Grandad, Thereэ's head on the beach

'It's been investigated.'

'Some fat cop with a lump of dead grass on his head walks down the beach, looks at the victim, and hands him over to the bodysnatching rat brothers. They shake hands and he drives off. Fifteen minutes all told. I'd hardly call that an investigation.'

'He filed a report.'

'Oh, good. Now we're getting somewhere. Show it to me.'

'Hmm. All right.'

'Really?'

'No. Not really. Are you insane? I'm hardly going to risk what little I have left of a career by leaking confidential documents to the press.'

'You've done worse.'

'Not in public.'

I sighed and looked him over. And I have to confess that was a peculiar moment. I knew Chompu would sooner mount a faulty electric junction box during a rainstorm than have carnal knowledge of a woman, but there was something really…erotic about him lying there in his silk gown, his tanned muscular legs exposed to the mid- thigh. His hair wet from the shower. I was embarrassed by the emotions dribbling through me.

'I'd let you have sex with me,' I said.

He coughed and dropped his joint down among the cushions. He burrowed frantically after it before the entire scatter empire went up in flames. You got to see all his neat little teeth when he laughed, and he did laugh long and hard.

'What on earth for?' he asked at last with his rescued joint between his fingers.

'A reward?' I said.

'You're hilarious, really you are. I'd sooner…'

'I know.'

Gay or not, that kind of reaction didn't do a lot for a girl's self-esteem. I don't know what had come over me. I'd never found him even vaguely sexual before. I put it down to the trauma of discovering my mother in flagrante. But, well, if my body didn't tempt him, I suppose all I was left with was blackmail.

'This is such a nice little house,' I said. 'Hidden from the road by a long winding driveway through the trees.'

'I was waiting for this.'

'A stash of marijuana and a stack of special magazines. Unauthorized use of handcuffs. Quite a little love nest.'

'You wouldn't.'

'An anonymous phone call to the major. A late-night raid.'

I sat on my balcony with Gogo and Sticky on either side of me, as full of vim and vigor as roadkill. I was attempting to read the photocopy of Lieutenant Egalat (Egg) Wirawot's report on the discovery of a John Doe on Maprao beach. It wasn't War and Peace. Two and a half sheets, all told. It was getting harder to read as the light drained away. If there had been a sun, it would have been setting behind me, but we were in what they call a lull, a word I'd become very familiar with of late. The wind had died completely and the dark clouds were all low and gathering to drench us for the standard twenty minutes. Mair and Arny were running around closing all the windows. You can't say the monsoon season didn't have a sense of humor. I should have been helping the family batten down the hatches, but I'd only just been sent the report and I wanted to know what it said. If fiction awards were presented in the category of police reports, I had the winner right there on my lap.

FOUND THE HEAD-NO DISTINGUISHING MARKS-LONG HAIR, EARRINGS, DARK SKIN-PROBABLY BURMESE-MARKED OFF A PERIMETER AND SCOURED THE BEACH FOR EVIDENCE-INTERVIEWED AND CONSOLED DISTRAUGHT VILLAGERS-BEGAN SYSTEMATIC INVESTIGATION AT THE DOCKS-NO COOPERATION FROM THE BURMESE FISHERMEN-CONCLUDED THAT THIS WAS ONE MORE INTERNAL DISPUTE WITHIN THEIR COMMUNITY SETTLED THE WAY THEY DO.

It began.

There were vegetables, but that was the meat of it. The people behind our resort have three cows. Even on a good day when they get bamboo root treats, those cows couldn't produce half the manure I read there in that report. And his nonexistent, in-depth systematic investigation hadn't turned up so much as a name.

The sky all around me grumbled like a troubled stomach, and the cloud-and I swear I'm not making this up- squatted down on our resort like a huge Malay black bear's bottom. Plonked itself right down on top of us. It was so dark I could no longer make out words on the paper. The dogs, a species renowned for its innate sense of predicting extreme weather conditions, snored through it. Only when the rain tossed itself down in zinc bathtubs and the wind rose to smash it sideways against our little huts did they wake up, stretch, and amble off in search of a drier spot. I was halfway inside my room when I noticed Grandad Jah jogging toward me through the deluge. I'd seen video footage of a horse being picked up by a tornado. A horse weighs a thousand times more than my grandad, and I swear his feet weren't touching the ground.

'Grab something solid,' I shouted, but my words were whisked away on the wind. It could only be the weight of the rain soaking through his clothes that stopped him flying off like Mary Poppins. He clambered up the steps and pushed past me into the cabin. He had a smile on his face. It didn't suit him. When the door was shut, he started to undress.

'Grandad, don't.'

'Pneumonia,' he said. 'That's what gets us. Lungs full of rain. Sudden chill. Two days and you're on the pyre. Can't be too careful.'

'It's not appropriate to…'

But I was too late. His thick soggy shirt was already on the floor, and he was working on the tie string of his fisherman's trousers. Grandad undressing was like a skeleton shedding its ectoplasm. I hurried to the cupboard for a spare blanket and wrapped it around him before I had to witness any more of him.

'What do you want, Grandad?'

'I've got it,' he said, his daringly small underpants falling to the floor beneath the blanket.

'I'm sure you have. What is it?'

'The number.'

'What num- The engine?'

He grinned.

'But how? It wasn't there last night,' I reminded him.

Me and Grandad had crept out under the cover of the crashing surf the previous night and broken into the Honda. We'd left no traces. Grandad Jah was the Ali Baba of grand theft auto. But our clandestine operation beneath the bonnet had only succeeded in confirming that the couple had gone to great lengths not to be traced. The engine number had been filed away to nothing.

'There are ways,' he said.

'To read a number that's not there?'

'To read the ghost of that number, young Jimm. When a number is punched onto metal, the metal below it is hardened. Even when the surface is filed level, that hard metal retains the number. By cleaning off the grease with petrol and applying heat from a blowtorch, then by grinding down the area with emery paper and working up a fine shine, with a strong side light you can pick out the relief of the original numbers.'

The rain was beating so hard on the concrete tile roof that Grandad had been forced to shout the end of his explanation. Then, within a minute, the storm was gone, and the rays of the setting sun found a loophole in the convoluted clouds and formed a halo around him. He looked like the starving Buddha. He was, without question, an arrogant, ignorant, genius.

'How are the preparations going?'

'I'm getting wigs made.'

'What for?'

'For my head.'

'I know where they go,' I said. 'I'm asking you why you need them. Did you accidently exfoliate all your hair off?'