Colin Cotterill - Killed at the Whim of a Hat

“Ergo, a woman. Huh! And I thought you were one of us.”

“And I thought you had to be gay to be prickly.”

“You do. But once you open up the possibility of the killer being a woman, you’re down to the one suspect. I don’t like that.”

“The nun? And you like her.”

“I don’t know her well enough to like her. But I want to believe that all this time in the bush hasn’t completely erased my instincts.”

“Don’t underestimate the power of love.”

“Oh, shut up. I suppose I’m going to have to pay another visit to the nun lady. You won’t arrest her just yet, will you?”

“Based on what? We haven’t seen anything to suggest the killer could have been a woman because we haven’t seen anything. Right?”

“Right.”

“And that’s another problem.”

“What is?”

“I have to find a way to introduce these pictures into the case without committing you to a three-year jail term for tampering with evidence in a murder inquiry.”

“Come on. It wasn’t even evidence when I tampered with it.”

“Even so, you did lie to, ooh, how many was it? Twelve police officers?”

“Play back the tape. I said nothing of the sort. I just intimated.”

“Of course you did. You’re basically a very honest person. That’s why I knew you were lying through your teeth. But I doubt Mana will remember it like that, nor the Bangkok detectives.”

“Who’d ever have thought they’d lose the damned camera? So how do you propose we do this?”

“Do you have a printer?”

“Yes.”

“Is it traceable to you?”

With every encounter, Chompu climbed higher and higher in my esteem and lower on the table of people I’d trust, which was a very short table to begin with. I left him to watch the painfully slow color printer and made my way to the kitchen to prepare lunch. I’d invited the lieutenant to eat with us. Something minuscule in the far back left-hand closet of my mind wondered whether Ed was still waiting at the concrete table for me, but before I could get that far I heard a grunt from behind. I looked around to see Granddad Jah sitting at one of our grass-roofed tables. He was dressed, which surprised me. He wore a dark blue Mao shirt and gray slacks.

“So, you weren’t planning on asking me anything?” he said, gruffly.

“I haven’t seen you,” I told him. “How could I —?”

“I travel halfway down the country for you and you don’t even say thank you.”

“You’ve been to Surat already?”

I must have been impressed because I’d squealed my question. He definitely smiled this time. I sat and squeezed his hand and he enjoyed that for a few seconds before pulling his coralesque fingers away.

“No big deal,” he said.

“And you saw Captain Waew?”

“Of course.”

“Brilliant.” We’d all tried. Me, the major, the lieutenant. He wouldn’t give us the time of day. “How did you do it?”

“I’ll tell you someday.”

I knew he wouldn’t. It was starting to look as if lunch would have to cook itself.

“All right. I’m all ears,” I told him.

He cleared his throat and produced a small notepad from his back pocket. He barely referred to it.

“An influential person…” he began (always a bad start to a story), “headed a gang that was involved in various nefarious operations. Waew, who was a lieutenant colonel at the time, had been approached by an aide to this gangster who brazenly offered Waew a very reasonable monthly stipend if he would keep his eyes averted from the gang’s activities. Waew being, at that time, one of the very rare Thai police officers with a conscience, told the representative that he was on board, but also informed his superior officer of the offer. Thereafter followed a very in-depth investigation of the gang’s comings and goings. Even though this said villain had his finger in a number of pies, the police decided to focus on just the one activity in order to build a cast-iron case against him.”

I noticed then as I looked across the table, that there wasn’t actually anything written in Granddad Jah’s notebook but he gave the appearance of reading from it like a report. Impressive. I was sure if ever I made it to seventy-four I’d not even remember which end of the toothbrush to hold on to.

“As Waew had received three complaints of automobile theft from car rental companies,” he continued, “and as the detective knew from the aide that this was one of the figure’s most lucrative operations, he decided — ”

I put up my hand.

“What?”

“Why take cars from rental companies? Why go to all the trouble of counterfeiting IDs and investing in deposits when you could just break into a parked car and hotwire it and drive it off?”

It was a dumb question but I thought Granddad Jah would enjoy it.

“A good point,” he said. That was probably the first compliment I’d received from him since grade six when I won the new-year greetings card design competition at Guides. “But use your brain, why don’t you?” (deflation) “You rent a car for, what? A week? Two? That gives you two weeks to change the plates, forge the paperwork, and drive the vehicle across a border. If you steal someone’s car, you have the police out after you from day one.”

I smiled to acknowledge the point. Where was this granddad during the early days of my career? Watching traffic. I could have used him.

“Should I continue or would you like to interrupt again?” he asked.

“Please.”

“It was clear that the influential figure was recruiting hippies to do his dirty work. There were a lot of backpackers hanging around the islands, living cheap, smoking marijuana. Of course, most of them were foreigners. But there were the dregs of the communist movement, Thais who’d fled to the jungles to escape the junta, and they’d never been able to fit back in to society. Some of them set up communes that attracted younger kids. Most of them were just anti-establishment; others were playing at being flower children. There were a couple of farms down here in the south.

“Blissy Travel was the sixth tour company to be hit by the gang. Then there was a similar establishment down in Songkla. Hiring out cars without drivers was a relatively new phenomenon here, so it wasn’t hard to chart all the establishments that offered rentals. It wasn’t possible to stake out all of them so Waew had to take a chance. Blissy Travel had reported a van of theirs hadn’t been returned on the agreed date. Their second van had been rented out two days earlier, also by what the owner called ‘a hippy couple.” Waew put out the registration information and got lucky. The second VW had been pulled over in Tha Chana the day after it was rented. The driver and his passenger had been charged with indecent exposure. They’d been found sleeping naked in the back of the van early that morning.

“Waew went to meet the arresting officer and talk to the hippy couple. They made a deal. They would implicate the influential figure and give evidence against him in return for charges being dropped against them. Waew arranged a place for them to stay, what we would now refer to as a safe house, and they arrested the figure. Waew had his case, open and shut. They just awaited the trial date. Then, two days before the trial, the witnesses disappeared.”

“They got cold feet?”

“Not according to Waew. He said there were signs of a struggle and there were personal belongings and money left behind. All the things they would have taken if they’d just done a runner.”

“Who knew about the safe house?”

“Waew and his boss.”

“Ahh. So do we assume the influential figure found an ally at the police department after all?”