The words are written in blood in neat handwriting across the top of the mirror. What I have described as a smudge is an elongated spurt of blood between the words who and father.
I am being hollowed out by something even more toxic to mental health than fear. I find my features pinching in some kind of caricature of righteous rage. A-Wut is no fool, he sees what is happening to me.
“Who…” My mind wanders, searching for an escape. I force it to return to the scene of the crime. “Who reported it?” I demand.
A-Wut puts an arm around me and squeezes hard. “That’s your job to find out, good buddy,” he says in a consoling tone. “We’re only forensics.”
“But…” I lose track, try again. “But somebody must have…”
“We came because of the rumor. Think about it, who in Bangkok is going to own up to being the first to see a corpse like that? If superstition doesn’t faze them, fear of law enforcement would have the same effect. No one wants to be associated with anything so extreme. Bad joss. Very, very bad joss. You know that.”
“Right,” I say, gulping and staring again at the mirror, all too aware that a great heap of very bad joss has landed on me also. “Right.” I fish out my phone to call Sergeant Ruamsantiah, who says he will detail half a dozen constables to start taking statements from the people in the market. For the moment I am unable to bring myself to tell him about the writing on the mirror. For the moment I cannot face the world, either. I wait downstairs for the Sergeant to arrive.
–
By the way, my name is Sonchai Jitpleecheep, Homicide Detective, attached to District 8 Police Station where one Colonel Vikorn presides, at your service.
Part 1
1
These are strange times on Planet Thailand. Even Colonel Vikorn is acting out of character. He called me at around four-thirty this morning to tell me to find my own transport to take me to a specific point on the east bank of the Chao Phraya River.
“The team is already there. Sergeant Ruamsantiah will explain.”
“Is it related to-”
“Not clear.”
He closed his phone before I could ask what it was about, and why he would need me to meet the Sergeant at such an hour at a location some ten miles from District 8. And what team, exactly, was he talking about? And why would he choose the filthiest morning I’ve witnessed since the last typhoon season twelve months ago? And most troubling of alclass="underline" why was I being distracted from the case known as the Market Murder, in which the victim has been provisionally named as Nong X? A case, after all, with my name on it.
Like a dutiful serf I grabbed a pair of jeans, T-shirt, and waterproof jacket, kissed Chanya on the lips while she snored, took a peep out of the door at the sheets of rain that were flooding the street, which would be a river of brown mud in an hour or so-and called a cab. I had to promise to pay triple before the driver would consent to take me to the river. He showed up in ten minutes, his wheels sloshing through the mounting torrent, and he turned out to be more valiant than I expected. We were within half a mile of the location given by Vikorn when he stopped. The flooding by that time was up to the level of his exhaust pipe, forcing him to keep gunning the motor while slipping the clutch, to stop water from entering the cylinders. I gave him his full fee and wished him luck on the way home and watched him drive back through the muddy floods, his engine screaming. According to the GPS on my smart phone, all I had to do was find the river and walk a few hundred yards north along its bank.
I found the river by following its thunder. I don’t think I’ve ever heard it so loud or been so drenched. I was shocked, too, by the way the wind roared through in gusts, temporarily tearing up the mist and revealing a churning brown monster in a rage bathed in clear end-of-the-world light. I wondered how the cargo ships were faring at the port. And where had they stored all the long-tail passenger ferries, the tourist vessels, the floating restaurants, the rice barges. No boat was built for this leviathan.
From the east bank of the Chao Phraya it was easy enough to follow the GPS on my smart phone in a northward direction. Visibility was so low that even if I reached the coordinates the Colonel had given, there was no guarantee I would be able to see the people I was supposed to meet. Unless the wind conveniently cleared the air again.
For a moment it did. A sudden gust screamed down the river valley, tearing up the mist in one long howl. I was at a bend where the river made an abrupt turn to the west. I knew that bend; so did everyone who had spent Sundays hanging out on the Chao Phraya. It was a tourist spot that jutted way out into the water where you took selfies of you and your loved ones smiling and playing at happy families. Not today, though, not in this storm. According to my phone I was no more than fifty yards from the meeting point Vikorn had given, which was about twenty yards from the riverbank. I forgot about that when I caught sight of a small flat-bottomed tourist vessel downstream in the middle of the torrent, held fast by a stout rope fastened to a stanchion on the extended promontory. I stopped, gripped the safety rail, and stared.
At first I thought the only human on the boat was a tall farang with startling blond hair. He stood in some kind of high-tech parka with feet apart, arms folded, compensating for the rolling of the deck without visible effort. Then I realized he was standing over a group of terrified Thais, two men and two women. The Westerner opened his mouth to speak in what seemed like slow, deliberate instructions. Then he clapped his hands and the two Thai men fell upon the two women. It took less than a minute to throw them into the raging current, where they disappeared instantly. I stared openmouthed at the farang on the boat, the wild river, the point where the women had been instantly engulfed. Frantic for some kind of explanation, some clue that would orientate me in a moment of confusion, I turned away to search for the people I was supposed to meet. A white van was parked a few hundred yards back from the river and I made toward it.
In the couple of minutes it took to run in that direction, the wind died and the mist returned. I had to use the GPS to locate the van when it was no more than thirty feet away. I beat on the sliding door, which opened to reveal Sergeant Ruamsantiah, Colonel Vikorn’s most trusted aide, who pulled me inside. I told him in a gush what I had witnessed. He wrinkled his brow and turned his head in wonder at my report. He had not seen anything himself. He had arrived nearly an hour ago and become inured to zero visibility. Fleeting breaks in the fog had ceased to seduce him out of his torpor. He told me that Vikorn had ordered him up here some time before he had called me. The weather was so bad no willing driver could be found, so Ruamsantiah drove the police van himself. He had no better idea what it was all about than did I. All he knew was that he was supposed to meet what he called “a third party,” at the same coordinates that the Colonel had given to me. Now we watched through the windshield while a figure emerged out of the mist no more than ten feet from the van and made its way toward us, crouched, soaked and monochrome in black coveralls with a hood tied under the chin.
“That’s her,” Ruamsantiah said, and pulled the door open.
–
She was average height for a Thai woman, about five three, in her late twenties or early thirties. As far as I could tell she was pretty in a sharp-featured kind of way, but her personality hit you before you had a chance to concentrate on her sex appeal. Even without the cute black-rimmed spectacles, like miniature windows smeared with rain, you would have guessed she was a smart cookie from the new generation of Thais. She did not want to climb into the van. Instead, she jerked her chin toward the river and led us toward it. Her own van was about a hundred yards away, invisible in the dense mist. When he saw us her driver opened the sliding door. The Sergeant and I held back for her to enter first, but she shook her head to make us precede her. We obeyed.