The Night Tiger(103)
At the graveyard, Shin paid the trishaw man, and I went in, looking for Dr. MacFarlane’s resting place. The church itself was a large wooden building with a steeply pitched roof and carved Gothic arches. Some of the graves were elaborate affairs with carved angels and stonework boxes, while others were simple crosses. They seemed to be placed in a somewhat haphazard order, and I looked about for a newer section.
Shin walked across the clipped grass. “Find it?”
“Not yet.”
There was no one around. Not a bird stirred in the enormous hushed silence, the grey sky a bowl, as though the whole world was waiting for the rain to come.
“Actually, Robert had some information—he said you’d showed him the lists,” said Shin, after a pause. “That’s why he was looking for you.”
“Why didn’t you mention it earlier?”
“I thought you’d be heartbroken over him, but you must be fine since you managed to eat so much.”
I rolled my eyes. “What did he find?”
“Apparently there was a Dr. John MacFarlane in the Taiping area. An old Malaya hand who’d been out here for twenty years; before that he was in Burma. He’d a loose connection to the Batu Gajah District Hospital—subbed in occasionally when needed. A bit of an eccentric with no wife or family. And as we saw from the pathology records, he donated one of his fingers about five years ago, after a trip upriver with Acton.”
“So what was he doing here in Taiping?”
“Not Taiping, but somewhere farther out. One of the neighboring villages.”
“Kamunting,” I said at once. “That was the name on the paper.”
“Out here, he lived a semiretired life with a private practice. Said he’d never go back to Scotland, which he’d fled forty years ago, leaving three assertive sisters behind. And that’s all.”
“What? There must be more.”
Ren had said my master, though the way he had pronounced it, with unthinking fidelity, sent a shiver down my spine. Who was his real master—was it William Acton or this Dr. MacFarlane whose directive he had followed without questioning?
“That’s all the hard information that Robert could find. He did say there was gossip, too, but it could have been slander, etcetera, etcetera. Very conscientious, our Robert.”
“Robert is a decent person.”
“So decent that he dropped you like a hot potato today,” he said bitterly.
I didn’t reply because I’d found it. A fresh grave with a thin fur of grass, the few words on the headstone sharply cut as though they had been chiseled yesterday:
John Alexander MacFarlane
b. July 15th, 1862 d. May 10th, 1931
Deliver us, O Lord.
I stiffened, calculating the dates. Yesterday, Ren had whispered there were only two days left; taking them into account, it added up to exactly forty-nine days since his death. My mother had told me that the soul wandered for those forty-nine days, restlessly weighing up its sins.
“What did he die of?” I asked.
“Malaria, apparently. He’d had it on and off for years.”
I laid the bunch of flowers on the grave, since there was no vase or crevice. They looked naked and forlorn lying on the bare ground, the leggy stems stripped of leaves. There was something peculiar about the grave: a wooden stick had been driven into it at an angle. It was about six inches long and looked like part of a broom handle. I didn’t dare touch it—it looked so deliberate—but I’d never seen anything like this before.
“Pass me the spade,” I said. Shin shook his head warningly. “Why?” Then I saw the elderly Tamil lady, her thin hair knotted in a bun, wearing a deep brown sarong. She was making her way over to us and shouting something. “Does she want us to leave?”
We stepped back from the grave, but the woman kept advancing. It turned out that she was waving a welcome to us. Apparently there weren’t many visitors to the cemetery, and she was pleased that we’d come.
“Tinggal, ya, tinggal!” she said in Malay. “Stay, stay. Do you want water for the flowers?” She was the caretaker’s mother; her son was out at the moment. “Going to rain,” she said, looking at the sky. “How come you came so late? You friends? Patients?”
I didn’t know what to say, but Shin just smiled. “Did you know him?”
To my surprise, she gave a quick nod. “We know who all the orang puteh around here are, though he lived farther out on the Kamunting side. He treated my nephew for ringworm. Such a pity he died. He was younger than me.”
She shuffled off to get some water for the flowers. It seemed to distress her that they were just lying on the grave, so I carefully gathered them up again. Returning with a jam jar, she said, “So where are you two from?”
“Ipoh,” said Shin. “I’m a medical student. I’m sorry to hear that Dr. MacFarlane died.”
“Oh, one of his students. Well, he was sick for a while. In fact, people said he lost his mind. His housekeeper left, you know, and then it was just the old man and that Chinese boy.”
My ears pricked up. “Was his name Ren?”
“I don’t know. A small houseboy, about ten or eleven years old. He was a good boy. Took care of everything in the house when the housekeeper left. Can’t have been easy with the doctor like that. I saw him at the funeral. All shaken up and trying not to cry, poor thing. You know him?”