want to move in with him until after they were married. That set more alarm bells ringing in my cynical head. Ten o’clock was the perfect time for a young lady to head off to a nightclub with her Thai beau.
I had a couple of more beers with Jack and I told him a few horror stories of farang men who’d lost everything to their Thai wives or girlfriends, but he just laughed and said that Ying was different. If I’d had a dollar for every guy who’s told me that his girl was different, I’d be a hell of a lot richer than I am. I didn’t tell Jack that, though. I wished him well, told him that his application was working its way through the system, and I went off to phone Robyn.
I told Robyn that his father was still determined to marry Ying and that the next stage would be to start checking her background. He was keen for me to proceed and agreed to wire over further funds. I already had a game plan. In my experience, girls having their hair done tended to chat away merrily. In the past I’d tried using my wife to glean information from various hairdressers but she tended to march in and tell all and sundry that her husband was a private eye and ask her questions point blank. Her elder sister Boo was a bit more devious, though, and in recent years she’d had many a free cut and blow dry courtesy of my investigations. I left it until Friday afternoon, figuring that was a dead cert for a day that Miss Ying would get her hair done. I took the VIP bus down to Cha Am with Boo. I showed her a photograph of Ying and made sure that she was in the salon by three o’clock.
Half an hour after Boo had sat down, Ying walked in. She was obviously well known and as luck would have it she sat down next to my sister-in-law. I love it when a plan comes together!
As it happened, Boo didn’t have to do any fishing. It turned out that Ying loved the sound of her own voice and she wanted to tell all and sundry about her good fortune. She had a hooked a rich old farang, there was a huge dowry on the horizon and she was going to be moving to the UK before long.
I’d briefed Boo to see what the hairdressing girls knew, so she used delaying tactics and asked for a dye job. They were still working on her hair when Ying dropped a big tip and headed into the apartment block for her rendezvous with Jack.
It was easy enough then for Boo to get the full scoop on Miss Ying. Later, as we sank a couple of congratulatory Jack Daniels, Boo told me what she’d learned. According to the girls, who were getting a bit fed up with Ying’s boasting, she was the long time mia noi, minor wife, of a local car dealer and that he was also planning to move to the UK to set up a business exporting cars back to Thailand. The farang was old and according to Ying wouldn’t be alive much longer and that she and her boyfriend would have the lot. I gave Boo a 1,000-baht bonus and complemented her on her red hair.
I put Boo on the bus back to Bangkok and staked out the apartment block in a rental car. If I had Miss Ying right, she’d be hanging out with Jack until ten o’clock and then she’d be out on the town with Mr Car Dealer. I couldn’t stop myself grinning when at ten thirty an older model BMW arrived in front of the block, and a few minutes later Ying hurried out and climbed in to give the driver a peck on the cheek. Bingo.
I followed them to a trendy bar-restaurant where a local band belted out pretty good cover versions of Eighties songs to a packed house of middle-class Thais. I got a seat by the bar and munched on my favourite snacks-gung shar nam pla, or raw prawns marinated in fish sauce and chilli, with lashings of raw garlic. Lovely.
Miss Ying and Mr Car Dealer sat at a table and sipped champagne as they listened to the band. There was a large group at the neighbouring table that were celebrating a birthday and at midnight a big cake was taken to their table and everyone began singing ‘happy birthday’. I took the opportunity to pop over with my digital camera and join the other revellers who were taking photographs. I managed to fire off a few shots that clearly showed Miss Ying and Mr Car Dealer together.
I booked into a hotel at Robyn’s expense and the following day headed back to Bangkok. I emailed Robyn a full report and copies of the photographs I’d taken. I figured that would be the end of the case. As it happened, I was wrong. I hadn’t taken into account how attached Jack was to young Miss Ying. When Robyn had told his father about Ying’s boyfriend, Jack point blank refused to believe him. Ying had told him that the man was her brother, and that Jack was the only man she loved. Jack believed her, which just goes to show that there’s no fool like an old fool. It’s a standard lie for Thai girls to pass off their boyfriends, or even husbands, as their brothers. ‘Oh, I share my room with my brother’ they’ll tell their farang sponsor. Bullshit. I’ve been at airports on surveillance jobs when I’ve seen a bargirl tearfully wave off her farang lover, accompanied by her ‘brother’. As soon as the farang has passed through Immigration, the ‘brother’ and the bargirl are at it like dogs in heat.
Anyway, Robyn was starting to panic as he realised that he was faced with the loss of his inheritance. He wanted to know what I thought he should do. I said that if he sent me another 10,000 baht I’d head back to Cha Am and speak to the girl. I might have given Robyn the impression that I was going to get heavy with Miss Ying, but in fact I was just going to play a mind game on her. It was clear from what Boo had told me that Ying wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer so I figured she’d be gullible to fall for any line I gave her.
I waited until the money had come through before catching the VIP bus back to Cha Am. I’d put on a suit and carried a briefcase and added a pair of spectacles to give me added authority. I knocked on Miss Ying’s door, gave her the ‘I’m from the British Embassy and I’m here to talk about your visa application’ speech. I had a fistful of leaflets that I’d picked up last time I’d been at the embassy, and I gave them to her.
Part of me felt sorry for the girl. She was only doing what she had to do to survive. If she’d been born in the West I doubt that she’d have thrown herself at an old fart like Jack or a married man like Mr Car Salesman. But Thailand wasn’t the West and she would soon be thirty and in Thailand a thirty-year-old woman is well over the hill. But Miss Ying wasn’t paying my wages and Robyn was so I hardened my heart and lied to her. I told her that she wasn’t going to get a visa to the UK because the embassy was unhappy at the huge age gap between Jack and herself. I also told her that Jack had very little money, and that he lived off a small allowance. If he’d told her that he was wealthy, he was lying, I said. And I told her that any assets he had in England would, under English law, go to his children on his death. Even if they did go ahead with the marriage, all she would be entitled to would be half of any money that Jack had in Thailand. And there wouldn’t be much of that.
She took it quite well, under the circumstances. She nodded and smiled, fluttered her eyelashes and asked me if I was married. A real trooper.
Jack returned to the UK a few weeks later. I got an email from Robyn saying that I’d killed the romance stone-dead and that his father was busy sending off angry letters to the British Embassy complaining about no-good interfering busybodies and threatening to sue them. It would be water off a duck’s back and I doubted that he’d ever get a reply. I figured Jack had had a lucky escape. He seemed healthy for his age and I got the feeling that Ying might well have been tempted to hurry things along, death-wise. It wouldn’t be the first time that an old farang had been found dead at the bottom of the stairs by a tearful Thai wife. Divorce Thai-style, they call it.
THE CASE OF THE BAD GOOD GIRLS
I’ve lost count of the number of times over the years that guys have said to me that they were ninety-nine per cent sure that their Thai girlfriends weren’t fooling around ‘because she’s a good girl.’ They’re not making a moral judgment, of course. What they mean is that she wasn’t dancing around a silver pole when they met. She wasn’t a bargirl. And, their logic goes, if she wasn’t a bargirl, then she must be a good girl. The problem with that argument is not all bargirls are bad girls. And not all bad girls work in the bars. There are plenty of girls in regular jobs, or going to college, who are every bit as dangerous as the most hardcore go-go dancer.
There’s a pattern to my ‘good girl’ investigations. I’m usually hired by guys who’ve made several visits to Thailand and who have got bored with the bar scene. Bored with watching beautiful semi-naked girls dance around silver poles, I hear you cry. Never! Nah, it’s true. After a while they get bored of hanging out with hookers, and they dream of having a true ‘girlfriend experience’. They start to look elsewhere for female companionship. They pick up a smattering of Thai and start to strike up conversations with shop girls in the local Robinsons department store, or the girl who cuts their hair, or the receptionist in their hotel. One thing leads to another and before long the love- struck tourist is taking the ‘good’ girl to the movies, to dinner, and eventually, to bed. He can’t believe his luck. He’s going out with a regular girl. A girl who hasn’t slept with thousands of other farangs, who doesn’t have a tattoo of a scorpion on her shoulder or stretch marks across her stomach. A girl who says that she loves him, who doesn’t demand a bar fine before going out with him or 2,000 baht every time they have sex.
Stop right there.
