Read Forget You Had a Daughter - Doing Time in the Bangkok Hilton Online
Authors: Sandra Gregory
Tags: #True Crime, #General, #Social Science, #Criminology, #Biography & Autobiography
I woke abruptly when the van stopped at the police station. ‘That was a dream, wasn’t it, Robert,’ I said.‘Tell me that was a
dream.’
‘It happened,’ he snapped.‘Now get out of the van.’
It was still pitch black.The police station was somewhere in the heart of Bangkok although where exactly I’m not sure. Up a set of rickety steps we climbed into a dark room, where I could hear something moving in a corner. My mind was racing overtime and I was sure I could see the faces of screaming prisoners.A hundred different thoughts competed for space in my head.
Someone switched on a light.The office was very large and on
one side there was a small, folding bed, on which a policeman was lying. He rose slowly and the customs officials signed us over to the police.Words were exchanged.
Our bags were searched and our pockets were emptied. Robert had a good camera, an electronic chess game and a Walkman amongst other things and the policeman took them. They took most of my money from me and I signed for it. It would be stolen, they said, if I took it downstairs. I was allowed to keep my book of family photographs.The customs officers left and we heard their laughter as it echoed down the walls of the corridor.
We were led through one gate, then a second and finally into an area with fluorescent tube lights. On the right-hand side was a very large room with bars all the way down the front. On the left side was a much smaller room with bars down the front and side. Robert was placed in the larger of the two rooms with some older men, probably prisoners. I was put in the smaller room. For some reason they never locked the door.
Two sides of the room consisted of bars; it had a floor and a par- titioned section at the end which, I discovered, was the toilet area
– a concrete spot with a hole in the floor and a cement trough full of slimy water. It smelled putrid.The floor was crusty from years of dirt.The smell from the water I was supposed to wash from was so foul that my head spun whenever I went near it.
Mum and Dad
, I whispered to myself,
I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean this to happen.
I started to cry.
The guards left me with a few items of clothing and I rolled up my coat and placed it on the floor against a wall at the back of the cage. I lay down and began drifting to sleep.A policeman appeared. ‘No,’ he said, pointing in the opposite direction from where I was lying,‘you must not sleep here, you must sleep there.’ I moved
hastily, and then slept.
The next morning I realised there was a thin window in the brick wall, towards the back of the cell and through this I could see the steps that went upstairs in the police station. The policemen
could stand on a certain stair and see into the cell where I was sleeping.This must have been a regular practice with female pris- oners.They seemed to want to point me out to their friends.
What would I do now? A metal plate, covered in sloppy rice with a little bit of overcooked cabbage, had been placed in front of me on the floor. Breakfast. There was something in the corner. Two large eyes stared at me. I rolled over on the floor and saw the largest hairy rat imaginable and it was eating my food. He was two feet away from me. I was glad that I wasn’t hungry.
Years before, in America, I recalled my mum thinking that I was crazy because there were always half-eaten cherries on the kitchen table.‘Sandra,’ she said,‘this is no way to dispose of fruit. If you’re going to half-eat it throw the rest out as well.’
But it wasn’t me. It turned out that we had field mice in the house, coming in through the back of the cooker. ‘The trouble with mice,’ she laughed,‘is that if you’ve seen one you’ve probably got a hundred.You never see them together.’
As I stood there staring at the rat in my cell, I thought of that conversation with my mum and I began shaking. Shit, there must be hundreds of rats there, underneath me, crawling around and over each other’s wet bodies. Suddenly, more than anything, I was embarrassed to be there, and having to take food from my gaolers with rats scuttling inside the cell.The rat could have it. I stuffed my coat down the hole where the rat had appeared. I would figure out a pillow for that night later.
There was nothing to do, for the moment at least, but get on with things. The grime and dirt had built up over the years like paint and I decided to get comfortable. I got some water from the toilet, ripped up a shirt for a cloth and then scrubbed the floor- boards and the bars.
No matter how ridiculous this situation appeared to me I would get out soon, I was convinced of it. I was a British citizen. They wouldn’t keep me here for long. Not in this filth.
six
Suicide is Painless
Dear Mum and Dad
My head is spinning with shock, sorrow, shame and remorse over this disgusting situation I have created. I feel dirty all the time, I don’t know if I will ever be able to get used to this place. I went out to court yesterday and one of the guards let a Thai prisoner up to the court to act as translator; he only had one leg and spoke no English at all really…
Letter to Mum and Dad, May
1993
I walked the narrow corridor between the two cages daily. For six days I could speak with Robert and we would stand at the bars chatting, swapping unlimited angst, which was such a ludicrous scenario that I still wonder why we spoke, given what had just happened. Why was I doing this? It was simple. I desperately wanted conversation with someone familiar, even if it was from the guy who had landed me in this mess in the first place. And I presumed Robert knew the ropes.
Robert constantly asked me to protect him, to say that he knew nothing about the drugs and to ensure that he went free. Over and over he told me that he would be more help to me on the outside than he ever would be from the inside. I was terribly confused. The whole episode had sent me into shock and I could hardly collect my own thoughts, let alone make a rational decision about what to say about Robert and his
role in smuggling the heroin. But why should I take the blame?
One thing was clear; he never had the belly for the trouble we were in. A worried woman knows a worried man when she sees one.
‘We’ll escape,’ he said, pointing out rusty bars high above the cell I was being held in.‘Pull them to see if they’ll move and feel along the walls for a way out,’ he continued. ‘It’ll be easier to get out of here than it will to get out of a prison.’
I thought he was mad. Surely we wouldn’t have to escape from the police station, never mind prison.We wouldn’t be there that long. If he wants to escape then fine, he can go ahead. I was too scared to try to do anything that might upset the police.
Although Robert still wanted me to say he had had nothing to do with the heroin, the least I expected him to say was that he was sorry. Nothing.
Jean Sharpe, a representative from the British Embassy, came to see me on my second day. She was wearing a pretty floral dress. Her attitude was stiff and brisk.‘Your parents are going to be told what has happened to you,’ she stated, baldly.
I passed her the letter I had scribbled to my family telling them to forget all about me.
‘No,’ I said,‘no, please don’t tell them. Don’t tell anybody where I am or what is happening to me. Just go away and don’t come back.’
She glanced at the letter.‘The media might be interested in this case, so it would be better if your parents hear from the Foreign Office than from a journalist or from reading about it in a newspa- per.’
‘The media? Don’t be ridiculous. The media won’t be inter- ested in this. I’m sure there are far more interesting things for them to report on than me.’ Her eyes widened.
I wondered what kind of sentence I might receive; at worst weeks, perhaps even a month. ‘Jean,’ I asked, ‘what am I likely to get for this?’
‘The minimum sentence is
25
years, Sandra,’ she said,‘but they could uphold the maximum, which I think you know is death.’
What? What? What the hell are you talking about? Minimum?
Maximum?
25
years? Death?
‘No, Jean,’ I blurted out.‘That’s not possible. No way! I can’t do that!’
She barely moved. ‘Oh, yes, you can,’ she said, ‘yes, you can.
You’ll find the strength.’
The air was dry and I sucked on it for moisture. I looked up at the cell ceiling, imagining I might never see natural light again. I almost threw up at the thought of the rats. Jean’s conversation echoed, sounding almost berserk. Was she insane? ‘Find the strength’? She had to be joking.
‘No, I won’t,’ I repeated.‘I’m not that sort of person.’
Jean looked away again, handed me a small booklet containing a list of lawyers, saying she would see me at LardYao, and promptly left.
What a horrible woman
, I thought.Yet over the coming years I grew to rely on Jean so much and thought so highly of her that when the Foreign Office transferred her out of Bangkok I must have cried for a month. She turned out to be one of the loveliest women, who fought my corner more times than I can remember.
There were quite a few Thai men in the cells of the Crime Suppression Division and, after the rat ate my rice the first morning, I gave the sloppy rations to those in the cage opposite me.They devoured it.The food was pale and disgusting.The cells for both the men and women faced directly opposite each other, so there was no such thing as privacy. I watched them as much as they watched me because there was nothing much else to look at. Two teenage brothers in the men’s cell were thin, poor and dirty. Every night they slept entwined around each other. They had been offered £
100
to drive a pick-up truck down to Bangkok. They were stopped and the police found several
hundred kilos of marijuana, all professionally pressed and baled. I looked at them as they hugged each other. Fear sat in their gut like broken glass.
There was no natural light in the cells, although it was never dark because the fluorescent strip lights were kept on all the time. After I had scrubbed the cell a few days earlier, I had stuck large pieces of old newspaper over the bars to stop the lights keeping me awake at night. My sickness wouldn’t go away, and the light burned my eyes, giving me splitting headaches.A light in another room silhouetted a policeman.
Every day I was taken upstairs for questioning and on the third day, the policeman in charge of the case, who seemed fairly decent, handed me several sheets of typed A
4
paper and told me to sign at the bottom. Up until that point I had been as cooperative as
could be expected but when I saw an official document typed in Thai, without translation, I panicked. My father’s voice came back to me.
‘Never sign anything, Sandra,’ he had always warned me, ‘until you have read and understood all the small print. If you don’t like it, don’t sign it.’ Even
7
,
000
miles from home he made perfect sense.
‘No,’ I said,‘I won’t sign it.What does it say?’
‘Nothing,’ said the policeman.‘Just what you have told me.’
There was a silence between us. It was obvious he was lying about what was in the document. His brown eyes hardened. I could be signing my death warrant.
‘No,’ I repeated,‘I’m not signing.’
‘You sign,’ he shouted, with increasing purpose to his voice.‘If you no sign the court give you the big sentence.You sign.’ It was obvious he was talking about the death penalty but it was another chance I would have to take. Still he persisted.‘If my king gives an amnesty to prisoners, you will not get the amnesty if you no sign. You die in Thai prison. If you apply for Royal Pardon, you no get it if you no sign.’
He repeated his signing mantra over and over, telling me that I would spend the rest of my life in prison. I was scared but I would not sign.The following day he came downstairs for me at around
4
o’clock in the morning.
‘Get up, get up, you sign.’ I refused and the tension between us increased. Later, he returned, offering to go out and get me any- thing I wanted to eat. He knew I hadn’t eaten in days.‘You sign?’ he pleaded, pretending that there was some intimacy between us, as if he understood my predicament.
‘No,’ I said, again.‘I won’t sign it.’
We continued this for a few more days. His frustration finally got the better of him and he took me upstairs again to his interro- gation office. He shut the door and whispered.‘I cannot stop my men coming in to see you in the night if you no sign.They like you, but I tell them “no”.’ It was obvious what he meant but I didn’t care if they raped me. If it happened I would deal with it but I still wasn’t going to sign their stupid paper.
‘Do what you like, I’m not signing anything.’
Robert bought a bottle ofThai whisky from one of the policemen and that night we split it. I had eaten nothing and fear orbited my body like a satellite.With a bottle of paracetamol and a packet of antidepressants I drank the whisky. I’d had enough of this shit. It seemed like the easiest way out of everything. I wanted to make it easier for everyone concerned: my family, friends and even the Thai officials.
‘I’m going to sleep Robert,’ I said to him, at around seven in the evening.‘Don’t bother waking me up.’
In the early hours of the morning I woke up, the usual fluores- cent light buzzing overhead, hoping that I was dead. Although I knew I was alive I pretended that this was what death felt like – not too sore, just a little hazy, a little grey.
Stupid cow.
My pathetic attempt at suicide had failed miserably. I stumbled into the slimy toilet area, slipping and cracking my head on the concrete tank.
Lying on the wet floor, I realised that I was not in heaven but still very much in Thai hell.The ruinous stench of the police station lingered on.
Christ, Sandra, you are an idiot.You can’t even kill yourself without messing up.
The next morning Robert told me that he had suspected I
wanted to kill myself. I think he had wanted me to die.
Two women walked into the main office of the police station while I was being interviewed. ‘Ugh, the press,’ said one police- man.