Colin Cotterill - The Merry Misogynist

"Did he say which one?"

"Which one what?"

"Which finger was hanging off?"

"I don't think so. Why?"

"Ngam, our girl from Vang Vieng, had a broken finger."

"You think it might be significant?"

"Just a thought I've been playing with. If it was the ring finger it could mean he was desperate to retrieve the ring. If the fingers had swollen he'd have to break the joint to get it off. It could be an issue he has about marriage."

"Dr Siri, this lunatic could be killing women all over the country and we'd be none the wiser."

"Could you contact all the police stations and get them to check their files?"

"I wish it were that easy, Doctor. Most of the files from the old regime were destroyed before they left. It's taken us this long just to get our own filing system in order. And for the first eighteen months it was a lot like the Royalists in Luang Nam Tha: foot soldiers substituting as policemen. Not all of them could read or write. And even if we did have a system, the thing that scares me is this: in both of these cases the bodies were found quite by chance before they were completely consumed by the forest. If there were other murders we might never learn of them."

Siri dropped onto all four legs of his chair and pulled out a sheet of blank paper and a pencil from his desk drawer. He made a rough sketch on it. Phosy leaned over the desk to take a look.

"A panda?" he guessed.

"It's supposed to be Laos, inspector. And look! Here is Ban Xon, where Ngam met Phan. Here is Vang Vieng, where her body was found. They're forty kilometres apart. Let's assume that he woos and weds them in place A then removes them to place B, just far enough away so that nobody will recognize the body, and nobody will come forward there to report a missing relative. If we apply the same distance rule to your soldier's corpse in Luang Nam Tha, we should assume she was from Muang Sing or perhaps Na Mo. You're quite right, we may never find other corpses. So what we should be looking for isn't bodies, but reports of country girls who were swept off their feet by smooth city boys and never seen again."

"Siri, you aren't paying attention. I've just explained that we don't even have a murder data bank. How do you suppose we can get information about missing daughters?"

"By using a network that cares about such things — a network far more efficient than the police force."

"Oh really? And what would that be exactly?"

Dr Siri arrived at the humble tree-bordered office of the Lao Patriotic Women's Association a little after ten. The group had been established in 1955 to mobilize the untapped resource known as women for the Lao People's Revolutionary Party. Lao women were accorded the right to vote three years later in the first coalition elections. Socialism had re-evaluated the status of females and encouraged them to take an active role in the creation of the new socialist state. That encouragement obviously had its limits, as by 1978 there were still no women on the politburo or holding power in the Central Committee. But the network was vast and the benefits to females at both ends of the economic scale were impressive.

The ladies in their spotless white blouses and carefully folded phasins were filing out of a meeting room with their neatly penned notes and their empty teacups. They looked content, every one of them. Perhaps, Siri thought, it was because they didn't have to work with men. But even when they saw the small smiling doctor standing in the entrance hall they nodded and said, 'Good health' as if his presence hadn't spoiled their day at all. The lady he'd come to meet was one of the last to emerge from the room. She carried a bulky slide projector piled high with study materials.

"Dr Pornsawan?"

"Dr Siri. Well, my word. What a sight for sore eyes."

Despite the danger of being seen to be a chauvinist, he relieved the doctor of most of her papers and left her with the projector. He walked at her side. She was a tidy, compact woman with no bodily excesses, no unnecessary height, and no eyebrows.

"Still no facial hair, I see." Siri laughed.

"It seems so silly to draw them on, don't you think? Once the damned things refused to grow back after the nunnery I decided to let them have it their way. Men find it attractive, I'm told."

"And I'm one of them."

"You're so sweet. Are you here to see me?"

"If you have a few minutes."

"Your projects are always worth finding a few minutes for, Comrade. Come up to my office."

The telling of the whole tale took twenty minutes and Dr Pornsawan's tears flowed for nineteen of them.

"I swear," she said when he was done, "in all my years of tending to women in the most wretched conditions, I have never heard of such a filthy aberration. What has happened to our society that such horror could occur, Siri? Something in me prays that this isn't just the beginning of the release of the demons. The wars inured us to atrocities, and the demons grew inside. Are they just now showing themselves?"

"I really don't want to believe so, Comrade. This is one renegade devil."

"And we have to stop him, by God we have to." She slapped her desk and all her pencils changed position.

"That's why I'm here."

"How can we help?"

Siri described the type of man they were looking for. He wanted to hear of families whose daughters had been whisked away and vanished without a trace. He wanted to hear gossip of smooth suitors, of truck owners, of seducers of entire villages. He wanted anecdotes, rumours, and hearsay. He wanted women in the markets to include it in their morning news reports and army wives to make mention of it during village workshops. Missing daughters had to be significant news in the women's networks.

"How soon can you start?" Siri asked.

"Yesterday!"

"That should do it."

When Comrade Civilai arrived at the morgue that lunchtime he was surprised to find everyone busy in the cutting room. It was Saturday — a half day. They should have all been on their way home. But he didn't want to disturb them. As a new retiree he found himself bothering a lot of people. He'd pop by his old office to say hello, and they'd be glad to see him, but busy. He'd offer his advice here and there — his seventy-three years of experience — surely somebody would want some of that? But all he seemed to do was get in the way. So he baked.

He sat at Siri's desk with a dozen lemon meringue tarts on a tin tray. He felt a little foolish. He'd imagined walking into the morgue, everybody free, jumping for joy at the sight of his lemon meringues, Dtui running off to fetch coffee from the canteen. Then sitting around the office cracking egg jokes and eating tarts.

But they were busy.

He decided to give them five — no, ten — minutes, then leave. He'd attach a note to the tarts and go. Or he'd take them with him somewhere else. Somewhere he'd be appreciated. There was no shortage of people in need of lemon meringue. He stretched out his long legs and one foot kicked a large cardboard box on the floor.?

Siri removed his rubber gloves and went to the sink to wash his hands.

"Right," he said. "If that wasn't the silliest task we've performed here I'd say it ranks in the top three."

"Come on, Doc," Dtui said. "It was a public service."

"It was a private service, and I feel like an accessory."

The deputy minister of sport had arrived at the morgue before midday with his mother on a stretcher. The old lady had just passed away, but on her deathbed she'd asked to see the family diamonds for the last time. Reluctantly, the deputy had brought her the seven tiny cut stones that would pass down to him and his wife once his mother was gone.

"Let me touch them," the old lady had said.