She watched him go. Don’t worry, brother, she thought, I don’t need to.

Hardly had the noise of his progress away through the jungle ceased when a movement at the far side of the former parade ground caught her eye. A small black man wearing only the briefest of loincloths stood there, a small bundle of leaves in one hand, in the other a blowpipe so long and thin it looked twice his height. His physique was that of a slender athlete, though she knew from seeing him at close quarters that his face was lined and the touches of grey in his black frizz showed he was well over middle age.

Lee raised her hand slowly in greeting. The Sakais were timid people at best, though kindly. So quickly had this Sakai come to their help, Lee realised these jungle dwellers must have known of the camp and of the movements of the communists, though they had kept well hidden for at no time had there been any talk of any Sakais living close by. Yet once the men had gone this man had come with aid for the two distressed women.

She put her hands together Chinese-fashion and bowed respectfully. She warmed to anyone who could outwit Heng Hou. He grinned and mimicked her movement, coming forward offering the leaves.

Inside was a grey powder. He took a small flat stick and divided the powder in half; he pointed to her mother, then to where the sun would set and one half of the powder, then to where the sun would rise and to the other half.

‘Night and morning,’ Lee said in Malay. She felt he understood what she said, but he never spoke.

The Sakai tribesman gently took the leaf back and mixed the one half in a cup of water, nodded and smiled, looked at her mother and nodded and smiled again.

I do hope you’re right, she thought, then, pointing to herself and her mother and back to the Sakai, indicated that they might all go the way he had come.

He looked at her mother, pursed his lips in the same manner as prescribers of medicine the world over, then nodded but shrugged at the same time.

‘And?’ She made the sign that had come to mean the soldier to them both: a stroke across the top of her head which indicated the deep passage of the bullet over the top of the man’s head.

Now the purse of the lips was more positive and the eyes looked into hers with concern. He frowned, then gave a low whistle like a bird call, and from the jungle came a tiny, beautifully proportioned young woman wearing just a waist sarong. He spoke to her rapidly. The girl nodded, then came forward and in perfect but slow Malay said, ‘My father says the man is very ill. They have taken him to Pa Kasut in the hills where cooler, better for patient. But he thinks needs own kind to talk to him, bring him back ... ’

She struggled now for the right word.

‘ ... to consciousness,’ Lee supplied, then, as the girl looked puzzled, added, ‘from coma, from deep sleep?’ The girl nodded gravely while her father spoke again to her.

‘Father says if want to see should come quick or may be too late.’

Lee realised the meaning of the young girl’s presence. It seemed the effort and peril of dragging the soldier out of the sight of the retreating terrorists might well have been in vain. They had not saved his life, merely prolonged it.

‘Pa Kasut, all Sakais, done all can,’ the girl added earnestly.

‘I know and I thank you, my mother and I both thank you,’ Lee assured them both. ‘Without your help the man would certainly have been shot dead and we would have starved.’ She smiled and accepted the length of thick tapioca root, staple diet for the Sakais, the girl now held out to her.

This was the first time Lee had been able to communicate with the Sakais directly and she was anxious not to let the girl go until she had dealt with this new problem.

‘The man,’ she said, ‘is a soldier and carries in his pocket a picture of my friend Elizabeth Hammond. She lives at the plantation Rinsey, north of Bukit Kinta — ’

‘Along the Sungei Woh,’ the girl said.

‘This I do not know. Would you or your Sakais take us there so then we could bring the girl Elizabeth to the man? She could talk to him — before it is too late.’

The girl turned to her father and they talked together for a long time.

Lee saw her mother move and went to reassure her, but when she saw that Josef was gone and only the tribespeople were there she rested back content.

‘He has brought a powder for you to take — ’ she began.

‘Give it to me.’ Ch’ing reached for the cup. ‘I must be strong soon. We must go before communists come back.’ She reached for the cup and drank it down.

‘The girl speaks good Malay I can understand,’ Lee told her.

Ch’ing called her thanks.

‘They say the soldier is very ill, unconscious.’ She sat on the end of the long chair and spoke quietly. ‘I think if he is Miss Liz’s boyfriend we should try to take her to see him — very quickly, they think. I’ve asked if they would guide us to Rinsey.’

The old lady’s mouth opened and a look of such eagerness came to her face that the girl spoke to her father and pointed to Ch’ing.

He shook his head and the girl turned back. ‘My father said too far for old lady and too dangerous, Sungei Woh in great flood from hill storms.’

‘But you must go,’ Ch’ing insisted, ‘You go! Go!’

‘We take mother to our village first,’ the girl said. ‘Father says no time to waste.’

Chapter Eighteen

The tea chests were already half full of George Harfield’s possessions when Liz paused and said reflectively, ‘You know, as soon as things could be arranged I’d like to go back to England. I could find a flat and a job and keep house for Wendy at holiday times. I just feel a kind of aching despair here.’

Blanche reflected that ‘aching despair’ exactly summed up how she too felt, and how she had felt ever since Neville’s murder and George Harfield being committed to prison. Two things occupied her mind; bringing Josef to justice and procuring George Harfield’s release. She had no doubt of the former’s guilt or the latter’s innocence.

She found herself calculating how old she would be on George’s release if he had to serve his full sentence. Even making allowance for an early parole, she would be well into her middle fifties. She supposed just making the calculation proved how furious she still was at the efficiency of the trap and showed how much she cared about their complete failure to find any witness or anything that could have helped George at his trial.

‘Will you go back ... ?’ Liz began.

Blanche rose from her knees where she had been folding George’s underwear and putting it neatly into a leather suitcase. She went to look out of the window at the mining complex laid out below. The muddy green waters, the dredgers with the noisy buckets, the jungle down to the water’s edge, sliced into here and there to make room for the wooden workplaces and office — and Kampong Kinta. All safe behind the virtual stockade George had ordered built and supervised, but she had come to be certain that there were as many communist sympathisers within the barriers as without.

Some thirty feet below in the roadway she could see the new and unfortunately spotty young manager the company had sent out. He had already been to see the Hammonds and officiously instructed them that the furniture in George’s house went with the job. Watching him pointing and gesticulating to the men on the dredgers, she decided they would take the American refrigerator from the lounge — she was sure that did not belong to the company.

‘After all, you didn’t want to leave Pearling,’ Liz added.

‘Perhaps going back is not what I’m about.’ Blanche spoke slowly, almost as if discovering the truth of the words as they came to her lips.

After a moment she turned to look at her daughter, remembering how George too had lost weight. In the dock he had looked as if years, not weeks, had passed. He had appeared dignified, pale, tense — and angry. Anger under control had been more awesome at that moment than the passion that screams and rails against fate, but it was also, she knew, the kind of anger that ate into a man like a canker. She turned back to the window; somewhere within her view at that moment there must be some shred of evidence that would prove his innocence.