A regulation laid down that there must always be enough room within the wire to allow the police to deploy at the four corners of the camp. There they built small earth posts covered with an attap roof. On these machine guns could be erected to rake the village in case of riot, or aimed outside in case of assault by the jungle fighters.

But in Todak already the huts were squeezed tight together, with no room for poultry runs, no room for pigsties, no room for vegetable plots. Then an order came from Headquarters that no building could be done on the area reserved for the police playing-field in high Todak. Hastily, the roofs erected there, and for which ‘pleasant money’ (for the police, it was said) had been collected, were pulled down, and forty more families went down in the swamp.

*  *  *

Luke Davis looked at his watch. ‘Nearly eleven,’ he said. ‘We agreed to meet at the coffee shop round about this time with the others. Let’s go.’

Daley followed Luke Davis as they picked their way through the garbage heaps and the stumps of low Todak; they reached the road, for a moment stood to look at the screening van; the people filing, the Chinese inspectors in their black trousers walking among them, trying to get those who had already been screened to talk. Pang was much in evidence. He was interrogating with great courtesy, a smile of encouragement on his beaming face, two rubber tapper girls with crisp waved hair, who stood like stones, in front of him.

‘And did you not hear any noise that night?’

‘Which night?’

‘The night the r.o. was murdered.’

‘We heard nothing.’

‘Have you ever heard or seen any bandits coming near your village?’

‘Which village?’

‘This village.’

‘This village?’

‘Yes, anyone from outside who has come near, whom you may have seen?’

‘We have seen nothing.’

Young Detective Inspector Huang was having a worse time with a cheery-faced buxom woman whom he had collared, together with her fourteen-year-old son.

‘How old are you?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘How old is your son?’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘Don’t you know how old he is? Where did you come from?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Do you know where you are now?’

‘No.’

‘It is incredible,’ said Luke, ‘how dumb they can become. A wall of impenetrable stupidity … their only defence. Not to know, not to see, nor hear, nor speak … unable to remember their names, nor how many children they have. I had a village like that to screen once. Not one person there knew there was an Emergency on.’

‘They are so terrorized, so much more terrified of us and unable to understand what has happened to them, that their only refuge is complete idiocy,’ said Daley.

‘I don’t know what the answer is, do you?’