Number Seven

by Colin Cotterill

  Number Seven

  Sex on the Beach

  A Jimm Juree Short Story

  By Colin Cotterill

  Number Seven: Sex on the Beach

  Copyright © Colin Cotterill, 2018

  DCO Books

  eBook Edition published by

  Proglen Trading Co., Ltd. 2018

  Bangkok Thailand

  http://www.dco.co.th

  eBook ISBN 978-616-456-005-5

  All Rights Reserved

  This book is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and other elements of the story are either the product of the author's imagination or else are used only fictitiously. Any resemblance to real characters, living or dead, or to real incidents, is entirely coincidental.

  Also by Colin Cotterill

  Dr. Siri Paiboun series

  The Coroner's Lunch (2004)

  Thirty-Three Teeth (August 2005)

  Disco For the Departed (August 2006

  Anarchy and Old Dogs (August 2007)

  Curse of the Pogo Stick (August 2008)

  The Merry Misogynist (August 2009)

  Love Songs from a Shallow Grave (August 2010)

  Slash and Burn (October 2011)

  The Woman Who Wouldn't Die (January 2013)

  Six and a Half Deadly Sins (May 2015)

  The Rat Catchers' Olympics (August 2017)

  Jimm Juree series

  Killed at the Whim of a Hat (July 2011)

  Grandad, There's a Head on the Beach (June 2012)

  The Axe Factor (April 2014)

  The Amok Runners (June 2016)

  Other publications

  Evil in the Land Without (2003)

  Ethel and Joan Go to Phuket (2004)

  Pool and its Role in Asian Communism (2005)

  Cyclelogical (2006)

  Ageing Disgracefully (2009)

  Bleeding in Black and White (2015)

  Contents

  Introduction to Jimm Juree

  Sex on the Beach

  Introduction

  Brief description of how the Jurees ended up in Maprao, the buttock-hole of the earth.

  I’ll keep this brief because it still irks me to tell our story. My name is Jimm Juree and I was, at one stage, a mere liver failure away from fame and fortune in Chiang Mai. But our mother, Mair, dragged the family down south to run a decrepit seaside resort on the Gulf of Thailand. I’m a reporter. A real one. And as soon as the head of the crime desk at the Chiang Mai Mail completed his impending suicide by Mekhong Whisky, I was to step into his moldy old shoes; only the second female in the country to hold such a prestigious position.

  Then Mair – nutty as peanut brittle – sold our family home without telling us and headed south. With her went her father, Granddad Jah, the only Thai traffic policeman to go through an entire career without accepting bribes or kickbacks, my brother, Arny, a wimpy lamb with the body of a Greek God, and me. The only one to pass up on family obligation was Sissy, my transsexual brother. Once a cabaret star, and briefly a TV celebrity, now an ageing recluse, Sissy had become something of an internet criminal and although I haven’t forgiven her for deserting us, I do find her skills useful from time to time.

  You see, although I would never have guessed it, Maprao and its environs is a hotbed of crime. Although I’m technically the part-time social events reporter for the shitty local newspaper, barely a week goes by that I’m not chasing down some misdemeanor or another. Our local police (who make the Keystone Cops look like the SAS) are of the belief that I brought all this crime with me from the city. I know that it’s always been here but our gentlemen in brown prefer not to notice it. As they say, and quite rightly too, they just don’t get paid enough to stand in front of a loaded gun. All we get from them are complaints about all the extra paperwork we’re causing them.

  So it’s down to our disjointed family to solve the mysteries and put the perps away. We’re a surprisingly efficient team of crime fighters but I have to confess we were hopeless at running a resort and deserved all the disasters that befell us. At the time of writing this, we still haven’t been able to salvage our monsoon ravaged bungalows from the depths of the bay and we’ve spent the past year doing odd jobs to make ends meet. The bank has been particularly slow in paying out on our disaster insurance claim. But we’re refusing to budge until they do.

  As it turned out, there was some method to Mair’s madness in bringing us down south, but in order to learn what that was you’ll have to fork out some money for the actual books that tell our sorry story. Details of those are below. I can’t say too much because Sissi and I are in a long ongoing dialogue with Clint Eastwood who probably wants to turn our family exploits into a movie. In the meantime, the files that I’m sending you in this series of shorts have been collated from the astounding cases I’ve been involved in since the floods. There is an expression, “Only in Thailand”, used freely by frustrated and frustrating foreigners who like nothing better than to complain about us. But, I have to confess, most of the cases I’ve been involved in here really could only have happened in my country. I hope you enjoy them.

  Novels most likely currently under option consideration by Malpaso Productions;

  Killed at the Whim of a Hat (July 2011) - Minotaur Books, New York ISBN 9780312564537

  Grandad, There's a Head on the Beach (June 2012) - Minotaur Books, New York ISBN 9780312564544

  The Axe Factor (April 2014) - Minotaur Books, New York ISBN 9781250043368

  The Amok Runners (June 2016) - CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform ISBN 9781533265289

  There’s also an exclusive short at Criminal Element called Hidden Genders that gives you some background on Sissi.

  It won’t help you much but the writer of these stories has a web page you probably shouldn’t bother going to.

  www.colincotterill.com

  Sex on the Beach

  There weren’t a lot of murders in this neck of the woods that year. There are those who’d see that as a good thing. I’m not one of them. You can’t beat a good murder to brighten up an overcast lull in your life. And I was certainly in one of those. I was stuck in a family commitment that had me living in a village of bumpkins on the Gulf of Thailand. Our only source of income, the Gulf Bay Lovely Resort and Restaurant was sitting at the bottom of the sea following a bout of inclement weather that ate a chunk of our coast. The storms reclaimed eighty hectares of palm plantations and waterlogged a thousand homes. Our only hope for compensation rested with a natural disaster insurance policy we’d taken out with the bank. They were arguing that our resort was never worth anything which, in a way, was true but irrelevant. They should have assessed its lack of value before they signed the contract. As it was, they didn’t actually expect a disaster and we stood to earn five million baht. That would be enough to rebuild and refurnish the Lovely Resort and our mother’s mini-mart and earn me a couple of crates of Chilean red to celebrate.

  Our meeting with Mrs. Doom, the bank manager, was on the day politics in the central region turned bloody. The rural red and royalist yellow factions were shooting each other. My country had always been politically bizarre but we Thais were losing respect for our own brothers and sisters. The ASEAN summit was cancelled in fear for the lives of the foreign ministers in attendance and tourism was taking a hammering from passionate demonstrations in Bangkok. We in the provinces watched it on TV as if it were happening in another, less civilized, country.

  We were sitting in the manager’s glass booth on view like zoo reptiles; me, my brother, Arny, my granddad Jah and my mother, Mair. Mrs. Doom had gone to get us some rosella cordial despite the fact we all said we didn’t want any. We weren’t being polite. It’s awful stuff. She returned with a pitcher, four plastic beakers and a fake smile she
’d obviously been practicing in the kitchen. Mair wasn’t given to pleasantries.

  “So, did we get it?” she asked before the woman could pour.

  “It isn’t that simple,” said the manager.

  “It’s a yes or no question,” said Mair. “Can’t get simpler than that.”

  “Now, Mrs. Juree,” said the manager. “I’ve told you there are a number of complications attached to your claim.”

  “And there are a number of fingers attached to my fist,” said Mair.

  Arny and I shouted “Mair!”, and granddad shook his head.

  “I don’t think that attitude is going to help,” said the manager.

  “Not in the slightest,” said granddad.

  I looked at Mair. She wore that Titanic-going-down smile I recognized. I knew she’d barely got started.

  “No, I’m tired of being polite about all this,” she said. “We filled out all your stupid forms, answered all your ridiculous questions, bought you sticky rice sweets still warm from the grill and all the while you knew you weren’t going to pay up.”

  “It wasn’t my decision to make,” said Manager Doom, still holding the full jug.

  “Of course it was,” said Mair.

  Granddad got to his feet and walked out of the glass booth. He was sure we’d blown it. I considered joining him but I had a hope that Mair had a plan attached to her rudeness.

  “You’re our bank manager,” she said. “You made the initial appraisal of our application. Your head office would want to know whether we were good customers. They’d ask you whether we were worth taking a chance on. If we were rolling in money this insurance pay-out would be an investment. But you told them we were no-hopers. You told them to tie up the claim in so much red tape we’d lose interest and go back north where we came from.”

  At this juncture it’s probably worth mentioning that my mother was currently dipping her toe in the great ocean of Alzheimer’s, deciding whether it was worth taking the plunge. One minute she’d be citing international law to argue the case against cruelty to animals and the next she’d be warming up her handbag in the microwave. She was currently in her scary public prosecutor mode.

  “That’s nonsense,” said Manager Doom.

  “Is it?” said Mair. “I don’t think so. You’ve always been against us.”

  Doom didn’t seem too concerned by the attack.

  “One thing is true,” she said. “My assessment of your chances of surviving a second incarnation of the Lovely Bay Resort was not positive. But it was not incorrect. You were in dire straits. You had no customers. You were withdrawing heavily from your savings account every month. The business was dying. When the monsoon obliterated your resort I expected you to leave. Really, insurance or no insurance, nobody at the bank could imagine you rebuilding and putting yourselves through that same futile punishment all over again. But it wasn’t my assessment that stymied the process.”

  “What was it then?” Mair asked.

  “You read the contract?” said Doom.

  “All of it,” said Arny.

  My brother was a champion body builder, solid as the Taj Mahal, but he had the ability to fade away into the surroundings. I often forgot he was with us. He’d studied the contract. He went through it with his dictionary, unclogging the legalese. We thought we understood everything.

  “Then you’ll know there’s a clause in Section 23,” she said. She held up her copy of the contract. “It says, ‘This contract will be deemed null and void if the householder is found to have ignored warnings of impending climactic disasters.’”

  “Our resort was washed away in a monsoon,” said Mair. “It was the only time anyone in the village could remember such a thing happening.”

  “Yes,” said Doom.

  “Then how does Section 23 apply to us?”

  “The clause goes on to say… ‘It is the responsibility of the householder to avail themselves of all relevant information regarding the vulnerability of the property to natural or unnatural catastrophes.’”

  “Apart from an appointment with the Lord Buddha I don’t see how we could have availed ourselves of that information,” said Mair.

  “Or a visit to the land office in Lang Suan?” said Doom. “Three years before you moved here the council built a concrete jetty at the estuary at Pak Nam. It reaches three hundred metres into the sea. At the time, academics were in agreement that every man-made structure along the coastline has a knock on effect. That is to say, if you protect a beach or a bay you disrupt the natural tides and currents and the consequent flow of sand. It’s known as passive erosion. Your beach, eight kilometres south of the jetty, was on the list of areas likely to experience serious land loss.”

  “Mair, did you cancel your subscription to ‘Thoroughly Dull Surveys and Reports Quarterly’ before we moved down here?” I asked.

  “I couldn’t keep up with the payments,” she said. “Sorry.”

  “Mrs Doom,” I said. “This is bullshit.”

  “You may be right,” she said, “But the bank has a serious legal team in place for the purpose of making claims like yours fail.”

  “It’s a dirty business,” said Mair.

  “And we have no choice but to fight dirt with dirt,” I said.

  As we paraded out of the aquarium I felt the same fire that burned in Mair’s soul. I sat on one of the plastic molded seats and called my brother-cum-sister, Sissy. If anyone could fight dirt, she could. She lived her life inside a computer world where there were no laws and no borders. We chatted for twenty minutes and I related the happenings of our unsuccessful meeting. She told me, not for the first time, that if I’d let her handle our affairs from the beginning she could have us all living comfortably instead of nibbling at chicken feed. Mair knew that Sissy’s fortune was ill-gotten and would have nothing to do with it. I, on the other hand, had no problems with her methods, or the odd handout.

  Arny had taken Mair and Granddad home in the Mighty X. I’d come on the bicycle. Still working on those thighs. The manager was in her booth engaged in the meaningless drudge of banking but she looked up when I stood to leave and beckoned me inside.

  “Take a seat,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about your case.”

  I sat but said nothing.

  “I think there might be a way around this problem.”

  I kept quiet.

  “I have to say I was extremely impressed with your detective work following our robbery,” she said.

  When her branch was robbed a few weeks earlier there were those, Mair included, who considered it possible Manager Doom had not been just an innocent victim. I’d solved the case and reignited my relationship with the national newspapers, but I’d been unable to pin anything on Doom. In my mind she was either innocent or extremely clever. I let her talk.

  “You’re a very talented journalist,” she said. “I’ve been reading back over your old stories on the web. I think you might be able to help me. I’m going to tell you a secret but I need you to promise it won’t go beyond this room.”

  I nodded. Not a promise, exactly.

  “I’m married and we have a child,” she said. “My husband has nothing much to do with us. He is a block of concrete.”

  I understood that. I’d been briefly married to a slab myself.

  “We made the baby and that was it,” she continued. “We do not have a physical relationship. Enter Te Win. He was a Burmese foreman at one of the ports we deal with. The Thai manager trusted him with the monthly salaries so Te Win was a regular visitor here. We fell in love.”

  I wasn’t that patient with love stories, especially as I didn’t have any of my own.

  “It wasn’t just sex,” she said.

  “It never is,” I replied.

  I wondered why I was getting this world exclusive on her love life, but I waited it out.

  “He is ambitious,” she said. “He speaks four languages fluently. He has a brilliant mind. If he’d been born in Thailand instead of Burma he
’d probably be a…I don’t know, a lecturer, a business magnate. He had a job offer in Phuket. Not much more money but an in to the building trade, tremendous prospects. I was sad to lose him but agreed he should go. We would get together whenever we could.”

  “And he got in trouble,” I said.

  “They say he killed a girl.”

  “Who’s they?”

  “The police.”

  “There was nothing about it in the newspapers.”

  And I should know. My granddad Jah devoured the crime pages of the nationals. He’d been a traffic cop for forty years. He could tell you every law in the land and how they’d been abused. Over lunch he’d regale us with tales of headline death and dirt and decapitation. If there’d been a murder in Phuket he’d have let us know.

  “They haven’t released the story yet,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then why would the police contact you?”

  “They didn’t. Not directly. I heard from his lawyer.”

  “Wait,” I said. “His lawyer? Since when did a Burmese labourer have a lawyer?”

  “It’s an NGO group that provides legal help to foreign workers. They went to see him in jail. Offered their services.”

  “And he agreed?”

  “Not a lot of choice for a Burmese,” she said. “They’re usually left to cope for themselves. I’d like you to go and see him.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll pay your expenses.”

  I laughed.