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street person. But the account of one witness was accurate enough to give Siri cause for concern.
    Ba See sold old stamps and coins from a tiny shopfront near the corner of Samsenthai Road and Pangkham. It was unlikely she made a living from it but she enjoyed sitting on her threadbare wicker armchair and watching the street.
    “Every Friday,” she said. “Regular as clockwork for the past two years he’d turn up at five thirty a.m. on the dot. Don’t know how he managed it. Never saw him wear a watch, or much else for that matter. He’d go over to the first of them colonials across the street.” She pointed to three ancient French buildings behind a low white wall. At one time they’d been white, but time and weather had turned them as ugly as a smoker’s teeth.
    “He’d go over and bang on the door,” she continued. “No point in it at all. There are six families living in there, government workers from the provinces, and they’ve all got their own rooms. The front door’s never locked. But he didn’t ever go in. He just stood there knocking. People came down to see what he wanted but he never wanted anything. Only wanted to bang by the looks of it. Every damned week. Then, last Friday, he didn’t show up. I was waiting for my regular five thirty bang but he didn’t come. It surprised me. Even some of the women in the house came down and looked out the door like they were expecting him. Day before yesterday, he didn’t come again. Must be something wrong.”
    Siri and Daeng went to the old building and asked the few people who were home. They supported Ba See’s story. Nobody had any idea why he knocked on the door every week, and nobody had seen him for the last two Fridays. Siri leaned his head against Daeng’s shoulder blade. They were sitting on his bike. No greater love has any man than to let his wife have a turn at driving his beloved motorcycle.
    “So what do we do next?” Daeng asked.
    “If we had TV we could put an artist’s impression of him on the evening news.”
    “Failing that?”
    “Failing that I think we’ve come to the end of our leads for the day. Let’s mark it down as ongoing and move on to the next impossible situation.”
    “Your house?”
    “Are you up for it?”
    “If you are.”
 
    They pulled up in front of Siri’s old bungalow and conducted a quick surveillance of the property. There were some six children frozen like statues in the front yard. Daeng turned to Siri, who could only shrug. On the roof was what looked like a handleless red-and-white-polka-dot umbrella forming a dome in the centre of the tiles. A makeshift clothesline had been strung up between a tree and a very ornate spirit house, one that hadn’t been there on Siri’s last visit. An assortment of brightly coloured ladies’ undergarments hung from the rope like distress flags on a ship. Thai religious music filled the street in front of the house, and one of the front windows bore brown tape in the shape of a cross.
    “I don’t know,” Daeng said. “Fighting the French in the jungles is one thing…”
    “Be brave, ma Pasionaria. A warning, though: I may have to feign anger. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t burst out laughing.”
    “I’ll do my best.”
    Siri’s habit of collecting strays had begun when his original lodging was blown up and he was relocated to the suburbs. It hadn’t seemed logical for a single man to live alone in such a mansion. Several down-and-outs had passed through over the previous year. Some had stayed. On the current roster, as far as he knew, were: Mr Inthanet, the puppet master from Luang Prabang; Mrs Fah, whose husband had been haunted to death, and her two children, Mee and Nounou; the two hopefully inactive prostitutes, Tong and Gongjai; Comrade Noo, the renegade monk fleeing the Thai junta; and a blind Hmong beggar, Pao, and his granddaughter, Lia, who had been swept from the road in front of Daeng’s shop before the police could tidy them away. Then