“ I am a person who recognizes the fallacy of humans.”
Lieutenant Chompu and I were driving across the skinniest part of the country. If you looked at the map of Thailand we were at the very squeezed waist. Since the seventeenth century they’d talked about digging a canal from the Gulf to the west coast but to lift such a long-term project off the ground it probably would have helped to have an administration in power for longer than five months. If they ever did get around to it, this would be the perfect place. There was so much pretty nature to churn up. In an air-conditioned police truck with Mai Charouenpura on the CD player and a little strawberry-shaped bottle of air freshener on the dash, the journey from one coast to the other would take us forty-five minutes. Chompu drove like a beast.
Involving the Pak Nam constabulary in my inquiry had been a calculated risk. If we stayed here, I mean if my family didn’t move away or if we weren’t all arrested for complicity in Mair’s revenge killing, I knew I’d need friends at the local police station. I decided to share my information about the Chainawat family, and invite the lieutenant along on the interview. It couldn’t hurt to have a policeman beside me. As he was now officially in charge of the VW investigation he decided it would be a lovely day for a drive and we both agreed it was such a picturesque route. He talked about the weather and the lack of excitement in Pak Nam and the joy of being in one of the last places on the planet where men all wore mustaches.
I took a chance and asked him about the progress in the Feuang Fa temple slaying. He turned his head to me with his mouth wide open and almost ran off the road.
“How could you possibly…?”
“I find things out,” I told him. “It’s my job.”
“But it’s ultra top secret.”
“I know.”
“I shall have to watch my mouth.”
“So…?”
“Off the record?”
“Of course, unless it’s really interesting.”
“It’s not. Believe me. Feuang Fa temple is slap in the middle of our jurisdiction. All right, perhaps not slap, but it’s certainly more ours than those crustaceans at Lang Suan. My word, they wouldn’t know what to do with a murder if it crept up their trouser legs and bit them on the you-know-what.”
“So Pak Nam should be running that inquiry too?”
“Yes. But what do you know? Bangkok, that cauldron of anarchy and fashion disasters, decides this is too high profile for us to handle. They send down a few plainclothes super-detectives, put a media blackout on the whole thing, set up Lang Suan as their center of operations, and pretend we don’t exist. Rude, if you ask me.”
“So they don’t give you any feedback?”
“Not a whimper. Major Mana goes into Lang Suan every day because, technically, we’re all supposed to be coordinating our efforts, sharing information. And we all know how that works, I don’t think. They treat him like a motorcycle messenger. It’s all take and take and no give. It’s our officers doing the legwork, the interviews, the paperwork, providing the local color, but they don’t tell us a monkey’s back end.”
“So why do you think they’ve blacked it out? Isn’t it just ‘Abbot gets killed in rural temple.’ ‘Another monk goes bad.’ Page two of the
“What do I think?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’ll tell you what I think. I think somebody is somebody.”
A statement like that probably wouldn’t have meant much to a non-Thai. But we lived in a country where being somebody, or being related to somebody, was far more relevant than what you did or how you did it. Sissi hadn’t got around to discovering what had caused the news blackout but the ‘connection’ angle was a likely one. During this great period of foolishness that pervaded in the capital, I could see a nod from a senior politician to a senior policeman suggesting, “We really don’t need any more bad press right now.” If either abbot was somebody’s brother or a member of a certain dynasty, there were those who’d exploit the connection for political gain. It would never work as a Hollywood movie plot device because nobody in the West would believe it, but it was one of the many cancerous growths in our culture and we’d come to expect it.
“Does your major tell you what snippets he’s picked up from Lang Suan?” I asked, ignoring the ‘somebody’ track for the time being.
“Well, like I say, they don’t give very much away, but Major Mana is livid. He thinks this case should be his career buster. He bitches about the whole thing. Before Bangkok came in and trampled all over us he’d handled all the initial statements, the crime scene photos, evidence searches, the lot.”
“You took photos?”
“Of course.”
“Can I see them sometime?”
“No.”
“Don’t be nasty.”
“No, I mean you can’t see them because they’re all gone, swept up in the great CSD evidence plunder. They even emptied our computer files and took our discs.”
“This sounds deep.”
“Doesn’t it.”
“Did you see the photos?”
“I’m afraid I did. I could never forget them. Blood’s never been my strong point.”
“Could you describe the scene to me?”
“Do I have to?”
“It might help.” Chompu pulled the truck over to the side of the road.
“What are we stopping for?”
“I need to use my hands.”
“To describe a crime scene.”
“It makes it more dramatic.”
“OK.”
“Well, he…the deceased, was lying facedown on the concrete path, feet pointing…it must have been east. His head was almost in the flower bed, blood puddled under him half a meter to either side.”
“What was his expression?”
“Couldn’t see it. His whole face was masked by his hat.”
“And his robes?”
“Normal enough. No wounds, no blood at the back. The major said he’d been stabbed at least a dozen times in the stomach.”
Chompu stabbed into the air in front of him.
“That sounds extreme.”
“We discussed that in the station once we were excluded from the loop. The frenzied stabbing ruled out a lot of small-time crimes. Unlikely to be a mugging, not that he’d have a lot of money on him. Unlikely the perpetrator was caught red-handed doing something he shouldn’t. Even a hired hit seemed unlikely. This was more a…a grievance. It was a hate killing, either of Abbot Winai personally or of what he represented.”
“Someone with a grievance against Buddhism?”
“It’s happened before.”
“What’s to hate about Buddhism? It’s the most nonviolent, forgiving religion there is.”
“You never can tell. A novice abused by a monk when he was young. Someone who believed his grandma was cremated before she was dead. An old feud. Land deeds. And, don’t forget, the temple’s quick to welcome ex- thises and thats into its fold without background checks. There are a lot of gangsters in saffron.”
“Was there anything in the evidence they took that might have pointed to a motive?”
“Nothing at all.”
“And that was the last you heard from Lang Suan?”
