Love Songs from a Shallow Grave

might have sent the boy off to a minder somewhere,” Dtui suggested, pouring hot water on her instant noodles.
    “That’s what I assumed at first. But the neighbours remember hearing the boy at various times over the weekend. Someone else recalls seeing them at the market on Saturday. His wife said he’d come by the school to pick up their son on Friday. That wouldn’t work out. To kill the first victim he would have had to be inside K6 at night. They wouldn’t have let him in if he’d turned up late. What kind of electrician works at midnight? He had to have been there inside the compound, hidden away somewhere after his regular day of work.”
    “The wife might have been lying.”
    “I thought wives didn’t lie.”
    “Good ones don’t.”
    “Well, his wife’s been camped outside the jail day and night, since Neung was arrested. She refuses to leave. She knows he was having a relationship with one of the victims but she’s still there supporting him. I’d say that makes her a good wife, wouldn’t you?”
    “Dr Siri’s got to you, hasn’t he?”
    “There are just too many ‘Why would he?’ questions. Why would he murder the women in places that could all be traced back to him? After all the planning, why would he not cover his tracks? And then there’s motive. What reason did he have to kill them? I didn’t find any conflict. He doesn’t strike me as the type of person who’d kill just for the thrill of it. And this murderer really has to be some kind of psychopath.”
    “Somebody must have had a motive,” Dtui said. She put a flat plate on top of her noodle bowl and let it sit until all the chemicals and flavouring and inedible carbohydrates decided to become food. She sat on the edge of the bed and stroked her daughter’s hair. “If Neung didn’t do it,” she said, “someone must really hate him.”

17
Z
    T he following day, Dtui’s comment, “Someone must really hate him,” was at the front of Inspector Phosy’s mind. The rains were holding back but Vientiane was a swamp of mud. All the citizens he passed wore clogs of red clay like Frankenstein boots. Bicycle tyres swelled to tractor-tread thickness. Street dogs had become two-flavoured, caramel above, cocoa below. With all the slithering and sliding, everyday activities had turned to slapstick. The famous Lao sense of humour, bogged down in the socialist depression, found an outlet. Laughter could be heard all around the town. Bicycle-skid victims sat in the middle of the road and howled with delight. Children giggled as they skated across Ian Xang Avenue in their flip-flops. Big-boned ladies held on to each other as they attempted to ford a muddy lane, screaming with merriment.
    Phosy witnessed this new mood as he drove back and forth across the city in his four-wheel-drive jeep. He recalled the days when laughter was as common as the chirrup of crickets and the clack of the wooden blocks of noodle sellers advertising their wares. He liked this Vientiane, and on any other occasion it would have cheered him up, but today he had a sombre mission. He had to find another suspect in a case he’d considered closed. He had to put together enough evidence to prevent an innocent man from facing the executioner. In his note, Siri had asked about the morphine elixir. Who was taking painkillers and why? Neung had no obvious injury, but one man on his list did. Comrade Phoumi, the security chief. Could Phoumi have injured his wrist in the first attack and been taking morphine to deaden the pain? It was his left wrist so he could still use his sword hand.
    Then there was Major Dung, sword expert. He’d lied about his contact with épées. He was a ladies’ man. Didn’t like to be rejected. A career soldier, a trained killer. He didn’t have respect for women, Lao women in particular. The alibi for both of these suspects, impossible to verify without Prime Ministerial intervention, was that they were asleep in their respective dormitories at the time of all three murders. Phosy decided it wouldn’t have been beyond either of them to frame a Lao engineer for murders they’d committed. But again he was missing a motive.
    Then, next on his list was Comrade Chanti, the husband of the first victim. A reply – long time coming – had arrived from Houaphan that morning. It was handwritten by the signatory at the military wedding of Chanti and Dew back in 1969. The writer was a colonel in the North-eastern Region 7 and a distant, and