Dead in the Dog Read Online Free PDF Page A

dislike of the founding of the Irish Free State had made him move in 1923 to Norfolk, where he established a successful stud farm. James was sent off to a minor public school in Cambridgeshire, then to agricultural college, where he finished in 1937 at the age of twenty-one. He worked for his father for a year, but they failed to get along and he began looking for a farm manager’s post. However, with war imminent, James volunteered for the navy in ’39, spent a year at sea, then was posted to Ceylon and spent the rest of the war as an undistinguished lieutenant at HQ Trincomalee. Demobbed in 1946, he got a job as an estate under-manager in Gloucestershire, but became restless and wanted to emigrate and set up on his own somewhere. His father had died a couple of years earlier and when his mother sold up the stud farm, she funded his purchase of Gunong Besar. Though he would have preferred going back to Ceylon, the place was cheap, having been run down during the war and in 1948 he moved in. Advertising for a manager, he was lucky enough to have got Douglas Mackay up from Johore, who had long experience of the rubber trade, of which James knew little apart from what he had picked up in Ceylon.
    Now he sat turning his beer glass around in his fingers, ruminating about the future and wondering if he should pack up and go back to Britain or try Kenya or New Zealand – but whether with or without Diane was the question?
    It was beginning to get dusk outside and the manager switched on the lights in the club-room – large, rather dim glass globes hanging from the beams high up in the ceiling, from which also dangled the half-dozen big fans that turned endlessly above them. The nearness of the equator, just south of Singapore, meant that it got dark at about seven o’clock all year round – just as there were no noticeable seasons, as the long, thin peninsula got monsoons from both sides, so it rained at some time on almost every day of the year.
    As the lights came on and the darkness deepened outside, so members began to drift into the club, chattering in a variety of accents, from a Home Counties drawl to the abrasive rasp of Alice Springs. Soon the line of stools filled up and Daniel was scurrying back and forth with gin and tonics,
stengahs
and the ubiquitous Tiger and Anchor beers. Robertson’s mood lightened, as he knew almost everyone and nodded and exchanged greetings in his usual loud and hearty style, concealing his aggrieved chagrin beneath his habitual bonhomie.
    Les Arnold, an Australian planter from the next estate beyond Gunong Besar, plumped himself down on one side, giving James a playful punch on the arm in greeting, as he yelled for his beer. A lean, wiry fellow, he was unmarried, as far as anyone knew, and was the ultimate extrovert. Sometimes the suspicious James wondered if his habitual flirting with Diane was a cover for more serious lechery with her, but Les behaved like that with everything in a skirt.
    On the other side, an older man with a toothbrush moustache and a bald patch sat himself down more decorously. Alfred Morris, a major in the Medical Corps, was the Administrative Officer from BMH. He was a trim, erect man, who had come up through the ranks and been commissioned from Warrant Officer during the war. A popular figure in TT, he seemed like everyone’s uncle, with his calm, amiable manner and his ability to pour oil on the frequently troubled waters in both the hospital and the club. James knew that this was his last tour before retiring to grow roses at his cottage in Kent. After making signs to the harassed manager for beer, Alfred turned to Robertson.
    â€˜James, let me introduce you to a prospective new member. Just out from home, only arrived today.’
    He leaned back to reveal Tom Howden on the next stool and allow the ritual of exchanging of names and handshakes. However surly and objectionable Robertson could be to his family and employees, his public