Love Songs from a Shallow Grave

wasn’t messing with the dead. It was, in many respects, striving for the rights of the living. They couldn’t keep a good closet detective down. It was a Saturday evening and Siri and Inspector Phosy were seated on a mat at the back of the evening market. Four glasses stood at various angles on the uneven ground in front of them, two were half full. Two Thumbs had obliged them by lowering their umbrella. There were stars in the sky at last and the drinkers wanted to see them. The first rule of cigarette and alcohol stall management was that the customer was always right until they ran out of money.
    “It looks like we’re still recognizing the Khmer Rouge,” Phosy said. He hadn’t known whether to broach the subject of Kampuchea but he had questions he wanted answered.
    “Their embassy’s still open but I’ve been smelling the odd scent of combustible chemicals from Daeng’s kitchen,” Siri smiled. “So, don’t be surprised if you wake up one morning and there’s a mushroom cloud where their embassy used to be.”
    As often occurred in these encounters, Phosy was only half certain that was a joke so he ignored it.
    “It’s hard to believe all that horror is going on right next door,” he said. “But you’ve recovered from your ordeal remarkably. I thought you’d be a wreck for months after what you went through.”
    Siri smiled and looked around. He had recovered quite remarkably. Since that first morning back he’d averaged twenty minutes sleep a night. And those tiny pecks of sleep were crammed so full of the most horrific nightmares he got more rest when he was awake. He hadn’t been able to keep food down so he was on a diet of rice porridge. Anybody passing his bathroom would swear some farm animal was being strangled inside. He still couldn’t write with his right hand and he was deaf in one ear. At the slightest unexpected sound he’d jump a foot in the air and his heart would race for five minutes before it could be stilled. He would put his hand to his face and find tears on his cheeks and, at any time of the day or night, images of the dead Khmer were inside his head. Quite a remarkable recovery.
    “There used to be an expression,” he said. “‘There’s always someone worse off than you.’ But when you get to the Khmer, you’re at the end of the line, Phosy. It now reads, ‘There’s always someone worse off than you, unless you’re Cambodian.’ They call the system there Angkar. It’s a political machine that has everyone hypnotised. Mindless. I can’t believe there’s any place worse than Kampuchea, Phosy.”
    “How did…? Ah, never mind.”
    “Go ahead.”
    “How did you occupy your mind through all those hours of being locked up?”
    “It’s pretty much the same as enduring political seminars. You’ve been through it. Songs. I sang a lot of Mo Lum country songs to myself and made up a few dozen more in my mind.”
    “I’d like to hear them sometime.”
    “I doubt that. Unless the title ‘My mama sold the buffalo and bought a rocket launcher’ appeals to you. Then there were word games and mathematics puzzles. Not to mention solving real life mysteries. I have to say there was a long period there when you squatted in my mind, Inspector Phosy.”
    “Me?”
    “I was very afraid of the outcome.”
    “Of the three-épée case?”
    “I was afraid you might miss the clues. I underestimated you, and for that I apologise deeply.”
    “No need to apologise. You had every right to be afraid. My investigation concluded with half-a-dozen bullet holes in Comrade Neung. End of case. It wasn’t until I started to think like you that I saw things the way they really were.”
    “We can’t think the thoughts of others, Phosy.”
    “Maybe not. But we can open our minds and let other people’s thoughts in.”
    “I’m sure Comrade Neung will be eternally grateful you did. Tell me, at what point did you work it all out?”
    “When I read the diary. There were a lot of thoughts at the back of my mind. I’d wondered about the monogram. They’d called Neung Zorro over there. It was a sort of playful joke. But Neung was embarrassed by it. He certainly didn’t give me the impression he was so proud of it he’d use it as his signature. He didn’t tell anyone when he came back. Not even his father. So I wondered who’d know about it. It had to be someone he met in Germany.”
    “So, by this stage you’d dismissed Neung as a suspect?”
    “Not out with the