Love Songs from a Shallow Grave

back only two months and tells you she has an assignment at K6 and she’ll be working nights, staying out there…All those soldiers…”
    “How must you feel?” Sihot tutted and shook his head.
    “I wanted…”
    “Yes?”
    “I wanted it all to be over.”
    “Well, it certainly is now,” Phosy reminded him.
    “Not like that.”
    “But, ‘like that’ is how it ended. A sword through the heart.”
    “Look, you can’t do this to me.” There was a fire burning in Chanti’s eyes. “It’s not fair. Just leave me alone.”
    “One final question, if I may, Comrade,” Sihot asked. “Do you happen to know of a woman called Khantaly Sisamouth? Or you might know her better by her nickname – Kiang.”
    “No,” said Chanti.
    The three investigators looked at one another. When working for long enough in crime prevention, a policeman, even an amateur medical sleuth, learns to recognise the ‘paradoxical no’. The paradoxical no is a cunning little beast because it has the appearance of a ‘no’, but it is clearly a ‘yes’ in costume. Comrade Chanti was lying to them.
∗
    What they all believed would be the final stop of the day was at the Sisangvone primary school. Although Monday classes hadn’t been interrupted, the classroom which had been the scene of the previous day’s murder had been sealed off and its children distributed to other rooms. The head teacher unlocked the door and stood back to let them in.
    “Do you always keep this locked when there’s no class?” Phosy asked.
    The tall but undernourished teacher shook his head and a pencil fell out from behind his ear.
    “No,” he said, bending to retrieve it. “Usually not. I put a padlock on it when the sergeant here told me to keep the children out.” He started to unfasten the wooden shutters.
    “You aren’t afraid of things being stolen?” Phosy asked.
    The head teacher laughed. “What’s to steal? We’ve just the one set of books for the teachers, none for the children. We buy our own chalk and keep it with us.” He fished out two sticks from his top pocket as evidence. “And the desks and chairs are so old they have French chewing gum stuck to the bottom of them.”
    Siri smiled and shook the teacher’s hand as he walked into the classroom. The lack of books evidently extended to a lack of paper and paint. The few pictures on the walls were drawn in pencil on flaps torn from cardboard boxes. The desks and chairs had been pushed against the walls leaving an empty space in the centre of the room. Once varnished, the wooden floor had now been buffed grey by generations of feet and scratched to high heaven by the shifting of furniture. This was a classroom with a history.
    “Comrade, could you tell the doctor what you told us?” Sihot asked of the teacher.
    “All right,” he said. “I came in on Sunday morning at about seven. My wife and I live in a shared house down the street so I can walk here. The local youth movement conducts a political pathfinders session on Sunday mornings for the older children. We use this room ‘cause it’s the biggest. Sometimes they like to do activities where the kids have to move around. When I got in, I was surprised to see all this furniture moved back. But I assumed the youth cadres had come early to set things up. I started to open the shutters. That’s when I noticed the young lady.”
    Siri walked to the blackboard. It was made of sao wood, a type of oak, hard enough to make boats out of. The point of the sword had entered the board at a height almost level with his own heart. The thrust must have been terribly powerful. Powerful enough to keep the victim on her feet. The blood had formed a figure-of-eight stain where she’d been standing.
    “Our last class was on Saturday morning,” the teacher was saying in the background. “After that, I went from room to room making sure nobody had left anything behind. Forgetful bunch, these children. I shut all the doors. I had a regional educational administrators’ meeting in the afternoon and went straight home after that.”
    “So nobody was here in the afternoon or evening,” Siri asked.
    “Sometimes the children like to come and sit and play. I don’t begrudge them that. This isn’t much on atmosphere but it’s better than the crowded conditions some of them have to put up with at home. But the weather’s been shocking lately. You saw the football field, or rather, you didn’t. It looks like a paddy field. Not many