Colin Cotterill - Killed at the Whim of a Hat

Mair dropped her spoon, leaped from her seat and threw her arms around her youngest.

“Oh, child,” she said, “I’m so pleased for you. Well done. Well done.”

I settled for reaching across and squeezing his hand. I was still suspicious. Granddad Jah, looking like death boiled up, stared at him in disbelief.

“Nice one, nong ,” I said. “Who’s the unlucky girl?”

Mair returned to her seat with a damp and shiny face.

“Don’t be cruel,” she said. “What’s your young lady’s name, child?”

“Gaew,” he said, still beaming with pride.

“And what does she do?”

“She used to be a bodybuilder. I met her at the weight room at Bang Ga. She still does weights but she doesn’t compete anymore. Who’d have thought it? A little wooden gym in the countryside and I’d find someone like Gaew. I recognized her right away from her photos.”

“What photos, child?” Mair asked.

“In Body Thai .”

“She was in a magazine?”

“Not just in it. She had features regularly. International journals too. She was a celebrity.”

“And she lives in Bang Ga?” I asked. I hadn’t reached the goose-bump stage but I could certainly feel little prickles of foreboding.

“Even celebrities have to be born somewhere,” Arny reminded me. “Her family’s all there. I went to their house. All the awards. All the photos. It was like a museum. Everything I’ve ever dreamed of. She told me all her stories at lunch.”

“So, you’ve eaten with her?” Mair asked.

“Twice now. I took her into Lang Suan yesterday. We talked a lot. When we got back to her house there was nobody there. We almost had sex.”

Granddad dropped his doughnut. Mair laughed out loud.

“Arny,” I said, astonished. “We’re eating here. And you weren’t going to lose your big V until you found the big L, remember?”

“Oh, Jimm, really. This is it,” he said. “The heart freeze and everything. I know it’s right. I’m going to ask her to marry me.”

“Oh, child,” Mair said. “You’re a big boy now but there’s really no hurry. Trust me. How long have you known her?”

“Three days.”

“Three days, right. Then if it’s love after three days, it’ll still be love after three months. None of us wants to make commitments on impulse. I’m delighted, really. But passion is an egg. You have to see it grow into a chicken before you decide whether it’s a boiler or a roaster.”

Mair always had a way with idioms.

“What does Gaew think about all this?” I asked.

“She feels really exactly the same. She said as soon as she saw me it was ‘clunk’. That’s how it hit me, too. Clunk. She said she hadn’t felt that way since she met her first husband. She said it was a rare, almost impossible feeling to reproduce but she had it.”

The frame had paused again without us noticing.

“Her first husband?” Mair asked.

“Yeah. He was the one who got her into bodybuilding. He was an icon, too. Dom, Mick’s Gym, Purachart. He won the all-Asian title twice. You remember him. I had his poster on my wall when I was just starting out.”

“You started out when you were fourteen,” I reminded him.

“Yeah. Really” — Arny nodded — “that was a while ago, wasn’t it?”

Ahead of me was a metaphorical field which was peppered with metaphorical landmines. I could have progressed lightly and tiptoed around but I knew we were headed for a messy bang whatever I did.

“ Nong ?” I asked. “How old’s your girlfriend?”

“Fifty-eight.”

There was no shame or embarrassment in his voice. He’d said it proudly and loudly. It didn’t seem to cross his mind at all what effect such a statement might have on his fifty-seven-year-old mother. Mair hung on to her Titanic smile but couldn’t bring herself to speak. She wiped her mouth with a tissue, stood, and walked unsteadily in the direction of the shop. Arny watched her go with a real smile on his own face.

“Looks like Mair’s as excited about all this as I am,” he said.

The silence that followed was interrupted by the beep of a motorcycle horn. Ed rode past and waved. Sitting behind him was an attractive girl about my age. She smiled at me and put her hand to her heart. Not for the first time that day I didn’t know how to react, and it was barely seven o’clock.

Lieutenant Chompu came by at eight. I’d given him the heads-up about my note. Granddad Jah and I piled into his truck and headed off out of Maprao. Da Endorphine, the slick ballad queen was cooing on the CD player. Of course, I was the girly in the backseat. Chompu read the note and flipped it over to look at the election poster.

“Any idea what year this might have been?” he asked.

“Seventies by the look of his tie and his sideburns,” Granddad said. “Probably the man’s first attempt at conning his way into public office.”

“But why was it delivered to me?” I asked. “Who knows I’m involved in the case?”

“You mean apart from all of Lang Suan, seventy-two percent of the province and approximately half the south of Thailand?” Chompu asked.

“All right, yes,” I agreed. “But why send it to me and not you lot?”

“Because nobody trusts the police,” said Granddad, matter-of-factly.

“That’s the truth,” said Chompu, “but I wouldn’t be surprised, given the events of last night, if this note isn’t part of a…deeper story.”

I noticed how Chompu liked to leave dramatic gaps, probably so they could edit in music bites later.

“What happened last night?” I asked.

“Of course, I’m not at liberty to divulge details of an ongoing case, but I can probably, at a pinch, tell you that they found your Tan Sugit handcuffed naked to a bench at the Lang Suan train station early this morning.”

“Dead?”

“Stop it. They can’t all be dead. We have a three-body-per-decade quota. No, he was bruised and woozy from some drug and he had the words sa som — ‘deserved’ — written on his belly in some animal blood. But he was very alive and thoroughly embarrassed. He told Lang Suan police it had been a terrorist attack. That they’d threatened to kill him but he’d been able to play on the sympathy of the kidnappers — a technique he’d learned, he said, from many years of dealing with southern insurgents — and they’d let him go unharmed.”

“But chained naked to a train station,” I pointed out.

“A symbolic gesture. A small victory.”

“What did he say they were after?”

“He hinted he might have been in possession of some sensitive documents on the new government policy for dealing with Muslim separatists.”

“Bunch of cow dung,” said Granddad.

“But you think it has something to do with my note?” I asked.

“Coincidences such as this only happen on television.”

We’d turned onto the highway and were heading north.

“Do you know anything about Sugit having a daughter?” I asked.

“Yes. I imagine you’d have seen her if you went to the house.”

“The fat girl? He treated her more like a maid.”

“She’s been living with him for several months, I heard. I think it’s important that we find out what she knows.”

“So, if you think the daughter is a key factor in solving the case, why are we heading away from Lang Suan?”

“All right, I’m not at liberty, et cetera, blah, blah, but I might have committed a slight error yesterday. Following our very pleasant lunch, I decided to follow up on your Sugit’s violent reaction to wicked Auntie Chainawat. I was curious to know why he disliked her so much. So I went over to Ranong.”

“And you’re afraid your visit was the reason for Sugit’s kidnapping. You think you’ve sparked a Chinese mafia war between two of the south’s most dangerous clans and that soon the entire region will be a battleground of blood and revenge.”