Number Twelve

by Colin Cotterill

  Number Twelve

  Lost Property

  A Jimm Juree Short Story

  By Colin Cotterill

  Number Twelve: Lost Property

  Copyright © Colin Cotterill, 2019

  DCO Books

  eBook Edition published by

  Proglen Trading Co., Ltd. 2019

  Bangkok Thailand

  http://www.dco.co.th

  eBook ISBN 978-616-456-025-3

  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

  Lost Property

  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

  Lost Property

  Yes. I know. There are far too many reports in these files that dwell on death and violence. But that’s largely because it’s what the readers of my crime-desk case files want to read about – you included. That doesn’t mean I make them up just to keep you happy. Death and violence are all around us and are unavoidable. How many killings do we witness a year while we’re being seduced by our TVs and on-line movies? They’re forever pushing our sensitivities and taste to the limits. No wonder we’re all so blasé about cruelty and the sight of blood and guts.

  So, I’m including here a story that my editor deemed “too soft” and refused to publish. I argued myself purple in the face that crime comes in many guises, and some of the simplest cases tell us more about our fellow man ... and woman, than any of the most horrific dramas. I called my case Lost Property, which the publisher also scoffed at.

  “Who’s going to read that?” he asked.

  “People who lost things?” I suggested without success. And there was one more non-selling point that worried him. I was the victim in the story. He said that amounted to fraudulent reportage, as the writer (me) could not be impartial when writing about a case in which I featured.

  Sooner than bin a perfectly good story, I decided to put it on-line with my other case studies. I felt sure that one day I’d hit my tipping point and become a household name. They’d call me the lost gem of the Internet; an undiscovered Web literati-ist (or whatever the singular form is).

  So, anyway – the story.

  It all began with my stupidity. It has to be said that a person doesn’t just become stupid overnight. It’s a creeping ivy that leeches onto your common sense over the years, and mixes your metaphors. I was only thirty-six years old, but losing the motorcycle keys was a daily event. I’d book travel for the wrong date, empty full glasses of Chilean red onto my keyboard while still sober, and forget simple words like “di
gress” and “trolley”. And so it was inevitable that I’d withdraw money from the ATM, put it in my handbag, load my shopping into the Mighty X, and drive away with my handbag presumably still hooked over the handlebar of my ... my supermarket ... whatchamacallit.

  I might not have noticed this error until the evening, but for the fact I’d headed straight to the PTT petrol station to get 200 baht’s worth of diesel, and with the friendly PTT girl pumping away, I realized I didn’t have my handbag. I knew where it was, of course. It was there in my mind’s eye, abandoned in the Tesco car park, pining for its mistress. I had to get back there before it was too late, but no matter how sincerely I promised to return anon with cash, the PTT girl wouldn’t let me go. I was already thinking through the agenda of nuisance I faced. My handbag contained my ATM and credit cards, my Boots and HomePro discount cards, my driving license, my Thai ID, and the organ donor card I’d have to cancel now that I was officially brain dead. I offered to deposit the newly-bought unsweetened soy milk and carrots as security, but the PTT manager insisted on me leaving my cell phone. So desperate was I to get back to Tesco, I agreed without completely considering the ramifications of having no method of communication.

  I featured on two police speed camera specials on my one-kilometre highway return to the supermarket. I was on two wheels on both U-turns that got me there, and I arrived no more than fifteen minutes after I’d left. My brolly ... cart ... trolley was exactly where I’d left it, one wheel in the gutter, but it was empty. A second cart was nestled beside it, like two goat carcasses making friends. That too was empty. It was early and I’d deliberately parked in the car park wilderness so I wouldn’t have to deal with the blind reversers near the main entry. My granddad Jah had told me that sixty percent of car scratches and dents occur when your car is unattended, and the perpetrators invariably flee the scene as if nothing had happened. He knew everything there was to know about scratches and dents. Public car parks, he said, were breeding grounds for unaccountable vandalism.

  But I undress ... no ... digress. Given the evidence, my first reaction was that the owner of the second non-motorized transportation apparatus hereafter referred to as a “cart” had seen my handbag, seized the opportunity to grab it, and headed off with my entire identity in a cheap cloth clutch. My dementia allowed me a window of memory through which I saw a cream-coloured pick-up truck. It registered because it and the Mighty X were the only vehicles parked out there in the wilds. It had arrived just a minute after me. I hadn’t taken note of the year or make of the truck, or the license number, but I could have picked out the driver in a line-up. He was gorgeous. Tight white T-shirt and gelled-back hair, and he’d smiled at me. Everything either side of that smile was a blur.

  The truck had still been there when I returned with my soy milk and carrots. I’d sat behind my steering wheel for a few minutes, plotting an accidental second meeting with the handsome shopper, but, once again, my height, girth, and age overwhelmed my imagination and I left him alone with my left luggage. It was just as well. What kind of life would I have lived with a man who stole handbags?

  I went to the Tesco administration desk and asked if anyone had handed in a cloth, hilltribe handbag full of money and hard-to-replace documents. I recall chuckling a little as I said it. Stupid people don’t deserve a break. “Make us suffer” That was my new mantra. It seemed like justice had been served when the manager and the cashier who’d bagged my shopping came up blank in the lost property department. Nobody had handed in anything. For some, at-the-time absurd reason, the stubby security guard – probably a failed police academy applicant – took my photograph with his cell phone. And for some other reason, I smiled for the picture. I showed him the crime scene and he photographed the two empty trannies.

  “The cart collector doesn’t start work until ten,” he said. “And this part of the car park doesn’t fill out until the place gets busy around lunch time.”

  “You have CCTV?” I asked.

  “Only at the entrance.”

  “So you’d have a record of me arriving, and the person who followed me in?”

  “Yeah, we would have. But the camera’s been on the blink for a week. It’s not working right now.”

  “Great.”

  The receptionist took my phone number and found my Tesco membership number on their computer. I was officially in the loop, although at the time I didn’t really realize what that meant.

  More importantly, I couldn’t phone my gay boyfriend, Lieutenant Chompu of the Royal Thai Police, because my phone was being held as security at the PTT station. I had no ATM card to pay them off. Staring pleadingly at the ATM machine had no effect. I had some cash back at home, and a family who would be only too delighted to quantify my stupidity and think even less of me than they already did. I drove home and snuck in through the back fence of our still-incomplete beach resort construction site, and emptied my shoe box of small change. I stopped and looked at Gulf Bay Lovely Resort and Restaurant - Two. The potential of an income was all around me, but the here and now was bereft. We were still poor and I’d made us even more so by giving away Mair’s money.

  I had just enough to pay back PTT. My phone, rescued from the oil barons, had thirty-seven unanswered Line calls. The onslaught had begun at 9:17, just two minutes after my return to Tesco to my empty trollop. I was mystified. I had no time to look through the list. I’d resigned to the fact I had to visit the city police station. I wasn’t popular there. Non-corrupt journalists didn’t make many friends in the ranks of public officials. But there was a process. I report my loss. I get an official letter to that effect with a police stamp, and I can begin the arduous task of contacting the banks and authorities and government departments to cancel my accidentally deleted life and reboot it.

  While sitting on the wooden bench waiting for the typist to put my loss on record, I looked through the missed calls. It was peculiar. There were messages from people I’d only met briefly or dealt with in an official capacity: the head of the telecommunications department, my bank manager, the director of the hospital, the vet, the computer repair shop ... my mother, who never used a phone.

  “Mair,” I said. The return call to my mother was my priority. I assumed Granddad Jah had croaked. But, no such luck.

  “You’re a celebrity, Jill,” she said.

  And they say dementia isn’t hereditary. Mair was nuttier than a pecan pie. I’d given up on her ever getting my name right.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “You’re trending. I believe that’s the expression they use.”

  “On what?”

  “On the Lang Suan social network.”

  “There’s no such–”

  “You’re the news of the day. Your photo’s on every page, but I suppose they aren’t pages, are they? Not any more. Probably called–”

  “Mair, you don’t have a computer, or any interest in them.”

  “But your father has a phone. (This ‘father’ definition was still undergoing research.) He said everyone in Lang Suan gets updates of breaking news. And you’re the crime news today.”

  “I lost my handbag,” I said. “Hardly a crime.”

  “And everyone in Lang Suan is looking for it. Isn’t that exciting?”

  I hung up. The first thought that came to mind was that I’d been in the province for three years. I’d caught murderers and solved crimes that had baffled the police. I’d been reasonably kind to animals and the elderly, and I’d championed the fight to protect the environment. So why the frock did I become a celebrity for doing something painfully stupid? I called my sister, Sissy, in Chiang Mai.

  “People don’t want competent heroes,” she said. “The amateur Web cops want to help the little guy. They want mini-mysteries they can get together to solve. A lost handbag is within their experience and their capabilities. It’s like a missing cat. The more of you that look for it the better the chances of finding it. Not that I’d ever go looking for a cat. Why do you think all
these public officials and department heads got onto it so fast?”

  “Because they’re looking for any excuse not to work?”

  “Partly. But it’s also the thrill of the chase. There’s a pride in contributing to a group effort. It’s like a football game with hundreds of people on your team. Everyone has a part to play and they can all share the victory. They can cut down on door knocking and trail following. It’s like the cream-coloured truck.”

  “The...? How do you know about the cream-coloured truck…? Have you been following me?”

  “I have a trace on your name,” she said. “Usually I only get a hit when you publish something, and those hits get fewer and further between. But today, little Jimm, you’re the queen of the networks. Wouldn’t be surprised if you went viral.”

  “Oh, great. What about the truck?”

  “The driver saw the story. He attached a photo of his truck and posted that he’d seen a cute girl in a Mighty X and–”

  “He said I was cute?”

  “He said he did his shopping and went back to his truck. You’d left. He parked his trolley beside yours, and left for work at the provincial electricity authority. He logged on and saw your photo. He said he hadn’t noticed anything in your trolley.”

  “He said I was cute?”

  “Nice to see you have your priorities in order. I can send you his Line address.”

  “He could be lying,” I said.

  “Guilty people tend not to contribute to chat groups.”