The Night Tiger(22)
* * *
William keeps no dogs to warn him of any approach and now regrets it. He has an old Purdey shotgun in the house, but it isn’t loaded. He ought to warn Ah Long and the boy not to wander from the house in the evening. Turning back, he sees Ah Long on the veranda.
“Tuan!” he shouts. “Hospital!”
William is the medical officer on call this weekend. He hurries up the steps. “What is it?”
Ah Long’s Malay is bad and his English even poorer. He should have the boy take messages in future, but for now, Ah Long is the bearer of news even he can express clearly. “Someone is dead.”
Out of the corner of his eye, William sees Ren staring, white-faced, at him. He looks terrified.
* * *
Harun is off duty so William drives himself. The incident has taken place at the same plantation that he walked through on Friday morning; the message was brief and only mentioned that a body had been discovered. Most local deaths are caused by malaria or tuberculosis, though snakebites and accidents are also common.
The manager of this estate is Henry Thomson, Lydia’s father. As William pulls in, he sees a small knot of people. Thomson’s thin figure hovers near the tall bulk of a Sikh police officer and his Malay constable. The officer introduces himself as Captain Jagjit Singh, an inspector in the Federated Malay States Police. His English is excellent, and William guesses that he, like many police officers in Malaya, was recruited from the Indian Army to supplement the dearth of trained officers.
“The body was found past noon,” he says. “Looks like an animal attack, but we can’t rule out foul play. We couldn’t get hold of Dr. Rawlings, and I’d like to establish a cause of death before we move it.”
They’re walking now, heading deeper into the rubber estate. Distracted by the sameness of the trees, William wonders whether he’s ever passed through this portion of the estate.
“Who found it?” he asks.
“One of the rubber tappers.”
Thomson has been silent, his thin, worried face looking down at the dry leaves on which they tread, but now he says, “I’m not sure if it’s one of my workers. We’ll need to do a roll call.”
“What makes you think it might be foul play?” asks William.
Captain Singh hesitates. “It’s hard to say. There’s not much of it left.”
* * *
Arriving at the scene, a dip in the ground covered by undergrowth, they see the squatting figure of a Malay constable left on guard. He stands up hastily with a look of relief. Thomson excuses himself. “I don’t need to see it again,” he says.
William walks over. A slim arm protrudes from under a bush. It has a greyish pallor; a line of ants crawls over it. Pushing his way into the bush, William lifts the low whiplike branches out of the way.
“Has it been moved?” he calls over his shoulder.
“No.”
William stares down at what was once a woman. Two outstretched arms are still attached to a torso. Part of a green blouse wreathes one shoulder. Beneath the thin cotton, the punctured rib cage shows the shattered white ends of bone and a hollow bloody darkness. Rubbery-looking skin is beginning to peel from the edge of the wounds. From the pelvis down, there is nothing.
“Where’s the head?” says William, fighting back his sickness. There’s a sickly sweet carrion smell rising from the body and the shimmering wriggle of maggots. Their size, and the fact that it takes eight to twenty hours for them to hatch in this tropical climate, puts the time of death somewhere around Thursday night or Friday morning.
“We haven’t found it yet.” Captain Singh stays carefully upwind from the smell. “We’re still searching in a quarter-mile radius.”
William forces himself to look at the body again, but his mind is already made up. “It’s an animal. Those deep punctures on her torso look like tooth marks. The cervical spine has been severed. Her shoulders are also marked. It probably got her by the neck and suffocated her first.”
“What do you think then—leopard or tiger?”
Leopards are far more common in Malaya than tigers, outnumbering them by at least ten to one. William knows several residents whose dogs have been eaten by leopards.
“Tiger, maybe. The spacing of the bite marks looks a bit large for a leopard. Also, it takes a certain amount of jaw strength to break the spine. You should ask Rawlings—I assume he’ll be doing the autopsy?”
Rawlings, the hospital pathologist, is also acting coroner, the one who will weigh and measure out the sad secrets of this body. William takes a handkerchief out of his pocket and holds it over his mouth. The pressure alleviates his nausea.
“No tracks,” says Captain Singh.
William looks at the ground, thickly carpeted with dried leaves. In the absence of bare earth, it will be hard to find pugmarks.
“I think she was killed somewhere else,” he says. “There isn’t enough blood—perhaps this part of the body was taken for a second meal.”
Tigers, he knows, will return to a carcass repeatedly, even when the meat has gone high. It may be difficult to find the other body parts, as a tiger’s range can cover many miles. His thoughts leap to the fresh prints near his bungalow.
“I’ll get a tracker and some dogs,” says Captain Singh. “But something about this doesn’t look typical. Doesn’t it strike you that not much has actually been eaten? Tigers tend to go for the abdomen first, not the limbs. But here the torso is largely intact.” Like many Sikhs, he’s a tall, rangy man, made even more imposing by his white turban. His sharp amber eyes are fixed on the corpse.