Free The Devil's Garden by Nigel Barley Page A

He stopped near the edge of the sand. There could be mines too and any Japanese soldier who saw him here would open fire at once. And then the wind shifted and there came, not the smell of the fresh, open sea but a terrible stench. Pilchard had smelt death often enough in Changi to recognise its clinging, rosaceous scent. Bloated bodies were entangled at the feet of the trestles that held up the wire, dozens, maybe hundreds, half in, half out of the sea, bobbing jauntily in the little waves. The wind carried a castanetting noise, like the busy typing pool of an insurance office at full stretch, that he could not at first identify. Then he realised with horror that each corpse was swarming with a hundred feasting crabs, possibly Carcinscorpius rotundicauda, clicking away in frenzy with claws like manic chopsticks. So the rumours had been correct then. The Japanese had taken a terrible revenge for the succour the Singapore Chinese had given their cousins on the Chinese mainland, rounded up anyone on the lists of support organisations, anyone with Triad tattoos, in the end any young men at all who just happened to fall into their hands and brought them to lonely spots like this and Pulau Belakang Mati to be bloodily bayoneted, clubbed to death, machine-gunned along with the Sikhs who had refused to join the INA and the Malays who had so bloodied their noses. He swigged calming water hastily from his bottle, emptying it, and swallowed hard and a trifle unsteadily.
    In early accounts of Singapore, this was where the Sea Gypsies had lived and the beaches had been littered with the skulls of those brought here in acts of piracy to be slaughtered. He had written a professionally dry paper about some of their more picturesque customs for the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society . The British had had the bones cleaned up and flung in the sea by the sackload since there had been no invention of physical anthropology as yet to cry out against the waste of specimens. Now the skulls were back and there would be plenty of work for the anthropologists after this lot. As his vision cleared, two khaki-clad Japanese figures appeared, waddling up the beach a few hundred yards away, through a sort of sand mist whipped up by the breeze, gripping probing rifles, boots slung around their necks and bare feet slipping in the powdery sand. They pushed each other playfully, like schoolboys and giggled, the sound of their laughter cut through by the buffeting wind. This south shore was too dangerous, would be too heavily patrolled—asking for trouble. He must choose another way. He ducked back into the long grass and waited until their happy, chattering voices had passed and faded on the wind, then headed back inland through the tall, swishing stems that he identified provisionally as being of the genus Imperata .
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    In sick bay, Lady Pendleberry shifted her weight in the splintered cane chair. Both she and the chair had seen better days. She fanned herself tiredly, feeling no relief from the hot draught and thought of similar missions of mercy in the Norfolk village of her youth. Then, it had been baskets of coal and turnips for the old and sick, propped on the front of her bicycle, as she did the rounds of the bleak farm cottages. Cold had been the enemy then. These days it was heat and the remedy now was water and coconuts but it was all the same and just as pointless. Others would see the habit of charity as the mark of her simplicity and generosity but it was more that, when simply everyone was so far below you, their own petty social hierarchies faded to nothing and they all deserved sympathy equally. She ought to be knitting as she sat but she was just too tired. A Japanese pullover had been stolen the day before, already unpicked and mated with other old wool. Now it would have to be reknitted into new goods to sell back in town and it was her turn to effect the reincarnation. Mrs Grimes was panting wearily on the thin, stained