Читаем Dead in the Dog полностью

‘Just in time, doc,’ he said cheerfully. ‘They’re about to bring the bastards out of the ulu down there.’ As he waved a hand down the straight road, a corporal crouched over a radio pack called out to him.

‘They say they can see the edge of the trees, sir. Be with us in a few minutes.’

The West Berkshires officer gave a shrill blast on a whistle and beckoned to a group of squaddies waiting around a Ferret armoured scout car, a TCV and a pair of Land Rovers. As the men jogged towards them, the captain began striding down the road. ‘Come on, doc, duty calls!’

Tom slung his bag over his shoulder and sweating like a bull in the cloying heat, followed the men for a few hundred yards, until a soldier suddenly appeared through the lalang grass, holding up his rifle and pointing back into the trees.

A few moments later, a strange procession appeared out of the forest, which confirmed Tom’s impression that he was in a time-warp created by Somerset Maugham or some Edwardian writing about the last days of the British Raj. Some British and Gurkha soldiers appeared, followed by two Malay Regiment men carrying a long bamboo pole on their shoulders. From this hung a corpse, suspended by ropes tied around ankles and wrists. Tom had seen old photos of tigers being retrieved like this, after being slaughtered by some pith-helmeted colonial general, but he never expected to see the method used for humans.

As the two bearers thankfully dropped their burden on the wide verge at the edge of the road, two similar convoys came out of the jungle, this time carried by a pair of West Berkshires and another two locally enlisted Malay privates.

‘Right, doctor, they’re all yours,’ announced the cheerful young captain, as the troops set about untying the corpses from the poles. ‘Let’s know when you’re through, so I can send a few lads down with shovels.’

The men from the patrol went wearily up to the tents for food and rest, while the fresher men from the vehicles stood around to watch Tom do his stuff. The three bodies, dressed in ragged bloodstained clothing, were laid out a few feet apart and he began by taking photographs of them, which seemed a sensible thing to do, as he had no orders as how to proceed. Two of the corpses were men, the other a young woman, though it was hard to tell, as her head seemed to have been exploded from the inside.

‘Were they all shot with FNs?’ he asked the captain.

‘Two of them, doc. The other was traversed with a Bren.’

Tom set out his meagre equipment, the old box of instruments giving rise to a chatter of interest amongst the watchers. Pulling on a pair of gloves, he asked the officer if someone could jot down a few notes and the captain gave the clipboard to his sergeant. Squatting uncomfortably on his heels, Tom began his examination by pulling aside the soaked, tattered shirt of the first man, a young Chinese with blood dribbling from his mouth. There were two bullet entrance wounds on his chest and a large exit wound on his back.

After opening the thorax with one of Cropper’s ferocious knives, Tom dictated a short account of the chaos within the chest cavity and the destruction of the spine, rather similar to the injury to James Robertson. However, unlike the planter, there were no bullets inside the body, the high velocity of the FN having whistled them right through to lie somewhere out there in the deep jungle.

He had a cursory look at the other main organs, mainly out of interest, in case the privations of living for years on poor rations and with rampant infectious diseases and parasites, might have left some mark. He found nothing significant and went on to look at the second man.

This was a different situation altogether, as there was a line of eight bullet entrance rounds running diagonally across his chest and abdomen, as his life was blasted away by a moving hail of bullets from a Bren gun. One of the bullets was still in the body, one lodged under the skin of the back where it had run out of momentum after passing through a vertebra.

‘That will be a three-oh-three, doc,’ commented the helpful young captain. ‘We’ve still got some of the old Brens, before they changed the barrels to fire the NATO seven-point-sixes.’

Again, Tom was chillingly reminded of James Robertson, whose spine had arrested a similar .303 projectile.

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