by Harlan Wolff
“Muscles and short hair, like soldiers. Not suntanned like tourists who have been here a while, more like burnt red. One of them had a big scar down his forehead that crossed his eye.”
“Which eye?”
“I asked them that. Two people said it was the right eye, and the other two said it was the left.”
“They sound like imports. A couple of paid hitmen maybe.”
“Someone said they spoke a language that didn’t sound like English,” Jenny added.
“Thanks, Jen, you’re a good detective.”
She didn’t tell him that the waitress from the restaurant said she thought Nadia was a Russian prostitute and hadn’t thought it strange for two men to visit her in her room. Jenny knew to be very careful about what she said to Carl right now. She was in an awkward position, having never hidden her dislike for Nadia. The truth was Jenny had nothing against her beyond the fact that Nadia was sleeping with Carl. Jenny would have been happy to be in her place, and she knew everyone was aware of that.
Carl picked his phone up off the bar and punched redial. The colonel told him he was concerned and that the major sounded like bad news. After some back and forth, Colonel Pornchai promised to reach out to his contacts at the provincial headquarters. Carl then explained that two foreigners had arrived on a speedboat at eleven in the morning and left around eleven-thirty. Carl told him there was only one telephone tower on the island, and if the men had brought mobile phones, there would be one or two numbers logged onto that tower around eleven and gone half an hour later. He asked the colonel to find him those phone numbers.”
“You need to leave it to the police,” the colonel barked down the phone.
“If I leave it to the police I will be found guilty of murdering her even though I wasn’t on the island at the time. You know that. I need those numbers.”
“You need to calm down, I know you’re upset. I’ll see what I can do,” the colonel told him.
“How long will it take you to get them?” Carl asked.
“You know how long these things take, it will be at least a couple of days.”
“Thank you.”
“No problem, and try not to get too drunk tonight, you’ll need a clear head for your interrogation tomorrow.”
“Don’t worry, it shouldn’t take long, I was thinking of confessing as a favour to the local cops.”
“It’s good you are still making jokes, at least you’re not heartbroken,” the colonel told him, and then did what he always did, he hung up without saying goodbye.
Not heartbroken? The colonel was right about that, and that was bothering him. He was very sad, yes, but not what could be described as heartbroken. Carl felt a significant loss and tremendous anger, and there was plenty of remorse, but he didn’t feel like his world had ended. He suddenly felt guilty, and the guilt made him even angrier. Poor Nadia, she had died living with a man that couldn’t even mourn her like he was supposed to. Carl was thinking, she had probably deserved better than that.
By midnight Carl was stinking drunk, and that’s when he realised he had nowhere to sleep. He sure as hell wasn’t going back to his room. Clouseau and George had staggered away from the bar an hour earlier, and Jenny was asleep face down on the counter. Carl left the Flying Fish and walked along the beach. After a swim to wash away the cobwebs in his head, he lay down on the sand under an overhanging tree and went to sleep.
CHAPTER 7
“Never give a sucker an even break.”
– W. C. Fields
Carl woke up as soon as the sun touched his face, and he was not happy about it. The well-deserved hangover was crippling, so he went to lie down in the sea for a while. He had to wait almost an hour for the beach restaurant to open but knew from experience that probably meant two hours. The restaurant had a big white sign facing the beach that said breakfast started at seven but, as usual, the first yawning member of staff showed up at ten to eight without the key to the kitchen. Fortunately, the cook arrived five minutes later and had remembered to bring his key.
“Coffee, black as a policeman’s heart,” Carl called out to the girl in Thai. The girl spoke the southern dialect and understood very little Carl had ever said to her.
“Coffee,” Carl told her patiently, and she returned a few minutes later with a pale milky liquid that he quickly refused.
“Coffee with no milk and no sugar,” he told her slowly, as he pushed the cup as far away as he could without it falling off the table. Carl always ordered his coffee black, but this was a girl who slept the sleep of the dead and was reborn with every sunrise; the demands of the new day never burdened by the events of the day before. Her life as a waitress was evenly balanced by twelve hours of work followed by twelve hours of uninterrupted sleep. On this morning, like every morning, her disapproving face said, why didn’t you say that in the first place? Then she shuffled back to the kitchen.
George walked in at half-past eight, sat down opposite him and asked, “Where did you sleep last night?”
Carl jerked his thumb sideways and stabbed it in the direction of the tree with the low hanging bough. “I read once that a man in California was raped on a beach by four young women, but I was lucky enough to have a quiet night,” Carl said wistfully. Then he added, “George, it has occurred to me that a man’s life is decided by which airplane he catches. I sometimes wonder what life would have been like if I had gone somewhere like California, instead of Thailand.”
“You would have ended up in the penitentiary, and probably more than once,” George told him.
“There is that of course,” Carl replied.
“What happens today?” George asked.
“We wait a bit to give the colonel time to wake up, then I’ll call him.”
They both ordered fried rice. The items on the western breakfast menu were best avoided because the eggs were always overcooked and the bacon was always medium-rare. The fried rice was better, so they had fried rice for breakfast every morning.
“Can I go and take a shower in your room?” Carl asked.
“Sure,” replied George and he put the key on the table. “There’s a razor there too. That designer stubble makes you look like an Italian gangster.”
“Should never make fun of the Italians, George. They were Romans once.”
“But now they all run pizzerias and ice-cream shops,” George said.
“Good point. Maybe a shave is a good idea. I need to make myself presentable for the firing squad, and getting my face in the newspapers doesn’t happen every day.”
“You think you’ll be in the papers?”
“Of course: day one is the colour picture of the naked corpse covered in blood; day two is the picture of the bruised and confused murderer, sitting on a chair with smiling policemen lined up behind him like a Welsh choir. The camera catches the accused looking down in shame at his signed confession. Case closed, and all is well with the world. Once again, Thai justice prevails.”
“I hope you’re wrong,” George said.
“That’ll be the day!” Carl said as he picked up the key to George’s hut and walked off.
Twenty minutes later he was back, showered and shaved. He ordered another coffee, took the phone from his trouser pocket and called the colonel.
After the pleasantries, Carl asked, “Can you get a message to the chief of the station, let him know I’m not really Jack the Ripper?”
“Jack who?”
“He was a famous murderer of women. Just try and tell the chief something good about me.”
“You want me to lie to a fellow officer?” the colonel asked, laughing loudly into the phone.
“Funny man. And yesterday you said you had a copy of Nadia’s passport on your desk, can you take a picture of it and message it to me?”
“OK, I’ll see what I can do. I’ll call you back in an hour.”
Carl handed George back his key and went for a walk along the beach. It wasn’t long before his clean shirt was drenched in sweat and Ca
rl found himself wondering what life would have been like if he had got on a plane to Iceland all those years ago. Would he have been bored? Because he had never been bored in Thailand; that was for sure. Broke, rich, miserable, happy, married, divorced, free as a bird, on the most wanted list, but never bored. Thailand always had that going for it.
The phone rang ten minutes later. The colonel sounded stressed. “They are claiming you killed her. They have witnesses that saw you meeting with gangsters on the mainland. They say you hired a hitman.”
“Of course I met with a gangster yesterday! For fuck’s sake, the witnesses must have seen me talking to Gop.”
“Oh dear, that’s not good. Gop’s back in Bangkok now, and he can’t go back there, there’s an arrest warrant out on him.”
“What for?”
“You know Gop, he gets carried away and puts people in the hospital when he’s only been told to scare them. And sometimes, he does worse. Things have been quiet since you left, so he has to do some work for a bookmaker I know. The bookie sent him to tell a taxi driver off for not paying his gambling debts, but he got carried away, and the man died a week later in hospital. It’s a big mess, and it will take me a while to clean it up.”
“So Gop’s on the run, what do we do now?”
“Deny the charges, and I’ll make sure you get bail.”
“Fucking brilliant plan. Are you sure you don’t want me to confess instead?”
“Do you have enough money?” the colonel asked, ignoring Carl’s frustration.
“Fortunately, I think I do,” Carl said.
“That’s good then. I’ll make some calls.”
“Yes, I imagine the news I have some money will become a cause for celebration across the entire fucking province. They will probably want to use it to build a swimming pool and tennis courts behind the police station. Perhaps they can use what’s left to give the clock tower a new coat of paint as well.” The colonel laughed and then hung up. Carl watched the waves roll in for a while. It felt like the colonel was going to treat him like a client, something he had always avoided, with good reason. It wasn’t fun being the client, and he had no doubt it was going to get very damned expensive.
CHAPTER 8
“There is nothing more unaesthetic than a policeman.”
– Arthur Conan Doyle
The police station was a white concrete building on stilts. Carl sat in a small room, on an uncomfortable wooden chair, across the desk from the irascible major. It was a full day since Nadia had been murdered and Carl was still their only suspect, and they clearly weren’t looking for another one. The major made it clear he had no interest in speaking to Carl directly and had insisted on a translator. An anorexic foreign woman arrived, and Carl was told he would have to pay her for her time. It turned out she was a friend of the major and she came to the station to teach the police English and was there every day, except Sunday. Carl wasn’t surprised that the major’s English wasn’t very good because his English teacher was German and spoke English with such a strong accent that Carl was struggling to understand what she said, and this was just the start of his problems; her Thai was worse than her English. She would listen to the major’s questions then have him repeat each one three times because she hadn’t understood. Of course, what was of even greater cause for concern was how she translated Carl’s answers; her statements were simplified to the point of nonsensical, but the major kept typing away, and Carl’s constant correction of her Thai was angering him. Having already decided Carl was guilty he had little interest in the accuracy of what he was typing.
The questioning had begun with the standard: “Name? Age? Address in Thailand? Father’s name? Mother’s name? ID card?”
Carl didn’t have an ID card, so he put his passport on the desk instead. The major’s name was Yodsak according to the badge on his chest. The translator’s name was Candy, but Carl assumed that to be her porn star name, she clearly wasn’t there for her language skills. Major Yodsak picked up Carl’s passport and put it in a drawer.
Every question took a long time because the translator was struggling over every word. Carl started translating for the translator. She had that vague, pasty, undernourished look that Carl assumed was a result of drug addiction. A dependence on the pipe or the needle would explain her wanting to get close to the police, in every way.
“Why you kill your girlfriend?” Major Yodsak asked in English, finally giving up and bypassing the translator.
“I didn’t,” Carl answered.
The major, struggling for the words in English, switched to Thai. “It’s better for you with the judge if you confess.”
“I don’t see how you reached that conclusion,” Carl replied.
“You don’t understand Thai law,” the major told him, “if you don’t confess your sentence will be double.”
He was right of course. In Thailand pleading not guilty received double the sentence of a person admitting their guilt. Under such inducement, even the innocent had a tendency to plead guilty. The next step, should he admit the crime, would be a reenactment in front of the media cameras. Carl knew why they did this, apart from locking the guilty into their confession it also served a second purpose; it made sure those that hadn’t done the deed were later able to confess accurately in court, even though they hadn’t been there. Imagine the confusion if a perp stood up in court and got the facts in their confession wrong. The major was going to do his best to see that couldn’t happen. That would be a loss of face.
“I will make no further statement and will only answer questions later in court.” Carl had decided it was time to make a stand, and he knew the law.
“You will regret that,” the major told him.
“I have lots of regrets, not going to Iceland now being one of them. I bet the weather is nice and crisp there this time of year.”
The translator tried to translate this for the major but couldn’t.
“All Cod Wars aside I’m sure the Icelandic people are lovely and don’t hold grudges, especially as they won the last one.” Carl was going to make the translator’s job impossible until the major accepted that he wasn’t getting a confession. It didn’t take Carl long to convince him.
“You will be called to the prosecutor’s office to be formally charged,” the major said as a threat. Then he signalled for Carl to sign the document he’d typed. Carl shook his head.
“Sign,” the major barked at him.
“I don’t read Thai,” Carl said.
“The translator can tell you what it says,” the major told him.
“Email it to my lawyer in Bangkok,” Carl told him.
The major was fuming. “Sign!”
The door opened, and the inspector came into the room. Major Yodsak leapt out of his chair and snapped to attention. The inspector was the boss, and it was his police station. He looked at the paper the major had been waving about before he came in, and told the major to let Carl go until more evidence could be gathered.
“But he’s the boyfriend, he must make a statement,” the major pleaded.
“He can make his statement later, he’s not going to sign this,” the inspector told the major, placing the paper back on the desk.
“Could I have my passport back, please?” Carl asked with his hand out.
The major looked at his inspector, turned red in the face, and handed it over.
“Thank you,” Carl said. “They’ll be sending me a summons in writing I expect, so you’ll need my address in Bangkok. It’s 11/33 Sukhumvit Soi 23.”
“You can’t go to Bangkok. You are being investigated for murder here.”
Carl wrote the address on a piece of paper and handed it to the translator. “Please give him this when he calms down. Tell him it’s my official address in Thailand,” and then Carl walked out the door. He wasn’t worried about antagonising the major as the damage had been done, and nothing he said now was going to change that.
The inspector gave him a smile as he passed
him on the way out the door. Carl owed Colonel Pornchai for this intervention. He had no doubt about that. Carl’s colonel and the inspector were the same ranks, and they had probably been in the Police Academy together, perhaps in the same class. Major Yodsak had been put in his place, for now, but he wouldn’t stay there for long. Carl knew the type, he would be coming after Carl again, and he would make sure he had more ammunition next time.
CHAPTER 9
“If you go anywhere, even paradise, you will miss your home.”
– Malala Yousafzai
Carl could see the lights of Bangkok in the distance. This was his first time back in a year, and he had mixed feelings about it. Bangkok was where he’d spent all of his adult life, and it was supposed to be home, but he wasn’t so sure. His presence there had been a forty-year busman’s holiday, an endless struggle to survive the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune; in his case most of the wounds self-inflicted by his fondness for fast women, faster cars, villainous rogues, and an inability to resist the kind of trouble any sane person would have run a mile from. Carl had, for the first time in his life avoided conflict for a whole year, but now, like an old friend tapping him on the shoulder, it had found him anyway. He wondered if he was out of shape, like a boxer who hadn’t trained for a long time, and if it would be different this time because this time it wasn’t Bangkok pulling the strings of his destiny; this time he was bringing the trouble with him. One thing that he was sure of: put him and Bangkok together, and something was going to happen.
“There it is,” George told Carl, “what do you think?”
“I think it’s like the man who walked into the doctor’s office and said, Doctor, I think I’m a moth. The doctor looked him up and down, and said, I don’t know what I can do for you. I’m a chiropodist, and what you need is a psychiatrist. The first man said, I know - I was on my way to the psychiatrist’s office, but I saw your light was on.”
“It’s good to see you’re back to your old self,” George told him, smiling.