by Harlan Wolff
They all got on the boat, and the boatman pushed off from the jetty. Once the engine was smoking, and the propeller at the end of the long pole was spinning, he dipped it in the water, and they took off. The wooden boat made better speed than usual on the calm sea.
“Nobody’s looking for us in Bangkok, George, it was just the colonel wanting me back. He’s missing his extra income, so I think it’s time we went home.”
“What happened to your retirement plan?” George asked.
“It died before I did,” Carl said.
“What are you going to do about Nadia?” George asked him.
“I’ll sit her down and tell her it’s over.”
“Just like that?”
“No choice, that woman’s too much stress and very high maintenance. I can’t play private detective and cunt-struck fool, not at the same time,” Carl told him.
“Poor kid,” George said with sadness because everybody under forty was a kid to George.
“She was unhappy long before I met her, and I assume she’ll still be when I’m gone.”
“You can be a cold bastard sometimes, Carl,” George said.
“Don’t think I don’t like her George, I do. The problem is her endless dramas have nothing to do with me; it’s just her tantrums require an audience, and right now, that’s me. Whatever screwed her up was a long time ago, and it screwed her up good. Don’t worry, she won’t have a problem getting a new accomplice to play her mind games, not with a body like that she won’t.”
George knew better than to argue so had nothing more to say on the subject, and for the rest of the journey, he was silent. Clouseau was in a state of shock from what he’d heard. He certainly wouldn’t ever have considered throwing away a beautiful, tall blonde with large breasts, if he’d ever had one, which he hadn’t. His friend had clearly gone mad.
When they reached the island, the engine was switched off, and the boat glided to the wooden pier. The pier and the island’s main street were deserted. No pickup trucks or motorcycles were waiting for the tourist boats. It was as if there had been a storm warning and everybody had run for shelter, but the sky was blue, and the sea was still as a millpond. The three men walked along the road, past the shop-houses with their closed shutters, in the direction of their beach, almost two kilometres away.
“What a strange day this is, I have never seen the island deserted before,” Clouseau said as they walked.
“Maybe Nadia’s sunbathing topless again,” Carl suggested, smiling.
“Not after what happened the last time. I told her never to do that again,” Clouseau growled, remembering the day the quivering bushes along the beach had concealed every young male on the island. “I told her that foreign women behaving like they do in Europe is dangerous here, and she promised she would never do it again.”
“I was only joking. I’m sure she took your advice,” Carl reassured him.
They turned off the main road when they reached the dirt path that ran the short distance to the beach. As they got closer to the beach, they could see all the island’s cars, trucks and motorcycles parked amongst the shade of the palm trees. Once they reached the sand, they could see a crowd of people in the distance milling around the restaurant in front of the resort. There was a police speedboat from the mainland too, beached in front of the restaurant. The three men walked fast, not quite at a run, trying not to be conspicuous.
The crowd was gathered in small groups, but everybody was facing toward the hut that Carl had lived in for the past eleven months. He saw that several uniformed policemen were surrounding his hut. When Carl got there, he found there were police inside as well as outside. It looked like a massive scrum with Carl’s home in the middle, and every cop’s position in the scrum determined by his rank. The lower their place in the pecking order, the further back they were. Carl crashed through the wall of lower ranked policemen and pushed his way through his front door.
Carl’s small bedroom was full of men in khaki, and he tried to squeeze through them to see what they were all looking at. After pushing some uniforms out of his way, through a gap, he saw Nadia naked on the floor, arms outstretched, sitting up, with her back against the wall; her face was caked in dried blood, as was her long blonde hair. Two senior officers were discussing the size of her breasts as they stomped over the crime scene, corrupting any evidence that might have been left by the killer. Carl knew she was dead even before he saw the bullet hole between her eyes. Someone had worked her over and then shot her at point blank.
Clouseau had remained outside the door; he knew his place now all his bosses were around. George had followed Carl into the room just in time to see his legs give way as he dropped to the floor. George watched Carl, on his knees now, his head darting from side to side, trying to see between the rows of khaki-clad legs. Carl sat down on the floor, staring at the body with a dizzy look on his face - half shock and half rage. The policemen closed ranks around him, and George was forced to stay where he was, just inside the door. George had seen plenty of shock victims in Vietnam, on both sides of the conflict, but he had never seen a person in a state of shock manage to be so pragmatic. But Carl was not like other people, and George could see his friend was already studying and memorising the crime scene.
George had been around enough corpses to know Nadia had been dead for hours. There was a towel lying beside the body, suggesting she’d been killed coming out of the shower. Nadia had never got used to Thailand’s heat and humidity and took a lot of cold showers. George had seen her from the boat that morning, walking on the beach very much alive, and that meant, while they were on the mainland someone had entered the hut, savagely attacked her and then put a bullet in her head. It didn’t look like a sexual attack, she hadn’t been dragged to the bed, and the whole thing looked far too businesslike to be a sex crime. The scene reminded George of gung-ho GIs, fresh off the choppers, searching South Vietnamese villages for Vietcong - villages he saw over and over again in his dreams, the huts very similar to this one.
CHAPTER 5
“A really good detective never gets married.”
– Raymond Chandler
Carl got to his feet and was immediately grabbed by four policemen. He was frogmarched outside and made to sit on the rattan chair. The cigar he’d left there that morning was still in the ashtray, so he picked it up and put it in his mouth.
“Any of you got a light?” he asked the group of policemen.
“Why you kill her?” A menacing looking man in a police major’s uniform stepped forward and screamed at Carl.
“I was on the mainland,” Carl muttered back in Thai. Under the small table, he found the box of matches he’d put there. He picked up the box of matches and lit what was left of the cigar.
“Why you argue? Why you kill her?” The major continued yelling in English. “I not like clever foreigners. You tell me truth now, or else!”
“Or else what?” Carl asked him.
“Or else I arrest you,” the man threatened through closed teeth, whistling as he spoke.
“Right,” Carl barked back at him, “you’d better show me your fucking handcuffs then.”
Clouseau stepped forward to speak on Carl’s behalf. The sergeant put his hands together and moved them up and down in the subservient prayer like wai while averting his eyes from the gaze of the senior officer. Before he had a chance to say anything, the major bellowed at him that he wasn’t to interfere in things above his station. Clouseau quickly retreated; it was essential to know your place in Thailand. Meanwhile, the diversion had served its purpose and stopped the confrontation between the two men escalating into a full-blown shouting match.
“Do you think it’s a good idea to trample all over the crime scene before forensics have taken a look?” Carl asked the major calmly in Thai.
“This not American movie, Thai police better than American police. Must find murderer fast - murderer confesses - the judge gives firing squad – then bang-bang,” the major said with a
grin, pointing his finger at Carl like a gun. “You confess now or later, but for sure you confess. I have promotion to lieutenant colonel for sure,” he said and laughed loudly.
“Fuck me! Couldn’t you just buy yourself a promotion, like everybody else does?” Carl asked him.
“You not so clever in jail. In jail, they know what to do with clever foreigner like you,” the major told him.
The most senior officer at the crime scene stepped forward, a colonel by the insignia on his uniform, “Is this him?” he asked the major.
“Yes sir, this is the murderer,” the major replied proudly.
Carl looked at the colonel and said in clear Thai, “I was on the mainland all day. There are plenty of witnesses.”
The colonel replied in Thai, “You are the boyfriend, so you will need to come to the police station to answer some questions. Please don’t leave the area until we let you know everything that is required of you.”
“I understand,” Carl told him.
The colonel and the major walked away together with the major, clearly excited, explaining their great fortune in catching the murderer so quickly. He insisted their bosses at the provincial head office would be impressed. The colonel didn’t like his major, and he said nothing.
Clouseau saw them walk away, and came over to where Carl was sitting. “That major hates foreigners,” he told him. “When he was stationed in Pattaya his wife ran off with a German man. Not long after, the German’s house was raided, and a bag of speed pills was found under the bed, and now they are both in prison. You be careful Carl, he is a bad man.”
“Someone should tell him to be careful, I’m in a nasty mood myself,” Carl said.
George was sombre as he joined his friends. “Anything you need, Carl, just tell me,” he said.
“Thanks, George, right now I need to get back inside the room before they take the body away.”
The hut was emptying, and all the junior officers were slowly leaving the scene, following their colonel onto the beach. A man in jeans, with a goatee, carrying a battered film camera with a flashbulb, approached and went inside. Clouseau leant forward and whispered to Carl, “He is the crime scene photographer, but his real business is selling photos of dead bodies to the newspapers. A murdered blonde with no clothes on will make him a lot of money, front page for sure.”
“When he’s done, I’m going inside,” Carl said.
“Be careful, they will say you tried to destroy evidence,” Clouseau told him.
“Impossible, because they’ve already destroyed it,” Carl said.
“Alright, if I cough it means they are coming back,” Clouseau told him, and took up position outside the door, standing to attention to look like he’d been ordered to stand there.
The flashes from inside the hut stopped, and the young man with the goatee left and walked past them smiling to himself. Some low ranking policemen were still milling around outside, but they weren’t significant enough to have an opinion on anything. Having decided it was safe, Clouseau nodded at Carl and George, and they both went inside.
The bed that Carl and Nadia slept on had been climbed over by eager policemen, and the white bedsheet was covered in boot marks. The off-white tiled floor showed the scuffs of dozens of clumsy boots. If the killers had left any footprints, they were impossible to see now. Carl stepped around the bed and stopped in front of Nadia’s body. The photographer had lifted her head and put her hair behind her shoulders, fully exposing both breasts to his lens. Carl pulled her long hair down to cover both breasts. Her face was a bloody mess, and Carl felt his knees shaking as he knelt in front of the body. She had been punched in the face many times, two front teeth were gone, and her nose was broken. She also had marks on her upper arms, where one man had been holding her, and two of her fingers had been broken, probably intentionally. Carl figured it had taken at least two strong men; one to grab her as she came out of the bathroom and restrain her while the other man worked her over. It looked like they’d wanted information from her before executing her. Why the savage beating, and what had they wanted her to tell them before they shot her?
According to what Carl overheard, nobody nearby heard a gunshot, so the gun must have had a silencer. Carl was reaching the opinion she had been murdered by professionals; at least two of them. They would have been heavily built too, because Nadia was no lightweight, and she certainly knew how to throw a right hook; Carl had been on the receiving end of enough of her punches to know she could have put up a decent fight against a small man, but this had not been a fair fight. The attack had been contained in the corner just outside the bathroom door, and it would have taken at least two powerful men to accomplish that. The last thing Carl mentally recorded before he stood up was the several cuts and bruises on her shins, where she had kicked out at her attackers as they worked her over.
A quick inspection of the drawers revealed that Nadia’s diary had been taken away. George commented that he had seen it in the hand of one of the policemen. Carl hadn’t looked inside her diary but now wished he had. Not that he could have read Russian, but it wouldn’t have been in Russian it would have been in Serbian, and he wouldn’t have understood that either. Why had she told him she was Russian? Fortunately, Carl had kept his documents with George, he had heard of too many passports torn up in fits of jealousy to carelessly leave his lying around in the same room as a woman that was always angry with him over something or other. Carl knew that Nadia kept her most important documents in the void under the bottom drawer beside the bed. When he removed all the drawers, he saw everything was still there except her spare mobile phone, passport and Austrian foreign resident’s ID card. He had seen her pile of personal documents laid out on the bed once when he came back from the Flying Fish early, and Nadia was in the shower, but the passport had been in a protective cover, and he had assumed it was Russian and hadn’t looked further, because Carl never investigated his friends, it was his rule. He wondered what had happened to her passport and phone? He knew the police hadn’t found them; otherwise, they would have taken everything.
“Christ Carl, what the hell happened?” George blurted out, tears running down both cheeks.
“I don’t know yet, George, but I swear I’m going to find out, and I’ll get these fucking bastards if it’s the last thing I ever do.”
CHAPTER 6
“Unless you are good at guessing, it is not much use being a detective.”
– Agatha Christie
By the time the sun went down, the police were nowhere to be seen. Nadia’s body had been taken to the mainland in the late afternoon, carried in a plastic body bag and thrown in the back of a speedboat like a sack of rice. The day shift was over, and the policemen had gone back to the mainland to clock out and go home to their wives and mistresses. The island was peaceful again as if nothing had happened.
Carl, George, and Clouseau sat together at the bar of the Flying Fish. Jenny was in her usual place behind the counter serving drinks, sliding them slowly along the bar one after another like a funeral procession. Time passed without anybody saying anything until Carl broke the silence as he sipped from his fifth whisky.
“Jen, go down to the restaurant and hang out for a while. Find out what people saw and heard,” Carl said. Jenny looked at Carl’s face scrunched up with tension and thought better of arguing with him. She came out from behind the bar and walked away up the beach.
“I have a friend in Bangkok, a colonel, he wants to ask you some questions Clouseau. Please tell him whatever he wants to know.” Carl said as he punched redial on his new phone and handed it to Clouseau. The sergeant walked down to the sea with the phone to his ear, and he bowed subserviently as he spoke to the colonel.
“I hate to ask this but are you planning to go after the killer out of guilt? Because that’s not a healthy reason,” George said when Clouseau was out of earshot.
“Guilt’s got nothing to do with it. Just because I wasn’t planning to settle down for the rest of my l
ife and buy bedroom slippers, doesn’t mean I can walk away from this. Anyway, if I don’t do it, there’s nobody else going to do it properly.”
According to news reports, the consensus on social media was local fishermen had got high on alcohol and amphetamines and raped and murdered Nadia. That was often the case when a female tourist was found murdered on an island in Thailand. But Carl knew this was no random act of violence by local boys off a fishing boat. What kind of fishermen had a gun with a silencer? Carl took Jenny’s place behind the bar and poured more drinks.
Clouseau came back to the bar, putting the telephone in front of Carl. He was impressed that Carl had such a powerful friend in Bangkok. A beer was placed in front of the sergeant, and he gulped it down. Everybody was trying very hard to drink themselves’ numb.
After a while, Jenny came back, and Carl vacated the small space behind the bar for her. She checked everybody’s drinks and then said, “A speedboat arrived at the beach around eleven, and left half an hour later. Two big foreign men went into the hut, and there was a loud argument.”
“A loud argument?”
“You know island people stay out of disagreements between tourists,” Jenny said.
“Until they’re dead,” Carl replied.
“It’s the way it is,” Jenny told him as she handed him another drink.
“Yeah, yeah, I know. Did you get a description of the two foreigners or the boat?”
“The boat was probably red. Three people said red, and one said blue, so I think it was red.”
“And, the men?”
