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American high school at kilometre 6. It was what the English would call a bungalow and what the Lao would call a rather pointless style of architecture – not raised from the ground on stilts to allow the air to circulate and the floods to pass beneath. Windows of glass that magnified the rays of the sun. A toilet with a communal seat that encouraged the exchange of germs and disease. But the senior Party members didn’t live there because it was practical. They’d moved into the walled US compound to thumb their socialist noses at the Americans. They’d endured and survived the endless air raids on their cave enclaves in the north-east for thirty years. The enemy owed them.
    Daeng was pleased to see how well the old comrade was looking. Only she and Siri knew the actual reason for his retirement and both had sworn not to discuss it again. Dtui, like the rest of Laos, saw him as an elder statesman in frail health who had retired gracefully. But there was nothing frail about him on this day.
    “I must say it’s rare that I get two voluptuous lady visitors at the same time,” he said. “Nice to see I haven’t lost that magnetism. How did you get here?”
    “On our bicycles,” Dtui told him.
    “All this way? And you with your arthritis, Madame Daeng.”
    “Can’t let a little chronic pain spoil a day out, comrade,” she told him.
    “That’s the spirit. Then I think you both deserve a drink for making it here.”
    “I’m on the baby wagon, uncle,” Dtui confessed. “But Madame Daeng got quite sloshed at lunchtime. I think that’s why she can’t feel her legs.”
    “Nice to see,” said Civilai, pulling down several bottles from the Formica wall cabinet. “Then she’ll need topping up.”
    “Where’s Madame Nong today?” Dtui asked, wondering whether Civilai’s wife would let him tipple in the afternoon if she were around.
    “Women’s Union excursion…again. She’s been signing up for all of them since I became redundant. Can’t really understand it. You’d think she’d want to spend all her time cleaning up after me, wouldn’t you?”
    “You’d think so.” Daeng smiled. “We girls are mysterious creatures.”
    “No arguments from me there.” Civilai nodded, arriving at the table with three full glasses with lime slices hanging onto them for dear life. “So, what can I do for you, ladies?”
    They sat and drank their vodka sodas – one without vodka, two with little soda – while Dtui told Civilai all about the peculiar happenings at the morgue and the reluctance of the police and the army to share their findings. He agreed that, although there were several dozen people who might like to give Siri a good slapping, none that he could think of disliked the doctor enough to blow him up. He recalled one attempt on the coroner’s life a year before but as far as he knew there had been nothing personal about it and the perpetrator was safely behind bars.
    “When’s Siri due back?” Civilai asked.
    “Tomorrow evening,” Dtui told him.
    “Then we’d better get cracking. We can’t have our chief and only coroner killed by some maniac, can we now?”
    “You think you can help?” Dtui asked.
    “Undoubtedly. If a respected Party dinosaur can’t call in a favour or two, who the blazes can?”
     
    Some people just die. Siri had come to that conclusion after many years of careful observation. They don’t necessarily die of anything, they just get old, everything gives up, and they pass away. It’s as simple as that. There are those who describe it as dying of old age but that puts old age in the same category as bubonic plague and the Black Death. There really is nothing dangerous about old age and there’s no reason to be afraid of it. It certainly hadn’t done Dr Siri any harm. He’d been passing through its hallowed halls for some years and it hadn’t killed him.
    Comrade Singsai had passed away in his sleep during an excruciatingly long speech discussing the allocation