The silence was shattered now by shouts and men coming running and the sound of a car horn blowing at the main gates.

Men came from their huts, the guards running along the wire. There was a babble of questions and many pointing fingers. Blanche led the way towards the front gate, meeting Inspector Aba, who had rushed from his riot at Ipoh bringing two guards for Rinsey.

‘I’ve just shot Josef Guisan,’ she told him, moving out and around the wire to where the body lay.

She had shot him in cold blood, she knew that. Murder, she supposed. She thought about George in prison. Lovers in prison, one for rape, one for murder. What about that? And what about Liz and Wendy? She watched Inspector Aba as he took over the lead; she doubted he would let the matter go without an inquiry.

They approached the fallen man with caution. But there was absolutely no doubt, the shot had hit the heart with pinpoint accuracy. The stain on the chest looked black now and the inspector ordered a man back for a lamp. Anna came too from the house and stood by Blanche, gripping her hand as the inspector raised the light.

‘Aaah!’ She greeted the sight of Josef’s body with a cry that expressed justice done. By her side a small voice piped, ‘that’s good thing! He hurt my grandmother many times.’ He pushed himself between Anna and Blanche and took both their hands. Looking up at Blanche, he added, ‘You like mongoose, kill bad things.’

Blanche regarded the inspector, whose officiousness seemed to waiver at Datuk’s judgement. He went back to bend over the body. As he moved the rifle the hand was lifted too, and in death the finger was still curled in the trigger guard.

‘It is fortunate thing he did not have time to fire first,’ Inspector Aba concluded.

Chapter Twenty-Three

There was a feeling of extreme peace all around. There had been a voice before, but now blessed stillness. Alan felt on the very lip of heaven. He had only to bequeath his breath to the wind and be gone.

And yet ... and yet ... it felt like a dream, half remembered, something in life half yearned for even while not properly recalled.

There was a voice that came again and he remembered the same voice had called before. A siren voice, luring him away from this blankness that was oblivion. A siren voice, but it paused and he knew he could decide to go now.

The voice came again louder, as if it yearned for him. He wondered, wavered — siren voices invited disaster, sang sailors on to rocks.

He thought he heard another sound, as if he gasped — was he trying to swim away? Then there was much activity around him. Was this the final surge over treacherous reefs to the calm lagoon beyond?

Be still, leave me, leave me. His brain inside his skull felt too big, too much to be poured back in. ‘Quarts into pint pots,’ he heard his father say, adding with a familiar, weary acceptance, ‘but you’ll always try!’

‘Alan, Alan,’ the urgent voice said close by his ear, ‘come back to me.’

How could he? He didn’t know where he was.

Something like panic stirred at the base of his spine and ran like uneasy fingers up to his head. Sensation flooded back, awareness like all-over pins and needles assailed him and he felt as if his body was unbalanced, as if he swam or floated in some strange substance like ... like the warm wobbly wallpaper glue his father’s decorator used.

He remembered his father always had the firm’s decorator at home. ‘I like to see a good professional job,’ he would say, then add as an aside just to Alan, ‘and I don’t want to have to do it.’ Memory came crushing back. His father was dead. The hurt of his death came sharp on the recollection. His father was dead; his mother? She had cried the last time he had seen her, cried about him, because of him. What had he done? It all seemed so sad.

Was it his mother speaking to him? It was a woman’s voice, he thought. Like his mother, always asking him to do things. ‘Take your father’s lunch to him.’ Go and tell your father the carpenter’s not able to come today.’ But his father was dead and his mother had cried because he had sailed far away, to the other side of the world.

He supposed he could open his eyes, though it seemed like quite an undertaking. Like someone shut up inside a difficult box of tricks with booby traps on all sides, he cautiously ordered his eyelids to go up a little. Nothing happened, only after a time the quality of colour seemed to have altered — black had become a kind of gingery brown.

It took him some time to realise that his eyes were parted a fraction and what he could see was hair — it could be a beard. He didn’t know he had a beard. A small quaking laugh formed somewhere as he wondered if he was Rumpelstiltskin.

Something moved across his vision, a hand, and he felt something being soothed on his lips, moist, sweet, nice. He was hungry, he realised, very hungry.

‘Alan!’ the voice was urgent. ‘I thought your lips moved. Alan?’ The fingers that had brought moisture before now played along his lips as if testing for some reverberation of life.

Then the moisture and the sweetness came on his lips again.

He could see no one.

Then another sensation blotted out all others. Someone was moving a finger along the line of his ribs. This had happened to him before — and this was a different memory. This was something he wanted. This was the voice. He wanted to see, and he forced his eyelids higher like a child reborn with an urgent instinct to view his world.

He could see a wall of bamboo, a high woven roof. Then he focused on someone very close to his side, someone — making free with his body. The face and the voice all came together. ‘Liz!’ he shouted. ‘Liz!’ The sound started in his mind like a triumphant shout, but came from his throat like the rasping of a rusty knife on an old dry brick.

‘Alan? Alan!’ This was the yearning voice! Now her anxious face peered down at him as if hope was some strange creature she was afraid to look for.

‘Alan?’ The word was all caution. He saw how she slowly allowed herself to recognise the light of rational life in his half-opened eyes. He saw her face transformed as finally she saw he knew her. ‘Alan, my darling ... Oh! I didn’t think we’d ever really look at each other again.’ She pressed her face close to his. ‘Oh! Thank God, thank God! If there’s no more than this, I thank God!’

He did not understand, remembering her finger along his ribcage. What was she saying? There was to be much more!

‘I knew if I loved you enough you wouldn’t go from me.’

He felt her tears hot on his cheeks and he tried to move a hand to touch her, but she rose too soon. ‘I must tell the others.’

She ran to the doorway from the sleeping bench where he lay against one wall. He felt bereft as she left; turning his head to watch, he was alarmed when she seemed to drop out of sight from the door. Then he remembered native huts he had seen high on stilts. He had not realised that some might have such noble-seeming proportions inside. The room where he lay seemed enormous and airy, with pleasant filtered sunlight.

He heard her calling, ‘Lee, Ch’ing, Pa Kasut! He’s come round! He’s come back!’

Then her head reappeared in the doorway. Alan felt his mind light up, and as she ran across to him he thought she was like a girl in an English buttercup field with the sun behind her — and he lying in the grass.

‘Will you try a proper drink?’ She took up a small cup and dipped it into a bowl. Then she was back by his side supporting his head, letting him sip from the cup. ‘This is what the Sakais have brewed, it’s kept you alive.’

He was aware of the strange sensation of hair all around his lips as he drank. After she had taken the cup away he tried to lift a hand to feel. He wondered at the slowness of the hand that came eventually from his side upwards. He wondered at the hand. Did those elongated, skeletal fingers belong to him?