Number Four

by Colin Cotterill

  ‘…of course, there it was: the screen message telling me I’d timed out again. It was as if they knew I’d left the room. Paranoia set in. I covered the web cam with a post-it. I was sure they were watching me. I was in despair. But if I turned off the computer I’d have a bank account light many thousand baht and still no air ticket to show for it.

  ‘I back-buttoned, reunited with a very forgetful Ricky and watched as my expenses multiplied. But at least I had something to drink. The whole process had become a sort of computer game where the object was to get to the next level or risk death. I had become obsessed with the fear that I’d never see that “WELL DONE, DULA. YOU HAVE SUCCESSFULLY BOOKED YOUR ASIA WINGS FLIGHT TO PARIS” notice.

  ‘And I suppose, Dear Jimmlin, here is as good a point as any to mention my condition. The doctors call it an emotional trigger. My case-worker said I’d be fine as long as I continued to recognize the signals leading to my breaking point. She taught me breathing exercises and yoga positions that would bring me back from the edge of the abyss. I was to repeat the phrase, “I am in control. I am love – not hate. I will not allow circumstances to turn me into a beast.” She knew I had a short fuse but was totally oblivious to the fact that my personal bomb had already gone off on three occasions. One should never be boastful of doing away with one’s fellow human beings but I still believe I deserve some credit for selecting only those who deserved it.’

  What? Doing away…? Dula, what have you done? I read it over a few times and I was in no doubt she was announcing she’d killed before. I ordered another Leo beer – a large one – and phoned Sissi.

  ‘Whoa,’ said Sissi, after I’d read her the segment. ‘So, why do you think she’s sending this to you?’

  ‘I don’t know, Sis. Perhaps she did something bad and she wants to confess.’

  ‘Why to you?’

  ‘It was me that got her hooked on wine,’ I said. ‘Perhaps if she’d been drinking tea she’d be on her way to Paris by now.’

  ‘Well, if she blames you I guess you’d better check the next envelope for anthrax. ‘

  A few seconds after I turned off the phone, I got another call. This one from Laurie.

  ‘I found your sender,’ he said. ‘But she’s not Indian.’

  ‘She’s not?’ I said, relieved I hadn’t put him in harm’s way.

  ‘Thai,’ he said. ‘Nune, works as a receptionist at Mae Jo University. She went out to post the letters in her morning coffee break. One a day.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because your pen friend, Dula asked her to,’ he said. ‘She sent her five sealed letters in a parcel from Malaysia. Asked Nune to send one a day. ‘

  ‘I’m back to why again.’

  ‘Nune had no idea. Dula works in the English department there, teaches literature part-time. Transferred from Chiang Mai University fifteen odd years ago. She was on faculty counting down to her retirement. Two weeks ago she vanished. No explanation. Classes untaught. Didn’t pick up her salary. Next thing you know this parcel arrives. Dula said she’d explain it all when she got back.’

  ‘Did Nune give you the last letter?’

  ‘No, said she wouldn’t feel right handing it over to a stranger. She posted it. With all the talking we missed the morning collection so you won’t get it ‘til the day after tomorrow. Sorry.’

  *

  I didn’t sleep a lot that night. I kept wondering, “why me?” I didn’t even know the woman. And what were the odds of there being two murderers in the same family? Was she getting senile and starting to channel her dead husband? Or had they been doing it together? She got let off. He got dead. Maybe she thought I was still a functioning crime reporter rather than a documenter of rural fashion trends and fruit sculptures. Perhaps she was offering me an exclusive on the life of an average family of serial killers. Or maybe it was all some sort of joke. One of my old newspaper buddies having a little bit of fun with me. If so, it was working. I was whirling around like a pair of undershorts in a spin drier. I didn’t know what to do next. I had Sissi following up on the husband’s murder case and she promised to hack into the Malay National Police data bank to see if anything had happened to shut down the Asian Wings website.

  At 3AM I was so awake I could think of nothing better to do than walk down to the beach and look at the moon for inspiration. It wasn’t quite full. That was a good thing because a solid moon in a vast coastal sky disoriented me. I always checked my palms for hairs on full moon nights and stayed away from livestock. But that morning, despite my lack of sleep, my mind was as clear as the silver-grey sky. And a couple of things worried me. One was the style and content of the letter. It was written by hand as I might have expected, but the voice didn’t strike me as that of an Indian academic in her sixties, a woman who was still wearing saris ten years after moving to Thailand. And there was the house. If she was still living in the house her husband had saved up for, why did she say in the letter that she was living in an apartment? Why had she moved? Then there was the convoluted system of mailing the letters to me via Chiang Mai. Why didn’t she just send them directly?

  I really needed to see that last installment of the letter but I knew nothing would arrive the next day. I taught my classes with one eye on the road beyond, just in case there was an accidental surge of efficiency by the postal service. But my post boy didn’t put in an appearance and my students depressed me even more than usual. I punished them by setting them unnecessary homework. I gave each of them a ten-year-old copy of the New Yorker and had them underline any words they recognized. It had no academic grounding whatsoever. It was just cruelty.

  Sissi phoned mid-afternoon. She didn’t cheer me up at all. There were complaints in their thousands posted on the net from disgruntled customers but she’d found no reason for the Asian Wings website being down. There had been murders in Malaysia, some very colourful, but none of them seemed relevant to Dula’s claims. Meanwhile, back in olde Chiang Mai, the philosopher’s murders apparently took place in a dimension where nothing was committed to computer. There were press reports that stated the facts of the killings but these were the days before ‘on-line’ news coverage so there was really nothing to learn from accessing newspaper data banks legally or otherwise.

  ‘I have to admit there was a dark, gloomy world before the internet where dinosaurs roamed,’ said Sissi. ‘But I did learn that the philosopher was connected to the two men he murdered.’

  ‘Excellent,’ I said. ‘How?’

  ‘The realtor was the man who supposedly acted as an agent for the house they’d been saving up for. Nyna; the land mafia. The bank manager offered a loan privately with interest that the university man couldn’t hope to have repaid on his salary. They would have been in debt for years. But the clincher was that these two were acting independently of the owner of the house. The couple handed over their savings and still didn’t have a property to show for it. The police did nothing because there was nothing incriminating on paper. They’d done their nefarious deed on handshakes and trust; the old fashioned way.’

  ‘So the philosopher killed them for what…some sort of vengeance?’ I asked.

  ‘Or more,’ said Sissi. ‘They’d made official complaints with the police but nobody really listened. After the murder trial, the whole story came out and the role of the two perpetrators of the scam was made public. Of course, that didn’t help the philosopher who was undoubtedly guilty, but it did release the funds he’d paid and allowed the wife to take ownership of the house. The husband had clearly committed murder out of love for her. Hence the quote, “We do not judge the people we love.”

  It was a lovely murder story. I wondered if the postman would ever kill for me. I doubted it. But still I was uneasy about the balance of the information I was getting. On a whim, I asked,

  ‘Can you do a search of their friends and other family members?’

  ‘Of the serial couple?’

  ‘Yes.

  ‘That I can probably manage,’ she s
aid.

  ‘I don’t suppose I could ask you to knock on a few doors and ask questions.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ she said. ‘Can you see me putting through the polluted traffic on a motor scooter, sweaty under a full sun, finding it within myself to be diplomatic with morons?’

  I couldn’t. Sissi in daylight was a scary thought. She suggested I send Laurie to talk to someone at the Gazette, which I did. He had a life of his own so it was unreasonable for me to glare at my phone screen throughout the evening waiting for a result. All I got were two sweet but ill-timed supposedly anonymous text messages from my postman. I was too tunnel-focused on Asian Wings to reply. I couldn’t summon up anything lovely to say.

  So, I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised when a different postman pulled up in front of my shophouse the next day. He stepped down from the motorcycle and walked to me and politely handed me my letter. He was definitely married.

  ‘You’re not my usual postman,’ I said.

  ‘Aron asked to switch routes,’ he said.

  Aron, right. That was it. I’d uhmed through it over lunch not wanting to admit I’d forgotten my suitor’s name. I suppose that was significant. I thanked the married man and stared at the envelope. It looked exactly the same as the others. My name in biro. The neat handwriting. No emoticons. Just a careful, meticulously spaced name and address. Not the manic scrawl of a murderer. I noticed my hands were shaking a little as I tore open the envelope. I took a deep breath and read aloud,

  “And, that night, admittedly under the influence of cheap wine, and airline harassment, I timed out before I could complete my mantra. I had been forced to take out life, travel and baggage insurance, I had agreed to rent a car, to first night bookings at a hotel, and was given a forty percent discount at a French restaurant on the bank of the Seine with a view of Notre Dame. My total was eighty-one thousand baht. Only three-thousand baht less than a business class seat on Thai Airways. But still my flight was not confirmed. I feel there was that same slightly guilty look in Ricky’s eyes when he asked me if I had any more requests. It was a YES/NO button. I was at the point where I could well have clicked YES and requested a seat up there with the pilot with canapés and champagne.

  “I clicked NO and to my surprise that winning final webpage appeared with Ricky looking as happy as a new born owl chick and the message that my booking was confirmed. But it didn’t matter. I had already crossed over. My computer; in fact my whole apartment was bathed in a red aura. My fingers twitched. I needed to go out and kill somebody. If I was lucky they’d have a wallet or a handbag full of cash. That would make everything even itself out. But Asian Wings had one more surprise for me. Fate was on my side. Before signing off, Ricky thanked me for my patronage, said he was always eager to improve his services and would LOVE to receive feedback from valued customers such as myself. He had ‘live texting’ and I could share my experiences with him in real time. The red glow of my apartment seemed to bleed into my keyboard as I typed.

  “Ricky?”

  “Hi, Dula.”

  “It’s been so great to work with you.”

  “I’m happy to hear that.”

  “Are you busy on Saturday?”

  “I have a girlfriend.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean it to sound like a date. I have a travel blog that reaches half a million people and I would have liked to interview you or someone from your company and share the marvelous experiences I’ve had with your on-line booking.”

  I added my phone number and signed out. I stared at the blank screen and drank my wine. I imagined all the things I could do to ease my pain. The phone roused me from my manic funk.

  “Ricky?” I said.

  “Good evening Dula,’ came a voice.

  “You’re not Ricky,” I said. At least it wasn’t how I imagined him to sound. The voice was too soft, too effeminate, with a Malay accent.

  “I’m sorry,” said the man. ‘My name is Sidney Herath. I’m the director of Asian Wings.”

  “I’m honoured to hear from you,” I said. “I was particularly impressed with your booking system.”

  “I’m proud to say I was integral in its design,” said the man.

  “Then you really are the one I should see,” I said. “Any chance of meeting up for an interview and a few photos?”

  I think that’s about it. My ball pen is almost dry and I’m out of paper. My red glow took me south on the train to KL that last weekend to a luxurious office in Desa Park. There I met Sidney Herath and there I chained him to a toilet bowl and removed parts of him. The choices were kind of obvious.

  “You can lose three fingers, or two fingers or one finger.”

  There was no ‘zero finger’ option.

  I put the letter down on my dirty little desk and looked up at the sky. A vast flock of terns with the sun reflecting glary white off their feathers chose that moment to head south. It was spectacular but I didn’t even have the strength to go, ‘Wow’. I’d received my confession. For some reason it was now all on me to …to do what? Tell the police? Investigate? Write? What was I supposed to do next? Something told me I had to right a wrong. That had to be the point. Dula had killed the director of some seedy airline. She’d done so because of this manic red light that went off in her head. She’d been cheated. But wasn’t that exactly the same reason the banker and the realtor in Chiang Mai had been killed? They’d cheated Dula’s family. They’d cheated Dula. Does a couple marry because they share the same obsession? Was there, back then, a dating site for like-minded psychopaths?

  I didn’t think so.

  Sissi had found the police report in Kuala Lumpur and phoned me at three in the morning. It didn’t matter. I still hadn’t been able to sleep.

  ‘Shoot,’ I said.

  ‘They’re big on detail and overly long sentences,’ she said. I used Google translate then fixed it up a bit. Here it is. “Following complaints from the cleaning staff on the fifteenth of this month, the security people of the building which housed the Asian Wings suite used the service key to access the office and investigate the strange smell. Inside, they found the dismembered body of Asian Wings director, Sidney Herath. There was no sign of a weapon but there was a copious amount of blood which suggested a knife had been used. There was nobody else there and our investigators learned that ninety percent of Asian Wings operations were outsourced with only the director, a secretary and a small crew of part-timers using the central office spasmodically”. That’s my new favourite word - spasmodically. “The estimated time of death was around 5PM on the Saturday.

  ‘Enter Dula,’ I said.

  ‘Two days later,’ said Sissi, ‘with the police still none the wiser, an elderly lady of Indian appearance walked into Ibu Pejabat police station and confessed to the murder. She said nothing more. A lot of people confess to murders they didn’t commit so they took down her personal details and she sat, patiently, in the waiting room. After a few hours, the police were deciding whether to eject her. That was when she started to describe her interaction with the Asian Wings website. On the Asian Wings computer, they found the booking she described and they proceeded to put her in a cell. She refused the services of a lawyer and insisted on substituting her one phone call with one letter as was allowed in the Malay criminal code. As they still had no physical evidence against her they allowed her to write. As Malaysia claims not to be a repressive state, they observed her right to communicate privately and the charge sergeant even dropped off her letter at the post office on his way home. The Asian Wings website was subsequently shut down until further notice. Looks like the old lady cut the guy up for less-than-honest on-line practices. There’s none of us didn’t have that thought from time to time attempting to book stuff on the web.’

  ‘You know what it looks like to me?’ I said. ‘Dula’s first reaction was to kill. She said she’d killed before. She described her personal trigger. What if…? What if it wasn’t the husband who killed the two characters in Chiang Mai? What if his
wife did it and he confessed to the crime to save her? What was it he said? “We do not judge the people we love.” After that trauma, Dula started to get psychological help. She learned to cage the demon inside. But not completely. In her letter she said she’d lost it on three occasions. If two were the murders in Chiang Mai that leaves another one unaccounted for. Are you still running your alter-ego on the retired cop website? What’s her name? Legless Elena?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘Do you think you can put the word out? I think we’d be looking for exactly the same M.O. Frustration at some shady dealings. Dismemberment. Lots of blood but no hard evidence. Nobody convicted. Dula didn’t travel that much so I’m tempted to keep the search regional.’

  ‘Time frame?’

  ‘She might have been active before she married and left India but let’s start from when she arrived here and work backwards. Goodness knows there are enough scam artists in Thailand to keep your average avenging serial killer happy.’

  ‘Perhaps this is why she wrote to you,’ said Sissi. ‘She knows you’re a journalist of sorts and thought you might be able to reopen the case. Clear her husband’s name.’

  ‘Then why not write directly to me? Why all this segments-via-a-third-person intrigue? Why not just tell me what she’d done and ask for help to exonerate the philosopher?’

  ‘Perhaps she knew what a sucker you are for mysteries.’

  *

  It was just after my Saturday class spent mostly forcing seven-year-olds to Hoke the Pokey that the pieces began to fit together. Laurie called with news from his friend at Thai Rat, our muck-raking national. She’d dug out the report on the Chiang Mai slayings. Both victims had been found chained to their toilet bowls and separated messily from various organs. All their fingers had been removed and their tongues severed. I had no idea why I hadn’t heard the story in the school playground. It was exactly the gore we kids lived for. The trial was covered briefly. It was pretty much a formality. The philosopher didn’t bother with a lawyer so they merely read the charges, the defendant admitted to the slayings, and the judge ordered him executed. Neat. All over in twenty minutes. The report said that his family was in the dock to hear the decision. I wondered if I might talk to them to get a feel of whether they believed their relative was capable of committing such grisly murders.