Killed at the Whim of a Hat (Thorndike Press Large Print Reviewers' Choice) - Hardcover

Colin Cotterill was born in London. He has taught in Australia, the USA and Japan and lived for many years in Laos where he worked for nongovernmental social service organizations. He now writes full-time and lives in Chumphone, Thailand. He has been short-listed for the CWA Gold Dagger and has won the CWA Dagger in the Library.

“Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream.”
—GEORGE W. BUSH, LACROSSE, WISCONSIN, 18 OCTOBER, 2000
 
Old Mel hired one of Da’s nephews—the slow-witted one with the dent in his forehead—to sink a well in his back acre. The irrigation trenches his family had dug between the rows of oil palms didn’t extend to the rear fence and the new fronds were browning even before they fanned open. It hadn’t rained for a month. Mel had been lugging watering cans out there for two weeks and his back bones were starting to clack like mah-jong tiles. So, a well, a cheap Chinese pump, half a dozen sprinklers, and all he’d need to do was flick a switch. Oil palms took care of themselves if you watered them often and gave them manure treats once every three months. Twenty palms saved without crippling his spine. Cheap at twice the price.
So, on Saturday last, Old Mel sat on the top rung of the back fence and watched the young man work. The nephew’s skull indentation made Mel wonder if he’d been hit by a metal petanque ball thrown at high speed. Such was the concavity. But he decided it was better not to ask. He knew the response would be long and slobbered. He knew the nephew would stop work to reply because he couldn’t perform two functions simultaneously. So Mel merely sat and watched him dig. He could have chipped in with some labor to make the job easier but Old Mel was a firm believer in not hiring a goat and bleating himself.
The tried-and-tested southern Thai method of sinking a well would undoubtedly not have been acceptable in any Western country where concepts such as “quality” and “safety standards” were firmly in place. Four one-meter concrete pipe segments lay on the ground to one side. The nephew would dig a hole broad and deep enough to insert one of the segments. He would then jump into the hole and continue to burrow downward, scooping out earth from beneath the concrete pipe. The latter would sink into the ground like a very slow elevator. Once its top lip was level with the surface of the field, the second pipe segment would be placed on top of it and the excavation would continue. The earth in Old Mel’s field was a mixture of dirt and sand and once you got below the knotty pissweed, it was not terribly hard to dig. The problems would begin—if you were lucky—when the third section was inserted and the water started to rise, turning the hole into a mudbath spa. Before the fourth segment was level with the ground, the unfortunate young man could be spending half his time submerged in murky brown water.
But on this arid Saturday morning the well would not allow itself to be sunk. At no more than waist depth below the surface, the nephew’s hoe clanged against something solid. A loud metallic gong scattered the wimpy drongos from the trees. Lizards scampered from beneath rocks. The nephew was obviously enchanted by the percussion because he struck three more times before Mel could convince him to cease. The old man climbed down from his perch, hooked his toes into his sandals, and ambled over to the hole. He stopped at the concrete rim and stared down at his laborer’s feet which, against all the odds, stood astride a small island of rust.
“It can’t be much,” Mel said. “Probably a barrel lid. Sink your hoe off to the edges. You can work your way below it and pry it up.”
Easily said. The nephew prodded and poked but every foray produced the same tinny clunk. There was no way around it. For all anyone knew, the obstruction might have extended from the Gulf all the way across to the Andaman Sea and been connected to one of the earth’s plates. All Mel could think about was that this sheet of metal stood defiantly between him and lower-back-pain relief. He wasn’t about to give in without a fight whether it unbalanced the earth or not. He walked to the fence, grabbed a solid black crowbar and held it out to the lad.
“Here, use this,” he said. “Smash your way through it.”
Da’s nephew stared forlornly at the tool. It was obvious some laborious mechanical process was taking place in his mind. The crowbar was getting heavy in Mel’s hand.
“I’m just paid for digging,” said the nephew, at last. “Nobody said nothing about smashing. That’s a job for specialists, smashing is. I’m just a digger.”
“Go on, boy. Look at it. It’s rusted to hell. You could sneeze a hole in it.”
“I don’t know, Old Mel. Wear and tear on the tools. All that added time...”
This was a lesson learned for Mel. A brain dent did not necessarily affect a young man’s ability to extort.
“All right, look. I’m not going to pay you to start a new well somewhere else, so why don’t we just say ... what? Fifty baht extra? How’s that?”
There was no further discussion. The nephew began jabbing the crowbar into the metal plate with renewed enthusiasm. With the fifty baht incentive, the young man performed like a large, enthusiastic can opener. He stood at the center of the hole and gouged through the metal around him. Like Mel, he’d probably expected to be able to lift out a perfect circle of rusted metal and continue his dig south uninterrupted. He would have anticipated a firm grounding of earth beneath the metal. He probably didn’t expect in his wildest and most troubling dreams to hear that teeth-grinding creak, or to have the metal upon which he stood drop like a theatrical trapdoor. He seemed to hover in midair for a split second before plummeting into the dark void beneath him.
The silence that followed stretched into the hot early morning like warm noodle dough. Crickets and songbirds held their breaths. A solitary wispy cloud hung overhead. Mel stood leaning forward slightly to look into the hole but all he could see was blackness. He didn’t recall the lad’s name so he couldn’t call it out.
“You all right there?” he said. Then, realizing the newly opened shaft might be vastly deep he shouted the same question. “YOU ALL RIGHT?”
There was no reply.
A number of lands around the globe have what they refer to as a southern temperament. Thailand is no exception. Old Mel could surely have gone running off screaming for help. He might have beaten a pestle against the old tin tub that hung from his balcony or trekked those two kilometers to the nearest payphone. But he was a southerner. He broke off a stem of sweet grass to chew while he sat on the concrete segment and gazed into the abyss. There was a good deal to consider. Perhaps this had been a blessing in disguise. He wondered whether they’d chanced on an old well shaft. Saved themselves time. But there’d been no splash. It was probably dry. Bad luck, that.
“Young fellow?” he called again, half-heartedly.
There was still no response.
Mel wondered just how long was a suitable period of time before he should get anxious. He was in the middle of a plan. Go back to the shed. Get a rope. Tie it to the fence. Lower it into the hole, and ... but there was his back problem. That wouldn’t work. He’d have to call his neighbor, Gai, to—
“Old Mel.”
The voice was odd, echoey, like that of a lone sardine in a tin can.
“Old Mel. You there?”
“What are you playing at down there?” Mel asked. “You stuck?”
“No, no. I had the wind knocked out of me, that’s all, but I chanced lucky. I’m on ... a bed.”
“That’s what they call concussion, boy. You need a—”
“No. I’m on a bed. Really I am.”
“What makes you think so?”
“I can feel the springs.”
“Plant roots, boy. Easily mistaken for bedsprings.”
Mel realized that in the nephew’s case, concussion wouldn’t have made a lot of difference.
“All right, look, I need to fetch somebody,” he said.
“You know, I can probably get myself out, Old Mel. I’m not so far from the hole. I’m looking up at it.”
“You injured?”
“No, but my shirt’s snagged on one of the springs. You should come down and have a look. This is odd, Old Mel. The more my eyes get used to the dark, the odder it is.”
“What can you see, boy?”
“Windows.”
Old Mel chuckled. “You’re on a bed and you’ve got windows round you? Sounds to me like you’ve found yourself an underground bedroom. What are the odds of that?”
He was wondering where the nearest psychiatric care unit might be. Whether analysis was included under the government thirty-baht universal health initiative.
“And there’s...” the nephew began.
“A bedside lamp?”
“Oh, no. Old Mel. Old Mel.”
There was a real panicky timbre to his voice.
“What? What is it?”
“There’s skeletons down here.”
Mel was hoping he wouldn’t have to be responsible in some way for the young fellow’s rehabilitation. Whether he’d be obliged to employ him in some menial position in which his affliction wouldn’t be too much of a disadvantage. Scarecrow, perhaps? Maybe he could find a witness who’d swear the boy was already eight points brain-dead before he fell down the old well shaft. You had to be careful these days with so many unemployed lawyers around. Mean buggers, those lawyers.
“They animal bones, boy?” he asked, just to humor the lad.
“No, Old Mel. They’re people all right.”
“How can you tell?”
“One’s wearing a hat.”
*   *   *
That was as far as I managed to get with the fertile prose version. It t...