The Dying Beach

by Angela Savage

  Nothing so benign as an accidental drowning.

  Did the roommate know more about Pla’s death than she let on?

  7

  Rajiv woke to find Jayne fully dressed. A glance at the clock told him it was half past three. He saw her take something from among Pla’s things and transfer it to her handbag. In the next moment she slipped the bag over her shoulder and was heading for the door.

  ‘Will you be going out without me?’ he said.

  Jayne spun around, hand to her throat. ‘You scared me.’

  ‘Are you not thinking it would scare me also to wake and find you gone?’ Rajiv said.

  ‘I was going to leave you a note.’

  Rajiv got out of bed and began pulling on his clothes. ‘And what would your note have been saying?’

  ‘That I had a few more questions for Pla’s roommate Suthita.’

  He made no attempt to conceal his frustration. ‘We have a day and a half left of our holiday and you are wanting to spend it asking more questions about Miss Pla’s death?’

  ‘No, not about her death. About her funeral. It won’t take long and then we can do something together after that.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ Rajiv said from the bathroom. He splashed cold water on his face and combed his hair.

  ‘You don’t have to—’ Jayne began.

  He walked out of the bathroom with his hand in the air. ‘I am coming with you. We can go on from Khlong Haeng village to the gastropod fossil site I was telling you about.’

  ‘Sounds riveting,’ Jayne muttered.

  Rajiv pretended not to hear her.

  The journey to Khlong Haeng seemed to go faster than it had that morning. The market where they’d had lunch was deserted, empty wooden stalls and tyre tracks where the vendor carts had been. Little appeared to have changed in the compound where Pla and Suthita lived. Even the rice still steamed unattended in the open-air kitchen where Rajiv waited once again.

  The door to Suthita’s room swung open in response to Jayne’s knock. From where he was standing, Rajiv heard Jayne gasp and saw her reel back from the doorway.

  ‘Shit.’

  Rajiv rushed towards her. ‘What is it?’

  Jayne raised her hand as though trying to block the view. But Rajiv would not be deterred. He looked over her shoulder and froze.

  The room was bathed in blood. The floor, the walls, the bed. Rajiv closed his eyes, forced them open again. Thai words he couldn’t decipher appeared to have been written in blood on the wall and, beneath the words, entangled in bloody sheets on the floor, was Suthita, her sightless eyes staring at him.

  ‘Back away slowly. And don’t touch anything.’ Jayne issued the order in a calm, firm tone. Rajiv must have been wrong in assuming, from her upbringing, that she was unfamiliar with death. Hers was not the voice of someone confronting a dead body for the first time. He’d also seen dead bodies before, of course, watched them burn on the sacred ghats. But none so bloody as this.

  ‘You going to be sick?’ Jayne said, her back still to him.

  Rajiv shook his head.

  ‘If you’re going to throw up, get as far away as possible.’

  ‘I—I’m fine.’

  Jayne leaned forward so her head was inside the room. Rajiv stepped back, her body shielding him from the carnage.

  ‘What do the words say?’ he asked.

  ‘Jai sa-lai. It means heartbroken. Actually, it’s stronger than that. It’s like the heart has been shattered into a million pieces.’

  For a few moments, she said nothing. When she finally turned to face him, she was ghostly pale.

  ‘Rajiv?’ She said his name as though she’d forgotten he was there. He feared she’d gone into shock. But with a sharp intake of breath, she seemed to come to her senses. ‘No one’s seen us, right?’

  Rajiv nodded. Jayne turned and closed the door to Suthita’s apartment.

  ‘You’re not going to leave her there like that?’ he gasped.

  ‘We’ll call the cops when we get back to the hotel. Right now, we’ve got to get the hell out of here. Trust me, we don’t want to be caught anywhere near the dead body of a Thai woman we met with only this morning.’

  Jayne hurried towards the road.

  The distant wail of a police siren and Jayne’s quickening pace made Rajiv withhold further questions. They walked as fast as they could without running, reaching the songthaew station just as the police car came into view. As it passed them, Jayne ducked to the ground as if she’d dropped something.

  ‘The cops are headed for Suthita’s place,’ she said, crouching. ‘I’m sure of it. Somebody must’ve called them.’

  She stood up, her forehead glistening with sweat. ‘If a songthaew doesn’t come soon, we’re fucked.’

  Accustomed as he was to her liberal use of expletives, Rajiv could tell Jayne was genuinely frightened. The police car turned in the direction of the compound and seconds later the siren stopped. Rajiv groaned with relief as a songthaew appeared. They scrambled on board.

  Rajiv expected that they would talk back at the hotel, discuss the implications of their gruesome discovery, plan their next steps. But Jayne barely paused for breath.

  ‘We have to check out,’ she said. ‘You pack our things. I’ll go settle the bill. We’ll take separate songthaews. Better still, I’ll take a tuktuk, you take a songthaew. I’ll meet you at the French café on the beachfront in twenty minutes. I think it’s called Le Cadeau.’

  It was more than Rajiv could stand.

  ‘I’m your partner, Jayne, not your manservant. You must be telling me what is going on.’

  To his surprise, though they were out in the open, Jayne turned and embraced him, fast and hard.

  ‘We may be in danger,’ she whispered. ‘If there was foul play involved in Suthita’s death, someone might be looking for a couple like us. We’ll be less conspicuous in Ao Nang.’

  Rajiv understood that. They stood out on the quiet beach where they were staying. In the resort town, there were other couples like them, European women with Thai men, locals as dark-skinned as he was.

  ‘But she committed suicide, isn’t it?’ Even as he spoke, Rajiv heard the doubt in his voice. Women typically left neat suicides—not like the bloody mess they’d found in the girl’s room.

  Jayne took his left hand in hers. ‘I don’t know how much you saw, but there was a deep cut in Suthita’s left arm and blood had pooled in her palm. This means she would have used her right hand to make the cut, then dipped her right index finger in the blood to write her suicide note on the wall, yes?’

  She touched her right index finger to the palm of his hand, making the hair rise on the back of Rajiv’s neck.

  ‘But Suthita was left-handed,’ Jayne said. ‘I noticed when she wrote down the address of the temple where Pla’s body is being cremated. I mightn’t have remembered except the girl at Barracuda Tours was left-handed, too. It was odd to encounter two in a row when just the other day you told me that—’

  ‘—only ten per cent of the population is left-handed.’ Rajiv finished the sentence. He felt his face burn. ‘But that means—’

  Jayne squeezed his hand and dropped it.

  ‘It means we have to get moving.’

  8

  Bapit restored his phone to his chest pocket, making his safari jacket sag on his gaunt frame. His uncle had the bones of a bird, Othong thought, and the heart of a vulture.

  ‘That was Sergeant Yongyuth,’ Bapit said, as though Othong hadn’t overhead every word. ‘They’ve found the girl’s body. They’re ruling it as a suicide.’

  Othong kept his gaze level with the phone in the old man’s pocket, but he could feel Bapit’s growing rage.

  ‘Explain to me again what the hell happened.’

  ‘Well, I remembered Uncle saying he’d kill to get his hands on the girl’s notebook and—’

  ‘What girl? What notebook?’

  ‘The girl from the power plant consultations. Remember? When
Uncle heard she’d drowned, he said—’

  Bapit slapped him. ‘That was a turn of phrase, you imbecile.’

  The slap didn’t carry much force but Othong’s face burned all the same.

  ‘If you think I’d want you to kill an innocent girl to satisfy my curiosity, you’re even more stupid than I realised,’ Bapit said.

  ‘I didn’t mean to kill her, Uncle. It was an accident.’

  ‘So you say, nephew. And knowing you to be a clumsy, stupid oaf, I believe you. That is the only reason I have not handed you over to the police. Now go and put some clean clothes on.’

  ‘I don’t have any—’

  ‘The mae ban found some for you.’

  Othong didn’t wait to be told twice. He scuttled off to the spare room to find laid out on the bed a pair of pants and a shirt large enough to fit him. Not Uncle Bapit’s clothes. The old man was a walking chopstick. They must have belonged to his cousin, Vidura, clothes left behind when he went off to serve with the Thai Army on the Cambodian border. Vidura the golden boy, the smart one. Uncle would never have slapped Vidura on the face, never called him an imbecile. Right up until the moment he tripped a landmine, Vidura had never fucked up like Othong.

  His uncle’s insults stung all the more because Othong had thought himself very clever to locate the right address. And he honestly hadn’t meant to hurt the girl. He’d started out politely explaining that he just wanted her to hand over Pla’s things. But when the girl started screaming about ghosts and farangs, Othong couldn’t think straight. He’d barged inside and hit her in the mouth, intending to shut her up for long enough to hear him out. But she lost her balance and struck her head hard on the corner of the bed as she crashed to the floor. He tried all he could to rouse her, but nothing worked. The breath had gone from her and he couldn’t bring it back.

  Othong was prone to accidents. As a child, he strangled kittens by holding them too tightly, trampled newborn chicks underfoot. When he played rough and tumble games, the village boys ended up with broken bones. Othong had always misjudged his own strength. A clumsy stupid oaf, his uncle called him. Ngo ngao tao toon—‘stupid as a turtle and a mole’—the village boys chanted. But Othong wasn’t stupid. A turtle would’ve panicked and hidden inside its shell. A mole would have dug itself into a hole. But Othong was smarter than that. He made the girl’s death look like a suicide. He based it on a movie where the character had scrawled the name of her two-timing boyfriend on the wall in her own blood before bleeding to death and coming back as a phi hai to haunt him. Othong wasn’t afraid of being haunted by the girl’s ghost, though, seeing as he hadn’t offended her and only killed her by accident.

  It was a good plan but if he’d had more time to think it through, Othong would’ve searched the place before he cut into the body, as the blood made his task more difficult. As it was, he couldn’t find any notebook; the only thing worth taking was a wallet. Despite his best efforts, he ended up sticky with blood and had to wear the good jacket he kept under his motorbike seat to hide the stains on his T-shirt and jeans for the ride back to his uncle’s place. To Othong’s dismay, Bapit insisted he burn the jacket, along with the rest of his clothes.

  His uncle placed the call to his policeman friend as Othong headed outside to the bathing block. He stripped, careful to keep his clothes off the damp floor, and sluiced himself with water. Using a wedge of soap and a ragged toothbrush, he scrubbed away every trace of blood caught under his fingernails and toenails. He shampooed his hair twice, before wrapping himself in a sarong and heading out to the incinerator with his clothes. He fished the girl’s wallet from the pocket of his jeans before flinging them onto the fire and stashed it under a beam in the roof of the bathroom to collect when his uncle wasn’t looking.

  The old man was still on the phone, apparently on hold, when Othong returned to the living room. Bapit nodded for him to take a seat. Othong wore only the damp sarong, and in his uncle’s air-conditioned office he was soon freezing. It took a full ten minutes for Bapit to get the all clear from the sergeant, after which he focused on ticking off his nephew, before Othong was finally dismissed to get dressed.

  Wearing his dead cousin’s cast-offs, Othong faced Bapit again. ‘I’ll be off now, Uncle,’ he said, bowing with a humble wai.

  Bapit raised his hand. ‘Out of curiosity, did you happen to find out anything useful from the girl before you killed her?’

  ‘Please, Uncle, it was an accident—’ Othong began.

  ‘Just answer my question.’

  ‘I asked her about Miss Pla’s things and she said something about ghosts and khon farang—’

  ‘What about foreigners?’ The old man looked worried. ‘Was it something to do with the project?’

  ‘I–I don’t know,’ Othong stammered. ‘She wasn’t making any sense. She said khon plaek nah came and collected Miss Pla’s things and—’

  ‘Did she say strangers or foreigners?’ Bapit grabbed Othong by the shoulders and shook him. ‘Think, you moron. Which words did she use?’

  ‘Khon farang,’ Othong said.

  ‘Are you absolutely sure?’

  The more his uncle pressed him, the less sure Othong became.

  ‘Khon farang,’ he repeated.

  His uncle released his grip. ‘How could this happen?’ His hands groped for the cigarettes in his chest pocket. ‘I’ve got to find out who this farang is.’

  ‘Perhaps I can do that for you, Uncle,’ Othong piped up, eager for a second chance.

  ‘You?’ Uncle Bapit spat. ‘You’ve got a nerve. The only thing you can do for me right now is get out of my sight.’

  Othong didn’t wait to be asked a second time. He fled to the yard and fired up his motorbike, already planning the hunt for Miss Pla’s farang friend.

  9

  ‘Something like this happened to me once before,’ Jayne said, stirring her coffee.

  They were sitting in an open-sided café with a view of the beach. Michael Jackson’s Dangerous album was playing in the background, an upbeat soundtrack ill-suited to Rajiv’s mood. He leaned closer to hear Jayne above the music.

  ‘In Chiang Mai, about a year ago,’ she said. ‘I had several Thai cops on my tail, at least one of whom wanted to kill me.’

  Rajiv raised his eyebrows in alarm, but Jayne was too distracted by her coffee to notice.

  ‘To shake them off, I changed hotels, registered under a false ID and changed my appearance.’

  ‘Did it work?’

  ‘Well, clearly I didn’t get killed,’ she said drily. ‘And it bought me time to work on the case.’

  ‘But we are not working on a case.’ Rajiv felt his anxiety levels rising. ‘Indeed, if we are somehow unfortunate enough to be implicated in what we have just witnessed’—he waved his hand in the vague direction of Khlong Haeng village—‘we may never work on another case again.’

  Jayne held her teaspoon over her cup, her hand steady. ‘I admit there are risks in hanging around.’

  ‘Hanging around?’ Rajiv gasped. ‘Why on earth would you even contemplate doing that?’

  She placed the spoon on her saucer and looked him in the eye. ‘I don’t believe Pla’s death was an accident any more than Suthita’s death was a suicide.’

  ‘But what has that got to do with you?’

  ‘Because the cops have already ruled Pla’s death as accidental, and I guarantee they will rule Suthita’s as suicide. No one will stand up for these two young women and whoever killed them will get away with murder. And that offends my sense of justice.’

  Rajiv hesitated, torn between his sympathy for Jayne’s principled stance and his instinct to get the hell out of town as quickly as possible.

  ‘It’s too dangerous,’ he said. ‘What if whoever did that to Suthita comes after us?’

  ‘Highly unlikely,’ Jayne countered. ‘Suthita wouldn’t let you in her room, remember? If she let in the man who killed her—and I’m assuming it was a man—chances are she knew him. The vast majority
of murder victims in Australia are killed by someone they know. I imagine it’s the same in Thailand.’

  ‘But why would anyone want to kill Miss Pla and Miss Suthita?’ He regretted the question as soon as he spoke, knowing it would only encourage her.

  ‘That’s what we need to figure out,’ Jayne said. ‘I’ll need to take a closer look at Pla’s notes and you—’

  Rajiv shook his head. ‘I am not believing it. You are seriously suggesting we investigate.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘What about the police?’

  ‘I’m telling you, they’ll rule Suthita’s death as a suicide. They won’t be looking for us. But if you want, we could always take precautions like I did in Chiang Mai just to be on the safe side.’ She lit a cigarette, blew smoke into the air above their heads.

  ‘We can’t afford it,’ Rajiv said, changing tack. ‘We are already having three clients lined up on our return to Bangkok, and there may be more inquiries awaiting our attention once I get the chance to check the email.’

  Jayne pointed at him with her cigarette. ‘I knew formalising the business would cause problems. Are you saying I can’t help Pla, or anyone else for that matter, unless they’re a paying customer?’

  ‘Actually, I am in favour of directing some of our profits into pro bono casework. That is what you are proposing in this instance, isn’t it?’

  ‘I guess so.’

  Rajiv started making calculations on a paper serviette. ‘We are scheduled to return to Bangkok the day after tomorrow. Assuming I agreed to us taking on this case, how much longer do you propose we spend in Krabi?’

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. As long as it takes, I guess.’

  ‘In future we may agree on a formula for the allocation of time and money to pro bono cases,’ Rajiv said, still scribbling. ‘But in the meantime, we have to set limits and consider not only the direct costs but also the loss of potential revenue.’ He turned the serviette around to face her. ‘We can afford to spend five more days here, seven maximum.’