‘What on earth is going on here?’ Siri asked.
‘Auntie Bpoo’s last stand,’ shouted Civilai.
‘Has anyone actually seen the party girl yet?’ Daeng asked.
‘Not a sign,’ they shouted.
‘I don’t understand it,’ said Inspector Phosy. ‘She’s a street fortune-teller. She reads the cards at five hundred kip a pot. Where did the money come from for all this?’
‘She obviously has other resources,’ said Dtui.
Daeng stood up.
‘Look,’ she shouted. ‘How about we wander down to the river’s edge with our respective bottles so we can actually hear ourselves speak?’
‘We … we might lose our table,’ said Geung.
‘Look at us,’ said Civilai. ‘Do you think anyone would dare take the table of such a scary group?’
Mr Geung laughed and they upped and followed the narrow dirt path to the water. There was a concrete foundation down there for what was once a boat landing. It made a perfect seat.
‘That’s better,’ said Civilai. ‘Who are all those people up there?’
‘It would appear Bpoo has more friends than we thought,’ said Daeng. ‘And it’s invitation only so they aren’t all freeloaders.’
‘And who would have expected all this anyway?’ said Dtui.
‘All right,’ said Siri. ‘While we have a few minutes of quiet, let’s listen to what Phosy has to say about his investigation of the Vietnamese and Madame Peung. We’ve all been on the edge of our seats these past few days.’
In fact, the only person even vaguely likely to fall off his seat had been Siri. It had been a difficult few days for him. He’d done everything Madame Peung had suggested: the breathing exercises, the yoga, the cat’s whisker grass tea. He’d been patient with the spirits he saw. He’d tried not to judge. Not to tell them to their faces that they were scientifically impossible. As the witch had told him time and time again, he had to be an empty house with a sign out front saying VACANCY in large letters. He’d done just that but nobody had knocked on his door. He’d constructed no end of mental devices to lure them inside. He’d even strewn mental nails across the road out front so that souls passing on motorcycles might have a flat tyre and come in to use the telephone. Nothing had worked. But most frustrating was the fact that the used-to-be woman had not made an appearance. He was beginning to have doubts, and Phosy’s findings would help a great deal to maintain his faith.
Phosy had brought along his notebook but he rarely referred to it. He took a sip of his whisky and coughed.
‘Madame Peung,’ he began, and coughed again, ‘was everything we’d heard about her. The wife of a general who got rich by diverting United States funding to his own projects. She was wiser than her husband it seems because she could see the direction this country was headed. Without his knowledge she contacted the Pathet Lao and provided them with donations to fund their underground operations. As a widow, once the PL took over the country, she was on their list of wealthy sympathizers. She made numerous trips to Hanoi and was responsible for a number of profitable deals. Everything seemed to be running as regular as clockwork until this past July when she went missing for eighteen days. I patiently awaited my turn at our central post office and talked to the manager at the hotel she always stayed at in Vietnam. We have a Vietnamese translator at HQ.
‘When she turned up after her mysterious disappearance, she’d told the manager that she had no idea where she’d been. She said she’d woken up in a small clinic somewhere and they told her she’d suffered a brain aneurysm and had been in a coma. The doctor had been very pleased with her recovery and released her. She paid her hotel bill in full and returned to Laos. That night, she was killed.’
‘Sounds like just a little too much of a coincidence to me,’ said Daeng.
‘I talked to her live-in girl about that night,’ said Phosy. ‘She said that Madame Peung had arrived late that afternoon with a truck and a driver. The driver had his hat pulled down over his eyes. There was a crate on the back of the truck. The girl came out to help carry it but Madame Peung called to her from the passenger window and told her to go down to the village and bring ten litres of petrol for the truck. She didn’t know why the truck driver couldn’t go down there himself but she wasn’t one to question orders. By the time she’d lugged the container back up the hill, the truck was gone. Either the crate went with it or it was in the widow’s room, because the girl didn’t see it again. The door to Madame Peung’s room was shut and when the girl asked if she wanted dinner the old lady declined. But it appears that Madame Peung often went to sleep early after a long journey so the girl thought nothing more of it. She went to bed at about nine and, the next thing she knew, she was woken by a shot. She’d been in a deep sleep so she wasn’t sure she hadn’t dreamed it. But the second gunshot most certainly came from inside the house. She wasn’t particularly fond of the job or the widow but she heard footsteps running away so she took a look at the widow’s room. That’s when she saw the body. She ran out the back door and hid in the bushes until she heard the villagers arrive.
‘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.’