Love Songs from a Shallow Grave

this morning. Madame Daeng saw it as an amber rather than a red alert.”
    “Oh, did she? And this morning?”
    “I had a swimming lesson.”
    “Don’t make fun of me.”
    “I’m serious. The Seniors’ Union has a class on Saturday mornings. They cleaned all the gunge out of the Ian Xang pool.”
    “You’re learning to swim, at your age?”
    “I’ve found the god of drowning is particularly insensitive to the age of his victims. I’ve had one or two narrow escapes in water lately. I thought it was time to master the element. And if I suddenly have the urge to swim across to Thailand, I could – ”
    “And your swimming lesson took precedence over my request to see you?”
    “Phosy, you have to admit you’ve become a little oversensitive since you became a father. You’ve had me drop everything and rush to the police dormitory for…for what? A little wind? A touch of diarrhoea? A small – ”
    “You can never be too careful.”
    “Your wife’s a nurse. And she’s a very competent one. She can handle all these things.”
    “Dr Siri, Dtui comes from a bloodline of disaster. Her mother lost ten children during or shortly after birth. Our country has a horrible record. Twenty per cent of kids don’t make it to their first birthdays. Forty per cent don’t reach eleven.”
    “And I guarantee not one of them had a mother who was a qualified nurse and a father who could afford to put regular meals on the table. The only danger little Malee has, as far as I can see, is that her father’s going to coddle her to death. Tell me, what was last night’s emergency?”
    “If you aren’t going to take it seriously…”
    “Come on. I’m listening.”
    “She’s yellow.”
    “All over?”
    “It’s hepatitis.”
    “What does Dtui say?”
    “She doesn’t know. She’s got other things on her mind.”
    “What does she say?”
    “She said it’s the light through the curtains.”
    “What colour’s the curtain?”
    “White.”
    “Phosy?”
    “Creamy white.”
    “It’s yellow, Phosy. I’ve seen it. Yellow with cartoon dogs or some such.”
    “The baby still looked yellow when I took her outside.”
    “Then stop taking her outside. Goodness, man. It’s the rainy season. She’ll catch a real disease. Then you’ll have something to complain about.”
    Phosy hadn’t appreciated the lecture. He’d sent two of his men with Siri to offload the corpse and retreated to his office to write his angry report. Madame Daeng had taken the motorcycle home from K6. Siri would be a little while settling poor Dew in at the morgue, then he’d walk back. He wished he could be home with his lovely new books but he needed time alone with the corpse to organise his thoughts. Dew still had a lot of talking to do, he decided. She knew her killer. That much was certain. Their midnight sauna pointed to the possibility that they were lovers. This rendezvous, he decided, was passion. The type of passion that makes you crazy enough to risk your career and your freedom for a few moments of pleasure. When he was young, Siri had known that passion himself.
    He hadn’t had time to search for a false compartment in which the killer might hide a sword. But he was convinced he wouldn’t have found one. If you were planning to kill a lover, there were far more convenient – and much shorter – weapons that would have been easier to conceal. It was almost as if the épée was symbolic, perhaps even part of the ritual. He wondered if the épée was the message itself. What if it wasn’t hidden at all? What if the girl knew she was about to die? Had she wanted to be killed? Had she brought it herself?
    As often occurred in these confusing, ghost-ridden years of his life, Siri felt a familiar anger. He was the host, like it or not, of a thousand-year-old Hmong shaman by the name of Yeh Ming. It was like a gall-bladder infection, but of the soul. There was nothing tangible inside to operate on. He was stuck with this presence and still hadn’t mastered the art of living with his ancestor. He’d wondered often whether the fault lay in his failure to grasp the true essence of religion. If he’d been a better Buddhist perhaps he could beat the eight-fold path to his spiritual back door, burst into the projection booth and catch old Yeh Ming tangled up in a thousand years of celluloid. Couldn’t they then have sat down together, organised everything into reels, and canned and labelled them? Neither of them would have