De Beaumont shook his head. No need. A fine evening. The walk will do me good.”
When he raised her hand to his lips it was limp and unre-sponsive. He picked up his coat, opened the door and smiled. “Good night, Anne.”
“Good night, Colonel de Beaumont,” she said formally, and the door closed.
He stood on the top step, a slight smile on his face. She was annoyed because he had brought to light something dis-creditable in Mallory’s past and that annoyance could only be the automatic reaction of a woman already deeply in-volved, which was interesting.
He moved down the steps towards the main gate and Jacaud stepped out of the bushes. “What happened?”
De Beaumont shrugged. “Patience, my dear Jacaud. I have set things in motion. Now we must await developments.”
A foot crunched on gravel and Jacaud pulled him quickly into the shadows. A moment later Mallory walked by and went towards the house.
“What do we do now?” Jacaud whispered. “Return to St. Pierre?”
De Beaumont shook his head. “The night is young and interesting things have yet to happen. I think we will go down to the hotel and sample some of our good friend Owens contraband brandy. We can await developments there.”
He chuckled gently and led the way out through the gates to the narrow dirt road, white in the gloaming.
“Who was he, Hamish?” Anne said calmly. “I want to know.”
“Neil Mallory?” Hamish shrugged. “An outstanding paratroop officer. First-rate war record, decorated several times. Afterwards, Palestine, Malaya, a different kind of war. He went to Korea in “51 was wounded and captured somewhere on the Imjin. Prisoner for two years.”
“And then what?”
“From what one can make out he was the sort of man people were rather afraid of, especially his superiors. A little like Lawrence or Orde Wingate, God rest his soul. The sort of desperate eccentric who doesn’t really fit in where peace-time soldiering’s concerned.”
“De Beaumont said he was a colonel? He must have been very young.”
“Probably the youngest in the army at the time. He wrote this bookA New Concept of Revolutionary Warfare for the War Office in 1953. It aroused a lot of talk at the time. Most people seemed to think he’d turned Communist. Kept quoting from Mao Tse-tung’s book on guerrilla warfare as if the damned thing were a bible.”
“What happened?”
“He’d been promoted lieutenant-colonel after the Korean business. They had to find him something to do so they sent him to Malaya. Things weren’t too good at that time. In some areas the Communist guerrillas virtually controlled everything. They gave Mallory command of some local troops. It wasn’t really a regiment. Not much more than a hundred men. Recruiting was bad at the time. Little stocky Malayan peasants straight out of the rice fields. I know thetype.”
“Did they make good soldiers?”
“In three months they were probably the most formidable jungle troops in Malaya. Within six they’d proved them-selves so efficient in the field they’d earned a nickname: Mallory’s Tigers.”
“What happened in Perak?”
“The climax of the drama, or the tragedy, if you like, be-cause that’s what it was. At that time Perak was rotten with Communist guerrillas, especially on the border with Thai-land. The powers-that-be told Mallory to go in and clean them out once and for all.”
“And did he?”
“I think you could say that, but when he’d finished he’d earned himself a new name.”
“The Butcher of Perak?”
That’s right. A man who’d ordered the shooting of many prisoners, who had interrogated and tortured captives in cus-tody. A man who was proved to have acted with a single-minded and quite cold-blooded ferocity.”
“And he was cashiered?”
The General shook his head. “I should imagine that would have involved others. No, they simply retired him. Gave the usual sort of story to the newspapers. Took the line that he’d never really recovered from his experiences in Chinese hands and so on. Nobody could argue with that and the whole thing simply faded away.”
She sat staring into the fire for several moments, then shook her head. “The man you describe must have been a monster, and Neil Mallory isn’t that, I’m sure.”