The soup began to bubble. He poured it into a bowl and, when it had cooled a little, began to eat.
The penalty for being found in the illegal possession of arms was death. Whether or not knowledge of the whereabouts of smuggled arms would constitute possession, and whether concealment of such knowledge carried the same penalty he did not know. One thing was clear. The illegal selling of smuggled arms would certainly be a hanging matter; at least while the emergency regulations remained in force. The best thing he could do was to go to Mr. Wright immediately and make a clean breast of the matter.
But a clean breast of what matter? He did not really know anything about an arms dump. He only believed one to be there. And where was 'there' ? Assuming that his deductions were correct, the dump was concealed in an area of jungle covering at least three square miles. It might prove quite impossible to find. Mr. Wright would not thank him for starring a wild goose chase, and neither would the police. When the time came for him to apply for a local bus service franchise they might remember the trouble he had caused and hold it against him. No. The best thing he could do was nothing.
He finished his soup and felt better. He was an innocent man again quietly digesting his evening meal. What did he want with smuggled arms? Could he ever have sold them? Of course not. Who would buy? And supposing others knew of the dump, if dump there were. Ten men had been killed; but supposing that other members of the guerrilla band had stayed behind. It might be highly dangerous to start searching in the area for their camp. Besides, there was always a chance that one or two of the men living at Awang already knew where it was. Not a very big chance perhaps; the guerrillas would not have trusted their unwilling hosts to that extent; but someone might have found out by chance. Naturally, no man or woman from the village would dare to go to the police with the information; or not immediately anyway. A decent interval would have to elapse before the dump could be discovered 'accidentally'. More likely it would just be forgotten. And that perhaps was what he would do; forget about it. After all, he could always remember again later, if he wanted to.
There was a metal trunk in one corner of the room. In it he kept his catalogues and trade papers, and the schedule of a projected daily bus service linking ten of the principal rubber estates in the district with Bukit Amphu sixteen miles away. He took the schedule out, read it through very carefully, and then began to make one or two long-contemplated modifications.
IV
A month went by before Girija made any move to locate the arms dump.
There had been no reports of any special patrol activity in the district, and guerrilla attacks in the province had been concentrated on areas nearer the coast. He had watched the men from Awang carefully without detecting anything unusual in their demeanour. But such reassurances came mingled with doubt. If no dump had been discovered, it could well be for the simple reason that none existed.
It was, in fact, the growing conviction that he must have been mistaken that gave him the courage he needed to go on. If there were nothing to find, he argued, there could be nothing incriminating in the search.
The first part of his plan called for a satisfactory cover for repeated visits to the Awang area. He might avoid going through the village itself, but he would have to use a mile or more of the road leading to it. Encounters with men who knew him, and who might gossip or ask questions, would be inevitable. The difficulty had seemed insurmountable at first; but finally he had had an idea.
The latex produced by the estate went thirty miles by road down to the port of Kuala Pangkalan and from there was shipped to Singapore. Since the emergency, the trucks from the coast had had to be provided with armoured car escorts, and, consequently, did not make the journey so often. Mr. Wright had been talking for some time, and writing to Singapore, about the need for additional storage sheds. The Singapore office had been reluctant to authorise the expenditure. Girija's idea was to make the new sheds an excuse for his trips to Awang.
Near the abandoned mine workings there were a number of derelict corrugated-iron buildings which had been used as offices, stores and repair shops. Girija wrote to the head office of the mining company in Kota Bharu, and asked permission to inspect the property with a possible view to making an offer for the material of the buildings.
He did not tell Mr. Wright. If Mr. Wright found out no great harm would be done. Indeed, Mr. Wright would probably give him a pat on the back for his zeal and initiative in attempting to solve the problem of the new storage sheds. But Mr. Wright would also tell him something he already knew; that the mining company's rust-eaten buildings were not worth the cost of dismantling them, and that it would be a waste of time for him to go and inspect them.
The mining company replied with understandable enthusiasm that Mr. Krishnan had their full permission to inspect the buildings any time he liked. That was all he needed. No one person he might encounter there would know exactly how many visits of inspection he had made, nor how many might be necessary. It would be assumed that he was acting on Mr. Wright's instructions. If he were ever challenged he could produce the letter.
The following Sunday he cycled out to Awang. Just short of the village, he turned off the road on to the overgrown track which led to the mining company's property. He met nobody on the way.
Ground sluicing had cleared some twenty acres of land in the bend of the river. No topsoil had been left for the jungle to reclaim and the brown scars of the workings were still visible beneath a thin film of scrub and weed. Girija walked along the river bank until he came to the shell of a building that had housed a big rotary pump, and went through the motions of inspecting it and taking notes. This was for the benefit of anyone who might have seen him and was watching from across the river. After a few minutes he moved away, circling out of sight of the river bank until he reached the cover of some trees.
He had thought long and carefully about the problems of searching the area. The only large-scale map which covered it, and to which he might ordinarily have had access, was an ordnance survey sheet marked with the estate boundary lines. Unfortunately, a strict security regulation governed the distribution and custody of such maps at that time, and it had to be kept by Mr. Wright in his personal safe. Girija was forced to rely on his none too vivid recollection of it.
The picture in his mind was one of three parallel ridges, rather like steps, with contour lines very close together. That meant, he knew, that the sides of the ridges were steep and that there were deep ravines between them. It was not much to go on ; but it was something. He did not believe that even inexperienced men would choose the floor of a ravine for a base camp, any more than they would choose to perch on the summit of a ridge. To that extent the likely areas of search were limited. And there was another factor to be considered. Even if they had had only small quantities of arms and ammunition to store, they would have tried to find a place for them which gave some protection from the weather. He thought it unlikely that there were caves there; but on the steeper hillsides there would be sizeable hollows made during the monsoons, when the heavier trees fell and tore their roots out of the ground. Such hollows could easily be made into shelters. All in all, it seemed sensible to start the search by working along the upper slopes.
He attempted to do so; and that first Sunday expedition was very nearly the last. It took him an hour to climb three hundred yards up the side of the first ridge, and almost as long to get down again. He tore his clothes, scratched his arms and legs, and ended by becoming completely exhausted. He also became frightened. If some patrolling policeman were to ask him to account for the tears and scratches, he would be hard put to it to invent a convincing explanation.
He succeeded in getting back to his house unobserved; but the experience had thoroughly unnerved him and he decided to abandon the whole project. For several days he did succeed in putting it out of his mind. Then, as the scratches on his arms and legs began to heal, he began to think again. None of the ambushed men had had scratches on the arms and legs. That meant that they must have found an easy route to and from their hiding place. The beauty of this deduction restored his confidence.
The next time he made no attempt to penetrate the jungle. Instead he worked his way round the fringes of it looking for easy ways in. He found several and noted them for future reference.
The following Sunday he began a systematic probe. He had learned well from his initial mistake. When the going became too hard, he made no attempt to force a path through, but went back and tried a different or more circuitous way. He knew by now that he could never hope to cover anything like the whole area; but he had become philosophical about the search ; it was a kind of game now, and although he did not expect to win, he had not yet reached the point of conceding his defeat.
Eight weeks after he began, he received his first piece of encouragement. He had been following a dry stream bed up a fold in a hillside. On both sides there were cane thickets of a kind he had learned to avoid. It was useless to try and push your way through. You had to go round them; and they often covered wide areas. Then, as the stream bed bore away sharply to the left, he paused. There were a few pieces of dead cane lying on the ground. At first he thought that they had been broken away by some animal grubbing for food among the roots. Then he saw that they had been cut.
He stood still for a moment, staring. There was no mistaking the marks on the cane. They had been made by a metal cutting-edge. He examined the border of the thicket carefully. For a distance of about two feet the cane was thinner and greener, and near the ground he could see short stumps of older cane in amongst the new growth. At some time in the not too distant past, someone had cleared a path there.
It was getting late, and he was a mile and a half or more from the tin workings and the shed where he had left his bicycle. He decided to leave further investigation until the following Sunday. During the week, on the pretext of checking an inventory, he went to the tool store, borrowed one of the long chopping knives, called a parang, that the estate workers used for clearing underbrush, and hid it in his room. On Sunday morning he wrapped the parang in newspaper, tied it to the cross-bar of his bicycle and set off early for Awang.
He found his way back to the cane thicket without difficulty and started hacking a path through it with the parang. The new growth had not yet had time to harden, and the going was fairly easy. He had no fear of running into surviving members of the band. If this were indeed the way to their camp, it had not been used for several months.
The path was uphill. After he had gone fifteen yards, the cane thinned out and he found himself on a shallow ledge from which he could see down into the stream bed. On the ground there were some dead tree branches arranged to form a sort of chair. It looked as if the ledge had been used as a vantage point from which a sentry could cover the approach along the stream bed. A well-worn track led off to the right. He followed it, his heart pounding.
The camp was in a clearing shielded both from the sun and from air observation by the branches of a large flame-of-the-forest. The jungle apes had been there before him. Pieces of clothing had been torn apart and scattered over the clearing amid cooking pots, an earthenware chatty and empty rice bags. The only thing that seemed to have escaped the apes' attentions was a metal box. It was full of leaflets, printed in Malay and Chinese, calling upon the people of Malaya to rise against the imperialist exploiters and establish a people's democracy.
There was another path leading down from the clearing and Girija followed it. About twelve yards down, a hole had been dug and used as a latrine. He walked back slowly to the clearing. In the long search for the camp site his doubts had been forgotten. Now, he remembered them and faced the bitterness of defeat. Lieutenant Haynes had been right. He, Girija, had been wrong. For Sunday after Sunday he had exchanged the pleasures of tiffin with his future mother-in-law, and the soft glances of Sumitra, for senseless walks in the jungle and the pursuit of an illusion. There was no arms dump ; there never had been.
He had started to retrace his footsteps when his foot struck something that tinkled. He looked down. Lying on the ground was a brass cartridge-case. As he bent down to pick it up he saw another one. A minute later he had found three more. He stared at them, puzzled. They were of .303 calibre. He went over the ground again and found what he was looking for; the clip which had held the five rounds.
There was no doubt about it. A .303 rifle had been fired there. But no rifle of any kind had been found at the scene of the ambush. And none of the weapons had been of .303 calibre. Where, then, was the rifle?
He searched the camp site thoroughly first. He found a small fixed frequency radio in a teak box; but no rifle. He began to search the hillside above the camp, taking any route that looked as if it might conceivably have been used before. After about an hour he came upon a clump of bamboo from which a number of thick stalks had been cut. Then, about twelve yards away, he saw it.
Braced between the steep hillside and the trunk of a tree was a triangular roof of bamboo. Cane screens had been plaited to enclose the sides of the structure and form a shelter.
Girija scrambled towards it, slipping and sliding on the spongy carpet of dead leaves and slashing wildly with the parang at the undergrowth in his path. When he reached the shelter, he stood for an instant, breathless and trying to prepare himself for the crushing disappointment of finding it empty. Then, he pulled one of the screens aside.