The Merry Misogynist dsp-6

by Colin Cotterill

  He was still laughing when he reached the bottom of the stairs. In one of the main rooms, two men sat at one desk poring over a large map draped over the desktop like an oversized tablecloth. One of the men was tall and slim with eyes dark and deep enough to dip a fountain pen into. The other was stocky with a broken nose and a scar on his cheek. He could have been nothing other than a boxer.

  "Comrades," said Kummai. The two men looked up. "This is Siri, my old doctor from the war. I still have his handiwork on my gut."

  Siri and the men shook hands and wished each other good health. Both men had impressive grips.

  "These brave men are leaving for the wilds of the Thon River."

  "To interview?" Siri asked.

  "To collect the data," said the boxer. "We gather a team of locals and train them. They go off into the remote areas with our forms and fill them out. Two weeks later we collect the paperwork and pay off the workers."

  Siri noticed that the slim man was staring at him. It was a look of distrust. A fear of strangers perhaps? Siri felt a tingle the length of his spine.

  "Two weeks exactly?" he asked.

  "That's how long it usually takes," said the deep-eyed man.

  "And it's just the two of you?"

  "These two plus the head of the unit, Comrade Buaphan," said Kummai. The tingle became a shudder.

  Deep Eyes seemed to notice the doctor's change of mood. He raised his brow. "Are you all right, Doctor?" he asked.

  "Of course he's all right," Kummai cut in. "In fact he's remarkable for a man his age. I doubt I'll be able to stand up when I'm ninety."

  "Well," said Siri, "I've seen everyone else on the project. I suppose I should meet Comrade Buaphan too."

  "Quite right," said the director. "I want all my boys and girls to meet the great Dr Siri." The two men returned Siri's nod and he followed Kummai out of the room. There was a closed door on the far side of the entrance hall and Kummai entered without knocking. Sitting on an armchair reading a Thai magazine was a tall, elegant man with high cheekbones and thick ebony hair that curled at his collar. He was at the opposite end of the best-dressed spectrum from Kummai: light brown stay-press slacks, white shirt buttoned to the collar, and, despite the heat, navy blue socks. This was exactly the identikit picture of the strangler that Siri had drawn in his mind's eye. The man looked up slowly from his article.

  "Ah, Buaphan, nothing to do?" asked the director with uncomfortable levity.

  "No," the man replied. His voice was deep and authoritative.

  "I thought you might be in a last-minute panic."

  "I'm not."

  Kummai laughed as if it were a joke.

  "Right, then," he said. "This is Dr Siri, our old bush surgeon."

  Buaphan didn't let go of his magazine or proffer his large hand. He gave a slight nod. "Doctor."

  "Comrade Buaphan," said Siri, returning the nod. "I hear you're taking your team to the Thon River district today."

  "That's right."

  "I didn't see a truck in the yard."

  "Probably because it's not there," Buaphan said drily then returned to his story. Siri and Kummai looked at one another.

  "It's off getting all its bits checked," said the director. "And oil and water and all that. Make it fit for the road, you know?"

  "Do you drive, Comrade?" Siri asked the top of the tall man's head.

  "Yes," he replied. "If I had my way."

  "Comrade Buaphan has a problem with our drivers," the director told Siri.

  Buaphan slapped his magazine shut.

  "Actually, Doctor, I don't have a problem with the drivers," he said. "I have a problem with inefficiency and waste. The three of us on the team are perfectly capable of driving the truck. Hiring a halfwit to take the wheel seems to me a perfect example of the departure from thrift that our Central Committee is so adamantly against."

  "Comrade Buaphan is a little upset that the ministry insists there be a designated driver on the mission." Kummai smiled at Siri. The doctor was starting to wonder which of these two was the director of the Census Department and how they'd ever be able to communicate without someone else in the room. The section chief showed a remarkable lack of respect for Kummai, and the old soldier seemed to be in awe of his subordinate.

  "I wouldn't mind so much if he could drive," Buaphan mumbled to himself.

  "Comrade Buaphan is a jack-of-all-trades, Doctor," said the director. "He wants to drive and coordinate the project at the same — "

  Kummai was interrupted by a crunch of gears outside the window. All three men looked out as a large green truck lurched into the yard and screeched to a halt. The driver was bald as a bubble and hunched over the wheel, almost clutching it to his chest. He took his foot off the clutch before taking it out of gear and the vehicle hopped half a metre forward and stalled.

  "See what I mean, Doctor?" said Buaphan. "He always does that. He thinks it's how you're supposed to stop a truck. He has no respect for his engine."

  "Dr Siri," said Kummai, "I'm sure you understand you can't just throw somebody out of a job. The driver's a political appointee just as I am. You could no sooner get rid of him than you could me."

  Siri saw Buaphan look away with a 'would that I could' expression. He wondered what kind of appointee the bad-mannered section head might have been. He had the type of arrogance that the doctor had seen before in the children of influential men. Perhaps he was the relative of one of the rich business families bankrolling underground military projects. He certainly had breeding, albeit with an absence of manners. Was he one of the advantaged who could buy his way into a position of authority? And if so, why this job? What was there about regular trips into the countryside to appeal to a man like Buaphan?

  "Have you been involved in this project long, Comrade Buaphan?" he asked.

  "If I didn't know better, Doctor, I'd say you'd left medicine and gone to work for the secret police," answered the man. He stood and tossed his magazine onto the chair.

  "Buaphan has been with the project since the beginning," said Kummai.

  The section head took a pile of documents and his briefcase from the desk and walked past the two men without saying another word. His footsteps creaked on the parquet floorboards.

  "Friendly chap," Siri said.

  "He's a bit brusque but he's very good at his job," said Kummai.

  "And you've worked with him for over a year?"

  "Almost two."

  "I would have thumped him long ago."

  Kummai's laugh was genuine but his eyes seemed to agree. They watched through the open window as Buaphan climbed into the passenger seat beside the smiling driver. Deep Eyes and Broken Nose made themselves comfortable among the bags on the flatbed. They put on large straw hats and rolled down their sleeves. It would be a long journey for them.

  "Nice truck," said Siri.

  "It's sturdy enough," Kummai told him. "It belonged to the Chinese military. We converted it."

  The driver started her up and crunched the gears before finding first. They saw Buaphan raise his eyes to the heavens and yell at the poor man behind the wheel, probably not for the first or last time. Siri stared at the section head. He was an objectionable man, but was he capable of murder? Was he a sadist? As the truck pulled out of the yard, the two men on the back gazed at Siri and exchanged a word or two.

  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 kilometres."

  "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.

  15

  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 Kilometre 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 kilometre 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 petrol 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. T
he 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 kilometres 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?"