Stephen Leather - Bangkok Bob and the missing Mormon

‘So, is that what you want to use?’

Her smile widened. Her teeth were slightly grey but perfectly even. ‘Actually, Khun Bob, I am more old school,’ she said. ‘I prefer the old-fashioned method.’

That didn’t sound so great, because old-fashioned basically involved shoving a camera up where the sun doesn’t shine.

I smiled. ‘Why’s that, Dr Ma-lee?’ I asked.

‘Two reasons, really,’ she said. ‘First, the capsule method really only allows us one pass. We see what we see and that’s the end of it. But with the camera I can spend as long as I need in there. I can view any problem from different angles which helps better to assess what needs to be done.’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘I see.’

I didn’t like the way she was talking about problems before she’d even started. I wanted her tell me that everything was going to be just fine, that there was nothing to worry about.

I didn’t want to hear about problems.

Or red flags.

Or cancer.

‘But the big advantage is that the equipment I use allows me to deal with any polyps that we find there and then. All the capsule does is tell us where there is a problem, we would then have to go back in and deal with it. So on balance, we’re better off doing it the old-fashioned away.’

I smiled but really I didn’t feel like smiling.

Before the colonoscopy had been an abstract procedure, but now it was a looming reality, and it wasn’t something that I was looking forward to. Not one bit.

‘And you understand there are preparations before we can do anything?’ she said, smiling and nodding.

Preparations?

That didn’t sound good.

It wasn’t hard finding out where Somchit Santhanavit – alias Tukkata – lived. Thai surnames are usually very distinctive. In fact, a hundred years or so ago there weren’t any surnames. The entire population had just first names. It was King Vajiravudh who realised that knowing his subjects on a first name basis wasn’t conducive to good governorship. If nothing else it made taxation difficult. He issued an edict that henceforth every family should have a family name and even came up with several hundred surnames himself.

Vajiravudh was one of the great kings of Thailand. He was educated at Sandhurst, studied law and history at Oxford, and was a real Anglophile. He replaced the traditional flag of Siam – a white elephant on a red background – with its present version of red, white and blue stripes and introduced the Boy Scouts to Thailand.

The fact that there were no surnames until the twentieth century meant that there were no common family names, no equivalent of Smith or Jones or Williams. There were also hundreds of thousands of them. Surnames were distinctive and often ran to more than five syllables. There were also so hard to remember that outside of official business Thais generally didn’t use them. They would introduce themselves by their first names, or their nickname, and often close friends of many years might not know each other’s family names.

The fact that Thai surnames were so distinctive also meant that once you did know the full name of the person you were looking for it was often reasonably easy to track them down. The phone book was often all that you needed, provided that you could read Thai.

I could.

The Santhanavit residence was on Sukhumvit Soi 39, not far from the Emporium Department Store. I like the Emporium. It’s one of the most up-market department store in Bangkok, jam-packed with designer label clothing, state-of-the-art electronics and the prettiest girls you’ve ever seen selling perfume on the ground floor. It’s also got a great food court, one of the best-kept secrets of culinary Bangkok. You buy coupons which you can exchange for Thai dishes that you’d normally find on the street: stewed pork knuckle; wanton noodle soup; chicken and rice. You get the street hawker culinary experience but with an unbeatable view over the city.

I could just about see the top of the Emporium tower while I was parked outside the big house midway down Soi 39 where the Santhanavits lived. I couldn’t say exactly how big because it was surrounded by a wall twice my height and the gate was solid metal. All I could see from the street was the roof. It was a big roof. Maybe eighty yards from end to end. Attached to the all at the side of the gate were metal tubes for newspapers, two for leading Thai papers and one for the Bangkok Post. The newspaper delivery boys didn’t throw the papers onto the garden American-style or push them through the letterbox, British-style. They went into the tubes and the maid or security guard came out and collected then.

Under the newspaper tubes was an oblong red box with Thai writing on it.

Interesting.

It was a police box.

The Thai police aren’t the hardest working law enforcement officials in the world, and their bosses are always looking for ways of making them more efficient. One scheme was to attach the red boxes at points around the various beats in the city. Inside the red boxes were cards which had to be signed every hour by patrolling police officers. At first the red boxes were placed at random, but before long the city’s wealthier citizens realised that having a police officer turning up at your gate every hour was a pretty good way of deterring criminals. They started offering hard cash for the privilege of having one of the red boxes.

That meant that my idea of sitting outside the house and waiting for Tukkata to leave was a non-starter as cops would be turning up every hour or so and they’d be sure to spot my car. A black Hummer is pretty hard to miss.

Time for Plan B.

I drove home.

The Dubliner is an Irish pub at the entrance to Washington Square, all green paintwork and shamrocks with Guinness signs and dark wooden tables, some of them made from barrels. I sat down at a corner table and ordered a coffee and waited for the boiler room boys to put in an appearance. The pub was just around the corner from the kickboxing gym where Lek and Tam trained so I kept my face turned away from the window just in case either of them walked by.

Sitting at the table next to mine was a couple in their sixties from England with a man who was obviously their son and a girl who was obviously a bargirl, or a former bargirl. The parents were stick-thin and grey-haired with worn, tired faces, but they were clearly proud of the fact that their son had acquired a beautiful Thai bride-to-be. Their son was slack-jawed and shaven headed and had his name tattooed in Thai across his forearm. Derek. He was wearing a Chang beer vest and baggy shorts and plastic flip-flops and a fake Rolex watch and he spent a lot of time scratching himself.

He was educating his parents on the best way to treat Thais which seemed to involve speaking slowly and loudly and offering them bribes, and telling mum and dad that it was the best country in the world unless you were into drugs because they shot drug-dealers. He didn’t seem the sharpest knife in the drawer, but his proud parents were nodding and grunting at his pearls of wisdom as they ate their way through the Dubliner’s massive all-day breakfasts.

The girl sitting with them was in her very early twenties, dark-skinned with the high cheekbones you usually find on girls from Surin, close to the border with Cambodia.

Why did I think she was a bargirl?

The tattoo of a scorpion on her left shoulder was a clue.

As was the ornate tattoo across the small of her back, revealed every time she leaned forward to pick up one of the French fries off Derek’s plate.

The way she was dressed screamed bargirl – tight blue jeans and even tighter low-cut black t-shirt, with a heavy gold necklace that Derek had no doubt bought for.