathedral in Singapore.

The bastard! She gingerly touched her face again and wondered how well she could cover up any marks by tomorrow night, when there was the weekly dance at The Dog.

A slim Tamil came in through the dining room, carrying a tray bearing a bottle of Johnnie Walker, a tumbler and a jug of iced water.

‘A big one, Siva,’ she murmured, still shielding one side of her face with a scarlet-nailed hand, though the amah had already given him a blow-by-blow account of the fracas. He poured a liberal shot of whisky into the glass and added an equal amount of water – the famous ‘stinger’ was a corruption of the Malay ‘stengah’, meaning ‘half’.

He lowered the tray for her to take the glass, but she gestured to a small table at the end of the settee. ‘Leave it, Siva. I may want another.’

He put the tray down and stepped back.

‘Mem want anything else? Sandwich, curry puff?’

She shook her head, managing to give him a wan smile. He was a good-looking fellow of about her own age – but of course, he was Indian. Not that that seemed to bother her bloody husband!

The cook-cum-butler padded silently to the door but stopped there to throw a look back at the woman sipping her drink. Though he considered her no more attractive than most of the sleek girls of his own race, the contrast between their dark beauty and her startling blondeness always intrigued him. Slim but full-breasted, her long pale neck was framed by the silky swathe of hair the colour of light honey that came down to her shoulders. He knew that some English women got their colour from a bottle, but this was surely natural. With a little sigh at such forbidden fruit, he padded off to his kitchen hut behind the house, to sit over a cup of tea with the amah and gossip about the latest domestic developments at Gunong Besar Estate.

On the settee, the blonde drank her first stinger quickly and poured herself a stronger one. She lifted her shapely legs up on to the cushions and leaned back against one of the padded arms, cradling the drink in her hands. Her temper had cooled, but it was replaced by a steely determination to do the swine down as effectively as she could.