Dead in the Dog

The reason for the diversion was an armed robbery at one of two banks in the town, which involved a shooting. At one end of the main street was the Chartered Bank and almost opposite, the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank. They were small establishments, just a couple of rooms with a Chinese sub-manager and a few Chinese and Indian tellers and clerks. Outside the door of the Chartered Bank was the usual guard, a turbaned Sikh jaga sitting on a wooden chair, cradling a twelve-bore shotgun and chewing red chillies as if they were crisps.

At mid-morning on Tuesday, a battered Ford pick-up stopped outside and two men rushed into the bank, another two overpowering the startled Sikh before he could even raise his gun. They hit him on the head and lashed him to his chair, before joining their accomplices inside, where amid much screaming from both robbers and customers, the threat of a pair of sawn-off shotguns made the terrified staff scrabble together as much money as they could muster. Though the police headquarters was only a few hundred yards away, it was beyond the other end of the street and out of earshot of the fracas in the bank.

Within minutes, the thieves had grabbed all they were likely to get and rushed out of the bank. By now the very angry jaga had freed one of his arms from the rope and as the men were scrambling aboard their stolen truck, he managed to reach his twelve-bore and let off a blast which peppered several of the robbers. As they revved away, one them fired a shot in return, which hit the Sikh in the legs. At that distance, the discharge was not crippling, but the guard’s roars of pain and outrage were added to the cacophony coming from the bank.

The sound of shots brought the police racing down the street and soon there was a full scale pursuit in operation. The Ford had vanished in the direction of Ipoh, but was soon found abandoned near a patch of secondary jungle halfway to Kampong Kerdah. Steven Blackwell and many of his officers were busy for the rest of the day organizing a search through the heavily forested land nearby, but without success.

The superintendent was concerned that this might be a terrorist-linked incident, especially as the witnesses confirmed that the attackers were all Chinese. Though this was by no means conclusive, it was known that the Malayan Communist Party sometimes resorted to robbery to get funds to sustain its desperate campaign.

At the back of his mind, Steven also worried about the possibility of a connection with the attack on Gunong Besar and the Robertson murder, even though all common sense indicated that Chin Peng’s men could have nothing to do with James’s corpse arriving at The Dog.

By Thursday, this enquiry had fizzled out for lack of any more evidence and Blackwell’s attention was once more drawn back to the Robertson case. As a result of making some early phone calls, the afternoon again saw him at the garrison headquarters, meeting this time in Major Enderby’s office in one of the ‘spiders’, the long wooden huts that jutted from the central roadway. The SIB sergeant from Ipoh and the tubby intelligence officer, Captain Preston, were there again to discuss the situation.

As he was on his home ground, Enderby, the head of the Brigade’s military police, appointed himself chairman and shuffled some papers on his desk as the other three men pulled up chairs. He stared at them fiercely, this being his usual expression, which he felt obliged to maintain as the local upholder of Queen’s Regulations.

‘As you rightly said on the phone, superintendent, in this rather isolated town, we cannot disregard the possibility that the perpetrator is a member of Her Majesty’s Forces.’

Steven smiled disarmingly at Enderby, as the latter continued.

‘As we’ve decided that it seems unlikely that any of the local native inhabitants did this, then statistically there are far more Service people around here than the relatively few planters.’

Preston, the Intelligence man, bobbed his moon face, yet immediately qualified his agreement.

‘Can’t dismiss them entirely, though. After all, Jimmy Robertson was an estate man himself.’

The craggy-faced staff sergeant scowled down at his gleaming boots as he spoke. ‘In my experience, sir, any bugger can commit any crime!’

Markham always managed to give the impression that he thought all commissioned officers were ineffectual prats, though nothing he ever said could be construed as open criticism.

Steven Blackwell opened a thin manilla folder and laid it on Enderby’s desk. ‘I’ve had the first report up from the Government Chemist’s laboratory in KL,’ he said briskly. ‘James Robertson had a moderate amount of alcohol in the blood sample taken at the post-mortem. It was just over a hundred and forty milligrams per hundred millilitres.’

‘What’s that in English?’ demanded Enderby, his cigarette-stained moustache bristling.

‘Certainly shouldn’t be driving a car, but given Jimmy’s capacity for drink, I’d say it was about average for a night in The Dog.’