With more than an hour before she was due to meet Mayuree at the bus depot, Jayne summoned a waiter and asked for a beer, a packet of cigarettes and a plate of pad thai, in that order.
She sipped the beer, smoked a cigarette and leafed through the diary. The simplest course of action was to hand it to Maryanne’s father. He’d employed Jayne to prove his daughter hadn’t committed suicide, and the diary would make him feel vindicated.
But that’s not all it would do to him: the truths it contained might do serious damage. Then again, if Jim Delbeck were the racist prick the diary suggested, why should Jayne care? On one level, it would be satisfying to drop those bombshells on Maryanne’s behalf.
The arrival of the fried noodles provided a distraction, but she only managed to pick at the food. She pushed aside the plate and lit another cigarette. A motorised long-tail boat raced along the river, ferrying a group of tourists towards the bridge. Water lapped at the raft in its wake and the restaurant rocked.
Jayne remembered Rajiv’s notes and fished them out of her bag. He had customised a guide to Kanchanaburi for her, photocopying items of interest from travel guides, history books, newspapers and magazines. Jayne failed to understand why he kept trying to please her when she treated him so badly. At the same time, she felt guilty he wasn’t there with her. Kanchanaburi was his kind of place.
To punish herself, she read every page of his notes. She learned that Kanchanaburi province, known as Thailand’s Wild West, boasted some of the country’s highest waterfalls and largest sanctuaries, where elephants and even tigers roamed in the wild. Signs of human habitation dated back ten thousand years, and in the thirteenth century Kanchanaburi had been an outpost of the mighty Angkor empire. While the Thais visited for the spectacular scenery and floating discos, the major attraction for Western tourists was the province’s World War II history. Under the command of the Japanese Imperial Army, some 16,000 Australian, British, Dutch and American prisoners of war had died building the Death Railway from Thailand to Burma. Their stories were commemorated with museums and monuments from Kanchanaburi Town to as far away as Hellfire Pass in the province’s northwest, their remains interred at two Allied War Cemeteries.
More than 70,000 Asian labourers also died building the Death Railway, press-ganged from colonial Malaya, Burma, Thailand and what is now Indonesia. There were no monuments to them, only a mass grave allegedly covered by an orchard of limes and banana trees.
Jayne put down the notes. Did she have the right to punish Jim Delbeck for being racist when even here Asians were treated as second-class citizens? And what about Maryanne? Though she lamented her father’s racism, she wasn’t above prejudice herself. No one ever was. And it was inconclusive from her journal entries whether she intended her relationship with Sumet to drive a wedge between her and her father, or to test his love.
Jayne checked her watch and signalled for the bill. A light breeze sent her notes drifting to the floor. She gathered them up, put them into her bag and reached for the diary. The front cover had blown open, revealing Maryanne’s name and contact details. Jayne stared at it for a moment, picked up her phone and called Rajiv.
From the moment Uncle returned to the bookshop, he’d been on a mission to subvert Rajiv’s carefully computerised system and restore his own eclectic regime. It started with small acts of resistance—moving the keyboard aside to make room for his receipt pad, pens and carbon paper, ‘forgetting’ to return books to the shelves so they amassed in piles on the front desk—and soon developed into a full-scale rebellion. Rajiv arrived one morning to find towering stacks of books where a shelving unit had been and the computer disconnected at the wall. He turned the computer back on but his efforts to enter data were frustrated by tacky keys. Something had been spilled on the keyboard. Sabotage.
After an hour spent trying to consolidate records without use of the letter ‘s’, Rajiv was ready to tear his hair out when Jayne called. Mumbling something about a new keyboard to his uncle, he excused himself for the rest of the afternoon. Uncle smiled and squeezed his shoulder as if he couldn’t be happier.
Jayne gave Rajiv a précis of the contents of Maryanne’s diary, including Maryanne’s email address. She asked him to access it, gave him a list of possible passwords and said she would call again once she got back to Bangkok. There was no small talk, no reference to their previous conversation.
She told him nothing about Kanchanaburi and he knew better than to ask.
He took it as a good sign that she called; he was useful to her, maybe indispensable. It brought him closer to realising his ambition of becoming her partner in the detective business—a partnership he needed to secure sooner rather than later, given the return of Uncle.
He had to tread lightly. Jayne was fiercely independent and the notion that his skills were important to the business had to come from her. He needed to earn her respect without making her resent him.
At the same time, Rajiv needed to stand up for himself.
He’d put up with being treated badly in light of the traumatic events in Pattaya. But he couldn’t let her walk all over him.
Trouble was, Rajiv felt himself falling in love with Jayne.
The full force of his feelings struck him when he saw her unconscious in the hospital. He wanted to win her over, but as his actions on that fateful night in Pattaya had shown, Rajiv wasn’t romantic hero material. Not for him the lead role in The Ramayana, the Thai version of which, The Ramakien, he was currently reading to see how it differed from the Indian epic poem. He was no warrior-hero like Rama or his brother Lakshman. What Rajiv had to offer was brains not brawn. He was more like the monkey king Hanuman, whose cunning and resourcefulness were central to the heroes’ success. He took heart from Hanuman’s prominent role in The Ramakien, and hoped Jayne, like the Thais, appreciated the merits of cleverness and trickery.
He could have gone to an internet café nearby on Khao San Road, but the one on Silom was cleaner and faster. That it was close to Jayne’s apartment was an added advantage in case he found anything of significance that needed to be printed out and taken to her later that evening.
It was still early enough to get a seat on the ferry. He handed ten baht to the conductor as she shuffled along the aisle, rattling the coins in her metal cylinder. Rajiv scanned the books in his bag: a history of the Death Railway, an Australian crime novel called Kickback that he’d picked up for Jayne, a bootlegged copy of a hacker’s manual, and an English translation of The Ramakien that he fished out and resumed reading.