Colin Cotterill - Love Songs from a Shallow Grave

"It must have been a sight to see. I wish I'd been here." Siri shook his head in amazement as he looked around. It was true, the red book covers were inside the display cabinet like gallery exhibits. "Tell me, Comrade, do you have many returnees from the eastern bloc coming to use your service?"

"Returnees are our burgeoning target market, Comrade. As the number of returnees swells, I imagine in ten years we'll have to move to larger premises."

"But, right now?"

"You have to understand," said the clerk, pointing a spindly ginseng finger at the doctor. "Not many of our brothers and sisters have returned to Laos this soon."

"I do understand that. I'm just interested. How many returnees do you have subscribing to say…Russian journals?"

The clerk reached below the counter for a ledger thick as a door step. He opened the cover and flipped two or three pages. He laboured over the list for longer than necessary.

"Four," he said.

"Hmm. Then I imagine the odds of two customers actually bumping into each other are quite remote."

"Unless they're in the reading room at the same time."

"You have a reading room?"

"A small one. But I encourage customers to use it when they're here. I have tea in there. On occasions the odd sesame biscuit."

"Could I see it?"

"Certainly."

The clerk walked around the counter on his long uncoordinated legs. Siri's chin came to his solar plexus. He led the doctor to a door at the rear of the store and opened it to reveal a small windowless room which could have been the parlour of an elderly royalist. Two comfortable sofas scattered liberally with unmatching cushions bordered a large teak coffee table with a cotton doily at its centre. Resting upon that was a basket of colourful but unconvincing plastic flowers. Around the walls were large tourist posters of Moscow, Berlin, Belgrade and Prague, a handwritten sign saying 'WELCOME TO OUR READING ROOM' in eight languages, and butterflies, a lot of three-dimensional butterflies cut out of coloured paper. To one side a taller table held a tin tray with upturned cups, a sugar dish in a moat of water to discourage ants, and a large pink flowery thermos.

Ignoring the absence of natural light and the leaning towards kitsch it was a pleasant room. Some love had gone into it, some appreciation that customers might lack a convivial place to read in their crowded dormitories. And if two customers should be here at the same time with common experiences from Europe, otherwise incompatible people might become friends. And what better place for a killer to stalk his victims?

"Comrade," Siri turned to the clerk who was standing uncomfortably close, "do the names Hatavan Rattanasamay, Khantaly Sisamouth, or Sunisa Simmarit mean anything to you?"

Siri bunched his fists in hope as the man considered his question.

"Yes," said the clerk.

"Which one?"

"All of them."?

Madame Daeng's noodle shop was fast becoming the surrogate after-hours police briefing room. While he waited for the actual police officers to arrive, Civilai stood beneath the altar Daeng had lovingly built and decorated. It was a two-storey affair attached to the main pillar of the building. It was traditional to have a spirit house outside as a boarding inn for the displaced spirits of the land, but the authorities were being finicky about residents displaying their animism blatantly in public. So Daeng had flown in the face of tradition and brought them inside. She had even dared to house them under the same roof as the ancestral shrine.

The ancestors lived upstairs in a thirty-centimetre-square box behind a barricade of Buddhas, incense sticks, wooden elephants, Chinese and Indian deities, a half bottle of red Fanta, and Sainte-Barbe, the patron saint of firemen whom Daeng had rescued from the bin of one of the French oppressors back in the fifties. Downstairs lived the rehoused phaphoom. These spirits of the earth were unashamed capitalists. Like the poor Lao who lusted after the consumer items they heard about on Thai radio, the phaphoom were far more cooperative when bribed. A free lodging wasn't always enough. Madame Daeng's spirit house was straight from the high society catalogues. Inside was all the doll's furniture she could cram into the space; a refrigerator, TV, bathtub, wardrobe, and shoe rack. Parked on a ledge in front were a toy school bus and a Mercedes Benz with diplomatic plates just in case they felt like an excursion.

Civilai chuckled to himself. Daeng was married to a man who lived amongst spirits. Surely, with such personal contact, she could dispense with all this mumbo jumbo. Why would a woman so worldly, so astute, put so much effort into superstition? He was reaching for the patron saint of French firemen when Madame Daeng came down the stairs.

"Don't you dare," she called.

"I was just — "

"Then don't. A woman's spirit house is her soul. Leave it alone."

"You're an enigma, Madame Daeng."

"And plan to stay that way."

A lilac Vespa stopped directly beneath the shop awning and a rain-sodden Phosy climbed from its seat.

"Will it ever stop raining?" he asked nobody in particular He kicked off his sandals and shook himself like a dog before entering. He carried a wad of papers wrapped in several plastic bags. They were obviously more important than himself in shorts and a T-shirt. At the sound of the bike, Siri had shelved his book and come downstairs.

"No Sihot?" he asked.

"Family crisis," Phosy told him. "Seems the more relatives you have to live with the more crises you have to endure."

"And where's Dtui?" Daeng asked.

Phosy hesitated.

"She's not here? I came straight from the ministry," he said. "Haven't had a chance to go home."

"You were at the ministry dressed like that?" she asked.

"Er, no. I have…I have spare clothes at the office."

On their way to the meeting table, Siri and Daeng exchanged one of their now customary glances. Once they were seated, Civilai, oblivious to any domestic drama, opened the proceedings. Siri noticed that his friend was wearing the same clothes he'd worn the last time they'd seen him.

"As instructed," Civilai began, "I performed my underhand duties at K6. Being a resident there and having no known police background, I was able to do my spying with relative ease. As you know, in my dotage I have become something of an Adonis in the kitchen. So, on Thursday I took a tray of sweet, freshly baked macaroons to the old stable building which the Vietnamese use as their centre of operations. As I am a frail and harmless pensioner, but fluent in Vietnamese, the guards quickly opened up to me and started to share secrets. My macaroons have that effect on people. The soldiers made no secret of the fact that they dislike their commander, Major Dung. They don't like his womanising ways or his personality, but they all agreed he is a man with many skills. Most pertinent of these is that the major is an expert in amongst other things, a Vietnamese martial art called quoc ngu. It is, basically, the use of a double-edged sword. And he brought at least one with him."

"I knew it," Siri said.

"One of the men had seen him practising with-it in the clearing behind the stables," Civilai added.

"What about fencing swords?" Phosy asked.

"Nobody I spoke to there knew what fencing was so I can't answer that. The macaroons ran out before I could get any more information about Dung. But, as an aside, I enquired about the project being undertaken by Electricite du Lao. It appears that both the auditorium and the houses around the garden sauna are included in the rewiring schedule. Your Comrade Chanti would surely have been at both locations, at least during the planning stage."

"Sihot went to talk to him today," Phosy told them. "We'll see what he had to say for himself tomorrow."