‘Tell her if the hut isn’t down by tomorrow morning I’ll shove her in jail,’ shouted Uxbridge, wiping his forehead. ‘And now throw her out. Oh hello, Daley, didn’t see you come in.’

‘What is the matter with the hut?’

Uxbridge’s face clouded a little. ‘Oh well, it looks as if we’d used up more wire than we thought … I got a government chit the other day saying no more wire … I’ve got to bring in the fence a bit. I’m satisfied Ah Kim did his work all right, it’s just that we must get the huts together, squeezed a bit … we’ve overstretched ourselves.’

‘Which means,’ Daley thought, ‘that Ah Kim has pocketed the wire and Uxbridge is too lazy to measure.’

‘Don’t forget the field of fire,’ said Daley.

A regulation laid down that there must always be enough room within the wire to allow the police to deploy at the four corners of the camp. There they built small earth posts covered with an attap roof. On these machine guns could be erected to rake the village in case of riot, or aimed outside in case of assault by the jungle fighters.

But in Todak already the huts were squeezed tight together, with no room for poultry runs, no room for pigsties, no room for vegetable plots. Then an order came from Headquarters that no building could be done on the area reserved for the police playing-field in high Todak. Hastily, the roofs erected there, and for which ‘pleasant money’ (for the police, it was said) had been collected, were pulled down, and forty more families went down in the swamp.

*  *  *

Luke Davis looked at his watch. ‘Nearly eleven,’ he said. ‘We agreed to meet at the coffee shop round about this time with the others. Let’s go.’

Daley followed Luke Davis as they picked their way through the garbage heaps and the stumps of low Todak; they reached the road, for a moment stood to look at the screening van; the people filing, the Chinese inspectors in their black trousers walking among them, trying to get those who had already been screened to talk. Pang was much in evidence. He was interrogating with great courtesy, a smile of encouragement on his beaming face, two rubber tapper girls with crisp waved hair, who stood like stones, in front of him.

‘And did you not hear any noise that night?’

‘Which night?’

‘The night the r.o. was murdered.’

‘We heard nothing.’

‘Have you ever heard or seen any bandits coming near your village?’

‘Which village?’

‘This village.’

‘This village?’

‘Yes, anyone from outside who has come near, whom you may have seen?’

‘We have seen nothing.’

Young Detective Inspector Huang was having a worse time with a cheery-faced buxom woman whom he had collared, together with her fourteen-year-old son.

‘How old are you?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘How old is your son?’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘Don’t you know how old he is? Where did you come from?’