The Amok Runners

by Colin Cotterill

  I was astounded. She’d rather lost a dimension in my mind’s eye. But that made my next job even more difficult. I’d been charged with breaking the news to this gorgeous woman that Arny wouldn’t go out with her. It was a delicate situation but I could only charge into it like a bull.

  ‘Bunny, I’m sorry, but …’

  Her cell phone rang.

  As she fished it from her bag she said, ‘Even the name’s kind of quirky. What woman would imagine a lover with the name of Sissy?’

  ‘I …?’

  ‘Excuse me.’

  She pressed receive and fell into a loud phone shout with someone almost out of cellular range. I knew my mouth was still open because a fly flew into it and I swallowed it.

  Chapter 16

  “Don't you find it a little bit (of a) coincidence that the body fell perfectly within the chalk outline on the floor?”

  The Pink Panther (2006)

  The matt-black Lexus dropped us off at the gate to the ski chalet house. The drive back had been uneventful. We’d picked up Sissy in front of the university and headed out to the mountains. Bunny sat in front with Gus. We fooled around in the back seat. Neither I nor Sissy had been free to tell our news. We’d said goodbye to Bunny who waved at us through the closed window. Arny mouthed, ‘I’m sorry,’ as they drove away and she looked blank. We’d tried to say goodbye to Gus who leaned forward to hide his left hand from his passenger and proffered us a middle finger. It probably annoyed him more that we found the gesture hilarious. So what if he did earn forty times more than we did? He was a man slave – no dignity in that.

  ‘I got stuff to tell you,’ Sissy said.

  ‘Me too,’ I replied.

  We fumbled to unlock the front door, forgot where the light switches were and stumbled into the living room. I found one dimmer on the post in front of me and all the lights came on at once. There was a body on the Persian carpet. Arny screamed.

  ‘That wasn’t there when we left, was it?’ Sissy asked.

  ‘Oh, shit,’ I said. ‘This is very bad.’

  We walked to the body. We weren’t coroners but dead was dead. The man was middle-aged, Asian, well dressed, had a pained look on his face, dark skinned but drained. There was a bloodstain on the carpet that formed the shape of a lotus leaf around his head.

  ‘Boys!’ I said.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I think this is the perfect time to make this somebody else’s problem.’

  ‘I agree,’ said Sissy.

  ‘Arny, lock the front door.’

  He didn’t respond. He wasn’t one for dead bodies.

  ‘Arny,’ I tried again. ‘The door.’

  That got him moving. We rolled our visitor in the carpet and tied it with curtain cords. We carried the package out to the deck, leaned it onto the balcony while we caught our breaths then toppled it over. There was one loud bang at the front door before the whole thing left its hinges and thumped to the floor. A dozen police officers – one with a video camera – charged into the house. They had their guns drawn. They hurried through the living room and surrounded us on the balcony. We were leaning nonchalantly against the rail. The cameraman rushed toward us and drowned us in a white light as the camera rolled. I raised two fingers behind Arny’s head.

  I recognized the Fang desk sergeant amongst the invaders. He stepped forward, confused, glanced over the rail into the dark water, looked at the three smiling inhabitants, and obviously didn’t know what to say.

  ‘Sergeant,’ I said, ‘is there some problem?’

  ‘I … er … we heard there was some disturbance here,’ he said. ‘The neighbours alerted us.’

  ‘They must have good hearing,’ I said. ‘There’s nobody for half a mile.’

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Well, they were passing and heard something. We were concerned for your safety given the events of last Monday.’

  ‘Well, that’s very nice of you,’ said Sissy. ‘I’ll sleep so much better in my bed tonight in the knowledge that you’re out there watching over us.’

  There were policemen running in and out of rooms like the Keystone Cops. Chat looked over the balcony again. ‘Perhaps we should just take a look around to be sure there are no intruders.’

  ‘No,’ said Arny.

  We were no less surprised than the policeman by our little brother’s interruption.

  ‘What?’ said Chat.

  ‘I said, no!’ replied Arny. ‘Unless you have a warrant, of course. You don’t, do you?’

  ‘Not … no.’

  ‘Right then. You know the way out.’

  We looked at our little brother with admiration. Cops came from the upper floors shaking their heads.

  ‘Well, in that case … sorry to have disturbed you,’ said the policeman. He even saluted before turning back into the living room.

  ‘Oh, sergeant,’ Sissy called. Chat looked back over his shoulder. ‘If you’d be kind enough to replace the front door before you go we’d sleep even more soundly.’

  It took the police twenty minutes with improvised tools to re-hang the door. We sat on the recliners with our feet up and our backs to the action. When the last officer left and slammed the door behind him we did a quick reconnoitre of the house to be sure there weren’t any left-over police hiding in the closets or under the bed. When we were certain we were alone we hurried to the balcony and leaned over. The river below was in shadow as the deck blocked off the lights from the house. I threw the switch to turn on the floodlights opposite. The warm green glow reached across the river and outlined the Persian carpet wedged on the rocks below us. In March the river ran low. The only spot one could really launch a body with any conviction was four or five meters in.

  We scrambled down the bank.

  ‘Just as well, I guess,’ Sissy said. ‘The carpet would have given us away eventually.’

  ‘Huh, you think the local police could match a carpet to a house?’ I said. ‘They can hardly fill out a parking ticket.’

  We unrolled our victim, pulled him out to the middle of the river, and sent him off downstream. He floated nicely. The hole in his head obviously hadn’t let any of the air out of him. The current ran slowly but it had power. It carried off our unwelcome visitor, steered him around the bend and out of sight. We re-rolled the carpet around three large rocks and dragged it to the deepest point of the river. It sank as one would expect a four-thousand buck Persian wool carpet to sink. Even if some ranking police officer with an inkling were to return to the scene all he’d find would be a newly washed carpet and no body.

  We waded back to the bank and sat breathing heavily as much from relief as from effort.

  ‘There’s a bright side to this,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, good,’ said Arny.

  ‘It tells us they don’t think they can kill us anymore,’ I said. ‘If they did they’d just shoot us and throw us over the balcony. They wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble to set us up. I think we’re physically safe for the time being.’

  ‘I don’t feel particularly safe,’ said Sissi.

  ‘You did great, Arny,’ I said. Sissy mussed his hair.

  ‘You think maybe it’s time for us to go home yet?’ he asked.

  ‘No, but I tell you what we need to do,’ I said.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Take in tenants. The better-known the better. We don’t want the gendarmes trying this one on us again.’

  We climbed up to the balcony and sat on the recliners waiting for the shakes to go away. We were quiet for a while. Night creatures screeched and groaned and gurgled all around us. The river bubbled against the rocks. A truck with a faulty camshaft thumped over the distant bridge.

  ‘Doesn’t it get to you two?’ Arny asked.

  ‘What?’ we asked.

  ‘What we just did.’

  ‘Throwing a dead body off the balcony?’ said Sissy.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘It’s starting to,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve got a s
erious wobble in my belly,’ I told them. ‘I need a shit and a shower, urgently.’

  We all felt better after a soak and a glass of neat scotch. It wasn’t a trauma that could be puffed away on a joint. “Scotch made a man of you, even if you started off as a woman.” That was one of our granddad’s favourite sayings. If you got the right whisky, a little matter of manhandling a corpse into a river could be seen as just a couple o’ boys letting off steam. And we had the right whisky. The Swiss accountant was a good example of not being able to take it with you. He’d left a cabinet of expensive liquor. All the bottles had been opened but the contents barely touched, so he must have had a vision of his wife trying to sell them back to the liquor store. The cabinet had been securely fastened but my days on the crime desk had somehow turned me into a pretty good picklock. Arny threw back two wine coolers in record time. He wasn’t the hard alcohol type. After a few sips of 18-year-old Talisker, Sissy and I were clear-headed enough to remember the two important matters of the day.

  ‘What about Nit?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah, right,’ said Sissy. ‘Forgot about Nit. He said hello and told me to remind you he’s paying for a public interest assignment and not a murder enquiry. He tells me that over the past twenty-four hours the Chiang Mai cops haven’t put out any new statements about Boon’s killing. But he says there’s a lot of pressure from Bangkok to find who offed him. The way they say it happened was like this: Boon was supposed to meet someone at Doi Chang coffee shop. The waitress girls said he was sitting there for a half hour looking at his watch and staring out the window. They recognized him from TV. Then he gets a call on his cell, pays and runs off out.’

  ‘It was too public,’ I said.

  ‘Right. The investigators guess the killers called him back to the parking lot and terminated him there.’

  ‘That doesn’t make sense,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to make an appointment with a guy to shoot him. Boon didn’t have any security – no bodyguards. They could have killed him any time. I bet you something was supposed to be handed over there; papers, money or something, and it didn’t happen.’

  ‘Or it happened and they didn’t need him anymore,’ said Arny already slurring.

  ‘Right,’ I agreed. ‘And it’s all got to be connected with him staying in Fang after Siam wraps up. You know? I think we need to get a few more details about who he was dealing with up here. What kind of contract he had. I think we need to talk to his company again.’

  ‘I’ll call,’ said Sissy.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t get the feeling his secretary would tell us anything over the telephone. I need to go to Bangkok and talk to her personally – use my charm.’

  ‘You haven’t got charm, sister,’ said Sissy. ‘This is a job for Casanova here. I’ll go. You hold the fort here.’

  With Arny there on the balcony with us I couldn’t tell Sissy about our weird afternoon. Or perhaps I just didn’t think it was that urgent. But I wondered how innocent my gender bender brother had been in the whole affair. If I didn’t know better I’d say he’d been flirting.

  ‘Have you noticed how heavily you’ve been leaning on your alter ego of late?’ I asked.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Just that I’m wondering whether that chest tape might have made you forget you have breasts.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I’ll go as a woman. I’m even more charming as a girl.’

  ‘If you’re sure.’

  ‘Next break in filming,’ he said.

  ‘That could be two weeks off,’ said Arny.

  ‘Did you see the stupa on top of Tha Ton hill when we drove in?’ I asked.

  ‘Can’t say I noticed,’ said Sissy.

  ‘You wouldn’t have seen it,’ I said. ‘The mountain’s just a blur and if it doesn’t rain overnight I’ve got a feeling tomorrow’s going to be another rest day. No-one’s in a rush to put the fires out.’

  ‘Okay. Then tomorrow it is. I’ll take the Suzuki.’

  ‘Did you get a chance to talk to Nit about the CCTV idea?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Sissy. ‘He was into it. His neighbor’s wife’s a cleaner at the Dhara Dhevi. She knows the security guy. They’ve only got two cameras: one in reception and one in the parking lot. They keep the tapes for a month so he should have the two guys that walked through reception that night, then one more when they get in their car. The News has agreed to pay for copying the film. They’ll make stills of the two guys and run them in the paper for as long as they can till the cops come and shut ‘em down. They hope they’ll get an ID before then. He’ll send us copies when he gets ...’

  There came an almighty crash from the front of the house. Fearing the worst, we all leapt from our recliners and looked nonchalant. But even in a state of panic none of us spilled our eighteen-year-old scotch. We strolled back into the house and found the front door lying on the ground, and a lanky confused Burmese in a brand new pink skirt. Khin stood in the empty door frame with one fist in front of her.

  ‘Khin, you mountain woman,’ said Sissy. ‘Don’t you know your own strength?’

  ‘I merely knocked,’ Khin replied. ‘Even where I come from these things have hinges.’ She walked on top of the door and between us. ‘I can’t tell you how problematic it’s been finding you. I don’t suppose you have a kitchenette here? I could eat a horse – a large one.’

  What the larder lacked in horses it made up for in instant noodles. Khin had two bowls steaming in front of her. We three sat on the far side of the chic Fleig table waiting for the next utterly predictable instalment of her story. We’d heard so many chapters it was starting to sound like one of the fifties radio dramas that spun out their far-fetched yarns for a decade before fizzling out with the sponsorship fees. The Burmese spoke between slurps.

  ‘Yes,’ she began. ‘I have in fact spent the previous two nights working by candlelight in the musty underground manuscript room at Suan Dork Temple. I have befriended no end of entomological specimens. But deep in the shelves I found two manuscripts that were devoted to the biography of your beloved monarch, Mangrai.’

  ‘Go grandpa,’ said Sissy.

  ‘They were dated 1629 but they would naturally have been rewritten from earlier versions. They were resplendent with details of the despot’s jolly adventures around the region. Were you aware, for example, that he acquired some three-hundred concubines in his travels?’

  ‘Wow,’ said Sissy. ‘The guy must have died before he hit thirty.’

  ‘In actual fact, (Khin avoided humour whenever possible), he lived to the ripe old age of seventy-nine. He passed away on a shopping expedition at Chiang Mai’s central market in 1317.’

  Sissy laughed.

  ‘Can’t you just see him, Jimm? Wandering through the market with his three hundred wives? Honey, get me a dress. Honey, look at those shoes. Aren’t they just me?’

  A slightly pickled Arny joined in.

  ‘Can you believe that?’ he said. ‘He survives endless battles against the Mongols and dies shopping. There’s a message there for us single guys.’

  Khin used this frivolous hiatus to slurp up several forkfuls of slithery noodles and wash them down with whisky.

  ‘I found a great deal of fascinating data,’ she continued, a worm of pasta dangling from the corner of her mouth. ‘But there were only two mentions of the Sikanchai dagger. Don’t forget, the dagger is the key. Find the dagger and we have the treasure.’

  I yawned behind my hand.

  ‘One entry referred to its use at the coronation during the establishment of Chiang Mai. Of this we have already learned, except that there was a direct reference to all the coronation regalia being protected by the men of the Royal Plaza. These were the ceremonial guards, the Thai equivalent of England’s Beefeaters, and they were certain to have been based in the ancient city whilst King Mangrai was active there.’

  She scooped up more noodles, let them settle in her big mouth then reached for her Abibas day pack on the
floor at her feet. She pulled out a Hello Kitty lined notebook and flipped through the pages.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘So we come to the second mention. You have to remember that the texts were written in ancient Shan.’

  ‘Which you happened to have picked up on the flight from Yangon,’ Sissy threw in.

  ‘It’s quite a straight-forward language. Grammatically logical but rather flowery. It’s similar to Thai in many ways. It’s very much open to interpretation but it seems to say something like this: “In the regent’s declining years,” Khin read, “he spent more time in the water city, and there it was he put the kin of the dagger to rest”. That’s my starting off point.’

  ‘So it didn’t exactly say “the Sikanchai dagger” then?’ I pointed out.

  ‘It is implied.’

  ‘Khin,’ I said, ‘don’t you think you’re trying just a little too hard to make the facts fit the dreams?’

  ‘I assure you this is the dagger we’re seeking.’

  I looked her in the eye. ‘Sister, you’re a researcher. You have to see what’s actually there in front of you, not what you hope’s there.’

  ‘It is there, Jimm.’

  ‘Okay, so it’s there,’ Arny was impatient. ‘Where’s the water city?’

  ‘Ah, good question,’ she said. ‘There is no other mention of the water city in any of the other texts, but here’s my calculated guess. Before founding Chiang Mai, King Mangrai built a walled city to its south at a bend in the Ping river. He lived there on and off, even after the establishment of Chiang Mai as the capital of his kingdom. If the location had been less problematic it would have been the capital of Lanna and not Chiang Mai.’

  ‘Wiang Kum Kam,’ I said.

  Arny raised his eyebrows. ‘How’d you know that?’

  ‘I’ve been there,’ I said, ‘on a story. It’s a dozen piles of bricks off the road to Lamphun. I’d been expecting Angkor Wat but all I got was a building site.’