Number Six by Colin Cotterill

Author:Colin Cotterill [Cotterill, Colin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9786164560048
Publisher: Proglen
Published: 2018-06-16T16:00:00+00:00

*

As we drove along the highway to the Street Dog Project HQ, Chom played Maria Carey on the CD player to cheer me up. That was never going to work so he changed the subject instead.

“When you talked to the bank manager, did she tell you how the workers got out of the bank?” he asked.

“What?” I said.

“The bank was full of smoke and the three workers were unconscious. How did they get out?”

“The bank guard dragged them out,” I said.

“How come he wasn’t overcome by the fumes?”

“I asked Doom that too. She said he’s normally stationed outside beside a busy road. So he wears a face mask to keep down the pollution intake. They’re saying that the mask filtered out enough of the bad air to give him time to go in and rescue the unconscious women. But he succumbed too once everyone was out. I guess he was functioning on adrenalin. He was in a worse state than all of them. He’s still on oxygen at the hospital. They’re calling him a hero. I’m working on a piece about him. Lowly guard risks his life to save his workmates. That sort of thing. Sissy’s doing a background check on him for me.”

“I’d like to talk to him,” said Chom. “Nothing official. I’m just curious. The Lang Suan investigation has come to a dead end. Apart from the robbers, the guard’s the only one who knew what happened in that bank between the smoke bombs going off and the rescue. He had to have seen the intruders.”

“Mrs. Doom said the back door was unlocked when she went back to assess the damage and losses. So, they probably left that way. But did they also enter through that door? If they did, someone on the inside would have had to unlock the two security exits for them.”

The conversation distraction stopped working when we pulled up in front of a two-storey terraced house in Tha Chana. The sign out front with the same shocking pink letters said this was the headquarters of the SDP. Birgitt, the founder and manager of the programme came to meet us at the gate. She was a lean woman in her eighties with cheek bones that made her head look aerodynamic. She remembered me from our interview. We sat in the air-conditioned office and drank her home-made cappuccinos. I spun her the same lie about Beer wandering into the temple grounds and being picked up by accident. She went to a shelf and pulled down a thick album.

“We photograph all of our ladies when they arrive at the vet,” she said. “Then we give them a reference number and code. I have one copy on the computer but I can never resist making a hard copy. I like the old fashioned ways.”

She opened the album to show us hundreds of mug shots of confused animals with their arrest codes written on paper at their paws.

“I like to keep it all up to date,” she said. “So I should have the dogs we collected at Ny Kao temple here.

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