The Merry Misogynist

again.
    “Darn it,” said Civilai. “And here I was thinking the tin man had found his heart.”
    “And here I am thinking it’s time to shake out the creases from Rajid’s sheets and let him get some rest,” Dtui announced with a laugh. She stood with her baby and let everyone have a little hand squeeze and cheek sniff of Malee before stepping out. Geung followed her. Mr Tickoo stacked the stools and bowed a goodbye to his son’s guests.
    Phosy cornered Siri and Civilai and told them he wanted a word with them. They went to the canteen and ordered three glasses of Mahosot coffee, a gooey brew rumoured to have polished off a number of patients who might have pulled through otherwise. They sat by an open window where the scent from the hairy jasmine bushes overwhelmed the general antiseptic atmosphere of the hospital. A fan above their heads kept off the evening mosquitoes.
    “All right, boys. Here’s the latest,” Phosy said. “First, we’ve had no luck at all with the ministries, the Central Committee, or any of the aid programmes. No projects planned or executed in or around Vang Vieng on the dates our villain was there.”
    “Damn,” said Siri.
    “Doctor, as soon as I got your information yesterday, I contacted the police station in Pakse. It’s one of the few places you can get a phone call through to these days. They’re a bit behind in submitting their case ledgers. They still had the last two years’ books down there. I thought it might take a few days for them to go through them, but one of the officers remembered a complaint filed by the parents of a missing girl. It rang a bell with the sergeant when I mentioned the logging concession incident.”
    “I know the officers in Pakse,” said Siri. “There wasn’t a lot of bell ringing going on down there.”
    “I imagine the complaint wouldn’t have been remembered, and perhaps not even filed at all, if it hadn’t been for the peculiar events that surrounded it,” Phosy continued. “The mother was still upset about what happened, or almost happened, to her daughter at the concession. The girl had promised solemnly that she’d phone her at the Bureau de Poste on a certain day at a certain time. The mother and father travelled overnight to be there. She didn’t call. The parents waited there for five hours. They tried to get through to the Vientiane number the groom had given them for emergencies but the post office clerk told them there was no such code. That’s when they went to file with the police.
    “It was while they were telling their story that the sergeant tied it together with another case being looked into. And this sounds very much like our villain. There’d been a complaint about a false laissez-passer. You both know how it works – when you travel between provinces you have to report at a police box.”
    “Do they take down licence plate numbers?” Siri asked excitedly.
    “I’m afraid not.”
    “Typical. Something that might have been useful…”
    “There are army barricades that take down plate numbers, but they tend to ignore anything that isn’t privately owned. We’re checking with the military posts down there anyway. All they do at the migration checkpoints is slowly and painfully copy down all the information on the laissez-passer and write the date in an exercise book. That information goes to the central registry in Pakse, where somebody else copies it out of the exercise book and into a bigger book – ”
    “So on ad infinitum,” said Civilai.
    “Well, it turns out that the registrar who noted the information was out drinking one night with a couple of mates from the Champasak Forestry Department – ”
    “Which I believe is now officially known as the Champasak Deforestry Department,” Civilai cut in again.
    “Are you going to let me finish, Comrade?”
    “Sorry.”
    “He told his drinking friends that he’d noticed Forestry had a bigwig from Vientiane in town. They said they hadn’t heard about it. They mentioned it to their regional boss, and he confirmed there weren’t any visitors from anywhere around the date noted in the book, hence the fake laissez-passer complaint. After further investigation they found that the impostor had checked out of the province at the same checkpoint two days later. Don’t forget it takes a while for the checkpoint information to reach the city. These were exactly the dates the parents of the missing girl claimed her suitor was in town. He was