"Tied to a tree."
"Exactly like our girl in Vang Vieng. But this one had been there a little longer. There was significant animal damage so you can imagine the scene. Two young conscripts without any battleground experience…"
"I'd guess not even war could have prepared them for a sight like that."
"After they throw up their lunch, they decide they should tell someone. Our boy Sida stays with the body while his pal runs off to find the army commander. And our boy gets bold. He unties the ribbons that bind her hands, and she falls backwards, and that's when he sees the pestle. If he'd had any more lunch…"
"Did anyone report it?"
"It all seemed to vanish. The commander told them he'd handle it and that they shouldn't mention a word of it to anyone. I imagine he didn't want a panic on his hands. While Sida was still on duty in the town, not one person came forward to report a missing girl. Case closed."
"Did you get this directly from Sida?"
"No. For obvious reasons, he didn't stick around once the PL took over. It appears he was pretty close to the nurse's boyfriend, though. But you're right, it's all hearsay. Nothing we could use in court. There were one or two little details that make it obvious this was the same perpetrator."
"Like the ribbon?"
"And candles…little temple candles. And the pestle was black stone."
"That's him all right. Did Sida remember any physical signs? Did he notice whether the girl had been strangled?"
Phosy went through his notes. "No. I get the impression she was pretty far gone as animal feed by the time they found her. I was surprised what a detailed description Sida was able to give his friend. I'd be surprised if he doesn't still have nightmares about it. He talked about her face being gone and one of her fingers hanging off. There was gore every — "
"Did he say which one?"
"Which one what?"
"Which finger was hanging off?"
"I don't think so. Why?"
"Ngam, our girl from Vang Vieng, had a broken finger."
"You think it might be significant?"
"Just a thought I've been playing with. If it was the ring finger it could mean he was desperate to retrieve the ring. If the fingers had swollen he'd have to break the joint to get it off. It could be an issue he has about marriage."
"Dr Siri, this lunatic could be killing women all over the country and we'd be none the wiser."
"Could you contact all the police stations and get them to check their files?"
"I wish it were that easy, Doctor. Most of the files from the old regime were destroyed before they left. It's taken us this long just to get our own filing system in order. And for the first eighteen months it was a lot like the Royalists in Luang Nam Tha: foot soldiers substituting as policemen. Not all of them could read or write. And even if we did have a system, the thing that scares me is this: in both of these cases the bodies were found quite by chance before they were completely consumed by the forest. If there were other murders we might never learn of them."
Siri dropped onto all four legs of his chair and pulled out a sheet of blank paper and a pencil from his desk drawer. He made a rough sketch on it. Phosy leaned over the desk to take a look.
"A panda?" he guessed.
"It's supposed to be Laos, inspector. And look! Here is Ban Xon, where Ngam met Phan. Here is Vang Vieng, where her body was found. They're forty kilometres apart. Let's assume that he woos and weds them in place A then removes them to place B, just far enough away so that nobody will recognize the body, and nobody will come forward there to report a missing relative. If we apply the same distance rule to your soldier's corpse in Luang Nam Tha, we should assume she was from Muang Sing or perhaps Na Mo. You're quite right, we may never find other corpses. So what we should be looking for isn't bodies, but reports of country girls who were swept off their feet by smooth city boys and never seen again."
"Siri, you aren't paying attention. I've just explained that we don't even have a murder data bank. How do you suppose we can get information about missing daughters?"
"By using a network that cares about such things — a network far more efficient than the police force."
"Oh really? And what would that be exactly?"
Dr Siri arrived at the humble tree-bordered office of the Lao Patriotic Women's Association a little after ten. The group had been established in 1955 to mobilize the untapped resource known as women for the Lao People's Revolutionary Party. Lao women were accorded the right to vote three years later in the first coalition elections. Socialism had re-evaluated the status of females and encouraged them to take an active role in the creation of the new socialist state. That encouragement obviously had its limits, as by 1978 there were still no women on the politburo or holding power in the Central Committee. But the network was vast and the benefits to females at both ends of the economic scale were impressive.
The ladies in their spotless white blouses and carefully folded phasins were filing out of a meeting room with their neatly penned notes and their empty teacups. They looked content, every one of them. Perhaps, Siri thought, it was because they didn't have to work with men. But even when they saw the small smiling doctor standing in the entrance hall they nodded and said, 'Good health' as if his presence hadn't spoiled their day at all. The lady he'd come to meet was one of the last to emerge from the room. She carried a bulky slide projector piled high with study materials.
"Dr Pornsawan?"
"Dr Siri. Well, my word. What a sight for sore eyes."
Despite the danger of being seen to be a chauvinist, he relieved the doctor of most of her papers and left her with the projector. He walked at her side. She was a tidy, compact woman with no bodily excesses, no unnecessary height, and no eyebrows.
"Still no facial hair, I see." Siri laughed.
"It seems so silly to draw them on, don't you think? Once the damned things refused to grow back after the nunnery I decided to let them have it their way. Men find it attractive, I'm told."
"And I'm one of them."
"You're so sweet. Are you here to see me?"
"If you have a few minutes."
"Your projects are always worth finding a few minutes for, Comrade. Come up to my office."
The telling of the whole tale took twenty minutes and Dr Pornsawan's tears flowed for nineteen of them.
"I swear," she said when he was done, "in all my years of tending to women in the most wretched conditions, I have never heard of such a filthy aberration. What has happened to our society that such horror could occur, Siri? Something in me prays that this isn't just the beginning of the release of the demons. The wars inured us to atrocities, and the demons grew inside. Are they just now showing themselves?"
"I really don't want to believe so, Comrade. This is one renegade devil."
"And we have to stop him, by God we have to." She slapped her desk and all her pencils changed position.
"That's why I'm here."
"How can we help?"
Siri described the type of man they were looking for. He wanted to hear of families whose daughters had been whisked away and vanished without a trace. He wanted to hear gossip of smooth suitors, of truck owners, of seducers of entire villages. He wanted anecdotes, rumours, and hearsay. He wanted women in the markets to include it in their morning news reports and army wives to make mention of it during village workshops. Missing daughters had to be significant news in the women's networks.
"How soon can you start?" Siri asked.
"Yesterday!"
"That should do it."
10