Melissa felt a great silent wave of emotion welling up inside her, but as she had on numerous occasions before, she willed herself to take control of it. There was at least one area of hope on the horizon: the shooting contest in two days’ time. Of course, she had not the remotest interest in shooting, but Bob Beresford would be there, and that particular young man was beginning to receive more and more of her attention as time went by. She constantly found herself thinking about him; worse still, in bed during the long hot sleepless nights, her thoughts turned into the most torrid fantasies, in which he figured prominently. She began to wonder if she was not becoming a little obsessed with him. Her concept of men was still surprisingly girlish, nurtured by the overprotective lifestyle she had experienced in the girls’ boarding school in which she had but lately resided. The fact that she was still a virgin at eighteen was frankly not from choice. She had simply not been given the opportunity of being with boys, right from the age when she was first interested in them, and now that she had ‘done her time,’ that was one matter she intended putting right at the earliest opportunity. At boarding school, nobody would ever admit to being a virgin so great was the shame of it. Free time was often spent recounting lewd adventures with the opposite sex, and though eighty percent of them were undoubtedly pure fiction it was not done to accuse the author of being a liar.
As a consequence of all this, sex, to Melissa, had taken on the form of a terrifying hurdle over which she must scramble before she could ever hope to enjoy herself. She was not so hardened that sex with just anybody would suffice; but Bob Beresford was lean, attractive, and very manly. She could quite easily visualize herself going to bed with him.
She felt suddenly ashamed by the openness of her own thoughts and she blushed, glancing around nervously, as though afraid that somebody might be observing her. She moved back to her desk, sat down again, and picked up the hand mirror. She was pretty, there was no doubt of that … but Bob did not seem to be very forthright. It might be up to her to make the first move …
‘Melissa? Aren’t you coming out again? It’s beautiful out here.’ Her mother’s voice shrilled from the garden.
‘Coming,’ she replied wearily. She put the mirror down on the desk and stood up; but the mirror, dangerously close to the edge of the wood, overbalanced, and fell with a crash onto the tiled floor. With an exclamation of anger, Melissa stooped and retrieved it. There was a wide diagonal crack running across its surface. When Melissa examined her reflection, the two halves of her face did not fit together properly, giving the impression that she was horribly deformed.
‘Just what I needed,’ she muttered darkly. ‘Seven years’ bad luck.’
She dropped the mirror into the litter bin on her way out of the room.
Haji hugged the darkness to him like a second skin as he advanced cautiously on the sleeping kampong. He was wise enough to know that what had worked before would work again. He was also clever enough to realize that he must not strike in the same place. So, through the early evening, he had haunted the roads and secondary jungle nearer to Kampong Wau, and as the hours passed by he had moved progressively nearer to the buildings, taking breaks to listen and watch. Now, the very last lamps had been extinguished for over an hour and the only movements came from within a flimsy wooden stockade, where several skinny cows had been herded for the night. They were quite settled at the moment, but occasionally one would stamp a foot or rub an irritating itch against the stockade, and at such times Haji would freeze, hugging the ground and gazing all around to ensure that no Upright had come out of his home to investigate.
The moon was full and he could see quite plainly every detail of the village before him. Somewhere, hidden from his view, a dog yapped briefly and Haji licked his lips, for he had eaten dogs on several occasions and knew what tender morsels they were. But tonight he had fixed his sights on one of the occupants of the stockade, and nothing would dissuade him from his choice at this late stage. He crept nearer, placing his feet with delicate precision. His wounded forepaw had passed the point of pain and had lapsed into a semi-numbness, which he found even more irritating because it might cause him to act clumsily at a critical moment. Earlier that same day, it had caused him to stumble as he began to run at an unsuspecting wild pig. Haji had recovered quickly, but the mistake cost him precious moments and the pig had escaped by a hair’s breadth, plunging into the jungle with nothing more than a few claw marks across its rump.
It was necessary now to cross a stretch of open ground flanked by houses, and he moved over it as fleet and silent as a shadow, until he was no more than a few yards from the stockade. Abruptly, the cows became aware that something was wrong. They snorted, began to mill around uncertainly in the centre of the small pen. There was little room for them to move and certainly nowhere for them to run to. Haji closed the final distance and took the five-foot fence in a single bound, coming over the top of it like a terrible striped shadow. He came down in the midst of the cattle and then all hell broke loose. Their eyes bulging in fear and lowing at the tops of their voices, the cows reeled away from him, their combined weight connecting with the flimsy fencing and shattering the roughly nailed wood. In the same instant, Haji selected his kill, a large leggy calf that was bawling frantically for its mother, and with one, well-aimed spring he had dragged the luckless infant into the dirt and was tearing at its throat. In a confusion of dust and legs and noise, the calf was slaughtered and then Haji was dragging it to the breach in the wall that the other cows were now spilling out of. In the kampong, oil lamps were being lit and the voices of nearby Uprights were shouting out in anger and surprise. For some reason, the cows’ panicked senses made them whirl around and come thundering back at Haji, whereupon he relinquished his hold on the calf’s throat and let out a blood-chilling roar that halted them in their tracks. They milled about again and lit out in another direction. Haji grabbed the still-quivering calf, jerked it around the edge of the stockade, but its legs became entangled in some lengths of fallen wood and wire and he was stuck for the moment. He became aware of Uprights emerging into the night, jabbering excitedly. With a snarl of rage, he took a firmer grip on the calf and heaved it with all his strength, tearing the carcass away and leaving one of its rear legs behind, neatly torn off at the knee. Then with a prodigious effort, he hefted the creature just clear of the ground and raced across the clearing.
The kampong was now in pandemonium, shouts and curses spilling from every house. But to the bleary eyes of people stumbling from their beds, Haji was little more than a shadow, disappearing into the secondary jungle that bordered the village. The man who owned the calf quickly discovered his loss and began to exhort his friends into forming a rescue party. Hardly surprisingly, nobody seemed very keen on the idea of following the tiger into the jungle and anyway, they were more concerned with rounding up the other cattle and repairing the stockade. By the time anybody was organized enough to think of doing anything, Haji was half a mile away in the deepest jungle, enjoying a late but very satisfactory supper.
On Wednesdays, it was Harry’s custom to meet up with Dennis at the Officers’ Mess for a lunchtime drink. The ever-faithful trishaw driver would turn up at