Read Online Six and a Half Deadly Sins by Colin Cotterill - Free Book Online

could I now? So who signed it?”
    “Comrade Goi.”
    “He sounds important. Who is he, the governor of the province?”
    “No.”
    “Then …?”
    “He’s the senior foreman of the Chinese road project.”
    “Really? So show me the document.”
    “I …”
    “That’s an order.”
    Teyp went to his desk and removed a banana that was acting as a paperweight for a brown envelope. The banana reminded Phosy he hadn’t eaten for twenty hours. He instructed the smallest of the constables to organize food for himself and his guests as soon as possible. In the meantime, they’d settle for tea. The little officer ran off.
    Teyp brought over the envelope. Phosy smiled. It was sealed. He hooked his little finger into the flap and ripped it open. It contained one sheet of greying paper with a rather brief typed letter on one side. It said that, following athorough investigation, Inspector Phosy had come to the conclusion that there was no Chinese involvement in the incident that led to the deaths of the two village headmen.
    Phosy looked up at the sergeant, who was staring at his own bare feet. “It appears that not only am I a poor speller,” said Phosy, “but that I’ve already signed this crock of shit, and it’s all addressed and ready to go off. Now how do you account for that?”
    Sergeant Teyp could say nothing.
    “Well, I’ll tell you what we’ll do,” said Phosy, ripping the letter into smaller and smaller pieces. “We’ll assume that you didn’t know your Comrade Goi signed my name on this letter instead of his own. We’ll assume you believed he was authorized to communicate directly with the ministry. We’ll assume that the eight regulations and two laws you and your men have already broken will not be written up in my report and that you are able to start again with a clean sheet. And we’ll assume that you, rather than the Chinese road builders, are in charge up here. How does that grab you?”
    Sergeant Teyp nodded and said quietly, “Thank you, sir.”
    Phosy didn’t feel nearly as confident as he sounded, but he needed the sergeant and his men to have faith in him. “We have a system. Laws. Everything that happens here is reported to and acted on in Vientiane. You are members of the Lao police force. Never forget that. If we don’t investigate a crime, we don’t issue documents to say we did. Now brief me on the case.”
    There were no laws as such. The ministry had drawn up a list of crimes and suitable punishments, but the judicial system was in its infancy and justice was being meted out by old military officers and headmen who interpreted the ambiguous lists however they saw fit. Even so, Phosy’s serious talk seemed to have penetrated, as a brief expression of pride shone in the sergeant’s face. Phosy was suddenly aware of thebruises where the stick had been poked repeatedly into his ribs that morning.
    Before going to the filing cabinet, Teyp took his shirt from the back of his chair and put it on. He opened a drawer and started to finger through the files. There was a sudden flurry of language from the previously silent Mrs. Loo.
    “Here,” said the sergeant, holding the file aloft.
    “Read it to me,” said Phosy.
    “Yes, sir.”
    Teyp sat at his desk and gave the date of the crime and the names of the police involved in the investigation. “As we don’t have any working phones up here, we were alerted to the crime by a villager who got a ride in on an army vehicle,” Teyp read. “We were led to a clearing down the gully from the village of Muang Se. It’s a Yao village, and not many of the residents speak Lao, but our own constable Buri does. There we found the two corpses of Headman Mao, the Yao, and Headman Panpan, the Akha, both lying facedown in the dirt. Both had sustained multiple wounds. Both were shirtless and barefooted and wearing only football shorts. To all appearances it seemed that the two men had been overpowered by unknown assailants. Two sharpened