Shrouded Corpse

Lautoka’s Case Of The Shrouded Corpse

LAUTOKA lay sleeping in the Easter moonlight. Even the midnight chorus of the Sugar City’s countless mongrel dogs was stilled.

The bedside telephone awakened Captain Trevor Withers. His “hulloa” was not cordial.

The voice of his best friend’s wife came urgently. “Oh, Trevor, can you help me? Tom is away and I think Laddie’s been poisoned. He’s lying on the lounge floor, and he’s bleeding and vomiting and crying—I don’t know what to do”.

Trevor could hear Laddie’s screams in the background. He aroused a houseboy, and threw on the first garment at hand. His Holden ate up a mile of distance in a few minutes.

Mrs. Smith was hysterical.

Laddie, a very big dog, was greatly loved in her household.

He was in extremis. There clearly was only one thing to do—but how to do it?

Trevor telephoned a medical man he knew and asked if he would come with a hypodermic and a lethal dose. The medico wanted to know why the hell he should be aroused from his beauty sleep to attend to a bloody dog.

Trevor hung up.

He asked Mrs. Smith to go to her room, and sent his boy for a heavy hammer. They killed it with three blows, there on the lounge floor.

They wrapped the bleeding body in a sheet and carried it out to the boot of the car. They spent some time trying to clean the floor.

Then, what to do with the body? The deep water at the dockside seemed the best bet. * * * An American warship and another ship lay at the wharf.

All should have been clear; but a late-feasting Indian merchant was there in his car, pointing out to his guests the helicopter perched on the ship’s deck.

Trevor drew quietly to the side, and waited. When the Indian party left, he drove the car to the dockside between the two ships, and they lifted the body out of the boot. The body quivered.

“Good God,” exclaimed Trevor, “he isn’t dead yet. Get the hammer”. The Fijian boy handed him the weapon.

“No, you do it—right on the head. Hit him hard this time”.

Trevor held the sheet-swathed body on the edge of the wharf, and the boy swung the hammer —and then they let the body, sheet and all, slide into the water.

They drove away. They did not notice, on the stern of the warship, a watchman whose eyes were popping out of his head. * * * At 4 a.m., a deep-sleeping Trevor was aroused again, this time by his house-boy, who kept repeating “Please—please”.

“Please what?” howled Trevor.

It took a couple of fumbling minutes for him to realise that the boy was saying, “police”. He found, at the door, a very stiff young Fijian sub-inspector of police, attended by two constables and a Landrover. The officer wanted to know whether Trevor had been on the wharf that night.

Trevor said he had been at the wharf about 1 a.m.

The young police officer handled the situation with tenacity and skill.

Did you go to the wharf in a car numbered so-and-so?—Yes.

Did you see anyone there? —Yes, an Indian gentleman.

Did you speak to him?—No.

What did you do?—I sat in my car.

How long?—Until the Indian gentleman had gone.

What did you do then?— I drove to the edge of the wharf and we took a body out of the car.

And then?—We struck the body with a hammer.

And then?—We pushed the body over into the water.

Whose body was it?—The body of Laddie Smith.

The officer gasped, and his living pencil took spasmodic leaps.

This was it—a murder case. “You will come with me,” he said. “We will go and see Mrs. Smith.”

“No, no,” said Trevor. “She is

very distressed. We should not disturb her. She was very fond of that big dog.”

The official calm of the police man broke down. “Of what?” he cried.

“Of Laddie, her dog,” said Captain Withers.

The young sub-inspector made a creditable recovery. “You will come with me to the wharf,” he said, nastily.

At the wharf were more police, the harbour-master, several Ameri can blue-jackets, and a steadily increasing crowd of spectators, gazing at a pool of blood. Two or three men were scrambling about under the wharf, with spotlights. They had found the blood-stained sheet.

The sub-inspector reported to his colleagues, and to the harbour master, whose reaction to loss of sleep was inability to see any thing funny in anything, at that hour in the morning ... He had a final word as he got into his car: “Trevor,” he said solemnly, “if ever I catch you alone in a suitable place I’ll cut that practical joking out of you with a meat axe, even if I’ve got to dis embowel you”, * * * Captain Withers awakened late, and looked for his breakfast.

There was none his second house-boy had not turned up.

He was in a bad mood, pre paring toast and coffee, when the Fijian house-boy arrived. The lad was in a state of high excitement.

“Where the hell have you been?” roared Trevor.

“Been at wharf,” explained the boy. “Very bad thing there. All people there looking for body.”

“Body of what?” demanded Withers, “Oh, dead body. White man kill house-girl from Mocambo Hotel, and throw her over wharf.

Oh, very bad.”

Snarling, his master hurried off into town, to kill the Mocambo murder story before it got really blown up.— RWR.