Six and a Half Deadly Sins

by Colin Cotterill

  “I mean, I can see their point. What good does it do if you have to give most of your livestock away to your layabout neighbors? The government pays so little, the breeders prefer to hide their animals in the forest when the chicken counters come around.” Dtui looked at the doctor’s glazed expression.

  “My classes?” she said. “They’re going fine.”

  “That’s good to hear,” he said. “You know, I think I can see signs of tobacco addiction in this chicken. Lungs are a little sooty. Nicotine stains on the claws. I’d say if you hadn’t strangled her, she’d have died of lung cancer within the week.”

  “Then I can fry her with a clear conscience,” she said. “Why did you want me here, Doc?”

  “I thought you’d never ask.”

  He coughed, reached into his shoulder pouch and produced a plastic bag. He opened it on the stainless steel mortuary table, removed the pha sin and told her the story of how it had come into his possession. Once he had done so, he dramatically reached into the section of hem that had been unstitched and produced the severed finger.

  “Yuck,” said Dtui.

  “Yuck, indeed,” Siri agreed. “This is the reason I wanted to meet you here.”

  “To repulse me?”

  “To solve the mystery of why I was sent a finger. I have learned that the skirt itself probably originated in the north. Now we need to ascertain the fate of the finger owner.”

  “You’re the coroner.”

  “Ex-coroner. You are the coroner-elect.”

  “I’m unqualified.”

  “But not untrained. You have drained every last milliliter of knowledge from me, digested numerous books in languages I could never read, and you have an uncanny instinct. The only reason you aren’t the national coroner is that the cheapskates up at Parliament House can’t afford to send you to the Soviet Union to get a certificate.”

  “Well, plus I have a one-year-old daughter and a husband who expects food on the table when he comes home from a busy day of policing.”

  “And where is our brave Inspector Phosy these days?”

  “Luang Nam Tha.”

  “No? Huh! See?” Siri shuffled around the slab with his arms aloft.

  “See what?” asked Dtui.

  “There is no such thing as a coincidence, Nurse Dtui. Here I receive a parcel from Luang Nam Tha, and there he is in Luang Nam Tha. Tell me there’s not something suspicious about that. What’s he doing there?”

  “Something top secret.”

  “What?”

  “How could I know? It’s top secret.” She blushed and turned away.

  “Dtui, your husband discusses all his cases with you. He’d be a fool not to. And given my wealth of experience, you’d be a fool not to tell me.”

  “I’m not supposed to.”

  “Of course you’re not.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Two important village headmen died mysteriously within a few minutes of each other. He’s up there to avert an international incident.”

  “Fascinating. Which nation are we placating?”

  “China. You know things are a little difficult up there now.”

  “As ever.”

  “Well, the two villages are on the route of Chinese Road Number Two. The Chinese laborers are camped nearby. There are rumors that the headmen were killed by the workers.”

  “Cause of death?”

  “Multiple stab wounds.”

  “Weapon?”

  “Sharpened bamboo poles.”

  “Ouch.”

  “If it turns out the Chinese are responsible, there’d be enough pressure from Hanoi to have the road project shut down. The Chinese have been laying roads up there for twelve years already. The Thais and the Viets are certain there are motives beyond international aid. Some of those roads are getting perilously close to their borders.”

  “That sounds like a remarkably patient invasion to me.”

  “It took them two thousand years to build a wall.”

  “Good point. What they need up there is a forensic investigator and his wife.”

  “Don’t bother. Phosy tried that one. The police department doesn’t want an in-depth investigation. They want a senior policeman to go up there to make a statement that the Chinese couldn’t possibly have been responsible. The government wants to keep the road program going for as long as it can.”

  “My thought is that they didn’t select the right man for the job. He’s hardly going to fabricate a report just to please the government. He’s far too conscientious for that.”

  “Phosy’s Phosy. He’ll go there and discover the truth and submit his report, and if it suits them, they’ll announce it. And if it doesn’t, they’ll rewrite it. He just needs to be seen up there.”

  “He needs me.”

  “You’ll have to find another way of getting there. The police won’t fly you up. What about Justice?”

  “I’m working on that. But first, the finger. I doubt I’ll be able to analyze it in Luang Nam Tha.”

  Dtui looked around at the morgue lab. At the peeling paint and the grumbling air conditioner. At the open cupboards that had once contained equipment. At the flickering strip light and the unswept floor. “I doubt you’ll be able to here.”

  “We have the books. We have Teacher Ou at the lycée with her chemistry set. We have experience. We are a highly professional crew.”

  “Then you would have heard there are protocols about not contaminating evidence.”

  “I’ve heard that. Your point?”

  “You just put the finger in your shirt pocket with the pens.”

  He hurriedly removed the finger and held it up between his thumb and forefinger like a cigar. There was an ink stain along one side. He hadn’t noticed the pen was leaking because his peasant shirt was the same color as the ink.

  “Let’s just say that if we were in a country that accepted evidence based on trace elements,” said Dtui, “our finger here would be thrown out of court.”

  “I most certainly would not allow anyone to throw my finger out of anything. We’ve become quite attached over the past month.”

  “You’ve had it for a month?”

  “I only recently found it in the hem.”

  “It’s just …” She took the finger from Siri and held it to her nose.

  “Ah, an insight,” said Siri.

  “There’s not much deterioration,” said Dtui. “You didn’t have it in formaldehyde, did you?”

  “It’s been in the fridge with the soy milk for the past week, but the freezer doesn’t work.”

  “And if you assume it was in the post office for the usual couple of weeks, you’d expect it to stink by now.”

  “Odd, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t smell any preservatives, but there is a strange … I don’t know, pervasive odor of something I should be able to recognize.” She took up the pha sin and sniffed at the hem. “It’s stronger here … something chemical,” she decided, “but it’s as if there are several scents combined.”

  “Teacher Ou might be able to isolate the compounds,” said Siri.

  “I’ll take it over to her after.”

  “What about the finger itself?”

  “Well, it’s quite well preserved, so I imagine there hasn’t been much shrinkage. It belonged to a male.”

  “What makes you think so?”

  At sessions such as this, Dtui always assumed her boss had already arrived at his conclusions and was merely seeking a second opinion. “Hairs,” she said. “We girls don’t generally have hairy knuckles.”

  “I’ve dated a few who did.”

  Dtui laughed.

  “So if it is male,” she said, “its size suggests it’s a pinky. Callused pad. This is the finger of a laborer, not a clerk or a rice planter submerged in water all day.”

  “Any chance he’s still living?”

  “Don’t know. There’s no congealed blood at the base, so no evidence it was cut off when he was alive.”

 
“How was it cut?”

  “Scissors.”

  Siri raised his bushy white eyebrows.

  Dtui smiled. “Or more likely shears of some kind,” she said. “With a knife or machete, you get an even cut. But look here. There’s a step. You get that when two blades meet at different levels.”

  “You do realize you’re wasted teaching basic bed-wetting?”

  “Yes.”

  “Anything else?”

  She took up the magnifying glass and rotated the finger. “Dirt,” she said. “Clay, perhaps, under the fingernail.”

  “Laterite.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I took a sample to an ex-patient at the public works department.”

  “And he recognized the color?”

  “The taste. It’s particularly—”

  “But the nail’s still dirty.”

  “Yes, I put it back.”

  “For me? How sweet.”

  “But don’t you see, Dtui? Another connection. Phosy’s headmen were allegedly killed by Chinese road workers. And here we have a severed finger with laterite under the nail. A road builder.”

  “Or somebody climbing out of a pit. Or a brickmaker. Or the center forward of a football team who fell over in the penalty area. Laterite’s everywhere, Doc.”

  Siri diverted his look of disappointment into an inquisitive gaze at the missing louvers.

  “Regardless,” he said, “I believe the answer to all our quests lies to the north. At the Chinese border. The sooner Daeng and I can get there, the better.”

  “You do realize that even though the sin originates from the north, it could have been sent from anywhere?”

  “Never mind. Daeng’s never been to Luang Nam Tha. We’re attempting to see every province before we pass away. And we really want to get out of our noisy house.”

  “How can I help?”

  Siri took the scissors from the equipment cabinet and cut the sin lengthwise into two halves. “I’ll keep half of this in case we find ourselves suddenly jetting off to Luang Nam Tha. You take the other half to Teacher Ou and see if she can identify the conflicting compounds we can smell. I’ll leave the finger with you. Do your Dtui magic on it.”

  “You know, it’s strange,” she said. “The digital pulp is callused, but the skin is surprisingly pale. You’d assume a laborer to show the ravages of the sun.”

  “An albino, perhaps?”

  “Hm. Not impossible.”

  “What fun Simenon would have with this one.” Siri laughed. “The Case of the Finger of the White-Skinned Chinese Laborer.”

  With that, his laugh broke into a coughing fit. Flu—Euro-pean-style, more damned annoying than lethal—seemed to be going around the capital, and Siri was afraid he’d caught it.

  Before leaving the hospital grounds, Siri looked at the piece of paper that contained the addresses of Judge Haeng’s mistresses. He triangulated them in his mind and decided he only had the lung capacity that day for one visit. His choice was mistress number three, Miss Singxay, the one who hadn’t claimed abuse. In battle it often proved just as valuable to analyze those targets not attacked by the enemy as those that were.

  Miss Singxay lived in a small apartment above a hairdresser’s on Pangkham. Ugly guarded the bike. There was a steep private staircase to the rear. Siri had to catch his breath before knocking. The moderate force of his knock opened the door. It swung on uneven hinges, affording him a view of the room partly blocked by the small shower alcove inside the door. He could see cheap plastic furniture. Snoopy drapes that filtered in more sunlight than they blocked. Three burning incense sticks in a jar of sand with wispy smoke curling up to the ceiling and filling the room with a sweet musk. And two sets of naked legs on a thin mattress.

  Politeness dictated he should turn and leave, but being the curious type, Siri kicked off his sandals and stepped inside. Once beyond the bathroom wall, he had a full view of the two naked sleepers. Empty beer bottles on the floor partly explained why they hadn’t been roused by the knock. On the window side slept a rather plump but not unpleasant-looking girl who couldn’t have been much older then eighteen. On the door side, also naked and rather hideous, lay the permanent secretary of the Ministry of Education and Sport.

  You never have a camera when you could most use one, thought Siri.

  He stifled a cough, reversed out of the room, retrieved his sandals and went downstairs. There he sat at a roadside stall and nursed a cup of truly awful coffee for almost an hour. Just as he was about to call it a day, a shiny black ZIL limousine turned into the lane, drove past the hairdresser’s shop, honked its horn once and pulled up twenty meters away. A rather pathetic attempt at subterfuge, thought Siri. In under a minute, a portly elderly comrade in a floppy hat and glassless spectacles appeared from the alleyway beside the salon. He went to the car and climbed in the backseat. In a wheel spin of dust the car headed off.

  Siri paid for his coffee, albeit reluctantly, re-climbed the stairs, recollected his breath and reprodded the door. As before, it fell free from the broken hasp and swung open. To his right the plastic curtain was pulled across the shower stall, and he could hear the splashing of water behind it. He entered the room and sat at the foot of the bed. There were no pictures on the walls, no calendar, no signs of ownership. The only personal touch was a suitcase that stood against the back wall of the shower stall. It acted as an altar for assorted plaster deities and photographs of ancestors on curling paper. There were two unlit yellow candles.

  There was no closet in the room, just a cardboard box piled with clothes beside the bed. He reached down into it but found nothing but polyester. His legs creaked as he sank to his knees and checked beneath the bed. He saw nothing but balls of dust and dead cockroaches. Thus he decided there was only one hiding place in the room. The splashing sounds continued. Miss Singxay was either very dirty or was attempting to drown herself. He heard the clearing of her throat and the spit of whatever had lodged there. One by one, Siri removed the cheap idols from atop the suitcase. It had to be said he had no legal right to be in that room and no suspicions at all that anything incriminating was hidden there. But Singxay had once belonged to a judge. Now she was entertaining a permanent secretary. Judge Haeng hadn’t hinted at a time-share agreement, so Siri was interested to know when and how the girl had changed ownership.

  The suitcase was full. Occupying most of the space was a tape recorder that looked old enough to predate the invention of sound recording. There were numerous tapes, many labeled with the names of popular Thai singers. But one small pile held together with a thick rubber band carried just the one word, HAENG. Beside the name were heart stickers—1, 2, 3—which appeared to signify the order of the tapes. There was a framed photograph without glass that contained an impressively touched-up photograph of Judge Haeng. The words TO MY LOVE were written across the bottom. And there were objects: a Party tie, a black comb, a wad of official-looking documents, a clip of dark hair in a small plastic bag. And then, to Siri’s utter surprise, a diary. There was a vast population of illiterate girls in Laos, any one of whom would fit the role a wealthy man might have in mind. But Judge Haeng had a great ego, and the stimulation for such a man would be that he could attract a female who had spent time in school. A knowledgeable girl who could engage his intellect, but not so smart that she might surpass it.

  When Miss Singxay finally emerged from the bathroom, she was wearing a paper-thin pha kow ma cloth. Her first move was toward the open front door. She swore and pushed it shut, using her hip to force it back into its frame. She turned, walked a few steps and noticed the open suitcase before she saw the elderly gentleman leaning against the wall beside it. Her diary was open on his lap. To her credit, she didn’t scream or reach for a weapon. Perhaps she was pleased to find someone interested enough in her to read her thoughts. Or perhaps she was no longer shocked at the sight of old men in her bedroom.

  Siri parked his Pigeon inside the front gate of his allocated house and st
epped beneath the badminton net strung across the path. From it hung various articles of clothing. These included one or two ladies’ garments that could only be described as brief. He wondered naughtily whether Madame Daeng had bought them for their next honeymoon up north. He entered the hallway and nodded at blind Pao, who nodded back. It always gave Siri the willies when that happened. He stepped around a large metal bowl and the four women who knelt there peeling turnips. Forest monk Noo and Mr. Inthanet were sitting cross-legged in one of the side rooms playing cards. They invited the doctor to join them. He told them he’d be there anon. He passed three other characters in the kitchen, only one of whom he recognized, and emerged into the small backyard feeling he’d just passed through a busy bus terminal.

  At the back of the yard, Crazy Rajhid stood behind a bush. He was apparently naked. Madame Daeng sat at the garden table while five children ran rings around her firing invisible Kalashnikovs. From the step it appeared she had a cigar between her lips, but on closer inspection, it turned out to be a wedge of wood. She was biting down on it.

  Siri smiled and sat opposite her. “Have a good day, dear?” he asked.

  “I’m torn between chronic boredom and insanity,” she told him, allowing the wood to drop onto the table. “You?”

  “I have a story to tell you,” he said. “The wheels are in motion. Or, as Judge Haeng might say, ‘A good socialist does not smash a snowman with a hammer because he knows that when things warm up, the snowman will be a small puddle of water, and buying the hammer would have been an unnecessary expense.’ ”

  “It had better start melting soon, Siri,” said Daeng. “The old fellow who sells grass brooms came by today, and I was tempted to throw myself at him—to beg him to take me away.”

  “You made the right choice to stay, my beloved.” And he told her about his adventure at the room of young Miss Singxay. “It’s only a matter of time before our judge is free to abuse his position again.”

  “Time we haven’t got. Why don’t we just jump on the Triumph and head north?”

  “We used up our petrol allowance riding back from the pump.”

  “Wasn’t Communism supposed to make poverty bearable?”