Colin Cotterill - Killed at the Whim of a Hat

“No question about it. The case was dropped. Waew was demoted to captain, and the major general started driving round in a brand-new Saab.”

“And our hippies?”

“Nobody saw hide nor hair of them again.”

“So there’s every possibility the couple we found under Old Mel’s land were the missing witnesses. They buried the hippies and the evidence in one foul swoop.”

“Sounds logical.”

“I don’t suppose there’s any way we’d be able to catch up with the influential figure?”

“That wouldn’t be any problem at all.”

“It wouldn’t? Why not?”

“Does the name Sugit Suttirat mean anything to you?” It didn’t. “He was briefly the Minister for the Environment and then Rural Affairs in two, just as brief, governments in the late eighties. Long enough to make his fortune. He’s now the national chairman of the Awuso Foundation. He’s got a big house and an office right there in Lang Suan.”

After Granddad Jah had left I sat and watched the sea for a while. It was silver and languid like a lake of snot. There was a wall of weather on the horizon, a dark blue line like ranks of special effect ores about to invade our Minas Tirith. It didn’t do a thing to assuage my feeling that it was me against them. The last archer on the battlement. It was all there embedded in the system: get rich whatever way you can, use the money to get power, get richer. And there were no public outcryings because your average man in the paddy envied them their success. Those middle class yellow-shirted idealists playing ping-pong in our assembly building weren’t going to change anything apart from the flower arrangements around the fountain.

I sat on a stool in front of Maprao Awnings, the shop belonging to the private detective, Meng. It was humiliating. He had a client. His wife had placed the stool in shadow and given me a cool pack of 30 % fruit juice but I was still visible from the road. I’d been in a funk since Granddad Jah’s story. I’d completely forgotten to make lunch so Chompu had driven back to Pak Nam and the family had been forced to make do with dom yam -flavored instant noodles with a side plate of dried squid. I couldn’t eat. I sat and watched them and wondered why I’d been so keen to beam myself back into the ugly twenty-first century. Once I could no longer stand watching them tuck into the fast food with the same relish they attacked my meals, I jumped on the auntie bike and set off for the plastic awning shop. I could have walked. It was only three hundred meters. But I felt I needed to be traveling at speed to get past Ed who was still there at the concrete table.

“ Koon Jimm…?” I heard over my shoulder.

“Not now, Ed.”

What kind of man, I ask you, given the current economic turndown, would have two and a half hours to waste in the middle of the day? An unemployed loser, that’s who.

But now I wish I’d walked because a stroll in the midday heat would have been preferable to being eyed by every motorcycle and truck that passed along our village’s one road. At last I heard voices emerging from the shop, and Auntie Summorn, the mother of Maprao’s only known villain, Daeng, was thanking the detective and walking with him to the roadside.

“That makes me feel much more comfortable,” I heard her say, and I didn’t get the feeling she was talking about awnings. A truck that was neither a taxi nor the vehicle of an abductor of elderly people stopped beside her and swept her off. That happens a lot down here. You go for a stroll and everyone stops to give you a ride. Annoying in a lovable kind of way, I suppose. The detective turned to me. If you already have an image of a private detective in your mind, you’ll need to delete it and start again. Koon Meng was about my height but skinny as an ink line. I was surprised he could stand up under the weight of his clothes. I assumed it was the pen in his shirt front pocket that gave him his stoop. He had a five hair mustache and long gray hair tied in a ponytail.

“Sorry to have kept you,” he said. “It’s getting to the stage that I could use a waiting room.”

He laughed with only his bottom teeth which I thought was impossible.

“Nice to see the detecting business is doing so well,” I said with a thick smattering of irony I didn’t expect him to get.

We walked to his office which was merely the front room of his single-story house with a desk off to one side. I sat. He sat.

“How can I help you?” he asked.

“I want to know what service you’re performing for my mother and how much you intend to charge her for it,” I said.

I hoped he wouldn’t ask me if I’d posed this question to Mair because then I’d have to admit I hadn’t, not directly, which would make it look like I didn’t communicate with my own mother. And then, as I’d been sitting on his humiliating little stool I’d wondered how I might react if he cited the problem of detective-client confidentiality, at which juncture I’d point out that he was a plastic awnings installer and, as far as I knew, there was nothing in the Awnings Code of Honor that covered such ethical dilemmas. But he didn’t give me a chance to use any of my smart-arsed retorts.

“I’m chasing up some poison for her,” he said.

All right. I gave him points for honesty.

“And how would you go about that?”

“Take a sample to the lab in Chumphon.”

“A sample of what?”

“Stomach contents. From your poisoned dog.”

“And where did you…? Oh, yuck.”

The plastic container in the freezer flashed into my mind. Surely she didn’t…She couldn’t have. I shook the thought from my head like a dog shaking off a bath.

“And what did you discover?”

“Lannate 90.”

“And that is?”

“A common pest control. It was considered too toxic for use as an insecticide but it’s still available. A nasty way to go, I’d imagine. A lot of restaurants and resorts use it to keep down the stray dog population. They don’t like dogs worrying customers. They mix it with scraps and leave it out front overnight.”

“And this poison has the ability to distinguish between stray dogs and dogs in collars with their telephone number printed on them?”

“No. Kills em all.”

“But the only resort or restaurant for five kilometers is ours.”

“Right.”

“And we didn’t…”

“Right.”

“So, was that the end of your involvement in this case?”

“No.”

“What else are you doing?”

“Your mother wanted to know the strength and effects of Lannate 90 and who’d have access to it. I told her anyone can buy it but most people with plantations or orchards would have it handy. But that’s most of the population of Maprao.”

“And that was it?”

“Almost.”

“Almost?”

He twirled a plastic curtain ring around his little ringer. I glared.

“She asked me to buy some for her.”

“What? How much, exactly?”

“Twenty bags.”

I decided not to ride back home right away. I needed a break from intrigue. My mind was out of practice. The nearest thing to a crime I’d experienced since we dropped down here was the kidnapping of our brand-new red garbage bin from the front of the shop one night in April. The case hadn’t even made it as far as the police station. The neighborhood council had been so devastated that they’d set up a vigilante team. Bless them, they’d found the bin at a small peripatetic fishing community of north-easterners who were using it to ice their catches. The head of our council fined them in lieu of arrest, our bin was returned and we had free squid for a month. It had been an impressive display of local support but hardly front page Thai Rat news.