The front left-hand tinted window of the four-wheel drive wound down with the even pace of an electronic device. A swarthy man in dark sunglasses leaned out, an elbow resting on the edge. He called – Singh heard him – “Som!”
The amputee turned around. The man slung an AK-47 – even from a hundred metres away Singh recognised the wooden stock and curved ammunition cartridge – over the sill. Without pausing, ignoring Som’s sudden panicked cry for help as he realised what was about to happen, the man opened fire. Within seconds, although it felt a lot longer to Singh, who was still running, hadn’t stopped running, the man retreated into the vehicle and sped off, spitting gravel into the air.
Singh reached the spot. The amputee was lying on the ground, his body a network of bullet holes. Blood flowed from Som’s body through the cracks and crevices on the ground like minor tributaries from a great river.
He was quite, quite dead.
Singh squatted down on his haunches next to the body. He covered his face in his hands. He could hear screaming but it seemed to come from a long way away. It appeared that Som’s information was very valuable indeed. It had just cost him his life.
Thirteen
“You were only gone for a couple of hours,” complained Colonel Menhay. “And you managed to get some poor bastard killed.”
Singh felt a sudden childish urge to stick his fingers into his ears – to block out the criticism from the colonel. More importantly, to try and shut out the echoes of Som’s screams when he had seen the machine gun, screams that were first drowned out and then silenced by the rapid fire of the weapon. The policeman feared that it would take quite some time before he could put that animal sound of terror behind him.
He tried to focus on the here and now, to put Som’s death out of his mind except as a case to be solved. He was a policeman – he needed to pull himself together. Unfortunately, the cold hard reality was that he, Singh, murder expert, had never actually seen anyone killed before. His role was to arrive at the scene of death in the aftermath, ready to take charge and play the hero. To be there at the kill had been a stomach-churning experience and one he didn’t want repeated – ever.
His thoughts turned to Sovann and how she had explained her composed behaviour when confronted with Huon’s corpse; that she had seen too much death, too much dying, to be knocked out of kilter by such a discovery. Well, he had seen death, but seeing the dying was a quite different experience. He dragged himself back to the matter at hand. “Som must have had important information about Huon.”
“Possibly,” agreed Menhay. “But even informants have enemies.”
“You’re suggesting he might have been killed for something unrelated to the Huon investigation?”
“We should not ignore any possibilities.”
“Really – do you want me to take into account the possibility that he was killed by little green men from Mars?”
Menhay appeared unmoved by the lame attempt at sarcasm. “Your eye-witness testimony seems to exclude that possibility,” he remarked.
Singh had described as fully as he could the dark vehicle with the tinted glass, the missing plates and the swarthy man, his features in shadows, his eyes hidden behind shades, his hands gloved. It had been hopeless and he knew it. On the quiet drive back to the police station, he had counted half a dozen vehicles and even more men who fitted that description. “Som called us, we agreed to meet,” he insisted stubbornly. “Someone killed him before he could divulge what he knew. There’s a connection to this case, I guarantee it.”
Menhay steepled his fingers and peered at Singh over the top. “Even if I agree,” he said, “what do you want me to do about it?”
“Trace the weapon?”
Menhay laughed out loud, a sudden crack with no humour in it. “This country is awash with AK-47s. That gun is in a ditch somewhere, not resting by our killer’s bedside table.”
There wasn’t much Singh could do to contradict Menhay’s analysis. He glanced at Chhean. She was sitting on a chair in a corner of the room, her eyes huge and dark in a pale face. She had been violently sick when she saw Som’s body, riddled with holes like a sieve. Apparently, bullets were no longer scarce in Cambodia. Fortunately, she had the good sense to make a dash for the bushes beforehand and hadn’t contaminated the scene. Not that there appeared to be much information to be derived from the body or the vicinity of the crime.
“I’m sure it was a contract killing anyway,” added the colonel. His jaw clenched. “Probably, it was an off-duty policeman. Anyway, there won’t be any traceable link between the killer and whoever ordered the hit.”
No traceable link. A small part of Singh was convinced that Menhay wasn’t trying hard enough, throwing up obstacles instead of thinking of ways to further the investigation. Mostly, he understood that the colonel was just being honest with him. The inspector scratched his beard directly under his lower lip – it always itched when he was feeling the pressure. There were no leads. That was the reality. Som had been killed and it looked like whoever did it was going to get away with murder. His only hope was to prove a link to the killing of Huon – and trace the murderer, and his master, that way.
“Where is Sovann?” he asked.
“Still in the lock-up.”
“And you don’t think that Som’s death changes anything?”
“I don’t think it wipes her fingerprints from the murder weapon – no.” Menhay added in a resolute voice, “Tomorrow, I’m going to charge her with Huon’s murder. That’s it. Case closed. The Cambodian police force would like to extend its thanks to our ASEAN colleagues from Singapore for their assistance.”
Singh ground his teeth with frustration. He wondered whether it was audible to the other man. At this rate, he’d soon be down to yellow stumps like the rest of the population. This Cambodian colonel was like a piece of granite, immovable from his position. But if Menhay thought that he was going to accept his diktat, he was in for a nasty surprise. A sudden recollection of his secondary school physics gave the inspector some comfort. What was it the cigarette-smoking, chalk-throwing Mr Wong used to say – moving an object was not a question of mass but of leverage? Very well, he knew what he was looking for now – some, any, leverage. He spared a last thought for Som. The killing fields of Choeng Ek – what a place to die.
♦
The next morning, Singh was awoken from a troubled sleep by his telephone ringing. He dragged himself upright with difficulty, propping the pillow up behind him. His muscles were stiff with shock at the events of the previous day: a disconcerting similarity to the dead man, thought Singh, who was presumably in an advanced state of rigor mortis by now. The hotel room was in pitch darkness but that could be a consequence of the heavy curtains which excluded all light. He was so disorientated by recent events that it could be high noon for all he knew.
Singh fumbled for the phone while glancing at the luminous digital clock on the bedside table. It was only seven a.m. – who would call him at that hour? He really, really hoped it wasn’t his wife with news of the death, from natural causes, of some distant elderly relative by marriage. He wasn’t in the mood to give a damn about peaceful deaths at an advanced age. Not here in Cambodia.
He picked up the receiver reluctantly. The voice at the other end was young and excited. “Inspector Singh – is that you? Are you awake?”
What sort of question was that to ask a person after ringing them at dawn? wondered Singh. He snapped, “Who is this?”
“Kar Savuth – the pathologist on the Huon case.”
He should have recognised the high-pitched voice at once. It was the absence of the usual underlying snideness which had thrown him off the scent. Perhaps Savuth’s customary bad attitude, like Singh’s powers of deduction, only kicked in after his third cup of coffee.
“What do you want?” he grunted. He was a fat, turban-less man who had slept badly. Savuth had better have a good reason for calling so early or he was going to get an earful from Singh. The insp
ector was not a morning person at the best of times, his wife would testify to that.
“You remember you asked me to have another look at the fingerprint evidence?”
“Yes.” He tried to inject a note of regret into the single word. He certainly wouldn’t have asked for a second opinion if he had known that it would arrive with the sun.
“The fingerprints belong to Sovann Armstrong. I double-checked.”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” he growled.
“Angle of entry!”
“What?”
“The angle of entry of the knife – the knife went straight in. A horizontal line.” Savuth’s voice was no more than a squeak of excitement now.
“What in God’s name are you talking about?” Singh scratched his head with blunt fingers since he hadn’t put his turban on yet. It made a change from scratching his beard but it still reflected a state of increased aggravation.
“The deceased was five feet and five inches tall. I would estimate that Sovann Armstrong is about five foot and two inches tall.”
“Is this a height competition? If I take part am I allowed to wear my turban?”
The pathologist greeted this remark with a gale of laughter. Singh held the receiver away from his ear and missed the rest of Savuth’s explanation on the relevance of height differentials. He was waking up slowly although his eyes were almost caked shut with early-morning grime, a sure sign of a very disturbed sleep. He suddenly remembered his recurrent nightmare – it was him that had been shot instead of Som, the pattern of holes on his body like a constellation of stars at night. However, instead of blood, he had oozed disgusting yellow sticky fat from the wounds. He had woken up in a cold sweat with the voice of Dr Maniam ringing in his ears – the Singapore pathologist explaining to his giggling colleagues that he had feared what would happen if the inspector didn’t go on a diet.
Singh shuddered and turned his attention back to Savuth. “What’s that you said? I missed it,” he barked.
He listened to the pathologist with growing interest, nodding his head repeatedly, forgetting his unpleasant dreams. “That’s very interesting,” he said at last. “I’ll explain to Menhay and call you at some point – I suspect he’ll think I made the whole thing up.”
Singh put the phone down, clambered to his feet, tied his sarong more tightly around his waist and walked to the sink where he splashed cold water over his face. He needed to be sure that he was awake and not in the throes of another bizarre dream. He thought about what the young man had said – it was a fascinating theory, capable of any number of alternative explanations, of course, but still suggestive. Singh was prepared to rely on a bit of conjecture if it supported his paradigm. Often it came to nothing, but once in a while it was the loose thread from which he could unravel an entire mystery.
♦
His teeth brushed, his shirt pocket well supplied with pens, his turban tightly wound around his head, Singh presented himself at Colonel Menhay’s office like a schoolboy looking for approval. The colonel was unprepared for good cheer from the Sikh inspector whom he had last seen dragging himself back to the hotel; shaken by Som’s shooting and angry at Menhay for refusing to see the incident as an indication of Sovann’s possible innocence.
“Why are you in such a good mood?” queried Menhay.
“Another day, new ideas, new avenues for investigation…” explained Singh with a broad smile.
“Let’s hope some of your ‘new avenues’ live long enough to see ‘another day’,” said Menhay and then felt a stab of guilt at the shadow that flitted across the fat man’s face. It was unnecessary to remind this desk jockey masquerading as a murder cop of the events of the previous day. Menhay had first seen someone gunned down in cold blood so long ago that the memory of that incident had faded. It dated from when he had heeded Sihanouk’s call and fled into the jungles to join Pol Pot’s revolutionary forces. He had been an idealistic young man, real fire in his belly for taking on the American puppet government in Phnom Penh.
In some ways, he was still puzzled by the fact that he had not been swept away by Brother N°1’s revolutionary ideology. He had been precisely the sort of young man who soon lost sight of the cruelty of the means in a zealot’s conviction of the worthiness of the ends. Looking back, he decided that it had been the simple kindness his Buddhist mother had always shown to all creatures: four-legged, two-legged, winged. He had never been able to see his fellow Khmer as just ciphers in a grand strategy. They had been people to him, individuals, and he had seen their pain and felt their suffering. So he had risked death and torture to flee to Southern Vietnam and join the small band of exiled Cambodian soldiers, biding his time, waiting for an opportunity to avenge his people. And his moment had come. He had been part of the army that liberated Phnom Penh. It had been too late to save his mother or the rest of his brothers and sisters. They had all perished of disease and starvation. Seven of them. A neighbour had told him that his mother had always believed that he would return in triumph to save them. She had waited as long as she could but he had not been in time.
“What are you thinking about?” demanded Singh. “Have you had any leads?”
Menhay shook his head, hoping the other man could not see that his eyes were wet. That would be very embarrassing indeed, especially as he had just been mentally mocking the Sikh for not being sufficiently hardened, despite his job title, to the reality of murder. He said firmly, “I thought I told you it was ‘case closed’?”
“I had a call from Savuth this morning.”
“The pathologist? What did he want?”
“He looked at the forensic evidence again.”
“Why would he do that?” Menhay’s glance was as sharp as a well-honed knife.
“Er…I asked him to – just to be on the safe side.”
“You’re still trying to save Sovann – even though she gave us the motive out of her own mouth?” Menhay felt a sudden weariness sweep through his body. How dogmatic could this policeman be?
“Savuth says that the angle of entry of the knife was horizontal – it went in perfectly straight.”
“So?”
“Sovann Armstrong was only slightly shorter than Huon. If she stabbed him, her arm would have been higher than his chest. To inflict a wound to the heart, the angle of entry would have been sharply downwards.”
Menhay, elbows on the table, buried his face in his hands.
The fat policeman stood up and mimicked a downward stabbing action. “You see? Her blow would have been much less straight.”
“Or he slipped, or his false leg fell off, or he stood on tiptoes or he was lying on the ground or she jumped at him.” Menhay was gob-smacked that the policeman from Singapore was prepared to rely on such tenuous evidence. This was less credible than the wisdom dispensed by Cambodian witchdoctors.
“Look, I agree there are a hundred alternative explanations,” said Singh. “But what Kar Savuth has done is given you one that is consistent with Sovann’s innocence, not her guilt.”
Menhay was silent and the other man read it as an invitation to continue. “I don’t know Sovann Armstrong very well. But my instincts tell me that she is not the sort to commit murder. She’s more like one of those long-suffering types with enormous quiet strength of character.”
The colonel was suddenly thoughtful. The way Singh described Sovann Armstrong reminded him of his own mother of whom he had been thinking just a few short minutes ago. She had not been beautiful like Sovann, a plain-faced sturdy woman carrying the produce of their small plot of land to market every day. But she too had been a kindly woman with quiet strength. She would never have murdered someone – not in cold blood.
“Maybe you’re right,” he admitted grudgingly. “You should keep sniffing around.”
Singh smiled broadly.
“But no more bodies,” warned Menhay and received an agreeable nod as if it was within the Sikh’s powers to prevent any further killings.
The telephone
on his desk rang and the colonel answered it. In a few seconds he hung up and crossed his eyes at the inspector, feeling much more charitable towards him upon the appearance of a common enemy. “It’s Adnan Muhammad, he wants to see us.”
♦
Adnan Muhammad had been placed in a small waiting room with slightly cleaner walls than those in the interview room. Despite this, his expression was that of a fastidious man who was offended by his surroundings. The appearance of Singh and Menhay did not seem to improve his mood. Chhean, who had caught up with the policemen after another few thankless hours trawling through documents, was not sure she entirely blamed him. The two men together reinforced the first impression of each – that they were stubborn men who found it difficult to knuckle down before authority, especially as represented by the mouthpieces of multi-lateral organisations.
Adnan attempted a smile which reminded Chhean of the expression on a child’s face when it bites into something sour.
“How is it going, gentlemen?”
The quick shrug of the shoulders from both men, in unison like heavy-set synchronised swimmers, appeared to annoy him. His nostrils flared slightly but he persevered. “I heard you made an arrest yesterday.”
That was not exactly a secret, thought Chhean dismissively. The morning’s newspapers were filled with details of the colourful raid on the Raffles Le Royal the previous day. The editorials were in two minds whether this was a spectacular success by the Cambodian police or a spectacular cock-up. She glanced at the two policemen – they represented both viewpoints.
Menhay nodded woodenly in response. “Yes, we have arrested a woman – a Cambodian American. We are considering pressing charges.” He glanced at the inspector, who was looking at him pleadingly. “We need a bit more time to tie up loose ends.”
Chhean sensed rather than saw the tension go out of the fat man. He was still hoping there was another solution.
If Adnan was impressed that the investigation had already resulted in an arrest, he hid it well. “Interesting,” he mused. “I would not have thought this was a woman’s crime.”
A Deadly Cambodian Crime Spree Page 16
