White Crocodile

by Medina, KT

  The throng of Khmers were heading into Battambang centre, and she followed them, letting herself be carried along by the flow, making no conscious choices about where she was going, what she was going to do. In the centre of the bridge over the Sanger, she stopped, tilting forward over the concrete parapet – in almost exactly the same place she had stood a few days ago – watching the early morning light play across the muddy water, feeling sacks and bags brushing against her back as people shuffled past.

  Tess knew that she should go to the hospital, find Ret S’Mai and try and get him to talk one way or the other. But she felt as if she could more easily drop over the parapet of this bridge and walk on the water below her than do anything constructive; as if all the energy had been sucked out of her by the fifteen minutes she’d spent in MacSween’s office.

  The morning was scorching and even standing in the centre of the bridge, soft gusts of cooler air from the surface of the water eddying around her, she was boiling in sweat. Though she pressed herself against the parapet, she was still jostled by the people passing behind her. She felt like turning around and yelling at them all to keep their distance, but on another level she knew that she was safe in their company, both physically and mentally. Slumping down on the road, ignoring the surprised looks of passers-by, she pulled off her combat boots and socks, stuffed a sock into each boot, tied the laces together and hung them over her shoulder. The tarmac was chill against her bare soles as she pushed herself to her feet; it had trapped the night’s cool.

  She started to walk again, turning left when she reached the end of the bridge, away from the Riverside Balcony Bar and its rowdy breakfast crowd, away from the centre of town.

  If Jakkleson had been lured out to Crocodile Mountain and killed, it meant that her own life was in danger too. She experienced an almost overwhelming urge to go straight back to her apartment and pack her things – just as Alex had told her to do – go to the bus station and catch a bus to Phnom Penh. Go home before you no longer can. Six hours by road, enough distance, surely, to put her out of harm’s way. She could be there by dinnertime, check into one of the faceless city-centre hotels and become just another anonymous tourist until she could book a flight back to England.

  Run away. She thought about running away and then she thought about Luke as she had last seen him, a tiny figure on the doorstep of their house. The couple of phone calls they had shared since, shouting over the interference on the line. The knowledge that he had been frightened; that she had dismissed his fears. And what of Johnny? Jakkleson? What of that little girl who had tried to warn her about the White Crocodile?

  A young Khmer man with bleached blond hair and multiple ear piercings appeared in front of her suddenly, holding out a flyer with a picture of a boat on the front.

  ‘Boat trip. See beautiful countryside.’

  He pointed towards a wooden boat, painted in blue and yellow, tied up to a jetty on the river. The boat was about thirty feet long, an old wooden tub which would have been long since mothballed in a richer country. There was no inside, just a flat deck with a multicoloured sunshade stretched over it.

  ‘No. Thank you.’

  ‘Please come. Lots of fun. Come beautiful lady.’

  Without making eye contact, she tried to move past him; he sidestepped in front of her. ‘Only two dollar. Two dollar, four hours. No better deal, whole of Battambang. Lot of other tourists.’

  She was about to say, ‘I’m not a tourist,’ but she stopped herself. She looked past him to the other passengers seated on the benches under the awning – only six of them. Two of them, a girl and boy aged about twenty, Gandhi pants and dreadlocks, were poring over a copy of Cambodia on a Shoestring; the others, three men and a woman, each sitting separately from each other, clearly not yet acquainted, wearing the ubiquitous traveller’s uniform of grungy T-shirt and multi-pocketed shorts. Normality. In some form at least. And space to think. To clear her mind, make some logical decisions.

  Sliding her boots off her shoulder and lowering them to the ground, she rooted around in her pocket, held out her two dollars to the bleached-haired man.

  ‘Good choice beautiful lady. You have wonderful day.’

  *

  The boat motored at a snail’s pace through a series of shabby, untended suburbs – if you could call them that – of crumbling white-painted concrete houses mixed with traditional bamboo huts, women washing clothes, krama scarves wrapped around their heads to protect them from the sun, naked children splashing and swimming, the rubbish collected in reeds on either side of the river petering out as they left the buildings behind and floated into the countryside. The dreadlocked hippies were keeping to themselves, but the other four had formed a group at the stern and were chatting and laughing, sharing cans of beer that one of them had brought in his rucksack.

  Resting her chin on the side of the boat, Tess watched the banks slip by: paddy field after paddy field terraced up the side of low hills, the workers harvesting the rice dots of primary colour among the intense emerald of the rice plants; a tiny village of crooked bamboo huts on stilts, deserted except for a couple of old people sitting in doorways in the sun, a few chickens pecking in the dirt, and a pack of tiny children who kept pace with the boat for a couple of hundred metres, running along the bank, shouting and waving. They passed a small wat set incongruously in the middle of a field, a couple of monks in orange robes drifting between the temple’s intricately carved pillars like spirits. It was stunning countryside, peaceful and unworldly, and she realised that she had never had a chance to look at rural Cambodia like this – just look – with no other motive than to absorb and enjoy.

  Would she let herself be driven out of Battambang, out of this beautiful, complex country? Thwarted by some five-hundred-year-old myth?

  Her feelings for Luke were so confused that even here, sitting quietly, able to think, to reason undisturbed, she still couldn’t order the emotions in her mind. She had loved him once, with an intensity that even at the time she had realised was obsessive, driven by a need to cling to someone, to call them her own. And he had reciprocated, driven by a similar need. He had loved and needed her every bit as much as she had loved and needed him – she was certain of that. But he had also callously exploited her weakness. And now? There was no love left, but there was memory and because of that a muddled, desperate kind of loyalty.

  She was her father’s daughter too, in the end: the formative years of being motherless, of having him as her sole influence, were more deeply implanted in her than she cared to admit. For a whole host of reasons, she knew that she wouldn’t be able to live comfortably in her own skin if she ran now. She would always be wondering what would have happened if she had stayed.

  What was so vitally important here that so many people had to die?

  37

  Manchester, England

  Eleven p.m., and though the night had hardly begun for them, even the prostitutes and drug dealers occupying their patches on Cheetham Hill Road looked cold and weary. Wessex pulled his collar up around his face, glancing up at the snowflakes drifting down from the orange halo cast by the sodium-vapour street light above him. Viles was sitting across the road in a twenty-four-hour kebab joint, reading the Manchester Evening News and dragging out a can of Diet Coke and a doner. Wessex caught her eye through the grubby plate-glass window and gave her an almost imperceptible nod.

  The brothel was in an Edwardian terrace, jammed between a shuttered grocer’s on one side and a branch of Barclays Bank on the other. The only thing marking it out as a brothel was the fact that the facade bore years of city grime and the curtains, a dull shade of crimson, were crying out for a makeover. A Volvo estate was parked outside, its front wheel on the kerb, as if its driver had been in a hurry. Wessex locked eyes with the stuffed bunny discarded on the child seat in the back.

  His phone rang.

  ‘Wessex.’

  ‘Jane Percival.’ She sounded livelier than he felt. ‘Sorry for the lateness of
the hour, Detective Inspector. But I know you’ve been burning the candle at both ends on this case anyway, so I wanted to tell you straight away. We’ve had a result from our blood test, and from the DNA ancestry test.’

  He moved over to the side of the pavement, cupping his hand to his mouth and lowering his voice. ‘Great. Go ahead.’

  ‘The blood sample showed traces of diazepam – Valium.’

  ‘So she was drugged forcibly?’

  ‘It’s impossible to know how it was administered. She may have been a habitual user.’

  ‘And the DNA test?’

  ‘Well, I didn’t get very far with our in-house DNA testing. South East Asia was all they told me. I thought you might want it narrowed down a bit more than that. Seeing as you have nothing else to go on.’

  ‘Right.’ It felt uncomfortable to be reminded. ‘And?’

  ‘And I won’t bore you with too many details because I appreciate that you’re standing on a pavement freezing your nibs off. But I remembered a forensics conference I went to last year. We had a speaker, a professor, from the Research Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment at University College London. He was talking about advances in genetic testing, most of it way beyond our meagre budget of course.’

  ‘Go on.’ It was all he could do to stop his teeth chattering.

  ‘The professor was talking about a couple of projects they were doing in conjunction with the University of California and Chiang Mai University in Thailand, identifying the key genetic markers in different language groups in that region. Thai speakers, Malay speakers, Khmer speakers, etc.’

  A car shot past, too close to the kerb, its radio thumping R & B; Wessex leapt back as muddy slush mushroomed up.

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sorry, nothing. Just got a drenching. Go on, go on.’

  ‘Khmer. Our girl was a Khmer speaker.’

  ‘She’s from Cambodia?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘OK. Thanks, Jane. I really appreciate you pushing the boat out for me on this one. Call if you get anything else.’ Flicking the telephone shut, he dropped it into his coat pocket.

  ‘Cambodia,’ he muttered, walking back across the pavement to the dirty white-painted front door. He knew nothing about it; just a faint trace of its history under the Khmer Rouge. He had visions of a subsistence existence, ox carts and paddy fields, people who could barely afford a bowl of rice to eat, let alone a plane ticket to England.

  The brothel owner, standing behind a makeshift Formica counter in the narrow hallway, was mid-fifties, rat-thin, with bad teeth and a shaven head. He didn’t look like a healthy man. Wessex would be surprised if his skin, grey-white as a rain-heavy sky, had ever glimpsed the sun.

  He had to pay up front; fifty quid, no questions asked.

  The attic room he was sent to had aubergine-coloured walls and a threadbare seventies carpet, a psychedelic pattern of aubergine and yellow swirls. The only furniture in the room was a double bed that sagged in the middle and a heavy dark wood rocking chair in the corner. Pinching the threadbare piece of material covering the bed – a ‘throw’ it would probably have been called in a more salubrious setting – between the tips of his index finger and thumb, he peeled it off and tossed it on to the floor. Years ago, he had watched a programme during which scientists had tested furnishings in a typical three-star town-centre hotel – a seaside town somewhere down south, he couldn’t remember the name – to see what substances they harboured. The sheets had been clean, but the bed cover had carried seventeen different types of sperm and twenty-six of urine. You could quadruple that in this kind of establishment and still fall woefully short.

  Sitting down on the side of the bed, he lowered his head to his hands and sucked in a couple of deep breaths, trying to rid himself of the knot of tension in his stomach.

  There was a knock on the door. He looked up.

  38

  Leaving her boots at the top of the bank, Tess picked her way back down towards the river. The afternoon on the boat had been lovely, and she had no compulsion or desire to be anywhere else. She stopped and sat when she reached the wall of reeds hemming the water. The noise of the Riverside Balcony Bar hummed behind her. In front of her, the Sanger silently reflected the lights of central Battambang: dancing orange fires from the food stalls, the white beam of a motorcycle headlight sweeping along the road at the top of the bank, the steady yellow glow from windows.

  She had returned from the trip an hour earlier and nipped into the Balcony Bar for dinner, choosing a quiet corner table and sitting with her back to the room, so that no one would be tempted to engage her in conversation. She could have killed for a steak with pepper sauce, but they had run out and what was left on the menu was traditional Cambodian dishes or a selection of right-on traveller food: vegetable stews, salads and stir-fries. She settled for a Khmer curry of chicken, sweet potato and pumpkin in a coconut milk sauce, and a bottle of Kingdom beer. When they arrived, she polished them off in five minutes – she hadn’t eaten since breakfast at 6 a.m. and realised, after the first spoonful, that she was starving. After dinner she ordered another bottle of beer and carried it back down the stairs.

  Wiggling her toes, she wormed them into the silty earth of the riverbank. It was quiet here, the air warm and still. A faint smell of sewage rose from the water below her. She closed her eyes and tuned in to the sound of the river slipping by – and then another noise, footsteps on the embankment behind her. She looked around, saw Alex making his way towards her out of the darkness.

  ‘Hello, Tess.’ He sat down.

  ‘Hello, Alex,’ she said coolly.

  ‘How are you doing?’

  ‘Good, thanks. Just escaping—’ She broke off with a shrug, letting the words hang in the air. ‘Enjoying the view. It’s beautiful down here.’

  ‘Yeah, it is beautiful.’ His voice was soft.

  She glanced over. His shirt was unbuttoned. Quickly, she traced her gaze down the smooth muscles of his chest and stomach, to the butt of his Browning sticking out from his belt. He was sitting too close. She could smell him. She leaned back against the bank, edging away a little, and cast her eyes along the river again following the darkness to where it transitioned to streets and lights.

  ‘How did you know where I was?’

  ‘I’ve been looking for you. I had just given up and was walking home, when I found these at the top of the bank.’

  He held up her boots; she took them from him.

  ‘Breadcrumbs.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Nothing. Just a fairy story.’

  ‘Oh.’ He nodded, not understanding.

  ‘Why were you looking for me?’

  ‘I wanted to talk to you.’

  She looked back down at her toes. The nails were blackened with mud. There were two lines of tiny dents on the bank where she had wormed them into the soil.

  ‘The police want to interview all of us tomorrow. MacSween has suspended the operation. No more clearing until all this shit is sorted out.’ He paused. ‘One way or another.’

  ‘Until someone catches the White Crocodile.’

  ‘Until we catch it.’

  ‘There is no we.’ She looked him in the eyes. ‘How did you know that I was Luke’s wife, Alex? I didn’t think anyone knew.’

  ‘I don’t think anyone else does know,’ he said casually, his gaze drifting away from hers.

  ‘So how do you?’

  He didn’t speak for a long moment. Tess waited, watching him, the doubt written in his features.

  ‘Tell me.’

  With a sigh, he reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet. Flipping it open, he slipped out a folded sheet of paper and dropped it into her lap. The paper was thin, pale yellow, faded white at the creases. Though she didn’t need to – she already knew exactly what it was – Tess picked it up and slowly unfolded it. A photo-booth photograph was stapled to the top right-hand corner of the paper: her tongue
stuck out, red hair in pigtails, too much lipstick on, ‘I love you, Luke’ scrawled across the page, a big heart slashing through the words. She remembered writing it the day before they got married, remembered scrawling the heart in thick red ink. She looked up. Alex held her gaze for a brief moment before looking away. Refolding the paper, she threw it back at him.

  ‘Where did you get that?’

  ‘Luke showed it to me once when we were in a bar together.’ His voice was little more than a whisper. ‘Not long before he died.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He was drunk. He never talked about his private life because he didn’t think it was anyone else’s business. He had told us that he was single.’ Tipping his head back, he stared up at the starry sky. ‘Though he lied about that.’

  Tess nudged her hand against his thigh. ‘Tell me, Alex.’

  ‘He was—’ He turned to look at her. ‘Melancholy, I suppose.’

  ‘Why? Why was he melancholy?’

  ‘He used to get like that. He was very aware of his own mortality. Afraid of dying.’

  ‘Did he know? Did he know he was going to die?’

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t think about it at the time, but looking back, maybe he did.’ He met her gaze; shadows filled his eyes. ‘Probably. Probably he did.’

  ‘How did you get my letter?’

  ‘MacSween had Luke’s landlady pack his stuff into boxes. He put them in the cellar at MCT House because he didn’t know what else to do with Luke’s things. I went through them, took your letter.’