Dead in the Dog

He pulled his mind back to the present and with no leads whatsoever to follow on the local bank robbery, he concentrated on this morning’s earlier meeting about James Robertson. The Telex from Australia was interesting, but Steven knew that some old conviction for a brawl over a woman was little use apart from suggesting a violent temper and willingness to use violence. The fact that it involved a rifle was food for thought, but since coming to Malaya, Les Arnold had not fallen foul of the law in any way, though he had been ushered out of The Dog several times for becoming too stroppy after having too much to drink.

The phrase ‘brawl over a woman’ stuck in Steven’s mind and he wondered if history might have repeated itself, as the Australian planter had made little secret of his lustful admiration for his next-door neighbour, Diane Robertson. Yet the very openness of his libidinous admission rather defused its significance.

With a sigh, he drew a pad of lined paper towards him and began to write, cursing under his breath as the sweat from the edge of his hand dampened the lower part of the page and made the ink run when he reached it. He persevered for a quarter of an hour, then sat back and read through the notes he had made, before reaching across his desk and pinging the small brass bell that sat there. A moment later, his middle-aged Tamil clerk came in from the room next door.

‘Santhanam, will you ask Inspector Tan to come up, please? And get us a couple of cold drinks from the fridge.’

His impassive assistant appeared within a few moments and sat on the other side of the desk, gratefully accepting one of the icy grapefruit sodas. Steven pushed across the notes he had made.

‘I’ve been trying to make some sense of all this business, Tan. Let’s go through each of the names and you tell me what you think.’

The inspector gravely read through what his boss had written, sucking intermittently on the straw in his bottle of ‘GFS’. Eventually, he looked up and put the pad back on the desk.

‘Diane Robertson, she is not a favoured candidate.’ He made it a statement, rather than a question.

Blackwell shook his head. ‘No, I can’t see it, really. We know they had problems with their marriage, and both seem to have been routinely unfaithful, according to all the gossip. But why should she kill him?’

‘Jealousy and anger at his constant affairs, perhaps,’ ventured Tan. ‘But separation or divorce would seem an easier solution.’

Steven mopped his neck with a handkerchief. ‘Technically, she could have done it.’

‘Certainly she would have been someone he knew and would have stopped for, which was what we assumed must have happened,’ agreed the inspector.

Blackwell shrugged. ‘Yes, but I still don’t fancy her as the killer, somehow. What about Leslie Arnold?’

‘He has this unfortunate past history of violence,’ answered Tan. ‘Though I suppose it shouldn’t be held against him. He admitted to you that he had lustful feelings towards Mister Robertson’s wife,’ he added primly.

Steven tapped his desk with the end of his fountain pen.

‘There’s been a rumour for some time that Arnold would have liked to buy Gunong Besar if it came up for sale. It seems he’s made a success of his own place and would like to expand. But I hardly think he would kill the owner just to get his hands on the property.’

Tan gave one of his rare smiles. ‘Perhaps he thought he might get James’s property and his wife with the one shot!’

The superintendent sighed again. ‘He has no alibi for the time of the shooting – and he does live next door to the dead man, up a long and lonely road. But we’ve got not a shred of evidence against him.’

The inspector put a slim finger on the notes before him.

‘The Mackays are also next door and on the same lonely road, sir.’

‘Yes, I wonder about the Mackays. Upright, sober and churchgoing, not typical of most of the folks around here. Yet I sense something wrong between them, there’s a tension you can almost feel when you’re with them.’

Tan said nothing, as the emotions that Europeans experienced were a mystery to him. He had been brought up in a large Cantonese family in Ipoh where everyone had seemed too busy making money or working towards a career to be cursed with introspection or jealousy.

‘Again the bush-telegraph around Tanah Timah whispered that Jimmy Robertson may have made a play for his manager’s wife at one time, but we can’t accept every bit of spiteful tittle-tattle that goes around.’

Tan was not sure what ‘tittle-tattle’ might be, but he got the general drift of his superior officer’s remarks.

‘Then there are the military people, sir. That’s going to be difficult for us.’

Steven Blackwell groaned. ‘Don’t I just know it! They’ve played along so far, but a lieutenant colonel is going to be a tough nut to deal with.’

‘You have no serious suspicions of the Commanding Officer, have you, sir?’

‘I suspect everyone, Tan. Reluctantly and probably hopelessly! But all the people who had access or even a fragile motive have to be considered.’