Colin Cotterill - The Coroners Lunch

Colin Cotterill

The Coroners Lunch

The first book in the Dr Siri Paiboun series

2004

In Laos in the year 1976, the monarchy has been deposed, and the Communist Pathet Lao have taken over. Most of the educated class has fled, but Dr Siri Paiboun, a Paris-trained doctor remains. And so this 72-year-old physician is appointed state coroner, despite having no training, equipment, experience or even inclination for the job. But the jobs not that bad and Siri quickly settles into a routine of studying outdated medical texts, scrounging scarce supplies, and circumnavigating bureaucratic red tape to arrive at justice. The fact that the recently departed are prone to pay Siri the odd, unwanted nocturnal visit turns out to be an added bonus in his new line of work. But when the wife of a party leader turns up dead and the bodies of tortured Vietnamese soldiers start bobbing to the surface of a Laotian lake, all eyes turn to Siri. Faced with official cover-ups and an emerging international crisis, the doctor enlists old friends, village shamans, forest spirits, dream visits from the dead and even the occasional bit of medical deduction to solve the crimes.

PEOPLES DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF LAOS, OCTOBER 1976

T ran, Tran, and Hok broke through the heavy end-of-wet-season clouds. The warm night air rushed against their reluctant smiles and yanked their hair vertical. They fell in a neat formation, like sleet. There was no time for elegant floating or fancy aerobatics; they just followed the rusty bombshells that were tied to their feet with pink nylon string.

Tran the elder led the charge. He was the heaviest of the three. By the time he reached the surface of Nam Ngum reservoir, he was already ahead by two seconds. If this had been the Olympics, he would have scored a 9.98 or thereabouts. There was barely a splash. Tran the younger and Hok-the-twice-dead pierced the water without so much as a pulse-beat between them.

A quarter of a ton of unarmed ordnance dragged all three men quickly to the smooth muddy bottom of the lake and anchored them there. For two weeks, Tran, Tran, and Hok swayed gently back and forth in the current and entertained the fish and algae that fed on them like diners at a slow-moving noodle stall.

VIENTIANE, TWO WEEKS LATER

I t was a depressing audience, and there were going to be a lot more like it. Now that Haeng, the spotty-faced magistrate, was back, Siri would have to explain himself every damn Friday, and kowtow to a man young enough to be his grandson.

In the jargon of the Marxist-Leninists, the sessions were known as burden-sharing tutorials. But after the first hour in front of Judge Haengs warped plywood desk, Dr Siris burden had become more weighty. The judge, fresh off the production line, had taken great delight in casting un-expert doubts on Siris reports and correcting his spelling.

And what do you put the loss of blood down to? Judge Haeng asked.

Siri wondered more than once whether he was deliberately being asked trick questions to establish the state of his mind. Well. He considered it for a moment. The bodys inability to keep it in? The little judge hmmed and looked back down at the report. He wasnt even bright enough for sarcasm. Of course, the fact that the poor mans legs had been cut off above the knees might have had something to do with it. Its all there in the report.

You may believe its all here in the report, Comrade Siri, but you seem to be very selective as to what information you share with your readers. Id like to see much more detail in the future, if you dont mind. And to be honest, I dont see how you can be so sure it was the loss of blood that killed him, rather than, say

Heart failure?

Exactly. It would have been a terrible shock when his legs were severed. How do you know he didnt have a heart attack? He wasnt a young man.

With each of the previous three cases theyd debated, Haeng had somehow twisted the facts around to the possibility of a natural death, but this was his most creative suggestion. It struck Siri that the judge would be delighted if all the case reports that came through his office were headed cardiac arrest.

True, the fishermans heart had stopped beating, but it was the signal announcing his death rather than the cause of it. The newly armour-plated military launch had crashed into the concrete dock at Tar Deua. With all the extra weight, it lay low in the water. Fortunately for the crew, the collision was cushioned by the longboat man standing in his little wooden craft against the wall, with no way to escape. Like a surprising number of fishermen on the Mekhong, hed never learned to swim.

The overlapping metal deck sliced him apart like a scythe cutting through rice stalks, and the railing pinned him upright where he had been standing. The embarrassed captain and his crew pulled him his torso up onto the deck, where he lay in numb confusion, chattering and laughing as if he didnt know he was missing a couple of limbs.

The boat reversed and people on the bank watched the legs topple into the water and sink. They likely swelled up in a few hours and returned to the surface. They had worn odd flip-flops, so the chances of them being re-united in time for the funeral were poor.

If you intend to cite a heart attack for every cause of death, I dont really see why we need a coroner at all, Comrade. Siri had reached his limit, and it was a limit that floated in a vast distant atmosphere. After seventy-two years, hed seen so many hardships that hed reached the calmness of an astronaut bobbing about in space. Although he wasnt much better at Buddhism than he was at communism, he seemed able to meditate himself away from anger. Nobody could recall him losing his temper.

Dr Siri Paiboun was often described as a short-arsed man. He had a peculiar build, like a lightweight wrestler with a stoop. When he walked, it was as if his bottom half was doing its best to keep up with his top half. His hair, clipped short, was a dazzling white. Where a lot of Lao men had awakened late in life to find, by some miracle of the Lord above, their hair returned to its youthful blackness, Siri had more sensible uses for his allowance than Yu Dum Chinese dye. There was nothing fake or added or subtracted about him. He was all himself.

Hed never had much success with whiskers, unless you counted eyebrows as whiskers. Siris had become so overgrown, it took strangers a while to make out his peculiar eyes. Even those whod travelled ten times around the world had never seen such eyes. They were the bright green of well-lighted snooker-table felt, and they never failed to amuse him when they stared back from his mirror. He didnt know much about his real parents, but there had been no rumours of aliens in his blood. How hed ended up with eyes like these, he couldnt explain to anyone.

Forty minutes into the shared burden tutorial, Judge Haeng still hadnt been able to look into those eyes. Hed watched his pencil wagging. Hed looked at the button dangling from the cuff of the doctors white shirt. Hed stared up through the broken louvre window as if the red star were sparkling in the evening sky outside the walls of the Department of Justice. But he hadnt once looked into Siris brilliant green eyes.

Of course, Comrade Siri, we have to have a coroner because, as you well know, any organised socialist system must be accountable to its brothers and sisters. Revolutionary consciousness is maintained beneath the brilliance of the beam from the socialist lighthouse. But the people have a right to see the lighthouse keepers clean underwear drying on the rocks.