“… the storm clouds on the horizon were getting nearly directly overhead.”
Arny and I arrived at Pak Nam police station at ten fifty. We had a long-standing arrangement whereby if ever I had to leave home after dark for anything that wasn’t a date (three in the past three years) he’d come with me. He pretends it’s because he’s worried about the truck getting stolen but I know if he didn’t come he’d stay awake all night worrying about me. Mair succeeded in making us all weird in our own ways but she also gave us a deep sense of loyalty. We walked up to reception and a sergeant, slightly crooked like a bamboo root, was sitting on a stool behind the counter. I’d never seen him before. He looked nervous.
“I’m — ” I began, but he waved us through without saying anything.
There were police everywhere that I didn’t recognize and I was starting to think the place had changed hands in a coup, but then I saw Constable Ma Dum hurry out of the meeting room. I called to him.
“In there,” he said, looking twice at my bodyguard.
We walked into a room that was crowded but not active. It was like half-time at a sporting event when the team was being thrashed to within an inch of its life. A few mumbled conversations ceased and all heads turned to look in our direction. I recognized the two detectives we’d seen at Wat Feuang Fa. Major Mana was there and Chompu and a dozen men in uniform, most of whom I didn’t know.
“Well, this is an interesting turn of events,” said the taller of the two detectives. His hair was stiff and spiked like the bristles of a bottlebrush and his face looked as moistureless as the skin of a longan fruit. His partner was in poor shape but thought he could also get away with wearing tight jeans and a black T-shirt tucked into his belt. He couldn’t. Both men homed in on Arny who cowered beside the door.
“Manage to pray your way through your loss, did you?” said the paunchy cop.
Of course, they remembered him from the day we’d first visited the temple, but neither of them had seen me that afternoon.
“What brings you here, big man?” asked longan skin.
“He’s with me,” I said, stepping up to the two detectives and offering them my most subservient wai. Neither man bothered to return it.
“This is the reporter,” Mana told them. Chompu stood behind him with his eyes fixed on my brother.
“Interesting,” said the detective. “And what a coincidence. Titan here turns up at Wat Feuang Fa the day after a killing to cry over some imaginary bereavement, and his girlfriend just happens to be interfering in a case that no other reporter in the country knows anything about.”
“Fishy,” said the paunch. “I’d like to hear how you both wound up at the temple in the first place.”
“Very well.” I nodded my head. “Then let’s all get comfortable, shall we?”
I walked through the throng of visitors to the bosom of the local team. It was one of those ‘think on your feet’ moments. I needed time to come up with a story that didn’t damage the already fragile reputation of Pak Nam police but one that didn’t push me and Arny into the front chorus of suspects. I sat on the low window ledge and folded my arms.
“The reason we were at Feuang Fa temple,” I said, “was because I’d received a telephone call telling me there’d been a killing out there.”
“Who from?” asked longan skin.
“I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to divulge my sources.”
“So, you’re saying that someone just happened to have your number, knew you lived around here and randomly chose you to pass the information on to?”
“No, nothing random about it. I moved down here nine months ago at which time I traveled hither and thither passing around my name card and telling everyone I’d pay for information on serious criminal activity in the district. This was the first seedling to poke up its head following that early sowing. With regard to my…our visit to the temple, my boyfriend, who is actually my brother, agreed to drive me there that afternoon, despite the fact that he was still grieving over his beloved dog, John, who had been poisoned that morning. Arny is a very sensitive man and the journey proved to be too much for him. His need for solace was quite genuine. I, on the other hand, was devious. I opted to sneak out of the truck in search of witnesses. As there was no crime scene marked off I was perfectly within my rights to do so.”
I was grateful that the expense and the lost weekends of my M.A. course hadn’t been totally in vain. If nothing else, my analysis of George W.’s oratory style had taught me that a sincere countenance and a confident stance were sufficient to distract your audience from the fact that you were talking rubbish.
“Which brings me to the camera,” I said. “This may be harder to believe, but there was a small dog called Sticky Rice who was in the habit — ”
“All right,” said longan skin, “we know the dog story. What we need to know is whether you made a copy of the photographs.”
“How dare you?” I said, with heapings of indignation in my voice. I was ashamed at how quickly the deceit had sped from my mouth. In the background I could see Arny’s eyeballs roll.
“I confess, when I found the camera I did attempt to turn it on,” I said. “I mean, it could have belonged to someone at the temple. But it had experienced serious damage at the paws of the dog and I couldn’t operate the ‘play’ mode.”
“You didn’t think to take out the memory card?” asked the paunch.
“Cameras have memory cards?” I gasped. “I thought that was just computers. Whatever will they think of next? Why are you asking? Haven’t you been able to open it?”
I hadn’t seen so many heads exchange guilty glances since our secondary school chemistry teacher asked us who was responsible for exploding a stink bomb in the staff room. There was a geometric web of eye contact around me. At last the tall detective nodded to Mana.
“First of all,” said the major, “nothing you’ve heard over the past week, nor things you’ll hear tonight, are for publication. You print anything before we’re ready to release it and I’ll have you arrested.” He paused but I didn’t react at all. “The reason we called you in, is that…the camera’s lost.”
“Lost?”
“Stolen.”
The police were always good for a laugh.
“From a police station?”
“No,” he said, grimly. “This afternoon I had Sergeant Phoom run it over to the Lang Suan station on his motorcycle. There was an accident.”
“That was no accident,” said Chompu.
“Lieutenant! Quiet! We don’t know for certain. It could have been an accident.”
“Is the sergeant all right?” I asked.
“He’s in Pak Nam hospital,” said Chompu. “He was run off the road by a car. He lost a lot of skin and was knocked out. A passerby phoned an ambulance and the hospital called us. When we got there, the passerby was gone and so was the camera.”
“Technically, it could have been highway robbery,” said longan skin. “But it’s unlikely. There are much safer targets than a police officer in uniform. That’s why we need to know who you’ve told about the camera.”
“Who I…?”
I had to think about it. If they asked Arny he’d tell them without even a suggestion of thumbscrews.
“Just me and my brother knew,” I told them.
“You didn’t tell anyone at the temple?”
“I didn’t see anyone, apart from Abbot Kem.”
“You told him?”
“Er, no.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure. I said goodbye to him, went to get my shoes, then followed the dogs to the back of the hut.”
“What about the nun?”
“She wasn’t there.”
“But she could have seen you. She could have been somewhere else.”
I looked around the room. Some of the men turned away in embarrassment.
“Is the nun…?” I began.
“That’s nothing for you to worry about,” said Mana. I could see he was perturbed at being outgunned in his own station. He’d been relegated to crowd control. I didn’t want to think about the nun being a suspect. I swung the subject back to the accident.
“Is anyone with Sergeant Phoom?” I asked.
“We’ve got a man there,” Chompu said.
“Were there any other witnesses apart from the person who phoned it in?” I asked.
“It happened at a point on the way to Lang Suan where the road curves around the river,” Chompu told me. “There are no houses there and the road’s very quiet after midday.”
It was the perfect location at the perfect time.
“All right, then assuming I’m not lying, and I really didn’t tell anyone,” I said, “how could the perpetrator know that Phoom had the camera? Did the sergeant have any idea?”
“He’s still unconscious,” said Mana. “But we didn’t actually invite you here to conduct an interview. We just want you to answer our questions and leave the inquiry to us.”
“And there I was thinking I’d been helpful,” I said.
“You have,” said the paunch. “Did you happen to note down the make of the camera?”
“Yes.”
He produced a piece of paper from his folder.
“Do you remember if it was a Nikon DSLR D3555?”
There was something going on between Bangkok and our Major Mana. They glared icicles back and forth across the room. I wondered why the police needed to ask me about the make of the camera. I have a good memory for little facts with numbers and letters in them.
“That’s the make that I wrote down,” I told them.
“Are you sure?”
I wished he’d stop asking me if I was sure. If I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t say anything, would I now?
“Yes. Why?”
“Because, according to our detective friends from Bangkok, here” — Mana smiled — “the camera details that both you and I wrote down are wrong.”
“We didn’t say they were wrong,” said longan skin. “All we said was there was no such camera listed in the Nikon catalog. We’d have to contact the company and have them run a check on it. It may be a discontinued line.”
“And you’re sure you didn’t make a copy of the film?” asked the paunch.
If only I’d had a machete on me…
“Sir,” I said, earnestly, “not all reporters are rebels. I worked for a responsible newspaper and they taught us ethics. My grandfather was a member of the Royal Thai Police force for over forty years. He taught me the difference between legal and illegal.” I noticed Arny duck out of the room. “My mother is a religious woman. She taught us all the difference between right and wrong. Please don’t insult me by suggesting I’d do anything underhanded.”
See? I didn’t exactly say, no.
“Then that’ll be all,” he said. “We may have to contact you again.”
I was dismissed. The meeting broke up. The detectives and city cops retired to Lang Suan and I heard Major Mana’s souped-up truck growl out of the car park. I didn’t know where Arny was. He was probably in the temple opposite, sulking. Lies weighed heavily upon him even if they belonged to somebody else. My lieutenant had told me to meet him in his office in five minutes and I was sitting on his side of the desk enjoying its neatness when he arrived. He was carrying two suspiciously non-steaming mugs and put one down in front of me. I gazed into it and saw the stain on the bottom. “Water?” I asked.
“Vodka tonic.”
“They’ve got tonic down here?”
“Tesco. They’ve got everything at Tesco.” My entire family had gone to the opening of Tesco Lotus out on the highway. It was the biggest thing to happen to the province since…no. It was the biggest thing to happen to the province. Our own superstore and the first possibility to find cream cheese and wine and made-in-Vietnam Chez Guevara T-shirts for forty baht. They had palm oil made from our own local palms via Bangkok on special at twenty baht a bottle, cheaper than we could make it ourselves. They had chocolates from Switzerland and skin whiteners from Malaysia. Except we hadn’t been able to get in that day because there’d been so many people nobody could move in or out. We got to within four meters of the door and Arny lifted me onto his shoulders and I could see a lake of heads spread out before me. But it was a stagnant lake and I doubt any of those people made it out of there before the week was out. But, meanwhile, back at the police station, “Should we really be drinking vodka tonic on duty?” I asked.
“It’s almost midnight and they called me in from a very promising soiree. They owe me. So?”
“So?”
We sipped our drinks. The tonic barely troubled the vodka.
“Brother?” he said.
“Oh, ho. Don’t. Don’t even…”
“He doesn’t look straight.”
“He’s no shape at all.”
“He’s gorgeous.”
“Forget it.”
“I’ll take your word for it but I may involve him in fantasy moments if you think he wouldn’t mind.”
“Go for it.”
We sipped again.
“You and I need to make an appointment,” he said.
“What for?”
“To view the you-know-what.”
“No, I don’t know what.”
“Certainly you do. You wouldn’t want me to say it out loud, would you?”
“Weren’t you listening before?”
“The Chiang Mai Mail taught you ethics, Granddad taught you the law and Mummy taught you morals. How’s that?”
“And why didn’t it register?”
“Your granddad was in traffic for forty years. Your mother did a three-week Buddhism refresher course, and newspaper ethics…?”
This man was starting to make me feel uneasy.
“Do you have a remote camera in my bathroom too? You know nothing, trust me.”
“I know you made a copy of what was on that camera memory card.”
“And how would you know that?”
“Because it’s exactly what I would have done. And you and I have a lot in common.”
“We’re both girls deep down?”
He lingered before his next sip. I wondered if my knee had landed a blow.
“We’re both more capable than people around us give us credit for,” he said.
He’d dusted off my powder-puff attack without a flinch.
“If you don’t want your career to flush completely down the cesspit,” he continued, “you need someone here at your local police station providing information. I need your back-up to make me more than just a pretty face around here. It’s a simple professional trade-off on friendly terms.”
I knocked back the remainder of the drink. My mouth was too small to take it all but I was determined not to choke in front of him.
“You presumably know where we live,” I said.
He smiled.
“Ten a.m.,” he said.
I spent what sleep time was left of that morning in a nightmare of graphically epic proportions. The colors were so loud I couldn’t hear any dialogue. There were nuns and monks in there and noisy bougainvilleas. Yuppies in yellow shirts were vacuuming. Purple heads in plastic bags were swaying at the ends of ropes. Chompu was dancing. John the dead dog was bleeding in B-movie red everywhere. It was the kind of dream you needed ski goggles to get through or else you’d wake up blinded. I came around at six, more exhausted than I’d gone to bed. The sunrise was shocking pink.
I was apparently still seeing life through the lens of that very expensive camera when I arrived at Pak Nam’s mini hospital. The outpatients area was ablaze with color: the dull yellow of hepatitis, the scarlets and crimsons of recent motorcycle accidents, the mauve of football injuries, the pale greens of food poisoning, and the various shades of pink from pregnancy right through the color chart to the weak pallor of anemia. I sat with my hand shading my eyes waiting for the nurse to take me to Sergeant Phoom and I thought about logistics. If it really had been the killer who ran the sergeant off the road and stolen the camera, he had what he wanted now and had no reason to stick around. There would have been a sudden departure. I took out my cell phone and called the hotels I’d visited a few days earlier. My suspects in Lang Suan hadn’t checked out. So I tried the resorts. Nobody picked up the phone at the Tiwa Resort. I talked to the receptionist at the 69 who told me only the Korean lady had left the previous day. A group of Korean electricians had moved in and had spent their lunchtime drinking in the restaurant so there might have been some conflict. It was anyone’s guess. Dr. Jiradet was scheduled to check out that morning and the receptionist also hinted that she thought the teenager might have moved in with the German.
Sergeant Phoom was in a small ward with four beds. The other beds were occupied by people who looked like there was absolutely nothing wrong with them. They were chatting with seven or eight village types who were sitting cross-legged on the floor eating. Only the sergeant seemed poorly and I wondered whether I should suggest the revelers keep the noise down. A young constable I didn’t know sat beside him reading an illustrated brochure on kidney diseases. He looked up when I walked to the bed.
“How is he?” I asked.
I had a bag of mangosteens that I placed on the bedside table. Phoom wouldn’t be in any state to peel away the thick skins for some time to come. Both his eyes were purple and bloated and a shaved section of hair framed a nine-centimeter millipede of stitching. His mouth was closed and bloody. His arms and legs were wrapped in bandages like a cartoon explosion victim.
“He’s fine,” said the constable.
He was a pretty boy, not rugged enough to grow into a gnarled old detective.
“Really?”
“He was awake a little while ago.”
“Did he say anything?”
“Nothing coherent. Um, who are you?”
I was about to dive straight into a lie just in case they’d told him not to allow in the press, but in this little corner of Utopia, that would always come back to bite me.
“My name’s Jimm Juree. I — ”
“You’re the journalist.”
“I know the sergeant. I just — ”
“I always wanted to write.”
Nine months earlier, my reaction to such a straight line would have been ‘You should have paid more attention at nursery school’ or ‘Lucky the police entrance exam is all pictures’. I doubt I would have voiced those smarmy comments although I would certainly have imagined them. But something was happening to my sarcasm skills and I didn’t like it. I found myself feeling disappointment on his behalf, sad that he’d become a policeman and missed out on the chance to be nominated for an S.E.A. Write Award.
“It’s never too late to start,” I said.
Sergeant Phoom coughed and the constable held a small bottle of Red Bull to the older man’s bloody lips.
“Is that prescribed?” I asked.
“He swears by it.”
Whatever works, I thought. Why not a placebo of sucrose and glucose and caffeine? The sergeant turned his bruised and bloody head slowly to my side of the bed. It was like watching a piglet turn on a rotisserie.
“Nong Jimm,” he said. I had to strain to hear him.
“Isn’t this ward a bit noisy for you?” I asked.
“It’s like this all the time,” he said.
I looked to the constable for an explanation.
“His family,” he said, nodding at the floor party. A couple of them waved at me. I waved back. I pulled across a chair and sat close to the sergeant.
“Did you see the car that hit you?” I asked.
“I’ve asked all that,” said the constable.
“Poor man’s hit his head,” I reminded him. “It always pays to ask twice just to confirm the answer’s the same. Sergeant?”
“I got a brief glimpse of it in the mirror,” he said. “It was right on top of me then. Black Benz. New one.”
I got that bat in the belly flutter and looked up at the constable.
“That’s what he said before.” He nodded.
“Have you got your radio with you?” I asked. He patted the back of his belt. “All right. Call the station. Ask them if anyone’s been to the Tiwa Resort. If not, tell them there’s a guest from out of town staying there in room seven. He’s got a black Benz.”
The young man looked uncertain.
“Go ahead,” said the sergeant.
The constable called through and passed on the message. There was silence as he listened. I listened. The three patients and the family on the floor listened. The policeman nodded when the reply came through and he switched off the radio.
“They’ll send some men out there right away,” he said.
That didn’t result in a cheer exactly, more a group “Hmm.” There really is no way to describe that feeling you get when you believe you’ve contributed to the solving of a crime. I might have even joined the police force but for the fact I’d be cleaning toilets and making tea for the rest of my career. Gender equality hasn’t found a home in the police force. At least as a journalist I was allowed to ask questions. I leaned back down to the sergeant.
“Did you see the driver?” I asked.
“The glass was smoked,” he said. “All I got was a shadow. Little fellow. It all happened in a flash. I hit the ground. I was woozy for a second. I looked around and then I was out of it.”
Something troubled me.
“Were you riding without your helmet on?” I asked him.
He laughed and the scent of a dentist’s office, blood and antiseptic, puffed into my face.
“More than my career’s worth, that would be,” he said. “You just have to sit on the saddle, parked, without your helmet and they’ll have your stripes these days.”
“And it was fastened?”
“Strapped tight.”
“So, how did you get that crack on your skull?”
He reached up slowly and painfully and caressed his head.
“I was wondering about that myself,” he said.
I found the office of the hospital director, Dr. Fahlap. He was a small man of Chinese stock in his late fifties. He had the most forgettable face I’d ever seen. In fact if you asked me now to describe him, I wouldn’t be able to. I asked him whether the injury to Sergeant Phoom’s head could have been a result of him hitting his head on the road. Fahlap was the type of man who gave thought to questions and you could see the replies forming in his eyes.
“No,” he said at last. “It was a blow from a blunt object. Perhaps a tire lever.”
That’s what I’d been afraid of. On a quiet stretch of road, the killer had removed the sergeant’s helmet and smashed him over the head. He wanted the policeman dead. Perhaps he was afraid he’d been seen and could be identified. So why was the sergeant still alive? Why just the one blow? Of course. The killer was interrupted. That had to be it. We needed to find who phoned in the accident. I bet that person had seen the killer.
I was just about to thank the doctor and get back home when I had another thought.
“Doctor, do you know anything about a hospital adviser staying at the 69 Resort?”
A pause.
“What hospital is he advising at?”
“Yours,” I said.
“Do you have his name?”
“Dr. Jiradet.”
“I’ve never heard of him.”
I arrived home at ten fifteen. Sitting at the concrete table out front of the shop were my Lieutenant Chompu and Ed the grass man. They seemed to be getting along famously. It had a strange effect on me. It wasn’t jealousy exactly. Neither of them belonged to me or ever would. It was more like an annoyance that they should form an alliance so quickly. I ignored them both as I stepped down from the truck and walked into the shop.
“Nong Jimm,” Chompu called. “Are you not talking to me?”
“I don’t want to interrupt,” I said, deliberately not looking at Ed the grass man.
“When’s showtime?” the policeman asked.
“Give me five minutes.”
I walked in through the open shop front. There was no sign of Mair. I looked in the storeroom and peered out into the back garden. There were chickens aplenty but no mothers. I was on my way back when I noticed two bare feet sticking out from under the counter. By edging sideways I was able to take in the entire vista of my mother’s backside.
“Mair?”
“Shhh.”
I went to the counter and knelt down.
“Mair, why are you under the counter?”
“There’s a policeman out there.”
“I know.”
“It’s all over. The game’s up.”
I had the strongest urge to laugh but I felt there was some method to this particular madness.
“Mair, what have you done?”
My mother was shaking like a rat at a lab interview. I reached under the counter and hugged as much of her as I could.
“Mair, the policeman’s here to see me. He’s a friend of mine. We’re working on a case together. There’s nothing to worry about.”
One by one the shakes subsided and I heard a couple of recovering breaths, then a rapping sound. She was tapping on the underside of the counter with her knuckles.
“I’ll have to get Ed in,” she said.
“What?”
She reversed past me and climbed stiffly to her feet. She started to knock now on the top of the counter.
“Everywhere, they are. Little bastards.”
“Who?”
“Termites.”
I really had to laugh then.
“Mair, that down there had nothing to do with termites.”
“Don’t be silly, child. What else would I be doing on the floor?”
“Hiding out?”
“Such an imagination. You should be writing novels, girl, not reporting on other people’s failings.”
I watched her banging her fist on the plastic counter-top and knew it was the time for me to go and have a talk with the awning detective. But, first things first. I walked outside and collected my lieutenant and had intended to ignore Ed, but the beanstalk called out to me,
“Koon Jimm?”
I was afraid he’d shout something embarrassing so I left Chompu tapdancing on the gravel in the driveway and walked casually back.
“Yes?”
“I need to speak with you,” he said. He stood up and towered over me like a palm tree.
“I don’t need any grass cutting,” I said. I mentally took a long run up and kicked myself in the backside. There had been no need for rudeness, but it was said so I couldn’t take it back.
“It’s not about grass.”
“As you can see, I’m rather busy.”
His hands were in front of him holding his cap like some farmhand talking to the wife of the prime minister. I looked up at his face glaring at me, tangled in the rays of the sun. It was the first time I’d looked him in the eye. His mustache didn’t suit him and his hair was either uncombed or uncombable. But his eyes were molten dark chocolate. I wished I hadn’t looked into his eyes.
“I can wait till you’re free,” he said.
“It might be a while.”
“I can wait.”
“Don’t you have some important weeding to do, or something?”
I already had welts on the cheeks of my mental bottom.
“The weeds will still be there tomorrow,” he said, and he smiled. If the eyes hadn’t been bad enough, the smile…
“Suit yourself,” I said. “I’ll be finished when I’m finished.”
I left him standing there. He really was far too tall to be taken seriously and annoyingly persistent. I collected Chompu and we went to my hut. Unless there’d been another power failure — daily now; a concerted education project provided by the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand to show us what life was like in the Stone Age — my laptop should have been fully charged. Just in case it wasn’t, Chompu had brought his own. A darling little Dell in puce. We sat on the veranda with the laptop on my cane table and us on the rattan chairs that squeaked and creaked like mouse S amp;M. I offered him a can of beer from my bar fridge but he said he was watching his weight and settled for an iced water.
As we waited for the computer to come to the boil, I told him about my visit to the hospital and the Benz. It didn’t surprise me at all that he’d already heard. He’d been following events on his truck radio and he’d passed by the hospital in my wake. The driver of the Benz had long since departed and the police were following up on both the name he’d registered under and the license plate of the car. He said he’d pass on the theories about Sergeant Phoom’s injuries.
I plugged in my USB onto which I’d copied the photos from the computer at Home Art. When the ‘select file’ message popped up, I hesitated to click. The pictures were still heavy in my otherwise lightweight heart.
“This isn’t family viewing,” I told him.
“I imagine I’ve seen worse,” he said.
I doubted it. I clicked, and one by gruesome one the slides appeared on the screen. He watched the entire show with his hand over his mouth but the pupils of his eyes active, darting from point to point on the screen. I’d had my fill of that. I’d been through it all, zooming, highlighting, sharpening, redefining and all I’d found was the brutal assassination of an abbot.
“Again,” said Chompu.
He dragged his chair closer to the screen so his nose was barely a sniff away from the carnage. He watched the entire performance one more time from beginning to end. When the skinny dog sang in the final frame, Chompu stood and unclicked the hinges in his neck before walking inside my hut and getting himself a beer.
“Damn,” he said, “that was beautiful.”
That was the scariest moment of the morning by far.
“Beautiful?” I said. “Beautiful? How sick are you to see anything beautiful in that?”
He took a very masculine swig of his beer and dabbed his lips with a tissue.
“What do you want me to say?” he asked. “That it was awful and bloody and premeditated and sick?”
“Yes.”
“Well, of course, ‘yes’. It was all of those things. Nobody in his or her or its right mind would think otherwise. But didn’t you see it? Didn’t you see the composition? The scenery? It was staged. It was a final operatic montage. It was a tour de force of color and spectacle.”
If I’d been a police officer at that moment and he’d been a run-down resort manager, I would have asked him about his whereabouts on that Saturday afternoon. I even felt uneasy sitting there beside him.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“I think it’s lucky you didn’t watch the show beside Major Mana and the Bangkok detectives. You’d be in a cell by now.”
“But that’s why it’s so much more fun to watch it with you. They’d just have seen it as the documentation of a murder. You and I see it as so much more.”
“We do?”
“Of course we do. It’s not just a killing. It’s a climax. It’s a loud, ‘Look what I’ve done, world! See how poetic this murder has been’.”
“Poetic justice?”
“Exactly. It all had to be recorded because it’s an artistic image that’s been germinating in the killer’s mind. The cameraman or — woman just needed to match the actual slaughter to the vision. That’s why getting back the camera was so important. It was confirmation that justice had been done according to the divine ordinance.”
“Man or woman?”
“What?”
“You said, ‘cameraman or — woman just needed to match…’”
“Hmm. Did I?”
“You know you did. What did you see in those pictures that suggested the killer might be a woman?”
“Not that it precluded a man, more that it included a woman. The glove.”
“It was an oven mitt. I assumed he’d worn it to add to the color.”
“Whereas I assumed it was worn as a disguise. A tight glove or none at all would have immediately given away the size of the hand, the length of the fingers.”
“That’s all?”
“I don’t know. If it had been a video recording I would have felt more confident to pass on my gut feeling. There was just something about the grip on the knife, the way the blade was poked rather than thrust, the forensic report that said the wounds had all been comparatively shallow. It all suggests a lack of strength.”
“Ergo, a woman. Huh! And I thought you were one of us.”
“And I thought you had to be gay to be prickly.”
“You do. But once you open up the possibility of the killer being a woman, you’re down to the one suspect. I don’t like that.”
“The nun? And you like her.”
“I don’t know her well enough to like her. But I want to believe that all this time in the bush hasn’t completely erased my instincts.”
“Don’t underestimate the power of love.”
“Oh, shut up. I suppose I’m going to have to pay another visit to the nun lady. You won’t arrest her just yet, will you?”
“Based on what? We haven’t seen anything to suggest the killer could have been a woman because we haven’t seen anything. Right?”
“Right.”
“And that’s another problem.”
“What is?”
“I have to find a way to introduce these pictures into the case without committing you to a three-year jail term for tampering with evidence in a murder inquiry.”
“Come on. It wasn’t even evidence when I tampered with it.”
“Even so, you did lie to, ooh, how many was it? Twelve police officers?”
“Play back the tape. I said nothing of the sort. I just intimated.”
“Of course you did. You’re basically a very honest person. That’s why I knew you were lying through your teeth. But I doubt Mana will remember it like that, nor the Bangkok detectives.”
“Who’d ever have thought they’d lose the damned camera? So how do you propose we do this?”
“Do you have a printer?”
“Yes.”
“Is it traceable to you?”
With every encounter, Chompu climbed higher and higher in my esteem and lower on the table of people I’d trust, which was a very short table to begin with. I left him to watch the painfully slow color printer and made my way to the kitchen to prepare lunch. I’d invited the lieutenant to eat with us. Something minuscule in the far back left-hand closet of my mind wondered whether Ed was still waiting at the concrete table for me, but before I could get that far I heard a grunt from behind. I looked around to see Granddad Jah sitting at one of our grass-roofed tables. He was dressed, which surprised me. He wore a dark blue Mao shirt and gray slacks.
“So, you weren’t planning on asking me anything?” he said, gruffly.
“I haven’t seen you,” I told him. “How could I —?”
“I travel halfway down the country for you and you don’t even say thank you.”
“You’ve been to Surat already?”
I must have been impressed because I’d squealed my question. He definitely smiled this time. I sat and squeezed his hand and he enjoyed that for a few seconds before pulling his coralesque fingers away.
“No big deal,” he said.
“And you saw Captain Waew?”
“Of course.”
“Brilliant.” We’d all tried. Me, the major, the lieutenant. He wouldn’t give us the time of day. “How did you do it?”
“I’ll tell you someday.”
I knew he wouldn’t. It was starting to look as if lunch would have to cook itself.
“All right. I’m all ears,” I told him.
He cleared his throat and produced a small notepad from his back pocket. He barely referred to it.
“An influential person…” he began (always a bad start to a story), “headed a gang that was involved in various nefarious operations. Waew, who was a lieutenant colonel at the time, had been approached by an aide to this gangster who brazenly offered Waew a very reasonable monthly stipend if he would keep his eyes averted from the gang’s activities. Waew being, at that time, one of the very rare Thai police officers with a conscience, told the representative that he was on board, but also informed his superior officer of the offer. Thereafter followed a very in-depth investigation of the gang’s comings and goings. Even though this said villain had his finger in a number of pies, the police decided to focus on just the one activity in order to build a cast-iron case against him.”
I noticed then as I looked across the table, that there wasn’t actually anything written in Granddad Jah’s notebook but he gave the appearance of reading from it like a report. Impressive. I was sure if ever I made it to seventy-four I’d not even remember which end of the toothbrush to hold on to.
“As Waew had received three complaints of automobile theft from car rental companies,” he continued, “and as the detective knew from the aide that this was one of the figure’s most lucrative operations, he decided — ”
I put up my hand.
“What?”
“Why take cars from rental companies? Why go to all the trouble of counterfeiting IDs and investing in deposits when you could just break into a parked car and hotwire it and drive it off?”
It was a dumb question but I thought Granddad Jah would enjoy it.
“A good point,” he said. That was probably the first compliment I’d received from him since grade six when I won the new-year greetings card design competition at Guides. “But use your brain, why don’t you?” (deflation) “You rent a car for, what? A week? Two? That gives you two weeks to change the plates, forge the paperwork, and drive the vehicle across a border. If you steal someone’s car, you have the police out after you from day one.”
I smiled to acknowledge the point. Where was this granddad during the early days of my career? Watching traffic. I could have used him.
“Should I continue or would you like to interrupt again?” he asked.
“Please.”
“It was clear that the influential figure was recruiting hippies to do his dirty work. There were a lot of backpackers hanging around the islands, living cheap, smoking marijuana. Of course, most of them were foreigners. But there were the dregs of the communist movement, Thais who’d fled to the jungles to escape the junta, and they’d never been able to fit back in to society. Some of them set up communes that attracted younger kids. Most of them were just anti-establishment; others were playing at being flower children. There were a couple of farms down here in the south.
“Blissy Travel was the sixth tour company to be hit by the gang. Then there was a similar establishment down in Songkla. Hiring out cars without drivers was a relatively new phenomenon here, so it wasn’t hard to chart all the establishments that offered rentals. It wasn’t possible to stake out all of them so Waew had to take a chance. Blissy Travel had reported a van of theirs hadn’t been returned on the agreed date. Their second van had been rented out two days earlier, also by what the owner called ‘a hippy couple.” Waew put out the registration information and got lucky. The second VW had been pulled over in Tha Chana the day after it was rented. The driver and his passenger had been charged with indecent exposure. They’d been found sleeping naked in the back of the van early that morning.
“Waew went to meet the arresting officer and talk to the hippy couple. They made a deal. They would implicate the influential figure and give evidence against him in return for charges being dropped against them. Waew arranged a place for them to stay, what we would now refer to as a safe house, and they arrested the figure. Waew had his case, open and shut. They just awaited the trial date. Then, two days before the trial, the witnesses disappeared.”
“They got cold feet?”
“Not according to Waew. He said there were signs of a struggle and there were personal belongings and money left behind. All the things they would have taken if they’d just done a runner.”
“Who knew about the safe house?”
“Waew and his boss.”
“Ahh. So do we assume the influential figure found an ally at the police department after all?”
“No question about it. The case was dropped. Waew was demoted to captain, and the major general started driving round in a brand-new Saab.”
“And our hippies?”
“Nobody saw hide nor hair of them again.”
“So there’s every possibility the couple we found under Old Mel’s land were the missing witnesses. They buried the hippies and the evidence in one foul swoop.”
“Sounds logical.”
“I don’t suppose there’s any way we’d be able to catch up with the influential figure?”
“That wouldn’t be any problem at all.”
“It wouldn’t? Why not?”
“Does the name Sugit Suttirat mean anything to you?” It didn’t. “He was briefly the Minister for the Environment and then Rural Affairs in two, just as brief, governments in the late eighties. Long enough to make his fortune. He’s now the national chairman of the Awuso Foundation. He’s got a big house and an office right there in Lang Suan.”
After Granddad Jah had left I sat and watched the sea for a while. It was silver and languid like a lake of snot. There was a wall of weather on the horizon, a dark blue line like ranks of special effect ores about to invade our Minas Tirith. It didn’t do a thing to assuage my feeling that it was me against them. The last archer on the battlement. It was all there embedded in the system: get rich whatever way you can, use the money to get power, get richer. And there were no public outcryings because your average man in the paddy envied them their success. Those middle class yellow-shirted idealists playing ping-pong in our assembly building weren’t going to change anything apart from the flower arrangements around the fountain.