Colin Cotterill - The Coroner's lunch

“It’s revenge, Dr. Siri. They were brainwashed, you see? The Americans convinced them that us communists would never do anything to help them if we came to power. They don’t realize that we’re all brothers. The Americans managed to make them believe that they aren’t Lao.”

“They’re not.”

“Not technically, Comrade. But they’re family. They may not have been born to Lao parents, but we all live together in the same homeland. A dog or a cat isn’t a human being, but think how many families treat their dogs like a member of the family. It’s the same thing.”

“H’mm. Good point. So you think the dog’s biting the hand that feeds it?”

“In a way, yes. Not the whole pack, Doctor. Just one or two rabid strays. But until we know what poison they’ve been using, we won’t be able to round them up. That’s why we need you.”

They pulled into a sprawling military complex with machinery and vehicles all over. To anyone foolish enough to believe the captain, this would have seemed a humanitarian effort to exceed even the most extravagant of the U.N.’s follies.

Under a makeshift palm-leaf shelter behind the empty command office, two large caskets lay side by side. Bare-chested soldiers carried them inside and placed them on trestle tables that wobbled under their weight. The men pried off the lids to reveal Kumsing’s predecessor and his companion. They were wrapped in natural tobacco leaves and garnished with herbs. This reduced the smell and kept the bodies in remarkably good condition. There was minimal insect damage.

The camp medic was a twenty-year-old, trained as a field nurse on dummy patients without blood. He and a middle-aged woman from the mess tent were assigned to help Siri with the autopsies. If he’d ever had doubts as to his good fortune at having Geung and Dtui at the morgue, the following six hours dispelled any of them. These two were worse than hopeless.

Even before the bone cutters had begun their cracking of the first rib cage, the boy was throwing up through the open window. He repeated this trick a dozen times during the day. The woman didn’t stop gabbing the whole time, asking silly questions, getting in Siri’s way to get a better look at the fellow’s insides. She had to get it all right to tell the girls back at the canteen. With those two, and the huge flying insects that buzzed in his face like little helicopters, the ordeal was a nightmare.

It wasn’t even a nightmare with a happy ending. He wanted very much to find clear signs of natural causes of death, but he couldn’t. Neither was there anything to suggest foul play in either man. The junior officer’s collision with the tree had made an awful mess of him. Some thirty-eight bones were broken and the skull was shattered. But it was all postmortem. He’d died some time before his jeep hit the tree.

Both men had been in prime physical condition, strong and healthy; but, for some reason, they’d simply stopped living. He couldn’t understand it, and he knew that wasn’t an answer Captain Kumsing would want to hear. The only other option was, indeed, that someone had used a toxin that left no obvious signs.

Siri put the men back together as best he could without assistance, and soldiers came to replace them in the caskets. It was usual, with deaths such as these, that didn’t result from natural causes, for the bodies to be buried as soon as possible without any ceremony at the graveside. They couldn’t be cremated, because the belief was that their souls weren’t yet ready to go to heaven.

Superstition, religion, and custom often overlapped in Laos, and even Siri, who had no spiritual beliefs, found nothing strange about such a practice. It was just the way it had always been. The bones would be left to commune with the earth until the family decided a fitting period had passed. Then the body, if the family could find it, would be dug up and cremated withfull ceremony.

Siri went to see Kumsing in the project office that he shared with five enlisted men. He was sitting at a far desk, the smallest desk in the office. Siri noticed how the thin man twitched as he worked and wondered whether the tic was a result of the stress he was under. He wore a white T-shirt as a disguise for his rank and had forbidden anyone to salute him. Siri decided that if the Hmong didn’t get him, he’d probably worry himself to death.

He took the captain outside and explained what he’d found and what he hadn’t. They walked together across the clearing. Even in Vientiane, Siri had never seen so much earth-moving equipment in one place.

“So, are you saying they died of natural causes?”

“No, I’m saying I found no evidence they died of unnatural causes. But neither did I find indications of natural death.”

“But the captain crashed into a damn tree. Don’t tell me that didn’t kill him.”

“He was dead before he hit it.”

“That’s not possible. The men said he was standing up with his foot on the accelerator, yelling his heart out. You must have got it wrong.”

“I’d feel a lot better if I did get it wrong. But there’s no doubt in my mind. The tree didn’t kill him, and a heart attack didn’t kill his mate. I couldn’t see any evidence they’d been poisoned by anything traditional. But I’ve heard of potions that can kill a man without leaving obvious signs. It would take a lifetime to test for all of them.”

This debriefing obviously wasn’t pleasing Kumsing, whose tic became more pronounced the more he heard. He thrashed the side of his fatigues with a sprig of young bamboo.

“Have you interviewed the locals?” Siri asked.

“The Hmong? They just deny everything. They aren’t likely to give up one of their own. They’re peculiar people, all that spirit-worship mumbo-jumbo. It wouldn’t surprise me if they have one of those witch doctors with his own factory turning out poisons and crazy drugs.”

“How far is it to the nearest village?”

“Four, five kilometers. Why?”

“I need to go and talk to them.”

“Oh. That won’t do you any good.”

“Captain, the only way we can isolate the drug, if there was a drug, would be to find out what varieties they use out there. Get samples and take them back to do tests in Vientiane. Until that happens, we won’t know the cause of death, and you can’t arrest anyone. Are you with me?”

“I suppose so.”

“Good. I’ll need a driver.”

“You want to go now?”

“No time like the present.”

“But it’ll be dark in a few hours.”

“Then it’s just as well that I’m not afraid of the dark, isn’t it?”

They were driving along an overgrown gully similar to the one by the airfield. Siri suspected these tracks couldn’t be seen from the air, and were probably set up by smugglers. The Ho Chi Minh Trail was just like this, a tunnel through jungle. It was no wonder the Americans had been unable to shut it down. The Hmong must have learned the trick from their enemy.

Captain Kumsing had opted not to come along on this journey. He’d sent Siri with a driver and a younger captain. The driver was the friendlier of the two.

Siri asked whether they’d be able to see the project site on the way.

“No, sir. It’s over that way about thirteen kilometers.”

“Really? Seems a bit odd you’d set up a crop substitution project so far from the villages you’re helping.”

The driver laughed. “Yes, sir. It does, doesn’t it?”

The captain glared at Siri, but it didn’t stop him smiling. In fact he kept smiling until a large black shape came hurtling at the windscreen with a thud. The shape flapped against the glass and flew up over the roof of the cab. Siri and the captain both shielded their eyes, but the driver seemed used to it.