“ They misunderestimated me.”
Granddad Jah and I had arranged to meet Lieutenant Chompu at the Northeastern Seaside Restaurant overlooking the concrete battleship. Arny had wanted to take the truck to his gym and he sulked so much when I challenged him that I finally relented. He wouldn’t even tell me why he needed it so badly but he was dressed up: long-sleeved shirt, jeans with a crease, real shoes. I tried to joke with him about a date and he turned the color of ripe chili.
That left me with a new problem. I had to use the motorcycle but I had Granddad Jah with me, and he was old-school when it came to sexism. There wasn’t a hope in hell that he’d let me drive the motorbike. He even tried to get me to sit sidesaddle as it was more ladylike. I won that tussle, but Granddad Jah on a motorcycle was road safety personified. We spent half an hour digging out the spare helmet from the removal boxes before he’d agree to set off. He rode 100 % by the book: correct procedure, hand signals, turning protocol, but, as everyone else was ignorant that there was a book, they were busy doing everything the wrong way just as their forefathers had done before them. That made us the most dangerous people on the road. And heaven forbid you’d be in a hurry. He practiced what he called ‘defensive driving’ which meant we traveled so slowly we were often overtaken by maimed war veterans on tricycles.
We’d gone first to Wat Feuang Fa as I’d wanted to show him the crime scene and, perhaps, get him in conversation with Abbot Kem. It took us so long to get there I could feel myself aging. I wished I’d brought some embroidery to while away the trip but instead I yelled the details of the case through his thick helmet. All I left out was the contents of the camera. I was afraid if I told him, he’d be morally obliged to pass on the information to the police. He was a tough one to read.
At the temple, we were to be disappointed. All we found there was a young novice whose duty it was to feed the dogs, and a monk so ancient and so covered in religious tattoos that he looked like he’d been excavated from some historical site. He seemed half blind, staring out through misty opal eyes and massaging each shuddering hand with the other. I joined him in the office. Granddad Jah had opted to stay outside. He seemed uninterested.
“We’ve come to see Abbot Kem,” I told him. I half expected his inner workings to be as rusted as his casing but his voice was surprisingly young and his mind bubbled with energy.
“Vanished, poof, into thin air,” he said. “Haven’t seen a sight of him since they took the girl.”
“The girl?”
“The nun. Can’t remember her name but we only had the one.”
“Who took her?”
“Those scruffy Bangkok detectives, the tall one and his podgy mate.”
“Was she formally arrested?” I asked the monk.
“Must have had a warrant, I’d suppose. Not even Bangkok detectives can just kidnap a nun and whisk her off, can they now?”
“Do you think the abbot followed her?”
“You know I do a bit of palm reading on the side but I can’t claim my ESP’s all that hot. All I know is she’s gone and he’s gone and I’m left holding the fort. Just hope I can stay alive long enough to welcome him back. Wouldn’t want to be running a place this size all by myself.”
I thanked the old fellow and went outside to join my granddad. I was surprised to find both sandals there waiting for me although I did spot one black eye peering out from the bushes. We walked up to the crime scene along the concrete path. Granddad stood back for a few seconds and shook his head.
“If ever I saw a murderer who wanted to get caught,” he said.
“Open, isn’t it.”
“Look at it. Top of a slope. Well used road at the bottom. Bright flowering bushes advertising the location. Plain view from the temple. And you say the dogs attacked him?”
“Abbot Kem said he’d been alerted by the sound of the dogs barking.”
“Well then, anyone might have looked up once the dogs got going.”
“So he was lucky?”
“I’d say so. And where did he run? A man with a pack of dogs after him. He’s not going to head downhill into a wide open space. He’d have to go this way.”
Granddad Jah pushed his way through the unruly bougainvilleas and, for want of a better plan, I followed him. We emerged on the far side where the temple perimeter posts were lined up alongside a wood. There was no wall. To the left, the posts stretched all the way down to the road. To the right I could make out a small green roof.
“Any idea what that is?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He waited.
“Gonna tell me?”
“It’s the nun’s hut.”
“Well then.”
I’d suggested the possibility of the nun being implicated in the murder and done my best to make it sound unlikely. The concrete path meandered over the crest of the hill and approached the living quarters from the south. It was a very open track. But looking along the perimeter directly to the hut, I could see a case for someone concealing herself in the bushes and leaping out on an unsuspecting abbot. That’s when I decided to tell him about the photographs. Not that I’d downloaded them, but that Arny and I had seen them. We sat in the shade of a particularly tall bush and I hoped that my description of the crime might point the finger away from my sweet, love-struck nun.
“You still think she did it?” I asked.
“Well, if I was one of those modern, hi-so techno yuppie police superstars from Bangkok, I’d probably put all this information together and say, ‘Yes, she’s the common denominator’,” he said. “And I’d stop looking. But if I was an old, retired traffic policeman with not a single commendation or service ribbon to his name, I’d probably do this.”
And with that he headed off into the overgrown woodland straight ahead of us. He was fit for his age. It was all I could do to keep up with him. The branches he pushed past whipped back into my face and the ground was thick with roots and nasty nettles that bit my ankles. I doubted any other creature had entered this jungle since the dinosaurs. But some thirty meters from the perimeter fence, Granddad Jah and the vegetation stopped dead. I ran into his back. Before us was a red dirt track cut through the undergrowth. It was common enough down here where locals planted cash crops where they could and dug out trails through the jungle for access. The way was heavily rutted with what looked like truck tire and motorcycle tracks. Granddad Jah looked left and right but didn’t step out onto the dirt.
“All right,” he said. “It’s narrow. If, for whatever reason, I was to stop here in a car, I’d know some local farmer might need to get past to plant his palms or collect his berries, so I’d pull over as tight onto the verge as I could. About…there.”
He was pointing to a grassy area ten meters ahead. We picked our way along the edge of the wood, being careful not to step on the track, and stopped at the rough patch of weeds.
“What if he came on a motorcycle?” I asked.
He contemplated that possibility.
“Then we’re buggered,” he said. “But let’s go with the black Benz theory for now and see where that takes us. Ready?”
“OK. He parks here,” I said. “He cuts through the jungle, kills the abbot, for whatever reason, then comes back to…Wait! Look at this.”
I crouched down to get a better look. A cigarette butt in the grass. It was tipped and imported, not the type of thing Maprao locals would smoke. Granddad Jah knelt beside me and found another, then one more. We didn’t touch them.
“Three cigarette ends,” he said. “Now that’s either totally irrelevant or really significant. If the latter, it changes the theory completely.”
“It does?”
“Certainly. It either means our killer was so cool and collected that he felt he could get away with having a leisurely smoke or three, either before or after the murder…”
“…or he had an accomplice waiting in the car,” I added.
“Sometimes, Jimm,” he said, with one of his almost smiles, “I think you’re wasted as a girl.”
I held my tongue. In his mind it might have even been a compliment.
“You think that was good?” I said. “How about this? You’ve got a whacking great Mercedes Benz on a little dirt track and somehow you’ve got to get it out again. Sooner than reverse all the way back to the road, you keep going till you find somewhere to turn around so you’re facing the right direction for the getaway.”
He really smiled this time and squeezed my hand. I don’t remember him touching me since primary school.
“And that,” he said confidently, “is where we’ll find our perfect car tracks. Good girl.”
We hurried along the edge of the trail. There was one break in the tree line but the ditch there would have made it impossible to drive in. Then, around the next bend, we came upon forensic heaven 101. Sand, and one perfect M of tire marks, in and out. Forgetting myself briefly, I raised my hand for Granddad Jah to high-five me. He had no idea what I was doing and glared at me until my hand was back at my side.
That was the morning’s work, and now we sat waiting for Lieutenant Chompu at the empty Northeastern Seaside Restaurant. Opposite, local tourists paid thirty baht to set off firecrackers in honor of the Prince of Chumphon, father of the Thai navy, part-time magician. This would be followed by a climb up to the deck of a fifty-meter concrete battleship erected in his honor. Pak Nam’s most famous landmark, complete with concrete sailors and interlocking dolphins. What can I say?
Chompu arrived on foot. I was surprised. Pak Nam police station was only six hundred meters away, but policemen rarely walked. It made them look too common. I’d been nervous, I confess, about what Granddad Jah’s reaction might have been to this flowery policeman. He was hardly in a position to complain, of course. He’d indirectly sired one grandson who was the 1992 Miss Pattaya World, and one more who’d refused point-blank to have sexual relations unless it was a sincere love match, ergo, a thirty-two-year-old virgin. With a record like that, a man would have to have serious doubts about his own gene pool.
To my surprise, Granddad Jah stood and saluted when Chompu arrived. It didn’t feel sarcastic. The lieutenant generously returned the salute and removed his hat. We sat under the wooden canopy and Granddad and Chompu briefly exchanged professional backgrounds. I took the female role and ordered an assortment of Esarn Lao delicacies and cold beer and Coca-Cola for the lieutenant. Chompu was very respectful and I got the feeling my granddad had warmed to him early on. He told the policeman about the dirt track we’d found beside Wat Feuang Fa and I smiled at Granddad’s look of awe when the lieutenant immediately took out his cell phone and passed on the information to somebody at the station. He related the story exactly as it had been told to him. He even asked Granddad for his full name so he could be cited as a witness. With the detectives back in Bangkok with their suspect, the local stations were now responsible again for any ongoing developments in the case. When Chompu turned off his phone, both he and Granddad were grinning widely.
“Well, that’s one happy major,” said Chompu. “If this comes to something, you’ll have a friend for life.”
He raised his glass and we all clinked.
“Any news from your end?” I asked.
“Afraid there weren’t any prints on the cigarette lighter you gave us,” said Chompu. “But we’ve got word back on the camera. It wasn’t a make that can be bought.”
“You have to steal it?”
“Either that or you have to be a professional photographer. Canon has a policy of asking professionals to trial their prototypes. That brand number was a prototype. They make a hundred or so of each and ask the pros to test them.”
“So it should be possible to get a list of the people asked to trial the camera,” I said.
“Technically. But it involves contacting Canon offices overseas. That could take some time, given…”
“Given all the foolishness going on in Bangkok,” I said. “Any news about the Merc driver?”
“None of the mobile units spotted him on the highway heading in either direction,” he said. “And, as you both know, I’m not at liberty to divulge information on an ongoing investigation, et cetera, et cetera, blah, blah, but, between you and me, the daughter of the 69 Resort owner remembered the license number of the car.”
“Good for her,” I said.
“Even more impressive if you consider she’s four.”
“So we shouldn’t put too much faith in it.”
“No. I’m told she’s quite a prodigy when it comes to license plates. Anyway, they’re running the number. There are also developments on the attack on Phoom that I’m not at liberty to tell you about. The person who phoned in the accident on his cell didn’t stick around once the ambulance arrived. That’s quite common. Folks wanting to help but not to get involved in reports and interviews.”
“Better than not taking the trouble in the first place,” said Granddad Jah.
“Couldn’t agree more,” said Chompu. “But there was something. We had the local radio station, 106.50, ask for witnesses and a lady called in saying she’d passed an accident on the road. There were two vehicles parked already so she hadn’t stopped. But she saw a man and a woman leaning over the victim.”
“Two vehicles?” I said. “Really? Did she mention what types they were?”
“One pick-up truck and one car was all she remembered. No make or color.”
“Is there any way to trace the good Samaritan call to the hospital?” I asked.
“It’s not easy. We’d need a warrant from a judge.”
“But it can be done.”
“I’m assuming the major has already started the paperwork. What’s on your mind?”
“Well, suppose the killer bumps Sergeant Phoom’s bike, is afraid the sergeant could identify him and decides to stop and finish him off. He’s bent over the body with a tire lever when this lady in a truck comes around the bend and stops to help. Our killer pretends he’s just come across the accident and is aiding the victim. The woman phones the hospital and our killer flees the scene. The woman, for reasons of her own, also vanishes as soon as she’s certain the sergeant’s taken care of.”
“In which case, the woman would have been in close contact with the killer,” said Granddad Jah. “She could identify him.”
I hadn’t seen Granddad this animated since the great diarrhea onslaught of 2005. I liked him like this — without the diarrhea, naturally.
“Good,” said Chompu. “I’ll keep prodding the major on the phone records.”
“Remind him what a boost it would be to his career chances,” I suggested. “The man’s a bubbling volcano of ambition.”
“There’s one other possibility,” said Granddad.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“The one you’re deliberately avoiding,” he said. “Somebody might want to call the hospital and ask whether it was a man or a woman who phoned in the accident.”
I got it immediately. I didn’t want to imagine my nun having a secret life outside the temple with wigs and fast cars and sharp knives. Granddad Jah was right. I really wanted the killer to be a man.
“I’ll get onto that first thing this afternoon,” said the lieutenant.
“Which brings us to the VW case,” I said.
“There’s more?” Chompu feigned horror. “Should I cancel my pedicure?”
“You should at least order us a couple more bottles,” I told him. “You could be here for some time yet.”
Again I left it to Granddad Jah to tell of his visit to demoted Captain Waew of the Surat police force. I kept expecting Chompu to say, “Of course, I knew all that.” But it was evident that he didn’t. He had his Paddington Bear notepad open on the table and was throwing down a rapid shorthand. Granddad excused himself at one stage to take care of his long-suffering bladder, and it gave me a chance to ask Chompu what he’d done about the photos.
“It’s difficult,” he admitted. “I considered leaving them at the front desk and running away, but I realized everything would fall back on you as you were the one who found the camera. I can’t plant them anywhere and it’s a bit late to discover them at the crime scene. So, I admit, I’m boggled. I’m hoping something will come up to make their appearance unnecessary. Meanwhile, they’re under my mattress.”
“I appreciate you doing this.”
“We’re partners in crime.”
I looked up to see whether Granddad had completed his ablutions.
“Which reminds me,” I said in my low, conspiratorial voice, “have you heard of any…serious crimes committed today?”
“How serious?”
“Oh, I don’t know. A killing?”
He laughed. “You’re insatiable.”
“So, have you?”
“No.”
“No missing persons? Almost fatal injuries? Suspected poisonings?”
“Be patient. All these things will come.”
I hoped in my heart that they wouldn’t, but it looked as if Mair might have got away with it so far.
“Oh, and I forgot,” said the lieutenant. “We traced your Dr. Jiradet the so-called adviser to the Pak Nam hospital. It appears he was there at the resort on a tryst with a juvenile harlot. They checked into separate rooms but nobody was really fooled, particularly his wife. Word has it that when her doctor left town the young lady in question found herself a tourist. You have to admire her opportunism, don’t you?”
Two more suspects dust-bitten. I was running out of possibilities. Granddad returned. I’d considered not telling Chompu about my visit to ex-MP Sugit. I supposed there’d be arguments made that I was interfering in police business and unduly alerting a potential suspect in a dual homicide inquiry. In Chiang Mai I would have been arrested for it. But this was Pak Nam, and Chompu and I were already up to our necks in evidence tampering so I figured, what the heck. When I was done, he closed his mouth.
“Unbelievable,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe how dull life was in Pak Nam before you lot arrived.”
I wondered at that moment whether he might be considering us suspects. Odd family turns up in town — bodies everywhere. But I got the impression he wouldn’t have minded that either.
“So, you aren’t angry?” I asked.
“Angry? I’m throbbing with excitement. Batman and Robin have arrived. Whatever will they do next?”
I wasn’t particularly thrilled with the analogy, especially if I was supposed to be Robin. But Granddad Jah continued to glow, both from the beer and the adulation. He rather spoiled the mood once the bill was paid, by informing me that we were both over the alcoholic limit for safe driving and insisting we walk half a kilometer to the 7-Eleven to get motorcycle taxis home. He ignored my pleas that most of the drivers were addicts or imbeciles and we were safer driving drunk. He then wasted another twenty minutes arguing with the freak circus that he wouldn’t allow them to go anywhere unless they put on helmets. I hadn’t seen a motorcycle helmet in all the nine months we’d been here.
Eventually, we arrived home with doggy bags of Esarn food for Mair and Arny and a peopley bag of scraps for Gogo. As we pulled up, I saw Mair in front of the shop talking to the same elderly lady I’d seen at the plastic awning detective agency. This, I remembered, was the mother of Maprao’s only known villain: an alliance I felt most uncomfortable about. I paused nearby for a moment but the two women were deep in conversation and seemed not to notice me. I went in search of Arny to give him his lunch but he was nowhere to be found. A family of four, young parents and two toddlers, were sitting in front of one of the cabanas. The door was open but their bags were on the front steps. I’d noticed a Suzuki Caribbean in the car park but I’d assumed its owner was walking on the beach.
“Excuse me, do you work here?” the father called to me.
“Kind of.”
“Hope you don’t mind,” he said, “but we couldn’t find anyone to talk to and the door was open.”
“Are you staying the night?” I asked. Iwo.
“No problem. I’ll find a key for you.”
“We could use a meal.”
I somehow managed to convince them that our plat du jour was delicious spicy northeastern food and went to heat up our takeaways. I ignored the whining from Gogo when I added the scraps and I was quite pleased with the finished meal. The guests didn’t complain either.
I called Sissi.
“iFurn executive line,” she said. “I’m Dr. Monique Dubois. Can I help you?”
She sometimes used this number for her IKEA II customers. She had a Web company called iFurn. Little i’s and e’s were really big in online sales evidently. She had an iFurn Web site with pictures of her exclusive furniture range which was actually cut and pasted from the IKEA site. The only difference was that her prices were three times theirs. Her slogan was IKEA looks but iFurn quality. She claimed to be the IKEA top end, the stuff they produced before they started cutting corners and downgrading materials. And people fell for it. When she got an order she’d pocket the remittance, rewrite the invoice, and send it to IKEA, paying the catalog price. IKEA dispatched it directly to the customer. The phone line was back-up in case anyone received their package and noticed the discrepancy in the invoice. It rarely happened, but when it did she’d explain that this was the company’s way of reducing the tax and, in turn, lowering the overall cost to the consumer. Her philosophy was that some people desperately wanted to pay too much for what they perceived as quality and were less likely to complain. She’d run this scam for two years. The phone connection was untraceable and the Web site was wired against intrusion. She’d know if anyone tried to shut it down. She was a diva.
“Hello,” I said. “I was looking for a card table that collapses as soon as you rest your arm on it.”
“Little sister.”
“You busy?”
“The world never sleeps.”
“Are you getting out to see that world, Sis? Breathing any of that air? Bumping into any of those world citizens on street corners?”
“We have a rooftop garden. It’s very airy at three or four a.m.”
“Restaurants? Bars? Bank queues? Crowded shopping centers? Society?”
“Are you channeling our mother?”
“I worry about you. What was that movie about the woman who stayed in the house all the time and ate and ate and got bigger and bigger till she filled the room, then she exploded?”
“Yeah. I remember. It was one of Audrey Hepburn’s best.”
“Sissi. I think Mair’s done something bad. I’m frightened.”
There was dead air on the iFurn line, then she said, “All right. Let me hear it.”
I told her the lot: John, the awning detective, the poison, the early morning ninja show by Mair.
“I have frightening visions of her wiping out anyone in Maprao who bought that particular brand of insect killer. And we’re talking hundreds.”
“Hmm. Hickville genocide. Have there been any reports of a death?”
“No.”
“Then, good luck to her. She’s getting away with it. She still has the savvy to cover her tracks, and we always encouraged her to get a hobby.”
“You think I’m being paranoid, don’t you?”
“No. I think you’re a complete idiot. Mair’s a little odd. But you don’t go from dotty to wiping out half a community with rat poison. What I do think is that you’ve been down there in oogaboogaland long enough. It’s time to come home. I have a spare room and a whole cabinet of movies you haven’t seen. We can drink Absolut vodka and watch old Wagon Train episodes on Utorrent and stuff ourselves with chocolate.”
I sighed. It did sound tempting. Almost a deal. But I had some unfinished business.
“All right,” I said. “That’s close to being an option. But let me sort out all these murders first. Have you had any thoughts about my abbot slaying?”
“I had a brainwave,” she said. “I’m a member of this Web site called Police Beat. It’s like Facebook but it’s for anyone with police connections. It’s mostly old cops, men, retired and active — unattractive police officers trawling for women with uniform fetishes. In fact, that’s why I joined. But it gets an interesting mixed clientele as well. Some female officers, public prosecutors, crime writers hoping for scraps, the odd hooker throwing in a discreet ad masked as a chat. But the fascinating thing is, it’s international. You get dialogues in bad English discussing law and swapping police techniques. I guess there are a lot of people out there who don’t realize what the site’s really about.
“My site identity is Elena. I’m a Russian homicide detective who lost a leg in a gang fight. But I’m gorgeous, you see, and all those noble police officers are prepared to ignore my stub. You’d be surprised what information one-legged Elena can elicit. But, anyway, there’s this chat-room for discussing cases. So I mentioned our temple killing and the weird thing with the hat and I sent out a plea for any other hate/hat related stories.”
“You mean, just in case there’s a worldwide serial killer who puts hats on his victims before he stabs them to death? Siss?”
“You asked me to think outside the box.”
“Not outside the planet.”
“Fine. You don’t want my help then I won’t…”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. You’re right. I mean, you’re absolutely right. So? Any luck?”
“Not yet. I had an alcoholic ex-detective in southern California tell me in great detail about a performance artist who used to put party hats on roadkill and photograph them. She had an exhibition. That’s as close as we’ve come so far. But this is a huge network. It’ll take time.”
“I trust you.”
“You should.”
“How’s the Web idol job?”
“We have conflict.”
“Already?”
“They want me to post my picture — pre-work. Me in the raw.”
“Naked?”
“My Webcam would never forgive me for such a thing. No, they want me to show my actual, time-ravaged face. They say it would inspire the youth.”
“Do they know your real name?”
“No.”
“So, do it.”
“Are you mad? What if anyone recognized me?”
“They’d send you an e-mail and ask how you’ve been, and you’d answer and that’s the last you’d hear from them. Internet reunions are fleeting and they tire fast. I’m serious. Do it.”
“I’d sooner die.”