Number Five

by Colin Cotterill

  Number Five

  Trash

  A Jimm Juree Short Story

  By Colin Cotterill

  Number Five: Trash

  Copyright © Colin Cotterill, 2018

  First published DCO Books 2018

  eBook Edition published by

  DCO Books, 2018

  Proglen Trading Co., Ltd.

  Bangkok Thailand

  http://www.dco.co.th

  ISBN 978-616-456-003-1

  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

  Trash

  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

  Trash

  My grandfather was a traffic policeman with the Royal Thai Police for forty years and never made it beyond the rank of corporal. But this fact had nothing to do with incompetence or a lack of enthusiasm. Granddad Jah was a natural police officer with a sharp mind and he should have scampered up through the ranks like a shrew up a monkey tree. But Granddad Jah had one character flaw that condemned him to the lower echelon for his entire career. He refused to take bribes.

  In a police force starved of funds, where a lieutenant earns $360 dollars a month and has to buy his own gun, corruption was expected and, in some cases, commended. Promotion to the top ranks involved the movement of huge sums of money; amounts that could never have been amassed on a policeman’s salary alone. If a general has to bribe his way into the position he’s not likely to launch an anti-corruption programme to get the boys in uniform out of the habit. So the cycle continues.

  And how can anyone trust a colleague who refuses to accept his rightful booty? I don’t know whether Granddad Jah’s unpleasant personality was already formed before joining the force, or whether forty years of mistrust and hatred whittled him down to the grumpy old bastard we know today. I’d lived with him in our family shop in Chiang Mai until my short-lived experiment with marriage at the age of twenty-seven. And I can’t say I got any eye contact from him in all those years. After he retired and we moved south, he’d sit moodily beside the road watching cars go past and taking notes of misdemeanours; broken lights, heavily-tinted windows, expired registration. After little more than a year he had fourteen school exercise books full of notes.

  He had other hobbies, of course. He wrote letters of complaint to the local council about almost everything. He collected photographs of the Queen, carved canoes out of tree trunks and, oh yes, was waging a war against proselytes. The Christian left had developed an infuriating tactic in its battle against all other religions.
They stamped their mottos on yellow metal plates, drove around in cherry-pickers and nailed and bolted them onto the highest boughs of trees and the uppermost tips of telegraph poles. I couldn’t drive more than twenty kilometres without being reminded that Jesus would be alive today if it wasn’t for me and that I’d die pretty soon if I didn’t stop sinning. As Granddad Jah, rightly said, “You don’t see the God Squad trying that in Saudi Arabia.”

  So he had a special bamboo ladder made; even longer than the super stepladders of the Telephone Organization of Thailand. He had wheels put on one end, grabbed the other, and cycled from one sign to the next, dragging the ladder beside him. (He pointed out there were no traffic regulations against doing so.) He’d climb up his ladder with a pot of lime green enamel and paint over the signs, usually putting more on himself.

  But today’s case file concerns Granddad’s most interesting hobby, one which actually called upon his expertise as a policeman. He often lured me in as a technical advisor on social issues, of which he knew little. I’d been a crime reporter in Chiang Mai for fourteen years but was currently teaching ingrates and writing about the latest wedding fashions for the Chumphon Gazette. So, I was keen, if not desperate, to get my teeth into anything of substance, no matter how smelly.

  Every now and then, Granddad Jah would turn up at my place with a plastic bag full of trash that had washed up on our beach. The best pickings were from October to February when the monsoons changed the currents and brought us all the domestic garbage from Lang Suan. The townies tossed their household waste into the river and watched it float away to the sea. There, it hitched a ride back on the current and landed on our beach. I say ‘our’ beach but none of us had lived there since our Gulf Bay Lovely Resort and Restaurant was wiped out in a freak storm at the end of the previous year. We were still awaiting good news from the bank regarding our disaster insurance. But Granddad went there every day to inspect the damage and search the garbage. Most of it offered no clues of its origins – just vegetable peelings and used baby nappies (that is to say the nappies rather than the babies were used) and anything else that couldn’t be sold to recyclers. It’s the money rather than any social morality that inspires recycling in our region.

  Sometimes, we got lucky and the bag contained informative junk. There’d be bills or letters or personal papers with a name and address. Granddad Jah would put on his old uniform and drive into town in the Mighty X with a fake red light on the roof. He’d go to the address, admonish the dirty residents, tell them they’d been captured on CCTV by one of several hundred disguised riverbank cameras, and informed them they’d be fined a minimum of five thousand baht if they repeated the offence. If the owner refuted Granddad’s accusation, he’d go to the truck and bring back the bag still containing the evidence, and empty it onto the doorstop. Given the number of houses on or near the river, and the multiple use of this convenient, natural waste disposal system, Granddad was unlikely to make an impact on global pollution but it gave him pleasure to shame the householders and perhaps prevent one more turtle from choking on a plastic bag. For a man so lacking in social skills he had a good heart. And, one day, his hobby took on a completely different dimension.

  I’d been working on another story at the time. My friend, Nurse Da, had told me about a sudden rise in the number of Burmese in the district dying from malaria. We had a large Burmese population, most working in the fishing and palm oil industries. Lang Suan didn’t have a particularly high incidence of malaria but some twelve Burmese had died since the start of the year, twice as many as locals. It would have made sense if they’d all been working in the jungle together but most were itinerants heading here from all points of the compass. Why were they more susceptible than us? It was an interesting premise for a news article but my fool of an editor wanted me to cover the regional vegetable carving championships in La Mae and told me, in no uncertain terms, to get those silly investigative journalistic notions out of my head.

  I returned home on foot following a particularly thrilling and I must say, controversial vegetable fest. My Honda Dream had run out of petrol two kilometres from home and I didn’t have any money on me. I tried to exchange a dozen prize-winning marigolds-cum-carrots for half a litre of benzene but the boy at the pump was having nothing of it. Granddad Jah was waiting for me in front of my little shophouse. He had a large black plastic bag at his feet.

  “I’m not really in the mood for sifting through garbage,” I told him.

  “You will be,” he said, and held up a can that had once contained spicy pilchards. I still wasn’t inspired.

  “Have you resorted to eating out of garbage bags?” I asked.

  “Girl..,” he said. (He liked to call me ‘Girl’) “…don’t you show disrespect, now.”

  “Who am I disrespecting?”

  “Poor people.” He said. “People who have to live out of supermarket skips, refugees, war victims.”

  I was surprised how much ground I’d covered with my pilchard joke.

  “Then I give up,” I said. “Why are you showing me a pilchard can?”

  He reached his thumb and forefinger into the can and pulled out a small plastic bag covered in tomato sauce. I guessed it had been there for some time. I could smell it from three metres away.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “If it looks like a plastic bag, it’s probably a plastic bag,” he said.

  He got more loveable every day. I parked the Honda, not bothering to lock it. It wasn’t going anywhere.

  “’What’s inside?’ is the question you should be asking me,” he said.

  “All right. What’s inside?”

  He made a performance of unfolding the bag and pulling out what looked like a cigarette.

  “A note,” he said. “The water got to it but some of it’s still readable.”

  He unrolled the paper and held it out to me. It was obvious he’d already read it and had put it back in the plastic for effect.

  “Can’t you just tell me what it says?” I asked.

  “Your eyes are younger than mine, Girl. I want you to tell me what you see.”

  I reluctantly took it from him. It stank of rotten fish. Half of it was a red smudge as if the pilchard eater had used it as a napkin to wipe his mouth. But further up, the blur became shapes and, at the top there were recognizable Thai characters. The handwriting was childlike and apparently written in red crayon. It was faint but legible.

  “My name is Toy,” it said. “I am a prisoner here. Please rescue me at…”

  At that point the writing merged with the sauce. The last two recognizable words could have been ‘old’ and ‘house’ and a little further down there was the number ‘2’. But it was impossible to make out anything else. I re-read it aloud.

  “Well?” said Granddad.

  “Well, what?”

  “Someone’s clearly being held against their will. For argument’s sake let’s say it’s a girl.”

  “Why would we do that?” I asked.

  “Because ninety-one percent of abductees around the world are female,” he said.

  I didn’t question that because he was generally more accurate than Google.

  “Or it’s some kid playing kidnapping,” I said.

  Granddad shook his head and snorted.

  “If it was a game, she’d find a nice clean bottle to put her message in. She’d want it to be found. But she put it in a pilchard can. Why?”

  “I’m sure you have an answer to that.”

  “Think about it, Girl. If it was in a bottle, the person who’s holding her prisoner would find it. This child would be in danger. Putting it in a can decreases the odds that her captor would discover it.”

  “And decreases the odds of it being found by anyone,” I said. “She wraps it in a plastic bag, puts it in a dirty tin can, closes the lid and throws it in the garbage. Who’s going to find that?”

  “Cans are recyclable,” he said. “Some scavenger is very likely to find it, open the can t
o wash it and, voila, the note.”

  “Then why wouldn’t the captor recycle it himself?”

  “Any number of reasons,” he said. “It might not be worth his while. Recycled cans go for three baht a kilo. There are plenty of people who’d consider that small fry. A lot of work for small returns.”

  “So you’re saying the captor doesn’t need money?”

  “Possibly.”

  “And he just leaves coloured crayons and notepaper lying around for Toy to write notes for help?”

  “Yes, if she’s a young child,” said Granddad. “He might provide her with pencils and paper to keep her occupied.”

  “Sounds like a very accommodating kidnapper,” I said.

  “He feeds the child canned food. Keeps her in a locked room. Collects the garbage every couple of days. He doesn’t think to check the cans. Just takes out the garbage and throws it in the river.”

  “You’ve had far too long to think about this,” Granddad.

  “Come on, Girl. What other scenario can there be?”

  “You’re the only scavenger I know who’d bother to take an oily plastic bag out of a pilchard can. What are the chances that a retired police officer would discover her note?”

  “Very small, if she only sent out one note. But she’s smart. The plastic bag tells us that. What if she’s been sending out messages with every can? She’d increase the odds of discovery with each message.”

  “I don’t know…”

  “Look,” he said, “At the very least we’d be searching for a litterbug, like all the others. We do our detecting, find out where he lives and…”