fee, of course.
Once the money had been paid and the police had pocketed their sweeteners the atmosphere changed. The shackles were taken off, Armitage was given a coffee and croissant and taken to Don Muang Airport in the back of the police chief’s Mercedes where he and his brother were escorted on to the next plane to Singapore. Armitage’s passport was stamped persona non grata and he was told never to darken Thailand’s doorstep again.
My first case, and I’d come out smelling of roses. I’d made money and I’d helped someone; a private eye couldn’t ask for a better result.
THE CASE OF THE RELUCTANT VIRGIN
It was love at first sight, at least that’s how the client described it. He’d seen her across a crowded dancefloor in a trendy Phuket nightclub. She was slim and sexy, long black hair, great legs, and was one hell of a dancer. The client was an accountant from Glasgow in Scotland with an accent so impenetrable that I had to keep asking him to repeat himself. He was in his late forties, which made him almost twice the age of the love of his life. He was average looking, definitely not movie-star material but he had his own hair and most of his own teeth and the gold Rolex on his wrist suggested that he was making good money and that alone would make him attractive to the average bar-going Thai girl. Not that Joy was a bargirl. She worked in a hair salon in Patong, the island’s major tourist area but she liked to let her hair down in the evenings.
The client, Bill MacKay, had offered to buy Joy a drink as she rested between bouts of dancing, and the following day she’d acted as a tour guide, showing him around the island. MacKay showed me photographs of them at a monkey show, riding elephants, posing on beaches. The perfect couple. MacKay had gone to Phuket with three golfing buddies, but after he met Joy he didn’t spend much time on the links. He and Joy became inseparable and by the time his three-week vacation was over he’d proposed to her, on bended knee in a crowded seafood restaurant as the band played ‘My Way’. He’d asked for the theme from Titanic but something had got lost in translation. Not that MacKay cared. Joy said yes and that was all that mattered.
They went to Joy’s home town of Chiang Mai and he met her parents. They were a middle-class Thai couple with six children of whom Joy was the second youngest. They owned a small noodle shop and seemed thrilled to have MacKay as a potential son-in-law. They’d discussed the sin sot-the Thai dowry that’s usually paid to a girl’s parents-and they’d agreed on a very reasonable 100,000 baht. Reasonable for a farang, that is. Thais usually paid about 20,000 in poorer families.
MacKay was sure that his bride-to-be was a good girl and not involved in the island’s thriving sex industry. Estimates of the number of prostitutes working in Phuket vary from 4,000 to 20,000, but Joy had never danced in a go-go bar or worked up a lather in a massage parlour. But even good girls can be won over by handsome strangers so he didn’t want her to stay in Phuket while he was back in Scotland. I guess he figured that if he could win her heart in just a few short weeks, another visitor might just be as lucky. He had given her 50,000 baht and told her to quit her job and stay with her parents while he was away. MacKay planned to be in Scotland for two months, and then return with his parents for a big Thai wedding. He’d do the paperwork with the embassy and if all went well he and Joy would return to Glasgow to start a new life together. He owned a big house on the outskirts of the city and planned to set Joy up with her own beauty parlour and then live happily ever after. But he’d heard all the horror stories about men being ripped off by Thai brides, taken for a ride while a husband or boyfriend waited in the background, maybe with a kid or two. So the day before MacKay was due to fly back to Scotland, he came around to my office and plonked down the holiday snaps and a 30,000-baht retainer on my desk.
‘I want to know if she’s got any skeletons in her closet,’ he said.
‘Like a husband?’ I said.
‘Anything,’ said MacKay. ‘I’m sure I’ve got nothing to worry about, but better safe than sorry, as my mother always says.’
‘Forewarned is forearmed,’ I said. ‘Has she ever given you any reason to suspect that there might be a problem?’
MacKay shook his head emphatically. ‘She’s never asked me for money, never given me any reason to suspect that she might be hiding anything.’ He leaned across my desk and lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘And so far as I know, she’s still a virgin.’
My eyebrows headed skyward. Joy wasn’t a sex worker but she’d clearly had no reservations about going out with a farang, and that suggested she had at least some sexual experience. I’d never met a Westerner before who’d claimed that his girlfriend was a virgin. But I’ve never seen the Taj Mahal and everyone tells me that exists, so I was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt.
‘You haven’t slept together?’
He flashed me an embarrassed smile. ‘We’ve slept together loads of times, but we’ve never…’ He nodded like a woodpecker getting busy on an oak. ‘You know…’
I nodded. I knew. But it sounded unlikely. Lots of Thai girls were virgins when they married. In Thai society, it was pretty much the norm. But Thai girls weren’t usually so coy with Westerners. And real virgins generally didn’t share a bed with their boyfriends.
‘She does things…’ he said. ‘You know…’ He nodded encouragingly. ‘Things.’
‘Things?’
‘You know. Oral.’
I winced. More information than I needed.
‘She loves oral. It’s just that she says she doesn’t want to go the whole way, not until we’re married.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘I get the picture.’
‘She’s really good at it. I mean, the fact that we haven’t had sex yet doesn’t worry me. She says she loves me.’
‘Got it,’ I said.
‘Spends hours going down on me, that’s not a problem, but she won’t allow, you know, penetration.’
Far more information than I needed. I stood up and shook his hand and ushered him out of the office, promising to call him once I’d run a check on the lovely Joy.
First things first. I bought a Thai Airways ticket from Bangkok to Phuket, Phuket to Chiang Mai, and Chiang Mai to Bangkok, then flew down south and wandered into the beauty parlour where she worked. There was no sign of her and when I asked for her I was told that she’d gone back home, to Chiang Mai. So far, so good.
I had a haircut and a face massage, a manicure and a pedicure. All at the client’s expense, of course. I walked out smelling like a tart’s boudoir with the full background on Joy. She’d met a farang called Bill, fallen in love with him and had gone back home to stay with her parents until they got married. So far as the beauty parlour girls knew. Joy had never had a serious boyfriend and had never been married. She’d always enjoyed dancing and discos, and had gone out with several farangs, but there had been nobody regular and she didn’t have anyone sending her money from overseas. It was starting to look as if Joy really was on the level and that Bill had found the rarest of jewels, a Thai girl who was a virgin and who loved him.
I caught a taxi to the airport and got the next flight to Chiang Mai. It was late evening by the time I arrived so I checked into a small hotel and drank the best part of a bottle of Jack Daniels before retiring to bed. Three times during the night small cards mysteriously appeared under my door offering visiting massage services but a good nights sleep was all the relaxation I needed.
Joy had told Bill that she was from Chiang Mai, but in fact she’d been born in a small town about forty miles away. There is nothing unusual or suspicious about that, most Thais would give the nearest big city as their place of birth. But it meant that I’d have to go to the local municipal office rather than the big one in Chiang Mai.
I had the hotel’s buffet breakfast and then went out on to the street to negotiate with a taxi driver. I promised him 500 baht for a half day, plus another 200 to take me to the airport once I’d finished.
For starters we took a drive past the house where Joy was living. I didn’t stop because a farang visitor would have attracted too much attention. It was a three-storey shophouse with the noodle shop in the ground floor. I saw a Thai man in his sixties, who I guessed was the girl’s father, ladling soup into a line of chipped bowls, but there was no sign of Joy.
The driver took me to the municipal office, the Tee Wah Garn, a grey concrete building with two Thai flags
