ever after. I knew of a few cases where it’s worked out. Four, in fact. But in all four cases the girls hadn’t been working in the bars for more than a few weeks, and the guys they married weren’t hardened barflies. But they were the exceptions. Generally marriages to bargirls don’t work out. The girls are damaged goods. Many are on drugs, many have a kid upcountry staying with the parents, more often than not there’s a Thai boyfriend or even a husband in the background. A girl who’s been working the bars for just a couple of years will have slept with hundreds of different guys and is probably supporting her whole family. Any farang who expects to find the love of his life under those circumstances needs his head examined. And the services of a Bangkok private eye.
THE CASE OF THE INTERNET SCAMMER
I was having a dream about two twin go-go dancers doing terrible things to me with whipped cream when my mobile phone started ringing and dragged me back to reality. It was a British voice on the other end of the line. A man.
‘What time is it there?’ he asked.
‘What do you think I am, a speaking clock?’ I growled. I squinted at the clock on the bedside table. It was just after three.
‘It’s nine o’clock here,’ he said.
‘It’s three in Bangkok,’ I said.
‘That’s okay then,’ he said.
‘In the morning,’ I said. ‘It’s three o’clock in the morning.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m in London.’
‘Congratulations,’ I said.
‘Shall I call back later?’
I sat up in bed, rubbing my face. ‘That’s okay, I’m awake now. Is this business or pleasure?’
‘Business,’ he said. ‘I need help.’
I always keep a notebook and pen by my clock so I took notes as the caller went through his story. His name was Mike Tyson (no relation to the boxer, he said, ‘and I’m a fair bit older and whiter’) and he was a retired businessmen. He’d built up his own sportswear company and sold out for a decent price once he hit sixty. I got the feeling that he wasn’t exactly short of money. He’d sent his Thai girlfriend the money for her ticket to the UK but Mike had waited at Heathrow airport for hours and there’d been no sign of her. He’d tried calling her mobile phone but it was switched off. Mike was sure that something had happened to her and he wanted me to check the local hospitals, go around to her house, to do whatever it took to find out what had happened to her.
It was an easy enough job, so I told him to send me a 10,000-baht retainer through Western Union.
‘No problem, that’s how I send money to Metta,’ he said.
‘Have you been sending her a lot of money?’ I asked. Alarm bells were already ringing.
‘Just a few hundred pounds a month,’ he said. ‘And some extra money when her father was in hospital. And money for her passport and visa. And for her ticket.’
I asked Mike for as much detail as he could give me. Her name was Metta Khonkaen, he said. I got him to spell it for me twice because Khonkaen is a city in the north east and it seemed a strange surname. It would be like being called Pete Birmingham or Eddie Queenstown. Not impossible, but unlikely. He had her date of birth and I groaned inwardly when I realised that he was almost three times her age. Alarm bells were really ringing now.
‘Where did you meet Metta?’ I asked. I would have bet money that he’d met the lovely Metta in a go-go bar or massage parlour.
‘I haven’t actually met her yet,’ said Mike. ‘Not in person. We met online.’
I was totally awake now. Mike had sent hundreds if not thousands of pounds to a girl he hadn’t even met? I was starting to wish I’d asked for a bigger retainer because Mike clearly wasn’t a man who kept a tight grip on his money.
I asked Mike to email me any pictures he had of Metta, and to fax copies of any paperwork he had, then I put down the phone and went back to sleep.
The next day I wandered along to Starbucks for a latte and a banana muffin and then took a motorcycle taxi to the Western Union office. Mike had been as good as his word and I collected my 10,000 baht. There was a faxed copy of her passport and copies of the papers that she’d taken to the British Embassy. And he’d emailed me some head and shoulder shots of her. Metta was a stunner, no doubt about it. Pale skin, high cheekbones, long straight hair.
I went through the motions and phoned a couple of dozen hospitals in Bangkok but none had admitted a Metta Khonkaen. I checked my emails and there was a message from Mike. One of life’s little coincidences; just a couple of hours after speaking to me, he’d received an email from a friend of Metta’s. According to the friend, Metta had been arrested by the immigration police when she was trying to leave the country. There was something wrong with her visa and she didn’t have enough funds to cover her time in the UK. The police were holding her in the notorious Bangkok Hilton and the friend said that she needed 50,000 baht to get her released, and another 150,000 baht so that Metta could show she had sufficient funds to travel to the UK. Two hundred thousand baht in all. The helpful friend had included her own name and bank account details so that Mike could send her the money without further ado.
I phoned Mike and the guy was at the end of his tether. It was too late to send the money but the next day he was going to be at the bank first thing to arrange the telegraphic transfer. I told him to wait until I’d made a few enquiries, there were just so many things about this case that didn’t ring true. I pressed him for more details about his internet courtship. He told me that he’d first met her in a chatroom, and they’d started talking by email every day. She was working as a waitress in Bangkok but after Mike started sending her money she’d gone back to stay with her parents in Chiang Rai, helping to support her younger sisters while she studied for a degree in accounting. It had always been her dream to live in England, she’d said. They’d traded photographs, and Metta had told Mike that he was the most handsome man she’d ever seen. Like a movie star, she’d said. And she loved the photographs of his large house in central London. His thirty-two-foot yacht. His collection of sports cars. Her email began to become more affectionate. Maybe she could fly to London to see him, she’d suggested. Maybe they’d get on so well together that he would want her to stay with him. Maybe he might one day want to marry her.
By the time Mike had finished telling me the story, he was in tears. I told him not to do anything until he heard from me again.
I picked up a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label and went along to the Immigration Department on Soi Suan Phlu. The chief there was an old friend of mine. I went up to the third floor, gave him the whisky and then we spent half an hour talking about golf before I got around to the real reason for my visit. I showed him the fax of Metta passport and he shook his head emphatically. ‘ Mai chai, mai chai, mai chai,’ he muttered.
He pointed at the passport picture. Metta was smiling happily. The chief explained that smiling wasn’t allowed in passport photographs. They were taken in the passport office and the camera operator would make sure that the person didn’t smile. Also, the wavy lines that were supposed to run through the photograph were missing, and the surname was in a slightly different typeface to the rest of the wording on the passport. It looked to the chief as if the photograph had been stuck into an existing passport, and the surname had been typed on a piece of paper and stuck into the travel document. The passport was fake.
I asked him what would happen if the girl tried to leave the country with a doctored passport. Would she be arrested?
The chief assured me that the girl would probably have just been turned away. If she had been a known criminal then she might have been held by the immigration police, but she certainly wouldn’t have been hauled off to the Bangkok Hilton. To put my mind at rest he tapped the name into his computer terminal. There was no record of any problems with a Metta Khonkaen.
My next call was to the municipal office in Pathumwan. I was a regular visitor and whenever I popped in I took a selection of Thai snacks with me. The head lady saw me coming and came over to relieve me off my tidbits and see what I wanted. I asked her about Metta’s surname and she shook her head emphatically. Khonkaen was not a surname that she had ever come across and after a couple of minutes on her computer terminal she was able to tell me that there wasn’t a Khonkaen family anywhere in the country.
