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

"Piper."

I told her who I was, where I was, and what was happening. I didn't know whether she could speak Thai, so I did this in my pronunciation-challenged English. All the time she kept quiet, and I wondered whether she'd put the phone on her desk and gone out for dinner. But I kept going all the way to Sawee and the seven incarcerated Burmese.

"Can you hear me OK?" I asked.

There was a pause and a sound like the tap of a keyboard.

"Just the seven?" she asked.

I think I preferred her when she was quiet.

"Yes."

"It's just that that is rather small fry."

She had a Lady Di accent.

"Just how many people need to be kidnapped and killed before we can increase the size of the fry?" I asked.

"Thousands disappear every year," she said. "Refugees wiped out by the junta on their way to Thai camps. Children nabbed from construction site slums. And lots of et ceteras. I get reports such as yours every day. Your situation is every bit as tragic, of course, but the resources needed to resolve the matter would far exceed the benefits."

I didn't know whether I admired her honesty or hated her for it.

"Benefits obviously meaning something more important than keeping people alive," I presumed.

"Yes, look, I'm sorry. In my line of work I tend to trivialize death. It helps. The benefits I'm referring to are the factors which help to change world opinion. Burma has no natural oil to rescue from tyranny, so we have to rely on slowly creating a mood of outrage at the social level before we can hope for international intervention. Once we have political support, we may be able to save more lives than we can with a small police action in the forgettable south."

"I thought you had a budget for things like this."

"We do. But our directive is to maximize these situations. To take an issue and humanize it at an international level. Touch as many hearts as possible. We did a sea rescue once, but it was so isolated and over so quickly that we barely made a ripple in the world press. It was a very expensive failure."

I was punched numb for a few seconds. When I came around, I asked, "Do you have a counterpart at the Thai Police Ministry?"

"Certainly. We fund their Division of International Day Laborers."

With all that money you'd think they'd come up with something more catchy than DIDL.

"And what do they do there?" I asked.

"They distribute information to the press. Collect relevant reports from the police data bank."

"Any of them have guns?"

"What are you getting at? They're all qualified police officers."

"I mean, do they ever leave the office and go out and shoot people?"

"Not…no, not shoot. There are officers attached to the unit who are involved in casework."

"But they could be called upon if massive public outrage was being waged. They could rush to a scene if it was in the public eye and guaranteed a world audience?"

"I suppose…yes."

"Good. Then this conversation wasn't a complete waste of time. I'll get back to you."

The trouble with a cell phone was that if you slammed it down, you'd break your own jaw. It seemed the bigger the organization, the less they dealt with actual people. And don't even get me started on the UN. All I needed was a few thousand dollars for high-powered weaponry, and we could do the rest ourselves. Blow those slavers out of the Gulf. But no, I suppose that would be just too difficult for the silly cow to write up in the annual report.

I collected my printouts and my family and Captain Waew, abandoned all the street-bound nerds, and returned to the truck. We were on our own, tactically, but I didn't want to break that news to the task force. It was a desperately lonely feeling. Giving up suddenly felt like such a good idea. While Grandad drove us very slowly home through the drizzle, I looked around at my cohorts. Arny had joined up because he wanted to impress his girlfriend. Grandad and Waew were on board because they wanted to get revenge on a couple of hoods. None of us was particularly fond of the Burmese. Once the Viagra had worn off, I doubted I'd have any personal interest at all. So what was it? Why could I not shake this urge to do something suicidal? The rain smudged my side window, and I looked into its patterns. I saw the posturing of the rat brothers and the homophobic bullying of Lieutenant Egg, and I thought back to why I'd become a crime reporter. If the crooks were crooked and the cops were crooked, who was there left to bring justice to our corrupt world? Who could we respect? Where was the shoulder angel who twanged on the conscience of the undecided youth? Who else might argue that the words graft and dishonesty and selfishness were not necessarily inspirational? Who else but the press? That's why I'd become a journalist, and that's why I'd turned to crime writing. To shore up our flimsy status quo. To challenge the view that the bigger the crime the lower the chances of arrest.

Victims of trafficking and imminent execution shouldn't be on their own with no hero to fly in and rescue them. But out there on the high sea there were only the seagull and the prawn to witness the crime. It was a vast lawless outback. It was impossible for a criminal not to be overwhelmed by that feeling of invincibility. Who cared what he did?

Me.

I'm not sure anybody noticed that explosion of moral dignity inside the cab of the Mighty X. I felt it was time to inspire a team spirit.

"OK, everyone," I said. "Let's get serious. What do we have to go on?"

I'd forgotten all about the old boys and their afternoon detective work. As they hadn't mentioned anything I assumed they'd had no success with the Thai boat owners. So I was surprised when, with a twitch, Captain Waew said:

"Common opinion is that it's the Bangkok boats doing all the illegal stuff. There were two new concessions added out of the blue last year by senatorial decree, or whatever it's called. That means that despite long-standing agreements with the Fisheries department limiting the number of contracts, every now and then you get some influential figure handing out deals to this or that nephew or cousin. They'd lease big boats and take them deep into the Gulf. They'd reap as much profit as they could before the next election when the contracts were revoked by the next minister, who'd go on to replace them with his own relatives."

"Did you manage to get the names of any of the boats?" I asked.

"The contact didn't know any specifics, so I phoned the Department of Fisheries. They'll fax me a list of all the newly registered boats over the past year. The local trawler owners aren't at all happy about outsiders coming in, ignoring all the no-fishing zone markers, using dragnets over young coral and just generally making assholes of themselves. The big-boat captains that come from down here in the south, they aren't averse to bending the odd rule, but they've all learned from experience what overfishing has done to their industry."

"This might be a stupid question," I asked, "but isn't there anyone policing the sea at all?"

"I found an old seafarer who told me all about the Coastal Patrol," said Grandad. "Except he called them the

Postal Patrol. They have two boats to police an area of two thousand square kilometers. And they don't have much of a budget for fuel, so they rely on donations."

"Don't tell me," I said. "From big-boat owners."

"That would be correct."

"So if they don't go after the big boats, what do they do?"

"Splash around in the shallows hassling the small-boat fishermen, from what I can make out. Fine them for minor infringements."

"While the big boats break the law with impunity," said Waew.

"It all seems…I don't know…too big for us," said Arny. Never one to pass up an opportunity for pessimism.