The Axe Factor: A Jimm Juree Mystery (Jimm Juree Mysteries) (24 page)

“What are you doing?” he whispered. “The door could have been wired to an alarm.”

“I knew it was safe.”

“How?”

Chompu pointed to the note taped to the inside of the glass. It read:
Jimm. This door’s open
.

“We’re lit up like the Royal Palace here,” whispered Grandad.

But Chompu drew solace from the fact that they had Kow watching their backs from the bushes below. He took the cell phone off his belt.

“Kow,” he said. “See anything?”

“I see you two” came the reply.

“Nothing else?”

“No.”

“I’ll keep this channel open. Shout if anything comes up … Kow? You’re supposed to say, ‘Roger’ or something. Kow? Kow?”

There was nothing but static.

“The useless lump’s probably dropped his phone down a crack in the rocks,” said Grandad. “Worthless. I tell you.”

“There’s no need for—” Chompu began, but he was interrupted by a man’s voice from the stairwell behind them.

“I know you’re down there.”

Grandad’s heart flipped over like a pancake. Chompu’s legs turned to agar. The voice was followed by what could only be described as a soundtrack, the type in movies that accompanies a lone female on a walk through a haunted house, all singing saws and piano strings.

“Come on up,” said the voice. “Don’t be afraid. I have something for you. Something you’ll never forget.”

This time it was Chompu with the signals. He pointed to himself, twiddled his fingers to suggest walking, and pointed to the external staircase they’d passed on their way in. He indicated for Grandad to take the internal stairs, and in seconds he was gone. Grandad remained alone at the foot of the staircase. It was hard to tell what he was thinking at that moment because he never shared his feelings with anyone. As a lifelong traffic policeman he’d never been in a life-or-death situation. He’d had a gun during his career but had never fired it in all of those years in uniform. It was unlikely he was as cool and calm as he pretended to be as he climbed the stairs. He reached the top landing, which was pitch black, but he knew his silhouette would still be illuminated from below. An easy target for anyone armed. He flicked the two-way switch at the top of the stairs and instead of seeing everything clearly, the downstairs lights went out and he was once again blind.

“Are you feeling afraid?” came the voice of Coralbank, the music increasing in volume behind it. Grandad had no idea what the voice was saying, so he didn’t reply.

“This is how it feels,” Coralbank continued. “That moment of confusion. What lies inside the darkness? It’s the moment when you don’t know with any certainty how close to death you are. When you wonder what I am holding here in this invisible void.”

Grandad Jah was actually wondering where the hell his brave policeman colleague had gone. Why Kow didn’t answer the phone. Why he was all alone in this raid. Why the rain lashing against the windows sounded so final. Whether the Burmese were here too, lurking in the blackness with their knives. One old man against three assailants. The writer was still babbling on.

“Come in,” he said. “Take one brave step farther into the darkness.”

The only choice Grandad had was to remain silent. He had his gun. All it lacked was bullets. Only he knew this fact. Pistol ammunition could only be sold if you had a certificate from the police. As the gun was unlicensed, he’d not had that option.

“Just trust me,” said the writer. “Follow my voice. Put all your faith in me. Come to me.”

Grandad felt along the upstairs landing for a second switch, one that might end this terror. He crept silently sideways with his back to the wall, away from the voice. All the time feeling for a light switch. He wondered what he might be reincarnated as. A horse? A cockroach? As barely living coral? He wondered whether he’d be given a choice. Wondered whether his unpleasantness in this life might condemn him to misery in the next. If only he’d spent those nights in the coffin.

He was about five paces to the right of the staircase now and decided he had no choice but to attack. To run headfirst toward the speaker. Perhaps he might barge into him and catch him by surprise. He let out a deep breath and started across the room. After only three steps he was blinded by a battery of spotlights embedded in the ceiling. He looked to his left to see Lieutenant Chompu at the study door with his hand on the main light switch.

In the center of the room was a two-person dining table, laid to the nines with a candelabrum, several plates with stainless steel covers and a full bottle of wine with two glasses. On the far side of the table, naked apart from a leather waistcoat, thigh-length boots, and a black Lone Ranger mask, was the famous author, Conrad Coralbank. His lips formed an almost perfect O.

*   *   *

“It begins,” she’d said, the insipid smile still on her face, “with a slight catch in the breath, then a heart flutter. Then the room tilts first one way, then the other.”

I was living her description.

“You feel as if your sense of balance has been lost,” she continued. “As if you couldn’t stand even if you wanted to. Then, poof, you’re gone.”

Just before I fell headfirst onto the glass coffee table and made a big bloody crease across my forehead, I thought I’d seen someone—a woman, perhaps—walk into the room. But I had been too preoccupied with my fight against unconsciousness to notice who she was. The bitter Shiraz. The sleight of hand. The overwhelming feeling of stupidity. All this came to me in the seconds before the crash of glass and the swirling pool of nausea.

*   *   *

They sat in the main room of the big glass house. It was something Lieutenant Chompu had dreamed of—a drawing-room denouement. He didn’t actually know what a drawing room was, but he and Jimm had watched
Poirot
on illegal BBC downloads. All the murder mysteries ended like this, and it gave a clever policeman the chance to bamboozle a confession out of the guilty party.

Seated around the glass coffee table were the author, now dressed in a
yukata
, the maid with her face caked in powder, the man she claimed to be her husband but who was actually her brother, a retired traffic cop, a fisherman, and him, the clever police officer. And he needed to be brilliant that evening because as far as he could see no crime had actually been committed. Not unless you counted trespassing on private property and illegal entry. But the air was thick with potential confessions.

There was, it had to be said, one more flaw in the methodology of this denouement. There was no common language. Coralbank’s Thai was only matched in its awfulness by the English of Grandad Jah and Chompu. The latter had a number of memorized phrases but no vocabulary that could be considered “functional.” Captain Kow happily confessed that Manchester and United were the only two words he knew in English. Jo the gardener spoke nothing but Burmese, which left only A, the maid. Although her English and Thai both sounded like Burmese, she had the vocabulary and was truly the only person who could act as interpreter. Which explains why one of the main suspects in a crime nobody could actually put their finger on was translating.

Chompu walked around the circle of chairs with his hands behind his back.

“So,” he said. “A…”

“Would you like some coffee?” she asked.

“No, I would not. But thank you for asking. I was—”

“Tea?”

“Ms. A,” he said. “Let us just imagine for a moment that you are not a maid. You are merely a member of the household. Do not feel obliged to serve us.”

“Very well, sir.”

“Right,” said Chompu. “Now we have a number of issues to work through. I’d appreciate it if you could translate for your employer as we proceed. I shall, of course, be checking the accuracy of your English because I am fluent in the language. I’m just a little too shy to speak it.”

“Yes, sir.”

Chompu flipped open his Hello Kitty notepad.

“Ms. A, on the evening of the twentieth, your … husband was seen in the garden of this house with a machete and a cement bag. Could you tell us what he was doing there?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I mean … tell us.”

“It’s difficult,” she said.

“Sometimes the truth can be,” said Chompu.

“No, I mean it’s difficult to answer your questions and translate at the same time.”

“I understand. Then we’ll allow you to translate at the end of each block of questions.”

“Thank you, sir.”

She told Coralbank, who didn’t seem to be in the mood for any of this. In fact, since his embarrassing exposure, the renowned writer had been remarkably short of words.

“So, Ms. A,” said Chompu.

“Durian, sir.”

“What about it?”

“The master has a dozen durian trees along the edge of his land. He hates the smell. He kindly allows us to sell the fruit we get from those trees, but he refuses to let us harvest them during the heat of the day when he’s around. He has a very sensitive nose. So Jo cuts them down late at night when it’s cool and the master is asleep.”

“A, could you ask the master if that’s true?” said Chompu.

“Are you nuts?” asked Grandad. “Do you honestly think she’d tell us if he said no?”

“I know what I’m doing,” said the policeman.

“You could have fooled me.”

“The master says it’s true,” said A, and Chompu felt even more stupid. He returned to his notes.

“On the night of the thirteenth,” he said, “you hired a motorcycle taxi with a sidecar to take two polystyrene boxes to the bus station.”

“That might be true, sir.”

“Might be?”

“It’s something we do often, sir. But I’m not sure whether we sent boxes on that date.”

“What was in the boxes?”

“Why, the durian, sir. We send them to my sister in Chiang Mai. These are very expensive durian. Golden Pillow. The best. They cost a small fortune in the north. My sister sells them at Warorot Market.”

“It all smells pretty fishy to me,” said Grandad.

“It all sounds pretty logical to me,” said Captain Kow, who knew what fishy smelled like.

Captain Kow smiled. Grandad Jah snarled. Chompu realized he was on dodgy legal ground by just being there, interrogating people without a warrant. And still there wasn’t a hint of a crime. He knew he’d have to get his questioning done and leave before the owner came to his senses and called his lawyer.

“Ms. A,” he said, “could you ask Mr. Coralbank where his wife is?”

“Oh, I know where she is, sir.”

“You do?”

“Yes, sir. She’s in Bangkok.”

“Is there any way of verifying that?”

“I have her cell-phone number,” she said. “We chat often. I was quite close to the mistress.”

“Do you have the number?”

A took her cell phone from her pocket and scrolled down. She pressed “Connect” and handed the phone to the policeman. There followed a short but friendly conversation in which Chompu asked Coralbank’s wife how she was and apologized for the inconvenience. He clicked “End call” and nodded to his cohorts. The chances of a major crime having taken place at the big glass house were becoming remote. He tried one last ploy.

“Ms. A,” he said.

“Yes, sir?”

“Did you or did you not make threats against Jimm Juree?”

“Threats? No sir.”

“Are you sure?”

“Why would I make threats to her?”

“That’s for you to tell me.”

Chompu knew that Poirot would have had a tearful confession out of the girl by now. Fiction was so … convenient. She still wasn’t near to breaking point. He pushed a little.

“So you didn’t write a threatening letter to Jimm Juree or try to poison her dogs?”

“No … no, sir. I’m very fond of dogs, and…”

“And what?”

“I can’t write so well.”

“You were a university graduate.”

“I used to write, sir. I used to write a lot. But then this happened.”

She rolled up her sleeve to reveal a wrist wound.

“What’s that?”

“A bullet, sir. We were passing through the no-go zone to get to the camps in Thailand. The Burmese military weren’t so strict back then. I imagine I was just unlucky. I was shooting practice for some bored army sentry. He hit me in the right wrist and severed a nerve. I can’t use the thumb on my right hand. But I can type.”

“And you expect us to believe the Englishman hired you with a disability like that?” said Grandad.

“I can do all the big jobs,” she said. “And the master’s very kind.”

“Oh, come on,” said Grandad. “She’s got bullshit coming out of every orifice. Let me do this. I’ll show you what an interrogation looks like.”

He stepped past Chompu and pointed his index finger in the maid’s face.

“Girl,” he said, “what about your warning to Jimm when she came here. Are you going to tell us that didn’t happen either?”

A was shaken. She looked at her boss and her husband/brother.

“I … I did warn her,” she said.

“What about?”

“I can’t … I can’t really tell you, sir.”

“See, son,” said Grandad to Chompu. “That’s the way you do it. No need to pussyfoot around with these people. Go for the jugular.”

A was translating but not for Coralbank. She was speaking Burmese with her brother. The writer continued to sit deaf and dumbfounded. If anyone looked guilty in that room it was him.

“And while you’re at it,” said Grandad, “you can tell us why you thought it necessary to pretend this little midget here was your husband when in fact he’s your brother.”

This really stunned the maid. She blushed and looked fleetingly at Coralbank, who didn’t make eye contact with anyone.

“I would like to maintain my right to remain silent,” she said.

Grandad laughed. “You’re Burmese, girl,” he said. “You don’t have any rights.”

“That’s not strictly true,” said Chompu, “but I will take you to the police station if you refuse to answer those questions. And the first thing they’ll do is ask to see your papers.”

“It’s not … I can’t, sir,” she said.

“Why not?”

“We’ll lose our jobs here,” she said.

“It’s that serious?”

“Yes, sir. Please don’t make me.”

“It’s simple,” said Grandad Jah. “You talk or you’re on the next armored police truck back to Burma.”