Jimm Juree 01; Killed at the Whim of a Hat

speaking English to the driver. The policeman was pretty good, clear, easy to understand, but the driver had no idea what he was saying. The major general tried several times without success. That immediately established that it was likely the driver’s communication skills that were lacking rather than the passenger’s. Finally came the question I’d been waiting for.
    MAJOR G:
    At any time, did she get you to make a telephone call to the Pak Nam police station?
    DRIVER:
    No, sir .
    MAJOR G:
    Nothing to do with a missing camera?
    DRIVER:
    No .
    And that was pretty much it. There were a few more questions but that was the bulk of it. We paid our forty baht and walked slowly back to the bike, chewing everything over.
    “That major general’s sharp,” said Granddad.
    “They’ve snuck one or two smart ones in since you left the force,” I told him. “Were there any questions he didn’t ask?”
    “I would have pushed him on whether there was any chance at all of this woman being Thai, acting like a foreigner.”
    “You aren’t still thinking about the nun?”
    “Not necessarily. There’s that one missing link about the phone call to Pak Nam police station reporting the lost camera. If a foreigner had made the call, they would have picked up on it.”
    “It could have been the friends she was staying with in Pak Nam. Accomplices. She could have had them call.”
    “Then there’s the question of how she knew the camera had been found. How did she know it was on its way to Lang Suan with the sergeant?”
    I stopped and considered the sequence of events.
    “Who would have received the original call?” I asked.
    “The desk sergeant.”
    “Sergeant Phoom himself, right. He would have passed the message upstairs. But what if nobody had bothered to tell him the original call was a fake? There was a lot going on at the station around that time. Isn’t it possible he wasn’t included in the loop?”
    “More than likely, knowing the workings of a police station.”
    “And what if he’d been given a return number to call if there was any news? He’s handed the camera to take to Lang Suan but before he leaves, he calls the number and lets them know he’s on his way. He’s a considerate man. He thinks he’s just doing the forensics department a favor. Putting the owner’s mind at ease.”
    We were closer to Pak Nam hospital than we were to home so we detoured. Sergeant Phoom was looking a lot better but his relatives were still there around the bed making a lot of noise. I was sure he’d be grateful for his official release so he could get some peace. There was no longer a police watchman on duty. We sat with the sergeant and I asked him about the phone call. It had been placed from a cell phone and the speaker was a woman, he recalled. She was certainly a Thai and she told him she was calling on behalf of the Lang Suan police headquarters. She’d left a contact number and, as I’d suspected, Sergeant Phoom had called her back to tell her he was returning the camera. He’d inadvertently triggered his own attack. The major had ordered him to deliver the camera, but as he was a mere sergeant, nobody had bothered to explain the history or relevance of the delivery. He thought he was merely returning a lost item. He still had the number on a slip of paper in his wallet. The temptation to call it immediately filled my bladder with excitement, but I’d messed around enough with evidence. To pep the sergeant up a little, we had him phone in this revelation himself. He could blame the delay on concussion. I thought it might help him feel less like a complete loser. I told him if he was promoted on the strength of this new evidence I wanted a slap-up meal comprising anything without fish in it.
    On the drive home I was thinking about the ornithologist who’d spent a week in our end room and checked out a day early. I also considered our local postman’s wife, the noodle lady and forty-odd other local women who fitted or could be decorated to fit the description of the killer from Hong Kong, Ming Xi Wu. And I thought about my nun and wondered whether anyone would take the driver’s statement seriously. It didn’t make any sense at all to consider her a suspect. But it was only by seeing the photos that anyone else might understand. I was afraid we’d have to give them up. My thoughts were interrupted by the jaunty Swedish tone of my cell phone. It was Chompu.
    “Was that your doing?” he