And Pang’s agile fat feminine buttocks in their tight black pants ran down the slope.

The two police officers watched as the parade continued past the vans. At the canvas sides of each van stood other detectives, ears pressed against the folds to hear the whisper from inside. ‘That one,’ and the Special Branch men would go up to the woman or man now standing in front of the slit and push the suspect out of the line up to the waiting barred police van, parked a little farther up the road.

Heat glares, pressing down armour of solid heat, encasing, paralysing. Crufts lost sight, lost touch, refugee from the heat into the half-consciousness of a daydream, a daydream resolved into a merciless, glazed repetition …

Of the terror-stricken mata-mata surging out of the glittering ecstatic full-moon night, the silver world outside his bungalow.Moonlight trickling on the huddled huts, and the mata-mata panting, forgetting to salute.

‘Tuan, Tuan, apa Tuan Uxbridge.’

‘What the blazes are you talking about?’

Between hiccups of terror he spoke. He and a comrade on night duty detailed to check the perimeter fence had come to the low lying swampy part, and seen a bundle lying there. Cautiously they challenged, their weapons cocked, approached, fingers on triggers. The unmoving shape, it was a man, a white man, it was … The Malay could not and would not go further. ‘Tuan must see himself,’ he said.

And Crufts had run out in the lovely silver moonlight, with a posse of six mata-matas, and come upon Uxbridge the Resettlement Officer, leaning as if asleep on the barbed-wire fence sagging beneath his weight, dead on the wire fence, shot in the back, and cold. From the thick green mud upon his clothes he must have been half carried, half dragged from some distance away. His revolver was gone, his identity card was gone, but his money, three hundred dollars of it, was in his wallet. That was the supreme insult, and Crufts felt himself flushing with anger in the moonlight. Show off, he thought; want the people here to know they were not after his money but after him. Justice, he thought, and for a moment stood unbelieving, turning his flashlight into the death-drowned face, stiff and blue-jowled, the eyes coagulated like latex, the uncovered teeth coated with a thick yellow creamy substance.

And then he looked round. The silver night pressed her stifling brightness on him, and the huts were shining silver humps, abandoned cocoons, glistening on a swallowed earth. Crufts would never remember how he had reached the body, but all his life he would remember the journey back. The mata-matas not refusing yet standing passive, unwilling to move, to bear the dead unclean body; frightened of the ravenous white ghost; and finally one had been prevailed upon to take one foot and one the other, and Crufts carrying Uxbridge by the armpits, and what a weight the man was!