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

There are a whole host of things I love about living in Thailand: the gorgeous women, the climate, the food, the beaches. But right at the top of the list of things I hate is being pursued at high speed by two motorcyclists with gun-toting pillion passengers. The guys out to put a bullet in my head weren’t flashing the smiles that Thailand is famous for-they were glaring at me with murder in their eyes. I swerved over to the right, trying to clip the rear wheel of the bike nearest to me but he moved away easily. The pillion passenger was caught off balance and he grabbed the waist of the driver. I took a quick look over my left shoulder. The second pillion passenger had his gun aimed at my head. I slammed on the brakes and the bike roared by, the passenger’s hair whipping in the wind.

I cursed, spitting out pretty much all the swear words I knew. I was in deep, deep shit, and it had all been the fault of my brand new digital camera.

The case had started easily enough. I’d received a phone call from a Dutch detective agency in Amsterdam that I’d done business with a few times. They were good payers and good payers are like hens teeth in the private-eye business. They were acting for a well-known Dutch businessmen who’d married a girl from Bangkok five years earlier. The businessmen had started taking his wife to a local Thai restaurant and was worried that she might have started a relationship with a young waiter. The Dutch detectives had put the wife under surveillance but so far hadn’t caught her misbehaving, but now the wife was planning to fly to Thailand for Songkran, the Thai new year. It’s the traditional time for Thai families to get together, and the businessman was too busy adding to his millions to go with her. A red flag was raised when the Dutch detectives discovered that the Thai waiter had booked onto the same flight to Bangkok. It could have been a coincidence, of course, but the Dutch guys wanted me to mount a surveillance operation once they’d arrived in Bangkok.

The girl’s parents lived in Chiang Mai, in the north of Thailand, so the first thing I did was to check if she had booked an onward flight from Bangkok. She hadn’t, but she might be planning to buy the ticket once she’d arrived, or even travel up by train or bus. I asked for a description of the jewellery and watch she usually wore, because photographs were often surprisingly unhelpful for identifying people and there would be several dozen young and pretty girls, all with black hair and brown eyes, getting off the KLM 747 from Amsterdam. The information, along with her passport number and a copy of her Thai ID card, came over with her pictures, plus a photograph of the waiter, and a sizeable retainer was transferred into my account with Bangkok Bank.

She was due to arrive at Don Muang at eleven o’clock in the morning in two days’ time. The problem was, I had no idea what she was going to do once she’d arrived. I bought Business Class tickets on the three flights that were due to leave for Chiang Mai after her flight had arrived, just in case she decided to head up north straight away. But if she took a car into Bangkok, I had a problem. I’d have to be in the terminal to check that she arrived, but that would mean parking my car in the multistorey. If she hopped into a cab I’d lose her before I got back to my vehicle. If she was picked up by a friend then the friend would have parked in the multistorey and by the time I’d identified their car it would be too late to get to my own vehicle. I couldn’t use motorcycles to follow her because motorcycles aren’t allowed on the country’s expressways, and the route from the airport to the city was all expressway. I didn’t have the money to start paying half a dozen guys to stake out the airport to cover every eventuality so I decided to nab a taxi driver at the airport and offered him 2,000 baht for a four-hour hire. He practically bit my hand off and I gave him 500 baht up front and told him to wait outside the terminal for me. He had a mobile phone so that if the girl headed to the car park I could follow her and then call the taxi to pick me up. If she hired a cab then I was ahead of the game, I just had to get into my taxi and follow her. And if she walked over to the domestic terminal and bought a ticket to Chiang Mai, all I’d have to do would be to get on the flight with her. I was feeling pretty pleased with myself as I sipped a cup of coffee in the arrivals area.

The terminal was packed, as hundreds of thousands of Thais rushed home in time for the New Year celebrations. There were lots of tourists too, who think it’s fun to douse each other with water as a way of celebrating Thai New Year. Frankly, after ten years of having water thrown in my face every April, I celebrate the festival by staying at home and ordering pizza and beer over the phone. But that’s just me.

The flight landed bang on time and it took them just over an hour to pass through Customs and Immigration. I spotted the girl among a group of Thais. She was pushing a trolley piled high with suitcases and bulging nylon bags, presumably gifts for her family. The waiter was a few paces behind her, pushing his own trolley. Nothing suspicious about that, they would have been sure to have met on the plane even if they hadn’t been planning to travel together. The photographs that the Dutch agency sent didn’t do the girl justice. She had waist-length hair, high cheekbones, and was model-pretty with curves in all the right places. She was tall for a Thai, five-seven or thereabouts, and she was wearing a short denim skirt that showed off a gorgeous pair of legs.

There were four people waiting to greet the girl, two were a few years younger than her and they quickly waied her, pressing their hands together and placing the tips of the fingers against their chins. Showing respect. That tends to be how Thais greet each other, even after long absences. No great show of emotion, no hugs or kisses. A nice, respectful wai. The girl first waied the two older members of the group, then returned the wai to the girl and boy who had waied her. Then she introduced them to the waiter. He waied them all, then they pushed their trolleys towards the car park. That answered two questions right there. She wasn’t flying to Chiang Mai and she was definitely travelling with the waiter.

I kept my distance but the terminal was so crowded that I doubted they would have spotted me even if they’d looked my way. They walked to the car park and started putting the bags into the back of a Toyota van. I made a note of the registration number and hurried back to the waiting taxi.

I was feeling even more pleased with myself as the van pulled out of the multistorey car park. I told the taxi driver to follow the van and settled back in my seat. All we had to do was keep the van in sight on the expressway and make sure that we took the same exit. The fact that I was tailing the van in a Bangkok taxi meant that there was virtually no way they’d spot me. Taxis account for about ten per cent of the cars on the roads at any time.

The van started to pull away from us and I told the driver to step on it. He nodded enthusiastically but we didn’t go any faster. I told him again, this time in Khmer, but that didn’t seem to sink in so I repeated myself in the Isaan dialect that many taxi drivers speak. He nodded again but the van continued to disappear into the distance. I peered into the footwell. The accelerator was flat against the floor. I groaned. The engine was juddering like a heart-attack victim and we hadn’t even broken sixty kilometres an hour. The driver grinned and gripped the steering wheel so tightly that his knuckles started to turn white.