Colin Cotterill [Dr. Siri Pai Love Songs from a Shallow Grave

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.Twice, Siri had asked what it was all about and twice he’d been ignored.He wasn’t in the best of moods.The constant drizzle had soaked into his bones.They walked through the open front gate and turned, not to the house, but towards the carport.An overhead fluorescent lamp flickered and buzzed like a hornet in a jar.It was mid afternoon.Siri wondered why they hadn’t turned it off.At the rear of the carport was a small wooden structure, two-by-two metres, two-and-a-half metres tall, with a sloping concrete tile roof.A Vietnamese security guard stood at ease in front of it with his pistol holstered.Major Ton Tran Dung nodded at the soldier who produced a torch from his belt and handed it to his superior officer.“There’s a light inside,” Major Dung said, “but the bulb appears to have burned out.It was the smell that alerted our patrol.” Siri had picked up on it even before they turned into the street.It was an odd combination of jasmine and herbs and stewed blood.“Our protocol is that if anything odd comes up, they’re to contact me directly,” Dung said.“So I was the first one to go into the room.I came over as fast as I could, noticed the heat and the scent of blood, then I opened the door and that’s when I found her.”Chief Phoumi grabbed the torch from Dung and grimaced as he did so.Siri noticed a bandage beneath the cuff of the man’s shirt.Phoumi used his other hand to pull the wooden handle.An overpowering stench appeared to push the door open from the inside.Siri felt a wave of warm air escape with it.Inside, the box was dark, lit feebly by what light could squeeze through a small air vent high in one wall.But it created only eerie black shapes.Phoumi turned on the torch and he and Siri stepped up to the doorway.The beam immediately picked out the naked body of a woman seated on a wooden bench.At first glance, she appeared to be skewered to the back rest by a thin metal pole that entered her body through the left breast.A trail of blood snaked down her lap to the floor.“Do we know who she is?” Phoumi asked Dung.“Yes, sir.Her name is Dew.She was one of the Lao counterparts on the bodyguard detail.New girl.She went off shift at seven yesterday evening.Didn’t report in for duty this morning.And – ”The major gestured that he’d like to talk privately.“Excuse us, Doctor,” Phoumi said, and walked towards the house where he huddled with the Vietnamese.He’d taken the torch with him so all Siri could see by the natural light through the door was a bloodied towel, crumpled on the floor at the girl’s feet.Instinctively, he knew it was important in some way.The two men returned and Phoumi handed Siri the torch.“All right, Doctor?” was all he said.Siri was fluent in Vietnamese and he was used to the brusqueness of the language, but he was struck by how unemotional these men had been.“Yes?” Siri said.“Perhaps it would be appropriate if you inspected the body.Just to be sure, you know?”“To be sure she’s dead, you mean?” Siri smiled.“She’s got a metal spike through her heart.I think you can be quite sure she won’t recover.”“Then, time of death, physical evidence, anything you can come up with will be useful.”Siri shrugged and walked carefully into the room.Although he’d suspected as much, it was obvious that this was a sauna, albeit a small, hand-made variety.He’d sampled one himself during a medical seminar in Vladivostok.In a Russian winter the sauna had been a godsend, but, in tropical Laos where a five-minute stroll on a humid afternoon would flush out even the most stubborn germs, it seemed rather ludicrous.An old Chinese gas heater stood in the middle of the floor surrounded by a tall embankment of large round stones.A bowl of dry herbs and flowers sat beside it on the wooden planks.Siri presumed it had once contained water or oil but, if so, the liquid had evaporated away.Moisture and pungent scents still clung to the ceiling and the walls.There were two benches – one low, upon which the body now sat, and one opposite about fifty centimetres higher.Siri placed the torch on the floor and knelt in front of the victim.He put his hands together in apology before beginning his examination.The weapon, which from outside had appeared to be a metal spike, was in fact a sword, to be more exact, it was an épée.Siri knew it well.His high school in Paris had provided after-hours classes in swordsmanship.It was a course the doctor had failed – twice.He hadn’t been able to come to grips with all that delicate prancing and twiddling when the underlying principle must surely have been to kill the opponent or be killed [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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