Killed at the Whim of a Hat

Fifteen

We arrived at Lang Suan at eleven thirty. Meteors had landed, dinosaurs had turned into goldfish, sprouted legs and become presidents, and it wasn’t even lunchtime yet. Lieutenant Chompu drove us directly to Sugit’s house. The lieutenant assured us that the old politician was in the hospital on a drip, milking all the sympathy and press attention he could get.

“So, why are we here?” I asked.

“We’re taking his daughter out for lunch,” he said. “I called to make a date while you were off partying with the Chainawats.”

Upmarket dining wasn’t easy to find in Lang Suan. You could forget French, Japanese and Italian, even American, Vietnamese and German. It was all too fancy for the locals. Even the new KFC had been empty since its launch a month earlier. So, we took the ex-minister’s daughter to a tiny place beside the Uaychai Department Store. It was owned by the minor wife of a propane gas tank baron who didn’t really care what she cooked as long as she turned a profit. The food was cheap but tasty and eclectic and the service was so slow it gave you plenty of time to chat.

The daughter, Mayuri, was indeed the crimson-haired servant I’d met, but not been introduced to, at the house. She’d come with us without protestation or fuss, just walked out past the camouflaged gardeners and climbed into the truck with a friendly smile. She seemed truly delighted to have an excuse to leave the property. She was funny and as colorful as her hair, but she seemed to be sadly lacking in instincts. She had no apparent fear that we complete strangers might have motives for this lunch other than food, and no sense at all that our questions were leading. It didn’t take a great mind to deduce that Mayuri wasn’t the brightest squid boat in the sea. I felt no pressing need to be discreet.

“A VW Kombi…” I began.

“I read that” — she thrashed into the gap. “Can you believe that? Buried. Unbelievable. Those poor people.”

I had no idea where to go from there.

“But you knew what a VW Kombi was before you read about it?” Chompu asked.

“Oh, yes.” She grinned. “They were so ‘it’ back then. They said there were more VW vans criss-crossing the world than there were in the whole of Germany. And that’s where they were made. Imagine that. A flock of, like eagles flying out in a fleet of Kombis all round the world. Wow!”

“Did you ever see one?” Chompu asked.

Mayuri was sitting next to him and she leaned close and cupped her hand around her mouth as if she were about to impart a deep secret.

“Not only did I see one,” she whispered aloud, “I rode in one. That’s why it was so awesome when I saw it in the newspaper.”

She had my undivided attention. There weren’t that many VW Kombis around.

“When was that?” I asked.

“Nineteen seventy-eight,” she said.

She’d hammered the year. Put herself right there.

“How old were you then?” Chompu asked.

“Twenty…what? Twenty-two?”

“How did you get to ride in a VW Kombi?” I asked.

She tutted and sipped her Coke.

“The things you do,” she said. “The things you do when you’re young.” She looked around at us all staring at her and decided it was probably no big deal to go on. “The seventies were crazy,” she said. “This army coup and commies everywhere, and government spies, everyone suspicious and blaming each other. It was a really hard time to grow up and, you know, believe anything. Some of us headed down to the beaches where the backpackers were. We had these wild times down there. We met this crazy Thai guy who’d been living in the jungle hiding out from the junta, and he had this family land outside Surat. He asked us to live with him there. There was like a group of us. We thought we were flower children but I think we’d been just pretend hippies till he came along. This Thai guy gave us a chance to live a real alternative lifestyle, you know? We set up this, what do you call it? This cooperative farm. He’d lived on something similar in the States, he said. We were trying to do it all without money. We grew most of what we needed, raised animals, cut wood for cooking, you know? It was this very simple, like, beautiful life.

“But there were needs, you see? The bigger our commune got, the more we needed — petrol for the pumps, you know, a truck, a little tractor — but we weren’t making anything from the stuff we produced. We were just, you know, surviving. And we needed money. I guess, when I think about it now, that means we weren’t very good at being self-sufficient. The whole point was that we…Anyway, I had this father, of sorts. I hadn’t spoken to him for years but I got in touch and asked him if he could let me have some money. He wasn’t into it but he said he had a few odd jobs he could let us do to earn some bread. He told me about this car rental deal. He’d front the rental money and arrange IDs. Two of us would hire a rental car, drive it to this friend of my father up the coast, and leave it there. His friend would take it to Hua Hin and sub-rent it to foreigners at three times the price. Then he’d drive it back.”

“What makes you think that’s what they did?” Granddad Jah asked.

“What else would they do with them?” she asked.

“Steal them.”

“Ooh, do you think so? That sounds a lot more dishonest than just borrowing, doesn’t it?”

“You don’t think it odd that they didn’t have you drive them back to the rental firm?”

“Right. I hadn’t thought about that.”

“Right,” I said. “And how long were you and your friends involved in this rental scam?”

“I don’t know. Three months? About that. It was a nice easy income. And we didn’t see it as illegal, you see? Just sharing rich people’s wealth around. That was our philosophy, our mantra.”

“Rob from the rich and give to yourselves?” said Granddad Jah.

Mayuri missed the point.

“We’d have nice cars to drive, look at the scenery, take our time and come back on the bus. And we had money for the commune.”

“So, how did the VWs change things?” Chompu asked.

Two of our seven ordered dishes arrived on the table. We didn’t know whether to tuck in or wait for the rest. Mayuri solved the dilemma by dipping a spoon into the prawn fried rice and ladling a good helping onto her plate.

“There were two or three couples renting cars, I remember,” she said. “They were mostly, you know, Fords and Austins, that kind of thing. Nice cars but nothing exciting. Then we were told to go to this company and they had two VW Kombis. They were, like, these chariots of the flower gods. We were awestruck. Dad wanted sedans but we couldn’t resist it. We rented one of the two VWs. It was a gas. We were so close to heaven we lost it.”

“The van?”

“Our minds. We’d wanted that life. That VW nirvana. Once we were driving around in a Kombi it was better than drugs.”

“Which you also had,” I threw in.

“Mostly ganja. We grew it in the hills around the commune. It was a sin, of course. But so was beer and swatting flies so we ignored that. Religion was one of those strangling, you know, doctrines we were anti at the time. So we all traveled with a stash of dope for the journey. We found somewhere secure to hide it ‘cause the cops were even more Bolshevik then than they are now.”

“That’s nice to hear,” said Chompu.

“My soul partner then, his name was Wee, beautiful man. He said we shouldn’t take the van straight up to the dealer guy. He said we should enjoy it a little bit.”

“So you didn’t make it to Chumphon?” I asked.

She giggled and I saw traces of the wild girl in her eyes. My mother had those same remnants of devil.

“We didn’t even make it out of the province,” she said. “We were picked up by the highway police the next morning and packed off to the Chaiya police station.”

“What for?” I asked. This and the account of the Surat detective, Captain Waew, were beginning to merge.

“Oh, you know. The supernatural magic of the Kombi. We’d driven around, had a little toke. Drove some more, had a little toke. Next thing you know we’re heading back into Surat. Going completely the wrong direction. So we found a pretty nature spot and bunked down for the night.”

“The police found you naked and stoned in the back of the van,” said Granddad Jah. “You weren’t twenty meters from the highway.”

“We were crazy, uncle. Like I say.”

She giggled again and shoveled in some rice; she seemed energized from the memories. Her past was obviously a lot more fun than her present.

“What happened then?” Chompu asked.

“We were using fake IDs. We knew it wouldn’t be long before the cops got wise to that, then tied us to the other cars we’d rented. We didn’t want to get in trouble. Then this inspector came from Surat and, like, told us he was investigating my dad — except he didn’t know he was my dad — and that we could do a deal. He said he’d keep us out of jail if we gave evidence against the old man. Of course, anything’s better than being in jail, right? So we agreed.”

“To give evidence against your own father?” Granddad Jah asked.

“Yeah. We weren’t that close. I don’t know. We might not have gone through with it if he’d helped get us out, but he just went quiet. Pretended he didn’t know us. I was afraid he was going to let us burn. You know? He was like that. But, anyway, while we were thinking about it, they put us up in this nice little locked-up house with a fridge and a TV. The detective said it was to keep us safe but there wasn’t any way to get out. There was this fat constable there at the gate watching over us. It was cool. We were just hanging out, watching TV. It was all so surreal. Then Dad showed up.”

“And he helped you stage the kidnapping?” I said.

“Yeah. It wasn’t that hard ‘cause the constable had vanished and left the doors unlocked. Weird, that.”

The last of our food order arrived, passing our hopes on the way which were heading at speed out of the window. The bodies in the VW were obviously not this couple.

“Did you go back to the commune after that?” Chompu asked.

“No. We weren’t game. We figured the police would have found out about it and raided the place. Dad told us to get out of town and lie low.”

“Where did you go?”

“Just drifted. Smartened ourselves up. Got casual work here and there and the whole love-child thing sort of got old in a hurry. It turned out me and Wee couldn’t get along in the normal capitalistic world. We drifted apart.”

“Any idea what happened to the VW you’d rented?” I asked.

“No. Last time I saw it, it was in the parking lot behind the Chaiya police station. I imagine they sent it back to the owner.”

“No,” said Granddad, “he didn’t get it back.”

“No? Probably got adopted by some kind law enforcement officer, then,” said Mayuri, out-eating us two to one despite all the talking. “I’d been thinking perhaps the one they found buried was the one we’d used.”

“Any idea who rented the second van?” Chompu asked her.

“No, like I say, we didn’t go back.”

“Do you know the names of anyone else in the commune?” Granddad Jah asked.

“Yeah, but it wouldn’t help. We were all Bread and Steed and Morning Glory. We discarded our decadent labels when we joined the farm. We didn’t know anyone’s real names. Wee wasn’t really Wee, you know? It’s English for urine. It’s full of nutrients. Indian fakirs drink it like orange juice.”

“Nice,” said Chompu, putting down his glass. “Where did you drive your stolen…I mean, borrowed rental cars to?”

“Tako.”

Tako was about thirty kilometers up the coast. There were two routes from Surat. If you took the highway you’d pass through Lang Suan. The quiet back road that avoided police blockades would lead you along the coast almost to Pak Nam. Back then, there wasn’t a bridge so the detour would drag you way up-river almost past Old Mel’s land. We needed to find out who rented that second van. Tan Sugit still wasn’t in the clear.

“Mayuri, you still aren’t very close to your father, are you?” I said.

“Can’t think what gives you that idea. You’ve only met the old bastard once.”

“Oh, just a hunch, I suppose,” I continued. “You’re implicating him in all kinds of illegal activities. You’re calling him names. You aren’t sitting by his bedside holding his hand.”

She laughed and a noodle slipped out of her mouth.

“He doesn’t need his hand held,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with him.”

“He was kidnapped and tortured,” I reminded her.

“He was not.”

“Do you know anything about last night’s events that you’d like to share with us?” Chompu asked.

“The doctor I phoned said the only evidence of torture they could find was in his imagination. He broke his nose but with all the reconstruction I doubt he felt it. No, I bet he just got downright drunk with his whores and they got carried away in some prank. He doesn’t have a clue when he’s drunk. The terrorist story was just something to save his face.”

“Why are you living with him?” I asked.

“He took me in as an unpaid housekeeper. I was out of work. Out of men. Out of luck. I contacted him and asked him if he had any odd jobs I could do. He asked if I could cook. I’d never actually lived in his house before. Ha, don’t look so surprised. I’m child number four of twenty-eight or so. Seven different women. There was only one that he married. I had to remind him who my mother was. There isn’t a lot of, what you’d call, paternal affection going on here, although there are nights I have to remind him we’re blood relatives, if you know what I mean.”

We dropped Mayuri back at her house, and on the way back across town we admitted we’d come full circle with the VW case. Granddad and I sat in the truck while Chompu popped in to see the duty officer at Lang Suan police headquarters.

“Granddad Jah,” I asked, “what do you make of it all? I mean, the kidnapping, the note to me?”

“I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head. “The girl could have been right. It might have been S amp;M that got out of control.”

“Stripped and handcuffed to a bench in the train station?”

“Some of those bar girls can be vindictive, Nong Jimm. You dump one and move on to another…”

“So, what about the words on his belly, sa som?”

“It means ‘deserved’.”

“I know what it means, Granddad, but why would bar girls write it on him? Don’t you think it sounds like something a bit more sinister? And surely you don’t think the note to me was just a coincidence. There has to be a connection.”

But I didn’t get a chance, then, to hear his response. We were interrupted by the breathless return of Lieutenant Chompu who jumped into the truck and showed us his small but perfect teeth.

“I don’t need to tell you,” he gasped, “I’m not at liberty to tell you this, but…we’ve got good news and bad news and good news and bad news, and then good news. But it’s all better than no news at all. Where should I start?” We both glared at him. “All right. The good news it is. First, the girl child was indeed a genius because the Benz number checked out. They found the car. The bad news is that it’s a rental from a company in Phuket, and the fellow that stayed over at the resort was one of their hired drivers. His name’s Wirapon, nickname, Keeo.”

“That shouldn’t rule him out,” I said. “Rental car drivers can be murderers, too.”

“That’s true. But it appears he’s more than happy to help the police with their inquiries. They’re driving him over from Phuket along with the details of the customer who hired the car and the daily log.”

“Doesn’t sound like a criminal to me,” said Granddad Jah.

“Me neither. He’ll be here by three so we should have some answers then. So, where was I? All right. Good news number two is that the court gave us the go-ahead to trace the number of the person who called in the accident of — aka attack on — Sergeant Phoom. The cell number belongs to the owner of a wheelchair and crutch dealership in Lang Suan. The bad news is that the owner says he wasn’t the person who called in. He’d lent his phone to his brother who was visiting from Chonburi that day. He was doing some business down here and had forgotten to bring his phone charger with him. He said his brother was due back to his home the next day and didn’t want to hang around here making police reports. The hospital number was on speed dial on the phone.”

“Well, if that’s true…” I said.

“…and if the second witness was correct about seeing a man and woman at the accident scene,” Chompu added, “it means that the other car at the scene was driven by a woman. The police here can’t get hold of the brother. He presumably hasn’t yet worked out how to charge his cell phone. But the crutch dealer said his brother had mentioned the accident. He’d said something about a Chinese woman in an expensive car who couldn’t speak any Thai. She was all aflutter because she was the first at the scene. Once the brother arrived she drove off. He was by himself. He didn’t have any choice but to phone for help.”

“This is all getting rather complicated,” I said.

My head buzzed. There was a road team in there working on my narrow mind. Trying to broaden it. I had to go over all the events of the previous week, deleting a male perpetrator and replacing him with a female. How sexist was I? I hadn’t once asked the hotels and resorts about women. I hadn’t once considered the possibility of a female being capable of a series of violent acts. Even when they presented me with a female suspect, I balked at the possibility. I was a chauvinist of the worst kind.

“She wasn’t necessarily Chinese at all,” said Granddad Jah in his annoying unexpressive tone. “She could very easily have been a Thai with a wig.”

I laughed.

“Why would she need a wig to convince anyone she was…? Oh.” I got it. “You’re still with the nun, aren’t you?”

“It all fits,” he said. “She sets it up to look like someone from outside has done it, puts on a disguise. Car rental. Sneaks in and out of the temple without being seen. Motive. Opportunity. Plus, she’s a classic psychopath, following this monk around for two thirds of her life. She takes my bet.”

I didn’t buy it. It wasn’t just because she was a nun who’d spent most of her life in pursuit of true love. It’s possible I might have empathized, but a good journalist is able to remove herself from a case. Even if I went along with Granddad’s scenario and I arrived at the point where I needed to exterminate Abbot Winai from Internal Affairs so I could be with my lover, it could never have been planned this methodically. I didn’t see the murder of the abbot as a mid-play act. This wasn’t the bumping off of a threat, the removal of a plot spoiler on the way to the final scene. I’d seen the photos. Abbot Winai was undoubtedly the star of the show and his demise was the climax. This was all about him, not her.

“I think it’s time to show your granddad the photos,” said Chompu.

I’d considered it myself, of course, albeit briefly. Granddad Jah had earned our trust, but this was more than just sharing information. It was sharing a secret. The lieutenant and I had deliberately withheld evidence. It was a criminal offense. Granddad Jah couldn’t even drink a beer without Breathalyzing himself. He was a stickler. He’d made his own life miserable by being honest. I had no idea where this would fit in his moral code book. Chompu could lose everything he’d fought for on this one throw of the dice, but he’d tossed the suckers anyway.

Granddad Jah was pensive for several seconds. His head nodded in time with the bleating of the ‘door unfastened’ buzzer. Then he looked at the policeman.

“I was wondering when you’d get around to it,” he said.

“You knew I’d downloaded the pictures?” said I.

“You didn’t think I’d be curious as to why a police lieutenant was going with you to your room at ten thirty in the morning?”

I should have had a snide answer to that but I was still in shock.

“Were you spying?”

“Just happened to be sitting in a bush, minding my own business. But I confess I wouldn’t mind seeing those slides from closer range.”

Granddad was in. We were safe. An alliance of three untrustworthy people.

“Well, if that wasn’t good enough news in itself,” said Chompu, “I have even more information to impart on our own modest VW inquiry. In his statement, Tan Sugit had mentioned being apprehended by four villains — sometimes stretching to six or eight depending on who he’s talking to — driving a refrigerated Milo chocolate drink van. The Milo company reported that such a van had been stolen the previous evening. Lang Suan police found it abandoned a few hours ago behind the clay urn foundry. The print people have been all over it but it seems to have been wiped clean. It all indicates that Tan Sugit’s abduction was not a figment of his imagination, after all.”

Chompu dropped us home and promised to call as soon as the results from the Benz driver interview came to light. I put Granddad Jah in front of my computer and showed him where to click. I was on my way to find Mair in the shop when I noticed our young family of guests back on the balcony. I noticed Gogo sitting with the kids, showing them her belly. She never showed me her belly. She seemed to like everyone except me.

“Would you mind if I asked you a question?” said the father.

I hoped it wouldn’t be anything difficult: the tides, the names of the islands you could vaguely see on the horizon, or the genus of the bright turquoise birds that sat regularly on our back fence. My local knowledge was remedial.

“Certainly.”

He walked leisurely beside me along the path behind the beachfront tables. He was cheerful, attractive in a young-married-man kind of way, and very polite, and the question he asked was a lot simpler than I’d imagined.

“Would you be interested in selling this place?”

My first reaction was that this crowd must have escaped from some maximum security family asylum. I looked back over my shoulder at the young wife and the happy children. They seemed normal enough.

“Why?” I asked.

“We’ve been driving down the coast,” he said, “looking for a little place to take over. My wife’s father passed away last year and left us a small sum we hadn’t expected. We have a modest dream to make a go of something on the coast. We aren’t rolling in money but I can make you a fair offer. We like it here.”

“You do? Why?”

“Haven’t you looked around?”

At his bidding, I looked around. The noncommittal weather of the past week had finally got its act together and a black pudding of a storm cloud was rolling toward us, filling the entire vast sky to the east. It was a Steven Spielberg moment. I instinctively knew I should have been egging the young father on, but all I could see were the faces of his children starving to death.

“Look. Really. This is the toilet plunger of resorts. We’ve been here nine months and we haven’t made enough money to get the truck tires pumped up.”

“But that’s because you don’t love it.”

“What?”

“None of you is really here. I’ve been watching you. I see you all come and go but your hearts aren’t here with you. A place like this, you have to work at. You’ve got no food in the kitchen refrigerator, no stock in the store. The cabins are sparse and uninviting. Nobody sweeps the beach.” (People sweep beaches?) “You’re all just staying here. I can make you an offer to give you all the chance to be where you really want to be, wherever that is.”

I walked into the shop and caught Mair darkening a white surgical mask with a black felt pen. It suddenly didn’t seem important anymore. I was in a state somewhere between excited and scared legless. I knew this would be the first engagement in a long-drawn-out battle but fate had armed me.

“Mair, you know the family in room two?”

“We’ve got guests?” she said, tucking the mask and pen into her apron. “That’s nice. Arny didn’t mention it.”

“That’s because he probably doesn’t know. He’s not here. He’s off romancing Granny. He’s hardly been here since the family arrived. They had to drive down the coast in search of lunch. They’re using their own towels. The guy fixed the cistern in the toilet. That’s embarrassing.”

“The cistern was broken?”

I sat beside her on the little bathroom stool and I took hold of her hand. I sighed a deep breath.

“Mair, listen. It’s not working. Whatever magic you thought might happen down here, it’s not. And the people in room two like it here. It’s a miracle, but they want to buy the resort. I know you — ”

“All right.”

“All right, what?”

“I’ll sell it to them.”

“Really?”

“If that’s what you all want. Yes, I can sell up.”

I’m not sure I can actually describe the feeling that slithered through my body when she said that, but I’ll try. I was ecstatic at first, elated, gold-plated. It was if a legion of warm maggots had been deployed into my veins. But, unexpectedly, their pace slowed and they grew heavy and cold and eventually froze. I had a body full of iced maggots.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“Child, in Chiang Mai we were five people in a house. Five individuals with nothing in common but a surname. We were hemmed in by traffic and breathing soot. We floated in noise and aggression and other people’s troubles. We were all so inside ourselves we stopped living for each other. I hoped coming here might pump life back into us as a family. I wanted my children and my father back while I could still recognize them, before it was too late.”

“Mair, I — ”

“But we gave it a good shot. Nine months is something to be proud of. I’m sure Sissi will be pleased to have us back.”

It was that easy. We could all go home and be happy again. Granddad Jah to his car spotting. Arny to his asexual body shop. Me to my desk beside the head crime reporter who always promised to die, one drink at a time, but never did. And Mair to…

“What are you doing here, Mair?” I asked.

“Doing?”

“Yeah. And don’t lie to me. It’s humiliating. I don’t like it. What do you do every night with your black get-up and your pest killer and your beach creeping?”

She was just about to slide into her Titanic smile but I suppose she realized the gig was up. She took me by the hand and massaged my knuckles with her thumb.

“We’re haunting a man,” she said. I held in my breath and waited. “The man who killed John. I found out who it was. The son of Auntie Summorn. He’s a nasty man, a drunk, a bully. He carries a gun and threatens people. My private detective knew who’d poisoned my dog straightaway. It wasn’t hard to work out how far John had walked before the poison took effect. And the man had killed countless other dogs who’d worried his precious chickens.

“I had a meeting with the owners of the other dogs he’d killed. They were all angry but the police do nothing about it. They say everyone should keep their hounds tied up. It’s our fault, they say. But, child, look at this place. How can you keep a dog chained with all this beautiful nature around? Our dogs were all well fed. They didn’t chase chickens because they were hungry. It was just a game to them. They played with the chicks, annoyed them a little. And his chickens weren’t penned. He thought they had a right to run wherever they liked but the dogs couldn’t.

“The people here were too polite or afraid to confront the thug with their suspicions. They talked to his mother but she’d long since lost control over her son. In fact she was afraid of him too. He lives in a cabin behind her house. He doesn’t work. He steals. He extorts money with threats. He’s a bad piece of work, Jimm. At our meeting we decided we should haunt him with the spirits of all the animals he’s killed. He’s a drunkard so it wasn’t so difficult to invade his dreams. At night, the voices of the dogs would come to him. Their shadows would pass his window but when he ran to the door there would be nothing there. Empty bags of pest killer that he thought he’d destroyed would return every morning on his doorstep. And there would be the howls, the incessant all-night howls keeping him awake. He’d walk around the hut with his gun but there would be no dogs, yet when he went back to bed, the howls would continue. He hasn’t slept for three nights.

“Last night he didn’t drink any alcohol. This morning he went to Kor Kow temple to make an offering to Jao Mair Guan Im, the Chinese goddess of mercy. When he came back home he went to his mother and told her he’s being haunted and asked her what he should do. She reported back to us. She told us in another day or two he should be broken completely.”

Mair had a smile on her face that wasn’t the old brand. It was fresh and alive and real. It was the smile I’d seen on Mayuri’s face that lunchtime: young and mischievous. It was the smile another Mair had projected to us little folk to illuminate tales. It was evidence that her embers were still burning.

I walked back to room two and thanked the young father for his offer, but told him my mother had refused to sell at any price. The storm clouds had lingered briefly overhead, then labored on toward Burma without shedding a tear.

Granddad Jah was walking along the sand with his head bowed and his shoulders hunched. I caught up with him.

“Sorry we didn’t show you before,” I said.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“What do you think?”

“I think there’s much more to it. I apologize to the nun. It wasn’t her. This was, I don’t know, psychotic. I’ve never seen anything like it. It wasn’t a hit or a revenge killing. The photographs weren’t merely a record. If you were going to document a killing like this, you’d video it. You’d film the whole thing. Then you wouldn’t miss anything.”

“With modern equipment you can stop at any frame and print it out,” I said. “The quality’s almost as good as a still camera.”

“Then the expensive still camera is relevant somehow. It was as if she or he wanted individual works of art to show how clever they were. Wanted to show off.”

“A sort of performance,” I said.

I thought about the colors. They’d mesmerized me from the moment I’d first looked at the photos. Colors. Then the image of luminous green overalls seeped into my mind, facedown in an unfinished mosaic pool on a raft of blood. Orange hat and all. I took out my cell phone and pressed an old number.

“iFurn executive line. I’m Dr. Monique — ”

“Siss, it’s me. Listen, can you get back to Yoshi?”

“Toshi.”

“Toshi, right. Ask him if there were any suspects for the hotel murder in Guam, the guy who landed in the swimming pool.”

“Are you suddenly taking me seriously?”

“I’ve always taken you seriously, pee. And, while you’re at it, can you ask your alcoholic detective in California for more details about the weirdo who photographed road-kill? Ask him if the party hats were orange.”

“I might even have another one for you.”

“Another what?”

“Orange hat murder. I got a message from Taiwan. A skinny Chinese inspector. I hope he didn’t doctor his profile photograph ‘cause if he did his real self must be hideous. He vaguely recalled a knifing at an aviary. They didn’t ever catch the killer. The peculiar thing was that she, the victim, was wearing an orange People First Party election rally hat, but she was a staunch Kuomintang, and their party color is blue. Originally they thought it was a political killing but nobody could see what was to be gained by it. She was an aviary worker. She cleaned up parrot shit. So, the case vanished into the dead files.”

Aviary. Exotic birds. Orange hat. Color.

“OK. Include that in the sweep,” I said. “I’ll take anything with orange hats and colorful locations. I’ve got a very bad feeling this is all connected somehow.”

“I could be the hottest one-legged Russian on Police Beat if we solve this one.”

“You can’t tell anyone anything. This is all still in the realm of the ridiculous. But let me know as soon as you get anything. There’s a nun in a greasy cell in Bangkok surrounded by tomboys with tattoos and we’ve got to get her out.”

“Will do. Over and out.”

We were walking back toward the shop, me and Granddad Jah. Kow, the squid boat captain, was across the street dispensing fishballs from his side car.

“Have you heard?” he called.

“I never hear anything,” I said, even though it was no longer true.

“Abbot killed up at Wat Feuang Fa. Some nun gutted him.”

How did he do it? He fished in the empty sea at night and drove around on his motorcycle in the day. How did he one-up the world on news? So much for the media blackout. If Captain Kow knew, it wouldn’t be long before every newspaper in the country heard. I was in a tough spot. I had the bulk of my story written but it didn’t have an ending yet. I’d left blanks for a lot of police quotations I could harvest at the last minute, and I’d done my best to avoid accusing my nun. I knew the other rags wouldn’t be so delicate. No, I wouldn’t send anything yet. I hoped the blackout pressure on the newspapers was heavy enough to keep the story off the front page for at least twenty-four hours. But, by then, I had to have it all sorted out. This was my story.

The afternoon stretched out like a long, nylon net with one single tangled sprat in its snare. Boats bobbed. Palms shimmied. Clouds stuck. How long could it take to interview a suspect in a murder inquiry? All right — weeks, yes. It could take forever. But this was just a rental car driver. He couldn’t have that much to say. Mair and I watched the family check out of room two and decided not to charge them. It was the least we could do for bursting their bubble. I was convinced we’d done them a favor. We thanked them for fixing the cistern and for offering us freedom. The father slipped me his name card just in case…I told him there was absolutely no way and put his card in my pocket.

And we waited, me and Granddad Jah. A loudspeaker van crawled by asking for old metal and bottles and tin cans and broken motors. The driver could have easily leaned out of the window and asked nicely, but he had the volume cranked up so high our windows vibrated and I almost missed the ‘Mamma Mia’ jingle. I clicked on the phone.

“Yes?”

“Me.” It was Chompu. “Lang Suan just e-mailed us the digital recording of the interview. I’ve sent a copy to your inbox.”

Something Chiang Mai in me was shocked that Lang Suan might have the concept of digital.

“What? Why? We aren’t online here,” I reminded him.

“Then get somewhere that is.”

We plodded along on the motorcycle, me on the back, Granddad Jah driving. I thought the excitement and urgency might prod him over sixty kph, but no. The law was the law. With such short notice we had just the one option to check my e-mail. It was three forty-five on Sunday and I knew the Internet cafe would be overrun with star troopers. I’d underestimated just how many there were. The line of motorcycles in front of the shop left us no choice but to park forty meters away. We pushed our way inside through a flock of young people with nowhere else to go. The owner, a young man with long hair and moon-landscape acne looked up briefly from his laptop when we entered, then looked back down again as if the door had merely been blown open by the wind. All five computers were in use, each occupied by two or three teenagers in the process of penetrating castles or massacring herds of villains.

“How long would we have to wait?” I asked the owner.

The man shrugged. It was his big profit margin period, early evenings and weekends. At twenty baht an hour he could clear, ooh, a hundred-and-twenty baht easy on an evening like this. In seventy-three years he’d have paid off the cost of the computers. It was a business that baffled me.

“All right,” I shouted. “Who’d be prepared to give up a machine for…fifty baht?”

They all turned back to their games. I tried one hundred and two hundred baht and got the same reaction.

“All right,” I said. “How much would it take?”

One group huddled and came up with a figure of five-hundred baht. They weren’t open to haggling. It was extortion but I was desperate. I handed over the money, asked for an extra set of headphones and Granddad and I hunkered down to listen to the interview. It took fifteen minutes to download the file and, by then, Granddad was grinding his teeth. Just as well they weren’t real.

In.

The recording began with several minutes of personal questions: name, address, occupation, et cetera. Then Major General Suvit, who was interviewing, got down to the nitty-gritty.

MAJOR G:

Koon Wirapon, why did you come to Lang Suan last week?

DRIVER:

Had a job, sir. A client wanted a Benz for eight days.

MAJOR G:

Who was the client?

DRIVER:

It’s here, (crinkle of paper) Ming Xi Wu, from Hong Kong.

MAJOR G:

Description.

DRIVER:

Around fifty, short, in pretty good shape for her age, tight short perm, could have been a wig, typical Chinese face with those big old-fashioned sunglasses. Dressed in safari clothes and boots.

MAJOR G:

Where did she want to go?

DRIVER:

No plan really. Just look around. When she first contacted the company, the e-mail said she wanted to see temples and local birds. She was a birdwatcher. She had cameras and binoculars and stuff.

Granddad Jah and I exchanged a look. I knew his mind had gone directly to the ornithologist in our first cabana. Coincidence?

MAJOR G:

So, you just drove her around?

DRIVER:

Pretty much, sir. She’d ask to stop here and there and she’d hop out and take pictures or look through her binoculars.

MAJOR G:

Did you take her to Wat Feuang Fa?

DRIVER:

To tell the truth, sir, I’m not familiar with the names of the temples down these parts. I’m from Trat. This was my first visit to the Gulf.

MAJOR G:

You might recall it. It’s a small temple but it’s on the crest of a hill. You can see it from the road. There’s a bank of bougainvilleas to one side.

DRIVER:

Oh, yes. I do recall that. My passenger was particularly interested in that one.

MAJOR G:

What happened?

DRIVER:

It was the second day. We’re driving along and she sees this temple and it’s like it’s the best thing she’s ever seen and she’s babbling on in Chinese and I don’t know what she wants. I speak English well enough but she’s all single words: stop, go, slow, turn. She tells me to slow down at the temple but not stop. She directs me onto this dirt track a little bit farther on. I try to tell her we could just drive straight up to the temple but she’s not having any of it. Probably didn’t have a clue what I was talking about.

MAJOR G:

So?

DRIVER:

So she wants to take pictures of something or other, I’m guessing. Tells me to pull over on this little lane, gets her camera all set up, grabs her shoulder bag and tells me to wait. She runs off into the bushes. I turn the car round, come back and park off the track. About, I don’t know, fifteen, twenty minutes later she’s back and in a real state. Looks like she’s been in a fight. She’s all sweaty and her leg’s cut. And mad, oh, is she mad. And she’s going on in her language, on, on, on. I don’t know what got into her but I tell you she frightened me. She says, “Go, go,” so I drive her back to Pak Nam and drop her off.

MAJOR G:

Where was she staying?

DRIVER:

With friends, according to the e-mail. No idea where they lived. She always had me pick her up and drop her off at the hospital intersection.

MAJOR G:

How did you know when to pick her up?

DRIVER:

She’d either write down a time on a bit of paper or she’d turn up at the Tiwa. That’s where I was staying. She’d arranged that.

MAJOR G:

And when was the next time you saw her?

DRIVER:

The next night. I hadn’t seen her all day. Didn’t know what she wanted me to do. She turns up at the Tiwa at about eight p.m. And there I am enjoying a glass of Saeng Som and Coke on the veranda. I’m just in my shorts, aren’t I? Well, it didn’t occur to me she’d want the car at night. Not a lot of luminous birds out, you know? But she’s all smiley and she wants to go for a drive. So I think perhaps she’s in the mood for a little night life. I’m fond of the odd disco myself. But, no. She doesn’t want me along. She seems to think she can just take the car off on her own. But we’ve got regulations, you see. If someone’s renting the car to drive themselves we have to do security checks. The company hangs on to their passports and makes sure they’ve got international licenses. That’s the law, right? But this woman booked with a driver and so there was no background check. I couldn’t let her take it.

MAJOR G:

So, what happened?

DRIVER:

She takes out this big wad of thousand baht notes and throws it on the table in front of me. There was twenty thousand baht in there.

MAJOR G:

You counted it?

DRIVER:

Later, yeah. It was a lot of money but I couldn’t let her just drive off. If she had an accident or drove into a brick wall, it was my arse on the line.

MAJOR G:

So, you refused to let her take it?

DRIVER:

At first, yes.

MAJOR G:

But then?

DRIVER:

I let her have it.

MAJOR G:

You accepted a bribe and allowed her to break the law?

DRIVER:

No. Yes, well, I took the money, but that wasn’t the reason I let her have the car.

MAJOR G:

And what was the reason?

DRIVER:

I was afraid of her.

MAJOR G:

You’re a big boy. You were afraid of a little Chinese woman?

DRIVER:

Yeah, I know. Saying it like that makes it sound ridiculous. But there was something about her. Something in her eyes wasn’t right. And she had this shoulder bag like a military kitbag and she kept reaching into it and I started imagining she had a gun in there or something.

MAJOR G:

But you didn’t actually see one.

DRIVER:

No.

MAJOR G:

Or a knife?

DRIVER:

No.

MAJOR G:

So you let her drive off in your car because you imagined she was dangerous.

DRIVER:

(long pause) Yeah. She had her hand inside her bag when she asked me for the key.

MAJOR G:

Sounds terrifying.

DRIVER:

You’d have to have been there.

MAJOR G:

I’m sure. And you gave her the key.

DRIVER:

Yeah.

MAJOR G:

And when did you drive her again?

DRIVER:

I didn’t.

MAJOR G:

You were booked for eight days. This was day three.

DRIVER:

That night I heard her arrive at about ten. I went outside but she’d gone.

MAJOR G:

She’d been out alone that night with the car?

DRIVER:

Yes, Major.

MAJOR G:

And she returned the vehicle in one piece?

DRIVER:

That’s right. The Benz wasn’t wrecked so I slept easier. But she kept the key with her, and the spare. Three days I don’t see her at all. The Benz is parked beside my room and I had no idea what she wants me to do, so I just hang out in the cabin and watch TV and drink and eat. I mean, I was getting paid whatever happened.

MAJOR G:

But you didn’t mention any of this in your driving log.

DRIVER:

I was afraid the boss would dock me for the days I didn’t drive. I didn’t tell him about the car going off without me or the money, either.

MAJOR G:

So, why are you telling me?

DRIVER:

They said in Phuket this is a murder inquiry. I’m not about to get myself tied up in lies if there’s a murder rap at the end of it.

MAJOR G:

Very wise, son. You’ve done time?

DRIVER:

Four years in Prem. Housebreaking, when I was younger. I’ve been clean since then.

MAJOR G:

So, did you see her again before you left for Phuket?

DRIVER:

Yeah, it was Thursday and I was due to get the car back before Friday morning. I still didn’t have a key. I was starting to think I might have to call the boss. But then she turns up. I’m on the balcony and she ignores me completely, jumps in the car and she’s off. Doesn’t say a word. Seems excited about something.

MAJOR G:

When did you get the car back?

DRIVER:

I found it parked on the side of the road outside the resort later that day. The key was in the ignition so I assumed she’d finished with it. She’d put a dent in the front bumper so I imagined she was embarrassed. There was another ten thousand baht on the front seat. I tell you, a Benz with the key in the ignition and cash on the seat. In Phuket that would have survived all of forty seconds. Must be a lot of saints living down here. I left straightaway. I’d had enough of her. I stopped at a body shop on the way home and had them hammer out the dent.

There followed a good deal of back and forth establishing the times that Ming Xi Wu had the car and crosschecking the reliability of the witness. Major General Suvit wanted to know where they’d been to on the first day of the itinerary, everything the customer had said and done, and what direction she headed when she got out of the car. He was very thorough. Then he surprised me by speaking English to the driver. The policeman was pretty good, clear, easy to understand, but the driver had no idea what he was saying. The major general tried several times without success. That immediately established that it was likely the driver’s communication skills that were lacking rather than the passenger’s. Finally came the question I’d been waiting for.

MAJOR G:

At any time, did she get you to make a telephone call to the Pak Nam police station?

DRIVER:

No, sir.

MAJOR G:

Nothing to do with a missing camera?

DRIVER:

No.

And that was pretty much it. There were a few more questions but that was the bulk of it. We paid our forty baht and walked slowly back to the bike, chewing everything over.

“That major general’s sharp,” said Granddad.

“They’ve snuck one or two smart ones in since you left the force,” I told him. “Were there any questions he didn’t ask?”

“I would have pushed him on whether there was any chance at all of this woman being Thai, acting like a foreigner.”

“You aren’t still thinking about the nun?”

“Not necessarily. There’s that one missing link about the phone call to Pak Nam police station reporting the lost camera. If a foreigner had made the call, they would have picked up on it.”

“It could have been the friends she was staying with in Pak Nam. Accomplices. She could have had them call.”

“Then there’s the question of how she knew the camera had been found. How did she know it was on its way to Lang Suan with the sergeant?”

I stopped and considered the sequence of events.

“Who would have received the original call?” I asked.

“The desk sergeant.”

“Sergeant Phoom himself, right. He would have passed the message upstairs. But what if nobody had bothered to tell him the original call was a fake? There was a lot going on at the station around that time. Isn’t it possible he wasn’t included in the loop?”

“More than likely, knowing the workings of a police station.”

“And what if he’d been given a return number to call if there was any news? He’s handed the camera to take to Lang Suan but before he leaves, he calls the number and lets them know he’s on his way. He’s a considerate man. He thinks he’s just doing the forensics department a favor. Putting the owner’s mind at ease.”

We were closer to Pak Nam hospital than we were to home so we detoured. Sergeant Phoom was looking a lot better but his relatives were still there around the bed making a lot of noise. I was sure he’d be grateful for his official release so he could get some peace. There was no longer a police watchman on duty. We sat with the sergeant and I asked him about the phone call. It had been placed from a cell phone and the speaker was a woman, he recalled. She was certainly a Thai and she told him she was calling on behalf of the Lang Suan police headquarters. She’d left a contact number and, as I’d suspected, Sergeant Phoom had called her back to tell her he was returning the camera. He’d inadvertently triggered his own attack. The major had ordered him to deliver the camera, but as he was a mere sergeant, nobody had bothered to explain the history or relevance of the delivery. He thought he was merely returning a lost item. He still had the number on a slip of paper in his wallet. The temptation to call it immediately filled my bladder with excitement, but I’d messed around enough with evidence. To pep the sergeant up a little, we had him phone in this revelation himself. He could blame the delay on concussion. I thought it might help him feel less like a complete loser. I told him if he was promoted on the strength of this new evidence I wanted a slap-up meal comprising anything without fish in it.

On the drive home I was thinking about the ornithologist who’d spent a week in our end room and checked out a day early. I also considered our local postman’s wife, the noodle lady and forty-odd other local women who fitted or could be decorated to fit the description of the killer from Hong Kong, Ming Xi Wu. And I thought about my nun and wondered whether anyone would take the driver’s statement seriously. It didn’t make any sense at all to consider her a suspect. But it was only by seeing the photos that anyone else might understand. I was afraid we’d have to give them up. My thoughts were interrupted by the jaunty Swedish tone of my cell phone. It was Chompu.

“Was that your doing?” he asked.

“What’s that?”

“Sergeant Phoom’s amnesia with regard to the telephone number.”

“Word gets around fast.”

“The major had me trace it. We still had some mileage left on our old warrant with the phone company. The caller had left a return number so we didn’t think they’d be directly connected to the crime. We were right. It was the number of a business service center called, uRinguist.”

“What’s that got to do with a missing camera?”

“Well, I haven’t actually called the number yet, but I looked up their Web site. It appears they do a thriving trade in translations and interpreting. A business person arrives from overseas and needs to send a message to, say, a Thai factory owner. He calls uRinguist and leaves a message in his own language whence it’s translated into Thai. A native Thai speaker then calls the factory owner ostensibly passing on the message as the visitor’s personal assistant. If there’s a reply, the process reverses itself and the visiting business person receives the reply in his or her own language. It gives the visitor some added status and a little class. It’s one of those huge ideas everyone wishes they’d thought of.”

“So, you’re saying Sergeant Phoom was called by a service?”

“Yes. They just read the message. ‘Hello, I’m calling on behalf of…’ et cetera.”

“And he called back to the service.”

“So it would seem. They translated the reply and probably sent a text message to the killer in her own language telling her the camera was on its way to Lang Suan. It was the moment she’d been waiting for all this time. But I’m afraid I’m going to have to make googoo eyes at the judge again to get into the uRinguist records. It’s a confidential service. And all that will have to wait till the morning ‘cause no self-respecting judge works on a Sunday. And I don’t even have a client’s name to give him.”

“The Hong Kong connection was false?”

“Surprise, surprise. None of the details sent to the rental company checked out. We have no idea what her real name is, but we do know something about her.”

“Shock me.”

“uRinguist doesn’t have Chinese interpreters. It only operates in three languages, Thai, English…and Japanese.”