Love Songs From a Shallow Grave by Colin Cotterill Page A

know. Thank you.”
    Siri sent the man back to the queue. He’d heard exactly what he was hoping for. If the towel had been on her lap when she was killed it would have been as bloody as hell. It would have soaked up several litres of blood. But it hadn’t. The only explanation was that the killer had placed the towel across her lap after he’d killed her for modesty. It was a polite, very Lao gesture at the end of an horrific, very un-Lao murder. And it left Siri with no idea of what kind of killer he should be looking for.
    The doctor returned to the sauna and processed this new information as he sat on the wooden bench. He felt a presence in the little room, not vivid enough to be described as a visitation and several layers away from communication as if it stood behind five plates of opaque glass. But he was sure Dew’s spirit was there. The girl who had died with a smile on her face and a question mark above her head was trying to get in touch but neither he nor she knew how to go about it.
    “If you have anything to tell me,” he said quietly, “now would be a really good time.”
    But, if she did, she kept it to herself and Siri, as frustrated by the spirit world as ever, walked out of the sauna and into a deluge of rain that darted accusingly like index fingers out of the black clouds. He could have taken shelter beneath the carport but it was full of soldiers so he jogged with blind conviction out of the gate and into the street. By the time he reached the house opposite he was already two kilograms heavier from the water soaked into his clothes. Beneath the porch roof a man in his early fifties sat on a breeze block with a broom leaning against the front door of the house beside him. Siri joined him and they both laughed.
    “Looks like it might rain,” the man said. He was slight but muscular, with skin as brown as lacquered teak. A weather-beaten Vietnamese peasant hat sat on the balcony in front of him.
    “Rain? Feels more like ball bearings,” Siri corrected him. They laughed again. Siri sat on the front step beside the man and squirmed in his wet underwear. “Been busy?”
    “Can’t get much done in this weather,” the man said. “The radio seems to think there are monsoons queued up like bicycle taxis just over the border,”
    Despite his appearance, the man spoke with a certain refinement and an almost unperceivable tinge of an accent. Siri recalled a conversation he’d had with the king before he was sent north. This man had a similar way about him, a modest class.
    “Is this your house?” Siri asked. It was an unnecessary question because the extended buttocks bushes were overgrown and knocking at the windows and the lawn grass was taller than the average goat. The man laughed.
    “No, sir,” he said. “I work here at K6. I’m Miht. I look after the verges and the trees. Cut the odd lawn every now and then. I’d need a chainsaw for this one, mind.”
    To Siri’s ear, the word ‘sir’ had come reluctantly from the man’s lips.
    “Been working here long?” he asked.
    “More than ten years now.”
    “That long? So, you’d remember the good old American days.”
    “That I would.”
    “I thought that generation of Lao servants had all left along with the USAID people.”
    “And you’d be right. The cooks, the housekeepers and drivers, most of them fled. But, to tell the truth, I didn’t have anywhere to go. I was just a handyman around the place. I didn’t work specifically for any family. I imagine the Pathet Lao didn’t see me as a threat. There are half a dozen of us old-timers still working here.”
    “They pay you?”
    “Rice ration, sir. Free room to sleep in. Can’t complain.”
    They chewed on sweet stems of grass and watched the restless Vietnamese soldiers opposite.
    “What a performance, eh?” Siri said.
    “You’re with the police?”
    “No, brother.”
    “Really? I thought I saw you arrive with the police.”
    “And so you did. I’m the coroner, Siri