Clive Macaulay, the police officer in charge of Mui Set’s case, did not know what to do with her. He was young, earnest, well meaning, had been a travelling salesman for Shell Oil in the Midlands before coming to try his luck in the Police Force in Malaya.

He did his best and kept Mui Set alone in a room in Police Headquarters pending her ultimate disposal. To prevent accidents, such as a Malaya mata-mata interfering with her, Macaulay locked the door.

Mui Set screamed and screamed. In the shack, among the rubber trees, she had never been alone. Now she was alone day and night.

Macaulay then tried keeping her at Police Headquarters, with the S.E.P.s. For a few days it seemed all right. Then regulations interfered. Mui Set was not technically of any value to Headquarters. No one could supervise her, she was slow-witted, fourteen, and there were many young ex-bandits about. Macaulay had to take her back and keep her in the locked room, meanwhile pressing for ‘disposal of Mui Set, female, age fourteen’.

After a week of confinement, Mui Set was no longer a dull normal. She was mad. She understood nothing of what had happened, except that she was in the hands of these frightening red-haired devils who were hunting her father. At first she had called, sobbing, hour upon hour, for her mother. But now only screamed without stop: ‘I want to die, I want to die!’

Macaulay took her to the Hospital. In the ward, Mui Set twisted and writhed on the bed. A wardress, a nurse, and a doctor held her down. The wardress spoke to her, kindly, soothingly, but Mui Set was beyond human contact. She could only fill the ward with screams. The one hundred other patients in the ward became uneasy and disordered. Some were surgical cases, awaiting operation. Others were just recovering from operation. There were several heart failures, asthmatics, an old woman dying of cancer of the liver, two or three typhoids, the usual jumble in the single women’s ward. Along the corridors Mui Set’s screaming echoed and reverberated.

The houseman on duty decided to give her a sedative injection. He approached Mui Set with a syringe, and called two orderlies to hold her down. The injection had no effect. Finally they strapped her to a stretcher and took her by ambulance to the Mental Hospital. It was night; the doctor at the Mental Hospital, overworked and ill, gave orders to put her in a room by herself, since she was violent. Mui Set was left alone, and somehow the straitjacket was forgotten. The next morning, when they came for her, Mui Set was dead. She had strangled herself with the sleeve of her hospital gown.

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