Colin Cotterill - The Woman Who Wouldn't die

‘There were a couple of things she mentioned to the young officer but that he didn’t consider important enough to add into his report. One was the fact that, when she came back to the house with the petrol, one of the piglets was gone. The sow had given birth three days before and had stopped giving the babies milk. The girl had been weaning them by hand. They were penned up so it couldn’t just run off. She wondered whether a crow had snatched it. Then there was the fact that when she was hiding in the bushes she thought she’d heard a truck starting up down on the main road. Sound carries at night in the countryside and road transport is so rare you tend to notice. She admitted she didn’t know if it was the engine of the truck Madame Peung had arrived in.’

‘So, do we know who the driver was?’ Civilai asked.

‘Now I do, but that was a breakthrough that came as a result of the photographs of Tang and Madame Peung that you sent me, Madame Daeng,’ said Phosy.

‘You sent photos?’ Siri asked.

‘I thought it might help,’ she smiled.

‘I’d sent them to the Vietnamese Intelligence Unit with my request to speak to the Hanoi cops,’ Phosy continued. ‘When I received their official response, there had been no mention of the photographs. I assumed nobody had recognized them. But then I was cornered one night by a shadowy character who’d been watching too many spy movies.’

‘Nothing wrong with that,’ said Civilai.

‘To cut a long story short, he had a gun and I beat him up.’

‘My brave policeman husband,’ said Dtui.

‘I don’t like guns,’ he said. ‘So I had this fellow at police HQ and he insisted on making a phone call to his Vietnamese buddies. I reminded him whose country he was in and how unlikely it was he’d ever see his homeland or his family again.’

‘You bully,’ said Civilai.

‘He was an arrogant little runt,’ said Phosy, by way of explanation. ‘But once he believed I was out of control he became very chatty. It turned out that he was a minor official at the Vietnamese Intelligence Unit. They’d sent him to extract the location of the character in the photograph from me. They must have thought I’d see the gun and blurt out where he was. They had every reason not to do all this through official channels, you see. Although it took me a while to get the whole story out of him. Your widow’s supposed brother, Tang, had been an agent at the Vietnamese Intelligence Unit. A very senior agent, in fact, and, by all accounts, a genius. He went AWOL. Hadn’t reported for duty for six months. Nobody knew where he was. His superiors were anxious to trace him. He’d been the head of Data Analysis. Name of Tang Cam. Before his disappearance he’d been working on French and American aerial photographs of the Mekhong River. But he had maximum security clearance to all the top secret files both in Vientiane and Hanoi.’

‘I’m certain they’d have files on all of us tucked away in Hanoi,’ said Civilai.

‘Together with witness reports and family history and psychological examinations,’ said Daeng. ‘I was one of their agents towards the end. They’d know more about me than I do. And with the recent agreement they’d have a share of all the files on our side too. They’d know about the minister’s background and his brother.’

‘All the things Madame Peung plucked out of the air,’ said Civilai.

‘I … I have a fffile?’ said Geung.

‘You’re technically a government worker, Geung,’ said Civilai. ‘They’d know everything about you.’

‘That’s … rude,’ said Geung.

Siri had remained quiet throughout this exchange. He was a stubborn man but he never ignored the facts. And they were stacking up against Madame Peung.

‘And the woman?’ he asked.

‘He wasn’t so certain about her,’ said Phosy. ‘But some of the operatives suggested there were similarities to a female officer who had once been Tang Cam’s mistress. Her name was Nguyen Hong Be. Vietnamese father; Lao mother. She had retired from the propaganda division after reaching the rank of colonel. But she’d spent most of her career directing entertainments for troops. They staged dramas for the villagers. She was-’

‘An actress,’ said Siri.

Madame Daeng squeezed his hand.

‘A very competent one too,’ said Phosy. ‘If things had been different she might have become famous. But the wars and …’

‘No, wait,’ said Civilai. ‘This is ridiculous. They find a Lao businesswoman and he gets this actress to impersonate her? Who’s going to be stupid enough to fall for that?’

‘No. I think it was the other way round,’ said Phosy. ‘Tang Cam had the actress already. All they had to do was wait until a Lao of similar appearance turned up. She didn’t have to be rich at all, or a businesswoman. A government official would have worked just as well. A visitor. A maid. Anyone single or widowed. Tang Cam would have access to the files to know who was unattached. Who lived in a remote area. All the spirit mumbo-jumbo would play into the hands of we ignorant Lao country folk.’

‘Am I the only one who doesn’t see the point of all this?’ said Nurse Dtui.

‘It’s complicated,’ Phosy told her.

‘Could I try to explain it?’ asked Daeng.

‘Be my guest.’

‘This is how I see it,’ she began. ‘A senior official at the Vietnamese Intelligence Unit with an interest in Lao history hears the legend of the French pillaging the treasure from the Royal Palace in 1910. He has an ancient mandarin concept of what treasure is: riches beyond dreams. He studies the French and American aerial photographs of the Mekhong and he sees it: the shape of the gunship that went down. With instruments he can measure it categorically to prove that it can only be that boat. There he is, a senior clerk earning twenty dollars a month and he knows his future would be assured by salvaging that vessel. But how? There are no Vietnamese projects in Sanyaburi. He doesn’t have clearance to travel in Laos. But he is a clever man and he comes up with a complicated but brilliant plan. He contacts his old lover who’s living in a dingy one-bedroom retiree’s apartment in Hanoi and together they hatch a plan. If it all works out they won’t need to recruit any other people. All the work will be done for them.’

Ugly growled and licked his balls.

They all laughed.

Daeng continued.

‘Somehow, they drug and kidnap Madame Peung and set up a hospital room to keep her in,’ Daeng continued. ‘She believes she’s had an aneurysm. Tang Cam is her doctor, Hong Be, her nurse. I would imagine they used a combination of drugs and hypnosis to learn about her village and the people who lived there — a way to recognize them. Under hypnosis it’s difficult to extract secrets but remarkably easy to draw out gossip and anecdotes. They would have kept her half-in, half-out of consciousness, Colonel Hong Be, her best friend, joking with her, learning her mannerisms and speech patterns.’

‘Does any of this have a factual base?’ Civilai asked.

‘None,’ said Phosy, ‘but circumstantially I’d say we’re heading in the right direction. We found the booking on Lao Aviation. Madame Peung was in a seat beside someone called Nguyen Be, a Vietnamese nursing sister whose paperwork said she was headed to hospital forty-nine. They’d never heard of her.’

‘Then, lead on, madam,’ said Civilai.

‘I wouldn’t be surprised if one other seat on that flight was occupied by our friend Tang Cam,’ said Daeng. ‘The Vietnamese secret service produce their own passports.’

‘I’m seeing the how,’ said Dtui, ‘but I’m still missing the why.’

‘The why is that the Vietnamese secret service knew all about the Minister of Agriculture and his relationship with his nutty wife,’ said Daeng. ‘The upper class Vietnamese community in Laos is very close. They would have known she was concerned about her brother-in-law and was looking for a medium. If they could convince her that the brother was in a boat, submerged in the Mekhong, he would have the resources to dig it out. And because it was a spiritual matter, he wouldn’t have told too many people. But they had to establish Madame Peung’s reputation in a hurry. News of a reincarnation would spread like a forest fire. The fact that the widow had been reborn with the gift of finding the dead was exactly what the minister’s wife was looking for.