The Devil's Garden (29 page)

‘Right answer, dear boy, bang on. Now, who else have we got that needs my thumbs up?'

Wells held up the exercise book list and stabbed at it with finger, not thumb. ‘Mrs Anna Kwok, local Chinese woman working with Force 136, beaten, tortured and starved for two years by the Kempeitei. I thought an MBE would do, after all she did survive—even if it is without fingernails.'

Mountbatten spread fingers to consider his own nails. They needed a manicure. ‘Right.'

‘Dr Voss, Head of the Women's Section in Changi. OBE. Posthumous, I'm afraid.'

‘She died there?'

‘No. I'm afraid the old girl was knocked down and killed by the film unit's jeep. After years in jail, the Changi prisoners aren't very good at traffic. Next. Head of local Chinese merchants, HK Fong. Turned up on the Padang in an MPAJA uniform. Now, that rather surprised everyone. We had him down to be charged with collaboration and financial shenanigans. Now, suddenly, he's come good and is a suitable model for His Majesty's Loyal Chinese. An OBE?'

‘Fine.' He hesitated. ‘M or O? Oh make it an O, since devaluation of currency is in our minds at the moment. By the way, how do we feel about the MPAJA?'

‘Official line is they're respected as our worthy allies in victory, though Frobisher, over at Political Affairs, points out they're mostly commies, rotten to the core. They talk a lot of hot air but they'll settle down again soon enough once we disarm them and find them all jobs where they can get their hand in the till. Which brings me to Chen Guang, their local commander. Of course nowadays he's red as a baboon's …er… backside but—would you believe it?—they say he used to be a priest once. Frobisher insists he's one of nature's gentlemen and has high hopes of him. Political feel a CBE is in order as part of the grooming process. Make sure he knows where his best interests lie and separate him from the hotheads. Apart from that, there's just some small fry up for military gongs and a quick shake of the grateful supremo's hand. The officers who organised the surrender ceremony, arranged the flowers, flags and so on, some corporal who broke out of Changi, sole survivor of a suicide mission, and joined the resistance.'

‘A corporal? I like the sound of him, tough, gritty, real man, people's war and so on?'

‘Quite, Sir. Top notch PR.' He turned a crisp page of his exercise book. ‘Then there's the other side of it. The footage from the concentration camps doesn't go down as satisfactorily over here as at home. There seems to be some confusion of the mind between it and the scenes shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombs, so, as far as the A-bombs are concerned, we should stick to distant mushroom clouds, nice, clean and impersonal. New shape. Great image. Political say the people in the streets are baying for blood. If we are going to stop them spilling each others', we need a few war-criminals and collaborators strung up for the cameras to show the locals they live in a just world again thanks to HMG. A few trials that could run for a couple of months with lots of harrowing detail should do the trick—as long as they're found guilty of course.'

‘Oh I think we can be sure of that. Who have we got?' Mountbatten admired his left profile and checked his teeth for remains of lunch. Rupert drew his breath over his own teeth like a wine-taster savouring a rare vintage.

‘Quite a choice, actually, Sir. We'd need a couple of good-quality Japanese generals. Itagaki would get us started and, if we get in quick, before anyone else, we can probably commandeer Yamashita back from the Philippines and ship him over without leaving the Americans short. We can hang quite a lot round their necks before we hang them
by
the neck. We need a few local supporting acts, of course, some INA traitors, Chinese and Malay police spies. The Japs have been very helpful in giving us lists. I wonder if we shouldn't have a sniff around the Brits at the Raffles Museum and Botanic Gardens. Something very fishy going on there, Sir.'

Mountbatten practised his steely glare absently in the mirror. ‘A museum? A garden? I hardly think there can be much for us there, Rupert. Anyway, they've been jolly decent to me and named a new rambling rose “Edwina” after my wife. She'll be pleased as punch.'

‘Normally, I'd agree with you, Sir. But it seems it's been a hotbed of collaboration. The Nip director was clearly some sort of a fascist fanatic. He went off and shot himself right after the news of the A-bombs arrived—in the garden of the Shinto temple—that place where the three hundred-odd other hard nuts blew themselves up with grenades.'

Mountbatten raised a carefully calibrated eyebrow of distaste. ‘Messy.'

‘Yes, Sir. Luckily, there was a great empty pit already dug round the back so we just had to shovel the bits in, or rather the Jap prisoners did. Anyway, out of the Brits, one fellow called Catchpole, seems sound enough. Established some sort of a clandestine news network during the occupation. The portrait of the King we used at the ceremony was one he'd kept pluckily tucked away in his room. Brave man. But this other one, Pilchard, seems a thoroughly bad lot. He cultivated strong Japanese contacts, had a free run all round the island doing no one quite knows what. Alleged involvement in some secret weapons research for them. We know for a fact he blackmailed the MPAJA. Got payoffs on a regular basis and seems to have been involved in the disappearance of a mysterious Mr Dagama who had been protecting them.'

Mountbatten screwed up his face on one side in sceptical appraisal, didn't like it, screwed up the other side. Better. Now how could that possibly be? Something to do with the line of the eyebrows. He
must
get them plucked. ‘Mmm? Was he by Jove? I don't like the sound of that. Better get some of our chaps to have a quick shuftie at him on the QT.' He flashed moral outrage into the glass. Now that was really good. He did it again and treated himself to a little smile of approval.

‘I should mention that we have been asked to drop in at Colombo on the way home, Sir. A few parades and some soft words to calm the hard feelings about Cocos-Keeling.'

‘What's that?' He fingered away an out-of-place eyelash.

‘Cocos-Keeling, Sir. A while back now. The mutiny amongst the Ceylonese troops, shot up their officers and tried to contact the Japs by radio to hand over the strategic installations to them. A couple of them were sent home to be put on trial and hanged to encourage the others. It caused a bit of bad blood locally.'

‘What the devil did they do that for?'

Rupert smiled. ‘Well … boredom must have been part of it. Once they'd bulldozed the palms, chased the locals away and closed down the copra industry, there can't have been much for them to do on the island, bit of a hellhole.'

‘What
is
copra?'

‘To tell you the truth, I've never been entirely sure, Sir. I had an uncle once who suffered from coprophilia and that wasn't very nice at all. But, as for Cocos-Keeling, there were two versions of events offered by the defence at the trial. One said that the mutineers were poor, deluded hotheads inflamed by nationalist, political rhetoric. Young sprogs more to be pitied than condemned. The usual stuff. The other was that it was all about some kind of sex ring organised by the senior officers among young recruits. There's always been a desperate lack of available women on Cocos-Keeling, apparently.'

‘Really? Maybe I should send Edwina.' He looked round, saw the knowing smile, feigned annoyance. ‘That's just a joke, Rupert.'

* * * 

Peace had returned to the Botanic Gardens. Elsewhere on the island the earth had been pulverised and punished till its bones showed bare. Here, greening vegetation had scabbed over the light wounds and soon all scars of purely personal horticulture would fade and vanish. Through morning rain, the lawns already rolled once more in unbroken undulations like models of slow time. In the midday lake, the carp swished their coy fins and gulped in sudden surprised immunity from predation. Visitors once more had eyes and noses, not just mouths, so leaves and flowers were stroked and sniffed, not rudely plucked and boiled, while birds now swooped and soared, fearless of nets and snares, as in a Disney cartoon of natural innocence. Orchids put forth delicate tendrils, trees set fruit, buds popped and unfurled, the foul
Amorphophallus
collapsed in on itself and gently deliquesced into oblivion, while the heliotropic cat alone retained a sharp-eared wariness and saw through the world of appearances with acid-green eyes of the deepest cynicism. The workers drafted onto the Burma railway did not return, bringing new skills, as had been promised by the Japanese but every thirty minutes a gaunt white man chuffed round the outer perimeter, entirely under his own steam, with an expression of such ultimate beatitude on his face that he became one of the attractions of the park through the sheer, locomotive bliss that he radiated. The remaining employees proved to have numerous vigorous cousins and fruitful nephews to fill the vacancies and repeople and restock the garden as it slowly healed and rejuvenated itself. Even Ping and Pong were discovered to have each just fathered twins, as if in demonstration of a Malthusian progression.

The choice of Major Spratt as temporary Director of both Museum and Gardens had come as something of a shock to the sensitive and as a disappointment to Dr Catchpole but, as the Major explained with frequent terseness, ‘What is a museum but a fancy depot of out-of-date supplies? Just a matter of turning over the stock, bit of spit and polish, checking for bugs and keeping your records straight.' As for academic pretension, behind the wire, had he not run a whole university? As a man aware of his priorities, immediately after his appointment, he embarked on a lengthy campaign of nitpicking complaint with the authorities about the wholly illegal removal of his museum's library to Changi during the war, demanding full restitution and compensation. Under his supervision, the museum whirred and clicked like a well-oiled machine. The staff no longer wandered about as fancy took them, they clocked in and out even between different buildings and his favourite joke was that his only regret was that the exhibits had not yet learned to stand to attention and salute as he entered the building. Bits of old stone, carvings, twiggery-pokery, none of it as neat as his perfect pyramids of tinned butter. The problem of disgraced and treacherous Pilchard had been elegantly solved by obliging Catchpole, who urged seconding him to another unit and shipping him off to do some sort of extended survey on far Cocos-Keeling. Just as well, considering his last act had been to take up with some Chinese woman young enough to be his daughter who had, herself, shamelessly fraternised with the enemy during the occupation. Disgusting. More likely than not, the paperwork would get lost and the two of them would disappear forever into some rustling and bottomless inter-departmental sink. Most satisfactory. He looked up from his desk. There was some sort of shemozzle going on outside in the forecourt. He lay his pipe aside, in the ashtray—the ornate, carved inkstone of his Japanese predecessor—with distaste. Now that proper tobacco was available again, it no longer seemed to have the same flavour that he remembered. There was no satisfaction in it. Perhaps they were monkeying about with the quality. He rose and peered out through the net curtain that smelt of mothballs, then tucked his swagger stick under his arm and strode out of his office, enjoying the tight military clicking of his heels on the stone flags. There were six men standing about, watching two others actually working—about par for the course out here—the idlers contributing by arguing and interfering.

‘Catchpole! What's all this fuss about? Sounds like an Irish Parliament out here.' Now even the two who had been working stopped and looked up. His deputy produced a slouching gesture, half salute, half retainer's touching of the forelock. He did not actually touch his forelock, for fear of disturbing his wig. Did the man really think he was fooling anyone with that damn thing sitting on his head like a duck's nest?

‘It's Raffles, Sir. They've come to take him back.'

Spratt pouted. The statue was being moved from the Museum and restored to relevance and the loss of Raffles might be considered a diminution of his own power, like the loss of a valuable hostage. But he preferred to see it as the extension of his reach to wherever the statue was now to stand. It had been agreed that only his staff could clean it of pigeon droppings, an important stipulation that he would not let slip. By degrees, slow increments of excrement, all the scattered public monuments of Singapore could be gathered under his skirts to form a gleaming, new empire of antiquities.

‘Where did they finally decide to put him?'

‘He's going back outside the theatre with a nice new flower bed and some tasteful urns. There is talk of a fountain. He got rather too many footballs in the neck on the Padang. It seems some people used to aim at him deliberately.' Catchpole shrugged. ‘Politics. Quite literal loss of face.' His own multiplicity of chins was growing back nicely.

‘Jolly good. Carry on. What about our new acquisitions—the Japanese memorials? All shipshape and Bristol fashion?'

Catchpole looked shifty. ‘Sorry, Sir. I'm afraid events rather overtook us there. The sappers blew them all up yesterday, including the Shinto temple. No sense of history, I'm afraid, and it seems they had to use up those out of date explosives from the stores before the new inventory could be made. We might be able to get a few fragments …?'

‘Let it go, I think.' Spratt stifled a smile. Perhaps it was all for the best. History itself was never wrong about what to keep and what to do away with. ‘You've organised the fund-raising bash for this evening? Everything tickety-boo?'

‘Yes, Major. The chairwoman, Mrs Rosenkranz, was just on the blower from the Austrian embassy, said she's turning up at four to lay on the catering and selection of Austrian wines. She's bringing along two stray Austrian admirals—both Rear and Vice—so we'll be well covered at both ends. It seems they have a few left over. Do they even have a navy now? As you can imagine, they're rather keen to impress our military.' His voice dropped. ‘She was quite firm no Russians were to be invited under any circumstances.'