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.
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 heard the rumors about my stepfather’s temper. I felt like giggling hysterically. Of all the things that had happened this weekend, he was the least to blame for once. And the truth was, he’d never laid a hand on me. He didn’t need to.
From the very beginning, I’d discovered that it was beneath my stepfather to discipline a girl. That was my mother’s job, and at the slightest sign of his displeasure, he’d merely glance at my mother for her to bite her lips and softly reprove me. At first, I hadn’t understood the cost. Singing loudly or whistling were offenses. So was talking back to him. They resulted in my mother emerging from discussions with him, white-faced and holding her wrist gingerly. Bruises on her upper arms where hard fingers had dug in. These were never as spectacular as the punishments meted out to Shin, and my mother never referred to them. But both of us learned to dread the vertical line that appeared on his forehead, in the exact middle of his brow, and the whitening of his nostrils.
I suppose you could say he thought what he was doing was right and just, and boys needed to be whipped into shape, and wives should learn their place. I didn’t know and, frankly, I never cared to understand my stepfather. I only knew I hated him.
* * *
Peering into my small mirror, I was dismayed. My left cheekbone was swollen, and there were several long scratches across my face. And as promised, I was developing a nice shiner. Glumly, I ran the numbers through my head again. At five cents a dance ticket, which meant three cents to me, I was still short seventy-five cents this month for my mother’s debt. But there was no way I could work like this, despite the knot of anxiety in my stomach. Rather than going in and facing stares, it would be better to ask Hui to tell the Mama that I couldn’t make it on Wednesday, so the next day after work, I went to visit her.
Hui sometimes worked evenings at another place, but I was fairly certain I’d find her at home. She didn’t live too far, which was how we’d become friends in the first place. Hui had brought a dress to Mrs. Tham’s shop, and I’d been given the task of altering it. It was a pretty frock—light frothy turquoise that looked like sea foam. I’d asked her what she wore it to.
“Tea dances. Have you ever been to one?” she said.
I hadn’t, although I’d taken dance lessons before.