Number Six

by Colin Cotterill

  “Thought you’d be here,” said Mah Yai as I passed.

  “The press is ever vigilant,” I said.

  I gave Chom a little thank you hug and sat beside him.

  “What’s the deal?” I asked.

  “Off the record?” he said.

  “Are you serious?”

  “No. I’ve just always wanted to say that.”

  “So?”

  “So, it was 8:45. The doors had opened at 8:30. There were a lot of market people here getting small change. The bank doesn’t make anything out of it. Just a public relations ploy to make friends with the simple folk.”

  “Can you get on with it?”

  “Sorry. Most of the rabble had left and someone noticed there was a fire. Four fires in fact, lit in the trash bins. As is bank policy, the customers were evacuated. Some of the bank staff got out. But the remaining staff and the guard were overcome by the smoke and rendered unconscious. While they were out all the tills were emptied and their wallets and purses were pilfered.”

  “How much did the robbers get?”

  “Nobody knows yet, but it was the end of the month. Probably a lot of cash around. They insisted on sending the staff to Lang Suan Hospital to make sure there was nothing toxic in their lungs.”

  “Have you checked the bins?”

  “Not allowed.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, that would be classified as ‘investigation’ which is the prerogative of the Lang Suan police department. As you can see I was merely placed here as a watchman.”

  “You’re better than anyone in Lang Suan.”

  “In many ways. But I have my orders.”

  “I don’t,” I said.

  I walked over to the nearest bin. In its heyday it had been a proud seventy-centimetre solid white plastic litter bin in which one would discard ones deposit slips. Now it squatted like the remains of a candle, spread out, charred and deflated. I bent down and took a sniff.

  “Be careful,” said Chom. “Something in there was strong enough to overpower three bank officials and a guard.”

  “I don’t smell anything but burned paper and plastic,” I said. But I did notice an ear of tin foil poking out of the wad. It seemed out of place.

  “Me neither,” said Chom. “Unless the fire burned off whatever it was that caused the fumes.”

  “I suppose you weren’t allowed to look at the CCTV footage for the morning?”

  “Not allowed. Watchman.”

  “Do you think they’ll let you sit in when they get here?”

  “It would be rude to kick me out considering this is our precinct.”

  “In that case…”

  I took out a USB stick from my shoulder bag and handed it to him.

  “What are you suggesting, you evil vixen?”

  “It’s back-up,” I said. “Knowing how efficient Lang Suan can be, they’ll probably download the morning’s coverage and lose it. This is just to help them out.”

  “You do know the camera’s still running?”

  “Oh shit.”

  “Only kidding. As part of my role as crime scene watchman, I turned off the computer which controls the cameras to protect it from a potential re-spark from the fire. None of the improper things you’ve said or done are on record. And that’s lucky because SCB have sound recording on their security cameras. State of the art.”

  “OK. Good. Then I’ve got to go.”

  “Where to?”

  “Lang Suan hospital.”

  *

  There was always an unforgiveable queue at the Lang Suan hospital as the sick and dying were herded into the little corrals where doctors so young they still wore retainers, guessed at your symptoms and prescribed whatever the pharmaceutical companies gave the best incentives to recommend. Or perhaps my cynicism has been shaped from personal experiences that others do not share. Either way, there was always plenty of time to get to know people in the queue there. I’d honed in on Mrs. Doom, the manager of the Siam Commercial bank in Pak Nam. She owed me a garland of favours and I was claiming one back. She was sitting on one of the wooden benches. Her eyes were watery and there was some nasty irritation around her nose.

  “It all happened so suddenly,” she said. “There was smoke all around and my first thought was to get the customers out to safety.”

  That’s never true. No matter how well a sea captain or a pilot or an SCB manager studies the protocols, the first instinct is always going to be to get yourself the hell out: every man for himself. Climbing the ladder of command at a bank is never going to be worth watching yourself sizzle while everyone around you heads for the exits.

  “Did you smell fire?” I asked.

  “I smelled smoke,” she said.

  “But not fire?”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Fire smells of what’s being burned. That’s the clue. Once the smoke takes over its harder to identify the source. Smoke is basically carbon. It poisons you. It has its own agenda. So…?”

  “So, what?”

  “Did you smell fire?”

  “Yes…No. I don’t remember. I don’t think so. All at once the bank was full of smoke. I didn’t stop to identify it.”

  “What colour was it?”

  “The smoke? Grey, perhaps. You know? Smoke coloured.”

  “Did you feel dizzy straight away? I mean, when the smoke first started.”

  “Not really. It must have been a few minutes before we started to drop. Why?”

  “Before I came here I talked to some of the customers you evacuated. None of them collapsed. Most of them said they felt fine. They weren’t even coughing.”

  A nurse called for Doom to join a secondary queue in front of the doctor’s corral. She got into a brief dry coughing fit.

  “We aren’t imagining things,” she said. “We went down like ten-pins, three of us and then the guard. The doctor in emergency gave us X rays. He said our lungs were cloudy. He put my people on oxygen. We’re waiting for the other test results.”

  “Any idea how the robbers got in?” I asked.

  “Perhaps they were in there all the time,” she said. “Posing as customers?”

  “Nobody in the crowd saw anyone suspicious leave the bank,” I told her. “Is there a back door?”

  “There’s a double door but you can only get in and out with a key for each.”

  “But they could have taken the keys from you or your staff while you were unconscious.”

  “Possible.”

  *

  I sat with Chom in front of the concrete bunker I rented. They called it a boutique shop house but that didn’t stop it being horrible. But it was cheap and, Buddha willing, we’d get our money from the government and I could revert to middle class. Right then, I was dirt poor. I knew Chom was embarrassed to be seen there. If anyone he knew passed by he’d wink and say, “We’re under cover. Shh!”

  It was Saturday morning but we were drinking from the last case of Chilean red, rescued from the resort before it went down. Cheap wine. Morning. Thirty-five and already a wino.

  “You can’t be serious?” I said.

  “They consulted with specialists from Chumphon,” said Chom.

  “Specialists in what?”

  “I’m assuming fire assessment.”

  “And he…or she... decided the bank staff were knocked out by the fumes of burning plastic.”

  “Plastic is a dangerous material.”

  “I don’t doubt it but it’s not logical.”

  “Life is illogical,” said Chom. “You living in a pig pen when I have a perfectly lovely spare room at my house with your name on the door, is illogical.”

  Chom was anal in more ways than one. I knew he’d learn to hate my scruffy lifestyle and kick me out within the month. I valued our friendship too much to put soiled underwear and used dental floss between us. But I treasured the offer and ignored it once more.

  “The illogical I’m referring to,” I said. “Is
this. The bank staff detect smoke, they shepherd the customers out onto the street and some stay behind to put out the fires. We’re talking minutes between the smoke starting and the collapses. The bank area is about 150 square metres. There are four little plastic litter bins. How much toxic smoke are they going to produce in those minutes to overwhelm four adults? And plastic smoke is black. The manager said their smoke was grey. None of it makes sense.”

  “Do you think the bank staff might have been faking it?” Chom asked.

  “I’ve learned there’s a lot of animosity amongst bank workers in this country, Chom. All smiles on the outside and catty and bitchy inside. I doubt you’d find a staff who’d like each other enough to put together a scam of this magnitude. No, I’m certain something overpowered them. We just have to find a common denominator. Something else they all inhaled that was strong enough to make them lose consciousness. I’m certain it wasn’t from the bins.”

  “Then why the smoke?”

  “That’s what I hope to determine today,” I said. “Hand it over, cowboy.”

  I held out my palm but he shook his head.

  “I couldn’t do it,” he said.

  “Yes, you could.”

  “It would have been thoroughly dishonest, not to mention, illegal.”

  “Chom, if you played poker your cards would all face forward. You are a terrible liar.”

  He reached into the top pocket of his reversible Hawaiian shirt and produced the USB.

  “Have you watched it already?” I asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Anything?”

  “Nothing spectacularly obvious.”

  “Did you bring your laptop?”

  “It’s in the car. Where’s yours?”

  “I exchanged it for rice. We paupers resort to drastic measures.”

  “You’re a journalist,” he said in desperation. “How can you function without a computer?”

  “The most immortal journalistic prose was written with a plume on parchment. I have my pencil and my notebook. I don’t need technology. Go get the laptop.”

  We watched the CCTV footage from half-an-hour before the bank opened to the point where the room was full of smoke.

  “See anything?” Chom asked.

  “A lot of market people queuing for bank services. Nothing suspicious. I wish we had the view from more than one angle.”

  “I risked my life just to get this one.”

  “I know. You’ve done great, Chom. Let’s look on a slower speed at the five minutes before the smoke starts.”

  We huddled. The picture was surprisingly clear. There were five people in the queue to the tellers and two sitting at the desk talking to officials. You could see the door and the feet of the guard on duty on the front steps. The cleaner crossed the screen mopping. In the top right of the picture, a woman, her head cut off by the angle, was helping herself to the complimentary fruit squash. She was wearing a typical market apron with a large pocket in front. She finished the drink, dropped the paper cup into the bin and picked up another cup of squash.

  “Must have been thirsty,” I said.

  The woman walked across the screen, her head still outside the frame. And it was then that somebody in the queue shouted, “Fire.” Smoke bellowed from the bin. Nobody could get close.

  “Let’s see that again,” said Chom.

  We watched it in even slower motion. The woman was standing between the bin and the camera. At first sight we’d assumed that she’d thrown only the cup into the bin but she could have easily dropped something else. She walked away and a few seconds later smoke entered the shot from the other side - the direction to which she’d walked.

  “They’re smoke bombs, Chom,” I said. “I had a feeling when I saw the tin foil. But there’s no doubt in my mind. There’s nothing else that could pump out that much smoke so fast. We used to make them in school in Chiang Mai. I bet you there’d be tin foil residue in all the bins.”

  “Are you sure you were born a girl?”

  “My ex asked me exactly that question the day we separated.”

  “Don’t you need a lighter to ignite them?”

  “Exes?”

  “Smoke bombs.”

  “You can make ring pull ignition,” I said. “Works like a hand grenade. You pull the pin and drop the bomb. It would have ignited the paper slips in the bins too.”

  “But the fumes from the smoke wouldn’t have been enough to overpower the staff?”

  “Very unlikely. It depends what they used in the bomb mixture, but listen.”

  The video continued to play although there was nothing to see but smoke. The sound was clear. There were shouts.

  “Get out. Get out.”

  There were one or two half-hearted screams. But there wasn’t a lot of coughing going on.

  “The smoke was just a distraction,” I said. “Just enough to get the customers out. But someone stayed in there. And they knew what they were doing. They knew where all the money was. It was the perfect day. The stall holders were depositing cash. The bank manager estimated there was over a million baht lying around. All the plantation foremen and the fishing boat owners would have been withdrawing cash to pay their workers.”

  “So, it was an inside job?”

  “That’s what I don’t get. There were eight bank workers on duty as well as the guard and the cleaner. Four of them were knocked out by whatever it was that left them unconscious.”

  “One of them could have been faking,” said Chom.

  “But they all demonstrated the same symptoms when they arrived at the hospital,” I said. “There really is something about this that we haven’t thought through. We need to go for a drive and clear our heads.”

  “I assume you’re inviting me and my darling saloon to take us somewhere.”

  “Anywhere you wish.”

  “I’m also assuming you already have somewhere in mind?’

  “Funny you should say that.”

  *

  There was a different driver that Saturday and a young, perky volunteer. We’d arrived at Ny Kao temple at the same time as the Street Dog truck and they were just about to open the cages and return the impotent ladies to a semi-life of depressing indifference. I stood in the shade of an iron filings tree watching the girl volunteer boldly reaching into the cages, grabbing the beasts by the scruffs of their necks and lowering them to the ground. The road sick dogs looked around to get their bearings and had a long pee before staggering off to the patch of dirt they’d adopted as home.

  There were eleven dogs in all: the mangy, the crippled, the maggot infested, but not one of them was Beer. I had that sinking feeling that makes you look on the ground because you expect your stomach to be down there between your feet. I didn’t even have the presence of mind to say, “Oh, shit”. I was frozen to my tree shade. The volunteer climbed in beside the driver who switched on the engine. I found my legs and ran over to the truck before it could pull out.

  “Excuse me,” I shouted, tapping the glass.

  The girl lowered the window just a crack so as not to free the conditioned air from the cab.

  “Yes?” she said in that self-righteous way volunteers speak to people who only work for money.

  “You’re missing a dog,” I said.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  I smiled at her to give myself enough time to be somebody I wasn’t.

  “I’m from the council,” I said.

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  “We’re following up on the well-being of temple dogs throughout the district,” I said. “For example, I was here on Thursday and I counted twelve dogs onto your truck. Now there are only eleven.”

  She held up a clipboard. All that was on it were two sets of tally marks. Eleven above the line. Eleven below it. Hardly conclusive.

  “You’re mistaken,” she said. “See? Eleven dogs collected. Eleven returned.”

  “No. There’s one missing,” I said.

 
“There is not,” she said.

  I was in a state of panic. There wasn’t enough space between the window and the door frame to reach in and grab her throat. The driver put the gear lever in drive. I ran around and stood in front of the truck. Chom, sensing my distress, left his car and jogged over to me.

  “What’s going on here?” he asked in his straight Bruce Willis voice. He flashed his ID card which seemed to worry the driver a lot more than it did the girl. Part-time drivers in my country often had shady pasts and even darker presents. The enquiries that followed had little chance of yielding results. They’d picked up eleven dogs from the hospital that morning. To distinguish them from other dogs, project dogs wore red neck ribbons with the temple code written on them. As neither the girl nor the driver had witnessed the picking up of the strays on Thursday, they suggested we go to the animal hospital and see whether the neck bands had been mixed up somehow. Perhaps the missing dog had been sent somewhere else by mistake. We had no choice. I was embarrassed beyond words. Mair would be devastated if one of her dogs was lost. She loved them more than she cared for her family. I would never be forgiven. Life as we knew it would come to an end. And all because of my selfishness and impatience.

  At the animal hospital there were no Street Dog Project dogs in residence.

  “We take two or three loads a week,” the vet told us. He was a good looking man spoiled by sinister eyebrows. “We don’t have the staff or the facilities for any more than that. The project director pays for the service and medicines and the doctors here do the ops for half our regular fee.”

  I explained that our beloved dog had snuck away to the temple as she was getting close to her heat and was in search of an eligible bachelor. She was mistakenly picked up by the Street Dog volunteers three days ago. Yes, it was a lie - a small one - but I wasn’t about to confess my sin to a hospital full of animal lovers. I knew I would be punished in a future life so there was no need to accept chastisement in this one.