Grandad, Thereэ's head on the beach

'How far out can the little boats go?' I asked.

'Depends on the waves,' he said. 'Two meters maximum for most of us.'

'But if it's calm?'

'Go all the way to Vietnam or until the diesel ran out. Why?'

I'd decided the previous night to tell the captain everything, from the head on the beach to the slave ships to the suspected involvement of the Pak Nam police force. He listened intently but didn't seem all that surprised.

'It's not just here,' he said, when I was done.

'What's not?'

'The slavery. Happens all around the coast. Except the recruiting's done by agents over on the west. They put crews together, take their down payments, make promises, then vanish. The Burmese do a three-month stint, then queue up for their salaries only to be told that the wages are all handled through the agencies. It's in the contract- in Thai. As the agents have all shut up and shipped out, that's three months of free labor and nothing for the Burmese to send back to their families. Happens all the time.'

I blame Buddhism, you know? Get yourself a soft religion and you can forgive yourself almost anything. No shame. No guilt. I'll do my penance in the next life. No worries. I wondered whether Captain Kow was one of those maipen rai characters. One of the 'no problem, let's not get worked up over nothing' majority.

'I imagine you're going to do something about it,' he said, and smiled.

Damn. I wish I could have put some teeth in that gap. I knew it would have been a grand smile if it hadn't been so vacant.

'I'd need help,' I confessed.

'I could get about ten, maybe fifteen small-boat men together, I suppose.'

'You could? And why would they cooperate?'

'They don't like the big boats much. And they owe me favors.'

'And why would you cooperate?'

'Me?' He laughed. 'I like your style, Jimm. I like your spunk. You're a credit to your mother. I'd be proud to be there beside you.'

You tend to assume old men are flirting when they overdo the rhetoric, but Captain Kow's eyes sparkled and I really got the feeling he was up for the adventure.

'You got a plan?' he asked.

'Sort of,' I replied. 'Do I have to tell you it?'

'Too true you do.'

It was almost lunchtime when Lieutenant Chompu called me from the police station.

'At last,' I said. 'How long does it take to read a few documents?'

'Ooh, what dominance,' he said. 'I love a forceful woman. If it had been just words, I might have finished yesterday evening. But it wasn't that simple. Our Lieutenant Egg uses his own shorthand, the type of which I'd never seen. It amounts to leaving out all the vowels and tone markers. So every word was a puzzle.'

'But you cracked it?'

'I have a reputation for inserting my key into otherwise impenetrable locks.'

'But the documents?'

'Yes, those too. I have entered his devious world, young Jimm.'

'And did you find anything?'

'Not really.'

'Chom!'

'Not a complete failure, however. I found no fewer than eleven official reports in normal script for beached bodies and body parts. These were cases he'd personally taken on. His success rate in finding relatives and solving the cases was-as far as I could see-zero. All 'Case closed, probably Burmese, domestic dispute.' '

'But he's only been here in Pak Nam for a month.'

'Right. These reports go back six months to when he was stationed in Pattani. Your personal head is number eleven. It's his first up here.'

'So if he's cleaning up, he's following a boat.'

'Or a fleet. I checked out the movement of deep-sea vessels from Pattani to Lang Suan around the time of his transfer. There was a total of four that changed registration and fishing zones. One was a mackerel trawler bought by a conglomerate in Prajuab. But three others always traveled together. Same owner. Same catch records. They're now operating out of Pak Nam, but they spend most of their time at sea and transfer their catch to smaller boats. This deep-sea fleet has five local boats registered to collect and deliver. Doing good business, by all accounts.'

'So somewhere out there are three big boats that don't come home much. I bet that's them. There I was imagining one slaver ship. Sneaking up on it in the dead of night. Surprising its sleeping crew. But three? You've just changed the odds.'

'You mean from 'don't even think about it' to 'very don't even think about it'?'

'Why do I not feel a deep sense of police cooperation?'

'Jimm, there are three boats bobbing fifty kilometers from the nearest impartial witness. They'll each have burly, unshaven ex-convict types with automatic weapons patrolling the decks. They would have already massacred so many random Burmese that they'll not even consider murder to be a negative thing. They'll have spotlights on their boats, radar even. I have no idea how you'd sneak up on them without being cut into little bloody pieces. My love remains undying, but my cooperation ended with this report.'

'You aren't even going to tell your boss?'

'Tell him what?'

'That…'

No. He was right. No evidence. No proof. No point.

'Chom. Don't you have an urge to see justice done?'

'It's not nearly as strong as my urge to reach forty with a complete set of limbs.'

'Then do it for me.'

'Valor, you mean? Chivalry?'

'Don't tell me it's dead.'

'You know in your heart it is.'

'Fine. Never mind. I'll die without a hero by my side. Without ever knowing what it's like to have a man stand up for me, put his life on the line out of love.'

'So I'm excused then?'

'I suppose.'

'Good. Oh, and there was a message from the post office.'

'What? Are you moonlighting for the Royal Thai Post now?'

'They have my number because I receive a lot of FedEx packages in plain brown envelopes full of evidence, if you know what I mean. And they know that you and I are seeing each other.'

'In the romantic sense?'

'Naturally. In a place like Pak Nam they always hold out hope that people like me can see the folly of our ways.'

'So?'

'So, Nat the manager said he'd had a suspicious visitor. A woman. She wanted to get in touch with her sister who'd given the Pak Nam Lang Suan post office as her return address. He'd told her that the sender sounded like the girl and her mother who were staying at your resort.'

'Oh great.'

'After she'd gone, it occurred to him that they'd only typed that information into the system at eight this morning and the parcel wouldn't be arriving till tomorrow. So he couldn't see how anyone would know. He tried to phone your mother. As he was calling, a cell tone rang out from his pile of outgoing mail. He hung up and tried again. And it rang again. He found a letter from your mother with a phone inside. He wondered whether she'd put it there by mistake.'

'When was the woman there?'

'Just before I called you.'