Colin Cotterill - The Coroner's lunch

“And why not?”

“I’d never be able to forgive myself if you…well, you know.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Look, doctor. You aren’t a young man.”

“Are you suggesting I’m too old to ride a bicycle?”

“No.”

“Then what are you saying?”

“That over the age of seventy, the odds of having a heart attack rise forty percent every year.”

“God, so I’m already at 120 percent. They aren’t good odds.”

“Okay. Maybe I got the figures wrong. But I don’t want my bicycle to be the cause of your death.”

“Dtui. Don’t be ridiculous. I swear I won’t have a heart attack. Just lend me the bike.”

“No.”

“Please.” His green eyes became moist. That always melted her.

“All right. But on two conditions.”

“I’m sure I’ll regret this, but what are they?”

“One, that you ride slowly and stop if you feel tired.”

“Certainly.”

“And two, that you train me to be the new coroner.”

“What?”

“Doctor Siri. There you are begging the Health Department to send someone to train in Eastern Europe and not getting anywhere.”

“No.”

“Whereas here you have a young intelligent nurse, absorbent as blotting paper, enthusiastic as a puppy, resilient as a…a…brick, already in place, eager to be your apprentice.”

“No.”

“And then you could say you have this bright girl who already trained as a coroner and she’s ready to go to further her education in Bulgaria or some such place.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“You aren’t the type.”

“Because I’m a girl?”

“Because you read comics and fan magazines.”

“I need stimulation.”

“I can’t believe you’re even asking. You’re a bubblehead. When did you suddenly develop an interest in pathology?”

“I’ve always been interested. But you don’t give me a chance to do interesting things. You treat me like a secretary.”

Geung walked in on them with a bucket in one hand and a mop in the other.

“Are you h…having a fight?” He smiled.

Siri grabbed the bike key from Dtui’s desk. “No. We aren’t having a fight. Nurse Dtui is just trying to extort three years of free education and a tour of Europe out of me in return for twenty minutes on her bicycle. That’s fair, don’t you think?”

Dtui stormed out the door. “Take the damn bike.”

Considerably more than twenty minutes later, Siri found himself in front of a small house overlooking the grand yellow stupa. He hadn’t ridden a bicycle for thirty years. He should have got off and rested half way up Route That Luang when the air went out of him and his legs began to wobble. But he wanted to show Dtui just how resilient the over seventies could be.

“Hello, Uncle.” Teacher Oum stood by the open door and looked at the wheezing old doctor, wondering why he wasn’t speaking. She didn’t really know what to do to help him get his breath, so she did nothing. She was a scientist, not a nurse.

Oum was a prettily oval teacher at Lycee Vientiane. She was particularly attractive to a man like Siri, who found her worth almost killing himself for, for two reasons. First, she was the last surviving teacher of practical chemistry in the country. Siri was desperate for chemicals, and she had them. If you have the key, the color resulting from the mix of body fluids and chemicals can answer a lot of questions.

Oum had recently returned from Australia, where she’d obtained a degree in chemical engineering and lived with a sexually active Sydney boy named Gary. This left her with a knowledge of chemical compounds unequaled in Laos, a fluent grasp of the English language, and a one-year-old son with red hair.

English was Siri’s second attraction to her. He had a handbook from Chiang Mai University that unlocked many of the color-test mysteries. If it had been in Thai or French or even Vietnamese, it would have been invaluable to him in his work. But it was, sadly, in English. The poor doctor could boast a vocabulary of some eleven words in the English language, and those he pronounced so horribly nobody knew what he was saying.

So Siri needed Teacher Oum not only for her chemicals, but also to decipher the text that showed how to use them.

“What’s in the bag?”

Siri still had hold of a small plastic bag fastened at the top with rubber bands. His breath and his voice were returning.

“Stomach contents.”

“Mmm. Nice. Other people bring soy milk or ice coffee.”

“Sorry.”

“You had breakfast yet?”

“No.”

An hour later, they were at the school. On Tuesdays she didn’t teach till ten. By holding on to his arm while he sat on his bike, she’d been able to drag him alongside her motorcycle. He was a little stressed from trying to keep his wheels from crashing into her, or diving into a pothole.

The science lab was poorly equipped. Oum’s office was a walk-in cupboard with shelves reaching to the ceiling, a tiny workbench, and two stools. The shelves were stacked with hundreds of neat bottles with handwritten labels that boasted they contained all kinds of sulphates and nitrates. Unfortunately, most of the boasts were as empty as the bottles. Generous American donations had long since dried up and the room contained mostly what was available locally. That wasn’t much. Oum had tried to keep a little of everything for old times’ sake, but Siri’s visits had seriously depleted her stocks.

Together, they’d submitted proposals through the Foreign Aid Department, but they knew they were low on the list. There were shortages of everything. So one Sunday they’d sat down and painstakingly copied letters in Russian and German, which they sent off directly to schools and universities in the Soviet bloc. They’d had no response thus far.

Siri produced the dog-eared Chemical Toxicology lab manual from his cloth shoulder bag. It was a stapled brown roneo copy he’d brought back from Chiang Mai. It was only printed on one side, and his detailed notes from Teacher Oum’s translations filled the blank backs.

“What are we looking for today, uncle?”

“Let’s start with cyanide.”

“Ooh. Poison.” She turned to the cyanide page and looked down the various tests. “We haven’t done poison before. You don’t sound like you’re sure.”

“You know me, Oum. I’ve never been that sure of anything. This is another guess. But there are a couple of clues.”

“Tell me.” She was pulling down jars from the shelves and checking to see how much she had left of the various chemicals she needed.

“Well, first of all, she, the victim, died suddenly without displaying any outward signs of distress. Secondly, her insides were particularly bright red. What are you sniffing that for? They don’t spoil, do they?”

“No, I get a little buzz. Want some?”

“No, thanks. Thirdly, my Mr. Geung noticed something strange while we were cutting. He said he smelled nuts.”

“Nuts?”

“He couldn’t really identify what type of nuts, but my guess is almonds. There aren’t that many nuts with distinctive smells.”

“Well, surely you and the nurse would have smelled it.”

“Not necessarily. A lot of people aren’t able to distinguish that particular smell. Some of Mr. Geung’s senses are quite well developed. I’m wondering if someone slipped her a pill somehow. The most common one available is cyanide. If I still had the body, there are other signs I could be looking for.”

“You lost the body?”

“It was reclaimed by the family.”

Oum looked up at him. “That’s a coincidence.”

“What is?”

“I hear Comrade Kham’s wife passed away suddenly yesterday and he went by the morgue and kidnapped the body.”