On 11th January 1980 I had to speak to a group of lawyers from the School of Law, giving them my opinion as a layman on legal affairs in Hong Kong. I again mentioned the attempted frame-up of John MacLennan, though again I refrained from naming him. These lawyers were later shocked by the news that John MacLennan was dead, and rightly guessed that he was the one to whom I had referred.
Four days after this speech, the news media informed the public that
a European policeman had committed suicide. This is not an infrequent occurrence. I have heard of police who felt they wanted to die rather than lose their jobs for refusing to join in the corruption found throughout the force. Quite a number have been found with gun shot wounds, and one is said to have jumped from a height. Friends and relatives sometimes protest that it was murder, not suicide, and there is reason to doubt that some of them were suicides. I have always had doubts, for example, about the death of Divisional Superintendent English, to whom I spoke on the phone a few days before his death. He was certainly in high spirits then. It was known that some of his men objected to carrying out the vice raids he organised.
He was also engaged on ferreting out the alleged murder of a gambling house proprietor by a policeman, a death that never went on record. It was about that particular case that he had phoned me just prior to his death. I had given the cise to his predecessor, but he had passed it back for me to identify the alleged killer. Mr. English rang me to say that he thought it was his responsibility to do the job, not mine, and I fully agreed with him. But a few days later he was dead, and this alleged murder case has never been mentioned again. The dead gambling- house keeper was said to have been buried secretly and his wife compensated and bundled off to Taiwan. I have no way of knowing whether the facts given to me were truc, nor whether it had any connection with the death of English. Who knows, day the truth may be known?
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But when news came that another policeman had committed suicide, I did not for one moment conect that with John MacLennan. He did not seem to me to be a suicidal type, but rather a dogged fighter.. But so it was, as the newspaper reported.
My first thought on hearing the news was that John had been hounded to the point when life became unbearable. But soon I was getting phone calls to say that John was not in a suicidal mood just prior to his death, and that there were five shots in the body. I questioned everyone I knew who had any knowledge of guns and suicide. This included serving and ex-police, ex-army men and suicide experts.
Ali denied the possibility of a man committing suicide by shooting himself 5 times with a .38 gun. I watched the police practising with these guns and noticed that they used two bands to shoot, and even then the back-fire shook their bodies. Then began a long period of rather sleepless nights and hectic days. From morning till night the media rang me up for details of the case, always the same questions over and over: "What have you done about MacLennan's case? What are you doing now? What are you going to do?" At night I tried to picture a murder and a suicide. If it was murder, how did the killer enter a locked bedroom or a flat locked from the inside? A lawyer whom I had never met before came secretly to
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my house to give me the answer. The murderer was hiding in the cupboard in the room."