The Night Tiger(75)
The tall, stooped figure of Rawlings, the pathologist, drifts over and William hesitates. He’s not afraid of Rawlings anymore, not since the magistrate ruled Ambika’s death an unfortunate accident, but he’s still wary around him.
Tonight, Rawlings looks more like a stork than ever. “Too bad about the tiger hunt, eh?”
William nods. “I’m sure they’ll try again.”
Rawlings rubs his jaw. His hands are large and white, and William tries not to imagine them slicing through skin with dissecting scissors. It’s silly, since he himself is a surgeon. But I only cut open the living. Not like Rawlings, whose patients are all dead.
“You know I wasn’t happy with the inquest.”
William keeps his face neutral.
Rawlings says, “There’s always cases like this, when something’s fishy but nobody believes you. Had one when I was stationed in Burma: they said it was witchcraft, people dying one after the other, but that was rubbish. It turned out to be arsenic poisoning from a private well.”
“And your point is?”
“This case,” says Rawlings, scraping at the floor absently with his shoe. “That woman, Ambika. It gives me the same feeling.”
“Surely you’re not suggesting that someone’s keeping a pet tiger!” William laughs uncomfortably.
“Not the tiger. The vomit. Remember how I said when we found the head, there were traces of vomit in the mouth?”
Unbidden, the image of Ambika’s broken body flashes in William’s mind, the way he found it half lying under a bush. A headless torso with grey, rubbery skin.
“If she ingested something poisonous, that would account for the kill being untouched. Animals have surprisingly good instinct: if it went for the stomach and intestines first, as most of the big cats do, it might have decided there was something in the body it didn’t like. But Farrell didn’t believe me, of course. Probably we’ll never prove it unless a proper investigation is done—who were her associates, whether there’d been any lovers or scandals. All this local talk about witchcraft and tigers is just a smokescreen.”
This is becoming a terrible evening for William. He swallows, reminding himself that he hasn’t committed a crime. Though given the force of public opinion, being associated with both Ambika and Nandani would be enough to sink him in this small social circle. People will follow him with their eyes, drop their voices when he enters a room. William has already had a taste of this back home.
Steady, he tells himself. It’s only Rawlings grumbling. His luck will save him. “So have you ever come across any true cases of witchcraft?” he says, hoping to distract him.
“No. Though I’ve seen some amazing runs of luck.”
“What sort?”
“You know, gambling, or things like not getting on a boat before it capsizes and so forth.”
For an instant, William is tempted to tell Rawlings about his own peculiar fortune: how time and again he has narrowly avoided trouble by the merest twist of fate. Like stumbling upon the obituary of that salesman, the only witness to his affair with Ambika. But it’s best not to say too much to Rawlings, who’s still pedantically listing different types of luck. “The Chinese say it’s your fate. You were in China, weren’t you?”
“I was born in Tientsin. My father was Vice Consul,” William says, relieved that the topic has shifted.
Rawlings looks at William with interest. “Were you now? So do you speak Chinese?”
“No, we came back when I was seven. I had an amah who taught me to speak Mandarin but I’ve forgotten it.”
He hasn’t, however, forgotten the gracious streets, the European buildings on wide roads in the foreign concessions, and behind them the jumble of alleys and hutongs. In his memories, it’s always winter in Tientsin, that city in the far north of China. A cold dry winter with the tang of burning donkey dung and a bone-chilling wind blowing in from the steppes.
“I’m surprised you didn’t enter the Service as well.”
There are reasons why he hasn’t followed his father’s footsteps, but he doesn’t discuss them. Instead, he says, “I can still write my Chinese name, though I can’t pronounce it properly.”
He pulls out his shining black fountain pen, and writes three characters awkwardly on a sheet of paper.
“Is that Chinese?” asks Leslie, peering over his shoulder. The guests crowd around curiously.
Lydia squeezes his arm, saying she’s impressed. “I’ve got a Chinese name, too. A fortune-teller wrote it for me in Hong Kong.”
“I used mine as my secret mark in boarding school,” says William lightly. “For years and years. Which is probably why I can still write it. Ren—how do you pronounce this?”
Shyly, Ren shakes his head. Although he can speak Cantonese, he can’t read many characters. Ah Long might be able to, though. Chattering and laughing, the group pours into the kitchen, despite William’s protests that it would be easier to call his cook out.
To his horror, the first thing he sees is Nandani sitting quietly at the kitchen table with a plate of food. He glances sharply at Ren, who lowers his head guiltily. The boy must have given her something to eat. Well, he can’t fault him for that. He’s a better man than me, thinks William, wishing desperately that Nandani would disappear and not look at him with her sad eyes.