Six and a Half Deadly Sins

by Colin Cotterill

A look of fear replaced the gentle smile on her face. The weaving shuttle fell from her hand, which had began to shake. “Oh, my word. Yes, of course I do,” she said. “I’m sorry. Really, I am. I don’t know where my head is these days. Dotty as a ladybird. Excuse me.”

  She scurried off into the backyard. There were sounds of hoeing from behind the latrine and the distraught voice of the weaver apparently berating herself in her own language. The visitors exchanged glances and raised eyebrows. There was the sound of a rusty hinge, a grunt, and the little woman came scurrying back, wiping dirt off a canvas bag the size of a folded parachute.

  She handed it to Siri. “You’d better be off before someone sees you,” she said, and took a step back.

  Siri began to unfasten the leather buckles.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” the woman asked, horrified.

  “I’m opening the—”

  “Not here,” she said. “Not in full view of everyone.”

  “But there may be questions,” said Siri.

  “I don’t care. Take it away.”

  Back in the jeep, as Siri drove them to Muang Sing, Daeng unfastened the pack. It was full of fist-sized plastic bags, each packed tightly with a fine white powder. Civilai leaned over the seat. Siri almost drove off the road. For once, none of them had a funny comment.

  “If I didn’t know better …” said Daeng. She made a slit in the top bag and poked in a finger. She licked it.

  “I bet that isn’t table salt,” said Civilai.

  “Heroin,” said Daeng. “Pure.”

  “Why would they—whoever they are—why would they give us a stash of heroin?” Siri asked. “And what’s it all got to do with the sin hunt?”

  “Technically, I suppose we should hand this over to the authorities,” said Civilai.

  “Do you think we’ve been set up?” Daeng asked. “We go round the next bend, and there’s an army checkpoint.”

  “I happen to know they’re a bit short of vehicles up here,” said Civilai. “Perhaps this is the reward for successfully following the clues. It’s the treasure.”

  “Somebody’s gone to a lot of trouble to set this all up,” Siri said. “We’re supposed to be learning from it. Paying attention. This isn’t just an adult game. Are there any other clues in the pack?”

  Daeng had all the plastic bags out spread over her lap and across the floor.

  “No, nothing,” she said. “It’s just—”

  They rounded the bend, and a ten-wheel truck came hurtling along the center of the road toward them. The driver was invisible behind a muddy windshield and obviously hadn’t seen the jeep. There was nowhere to pull off the road. Siri slammed on the brakes, and the jeep slithered across the dust. At the last second, the truck swerved to its right and slapped Agnes’s wing mirror, which folded inward but didn’t snap off. The truck didn’t stop. By the time the dust had settled, Siri was coughing up chunks of laterite, and everything in the jeep, including the passengers and the heroin, had a dirty brown crust.

  “Some people need a course in road manners,” said Civilai.

  The jeep bumped on along the old French road. Siri and Daeng were deep in thought. Civilai had wiped off the dust and neatly replaced the plastic bags in the pack. They were twenty-five minutes out of Muang Long when Siri pulled over.

  “It’s not ours,” he said.

  “What?” said Daeng.

  “The heroin. It was a mistake. We asked her if she had something for us, and she assumed we meant the stash. It has nothing to do with the treasure hunt.”

  “How can you be so sure?” Civilai asked.

  “Intuition,” said Siri. “Common sense. And even if I’m wrong, we shouldn’t be driving around with twenty kilos of pure heroin in bandit country. This is the Golden Triangle. Hard characters rule up here. Hoods with tattoos and gold needles under their skin to ward off bullets. If anyone knows what we’ve got, invasion or no invasion, they’ll come looking for us.”

  Civilai had taken to nursing the pack in the backseat. “I don’t see—” he began.

  “He’s right,” said Daeng. “He’s right.”

  The return journey to Muang Long was slower but more comfortable because Siri had learned when to stop for potholes. They passed the kamikaze truck parked beside the road just outside Muang Long. That and an ancient tractor dragging a trailer of bananas were the only vehicles they saw. They returned to Bak Haeng village and parked at the point where the lane became too narrow to drive. Siri and Civilai left Daeng in the jeep while they returned the stash.

  It later transpired that Siri and Civilai had come to the same wrong conclusion when first they saw the weaver spread-eagled on top of her loom. That it had been a long day, and she was tired and that this was how weavers relaxed—illogical though it may have seemed. When they got closer, they saw a face that advertised a fresh beating.

  “How could …?” Siri began. He leaned over the loom to check for signs of life.

  “We’ve hardly been gone forty minutes,” said Civilai. “Will she be all right?”

  “In her next life perhaps,” said Siri, and closed her eyelids.

  “No! Who …?”

  “Forty minutes was obviously long enough,” said Siri. “My guess is that the real couriers turned up just after we left. She spun some yarn about a jeep full of oldies who came by to collect the stash. And she was left splayed on her own loom as a message to the neighbors that you don’t mess with Big … insert name of Drug Baron of the Month.”

  “We killed her,” said Civilai.

  “Most certainly. If we hadn’t taken the parcel …”

  The old boys did the rounds of the surrounding huts. Naturally, nobody had seen or heard anything. Most were hostile in a subdued country fashion. Few seemed to give a damn that these were high-ranking lowland Lao officials. They showed no respect. The tribes in the north had been screwed by just about everybody. They had no allegiances. They looked after their own.

  Siri and Civilai returned to the hut. Their brief search produced further evidence that the weaver had been guilty of mistaken identity. They found a plastic bag, stapled shut. It contained one more skirt. But the game had lost its fun. The return journey to Muang Sing was conducted in silence.

  6

  The British Medical Journal of June 1877

  The four men being held at the central Police Headquarters in Vientiane weren’t giving anything away. Nurse Dtui had been asked to come and see if she recognized any of them. She didn’t. And even when she walked past the cell in which the men sat, none of them appeared to recognize her. Sergeant Sihot, who was handling matters in Inspector Phosy’s absence, suggested the men were thugs for hire. The fact that they’d been overpowered by a household of women, children, old men and a monk suggested they were in the wrong profession. But they were loyal. Either that, or they didn’t know who’d hired them to kidnap the inspector’s wife and child.

  Of course, Dtui had not been staying at Siri’s house. That would have been far too obvious. Word had been spread that she was there, but in fact, she and Malee were hiding out at the abandoned embassy compound of France, another victim of Laos’s fickle bed partner politics. She’d been growing more anxious with every passing day. It had been a week since Phosy’s message ordering her to go into hiding. She’d tried everything to get word to her husband that she was safe but to no avail. Nobody had anticipated the blatant thug invasion of Siri’s house. That battle was won, but new security measures had to be put in place.

  “Any news from Phosy?” she asked the sergeant.

  “Communication’s really—”

  “—bad up there, yes, I know, Sergeant. But it’s not impossible. He was able to get through a week ago.”

  “That was before the conflict started,” said Sihot. “And he got in touch from the base on the Chinese border. He’d be wise to stay away now. Nobody knows what’s going on up there. You don’t need to worry, Dtui. He can look after himself.”

  “He’
s on his own in a province he doesn’t know well. Someone up there has made threats and sent out assassins. And there’s a war on. If I choose to worry, I’ll worry, and so should you.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “What happens to the four thugs?”

  “No papers. Two of them don’t appear to speak Lao. We’ll keep working on them. We have modern interrogation techniques.”

  “Yes, I noticed the bruises.”

  Dtui was just leaving Police Headquarters to begin her circuitous return to the French compound when a samlor bicycle taxi pulled up alongside her. Fearing the worst, she stepped to one side and braced herself for the shot.

  “Dtui!” came a husky voice.

  On the seat was Teacher Ou in a pathetic state. Dtui’s cold had cleared, but it appeared Ou hadn’t been so lucky. She looked like she’d been passed through a mangle. Her face was white, her hair greasy, and sweat stained her pink blouse.

  “Ou,” said Dtui. She stepped up to the bicycle. “You look terrible. What …?”

  The teacher tried to get out of her seat but fell against the rider’s back and dropped sideways. She tumbled like a string puppet onto the broken paving stones. Dtui knelt and took hold of Ou’s head. The teacher tried to speak.

  “What? What is it?” Dtui asked.

  “Siri …” said Ou. “Must warn … Siri.”

  “Warn him? Warn him about what?”

  “Paris.”

  With that, her eyelids folded shut, and a slight dribble of blood crept from between her lips.

  “Ou! Ou!” shouted Dtui. She felt for a pulse. Slapped at her friend’s face, once, then once more. It was then that she felt the spirit leave the body. To Dtui’s shock and amazement, Teacher Ou was dead.

  Siri, Daeng and Civilai had slept roughly, parked five kilometers before Muang Sing, hidden from the road by a field of tall grass. Siri had been banished to a distant farmer’s gazebo where he could cough all he wanted without keeping the others awake. But it was turning into more than a cough. The donated medicine was finished, but the doctor could tell it had subdued his symptoms rather than cured them. He had something more than mere flu. He felt like hell.

  They’d decided against returning to the wooden house downtown where the jeep would spend the night parked out front. If the weaver had given away any information before she was killed, the rightful owner of the heroin would be looking for three old folks in a jeep. They wouldn’t have been hard to find.

  When the sun came up, none of them could claim to have slept well. They were hungry and cold and in need of a good wash to get the red dust out of their wrinkles. They sat around the warm embers of last night’s fire and watched as Daeng unpicked the hem of the latest sin. Rolled inside was a Chinese ten-yuan banknote.

  “I’m getting sick of this,” said Siri.

  “Come on,” said Daeng. “It’s a challenge. You’re just grumpy because you’re sick. Get a shower and a hot meal inside you, and you’ll be raring to go. We came all this way. We can’t stop now. Let’s go to the market. We’ll be safe with people around. We can eat and ask about this.”

  She held up the sin. It was beautifully crafted and heavy from the quality of the cloth. But there were still the familiar Thai Lu bands they’d come to recognize. Yet it was a single gold thread that drew their attention. “I’m sure somebody will recognize this,” Daeng said.

  They decided not to go to the central market but instead returned to a small local marketplace of seven or eight stalls they’d passed the previous evening. There were only foodstuffs on sale at most of the stalls, but one did have a heap of cheap T-shirts and the knockoff pha sins they’d seen before. They approached the seller. She was in her seventies and surprisingly jolly for such a poor woman.

  “Auntie,” Daeng said, “we were hoping to ask someone about a pha sin.”

  “What type of question would you be asking then?” the seller asked.

  “We’d like to know who wove this cloth.” Daeng held it up.

  “Hmm, it’s good quality,” said the woman. “My sister might be able to help. She used to be a weaver.”

  She called to a young boy who was sitting in the dust with a block of wood that might, with the right imagination, have been a truck that day. She told him to fetch Granny, and he seemed delighted to have been given a task. The sister arrived within a few minutes. She was a clone of the first woman. Daeng lay the sin across the stall.

  “Ah, she’s still using it,” said the ex-weaver.

  “Who?” Siri asked.

  “Mae. She used to work with the Americans at the clinic before. They had this gold thread sent over especially for her. She uses it sparingly now, but nobody else has anything like it.”

  Daeng shook her head. “How do you all know these things?” she asked. “You have no TV. No telephones. How does a remote village learn about the weaving habits of another village?”

  “Ah, little sister,” the ex-weaver said, “the sin is our telephone. When we travel—when we were still allowed to—we’d wear our best sin. At a distant market the aunties would come up to us and ask about our skirts. Back in the days before the cheap copies, you could tell anything about a stranger just by admiring her sin. There’s no question at all that this is one of Mae’s.”

  “Any idea where we might find her?” Civilai asked, still cuddling the large parcel to his chest.

  “She used to live in Muang Sing,” said the woman. “No idea if she’s still there. Just ask around. ‘American Mae,’ they call her.”

  There are moments that remind a coroner that his or her job is more than merely the slicing and cataloguing of meat. Looking down at the slab into the lifeless eyes of a friend is perhaps the most poignant. As a nurse, Dtui had been trained to help the sick. Her interest in pathology had grown from admiration for Dr. Siri. In fact, from outdated text books and trial and error, they had learned the craft together. Were it not for an unplanned pregnancy, Dtui would have traveled to the Eastern Bloc to learn the skill from experts. And in a country where handling the dead was considered taboo on many levels, she would have become the first coroner of Laos who actually wanted the job. All she had now was a nursing certificate and a hunger to learn more.

  Even so, Judge Haeng, back in his role of Head of Public Prosecution, had ordered her to find the cause of death of a teacher at Vientiane’s most prestigious school. Dtui had called back Mr. Geung from the house of his fiancée. She knew she’d never be able to perform the autopsy alone. That morning, Geung was already on the steps sweeping when she arrived at the morgue. The old welcome mat was back in its place. They hugged and cried for a very long time over the loss of their friend Ou. Geung had set about cleaning the building and had said nothing to Dtui, who sat on a stool beside the slab, holding her friend’s hand.

  At last she told him, “Geung, I can’t do it.”

  “I … I can show you,” he said.

  “No, honey. I know how, I just can’t bring myself to do it.”

  “Her d-d-dad said it’s all right,” he reminded her.

  “I know. He wants to know what happened. We all do. But … I don’t know. There must be another way. Geung, let’s put Teacher Ou back in the freezer and go for a walk.”

  “Okay.”

  For a large woman and an uncoordinated man, the lycée was a brisk thirty-minute walk from Mahosot, but the weather was pleasant, and there was enough cloud cover to shade them from the midday sun.

  The principal was still depressed at the loss of his most experienced science teacher. “But she studied in Australia,” he said, as if that were enough to exempt her from death.

  “I know,” Dtui replied.

  The principal showed Dtui and Geung to Ou’s small office behind the science lab. There was barely enough space for two, so the principal left them to it. Unvarnished wood shelves crammed with bottles reached high up two walls. The labels were in Russian and German. None was in Lao or English. There were photographs of Ou’s son, Nali, on the only vac
ant patch of wall. He would never get to know his mother. Dtui found herself squeezing Geung’s hand.

  “Hurts,” said Geung.

  “Sorry, pal. So where do we start?”

  “At the start,” said Geung.

  “All right.”

  She felt a sniffle as if her cold might be returning. “Any signs of medication?” she asked. “I suppose she might have taken some wrongly labeled cold medicine. But if she did, how would we know? After this, we can go to her parents’ house and take a look in the bathroom.”

  Geung burst out laughing.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Look in the ba—the bathroom.”

  It wasn’t easy to tell what might tickle Mr. Geung or why, but he never failed to make Dtui laugh, even on a dour day like this. “Geung, you’re a nutcase.”

  “I’m a nut.”

  Dtui turned a slow circle and took in the details of the alcove. “All right. So she would have been sitting at her desk. She was a scientist. What was she working on?”

  Dtui sat on Ou’s chair and looked around. There was a clunky black Soviet microscope to one side of the work bench. Beside it was a box of slides. Each one was hand labeled with a date. The latest slide contained a single strand of material. The label was marked COLOR TEST N34. Dtui knew that color tests were conducted to check for volatile substances. The combinations and the colors they produced were outlined in a book Siri had obtained from Chiang Mai University in Thailand. They had used the tests successfully on stomach contents and identifying pills and powders. Teacher Ou kept methodical notes in a ledger open on the desk. Slide N34 had featured in eleven tests. The teacher’s handwriting had deteriorated rapidly over the last five pages, and the final page was almost illegible. But Dtui could make out the word negative beside each entry.

  She opened the color test book. Teacher Ou had worked on the toxins in the same order they appeared in the book. The next toxin due to be tested for was arsenic, but there was no entry for it in the ledger. She sat at Ou’s desk and had pulled up the chair when her left foot kicked something on the floor. It was a book, a thick textbook. She picked it up and read the English title: Toxicology.