Colin Cotterill - Killed at the Whim of a Hat

“I know.”

“It’s all over. The game’s up.”

I had the strongest urge to laugh but I felt there was some method to this particular madness.

“Mair, what have you done?”

My mother was shaking like a rat at a lab interview. I reached under the counter and hugged as much of her as I could.

“Mair, the policeman’s here to see me. He’s a friend of mine. We’re working on a case together. There’s nothing to worry about.”

One by one the shakes subsided and I heard a couple of recovering breaths, then a rapping sound. She was tapping on the underside of the counter with her knuckles.

“I’ll have to get Ed in,” she said.

“What?”

She reversed past me and climbed stiffly to her feet. She started to knock now on the top of the counter.

“Everywhere, they are. Little bastards.”

“Who?”

“Termites.”

I really had to laugh then.

“Mair, that down there had nothing to do with termites.”

“Don’t be silly, child. What else would I be doing on the floor?”

“Hiding out?”

“Such an imagination. You should be writing novels, girl, not reporting on other people’s failings.”

I watched her banging her fist on the plastic counter-top and knew it was the time for me to go and have a talk with the awning detective. But, first things first. I walked outside and collected my lieutenant and had intended to ignore Ed, but the beanstalk called out to me,

“ Koon Jimm?”

I was afraid he’d shout something embarrassing so I left Chompu tapdancing on the gravel in the driveway and walked casually back.

“Yes?”

“I need to speak with you,” he said. He stood up and towered over me like a palm tree.

“I don’t need any grass cutting,” I said. I mentally took a long run up and kicked myself in the backside. There had been no need for rudeness, but it was said so I couldn’t take it back.

“It’s not about grass.”

“As you can see, I’m rather busy.”

His hands were in front of him holding his cap like some farmhand talking to the wife of the prime minister. I looked up at his face glaring at me, tangled in the rays of the sun. It was the first time I’d looked him in the eye. His mustache didn’t suit him and his hair was either uncombed or uncombable. But his eyes were molten dark chocolate. I wished I hadn’t looked into his eyes.

“I can wait till you’re free,” he said.

“It might be a while.”

“I can wait.”

“Don’t you have some important weeding to do, or something?”

I already had welts on the cheeks of my mental bottom.

“The weeds will still be there tomorrow,” he said, and he smiled. If the eyes hadn’t been bad enough, the smile…

“Suit yourself,” I said. “I’ll be finished when I’m finished.”

I left him standing there. He really was far too tall to be taken seriously and annoyingly persistent. I collected Chompu and we went to my hut. Unless there’d been another power failure — daily now; a concerted education project provided by the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand to show us what life was like in the Stone Age — my laptop should have been fully charged. Just in case it wasn’t, Chompu had brought his own. A darling little Dell in puce. We sat on the veranda with the laptop on my cane table and us on the rattan chairs that squeaked and creaked like mouse S amp;M. I offered him a can of beer from my bar fridge but he said he was watching his weight and settled for an iced water.

As we waited for the computer to come to the boil, I told him about my visit to the hospital and the Benz. It didn’t surprise me at all that he’d already heard. He’d been following events on his truck radio and he’d passed by the hospital in my wake. The driver of the Benz had long since departed and the police were following up on both the name he’d registered under and the license plate of the car. He said he’d pass on the theories about Sergeant Phoom’s injuries.

I plugged in my USB onto which I’d copied the photos from the computer at Home Art. When the ‘select file’ message popped up, I hesitated to click. The pictures were still heavy in my otherwise lightweight heart.

“This isn’t family viewing,” I told him.

“I imagine I’ve seen worse,” he said.

I doubted it. I clicked, and one by gruesome one the slides appeared on the screen. He watched the entire show with his hand over his mouth but the pupils of his eyes active, darting from point to point on the screen. I’d had my fill of that. I’d been through it all, zooming, highlighting, sharpening, redefining and all I’d found was the brutal assassination of an abbot.

“Again,” said Chompu.

He dragged his chair closer to the screen so his nose was barely a sniff away from the carnage. He watched the entire performance one more time from beginning to end. When the skinny dog sang in the final frame, Chompu stood and unclicked the hinges in his neck before walking inside my hut and getting himself a beer.

“Damn,” he said, “that was beautiful.”

That was the scariest moment of the morning by far.

“Beautiful?” I said. “Beautiful? How sick are you to see anything beautiful in that?”

He took a very masculine swig of his beer and dabbed his lips with a tissue.

“What do you want me to say?” he asked. “That it was awful and bloody and premeditated and sick?”

“Yes.”

“Well, of course, ‘yes’. It was all of those things. Nobody in his or her or its right mind would think otherwise. But didn’t you see it? Didn’t you see the composition? The scenery? It was staged. It was a final operatic montage. It was a tour de force of color and spectacle.”

If I’d been a police officer at that moment and he’d been a run-down resort manager, I would have asked him about his whereabouts on that Saturday afternoon. I even felt uneasy sitting there beside him.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“I think it’s lucky you didn’t watch the show beside Major Mana and the Bangkok detectives. You’d be in a cell by now.”

“But that’s why it’s so much more fun to watch it with you. They’d just have seen it as the documentation of a murder. You and I see it as so much more.”

“We do?”

“Of course we do. It’s not just a killing. It’s a climax. It’s a loud, ‘Look what I’ve done, world! See how poetic this murder has been’.”

“Poetic justice?”

“Exactly. It all had to be recorded because it’s an artistic image that’s been germinating in the killer’s mind. The cameraman or — woman just needed to match the actual slaughter to the vision. That’s why getting back the camera was so important. It was confirmation that justice had been done according to the divine ordinance.”

“Man or woman?”

“What?”

“You said, ‘cameraman or — woman just needed to match…’”

“Hmm. Did I?”

“You know you did. What did you see in those pictures that suggested the killer might be a woman?”

“Not that it precluded a man, more that it included a woman. The glove.”

“It was an oven mitt. I assumed he’d worn it to add to the color.”

“Whereas I assumed it was worn as a disguise. A tight glove or none at all would have immediately given away the size of the hand, the length of the fingers.”

“That’s all?”

“I don’t know. If it had been a video recording I would have felt more confident to pass on my gut feeling. There was just something about the grip on the knife, the way the blade was poked rather than thrust, the forensic report that said the wounds had all been comparatively shallow. It all suggests a lack of strength.”