looking for. She was in her early thirties, slightly chunky and with bad skin, the result of too little time in the sun and too long spent in smoky bars. I flashed her a smile and offered to buy her a drink. She looked surprised and pointed at her chest. ‘Me?’ she said.
‘Sure,’ I said.
She got herself a cola and then came over to sit next to me. Her name was Um and she was from Surin, so I chatted away in Khamen. I took it slowly, knocking back the JDs and buying her lots of colas. That’s how she made her money. The bar paid her a commission on every drink I bought for her. She was a waitress and not a dancer so she didn’t have to go with customers, but with so much young flesh on display I doubted that there’d be a rush to pay her bar fine. I gave her the impression that I might take her to a short-time hotel, stroked her leg and planted the occasional kiss on her cheek. She started to beam, probably planning how she was going to spend the thousand baht or so she thought I was going to give her. I persuaded her to start drinking Singha beer instead of the cola lady drinks, and waited until she’d knocked back a few before I raised the subject of Miles Beattie. Um knew him, and wasn’t impressed. He was a friend of the owner, another American, and he tended to take young girls and mistreat them. Several had returned with bruises after going short-term with him. I asked her why the girls didn’t just refuse to go with him. She smiled tightly and told me that Beattie had a lot of ‘mafa’ friends. That was the last thing I needed to hear. It was bad enough that Beattie was involved in law enforcement. Now I was being told that he was involved with criminals, too. If I crossed him, I could end up being caught between a rock and a hard place.
A few more drinks under her belt, and Um became even more talkative. She grabbed my arm and whispered conspiratorially, ‘we no use short-time room, here, okay?’
I asked her why. She looked around as if worried that someone might be listening, then told me that the owners of the bar had rigged up a camera in the short-time room. ‘They make DVDs, sell overseas.’
That came as a shock, all right. I’d heard rumours of short-time hotels having video cameras behind the mirrors, but this was a first. Most girls barfined from go-go bars take their customers to nearby hotels, but this bar had its own room upstairs where for a modest 200 baht the customer could get down and dirty with his temporary girlfriend. It was good news for the girls because they could be back dancing a few minutes after taking care of the customer, but clearly it was bad news for the customer if his nocturnal activities were going to be on sale for all and sundry to gawp at.
‘We go hotel, okay?’ pleaded Um. ‘I give you good time.’
I bought her another beer and asked her to get me a Jack Daniel’s. I was starting to get the picture. Beattie liked to be rough with his girls, and he was friends with a guy who was secretly recording sex sessions of his customers. And he was monitoring Nut’s emails, which suggested that he had an interest in her. Either she was a girlfriend, former or otherwise, or he wanted something from her. Beattie would have seen the emails from Klaus and realised that the German wanted to marry Nut. Maybe he’d threatened her, with violence or blackmail.
Um brought me a fresh Jack Daniel’s and I sipped it. I knew Nut was alive and well, but she was obviously hiding. But now it was starting to look as if it was Beattie she was hiding from, not Klaus.
I paid the bill and gave Um 1,000 baht as a tip. ‘I still go with you,’ she said. ‘Free.’
I told her that I had a wife at home and that if I fooled around she’d cut off my private parts and throw them to the ducks. She laughed at that, told me that I was a good man with a good heart and kissed me on the cheek. I felt sorry for her. She was the sort of woman that Klaus should have fallen for. She was closer to his age and I was sure she’d be so grateful to any man who took her away from the bar scene that she’d be a loyal and faithful partner. But Klaus had fallen for a girl almost half his age and he was paying the price.
The lie about being a student at Rhamkamheng was still worrying me. I wanted to make absolutely sure that she wasn’t there. One of the problems with tracing people in Thailand is the language. The Thai alphabet has forty- four consonants and twenty-six vowels, so translating a name from Thai into English is fraught with problems. If I was just one letter out, a computer check might well show a negative. Nut was her nickname, the name that everyone knew her by, but her official name was much longer, six syllables in all. To be absolutely sure that I had Nut’s official full name correct I’d have to go back to the municipal office in her home town. That was going to cost money, so I had to go and see Klaus to see if he wanted me to continue with the investigation or call it quits. I warned him that an American law enforcement official was checking Nut’s emails so that he should refrain from emailing her or checking her account. He wanted to know who the guy was and I gave him the name but it didn’t mean anything to him. I didn’t say anything about the porno DVDs or the fact that Beattie liked to abuse his girls.
I explained that I’d have to go to municipal office in Surat Thani and gave me a further retainer and an advance on expenses. I flew down to Surat Thani. The officials in the municipal office were very helpful. They usually are when a farang turns up wearing a suit. The story I was using this time was that I was a lawyer representing a foreigner who had died leaving a considerable sum of money to Nut. I explained that I was having trouble finding the girl in Bangkok and showed them the name and address that I had been given. The young woman who was helping me tapped away on her computer terminal, then gave me a beaming smile. She told me that the reason I was having such a hard time locating Khun Nut was that she had recently changed her name by the Thai equivalent of a deed poll. Name-changing is common practice in Thailand, and it’s relatively easy to obtain a new ID card and passport in a new name.
The girl wrote down the new name for me, and also a list of Nut’s family members, including Nong, a young sister who had moved to Bangkok.
I was feeling pretty pleased with myself on the flight back to Bangkok. It wouldn’t take me too long to track her down now that I had her new name.
My contact in the phone company had come through and there was a printout waiting for me in the fax machine when I reached home. I opened a bottle of Jack Daniels, flopped down onto the sofa and went through the printout. I knew most of the dialling codes by heart and I could see that the majority of the calls to Nut’s mobile had come from Rhamkamheng, with a few from the Sathorn Road area. The printout also showed me the nearest transmitter to Nut’s mobile at the time of each call.
Nut had only made a couple of dozen calls over the past month. Most were to a landline in Rhamkamheng. I phoned up my contact and asked him to get me an address for that number. He called me back within the hour. It was an apartment on Rhamkamheng Soi 53. I promised to send him another 5,000 baht.
The next day I went around to the apartment block with a bag full of Thai food for the office staff. That got them on my side right away, and they were more than happy to check if Nut was living there. Nut wasn’t, but the younger sister was. The room wasn’t rented in her name but as far as the staff were aware she lived there alone. Nong was in her early twenties so I assumed that she was a kept woman, possibly a minor wife, or mia noi. I didn’t want to raise suspicions by pressing them for the name of whoever was paying her bills. Besides, it was Nut I was interested in, not Nong.
The staff hadn’t asked what my interest was, but I could sense they were becoming increasingly nervous at my questioning. I decided that the best way was to go in hard. I told them that I was a policeman from Interpol investigating a serious crime involving pornography, and that while Nong probably wasn’t involved, her sister almost certainly was. The staff phoned up to Nong’s room and asked her to come down as there was a farang policeman who wanted to speak with her.
As soon as Nong stepped out the elevator I waved her over to a couple of sofas by the window. She was a pretty little thing, short hair and large, soulful eyes, and looked a good five years younger than her true age. I had no doubt that someone was paying her bills in exchange for sexual services. I kept a stern look on my face as I explained that I was a policeman with Interpol investigating pornographic material that was being sent to Europe. I told her that I believed that her sister Nut was involved, along with an American called Miles Beattie. I spoke to her in Thai and was quite aggressive because if at any time she demanded to see my ID it would be all over. By speaking quickly and forcefully I was able to keep her off balance. I told her that Nut had changed her name and address and I needed to know where to find her.
She kept shaking her head and said she knew nothing. I told her that I knew Nut had phoned her at home, and that she often phoned Nut. Then I told her that if she didn’t talk to me I’d take her to Rhamkamheng Police Station for further questioning. I was really pushing my luck because she could see that I was there on my own and any moment she was going to start wondering why I wasn’t accompanied by the local boys in brown. But like most Thais she feared authority and feared even more being held in police custody.
Close to tears, she admitted that her sister knew Charles Beattie but that’s he didn’t see him any more.
‘He was a boyfriend?’
