Confessions of a Bangkok Private Eye: True Stories From the Case Files of Warren Olson

THE CASE OF THE SUSPICIOUS SPOUSES

A big chunk of my work in the early days came from sex tourists who’d fallen in love with bargirls and wanted me to check up on whether or not they were being faithful. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred the answer was no, she was still sleeping with paying customers. It was money for the proverbial old rope. Initially I got work through word of mouth, but after a year or so I figured I should go out looking for business, and the best way to do that was through the internet. I set up a website advertising my services, www.thaiprivateeye.com, and before long I was getting assignments from around the world.

One of the first emails I got through the website was from a woman named Barbara who lived in Glasgow in bonnie Scotland. Any country that makes Johnnie Walker Black Label has got my vote of thanks, so I was more than happy to help Barbara. Plus she sent my retainer by bank transfer within forty-eight hours of me taking the case, which in my mind at least put paid to the theory that the Scots are tight with money. Barbara’s husband had been in Thailand for a couple of months, and while she had no evidence that her husband was fooling around, she had a feeling that something was wrong. Women’s intuition. And she wanted me to find out if he was having an affair with a Thai girl.

Her husband, William, was an artist and he’d been travelling around the Chiang Mai area, painting. For a lot of the time he’d been staying with a friend, but she didn’t have an address for him. All she knew was that it was a penthouse apartment with a stunning view. Not much help, really. He was going to stay in Bangkok for a week or so before returning to Scotland, but she didn’t know which hotel he’d be staying at. I explained that Bangkok was a city of more than ten million people, so without an address I had no hope of finding him. She did know the date of his return flight, and that he was flying British Airways. He’d bought a cheap economy ticket and he was locked into his return date so he’d have to be on that flight. I asked her to email me a photograph of him and I’d put him under surveillance at the airport. In my experience, if a guy has a Thai girlfriend she will see him off at the airport, for no other reason than he’d probably give her all his unwanted baht before heading for the plane.

The money, and the photograph, arrived within forty-eight hours. William was a good-looking guy with blonde hair tied back in a ponytail, in his early thirties. If he’d wanted to fool around in Thailand, I didn’t think he’d have had any problems.

I got to the airport a good three hours before the flight was due to leave and wandered around with a paper cup of coffee. He appeared ninety minutes before the flight was due to close, pushing a trolley loaded with two suitcases and a dozen or two cardboard tubes that I assumed contained his artwork. And hanging on his arm was an absolute stunner. The girl was in her early twenties, waist-length glossy black hair, smooth white skin, great figure and a mouth that just begged to be kissed. I took a few pictures with my digital camera. She kept planting kisses on his cheek, and I got a belting photograph of him with both hands on her bum, kissing her full on the mouth. A lot of times on surveillance operations I’m always amazed at how plain the girls are. Maybe it’s because I’ve been in Thailand so long but I’ve become very selective whereas a lot of tourists seem to jump on the first girl they see. I get paid to check up on some of the ugliest girls in the country, and the guys get really upset when I tell them that the love of their life is still sleeping with customers. But William’s girl was faultless, and I had half a mind to ‘accidentally’ bump into her and get her phone number after he’d flown off. But I’m nothing if not professional so I carried on taking a few long-range photographs.

They went and sat in a pub on the first floor while they waited for his flight, and I managed to get a couple more shots of them getting close and personal, then followed them to the departure gate where true to form he took out his wallet and gave her all his Thai money. She put up quite a performance, shaking her head and wiping tears from her eyes, but she took the money. After he’d kissed her and waved and gone through to immigration, I followed the girl to the taxi rank. Lots of heads turned to watch her as she walked. She got into a taxi and it headed down the expressway.

I caught a cab home and emailed the pictures to the wife, along with a report of what I’d seen. Easy money. I could imagine the scene in Glasgow when William arrived home. Thai girls tend to cut off the dicks of unfaithful husbands. Upcountry they toss the bloody remains to the ducks, and in the cities they put it in a food blender. I doubted that Barbara would be as cruel as that, but I reckoned William was still in for a shock when he got home.

A couple of days later, I got an email from the husband. I opened it, expecting a torrent of abuse, but to my surprise it was quite a chatty epistle, complimenting me on my professional approach to the job. And he thanked me for bringing an unhappy situation to an end. According to William, the love had gone from his marriage years ago and he had been trying to find a way of ending it. My investigation had been the spark for him and his wife to start talking about divorce, and now they had decided to consult lawyers and end the marriage. There were no kids and his wife had a well-paid job, so all they had to do was to decide on a fair split of the marital assets. Once that was out of the way, William planned to fly back to Thailand and start a new life with Som, the girl who’d been at the airport. And the main reason for the email was that William wanted to pay me to run a check on the lovely Som! I couldn’t believe it at first and thought it was a wind-up, but William was serious. Som had been a go-go dancer in the Long Gun Bar in Soi Cowboy, and while he’d paid her to stop work he was worried that she might go back to her old ways while he was in Scotland. I gave him my bank details and told him to send over a retainer. I told him I didn’t need a photograph of the lovely Som, but I’d need her date of birth, full Thai name and any other details he had.

A couple of days later he emailed me all the information. Som was twenty-two and lived in a cheap hotel in Soi 15, not far from Soi Cowboy. I knew the place. It was a well-known bargirl haunt. She went to school in Siam Square most mornings. Her mother lived in Pattaya with an elderly German.

William said that he’d agreed to transfer 15,000 baht a month into Som’s bank account. That set alarm bells ringing right away. A halfway decent bargirl can easily earn four times that dancing around a silver pole and sleeping with customers. A real pro with high-spending Japanese customers can earn six figures. Som was a stunner and I found it difficult to believe that she was staying at home for just 15,000 baht. Her hotel bill would be almost 10,000 baht a month, even on a long-term lease, then there would be her mobile phone bills, clothes, cosmetics, food. And as a bargirl, even a former one, there would be a good chance of a drugs problem and a very good chance that there was a family to support.

William said that she emailed him pretty much every day, and that she always answered her mobile.

I started to follow her. It wasn’t difficult. She didn’t own a car or a motorcycle and used taxis, motorcycle taxis and the Skytrain. Over a few days I kept a close eye on her. She went to school during the week, spent most of her time in her room, probably watching TV, and went out to eat at night with girlfriends. More often than not, Som would pick up the bill. I saw her using several different mobile phones, but I couldn’t get close enough to hear what she was saying. Multiple phones is always a bad sign. It suggests multiple boyfriends or sponsors. She never went to a nightclub or to the city’s red-light districts. She went to Pattaya one weekend but stayed with her mother and didn’t go near the bars.

I didn’t see her with another guy, Thai or farang, but it was clear that her lifestyle was costing well over 15,000 baht a month and as she wasn’t working the money had to be coming from somewhere.

I reported back to William. Som wasn’t seeing anyone, but she was living well beyond her means. I said that if he wanted to be sure that she didn’t have any other sponsors I’d have to check her bank account. At best that would mean a visit to a branch to sneak a look at a computer terminal, at worst it would mean a bribe of tens of thousands of baht. William said he’d pay me for another day to visit the bank and sent through the extra money to my account along with the details of her account.

I went along to a branch of Som’s bank in a tourist area, found a sweet young cashier, flashed her my most charming smile and told her that I’d sent money to my girlfriend but that she’d told me that it hadn’t arrived yet. I asked the cashier if she could check that the money had actually gone through. The girl told me what I already knew, that I’d have to go to Som’s branch to confirm the transfer, all she could do on her terminal was to check the balance. She called it up on screen and as she did I leaned over and took a quick look. There was close to two million baht in the account. I flashed the cashier a thumbs up. ‘Great,’ I said. ‘The money must have gone through,’ I said. ‘We’re building a house.’ I thanked her and hurried out.

I phoned William and told him that Som had a stack of money in her account, far more than she could have saved, even as a go-go dancer. The only way she could have amassed that amount of cash was from a generous sponsor, and probably more than one. She certainly didn’t need William’s 15,000 baht a month.

‘But you’ve never seen her with another guy?’ he said. I could hear the hope in his voice. I’ve heard it hundreds of times over the years. It was the sound of a man who wanted to believe that he wasn’t being lied to, even when all the evidence suggested the contrary. I don’t know what it is with these guys. They really do check their brains in at the airport. I don’t understand it. I understand bargirls. They work for money. Period. They don’t dance in go-go bars and sleep with men twice their age for fun. They do it for money. But the guys who fall in love with them, just what goes through their minds? The guys who cling to the hope that their bargirls are special, that their bargirls don’t lie and cheat, they’re the ones that I really don’t understand.

‘No, I’ve never seen her with a guy,’ I said. But just because I hadn’t seen her walking arm in arm with another farang didn’t mean that she didn’t have a string of overseas sponsors, men who would send her a monthly ‘salary’ in the hope that Som would be faithful to them. It was laughable. The best they could hope for was a form of timeshare: regular payments would entitle them to her company on their occasional visits to the Land of Smiles. She was providing a fantasy, and getting well paid for it, too.

‘There you go, then,’ said William. ‘That’s all I need to know. I’m going to give her the benefit of the doubt.’

I wished him well and cut the connection. I’d done my job. I’d told him what I thought, but he preferred to cling to the fantasy.

I opened a bottle of Jack Daniels. I’m sure Som would make William welcome when he came back to Thailand. She’d probably move in with him for a while, but as soon as a wealthier sponsor came to town she’d be off, spinning William a line about a relative being sick or her mother needing company. The only way to keep a girl like Som would be to keep upping the ante, to keep paying, until he had nothing left to give. And once she’d bled him dry she’d be off for ever. I raised the bottle in salute to the man on the other side of the world, a man who didn’t know what was about to hit him. Another lamb to the slaughter.