A Town like Alice

Ladies Annexe," I said. "I'm afraid it's not a very gay place, but the food is good."
    She smiled, and said warmly, "I'd love to do that, Mr Strachan. It's very kind of you to ask me."
    I got to my feet. "Very well, then, Miss Paget - six o'clock on Wednesday. And in the meantime, don't do anything in a great hurry. It never pays to be impetuous…"
    She went away, and I cleared my desk and took a taxi to the club for lunch. After lunch I had a cup of coffee and slept for ten minutes in a chair before the fire, and when I woke up I thought I ought to get some exercise. So I put on my hat and coat and went out and walked rather aimlessly up St James's Street and along Piccadilly to the Park. As I walked, I wondered how that fresh young woman was spending her weekend. Was she telling her friends all about her good luck, or was she sitting somewhere warm and quiet, nursing and cherishing her own anticipations, or was she on a spending spree already? Or was she out with a young man? She would have plenty of men now to choose from, I thought cynically, and then it struck me that she probably had those already because she was a very marriageable girl. Indeed, considering her appearance and her evident good nature, I was rather surprised that she was not married already.
    I had a little talk that evening in the club with a man who is in the Home Office about the procedure for establishing the death of a prisoner of war, and on Monday I had a number of telephone conversations with the War Office and the Home Office about the case. I found, as I had suspected, that there was an extraordinary procedure for proving death which could be invoked, but where a doctor was available who had attended the deceased in the prison camp the normal certification of death was the procedure to adopt. In this instance there was a general practitioner called Ferris in practice at Beckenham who had been a doctor in Camp 206 in the Takunan district on the Burma-Siam railway, and the official at the War Office advised me that this doctor would be in a position to give the normal death certificate.
    I rang him up next morning and he was out upon his rounds. I tried to make his wife understand what I wanted but I think it was too complicated for her; she suggested that I should call and see him after the evening surgery, at half past six. I hesitated over that because Beckenham is a good long way out, but I was anxious to get these formalities over quickly for the sake of the girl. So I went out to see this doctor that evening.
    He was a cheerful, fresh-faced man not more than thirty-five years old; he had a keen sense of humour, if rather a macabre one at times. He looked as healthy and fit as if he had spent the whole of his life in England in a country practice. I got to him just as he was finishing off the last of his patients, and he had leisure to talk for a little.
    "Lieutenant Paget," he said thoughtfully. "Oh yes, I know. Donald Paget-was his name Donald?" I said it was. "Oh, of course, I remember him quite well. Yes, I can write a death certificate. I'd like to do that for him, though I don't suppose it'll do him much good."
    "It will help his sister," I remarked. "There is a question of an inheritance, and the shorter we can make the necessary formalities the better for her."
    He reached for his pad of forms. "I wonder if she's got as much guts as her brother."
    "Was he a good chap?"
    He nodded. "Yes," he said. "He was a delicate-looking man, dark and rather pale, you know, but he was a very good type. I think he was a planter in civil life-anyway, he was in the Malay volunteers. He spoke Malay very well, and he got along in Siamese all right. With those languages, of course, he was a very useful man to have in the camp. We used to do a lot of black market with the villagers, the Siamese outside, you know. But quite apart from that, he was the sort of officer the men like. It was a great loss when he went."
    "What did he die of?" I asked.
    He paused with his pen poised over the paper. "Well, you could take your pick of half a dozen things. I hadn't time to do a post mortem, of course. Between you and me, I don't really know. I think he just died. But he'd recovered from enough to kill a dozen ordinary men, so I don't know that it' really matters what one puts down on the certificate. No legal point depends upon the cause of death, does it?"
    "Oh, no," I said. "All I want is the death certified."
    He still paused, in recollection. "He had