Free The Coroner's Lunch by Colin Cotterill Page B

knots. That’s the rule.”
    “What a good job. I should apply.”
    Bounheng laughed again a little nervously.
    “But I….”
    “What?” the captain asked.
    “No, it’s not important. I’ve got enough for my report. It doesn’t matter.”
    “No. Come on.”
    “Well, if you were traveling at ten knots and coming in to land….”
    “Yes?”
    “Why didn’t you have time to stop when you saw the longboat man?”
    Bounheng immediately broke eye contact and set off again on his escape across the fields. “Like I said, he shouldn’t have been there.”
    “But you’d have had a pilot, watching. Right?”
    Bounheng was obviously used to having a wristwatch that had somehow taken leave of him. He looked at the back of his wrist and swore unnecessarily and loudly when he noticed it was missing. “I’ve got to get back. Like you say, you’ve got enough for your report.”
    “Of course, I’m sorry to keep you so long. Thanks for your cooperation.”
    On the walk back, Bounheng slowed down a little and regained some of his composure. That was until he noticed Siri was no longer beside him. He turned back to see the doctor standing stock-still in the middle of the dead paddy, looking down at the unwatered stubble.
    “What is it, Doctor?” He went back to see what Siri was looking at. But the doctor wasn’t actually looking at anything. He was putting together a hypothesis. When he started to chuckle, the captain felt uneasy. “Doctor?”
    Siri gazed up at him, and then looked him directly in the eye. “All right, son. Here’s my theory. It may just be the foolish imagination of an old man, but hear me out. It seems to me, there’s a lot of smuggling goes on across the river. Most of the cigarettes and liquor we get in Laos come from Thailand.”
    “What are you…?”
    “Just listen up.” Siri noticed how the remaining friendly color had bleached from Bounheng’s face. He stood with his hands on his waist. “I believe you boat captains are…tempted to turn a blind eye from time to time. Maybe even change your schedule.”
    “Are you suggesting…?”
    “I’m suggesting for every two hundred crates of whisky you don’t see cross over…” Bounheng turned his back on Siri “…one crate may very well find its way aboard the river patrol boat as a sort of thank-you. I’m suggesting that on the evening the longboat man lost his legs and his life, the crew of your boat and its skipper were pissed as newts. I’m suggesting you were all so drunk, you had not a brass
kip
of control over your vessel; over the boat you’d only learned to operate a week earlier.”
    He saw a slight shudder pass across Bounheng’s young shoulders and walked closer to him. “I’m suggesting the longboat man wasn’t in the wrong place, but that you were. And by the time you realized it, you were so close to the wall of the bank that you had no time to pull up. I’m suggesting Mekhong Whisky killed the old fisherman.”
    He turned to see Bounheng’s face. Tears were rolling down his cheeks and his mouth was contorted with pain. Siri stood there, silent and overwhelmed at his own revelations. The adrenaline had sunk to his stomach, and it fluttered there like moths trapped in a jar. It was some minutes before the young man was able to speak. He couldn’t look at Siri. “Which…which one of them told you?”
    “Them?”
    “The crew.”
    “No, son. I haven’t talked to your crew, or to any witnesses.”
    Bounheng faced him, his eyes red with tears.
    “It was the longboat man himself that told me.”
    The captain dropped his head and sobbed as if the weight of the river were crushing his chest. Siri, too embarrassed to merely stand back and witness the man’s suffering, stepped up and put his arms around him. He felt Bounheng’s body throb with grief, and could understand how much the boy had already suffered for his foolishness. There was nothing to be said.
    By some miracle of timing and history, he’d avoided