Sissi called an hour later. She’d found one murder similar to those in Chiang Mai. It had taken place shortly before Dula and her husband arrived in Chiang Mai. The timing was right. I wouldn’t have heard of it as I was one year old at the time. I also wouldn’t have heard of it because it happened in India and we didn’t get a lot of news from there. The victim was a travel agent well-known for taking deposits for trips but not coming up with the tickets. He had a gang that protected him from retribution. But they were obviously not up to the job because he was found chopped up and fingerless in his bathroom. It was a traditional toilet so there had been no bowl to chain him to. I sensed a breakthrough.
‘Was it anywhere near Dula’s home town?’ I asked.
‘Nope,’ said Sissi. ‘Nor was it near the university she and the philosopher studied at. I could find no connections to Dula at all.
‘He didn’t organize their air travel from India?’ I asked.
‘Not a lot of traceable travel records back then. The airlines don’t hang on to historical flight data.’
‘So, Dula might have been ripped off?’
‘Might have.’
‘Damn. Did you learn anything about their relatives?’
‘Not much to know. I guess that was the reason the couple met and married so young. She was an only child. Mother died in childbirth. Father a university lecturer who bullied his daughter through school. He died before seeing her graduate. Couldn’t find any aunts or uncles. Unusual that in India. They tend to breed like rabbits.’
‘What did you mean by that being the reason the couple married so young?’
‘You know, two young, good-looking kids without family gravitating to each other.’
‘But he had family.’
‘Nope. Family truck drove in front of a train on an ungated crossing. All dead bar the little philosopher. Raised in a temple. No living relatives.’
‘But they…’
‘What?’
‘They said the family was in court to hear the verdict.’
‘Probably meant Dula.’
‘Then they would have said “wife”, not “family”. Do you think you could…?’
‘Search for missing family members? I’m on it, boss.’
I called Laurie back immediately with a request of such magnitude all of his debts to me would be paid off in one swoop if he agreed. To my surprise, he said yes but I knew there would be no result until the following day – or not at all if he got caught. That left me in a state of frustration that red wine would not be able to quell. I rode back over to Captain Kao’s where I found Mair hosting a Maprao Woman’s Association meeting. I sat outside on the balcony because Gogo, the manic street terrier, wouldn’t let me in. When the group disbanded I pulled Mair to one side. She seemed confused as to who I was.
‘Mair, do you know if Dula had any relatives?’
‘Jimm?’
‘That’s correct. Well done. Do you?’
‘Do I what?’
‘Do you know if Dula has any other relatives apart from her husband?’
‘Not that I know of,’ she said. ‘I’m sure I would have seen them walk past the shop if they came to visit. She never mentioned family to me. She did have a maid, I recall. I always had the feeling she was working here illegally.’
‘She wasn’t Thai?’
‘No, she was Indian too. A pretty young thing. Probably underage and an illegal alien. She didn’t go out of the apartment much but I’d see her on the balcony dusting and watering the plants. I don’t mean she was dusting the plants. She was-’
‘I get it, Mair. Did Dula ever talk about her?’
‘Not at all. That’s why I thought she was probably slave labour. I imagine they locked her in and beat her if the floors weren’t shining bright.’
‘But Dula didn’t strike you as a child molester?’
‘No, but evil people come in all sorts of guises.’
‘You only ever saw the maid from a distance?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then how can you be certain she was Indian?’
‘Who else would wear a sari to do the housework?’
*
I was starting to think the only way I’d be able to unravel the puzzle was to take a bus down to KL and see if I could get an interview with Dula. But it was a long way to go to be turned down. I wasn’t a relative or a lawyer and there was a chance she’d refuse to talk to me. Wouldn’t that have been frustrating? Instead, I waited for my team to come up with the goods.
Laurie got back to me first. He sounded breathless, in an excited kind of way.
‘Any luck?’ I asked.
‘Bloody oath,’ he said. That meant “yes”. I was bilingual in English and Australian.
‘What happened?’
‘I got the address from the receptionist, Nune,’ he said. ‘Dula’s place is a little cottage out in Doi Saket.’
‘Any trouble getting in?’
‘I had my housebreaking equipment with me but it turned out I didn’t have to use it. The door was unlocked.’
‘Trusting soul.’
‘I get the feeling she left in a hurry. There was a suitcase half-packed on the bed. Either she was interrupted whilst packing or she decided against luggage.’
‘Did you find her computer?’
‘I did, but it was password protected. I dicked around with it for a while but I couldn’t get in. I did find something interesting in the bin, though. Three sheets of A4 printed on one side. It would appear the story she told you about Asian Wings was all scripted.’
‘What?’
‘Yeah, she printed out something from the internet. It reads almost the same as what she wrote you.’
‘Including killing the director in Malaysia?’
‘Yes.’
‘But that…that’s not possible. That would mean the killing was all planned before she left.’
‘So it would seem.’
‘I don’t get it. Anything else in the bins apart from old wine bottles?’
‘Not a bottle in the house, old or otherwise. The place was spotless. Not even any empties in the garbage bin outside.’
‘Damn,’ I said. ‘Do you have the three sheets with you?’
‘Got ‘em right here.’
‘Can you read them to me?’
There were many similarities between the printed version of Dula’s story and her hand-written version. But there were also a few significant differences. The printed version made no reference to retirement, pensions or being “of a certain age”.’ No mention of Nune, the receptionist. The writer’s name had changed from Dula to Pari. There was no mention of me getting her hooked on wine. And still she talked about an apartment when Dula clearly lived in a house. It was Laurie’s theory that Dula had found the story on-line, altered it to put herself in the main role, and followed through with the fictional gory ending by making it fact. He said she wouldn’t have been the first person to have been sprung into action by the written word.
But I didn’t buy it. I was certain Dula or someone else had actually experienced that traumatic attempt to book a flight. If it was Dula she’d have to have written the ending beforehand then gone to KL to carry out the execution. But how could she have known in such detail what would actually happen at the Asian Wings headquarters? And why would she make changes to the script?
*
‘There was a daughter,’ said Sissi, scooping me from a shallow sleep.
‘Classic ex machina,’ I said.
‘I doubt she did it,’ said Sissi.
‘Why?’
‘She died when she was fifteen.’
‘You sure?’
‘I found the death certificate,’ she said. ‘Dula and her husband were listed as the parents.’
‘Was her name Pari?’
‘Saanvi. Died in a house fire. I couldn’t get any details.’
‘Damn.’
I told Sissi about Laurie’s visit to Dula’s house and the printed versi
on of the story.
‘That’s odd,’ said Sissi. ‘I suppose someone she knew could have sent it to her.’
‘Yes, someone she felt obliged to protect.’
‘By confessing to the crime.’
‘Just as the philosopher had done all those years ago.’
‘Has to be the daughter,’ said Sissi.
‘The dead daughter.’
There was a mutual silence as our brains flipped through the possibilities.
‘How would we work this if it was a screenplay?’ Sissi asked.
‘I guess we’d have to raise the girl from the dead,’ I said.
‘How would we go about that?’
‘Have someone else die in the fire and the parents switch her identity with that of their daughter.’
‘Because?’
‘Because their girl murdered the travel agent and they had to get out of town fast.’
‘Because she was a suspect.’
‘The only suspect.’
‘Might work. The girl’s a maniac and likely to kill again.’
‘But she was a child.’
‘Obviously had mental issues.’
‘So they smuggle her out of the country under the name of the dead girl. They arrange a passport and bring her to Thailand. But officially she’s not their daughter anymore.’
‘How do they get her in?’
I told her about Mair’s recollection of the maid.
‘Perfect,’ said Sissi. ‘They bring in the girl as domestic staff. They keep her locked up because she’s a danger to society.’
‘The letter said she was undergoing therapy so they must have registered her at a mental institution.’
‘Suan Plu,’ she said. ‘It’s the only one near. I’ll check their files. Indian national. We have the approximate dates. Shouldn’t be that hard to find her.’
‘But wait’, I said. ‘As a foreign national they wouldn’t treat her there. The parents would have to make her legal somehow.’
‘Of course,’ said Sissi. ‘The father would have to adopt her. There’d be a record of that too. I’ll get on it.’
And she was gone. My heart was pounding when I put down the phone. The adrenalin was pumping through me like liquid steroids in a high-pressure hose. We’d written plenty of screenplays before. Sent them off to Clint at Malpaso. We felt we were edging closer to perfection in each one even though he didn’t actually reply to any of them. It was Clint’s way of keeping us sharp. He was honing us. Any day he’d be in touch with good news. But we’d never used our screenplay skills to potentially solve a case before. This was a remarkable thing. It was the dawn of a new science; the marriage of cinematography and criminology: Crimatography. And I was its mother. Our screen hypothesis may have been completely wrong but what did it matter? We had a credible ending.
*
I met Dula in Bangkok a week after her release. I was surprise she’d contacted me. I thought she might hate me for what I’d done to her daughter. But she was like a woman who’d had a goiter removed from her neck and could wear turtlenecks again. (I’ll work on that description before I send this off to Clint.) I arrived at the lobby of the Shangri-La and saw her sitting by the window with a bottle of red on the coffee table in front of her and two glasses. She waved and smiled and stood to greet me. For some reason we shook hands. Mine was trembling.
Sissi had made short work of finding Saanvi’s file at Suan Plu and tracing the adoption. With a little institutional graft back then it hadn’t been that difficult to switch a few names about. Dula and the philosopher had home-tutored Saanvi who turned out to be the brilliant product of two brilliant minds. She had mastered mathematics and added four more languages to the three she’d brought to Thailand. The medication and counseling kept her on track and away from sharp objects. Of course nobody at Suan Plu knew of the murder in India. They classified her as potentially aggressive but of no danger to life or limb. So, feeling that his daughter was cured, the philosopher made the unwise decision to take her off the meds.
The timing was lousy. The philosopher and Dula were in the midst of an ongoing war with the banker and the real estate agent. They tried to play down the seriousness of the situation but Saanvi was astute and sensitive and she knew her parents were suffering. At first she tried to deal with the dishonest men directly. She visited their offices and begged them to help, but they were rude and unapologetic. Both were openly flirtatious and the agent made several lewd suggestions to the pretty Indian girl. Three days after those meetings, with the matter stewing to boiling point inside her, she hit a familiar red patch. She arranged to meet both men at their offices in one fateful evening and she disposed of them both.
Her father took it badly. It was he, after all, who’d had her taken off the medication. The parents loved their daughter and could not imagine her being executed for what was basically an involuntary act. The father confessed to both murders and Dula had her daughter committed. The girl knew she was ill and did not fight her mother’s decision. Again, the hospital was unaware their patient had committed murder. She spent eight years locked away and used her time to study more languages and take a number of courses with the Open University. When they finally released her, again, supposedly ‘cured’, she was immediately employable. Her language skills alone found her work with an international company. She took an apartment in Chiang Mai, not far from her mother, and settled into a social life. Her friends had no idea about her condition. The medication was reduced by increments until Saanvi was handling her circumstances through the power of her own will.
‘She was, to all those who knew her, a lovely person,’ Dula told me in the lounge of the Shangri La. ‘I had every hope that she was better. We visited one another often and did trips together. If you’d ever met her I’m sure you would have become the best of friends. When the red glow was out of her life she was the sweetest, kindest girl. That’s why her father had confessed to the murders she committed and why I did the same. All I needed to do was substitute my own particulars into her confession. She’d sent it to me that night after she’d disposed of the Asian Wings director. I had to go to KL to convince her to return to Thailand and say nothing of the killing.’
‘But you must have known how potentially dangerous she was,’ I said. ‘There was every possibility she’d kill again and you wouldn’t be around to protect her.’
Dula took a deep slug of her wine.
‘That, dear Jimmlin, is why I contacted you,’ she said.
‘Why?’
‘I’d followed your career with huge interest,’ she said. ‘You were a magnificent journalistic investigator. As a mother I could not turn in my own daughter to the police. Now, thanks to you, she is in custody and the law will decide what is to become of her. I needed a sign as to how to proceed. I decided that you would be the judge. If you were able to trace my daughter and discover her secret that would be fate telling me the game was up. If not, I would take the blame and trust my daughter to manage her own condition.’
‘That’s a hell of a lot of responsibility for a woman who writes about leg waxing for a paper nobody reads,’ I said.
‘You’ll never lose your sense of fair play,’ she said. ‘My husband and I were prepared to die for her but we knew what we were doing was wrong. We do not judge the people we love but we can allow others to judge for us.’
‘This is way too much for me to take in,’ I said. ‘I’m going.’
I threw back my drink and stood.
‘But, one last question,’ I said. ‘Why did you send the story via an intermediary and in installments?’
She smiled and took another sip of her drink.
‘I didn’t want the Malaysian police to link you to the crime,’ she said. ‘So I sent the letters through my university office in Chiang Mai. And as for the installments…? Well, mystery, Jimmlim. True discovery doesn’t come as a result of being given all the answers. Discovery comes from wonder. I believe it was de Rivarol who said, “It is
the dim haze of mystery that adds enchantment to pursuit.” My letters enchanted you, Jimmlin and led you to my dilemma.’
I guess I couldn’t argue with that. Smart fellow that de Rivarol, whoever he was.
THE END
Jimm Jurree’s Short Stories
Number One: The Funeral Photographer
In this story, Jimm, exiled from the north of Thailand and just about surviving in the south, finds a new career by accident. Being Jimm, a crime is never far away.
Number Two: When You Wish Upon a Star
A car drives into a river and a woman is dead. A terrible accident and a broken hearted husband. Or it would be if Jimm’s sixth sense didn’t cut in.
Number Three: Highway Robbery
"First, my only appointment of the week phoned to postpone. Second, on the TV news in the evening I was astounded to see scenes from our own Highway 41 where an armoured security van had been deserted minus its cash. And, third, I was awoken just before midnight by the sound of groaning coming from the empty shop house beside mine. It was a while before I learned how these three events were connected."
Number Four Page 4