Guards opened the gate electronically for them, and they drove up a winding driveway to a grand, steep-roofed house hidden in the trees.
The country home of tycoon Pansak Jermkhunthod was huge, beautiful and completely absurd. It was a villa designed on the lines of an over-sized temple, or perhaps a royal palace a Thai king might have built for himself circa 1830. It had multiple layers of roofs, the lowermost ones held up by painted, carved pillars.
Spiky and triangular, the building made Wong shiver. To him, the impression was one of rising fire energy, blasting over-rich yang energy upwards. Pyramid-shaped buildings were always unsuitable for personal dwellings, he believed. Only temples or churches had the right to point to Heaven with such casual effrontery. Yet an attitude of self-worship was all too common among the rich, and it was not surprising that the same conceit could be found in the design of their homes. No wonder many wealthy people were unhappy.
From his viewpoint in the driveway it looked as if the internal walls were lined with heads—how revolting. He squinted and realised that they were probably khon masks, repulsive heads of Thai gods with exaggerated lips and eyes, and teeth hanging down over their chins. How could anyone think that decapitated beings could add charm to their home? No lake was as deep and unfathomable as the human mind, he mused.
He fondled the charm around his neck, bowed his head, and stepped into the palace.
Joyce, meanwhile, had been told to relax and go shopping, but had decided against it—largely because she had no money left. There was another consideration: the possibility that she might get to hang out with movie stars. Now that was something not be missed.
Just outside the offices of Star City Ventures, she was interviewed by a young reporter from the Bangkok Post called Phaarata Sittiwong. The press, thronging around the doors, were hungry to speak to anyone who had the slightest connection to the case. In an attempt to prove to the reporter who interviewed her that she had not wasted her time, Joyce blurted out that she herself was part of an imported team investigating the incident.
Twenty minutes later, the two of them were on their way together to interview driver Boonchoob Chuntanaparb, who had been sent by police to recover at his home in a village on the outskirts of Samut Prakarn, just outside Bangkok.
Joyce was pleased that she could understand Phaarata’s Thai-accented English, which was far clearer than the police officer’s, although she pronounced with as wit and world-wide as wort-white.
In a coughing, light-blue taxi filled with images and statuettes of the Buddha, Phaarata explained that Samut Prakarn Province was at the mouth of the Chao Phraya River which ran through Bangkok.
‘Bangkok is really a very old place,’ she said. ‘It was built in the 1620s, but first it was on the west side of the river at Phra Pradaeng. Two hundred years later, King Rama the Second commanded his men to move the whole city across the waters in boats.’
‘Cheese, hard work.’
Joyce stared out of the stained taxi window. Although only a short hop by plane from Singapore, Thailand was totally different. There was an out-of-focus quality about it — the edges of the roads merged into the sidewalks and the sidewalks blurred into shops and restaurants. But the streets were a happy riot of colour, people were cheerful and brightly dressed, and they moved relatively fast, despite the fierce heat.
‘It’s nice, this place,’ she commented absently. She found the jostling rows of mismatched buildings oddly attractive.
Many streets featured long strings of ugly, blockish shops interspersed with absurdly ornate temples. Homes tended to be small and cottage-like, or large, grand, and half-hidden behind high walls. The streets, whether in the urban areas or on the long stretches of palm-fringed roads between, were lined with utility poles bearing a huge number of trailing wires. It appeared to her as if the whole of Thailand had been swamped in hundreds of thousands of kilometres of spaghetti cable dropped from the skies.
It took fifty-five minutes to arrive at the built-up centre of Samut Prakarn. Joyce was delighted when Phaarata suggested they transfer into a tiny three-wheeled taxi for the rest of the ride. The vehicle into which she climbed was a cross between a motorbike and a rickshaw, and had a blue and white striped awning over a small plastic sofa. ‘These bike things are soo like cute.’
‘Tuk-tuks.’ The reporter ordered the driver to go to a temple called Wat Chai Mongkon. ‘This you must see. It’s very beautiful. Very old. Built in 1350.’
‘Thirteen-fifty. Wow. That’s like—well, really, really old. I used to live in Hong Kong where nothing’s old. In Hong Kong, if a building is thirty, no one wants it and no one can get a mortgage to buy it and they have to pull it down.’
The buzzing, insect-like vehicle scuttled awkwardly around several corners, its engine straining and stuttering, its gears making an ear-piercing racket. But it weaved in and out of the traffic efficiently and they quickly found themselves in front of a bright, white temple with a multi-layered golden roof.
‘It’s just gorgeous,’ said Joyce. The temple was a clean, well-kept structure with six separate layers of overlapping, sloping roofs, each of which had its own upward-sweeping architectural flourishes. ‘Why has it got so many roofs? Do things leak here a lot?’
‘That’s the way they made them. It makes a place more grand to have roof on top of roof, people believe in Thailand. Protects us from bad influences, lift us nearer to heaven.’
The reporter scribbled an address on the front of her notebook and tore off the page for Joyce. ‘If you get time before you have to fly back, go to see the Wat Asokaram in Tambon Taiban. It’s not far. It’s worth seeing. It has bones of Buddha inside. It was built in 1955 by Phra Suttithama-rangsrikhampeeramaethajarn.’ ‘Who?’
‘Phra Suttithamarangsrikhampeeramaethajarn.’
‘That’s easy enough for you to say.’
‘What?’
‘It’s all right. I was just making a joke.’
They hailed another tuk-tuk and scooted along Phrakhonchai Road before tipping right into Sukhumwit Road and left into Phraeksa Road. Ten minutes later they were in a more rural area and the reporter led the tuk-tuk to a small house by the roadside on a street with no name and no kerb. Instead of ringing a doorbell, Phaarata stood outside a small terraced home and shouted through the window in the local language. To Joyce’s ear, the language sounded as if it was entirely made of cheh and keh and meh sounds and had to be spoken at breakneck speed.
Unable to understand a word of the conversation between Phaarata and Boonchoob Chuntanaparb’s mother, she cast her eyes around and looked at the curious world in which she found herself. The building was one of a row of miniature homes in a dusty, baked landscape where tiny slices of lush jungle were cramped by large factories and industrial buildings.
This is how some people live, she thought, suddenly amazed. I could live like this if I wanted to. There are many different ways people can live. This is one of them. This is their choice. It could be my choice. There are many choices. How big the world is. The thought made her simultaneously excited and terrified.
She turned back to face the discussion as the voices became louder and more animated. She still couldn’t follow what was being said. But the tone of the conversation made one point abundantly clear: Boonchoob was not there. Eventually the reporter thanked the woman of the house, bowed politely in her direction, and turned to her companion.
‘He’s gone out?’ guessed Joyce.
‘No. He never arrived home. He seems to have fled.’
‘Aha!’ said Joyce. ‘Weird—and suspicious, right?’
‘Weird? Why do you think that?’
‘Well, think about it. If he’s run off, it means he’s probably guilty of something. We just gotta work out what.’
Phaarata shook her head. ‘No. He is not guilty of something. Not like how you say. Sometimes when there is a car crash, the drivers flee. It happens.’
‘Why?’
‘Drivers, they think th
ey are going to be in trouble. Especially big trouble if their passenger is someone important. Or if they destroy someone’s expensive car.’
‘Oh. So you think he ran away because he thought he would get into trouble?’
‘I’m sure. His passengers were stars and the car was wrecked. It is no surprise he ran away.’
‘Where will he go?’
‘In Thailand, very easy to hide. This is a big country. Many small-small villages. Some in the forests, jungles. He will hide for a few weeks, few months, until all this fuss is over. Then he will quietly come back. It’s the Thai way.’
Joyce nodded. ‘Oh. I see. Well then, I guess this lead turned out to be a dead end. I just hope my boss is having a more successful time.’
Wong had not had a successful time.
He had left the grotesque, head-filled mansion and been driven back to Bangkok in a police vehicle. There he had met up again with Suchada Kamchoroen, who had taken him out of the theatre for some lunch at Anna’s Café in Soi Saladaeng, close to Silom Road’s busy office and shopping area.
Phaarata delivered Joyce to the group at the café on her way back to the newspaper office.
Hot and sweaty, the feng shui master’s assistant was rapturous about the drink she was handed. ‘I used to hate these,’ she said noisily slurping a cendol. ‘I think it was the idea of beans in a soft drink. And also the yucky feeling of lumps of jelly mixed in. But now I like them. I think I must have become truly half-Asian or something.’
On the way back into town, Phaarata had given Joyce a quick Thai lesson and she was anxious to share what she had learned. The words filled her with giggles. ‘There are thirteen words for me or I. The word for me if you are a guy is pom. Can you believe it? And if you are speaking to your younger sister, the word for I is pee. If you are talking to a mate, you say goo, and if you are a woman talking to an older person you say noo, which means mouse. Who made up this language, anyway? Whoever he was, you can tell it was a guy. It is like soo sexist.’
Wong wasn’t listening. He was frustrated. There had been no obvious clues at all at Pansak’s luxury home. A lengthy examination of the rooms the three stars had occupied revealed little of relevance. A detailed questioning of the servants had only raised three small points of interest, and two of them concerned the car, not the house.
First, both Khoon Boontawee and Warin Krungwong may well have had a very pleasant stay at the house—their rooms were well designed and suited their profiles adequately. The actress, Ing Suraswadee, might have been slightly less comfortable—she had an L-shaped room with an indentation in the south, crushing the ch’i and making it difficult for her to achieve recognition for her achievements while she was there.
Second, it appeared that the car had stopped somewhere, briefly, between leaving home and being attacked. The evidence for this was that two servants indicated that when the car left, Khoon Boontawee and the actress Ing Suraswadee were sitting in the back seat, and Warin Krungwong was sitting next to the driver. Yet when the attack happened, the driver’s statement revealed that Warin had joined the others in the back of the car. Where did they stop and rearrange themselves, and, more to the point, why?
Third, during the drive from the house to the spot where the car had been found, Wong had timed the journey. It took seven-and-a-half minutes. Officials said the traffic might have been slightly heavier the previous day, so it may have taken about nine minutes. Yet the official record of events suggested that close to twenty minutes passed before the crash. What happened in the intervening ten minutes?
Realising that her boss was not in a communicative mood, Joyce put her personal stereo headphones into her ears. Wong, detecting the shh-chka-shh-chka sound he so hated, shuffled further away.
The young woman decided to scan the two English newspapers. They had similar front page headlines: KHOON KIDNAPPED and TOP MOVIE CAST SNATCHED. The Bangkok Post, the Nation and the Thai language papers all had front-page photographs of the three actors too and speculation about what might have happened, with illustrations of black-masked villains snatching drugged stars from a car.
She then picked up Suchada’s voluminous files, which contained detailed profiles, photographs and other information about the missing actors. ‘Phwoar,’ she said, looking at a bare-chested picture of Warin Krungwong. ‘Tasty or wot.’
Suchada nibbled her fingernails, tense and confused. ‘How on earth did they do it without being seen? That’s what baffles me. The kidnappers would have had to lie in wait, catch up with the car, shoot the gas canister thing into it, ram the car off the road, stop their own car, grab the actors, and then race off. They managed all of that without being seen, on a busy road in the biggest, most traffic-congested place in the world.’
‘Outside Bangkok not so congested as inside,’ Wong said.
‘Yes, but the difference is not much these days,’ Suchada replied.
‘Phwoar!’ said Joyce even more loudly, discovering a picture of Warin in a loincloth. The others looked at her. ‘Sorry.’
She flicked through the rest of the photographs at speed, rapidly falling in love. While Khoon Boontawee may have been the big name among the three, Warin Krungwong was much more enticing. ‘He’s kind of a hunk,’ she said to the theatre manageress, slipping her headphones off. ‘And look at his expression. His eyes always look teary. And his hair flops over his forehead. That’s the sign of a truly brilliant actor.’
The Thai woman laughed.
‘You find the others,’ Joyce told Wong. ‘I’ll rescue Warin. Is that a deal?’
The feng shui master continued to ignore his assistant.
‘How was your trip to see the car driver, what was his name, Boonchoob?’ Suchada asked.
‘Oh. No good,’ said Joyce. ‘He scarpered. Apparently drivers in Thailand do that a lot. When they’ve crashed.’
‘Sometimes,’ Suchada said, shrugging.
Wong, desperate for a lead, looked over at his assistant. ‘You find anything interesting at house of driver? You go where?’
‘We went to a place called Samut something. Actually, it’s a funny word, Samut. My mum’s from England, and in the north of England “summat” means “something”.’
‘What?’
‘In England, summat means “something”.’
‘But what?’
‘Something. It means something.’
‘But wha—never mind.’
Joyce continued: ‘And they call the temples “wats”. That’s funny too, if you think about it. You know, what and wat.’
‘What?’
‘Yeah.’
At this point, Wong tuned out of the conversation, which was beginning to hurt his head. ‘There is video shop on next street, to east side,’ he said. ‘Why not you go see if you can find Khoon Boontawee movies? Do some background study.’
‘Good idea. Or maybe movies with Warin, even better.’
She picked up her bag and sauntered out of the café. The shh-chka-shh-chka noise faded.
The feng shui master breathed a sigh of relief and got back to staring at his lo shu charts for the three actors and the driver.
Major questions remained unanswered. He looked at the route map between Pansak’s house and the link roads to the New Petchburi Road. Somewhere on this route, the car stopped, the passengers swapped seats, and assailants appeared. But at which point? And most important of all, where did they take their victims? The questions gave him a headache.
And he felt terrible for another reason—an issue that no one had yet raised. It would only be a matter of time before it occurred to one of his paymasters, he thought grimly. Why had he, one of Singapore’s allegedly top-rated feng shui masters, been so wildly wrong in determining Khoon Boontawee’s fortune? The birth chart, which Wong had checked and double-checked, said that the film star’s Friday would turn out fine—but it had been a disaster.
He was checking flying star natal charts for all three actors for a third time when Joyce returned fro
m the shops carrying three disks in thin plastic film. ‘VCDs are really cheap here, aren’t they? I hope the quality’s okay.’
‘Hmm: No guarantees,’ Suchada told her.
Wong looked up, irritated that the teenager was back so soon. ‘You buy disk of Street Fighting Dragon?’
‘Naah, that’s not available yet. Give’m a chance. It was only premiered last night. I got some movies with Warin Krungwong in them.’ She held up some disks of action movies. ‘Actually it was really hard to find them. Had to go to loadsa shops. Warin doesn’t actually star in any movies. He’s always the co-star. But there’s a picture of him on the back of this one. I wonder if he would sign it for me?’
‘If we get him back,’ said Suchada.
‘Oh, yeah.’
Joyce sat down and asked the theatre manageress to translate the text on the back of the VCD packs.
‘This one sounds the best,’ said Suchada. ‘Khoon stars in it, but Warin gets a mention in the review. “Warin’s emotional performance as a power-crazy cop is electrifying. He well-deserved his best support actor nomination.”’ She flipped another disk over. ‘This one’s good—I’ve seen it. Warin plays the pilot of an aircraft with a hijacker on it. The plane crashes and he —’
‘Aiyeeah,’ Wong complained. ‘Can you go read video box someplace else?’
‘Okay, okay,’ said Joyce. ‘Keep yer hair on.’ She stood up, ready to move away.
But the feng shui master’s eyebrows suddenly rose. ‘Aiyeeah!’ he said again. ‘Gung-hai-la!
’ Joyce was pleased for a chance to show off that she actually understood a Chinese phrase. ‘What do you mean, “Of course”?’ she asked. ‘Of course what?’
The feng shui master urgently needed to go back to the theatre as quickly as he could. Traffic was gridlocked, so Suchada led them to a jetty where they could get a river ferry.
The Feng Shui Detective's Casebook Page 21
