They strolled to the servants’ quarters, where Ah Mei and Miss Lee were indolently doing the washing (not too many sheets; for Ah Mei’s sake, we changed only once a fortnight), and the cook’s vociferous and restless children were playing with empty tins, or stuffing themselves with our bread, butter, and jam. There would be sounds of gay laughter and bantering talk. The radio (Miss Lee’s) would be turned on full blast, for half an hour or so.

In the evening, occasionally, they would come again, and sit round the servants’ table, in the cool drop of night, while the fiery stars glowed overhead. Decorously they left, at half past ten. We could hear Ah Mei and Miss Lee’s giggles as they retired to their sleeping mats.

From time to time Ah Mei left us. A police car, slightly battered, driven by the Tamil police chauffeur (who wept such large tears upon my husband’s shoulder the night his wife was bewitched by a Malay night-spirit), would stop in front of the house. A Chinese inspector, occasionally a British officer, would step out of it, asking for Ah Mei. He would say: ‘We’ll do our best to send her back soon … as soon as she’s got the info we want … depends how quick she gets her work done.’

Ah Mei would be locked up in the prison cell with the suspect, always a young girl or a woman, a rubber tapper caught in a raid, or suspected of collecting subscriptions, or found with food outside the wire fences of the resettlement area, or informed upon, or perhaps just brought in on one of those swoops which, like a net catching fish, brought them in, to be sorted out later into the innocent and the probably guilty to be detained.

Usually the girl would be terrified. Sometimes, to soften her, if there was ‘something’ on her, she had been kept in solitary confinement for a few days or a week.

Names, names, what had really happened, who the girl was, her family – Ah Mei herself with her years in the People’s Movement often supplied in her mind the background and the connecting links of which the suspect was ignorant, piecing the information she obtained with her own knowledge. Ah Mei always got the goods.

In the cell together they would sit and talk, united by common misfortune, Ah Mei, a half smile on her face as she listened, rapt as a child listening to a story, never impatient, never obviously questioning, extracting from the unsuspecting suspect everything she could tell. When it was over, she would come back to write her report. She could not write it downstairs because Miss Lee was there, and the cook and his family. She wrote it upstairs, in our living-room.