The telephone ringing brought Donal out of his daydream.
He cleared his throat, picked up the handset, and with his slight Irish brogue, said. “Hello, Detective Inspector Crinigan speaking.”
“Hello Detective Inspector. My name is Doctor Timothy Clark and I am the coroner for the British Embassy in Cambodia. We have a mystery here, which I hope you can help us with,” said the well-spoken English Doctor.
“Hello Doctor Clark… Cambodia, that sounds interesting. How can I help?” asked Donal, intrigued.
The Doctor explained. “A body of a foreign man was found in one of the shallow dry wells in a recess in the temple ruins at *Ta-Prohm, which is a small ancient temple complex a kilometre away from *Angkor Thom, one of the main tourist sites in Siem Reap.”
Donal, knowing nothing about Cambodia, slid over his notepad and jotted down details.
The coroner told him. “A tour guide taking a party of tourists found the body after the guide decided to frighten the party. Ta Prohm temple is not a popular tourist spot and tourists usually don’t go inside the ruins. Although on this occasion, the guide took them off the planned route and inside to explore the dark recesses. However, it backfired when he shone his torch into a dry well and saw a body partially covered in earth lying there.”
Donal imagined the scene and thought about the face of the shocked guide. ‘I bet it scared the bejesus out of him.’ He smirked.
Dr Clark said. “We are having difficulty identifying the dead man. The Cambodian police brought the body to Phnom Penh and took it to the morgue in a large hospital, and then they contacted us because we are the only Embassy with a coroner.”
“Hmm, and I imagine it gets hot out there,” said Donal, “so the body would degrade quickly.”
“Yes Detective Inspector, it is very hot and humid here, but surprisingly, the body had not degraded at all. In fact, apart from the look of horror on the man’s face, the body looked fresh, which is why I cannot determine how long he has been dead.”
“Oh, said the detective,” sounding surprised. “Have you any clue who he was? Or how he died?”
The phone went quiet while Doctor Clark looked at his notes. “When I examined the body, the man looked to be in his mid-thirties. He was dressed in a hospital gown, with nothing found to identify him,” he said.
“Oh, that’s strange,” said Donal sounding surprised.
“Yes, it is,” said Doctor Clark sounding perplexed. “The nearest hospital is twenty kilometres from Ta-Prohm temple, but the hospital staff told the Cambodian Police they’d had no foreigners admitted in the last few weeks. However, the police had several foreigners’ come forward when they put a photo of the dead man in the Cambodia Daily newspaper a few days ago. The police said they’d interviewed several foreigners who said they had met this man in Phnom Penh several weeks before. He was an Englishman called Nick, a tourist from Brighton. But that’s all we know.”
Doctor Clark sighed and said. “As for how he died, therein lies the mystery.”
Donal could hear confusion in Doctor Clark’s voice as he said. “When I performed a post-mortem, I found a burst Berry Aneurysm in his brain, which suggested he had died from a tremendous shock. However, when I examined tissue samples, both the tissues and cells in his body looked to still be developing.”
Donal gasped. “What? How is that possible, Doctor Clark?”
“I have no idea Detective Inspector. I have never come across anything like this before. It has me baffled,” said the coroner with a quiver in his voice.
Donal, confused, sat back in his chair, and looked out of his glass-partitioned office at Detectives at their workstations, as Doctor Clark said. “I have done all I can at this stage, and I’m not equipped to investigate further. With you having one of the best forensic facilities in the world, I was hoping you could help solve this mystery.”
“I understand Doctor Clark. Yes, we should be able to help. Please send the information you have, and I will find out who he was. Send the body and anything that you think relevant here, and I will let my forensics team know.”
“Thank you Detective Inspector. I will send you the blood and DNA samples I took, along with photograph, and fingerprints to identify him. I do not have the facilities here to sequence the DNA, nor do anything other than test the blood for routine lab analysis.
Donal smiled. “Don’t worry Doctor Clark, if he is in our database, I will find him. If not, I will use good old fashioned detective work, either way, I will find out who he was and inform his next of kin. If you send me a scan of the fingerprint and photographs, I will get on with that straight away.”
“I will Detective, and then I will have the body flown to your crime lab with the tissue, blood, DNA samples, and my report.” Dr Clark chuckled. “The crime lab boys will laugh when they see my report, but wait until they examine the body.”
“Okay Doctor, have everything sent here under my name and I will start a case file,” said Donal and gave Doctor Clark the addresses he needed.
After they’d finished speaking, Doctor Clark scanned the fingerprint sheet and photographs to his computer and sent it to Donal.
After the UK Ambassador organised a priority flight for the body to be repatriated, Doctor Clark gathered up his samples and other information. He left the Embassy, got into a small Toyota ambulance, and headed through the hustle and bustle streets of the Cambodian capital.
It was a hot sunny day in Phnom Penh. Doctor Clark felt relieved when he went into the small cool shabby morgue at Phnom Penh’s Royal Rattanak Hospital.
With most Cambodians being Buddhists, no post mortems were carried out on them when they died, so there were limited facilities in Cambodia. Royal Rattanak Hospital catered for foreign patients and one of only a handful of hospitals that had a morgue.
A corpse lay on a metal table covered with a sheet. One of the Cambodian medics, who had driven Doctor Clark to the hospital, handed him a black bag. He removed the sheet and looked at the body, which appeared like Frankenstein’s monster with his black silk embroidery around the head, chest, and abdomen. “You are a mystery my friend. I wonder what secrets you hold,” he said as the Cambodian medics lifted the body, while he positioned the body bag underneath. The medics placed the body inside. ‘This will baffle them in London,’ thought Doctor Clark as he zipped up the bag.
He slipped the package containing his samples and other information into a plastic pouch on the front and taped a large sign to the bag that had written on it:
URGENT : For the attention of: Detective Inspector Donal Crinigan.
Head of Special Projects Investigation unit.
New Scotland Yard
Broadway
London, SW1H OBG.
“Okay,” said Dr Clark looking at his watch. “Let’s take him to the airport.”
Detective Inspector Crinigan looked at his notes and studied the information now on his computer.
‘This case sounds intriguing,’ he thought as he saw images of Siem Reap with the magnificent Angkor temples on the screen. He furrowed his brow as he then saw the images of Ta-Prohm temple. ‘That place looks eerie, like something from a horror movie,’ he thought and juddered, as he looked at huge old tree roots twisting around the ancient stone ruins.
He poured himself a coffee from a percolator, put in a splash of whiskey from a bottle in a drawer, and gazed out of his large arched office window overlooking St James's Park on a sunny June day. While he watched the Pelicans, other waterfowl, and pigeons, waddling about on mown grassland near an emerald green lakes edge, his computer beeped. ‘Ah, good, this will be the information from Dr Clark,’ he thought and felt his detective juices flowing.
****
Detective Inspector Donal Crinigan was born in Dublin. The son of an Irish Guarda, he followed in his father’s footsteps and family tradition and joined the police straight from school. He then went on to join the Metropolitan police and moved to London, where he became a homicide detective. Due to his fastidious nature and thorough detective work, he rapidly moved up the ranks. Now after 18 years with the Met, at 53-years-old, he was disillusioned with the police force. He had two grown up sons who were both in the police and an ex-wife. He still had strong feelings for her, even though she had remarried. His Irish accent was all but gone; unless he got angry, then a string of Irish obscenities could be heard echoing around the corridors of New Scotland Yard. His subordinates knew they were in deep shit, when he would come out of his office and point to the offending individual and with a broad Irish twang shouted ‘Johnson, come here you little bollix.’
With combed-back grey hair, craggy looks, and stocky build, the six-foot Irishman looked more like an old bare-knuckle fighter than a copper.
Donal felt irate with his job, because the only thing his Special Projects Investigation Unit investigated nowadays were dead yardies and drug dealers. Donal knew that months of investigation would be wasted when a slick city lawyer had the accused murderer set free on a technicality.
Donal wanted to take a redundancy payment if offered and do something different. “I am sick of these bollixes getting away with murder, because we didn’t describe in detail what their farts smelt of,” he used to moan to his colleagues. “Bloody red tape.”
****
Studying the information on his computer screen, he thought. ‘Hmm, this case sounds right up my alley. At last, I can do my job and solve a proper mystery.’ He entered information into the Met’s international database, sat back, and drank his coffee while he waited.