Colin Cotterill - Grandad, Thereэ's head on the beach

"Bad day at the office?" I asked. It was only nine A.M.

"They treat me like a dishrag," he said. "Honestly. I'm the only one actually working here, and nobody appreciates me. They've got their catfish ponds and their Five Star fried chicken concessions and their Amway-and who in their right mind would buy foundation cream from a man who plucks his nose hair in public, I ask you?-and actual policing is a troublesome diversion for most of them."

He plonked down in a padded chair I'd already liberated from plastic.

"Why didn't you want to meet in your office?" I asked.

"I don't have an office anymore. Not to myself, anyway. They put him in there-Egg, the fat man with the cat carcass on his head."

"What's he doing here?"

"Requested a transfer, they say. But pray tell me why anyone would ask to move here. He was in Pattani before."

"Well, excuse me, but that might just explain why he'd want to move here. Are you joking? Pattani? Muslims on motorcycles shooting harmless Buddhists. Buddhists on motorcycles shooting harmless Muslims. Pick off five of ours, and we'll pick off six of yours. Schools torched. Primary school teachers assassinated. It's the world center of cowards with weapons. Kill anyone as long as there's no danger of getting hurt yourself. It's the symbolism. They no longer value human life down there."

"Have you entirely finished?"

"Yes."

I hadn't really. There was so much I had to say about the deep south.

"Well, Senora Evita, if you'd been paying attention, you 'd have noticed I didn't question his reason for leaving Pattani. I asked why he'd want to come here to Thailand's own Pyong Yang when there are so many better moves he could have made. I sneaked a look at his transfer papers. He specifically requested Pak Nam, but he has no family connections here."

"Has he got a girlfriend?"

"Do you have no shame?"

"I'm not applying. I was just…"

"I know. I'm just being catty. Sorry."

"You don't like him, do you?"

"Well, apart from the fact that his short-wave radio is on ALL the time, you know what he did? You remember those darling little button ferns I had on the desk? He emptied them out the second-floor window, dirt and all."

"No!"

"Can you believe it? He said if he wanted to be in the jungle, he'd take a job with the border patrol. I'd nurtured those ferns. They were like children to me. Of course, they died immediately. They weren't used to the harsh world outside."

I took a tissue from my bag and handed it to him. I was just in time.

"He's a bully," I said.

Chompu nodded and wiped the tears from his eyes.

"I'm afraid of him," he said. "He talks so rudely to me. I daren't go in the office now."

"You've got a gun."

"You think I should?"

"Can't hurt. Most bullies are just friendless cowards. Nobody would miss him."

"Oh, but he has friends."

"How would you know?"

"Because according to the statement, he was having lunch with his buddies at eleven thirty yesterday."

"Were you doing surveillance on h- Wait! What statement?"

"The statement that was included in the investigation of your bombing. It was a hand grenade, by the way."

"Why would…? Don't tell me he provided an alibi for the rat brothers?"

"They're off the hook."

"I could see they were friendly when he came by our place the day they picked up the head. But why would he give them an-"

The door swung open, and Constable Mah Lek sauntered in with a tray of coffee cups and iced water.

"Sorry, folks," he said. "Had to wait for the water to boil. It's an old kettle. Sugar in the pot. Coconut cookies, but they're a bit old too."

He set his wares down on the table between us.

"Everything OK?" he asked.

"I'll recommend the service here to every criminal I know," I said.

He laughed and left us to it.

"Where were they supposedly having lunch?" I asked. "There'd have to be witnesses to corroborate it."

"Don't bother. They were at Egg's house. Just the three of them."

Convenient. Egg and the rats alone.

"He has a house?"

"On the way to the hospital."

"So he has other means. Like someone else I know."

"Don't lump me together with his type. My means are from a family heirloom."

"Accrued over hundreds of years of honest dealings with the common people, no doubt."

"Don't mock the wealthy. The only difference between your family and mine is that we were successful at business. We were competent."

"No argument there."

We sipped our Nescafe, and I wondered why instant coffee was classified as a drink.

"All right," I said at last. "Then we need a counter-witness who saw them in Maprao at the time of the explosion. You were interviewing the bystanders. Did anyone see the SUV?"

"No."

"Come on. We have twenty cars and trucks passing a day. Surely someone saw a big black wagon pass through."

"Not one."

"All right. Then they were driving one of their own cars. Did anyone see a strange slow-moving vehicle cruising the village?"

"No."

"A motorcycle with both riders in helmets?"

"No."

"Come on, Chom. You and the Keystone Kops were talking to the crowd for an hour. There were fifty-odd people there. Surely someone saw something? I watched Constable Mah Yai filling out a case form. Somebody was making a statement."

"Not about the bombing."

"Something else? What?"

"You know Ari?"

"The monkey handler? Who doesn't?"

"He filed a complaint."

"I bet it wasn't relevant."

"Someone's kidnapped his monkey."

If I was the UN, I'd pick up the phone and request a Thai/Burmese simultaneous interpreter. Twenty minutes later I'd have a girl in my office with a Ph.D. in both languages. I wasn't the UN, and I had no idea how to conduct a clandestine interview with Shwe the squid dryer. He supervised a team at Grajom Fy that laid out sandfish and baby squid on bamboo racks to dry under the hot sun. With the arrival of the monsoons, sunny periods were few, so the workers had to hurry out with their trays and be prepared to hurry them back under cover when the rains came. I know it sounds trivial, but some twenty thousand fish are sun-baked there every day. Someone was making a lot of money out of the operation, and it wasn't the Burmese.

There was just the one NGO working out of Pak Nam, and that was Rescue the Orphans Thailand. It was a branch of an international organization called Rescue the Orphans World that reputedly did some good…somewhere. I had yet to find that place. In my cynical mind they were every bit as bad as the SRM and a dozen other acronyms and ini-tialisms that claimed to be doing more than they were. They misled and leeched off the backs of other projects and took a lot of photos of things they weren't responsible for to send back to the ignorant church folks in the West. ROT was brazenly Christian. With every pill, every textbook, they'd issue a reminder to the orphans that if it wasn't for the great white God, they'd be illiterate or starving or dead. So howsabout a hymn?

But ROT was also one of the three places downtown with A/C (7-Eleven and the bank being the other two), so I strolled into their office. I'd heard they had a Burmese working there who spoke English. There were four desks, and they were all empty. A tall man in a yellow T-shirt, yellow trousers, and a yellow peaked cap was sitting on the floor cutting out yellow paper chains. Yellow seemed to be in this year. He looked fearfully in my direction.

"Hello," I said in English.

"Sawat dee," he said badly in Thai.

He remained seated on the ground, perhaps believing I'd come to the wrong place.

"Do you speak English?" I asked.

"Yes."

"I need to speak to a Burmese worker. Can you translate for me?"