Colin Cotterill - The Coroner's lunch

Siri dragged his chair over beside Phosy’s. His story had arrived at the Tuesday tests. He spoke in a whisper. “There wasn’t a shred of evidence in the brain that she’d been killed by parasites. Nothing. To go that suddenly, there should havebeen cysts.”

“Couldn’t the parasites have set up home somewhere else?”

“If they had, she would have been in agony for some time. The brain was the only location that might have caused her to switch off suddenly like that. So we did tests at the high school. We found a high concentration of cyanide in the stomach.”

“Cyanide?” They were both sobering up quite quickly.

“A lethal dose. I’d siphoned off some stomach fluid for the records but hadn’t kept any solids. The waste was all thrown out on Monday. By the time it became clear it could be useful, it had all been incinerated.

“My guess is that not all of the tablet had dissolved in her stomach. What hadn’t been absorbed into the blood before she died gave off fumes in the furnace. It isn’t airtight. The janitor who does the burning was off sick the next day. He showed distinct signs of cyanide poisoning. I found some dead roaches around the furnace and we tested them. They were positive.”

“Why do you assume the cyanide was in a tablet?” Phosy was leaning forward. He hadn’t touched his coffee. Siri told him about Mrs. Nitnoy’s hangover and the pills.

“I was hoping we’d be able to find traces of cyanide in the bottle but, actually, we struck oil.”

“Another pill?”

“There were three tablets left in the bottle. One of them was cyanide. It had been filed down to look exactly like the others. The other ladies at the Women’s Union had been very lucky.”

“So, someone put two cyanide tablets into a bottle of headache pills. They didn’t know when she’d take them, but I suppose that wasn’t important. Have you told Comrade Kham all this?”

“Ah, now, this is where things start to get complicated.” He told Phosy about the comrade’s visit to the morgue on Monday and the disappearance of the report. He didn’t mention that Mrs. Nitnoy had briefly come back to life.

The detective whistled long and low and drained his coffee cup. “This is a fine mess.”

“I was thinking of waiting to see whether my unfinished report turns up as the official statement.”

“Was it signed?”

“Not when it left me.”

“Good, yes. That would be very incriminating. I don’t think you should make this official until we know more about it. The Justice Department doesn’t have a great deal to do these days. Something like this would float up through the system in no time. What do you suppose your friend Haeng would do with it?”

“That’s just it: I don’t know how anyone would react. When we were in the north, justice sort of took care of itself. There was an honor system. But now that we’ve become civilized, a lot of people seem to be assuming roles left over from the old regime. I don’t know who to trust.”

After another coffee, the two men went downstairs. Saloop was on the night shift. It was eleven and he was wide awake. He bounded up to Siri’s leg and barked at it with his nose inches away from a potential kick in the jowls. He seemed unaware of the danger.

“What’s with the dog?”

“Doesn’t like me. Loves everyone else. Dogs have always had a problem with me. Never known one that didn’t act like this.”

“That’s odd.”

He looked up. The wooden shutter of the front bedroom window creaked shut. Siri followed his gaze.

“Night, Miss Vong.” She didn’t answer. He knew she’d want to get a look at whoever had been getting rowdy with Siri upstairs. If she had any romantic yearnings at all, she would be impressed by this good-looking policeman.

As he was getting on his old bike, and the dog-howl chorus struck up in the streets around them, Phosy leaned close to Siri’s ear. “Give me some time to think about this case before we do anything.”

“We?”

Both men smiled as Phosy kicked the motorcycle to life and sped off. Siri was left alone in the middle of the lane in a bank of smog, susceptible to dog attacks. Despite all the threats, he’d never been bitten by a dog, not once. Miss Vong’s shutter was slightly ajar again.

“Night, Miss Vong.”

“Go to bed, Dr. Siri.”

On Saturday, Siri was deservedly dull-headed. The chair squeaked when he leaned back from his thick forensic pathology text. He put his hand on his forehead and scoured the French department of his memory for a word. He knew it was in there. He’d put it in almost fifty years before and hadn’t had cause to remove it. But for the life of him he couldn’t find it.

Tearing in the main chest artery could be caused by high speed collision, or precipitation. What the hell was precipitation ?

The pages of his French dictionary had become welded together after a typhoon the previous year, and he hadn’t been able to get his hands on a new one.

“It’ll come,” he said. He leaned back as far as his chair would go, with his hands behind his head. “It’ll come.” He looked to the doorway and was startled to see a thin person in a much larger man’s uniform standing there. It was a uniform he knew very well, that of the ex-North, now entire, Vietnamese army. But he couldn’t recall seeing one so sparingly filled. It brought to Siri’s mind the monster body suits he’d seen in Japanese science fiction films. The man’s neck emerged from a collar that had space for three other necks. The rest of the uniform hung off him as if it were suspended from a hook. He spoke to Siri in Vietnamese.

“I’m looking for Dr. Siri Paiboun.”

Siri’s Vietnamese was heavily accented but otherwise fluent. He’d spent fifteen years in the north of that country, training at first to be a revolutionary. But finally, when they realized his limitations as a guerrilla, they had him working in field hospitals with the Viet Cong.

“You’ve found me.”

The man smiled with relief and walked uncomfortably over to the desk. He blushed and shook Siri’s hand. “I have to apologize for the….” He looked down at his own chest.

“The uniform? Did you lose a bet?”

The Vietnamese laughed. “No. It was the only one they had available at the embassy.”

“So why wear it?”

“I was brought in as a military adviser. The ambassador’s afraid that if I walked around in civilian clothes I could, technically, be shot as a spy.” Siri laughed. The story was even funnier than the uniform. “I’m Doctor Nguyen Hong.”

“Then drape yourself over that chair and tell me what I can do for you.”

Nguyen Hong smiled and sat opposite Siri. “I believe you had an alleged drowning victim in here this week.”

“Ahh. The twin. You’re a forensic scientist.”

“Just an old coroner, actually.”

In the doorway he hadn’t looked so old, but close up Siri could see the hair was a little too black, and the teeth were a little too large for the mouth. He was probably the same age as Siri, but with some renovations.

“What can I do for you?”

“I was hoping I’d be able to take a look at your victim. I suppose there’s an official way of asking, but I prefer the ‘front up and try’ method.”

“Me too.”

“Good. There is every reason to believe your chap’s Vietnamese as well. But without the tattoos we had no right to claim him. I don’t suppose you’d know what a fuss this is all causing back in Hanoi.”

“What kind of a fuss?”

“The story’s going around that you’ve kidnapped and tortured our citizens. They’re eager to find out how official it was.”

“Why would anyone assume it was official? It could have been a drug deal or-”