strength of just an M? The course was one of those money-making schemes the Education Ministry had become so fond of. Learning for rich people. Knowledge by the cubic centimeter. “Need a top-up on that degree, madam?” I didn’t think it would be that long before they had slots you’d have to continuously feed with ten
But, anyway, our course was a weekender. Two days of classes and homework for the weekdays. Most of us were working Monday to Friday so you had twenty mature (said with a straight face) students like me with no social lives getting together at weekends to read out our essays on magical bloody realism in English and being critiqued by our peers. After three years of that, assuming you continued to pay your fees and could fight your way through a final dissertation that neither you nor the lecturers really understood, you ended up with a Master of Arts in Critical English. Stay with me. There is a point to this sidetrack.
One course was called Public Oration and Oral Improvisation. We called it Pooi for short. It was taught by an old ex-playboy Englishman who still thought he had what it took. He flirted a lot and held in his gut for an hour and a half. It must have been a relief for him to get home and breathe normally. At the beginning of the course he allotted everyone a case study. This came in the form of a famous person who gave a lot of speeches. The point was to select one of his or her speeches, or excerpts from several, and analyze the techniques following a style analysis chart handed out by the lecturer. I was envious of my friend, Ning, because she got Bill Gates and he kept his speeches simple to the point of sometimes dropping his audience into a coma. I was lumbered with George W. Bush. I tried to trade him for Condoleezza Rice. I’d always thought if an ethnic girl with the surname Rice could pull herself out of anonymity, we all could. But nobody wanted George, so for six months I studied the oratory skills of the President of the United States of America. And I hadn’t thought it was possible but Condoleezza was way down the if-this-one-can-make-it…inspiration table compared to George W. The poor man really wasn’t a public speaker and I wondered whether he could make real sentences in his private life. But George was a hit and I got an A for that course.
Now, that was a very long way around explaining where I’d heard the phrase ‘killed at the whim of a hat’. George was in Washington, D.C., and he’d fallen off the edge of the teleprompter again and he was caught somewhere between ‘on a whim’ and ‘at the drop of a hat’ and ended up with terrorists killing one another ‘at the whim of a hat.” I’d spent a fortnight trying to work out what it meant. But it was the first phrase that came to mind when I heard about the abbot’s orange hat. For some reason, weird as it may seem, I knew that hat had a bearing on the case.
Every log and shell and homicidal crab was picked out by the big full spotlight in front of me. I sat on the grassy lip where the sea had left off its sand supper last monsoon season. Gogo was beside me, absentmindedly munching at the hair on her haunches. I always got the feeling dogs had seen cats do it and thought it was cool without really grasping the concept. Dogs were all male when it came to cleanliness. It was midnight. I’d considered breaking open one of the wine bottles I’d brought with me from Chiang Mai but while I’d searched through the unopened packing cases for the missing corkscrew the question ‘Why should I?’ began to flash in front of me like a low-battery warning. Was I celebrating the comeback of crime journalist, Jimm Juree, or mourning the demise of my short-lived innocence? Would I be toasting the return of my hard-arsed self or bemoaning her arrival? Or perhaps I was hoping that, wine-drunk on a grayscale beach, I would no longer see those forty-six photographs in color. I thought that big, almost-full saucer in the sky — just a chip off the underside — might help me to think, to have something to tell Arny the next morning. Something more satisfying than:
“It’s work.”
But it just hung there and drained me of all my excuses and, for the second time in three days, I cried my eyes out in front of a dog.
I handed over the camera to Major Mana the next morning. I’d exchanged greetings with Sergeant Phoom at the desk and he’d waved me up. Mana was in his office talking on his cell phone. It was something personal judging from how he put his hand over the phone and turned to the window when I appeared in his doorway. He didn’t seem terribly pleased to see me. He finished his conversation and nodded for me to come in. I put the camera in its plastic bag on his desk.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“Me, scratching your back,” I said. “I think this might be the camera nobody lost.”
I told him how and where I’d found it earlier that morning and that I wouldn’t mind at all if he took credit for its discovery. I expounded my theory that the mystery person who’d called asking if anyone had retrieved a forensic camera from the crime scene, might, in fact, have been the killer himself trying to find a camera dropped during the attack. I could only hint that the dogs may have frightened the killer away as I obviously couldn’t tell him I’d already looked at the photos.
Major Mana looked decidedly unenthusiastic about my theory. He thanked me for bringing in the camera and gave me a brief lecture on the importance of not touching evidence, as if the plastic bag had been a stroke of luck on my part.
“Should we take a look?” I asked. I felt that a journalist who’d recovered a camera should be excited about what was on it.
“At what?” he said.
“The pictures on the camera. They might be important.”
“Ah, no. We need to process the camera first.”
“Process it?”
“Check it for fingerprints and trace elements, you know…blood, fluids. We don’t have those facilities so we’d need to send it to Lang Suan who in turn would take it to Chumphon.”
“Aren’t you just a little bit curious to see what’s on it?” I asked. “You know, once you send it to Lang Suan they won’t share their findings with you.”
“Of course they will.”
“All you’d have to do is turn it on and take a look. You’d be perfectly justified.”
“There’s certain…protocol.”
“Really?”
“I promise, as soon as Lang Suan reveals the contents of this camera I shall pass the information on to you. I haven’t forgotten our deal.”
That pretty much confirmed that I wouldn’t be getting any useful inside information from my major. I thanked him for his cooperation and
“My journalist. I’ve missed you. Doughnut?”
I sat opposite him and broke off a limb of dough.
“I wasn’t expecting you all to be in so early,” I confessed.
“Are you joking? Two murder inquiries? The province has sent us oil tankers full of overtime money. We’re supposed to be on call. If Lang Suan needs a manicure or a change of light bulbs, we’ll be there. You watch.”
“I just stopped off at the major’s office. He didn’t seem pleased to see me.”
“You probably interrupted his Amway dealings. Direct sales of unwanted products for the discerning housewife.”
“He sells Amway?”
“Not a lot of income from bribes down here. He has to make his money in other dishonest ways.”
“How was the crime lab?”
“Useless and marvelous. How was Surat?”
The creep. How could he possibly know I went to Surat?
“If you’ve fitted a GPS device to the bottom of our truck I’ll — ”
“Tsk, tsk, little scribe. I’ve had a requisition for staples in the system for three months. How long do you think it would take me to produce a tracking device? You really should stop watching all that televised American junk. It’s all made up, you know?”
“Then how do you know I went to Surat? You’re starting to give me the willies, Lieutenant.”
“It’s all very simple. Imagine a world where there are no strangers, where everybody is either related or acquainted.”
