‘You need not be so polite … send them to my house.’

There was silence at Todak, silence ominous in the plywood huts. Uxbridge was well satisfied because all complaining had stopped. Father Destier tried to tell him about the water money. Daley tried to tell him that he was too hard on the people. ‘But they haven’t complained,’ he said. On his visits to Headquarters he gave a succinct report on the morale of the village. No incidents. People were buckling down to work. Curfew was working.

Still more people came.

The high land was crowded, the perimeter fence could only be readjusted there in one direction, encroaching on the area reserved for the police playing-field; when that was taken, Ah Kim sent word that a certain sum of money was to be raised to be distributed to the police for compensation …

‘But Uxbridge wouldn’t believe it, and I had no proof. I heard it all in my own village, and could not believe it, knowing how these things get about, until I came here myself once again.’ Thus Daley.

Todak, a still afternoon. Sullen, shut faces. Silence. Even the children ran away when Daley walked past them. They did not shout. They hid. Doors slammed, weakly. Uxbridge was in his office. In front of him stood an old woman with a wrinkled face, dressed in rubber-tapper black, hands stiff, gnarled as tree bark, on both sides of her. Georgie was translating, shouting. There was much shouting always, in the r.o.’s office in Todak.

‘You’ve got to move. You’re in the way of the wire.’

‘Tolong, please, Great Brother, tell the red-haired great man I cannot move my hut. Have compassion. I am an old woman. It cost me eight hundred dollars to put my hut up, then another two hundred to take it down and put it up again …’

‘Tell her if the hut isn’t down by tomorrow morning I’ll shove her in jail,’ shouted Uxbridge, wiping his forehead. ‘And now throw her out. Oh hello, Daley, didn’t see you come in.’

‘What is the matter with the hut?’

Uxbridge’s face clouded a little. ‘Oh well, it looks as if we’d used up more wire than we thought … I got a government chit the other day saying no more wire … I’ve got to bring in the fence a bit. I’m satisfied Ah Kim did his work all right, it’s just that we must get the huts together, squeezed a bit … we’ve overstretched ourselves.’

‘Which means,’ Daley thought, ‘that Ah Kim has pocketed the wire and Uxbridge is too lazy to measure.’

‘Don’t forget the field of fire,’ said Daley.