Neo joined them, and saw the covering tarpaulin in the centre of the standing circle, a circumference of feet. And then the girl approached, smiling, with Big Dog Tsou, and removed the sheet, and Neo looked, and knew: ‘This is Meng, who weighed the latex. That is why he was not weighing today.’

‘Comrades,’ said Big Dog Tsou, ‘this was a traitor and we have punished him.’

*  *  *

There is knowledge that is not knowledge, not in words and yet inhabits the mind, informs it with facts and events. And although no one told the story, yet this is what Neo grew to know, without once acknowledging that he knew.

How Meng went to the Estate Assistant Manager one day, ostensibly because he was ill but really because he wanted to inform on the People Inside, for Meng was greedy for money, and the People Inside had a price on their heads, each one of them.

But the Estate Manager was away, and so Meng, in his impatient lust for money made of selling man to man, took the estate bus to town twenty miles away. And there, bold and daring (for as a weigher he had had some authority), he went to the police building.

When he came to the wire fence, secure and solid and always fresh round the large yellow building with black-painted rain-pipes running down its walls, he looked fearfully round, afraid of a watcher, and seeing no one pay heed, gleaned foolish courage from his ignorance and greed, and went in and asked to see the European officer, the white man. He could not trust one of his own race, not knowing whether they might be of the Movement, and anyway he did not want to pay blackmail money for ever after, to a Malay or Chinese detective.

The police post was open day and night. Informers were promised the strictest secrecy, but there is no secrecy in Asia, not for anything, and least of all in the Police, which is for ever buying and selling information and then writing it all down in many copies for anyone to read. If one is an Asian, no European officer will be there to go straight to and whisper, and then go out again by another door. In front of everyone in the waiting hall, one walks up to two Malay constables, and asks to see the white man, and there are always loiterers about the station, and in the entrance room.

But Meng was foolish. He sidled up to the mata-matas in charge and grinned and put his hand to his forehead in the recognized salutation, tabek, tabek, and asked in Malay: ‘Tuan, orang puteh, the white man?’

‘He is out,’ said one Malay, surly and suspicious because Meng was Chinese. ‘What do you want?’