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

Anyway, when Robyn was in his forties he’d been in Thailand working for an NGO when he’d met the love of his life. He didn’t say that he’d met her in a bar and I didn’t ask. They’d married and he’d taken her back to Oxford where so far they’d lived happily ever after and raised a couple of kids. They were getting on fine, he said. He wasn’t a rich man, far from it. He worked in a bookshop in the city centre and didn’t seem to be particularly ambitious. But he wasn’t worried about his long-term prospects because his elderly father was very wealthy. Robyn’s dad, Jack, owned a huge farm on the outskirts of the city which he leased out while he lived in a bungalow. Robyn’s mother had passed away a few years earlier, and as Jack was now in his late seventies it wouldn’t be too long before the estate passed to Robyn. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t get the feeling that Robyn was waiting vulture-like for his old man to pass on, but death comes to all of us and when the Grim Reaper called for Jack, Robyn would get his inheritance.

Anyway, Robyn kept telling his dad what a great place Thailand was and suggested that he head out to the Land of Smiles for an extended holiday. The warm climate and the hospitable people would be a tonic for the old man, and a welcome change for the grey clouds and gloomy faces of a typical English winter. Eventually Jack agreed. Robyn was all too well aware of the dangers of Thai bargirls so he made sure that Jack steered clear of Bangkok, Pattaya and Phuket and suggested that he rent a serviced apartment in Cha-am. Robyn’s wife had friends and relatives in the beach resort, which is a couple of hours drive from Bangkok, so Robyn knew that Jack would be well looked after if he ran into any problems.

Robyn figured that his dad would have three months in the sun before returning to Oxford revitalised. What he didn’t plan on was the Thai gossip network, which went into overdrive almost as soon as Jack walked into his serviced apartment. A rich, elderly farang, staying alone. It was like a wounded tuna thrashing around in a shark-infested sea. Within days a beautiful young girl by the name of Ying was offering to show him around. Ying lived in the block and worked part-time as a real-estate agent. The way Robyn told it, she’d started cooking and cleaning for Jack, telling him that she had a Thai boyfriend in the past but that now she was footloose and fancy free and much preferred farang men to Thais

Jack and Robyn spoke every few days on the phone and at first Robyn was happy enough that his father had someone to cook and clean for him and to show him around. But Robyn’s happiness was short-lived when Jack dropped the bombshell that he and Ying had become more than just good friends. They were in love, Jack was going to marry her and as soon as the winter was over, he planned to bring her back to the UK. Jack was especially pleased that Ying was only a few years younger than Robyn’s wife so she wouldn’t be lonely.

That’s when Robyn got in touch with me. He realised that if the marriage went ahead, the family estate would quite probably end up in the hands of a twenty-something Thai girl.

Like Robyn, I was hearing alarm bells ringing. A ten-year age gap is perfectly acceptable in a relationship. I’ve known marriages work where the husband is twenty years older than the wife. But Jack was half a century older than Ying, and I doubted that it was his wrinkles or shrunken gums that she fancied. You didn’t have to be a private eye to realise that Jack had been hooked by a gold-digger, but the old man was clearly thinking with his dick rather than his brain, so the son wanted me on the case. He’d found my firm on the internet and called me straight away. Robyn had already done a bit of detective work himself. His wife had recommended the apartment block to Robyn’s father and she’d telephoned the staff there to get the low down on Ying. The staff didn’t think much of Ying, apparently, and were fairly sure that she had a Thai boyfriend. I assured Robyn that I’d be able to help and gave him my bank details.

As soon as the retainer had been transferred I phoned my contact at the British Embassy. Generally the embassy officials are not too helpful to guys like me but over the years my contact Clive had been less obstructive than most. I ran Jack’s situation by Clive and asked him what the chances would be of Miss Ying getting a visa to the UK. ‘About the same as a snowball in hell,’ said Clive. In cases like that-which were not unusual in Thailand-the embassy would keep on stalling, hoping that the husband-to-be would come to his senses. I passed that information on to Robyn so that at least he could stop worrying about anything happening in the short term.

The next step was to have chat with Jack. I caught a VIP bus to Cha Am, then paid ten baht for a motorcycle taxi to take me to the apartment block. I asked the girls at the reception desk to phone Jack’s room and five minutes later we were sitting at a beachside bar enjoying a couple of beers. I told him that I was from the British Embassy and that I had a few questions about his application for a visa for Ying. He didn’t question the fact that I had a New Zealand accent, and he was eager to chat. I figured that during the weeks he’d been in Thailand he’d been starved of intelligent conversation. We chatted about his life in Cha Am, his family back in Oxford, rugby, football, and then eventually we got around to the subject at hand. Miss Ying.

It was Jack’s first trip to Thailand, so I explained the basics to him. There are no pensions, unemployment benefits or sickness payments, so Thai girls would do whatever they had to do to survive and to support their families. And attaching herself to a wealthy older man was a much better option than planting rice by hand.

Jack shook his head, refusing to accept that I might be telling the truth. At his age he deserved a little pampering, he said. And he was sure that while Ying might not yet be in love with him, she would make a perfect wife.

According to Jack, she phoned him every morning, then came around in the early afternoon. Most days she went downstairs to the local hair salon to make herself look good for him. They would eat together most evenings, and then at ten o’clock she’d head off to her own room. They had become lovers he admitted coyly, but she didn’t want to move in with him until after they were married. That set more alarm bells ringing in my cynical head. Ten o’clock was the perfect time for a young lady to head off to a nightclub with her Thai beau.

I had a couple of more beers with Jack and I told him a few horror stories of farang men who’d lost everything to their Thai wives or girlfriends, but he just laughed and said that Ying was different. If I’d had a dollar for every guy who’s told me that his girl was different, I’d be a hell of a lot richer than I am. I didn’t tell Jack that, though. I wished him well, told him that his application was working its way through the system, and I went off to phone Robyn.

I told Robyn that his father was still determined to marry Ying and that the next stage would be to start checking her background. He was keen for me to proceed and agreed to wire over further funds. I already had a game plan. In my experience, girls having their hair done tended to chat away merrily. In the past I’d tried using my wife to glean information from various hairdressers but she tended to march in and tell all and sundry that her husband was a private eye and ask her questions point blank. Her elder sister Boo was a bit more devious, though, and in recent years she’d had many a free cut and blow dry courtesy of my investigations. I left it until Friday afternoon, figuring that was a dead cert for a day that Miss Ying would get her hair done. I took the VIP bus down to Cha Am with Boo. I showed her a photograph of Ying and made sure that she was in the salon by three o’clock.