“What ongoing case?” I said. “You have a dead body, two eyewitnesses, and a suspect with a self-inflicted amputation. You even have the murder weapon peppered with fingerprints. And I’d be surprised if you didn’t find e-mails on her computer linking her to a missing doctor and a huge disgraceful advertising campaign launched by the true villains in this drama, the Medley Corporation. But one nutty case at a time, right?”
I wouldn’t have been surprised about what they’d find on Dr. June’s computer because in the car over, I’d arranged for Sissi to copy a legible version of all her encrypted messages into her inbox. And I was being particularly disrespectful to a senior policeman because cheating death allows one a certain level of cockiness. But I was also wondering why the major was being so unenthusiastic about this self-solving case. It would certainly look good in the press.
“This is a police investigation,” he said. “Not a newspaper exposé. Details of the case will be released by my department as they unfold, after a thorough check of the facts. Any public disclosure of events by a material witness will be considered interference, and you would be subject to arrest. Do I make myself clear?”
“Perfectly,” I said. “And how is the progress going on the new police gymnasium?”
“What on earth has that to do with anything?”
“Well … Major, when I was doing research on the Medley Corporation’s involvement in rural communities, I found the list of projects they’re involved in. And what should I discover halfway down the list but the Lang Suan police gymnasium, proudly sponsored by Medichoc, Your Family’s Favorite Nibble. I could sing you the jingle as well, but I’m tone deaf.”
“Jimm.”
I’d forgotten Arny was sitting beside me. That happened often. I could tell he was feeling uncomfortable. He often encouraged me to temper my assaults on public officials. But this was important. I ignored him. The major blushed slightly and laughed unconvincingly.
“Are you suggesting,” he said, “that a major murder investigation might be influenced by a relationship with a sponsor?”
“Yes. This is Thailand.”
“You are Thai, aren’t you?”
“Absolutely. So I have a natural right to insult my country. And you know it’s true. Did Dr. June have a hand in getting you the deal?”
He smiled at his wall calendar.
“She did, didn’t she?” I smiled. “Well, I think that’s called a conflict of interest, damning enough to bring in the big boys from Bangkok, don’t you?”
“We’re perfectly capable of impartially conducting our own investigation.”
“I’m sure you’re right. Just as I’m perfectly capable of writing this up in a way that doesn’t negatively influence your case. I could even make it a heroic police operation in the sticks rather than, say, a mania triggered by pressure from a demonic multinational organization.”
“Are you blackmailing me?”
“A bit.”
Arny slumped back in his chair. It had been an exhausting night, and I wasn’t helping him to relax at all. The major stared into my bloodshot eyes.
“You don’t want to make an enemy of me, Jimm Juree,” he said.
“Not at all,” I agreed. “As my readers will learn when I describe the case, you are a conscientious, hard-working ally. A good friend. The country will love you. Never underestimate the power of the press.”
It was a bold speech from an unemployed journalist who made a living correcting bad English. The sign on his wall said, in Thai, THE ROYAL THAI POLICE ARE ALWAYS UPRIGHT AND HONEST. The English translation would have it that THE THAILAND POLICEMAN ALWAYS ERECT AND STRAIGHTFORWARD.
He stood, glared at me once more, and said, “You can write your damned story.”
And without another word, he left the room, trailed by his six silent aides. I had indeed made an enemy, and I knew I would come to regret it.
* * *
Lieutenant Chompu, Captain Kow, and Grandad Jah were sitting in the public waiting area when Arny and I emerged. A red beach umbrella flew past the entrance and momentarily distracted me. The police station car park was a pond in which Chompu’s SUV floated like a shiny black lotus. There was a lot of touching and feeling with everyone except Grandad. I ignored their questions about me and trauma and whether I’d be all right.
“Is Mair okay?” I asked.
“High and dry,” said Captain Kow. “Her and the dogs. The local headman came by earlier and evacuated everyone. There’s probably nothing to worry about, but the surf’s high and these storm surges are unpredictable.”
“They’re reporting five-meter waves off Chumphon estuary,” said Grandad. “They’re billeting everyone in schools till it’s all over. Everyone but your foolish mother, that is.”
“Why except her?” I asked.
“She refused to leave without the dogs and the cows,” said Chompu. “And the schools aren’t accepting any livestock.”
“So, where is she?”
“She’s in the hut in my palm garden,” said Kow. “It’s on high ground. Bit cramped, but as long as she leaves the cows outside…”
“I can’t even guarantee she’ll do that.” I smiled. “Thanks, Kow.”
“You’re welcome … my daughter.”
“You poor darling,” said Chompu. “You’ve had such an awful night. I heard all about it from the desk sergeant. And I’m afraid I should accept some of the blame for what happened over there at the hospital.”
“Why on earth should you do that?” I asked.
“Dr. Niramon was one of the people I phoned when we were trying to get through to you. She lives in a dormitory behind the hospital. She promised to go over to see if Dr. June had any idea where you were. She had a spare key to the operating room. She must have walked in on…”
Chompu shed a tear. He was fragile and I knew the thought that he’d caused someone’s death would linger for a long time. I put my arm around him and rested my cheek on his shoulder until his sobs subsided. I looked at my father and grandfather, who were both averting their eyes. I’d rather been hoping to see my Englishman waiting there, but it occurred to me he didn’t know anything about the night’s events. He probably felt he’d been stood up. I’d tried to call him from the police truck, but the signal said he wasn’t connected.
“I don’t suppose any of you have seen Conrad tonight?” I asked.
“Oh … we’ve seen him,” said Grandad.
“Pretty much all of him,” Chompu said with a sigh, pleased to be given more pleasant thoughts.
The three men giggled like schoolgirls.
“What?” said I.
“There’s a story you need to hear,” said Grandad.
“I’ll tell her,” said Chompu.
“What? What is it?” I asked.
“Your boyfriend’s a sleaze bucket,” said Grandad.
“That’s exactly why I should tell this story,” said Chompu.
“Filth,” said Grandad.
“If somebody doesn’t tell me soon, there’s a perfectly good axe in the evidence room just back there,” I said. “I swear…”
“All right, here it is…” began Chompu, and he told me the whole story, from the surveillance, to the naked dinner, to the Agatha Christie gathering in the living room. It sounded like a fun evening, and believe me I wish I could have been there to enjoy it. But nothing they told me made me think any less of my dashing writer. Not, that is, until they got to the part about the maid. They’d asked her why she felt she had to warn me on that first day at his house.
“At first, she wouldn’t say,” said Chompu. “She said she was just making a friendly suggestion from one woman to another. Then I reminded her she didn’t have a work permit and that I was a policeman. Thence honesty set in.”
“A scumbag,” said Grandad.
“Your writer seems to be doing the rounds,” said Chompu.
“Of what?” I asked.
“Of the local gals.”
“Oh.”
“He’s bedded every remotely attractive woman in the district and not a few plain ugly ones,” said Grandad. “Wouldn’t be at all surprised if that’s why his wife left him. No-good lump of—”
“The staff are apparently given a lot of nights off,” said Chompu. “But there are … how can I put it? Remains. Sometimes in the form of prophylactics…”
“Eeuw.”
“… or certain … equipment. As you’ve been there, I’m sure I don’t have to go into any detail. But often, actual young ladies come down for breakfast in various states. A recognized a lot of them as local girls. She’d tried to warn them, but they rarely listened.”
Guilty. And as if it had always been there, waiting for recognition, the nickname Gogo passed into my mind. The Thai pronunciation for Cocoa. Or Co … Co. Eighty-six kilos would be overweight for a Thai, but perfectly normal for a tall Westerner. For a tall Westerner like Conrad Coralbank. It wasn’t a coincidence that my horny writer and our local nurse had disappeared during the same twenty-four-hour period. Da was another one of his local conquests. A friendly smile cuts through a lot of language barriers. And I bet he charmed them all the same way he’d won me. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he had a list somewhere with ticks beside the names.
But what the heck? I used him, didn’t I? And just where did unfaithful men fit in a cosmic chart that included things like almost being chopped up with an axe? What did I care? In a way I felt pleased for all the women he’d bedded politely and respectfully—whom he’d gone out of his way to satisfy so they’d go to the pyre knowing, however briefly, what romance felt like. Goodness knows men in this country didn’t bother with any of that unnecessary nonsense. Oh, he was a bastard to all of us, no denying that. But in my case he’d exceeded my expectations and stuck around long enough to give me hope. Hope is a dangerous thing. But still I couldn’t hate him. He’d made me dinner, damn it. Tonight would probably have been the most romantic night of my life. Instead, I’d had the most frightening. Such is fate.
“So why did she pretend that her brother was her husband?” I asked.
“The only way A could keep his hands off her was by pretending she and Jo were married,” said Chompu. “Even then it wasn’t as if he stopped trying. I suppose some heterosexual men can’t keep it locked away.”
18.
Where the Soft Sand Caresses the Horizon
(beach resort ad)
Just like romance, intrigue and Dr. June, who succumbed to her injuries during the night, the storms of Christmas Eve had passed away when the sun came up on Christmas Day.
The conditions had been so awful the night before that when we left the police station, we barely made it to the Hibiscus Motel. There, we’d taken the last two rooms. Arny, Chompu, and I stayed in one room, me in the middle to spare my brother the accidental creeping hands of our randy policeman. Grandad Jah reluctantly shared the other with Captain Kow. Naturally, none of us got a wink of sleep. When we drove out the next morning, Lang Suan looked as if a hurricane had plowed through it. Santa had delivered debris. Vendors were mopping water from their shops. Palm fronds were wrapped around road signs far from any coconut trees. The council garbage bins had been thrown through windows and onto roofs.
The bridge over the Ga River had been washed away, so we had to turn around and take a route via Bangladesh to get home. We were in a comparatively jolly mood considering, but all we really needed was a good day’s sleep. Or two. In my case, they could wake me up at New Year. On the way we slalomed around roof tiles and tree branches. Lost dogs in collars sat beside the road looking for their owners. Bamboo sheds lay flat, and signposts were bent over like old ladies. Ignoring all this, the sky was a magnificent crimson, not unlike the floor of the operating theater the night before.
We drove through six centimeters of mud as we forged up to Kow’s palm plantation, although plantation was far too grand a word for the small patch of land he’d carved out of the jungle on the side of a hill. Mair and the dogs came running to greet us with their tongues out. The cows ignored us. My mother had been cut off from the outside world when the nearest cell-phone tower slid down the side of the mountain with several hundred rubber trees. So she hadn’t slept either. Arny and Grandad traveled in Kow’s motorcycle sidecar combo, while Chompu and I in the SUV updated Mair on all the fascinating news. The dogs sat on the backseat and, to Chompu’s dismay, all threw up within the space of ten minutes. Knowing Chom, I expected him to buy a new car rather than disinfect this one.
We headed to the coast. We crossed the little bridge that forded the stream that had always meandered gently behind the Lovely Resort. But, oddly, like an incomplete memory, the stream, not gentle at all now, meandered at speed directly into the sea. To the west, the house of our neighbor, Guy, usually hidden behind a bank of thick bushes, now had an unrestricted sea view. To the east, a still-snarling surf threw itself onto a ribbon of beach strewn with bamboo and garbage. We all instinctively looked behind us to see whether we’d taken a wrong turn. Had we been so befuddled with fatigue that we might have come to entirely the wrong beach? But there was the end of the bay with its distinctive rock formation. And there was the quaint bridge we’d planned to turn into a tourist attraction for Japanese honeymooners. And there, tossing around on the waves some fifty meters out, was Grandad Jah’s coffin.
We were in the right place. Everything else was where it should have been. But the Gulf Bay Lovely Resort and Restaurant was gone.
Also by Colin Cotterill
The Jimm Jurree Series
Killed at the Whim of a Hat
Grandad, There’s a Head on the Beach
The Dr. Siri Series
The Coroner’s Lunch
Thirty-Three Teeth
Disco for the Departed
Anarchy and Old Dogs
Curse of the Pogo Stick
The Merry Misogynist
Love Songs from a Shallow Grave
Slash and Burn
The Woman Who Wouldn’t Die
About the Author
Born in London, COLIN COTTERILL has worked as a teacher in Israel, Australia, the United States, and Japan before he started training teachers in Thailand. Cotterill now lives in a small fishing village on the Gulf of Siam in Southern Thailand. He’s won the Dilys and a CWA Dagger, and has been a finalist for several other awards.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE AXE FACTOR. Copyright © 2013 by Colin Cotterill. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.minotaurbooks.com
Cover design by David Baldeosingh Rotstein
Cover photo-illustration by Hugh Syme:
photograph of woman with axe © Rob Wood-Wood Ronsaville Harlin, Inc.; border © Tratong/Shutterstock.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Cotterill, Colin.
The axe factor: a Jimm Juree Mystery / Colin Cotterill.—First U.S. Edition.
pages cm.
ISBN 978-1-250-04336-8 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4668-4169-7 (e-book)
1. Women journalists—Thailand—Fiction. 2. Missing persons—Thailand—Maprao—Fiction. 3. Serial murderers—Thailand—Maprao—Fiction. 4. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
PR6053.O778A97 2014
823'.914—dc23
2014003807
eISBN 9781466841697
First published in 2013 in the United Kingdom by Quercus UK
First U.S. Edition: April 2014
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The Axe Factor: A Jimm Juree Mystery (Jimm Juree Mysteries) Page 22