‘They got them near Todak,’ explained Dr Eng the anaesthetist, watching with me. He was a Chinese from Penang, and had done underground anti-Japanese work during the Occupation. ‘Todak is now a resettlement camp, with barbed wire round it. It is known as a Bad Spot.’

Of course, it was always places which had done the most fighting against the Japanese in the last war, places once famous for their heroism, which had become notorious bad spots in the present trouble. Thus it was that Tanjong Malim, mentioned in Chapman’s book (Dr Eng was very enthusiastic about the book), and Kulai, and Labis, and Yong Peng, and Todak, were now bad spots. He knew a village which had been twice razed to the ground. Once by the Japanese, and last year by the British. The first time the people had been warned by the jungle guerrillas, and many had fled Inside. Those that could not escape, the Japanese had massacred. The second time the British had come at dawn, and surrounded the village. In six hours the whole population had been carted away in trucks, the pigs slaughtered, the crops smashed, and the whole area destroyed by fire. ‘Collective punishment,’ giggled Dr Eng, spreading sudden glee over his face, as Chinese will do to hide other emotions. Laughter is the open fan of the well-bred person masking the yawn of boredom, the twisted lip of pain, the clenched jaws of hatred.

While we were talking the theatre called for Dr Eng. The young terrorist would be operated on, to try to save his life. ‘So they can hang him afterwards. What a waste of time,’ was Betchine’s comment.

The boy was now dying. The older one was a hard case, as the attendant put it. ‘He won’t even take an injection for the pain, doctor.’ He lay with his head propped on a pillow as we passed his cell with its wide bars and its Malay policeman standing guard. His eyes followed us, contempt evident.

We stood by the young man’s bed; at his head also was a Malay mata-mata on guard, just as young as the terrorist. The glucose-saline transfusion set had stopped. Unnecessarily, I felt his swift small pulse. He had a smooth face, regular features, black hair growing in a point on the forehead. He looked like hundreds of other young Chinese, slim, neat of feature, spareness different from the beauty of the Malays, who, lacking the sharp, tense quality of the Chinese youth, make up for it by a more suave and sensual charm.

While we were looking at him, listening to his very shallow breathing, he opened his eyes and saw me.

‘Doctor,’ he said.

‘Yes, what is it?’

Although his intonation was Cantonese, he now spoke standard Chinese, both because I had done so, and because it is the language which the People Inside will use, whatever dialect group they may come from.