The Flower Girl

by Lilburne, Guy

  We all walked back to the prison mini bus. A couple of Thai people took my photo and were told off by the guards. The two people with the camera wai’d to them and hurried off.

  “Anyone want food?” asked Sawat.

  “Yes, I do. I’m starving.”

  Sawat asked the others in Thai and one of them went with Sawat to get the food while we waited on the bus. We all sat on the floor of the bus and shared sticky rice, som tam (A very spicy green papaya salad) and BBQ chicken. I had a chicken thigh and ate everything off it right down to the bone. One of the guards laughed and said something. Sawat told me that he had said that I eat like a Thai person. I was starving and I think it was the best meal I have ever eaten in my whole life. It was all washed down with an iced cold can of coke. Fantastic!

  I got the feeling that even the guards were my friends now. After we finished eating we headed back to the prison.

  “So, what are we going to do, Sawat?”

  “You are going to think about whatever it is that you still have to tell me.”

  “And how do I do that?”

  “I don’t know Steve, but the monk said that you already have all the answers. I’ll come and see you again tomorrow.”

  Chapter 13

  You Meditate Darling.

  I didn’t feel upset at all about going back to prison. Probably because I was now quite confident for the first time that I wasn’t going to be in prison for the next 15, 30 or 45 years and it felt good. I was also excited about seeing Aa and Bee and telling them everything that the monk had said. I knew that they would all be waiting excitedly to hear it. I was taken out of my orange jumpsuit, put back in my blue shorts and escorted back to the Quad. I was greeted by cheers and clapping from my friends. The sun was already over the main block now and there was more shade available in which to sit.

  Aa and Bee got up and ran towards me in the camp way that only gay men and Thai ladyboys can. They hugged me and ‘High Fived’ me, then escorted me back to the rest of our little group of convicts, like I was a returning hero. Aa cleared me a place to sit on the ground and there was a buzz of excitement as everyone waited for me to start speaking.

  “What!” I said, shrugging my shoulders.

  “Darling, tell us what happened. Did you find the old monk?” said Aa, playfully giving me a shove, which was strong enough to make me fall over on my side in the hot dusty earth. I regained my composure and position.

  “Yes, we found him and he is a lovely old man. I mean monk. Well, he is a man as well, obviously…….”

  “What did he say, darling? Did he remember you? Did he say that he also saw The Flower Girl? Did she say anything to him about the real murderer?”

  Everyone shuffled forward and listened. I couldn’t believe how excited everyone was and how interested in my story they were.

  “Yes. We found him and he remembered me.”

  Aa translated what I had said and there was a big cheer.

  “He also remembered seeing me with The Flower Girl.”

  Aa stood up to translate to the crowd, which was growing bigger by the minute, as others gathered around to see what all the fuss was about.

  “He also remembered speaking to The Flower Girl.”

  Aa continued to translate, but I noticed that she was getting more and more dramatic with each sentence that she translated, until it was turning into quite a dramatic and intense performance. At one point she started wailing and crying and miming someone shaking someone else. Then she mimed fainting and dropped to the ground. The crowd of tough bare-chested Thai men, with all their tattoo’s and muscles and toughness, gasped. Aa got back up and opened her arms to the heavens. Even I was getting goose bumps. I had carried on telling Aa what had happened at the temple/ I realised that she was adding a lot of bits on and making it into some kind of epic miraculous story, which I have no doubt must have been a lot more interesting than what really happened. Her translation had turned into a full blown ladyboy show. I have no idea what story she told to the prison inmates, but there seemed to be a lot of dancing monks and singing angels and emotion. The inmates and I watched Aa opened mouthed as she translated my story. At the end everyone clapped and cheered, but I didn’t know any longer if they were clapping me or the performance by Aa. I started clapping too, just in case.

  After the story telling, there was a lot of waiing and hand shaking and back slapping, then the prisoners drifted away back into their own little groups and gangs.

  “OK, darling. So, the monk he say that The Flower Girl already give you all the answers about her murder” said Aa, in a manner that told me she wanted to get down to the nitty gritty.

  “Yes. He said it a few times.”

  “Good. That’s very good. So what are the answer?”

  “I don’t know. I just can’t remember. I didn’t even remember about this woven blessing that I was wearing on my wrist, until Detective Sawat Deewat asked me about it.”

  “So maybe you need someone ask you question to jog your brain!”

  “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “OK. I ask you somethings.”

  “OK.”

  “What did The Flower Girl say about her murder?”

  “Aa, if I could remember, then I would have already told everything I know. I went into shock and panic when I was wanted for her murder and it is as if it wiped everything from my mind. The monk said that Pin had already told me everything that I needed to know to solve her murder and he said this a few times. He said that I have all the answers, but I don’t know how to find the answers inside myself. I remember his name was Dean.”

  “No problem. You just need to meditate, darling.”

  “I don’t know how too.”

  “You just need to relax your brain, be calm and let your brain be blank. Go back in brain to when you met The Flower Girl. I talk you through everything and ask you easy questions. You tell me what you see everything about it in your brain. Easy. No problem for do like this, darling” explained Aa, in her usual deep manly voice, with just a twist of effeminate campness, so the world would know that she is actually a lady and not the same as a normal man. Well, that and the fact she had a pair of big tits that she had paid for herself, and was extremely proud of.

  “How are we going to do that then?”

  “We talk to prison monk and find good place to meditate.”

  An hour later we were sitting in the prison Buddha room with the prison monk. The room had several gold plated casts of Buddha, fresh flowers, burning candles and incense sticks. There was a calm peacefulness in the room. Aa had already explained our predicament to the monk. We sat in front of the monk, who sat on a slightly raised stage. He blessed both of us and chanted some prayers. Aa translated everything the monk said and we closed our eyes. We controlled our breathing and imagined walking down some stairs into space and feeling very happy and relaxed. With each breath we went deeper and deeper into a happy relaxed state. Aa made notes of everything I was going to say and I went back to the moment I first saw Pin; my beautiful Flower Girl. I relived everything in my mind, as if I was watching a film and gave a running commentary.

  I did feel happy and relaxed and I felt very close to Pin again. I related the story in more detail then I had remembered before. I recounted the first full day that we had spent together, going to Chalong Temple and Phuket Zoo on my motorbike. I remembered that Pin had told me his name was Dean and he was 48 years old. He came from England, Leeds in England. He had met her when he had come to Karon Beach on holiday with his friends. The first time he came was about eight months before he killed her. When he went back to England he rang her every day at 6:00pm Thai time. He told her never to ring him and he would always ring her at the same time, because it was his dinner time. He came back to Thailand two months later on his own just to see her, but he was
only in Thailand for two weeks. That’s when she got pregnant. Two months later she realised that she was pregnant and, when she rang him to tell him, he was really angry because she had ‘Broken the rules’. Four months later, when Pin was six months pregnant, Dean came back to see her, but he was very different and angry with her a lot. Pin suspected that he was married already and he hit her when she asked him about it. He kept getting phone calls from a lady in England. Pin bought him a gold chain with the money that he had given her, to try to make him happy. I remembered that Pin showed me his photo. He was bald headed and he was wearing little round gold rimmed glasses. He had a beer belly and he looked scruffy, low class. He had a tattoo on his left calf. LUFC, which was for Leeds United Football Club. He had a snake wrapped around a dagger with the words ‘Leeds until I die’ written underneath it.

  When Dean was drunk and asleep one day on his third and final visit Pin answered his ringing phone and it was his wife. She said her name was Debbie and she was Dean’s wife. She said that Dean Wilkinson was her husband. She said that they had two grown up sons and one of them was in prison and she was worried that the younger one was going the same way. Pin told her that she was pregnant with Dean’s baby. Pin was scared and she ran away, but Dean went looking for her on his motorbike and found her. The next day they went for a picnic to Pins special secret place and he started attacking her again. She pulled the gold chain that she had bought him off his neck in the struggle. He hit her on the head with the rock and threw her over the cliff into the sea. He went back to England. He knew that he had killed her.

  “Wow!” I said, as I opened my eyes. I felt totally exhausted, having relived my whole story. Aa hugged me.

  “You did very good, darling. I write down everything you say and I think we have all the answers now. His name is Dean Will-kill-son.”

  “Wilkinson.”

  “Yes. That’s what I said.”

  I looked at the pages of notes that Aa had made, all scribbled in Thai and she had scribbled a cartoon drawing.

  “What’s this?”

  “I draw photo of the killer.”

  “It looks like a pot-bellied pig in a tee shirt.”

  “With tattoo.”

  “OK. A pot-bellied pig in a tee shirt with a tattoo, but it looks nothing like the photo that Pin had shown me.”

  “You show these to Detective Sawat Deewat and he find killer for you” smiled Aa.

  I had the best night’s sleep that I had had in a while. I was still snuggled up with over 200 inmates, but I slept well and I awoke happy and excited about seeing Sawat again. Now that I had managed to bring everything into my conscious memory, I suddenly had a lot to tell him. After breakfast I was taken to the legal visits room and, as usual, I had to wait in there for hours for the very late Detective Deewat.

  Sawat was happy and excited to see me too.

  “I’ve got some good news, Steve” he said, shaking my hand before he sat down. “I didn’t join the police to solve crime or speak to witnesses, but I did for you Steve. I have checked with all the local hotels and online booking agents like Agoda.com, to see if we had anyone called Dean checked into a hotel in Karon or Kata at the relevant times. I have a short list of Deans. There were only four. We have a Dean Smith, Dean K Allison, Dean Wilkinson and a Dean Mulligan.”

  Sawat put the list on the table in front of me and I could tell from his beaming smile that he was very pleased with himself.

  “The murderer is Dean Wilkinson. I meditated yesterday with Aa and the prison monk and I remembered everything. Aa wrote everything down.”

  I handed him the notes that Aa had made.

  “Why has she drawn a pig?”

  “It’s better if you just read the description.” I repeated the whole story again as Sawat read the notes.

  “Dean Wilkinson stayed at the Karon Inn Hotel on Patak Road. I’m going to start there Steve. I will soon be able to trace him back to an address in the UK. I’m going to have a fingertip search done of the murder scene to see if we can find the gold chain, but I wouldn’t hold out too much hope that we find it after a year.”

  “Thanks Sawat. I am really happy that you are the detective on my case.”

  “Steve, I didn’t join the police to solve murders and catch killers, but I’m going to do it for you.”

  “Thanks Sawat.”

  I went back to my everyday prison life and, like everyone else in prison, I just waited.

  Chapter 14

  A Pot Bellied Pig in a Tee Shirt. (With tattoos)

  I have to say that being in Phuket Prison wasn’t the worst time in my life. I was settling into the routine and it was quite a clean and tidy place, but the most important thing was that I had made more friends than I had ever made in my entire life. I also got a lot more respect than I probably deserved. Don’t get me wrong, going to prison is a very scary thing and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. There were some tough people in there. Sometimes a fight would break out and there was a level of violence that I had never witnessed before. In Phuket Prison, if they did fight, it wasn’t a fight to survive. It was a fight to kill.

  There was no doubt that Aa and her gang of ladyboys did take me under their wing and looked after me. The whole thing about The Flower Girl and her ghost definitely gave me a lot of protection inside. I started spending more and more time with the prison monk in the Buddha room. He spoke to me a lot, but I couldn’t understand a word when Aa wasn’t there to translate. I found a calmness and a peacefulness in the Buddha room. I started to meditate a lot and it got easier and I got better at it.

  The days just blended into more days, but I wasn’t really so worried with the lack of contact from Sawat. I thought that no news was good news. I’d like to say that I knew that Sawat would be working hard on my case but, to be honest, knowing Sawat, it was just as likely that he was too busy partying with the ladies. But I tried to be positive in my thoughts. It was over a week later when I was taken to the legal visits room for a meeting with Sawat. I was very happy to see him again and, as always, he looked immaculate and was charming and friendly. His smile cheered me up no end.

  “I’ve got some great news, Steve.”

  “Good. I was hoping you would have.”

  “I have to tell you Steve, that I didn’t become a Detective to………become a detective, but I have for you. I’ve been doing some detective work.”

  Sawat opened his briefcase and took out a photo and slid it across the desk to me. It was a photo of Pin with Dean. I recognised him straight away from the photo that Pin had shown me in the hotel room.

  “Do you recognize anyone in the photo Steve?”

  “Yes. I recognize both of them. This is Pin and this is Dean. That’s the same man who was in the photo that Pin had shown me in the hotel. Look you can even see the tattoo that I described to you.”

  “Yes, I know. That’s how I spotted it.”

  “Where did you get this?”

  “It was pinned up on the wall in one of the bars along Patak Road. One photo amongst hundreds. It was a miracle that I spotted it.”

  I looked at Pin. She was smiling back at me from the photo. I was so happy to see her beautiful face again. Happy, but sad at the same time. I felt a wave of deep emotion wash over me like a tidal wave. You guessed it, I started crying again.

  “Can I keep this photo please, Sawat?”

  “No. Sorry matey. It might be evidence.”

  “I understand. Thank you for showing it to me.”

  “I have more news Steve. It gets better.”

  I knew that Sawat was waiting for me to say something, but I couldn’t. I was just trying to get my emotions back under control. I knew that he was excited to tell me, so I just looked at him and nodded.

  “I’ve had a fingertip search made of the murder scene that you
had identified to the police officers. We searched the entire area. An area nearly as big as a football pitch and guess what?”

  “You found the gold necklace that Pin had ripped from his neck?”

  “Yes. How did you know that?”

  “I just guessed.”

  Sawat pulled a clear plastic exhibits bag from his briefcase. It contained the gold chain. He slid it across the desk to me.

  “See Steve, it’s the same chain he is wearing in the photo and we have had it examined. We have his DNA on it. We have got him Steve.”

  “How do you know it’s his DNA?”

  “He has a criminal record in England, Steve. He has form for violence, mostly domestic, but a couple of public order offences. We have his address in Leeds Steve. I have been speaking with a Detective Sergeant from Leeds.” Sawat flicked through his notebook. “Detective Sergeant Rich Perrins. He is very interested in the case. I think he is trying to get a trip to Thailand out of it, so he is very keen to help.”

  “So what happens now then? Has he been arrested?”

  “It’s not that easy, Steve. There is no extradition treaty between the UK and Thailand and no protocols. If we just have the UK police arrest him, then the chances are his defence will not agree to him coming to Thailand on a voluntary basis. If we try to get him extradited, then they will fight it. If we win, they will appeal over and over again at the various tiers of court, right up to the European Court of Human Rights. I doubt whether the Thai Government will pursue it all the way.”

  “That doesn’t sound good for me then. Will I be released?”

  “No. Well, not yet Steve. We have to try to get Dean Wilkinson first. If he admits the murder, then you walk. We are working on it, Steve.”

  “What if you don’t get him back to Thailand and he never admits the murder?”

  “Well, in that case, I think there will be some kind of hearing, but I don’t think the prosecution will be trying too hard to convict you. But there is still a case to be answered, Steve.”