Behind the Night Bazaar (7 page)

‘My career is a case of life imitating art,’ Jayne was saying. ‘All the PIs I read about were savvy and streetwise, flexible and resourceful. Having developed these skills just to survive in Bangkok, I figured I might as well get paid for it.’

‘Why not!’ Didier laughed. ‘Drink?’

She nodded and he signalled for the waiter to bring them another round of cocktails.

‘So what kind of detective novels do you read?’ he said, handing her a glass.

‘I like women writers mostly—Sara Paretsky, Val McDermid, Donna Leon—but not the forensic psychologists. I don’t buy all that stuff about violence being purely pathological.’

‘What about Agatha Christie?’

‘Agatha Christie?’ Jayne pulled a face. ‘It’s a bit old-fashioned. I mean, I read her when I was in my teens.’

‘I like Christie,’ Didier said. ‘Her plots are intricate and you’re always kept guessing whodunit until the very end.’

‘I like Agatha Christie,’ Max offered.

‘The stories aren’t exactly realistic,’ Jayne said, barely glancing at their host. ‘Not like the modern writers. Take James Ellroy, for example. His accounts of police corruption are based on historical events.’

‘All form and no substance!’

‘How can you say that?’ she said, her indignant tone belied by a smile. ‘He’s an amazing writer!’

‘I’ll bet nothing Ellroy ever wrote influenced the way policing is done. Whereas if you take the work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle…’

She rolled her eyes. ‘I don’t believe you!’

‘It’s true! Conan Doyle created new methods of detective work through the Sherlock Holmes stories. He invented the use of plaster moulds to preserve clues, the technique of dusting for fibres and ashes, not to mention his influence on the science of deduction. I guarantee if you read the Sherlock Holmes stories, you’ll pick up a few tips.’

With Jayne’s laughter in his ears and a conversation clearly closed to him, Max moved on to his other guests. He didn’t see Jayne and Didier again until they were leaving. Together.

‘Gotta go, Max,’ Jayne said. ‘I’ve got a surveillance job.’ She stood on her toes to kiss him on the cheek. ‘Thanks for a lovely evening.’

‘I’m walking her out,’ Didier said. ‘Thanks, Max. Great night.’

Still within earshot, Max heard Jayne say, ‘Shame I don’t have a Sherlock Holmes novel to take along and study,
n’est-ce pas
?’

‘
Absolument
!’ Didier laughed.

Max could have sworn they were flirting.

On returning to Chiang Mai, Didier sent Jayne a copy of
A Study in Scarlet
with an inscription:
To Jayne Keeney,
Discreet Private Investigator. May the solutions to all your
cases be elementary
.

Jayne reciprocated with Sara Paretsky’s
Tunnel Vision
and the note:
I’ll let you know if Holmes comes in handy.
Meanwhile, here’s one for you. I figure the title sums up your
taste in crime fiction
.

They corresponded often after that, sending books and reading lists, visiting each other in Bangkok and Chiang Mai, and their relationship remained flirtatious. Max couldn’t blame Jayne for her part, but he disapproved when Didier played along. It wasn’t fair on Jayne.

Max felt it would be more appropriate if Didier had flirted with him.

S
he was in a coastal village where the houses were made from disused bomb shelters. Turning a corner, she came face to face with a cow. It lowered its head and, using one of its horns as a prod, steered her out of the village along a path. Then she was on the edge of a cliff, the cow’s horn still digging into her back, staring at the sea, baffled to think it had come to this.

Jayne switched on the lamp, got up and lit a cigarette. Disoriented by the dream, it took her a moment to locate the ashtray. It was on a side-table next to a copy of
The
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
, an early gift from Didier that she often carried with her. Not that she’d ever admit it, but Didier was right about picking up tips from Holmes.

The book reminded her of the night she took him to Baker Street, a Bangkok bar designed to look like a gentlemen’s club. In keeping with the local talent for forgery, the bar’s wood panelling was synthetic, the armchairs vinyl, and the books on the shelves facades of moulded plastic. But with a large movie poster above the bar for
The Hound of
the Baskervilles
starring Basil Rathbone, and cocktails named for characters in the Sherlock Holmes stories, it seemed perfect for their first book club meeting. They’d spent the afternoon scouring secondhand bookshops along Khao San Road, buying a dozen books between them, which lay in plastic bags at their feet as they drank Moriarty and Doctor Watson cocktails and swapped life stories.

Jayne cast her mind back over their conversation, searching for any clues on what happened between Didier and his father. It was the night she figured out he was gay— that penny dropped when he talked about first arriving in Chiang Mai as a twenty-one-year-old student.

‘Back then I thought anything was possible,’ he said. ‘I’d come from a small town where the greatest faux pas was to stand out in a crowd. So imagine how I felt the first time I saw a kratoey. With long hair, painted nails and wearing what looked like a miniskirt, I didn’t pick that he was a boy. The skirt turned out to be flared shorts—part of his school uniform, no less—and he was standing with a group of school kids at a bus stop, laughing. A boy like that would’ve been crucified where I’d come from. But in Thailand, it seemed perfectly acceptable.’

Jayne’s face must have betrayed her scepticism as Didier hastened to add, ‘I was young and naive, Jayne. I’ve learned since then. I know being a kratoey is seen as punishment for sexual indiscretions committed in a past life—that they are tolerated rather than accepted. But back then, it was all new to me. I couldn’t believe it when my first Thai boyfriend turned around after a year together and announced that he was leaving me to get married. He even invited me to the wedding!’

Jayne laughed and shook her head, amused by her own wishful thinking as much as Didier’s story.

‘That, one of my older Thai friends told me, was a case of falling for “a fish in the wrong pond”.’ He drew inverted commas in the air. ‘What I needed to find was “a tree in the same forest”. So I did. I found a guy who swore he’d never give in to family pressure to get married. Trouble was I made the mistake of telling him I had no intention of ever returning to Canada and he left me for a Swedish tourist.’

Still laughing, Jayne flashed him a guilty smile. ‘I’m sorry, Didier. I shouldn’t laugh. But it’s comforting to know I’m not the only one who gets taken for a ride in relationships.’

‘Give me an example—make me feel like less of an idiot.’

‘OK.’ She took a swig from her cocktail and figured she had nothing to lose. ‘When I was starting out as a private investigator I was employed by this Australian guy, Richard Goodman, who’d been ripped off in a card scam. You know the sort of thing. Well-heeled tourist meets friendly local who turns out to be a croupier at the casino. Local says he can teach tourist how to play and win, and tourist agrees to participate in a private game for practice, a wealthy punter having conveniently turned up in the meantime. Then—lo and behold—tourist ends up losing hundreds of dollars.’

‘People keep falling for stunts like that.’

‘Yeah, well, that’s what I thought,’ she said. ‘See, I did end up tracking down the people behind the racket—a group of Filipinos with a history of that sort of thing—and Richard was grateful. He not only paid my fee, but insisted on wining and dining me as well. One thing led to another and I ended up spending the night with him, only to wake up the next morning and read in the papers that the Filipinos arrested the previous day on fraud charges claimed they’d been set up. The real brains behind the operation, they said, was an Australian man called Ralph Godsell.

‘Needless to say, Richard Goodman aka Ralph Godsell had done a runner in the night. And to really add insult to injury, he left me to pay the hotel bill.’

Didier laughed aloud. ‘Oh, that makes me feel much better.’

‘You’d think I’d have more sense,’ she said with a wry smile, ‘but I get so few offers in this place. Thai men seem to disapprove of me—I’m too loud, I guess—and most farang men prefer the local fare. Not that I blame them. Thai women are beautiful.’ She gestured towards the window overlooking the street. ‘Out there, I feel about as attractive as a sow’s ear in a sea of silk purses.’

‘Hardly an appropriate metaphor,’ Didier smiled.

Jayne blushed. ‘Take no notice, I’m just feeling sorry for myself. Another Moriarty and I’ll be fine.’ She signalled to the waiter. ‘What about you? Has your love life improved?’

‘I do have a partner,’ he said slowly. ‘We’ve been living together for nearly a year. He’s Thai. I guess that makes me one of those farang men who prefer the local fare.’

‘Sorry. That was out of line.’

‘Not at all. I know how it looks. Sanga’s more than ten years younger than me and an ex-bar boy. I’m a thirty-something expatriate who should know better. To be honest, I have no idea if it will last. But Nou—that’s Sanga’s nickname—has always been direct with me.’

Jayne raised her hand. ‘Mate, I’m the last person to criticise anyone else’s choices when it comes to relationships. I was going to say that I trust your judgment, but given your dodgy taste in crime fiction, I’m not so sure.’

‘Oh, that’s a low blow,’ he grinned. ‘Why don’t you come and visit us in Chiang Mai.’

‘You mean it?’

‘Absolutely. It’s my turn to host the next book club meeting anyway.’

‘I’ll drink to that.’ She drained the last of her cocktail.

Jayne had enjoyed the night. It was a relief to make light of the Richard/Ralph saga, which had bruised her both personally and professionally. She’d been too embarrassed to talk about it with anyone else, but Didier had given her the freedom to fess up. That night set the tone for their friendship: they could tell each other anything. Or so Jayne thought.

But why hadn’t Didier told her about the assault on his father? She wondered if that was why he’d left Quebec in the first place, and had never gone back.

‘You could have told me, Didi,’ Jayne said.

With a lump in her throat, she stubbed out her cigarette and picked up the Sherlock Holmes book, stopping at a passage marked in pencil in the margin:

‘Circumstantial evidence is a very tricky thing,’ answered Holmes thoughtfully; ‘it may seem to point very straight to one thing, but if you shift your point of view a little, you may find it pointing in an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different…’

Was Didier sending her a message? She recalled the Police Lieutenant Colonel’s response when asked if Didier had killed Nou: ‘All evidence points in that direction.’

‘And what if you shift your point of view a little?’ she said aloud.

Jayne returned to the desk and reread her notes from the paper. She added points from the Channel 4 report, together with what Max had told her. The TV stations would still be closed, so she switched on the radio, jotting down more information as it came through.

She watched the first news bulletins before taking a shower and washing her hair. The bathroom mirror showed the colour had returned to her face. There was determination in her mouth and jaw—an expression Jayne’s mother said made her look stubborn as a child—and her eyes were clear. She dressed quickly, slung a Do Not Disturb sign on her door and sprinted to a nearby 7-Eleven for the morning papers and coffee.

By 9am, Jayne had mapped out the case against Didier. She considered each piece of evidence on its own then examined how it all fitted together, coming up with as many holes in the case as police claimed to have leads. Jayne was no lawyer, but she knew that in the absence of either eyewitnesses to the murder or a full confession, everything became circumstantial, even the alleged discovery of the murder weapon at Didier’s house. As for the previous assault record, Max was wrong: while it might not look good, the bottom line was the charges were never substantiated.

If she assumed her friend was not guilty—not even of resisting arrest, let alone murdering his lover—Jayne could conclude Didier had been killed either by accident, the police fabricating a case to cover their own arses, or through some kind of conspiracy.

She thought of the steely-eyed lieutenant colonel. He didn’t come across as the sort of person who made mistakes. To her mind, the police blunder theory only held if the lieutenant colonel was covering up for someone else—a nervous rookie, for example. But it didn’t explain Nou’s death, which was why the police went to interview Didier in the first place. It all happened too fast and was too seamless to look like damage control.

That left her with the conspiracy theory: that Didier was set up to get him out of the way. But why not simply kill him? With Chiang Mai a hub for heroin trafficking in the region, it was not unprecedented for foreigners to be killed in drug-related attacks. A few years earlier, three US Drug Enforcement Agency officials had been executed, Mafia-style, in the area. Why go to the trouble of killing Nou as well and framing Didier for the murder?

Didier must have been considered so dangerous, it wasn’t enough to kill him: his character and his credibility had to be destroyed as well. But how could he have posed such a threat? His friends used to joke that he was more Thai than Thai because he was so respectful of local culture. To Jayne’s knowledge, Didier’s willingness to rock the boat didn’t extend beyond covertly distributing explicit pamphlets on AIDS prevention.

She picked up the phone and placed another call to Bangkok.

M
ax fumbled with the receiver, still groggy after a dose of Valium the night before. A strange voice said something in Thai, before a familiar one took its place.

‘Max, it’s Jayne.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Sorry, did I wake you?’

‘Yeah, it’s OK.’ He propped himself up on one elbow and checked his clock. 10.30am. He felt guilty for having overslept, even if it was a Sunday. ‘When did you get in?’