I phoned William and told him that Som had a stack of money in her account, far more than she could have saved, even as a go-go dancer. The only way she could have amassed that amount of cash was from a generous sponsor, and probably more than one. She certainly didn’t need William’s 15,000 baht a month.
‘But you’ve never seen her with another guy?’ he said. I could hear the hope in his voice. I’ve heard it hundreds of times over the years. It was the sound of a man who wanted to believe that he wasn’t being lied to, even when all the evidence suggested the contrary. I don’t know what it is with these guys. They really do check their brains in at the airport. I don’t understand it. I understand bargirls. They work for money. Period. They don’t dance in go-go bars and sleep with men twice their age for fun. They do it for money. But the guys who fall in love with them, just what goes through their minds? The guys who cling to the hope that their bargirls are special, that their bargirls don’t lie and cheat, they’re the ones that I really don’t understand.
‘No, I’ve never seen her with a guy,’ I said. But just because I hadn’t seen her walking arm in arm with another farang didn’t mean that she didn’t have a string of overseas sponsors, men who would send her a monthly ‘salary’ in the hope that Som would be faithful to them. It was laughable. The best they could hope for was a form of timeshare: regular payments would entitle them to her company on their occasional visits to the Land of Smiles. She was providing a fantasy, and getting well paid for it, too.
‘There you go, then,’ said William. ‘That’s all I need to know. I’m going to give her the benefit of the doubt.’
I wished him well and cut the connection. I’d done my job. I’d told him what I thought, but he preferred to cling to the fantasy.
I opened a bottle of Jack Daniels. I’m sure Som would make William welcome when he came back to Thailand. She’d probably move in with him for a while, but as soon as a wealthier sponsor came to town she’d be off, spinning William a line about a relative being sick or her mother needing company. The only way to keep a girl like Som would be to keep upping the ante, to keep paying, until he had nothing left to give. And once she’d bled him dry she’d be off for ever. I raised the bottle in salute to the man on the other side of the world, a man who didn’t know what was about to hit him. Another lamb to the slaughter.
THE CASE OF THE WORRIED HEIR
Robyn was a well-spoken guy and sounded like he had his head screwed on right when he phoned me from the UK. He lived in Oxford and the way he told it he was one of the few guys who’d married a Thai girl and made a success of it. Sorry if I sound cynical, but in the Western world marriages have about a fifty-fifty chance of actually ending up as till death do we part. In the States most marriages fail, and the UK has the worst marriage failure rate in Europe. Throw in the fact that the wife was a hooker prior to tying the knot and that she is from a totally different culture and I’m always amazed to hear that a Thai-farang marriage has lasted longer than five minutes.
Anyway, when Robyn was in his forties he’d been in Thailand working for an NGO when he’d met the love of his life. He didn’t say that he’d met her in a bar and I didn’t ask. They’d married and he’d taken her back to Oxford where so far they’d lived happily ever after and raised a couple of kids. They were getting on fine, he said. He wasn’t a rich man, far from it. He worked in a bookshop in the city centre and didn’t seem to be particularly ambitious. But he wasn’t worried about his long-term prospects because his elderly father was very wealthy. Robyn’s dad, Jack, owned a huge farm on the outskirts of the city which he leased out while he lived in a bungalow. Robyn’s mother had passed away a few years earlier, and as Jack was now in his late seventies it wouldn’t be too long before the estate passed to Robyn. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t get the feeling that Robyn was waiting vulture-like for his old man to pass on, but death comes to all of us and when the Grim Reaper called for Jack, Robyn would get his inheritance.
Anyway, Robyn kept telling his dad what a great place Thailand was and suggested that he head out to the Land of Smiles for an extended holiday. The warm climate and the hospitable people would be a tonic for the old man, and a welcome change for the grey clouds and gloomy faces of a typical English winter. Eventually Jack agreed. Robyn was all too well aware of the dangers of Thai bargirls so he made sure that Jack steered clear of Bangkok, Pattaya and Phuket and suggested that he rent a serviced apartment in Cha-am. Robyn’s wife had friends and relatives in the beach resort, which is a couple of hours drive from Bangkok, so Robyn knew that Jack would be well looked after if he ran into any problems.
Robyn figured that his dad would have three months in the sun before returning to Oxford revitalised. What he didn’t plan on was the Thai gossip network, which went into overdrive almost as soon as Jack walked into his serviced apartment. A rich, elderly farang, staying alone. It was like a wounded tuna thrashing around in a shark- infested sea. Within days a beautiful young girl by the name of Ying was offering to show him around. Ying lived in the block and worked part-time as a real-estate agent. The way Robyn told it, she’d started cooking and cleaning for Jack, telling him that she had a Thai boyfriend in the past but that now she was footloose and fancy free and much preferred farang men to Thais
Jack and Robyn spoke every few days on the phone and at first Robyn was happy enough that his father had someone to cook and clean for him and to show him around. But Robyn’s happiness was short-lived when Jack dropped the bombshell that he and Ying had become more than just good friends. They were in love, Jack was going to marry her and as soon as the winter was over, he planned to bring her back to the UK. Jack was especially pleased that Ying was only a few years younger than Robyn’s wife so she wouldn’t be lonely.
That’s when Robyn got in touch with me. He realised that if the marriage went ahead, the family estate would quite probably end up in the hands of a twenty-something Thai girl.
Like Robyn, I was hearing alarm bells ringing. A ten-year age gap is perfectly acceptable in a relationship. I’ve known marriages work where the husband is twenty years older than the wife. But Jack was half a century older than Ying, and I doubted that it was his wrinkles or shrunken gums that she fancied. You didn’t have to be a private eye to realise that Jack had been hooked by a gold-digger, but the old man was clearly thinking with his dick rather than his brain, so the son wanted me on the case. He’d found my firm on the internet and called me straight away. Robyn had already done a bit of detective work himself. His wife had recommended the apartment block to Robyn’s father and she’d telephoned the staff there to get the low down on Ying. The staff didn’t think much of Ying, apparently, and were fairly sure that she had a Thai boyfriend. I assured Robyn that I’d be able to help and gave him my bank details.
As soon as the retainer had been transferred I phoned my contact at the British Embassy. Generally the embassy officials are not too helpful to guys like me but over the years my contact Clive had been less obstructive than most. I ran Jack’s situation by Clive and asked him what the chances would be of Miss Ying getting a visa to the UK. ‘About the same as a snowball in hell,’ said Clive. In cases like that-which were not unusual in Thailand-the embassy would keep on stalling, hoping that the husband-to-be would come to his senses. I passed that information on to Robyn so that at least he could stop worrying about anything happening in the short term.
The next step was to have chat with Jack. I caught a VIP bus to Cha Am, then paid ten baht for a motorcycle taxi to take me to the apartment block. I asked the girls at the reception desk to phone Jack’s room and five minutes later we were sitting at a beachside bar enjoying a couple of beers. I told him that I was from the British Embassy and that I had a few questions about his application for a visa for Ying. He didn’t question the fact that I had a New Zealand accent, and he was eager to chat. I figured that during the weeks he’d been in Thailand he’d been starved of intelligent conversation. We chatted about his life in Cha Am, his family back in Oxford, rugby, football, and then eventually we got around to the subject at hand. Miss Ying.
It was Jack’s first trip to Thailand, so I explained the basics to him. There are no pensions, unemployment benefits or sickness payments, so Thai girls would do whatever they had to do to survive and to support their families. And attaching herself to a wealthy older man was a much better option than planting rice by hand.
Jack shook his head, refusing to accept that I might be telling the truth. At his age he deserved a little pampering, he said. And he was sure that while Ying might not yet be in love with him, she would make a perfect wife.
According to Jack, she phoned him every morning, then came around in the early afternoon. Most days she went downstairs to the local hair salon to make herself look good for him. They would eat together most evenings, and then at ten o’clock she’d head off to her own room. They had become lovers he admitted coyly, but she didn’t
