The White Pearl (25 page)

‘Mummy!’ Teddy screamed a warning in her ear. ‘A Japanese fighter. A Zero!’

Over the roar of burning buildings she heard the new sound, the spit and crack of machine-gun fire. She swung around, clasping
her son, and the sight that faced her stopped her heart. At the far end of the street a single-engine fighter was flying very
low, coming towards her as though it had smelled her blood. Its guns were slowly strafing the injured and shattering the windows,
kicking up chunks of rubble from the buildings, killing a horse, ripping open the plump cheeks of a native woman who was shaking
her fists at the monster in the sky. The library lay just ahead. Connie felt a shudder of relief and urged her legs to move
faster, but as she raced for its front steps a man in a safari jacket, his trousers blasted into rags, stumbled across the
street. He collapsed onto his knees in front of her.

‘Help me!’ he gasped. Where his left ear should be lay a dark, bubbling hole. Blood dribbled down his neck and pumped from
his legs.

Not now
, she wanted to scream at him.
Not now.

Instead, she released her hold on her son. She stood him on the ground, seized the man’s arm and tried to yank him to his
feet, but his
legs were broken. The roar of the aircraft engine bombarded her senses, vibrating the air in her lungs as it grew closer.
Chuck-chuck-chuck
, the guns rattled, deadening all other sounds. Teddy’s mouth was opening and shutting, shouting something as he struggled
to help raise the injured man by pushing his shoulder under the limp arm. But she couldn’t hear his voice.

‘Run, Teddy!’ she screamed at him. ‘Into the library!’

She hauled the man up but he slid to his knees once more, his face full of anguish and his hands clawing at her. She pushed
Teddy away.

‘Run!’

The Zero was almost upon them. Teddy wrenched her sleeve, breaking her grip on the man. He yelled something at her. In desperation
she bent double, lifted the man on her back and started to stagger as fast as she could towards the library. Teddy’s young
face crumpled in horror but he made an effort to help her, slowing his scampering steps to hers and trying to take some of
the weight.

‘No, Teddy. Run!’

The blow of someone crashing into her back should have knocked her off her feet. The only reason it didn’t was because a strong
hand held her upright. Someone had charged into her, yanking the man off her back so that he slumped to the ground where bullets
were already hissing and spitting, and chips of paving stone were dancing in the sunlight. Connie and Teddy were propelled
at speed into the stone wall of the library, jammed hard against it and held there. The cry of the wounded man fluttered in
the air somewhere behind her.

The plane ripped past overhead. Connie twisted her head and saw panicked people fleeing and falling in the street. More bodies
lay on the shimmering tarmac. Connie’s ears throbbed and her hand was twisted firmly into Teddy’s hair.

‘Now,
move
!’

The person crushing them against the wall stood back, releasing them and at once she spun round to see who had saved them.
She was met by Fitzpayne’s urgent grey eyes.

‘Inside. Quick,’ he ordered. ‘The plane will make a return run.’

‘Now, Teddy!’

Connie ran, hauling her son along with her, but she paused to stare at the man on the ground who had asked for their help.
He was lying in a pool of blood, bullet holes dotted over the front of his safari jacket like
scarlet buttons. His glazed eyes were opened to the sun and a fly was sipping moisture from the corner of one.

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered.

‘You are a fool,’ Fitzpayne said savagely behind her. ‘You and your son would have died.’

She shook her head at him in anger. ‘But how many people do I have to kill here in Palur before this country is satisfied
and spits me out?’

Blood and books: the smells mingled in the basement room of the library. It was stiflingly hot and airless, so that sweat
soaked Connie’s clothes, making them cling to her body. But at least she still had a body and limbs for them to cling to.
The image of the safari jacket with its crimson holes haunted her, and rage burned the back of her throat. She wanted to tear
that Jap plane out of the skies and shake it to pieces.

Other people came. Some brought the injured and wounded with them, some tumbled down the steps into the basement, sobbing.
A few crawled, leaving a trail of scarlet slime in their wake. She bandaged them using petticoats and shirts cut into strips,
she murmured soft words of comfort to soothe their fears and rocked in her arms the ones who needed to cry and hold onto someone.
When a bomb landed close by and made them flinch, she covered their ears. She wiped their tears. And all the time she swore
under her breath.

‘Talking to yourself?’

It was Fitzpayne again. She had not seen him for the couple of hours she had been inside the basement.

‘No,’ Connie muttered, straightening her back, ‘just telling the Japs what I would do to people who wage war on innocent civilians.’
She pushed away her hair and it felt slick against her skin. ‘What’s it like outside?’

‘Not good. The planes keep coming, waves of them.’

‘What have you been doing out there?’

‘Not much. Digging out survivors from the rubble of buildings.’

She looked at him properly. He was covered in dirt, his hair almost white with dust, his shirt was torn and blood on his arm
had dried in a crust. Was it his, or someone else’s? His face looked utterly exhausted.

‘Mr Fitzpayne, I …’

‘Call me Fitz.’

‘Fitz, I think you need a rest.’

He shrugged and gave her a crooked smile. ‘So do you, Mrs Hadley.’ He looked around and frowned. ‘Where’s the boy?’

‘Teddy?’ She pointed to the far corner of the room where her son was sitting on the floor surrounded by a group of young children.
He was reading to them. ‘He’s been helping me. Very brave.’

‘Like his mother.’

Her eyes flicked up to his face, but he wasn’t laughing at her. He took her elbow and steered her away from the woman whose
head she had just bandaged, to a quiet patch where he leaned against a wall and for a moment closed his eyes.

‘Do you have a cigarette?’ Connie asked.

He nodded, and drew a cigarette pack and matches from his pocket. She lit one, and handed it to him, then lit one for herself.
She breathed out a coil of smoke and felt some of the tension trickle away with it. ‘I was rude earlier, I’m sorry. I am very
grateful for your help in the street. It’s just that I was …’

‘Forget it. You wanted to save that man but,’ he looked at her through shrewd, intelligent eyes, ‘you can’t save everyone.’

Her gaze roamed around the room of wounded people. ‘I can save some,’ she said softly. ‘Tell me, do you believe in curses?’

‘Of course. Don’t you?’

She looked at him with surprise. She hadn’t expected that from him. With a grimace she drew on her cigarette. ‘Death seems
to follow me. As faithful as a dog.’

The amusement slid from his eyes. ‘Do you invite it?’

‘Of course not.’ She shrugged and gave Fitzpayne a self-conscious smile. ‘Do you know what one little girl called me today
when I bandaged her arm? She said I must be an angel.’

‘Angels bring happiness.’

‘Except for the Angel of Death.’

Instantly an edge of coldness crept into his eyes and his voice as he asked, ‘Is that what you are cursed to be?’

‘Yes.’

‘No, Mrs Hadley, you’re not thinking straight. It’s the shock of rubbing shoulders with death in the street today.’

Then he did something else that she wouldn’t have expected of him. He took her chin in his hand and shook it hard, as if to
rattle the thoughts out of her head. At the same time, his gaze fixed fiercely on hers
and she was conscious of the feel of his calloused fingers against her skin, an intimate touch from a man she barely knew.
His strange, questing look searched her eyes.

‘Why are you so angry with yourself?’ he asked with concern.

She jerked her head away. ‘I’m worried about my husband. He’ll have heard about the attack on Palur by now.’

‘Don’t fret over it. I sent a boy out to Hadley House to say that you and your son were unhurt.’

The way he said it, as if it were nothing. It astonished her.

‘Thank you. That was very kind.’

Somewhere across the room a tiny baby started to bleat.

‘Hear that?’ he said sharply. ‘It’s the sound of life, not death. Think of that when you are feeling buried under your curses.’

‘I delivered it.’

‘What?’

‘The baby. Here in this basement, an hour ago.’ She laughed at his expression of amazement. ‘I’ve never played midwife before,
but there was no one else to help the poor woman.’

‘Hah!’ He clapped her on the back so hard it made her cough. ‘So you have broken your curse.’

She stared at him. ‘What do you mean?’

‘A life for a life.’

She looked away. She didn’t want him to see what his words did to her, her eyes suddenly hot and stinging. She stubbed out
her cigarette.

‘I must go back to them,’ she said.

‘You don’t have to, you know. You look … as though you’ve done enough.’

She glanced down at herself, at her blood-stained clothes. Her hand touched her hair and found it caked with dirt and grit
from the explosion.

‘Of course I have to,’ she said.

It wasn’t the first time Connie had seen this amount of blood, the smell of it heavy in the air. No, this wasn’t the first
time. The first time was in the hut, that last day when everything changed.

‘What are you reading?’ Sho’s tone had been sharp when he woke. He had moved from sleep to total alertness in the course of
one breath.

Connie was sitting fully dressed and cross-legged on the end of the bed in the hut. In her hand she had clutched the sheets
of closely typed paper
taken from his attaché case. Earlier, she had focused on the features of her lover’s face as he slept, on the familiar lift
of his black eyebrow, the strong pad of flesh just beneath the cheekbone, the dormant line of his mouth. Her mind stumbled
when she tried to reconcile the words on the paper with the face she thought she knew.

‘I’m reading about what I did last week,’ she said flatly, ‘and the week before and the week before and the …’

‘Those are my private papers.’

‘And this,’ she snapped them through the sultry air, ‘is my private life.’

He sat bolt upright in the bed and stretched out his hand. ‘Give them to me.’ His voice was cold.

She uncurled from the mattress. ‘You’ve had someone spying on me.’

‘Not spying. Watching over you.’

‘Spying!’ She lifted one of the pages. ‘
Your fear that Mrs Constance Hadley is having affairs with other men is groundless – based on what I have been able to observe.
’ She tossed the document on the floor. ‘And this!
Mrs Hadley is, in my opinion, of stable mind and is well liked by the friends to whom I’ve spoken
. And this!
She and her husband sleep in the same bed.
Which of my servants did you bribe to get that intimate titbit?’

He sat very still. ‘I needed to be sure of you.’

‘Well,’ she said angrily, ‘if you won’t trust me, you can be sure of this – that we are finished.’

His pale skin grew paler and his eyes changed as he moved smoothly from the bed to the door where he stood naked, blocking
her exit.

‘No!’ he shouted. ‘No!’

His outburst unnerved her. Never in all their previous meetings together had he given any sign that she meant more to him
than a pleasant afternoon’s interlude. Yet now it seemed that their friendship lay in pieces, limp and colourless as the cigarette
butts discarded at their feet. She saw his eyes slide to the leather attaché case on the floor, and something about the way
he did it made her instantly alert. She darted forward and scooped it up.

Sho didn’t move from the door. ‘Put it down, Connie.’

She opened it. This time she looked in the zipped side flap, her fingers quick as she pulled out an object. It was a small
shagreen diary. She flicked it open. Inside, every page was covered in tight, neat writing, mostly in Japanese script but
some in English. She spotted Nigel’s name. Her own. Her fingers turned another page. A description of the
plantation smoke-sheds, an account of the rubber process. Page after page of Japanese writing, then a sketch of the
Repulse
and of the dry dock in Palur harbour. Johnnie Blake’s name beside the words
300 aircraft.
A list of regiments under the heading
Malaya Command: Indian III Corps, 8th Division (Australia), 11th Division, Malaya Regiment, 53rd Infantry Brigade.
Pages and pages of Japanese script.

Connie shut the diary with an angry snap, and saw on the back page in red ink the words:
300,000 whites tyrannise 100 million Asians
and underneath it,
KOTA BHARU is our way in.
Her blood grew sluggish in her veins as she realised what Shohei Takehashi was. The shock of it jammed her brain.

‘A spy,’ she hissed. ‘You’re a spy for Japan.’

How much have I told him?

How many times had he listened at Nigel’s table of talk of the rubber industry in Malaya? Or discussion of the airfields with
Johnnie? Or the impregnable state of Singapore’s sea-facing guns and its naval base?

Kota Bharu? Where the hell was that?

A knot of fear twisted in her stomach, and she dropped the book as if the pages burned her fingers. Sho’s face was without
expression as he stepped forward and she thought he was going to pick it up but instead his hand shot out and slapped her
face. The blow almost knocked out her teeth, and something exploded high up inside her nose sending tentacles of pain crawling
through her face. Blood, warm and salty, trickled out of her nostril and down onto her lips.

Connie blinked, swore and shook her head to clear it. But when he came at her again she was ready and rammed both of her fists
into the centre of his naked chest to push him away. She heard his lungs screech. She started to run for the door, but before
she could reach it her hair was yanked from behind. She lashed out with a fist, but she stumbled as she was swung sideways
by her hair like a rag doll.