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

"What?"

"Good for you, is what. Screw the tradition. You're a bloody heroine. It was one in the eye to the classes who believe their heritage allows them to break the rules. Left to her own devices, the little duchess probably failed the final semester, and they're still conducting an inquiry to see where she went wrong. As far as they're concerned, she was a top student who suddenly went bad. They'll invite her to resit those last finals, but for reasons you and I know, she'll have to decline. She still doesn't have her degree, does she?"

Noy blushed and sighed. There was a long period of silence that seemed appropriate.

"They came to see me in the dormitory," she said. "A couple of Thai goons in safari shirts…in the middle of D.C., I tell you. They asked me if I wanted to see my parents hurt. It would be a shame, they said, if they were to have an accident. The goons were very matter-of-fact about it. They told me all I had to do was go to the dean and confess that I'd switched my ID card with the Mom Luang's. She hadn't noticed I was a cheat. That, in fact, all my final semester scores should have been hers. Of course, I would have been thrown out of Georgetown in disgrace. My name…my family name would have been dirt. So I ran. I jumped on a Greyhound bus and headed south. I don't know why. It was all a little bit overwhelming. I was starting to get paranoid that they were after me. I was certain there'd be some way of checking passenger lists on aircraft out of the country, so I decided to leave overland. I met up with a tour group of Taiwanese students, and somehow, in the confusion that happens at borders, I got lost in the chaos when a large group came up against an underpaid immigration officer, and I arrived in Mexico in a tour bus. There was no record of me entering the country. I flew home from Mexico City. I think that was what gave us the time to get away from our house. They were still looking for me in the States."

"I respect her for what she did," said Mamanoy.

"You lost your jobs and your house," I said.

"We'd already lost them," she said. "My husband's debts…Noy's time in America gave us a sort of stay of execution. That was all. They paid off our bills as part of the deal, but they're in a position to put more pressure on us. My husband would never get work in his field again. He has accepted full responsibility."

"Oh, what a wonderful man. Frankly, I'm amazed that you're still together," I said.

"Love is-"

"Yeah. Don't bother."

"Being a family is all we have."

"Being a family's really going to make everything so much better on the road and in hiding for the rest of your lives."

"Do you have a better solution?"

"I can fix this," I said, with more confidence than I was actually generating.

"How?"

Good question.

"I'll get back to you on that," I said. "We have time. You'll be safe here for the foreseeable future. We can work together on a strategy."

They didn't look inspired. They still saw me as the cook. They didn't know I had contacts beyond Maprao. I had skills. But I did not reveal my secret identity just then. When the time was right, they would see my super-self.

The uneventfulness of the following morning made it all the more remarkable. At three A.M. the power had returned, and all the lights we'd forgotten to turn off and the utilities we'd forgotten to unplug came to life. There ensued the act of putting them all back to sleep. We'd awaken later to a cautious normality. The natural erosion caused by the backhoe ditch had turned our garden into the Grand Canyon. Water had gushed out onto the beach, and the rear flood waters had subsided. The tide had ebbed to leave one end of our latrine block embedded in the beach, as if it had dropped from space. The sky was clear, and the only reminder of the monsoon was a brisk wind blowing off the Gulf. The Noys sat on their veranda playing pre-breakfast mah-jong with Grandad and Captain Waew. Mair and the ladies of the cooperative continued with their exemplary renovation of the shop. Arny worked out by raking beach wood into pyres, which, if they ever dried out, would one day make spectacular bonfires.

Captain Kow announced that the small boats would be able to venture out that day. As they'd been docked during the temperamental tempest, he had no fresh fishballs to sell from his motorcycle sidecar. Undeterred, he was there bright and early in front of our shop with an honest sign saying THREE-DAY-OLD FISHBALLS-NOT THAT DELICIOUS. It was hardly surprising he sold not a one. I'd invited him to join us for breakfast. As always, he seemed flattered. Grandad Jah seethed, like the alpha old man, at the table but said nothing. And once everyone else was full and gone, I led the captain to my balcony. He admired my mobile shell collection.

"How far out can the little boats go?" I asked.

"Depends on the waves," he said. "Two meters maximum for most of us."

"But if it's calm?"

"Go all the way to Vietnam or until the diesel ran out. Why?"

I'd decided the previous night to tell the captain everything, from the head on the beach to the slave ships to the suspected involvement of the Pak Nam police force. He listened intently but didn't seem all that surprised.

"It's not just here," he said, when I was done.

"What's not?"

"The slavery. Happens all around the coast. Except the recruiting's done by agents over on the west. They put crews together, take their down payments, make promises, then vanish. The Burmese do a three-month stint, then queue up for their salaries only to be told that the wages are all handled through the agencies. It's in the contract-in Thai. As the agents have all shut up and shipped out, that's three months of free labor and nothing for the Burmese to send back to their families. Happens all the time."

I blame Buddhism, you know? Get yourself a soft religion and you can forgive yourself almost anything. No shame. No guilt. I'll do my penance in the next life. No worries. I wondered whether Captain Kow was one of those maipen rai characters. One of the "no problem, let's not get worked up over nothing" majority.

"I imagine you're going to do something about it," he said, and smiled.

Damn. I wish I could have put some teeth in that gap. I knew it would have been a grand smile if it hadn't been so vacant.

"I'd need help," I confessed.

"I could get about ten, maybe fifteen small-boat men together, I suppose."

"You could? And why would they cooperate?"

"They don't like the big boats much. And they owe me favors."

"And why would you cooperate?"

"Me?" He laughed. "I like your style, Jimm. I like your spunk. You're a credit to your mother. I'd be proud to be there beside you."

You tend to assume old men are flirting when they overdo the rhetoric, but Captain Kow's eyes sparkled and I really got the feeling he was up for the adventure.

"You got a plan?" he asked.

"Sort of," I replied. "Do I have to tell you it?"

"Too true you do."

It was almost lunchtime when Lieutenant Chompu called me from the police station.

"At last," I said. "How long does it take to read a few documents?"

"Ooh, what dominance," he said. "I love a forceful woman. If it had been just words, I might have finished yesterday evening. But it wasn't that simple. Our Lieutenant Egg uses his own shorthand, the type of which I'd never seen. It amounts to leaving out all the vowels and tone markers. So every word was a puzzle."

"But you cracked it?"

"I have a reputation for inserting my key into otherwise impenetrable locks."

"But the documents?"

"Yes, those too. I have entered his devious world, young Jimm."