Number Five

by Colin Cotterill

  “And burst in and rescue a cellar-full of tortured refugees.”

  “That’s it. No reason to say Toy’s the only one. There might be more.”

  Against my better judgment, I went out back and found the groundsheet and the rubber gloves we used to sift through beach garbage. Granddad had no sense of smell whatsoever so he couldn’t understand why I had to slather Tiger Balm ointment under my nose during our garbage treasure hunts. I didn’t see much point in this particular venture given that he’d already been through the contents with a fine tooth comb. If he hadn’t found anything I doubted I would. But he could be very insistent.

  We spread everything on the tarp. Water had seeped into the bag and anything paper had turned to mush. I sat back and stared out across the waste like a TV detective looking at the evidence board for hidden clues. And, in all modesty, I’m delighted to say I spotted one almost immediately - one Granddad Jah had missed. You see, his generation hadn’t been blessed with milk. It was a foreign creation that didn’t arrive on our shores until the eighties. Like anything else exotic or different, Granddad avoided the dreaded white fluid. He argued, condescendingly, that cow’s milk was produced with the aim of nurturing 300kg calves and he had no need for those extra 257kgs.

  So, I knew more about milk than he did. I knew, for example, that the cap told us it was whole milk and that the use by date was stamped on the plastic bottle. There was one squashed two-litre bottle with a blue cap in front of me. The use by date read March 10th. Today was March 18th. Milk was distributed seven days before its expiry. This was a little fact I learned from You Tube. In our climate you’d have three days maximum after the use by to drink it before the staphylococci got you. As it wouldn’t have been in the stores until March 3rd, I took delight in telling Granddad that this garbage was no more than two weeks old. Begrudgingly, he told me that was why he allowed me to sit in on his investigations.

  All good bad-guys in this day and age had to have a sobriquet. So, just to annoy Granddad, I started referring to our kidnapper as ‘The Milkman’. I’d already imagined the entire screenplay – final scene: we find a bomb shelter in The Milkman’s yard and rescue a dozen malnourished children. I’d need time to think it through. Unlikely to have a bomb shelter beside the Lang Suan River, for example. But, no hurry.

  “What else have you got?” asked Granddad.

  “Well, there can’t be more than ten outlets in Lang Suan that sell two-litre bottles of whole milk and six of those would be 7/11s. So, The Milkman is somewhere on a CCTV camera archive buying milk.”

  “Doesn’t help,” said Granddad. “And he could have bought it outside Lang Suan.”

  He was right. I returned to my search.

  “You didn’t find anything in here?” I asked.

  “Would I keep it to myself if I did?” he said.

  My mind said ‘yes’ but my mouth stayed shut. I went to work. I prodded, I squeezed unidentifiable objects, I held things to my nose that I wished I hadn’t. Of the recognizable, there was a dead light bulb, a few plastic pouches with traces of foodstuff, a toothpaste tube, cartons of 20% juice, a foam box with chicken bones inside, a disposable lighter, tissues that had amalgamated to form an abstract blob, three dry pens, an empty printer ink cartridge, and, unexpectedly, a non-reinforced cotton bra with a broken strap. That discovery disturbed me more than anything else.

  My attention was drawn back to the plastic bag that had contained the message. It was a small, zip-lock bag whose zip had obviously failed in its only mission in life. Sea water and sauce had found their ways inside and ruined most of the note. Granddad had discarded it. It lay beside the tarp covered in congealed saucelike gourmet road kill. I took it to the outside tap and washed it. And there for all to see was the label. The sauce hadn’t damaged it because it was a glossy sticker, the type of pill sachet you’d get from a doctor. And there, beneath the prescribed dose – two tablets twice a day – was the address: Medici Pharmacy, Tesco Shopping Complex, Lang Suan.

  On my way to Tesco I made a quick detour. My friend, Aung was still happily married and a devoted father but he continued to give off pheromones that turned my insides to semolina. I always tried to meet him when he was with his family for safety but on this particular day he was alone in the metalwork shop, welding. He was wearing a black singlet that made him look like Bruce Lee after a workout.

  “Jimm, my favourite Thai,” he said.

  “I’m sure your favourite Thai’s a long way down the list of favourite Burmese,” I said.

  “You’d still be in the top twenty,” he said. “You need some grinding or something?”

  If only.

  “I want to ask you about something,” I said. “I hear your community’s having a lot of malaria fatalities of late.”

  He took off his mask and wiped a dirty cloth over his face that put more grease on than it took off.

  “They say it’s a new strain,” he said. “A lot of our people have been bitten so many times growing up they’ve built up a sort of immunity to the old types. And they shy away from preventative medicine. They believe it’s worse to take malaria protection than to catch the disease. If they do, they know they can get it treated. They have some good drugs these days and if our people are registered they can get it under the government thirty-baht program at the hospital.”

  “And if they aren’t registered?”

  “They can still get it. There’s something called Asunate…Artesunate…something like that. It’s Chinese. Not as costly as the old stuff. Most of the pharmacies stock it.”

  “Do you know anyone that died?”

  “A couple.”

  “Were they being treated?”

  “Yeah, but they might have left it too late. There are those that don’t trust Thai doctors.”

  “Thanks.”

  I felt an obligation to ask how his wife and kids were but I fought it and left him with a smile.

  *

  Medici Pharmacy was a little alcove tucked into the unloved fashion lane at Tesco Supermarket. One of the two workers there wore a white coat which suggested she was a lot more important than she actually was. I climbed over the therapeutic paraphernalia to get to the counter.

  “Medici Pharmacy, welcome,” said white coat. “How can I help you?”

  I didn’t feel welcomed. Nor was I convinced she wanted to help me. I took the plastic bag, now inside a second, larger plastic bag, from my pack.

  “Is that blood?” she asked.

  You’d think a woman in a white coat would know the difference between blood and tomato sauce.

  “No,” I said. “It’s sauce. My granddad’s a clumsy eater. He’s run out of his medication and he can’t remember what it was. Alzheimer’s. You know how it is. The sachet has the date on it.”

  She took up her glasses and examined it.

  “This was three months ago,” she said.

  “Right. I was hoping you might have a record of the prescriptions you filled that day.”

  She laughed.

  “This isn’t that sort of pharmacy,” she said.

  “The sort that fills prescriptions?”

  “Right. We just sell medicine.”

  “No connection to any doctors?”

  “No.”

  “How do you know what to recommend?”

  “I’m a certified pharmacist.”

  “Wow! I see. So, if my granddad came in here with bowel cancer, you’d know what tablets to give him?”

  She glared at me.

  “I’d prescribe something to ease his pain and suggest in the strongest terms that he visits a higher authority,” she said.

  “Like a certified district nurse?”

  “Look, I don’t…”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m drifting away from the point of my visit. I was hoping you might have a record of your sale of this medicine to my granddad on this date so I could repeat the order and… ease his pain.”

  “I’d only have that sort of rec
ord if he was a member.”

  “Of?”

  “Of the global Medici Pharmacy Family,” she said. “Is he?”

  “Most certainly.”

  “Do you have his member card?”

  “Err, no.”

  “Never mind. Just give me his phone number and I can look up his membership number.”

  “Sorry, I have dyscalculia. Can’t retain numbers, you know? But, how about you look up the sales for that day and -,”

  “The sales of what?”

  That Medici Pharmacy Family fondness was wearing thin.

  “Whatever was in this sachet,” I said.

  “It could have been any number of things,” she said. “What are his symptoms?”

  “Illness,” I said. “General illness. He’s a walking compendium of medical conditions. If you show me the sales for that day I can probably recognize what he was suffering from around then.”

  She looked at me mockingly and absolutely refused to let me browse the sales for the day in question which pretty much shut down our civil communication. So I did what I should have done in the first place. I phoned my brother-cum-sister Sissy in Chiang Mai and had her go through the Medici database. That girl could hack. While I waited for her to get back to me I had a mango blizzard in Dairy Queen. The woman in the white coat passed me by on her way to the bathroom and I scurried back to Medici and asked the assistant if she could let me have something to treat malaria. She didn’t recommend me to a higher authority. She asked me what brand I wanted. I tried Artesunate. She asked me if I wanted a medium or a large pack.

  Not surprisingly, Sissy sent me the sales figures and the membership details within the hour. She was busy blackmailing an internationally renowned movie producer so we didn’t have a chance to chat. I was sitting at a dirty table in the food court with Granddad Jah looking through the lists. There were fifty-one sales listed for the date on the pill sachet. Only nineteen of these were for meds that would fit in a small plastic pouch. Eight of those customers were listed as non-members of the Medici Family. If the Milkman was one of them we’d already hit a dead end. We could only go ahead if we assumed he was a registered Mediciite. While Granddad complained to the manager about the state of the table, I used the Tesco free WiFi to pull up Google maps and I checked the proximity of the eleven listed member addresses to the river. Of course, as Granddad pointed out, there was every chance The Milkman lived nowhere near the river but drove to a bridge every now and then to dispose of his rubbish. I ignored Granddad.

  There were two houses on the list that backed onto the river. The one that most interested me was under the name Mr. Pichet Srisuwan.

  “This is the guy,” I said.

  “Why?” asked Granddad Jah.

  “Firstly, because most of the memberships are listed under the wife’s name because they do all the shopping. This one’s male so he’s probably a sad old single man.”

  “Or his wife bought her husband’s medicine so she put his name down as a member,” said Granddad.

  “Granted, but look at this. The medicine our Mr. Srisuwan bought that day was Halcion. I Googled it. It’s a very strong sleeping tablet. What better way to keep young Toy quiet at night when the neighbours might hear her shout for help?”

  “What about the other one on the list?” asked Granddad.

  “She bought broad spectrum antibiotics,” I said. “You know? It wouldn’t surprise me if you could get arsenic over the counter in this country.”

  I already had a pack of anti-malarials in my bag.

  “And the name?” he said.

  “Mrs. Bounsri Chansiri.”

  “Let’s check them both out,” he said.

  “What, now?”

  “Why not?” he said. “We’ve got the Mighty X and the red light.”

  “What’s our ploy, Inspector?”

  “We’ve got the offending garbage in the truck,” he said. “We just go at it like a regular trash shaming raid.”

  “You don’t have your uniform.”

  “We tell them it’s a…what do they call it at the bank? Casual Friday?”

  That was Granddad’s joke for the year.

  “It’s Tuesday,” I reminded him.

  I wasn’t at all confident that we might be closing in on The Milkman. I had my doubts that a felon would hand over his address and phone number to a supermarket. But, at my insistence, we went first to Mr. Pichet’s house. We caught sight of him raking leaves on his driveway. I couldn’t stop myself letting out a yelp. Granddad gave me the evil eye but I knew he was just as shocked as me. Mr. Pichet was so ugly he could only be a villain in some low-budget movie; the type where all the characters looked like they were supposed to: the comely school teacher with glasses and a bun, the rock-jawed policeman, the virginal ash-blonde heroine, and Pichet with his one eye and his caved-in skull and his festering neck scar.

  “Still think it’s him?” whispered Granddad as we walked from the truck.

  Admittedly I already had my doubts. I had this thing about stereotyping.

  “Khun Pichet?” said Granddad briefly flashing his hospital appointment card. “I’m Atom Phumisak from the environmental protection agency. This is my assistant, Moo.”

  “Welcome,” said Pichet. He put down his rake and wai’d us politely. “Come over to the shade. It’s hot. How can I help you?”

  He had a warm soft voice like a late night radio monk.

  “I’m afraid you’ve been caught throwing garbage in the river,” said Granddad.

  “Are you sure?” said the man.

  He looked crestfallen but perhaps he was unable to look any other way.

  “We have a video recording,” said Granddad.

  “But that’s…no, wait. You might be right. It was probably the girl.”

  “The girl?” I said.

  “We have a village girl come in twice a week to help with the washing and cleaning,” said Pichet. “I’ve caught her at it before. Told her off. She’s supposed to walk down the lane to the municipal bin but when she thinks nobody’s looking…”

  “So your girl throws your garbage in the river?” said Granddad.

  “I’m afraid so. I’m terribly sorry.”

  “Is her name Toy?” I asked.

  “Toy? No. Her name’s Yong. But look, where are my manners. You must have a drink.”

  “No, we’re fine,” said Granddad.

  “I insist,” said Pichet and he called to the house. “Darling!”

  “Yes?” came a voice.

  “We have guests. Can we get something cold?”

  “Coming,” said the voice.

  “Is that your cleaning girl?” I asked.

  “No, it’s my wife, Bing,” he said.

  It’s true I was surprised he had a wife, and that alone should have branded me an ugly-ist, but when she appeared from the house I had to pick up my jaw from the lawn. She was as beautiful as he was unsightly. She could have been a model on the cover of TV Weekly. She brought out a tray of iced sapodilla juice and coconut macaroons and she sat with us at the outside table. All the while her hand was on his. Granddad Jah debunked the Environmental Agency nonsense almost immediately and told them about his beach project. Far from being offended, the couple were a hundred percent in favour of his efforts. They told us they were members of the For Lang Suan group, keen to support social projects. They were intelligent, worldly and erudite and as unlikely to kidnap a young child as Granddad was of being voted Mr. Personality at the temple fete.

  In the truck to the second address on lane 12, I’d all but given up. My most likely suspect was innocent and I had no reason to believe this second Medici Family member had any connection with Toy. But Granddad still had to have his say.

  “Doesn’t mean they don’t have a cellar,” he said.

  “Granddad!”

  “And that was an awful lot of sleeping pills just ‘cause his wife snored. Really? Did she strike you as the type of girl who snored?”

  I laughed
.

  “It isn’t that easy to spot when they’re awake,” I said. “I thought you liked them.”

  “All I’m saying is that they aren’t necessarily eliminated from my enquiries.”

  The next couple would have been much easier to eliminate. They were young, early twenties and they’d just recently inherited the old, wooden, two-storey house from their grandmother. It perched uncomfortably close to the river. They were slowly doing work on it. The second floor was a patchwork of plywood and boards and the rear stairway was being re-assembled. It was a big job for a youngster and he didn’t strike me as the carpenter type.

  They too confessed to occasionally throwing garbage into the river. They felt bad about it but, as all the neighbours did the same they merely followed suit. Watching Granddad at work was like being back at school. They stood with their heads bowed as he wagged his finger and they promised never to do it again. They didn’t offer us a drink or have anything interesting to say so we started back to the truck. But something was worrying me. On the far side of the house was an old dog in a cage. It was a big fellow and it lay there silently. In all my time in the south I’d never been to a house whose dog failed to announce the arrival of strangers.

  “Your dog sick?” I asked the girl.

  She was pretty in a mid-afternoon mascara and rouge kind of way. I never understood why girls who still had their piglet skin would need to slather makeup on it.

  “He’s old,” she said.

  “So old he can’t bark?” I said, and started to walk toward the cage. The boy caught up and walked beside me, attempting to cut me off.

  “We don’t let people get too close to him,” he said. “He’s got…you know...diseases and mange and stuff.”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I’m a registered pharmacist. I can recommend some meds for him.”

  Even when I stood beside the cage, the dog didn’t register my presence. He just stared out blankly at a life he’d once enjoyed. I nodded at the boy and joined Granddad at the truck.

  “Before we go,” I said, “We need to confirm that the bag we found washed up on the beach was yours.”