Colin Cotterill - Disco for the Departed (Soho Crime)

Colin Cotterill

Dr Siri Paiboun

Disco for the Departed

The third book in the Dr Siri Paiboun series

2006

Dr Siri Paiboun may be in his seventy-third year, but hes still as sturdy as a jungle boar and as crafty as one. Denied the retirement he believes he so richly deserves, Dr Siri is the Lao Peoples Democratic Republics number one coroner. Hes also their only coroner. And although he would never admit it, hes rather enjoying the job.

Disco for the Departed finds Dr Siri despatched to the countrys newest National Monument: the caves where Laos future politburo hid while plotting their revolution. Here, the sudden appearance of a mummified arm protruding from a concrete path laid between the Presidents former lair and his new mansion has caused an understandable degree of embarrassment.

Quickly and discreetly, Dr Siri must supervise the disinterment of the body attached to the arm, identify it, and determine the cause of death. His autopsy provides some grisly surprises but it is his gifts as a shaman that put the septuagenarian doctor on the trail of the killer.

As Siri and his team close in, they must tackle a marriage proposal, a long walk home, and come face-to-face with a horrific sacrificial ritual. Is it any wonder Dr Siri takes up disco dancing?

GUESTHOUSE NUMBER ONE

D r Siri lay beneath the grimy mesh of the mosquito net watching the lizards third attempt. Twice, the small grey creature had scurried up the wall and ventured out across the ceiling. On both occasions the unthinkable had happened. The animal had lost its grip and come plummeting down with a splat onto the bare concrete of the guesthouse floor. For a house lizard this is the equivalent of a man coming unstuck from the ground and falling up with a crash onto the ceiling. Siri could see the stunned confusion on its little puckered face. It looked around to get its bearings then headed once more for the wall.

For over a month, Dr Siri Paiboun, the national coroner, had started to wonder whether his new incarnation might be disruptive to the natural laws of animal behaviour. The peculiarities could have started before, but it wasnt until the mongrel from the ice works began to build a nest in his front yard that he took any notice. She somehow managed to drag old car seats and cement sacks through his front gate and mould them into a very uncomfortable-looking roost. And there she sat patiently, day after day, as if waiting for an unlikely egg. A week later, the paddy mice at the back of the compound formed what could only be described as a gang and started terrorising his neighbours cat. This morning, as he was leaving his house in Vientiane for the trip up country, hed looked back to see a hen on his roof. As there was no sign of a ladder, he had to assume the thing had flown up there. And now the lizard. Even if these were coincidences, it was still very odd.

Ever since Siri had discovered his shaman ancestry a lot of strange things had happened in his life. He worked the nail of his pinky finger around the inside of his mouth, counting off his teeth. It was a habit hed started a few months earlier when he found out he was different. All there all thirty-three of them. The same number of teeth as old Prince Phetsarat the magician; the same number as some of the most respected shamans in the region; the same number as the Lord Buddha himself. Siri was in hallowed company. But even though he had the right number of teeth, he hadnt yet taken control of his abilities.

It was little more than a year ago that Siri had learned he hosted the spirit of an ancient Hmong shaman Yeh Ming. Until then, hed always thought his contact with departed souls in his dreams was some kind of mental illness. He hadnt bothered to try to interpret messages, hadnt even realised the spirits in his dreams were leaving clues to the manner of their deaths. But, all that had changed the previous year. Yeh Ming had become more active, woken up you could say, and had drawn the attention of the malevolent spirits of the forest. These evil spirits, these phibob, were gunning for Siris ancestor, and, as Siri was the host, he was suddenly in the line of fire. All those supernatural fireworks were spilling over into Siris life.

Very little could really shock the old surgeon any more, but he never ceased to be amused by the mysterious events happening around him. His own life seemed to grow more fascinating every day. While others his age began to wind down the clock into a frail twilight, Siri had become reborn to a period where fantasy and reality were interchangeable. Every day was a kick. He felt more alive than ever. If this were truly some kind of senile insanity, it was one he was secretly enjoying: one he was in no hurry to recover from.

That May, Siri had arrived at his seventy-third birthday and was still as sturdy as a jungle boar. His lungs let him down from time to time but his muscles and his mind were as taut as theyd been in his thirties. His head boasted a shock of thick white hair and his likeable face still drew flirtatious smiles from women half his age. None of his friends could imagine Dr Siri Paiboun running out of steam, not for a long while yet.

Now here he was in Party Guesthouse Number One in the cool north-east of the Peoples Democratic Republic of Laos and the year was 1977. Guesthouse was hardly an appropriate name for the two-storey building designed by Vietnamese rectangulists a few years earlier. It looked nothing like a house and its inmates were certainly not guests. It was mostly inhabited by those who had sinned, ideologically, against Party lines. Here, the village heads, government officials and army officers of the old royalist regime were lulled into believing they had come for a holiday in the mountains of Huaphan province. Invited to visit the revolutionary headquarters, they were soon moved along to the work camps around Sop Hao on the Vietnamese border. Despite its lack of facilities, the guesthouse was as good as life would get for them for quite some time.

Earlier that evening, Siri and Nurse Dtui had sat drinking coffee with a group of men from the south who had once held senior ranks in the royalist police force. They still assumed they were merely attending a seminar and would soon return to Vientiane with a new enlightened understanding of the Marxist-Leninist system. The mood had been jolly as they sat on the ground-floor veranda on uncomfortable red vinyl chairs. The men had spent their first afternoon doing getting to know you activities and still wore their paper name tags stapled to their top shirt pockets. Each mans name was followed by the word officer then a number. As if unwilling to break rank, they sat in numerical order around their small circle of chairs.

Siri listened to them tell of their good fortune to be seeing a part of the country that was as alien to the urban-ites as any foreign land. They talked of the locals as a tourist would of Africans or peculiar Europeans. Little did they know their brief excursion to the provinces would likely extend to months, in some cases, years. Little did they know they were to be trucked from the comparative luxury of the guesthouse to a site some eighty kilometres away. There they would be assigned to work gangs to rebuild roads, repair bombed bridges and help the local peasants till a booby-trapped land littered with un-exploded ordnance. In the evenings they would sit around blackboards in study groups beneath the yellow light of beeswax lamps. They would learn the dates of the most famous battles, the numbers of casualties, and the names of the great leaders of the revolution. This, and often much much worse, was Lao re-education.

Eventually, either by sincere personal choice or through desperation, they would swear undying devotion to the cause. If they were convincing enough, they might one day be returned to their families. If not, the families would be invited to travel north to join them. Only the women who truly loved their husbands and were prepared to forgo the luxuries of city life would accept such an offer. The majority fled across the Mekhong to take their chances on the Thai side.