"How old are your children, Comrade Chanti?" Siri asked.
"What? How old?"
"Yes."
"Five and…seven?"
"You don't sound too sure," Phosy observed.
"I'm certain."
Sihot produced his notebook from his top pocket. It was bound in a large rubber band that he had trouble removing.
"According to our files," he said. "Your children are six and eight."
"What? Well, yes. That could be right."
"You don't spend much time with your children, do you, Comrade?" Phosy said.
"I see them."
"But you don't live with them."
"Her mother looks after them."
"Her?"
"Dew's. They stay there. I work long hours. I can't…"
"You shouldn't have to," Phosy agreed. "It's a woman's job."
"She had no right to abandon you with them," Siri put in. "How old was the youngest when she left? Two? My word. You must have had a lot of serious discussions about the implications before she left."
"She didn't consult with me. Just announced she was going," Chanti said.
"You know, I'd be really pissed if my wife pulled a trick like that on me," Sihot grumbled, half to himself.
"It was demeaning," Chanti confessed.
"I bet it was," Phosy agreed. "And finally she comes back and you think it might be all right. Everything might get back to the way it was. You could be together as a family again."
"And then she moves in with her mother and the children and tells you she wants a divorce," said Siri.
"You can't…" Chanti began. "Did her mother tell you that?"
"Yes."
"Well, it's not true. She didn't want a divorce. Just some time to think. We could have sorted it out."
"So you thought," Siri said. "But then you find out she has a lover. After all that waiting, supporting her children…"
"I…I didn't know."
"Of course, you couldn't have been certain," Phosy kept up the attack, "but when she's been 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 people want to leave their homes in weather like this."
"We had a couple of our men talk to the kids, Doctor," Sihot said. "None of them were here Saturday afternoon or evening. Nobody saw anything."
Siri stopped suddenly and stared at the wall beside the door, then up at the ceiling.
"Head teacher, you don't have electricity."
"No, Comrade," replied the teacher. "Education keeps telling us they'll have us connected up by the end of the year. They've been saying that for two years."
Siri was confused. Even if he was two hours out with his estimation of the time of death, which he doubted, it would still have been dark in this classroom. Too dark to spear somebody accurately in the heart. Either the perpetrator was carrying a torch, or…
Siri walked around the room with Sihot close behind, his notepad at the ready. The doctor found what he was looking for on a desk at the front near the wall. It was just a small heap of wax moulded around an empty circle of space.
"Do you use candles often, Comrade?" he asked the teacher.
"No, Comrade. Beyond our budget, I'm afraid," he replied.
"Then it would appear our killer brought them with him and took them home when he was through."
They found similar deposits of wax on six of the desks. There might have been more, removed along with the candles.
"Not exactly floodlighting," Siri said, "but enough to light up their duelling arena."
"You think they were swordfighting in here?" Phosy asked.
"They cleared a space, lit up the room. Our victim was dressed for sport. It's as good a guess as any, I'd say."
"And you," Phosy looked at Sihot. "What's wrong with you, man? Do you have pebbles there for eyes? I send you here to investigate and you can't even see great lumps of wax?"
Sihot bunched up the corners of his mouth. Not a sulk exactly, more an attempt not to burst into tears. It saddened Siri to see a strong man embarrassed and he was surprised. He'd never known Phosy to rebuke his men in public. In fact, the inspector wasn't given to outbursts. He would normally shake his head and privately bemoan the lack of grey matter in the police force. This was particularly out of character. Something was wrong.
"Any chance she died by accident?" Phosy asked Siri, still staring at Sihot.
"I doubt that," Siri said. "If it's just a sparring match they'd have some cork thingamabobs on the ends of their weapons. At the very least they'd be fighting with blunt swords. The epee we pulled out of the victim was sharpened to a fine edge. The killer knew exactly what he was doing." ?
The jeep went by Police Headquarters with the intention of dropping off Sihot. There was a lot of paperwork that hadn't been started. The plan from there was for Phosy to drive Siri to the morgue, return the Willy's jeep to the garage, and go through the data they'd collected on the two victims, looking for connections. But, as Civilai often said, "Intentions can be as flimsy as toilet paper in a cheap bar."
As they pulled into the compound, a police boy dressed in a shirt so big it made him look as if he'd shrunk overnight leapt from the guard booth and waved his arms.
"Should I drive over him?" Sihot asked.
"Better stop, I suppose," Phosy told him.
The boy ran around to the inspector in the passenger seat.
"Sir, you have to go to K6," he said. "There's been a murder."
Given the pace of communication in the republic, it wasn't unthinkable for this to have been the message from two days hence just reached the guard post. But Phosy had a bad feeling that wasn't the case.
"Who told you?" he asked.
"Vietnamese security guy on a motorcycle, about an hour ago," said the boy.