The Half-Child

by Angela Savage

  Jayne shivered, the scar on her arm tingled.

  ‘Oh, come off it,’ she said, trying to hide the waver in her voice. ‘This is supposed to be a simple drowning accident, right? Your friend Somsri is probably preparing the autopsy report as we speak: dumb farang tourist drinks too much, falls into the pool and drowns. Maybe I knock my head on the side of the pool on the way in. No one will connect it with Maryanne Delbeck’s death since I’m just another guest here, though at this rate the Bayview might think twice about letting female guests from Australia out on the roof after dark.’

  Chaowalit sneered.

  ‘Doesn’t a stabbing spoil your plan?’

  He looked from the knife in his hand to Jayne and back again.

  ‘I’m good at improvising,’ he said and flicked the blade back into the handle.

  He reached down to pick up something from the ground.

  A Coke bottle. He held it by the neck and smashed the bottom on the side of the pool.

  ‘There’s more than one way to draw blood,’ he said, jabbing the air. ‘Here’s an idea: dumb farang tourist hits her face on a broken bottle that was lying by the side of the pool as she fell in. Hideous injuries. Death by drowning will seem merciful.’

  Jayne kept treading water, wondering how long she could keep it up, wondering if Chaowalit could swim.

  ‘You’re smart,’ she said, a shameless attempt at flattery.

  ‘Does Frank Harding know what you’re up to?’

  ‘None of Khun Frank’s business,’ Chaowalit said.

  ‘So this is just between you and Somsri.’

  Chaowalit said nothing.

  ‘Do you do all of the Doctor’s dirty work?’ Jayne continued. ‘Like, getting rid of Maryanne, for example?’

  Chaowalit yelped with surprise. ‘Is that what you think?

  Farang girl dies, son of a bitch like me must be behind it?’

  ‘I meant it as a compliment,’ Jayne said, inching her way towards the side of the pool. ‘Her death has kept everyone guessing. Was it suicide? Was it murder? No one seems to know, but I think you do.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because, as I said, you’re smart. Smarter than people realise.’

  Chaowalit considered this for a moment.

  ‘I was there when Khun Maryanne died, but I didn’t kill her.’

  ‘Then who did?’

  ‘You won’t believe me if I told you.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘It was an accident.’

  Jayne laboured to keep her head above water and her expression neutral.

  ‘I believe you.’

  Chaowalit shrugged. ‘Doesn’t matter if you believe me or not. You weren’t there.’

  ‘Was anyone else—apart from you and Maryanne, I mean?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What happened?’

  Chaowalit looked at the bottle in his hand and shrugged again. ‘It was Sumet’s idea.’

  ‘Sumet?’

  ‘Brother of that whore, Mayuree. He and Maryanne were, you know, faen kan.’ He made a lewd gesture using the bottleneck and his fist.

  ‘They were fucking,’ Jayne said.

  ‘Yes.’ He raised his eyebrows in admiration of her command of the Thai vernacular. ‘And planning to get married—or so he said. Problem is Sumet wanted Maryanne to take him back to Australia, but she wanted them to stay in Thailand. So Sumet hires me to proposition her.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I had to make it seem like she’d been leading me on. It wasn’t a stretch. I mean, she was always coming on to me, touching me, practising her Thai on me, you know. My job was to make her feel bad for being a little cock-teaser.’

  ‘He paid you to do this?’

  ‘Of course,’ Chaowalit shrugged. ‘I had to make Maryanne feel bad so he could come along and make her feel better. Only it didn’t work out that way.’

  ‘What went wrong?’

  ‘Depends on how you look at it.’

  Jayne touched the bottom of the pool with the tips of her toes.

  ‘Tell me how you look at it, younger brother.’

  ‘Okay,’ he nodded. ‘I look at it this way. Nice school teacher Sumet asks Chaowalit the thug to proposition his girlfriend. Does that sound like an act of true love to you?’

  ‘No, not at all,’ Jayne said.

  She moved closer to the side of the pool, her weight resting on her feet.

  ‘Chai laew,’ he agreed. ‘Chaowalit has met some bad types in his time. He knows a bastard when he sees one.

  Sumet didn’t deserve Maryanne. She was too good for him.

  I set her straight.’

  ‘Here? On the roof?’

  Chaowalit nodded. ‘Sumet phoned her and said to meet here for a romantic date in the moonlight. Plan was for

  Chaowalit to choose that same evening to proposition her. I followed the first part of the plan: I was waiting in the lobby and followed her up here. Then I explained how Sumet only wanted to marry her to get to Australia. I said I wouldn’t make her go back to Australia if she didn’t want to.’

  ‘So you did proposition her,’ Jayne said, thinking aloud.

  ‘I just told her the truth.’

  ‘How’d she take it?’

  ‘She didn’t believe me. Then I showed her the money Sumet paid me to make her change her mind. She just kept shaking her head saying no, no, no. Then Sumet showed up and she fell to pieces. Accused him of all kinds of things I can only guess at—she was crying and talking fast at him in English.’

  ‘How come the noise didn’t bring other people to the roof?’

  ‘She wasn’t shouting,’ Chaowalit said. ‘She was quiet, sobbing.’

  ‘More powerful than shouting,’ Jayne said.

  ‘Jing jing,’ Chaowalit nodded, grateful to get it off his chest. ‘Then she climbed over the railing. Things were getting way too heavy. I wanted to get the fuck out of there.

  But I was fixed to the spot. Maryanne is crying do you love me or not and Sumet is saying I love you, I love you and running towards her. I think she only meant to scare him ’cause she didn’t seem like the type to...’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She didn’t seem like the type to jump.’ Chaowalit shook his head. ‘She was too sweet, too happy.’

  Jayne registered a change of tone, edged further away.

  ‘That’s what everyone says about her.’

  ‘She was young, you know, and young girls make such a fucking drama of everything,’ Chaowalit said. ‘If a boy wants a night out with his friends, the girl weeps and pouts until he changes his mind. If he forgets her birthday, she goes into depression because it means he doesn’t love her.

  And if he gets sick of all the dramas and tries to break it off, she threatens to kill herself. It’s all an act, you know, just a way of getting what they want.’

  Jayne thought back over all the things she’d heard about Maryanne in the course of her investigation: that she was cheerful, upbeat, trusting, ‘too confident’. She was also young, inexperienced and used to getting her own way.

  Sumet’s betrayal, Chaowalit’s clumsy offer to replace him— Maryanne would have felt as if the rug had been pulled out from under her. It wasn’t a stretch to imagine her threatening to throw herself off the top of a building in order to punish both men. But did she mean to kill herself?

  ‘Are you sure it was an accident? You don’t think Sumet pushed her?’

  ‘Nah,’ Chaowalit shook his head. ‘He didn’t have the balls.’

  ‘Not like you?’ Jayne said.

  ‘Not like me.’

  Holding the bottle by the neck, he stepped into the shallow end of the pool.

  ‘You don’t need to do this,’ Jayne said, backing away.

  ‘I’m only interested in what happened to Maryanne.’

  ‘That so?’ Chaowalit tossed the broken bottle from one hand to the other. ‘You should’ve just asked in the first place.’

  ‘Can’t we make a
deal?’

  ‘Bit late for that now.’

  He started wading towards her.

  ‘There’s something you should know,’ Jayne said, her back pressed against the tiled wall of the pool. ‘I’ve already sent my findings to the police.’

  Chaowalit laughed. ‘You think the cops are a problem?

  Somsri has half the Pattaya Police Department on the payroll.’

  ‘I’m not talking about Pattaya,’ Jayne said, groping for a ladder or foothold. ‘I’m talking Bangkok. To my friend, a Police Major General.’

  Chaowalit’s expression darkened. ‘You’re a lying bitch.’

  She caught sight of the ladder in the far corner. No use.

  She reached around, placing her hands on the edge of the pool, eyes on Chaowalit.

  ‘This time tomorrow, Pattaya will be swarming with cops looking for you and Doctor Somsri. They’ll want to talk with Frank, too. And let’s see, who will be the fall guy for the operation? Can you see Doctor Somsri or Frank Harding defending a son of a bitch like you?’

  Jayne hoped Chaowalit didn’t see through the lie. She hadn’t actually sent anything to Wichit and even if she had, it had taken tonight to confirm Chaowalit’s involvement in the adoption racket. He was the link between the centre and the doctor’s rooms. The courier.

  ‘Enough fucking talk.’ He threw the bottle. The glass smashed on the edge of the pool where her hands had been only seconds before.

  Chaowalit took the knife from his waistband, flicked it open.

  ‘Back to Plan A?’ Jayne muttered in English.

  She groped the side of the pool, pretending to hoist herself out. At the last moment, she plunged under the water, hit the bottom with her feet and pivoted towards the ladder in the corner. She heard the clatter of the knife hitting the tiles but couldn’t see where it fell.

  She surfaced without looking behind her, grabbed the parallel bars of the ladder and swung herself out of the pool in a move powered entirely by adrenaline. Her left shoulder screamed in protest. So did the ankle on which she landed.

  Badly. She stumbled, whimpering, across the terrace towards the elevators and pounded her fist on the button.

  She could hear Chaowalit in the pool and glanced back.

  He’d ducked beneath the surface—he could swim after all— and was fishing for his knife.

  She heard him come up, curse and duck under again. She watched the lights showing the elevator’s slow ascent from the first, second, third, fourth floors.

  The number nine was illuminated when Chaowalit yelled ‘Gotcha!’

  She looked back as he hauled himself out of the pool, weighed down by wet jeans. He’d cut his hands on the broken glass and came storming towards her with blood dripping from his fingers along the edge of the blade.

  Her eyes darted from the lights passing the tenth, eleventh, twelfth floors, to the flashes of steel and blood.

  A few seconds more, she might’ve made it. But he was too close and there were still two floors to go.

  No. Only one. Thai hotels didn’t have thirteenth floors because Westerners considered thirteen unlucky. A few seconds’ grace. The elevator door opened and she dived in, expecting empty space, ready to spin around and claw at the buttons to close it. Instead, she crashed head first into someone.

  She collapsed without knowing if she’d hit friend or foe.

  33

  She had to get the baby to sleep. She tried lying alongside him, but he was so small and slippery, he kept falling between the wall and the bed. She put him in a matchbox where he lay on his back, waving his arms and legs in the air like an overturned beetle. But she still couldn’t get him to sleep because of the bright light shining in his eyes.

  Jayne came around to find a torch in her face. She squeezed her eyes shut, blinked until the phosphenes subsided, opened her eyes.

  The torch belonged to a woman in a white coat. Could she be back in Doctor’s Somsri’s rooms? She tried to push herself up but her arms were tied down. She wanted to scream but her voice caught in her throat.

  The woman in the white coat held something to the side of Jayne’s face and pushed a tube between her lips. ‘Water,’ she said. ‘Drink.’

  As Jayne drank she noticed the woman’s name-tag. A good sign.

  ‘Your arms are strapped down to stop you knocking out your saline drip. You’ve been thrashing around so much. It might have been the pain—you have a badly dislocated shoulder and a sprained ankle. We gave you some pain relief. We can probably untie you now.’

  The straw still in her mouth, Jayne nodded, sending a spasm through her left shoulder blade.

  ‘Do you need any more pain relief?’

  She spat out the straw. ‘Yes, please, that feels like a good idea.’

  Her voice sounded as if she’d smoked a whole packet of cigarettes in one sitting and washed them down with a bottle of whisky. The local brand.

  ‘Your Thai is good,’ the doctor said, unruffled. ‘The Police Major General told me it was.’

  ‘Major General Wichit?’ Jayne said. ‘What’s he doing in Pattaya?’

  Doctor Penchan raised her eyebrows. ‘You’re not in Pattaya, Khun Jayne. You’re in Bangkok. At the Christian Hospital.’

  Jayne scanned the room, took in the crucifix on the wall.

  ‘How—’

  ‘The Police Major General will explain, once I’m confident you’re well enough to see him.’

  ‘I feel fine,’ Jayne lied.

  Her shoulder throbbed. Her ankle ached. It hurt to open and close her eyes.

  The doctor put a velcro bandage around Jayne’s upper arm, adjusted her stethoscope and pumped in air to check her blood pressure. The tightening of the armband made Jayne feel faint.

  ‘I think we’ll wait until your blood pressure goes up a little.’

  Jayne had a thought that sent her blood pressure skyrocketing. ‘Rajiv!’

  ‘Would that be the Indian gentleman who brought these flowers?’

  Doctor Penchan gestured at a bouquet on the shelf, a wonderful clash of red roses, yellow marigolds and purple orchids.

  ‘I still don’t understand—’

  ‘You were unconscious for twelve hours. You came to briefly then fell asleep. It’s no wonder you’re disoriented.’

  ‘What day is it?’

  ‘It’s Sunday February nine, but only just.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘It’s three o’clock in the morning. Try to get some more sleep. Then I’ll let your friend Major General Wichit speak with you. And the Indian man, too.’

  Her voice was soothing, maternal. Jayne took the painkillers.

  Police Major General Wichit removed his hat and took a seat. They’d elevated Jayne’s bed and the drip was gone from her right hand, leaving behind a mushroom-coloured bruise. Her left shoulder was still strapped, but the colour had returned to her cheeks. She looked less deathly today.

  ‘Let’s talk in English,’ he said, placing his hat on his lap.

  ‘Where shall I begin?’

  He meant it as a rhetorical question but Jayne dived in.

  ‘Was it you in the lift?’

  ‘Actually, it was my subordinate, Sergeant Thawon, whom you nearly bowled over, but I was in the lift, yes.’

  ‘But how—?’

  ‘My nephew, Chai. You left a file on the desktop of his computer, addressed to me. He thought it was important and sent it through by email.’

  ‘The Thai police have email now?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘The letter wasn’t finished,’ Jayne said. ‘They were just notes. I knew I didn’t have a case until I had hard evidence.’

  ‘Yes, but I ran a check on Frank Harding and there were irregularities. Persona non grata in Laos, charges of adoption fraud in the Philippines dropped for lack of evidence. It was enough to sound alarm bells. I could tell you were getting close and I worried you might be in danger.’

  ‘But how did you find me?’

  ‘Your, umm…’


  ‘Assistant,’ Rajiv chimed in, putting his head in the door.

  ‘Good morning, Major General. Hello Jayne.’

  Jayne’s face lit up. ‘Rajiv!’

  ‘Good to see you looking better,’ he said. ‘Boss.’

  Jayne smiled in spite of the pain.

  ‘I’m sorry. Am I interrupting?’ Rajiv added. ‘Should I come back later?’

  ‘Actually, I was just about to explain to Khun Jayne how I managed to find her at the Bayview Hotel. Would you like to take over?’

  ‘Certainly.’ Rajiv installed himself on the end of Jayne’s bed in a manner not at all befitting an employee.

  ‘Forgive me, Jayne, but it’s only natural that when you were gone for so long, I should start to worry. I tried phoning you and someone answered but switched off the phone. I am thinking maybe I caught you in a tight spot where a ringing phone might be blowing your cover. In such a case, you’d be getting back to me, isn’t it? I waited ten more minutes and when I still hadn’t heard from you, I decided it was time to take action.

  ‘So I go through your notes and find the number for the Children’s Centre. Next I am asking our hotel receptionist,

  Miss Yui, to please be phoning the centre pretending to be the mother of a sick child and asking for the name of the consulting doctor. Miss Yui is then obtaining his address from directory assistance.

  ‘I impose on Miss Yui to assist me again by calling the Pattaya police on my behalf and report you as a missing person, last seen in the vicinity of the doctor’s rooms.

  When I am leafing through your notes, I also find a mobile phone number for Police Major General Wichit. I recall you mentioned you had a friend who was a Police Major General and I am thinking this must be the one. Yet again Miss Yui is coming to my aid, calling Major General Wichit from my phone. We learn he can speak English and Miss Yui puts him on to me.

  ‘I am surprised to learn that he is actually nearing Pattaya as we speak, coming to find you, Jayne. So I am giving him the address of the doctor’s rooms. Finally, after all this excitement, I thank Miss Yui and step outside to smoke a cigarette. That is when I see you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I am about to light my cigarette when I see a car pull up behind the hotel. To my surprise, it is that guard from the centre who is getting out. I see him open the back door of the car and drag something out. It’s you, Jayne. I am horrified. I am thinking they have killed you.