Behind the Night Bazaar (11 page)

‘Bom and Deh,’ Ratratarn said, ‘that should narrow the field. Idiot! There’d be hundreds men in Chiang Mai who go by those nicknames. Now think again, Officer. Is there anything else you can tell me, anything out of the ordinary you saw last night?’

Komet mulled over it for a moment. ‘Well, I did see a farang woman near the foreigner’s house when I first went on duty.’

‘What farang woman?’ Ratratarn’s tone was no longer sarcastic.

‘I don’t know, Sir. She had white skin. She was standing outside a cafe across the street.’

‘What time was this?’

‘When I arrived, Sir. She might have looked at the house once or twice. But she went away after that.’

‘Think harder, Officer Komet,’ Ratratarn said as he leafed through a pile of documents. ‘What did the farang woman look like?’

Komet took a deep breath. ‘She had dark hair, like a Thai person, but curly.’

‘And was this farang woman’s curly hair short or long?’ Ratratarn said, finger poised on a document.

‘Long enough to touch her shoulders.’

‘Gotcha!’ Ratratarn punched the page in front of him. ‘It’s in the interviews Pornsak and Tanin conducted at the Night Bazaar. Several witnesses reported seeing a farang woman with long, dark, curly hair in the bar that evening.’

‘Oh?’

Ratratarn looked up as if he’d forgotten Komet was in the room. ‘You can go, Officer. But when you resume your post this evening, your orders are to take down the names of all pedestrians—even the damn garbage collectors—and report back on any activity in the area surrounding the foreigner’s house.’

‘Yes, Sir.’

‘One more question. Did you check the locks on the doors and windows after those boys got into a fight in the street?’

‘I’m not sure, Sir.’

Komet regretted the words as soon as he’d said them.

‘Damn it, Komet! Did you or did you not check the doors and windows after the boys had left?’

‘I checked the front door, Sir. But maybe not the back…’ ‘Just get out of here!’

Ratratarn picked up the phone and began making a call before Komet had even closed the door.

The young officer resolved to be more diligent. He would check the doors and windows every hour. He would take down the names of everyone who even glanced in his direction. And he would not let his imagination run away with him. As Ratratarn said, phii were things peasants believed in, not members of the Chiang Mai police. Komet had a job to do. And with a baby due in the cool season, it was vital he kept doing it.

The line was busy. Ratratarn smoked a cigarette before trying again. It was risky, calling from his office. But his mobile phone battery was flat and it couldn’t wait. He had to talk to Kelly.

Ratratarn didn’t like dealing with farangs; but the building that housed Kelly’s venture was owned by the
jao
por
whose business interests Ratratarn protected. And it wasn’t a task he could delegate—despite years in the country, Kelly hadn’t learned Thai, whereas Ratratarn spoke reasonable English, a result of being posted as a young officer to the US Air Force base in Udon Thani.

He tried the number again. The phone was answered with a gruff ‘
kup
’. It was Kelly’s bouncer, Mongkol, a man with the face of a bullfrog and charm to match.

‘Get Kelly,’ Ratratarn said.

‘G’day Lieutenant Colonel,’ Kelly came on the line almost immediately. ‘What’s up?’

Ratratarn cleared his throat. ‘Looks like the foreign woman resurfaced last night.’

‘Are you serious? This is bad.’

It irked Ratratarn that Kelly only considered the situation serious when another foreigner was involved. He’d tied up loose ends within his own ranks, even allowing that imbecile Komet to take the credit for locating the murder weapon. Yet Kelly showed no sign of feeling under threat from the Thai side.

‘Who is this woman?’ Kelly continued. ‘Is she Australian?’

‘That’s what we’re trying to find out,’ Ratratarn said. ‘In the meantime, keep your eyes open. We can’t let anything slip at this point.’

‘For sure,’ Kelly said. ‘You’ll keep me posted?’

‘Excuse me?’ Sometimes Kelly’s vernacular was beyond him.

‘You’ll let me know, right?’

‘Of course.’ He paused for a moment. ‘You do realise this latest development affects our agreement.’

‘Oh, come on—’

‘I have to dedicate additional manpower to finding the farang woman. Such services cost time and money.’

Ratratarn wanted him to understand how the system worked: everybody served somebody. Ratratarn served the local mafia boss, while the jao por’s underlings served him. Pornsak, Tanin and Komet served Ratratarn, too, as did Kelly, although the Australian failed to appreciate this. Kelly laboured under the delusion that if he paid enough money he could buy himself out of the hierarchy. He thought the issue was price when, in fact, it was all about order and respect.

‘Listen, mate,’ Kelly said. ‘Can we meet in the next day or so? I agree, this changes things.’

Ratratarn smiled. ‘I’ll come tomorrow at midnight.’

He hung up and returned to the files on his desk. When Pornsak interviewed the owner of Man Date, he’d mentioned meeting a farang woman on the night of the murder. He said she’d accompanied the Canadian to the bar, witnessed the argument between him and Khun Sanga and left soon after. He couldn’t recall her name but said she spoke Thai.

One of the kids there also mentioned a farang woman. But Officer Tanin, who conducted that interview, hadn’t thought it warranted further questioning; he hadn’t even bothered taking down a physical description.

He read over the particulars in Pornsak’s report:

Name: Unknown
Height: approx. 1.6 metres
Race: European (white skin)
Appearance: Black-brown, curly, shoulder-length hair
Nationality: Unknown
Address in Thailand: Unknown
Other: Can speak Thai

He pressed the intercom button on his desk. ‘Send Sergeant Pornsak to me.’

‘He’s on patrol, Sir,’ the receptionist said.

‘Then put through a call to his
meu teu
, will you?’

The department did not distribute mobile phones to officers of Pornsak’s rank but he’d bought his own. Ratratarn picked up the receiver after the first ring and heard Pornsak’s voice through the static.

‘You wanted to speak to me, Sir?’

‘Yes. Pornsak, I want you to go back to the bar behind the Night Bazaar and question the owner again. See if he remembers anything else about the farang woman who was there on the night of the murder.’

‘Sir?’

‘Any details at all, especially where she might be staying in Chiang Mai. I want you to track down the kid whose statement Tanin took, too…’ he leafed through the file, ‘Khun Mana Traisophon. Lives at 4/17 Soi Wat Chiang Yeun. Ask him for the same information. I need a name.’

‘Yes, Sir.’

‘And Pornsak, you are to report back directly to me on this. Understand?’

‘Perfectly, Sir.’

Ratratarn terminated the call. His key chain was by the phone and he picked it up, weighing it in the palm of his hand. He walked across the room and unlocked a large filing cupboard.

The door opened on the material he’d taken from the dead foreigner’s house: computer, disks, files, folders full of documents and a bundle of personal effects, including letters. Ratratarn had checked all of the computer stuff and while he’d found plenty relating to the foreigner’s work on AIDS and prostitution, there was nothing that fingered him or Kelly in any way. Either Kelly got it wrong, in which case there’d been no point getting the Canadian out of the way, or the guy had seen them coming and passed on the evidence to someone else. Ratratarn was confident the foreigner’s Thai colleagues weren’t in on it, which suggested that information had been leaked to another farang. He found colleagues’ names among the computer files, but nothing that raised his suspicions.

He picked up the bundle of letters. Although the foreigner was Canadian, none of the envelopes bore stamps from Canada. There were a few from Australia, some from European countries and a large number from within Thailand.

Closing the cupboard, Ratratarn took the letters to his desk. He dreaded going through them, but it was another task he couldn’t delegate. Sorting them into piles by country, he lit another Krung Thep, inhaled deeply and opened the first of the envelopes.

J
ayne patted the document on her desk—lovingly, as if she could touch Didier by association—and looked at the familiar handwriting at the top of the page. Didier’s impatient scrawl was at odds with his nature. It made his letters difficult to read, though it pleased Jayne that he never resorted to typing them.

She shook her head and focused. The document was printed from a computer file. Didier had written in the top margin:
Background notes as requested: will discuss on 6/5
.

The paper, ‘The Impacts of the AIDS Epidemic on the Demographics of the Sex Industry in Northern Thailand’, was dated April 1996. It opened with a brief history of how AIDS, once a disease of injecting drug users and homosexuals in Bangkok in the mid-1980s, exploded into a national epidemic affecting one per cent of the Thai population— some 500,000 people—by 1992. HIV had quickly spread through the community via the sex industry, with rural areas the worst affected, particularly those in the north.

‘A survey of nearly 3000 sex workers in Chiang Mai last year found 40 per cent infected,’ Jayne read. ‘Infection rates are even higher among the city’s poorest sex workers: an estimated 72 per cent of women who charge fifty baht or less per customer are HIV-positive. Such women average ten to twenty clients per day, the majority of whom do not use condoms.’

Jayne shook her head at the implications: for a sex worker to service twenty clients per day meant, somewhere in the town, women were being fucked by a different man more than once every hour for less than two dollars a time.

Most of the sex workers Jayne had met were like Nalissa, working in up-market establishments catering to foreigners. There was no way she could get inside a brothel patronised by the poorest locals.

She rubbed her temples and returned to the report. It described how the successful implementation of public health activities such as a ‘100 per cent condom campaign’ was complicated by the fact that prostitution remained illegal in Thailand—a perplexing situation, given the industry’s high profile, and a testament to the Thai capacity for polite disregard.

‘Last year, as part of the national AIDS response, the government introduced a bill proposing to decriminalise prostitution,’ Jayne read, ‘arguing that if prostitution were no longer illegal, more sex workers would be encouraged to come forward for testing and counselling and the industry would be easier to regulate. However, the bill is yet to be enacted—’

The remainder of the sentence had been scribbled out, possibly by Moira O’Halloran, the lines in black ink rather than the blue Didier had used. Scowling, Jayne held the page up to the light and gradually made out the words beneath the lines: ‘nor is it ever likely to be enacted, so long as the military and police continue to profit as they do from the illegal trade.’ The words were significant and Jayne wondered why anyone would delete them.

She found the answer under a subheading ‘Shifts in Procurement Patterns’ in the local sex industry. In the north in particular, men were demanding greater access to non-Thai sex workers—such as women from the hill tribes and from neighbouring countries Burma and Laos. Demand had also increased for ‘virgins’ (younger women and children) in the belief that they were more likely to be ‘AIDS-free’. But in fact, the paper said these groups were at great risk of HIV infection, especially the children. And because of their status as minors, lack of family support and inability to speak Thai, most did not know how to access health services.

‘These shifts in demand have been well documented by the Zero Tolerance for Child Prostitution (ZTCP) Agency,’ Jayne read, ‘and are noted among both Thais and foreign sex tourists. Thai patrons favour underage, albeit post-pubescent girls. However, at least one expatriate entrepreneur in Chiang Mai is known to offer foreigners pre-pubescent children—a situation that could not exist without the collusion of the local police.’

Jayne paused to light a cigarette. Echoes of a conversation with Didier came back to her from a couple of months ago. They’d met to talk books, but Didier was preoccupied, his mood bleak. He told her that in villages around Chiang Mai where he worked, not a week went by without a funeral for someone who’d died of AIDS.

‘Last week, it was a sixteen-year-old girl,’ he told Jayne. ‘Given how long it takes AIDS to develop, she couldn’t have been more than eleven or twelve when she got infected.’

Jayne flicked the ash from her cigarette, kicking herself for not having thought of it before. Didier was looking into a child sex racket—possibly involving the ‘expatriate entrepreneur’ referred to in his notes. An operation like that would be worth a fortune, both to whoever ran it and to the cops paid to turn a blind eye. He must have found out who was behind it, and they’d killed him to keep it quiet. That would explain why he’d been framed for Nou’s murder, too: if his findings surfaced after his death, they could be dismissed as the ravings of a man unhinged, the amphetamines further evidence of an unbalanced mind.

Jayne forced herself to finish reading the document. ‘The conditions of vulnerability are clear,’ Didier had written. ‘They consist of poverty, gender, youth, ethnicity and illegality of status as a prostitute and/or illegal immigrant. The key is to enact legislation and develop projects that will have a real impact on changing such conditions.’

Jayne assumed it was Moira O’Halloran who’d put a single, black line through the text, from the subheading to the end of the document. Moira had told Jayne that her proposed study would ‘identify conditions of vulnerability’. Didier believed the conditions of vulnerability were already clear.

Her cigarette still smouldering in the ashtray, Jayne rose to her feet and started pacing the room. Didier had given Moira highly sensitive information—information that may have cost him his life—and she intended to do nothing with it. Jayne cursed again, searching for a way to both exonerate Didier and show the bitch up.