‘Sure thing,’ said Mick. He pulled the roll of notes from his belt and handed it over to Phoo. With that, Phoo fetched our packs and flung them in with us.
‘Ooooooh! Bye so long!’ grinned Phoo. He jumped into the yellow Jeep and it roared off the way we had come.
The songthaew drove us through the outskirts of Chiang Mai. The great brass, ticking engine of the sun was well up by now, and already we were missing the cool of the jungle. Mick, sitting in the open back of the vehicle, handed cigarettes round and we lit up.
‘These packs,’ Phil said.
‘What about ’em?’
‘They’re not the same ones we’ve been carrying for the last six hours.’
We looked at the packs. He was right. We opened them, and though they were stuffed with our clothes and belongings, Phil was correct. These were not the same backpacks we’d carried out of the village.
‘I thought mine was a little heavy,’ Charlie said.
Mick took a deep drag on his cigarette. He blew a thick plume of blue smoke at a tuk-tuk roaring inches behind the songthaew. Then he looked at us.
‘We’ve been shafted,’ he said.
38
We had indeed been shafted. Later, we estimated that we’d each carried at least five kilos of jungle morphine into Chiang Mai under the noses of the Thai army. Of course, it might have been Phoo’s enterprise, but at the back of it I saw Jack’s puppeteering hand. He’d made sure Phoo let us know that he was going to be away, knowing we’d try to bribe someone to take us out as soon as Charlie was ready to go; and he knew that we had every chance of squeezing through the army checkpoint downriver. No doubt if that army soldier had been more persistent and we’d been caught, we would be locked up in Chiang Mai jail with only Brazier-Armstrong to help us, and the story would start all over again. No doubt, too, that Jack’s money would have sprung Phoo. The rest of us would have been hung out to dry.
And no one would have believed us.
If I understood Jack correctly, the morphine base we’d brought downriver would be worth more than twenty thousand dollars in Chiang Mai, and would make business worth twenty-five million dollars on the streets of London, Paris and New York. It made us complicit in the smuggling of drugs, but there was a far more serious crime that one of us had to carry.
We had to spend a night in Chiang Mai before we could get on a flight to Bangkok. We returned to the River View Lodge to reclaim our stored suitcases and there we took two double rooms. I was never going to be happy until we were on our way to London. I wanted medical attention for Charlie, but it had to wait. Significantly, I chose to room with Phil while Mick agreed to share with and keep a close eye on Charlie, though we spent most of the time together, not wanting to venture out.
I could only guess at what Jack might do if the body surfaced while we were still in Chiang Mai. If Jack had wanted to kill us, he would have done it at the riverside before we’d exchanged the backpacks. But would his attitude change if he knew we’d murdered his nephew? My best hope would be that Jack’s guerrilla farming would take him on to another place long before some scavenging animal or hapless villager turned up something nasty.
We had a difficult time organising a flight out. I spent agonising hours on the telephone trying to make reservations. Finally we discarded our original tickets and bought four new one-way flights from Chiang Mai to London Heathrow via Bangkok.
‘Are you going to tell me about it?’ I said to Phil in a moment when we were alone.
He looked pale. He lowered himself gently on to the edge of his bed, put his hands on his knees, and stared at the wall.
I tried again. ‘This notion of release, Phil. Giving it up.’
‘Ha!’
‘What is it?’
‘Hearing you talk like that. It seems odd.’
I knew it wasn’t gratitude he wanted from me, but I had to say, ‘I suspect I owe you more than I’ll ever be able to tell you.’
‘It was over in a couple of minutes,’ he said. His voice was flat. ‘When you went out there that night, we followed, of course. He knocked the knife out of your hand and he kicked you unconscious. You were out. Belly down in the dust. He lifted your head by the hair and took a knife to your throat. I scooped up your machete and I hacked it into his neck before he could cut your throat.
‘It was like when you lodge an axe in a tree. I was gripping the handle of the machete and I couldn’t pull it out of his neck. I was still trying to dislodge the damned machete when he spun away from me, and he convulsed and smashed his head on the edge of the porch.
‘I wish I could say he died quickly. He didn’t. He couldn’t cry out. The machete was half buried in his neck.
‘I was useless. Shivering, still shivering. Mick rolled the body under the hut. He got under there himself and pulled the machete out, and the man bled to death, there, under the hut. Then Mick got me and you inside. He cleaned up before you came round. That’s the whole story.’
Although Phil said that was the whole story, it wasn’t the case. Now I understood what he’d meant when he’d said he was in hell. He had violated the holy injunction not to kill. He’d broken the sixth commandment to uphold the fifth, to honour his father: not in any intellectual ranking or ordering of these injunctions, but in the imperative of the blood and the moment.
Now I had to stand in awe of him.
But for Phil the entire saga
