Dead in the Dog

As he sat sweating under the rotating overhead fan, Steven’s mind reverted to the other suspects, if such unlikely candidates could be thought of as such. He was convinced that a woman was at the bottom of this crime, as he could not bring himself to believe that any other motive was credible. There was no possible financial reason why Jimmy should have been shot – Doug Mackay would not benefit from Robertson’s death. Indeed, he stood to lose his job and bungalow if Gunong Besar was sold up. Perhaps Les Arnold might have a slight motive, if he wanted to add that estate to his own holdings up at Batu Merah, but it seemed unlikely that he would devise such an elaborate scheme just to get hold of extra land. With any terrorist involvement ruled out, as it must be given the dumping of Jimmy’s body outside The Dog, then some motive related to passion, sex or jealousy must surely be the answer.

His train of thought was interrupted by one of the Indian civil employees coming in with a tray containing his eleven o’clock grapefruit soda to wash down a Paludrine tablet, his daily defence against malaria. Behind him came Inspector Tan, with some statements about a recent serious wounding in a kampong a few miles away. Steven motioned to him to sit down on the other side of the desk. He had not told him of the business with Colonel O’Neill and the armoury as, if it was a total red-herring, the fewer people who knew about it, the better.

‘Tan, where do we go from here, eh?’ he began, wanting to see if the highly intelligent inspector had any new thoughts to offer about the impasse in which they found themselves. ‘Do you feel that it is at all possible that our culprit is from the hospital?’

The smooth-faced officer sat primly in his chair opposite his chief. ‘Anything is possible, sir. Who of us can ever tell what emotions are seething beneath the surface of any of our fellow men?’

Steven had a fleeting impression that he was listening to some saying of Confucius, but Tan soon became less philosophical and more practical.

‘Sir, we have the surgeon gentleman, Major Bright, who it seems is very enamoured with Mrs Diane. I came to learn that he would very much have liked her to divorce her husband so that they could marry – and time was running out, as he is soon due to return to England. That could be a motive for him to rid himself of Mr Robertson. He has no firm alibi for the time of the shooting.’

‘So he’s a favourite of yours for the killing?’

Tan gave a slight lift of the shoulders, his face remaining impassive. ‘It seems unlikely, but it is a possibility. Perhaps a better one than for his colleague, Captain Meredith, the anaesthetist. He too had a motive in that Mr Robertson appears to have captured the affections of one of the nursing sisters, who the captain had considered his own lady friend. But that seems a much weaker motivation than the first.’

Trust his inspector to lay out the facts in such a clear, if dispassionate way, thought Blackwell.

‘Any other suspects appeal to you, Tan?’ he asked.

‘I understand that the Commanding Officer has been acting somewhat strangely,’ replied Tan, again surprising his boss with his grasp of the local gossip from BMH. ‘Recently, he also seems to be unusually attentive to Mrs Robertson, though I fail to see the relevance of that.’

The Chinese officer paused for a moment. ‘Those are the military candidates, sir. But of course, there are the civilians, the planters. Mr Arnold has a rather dubious past, including using a gun to wound someone in Australia, but I see little motivation for shooting Mr Robertson. I have heard that he has expressed open admiration for Mrs Diane, but I doubt that he wanted to remove her husband in order to marry her.’

‘What about the Mackays?’ asked Steven, curious to hear what his inspector’s analytical mind felt about them.

‘From my interviews with them when I took statements, I felt that there was some unhappiness between them. I heard rumours from elsewhere that it was possible that Mr Robertson had carried on some adulterous relationship with Mrs Mackay, but that seemed in the past. I cannot believe that it would be in the best interests of Mr Mackay to kill his employer, unless he was consumed by an excess of outraged jealousy.’

Steven was secretly amused by Tan’s rather pedantic and prim phraseology, probably culled from classic English novels, but he appreciated his clear overview of the situation, which confirmed his own feelings.

He placed his Paludrine tablet on his tongue and washed it down with the fizzy grey juice.

‘We’ll just have to wait and see what happens next, I’m afraid,’ he said to his inspector, reaching across for the reports on the local assault.

They had not long to wait.

THIRTEEN