The Coroner's Lunch by Colin Cotterill Page B

another guess. But there are a couple of clues.”
    “Tell me.” She was pulling down jars from the shelves and checking to see how much she had left of the various chemicals she needed.
    “Well, first of all, she, the victim, died suddenly without displaying any outward signs of distress. Secondly, her insides were particularly bright red. What are you sniffing that for? They don’t spoil, do they?”
    “No, I get a little buzz. Want some?”
    “No, thanks. Thirdly, my Mr. Geung noticed something strange while we were cutting. He said he smelled nuts.”
    “Nuts?”
    “He couldn’t really identify what type of nuts, but my guess is almonds. There aren’t that many nuts with distinctive smells.”
    “Well, surely you and the nurse would have smelled it.”
    “Not necessarily. A lot of people aren’t able to distinguish that particular smell. Some of Mr. Geung’s senses are quite well developed. I’m wondering if someone slipped her a pill somehow. The most common one available is cyanide. If I still had the body, there are other signs I could be looking for.”
    “You lost the body?”
    “It was reclaimed by the family.”
    Oum looked up at him. “That’s a coincidence.”
    “What is?”
    “I hear Comrade Kham’s wife passed away suddenly yesterday and he went by the morgue and kidnapped the body.”
    “Really? Where did you hear a thing like that?”
    “This is Vientiane, not Paris.”
    She was right, of course. In Laos, the six-degrees-of-separation rule could easily be downgraded to three, often to two. The population of Laos had dwindled to under three million, and Vientiane didn’t contain more than 150,000 of them. The odds of knowing, or knowing of, someone else were pretty good.
    “That’s true. In Paris you don’t have rumor and scandal crawling out of the trash, or up from the drains. If Vientiane folk don’t hear anything scandalous for two days, they just make it up to keep the momentum going.”
    “So, you’re telling me the stomach contents you brought to me for breakfast have nothing to do with—”
    “Oum, my love. I promise if you don’t ask me that question, I won’t lie to you.”
    “Then I won’t ask. Let’s get on with it. There are three color tests for cyanide in the magic book. I’ve got the chemicals to do two of them.”
    Siri pulled two plastic film containers from his bag.
    “I have her urine and blood here too, so we’ll need to do three samples for each test.”
    “Yes, sir. You don’t have any other bits of the comrade’s wife in that bag, do you?”
    He looked at her with his angriest and least convincing expression.
    “Oum. If I’m right about her, the fewer people who know about it the better. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
    “Yeah. I do. Really. Don’t worry.”
     
     
    It was lunchtime when Siri returned to the morgue. Auntie Lah had already sold out of baguettes and gone home, but Mr. Geung had kindly picked up the coroner’s lunch and left it on his desk. The office was deserted, so Siri went down to the log and sat alone, eating and thinking. He was surprised to hear Geung’s voice very close behind him.
    “Dtui. She…she went home.” Siri turned. His lab assistant was leaning over him like a schoolteacher with his finger pointed at Siri’s nose.
    “Oh, hello, Mr. Geung. Thanks for getting my—”
    “You were very bad.”
    “What?”
    “You were very very very bad.”
    “What did I do?” He felt curiously nervous.
    “She isn’t…isn’t…isn’t a bubblehead. She’s a nice girl.”
    “I—”
    “It was very bad to say th…th…those things to her.”
    Siri thought back to what he’d said. It hadn’t occurred to him anything he said could offend her. He didn’t think she was offendable. “Did you say she’d gone home?”
    “Yes.”
    “But she never goes home for lunch. And I had her bicycle.”
    “She’s gone home because she’s sad. You made her sad.”
    “I—”
    But Geung was finished. He turned