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

We lost the van before we reached the first turn off so I told the driver to take me back to my office. I gave him half the fee we had agreed on but he threw a temper tantrum and started waving his mobile phone at me and threatened to call his friends. Most taxi drivers have at least a crowbar or baseball bat in their vehicles, and guns aren’t unknown, and one of their favourite pastimes is roughing up troublesome farangs, as they call us foreigners, so I gave him the full 2,000 baht. The Dutchman would be covering my expenses anyway so it was no big deal.

I phoned the Dutch agency and spun them a story about knowing the general area where the subject was, but that I wanted a recent phone bill from the client to see if there were any Bangkok numbers that the girl had called before arriving in Thailand. An hour later and a phone bill was faxed through to me. I was in luck-there were four numbers with Bangkok’s 02 prefix. I fed the numbers into a reverse directory I use and the computer gave me the addresses. Three were offices and one was an apartment in the Bangna area of the city. I drove out to Bangna in a rental car and sat outside the apartment block for the rest of the day.

The apartment was in a small side road and it was difficult to get a view of the main entrance without sticking out like a sore thumb so I parked the car and went and sat in a small chicken restaurant opposite the block. I ordered some kow man gai, steamed chicken and rice with a tangy sauce and a bowl of watery soup. There was a British soccer game on the television set in the corner and after muttering ‘Man U channa nanon (Manchester United are sure to win) I was pretty much ignored by the half dozen male customers sitting at a Formica table drinking Singha beer. After about an hour I saw the waiter walking towards the apartment block. Bingo. He went inside.

I phoned my contact in the Dutch agency and explained that the waiter was definitely staying with the girl and there was no indication that they were heading up to Chiang Mai. My contact was pleased, but said that his client wanted a photograph of the girl and the waiter together.

I had a brand new digital camera in the boot of the car, so I parked as close to the apartment block as I could and sat with the camera on my lap. It had a telephoto lens and the salesman had assured me that it was state-of-the-art. Being digital, I could use my computer to email the pictures without having to wait for film to be processed. I as starting to feel pretty pleased with myself again. I had found where they were staying, there was only one way in and out, all I needed was a photograph and the fee was in the bag.

Time passed. It got dark. I had a couple of bottles of water in the car and I drank them both. Midnight passed. I was thinking about abandoning the surveillance for the night, figuring that perhaps the girl and the waiter were having too much fun to go out, when I saw movement in the lobby. I wound the window down and got the camera ready. It was the waiter. He held the door open and the girl walked out. ‘Yes,’ I hissed triumphantly. I brought up the camera lens and took a couple of quick shots. Just then there was a double flash of lightning. It looked as if my luck was changing for the worse-the weather had been fine all day and now that I had them in my sights a tropical storm was starting. I fired off another two quick shots and lightning flashed again.

Click. Flash. Click. Flash.

Then it hit me. My state-of-the-art digital camera with its onboard smarter-than-a-human-being computer had decided that as it was dark I should be using the flash. What the bloody thing hadn’t realised was that the last thing a private detective on a stakeout needs is a flash going off, computer-controlled or otherwise. The girl and the waiter looked in my direction and hurried along the road away from the car.

I cursed and fumbled with the camera, trying to find the control that turned off the flash.

Something smacked against the bonnet of the car and I looked up to see a muscle-bound Thai man glaring at me. He had a thick gold chain around his neck and a wicked scar across his left cheek that cut through a crop of old acne scars. He thumped on the bonnet again.

‘ Tham arai?” he screamed, which means ‘I’m sorry old chap but what exactly are you doing?’ or words to that effect.

I put the camera on the passenger seat and hit the central locking switch. The thuds of the locks clicking into place antagonised the man even more and he slapped the windscreen. A second man, just as heavily built, ran over and began pulling at the passenger door handle.

I looked around. Two more men were walking purposefully out of the restaurant and one of them was swinging a large machete. I didn’t know what I’d done to upset them but they didn’t look like the sort of guys who were going to respond to reason. I had the engine running to keep the aircon cold so I put the car into gear and moved forward, slowly enough to give the guy with the scar a chance to get out of the way. A foreigner running over a Thai would end only one way and sleeping on the floor of a Thai prison wasn’t how I was planning to spend my retirement.

I pushed harder on the accelerator. The guy kept hold of the passenger side door handle and jogged to keep up. I cursed. I didn’t want to drag him down the road, but I was equally unhappy at the prospect of the guy with the machete doing a remodelling job on the rental car.

Machete Guy shouted something and started to run. I stopped worrying about the man on the passenger side and pushed the accelerator to the floor. The wheels screeched on the tarmac and the car leapt forward. I roared down the road, snatching a quick look in the rear-view mirror. The four men were standing on the pavement, screaming at me. I grinned and took the first right turn, onto a major road. I was just starting to relax when I saw the motorbikes.

As they got closer I recognised one of the drivers-it was Machete Guy. I had no idea what I’d done to upset the guys, but figured they had obviously been up to something iffy and thought that I’d been taking photographs of them. Drugs maybe, or gambling. There might have been an underage brothel above the restaurant for all I knew. In an ideal world I’d have just explained that I had been taking pictures of an unfaithful wife, but Bangkok wasn’t an ideal world and it was probably too late for any explanation.

There was a fair bit of traffic around and I had to slow down. The motorcycles quickly gained on me. Machete Guy’s pillion passenger brandished a pistol and motioned for me to pull over to the side of the road. Yeah, right. I shook my head, braked hard, and pulled a left, cutting across a bus and feeling the rear end fishtail as I floored the accelerator again. I knew there was no way I was going to be able to outrun the bikes in the city. It would only be a matter of time before I hit traffic or a red light.

I could feel sweat trickling down my neck. Life is cheap in Bangkok. That’s not a clichA©, it’s an economic truth. The going rate for a professional hit is 20,000 baht for a Thai, 50,000 if it’s a farang. But amateurs were also happy to use bullets to solve a quarrel because most murderers end up serving seven years at most, and that was in the unlikely event of them being caught. All of this was running through my mind as I drove through the streets at high speed. Along with wondering why I hadn’t chosen another profession, why I’d moved to the Land of Smiles in the first place, and why I hadn’t read the manual for the camera before taking it on the job.

The best I could hope for was to run across a police patrol car but even that was no guarantee that I’d be safe. For all I knew, the four guys in hot pursuit could well be off-duty cops.

The second bike drew up on my passenger side and the pillion passenger waved a large automatic at me. I swung the car to the right. I had a really, really bad feeling about the way this was going to play out. They were getting madder and madder and all it would take would be one shot to a tyre and it would all be over.