Love Songs from a Shallow Grave

nearer to the exams a classmate had found Jim walking around outside at midnight in the snow. She’d been crying. She’d said, “He really won’t leave me alone. He won’t let me study.”
    The classmate had suggested she tell the student representative but Jim had refused. The Lao student said she became concerned for Jim’s well-being after that night but Jim wouldn’t let her get close. And it was around then that Jim’s future came tumbling down. She failed her exams, but more than that it was as if she’d become an entirely different person. One girl commented, “She’d lost all her warmth. She didn’t speak. Didn’t answer any questions. Something terrible had happened to her. We thought it must have been him, whoever he was. We didn’t know what he’d done to her but she was clearly terrified of him.”
    Phosy had gone through the translation two or three times, astonished at what a transformation had come over the woman. Something had happened in Berlin to change a bright, straight-A student with a brilliant future into a frightened failure. In Phosy’s mind the killer had taken on a new, more sinister guise. What happened in Berlin might have been unrelated to the K6 murders but he didn’t believe so. He immediately demanded a list of all foreign students studying in East Germany in 1977.
    Apart from confirmation that victim two, Kiang, had taken no physical education classes and that victim one, Dew, had at one stage been selected to compete in a regional fencing tournament in a very small town in Bulgaria, no other information had arrived to bring him closer to his killer. His desk was a monument of paperwork; his own notes, interview transcripts, and telexes. But, on the front left-hand corner was the list of subscribers at the government bookshop. It was on the top of a pile, weighted down with a tiny plaster cast of Malee’s left foot age one month. Eleventh down that list was the name Somdy Borachit.
∗
    “Sh…sh…she didn’t come back today.”
    “Who’s that, Geung?”
    Dtui was sitting on a stool facing the freezer controls with the Russian-Lao dictionary open on her lap. Mr Geung was using a long-handled broom to sweep cobwebs from the ceiling.
    “The Down’s Syndrome. She didn’t come b…back.”
    “Must have been a mirage, hon.”
    “No…no…no. What’s a marge?”
    “A mirage is something you think you see but it isn’t really there.”
    “I saw her.”
    “Ah, but did you? What if you wanted to see her so much that you made her up?”
    “Eh?”
    “You made magic and she came.”
    “I…I…I can’t make magic.”
    “If you want something badly enough, you can.”
    “Really?”
    “Yeah. Look at Malee. I really wanted Malee in my life and there she was.”
    “No. You had s…sex and you made a baby.”
    “OK, right. That helped too. But it all started with a dream. And then I wished.”
    “I wouldn’t w…w…wish for a Down’s Syndrome to come.”
    “Why not?”
    He put on a deep voice.
    “That lot are f…feeble minded.”
    “Yeah? Who said that?”
    “Judge Haeng.”
    “Oh, yeah? Is that the same Judge Haeng who had you sent way up north?”
    “Yes.”
    “And you found your way back to the morgue all by yourself?”
    “Yes.”
    “Then, you tell me which one of you is feeble minded. Look, Geung, you’ve been giving this woman a hard time since she started here. And, as far as I can see, she hasn’t done anything wrong. I’ll tell you how to look at this. There are times when you feel…out of it, right? When people make you feel like an outsider.”
    “Yes. Lots.”
    “But you have me and Dr Siri, and Civilai and now you have Malee. And we all make you feel better at those times. Right?”
    “Yes.”
    “Well, maybe, this woman, if she exists, maybe she feels like you do sometimes. But she hasn’t got a morgue full of family to make her feel better. People who love her. Maybe she’d appreciate just a friendly ‘hello’ sometimes and she wouldn’t feel like an outsider.”
    “Just a hello.”
    “That’s all. Then she’ll start to feel like you do.”
    “That’s all?”
    “Right. But I still don’t believe there is a Down’s Syndrome girl. Nobody else has seen her. I think she’s a joke you’re playing on us.”
    “No. Sh…sh…she’s real. Her name’s Tukta.”
∗
    On the eve of Siri’s departure for Phnom Penh via Peking, he had a bit of trouble getting home from the morgue. As was often the way, he’d sat