In the Mouth of the Tiger Read online

  In the MOUTH of the TIGER

  Derek Emerson-Elliott and Lynette Silver

  First published in 2014 by

  Sally Milner Publishing Pty Ltd

  734 Woodville Road

  Binda NSW 2583 AUSTRALIA

  © Derek Emerson-Elliott and Lynette Silver 2014

  Design: Anna Warren, Warren Ventures Pty Ltd

  Editing: Anne Savage

  Printed in China

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Author: Silver, Lynette, author.

  Title: In the mouth of the tiger / Lynette Silver ; Derek Emerson Elliott.

  ISBN 9781863514576 (paperback)

  Other Authors/Contributors: Emerson Elliott, Derek, author.

  Dewey Number: A823.4

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the copyright owners and publishers.

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  Authors’ Note

  In the Mouth of the Tiger is a novel, set within the context of real events. The main characters and most of the minor characters are real people or are based on real people, and they did many of the things ascribed to them. Denis Elesmere-Elliott is based on the real-life MI6 agent Denis Emerson-Elliott, whose secret intelligence work is referred to in Lynette Silver’s book Deadly Secrets. Denis’s wife Nona, the heroine of the story, also existed, and her background and early life were as depicted in the book. In real life, Norma Emerson-Elliott (nee Orlov) died tragically young.

  At the time of the story, Britain ruled the whole of the Malayan Peninsula as part of her Empire.

  Military Intelligence 5 (MI5) and Military Intelligence 6 (MI6) are British Intelligence organisations. MI5 concentrates on counter-intelligence (the protection of British interests from foreign spies), while MI6 undertakes active espionage abroad. At the time of the story, Security Intelligence Far East (SIFE) was a special British Intelligence organisation set up in Singapore to combat the spread of Communism in South-East Asia. It comprised agents from both MI5 and MI6 and from other more shadowy organisations, and it carried out its work with utter ruthlessness and complete success.

  There are two intelligence hypotheses at the heart of the story. The first is that, with the secret approval of Stewart Menzies, the Chief of MI6, British intelligence ‘leaked’ critical military intelligence obtained through the highly secret Enigma decrypts to the Russians in 1943, despite direct orders to the contrary from Winston Churchill. That Enigma intelligence (called ‘Ultra’ material) was passed to the Russians is now accepted as fact, following discoveries made after the war. The illegal transfer of this vital military intelligence to the Russians helped them win the battle of Stalingrad – and thus probably the war.

  The second hypothesis, that MI6 manoeuvered the Malayan Communist Party into staging its attack on British authority in 1948 (known as the Malayan Emergency), is more speculative, but it is also consistent with all the known facts. The Communists, lauded for their resistance against the Japanese during the war, were poised to win the first elections in a Malaya approaching independence. To stop the possible election of a Communist government in Malaya, MI6 used a ‘plant’ in the Communist Party (Chin Peng, the Party’s leader) to take his people into the jungle in a rebellion doomed to fail.

  Ian Fleming once said that he gave his creation, James Bond, character traits borrowed from real-life intelligence officers with whom he had worked. He certainly worked with Denis Emerson-Elliott, and Denis had many of the character traits given to Bond – including urbanity and charm wedded to an utterly ruthless commitment to the cause at hand. Denis was the Personal Assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence in Australia just as Fleming was the Personal Assistant to the British Director of Naval Intelligence. In a curious echo of James Bond’s famous 007 number, Denis’s secret service identification number was BB 007.

  Foreign words and phrases

  Note: spelling of Malay words follows the form used at that time.

  ayer limou: lime drink

  Baba: man of Chinese-Malay descent

  belukan: young or secondary (regrowth) jungle

  changkul: hoe

  ikan: fish

  istana: palace

  jalan: street, walk

  jalan chepat: walk fast

  kalang: platform

  kampong: village

  kenganis: labourer

  makan: to eat

  makan kechil: snack, appetisers

  Nonya: woman of Chinese-Malay descent; also a style of cooking

  padang: village green, field

  parang: machete

  penghulu: headman

  punkah: fan

  seladang: wild ox

  sombong: barbarian

  stengah: whisky and soda

  tanah merah: red earth

  towkey: businessman, business leader

  tuan besar: boss, master, important man

  PART 1

  Frangipani

  “If there is one thing that sums up for me

  the lush, fragile beauty of Malaya between

  the wars, it is the scent of Frangipani...”

  DIARY OF DIANA LEE-CUNNINGHAM

  Chapter One

  Most families, like most nations, have their Foundation Myths. Their Dreamtimes. Stories from a Golden Age when the sun always shone and heroes walked the land. My own family has its Foundation Myth. A lovely myth set long ago in a distant land, about a beautiful girl who fell in love with a handsome English adventurer and lived with him happily ever after in a sprawling mansion by the sea.

  And like all good Foundation Myths, my family’s story is based on fact. I know, because I was that young girl, and I still have photographs of that time. I have them with me now, curled and faded brown after sixty years, but full of light, and grace, and happiness. There is a photo of me with my chestnut mare, Dame Fashion, and one of my husband on his stallion Thor. And one of Brown Rascal, the children’s pony, attended by its two syces and with a little blond boy on its back – dear Tony, who is smiling confidently for his Daddy though I remember how frightened he was.

  I also have photos of Whitelawns, our lovely home set on terraced lawns above the sparkling sea, with its turrets on either side and its deep, shady verandahs. We called it Whitelawns because we saw it first at night, with its broad lawns painted white by the moon.

  But like all Foundation Myths, ours was always only partly true. There were dark, dangerous currents beneath the happiness, debts of honour, and something else that even I could never have guessed at. And at the centre of that myth, at the centre of that enigma, was my husband.

  I dreamt about Denis years before I met him. I don’t mean that metaphorically, in the sense that he was the man of my dreams, but quite literally. He appeared in my dream exactly as he was to appear when I met him in real life, at the Selangor Club in 1936: a rather tall man with level blue-grey eyes, a firm jaw, and a broad mouth in which there always seemed to lurk the hint of a quiet smile.

  I was fifteen at the time of my dream, a gangling schoolgirl with a crush on the Scarlet Pimpernel and a head full of silly romantic notions. If I had invented a man of my dreams he would have been witty and foppish, like Sir Percy Blakeney, or arrogant and coldly enigmatic, like Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. No, I am quite certain that it was the real Denis who visited me in my dream that night in 1934, to prepare me for the future. He said things that have resonated down the years, and that make sense to me even today as I potter about my cosy retirement flat at Bateman’s Bay, bored out of my mind and longing
for the old days.

  I had gone to sleep quite frightened, as I often did in my large, dark bedroom upstairs in the big house in Penang where I was boarding while my mother travelled overseas. The bright moonlight provided no comfort, lighting up as it did the huge, carved pieces of mahogany furniture with which the room was stuffed, and the dark oil paintings that crowded the walls. I have hated heavy, dark furniture ever since, which is why we were to have nothing dark or heavy in Whitelawns. Even the dining table at Whitelawns was enamelled pale green, and when Amah and I laid it for a dinner party, the silver cutlery, the delicate white side-plates, and the candles in their tiny crystal bowls seemed to float on its surface as if on the surface of a pond.

  My sleep had been disturbed by the irrational fears that the room engendered, by real fears of Captain Ulrich and his wife, the owners of the house, and by the insistent calls of a fever bird from somewhere outside in the tangled garden. I had already woken once, to lie stiff and frightened with eyes wide open as I tried to work out what had roused me, only to drift back into that confused, fitful realm of sleep to which I had become accustomed.

  And then I had my dream. It was what they call today a ‘lucid’ dream, because I knew at the time that I was dreaming. In my dream, Denis came into my room, sat on the chair by my bed, and lit the pressure lamp on my bedside table. I distinctly remember the scratch of the match, the hiss as the lacy mantle became incandescent, and the squeak of the chair as he sat back comfortably, to contemplate me with a quiet smile.

  I made an attempt to get out of bed, but he held up a hand. ‘Don’t get up, Nona,’ he said softly. ‘I’m not here for a social visit, but we do need to talk. One day you will be coming away with me, but in the meantime you must stop being afraid. You are an awful lot better than this crowd you’re with now, and you mustn’t let them get you down.’

  ‘How will it be when I come away with you?’ I asked. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to accept his quiet words as the literal truth, and I wanted to know what it would be like when we were together.

  Denis did not answer immediately, then gave a slight shrug. ‘Pretty good on the whole. The odd bump or two on the way, but we will always be together.’

  I grinned and sat up, hugging myself with joy. The world lifted from my skinny shoulders and my heart seemed to be bursting with happiness. A thought suddenly struck me. ‘You won’t die?’ I asked anxiously. I don’t know why the thought popped into my head. Probably because a school friend had recently died. She had been on a trip to Frasers Hill and the family car had rolled, killing them all.

  Again Denis did not answer immediately. ‘I can’t promise I won’t die,’ he said, only half-serious. ‘That’s something nobody on earth can promise. But you mustn’t worry about things like that because in the end it’s only a game we’re playing. When the game’s over, we’ll pour ourselves a couple of decent gin and tonics and have a good laugh about it.’

  I lay back and closed my eyes. Of course it was a game, and you only lost if you took it too seriously. When I opened my eyes again Denis had got up and was turning down the lamp.

  ‘Goodnight, my dear,’ he said gently. ‘Sleep well. And remember – don’t let anyone ever frighten you again. You’re much too good for that.’

  I turned over in the darkness, conscious of a lovely new presence in my life, and fell into a dreamless sleep.

  At breakfast the next morning Captain Ulrich lurched against me as I was serving myself from the sideboard, running his hand quickly down my thigh and across my backside. In the past I had squirmed with embarrassment when he did that, pretending not to mind his fumbling, groping hands and the way he breathed into my face, his mouth open in a lascivious smile. But today I was a different person. I was loved and cherished by a man a hundred times finer than Ulrich and his awful wife, finer than anyone I knew. I stepped back, gripped him by the shoulders, and spoke fiercely into his face. ‘Don’t do that again, Captain. I don’t like it and it’s not right.’

  For a second Captain Ulrich looked startled, then he spat – quite literally spat – into my eyes. ‘Don’t talk to me like that, my fancy little lady . . .’ he began, but before he could finish I kicked him hard – in the shin. The left shin, which I knew still had an open wound from the Great War. An awful, weeping sore that refused to heal and which he exposed sometimes to the sunlight, sitting in his baggy shorts on the upstairs verandah and laughing at the repugnance I could not hide.

  The pain made him double over and when he straightened, his face glittering with malice, he struck me with a closed fist on the side of my face. The world seemed to contract as I nearly fainted from the force of the blow, but I kept to my feet and stared back into his eyes.

  The blow changed everything, and we both knew that immediately. I would develop a huge black eye, and if I told the Sisters at my school how I had come by it they would believe me. My mother had enrolled me at the Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus for a very good reason. Though she was Russian Orthodox she knew the value of being within the Catholic community in Penang in the 1930s. ‘The Roman Mafia’, she called them, but they looked after their own, and people like Captain Ulrich, dependent on their beneficence, feared them.

  So in an instant, in an exchange of looks, it was agreed. I would say nothing and Captain Ulrich would leave me strictly alone. He sat down, white-faced, blood beginning to ooze through the thick white sock on his leg, and ate his breakfast in silence. When Irma Ulrich came in she must have realised that something had changed profoundly. Instead of a sneering predator and a cowering victim she found two people being polite to each other. Two grown-ups instead of an adult and a child. I hoped she could not see the way my hands were trembling.

  Irma was a different proposition to her husband. She was not a physical bully but she was just as much a predator. Her tactics were a cloying familiarity and a sly, manipulative manner that made me writhe with a mixture of embarrassment and fear. I did not quite understand why I was frightened of her but I did know that she had some plan for me that could only be to her advantage and to my detriment. Exactly what her plan was I was still to fathom, which made me all the more nervous. In my wilder moments I thought she was planning to sell me to white slavers. It may sound absurd in these enlightened days but it was not a completely fanciful notion for the time. Vulnerable white women were still being sold into slavery in the Far East in the 1930s. The papers often reported the disappearance of young European woman, particularly in China, with the almost inevitable speculation that white slavers had been involved. There was even a story current at the time that one of the now-respectable émigré families in Penang had sold a daughter to the Chinese warlords during their escape from Russia, in exchange for cash and a safe passage to British Malaya.

  My fear that Irma had white slavery on her mind may have been unjustified, but I knew she was planning something. Biding her time, just waiting for my mother to fall into one of her periods of financial distress so that she could pounce and take me as a form of security for unpaid board. And her manner towards me added to my apprehension. She was friendly in a poisonous, conniving way – winning my reluctant confidence only to crush it with a sudden, spiteful comment. Usually these comments were about my mother. ‘No letter from Mother again this morning, Nona? So long now! You must be very worried indeed.’ A false, bright smile as she reached out to tweak my cheek. ‘But I’m sure she hasn’t done anything . . . stupid. I’m sure we will see her come back for you one day. But the fact that your board is weeks overdue must be a worry . . .’ And the tweak would become a painful pinch.

  But this morning, surprise at the changed atmosphere seemed to rob her of her normal poise and malice. Instead of sitting close to me and spinning her web she sat on the other side of the table and watched me speculatively. Like a snake watching a mouse, readjusting its plans to a fresh set of circumstances.

  ‘Don’t forget the Van der Staaten boys are coming over for dinner,’ she said at last, breaking a
silence that had begun to strain my nerves. But even this banal comment was delivered with a raising of the eyebrows, a curiously conspiratorial inflection in her high-pitched voice.

  ‘I won’t, Irma. I’m looking forward to it.’ But in truth I had completely forgotten the arrangement, and to be reminded of it on this of all special days depressed me. It was not that there was anything wrong with John and Ronnie Van der Staaten. They were pleasant, gangling young men, rather good looking as Dutch Eurasians often are, but the dinner raised the contentious issue of whether I should be mixing with people my mother would have regarded as socially beneath her. The Russian émigré community in Malaya had lost everything in the Revolution except their arrogance, which they clung to with shrill tenacity.

  And their father would be there, Big Jack Van der Staaten, an awful man even if he were one of the most successful traders in the Straits Settlements.

  I sighed before I could stop myself and looked up from my chilled papaya to see Irma eyeing me coldly across the table. ‘I suppose your mother would disapprove,’ she said tartly. ‘Really, Nona, you Russian émigrés are all alike. Airs and graces and no money to pay your bills. Julia should realise that the Van der Staatens are worth a hundred White Russians, for all their fancy titles. She should be grateful you’ve got a chance to meet the Van der Staaten boys on even terms.’

  I felt a chill at her words. Surely I was far too young for Irma to be matchmaking! But even as I tried to comfort myself with the thought, it struck me that it was exactly Big Jack’s style to pay Irma to further friendship between John and Ronnie and me. I may have been Russian, and an alien, and at times I thought probably illegitimate, but I was white and therefore quite a catch for a Eurasian family. Edwina Mountbatten may boast of her descent from an Algonquian Indian princess, and the ennobled children of Alexander Pushkin may trumpet their Ethiopian forebears, but in Colonial Malaya the emphasis was all on trying to be as white as possible. The whole business suddenly made me feel sick and I pushed aside my plate and got up. ‘I think I’ll go for a walk before it gets too hot,’ I said.