Daley did not reply. He thought then that he knew what the answer was. The two men walked on, Daley holding on inwardly to his answer … perhaps he’d still be able to show them, one day … Love was the answer, he thought, and then, confusedly, but Love is such a nauseating word in this heat …

*  *  *

Che Ahmad walked up to the police post. Fat Inspector Abdullah, massive and smooth, glistening hair and brown eyes, sat at his table, virgin of any paper dossier, the picture of deferential efficiency.

Bob Stewart was trying to grill him. Inspector Abdullah had not risen to this rank for nothing. He was due for a Colonial Police Medal any time now. He was good at his job, knew his men, religious, and had a sense of moderation in his pickings.

Not that Inspector Abdullah was averse to pickings. Everyone made pickings out of the Emergency. In the towns on Saturday nights you could often see him do his round, Sikh or Malay or Chinese detective, moving quietly from hawker to shop, collecting weekly dues; Abdullah’s brother-in-law, in the Singapore police, had transferred to the Traffic Branch, where the pickings were even larger. Everybody had pickings, even the white tuans. Abdullah smiled in perfect composure as Bob Stewart blustered and swore. Had not Bob Stewart a few months ago investigated Burley Ricketts? Abdullah, then in c.i.d. Anti-Corruption, had been a great help to Bob.

Burly Ricketts, once officer in charge of Rice Control, had arranged a contract with a Chinese rice firm, to supply with rice, in the usual police escorted convoys of lorries, a number of wired-in resettlement areas. His task was to supervise distribution, check rice weights, and see that they were not short. One day a zealous investigator came down from Headquarters and toured the district, and found that, officially, rice was being supplied to eighteen resettlement areas, but that only eleven existed. Seven areas did not exist, yet Government had paid for rice for them, for twelve thousand people who simply were not there.

The head of the Chinese rice firm abruptly disappeared in Indonesia. The manager of the lorry company (who merely delivered the rice) was detained for corruption; and Ricketts was boarded out for medical reasons and retired to honour and an intact pension in England.

When the rice contract was then given to Quo Boon, it was whispered that it was Quo Boon, through his agents, who had informed Government of the non-existence of these resettlement camps. Since then no relative, friend, or agent of Quo Boon’s manifold companies had dared to visit, on pain of assassination, the town where the family of the former rice merchant still lived (professing complete ignorance of their father’s whereabouts).