by Claire Gray
She knows what I mean straight away. ‘I don’t have pain anymore.’ She shrugs.
‘That’s good.’
‘Is it?’ she says. ‘I don’t feel anything at all now. I just feel empty.’
‘You’ve been through a lot. You’ll be okay when things have calmed down,’ I suggest, hearing my own lack of conviction clear with each word.
‘When will they calm down?’ Maliwan laughs, without any mirth.
‘I’m going for my shower,’ I say. We all woke up from our naps feeling an urgent need to wash, and agreed that Maliwan should go first, followed by myself. Steve and Dolph are waiting out in the courtyard, smoking and not talking to each other.
‘I really do feel empty,’ Maliwan says, looking hard into my eyes as I stand up. ‘I don’t think there’s a baby in there anymore.’
‘Have you had any bleeding?’ I ask, having trouble getting the last word out. I think of my own bleeding, last year, and how it had felt like a loss and a gain all at once.
‘No.’
‘Then it must still be in there.’
‘She. Not it,’ Maliwan says, gently resting a hand on her stomach.
As I’m gathering fresh clothes and a slightly damp towel from my bag, Steve crumples out his cigarette against the back wall, tosses it towards an overturned watering can and comes inside.
‘Twice in one week I’ve thought you were dead,’ he says to me. He pulls me into a hug, my arms already full of things so that I have to just stand there and let him envelop me. I drop a bottle of shampoo onto my foot.
‘It’s been a bad one,’ I manage to say, my face pressed against his shirt which smells of cigarettes and the forest.
‘We need to start being a bit more careful,’ he says. ‘Will you come with me to see Kadesadayurat this afternoon? I’ve texted him. He’s actually in his office for once.’
‘We probably should talk to him about everything that’s gone on.’ I nod. ‘But what about them?’
We both look outside to where Maliwan is standing beside Dolph, resting her head on his shoulder and watching as he blows smoke up towards the blue sky and the ragged pigeons on the roof.
‘I think we need to find a way of omitting them from the story. Don’t you?’ Steve says.
‘I feel like that too.’
‘In the interest of being more careful,’ Steve says slowly, ‘I’m wondering if maybe we should cease our investigations for a bit. We can hand everything over to Kadesadayurat and let him deal with Mrs Shuttleworth. She shouldn’t be too hard to find, an old woman charging around the jungle on a motorbike. And I’ve completely lost my way when it comes to the bombing. Perhaps we’re better off just observing and reporting. Investigative journalism isn’t really our thing.’
‘But we are good at it,’ I say. ‘Look what we’ve uncovered. Murder on a luxury resort. We unravelled it all.’
‘But we didn’t mean to. We stumbled upon that completely by accident.’
‘I think we’ve done really well,’ I say, in a quiet voice.
‘We have,’ Steve agrees. ‘But we’ve made some fairly poor decisions along the way too.’
Steve showers last because he’s the only one who doesn’t mind if there’s no hot water left. He tells Dolph, who has exited the bathroom in Steve’s purple dressing gown, that he can borrow some clothes. I watch as Dolph sifts through the contents of a lopsided wardrobe. He fingers the bright material and drags the hangars back and forth across the rail, making a screeching noise against the metal. The sound makes me shiver and I want to push him so that he disappears into the depths of the wardrobe, beyond the shoeboxes and the mounds of ties and belts. Steve’s never invited me in here before, but somehow the ordeal that we’ve all been through together has broken down barriers, and Maliwan is lounging on Steve’s bed, painting her toes with some turquoise nail varnish that she found in my bag. Still, I feel like an intruder and I try not to look around, keeping my eyes on the back of Dolph’s head, although I would very much like to explore this room just as Steve, I know, would like to ask me questions about why I came to the island.
The shirt Dolph picks out has a setting sun on the back, and the jeans are far too big for him, bunching up strangely. He looks homeless and insane. I’d be wary of him if we passed in the street.
‘Do we have a plan?’ Maliwan asks, without looking up from her toes.
Dolph finishes buttoning up the shirt and then stares at her, while chewing on his lips. Despite having his girlfriend back by his side, he’s still as frightened as he was when we first met him in the forest, I think. More frightened perhaps, because he has something to live for again. I can see fear in the way he tugs at his hair before speaking. He says: ‘I think the most important thing is for you to rest. The baby…’
‘I can’t rest until I know we’re safe,’ Maliwan interrupts. ‘And we won’t be safe until we find Pamela. She might try to kill us again. Or she might go to the police and tell them stories about us. They will probably believe her. She’s a rich woman and a good liar.’
‘We can leave,’ Dolph says. ‘Come to New York with me.’
Maliwan smiles. ‘You’re dreaming. I can’t leave for a million reasons. What about my mother? And you really want to go back to your family? You are sad every time you talk about them. No. We have to find Pamela. Okay? We have to.’
‘Well, I just don’t know where to look,’ Dolph says, shrugging so that the long sleeves of his shirt flap about.
‘She never usually stays at the resort,’ Maliwan says. ‘I don’t think she can stand it there. She just comes for business. She’ll sell it now that he’s dead, I bet.’
‘I think she’s staying at the Grand Hotel,’ I say, suddenly remembering. But then I remember about our appointment with Kadesadayurat. ‘We can look for her there. But Steve and I need to do some work this afternoon for the newspaper. What if we wait and go to the hotel in the morning? It’s getting sort of late now, anyway. Dolph’s right; you really should rest.’
They look at each other, and then Dolph says: ‘Yeah, but the thing is, we don’t know how much time we’ve got. We don’t know if maybe she’s trying to leave the country. The police might be looking for us already. It’s like Maliwan said; Pamela might even have gone to the police herself with a story about us.’
‘They would believe her over us.’ Maliwan nods.
Dolph looks at her. ‘I want you to feel safe. I’m going to make sure we find her, okay? I’ll make this right.’
She smiles at him and wriggles her freshly painted toes. I watch something in Dolph’s face harden, like he’s found a new source of strength as he meets her eyes.
‘One night,’ I say. ‘It’ll give us more time to plan. If she’s gone to the police then you really ought to stay hidden for now anyway, don’t you think?’
Eventually they nod and agree, but I see that they don’t like it.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
‘Let’s go, then,’ I say, my voice catching in my throat.
Steve has been waiting at the open front door while I finish lacing my trainers. The soles of my feet are shredded from the walk back to town; I’ve put on a thick pair of fluffy, pink socks but now my feet are burning up, which just makes them hurt more.
Standing in the shower gave me some energy back, but the water also made my injuries feel raw. I’ve discovered grazes and bumps on my skin that I hadn’t seen before. Maliwan is curiously unscathed but the same happened to Dolph after his shower; a cut on his cheek has opened up again, bleeding slowly. He rubs at it with the back of his hand, notices blood on his knuckles and licks it off. He’s sitting on the couch, reading the latest copy of the Koh Star.
‘I didn’t realise quite how bad it was,’ he says, holding up a page of photographs for Maliwan to see. I’ve already looked at them many times, but still I feel a shiver as I catch a glimpse now.
‘We should go there,’ Maliwan says. ‘It won’t feel real until we see it for ourselves. And I need t
o visit my mother, to tell her I’m okay. She must be very worried.’
I glance at Steve but then I remember that he doesn’t know I visited Maliwan’s mother’s house. No one does. I stay quiet.
‘We’ll be able to do all that,’ Dolph says. ‘I think things will get better soon, won’t they?’
No one responds to this, and Dolph doesn’t look like he really believes it. He stares back down at the newspaper and doesn’t turn on from the page showing Main Street and the people suffering there.
‘We’ll see you guys later,’ Steve says to them. ‘Help yourselves to whatever. But stay here and stay safe.’
Outside, we stand in the heat, looking up and down the road. Teenagers are sitting on mopeds beside the shop, drinking from bottles. A dog is barking at nothing, spinning in slow circles. It’s astonishing to step outside Steve’s house and find a certain normality, flowing along as usual.
Of course, we have no car, so we walk to the police station. I develop a way of turning my feet onto their sides so that they don’t hurt too badly as I walk on them. Steve manages to roll a cigarette as we move.
‘I’m sorry about your car,’ I say, as he lights his cigarette with a zippo we found under the couch earlier. ‘I’ll help you buy a new one.’
‘Oh, I don’t give a fuck about the car. It’s just a thing.’
‘It was a nice thing though,’ I say.
‘Actually, I saw an advert online for a van. I’ve always quite liked the idea of owning a van.’
‘Yeah, think of all the stuff we could put in the back of it,’ I say, although I can’t think of a single thing and, actually, can barely even keep my thoughts on the van; I look down a side street and think about how I could go that way and be on Main Street in ten minutes. I’ll have to go back there soon, before the idea of seeing it becomes too powerfully awful.
‘I was online just now, while you were getting ready,’ Steve continues, ‘and I was scrolling through some photographs on the New York Times website. Photos of this island, I mean. The aftermath of the attack. I actually spotted myself in the background of one, speaking to a shell-shocked backpacker in shorts and a bikini top, not far from the bombsite. I remember her. She had a boy’s phone number written on her arm in marker pen. She’d no idea what had happened to him, and tried describing him to me, her voice going up and down, her words round and round. I listened, gave her a cigarette and offered to help, but she wandered away while I was still speaking. I’ll never know what happened to her. Or the boy.’
‘Pamela Shuttleworth couldn’t have cared less about the bomb, could she?’ I say.
‘Oh no, I think she probably considered it a welcome distraction while she got on with her own evil.’
‘What are we going to tell Kadesadayurat?’
‘Let’s find out what he has to say, first of all. And then, I was thinking that you could tell him everything up to the point where Dolph appeared at that temple. So, he can know about Pamela driving you and Lena back that night, and even about the bike going missing and the shouting that you heard.’
‘I hope she gets arrested. Even if we’ve got it wrong and she didn’t do anything to her husband, she tried to kill us. Something has to happen to her.’
‘She’s rich though. She’s very rich. I’ll bet she’s not even on the island anymore, actually.’
‘You think she’s going to get away with it all?’ I say.
Steve shrugs and throws his cigarette into the gutter. ‘Let’s see what Kadesadayurat says.’
A bird cries mournfully from a roof above our heads. I try to picture what kind it might be, but can only imagine something black and vulture-like, which is not a bird I’ve ever seen around here; possibly not even a real type of bird at all. ‘Okay,’ I say. ‘Actually, it’s going to be a relief to hand this all over to someone.’
The police station, when we reach it, is even busier than the last time we visited. There are journalists waiting in the lobby, talking together in various languages and drinking from plastic cups. People with pale faces and bandages are sitting around the room, backpacks piled beside them. One woman is asleep, leaning against a potted plant. There are two policemen talking on phones behind the reception desk. They recognise us and buzz us through the door which leads to the corridor that Kadesadayurat’s office is situated on. Kadesadayurat shares the office with two other officers; it’s nearly as small as our own one, and is filled with files, computer monitors, over-flowing waste bins and busy wall charts. It smells, usually, of damp and coffee.
The corridor is packed with people, and we don’t make it as far as the office.
‘There he is,’ Steve says, pointing. Kadesadayurat is standing beside a water cooler.
We wave to him but he doesn’t see us, and begins moving towards a door with a neon exit sign above it.
‘Kadesadayurat!’ Steve shouts, and we run along the corridor, knocking past people and hopping around chairs and filing cabinets. The noise in here is enormous, but Kadesadayurat somehow hears his name being called over the ringing phones, the shouting, and the sounds of faxes coming through on ancient machines. We catch up with him beside a rainbow-striped notice board.
Kadesadayurat nods a greeting to us and crunches on a mint, which I can smell. The police officer is wearing his uniform but missing his hat. Rumpled and sweaty, he looks like he hasn’t slept for a while. He’s our only real police contact, and has been supplying small pieces of information to the Koh Star for a few years now; a mid-ranking officer somewhere in his thirties, he occasionally drinks with Steve and tries unsuccessfully to flirt with me. He always appears to be happy, even when talking about something horrible; a dog drowning in a sewage pipe, his daughter’s eczema, a bomb that killed people. He’s smiling even now. But he’s not happy, of course.
‘How are you guys doing?’ he says loudly over all the noise, squeezing us each on the shoulder. He doesn’t wait for a response. ‘Sorry, I’ve been busy. No time to speak to you. You see Bernard Shuttleworth yesterday? You get my text? I was going to phone you but I was too busy.’
‘We saw him.’ Steve nods.
‘It looks like he was hit by a car. That’s what killed him. He’d been beaten first though. Actually, we think he’d been tortured for a couple of days.’
‘Oh shit,’ Steve says. ‘And who do you think did it?’
‘His wife. We been out in the jungle, looking for her.’
‘You haven’t found her?’ I say.
‘Not yet, but we will.’
‘What makes you think that it was her?’ Steve asks.
Kadesadayurat stops smiling and takes another mint from his pocket. ‘We found some things in her car. We found things on her car. Dents and blood. We found things out in the temple that we know came from the golf resort. Tools. Knives from the kitchen there.’
‘She tortured him?’ I say, remembering what Dolph said about the wailing.
‘You blame her? He did not treat his wife with respect,’ Kadesadayurat says.
‘I guess.’ Steve nods, but his face has gone a shade of yellow and I see him swallow, like he’s trying not to be sick. I feel that way too; I can suddenly taste the food that I gobbled from the fridge earlier; bad and greasy.
‘I hope you find her,’ I say.
‘We’ll find her today.’ Kadesadayurat sticks a mint between his teeth, crushes it, and begins to move away down the corridor.
‘Wait, wait!’ Steve grabs for Kadesadayurat’s elbow before he can be absorbed into the mass of arguing, jabbing, rushing people.
‘What is it, Steve?’
‘Do you have any news about the bomb? Do we still not know who was behind it? We’ve heard nothing at all.’
‘Perhaps, my friend, but I can’t tell you,’ Kadesadayurat says, smiling again.
‘Good news?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘Really?’ Steve says.
‘Not yet, but soon.’ He winks.
I can hardly bring myself to wonder wh
at he means. I’m afraid that the police know nothing at all, and that the person or people behind the bomb will never be found. Kadesadayurat’s mobile phone begins to chirp in his pocket.
‘Excuse me,’ he says, answering it and turning slightly away from us, talking in Thai at great speed, so that even Steve can’t understand him.
I cross my arms and lean against the notice board, getting gently jostled as people pass by. I stare at the stains on the floor and don’t bother trying to follow the phone conversation. I think about Bernard Shuttleworth chipping golf balls over the wall at his home, sharing a drink of lemonade with me, and then dying horribly and slowly while I ran around in circles, achieving very little.
‘We maybe have good news sooner than I expected,’ Kadesadayurat says, spinning around to face us as he puts the phone away in his pocket. He squeezes Steve’s arm and then mine, staring into my eyes, our noses almost touching. ‘They’ve made an arrest in Australia.’
‘Who?’ I ask.
Kadesadayurat laughs, running his hands through his hair and beaming up at the ceiling where a light is flickering. ‘I can’t tell you that. And don’t print anything yet or put anything on that funky website you’re always updating. I’m just telling you both because I am your friend, that is all, okay?’
‘Okay,’ Steve says, smiling but looking bewildered all the same. ‘This is good news though, right? Actual good news?’
Several cheers go up around the building, the good news spreading.
‘I can’t tell you yet. Steve, I must go. We’ll talk later.’
‘But what about the Shuttleworths?’ I say, feeling a spark of panic, my face suddenly hot with sweat. ‘People will still look for her, won’t they?’
Kadesadayurat doesn’t answer. He moves through the crowd, sharing smiles and handshakes. The noise in the building has changed now; an elated roar. Even the ringing of the phones seems less shrill.
We go back outside, where some of the food stalls have returned to the square and there is a smell of smoke and meat. It’s as if these people can sense that an arrest has been made, and normality is struggling back to the streets. Steve lights a cigarette and stares up at the sky where there are no clouds and, although it’s getting late, the sun is still ferocious.
