The Night Tiger(110)
On the eighth ring, Ah Long picks up the receiver. He’s not as fast as Ren was, scampering to pick up the telephone. Then he’s at the veranda door.
“Lady, Tuan.”
Right on time, William thinks. After all, he didn’t go to church this morning; Lydia would have missed her chance to speak to him then. He takes a deep breath. “Hello?”
Her voice is faint and uncertain, even if you discount the crackling of the telephone line. “William? It’s Lydia. Will you be in early tomorrow morning?”
“How early?” This is both annoying and alarming. “Surely it can wait?”
More crackles on the line. “—talk about Iris.”
A strong wind is blowing, whipping the thin cotton of his sarong around his ankles. The smell of rain.
“What did you say?” he shouts.
“Meet me at seven. At the European wing.”
There’s a crooked flash of lightning and the phone goes dead. William stares at it. Tomorrow morning then. Despite the poor reception, there was a note of triumph in Lydia’s voice that makes the bile rise in his throat. What else has she been up to, sleuthing around in her amateur way? Squeezing his eyes shut, he prays for the dark fortune that has followed him, to favor him again.
* * *
By six on Monday morning, William is up and dressed. The storm that raged all night is gone, leaving only swathes of flooded grass and a steady dripping from the eaves. Ah Long serves a tepid breakfast of toast with tinned baked beans in tomato sauce. No eggs. William can’t stomach them this morning and besides, he misses Ren’s delicate omelets. The whole house misses Ren. In the gloom, it’s empty and full of shadows. Ah Long says gruffly, “When is the boy coming back?”
“I’ll look in on him today.”
Ren’s condition has been so strange, his deterioration so precipitate, that William is filled with sick dread that he’ll arrive at the hospital and find Ren dead. But he mustn’t mention such thoughts to Ah Long, who’s superstitious.
Darkness on the winding road before sunrise. The Austin’s headlamps scatter shadows that melt into the bushes and trees. What does Lydia want from him? He has a bad feeling, one that only intensifies when he gets to the hospital. A milky blush seeps from the horizon, and though the buildings are quiet, there’s the indefinable sensation that people are beginning to stir. It’s 6:45 a.m. He’s early.
The district hospital, built in a tropical half-timbered style, has a whimsical charm. Glancing up, William approaches the dark bulk of the administrative offices in the European wing. It’s one of the few two-story buildings in the low, gardenlike hospital—surely Lydia must be somewhere around here. Instinct takes him round the corner. And there she is, her bright hair recognizable from a distance.
Lydia stands on the wet grass beside the building, head turned towards a young Chinese man with a crooked jaw. Judging from his white uniform, he’s an orderly coming off the night shift, but the tension in the way they face each other alerts William. In the dim light, they don’t notice his quiet approach.
“—nothing to do with me,” says Lydia. “You can tell Dr. Rawlings all you like.”
The man opens his mouth, but William never hears what he says because there’s a crash. A flickering shadow that plummets, smashing into the young man’s head. He drops, dead weight crumpling. William runs. Gets on his knees, but it’s no good. He can see it right away. The skull has been smashed in, there are bits of nameless splatter on his hands, his shirt. The iron smell of blood and brains. Someone is screaming, a high hysterical sound. Whatever fell has shattered, but William recognizes the fragments. A heavy terra-cotta roof tile, the kind on the roofs in the hospital, the covered walkways, and wards. He stares upward. There’s nothing to be seen, only the open windows on the second floor and above them, the unbroken ridge of the roofline.
* * *
The whole affair is horrible, shocking even to William to whom blood and open wounds are no strangers. He can’t imagine what it’s like for Lydia, who’s led, crying and trembling, from the scene. The police arrive and take statements. They go up on the roof and note that a couple of tiles are missing, though whether that’s due to last night’s storm or whether they were gone months earlier, no one can say.
“Looks like the roof was being repaired,” says the sergeant, pointing out some tiles stacked in a corner of the building. “It might have hit you, sir.”
“Miss Thomson is the lucky one.” Indeed, Lydia could have easily been killed. A mere two feet separated her from the unfortunate orderly whose head was split like a watermelon.
“Did you know him?” asks the sergeant. “Wong Yun Kiong, also known as Y. K. Wong. Aged twenty-three.”
“He did a lot of work for Dr. Rawlings, I believe.” Remembering Lydia’s words, you can tell Dr. Rawlings all you like, he wonders at this.
“Will you take the day off?”
William shakes his head. “I’ve patients to see.”
When he’s finally released, he notes the tremor in his hands, the weakness in his knees. It’s a tragic, freak accident, but he can’t shake the feeling that there’s something wrong. The instinct that told him, just as the shadow fell, that doom was coming. For after the shock of seeing the body, his first reaction was that the wrong person had died. It should have been Lydia, he thinks, even as he’s filled with sickening guilt. That dark fortune that follows him, rearranging events to save him, has taken an inexplicable turn. Something’s wrong with the pattern, he thinks, even as he walks, dazed and nauseated, back to his office. Or has he been seeing everything upside down?