Colin Cotterill - Killed at the Whim of a Hat

“Just the three hectares?”

“Yeah.”

Just the strip of land that incidentally happened to contain two dead bodies in a VW. Some coincidence. I decided it might not be a bad idea to locate the owner and have a little chat.

“Fancy a paddle?” Chompu asked, nodding in the direction of the van.

I couldn’t say I was fond of the idea but that was the reason the nice lieutenant had brought us here. I doubted the investigators had left too many stones unturned but I kicked off my sandals, rolled up the legs of my jeans to my knees and lowered myself into the warm, stewy pond. The water only came to my shins but the gunk below it was so soft I sank to my thighs. Jeans probably ruined. To his credit, the lieutenant was right there beside me. We waded one cursory circuit of the old van. Things were slithering around my feet. I wanted to go home. I half expected a Transformer moment where the old VW reared up on its hind wheels and snapped at us but, of course, it didn’t.

I reached the side where the sliding door had once been. It now lay beneath my feet, giving me some solid base upon which to stand and examine just how ruined my jeans were. I climbed into the belly of the beast and sat on one of the two stubs that had once been front seats. In no time, the salt air would consume this museum piece but today it stood defiant. The steering wheel poked out gamely before me. I grabbed it, half expecting it to crumble like the driver but it was surprisingly solid. A testament to German engineering. The seat, too, felt secure. The back had wilted but the square of springs beneath my bottom still squeaked when I moved. My feet were submerged in water still but I imagined that the water had only risen once the pit was dug; otherwise I doubted all this metal could have survived. The windscreen in front of me was intact. The view was a wall of dirt, but I had an active imagination: a hippy driver and his companion.

“ You happy, babe? ”

“ Blissful .”

“ Glad you came? ”

“ Yeah. You OK to drive? ”

“ Sure. Not much traffic. Floating really .”

“ Want another smoke? ”

“ Why not, sweet baby? Why not? ”

Mair had told me about the hippies, the cheap foreigners who came on her treks. They didn’t come for the nature or the culture. They came for the opium and the mushrooms. She didn’t say she’d joined in. That’s one of the gaps I had to fill in myself. But Mair was something special. She’d been a lot of things. I’m guessing she was a communist for a while — spent time hiding out in the jungle during the military dictatorships. I remember hearing she’d spent time as a karaoke lounge waitress. Then she grew pomelos out in Kanchanaburi and raised, I think it was, pigs. But what I remember most warmly is her time as a tour guide. That’s where most of her stories came from. Granny Noi was still alive then. She ran the shop in those days. Granddad Jah was with the police. They’d look after us when Mair was away on her tours. Her homecomings were like someone turning on a tree swathed in fairy lights. She’d have stories to tell us about exotic and weird places and even weirder people. She’d bring bags full of sweets and souvenirs, hand-crafted cloths that she’d sat and watched being woven, shells from the islands, animals crafted from straw and beautiful colored stones. I had a collection of dirt from every province in Thailand. It was New Year’s every time Mair came back. Then, one time, she came home and she didn’t go away again and, one by one, the fairy lights went out.

But one thing I’ll never forget is Mair laughing about the resolve with which the stingy, locally labeled ‘bird shit’, foreigners hung on to their weed. Ganja was growing all around but in their drug-induced bouts of paranoia they’d protect their own personal stash with their lives. It was very Granddad Jah of me to assume that everyone in the seventies smoked dope. But the combination of Kombi, long hair and beads made me think I could get away with being prejudiced just this once. And I wondered where our VW couple kept their stash.

“Who did the search of the van?” I asked Chompu, who was tugging the sliding door out of the mud.

“The boss sent Senior Sergeant Major Tort to go over it.”

“And he’s a forensics expert?”

“No. He keeps our books in order.”

“So, nobody’s really…”

“Nope.”

“And who’s in charge of the case?”

“Me.”

“So why haven’t you…?”

“Because I was just bequeathed it by Major Mana in front of the toilet door in the upstairs corridor of the police station half an hour ago. He doesn’t want it anymore. Something else came up.”

It certainly did. But the fact that nobody had really looked at the VW gave me new hope. The stash. The glove-box was a gaping hole. What was left of the mattress and all the trace evidence it contained was probably in a skip behind the police station. I didn’t have too many places to look. I felt under the seat and wished I hadn’t. It occurred to me later that this was where all the body fluids and loose parts would have found their way over the years. I wasn’t about to dive into the murky water and feel around. I was on the verge of giving up when I remembered the Web site. I’d had to look up the make of the VW before I could send my report. The site had photos of a renovation and there behind the driver’s seat was a mound — some toolbox or the like — but it had stuck in my mind. It would have been directly under the mattress. A perfect hiding place. I clambered behind the seats and reached down into the shallow water.

“You look inspired,” said Chompu.

I found a latch of some description and some rusty knobs.

“Have you got any tools in that truck of yours, Lieutenant?” I asked. “I think we might have something here.”

“Arny, Arny, not now.”

My brother was about to set off along the beach in the midday heat rolling his log. It was starting to irk me. It was up there with self-flagellation and cross-carrying. He stopped, sighed and walked over to me along the light brown sand. My brother was a creation, the answer to a problem. He’d been bullied at school due to his sensitive nature and the fact that his brother, four years his senior, wore lipstick to class. Arny spent more time playing with girls than boys so it had been relatively simple for bullies to single him out from the herd. If she’d been around more, my mother would have taught him to negotiate his way out of trouble, taught him the value of a well-placed joke. But he was left to the one-track male logic of Granddad Jah to sort him out. Toughen him up. Teach him to fight. Of course, he didn’t ever learn how to fight but he did bulk up. The deeper his frustration, the harder he hit the weights. He couldn’t punish the boys that were making fun of him so he punished himself. Every barb put another disk on the barbell. And soon the weight room became his sanctuary and his body his barricade.

And here he was, a mini-Mr. Universe. And the type of people who wanted to meet him saw an incredible hulk of a man. They assumed he ate pigs whole and smashed bricks with his forehead. Men wanted him as a friend because he was incredibly cool to be seen with. And women? Forget it. Once his love emotions were unscrewed there was nothing holding him together at all. Women assumed he was all animal, but in reality Arny was delicate. He was a sort of Grand Palace made of potato crisps. From a distance you saw invulnerability but you just had to lean on him slightly and he crumbled. It took a special kind of person to befriend a contradiction like that.

Arny and I were close. We’d been inseparable — now we were just close. Since we’d followed Mair down to non-event world we’d been oddly distant. We’d both been too busy locked up in our respective moods.