Colin Cotterill - The Merry Misogynist

"But before that they all drove?"

"That's right."

"When did that system change?"

"A little over a year ago."

"Did anyone drive to Attapeu before that?"

"Yes, Buaphan's team, in fact. They were away for a couple of months."

"That's it! Kummai, I have to go." Siri gave the director's hand a quick shake. "Good to see you again."

He turned on his heel and was out of the door and across the yard in seconds. Kummai watched him climb onto his bike, kick it into life, and fly out through the open gates.

"At his age, unbelievable," said the director, scratching at his appendix scar.

Central Police Headquarters wasn't a very imposing or secure compound of buildings. There was a fence with no gate and a dirt quadrangle. The main building was a horseshoe with all its doors opening onto the yard. If a visitor didn't bother to stop at the police box in front or go to the little reception desk tucked up on the veranda, nobody would call him back. They'd assume he knew what he was doing. They hoped that with all the uniforms around, nobody would be foolish enough to try anything silly.

Siri drove into the yard like a bull from hell, scattering young officers out of his way, and skidded to a stop directly in front of Phosy's office. The sign over the door read POLICE INTELLIGENCE. All the jokes had already been used up over that one. He ran up the three steps and in through the open doorway. The five desks were of different shapes and sizes. The only thing they had in common was that they were all deserted.

"Shit!" he said aloud. He asked around outside and in the surrounding offices, but all he learned was that two of the staff of Intelligence were at a seminar in the north and the others hadn't left messages to say where they were off to. All anyone knew for sure was that their jeep wasn't parked in the police lot.

Siri found one pen on Phosy's desk that hadn't been dried up by the March heat and wrote, "Urgent! Call Siri!!!!"

He taped the note to the typewriter and left.

By midday, Phosy still hadn't been in touch, and a cauldron of fears and apprehensions was bubbling inside Siri. He'd just allowed a maniac to head off into the countryside. He should have stopped him. How? Not important. The fact remained that he should have found a way. Twice he'd hurried to the clerical office to phone police headquarters. The receptionist had told him to stop phoning. They had the message and they'd get Phosy to call as soon as he came back. The police telephonist had even gone to the trouble to tell him they weren't stupid. Siri knew when to hold his tongue. He knew also that the responsibility had fallen firmly on his own shoulders. With Dtui nursing a new baby, there were only Siri and Geung at the morgue with nothing to do. Siri put Geung in charge and told the administration clerk that if anyone called they should go to see Madame Daeng immediately.

It was the lunchtime rush at the noodle shop. Daeng had a happy sweat on her brow. The small fan on the post beside her kitchen had its work cut out for it. Siri knew his wife could cook noodles in her sleep; so he stood at her shoulder while she worked and told her everything about his visit to the Census Department that morning. She nodded at the right times, asked for clarification once or twice, and, when he was finished, she reached into her handbag, which hung beneath the spirit table, and handed him all the money she had in there.

"Drive carefully," she said.

Siri hurried upstairs to fill his day pack, and when he came back down she was there waiting for him with food for the trip. "Don't forget your lungs don't work so well," she said.

"I'm just going as a scout," he told her. "As soon as Phosy gets there I'm through. But I want to be sure I haven't condemned another girl to death by letting the strangler out of my sight."

"I know. I trust you." She squeezed his hand and watched him drive away. Siri looked back and waved. It occurred to him that there was no longer a Siri and a Daeng. They'd become one.

The reason the Intelligence unit had been empty that morning was that Sergeant Sihot had gone down to Champasak to make inquiries about the missing girl, and Phosy and his most senior investigator, Tham, were at the scene of a murder, an old murder.

Once he was certain there had been more than one abduction, Phosy had dispatched the Lao equivalent of an APB. This involved sending wires to the larger cities and towns, then relying on the passing along of documents through police couriers to the more remote stations. It might be up to a month before he could-be sure everyone had received a copy of the memo. That's why he'd been surprised to receive the call at eight that morning.

"I'd like to speak to Inspector Phosy," the voice had said.

"I'm Phosy."

"I got your note about the girls."

"And who are you?"

"I'm Sergeant Oudi from the police box at Kilometre 38 on the Bolikham Road intersection. But I'm calling from the bank in Pakxan. The manager lets us use — "

"I'm listening, Sergeant."

"All right. Well, they were fixing the bridge down at kilometre 10 last year, and one of the workers went to take a leak in the bushes, and he ran across these bones."

"Just bones?"

"Yes, Comrade. And no particular order to them, all scattered around this tree. I went to take a look, just for curiosity's sake. They could have been an animal for all I knew, but I found this long human hair. So I figured it was a dead woman, and the beasts had laid into her. Nothing to suggest there'd been foul play, and there hadn't been any reports of missing persons. So I buried the remains just to keep her spirit happy, you know? And I wrote out the report and sent it in with the ledger. Didn't hear anything more about it."

Phosy hadn't been surprised there was no follow-up. They barely had enough staff to stack the ledgers, let alone read them.

"All right," he said. "So what makes you think this could be connected to our case?"

"The ribbon, Inspector. There was pink ribbon around one of the bones."

While Sergeant Oudi and his colleague dug up the bones he'd so lovingly buried six months earlier, Phosy and Tham rummaged around the tree.

"You're sure this is the right place?" Phosy called to the local policeman.

Oudi held his hand against the amulet at his neck for the tenth time. Spirits didn't take too kindly to having their bones dug up.

"Yes, Comrade," he said. "All around there, they were."

"And apart from the hair and the ribbon, you didn't find anything else out of the ordinary?"

Phosy had withheld the most awful component of the murders from his memo. He believed it would be beneficial to have that one vital piece of evidence held in reserve in case they had a suspect.

"I mean anything at all," Phosy pushed. "No matter how irrelevant you think it might be."

"Yes, Comrade. Oh, wait. There was something."

"Yes?"

"A pestle." Phosy's heart clenched. "I found this pestle while I was gathering up the bones."

"And what did you do with it?"

"It was a good one, Comrade. I took it home for my wife."

Police headquarters had found it in its heart to provide Phosy's department with a jeep. It was a 1950 Willys, and Phosy liked the solid feel of it around him. It had a limited petrol ration, so it spent much of its time sitting idle under the corrugated tin carport. But this trip to Pakxan had been so urgent the inspector hadn't thought twice about filling the tank and putting two spare containers in the back. The cans stood either side of the remains of the poor woman now wrapped in a green groundsheet: the strangler's fourth suspected victim. The pestle, removed amid a scene of consternation from the kitchen of the sergeant's wife, was wrapped in the package along with the ribbon and hair. It was Phosy's intention to take all of it directly to the morgue and go through it with Siri.