Barbara Cleverly - The Palace Tiger

The doctor was the first to recover his aplomb. ‘Look — take the boy to my tent, will you?’ he said. ‘There’s a large table set out in there. . well, you never know. . I was prepared for incoming wounded.’ He looked at Joe’s arm. ‘And I see it was not in vain. You’d better come along, Joe.’

Joe followed Sir Hector to his tent and watched as Bahadur was laid by the bearers on the table. The doctor dismissed everyone and the two men were left alone with the body. Hector opened his black bag and took out a tray of gleaming silver instruments. ‘The living before the dead, I always say, however important the dead may have been. Show me your arm, Joe. Mmm. . you’ve had a lucky escape but you don’t need me to tell you that. So far. Have to hope it doesn’t go septic in this heat. Always the danger.’

To Joe’s surprise, he uncorked a bottle of Swiss mineral water and poured it over the wound, flushing away the dried blood and dirt into a copper basin. Joe winced and gritted his teeth and waited for the next part of the process.

‘Now the gore’s gone I see that it’s not too formidable. I think we can get away without stitching it if I bandage it carefully but it will need to be disinfected. You’ll have another interesting scar to impress the girls with, Joe.’

He took a small phial of yellow liquid from his bag, broke off the top and trickled the viscous contents over the tears in the flesh.

‘What’s that?’ Joe asked.

‘Haven’t the faintest idea! I get it from Udai’s court physician. Works a treat — much more effective than potassium permanganate,’ he said confidently and proceeded skilfully to bandage up the arm. ‘Now, before the body gets snatched away from us and started on the undertaking process, why don’t we have a look at it?’

‘I’ve had a look,’ said Joe repressively. ‘Throat torn out by a tiger. Small throat. Large claws.’

‘All the same,’ Hector persisted, ‘indulge my professional curiosity for a moment and approach with me, if you will, Commander.’

With dire memories of Madeleine making just the same formal use of his title before the enquiries into Prithvi’s death, Joe accepted the change in his role. No longer the patient, he was now the police commander being invited to witness an autopsy. Reluctantly he went to stand on the other side of the pathetic little corpse and watched as, with a face devoid of emotion, the doctor selected a slim instrument and proceeded to examine the wound.

‘Yes. No doubt about that. Tiger killed him with one, possibly two blows right to left diagonally across the throat. Death from immediate gross loss of blood. There’s something here. . sand. . bits of vegetation. .’

‘From the paw,’ said Joe, impatiently.

Hector glanced quickly at Joe. ‘Yes. . paw. I say, didn’t Colin tell us last evening that tiger kill their prey with their teeth?’

Joe was impressed by Sir Hector’s perception. ‘Yes, he did. And so they do, I understand. Water buffalo, large deer and so on. But Bahadur was hardly prey — more in the nature of a small, fragile nuisance who’d blundered by mistake into the tiger’s thicket and disturbed his midday snooze. Swatted him away.’

Sir Hector looked more closely at the wound, adjusting his spectacles as he probed. With a grunt of satisfaction, he selected a pair of tweezers from his kit and took out a white object, dropping it with a plink into a small china dish.

Joe peered at it. ‘Tiger’s claw?’

‘Yes.’

The doctor looked up from his work, set down his scalpel and spoke thoughtfully. ‘Joe, I want you to go over the whole thing again. Everything. Sorry to be so tedious but I want to hear what happened from the moment you got into your tree until the moment you found Bahadur in the thicket. Miss nothing out.’

To Joe’s further puzzlement, he took out a sheet of squared paper and began to draw a plan of the nullah, marking on it everyone’s position. He took a red pencil and, as Joe’s story progressed, he marked the paths the tigers had taken, the tigress moving in a straight line from right to left across the page, the cub lying up between the trees occupied by Bahadur and Claude and, having dispatched Bahadur, circling round to the south to attack Joe from behind.

He asked one question: ‘Is there any chance that the old tigress could have made a detour and herself have killed Bahadur?’

Joe considered this. ‘No. I would say — no. Ajit spotted her in the centre of the draw on her way down from the den. He tracked her as far as the next sector — Claude’s stand. From there she was in view tree by tree until I put a bullet in her.’

‘Thank you, Joe. You’re very patient. And clear.’

‘Sir Hector, is there a point to all this?’ Joe asked uncertainly.

The old doctor came close to him and shot a swift anxious look at the door flap. He paused for a moment, listening, before he answered.

‘I think we’ve got another one of those, Joe,’ he said.

This was the last thing in the world Joe wanted to hear and for a moment his mind refused to take in what Sir Hector was saying. He stifled the automatic objections that leapt to his lips and instead sat down, silently absorbing the doctor’s assertion, made carefully, unwillingly and fearfully. It was not an assertion he could dismiss out of hand.

‘You mean you’re not happy with the circumstances of the death as reported?’ he asked. ‘Surely nothing could be clearer?’ He pointed to the claw in the dish. ‘He even left his calling card.’

‘And there’s the problem,’ said Sir Hector. ‘Just follow a thought through with me, will you, Joe?’ He sighed and tugged at his moustache in his anxiety. ‘I’m sure you’ll say I’m being unnecessarily pedantic and after all, if you look at the line-up of witnesses closely involved — two top police officers, the best tiger hunter south of the Himalayas, the Resident, the maharanee, Sir George’s trusted hatchet-man. . well, who am I to throw a spanner in the works and tell you you’re all deluded?’

‘And is that what you’re saying? Come on! Out with it! What have you seen?’

‘Unfortunately, I haven’t got my microscope to hand. .’ He rummaged in his bag and produced a hand-held lens. ‘I use this for removing splinters and suchlike. It will have to do.’

He leant over the table and examined the claw again with the aid of the glass. ‘Ah! Yes! I was not mistaken. Here, take a look yourself, Joe.’

Joe looked and blinked and looked again.

‘Could you perhaps wash the rest of the blood off, Sir Hector? We need to be quite certain about this. . Thank you. Yes, that’s even clearer.’ He spoke slowly. ‘To my inexperienced eye, this claw has a slight striation along the length of it which might be a split or crack; it has a chip at what you might call the business end and the whole claw has a yellowed appearance.’ He looked up at Hector. ‘In fact it reminds me of nothing so much as my great-aunt Hester’s teeth in her declining days. Hector! This is the claw of an old tiger!’

Hector nodded. ‘Colin! You must fetch Colin!’

It was pitiful to see the change that had come over the old hunter in the last two hours. Like a man just hanging on to the threads of consciousness after a stunning blow to the skull, Joe thought. Colin was going through the remembered motions of polite response but his spirit was somewhere beyond reach. Blaming himself for the whole fiasco, Joe realized, and he acknowledged that in his place he would have reacted in the same way. He guessed that Colin would have seen in Joe’s eyes a reflection of his own pain and guilt had he been able to focus on anything other than his inner turmoil.