Stars Over the Southern Ocean

by J. H. Fletcher

  ‘Strong man like you? You’ll be good for a few years yet.’

  ‘No. Time’s running out; I can feel it.’ He did not turn his head from the fire. ‘One thing I wanted you to know. Noamunga will be yours. I changed the will after Jory died. Another thing; there’s a suitcase in the cupboard in my room. The cash in it is for you.’

  It was the first Marina had heard of any cash.

  ‘Twenty-five thousand quid. It belonged to my neighbour. Kelsey Reinhardt; you never met him. He left it with me for safekeeping. Said if anything happened to him it was mine. I’ve never touched it; I’d done nothing to earn it, so it never seemed right to spend it. But it’s yours, anyway, if you ever need it.’

  It happened three days later. Marrek had been walking in the bush country under the Wombat Ridge. Marina had watched him walk there often, no longer with heels punishing the earth, but tentatively, as though apologising for being there at all.

  She went to tell him tea was ready, found him with his face turned to the sky. She reckoned the stroke had felled him between one step and the next, death coming mercifully, without warning or pain. His expression was peaceful and she hoped that, at the last, the demons of Coverack had relented, permitting him to escape the rocks and find the safe harbour he had been seeking for so long.

  1993

  CHAPTER 44

  Greg had always been proud of his ability to put a bold face on things. The trouble was that those who knew him well also knew his bold face and—sometimes—what lay behind it.

  ‘We want you should pay us,’ Somchai said, smiling.

  A nice smile, patient and understanding. Those who didn’t know him would think him a most reasonable man.

  ‘Like you promised,’ Mongkut said. ‘No problem: that’s what you told us.’

  His smile, too, was patient and understanding.

  Greg looked from one of them to the other and found no comfort in their smiles.

  ‘We’ve hit a tiny snag,’ he said. ‘But I’m sure I’ll soon be able to sort it out.’

  ‘Snag? What snag?’ Not even the pretence of a smile now.

  ‘A small delay. Nothing serious. I expect to have the money very soon.’ He gave them his most lighthearted smile. ‘Very, very soon,’ he said.

  ‘You say money available when we want it. You have been saying this from the very beginning. Never mention snags.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘When pay?’ Somchai said.

  ‘I don’t want to mislead—’

  ‘When?’

  No way to hide it: the expression in their eyes scared him. He stared out through the verandah windows, trying to will away his fear. The weather had cleared; the land of perpetual summer was once again bathed in sunshine. Two days of bad weather had forced the Krabi fishermen to stay in port but the skies were now clear, the wind negligible, and Greg could see the sharp-prowed fishing boats working all the way down the coast, the crews busy with their nets. The fishermen were all poor men, but at that moment he would have exchanged places with any one of them.

  Mongkut and Somchai said nothing but he could feel them watching him.

  ‘I expect to have the money for you very soon,’ he said.

  He was trying to buy time; the truth was he had no idea where he could get it. Mum had nothing, as he’d expected; both his sisters had turned him down flat. As he’d expected.

  ‘Quarter of a million dollars?’ Tamsyn had said. ‘Get real!’

  ‘It’s important,’ he’d told her. ‘I’ll be in serious trouble if I can’t find it soon.’

  ‘That’s what you always say,’ Tamsyn said.

  Charlotte had said the same.

  Trouble was, they were right. That was what he always said. Now, when his situation really was desperate, neither of them believed him.

  Mongkut was talking in a voice so quiet that for a moment Greg did not register what he was saying.

  ‘Why not use a finance broker?’

  ‘That way, end all your problems,’ Somchai said.

  A finance broker? Greg dared not allow himself to hope, but hoped anyway.

  ‘I don’t know any finance brokers,’ he said.

  Nor did Krabi, little more than a fishing village, seem a likely place to find one.

  ‘We have a contact in Singapore,’ Mongkut said.

  ‘Very big man in finance world,’ Somchai said. ‘Many important men use him.’

  ‘What does he do, exactly?’ Greg asked.

  ‘Arranges loans for promising businesses. You need money, he can arrange.’

  ‘Only to selected clients,’ Mongkut said. ‘Very particular man.’

  ‘But you think he will act for me?’ Greg said, fingers and toes all crossed.

  ‘We will speak to him. Tell him you’re very good man, looking for short-term loan. Then he will decide. But do not worry, if we recommend, you will have good chance he will find money for you.’

  ‘I hope so,’ Greg said.

  Somchai gave him a beaming smile. ‘End of all your problems.’

  ‘When will you speak to him?’

  ‘Today,’ Mongkut said. ‘If interested, he will phone you.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘He will tell you when he phones,’ Somchai said.

  ‘If he phones,’ Mongkut said.

  Mr Tan phoned in the middle of the afternoon.

  He sounded pleasant but businesslike. He told Greg it was possible he could help but a meeting would be necessary.

  ‘Shall we say three days’ time?’

  ‘A meeting where?’

  ‘At my office in Singapore. New Asia Building, Shenton Way. Eleventh floor.’

  They agreed on a time; Greg said he would be there. He told Mongkut and Somchai. He would fly down from Bangkok, see the finance broker in Singapore.

  ‘Mr Tan’s a very good man,’ Somchai said. ‘See him, we are sure all your troubles will be over.’

  ‘Thanks to you,’ Greg said.

  ‘Glad to help,’ Somchai said.

  ‘One thing we would like you to do for us while you’re in Singapore,’ Mongkut said. ‘We have a small consignment of electrical components manufactured especially for us by a German company based in Singapore.’

  ‘We need them for another job we are working on. They are not heavy,’ Somchai said. ‘One small suitcase only.’

  ‘But very valuable and easily damaged,’ Mongkut said.

  ‘Which is why we dare not trust to post or ordinary courier. One of us was planning to fly down but if you would collect them for us …’

  ‘Of course I will,’ Greg said. ‘What are friends for?’

  All the way to Singapore Greg sat back in his seat, luxuriating in the thought that his troubles, as Somchai had said, were now behind him.

  What relief! What a fool he’d been to get so worked up over nothing!

  When he got to Changi airport, he took a taxi to the finance broker’s office in Shenton Way, arriving in good time for his meeting.

  Mr Tan foresaw no problem in interesting one or other of his clients in putting up the small amount of money required.

  ‘Most are interested in more substantial sums,’ Mr Tan said. ‘But I am confident I can arrange something. I will ask around and get back to you in a few days.’

  All very satisfactory and, if the thirty per cent rate of interest was higher than he’d expected, Greg consoled himself with the thought that beggars couldn’t be too choosy.

  After he left Mr Tan’s office he took a taxi to the Jurong industrial area, where the manager of the local branch of German conglomerate Helmut Kraus GmbH was expecting him. Herr Körner insisted that he inspect the contents of the locked case containing the electrical equipment. He did so. As far as he could tell, all seemed in order. The case was relocked. Greg signed for the consignment and put the key in his pocket. He caught another taxi across the island to Changi airport where he checked in for the return flight to Bangkok.

  There were no
problems at Changi but when he went through customs at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi airport he was escorted to a private room where he was invited to open the case he had kept with him throughout the flight. He did so, impatient at the delay, and found himself staring at the contents in a mixture of horror and disbelief.

  He protested his innocence; it did no good. He told them he had no idea how the electrical equipment he had seen in Singapore had somehow transmogrified into the packets of cocaine that now filled the case; the officials barked at him in Thai and he did not understand what they were saying.

  He was shackled, hands and legs. The humiliation was hard to bear but his protests were ignored. He was led away past gawking travellers and pushed into a blue-painted van with steel mesh over the windows. Two guards climbed in with him. They drove him through streets thronged with people going about their normal business in a world from which he had been so abruptly removed.

  It was impossible to see where they were going but eventually the van stopped briefly, blew its horn twice and, after a minute’s delay, trundled forward through a narrow opening into the courtyard of what Greg guessed was the Bangkok remand centre. The centre was in Maha Chai Road and he had passed it many times when he’d been staying in the capital, visiting government offices as he sought permission to develop the Nirvana resort on the Andaman Sea island of Laem Thong.

  He’d got permission in the end. Mongkut and Somchai had been immensely helpful to him; without their contacts in the ministry he doubted he would ever have managed it. He prayed they would be equally helpful in sorting out the inexplicable disaster that had now befallen him.

  Even now, with the shackles cutting into his ankles and wrists, he couldn’t believe what was happening to him. His throat was dry, his heart pounding. It was a nightmare, a mistake. He had done nothing. Over and over again, with increasing desperation, he said so to the guards in the truck. They ignored him. Perhaps they did not understand. Or worse, did not want to understand.

  His mind was all over the place. He took deep breaths, trying to regain control. He told himself it was very simple. Somehow he had to get hold of his partners. They would sort things out. They would do whatever they had to do to convince the authorities that it was all an absurd mistake, that he had done nothing, that he was innocent.

  The van door opened and he was dragged roughly out. Guards brandishing heavy wooden clubs shouted incomprehensibly. He was unshackled and made to strip. There in the open yard surrounded by buildings, he was subjected to the humiliation of an intimate body search. When the guards had finished with him, he barely had time to grab his clothes before, still naked, he was harried across the yard and past a grilled door into a building stinking of hopelessness and human waste.

  He was confronted by a dark corridor lined on both sides with barred cells. The cells were packed with prisoners. Emaciated hands were thrust between the bars, voices pleaded with passers-by for handouts: food, cigarettes, anything. Prodded by the clubs, Greg was driven down the corridor until a shout followed by a blow with a club brought him to a halt.

  Keys rattled as a barred grille was unlocked and pulled open. Greg was thrust into the crowded cell. The grille was slammed shut and relocked behind him. The guards’ boots echoed as they marched away.

  Greg, still clutching his clothes, stared about him at Asian bodies crammed so closely together there was barely room for them to move. At the hostile faces staring back at him. Nobody spoke and the silence was a threat. The crowded cell stank of fear, hatred and filth. He could see nowhere to sit. And this hellhole was where he was destined to stay? His mind could not take hold of the sheer impossibility of the situation. Of the impossible that had become reality.

  He stood with his back pressed against the bars. He was shaking with shock and fear as he dragged on his clothes and thrust his feet into his shoes. Naked, he had felt dangerously vulnerable; he did so still, but less so. Again he looked around him. It would be disastrous to show fear so he put on the bravest face he could and pushed himself away from the bars. He forced his way through the mob, shoving until, resentfully, they let him through. Most of them looked half-starved, many half-mad or worse.

  He thought, if his partners did not get him out very soon, it wouldn’t be long before he was looking half-mad himself. A wiry old man, sparse grey hair hanging about his face, stared at him with crazed eyes before hawking a gob of phlegm on to the floor at Greg’s feet.

  He shouted with sudden violence, using a Thai phrase that Greg couldn’t understand.

  There was a growl, low and menacing, from those around him. Greg could almost taste the hatred. The air in the crowded cell reeked of violence and he knew it wouldn’t take much for them to attack him. Do that and they would almost certainly kill him.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re saying,’ he said. ‘I don’t understand.’

  A voice called out from somewhere at the back of the cell. A voice with an Indian accent, speaking English.

  ‘He is saying you are a police spy.’

  A confusion of emotions: relief that there was someone to whom he could speak and maybe relate; horror that the prisoners might have such dangerous thoughts about him.

  ‘Of course I’m not. Please tell them they’re wrong.’

  ‘No use,’ the voice said. ‘They don’t trust me, either.’

  In the shadows of the jam-packed cell Greg couldn’t make out where the speaker was.

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Over here. Against the wall at the back.’

  Looking at the truculent expressions of those around him, Greg knew that if he tried to shove them much more there might be trouble but he had no option. The man who had called out to him in English offered the only prospect of sanity in what had become an insane world and he was determined to reach him.

  Slowly and cautiously, he continued to inch his way across the crowded cell, smiling apologetically at everyone as he did so. Reluctantly, the prisoners allowed him to squeeze between them. At last he reached the rear wall. A dark-skinned man, thin and bearded, was sitting on the floor. He looked up at Greg and nodded.

  ‘Am I glad to meet you,’ Greg said.

  There was no room to sit down but he thought he had the answer to that.

  The police had searched the suitcase and his body, yet for some reason had not told him to empty his pockets. His fingertips grazed the roll of bank notes he had with him.

  A few Singapore dollars and Malaysian ringgit and twenty thousand baht: a little under a thousand Australian dollars in all. He should be able to buy any number of favours with that, but there were dangers as well as benefits in having so much cash on him. He had no doubt many of the people here would happily cut his throat for a hundredth part of that amount; he couldn’t afford to let anyone know he had so much money.

  He teased a note out of the roll. Fifty baht. Two dollars. He clenched his fingers around it, took it out of his pocket and held it out, as surreptitiously as he could, to the youngster squatting next to the dark-skinned man.

  ‘Chuai noi …’

  Please. It was one of the few Thai words he knew.

  The youth, with a pimpled face and drug tracks on his wasted arms, glanced furtively about him. Shoulder hunched to conceal his hand, he grabbed the note, which disappeared so fast he might have swallowed it. He edged slightly to one side. Greg gave the smallest of nods and sat down in the tiny space made available by the young man’s movement.

  ‘Kop-khun krap.’ Thank you.

  He looked warily at his fellow-prisoners. They’d eyed him threateningly at first but now seemed to have lost interest. Any time now his partners would start checking to find out what had happened to him. When they knew they would do whatever was necessary to get him out. Now he was over the initial shock he thought things could have been worse.

  ‘If I were you,’ the Indian man said, ‘I’d hide my watch. You might lose it otherwise.’

  It hadn’t occurred to him.

  ‘Of course,�
�� he said.

  He slipped it off his wrist and put it in his pocket.

  ‘Drugs?’ the Indian man said.

  ‘Yes. But I’m innocent.’

  ‘Of course. We are all innocent here.’

  ‘But I really am. When my partners find out what’s happened, they’ll soon get me out.’

  ‘No,’ the man said.

  Greg stared.

  ‘Once you’re here, there’s no getting out. Whether you are truly innocent or not, if you plead guilty, you will still serve time but they will reduce your sentence. Plead innocence and they will find you guilty anyway. Then you could be here a long time.’

  Greg’s mouth was dry. ‘How long?’

  ‘What drugs are we talking?’

  ‘Cocaine.’

  ‘In that case you could be looking at twenty years.’

  Dear God, help me, Greg thought.

  ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘Two months? Three? Who is counting?’

  It could not, must not, be true. Twenty years? Mongkut and Somchai would get him out. They had to.

  Twenty years.

  Horror, terror, exhaustion. He could think of nothing more to say to the man beside him. He closed his eyes, leant the back of his head against the wall and settled down to wait.

  Slowly the minutes passed.

  Sometime during the day a fight broke out between two of the prisoners. Yells of abuse were followed by the men swinging wild blows at each other, culminating in a cry of pain from one of them.

  A clatter of boots from outside the cell as the guards came running. They threw open the barred door and dragged the two culprits into the corridor. From where he was sitting Greg could see nothing but heard the sound of the blows as they beat the two men with their clubs. Cries of anger changed quickly to cries of pain, followed by a silence broken only by the repeated blows of the clubs. Eventually they, too, ceased. The cell door was relocked and those inside heard the two men being dragged away. Unconscious? Dead? No way to know.

  Greg looked about him. None of the other prisoners had stirred during the incident. Their expressions remained apathetic. It was as though nothing had happened and Greg found their indifference the most frightening thing of all.