Colin Cotterill - Love Songs from a Shallow Grave

"What would you do in my situation?" he asked.

Dtui burst in through the door and threw her bag on the floor.

"If I have to go to one more Nurses for a Better Future meeting I'll scream," she said. "I hope you two aren't talking about me."

Phosy looked up at her with the hopeless expression of a pig on its way to the slaughter.

"He didn't do it," he said.

"Who didn't do what?"

"Neung. He wasn't the one."

"Malee told you that?"

She squeezed her husband's shoulder as she walked to the kitchen corner of the room.

"In a way, yes. Neung's wife was away on the weekend of the murders. He was looking after their son. He's six. Now, whoever killed those three women had gone to a lot of trouble, put a lot of planning into it. But there he was babysitting all weekend."

"So?"

"So why didn't he get his mother-in-law or a neighbour to look after the boy? He could have pretended to be working over the weekend. Why risk your son waking up in the middle of the night and not finding his dad there? Crying the damned house down? And how would he do it? Put the boy to bed, run off to K6 in the early morning, have a romp in a sauna with his boss's wife, stick a sword in her, drive home and kiss his son good morning?"

"He might have sent the boy off to a minder somewhere," Dtui suggested, pouring hot water on her instant noodles.

"That's what I assumed at first. But the neighbours remember hearing the boy at various times over the weekend. Someone else recalls seeing them at the market on Saturday. His wife said he'd come by the school to pick up their son on Friday. That wouldn't work out. To kill the first victim he would have had to be inside K6 at night. They wouldn't have let him in if he'd turned up late. What kind of electrician works at midnight? He had to have been there inside the compound, hidden away somewhere after his regular day of work."

"The wife might have been lying."

"I thought wives didn't lie."

"Good ones don't."

"Well, his wife's been camped outside the jail day and night, since Neung was arrested. She refuses to leave. She knows he was having a relationship with one of the victims but she's still there supporting him. I'd say that makes her a good wife, wouldn't you?"

"Dr Siri's got to you, hasn't he?"

"There are just too many 'Why would he?' questions. Why would he murder the women in places that could all be traced back to him? After all the planning, why would he not cover his tracks? And then there's motive. What reason did he have to kill them? I didn't find any conflict. He doesn't strike me as the type of person who'd kill just for the thrill of it. And this murderer really has to be some kind of psychopath."

"Somebody must have had a motive," Dtui said. She put a flat plate on top of her noodle bowl and let it sit until all the chemicals and flavouring and inedible carbohydrates decided to become food. She sat on the edge of the bed and stroked her daughter's hair. "If Neung didn't do it," she said, "someone must really hate him."

The following day, Dtui's comment, "Someone must really hate him," was at the front of Inspector Phosy's mind. The rains were holding back but Vientiane was a swamp of mud. All the citizens he passed wore clogs of red clay like Frankenstein boots. Bicycle tyres swelled to tractor-tread thickness. Street dogs had become two-flavoured, caramel above, cocoa below. With all the slithering and sliding, everyday activities had turned to slapstick. The famous Lao sense of humour, bogged down in the socialist depression, found an outlet. Laughter could be heard all around the town. Bicycle-skid victims sat in the middle of the road and howled with delight. Children giggled as they skated across Ian Xang Avenue in their flip-flops. Big-boned ladies held on to each other as they attempted to ford a muddy lane, screaming with merriment.

Phosy witnessed this new mood as he drove back and forth across the city in his four-wheel-drive jeep. He recalled the days when laughter was as common as the chirrup of crickets and the clack of the wooden blocks of noodle sellers advertising their wares. He liked this Vientiane, and on any other occasion it would have cheered him up, but today he had a sombre mission. He had to find another suspect in a case he'd considered closed. He had to put together enough evidence to prevent an innocent man from facing the executioner. In his note, Siri had asked about the morphine elixir. Who was taking painkillers and why? Neung had no obvious injury, but one man on his list did. Comrade Phoumi, the security chief. Could Phoumi have injured his wrist in the first attack and been taking morphine to deaden the pain? It was his left wrist so he could still use his sword hand.

Then there was Major Dung, sword expert. He'd lied about his contact with epees. He was a ladies' man. Didn't like to be rejected. A career soldier, a trained killer. He didn't have respect for women, Lao women in particular. The alibi for both of these suspects, impossible to verify without Prime Ministerial intervention, was that they were asleep in their respective dormitories at the time of all three murders. Phosy decided it wouldn't have been beyond either of them to frame a Lao engineer for murders they'd committed. But again he was missing a motive.

Then, next on his list was Comrade Chanti, the husband of the first victim. A reply — long time coming — had arrived from Houaphan that morning. It was handwritten by the signatory at the military wedding of Chanti and Dew back in 1969. The writer was a colonel in the North-eastern Region 7 and a distant, and apparently not loving, relative of Dew. He wrote;

No idea why they bothered. They couldn't stand each other from day one. Definitely an arranged marriage. Parents wanted their kids to appear normal, I suppose. Put pressure on them to produce grandkids. Maintain the family name. Not sure how they ever got around to that. Wouldn't be surprised if the boy was a fairy. Lot of them around these days…

So, Chanti; resentful at being forced into an arranged marriage, then deserted. Left with the responsibility of paying for the children's upkeep. No mother around. The marriage obviously a facade. But how would that play out in a mass-murder scenario? Why would he need to frame Neung? Siri always encouraged Phosy to paint elaborate hypotheses. The accusation was only the view of an old soldier but how about this? Possible homosexual connection? Chanti meets Neung at the government bookshop and flirts with him? Neung mocks him and…Phosy always had a problem hypothesising himself into homosexual relationships. He was old school. He had a hard time imagining that such tendencies were possible. They certainly weren't natural. But, in this permissive age, even such an unpleasant concept had to be kept in consideration.

Who else did he have? He looked at the fringe players; Neung's wife and his father, the bookshop clerk, other members of the security detail, other readers at the bookshop. He had to admit, with such a clear-cut suspect it wasn't going to be easy to find anyone better. So he focused on Siri's list. He began with the question, Did Kiang see her affair with Neung the same way he did? He drove to Kiang's house to talk to her mother. The woman was cheerful and open but she denied that she had ever heard the name Neung. She assured Phosy that if her daughter had been involved in any relationship, she would have been the first to know.

Kiang's younger brother Ming was at home and Phosy found an excuse to talk to the boy alone. Once they were out of earshot of his mother, the brother admitted his sister was involved with a man. She'd sworn the boy to secrecy but even so, this confidence hadn't allowed him access to details. The brother didn't know the man's name or anything about him. All he did know was that the lover was very much like her old boyfriend, Soop. It was as if the dead soldier had come back from heaven to be with her, she'd said. Kiang had never been happier. The boy didn't know why his sister would want to keep the relationship a secret from their mother. Phosy did. He was certain the old lady wouldn't have taken too kindly to her daughter flirting with a married man. Everything fitted. Kiang did have a crush on Neung. His version of events was accurate.