Stephen Leather - Confessions of a Bangkok Private Eye - True Stories From the Case Files of Warren Olson

It was getting late, too late to make it to Pattaya in time for a sales conference. I made a call to the company where Ying worked and in my very best Thai explained that my girlfriend was attending a sales conference in Pattaya and that she’d forgotten her make-up bag and that I wanted to get it to her but I didn’t know where the conference was being held. The conference was at the Ambassador Jomtien, a very helpful young switchboard girl explained, but that the conference finished at five so there was no need to get the bag to my girlfriend because she’d be back in Bangkok later tonight. I thanked her. So, I’d caught her out in one lie, and in my experience lies are like cockroaches. If you find one, there’ll be hundreds of others behind the skirting board. At least in the sort of places that I stay in.

I went back downstairs and paid my bill, then took a walk outside. There were lights up on the top floor so I figured that was where Ying was holed up. Next door to the restaurant was a ten-storey office block. Sitting on a deckchair at the entrance was a dark-skinned security guard in a uniform several sizes too big for him. I wandered over and started chatting to him in Laos. He was a nice guy, his wife was back in Udon Thani taking care of their five kids and he sent back most of his wages each month. Down the road from the office block I’d seen a street vendor selling a variety of fried insects, much loved by the people of Isaan. I asked him how he liked his grasshoppers and then went and bought him a bag of well-salted insects. I shared them with him as we talked. They taste a lot better than they sound, really. A bit like pork scratchings, it’s the crunch and the salt you’re aware of rather than a definite taste. Fried maggots are okay, too. I’ve never really had a problem eating insects. There’s no difference between a grasshopper and a prawn, really. So we shared the goodies and then I gave him a 500-baht note and asked him if he’d take me up the building stairwell so that I could take a look into the windows of the top floor of the restaurant. I spunhim a story about my girlfriend being inside with another farang but he was only interested in the money and he was more than happy to let me go upstairs on my own.

I found a grimy window in the stairwell on the fifth floor which gave me a reasonable view of the restaurant. There were lights on in one of the offices and I could see half a dozen teenage girls sitting on a couple of sofas, laughing and playing with their mobile phones. They were all wearing the traditional Thai students’ uniform of white shirt and black skirt. I couldn’t see Ying at first but after about fifteen minutes I saw her walk into view and drop down onto one of the sofas. She opened her Chanel bag and took something out. The students started clapping and leaned forward in anticipation.

Ying folded a piece of silver foil into a small crucible and then she flicked a cigarette lighter and I knew exactly what I was seeing. Yah ba being smoked. Amphetamines, the drug of choice for everyone from students at the country’s top universities wanting to stay up studying all night to go-go dancers needing the chemical stimulus to ply their trade all night. It used to be called yah ma, or horse drug, because it gave you the strength and stamina of a horse. The cops started calling it yah ba, the literal translation being Crazy Drug. The spin didn’t work. By the look of things, Ying was supplying the stuff. I hadn’t seen any money change hands so it looked as if she was giving them the stuff free of charge. So in just a few hours I’d caught Knight’s live-in lover in an outright lie and found her giving drugs to students. It wasn’t looking good, not if Knight figured she was the love of his life.

I went back downstairs, thanked my new-found friend, and went over to brief the motorcycle riders. It looked as if we were in for a long night; if Ying and her friends were fired up on amphetamines it could well be that they might go on somewhere else.

I sat in the rental car, keeping the engine running and the airconditioning going, sipping from a bottle of water that I always take with me on surveillance operations. Ying didn’t appear until two o’clock in the morning. There was a teenage boy with her, one of the restaurant workers I figured, with a designer hair cut and baggy jeans. They went to her BMW and a few minutes later I was following them across the city towards Ratchada. There are lots of late-night eating places Ratchada-way so I figured she was taking her friend for a meal. I was wrong. They pulled in front of a dingy apartment block, a far cry from Knight’s palatial accommodation.

I watched them go in. The young guy had a keycard to open the main door so it was probably his place. I waited in the car until four o’clock in the morning by which time it was obvious that they weren’t going anywhere. Lies, drugs, and a toy boy. Young miss Ying was a piece of work, all right.

I asked one of the motorcycle riders to stay outside the block with instructions to phone me as soon as they reappeared. If Ying was like every other Thai girl I knew, that would probably be after midday.

As it turned out, it was after two when they reappeared. My guy phoned me while he was following them and I could barely hear him over the noise of the traffic but I met up with him outside a gold shop in Phaholyothin. Ying and her boy were inside, checking out gold necklaces. Ying was clearly being very generous with Greig Knight’s money.

‘Lucky lad,’ I said in Thai.

‘Huh?’ said the motorcycle taxi driver, frowning.

Thai isn’t the easiest language, being tonal and all, so I said it again. ‘Lucky lad.’

His frown deepened.

‘Pretty girl, buying him presents. Lucky, right?’

He laughed and lit a cigarette. Inside the gold shop, Ying was fastening a gold chain around her friend’s wrist.

‘Never had a girl buy me anything.’

The motorcycle rider squinted across at me. ‘What do you mean?’ he asked.

I sighed. He obviously didn’t understand what I was getting at. ‘A girl, buying gold for a guy. It’s not something you see every day.’

‘You know that’s a girl, right?’

‘Of course I know it’s a girl. That’s why I’m following her. I’m just saying, she’s buying gold for the guy.’

‘That’s not a guy,’ he said.

Now I was confused. ‘A girl?’

‘A tom.’

‘A tom?’

‘The girl you’re following is buying gold for a tom. The one with the short hair is a girl, Khun Warren.’

I stared at the couple in the shop. Ying kissed her friend on the cheek, then they hugged. I groaned. My guy was right. Ying’s toy boy was a toy girl. Maybe a bit on the masculine side, but still a girl. I’d been so fixated on the possibility of Ying having a boyfriend that I’d missed the obvious. Lesbianism is fairly common in Thailand, more so than in the West. The problem was, how did I come up with the proof that Greig Knight would obviously want? Same-sex hand-holding is the norm in Thailand, and it’s not unusual for girls to share a bed without any sex being involved. In fact, all I had to go on was the kiss and hug and the gold gift. That wouldn’t be enough for Knight, he’d want concrete proof. I was going to need a photograph of the two girls in action to convince Knight that Ying had a lover. And I only had two more nights before my client returned from Hong Kong.

First I had to find out which number the girlfriend’s apartment was, and that was a job for a Thai. There were few farangs in that part of the city and I stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb. I told one of the motorcycle taxi drivers, Daeng, to lose his orange vest and pick up a carrier bag of food from a supermarket. All he had to do was to stick close to the girls when they left the gold shop and follow them inside the building. If challenged, all he had to do was to claim that he was making a delivery, but I doubted that it would come to that. By the look of it, the building didn’t even have a security guard.