The Merry Misogynist

by Colin Cotterill

  There were other questions that needed to be asked of the men who had just begun the six-hour journey to the Thon. But Siri was a coroner, not a policeman. Phosy was the man to take over from here. He could use his clout to look at the transport records of the Census Department and compare them with the dates of the abductions of the brides. He was almost certain he had his man. His instincts had been on edge since he’d first arrived there. Everything fitted: the access to documentation, the two-week hiatus between distribution and collection, and the truck. There was only one point that didn’t mesh with the facts. Champasak, the home of the missing girl they’d most recently learned of, was way down south. It was hardly a comfortable driving distance from Vientiane. Siri turned to Kummai.

  “What’s their radius?” he asked. “I mean, how far from Vientiane do they travel?”

  “Usually no more than two hundred kilometers.”

  “I see.”

  “There was too much wear and tear on the trucks. Petrol costs were too high. That’s why we started sending two of the teams off on scheduled aircraft flights.”

  “But before that they all drove?”

  “That’s right.”

  “When did that system change?”

  “A little over a year ago.”

  “Did anyone drive to Attapeu before that?”

  “Yes, Buaphan’s team, in fact. They were away for a couple of months.”

  “That’s it! Kummai, I have to go.” Siri gave the director’s hand a quick shake. “Good to see you again.”

  He turned on his heel and was out of the door and across the yard in seconds. Kummai watched him climb onto his bike, kick it into life, and fly out through the open gates.

  “At his age, unbelievable,” said the director, scratching at his appendix scar.

  A Lack of Police Intelligence

  Central Police Headquarters wasn’t a very imposing or secure compound of buildings. There was a fence with no gate and a dirt quadrangle. The main building was a horseshoe with all its doors opening onto the yard. If a visitor didn’t bother to stop at the police box in front or go to the little reception desk tucked up on the veranda, nobody would call him back. They’d assume he knew what he was doing. They hoped that with all the uniforms around, nobody would be foolish enough to try anything silly.

  Siri drove into the yard like a bull from hell, scattering young officers out of his way, and skidded to a stop directly in front of Phosy’s office. The sign over the door read POLICE INTELLIGENCE. All the jokes had already been used up over that one. He ran up the three steps and in through the open doorway. The five desks were of different shapes and sizes. The only thing they had in common was that they were all deserted.

  “Shit!” he said aloud. He asked around outside and in the surrounding offices, but all he learned was that two of the staff of Intelligence were at a seminar in the north and the others hadn’t left messages to say where they were off to. All anyone knew for sure was that their jeep wasn’t parked in the police lot.

  Siri found one pen on Phosy’s desk that hadn’t been dried up by the March heat and wrote, “Urgent! Call Siri!!!!”

  He taped the note to the typewriter and left.

  By midday, Phosy still hadn’t been in touch, and a cauldron of fears and apprehensions was bubbling inside Siri. He’d just allowed a maniac to head off into the countryside. He should have stopped him. How? Not important. The fact remained that he should have found a way. Twice he’d hurried to the clerical office to phone police headquarters. The receptionist had told him to stop phoning. They had the message and they’d get Phosy to call as soon as he came back. The police telephonist had even gone to the trouble to tell him they weren’t stupid. Siri knew when to hold his tongue. He knew also that the responsibility had fallen firmly on his own shoulders. With Dtui nursing a new baby, there were only Siri and Geung at the morgue with nothing to do. Siri put Geung in charge and told the administration clerk that if anyone called they should go to see Madame Daeng immediately.

  It was the lunchtime rush at the noodle shop. Daeng had a happy sweat on her brow. The small fan on the post beside her kitchen had its work cut out for it. Siri knew his wife could cook noodles in her sleep; so he stood at her shoulder while she worked and told her everything about his visit to the Census Department that morning. She nodded at the right times, asked for clarification once or twice, and, when he was finished, she reached into her handbag, which hung beneath the spirit table, and handed him all the money she had in there.

  “Drive carefully,” she said.

  Siri hurried upstairs to fill his day pack, and when he came back down she was there waiting for him with food for the trip. “Don’t forget your lungs don’t work so well,” she said.

  “I’m just going as a scout,” he told her. “As soon as Phosy gets there I’m through. But I want to be sure I haven’t condemned another girl to death by letting the strangler out of my sight.”

  “I know. I trust you.” She squeezed his hand and watched him drive away. Siri looked back and waved. It occurred to him that there was no longer a Siri and a Daeng. They’d become one.

  The reason the Intelligence unit had been empty that morning was that Sergeant Sihot had gone down to Champasak to make inquiries about the missing girl, and Phosy and his most senior investigator, Tham, were at the scene of a murder, an old murder.

  Once he was certain there had been more than one abduction, Phosy had dispatched the Lao equivalent of an APB. This involved sending wires to the larger cities and towns, then relying on the passing along of documents through police couriers to the more remote stations. It might be up to a month before he could be sure everyone had received a copy of the memo. That’s why he’d been surprised to receive the call at eight that morning.

  “I’d like to speak to Inspector Phosy,” the voice had said.

  “I’m Phosy.”

  “I got your note about the girls.”

  “And who are you?”

  “I’m Sergeant Oudi from the police box at Kilometer 38 on the Bolikham Road intersection. But I’m calling from the bank in Pakxan. The manager lets us use …”

  “I’m listening, Sergeant.”

  “All right. Well, they were fixing the bridge down at kilometer 10 last year, and one of the workers went to take a leak in the bushes, and he ran across these bones.”

  “Just bones?”

  “Yes, Comrade. And no particular order to them, all scattered around this tree. I went to take a look, just for curiosity’s sake. They could have been an animal for all I knew, but I found this long human hair. So I figured it was a dead woman, and the beasts had laid into her. Nothing to suggest there’d been foul play, and there hadn’t been any reports of missing persons. So I buried the remains just to keep her spirit happy, you know? And I wrote out the report and sent it in with the ledger. Didn’t hear anything more about it.”

  Phosy hadn’t been surprised there was no follow-up. They barely had enough staff to stack the ledgers, let alone read them.

  “All right,” he said. “So what makes you think this could be connected to our case?”

  “The ribbon, Inspector. There was pink ribbon around one of the bones.”

  While Sergeant Oudi and his colleague dug up the bones he’d so lovingly buried six months earlier, Phosy and Tham rummaged around the tree.

  “You’re sure this is the right place?” Phosy called to the local policeman.

  Oudi held his hand against the amulet at his neck for the tenth time. Spirits didn’t take too kindly to having their bones dug up.

  “Yes, Comrade,” he said. “All around there, they were.”

  “And apart from the hair and the ribbon, you didn’t find anything else out of the ordinary?”

  Phosy had withheld the most awful component of the murders from his memo. He believed it would be beneficial to have that one vital piece of evidence held in reserve in case they had a suspect.

  “I mean anything at all,” Phosy pushed
. “No matter how irrelevant you think it might be.”

  “Yes, Comrade. Oh, wait. There was something.”

  “Yes?”

  “A pestle.” Phosy’s heart clenched. “I found this pestle while I was gathering up the bones.”

  “And what did you do with it?”

  “It was a good one, Comrade. I took it home for my wife.”

  Police headquarters had found it in its heart to provide Phosy’s department with a jeep. It was a 1950 Willys, and Phosy liked the solid feel of it around him. It had a limited gasoline ration, so it spent much of its time sitting idle under the corrugated tin carport. But this trip to Pakxan had been so urgent the inspector hadn’t thought twice about filling the tank and putting two spare containers in the back. The cans stood either side of the remains of the poor woman now wrapped in a green groundsheet: the strangler’s fourth suspected victim. The pestle, removed amid a scene of consternation from the kitchen of the sergeant’s wife, was wrapped in the package along with the ribbon and hair. It was Phosy’s intention to take all of it directly to the morgue and go through it with Siri.

  Investigator Tham was driving. He was in his fifties, somewhat sedentary but a good soldier, more of a follower than a leader. Phosy took the opportunity to thumb through the notes he’d received from the ladies at the Lao Patriotic Women’s Association. He was looking for the anecdotal account of the wedding he’d heard about from Siri. He needed to confirm the location. If it was within driving distance from Pakxan he might be able to tie the two together.

  “Here,” he said.

  “What’s that, sir?” Tham looked to his right and saw his boss pawing through all the junk in the flapless glove compartment.

  “Any idea if there’s a map in h … ? Ah, yes.”

  “Want me to stop?”

  “No, keep going. I’ll manage.”

  Phosy unfolded the map and quickly homed in on the location where they’d just found the bones. He then traced his finger along the highway until he found the village he was looking for.

  “Damn! It all fits,” he said. Tham turned to him again and plummeted into a deep pothole. “Don’t feel obliged to look at me, Tham. You concentrate on the road and I’ll work the map.”

  “OK.”

  “The wedding was held at Paknyun. It’s forty kilometers from the intersection. Given the state of the road, he was probably able to drive there in a couple of hours. It’s just far enough away to be under the jurisdiction of another police force. So if the parents did make a complaint about a missing daughter, the news probably wouldn’t make it to our Sergeant Oudi. He’s very smart, our strangler. He’s got it all worked out. Tham, I want you to stop at the next village on the main road and wait for the bus going back out to Bolikham.”

  “That’ll take me away from Vientiane,” Tham said.

  “That’s right. Any problem with that?”

  “I promised my wife I’d pick up some big head catfish on the way home.”

  “Right. And I promised the parents of a beautiful girl in Ban Xon that I’d catch the maniac who killed their daughter. See any difference in priority there?”

  “Yes, sir. Sorry.”

  “You’ll stay on the bus till you get to Paknyun. I need all the information I can get from the people who attended the wedding. Don’t tell them we might have found the missing daughter. It’s possible we won’t be able to identify these bones. I don’t want to upset them unduly.”

  “But you think it’s her?”

  “Yes, Tham. I do.”

  When the police jeep pulled up outside Daeng’s noodle shop, it was already three p.m., and Madame Daeng was sitting outside on a rattan chair. She was dressed in her thick gabardine workers’ trousers, a loose-fitting blue shirt, and boots. Since her move to Vientiane she’d worn her hair short and wild. Now she’d greased it back, and at first glance Phosy thought she was a man. He jumped from the jeep and looked behind Daeng to see a closed until further notice sign on the shop shutter.

  “Madame Daeng, what’s so urgent?”

  “What on earth kept you, Phosy? I’ve been waiting for hours.” She threw a pack into the back of the jeep.

  “I just got back,” he said, eyeing the bag. “I dropped some bones off at the morgue. I didn’t get the message till I met the clerk.”

  “Are you alone?”

  “I dropped Tham off at a bus stop. Why?”

  “I think you’re going to need to pick up one or two officers on the way.”

  “On the way where?”

  “To the Thon River.” She walked past him and climbed up to the passenger seat.

  “What are you talking about? I’ve just driven all the way from Pakxan. What’s at the Thon River?”

  “Your murderer, Inspector. Siri left already. He has a three-hour start on us.”

  “What’s all this ‘us’? If you’re serious about the murderer being at Thon, I’m certainly not going to take an elderly lady with me. It would be more than my job’s worth.”

  “Well, Phosy, that would be a terrible shame, because then you wouldn’t get to hear about it. Dr. Siri will be massacred, the killer will claim his next victim, and you will have—dare I say it—egg on your face.”

  “Madame Daeng, listen! Withholding evidence is a serious offense. It’s not a game.”

  “I’m not withholding anything. I’m just planning to tell you on the journey.”

  Phosy slapped the fender of the jeep and hurt his hand.

  “You aren’t going to bully me into this. Besides, you can’t go to the Thon River. You don’t have a laissez-passer to leave Vientiane Prefecture.”

  “But you have one. Nobody’s going to notice a frail old lady. I’ll scrunch down on the floor under a blanket. They won’t search your vehicle. You’re a policeman. Now come on. It’s getting late.”

  “Madame Daeng, I …”

  “You’re wasting valuable time.”

  Phosy was still fuming as they neared the intersection at Sangkam. The road was in an awful state. Daeng sat beside him on the passenger seat and the two young officers he’d requisitioned from HQ sat in the back. She’d told him the entire story as Siri had told it to her, and he didn’t like it one tiny bit.

  “How could you let Siri go after him?” Phosy asked.

  Daeng laughed. “How could I stop him? You know Siri as well as I do. I could say, ‘Siri, please don’t go’ and he’d go anyway, and we’d both feel bad. Or I could give him my blessing and a bag of noodles for the journey, and only I’d feel bad.”

  “You’re each as ornery and obstinate as the other,” he yelled above the drone of the engine. “When you first suspected it might have something to do with the Census Department you should have contacted me straightaway. I’m sick of you two playing detective.”

  “You weren’t here. Your office was empty. Somebody had to play policeman.”

  “There were other officers around.”

  “Like them?” Daeng nodded to the rearview mirror. Phosy looked at the hairless faces of the two young men he’d snatched from headquarters. They were still twenty kilometers from their destination, and they already looked as if they might wet themselves with fear. “What would they have done?”

  “And what, tell me, is a seventy-three-year-old man going to do?”

  “You have a short memory, Phosy. Just how many of your cases have been solved by the doctor?”

  Phosy didn’t answer. He sulked all the way past the intersection. The window wipers smeared an omelete of insects across the thick glass. The jeep listed left and right as it negotiated the deep truck furrows. Eventually the policeman deigned to speak.

  “I think he’s got this one wrong,” he said.

  “Why so?”

  “The girl up in the north—the case I went up there to investigate—it happened way back in ’69. The Census Department was run by the old regime in those days. There’s nobody left from that era.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that too, Phosy. Siri
placed this man Buaphan’s accent as from the central region, and cultured. I can’t work out what someone like that is doing working for the Republic on an official project. The doctor suggested he might be from an influential family that had bought him a position. If that’s so, he might well have spent time up north with the Royalists during the war. He might have been an engineer or something. Plus she might have been his first victim. If he started his killing spree back then he wouldn’t have needed the Census Department job as a pretext to move around and attack these girls. There was chaos. He would have had ample opportunity. He liked it so much he got a job with the new regime so he could continue his hobby.”

  “You think somebody high profile would take such a gamble?”

  “Why not, Phosy? You’ve seen how arrogant he is. He believes he’s better than all of us. He’s planned it all so carefully. He can’t imagine anyone catching him. In his mind, he’s God.”

  Swimming Through Rocks

  Phan sat naked and cross-legged beneath the tree he’d selected on his previous visit. He welcomed the ravenous red ants and vampiric mosquitoes that chewed at his flesh. Eventually they too would learn he was invincible. By the light of the candles he looked through the documents one last time: the registration of marriage, the housing certificate, the laissez-passers, permission from the Social Relations office, bank statements, a police letter verifying that he was unmarried and not wanted for any crimes, birth certificate, Party membership record, and, just for icing on the cake, a full curriculum vitae.

  He lay back on the itchy grass and sighed. How wonderful it was to live in a state where the actual person was no longer important. Everything existed only on paper, including him. A man who merely walked the earth with nothing but breath and a strong beating heart was no longer a man in the Democratic Republic of Laos. God had been replaced by an earthbound bookkeeper.

  “I carry identification, therefore I am,” he said. And in this incarnation he was Phumphan Bourom of the Irrigation Department: a senior engineer with a degree from East Germany. He would overwhelm the village with his paperwork, let them mull over it, knowing there was no way for them to verify its authenticity before the wedding. It was all signed and stamped by respected cadres in the capital. The village heads would cosign the forms and give the go-ahead for a ceremony that had already been planned. It was inevitable because the responsibility had been removed from their shoulders. There was nothing a local administrator liked more than having someone else make decisions for him.