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.
William takes a final look himself and stiffens. On the left breast, the greyish skin is still intact and there, unmistakably, is a raised keloid scar in the shape of a butterfly. He knows this mark intimately, has paid money to run his fingers over it, and not even the handkerchief pressed desperately against his face can save him now.
William lurches out of the undergrowth and vomits by the side of a tree.
10
Ipoh
Sunday, June 7th
I returned to the dressmaker’s shop with a scratched face and the beginnings of a black eye. I’d hoped to let myself quietly in, but Mrs. Tham opened the door at the rattle of my key.
“Your face! Ji Lin, what happened to you? Did you get into a fight? Have you seen a doctor?”
I told her that I’d slipped and fallen. It wasn’t a very good story, and I waited, holding my breath, for the questioning to start again, but surprisingly she stopped. Studying me, she said. “You went home to Falim, did you?”
“Yes.”
“Did you see your stepfather?”
A look of pity crossed her face, and I understood that she, too, had