Colin Cotterill - Killed at the Whim of a Hat

“So even with all that eye sharing and co-breathing, it was still platonic?”

“Yes.”

“And you had this really nice connection but nothing came of it and you went your own ways and found religion?” I hoped I wasn’t being cynical.

“Yes.”

“And by chance, even though there are forty thousand wats in Thailand, by some quirk of fate, you ended up here together.”

She smiled again. “Of course not. We have always been in touch: letters, phone calls. We are like family. We have a connection. I think we always knew that we’d end up at the same place. Abbot Kem told me about the simple beauty of this region and I decided to move from the northeast.”

OK, the millionaire question. No friends to phone. No help from the audience.

“Are you still in love?” I asked.

The nun sighed deeply, then switched over to profound mode. She sandwiched her hands together in front of her lap and spoke to her toes. It felt rehearsed.

“When you understand the dharma,” she said, “all love and hate is absorbed into a greater appreciation of the universe. Personal likes and dislikes are irrelevant. You are no longer an individual. You are a part of the whole.”

Good speech. I didn’t believe her. I was annoyed not to have the abbot’s view of events. I needed to look into his eyes and see what his slant on all this was. For all I knew, this could all have been the nun’s personal fantasy. But somehow I doubted it.

“So, you don’t love each other anymore?” I asked.

I was probably sinning like hell by forcing a nun to answer personal questions about her love life, but I had a murder inquiry on my hands — at last. Thank God I wasn’t shackled by any of those guilt trips that are such a lovely feature of organized religion.

“My love encompasses all,” she said.

All right. Technically I’m a Buddhist. It’s written there on my ID card. But I was brought up as a sort of warped realist. My mother threw me into this modern world where I was supposed to make friends with technology and alien cultures. And although part of me believes there’s a higher plane where jogging and Big Brother Thailand and Bon Jovi aren’t important, I find it really hard to believe skinny old Abbot Kem had ever stopped loving the warmest nun on the planet. But was she worth killing the IA abbot for? I’d like to see Raymond Chandler get his chops around that one.

With the detectives and the IA monks back in the office detecting and my brother and his truck nowhere to be seen, I took the opportunity to visit the scene of the crime. The live abbot, Kem, was confined to the temple grounds but not to his quarters so he walked with me along the concrete path to the spot where the dead abbot, Winai, was found. A lethargic procession of temple dogs trailed along behind us. I attempted to push him on the relationship issue but he was mute on the subject. Not surprisingly, the body was no longer ahead of us on the path, but a large section of concrete had been stained a chewed-tobacco brown.

“Lot of blood,” I said.

“He was stabbed several times in the stomach,” Abbot Kem said.

I looked around. It wasn’t a secluded spot at all. I could see the road clearly down the hill with our truck pulled up beside it. To the north, anyone visiting the prayer hall, the monks, the nun, all of them had a clear view of where we now stood. And at our backs, the bright bank of bougainvilleas in full bloom reared up like an advertising hoarding declaring: MURDER OF THE DAY.

“Who found the body?” I asked.

“I did.”

“What time?”

“Just after three yesterday afternoon.”

“What made you come up here?”

“The dogs. There was a lot of commotion. They’re normally asleep around that time when the air’s at its driest. I was afraid they’d come across a cobra. When I got here I found the abbot dead on the path.”

“You came all this way because of a snake? Are you a snake charmer, Abbot?”

“Most of the snakes up here are harmless but we lose a lot of the dogs to cobra bites. The snakes only bite in self-defense so it’s often merely a question of refereeing. I have a cane basket. I get between the dogs and plonk it upside down on top of the snake and sit on it. When the dogs get bored and go home, I release the snake.”

“So, in fact, you’re rescuing the snake?”

“In a way, yes.”

I’d heard some wild witness statements in my time but that was a good one. However, unless any of the snakes were prepared to give evidence, it didn’t do a thing for Abbot Kem. I thanked him and watched him stroll back along the path, stopping here to pick up broken branches, there to pluck a dead leaf from a plant. As I walked down to the truck, I considered the variables. One resounding question that stuck in my mind was: Would a man who valued life enough to step between a pack of dogs and a cobra be able to kill another human being? But, I’d seen stranger things.

“How did you manage to talk your way past all those policemen?” I asked Arny as I climbed into the truck.

“I didn’t have to.”

“You must have said som — Oh, you were anxious, weren’t you?” He nodded. “And when you’re anxious your eyes water.” He nodded again. “And they thought you were crying and in desperate need to pray.”

“It was stressful,” he confessed.

I could picture the scene. Arny steps out of the truck. He’s surrounded. He panics. The detectives decide the only reason a one-hundred-kilogram brick barn would burst into tears is if he’s in desperate need of salvation. See? I knew there was a reason to bring Arny along. I climbed up his left side and gave him a kiss on the cheek. He liked it.

Two or three nights a week I’d phone Sissi in Chiang Mai or she’d phone me. We’re probably as close as two siblings who have nothing in common can be. I love her but I keep expecting that phone call where she says, “Jimm, I’ve decided you’re only pretending to like me so I don’t want to talk to you anymore.” That would bring her close-friend count down to exactly zero. To explain her temperament I’d need to go back a ways with this story.

When I was growing up it took me a while to realize that boys and girls were different. I’m not talking anatomically here, I mean, my brother Somkiet and I were one creature, and it was decidedly pink. We co-wore all my clothes but never his. We giggled and slapped a great deal. We had dolls and we spent an awfully long time looking at me in the shower. Mair started off angry. “You take off that nightie at once, mister, and clean your football boots.”

Granddad Jah bought him boxing gloves and enrolled him in the local gym. But over the years I felt a gradual decline in their resolve to divert Somkiet from the flowery path he skipped along. In fact it was Mair who gave him the final push.

At sixteen, Somkiet was at that crossroads we hear so much about and was in desperate need of good advice, preferably from a father figure. But all he got at home was Granny preparing herself for nirvana, Granddad Jah moping about his lack of advancement through the ranks of the police force, and me, hopelessly in love with Liu De Hua, the Hong Kong TV star. Nothing seemed as important to me as Liu. Even I had abandoned Somkiet. Once she’d given up her happy life, Mair waded through several years of depression. She lived like Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest. Her world started at the pavement in front of our shop and ended at the spirit house at the back fence. We weren’t much of a support group for a girl in a boy’s skin.