Colin Cotterill - The Coroner's lunch

“I’m leaving now.” He stood and handed the pencil back to Haeng. “Naturally, I won’t tell anyone we’ve had this little talk. Whether you discuss it is up to you. In the future, you’ll treat me with civility, and I shall offer you my experience and cooperation to help turn you, bit by bit, into the type of judge you should be.”

Haeng had stared into his powerful green eyes the whole time, hypnotized. Siri nodded, turned, walked to the door, and polished one sandal on the back of his trousers before leaving the eerily silent room.

“Well, I must say this is a lot more civilized than the bus.” Siri and Nguyen Hong sat in the back seat of the black limousine looking at the driver’s thick neck crammed into a tight Vietnamese military uniform. Nguyen Hong was wearing something that fit him better for the trip.

“The ambassador wouldn’t dream of letting me travel anywhere on public transport. He says there are bandits everywhere.”

“And he thinks we’d be safer in a big expensive car?”

“There is an escort.” They looked out through Siri’s window at the short but jolly armed escort on his post office motorcycle. A hunting rifle was slung over his shoulder. An ambush would wipe the lot of them out in seconds.

“I don’t think your ambassador gets out much.”

“Siri, I’ve been reading up on the resilience of the sphincter.” Siri chuckled.

“And they say the Vietnamese aren’t a cultured race.”

“You know we were wondering whether the bowels could have filled with reservoir water naturally over two weeks?” Both bodies had what they considered to be an abnormally large quantity of water in them. “Given the minimal fish and algae damage to the internal organs, the books say the muscle contraction would likely have made the bowels relatively watertight. There shouldn’t have been that much water inside.”

“Come on, Hong. Don’t we have enough mysteries already? Perhaps they were thirsty and drank a lot of lake water before they were killed.”

“None of that water had passed through the kidneys.”

“Then, what are you saying?”

“Have you ever been water-skiing, Siri?”

“Oh. All the time. I often hook up the line behind the yacht when I’m on a cruise.”

Nguyen Hong laughed. The driver looked at Siri in the rearview mirror and despised him for his wealth.

“Don’t tell me you have?”

“I had a privileged youth, before I saw the light.”

“Goodness. So, what’s it like?”

“Water-skiing? Invigorating.”

“And there’s a connection between that and the sphincters of Tran and Tran?”

“I’m not sure. There may be. You see, I wasn’t the world’s best water-skier. I spent more time falling down than skiing. And there’s no better way to give yourself an enema than to….”

“I get the point. So, do we assume the Trans were merrily water-skiing on Nam Ngum Reservoir?”

“Hardly. But if they’d been dragged behind a boat….”

“The effect would have been the same. Very clever. And that could have been part of the torture. God, I hope the torturers got something out of them. They certainly put a lot of effort into getting them to talk. You think they really had anything that important to say? You aren’t keeping anything from me, are you?”

“I’ve told you all I know. And I’m certain the driver knew nothing. All he could have disclosed was how many kilometers to the liter his jeep did.”

“Well, if I was the driver I would have told them that at the first sign of danger. Wouldn’t you, driver?” The driver ignored him and concentrated all his energy on rounding potholes and scattering pedestrians.

At the reservoir they met the Nam Ngum district chief, who introduced them to the two fishermen who’d found the Trans. The second of these two poor fellows had been sitting in his boat minding his own business, when a Tran came shooting up out of the water like a missile. The brown, misshapen face looked right at the fisherman before flopping back down. It almost gave him a heart attack.

When Siri told the district chief what he had in mind, he knew there wouldn’t be a long queue of volunteers. Even the best divers in the district would balk at going down in search of a three-week-old corpse. There was a healthy tradition of folklore and superstition around the lake villages, and the discovery of two bodies had shaken most folks up. But in a fishing community there’s always one old-timer who’ll do anything for a couple of kip. In this case it was Dun. Dun couldn’t even afford a boat. He usually just waded into the lake to his waist and cast his oft-repaired net into the water a few dozen times. He lived on the low-IQ sprats and water vermin that didn’t have the savvy to avoid him.

“Sure, I’ll do it…for five hundred kip. ”

Since the devaluation in June, the kip had settled at two hundred to the U.S. dollar. He was pushing his luck to ask for such a huge sum, but he fully expected the city fellows to bargain him down. They didn’t. They gave him half in advance. It was his lucky day.

The second fisherman took Dun out to where he’d been frightened by the sudden appearance of Tran, and Siri and Nguyen Hong stood on the shore with the chief. Dun put on the goggles Siri had brought from town and slid over the side of the boat still wearing his shirt. He wasn’t down for more than five seconds before he came up gasping for air. The chief explained it was a result of all the smoking he did. While Dun dove, and choked, dove and choked, Siri got the chief to fill in some of the details of the day they’d found the tattooed man.

“Exactly who was it that identified the marks as Vietnamese?”

“Oh, I was quite certain myself. But it was confirmed by this military chap. He said he’d been stationed over there in Vietnam, and he recognized the tattoos straight away.”

“Is he still around?”

“No. He wasn’t from here. He was just doing a survey.”

“On what?”

“Boat traffic back and forth to the rehabilitation islands, he said.”

They could see the two islands in the distance: Don Thao for the male villains and addicts, and Don Nang for the ladies. Siri dreaded to think what type of rehabilitation was going on there.

“Did you see his orders?”

“Goodness no, Doctor. People in uniforms don’t like to be bullied by laypeople, and he did have a big gun, so I didn’t ask.”

Out by the boat, old Mr. Dun was starting to look like a drowning victim himself. Nguyen Hong was concerned.

“Do you think we should call him back in? I don’t think he’s going to make it.” Siri nodded and they were just about to yell to the fisherman, when Dun stopped coming back up.

“Oh, shit.” They shielded their eyes from the glaring sun and scanned the water for any sign of Dun. The surface was smooth as glass and the man in the boat seemed unconcerned by what horror might have been going on below him.

Both doctors knew that in fresh water the diver had a little over four minutes. Nguyen Hong had been checking his watch. “Three. Why doesn’t the fisherman go down and help him?”

Siri asked the chief.

“He says he’s not a very good swimmer. No point in losing both of them.”

It was a little over the four-minute mark when Dun popped out of the water, his face smiling and purple. It was dramatic last-minute stuff, like Houdini. Dun held up his hand to wave and to show he was holding something. It seemed to be the end of a rope. When he yanked on it, first a foot, then a leg rose out of the water. Hok had been retrieved.

In order to get at the body before the air had a chance to speed up the decomposition, the two coroners set up a makeshift morgue in an empty concrete room behind the dam. The chief’s wife kept running in and out with tea.