Death in the Rainy Season Read online

  ‘The staff have been interviewed, and obviously the girl who found the body has given a statement. I’m not sure about the guests. But I’ve been talking to the Cambodian detective in charge of the investigation. Chey Sarit. You’ll meet him this morning. He spoke with the hotel manager, who seems competent. The manager questioned all his employees yesterday afternoon. Everyone who was on duty that night.’

  ‘The manager questioned his staff? Did the Cambodian detective talk to them?’

  ‘I don’t think so. There’s one strange thing: Hugo Quercy checked into the hotel under a false name. His house is five minutes’ walk away. I don’t need to tell you how distraught his wife is. She’s about to have their baby too.’

  ‘How do we know this?’

  ‘The employee who checked him in identified his body. He remembers him. But the name Quercy gave was Jean Dupont.’

  ‘I expect the staff interviews will have to be done again, according to procedure,’ Morel said, annoyed. ‘So what was Quercy doing there? At the hotel?’

  ‘Who knows? But I know what I’d be thinking if I was Florence Quercy. Whatever it is, it can’t be good,’ Nizet told Morel. ‘There’s more, but I think I’ll let the widow tell you herself. She was taken to hospital yesterday but she was checked out an hour later. I’d say she’s better off at home, given the standards of medical care here. You’ll meet her today.’

  ‘Why was she in hospital?’

  ‘Like I said, I want you to hear it from her.’

  ‘OK. That is why I’m here, after all. To help where I can.’

  Everywhere Morel looked, shop-houses had gone up. The footpaths were clearly not designed for walking. They were where people parked their bikes, lived and traded. A woman sat on her haunches under a tree, fanning a sleeping child. A man in a security uniform dozed on a chair. There were boxes of Angkor beer, piled on top of each other. Gold-painted shrines displayed for sale, and clothes hung out to dry.

  ‘Where is Quercy’s body now?’ Morel asked.

  ‘At the morgue.’

  ‘Have they performed an autopsy?’

  ‘No autopsy. That won’t happen. There’s no one who can do it.’

  ‘No forensic pathologist?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What about cause of death?’

  ‘We’ll get a doctor’s opinion on what happened. It’s the best we can do.’

  ‘When was the family notified?’ Morel said.

  ‘As soon as we realized who he was, we phoned the news through to the Quai d’Orsay. The minister was informed. I believe he told his sister himself. She’s a widow, you know. Lives alone. This will be a big shock for her.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘There’s a bit of pressure from Paris to get this solved. Quickly and quietly.’

  ‘So I understand. Will the body be sent home?’

  Nizet shook his head. ‘His wife has asked for the body to be cremated.’

  ‘So she identified him?’

  ‘No. It was Paul Arda, a close friend of his. Quercy’s wife has so far refused to view her husband’s body.’

  ‘And his mother? No plans to fly over? To say farewell to her son before his body’s incinerated?’

  ‘Hugo Quercy is dead,’ Nizet said. ‘And given the state he’s in, I’d say cremation is a good decision. No mother should see her child looking like that. You’ll be able to get a look at him, though.’

  ‘Good. I was hoping I might.’

  ‘I’ll drop you off and I’ll be back in an hour, to take you to the morgue and the hotel where Quercy died.’

  ‘Can’t we go straight to the morgue?’

  ‘We need the doctor there. He can’t make it earlier.’

  ‘All right. I appreciate it,’ Morel said in a clipped tone. He was beginning to sound like Nizet.

  ‘Is there anything else you need to know at this stage? In normal circumstances, I’d give you a pep talk on how things work here, but given you’re half Khmer, I expect you already know more than most,’ Nizet said.

  It was the second time he’d made reference to Morel’s background. Morel nearly said that he knew little about the way to carry out an investigation in Phnom Penh but decided not to.

  They parked outside the hotel and Nizet turned to Morel.

  ‘I’ll be back in an hour. By the way, this hotel belongs to Paul Arda. Quercy’s friend. It was his idea to offer you a room here. I think you can expect a generous rate.’

  ‘That’s good of him. But I’d rather pay the full price,’ Morel said. He had submitted, reluctantly, to Nizet’s offer to arrange his accommodation. But he would have preferred to make his own plans.

  ‘Suit yourself.’ Nizet raised his hand in a gesture of farewell and drove away.

  From the hubbub of the street, Morel stepped into a secluded world of giant potted palms and bougainvillea artfully placed around a kidney-shaped swimming pool. He walked past hotel guests reclining on daybeds piled with cushions, sipping fruit juices through straws, reading magazines or staring into space, with that unavoidable torpor that seemed to invade tourists in the tropics. The only sounds were the chirruping of birds and the gentle lap-lapping of water against the sides of the pool.

  After checking in, Morel unpacked his suitcase, and picked up the phone to order a coffee. Once he’d hung up, he stood in the middle of the room, feeling agitated. It was maddening to have to wait. He decided to have a quick shower and got out just in time to hear a knock on the door. A young Cambodian woman held his coffee on a tray. She presented it to him with a graceful smile and turned to leave. Blissfully alone and wrapped in the hotel dressing gown, he took his cup and stepped across to the window.

  From his room on the third floor, he could just make out the tiled outdoor area he’d walked through earlier, and several of the hotel guests lying prone around the pool. There was only one person in the water, swimming lazily from one end to the other.

  He drank his coffee, enjoying the feel of the cool floor-boards beneath his feet. Beyond the pool, Morel could see more bougainvillea, as well as papaya trees and coconut palms, and the wide, muddy river. This was Cambodia’s main artery, cutting a path across the city before continuing on its journey for thousands of miles.

  Before leaving for Siem Reap he’d tried to explain to his younger sister how he felt about the place. She had replied with an evasive ‘oh yeah?’ Adèle’s only trip to Cambodia had been a decade ago and she had never felt the urge to return. She was one hundred per cent Parisian. Just like his colleague Lila, Adèle would waste away if she had to live anywhere else.

  Down below, the swimmer had run out of energy and was standing still, waist-high in the water at one end of the pool, both elbows on the concrete. Morel wondered what Adèle was up to now. Maybe it hadn’t been such a great idea to have her move in with their father while he was away. Adèle was not patient with the old man at the best of times. The two of them had always rubbed each other up the wrong way.

  He’d resisted poring over the whole complicated business since arriving in Cambodia. But faced with a murder investigation, he found himself thinking of home. The night before, he’d slept poorly; he’d woken up several times when he thought he’d heard his father moving around his bedroom on the upper floor, before realizing he was a long way from their hôtel particulier in Paris. As a young man, Morel had moved back in to the family home after his mother’s death. It was meant to be temporary but the years had passed and now, more than two decades later, he was still there.

  It was hard for Morel to comprehend why he hadn’t moved out after all that time. It wasn’t easy with his father. It had only become worse after Morel, aged twenty-two, had announced he would not be doing anything with his degree in mathematics and that, rather than pursue a scientific career, he would prefer to train as a police officer.

  The night before this trip, Morel had made an effort and taken his father out to a new bistro in Neuilly.

  ‘Pretentious,’ Morel Senior had dec
lared before they had even sat down. He’d sent the wine back, claiming it was corked, and eaten his linguine alle vongole under duress, before declaring that the clams were chewy and that the restaurant’s problem was that it was ‘trying too hard’.

  ‘It’s a shame, really,’ he’d said, with a maddening smile. The conversation had veered towards politics, as it tended to these days. Which was fine, as long as Morel didn’t take the bait. His father was becoming more right-wing, retreating behind an intellectual pessimism that conveniently shut the world out.

  Morel took a sip of his coffee. It was strong and black, the way he liked it.

  At least his father had been true to himself over dinner. That wasn’t something Morel could count on nowadays. It was only six weeks since Philippe Morel had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. It had seemed like a good thing, initially, to know there was a name for the strangeness of this past year. You could begin to map out a foreign land by giving it a name. Here was the desert of forgetfulness, there a crater of anger, with its sudden eruptions you couldn’t predict. Morel Senior had always been a complicated man, but until now his moodiness had been controlled.

  The doctor’s assessment had provided a strange sort of relief, but that relief had been short-lived. Then came the questions. What happens next? How much worse will this get, and how quickly? What is the right thing for us, his children, to do?

  For now, the disease was in its early stages. But the decline, of course, was irreversible. In all his life, the old man had never asked for help. And Morel knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that his father would not want a life where he wasn’t in full possession of his faculties.

  The phone on Morel’s bedside table started ringing. He walked over to it and picked up the receiver. It was Nizet, telling him he was back and waiting in the lobby.

  ‘I’ll be there in five minutes,’ Morel said.

  He stepped back from the window and began to get dressed. Directly across from where he stood, he could make out the delta where the Mekong merged with its tributary, the Tonle Sap. More than anything in Cambodia, the Mekong had left an imprint on his mind and in his heart. Every time he returned, as the plane circled Phnom Penh, the moment he caught sight of the wide, shimmering river below was when he knew that a part of him belonged here, in a way that had nothing to do with knowledge or time. It was a tugging at the heart strings that went against reason.

  EIGHT

  Kate rolled over and opened her eyes. She had fallen asleep with her bedside light on. She looked at her watch. There was no point trying to get back to sleep, she had to get up in an hour.

  For a few seconds, her mind was blank. Then she remembered. But this time she didn’t fall apart. She had cried so many tears since the police had come to the office the day before, to tell them about Hugo’s death, that there was nothing left. Instead, she lay quietly, listening to the noises that had become a familiar fixture in her life over the past six months.

  She had always been a light sleeper and it didn’t help that she had to put up with such frequent intrusions from the outside world. Here, in this dingy room – the only thing she could properly afford – she could hear the neighbour’s snores through the paper-thin walls. The rain bled through the window, which the landlord had promised to fix months ago. It dripped steadily onto the floor. Each day, the same excitable bulbul made a loud entrance just before dawn. Her own personal alarm clock announcing the break of day. Its chirruping generally triggered a voluble exchange which, going by the level of noise, involved a whole bloody parliament of birds. More than once, Kate had wished she’d had a slingshot.

  When was it ever quiet, truly quiet here? In the small New Zealand town she came from, you could wake up wondering whether you’d gone deaf during the night, the silence was so complete. In the cold weatherboard house of her childhood, she’d lain in bed praying for the creaking of floorboards that told her she wasn’t the sole survivor of some major catastrophe that had wiped out every living thing yet somehow spared her.

  She sat up, feeling disoriented. After coming back from her night out with Adam, she’d had a Valium to help her lose consciousness. The little sleep she’d scrounged wasn’t enough. Every inch of her body clamoured for more.

  Adam. Last night came back to her as a series of stark images. What the hell, Kate? she asked herself. Adam, for Christ’s sake. Of all the men she might have slept with. She had a sudden, clear vision of his pale, naked body and quickly directed her thoughts elsewhere.

  As she got up, she dislodged a book that had been left on the bed. Something Hugo had lent her. She’d managed two pages and decided it was unreadable. He kept saying he was educating her, enriching her mind. She smiled, and immediately felt like crying. She wiped fiercely at her eyes and forced a wobbly smile back onto her face. Educating me, my arse. What a bloody nerve that man had.

  They all thought she was in love with Hugo. Typical, really. She was single so it went without saying that she must be pining for someone. No one could believe that maybe she and Hugo had a great deal of affection for each other and that there was nothing funny going on.

  She got the feeling at times that her colleagues felt sorry for her. Poor Kate, they probably thought. She doesn’t look after herself. If she had a man, then maybe she’d try a bit harder to look, well, decent.

  She got up and went to the mirror, unsteady on her feet. She took a long, cool look at herself. OK, so she had had issues with her body. Was there a woman out there who hadn’t? It had taken her a long time to accept herself but she had. And for a thirty-year-old woman, she was actually in reasonably good shape. Better to be yourself, flawed as you are, than something artificial, Kate. She would say this like a mantra to kick-start her day, and it worked. She could greet herself each morning with a semblance of grace and focus her energies elsewhere.

  What annoyed her was that it never occurred to any of those people who thought she was after Hugo that maybe she didn’t want or need a man in her life right now, and that maybe in their friendship he had been the more dependent of the two.

  Which wasn’t to say she hadn’t needed him. Now he was dead, she was more alone than ever. She felt hollow, as though her organs had been scooped out, leaving only flesh and brittle bone.

  She took a quick shower and immediately felt better. Getting dressed was a quick exercise. She just picked the first thing she saw and didn’t bother to brush her long black hair. Simply tied it into a knot.

  Before leaving the house, she searched for the book Hugo had given her. When she found it, she hugged it to her chest. It was comforting. She decided to keep it. Florence would never know, so what did it matter? At the thought of Hugo’s wife, Kate felt a great wave of sadness. Poor, poor Florence.

  She must think of something else. She needed to be strong. There was Kids at Risk to consider, now Hugo was gone. The NGO had his name written all over it. Before Hugo, the organization had been nothing, its contribution insignificant compared to the work others did in the same field. Now it had stature. Phnom Penh’s street kids depended on the network of services that Kids at Risk had developed over the past years.

  No one knew better than her what Hugo wanted to achieve. They had disagreed about many things but shared the same desire to produce quantifiable results for the 15,000 or so kids whose welfare they managed.

  Kate smiled at herself in the mirror, remembering the hours she and Hugo had spent talking. They’d had some heated discussions, Hugo speaking at great speed and throwing French words in every time he couldn’t immediately find the English one he was looking for; Kate interrupting constantly, because with Hugo it was the only way to get a word in edgeways. Sometimes he came over, and they sat up talking and drinking, side by side on her narrow bed. Ha! Now wouldn’t that have set the gossip wheels turning.

  Of course, there’d been things about Hugo that made her angry. He could be hurtful. Some might call it insensitivity, but Kate thought he simply lacked the social graces other people valued so muc
h. His bluntness was proof of his integrity. He didn’t conceal anything.

  He’d liked her company. Liked her modest place.

  ‘Doesn’t your wife mind that you’re with me?’ she’d asked him. ‘Isn’t she waiting for you? This is the second time this week.’

  He shook his head. ‘I can’t change the way I am. Florence accepts that.’ Which, Kate had to admit, seemed a tad complacent. He could be callous. But not with her. Not with her, right?

  ‘You did a fucking awful job with that last report. I wanted something real, not a deluge of meaningless stats,’ he’d snarled once, throwing the paper onto her desk and walking away before she could say anything. It had hurt, but he hadn’t meant to be unkind. He wanted Kids at Risk to be the best it could be, and for everyone to put their heart and soul into the job, as he did.

  She grabbed her bag and collected her keys. On her way out, she thought about Adam. He would probably make a bid for the director’s position as soon as he could. But he would wait for the right time. Even he knew better than to barge into the role before Hugo had been properly laid to rest.

  She didn’t like Adam. But he was the best in the team, after Hugo. And herself.

  They would need to work together. Starting now.

  NINE

  It was happening again.

  Adam sat up in bed and took a deep breath, bracing himself for the next gut-wrenching episode. Dawn crept through his blinds, a grey and stealthy presence. At least it wasn’t the middle of the night. He dreaded these episodes when the rest of the world was asleep.

  When the pain started up again, he tried as he always did to relax his body and to focus on his breathing. But soon it became too much to bear. Mild panic overcame him and he doubled over, groaning, oblivious to everything but the clenching of his stomach and the rapid, unfamiliar sound of his breathing. Getting over each hurdle of pain was like trying to sprint 400 metres. By the time it was over, he was covered in sweat and breathing hard, his head spinning and his body twitching with relief.