Read Online Jimm Juree 01; Killed at the Whim of a Hat by Colin Cotterill - Free Book Online Page B

sounds familiar. No wonder they look so sallow, the lot of them. But it’s that unspoken animosity that makes them more likely to give up top secret information.
    I found my nun whitewashing a wall, half her head and one arm.
    “Would you like me to just pour the can over you? It’d be quicker,” I said.
    My nun smiled. She was in her sixties, I imagined, and she’d probably been a heartbreaker when she was younger. She wasn’t much taller than me but unless she had some spare brushes stuffed down her shirt she’d been much more generously endowed. An old monk draped in a robe was sitting on a step with his back to her. There were barely breathing dog carcasses littered all around like casualties of a major canine battle.
    “Some can whitewash,” she said. “Some can repair cars. Of the two, whitewashing is my strongest hand so I suggest you don’t let me anywhere near your engine.”
    I liked her. I suppose I could have thrashed around in the small-talk undergrowth for ten minutes and crept up on the subject, or I could just attack. I read her as more of the direct type.
    “I heard your abbot got killed,” I said.
    “You did?”
    She let the fat brush drop to her side where it put another coat on her already white sarong.
    “Yup.”
    She seemed to be waiting for something.
    “So, did he?” I asked.
    “Get killed?”
    “Yes.”
    “Should we ask him?”
    “I…?”
    The pretty nun turned to the old monk sitting on the step. He appeared to be composing a psalm in the air with his long fingers.
    “ Jow a wat ” she said, the formal address. “This young lady was wondering whether you’d been killed.”
    My facts were undoubtedly less than accurate. The abbot wheeled around to look at me. He was weather-beaten like the wreck of a small canoe. His ribcage was an old Chinese abacus whose beads had been long lost, his face a clumsily sketched grid of experiences with pockmarks. Life had apparently had a go at him but he seemed comfortable in his ravaged body.
    “No.” He smiled.
    “Well, you can’t win them all,” I said.
    “Hoping for a dead abbot, were you?” my nun asked, still smiling.
    “In a way, yes,” I confessed. “But I’m also very pleased to see that the good father is alive and well.”
    “And how would a death improve your quality of life, young lady?” asked the nun. “I watched you breach the security post and jump from a car and sneak up on us. So, I have to assume the news of a killing was important to you in some way.”
    You know they’re often characters with shady pasts of their own, no more free from sin than you or I, but there’s something about a figure wrapped in saffron or virgin white that makes you want to tell the truth. So we sat, the three of us, and I gave them the blog version of the saga of my current life. They smiled and nodded along the entire journey, apparently fascinated by my decline. And I arrived at the juncture at which I now stood. And there was an exchange between them. If I’d been distracted by a hornet I might have missed it. And I agree I might very well be wrong, because monks and nuns and imams and Catholic priests are nothing more than little green space aliens in my mind. I’d been far too hip a teenager and too cynical a young thing to be snared by team religion. But I sensed there was a history between these two. I visualized it as a deep crimson pool in which they’d swum together somewhere in their past lives. I believe that brief unspoken look said:
    “You tell her.”
    “No, you tell her.”
    There was a pause during which I heard our truck start, reverse and drive away, but I was too close here to give up and chase after it. The abbot coughed and spoke.
    “Two of the men you saw walk out of my office are detectives from Bangkok. One other is a local detective from Lang Suan CID. Then there’s the head of our local council. The monks are attached to the Buddhist Sangba Supreme Council, a branch called the Pra Vinyathikum . If