‘You heard him,’ he said. ‘That’s what they really think of us, those red-haired devils.’ He spat. ‘Of course, man, I’m not interested in this sham party of yours, nobody is, when they see the front rows all filled up by Police. And then Moksa, Sir Creep-before-you-Walk, takes makan with them. No fooling, man …’ he shook his finger at me as if I were a child, ‘… no party is going to win that’s only a stooge, a running dog, I tell you, and for running dogs there’s only one thing.’ And mild, helpful Mr Bee drew his hand across his throat, reinforced it with a sound: ‘crrrrrrrr’ he said.

*  *  *

Damp fingers grasping pen, Luke Davis sat and squirmed in his rattan chair, scratched the prickly heat studding his neck with a few white pustules of nascent heat boils, smelt sweat feral trickle down his armpits. He was working on a report on terrorist supplies smuggled across the Straits from the island of Singapore to Malaya.

Luke was happy; not merely was this a strenuous and intricate piece of detecting, long hours of patient fitting together of fact and counterfact, minute collating of more or less reliable information from agents and spies and counterspies (all to be paid out of special funds for the purpose); his absorption freed him of that disturbing inner malaise which made him question the purpose of his efforts and the validity of his intentions.

For he was of the tribe called tender-minded, to whom compunction clings as native skin; who expect others and themselves to act as they ought instead of behaving as they do. Such people are more likely found among those miscalled Intellectual; hard upon their own failings, no dogma is secure with them. Their minds are unable to leave mental stones unturned. They remain for ever suspect, disadvantaged among the many who stifle dubiety with the clamour of conviction.

In a country and in a job where thinking is nearly out of bounds, and bound to withhold action, awareness of this fault kept Luke a little apart from his fellows and consequently lonely. He had gone into the Police hoping to lose this weakness in action, as men sincere enough to know themselves capable of being afraid live dangerously, for ever to test the edge of their fear.

But in the Force he had found another kind of loneliness, that of the white man cut off from the world around him, clinging to disfigured shreds of his own.