The Garden of Evening Mists. Tan Twan Eng

Georgetown. Sunlight sifted down through the lattices of branches and leaves overhead, unable to sink far enough to dispel the soggy gloom at ground level. Vines hung from the branches in broad, sagging nooses. The girl took us along a narrow animal track, the stones greased with moss that threatened to send me sprawling at the slightest lapse in concentration. For fifteen, twenty minutes I followed her beneath tree ferns that spread their fronds over us, watering the light into a translucent green.

      We emerged into a small clearing. The girl stopped and pointed to a bamboo shack beneath the trees, the roof covered in a balding thatch of nipah fronds. The door was half-open, but it was dark inside. We moved closer to the hut, making as little noise as possible. In the trees behind us, branches cracked and then something heavy dropped to the ground. I spun around on my heel and looked back. The trees were still. Perhaps it was only a ripened durian, its armour of thorns shredding the leaves as it fell. I became aware of another sound running beneath the noise of the jungle, a vibration pitched so low it was almost soothing. It was coming from inside the hut.

      The door refused to move when I nudged it with my foot. I tried again, pushing harder this time. It swung open all the way. On the beaten-earth floor, three bodies lay in a moat of blood so dark and thick they seemed to be glued to it. Hundreds of flies crawled over their faces, distended bellies and loincloths. Their throats had been slit. The girl screamed and I clamped my palm over her mouth. She struggled, swinging her arms madly, but I held on to her tightly. The flies rose from the bodies and swarmed to the underside of the thatch roof, blackening it like an infestation of mould.

      The smell of food assailed me as we approached the kitchen. Frederic and Emily were seated at the table. They stopped talking and looked up when I entered, the girl peering from behind me. Emily made us sit at the kitchen table, where a planter’s breakfast had been laid out – plates of crispy bacon, sausages and eggs, fried bread and strawberry jam. Frederik poured us tea, sweetening it heavily with condensed milk. I drank a few mouthfuls. The heat spread through my body and stilled my shivering. I told them quickly what had happened.

      ‘Where’s Magnus?’ Emily’s eyes gouged into mine.

      ‘Still out in the fields, I think. I don’t know.’

      ‘Get Geoff!’ she snapped at Frederik. ‘Tell him to find your uncle. And ring the police. And Toombs. Go!’

      A maid brought out two blankets and Emily draped one over the girl’s shoulders, giving the other one to me. Frederik returned with Magnus a short while later, the dogs pushing past them to sniff at the girl’s legs. She screamed and shrank into her chair. Emily shouted at the dogs and they slunk off to a corner.

      ‘Damn it, Yun Ling,’ Magnus said, ‘you should have come home straightaway!’

      The girl started crying again. ‘Don’t shout-lah, you’re scaring the poor thing,’ Emily said, frowning at Magnus.

      ‘She wanted me to follow her,’ I said.

      ‘Going into the jungle was blerrie stupid,’ he said. ‘Blerrie stupid! Your father would cut off my balls if anything had happened to you.’

      ‘Nothing happened to me.’

      Glaring at me, he pulled out a chair and dropped into it heavily.

      When Toombs arrived the girl climbed down from her seat and clung to his leg. The Protector of Aborigines got down on one knee and questioned her gently, his Malay much more fluent than mine. After a while he took her hand and brought her back to the table, telling her to finish her cup of tea. She drank a sip, then another, her eyes never leaving Toombs.

      ‘She wouldn’t tell us her name,’ Emily said.

      ‘It’s Rohana,’ Toombs said. He turned to me. ‘Those bodies you saw – they were her sister, brother and her cousin.’

      ‘What were they doing in the shack?’ I asked.

      ‘Not a shack, really. A hide. They were waiting for wild boars to come out at night. They left their village to go hunting two days ago. They took Rohana with them. She was playing not far from the hide yesterday evening when she heard shouting. She hid in the trees.’

      ‘She saw what happened?’ Magnus asked.

      ‘Four CTs, two of them women,’ Toombs replied, glancing at the girl. Her eyes, large and dark, stared at him over her cup. ‘They forced her siblings and cousin into the hide. She heard them shouting a moment later. Then screams. When the CTs came out again, they were carrying the boar her brother had shot. One of them saw her and they gave chase. Rohana ran into the jungle. She spent all night hiding.’

      The police arrived an hour later, led by Sub-Inspector Lee Chun Ming. Rohana and I were questioned separately, Toombs sitting in with the girl when it came to her turn. Sub-Inspector Lee asked me to show the police the hide where we had found the bodies. We went in two cars, driving as near as we could to the spot where I had found the girl, before continuing on foot into the jungle.

      Later, on our way back to Majuba House, we passed groups of tea-pickers squatting by the roadside, smoking kretek cigarettes and talking among themselves, their baskets by their feet. Their eyes followed us as we drove past. News of the killings had already spread swiftly through the estate.

      It was evening when Sub-Inspector Lee and his men finished questioning the estate workers. I went to my room and packed my bag. When I had finished I lay down on my bed to rest, but my mind refused to settle. I went out to the terrace. A corner of the backyard was visible from where I stood. Emily emerged from the kitchen a moment later, three joss-sticks pressed between her palms. Standing in front of the red metal altar of the God of Heaven hanging on a wall, she lifted her face to the sky, raised her hands to her forehead and closed her eyes, her lips moving soundlessly. When she finished praying, she stood on her toes and inserted the joss-sticks into the incense holder between the two oranges and the three little cups of tea. Strands of smoke from the joss-sticks climbed up to the sky. The smell of the sandalwood incense drifted to me, lulling me into a brief moment of peace before it too dispersed with the smoke. I realised then what I had to do before I returned to Kuala Lumpur.

      ‘Eh, where are you going?’ Emily complained when she saw me walking out past the kitchen. ‘We’re eating dinner soon. I’m cooking char-siew tonight.’

      ‘I won’t be long.’

      Once again I followed Ah Cheong through the house and, just like before, he did not speak a word to me. We passed the room where I had sat with Aritomo on the morning we had first met, nearly a week before. The housekeeper did not stop, but led me along a walkway that ran beside a small courtyard with a rock garden. He paused outside a room with a half-open sliding door and knocked softly on the doorframe. Aritomo was behind his desk, arranging a pile of documents into a wooden box. He looked up at me, surprised. ‘Come inside,’ he said.

      Despite the bite in the air, the windows were open. In the distance, the mountains were receding into dusk. I looked around the room, searching for what I wanted. A bronze Buddha about a foot long reclined on the windowsill, the curve of his arm resting on his hip, gentle as the line of the mountains behind him. A black and white photograph of Emperor Hirohito in a military uniform hung on a wall; I looked away. The far end of the room was segmented by bookshelves lined with volumes of Malayan history and memoirs written by Stamford Raffles, Hugh Clifford, Frank A. Swettenham. A pair of bronze Chinese archers, about nine inches high, posed on the desk, pulling at bows that had no strings or arrows. A bamboo birdcage hung on the end of a thin rope from the ceiling, empty except for a stub of half-melted candle. The gardener appeared to be a collector of antique maps; there were framed charts of the Malay Archipelago and South East Asia, hand-drawn in detail by eighteenth-century Dutch, Portuguese and English explorers.

      Hanging at the far end of the room was a painting of a mansion built in the Anglo-Indian style so popular in Penang. A broad verandah ran around three sides of the house, buckled into place by a portico in front. Stamped into the pediment in the centre of the roof: ‘Athelstane’ and below it ‘1899’. Behind the house, the green waters of the channel separated Penang from the mainland. I remembered how proud