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

I caught a taxi to the airport and got the next flight to Chiang Mai. It was late evening by the time I arrived so I checked into a small hotel and drank the best part of a bottle of Jack Daniels before retiring to bed. Three times during the night small cards mysteriously appeared under my door offering visiting massage services but a good nights sleep was all the relaxation I needed.

Joy had told Bill that she was from Chiang Mai, but in fact she’d been born in a small town about forty miles away. There is nothing unusual or suspicious about that, most Thais would give the nearest big city as their place of birth. But it meant that I’d have to go to the local municipal office rather than the big one in Chiang Mai.

I had the hotel’s buffet breakfast and then went out on to the street to negotiate with a taxi driver. I promised him 500 baht for a half day, plus another 200 to take me to the airport once I’d finished.

For starters we took a drive past the house where Joy was living. I didn’t stop because a farang visitor would have attracted too much attention. It was a three-storey shophouse with the noodle shop in the ground floor. I saw a Thai man in his sixties, who I guessed was the girl’s father, ladling soup into a line of chipped bowls, but there was no sign of Joy.

The driver took me to the municipal office, the Tee Wah Garn, a grey concrete building with two Thai flags and a life-size painting of the King above the main entrance. On the way we stopped off at a supermarket and I bought two bottles of Johnnie Walker Black Label whisky, making sure that I kept the receipt.

The driver offered to go inside with me but I told him to wait outside. There are times when it pays to play the naA?ve foreigner, so I wasn’t planning to let on that I spoke pretty fluent Thai and I didn’t need an interpreter. The information on the government computers is supposedly confidential but a couple of bottles of imported whisky and a lot of smiling tends to get me what I need.

There was a reception desk that stretched across the main room behind which were a couple of dozen men and women tapping away at computer terminals. On the public side of the room were lines of plastic chairs where a handful of farmers waited patiently for whatever business they were hoping to transact. Overhead a couple of fans tried in vain to stir the stifing air.

I caught the eye of a middle-aged man with slicked-back hair and circular glasses, gave him a beaming smile, and went into my prepared speech. My brother, I said, was about to marry a local girl but his family was worried that she might be taking advantage of him. I passed over the carrier bag containing the two bottles of whisky, which disappeared under the counter without a word. I gave him another beaming smile and explained that I just wanted to know if the bride-to-be had been married or if she had registered any children.

‘No problem,’ the man said. ‘I’ll need her full name and date of birth.’

I had the name written in Thai and English, and her birth date. He frowned. ‘No record,’ he said.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘She’s definitely from here.’

‘The family name is correct?’

‘I’m sure it is.’ Bill MacKay had given me both the Thai and the English spellings.

‘Let me see,’ said the man. A few taps on the terminal and the helpful Government official had Joy’s details on screen. A smile spread slowly across his face. ‘There was a mistake on her birth date,’ he said. ‘The day and month is okay but the year was wrong. She was born five years earlier than she says.’

I nodded. So Joy wasn’t the perfect bride after all. She’d lied about her age. But MacKay was no spring chicken and there’d still be almost two decades between them, so I didn’t think he’d mind too much.

The man’s smile widened. ‘Your brother has married already?’ he asked.

‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘Is there a problem?’

‘I think so, yes,’ said the official.

‘She’s married already?’

The man shook his had, still grinning. ‘No. No husband. No children.’

Now I was confused. Other than shaving off a few years from her age, Joy seemed to have been as true as her word.

He twisted his terminal around and jabbed a finger at the screen. The wording was in Thai but I had no problem in reading what was there. There were details of Joy’s date and place of birth, her residential address, and the details of the rest of the family who lived in the home. Mother. Father. Two of her brothers. Three sisters. Then I saw what he was pointing out. The man laughed as I frowned. Two young men came over and the older man explained what was going on. I asked for a print-out of the information on the screen. As I left the building the laughter was spreading around the building.

I could have gone straight back to the airport but I wanted to see for myself so I had the taxi driver park around the corner from the noodle shop. I walked inside and ordered a Sprite and a bowl of noodles with pork. The old man I’d seen earlier had gone but I figured the woman who prepared the noodles was Joy’s mother. She was in her fifties with short hair that was still jet black, and wrinkled skin the colour of weathered teak. When she smiled at me she showed two gold teeth at the front of her mouth. She switched on an overhead fan and put a bucket of ice on the table to keep my beer cold.

I spooned chilli powder into my bowl of noodles and added a couple of spoonfuls of fish sauce. Lovely. I must have overdone the chilli because I had tears in my eyes by the third mouthful. I was on my second bottle of Sprite when Joy appeared at the back of the shop. I guess she’d come down from the living quarters above the shop. Tight jeans, a white T-shirt with a teddy bear on the front showing off several inches of a drum-taut stomach, her long hair tied back in a ponytail. She was wearing less make up than she had on in the pictures that MacKay had shown me, and as she went over to the old woman I could see a glittering diamond ring on her wedding finger. Joy was pretty in the pictures, and up close she was still pretty, but the signs were there for anyone to see. Anyone who knew what to look for, of course. Large hands, large feet, broad shoulders, a bump of an Adam’s apple. Taller than the average Thai girl. The love of MacKay’s life was a katoey. A ladyboy. And while I’d been in Thailand for long enough to be able to spot the difference between a ladyboy and the genuine thing, MacKay was a relative newcomer. The high cheekbones, long hair, long legs and large breasts were probably all he was looking at.

The Government computer had shown that Joy had been born a man. The question I wanted answering was how much of his original equipment remained. The fact that Joy was so tall suggested that she’d been on hormones from an early age, and she’d clearly had breast implants. The fact that Joy wouldn’t have full sex with MacKay might have more to do with her still having a penis and less to do with retaining her virginity. It’s always a tough call deciding how to refer to ladyboys. ‘He’ doesn’t sound right, not considering the long hair, proud breasts and pouting lips. But ‘she’ isn’t strictly accurate, not if they’ve got the full block and tackle, if you get my drift. And ‘it’ just sounds offensive. I was going to settle for ‘she’.

More often than not I can tell a ladyboy just by looking at her. The height is a clue, they have deep voices, large feet and hands, and unless they’ve had it surgically reduced, a large Adam’s apple. But if all else fails, I have a foolproof method that has never failed me. You get them into a conversation about Thai boxing and have them show you how they throw a punch. A man’s arm will go straight, but a woman’s arm will actually bend beyond the 180 degrees at the elbow. Don’t ask me why, but that’s the way it is, and it’s an infallible way of differentiating between a man and woman. But the presence of a penis is a pretty good indicator, too.