It started, then, my doubt, when the tall and earnest psychologist from Australia, one of those going about Malaya studying the Emergency and its effects, the means of psychological warfare employed to render its measures palatable, came to interrogate Ah Mei. It was extremely hot that day, but the psychologist was wide-awake. He had pored over Ah Mei’s files; now she stood in front of him, naked-footed, smiling, answering his questions without seeming to pause.

We were talking of Fong Kiap, moved from detention to rehabilitation camp, and who had developed such talent for embroidery that her linen tablecloths were on sale in the best shops of Singapore.

‘Certainly she used to pass food,’ said Ah Mei. ‘And the baby is her husband’s. He and her uncle and her brother are Inside.’

And then the psychologist asked her a question in the precise Mandarin Chinese he had studied at London University. ‘In your confession, Ah Mei, that long long one, you speak somewhere of a girl called Small Cloud, who was for a while in the jungle in the camp when you were there. Who is Small Cloud? Have you had any news of her? Do you know more about her?’

‘I do not,’ said Ah Mei. ‘I do not know what has happened to her. I never knew her very well. She must still be Inside. But she is not important.’

‘I thought,’ said the psychologist,’ that if you had been friendly with her it would have been a good idea to contact her. You know, the usual thing the police do, dropping leaflets appealing to her to surrender. In your confession you hinted that she went to the jungle because she was attracted by a high ranking communist officer in that camp?’

‘I know nothing more than what I said at the time,’ answered Ah Mei, ‘and perhaps it was only rumour, after all.’

And that was the first time, like a hand clapped in warning, inside me, I thought (and refused to know) that Ah Mei was lying.

‘A most interesting and intelligent girl,’ said the psychologist to me. ‘One thing puzzled me when I spoke to her this morning. That sometimes she talks of herself in the third person. Very old-fashioned Chinese, don’t you agree? But then they are all such odd mixtures of old superstition and traditional custom jumbled with the grievance which pushes them to the jungle …’

‘But I can’t fathom why Ah Mei switches herself from the third to the first person so often. I get the impression that she thinks of herself as two people … one in the jungle, when she says ‘she’, and one now, an ‘I’ … I wonder whether she has really split herself into two, so that she can now betray where she once believed?’