At first Sophie had been mortified to hear that Paul was involved in drug trafficking, yet it all made sense. Unfortunately, it was also likely to be part of the explanation as to why Louis had spent such a long time as a guest at his house. She was now certain that Paul had somehow used her brother, and that Louis had ended up dead as a result: she was no longer under any illusion that drugs had indeed been involved. However, she could not fathom what had been the true nature of the relationship between the two men or the role Jade had played in the entire saga. All she had, at this stage, was her instincts and a multitude of fragmentary evidence, which could unfortunately be interpreted many different ways. It was simply not enough, and she had little faith that she could win where government agencies had failed. Nonetheless, with Charles’s help, she drafted a letter to his French colleagues to be remitted to Interpol, listing carefully everything they had learned and everything they had intuited; at the very least she could pinpoint the location of Paul’s compound, intimating that the drugs were most likely manufactured on site. Regarding mode of transport, she also suggested that the police look into the charter flights in and out of the island; perhaps they consistently transported the same type of cargo and the pilots could be jettisoned to questioning.
When Sophie left Bangkok for the second time, she knew only one thing for sure: whatever she had now garnered would have to go with her to her grave. Nothing would be accomplished in sharing with her siblings or her parents either her suspicions or her findings. As far as they were all concerned, Louis’s death had been nothing but an unfortunate accident. At the time of his death, he had been clean and drug-free. His last months had been happy and according to Jade, his activities abroad had all been above board. She refused to sully his memory by exposing his association with an underworld figure, knee deep in drug trafficking. Yet Sophie felt like she still owed something to his memory, convinced against all reason that the dreams were at least a desperate attempt for them to unearth the truth and finger Paul in the end. Moreover, she desperately wanted to remember him, not for the anguish he had rained upon them, but for the free spirit he had once been. Sophie began writing.
It took her over a year to write a series of poems. She aptly called the collection Infinity, after the mathematical sign she wore around her neck. Paul would have found it ironic but their world would never cross again. She had just been given the green light by a local publisher, when her celebrity client had requested she organise and personally supervise her up-coming nuptials in the South of France. During Lily’s opening, she never mentioned the publishing deal to anyone, except later to Jacqueline, her childhood confidante, the one who had been there throughout her life through thick and thin, the one person she had ever truly trusted. Jacqueline’s feedback had been warm and positive and it had given her the impetus to continue and persevere against all odds. When the book was finally published to great critical acclaim, it was soon translated in several languages, no mere feat for a book of poems. Sophie had finally made peace with her conscience. Through her sonnets, she had freed herself from the past. The words floating across the pages had finally been able to lay Louis to rest. Whenever she thought of him now, neither Paul, nor Jade, nor drugs, nor Thailand, ever entered her thoughts again. The magic of words had proved the most effective talisman in fully capturing a boy robbed of his innocence.
Five years later, one of the largest seizure of Infinity brought the entire saga back to the fore. Indeed, a young American woman from Washington D.C, approximately 30 years of age, in good health despite her generous figure, had disappeared from a Bangkok nightclub during a night out with her girlfriends to celebrate her impending nuptials. Her future husband though had both the means and the connections and had refused to let the matter lie. The Thai government, under heavy international pressure to thoroughly investigate the case had finally traced the woman’s movements back to Koh Samui where she had been abducted. By the time she was found though, her body lay in a ditch, behind a small village, her death attributed to heart failure. The autopsy though revealed an overdose of Infinity, the first and only recorded death directly connected to the drug.
In fact during Paul’s latest caper things had gone terribly wrong. With an eager buyer in the US capital, ready to pay thrice the market price, provided the merchandise arrived before New Year’s Eve, he had vainly searched for a victim who would fit the profile he needed. His lookouts in various popular Bangkok venues had finally identified the young woman as fitting the bill. However, she refused to take the bait placed in front of her, which had come in the guise of a very good-looking Eurasian man who attempted to seduce her. When she had visited the bathroom though, a shack across a small gravel courtyard at the back of the discotheque, a man had hooded her, while two others had carried her to the van parked on the other side of the courtyard door. Her screams could not be heard over the thumping music. When Paul’s men had called him to let him know the victim was safely in their hands, Paul had, however, failed to answer the call. Due to the very late hour, their usual funeral service was closed and thus they could not contact anyone. At a loss on what to do next, they opted to take the ferry back to Koh Samui with their unconscious quarry still at the back: they knew Paul to keep a standard spare coffin at all times, tucked away in his garage. However, they were blissfully unaware that Paul had used the last one just the week before when making a last minute delivery to Hong Kong. Since his usual supplier had been temporarily out of stock, the box had not yet been replaced. By the time he returned their call, they were already half way up the hill.
Since it was impossible to keep the woman on the premises against her will, for simple security reasons, they were left with no choice but dump the body back in town, after pumping her with a mixture of Fentanyl and Infinity. At best the American would survive and remember nothing as to how she came to wake up in a dumpster in a different town all together. At worst, the concoction would kill her. With an accidental death on the island, Paul would end up being contacted anyway, both to fly the body back to Bangkok on one of his private charters, and to help with the administrative paperwork, which would allow him in the end to meet his buyer’s expectations. However, what Paul had not counted on, was the last minute switch of coroners when the body arrived at the Bangkok morgue: without any warning and without explanation, his usual acolyte had vanished into thin air. When the newly appointed medical examiner pinned the cause of death on Infinity, he alerted the authorities immediately.
Already under immense political pressure of figuring what had happened to the foreigner, found dead miles away from where she was last seen, the clues led the police back to Paul’s compound on the hills. Searching the premises under warrant, they discovered the secret lab; Paul was arrested on the spot. During the raid, Jade only narrowly avoided capture by escaping through the garden maze she knew so well. Faced with the possibility of a death sentence for their role in the organisation, Jade Inc.’s employees began to talk. To their interrogators’ surprise, every single one believed that previous victims, kept captive within the compound’s walls at some point or another under Paul’s watchful gaze, had voluntarily traded their empty coffin for a life without strife. None had ever contemplated the possibility that Paul may have had his victims killed, insisting they would never have been complicit in such crimes, which they would find abhorrent. Listening to the unfolding tales and stunned by the magnitude and the intricacy of the ruse, which, over a decade, had allowed Paul to transport drugs across international borders thanks to empty coffins and his vast network of operatives, the police of all concerned countries decided to keep their latest findings away from the public and the media, lest it forced too many families to re-visit their grief. Moreover, the Thai police was especially keen to see the matter put to rest as the investigation had failed to cast a positive light on its ability, rumours of widespread corruption too often erupting during the course of the inquiry.
Although faced with the mountain of evidence accumulated
against him, Paul continued to deny all murder charges. According to his defence, there was not a shred of evidence to back up the allegations. Indeed, he had only reluctantly admitted to helping his victims with new identities and enough seed money to start over somewhere, insisting against all odds that they had always been willing participants in the stratagem. In his opinion, most had had nothing to lose and had been offered the chance of a lifetime: it had always been a win-win proposition and a small price to pay. He remained though incapable of verifying any of their current whereabouts, nor did he seem to recall the names or the nationality on the allegedly new-minted passports he had provided for them. Moreover, during the entire course of the trial, snippets of which had made the front page of many newspapers across the globe, none of his alleged complicit partners ever took the opportunity to come out of hiding to give credence to his claims. One such witness is all Paul would have needed to avoid the death penalty.
Only by following the lengthy and well-publicised trial did Jade come to realise Paul’s ultimate betrayal: it was now clear that, in all likelihood, the only man she had ever loved was not living the carefree life he had been promised. His corpse was undoubtedly lying in a ditch somewhere. All her attempts to figure out what had become of the former Coroner with whom she had so many dealings, a man she was sure held the key to what happened to the victims in the end, had come to naught: the man had truly vanished without a trace as had his family. She thus endlessly wondered when Louis had drawn his last breath and whether he had suffered. However, despite her remorse, she hesitated to come forward and turn evidence against Paul, lest she incriminated herself for her active role in the whole saga. Hiding in her mother’s village, she finally mourned her lover. She waited for things to die down and for a more propitious time in order to re-merge with a different identity all together. For the longest time, she also debated as to whether she should contact Louis’s sisters to let them know they had been right in the first place: their former dream had indeed hinted at the unfathomable truth. When she came across Sophie’s book of poems on Amazon, sonnets which had stabbed at her heart in their poignancy, she had anonymously written to the author via her publisher.
“I loved your poems. I even learned most of them by heart. They stand as a fitting tribute to the man you loved and lost. And always, always believe in your dreams: they often hold a key to the past and often hint at the truth.”
The infinity symbol was the sole signature.
The Samui Conspiracy Page 31