Stephen Leather: Bangkok Bob and the missing Mormon

I kept looking at the pad. The doodle was turning into an angel with spreading wings. ‘Jon Junior came out here on a holiday, then he calls you to say he wants to work here. He’s your eldest boy and you were expecting him to work in the family firm, so it must have come as a shock.’

‘A surprise, yes.’

‘So did you argue with him?’

‘We had an exchange of views.’

‘And you weren’t happy about his career change?’

Mr Clare tutted. ‘He wanted to throw away his education to live in the Third World, in a country which hasn’t even opened itself up to the Lord.’

‘It’s a Buddhist country, but there are Christians here. And churches.’

‘That’s not the point,’ said Mr Clare. ‘I didn’t want him throwing away the opportunities he had worked for.’

‘So you did argue?’

‘I don’t like what you’re suggesting,’ said Mr Clare. ‘You’re making it sound as if I chased him away. I didn’t, Mr Turtledove. We discussed his plans, and we agreed that he should give it a go. If he wanted to be a teacher, that was up to him. But yes, I made my feelings clear on the subject, of course I did.’

Mrs Clare patted her husband on the shoulder. ‘Teaching is noble occupation, and we told him so,’ she said. ‘We suggested that if he wanted to teach, he should come back to Utah. He said he wanted to teach in Thailand, for a while at least, and we gave him our blessing. We said that he should try teaching in Thailand for a year.’

‘Then he would come back to Utah,’ said Mr Clare. ‘That’s how we left it.’

‘We have also taught our children to follow their own path, but to use the Lord as their guide,’ said Mrs Clare.

‘When he said goodbye, he said he loved us and that he’d call again in a week,’ said Mr Clare. ‘That was the last we heard from him.’

I looked down at the doodle again. I’d drawn horns on the angel and I flipped over the page before the Clares could see what I’d done. ‘Do you have an address for him?’

‘He was staying at a hotel in Sukhumvit Road but when we spoke he told us that he was checking out and moving into an apartment. He said he’d write to us with the address.’

I asked him for the address of the hotel and wrote it down.

‘We’ve already been there,’ said Mrs Clare. ‘So have the police. He checked out, just as he said he did.’

‘You’ve spoken to the police?’

Mr Clare shook his head. ‘The embassy said they’d spoken to them. And they said that they had checked all the hospitals.’

I nodded and smiled but didn’t tell them that in Thailand what people said they had done didn’t always match up with what had actually happened. More often than not you were told what you wanted to hear.

‘Did he tell you where he was going to be teaching?’

‘A small school, not far from his new apartment,’ said Mr Clare. ‘I don’t remember if he told me the name.’

‘Did Jon Junior have any teaching qualifications?’ I asked.

Mrs Clare shook her head. ‘Not specifically,’ she said. ‘But he did help tutor at a local school some weekends.’

‘Did he mention anyone he’d met here? Any friends?’

‘No one specifically,’ said Mr Clare.

‘Do you think you can find our son, Mr Turtledove?’ asked Mrs Clare, her hands fiddling in her lap.

‘I’ll do my best,’ I said, and I meant it.

She looked at me earnestly, hoping for more information and I smiled as reassuringly as I could. I wanted to tell her that doing my best was all I could promise, that whether or not I found him would be as much down to luck and fate as to the amount of effort I put into it. I wanted to explain what it was like in Thailand, but there was no easy way to put it into words and if I did try to explain then they’d think that I was a few cards short of a full deck.

When a crime takes place in the West, more often than not it’s solved by meat and potatoes police work. The police gather evidence, speak to witnesses, identify a suspect and, hopefully, arrest him. In Thailand, the police generally have a pretty good idea of who has committed a crime and then they work backwards to get the evidence to convict him. Or if the perpetrator has enough money or connections to buy himself out of trouble, then they look for evidence to convict someone else. The end result is the same, but the approach is totally different. What I really wanted to tell Mr and Mrs Clare that the best way of finding where Jon Junior had gone would be to find out where he was and if that sounds a bit like Alice in Wonderland, then welcome to Thailand. But I didn’t. I just kept on smiling reassuringly.

‘Do you think we should stay in Bangkok?’ asked Mr Clare.

I shrugged. ‘That’s up to you. But I can’t offer any guarantees of how long it could take. I might be lucky and find him after a couple of phone calls. Or I might still be looking for him in two months.’

‘It’s just that my cousin Jeb is minding the shop, and when the good Lord was handing out business acumen, Jeb was standing at the back of the queue playing with his Gameboy.’ He held up his hands. ‘Not that money’s an issue, it’s not. But Mr Richards said there wasn’t much that Mrs Clare and I could do ourselves, not being able to speak the language and all.’

I nodded sympathetically. ‘He’s probably right. You’d only be a day away if you were back in Utah. As soon as I found anything, I’d call you.’

‘God bless you, Mr Turtledove,’ said Mrs Clare, and she reached over and patted the back of my hand. She looked into my eyes with such intensity that for a moment I believed that a blessing from her might actually count for something.

‘I would say one thing, just to put your minds at rest,’ I said. ‘If anything really bad had happened, the police would probably know about it and the embassy would have been informed. And if he’d been robbed, his credit card would have been used, here or elsewhere in the world. If it had been theft, they wouldn’t have thrown the card away.’

‘You’re saying you don’t think that he’s dead, that’s what you’re saying?’ said Mrs Clare.

I nodded and looked into her eyes and tried to make it look as if my opinion might actually count for something.

Her husband was leaning forward, his eyes narrowing as if he had the start of a headache. He looked like a man who had something on his mind.

‘Is there something else, Mr Clare? Something worrying you?’

He looked over at his wife and she flashed him a quick, uncomfortable smile. Yes, there was something else, something that was painful that they didn’t want to talk about.

‘We read something in the paper, about a fire,’ said Mr Clare. ‘In a nightclub.’

‘Jon Junior wouldn’t be in a nightclub,’ said his wife, quickly.

Too quickly.

The nightclub they were talking about was the Kube. Two hundred and eighteen people had died. A lot had been foreigners. Most of the bodies still hadn’t been identified.

I nodded and tried to look reassuring. ‘That was last week,’ I said.

March the thirteenth, to be exact. A Saturday.

‘We wondered…’ said Mr Clare. ‘We thought…’ He shuddered and Mrs Clare reached over to hold his hand.

‘Jon Junior doesn’t go to nightclubs,’ said Mrs Clare. ‘He doesn’t drink. He doesn’t like the music.’

‘If…’ said Mr Clare, but then he winced as if he didn’t want to finish the sentence. I tried an even more reassuring smile to see if that would help. To my surprise, it did. ‘If Jon Junior was by any chance involved… in the fire.’ He rubbed his face with both hands. ‘Would they tell us? Would they even know? They said that the bodies..’ He shuddered.