Some Experiences in Malaya.
By Lieutenant-Colonel Donald Mackenzie.
For many years the author was Chief of Police in one of the native States of the Malay Peninsula, and here relates three queer little adventures which befell him in his official capacity.
"Do you mean to say you can't get any evidence whatever to go on?"
"No, Tuan."
LIEUTENANT-COLONEL DONALD MACKENZIE, THE AUTHOR.
From a Photograph.
"Then you and your detectives must be a lot of fools! In England a burglar or a murderer might be clever enough to hide all traces of his crime, but out here they are all coolies, and must leave no end of evidence which any officer who knows his work could easily follow up. If you can't do the simplest detective work, you and your men had better return to duty and leave your work to me. The next crime I will investigate myself. You can go."
I was Chief of Police of the native State of Sungei Ujong,[4] in the Malay Peninsula, and Detective-Sergeant Cassim stood rigidly at attention before me in my office. As I finished he saluted and left.
[4] Now combined with Jelebu and Negri Sembilan.
I was a fool—doubly a fool, for I had not only made a statement which I knew was wrong, but I had lost my temper. The Malay is dignified, if he is nothing else, and to lose one's temper with him is to lower one's own dignity, and that means lowering his respect.
When a man is worried, however, he is apt to forget the little niceties. Two gang robberies and a murder within ten days, and not a particle of evidence to go on, would fret most policemen's tempers, to say nothing of receiving one's reports back from the Resident minuted, "The police appear to be doing their duty in a somewhat perfunctory manner." I had to trust to my detectives, and they had failed to help me.
The following morning Barton, the Collector of Land Revenue, came to my office.
"Morning, old chap," he said. "You might send a detective to my house to see if he can find out anything. A burglary was committed last night, but the beggar must have been disturbed, for he only took away a Bee clock."
"I'll go myself," I said. I would show Sergeant Cassim how easily a crime could be detected, I told myself.
Like most of the houses in the place, Barton's was a bungalow. The upper halves of all the outer doors were venetianed, the doors themselves being merely fastened by bolts top and bottom. We did not go in for locks.
The burglary seemed quite simple of explanation. The "boy" must have forgotten to bolt one of the doors, and a midnight thief had simply walked in. Of course, the "boy" denied having failed in his duty—a Chinaman naturally would do so. But why the thief was contented with a clock, value two dollars, when he could have taken twenty times that amount beat me entirely.
As we left the compound to return to the office the doctor met us on his pony.
"You are the very man I was looking for," he said to me. "I had a thief in my house last night. One of the veranda doors was found open, but the queer part of the business is that he only took a clock. Thank goodness, he did not walk off with the Sultan's Cup."
"That's funny!" I replied. "Exactly the same thing happened to Barton last night, even to the article stolen. Let's go and have a look."
Examination convinced me that the robbery had been carried out in identically the same manner, and I grew puzzled.
"What does your 'boy' say?" I asked. "He probably forgot to bolt the door. I am almost sure that is what happened at Barton's."
"I can answer for that," replied the doctor. "I am a pretty late bird, as you fellows know; I did not turn in till about two last night, and I fastened the two doors myself."
If ever I searched a house thoroughly I did that one, but not a scrap of any sort of evidence could I find, in spite of my boast. I next sent the sergeant-major to scour the pawnshops, but without success; no one had tried to pawn a clock that day.
The climax was reached the following morning when, as I was returning from early parade, one of the Resident's "boys" met me with a note:—
"You might come up to the Residency and investigate a burglary which took place here last night. A clock was stolen."
I trust neither the boy nor my Sikh orderly fully understood my remarks on the subject. The doctor and Barton might pass their little robberies off as a joke, but a burglary at the Residency was a very different matter.
Exactly the same thing had occurred. A door had been found open and a clock gone. Nothing else had been touched. The Resident's remarks on the efficiency of my force as guardians of the peace were not complimentary, but distinctly to the point. Very sore, and very much mystified, I put my pride in my pocket and sent for Sergeant Cassim.
When he arrived I took him on one side and discussed these three bewildering robberies with him.
"Perhaps you can make something out of them," I said. "I believe it is the servants in each case."
He walked round the Resident's drawing-room, examined the floor of the veranda and the steps, and then said:—
"I shall be able to tell the Tuan to-morrow morning who committed the robberies."
"If you are so certain, why not now?"
"The Tuan must give me time to think and act."
That afternoon I received a letter through the post addressed to me in Malay. It contained a slip of paper bearing the following words, also in Malay:—
"If the Tuan will pretend he is going away to-night, and will return about eleven and hide near the veranda of his house, he will catch the burglar."
I have received a fair number of anonymous letters in my time, which usually meant nothing, but this was the oddest of them all. Why on earth should I pretend to leave for the night? Why could I not have been told merely to hide?
Suddenly the reason flashed across my mind—the guard! When I was living at head-quarters a guard, consisting of a lance-corporal and three men, was posted at my house from sunset till sunrise; in that district it was extremely useful to have four fully-armed men ready to accompany me anywhere at a moment's notice. When, however, I was absent on a tour of inspection the guard was dispensed with. It was apparently essential for the detecting of the burglar that the guard should be absent.
Of course, it might be only an excuse to get the house unguarded till the hour named in order that the burglar could enter before my return, and so doubly fool me; but I determined to risk it.
Accordingly I sent for the sergeant-major and told him I was going to investigate the last gang robbery myself on the spot, and that I should not be back till the following morning. He need not therefore post my guard.
A little before sunset I drove to a police-station about six miles away, and sent my dogcart back with instructions to return for me at six the following morning. I then told the sergeant in charge of the station that I was going to investigate the matter of the gang robbery, and that I should probably stay the night at the Towkay's (Chinese headman).
I visited the place, and, after spending an hour or so making inquiries—incidentally having to split a bottle of the vilest apology for champagne with the hospitable Towkay—I walked back to my house.
I suppose I must have been hiding at the side of the veranda for nearly an hour when a figure appeared at one of the dining-room doors. Being barefooted, I had not heard him approach the house, and I must confess that his sudden appearance was somewhat startling. He fumbled with the venetians for a couple of minutes; then the door opened silently and he entered the house. No sooner had he done so than the light of a bull's-eye lantern began to flash about the room; the man was evidently no ordinary thief.
"CREEPING ON TIP-TOE TO THE DOOR, I WAITED WITH WHAT PATIENCE I COULD MUSTER."
Creeping on tip-toe to the door he had entered by, I waited with what patience I could muster, intending to commence operations by knocking the thief down as soon as he appeared. Presently the light went out, and I had drawn my arm back to let him have my fist on the side of his head, when a voice said:—
"Tuan, here is the burglar."
It was Sergeant Cassim himself!
"What on earth does this mean?" I demanded. "Where is the man?"
"I am he. Did not the Tuan see me enter the house?"
"Of course I did; but what is the meaning of it?"
"The Tuan told me I was a fool, and that no man committed a crime in this country without leaving some trace of it; also that the Tuan would prove this to me by investigating the next case himself. I am a Malay, Tuan, and do not like to be called names when I have not deserved them. I knew that crimes were often committed and no trace left, so I thought I would prove this to the Tuan. Did I leave any traces?"
"No, you certainly did not."
"But if the Tuan had only thought, he must have known these were not real burglaries; they were all exactly alike, even to the article stolen. Has the Tuan ever known such a thing happen before? Even the letter did not help him. Surely no thief gives himself away—in this country, at least! I was quite prepared for the Tuan to tell me he saw the whole thing when he got the letter. He must have forgotten how he spoke to me."
Cassim was evidently a reader of character and knew how I would take his rebuke, which I had undoubtedly fully deserved.
"You are right and I was wrong, Cassim," I said; "I am sorry I spoke as I did. But you were doing a very risky thing. Suppose Tuan Barton, or the Tuan Doctor, or the Tuan Besar (the Resident) had caught you in their houses?"
"Who would have suspected or said anything to me? I am the detective-sergeant, and if I find a house open at night it is my duty to investigate the matter. I was seen, but the Tuan never thought of asking even that. If he had asked the Sikh sentry at the Residency, he would have said he had seen me walk round the building, for he challenged me. Why did the Tuan forget such a simple inquiry?"
"Of course, no one knows anything of this?" I said, evading his last question.
"Surely the Tuan can trust me?" he replied.
"All right. Keep it to yourself. I am much obliged to you for the lesson, and in future we will work together. Produce the clocks, and make up any story you like as to how you found them. The thief, of course, must have cleared out, and these burglaries must go in the crime book as 'Undetected: property recovered.' Oh, I forgot. How did you manage to open the doors?"
"That is very easy, Tuan," he replied, and he proceeded to show me. It was the simplest thing imaginable, but I am not going to give it away, for obvious reasons. Perhaps they have not got locks on the doors out there yet. I do not, however, mind telling a brother police-officer.
I have never told this yarn before; it would not have been fair to Cassim while he was in the service. It happened over fifteen years ago, and he must now have retired on pension. I hope it is the highest he could get, and that he is enjoying life under the shade of his own coco-nut plantation, for he was a thorough good fellow. No doubt he sometimes chuckles when he thinks of how he taught the Tuan Superintendent a lesson, not only in dignity, but also in the art of detecting crime.
Meanwhile the two gang robberies, which were the cause of Sergeant Cassim's little joke at my expense, seemed as far off discovery as ever. They had taken place within forty-eight hours of each other and less than five miles apart; and, so far, not a vestige of a clue could be found to work on.
"Look here, Cassim," I said, the morning after his exploit at my house, "something has got to be done. It is absurd, our being beaten like this. I don't want the Tuan Besar to report to the Tuan Governor that the police have not been able to do anything in the matter, or someone will get into trouble about it."
Cassim was as much bothered as myself, for complaints would probably mean the loss of his stripes, if nothing worse. An undetected crime of any magnitude was an unpardonable offence.
"Shall I read the Tuan my notes on the robbery at Ah Sing's again?" he asked.
"Yes. We may find we have overlooked something."
He got out his note-book and proceeded to read.
"Towkay Ah Sing reports that shortly before midnight on Thursday he was awakened by the door of his house being broken open. He was sleeping in a small room at the back, and his two coolies were asleep in the kitchen. He rushed out to see what had happened, and found the front room full of men; he thinks there were about a dozen. Their faces were blackened, and he could not recognise any of them; one had a lighted torch in his hand. The two coolies came in almost at the same time as himself. One of them had a stick, which he raised to strike a member of the gang, but he was stabbed in the side with a knife. Ah Sing and the two coolies were then knocked down, their hands and feet tied, and they were carried into the kitchen and thrown upon the floor. After about ten minutes the robbers left. One of the coolies managed to free his hands, and he unbound the other two. The gang took away a box containing clothing and jewellery from the front room, and another containing seven hundred dollars which Ah Sing kept under his bed. That is all, Tuan."
"And you found no traces of the robbers in or round the house?"
"Nothing except the extinguished torch."
"Ah Sing gave you a full description of all the articles stolen?" I asked.
"Yes, Tuan. He also says the money was in rolls of a hundred dollars, and that each roll had his 'chop' (private mark) on it."
"Well, he can say good-bye to his dollars," I said. "The robbers won't be such fools as to keep the 'chopped' papers they were wrapped in."
"The only other thing Ah Sing could state was that the men spoke the Fuhkien dialect," said Cassim.
"That is not much use as a clue, I am afraid. There are hundreds of Fuhkiens in the State. I will give a hundred dollars to the detective who can clear up this case. Why not try and earn them yourself, Cassim?"
"I will try, Tuan," he replied. "Shall I read the notes of the other robbery?"
"No; one at a time is enough. If we discover this one it may help us with the other."
As he left the office my Chinese clerk came in with a number of passes for me to initial.
In order to protect employers of Chinese labour, no coolie was allowed to leave any of the native States without a pass. Before a man could obtain a pass he had to produce from his employer a certificate giving his name and province and stating that he owed nothing to the mine or estate. This was attached to the pass, which was in English and Malay, and signed by the chief police-officer. On every road, at its junction with the neighbouring State, was a police-station, where all passes were examined.
"So-and-so, Fuhkien," began the clerk, putting the letters down in front of me, one by one, to be initialed.
What was it Cassim had said? "Ah Sing says the men spoke the Fuhkien dialect." Now, the robbers would not attempt to dispose of the stolen property in the State where the robbery had been committed. They knew that every police-station and pawnshop had been warned. They would therefore try and take it out of the country. I would mark every Fuhkien's pass and have him searched at the frontier station he tried to leave by.
"Hold on," I said; "I have not been listening to what you read out. Begin again." He did so, and I initialed every Fuhkien's pass in red pencil, those of other provinces in blue. When the passes were brought in, I also signed all the Fuhkiens' in red ink.
I then telegraphed to each frontier station:—
"Search all Chinese whose passes are signed in red ink; detain all who cannot account satisfactorily for their property, and report."
At six that evening I received a telegram in Malay from one of the police-stations:—
"Eleven Chinese with passes signed in red ink arrested this afternoon, accompanied by a bullock cart in which is a box containing clothing and jewellery and seven hundred dollars. Can give no satisfactory account of themselves."
Within half an hour a sergeant and six Sikhs were on their way to bring the Chinamen to head-quarters.
They arrived the following morning, and I at once sent for Ah Sing. As soon as he entered the charge-room he exclaimed:—
"Why, Tuan, there is my box which the robbers took away; it has my 'chop' on it!"
Sure enough it was, and it contained all the stolen property, tallying exactly with his description, even to the rolls of dollars in the "chopped" wrappers.
If ever a detective was astonished, Sergeant Cassim was.
"Who has won the hundred dollars, Tuan?" he asked.
"I have," I replied.
"But how did the Tuan discover it?"
"You gave me the clue yourself," I said. "You told me the robbers spoke the Fuhkien dialect, so I signed all the Fuhkien passes in red ink, and ordered that every man with one of these was to be searched at the frontier stations."
"The Tuan was right," cried Cassim. "Every man leaves some trace of his crime, and I thank the Tuan for proving it to me."
No defence was offered by the prisoners—they had none; and in due course they were sentenced to ten years' penal servitude each.
Thirteen years afterwards I was Secretary to the Council and Chief of Police of the international settlement of Kulangsu, in the province of Fuhkien.
One afternoon I was taking a walk on the mainland, when a Chinaman met me.
"Tabek, Tuan," he said.
As about a third of the male population of the province have at one time or another been immigrant coolies in the Malay Peninsula, it was no uncommon thing to be greeted in that language.
I returned his salutation, and was passing on, when he stopped and said:—
"Does not the Tuan remember me?"
"No, I can't say I do," I answered. "Where did you know me?"
"In Sungei Ujong. Does not the Tuan recollect a gang robbery at Towkay Ah Sing's, when one of the Towkay's coolies was stabbed? The gang was caught, and each man got ten years in jail."
"Yes, of course I remember it," I told him; "but what do you know about it?"
"I was one of the robbers, Tuan. The Tuan saw me every day in the jail for four years. I was put to mat-making."
"Oh, you were, were you?" I said. "Well, I hope you have given up gang robbery now?"
He grinned.
"By the by," I continued, "there was another gang robbery committed close to Ah Sing's and only two days before it. Did you ever hear anything about that?"
THE "MALE" AND "FEMALE" KRISES REFERRED TO IN THIS STORY.
"Suppose the Tuan found out who did it, would he have the men arrested?" he asked.
"It was so long ago that even if I found out it would probably be impossible to get up a case, for it would now be only hearsay evidence. No; I don't think I would do anything."
"We committed that robbery also, Tuan," he said.
At one time or another most people have gone in for collecting things; for twenty years my hobby was savage weapons. My Malay sergeant-major took a keen interest—or, with his innate courtesy, pretended to do so—in my collection, and I owe many of the weapons I have to him. Many of them have curious histories, but none more so than that connected with two Booghis krises.
Under our paternal rule the Malay is not allowed to wear his kris. He has a keen sense of his own dignity, and he wore his kris, as our ancestors did their swords, to uphold it. The resenting of an insult by the shedding of blood being contrary to our modern ideas, however, we disarmed him.
One day Sergeant-Major Etot brought before me a man who had been arrested for carrying a kris. He was an ordinary-looking Malay, but he had a deep scar across one side of his face, from the nose nearly to his ear. He said he was a Booghis, and that his tribe lived in the interior of Sumatra; that he had only the day before arrived from there, and did not know he was not allowed to wear his kris.
The sergeant-major showed me the kris, and said he had never seen one quite like it before; he had questioned the man about it, and he had told him that the Booghis had two kinds of krises only, which they named the "male" and the "female," which were very similar to each other, having but a slight difference.
The man in question was wearing a "male" kris. I asked him if any distinction was made as to who wore either weapon, and he said that the wearing of the "male" kris was dependent on a man's valour—in other words, I take it, the number of people he had disposed of. It seemed somewhat hard on him, a stranger, to be deprived of his weapon when he did not know he was committing an offence by wearing it, so I gave him a dollar for it.
"If you come back to this country," I said, "bring a 'female' kris, and I will buy it from you."
Some two years later I was sitting in my office one morning when I heard the sergeant-major order the reserve duty men to fall in with their rifles; half a minute later he appeared before me and reported that a man had run "amok" in the village, and after killing one man and wounding two others he had bolted into the jungle.
Now an "amok" is akin to a mad dog, and can only be treated as such. As soon as the fit has left the man he never offers resistance, but so long as he is under its influence the only course to pursue is to shoot him and so stop his murderous career.
"Serve out buckshot to the men," I ordered (we were armed with Sniders), "and send them into the jungle in pairs to look for him. They are to take him alive if they can, but if he is still 'gelah' (mad) they must shoot him. When you have sent them, come down to the village with me."
When we arrived there we found one man dead, stabbed through the heart; two others had also been stabbed, but had only received flesh wounds. No one knew anything about the affair save that a man had suddenly appeared, had run "amok," and then made for the jungle. No one knew who he was. I sent the body of the dead man to the hospital to await an inquest, and the other two to the doctor to have their wounds attended to.
About a couple of hours later the sergeant-major again appeared in my office. He was accompanied by a Malay constable, who reported as follows.
He and another constable had been searching the jungle for the "amok," but, not having found any trace of him, set off on their return to head-quarters. As they were walking along a narrow path in Indian file he suddenly saw a man dash out and stab his comrade, who was in front of him, in the neck with a kris. Realizing that he must be the man they were searching for, he jammed home the breech-block, cocked his rifle, and let the stranger have the charge of buckshot in the head, dropping him dead. The wounded policeman died within a minute or two, and, seeing he could do nothing for him, the survivor returned at once to report the matter.
"HE SAW A MAN DASH OUT AND STAB HIS COMRADE."
The sergeant-major and I accompanied him to the spot, and there we saw a ghastly sight. The unfortunate policeman lay dead, with his carotid artery severed, while his murderer was sprawled on his face about a couple of yards away, also dead, half the back of his head blown away. The sergeant-major turned the man over on to his back, and there, staring at us, was the Booghis from whom I had got the "male" kris a couple of years before; there was no mistaking the curious scar right across one side of his face.
Stooping, the sergeant-major picked up a kris which was lying close to the man's hand. He eyed it intently for a moment, wiped the blood off, and then, taking the blade between his thumb and forefinger, he handed me the hilt.
"The 'female' kris, Tuan," he said, politely.