Stephen Leather - Bangkok Bob and the missing Mormon

‘He went in a red tuk-tuk,’ I said. ‘He probably went to another hotel. Or an apartment block.’

The first driver took back the photograph and looked at it again. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Maybe I took him.’

‘Where?’ I asked.

The driver pointed down the soi. ‘That way.’

Right. Fine.

‘What was the name of the building you went to?’

The driver shrugged.

‘Are you sure it was him?’

The driver scratched his neck with the nail of his little finger that seemed to have been grown extra long specifically for the purpose of scratching.

‘I think so.’

‘Your tuk-tuk is red?’

The driver nodded.

‘Which one is yours?’ I asked, in case he was just telling me what I wanted to hear.

He pointed at one of the two red tuk-tuks. That was a good sign.

‘Was he with anyone?’

‘No, he was alone.’

‘And he went to another hotel?’

‘Condominium,’ he said.

‘Condominium?’ I repeated. ‘Are you sure?’

The driver shrugged and scratched his neck as he frowned at the photograph. ‘Old building,’ he said. ‘Sukhumvit Soi 22.’

‘Can you take me?’ I asked.

‘A hundred baht,’ he said quickly.

‘Let’s go.’

There are two sorts of tuk-tuks. There’s the three-wheeled type that is powered by a two-stroke scooter engine, covered with a canopy and with a seat just large for three people at the back. They’re noisy, smelly and uncomfortable and part of the Thai tourist experience, usually for a vastly-inflated fee. There are also four-wheeled versions with larger engines and with two facing seats at the back. They’re more for locals with too much baggage or shopping to get onto the bus. I’m not a fan of either but sitting in the back with my head jammed against the roof was the only way that I was going to get Jon Junior’s forwarding address.

Getting to Soi 22 from Soi 9 meant braving the traffic on the main Sukhumvit Road, a white-knuckle ride in any vehicle but a near-death experience in the back of a tuk-tuk, no matter how many wheels it has. The air was stifling hot, and every time we stopped it seemed that there was a bus next to us, belching out black smoke.

We shot down Soi 22 past a row of massage parlours and drove by the Imperial Queen’s Park Hotel and then made a quick left turn into one of the side sois. We slowed to a crawl past a woman who cooking at a roadside stall and I got a blast of burning chilli in my eyes. By time the tuk-tuk had stopped there were tears streaming down my face.

I used a handkerchief to wipe my eyes as I looked up at the building. It was hard to tell whether Jon Junior’s new address was a step up or a step down from the cheap hotel in Soi 9. From the look of the outside I’d probably say that he was paying a bit less but getting a bit more for his money. He was a good fifteen minute walk from the nearest Skytrain station, Phrom Pong, but there was a motorcycle taxi rank across from the building so transport wouldn’t be a problem. The building was a soot-stained, grey oblong, eight floors high, with windows that didn’t appear to have been cleaned in decades. There was no sign that I could see, no way of telling if the building was a hotel or an apartment block or an abattoir. Or a combination of all three.

‘You’re sure this is it?’ I asked the tuk-tuk driver as I climbed out of the back of the van. I had to bend my head low, the tiny vans were designed to ferry around slightly-built Thais, not six-foot-tall farangs.

The driver was smoking a roll-up and he took the remnants from between his lips, coughed and spat into the street. ‘I didn’t see him go in, but this is where I dropped him.’

‘With his bags?’

‘Yes.’

‘Just him?’

‘Like I said, him and his bags.’

‘But no one brought him here?’

He frowned, not understanding. ‘I did.’

Jai yen yen. It was my own fault for not phrasing the question properly.

‘You brought him and his bags, but did you bring anyone else?’

The driver took a last drag on his roll-up and flicked it into the gutter. ‘He came alone.’

I gave him a hundred baht note and he sped off in a cloud of black smoke.

There were two double doors at the entrance and I pushed through them into a small reception area. There were two rattan sofas and a glass-topped coffee table at one end of the room and a small booth at the other. There was a woman sitting in the booth watching a Thai soap area on a tiny television.

On the wall behind her were rows of keys on hooks and pigeon holes for mail. ‘Excuse me, is this a hotel or serviced apartments?’ I asked.

‘You want a room?’ she said, not taking her eyes off the TV. A middle-aged woman with hair piled high on her head was bemoaning the fact that her husband had taken a mia noi, a minor wife. The friend she was confiding in was nodding sympathetically and produced a box of tissues as the betrayed wife burst into tears. Heart-rending stuff.

I told the receptionist that I was looking for a friend and showed her Jon Junior’s picture. She glanced at it and handed it back to me.

‘He check out already.’

‘Jonathon Clare,’ I said. ‘From America.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘He check out.’

‘When?’

‘Last week.’

‘Where did he go?’

She sighed but kept looking at the television. I couldn’t tell if she was sighing because she was bored with my questions or if she was moved by what she was seeing on the television.

‘He didn’t say.’

‘But he paid his bill and left?’

She nodded.

‘He was a teacher,’ I said.

‘I know.’

‘Do you know where he was teaching?’

On the television the middle-aged betrayed wife collapsed onto a sofa and dabbed at her cheeks with a handful of tissues. The receptionist put her hands together and clasped them to her chest. She was close to tears. ‘No,’ she said.

‘Did he have any friends?’ I asked. ‘Anyone who came to see him?’

The soap opera hit a commercial break. The receptionist gasped.

I repeated my question.

‘There was a girl,’ she said, looking me in the eye for the first time since I’d walked into the building.

‘A Thai girl?’

The woman nodded. ‘Young.’

‘How young?’

‘A teenager.’

‘What did she look like?’

‘Short hair, hi-so maybe.’

‘She went to his room?’

The woman nodded. ‘Once. Mostly she waited for him here.’

‘She came often?’

‘Three or four times.’

‘Do you think she was a girlfriend? Or a student?’

She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. She was dressed like a student.’

‘Do you know which school she went to?’

She shook her head.

‘And this is a hotel, right? Not a condominium block.’

‘Both,’ she said. ‘You can rent rooms by the day or week, or you can stay for a year. Some people buy the rooms.’

‘What about Jonathan Clare? Was he renting by the day or the week?’

She picked up a ledger and flicked through it. ‘By the month,’ she said.

‘So he paid a deposit?’

The woman nodded.

‘And he got that back when he checked out?’

‘Usually we give people their deposits the day after they check out.’

‘That doesn’t make any sense.’

‘It’s our policy. We have to check for damage and that phone calls and electricity and water bills have been paid.’

‘And he came back for his deposit?’

She looked at the ledger and nodded.

If Jon Junior waited around for his deposit then he probably wasn’t running away from anyone. He’d just moved on. But why? And where?

I asked her if anyone had moved into Jon Junior’s room. She flicked through the ledger and shook her head. ‘It’s still empty,’ she said.