Marie-Andrée was bewildered when she met Charles at Bangkok’s Don Muang Airport on 2 August. He did not hug her or express any affection and behaved like a stranger. ‘There’s a limousine waiting,’ he said briskly.
After her bags were packed in the boot, the couple sat in the back of the Mercedes as it sped along the expressway, passing rice paddies and shoddy wooden houses beside the canals. Charles took four jewellery cases from the pockets of his denim jacket. ‘For you,’ he said, putting them in her lap. She opened the boxes, holding up in turn a jade pendant, a matching jade ring, a diamond ring and a sapphire ring surrounded with diamonds.
‘They’re beautiful!’ she said, mollified.
‘I’m glad you like them.’
‘But I cannot accept,’ she said, handing them back.
‘Not accept? What do you mean? You’ve come to live with me.’
The countryside was flat and drab. Through the haze of exhaust fumes ahead, the gilded spires of the city looked trashy and make-believe against the gleaming towers of the modern hotels.
‘Perhaps later, darling,’ she promised, finding it hard to call him ‘darling’. He was sitting next to her, but his body was barely touching hers. ‘Why don’t we see how it works out first? I might disappoint you.’
This flash of independence showed Charles a trait he didn’t like in a woman.
‘You know that I do some small illegal business here, Marie-Andrée,’ he said, looking at her absently over the top of his glasses. ‘It’s not at all dangerous, and you won’t be involved, but maybe it’s better for you if sometimes I introduce you as my secretary. And for your protection, we won’t use your real name, OK?’
Marie-Andrée breathed the cold air-conditioning and hid her shock behind a haughty tilt of the chin. To pose as his secretary? Use a false name? She didn’t have to accept this, she thought, as the car nudged its way into the dense log-jam of Sukhumvit Road. Panoramic advertising hoardings stood at intersections, depicting gory scenes from local horror films. Children pushed garlands of jasmine and frangipani against the car windows.
The car pulled up at the Rajah Hotel, a concrete box rushed up in Bangkok during the building boom of the 1960s. Heat shimmered up from the asphalt. American soldiers lounged in the lobby as bar-girls with vacant smiles circled aimlessly in hot pants and platform shoes. Asia did not seem quite so romantic this time, thought Marie-Andrée as she unpacked her clothes. Why was he so distant? Why had he changed so much?
Before Marie-Andrée’s arrival, Charles had been juggling an assortment of girlfriends, one of them a Thai girl, Ann, who managed a jewellery shop. It was always handy to have a local woman attached by bonds of love, he thought. If there was trouble, she was security. If he had something hot to drop, she could keep it. She could be his spy, his translator, and arrange useful business contacts.
The day after her arrival when he took Marie-Andrée to meet Ann, he explained all this to her. ‘At first, if I introduce you as my secretary,’ he told her, ‘she will have time to get used to the idea that you are more to me than that. In a month she will accept you as my wife.’
Charles had chosen a new name for Marie-Andrée. Like the Thai girl, she was being forced to submit. She would now become ‘Monique’ Leclerc, sometimes wife, sometimes secretary of ‘Alain Gautier’.
In the following days she spent much of her time alone in the hotel room. He did not like her roaming around the city on her own. She read paperbacks and wrote letters home to her family, hiding her unhappiness to save them from worrying, but hinting that she might be home sooner than expected. During their first nights together all his coldness melted, leaving her feeling physically and spiritually close to him. But he quickly stopped making love to her, even though they still slept in the same bed. ‘I’m tired,’ he would say, or, ‘I have too much on my mind.’ Marie-Andrée felt that her lovemaking did not please him and that Alain no longer desired her. She became frustrated and felt deceived.
Actually, Charles did feel affection for her but, as he insisted to himself, that ‘Quebecois pig-headedness had to be eliminated’. It was a psychological game – he would break her. He rose early, and often she was still asleep when he went out. Charles dressed like a businessman and carried his newly acquired crocodile-skin attaché case, which was full of papers. But what he did exactly, he kept a mystery.
A week after she arrived she passed Charles on his way out.
‘Darling, can you lend me five hundred dollars?’ he asked. ‘It’s a Thai holiday and my bank’s closed.’ As Marie-Andrée signed the traveller’s cheques back in their room, he asked her whether she had decided to stay with him. ‘You always say you are waiting to see whether it will work out,’ he said. ‘What do you think?’
‘I still don’t know. You have other girls here,’ she told him. ‘You don’t seem to care for me. Maybe it would be better if I went back to Canada.’
Her indecisiveness suddenly infuriated him.
‘It’s as you like, little girl, but make up your mind. I haven’t time for this uncertainty. In my business I can’t afford a girl who’s unsure of her loyalty.’ Suddenly he shouted at her: ‘Learn to be either black or white, not always different shades of grey – do you understand?’ Taking her traveller’s cheques, he left her sitting on the bed and slammed the door.
Marie-Andrée was aware that she had hurt his masculine pride. Of course she was undecided. His coldness was not an inducement to stay. She felt she was a woman who had suffered in love so much already. And now here was Charles, a man full of secrets, with Thai girlfriends, false names and a murky background. Could she really dream of setting up a home with him? One full of sunshine and children? Maybe she would try. At least he seemed like a man who was master of his own destiny.
After fifteen days in Bangkok, when her landing visa expired, Charles arranged for its extension. He borrowed another $500 from her, the last of her money. ‘I’m too busy to go to the bank,’ he told her. ‘Soon I’ll return it with interest.’ He was so offhand, as if he had access to unlimited funds. And when her visa came up for renewal again at the end of August, he promised to take care of it. Instead, he let it lapse. Now she was an illegal alien without cash or a return ticket.
She realized she was his prisoner.
On Thursday 4 September, an Australian couple lay on the sand of a Thai resort, their stomachs raw and rumbling in the aftermath of a bout of diarrhoea and vomiting. Next to them the French-Vietnamese psychiatrist and his wife ate crabs the fisherman had caught that morning. A jumble of giant rocks marked the southern edge of the beach, giving a name to the oldest resort in Thailand, Hua Hin, ‘Head of Stone’. It was an apt description of how the two Australians felt; it was difficult to keep their eyes open.
‘We heard you being sick last night,’ said the psychiatrist. ‘It sounded quite violent. Did you ever get to sleep?’
‘No. We were up all night,’ moaned Russell Lapthorne, a university professor travelling overland through Asia with his wife, Vera. They had first met ‘Jean Belmont’ and ‘Monique’ a few days before at Pattaya, a beach resort on the opposite shore of the Gulf. Over a few beers the psychiatrist suggested that they team up and travel south to Singapore by train, stopping at beaches on the way.
Monique played in the sand with her fluffy white puppy, Franky. ‘Jean Belmont’, her handsome husband, swam a few minutes in the water, showing off his taut, muscular body as he ran back up the sand and picked up his towel.
‘I’m going to the shop,’ he said, hardly out of breath. ‘I’ll buy some tinned milk to soothe your stomachs, and by tomorrow you’ll feel much better.’
The night before they had eaten together at a local shellfish restaurant. Later the Australian couple had rushed back to their room at the Railway Hotel, pale, shaking, and wracked with stomach cramps.
‘Seafood is always risky,’ said the psychiatrist, smiling down at them as he patted himself dry. ‘I remember my wife once, after a bouillabaisse in Marseilles, I thought she would die.’
At 3 p.m. Russell and Vera, weak from their illness, stretched out on deck-chairs on the shady veranda, where the potted palms rustled in the afternoon heat. Jean Belmont emerged from his adjoining room carrying a tray of glasses filled with chocolate-flavoured milk. He put a bowl on the floor for the puppy and passed a glass to each of his Australian friends.
‘Thanks, Jean,’ said Vera, gratefully sipping the milk. ‘I still feel a bit dizzy. I think I’ll go to bed.’
Monique threw a rubber ball along the veranda for Franky to chase, and Russell curled up in his chair with his book, Oil Politics. It was the rainy season. The air was sticky, and clouds were gathering for the afternoon thunderstorm over the South China Sea.
When Vera Lapthorne woke up, she got out of bed and fell over. The surroundings were strange. She tried to rouse her husband and then passed out again. It was Saturday 6 September, thirty-six hours after they had drunk the glasses of chocolate milk. When the hotel maids found them sprawled on the floor, both of them were taken to the local health clinic. While they were unconscious, their stomachs were pumped.
Vera was the first to make it back to the Railway Hotel, where their passports, marriage certificate, driving licences and all other identification were missing, as well as $900 in currency. Gone too was a cine-camera and Vera’s jewellery – a diamond ring and a gold chain. Vera knocked on the door of the adjoining room and was answered by an unfamiliar voice.
Jean Belmont and his wife Monique had vanished. All they had left behind was a used battery from a cassette recorder and Franky’s rubber ball. Vera stood on the veranda of the Railway Hotel, stunned by the meticulous treachery of the charming French couple.
Back in Bangkok, Charles and Marie-Andrée were already signing a lease for an apartment. Kanit House was a five-storey, U-shaped cement structure built in the 1950s, now run down, but convenient and respectable. A kidney-shaped swimming pool in the central courtyard added a token touch of glamour.
Their apartment, number 504, was on the top floor at the end of one of the wings. Through the bedroom windows they could see the gleaming white tower of the Dusit Thani Hotel among the rows of red-roofed bungalows and shops, like a symbol of the affluence and success Charles so desperately wanted.
There were two bedrooms, a balcony, and a living room with a kitchenette partitioned by a padded vinyl bar. On the liver-coloured rubber tiles stood a cane sofa and two chairs.
Charles saw the apartment as his business headquarters as well as his home. He had picked it mainly for its location, close to the tourist section of Bangkok and near the bars of Patpong, as well as most of the big hotels and shopping arcades. Charles had no belongings to add warmth to the barely furnished rooms except for his black leather punching bag which he hung near the door. It was for his guests. They would come to do business and end up fooling around with the bag. That would put him in a position of strength. Another distraction for the people he planned to entertain was Coco, a tiny gibbon monkey bought at a stall in the Sunday market. Coco was kept in a cage on the cement balcony that overlooked the swimming pool in the courtyard.
‘We have an apartment, and that gives me hope,’ Marie-Andrée wrote in her journal. ‘At last we spend the night, just the two of us, in our home. This makes me really happy.’
For her complicity in the drugging of the Lapthornes, Charles finally rewarded her with a night of lovemaking.
Meanwhile, dizzy and destitute in Hua Hin, Russell and Vera sold their Kodak Instamatic to pay for their hotel room and took their story to the local police. An interpreter recorded a statement, and the police, bemused, shook their heads smiling. Nothing could be done. A sympathetic businessman lent them the train fare back to Bangkok, and they went to their embassy for help. A few days later Russell collapsed with a high fever and abdominal pains and was rushed to the hospital, where he remained for two weeks.
Marie-Andrée was not to have Charles to herself for long. A fortnight later they drove 800 kilometres north-east from Bangkok to Chiang Mai, taking with them a plump, middle-aged Frenchman called André Breugnot.
Chiang Mai held many attractions for a visitor. Elevated about 300 metres above sea level, the climate was temperate, and the ancient capital had a reputation for its roses and beautiful women. The streets were lined with the traditional wooden Thai houses on stilts standing in gardens shaded by flame trees. A towering backdrop to the city were the mountains of the Golden Triangle that border Laos and Cambodia. These were the home of the hill tribes who divided their time between embroidering costumes and cultivating opium on steep, inaccessible fields that supplied 70 per cent of the raw material for the world’s illicit heroin market.
According to Charles, his passenger Breugnot had been sent to Thailand by a European heroin ring to pay off local suppliers. The Frenchman, allegedly, was one of the first names on the list supplied by his Hong Kong employers, or ‘investors’ as Charles preferred to call them.
Charles had been told that Breugnot, posing as an antiques dealer, would be flying from Paris to Bangkok via Hong Kong in early September and checking into the Royal Hotel. Charles later claimed to have hung around the Royal Hotel until he caught sight of a solitary Frenchman sitting at the bar. Charles took a seat nearby with one of his Thai girlfriends and began to drop phrases in French. As so often happened with the French in Asia, Breugnot was delighted to hear his own language spoken and quickly struck up a conversation with the charming Eurasian. The rest was easy.
According to Charles, who knew Chiang Mai was Breugnot’s destination, he mentioned casually that he was planning a trip there with his wife, ‘Monique’. Later, when they met for another drink, Breugnot volunteered that he too was going, and Charles offered to drive him there.
And so, on 20 September, they arrived in the old city together. After a sightseeing tour and a few drinks, Charles said goodbye to Breugnot, whom he had mildly dosed with laxatives, and drove back to Bangkok.
For this trip another passenger had joined them in the car – Dominique Rennelleau, a bearded young bank clerk Charles had picked up at an overlanders’ restaurant. For most of the journey the young Frenchman was unconscious.
When he next opened his eyes, Dominique was in a shadowy room cut with slats of sunlight. For a few minutes, as he realized how much his head was throbbing, he watched the specks of dust moving aimlessly around in the sunbeams. Where was he? Another hotel room? Yesterday – or was it the day before? – he was in Chiang Mai. Alain and Monique were charming, a nice straight young couple, and really, he thought, the man’s conversation was fascinating. They lived in Bangkok, they had told him, where Alain had a gem business.
It was after the dinner they had shared that Dominique’s memory faded out. He remembered rushing back to his dilapidated guesthouse in a trishaw, only just making it to the grim cement squat lavatory before his bowels exploded. Sweating, shaking and vomiting, it continued all night. The next morning he had woken up on the floor of his room. Alain, with his strange sallow face and bottomless black eyes, was looking down at him.
‘Well, you’ve got the bug, haven’t you?’ he said, looking concerned. ‘I know all about it. You’d better come home with us. We’ll look after you.’ They had helped him into their car and given him something that ‘would set his inside like concrete’.
And now? There was a tap on the door, and his host entered the bedroom. He was smiling and carrying a glass of white medicine. Dominique drank it. Then his limbs and head felt light and yet heavy at the same time, and consciousness washed away from him again.
Charles would say later that one reason he had taken Dominique Rennelleau back to Kanit House was to create an alibi for the job he had planned. After tucking his house-guest into bed with another sleeping draught, Charles caught the afternoon flight back to Chiang Mai, where a Thai friend met him at the airport and drove him to the Chiang Inn, the most luxurious hotel in the city. There, resting in his room, was André Breugnot.
It amused Charles for years to recall the way Breugnot greeted him when he walked into Room 207. ‘Who are you?’ said the Frenchman, realizing immediately that he was in danger. ‘I thought you were my friend.’
Charles had heard this before. It was his style to use friendship as a weapon to break and enter into his victim’s life. Intimacy and pills. Laxatives first, to induce illness so he could diagnose their complaints and offer helpful advice. Later, when their trust had been won and defences disarmed, he would move in with heavier weapons: Largactil, Quaaludes, Mogadon and other assorted soporifics.
Once he had dosed a man with Mogadon for a few days, Charles discovered he could make him do anything. What happened that afternoon between him and Breugnot would later be recounted in his own words:
Breugnot was surprised when I suddenly appeared at the door and told him that we had business to discuss. I asked him, ‘What did you come to Chiang Mai for? As a tourist or on business?’ At first he denied everything and I continued to question him. Later I gave him a Japanese slap on the side of the head, and he fell to the floor. When you’re hit like that you don’t see anything for a few minutes, and you get confused. ‘What is your trip, tourist or business?’ I kept asking. He didn’t answer so I kicked him and lifted him up by the shirt. He was a fat fellow. ‘You’re from the Thai police?’ he asked me, and I laughed. ‘No, I’m French,’ I told him.
‘What do you want from me?’ he cringed.
‘Your contacts in Bangkok,’ I said.
He told me he knew nothing and that he only came to Chiang Mai once a year.
‘You’re not a small boy,’ I told him. ‘You’re over forty – you must know a lot.’
Later, I made him take a Mogadon and waited for it to take effect. I didn’t want to leave any marks. I showed him a gun.
‘Either you speak up, André, or I work on you,’ I said, all this time speaking softly. ‘No one will ever know what you tell me.’
‘If I speak to you they will kill me,’ said Breugnot.
‘No one knows you’re in this room, André. In a few minutes you can be free.’
This was a classic Sobhraj deployment of psychology. Now he set about moulding Breugnot into a conspirator. He knew how insecure Europeans often felt in Asia, and how susceptible they were to a sympathetic listener.
‘I picked up a paper napkin from the breakfast tray and tore it in half,’ Charles continued. ‘“This one is your life,” I told him, laying down one sheet in front him, “and this one is your death. Which one do you choose?”
‘Then he asked me, “Are you sure no one outside this room will ever know?”
‘“No one will ever know,” I assured him.’
According to Charles, Breugnot then revealed details of his heroin business and gave him the names of some couriers who would be coming to Thailand.
‘Afterwards, I made him take some more capsules,’ Charles recalled. ‘“It’s just to secure our getaway,” I said. “When you wake up everything will be fine.”’
When Breugnot passed out I undressed him, and I put all his clothes neatly on the bed. I carried him to the bathroom – he was fat and heavy – and put him in the tub and turned on the tap. I laid his pipe near him on a stool by the bath and propped a newspaper, half in the water and half on the outside of the tub. I left some sleeping tablets on the sink. I didn’t touch his passport or wallet. I held André Breugnot’s head underwater until he was dead. Then I dusted my fingerprints, locked the door behind me, and put up a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign. I had worked fast and reached the airport in time to catch the afternoon flight to Bangkok.
Records at the French embassy in Bangkok showed that an André Breugnot, aged fifty-six, was found dead in a hotel room in Chiang Mai on 21 September. The maid found the body in the bathtub, blood dripping from the nose, and local police concluded that there was no trace of foul play. Charles later described this operation as ‘a cleaning’ and boasted about it. It was the perfect murder, one still officially listed as an accident.
Among the contacts Breugnot had given to Charles was Vitali Hakim, a Turk from Ibiza known to his friends as ‘Ved’. He would be coming to Bangkok in October to buy heroin, which would be packed in false-bottomed suitcases for the couriers to take to Europe.
For some time, agents of the US Drug Enforcement Agency based in Thailand had been putting pressure on the authorities to increase surveillance of all travellers flying from Bangkok bound for Europe and the States. The new smugglers’ route now went via Kathmandu where, Charles knew, ‘You could take a cow out through the airport.’ The second name that Breugnot allegedly gave him was that of a girl who would come from the United States to take a consignment of heroin from Bangkok to Kathmandu. From there it would be smuggled to Europe. Charles would claim later she was Teresa Knowlton, the girl from Seattle who was now packing her bags for her trip to Kopan Monastery in Kathmandu.
When Dominique woke up again in Kanit House a few days after the killing of Breugnot, he felt better. My God, how lucky I’ve been, he thought. If Alain hadn’t found me in Chiang Mai … I could be dead by now.
His train of thought came to a stop. How did he find me? I never told him where I was staying. Now here he was ensconced in the guest bedroom. It was simply furnished with a bed and a chest of drawers. He pulled up the venetian blinds and looked down into a courtyard with a swimming pool, a rock garden and sugar palms. He felt strong enough to get up and that night his host invited him out for a tour of the city.
In green neon script, the sign above the window in Nana Nua Road spelled out the name of the Grace Hotel, and beneath it hung a banner that read ‘Willkommen Liebe Gäste’. Noodle stalls cluttered the pavement outside. These were for the customers who needed to sober up before they went to bed with one of the bar-girls from inside, Charles explained to a bemused Dominique.
‘That’s where the girls go,’ he added, pointing to the small, short-stay hotels that lined the street. ‘Three dollars for two hours, five dollars the whole night.’ Cab drivers lounged near their cars, and two Thai bouncers watched the farangs – foreigners – filing in and out under the red canopy.
Inside, it took a few minutes for Dominique’s eyes to adjust to the smoky darkness. The room was large with a full-length bar, and waitresses circulated with wet trays of beer as two juke-boxes boomed out American rock. He followed Charles to a table. Everywhere he looked were girls, all so garishly dressed and brightly made-up that it was hard to tell the young from the middle-aged or the women from the ladyboys. There was dancing, chatter, loud rock music – this was a perpetual party where the female ‘guests’ were for sale.
Dominique would never have come to a place like this alone, but Charles was completely at ease, his hawk’s eyes taking in everything that was happening. Some of the girls smiled and waved at Charles.
‘Do you like these Thais?’ Dominique asked his host nervously, not wanting to say the wrong thing.
‘Not in the way you think. I’ve never had a prostitute in my life. I only come here to meet the tourists for my business,’ said Charles.
He was just starting out, he explained, but soon he would build the biggest cut-rate gem business in Bangkok. This was a city where few failed to succumb to gem fever. The most sacred Thai statues were coated with gold and encrusted with precious stones. Society women spent hours in beauty parlours, their perfect manicures showcasing expensive rings which glittered with sapphires, rubies and diamonds. Hundreds of jewellery shop windows, like Aladdin’s caves, lined the main streets, while the alleys of Chinatown, with their red shopfronts, presented a rainbow of jade, gold of high purity, and gems.
‘I can buy direct from the mines, cut out the Chinese middlemen, make a thousand per cent profit and still give my customers a bargain,’ Charles revealed. ‘Maybe I’ll take you to the gem mines at Chanthaburi,’ he suggested above the noise of the juke-box. ‘You can take some stones to Paris and make a profit.’
Dominique reached into the back pocket of his jeans to pay for a round of drinks and realized that his wallet was gone. Nor had he been able to find his passport and traveller’s cheques when he had dressed that evening. His $1,100 had been hard-earned on the tobacco fields of Australia, where he had worked for months to pay for a leisurely overland trek back to France. Nonplussed, he turned to his new friend.
‘Oh, I meant to tell you,’ said Charles, ‘I’ve put all your valuables in my safe at the bank. You’re still so sick and I’m out all day. While you’re my guest I feel responsible for you. Let me know when you need them.’
Charles had other plans for Dominique’s passport, and for the young man himself.
After a week at Kanit House with the French couple, Dominique was ready to move on. He wanted to see more of Asia and be home by Christmas, and asked Charles for his passport and money to be returned.
The next day he was sick again. He couldn’t seem to shake off the stomach bug. Alain and Monique are being so wonderfully patient, he thought to himself as Marie-Andrée put his glass of milky-white medicine on the cocktail bar. On top of the diarrhoea, he felt weak and sleepy. When he woke in the morning he didn’t know where he was. But Charles stuck his head in the bedroom doorway on his way out, asking, ‘So, how are you today, Dominique? We’ll soon have you cured.’
Why did they put up with him? he wondered.
Early in October, Dominique started to feel better, and Charles said he could stop taking the medicine Marie-Andrée had been dispensing for the past ten days and accompany them both on a trip to Pattaya and the gem mines at Chanthaburi.
For six hours Charles wandered up and down the shabby streets of Chanthaburi, 480 kilometres south of Bangkok. With a bored Dominique and Marie-Andrée in tow he sifted his hands through the sapphires and rubies piled on the pavement trestle tables.
‘See, most people would think this is valuable,’ he said, picking a large blue sapphire and holding it up to the light. ‘But it’s not. The sparkle is caused by tiny flecks of green.’
The old Chinese dealer behind the table nodded at Dominique and Marie-Andrée. ‘Your friend is an expert.’
Back in Bangkok, at Kanit House, Charles installed metal filing cabinets in the living room and filled the drawers with small white envelopes of stones from Chanthaburi. He acquired scales, tweezers, magnifying glasses and other paraphernalia. And just as Dominique was planning to leave he was struck again by the mysterious illness.
One morning while he was still ill, a handsome young Indian boy arrived at the door, smiling. Dominique noticed his fine white teeth. Charles welcomed him in and put his small cardboard suitcase down near the punching bag, which he sparred with jokingly. The boy was slight, and wore dark trousers, a white shirt and a thin moustache, which added to the impression of personal neatness – in contrast, Dominique realized uncomfortably, with his own unshaven face and crumpled clothes. The young Indian – Ajay Chowdury – professed himself to be ‘hip’ and addressed Dominique as ‘man’, speaking English with an Indian accent. Dominique could barely understand him.
Over breakfast Charles made a surprising announcement.
‘By the way, Dominique, I’m afraid I have to ask you to move out of the spare room. Ajay is going to need it; he’ll be working for me. You can sleep on the couch.’
Dominique had often heard Charles make jokes about Indians as if he despised the whole race. But he concealed his irritation at losing the room to the newcomer. After all, he would be leaving in a few days.
‘I met Ajay in the park,’ Charles explained. ‘He was lost.’
‘Yes, I still get lost around here,’ the Indian nodded, sitting almost upright on the sofa.
‘Where have you been staying?’ Dominique asked politely.
‘At the Hotel Malaysia. It’s a good place. I like it.’
Why does everyone stay there? Dominique wondered.
‘Ajay is going to find me customers at the Malaysia. I think he’ll be very good at it,’ Charles said as he ate the sandwiches Marie-Andrée had prepared.
Dominique tuned out of the conversation. English required too much concentration. Ajay didn’t speak French, and Dominique was feeling queasy again.
From then on, Apartment 504 became crowded with a passing parade of visitors, all potential customers, and the coffee table was usually littered with white paper packages of gems, ash trays and coffee cups. Young travellers from the cheap hotels were drawn in droves to the apartment by the stories they had heard from Ajay about ‘Alain Gautier’ and his cut-rate sapphires and rubies. Sometimes Dominique was asked to come into the room and pretend he was a good customer, one who made many profitable trips to Paris, selling the stones he had bought at Kanit House. Dominique didn’t know how to refuse. He felt so guilty about always being sick, and Marie-Andrée kindly nursing him. Charles was paying for his upkeep. The least he could do, he thought, was to help the family business.
Quickly the apartment turned into something like a youth hostel. There were French, Americans, English and Germans, and Charles spoke to them all in their own languages. But it was only when Charles was out on his mysterious rounds that the atmosphere really relaxed, for everyone knew that the hard-nosed businessman was not sympathetic to the wondrous lifestyle of wandering the world in a haze of marijuana smoke.
‘Drugs are the sickness of your generation,’ he would often say, rolling up his shirt-sleeves to show he had no syringe marks. ‘So many people have tried to convince me to smoke hash; so far, nobody has succeeded.’
Dominique had travelled the same roads as the visitors who flocked to Kanit House, but always with a map and a guidebook. So many of them, he realized now as he talked with them, drifted across Asia not knowing where they were going or why. Wide-eyed, they spoke of the restaurants in Bali that served omelettes prepared with hallucinogenic mushrooms; their illegal border-crossing into the territory of the hill tribes of the Golden Triangle; their foolhardy excitement at crossing the Khyber Pass while on LSD. Many travellers pined secretly for the comforts of home, and at Kanit House there was a kitchen where they could drink Nescafé and cook a steak. It was a luxury to lie around reading Newsweek, and to play badminton in the courtyard. It was a break from the chain of dollar-a-night hotels that had plastic jugs of water instead of toilet paper, and menus written in Urdu. You could walk out of number 504 with a pocket full of sapphires or a ruby ring, they believed, and when you got home you could sell the stones for such a profit that you wouldn’t have to work for another year. Then you could take off again, maybe to South America.
Marie-Andrée had been briefly happy when she and Charles had first moved into Kanit House. But now their apartment was always crowded with strangers and, unlike Charles, she was not adept at hiding her feelings as she served endless trays of pineapple and papaya and poured cups of coffee. Sometimes Charles would catch her scowling at the guests, and he would hurry her into the bedroom and shut the door.
‘Come on, darling, smile, be polite,’ he would say. ‘Don’t scare away my customers.’ She tried. She had sworn to herself to do anything to please him. Her love eclipsed anything she had felt before for a man. She knew she was becoming his slave. She was the one who had always to be available, smiling, on call twenty-four hours a day – if only to please him. But her devotion was not paying off. Charles was always elsewhere, busy promoting his gem business, seeing his Thai girls. How little she meant to Charles, she fretted. ‘I’m just an employee satisfying his whims.’ Yet strangest of all, her love for Charles kept growing.
It was on one of those afternoons when the living room was filled with visitors that Ajay turned up with an American girl. As soon as she walked in the door with a wide smile and sat down on the cane sofa, it was as though she had brought a party into the room with her.
‘Hi,’ she said, ‘my name’s Teresa.’
Wanting to be hospitable, Dominique offered to go out and get some beer while Teresa was telling everyone about the monastery in Kathmandu where she was going to become a Buddhist nun. She flashed a smile at Dominique as he went out.
When Teresa had arrived in Hong Kong from Seattle she had stayed at the Boston Guest House in the cavernous Chungking Mansions in Kowloon. A week later, on 12 October, Teresa Knowlton took Air Siam Flight 909 to Bangkok. Arriving early the next day she checked into the Hotel Malaysia on 13 October.
Built in the 1960s to attract American GIs on rest and recreation from Vietnam, the hotel sat behind a high wall in the narrow Soi Ngamduplee, and resembled any one of thousands of modern motels across America. It had achieved a word-of-mouth reputation on the drifters’ trail by being one of the few budget hotels with a swimming pool, air-conditioning and Western plumbing. When overlanders first set out to cross the continent, dollar-a-night hotels with rope pallets or lice-infested mattresses were a novelty, but by the time they reached Bangkok, a mid-point, they were willing to spend $3.50 on newly appreciated luxury.
The Hotel Malaysia was the place where most overlanders stayed. Day and night the foyer and adjoining coffee shop were crowded with footsore travellers. There were clean-cut students on their maiden voyages, idealistic and innocent, eager to talk politics with the locals, as well as bedraggled, taciturn veterans with only a bed roll and a string of Nepalese prayer beads; junkies, executive drop-outs and buoyantly healthy backpackers.
Downstairs, next to the lift, was a notice board of the road which guests used to swap Afghan lapis lazuli for jungle boots or to hawk forged student cards or perhaps find someone to cross a desert with. Around the swimming pool of the Malaysia, bright blue, heavily chlorinated and lined with coconut palms, it was possible to draw one of the only generalizations that could be made about the overland travellers. By the time they reached Bangkok few of them were fat. A sign said that bar-girls were prohibited from entering the pool. Guests lay on deck-chairs and smoked joints or drank beer. Frequently the Malaysia was raided by the Thai drug squad, but guests were usually tipped off in advance.
Among the other foreign travellers at the Malaysia when Teresa arrived were a young couple from Amsterdam who had been on the road for seven months. Cornelia Hemker, nicknamed ‘Cocky’, was a tall, quiet twenty-four-year-old woman with blue eyes and flowing fair hair who had worked as a secretary while saving for her ‘trip of a lifetime’. Her boyfriend of five years was Henk Bintanja, who had inherited swarthy skin and dark hair from his Indonesian father and bright blue eyes from his Dutch mother. By travel standards they were withdrawn, usually keeping to themselves as they conscientiously visited every sight recommended by the guidebooks. They took photographs and sent them back to their families, all the time recording their daily experiences neatly in exercise books.
When Cocky and Henk had packed up their small flat in Oosterparkstraat eight months earlier, Amsterdam had been blanketed with snow, and the canals were frozen hard. They put their bicycles in storage. Henk was close to completing his PhD in chemistry at the University of Amsterdam when he decided to take this year off and see the world before settling down. His laboratory work on the purification of water was finished, and while on the road he was completing some of his paperwork, corresponding with his course supervisor and even correcting proofs for his technical articles and posting them back to the university. Cocky’s sister Marijke and her husband, John Zant, a psychologist in an Amsterdam clinic, had joined them on this trip for three months in Bali. It was there that Zant noticed Cocky and Henk had become less excited by the novelty of travelling and often preferred to spend time alone in their hotel room reading and writing in their journals. After Marijke and John returned to the Netherlands, Cocky and Henk flew to the Malay Peninsula, then travelled north towards Thailand by train. On 29 September they took the twenty-four-hour trip from Butterworth in Penang to Bangkok and booked into the Hotel Malaysia. In one of their journals they wrote:
October 2nd – 15th: We arrived early. Knew the Malaysia was one of the cheapest hotels. There were many tourists whom we saw on the train, and we had to wait for our room until 10 a.m. It was 13 guilders. When we got inside, better than expected. Reception desk leaves something to be desired; if you ask for assistance, the girls yawn into your face and look annoyed, perhaps because they spend the nights on their backs with the tourists. Later, shopping in Silom Road. To tourist office for info. Going by bus we are glued together. Unbelievably humid especially when the bus stops, because of exhaust fumes. At the tourist office it becomes clear that for tourist visa, extension is difficult. Easier to go to Vientiane in Laos to get new visa.
Unimpressed by Dusit Zoo.
Went to Wat Phra Keo, 2nd visit but didn’t regret it. It was again thirsty weather; we sat somewhere and ordered milk but got soybean milk. At Oriental Hotel saw Thai dances; tickets 50 baht, the cheapest. We took a small beer, 44 baht, highly inflated price. Looked awfully five star. After show wanted to get food. Lunch was 90 baht ($4.50) so we declined. Walked down New Rd. but couldn’t find anything.
They had seemed like ordinary tourists, but Charles would say later that his men in Hong Kong had put their names on his list.
By the time Dominique returned to number 504, eager to see Teresa again and with two dozen bottles of Singha beer, the group of young travellers was in fits of laughter. He had never seen the living room so lively. Even Marie-Andrée had discarded her familiar gloominess, and her thin body was shaking with incredulous giggles. Two visiting Americans, a Thai girl, Ajay and Marie-Andrée were all absorbed in Teresa’s account of her sex life in Seattle.
Dominique opened the beers, put them on the coffee table in front of the guests and then sat on the sofa next to Teresa. His English was basic and he wondered if he misunderstood what Teresa was talking about. Her brown eyes were sparkling as she picked up her beer.
‘And so when he asked me to sleep with his friends,’ she said, shrugging, ‘I thought, well why not?’ In an undertone Marie-Andrée began questioning Dominique in French to make sure she understood the gist of the stories Teresa was telling.
It was a hot night and everyone kept drinking beer as Teresa chattered on. As she talked, she began stroking Dominique’s thigh. Startled, he went to the refrigerator for more beer. Was she getting drunk?
At 11 p.m. the door opened and Charles came into the room, looking trim and business-like in a light-blue open-necked shirt and dark trousers, and carrying an attaché case.
‘Oh, darling,’ Marie-Andrée called out, ‘come and meet Teresa, she’s fantastic!’ She went up to Charles and kissed him and led him into the room.
Charles glanced around at the chaos of empty bottles and cigarette butts, then focused his attention on the new guest.
‘Hello, Teresa,’ he said, smiling and walking towards her. She looked up at him and flashed a sultry smile. It seemed to the others that an electric current passed between them. ‘I hope you will allow my wife and I to take you swimming one weekend to Pattaya. It’s a beach resort. We have a bungalow there.’
The invitation was so direct and unprompted, as though Charles had planned to ask her before he had even opened the door, that Dominique would always remember it. Charles’ claim that when he walked into the room that night he had already been instructed to kill Teresa has been impossible to prove, but it must be considered as motive.
Charles made his rounds among the guests and then sat down next to Teresa. She was wearing a long maroon skirt and halter-neck top. Her skin was smooth and tanned. Around her neck she wore a woven red string, a protective Buddhist charm.
‘And so what’s all this about your sex life?’ Charles asked.
‘Oh, all sorts of things,’ Teresa giggled. ‘Sorry you missed it.’
‘My wife tells me that you’re off to a monastery in Kathmandu,’ he said, focussing on her. ‘I was born in a Buddhist country. It’s the greatest of all the religions, I think, and I’ve studied most of them.’
Already their intimacy had eclipsed the other house-guests. Teresa was giggling in erratic bursts and it was easy to see she was drunk. Charles knew the type well, he thought, he had used a hundred like her on his old jobs in Bombay.
‘Maybe you think it’s weird for me to be drinking and talking about sex before going to a monastery?’ Teresa said.
‘There are a thousand roads to reach Nirvana,’ Charles replied. ‘It doesn’t matter which one you take.’
Buddhism was a flexible religion, that’s why he liked it. Even the Thais kept an open mind. They were not supposed to kill, but Thais liked to eat fish, and fishermen must feed their families, so they solved the dilemma by believing that, having simply taken the fish from the water, they died of their own accord.
‘Do you expect to reach enlightenment,’ he smiled, ‘up there in those hills, where Buddha was born? Do you really have the self-discipline?’
‘I don’t have a real lot of self-discipline, but I’m working on it,’ she replied, suddenly serious. ‘How about you?’
‘To me, it’s the most important quality a man can have. You know, Teresa, when I was a little boy, I was like you. Running around, searching for something … reading Buddha, the Bible, philosophy, and in the end I realized that here, inside me, I had truth.’
He could see he had touched a chord in her. It was so easy with this type.
Dominique was the first to wake up the next morning. The others had headed out to Patpong on Charles’ instructions, and must have had a late night. He folded his sheets carefully and finished cleaning up after last night’s party. He couldn’t get Teresa out of his mind. She was so outspoken it had shocked him. Still, that was America, Dominique thought. And then she had put her hand on his thigh. At first he thought that she must be attracted to him, but later he had seen her doing the same to Ajay.
He wondered what she must have thought of Patpong, the outrageous sex district only a few blocks from Kanit House. Package tours flew in daily from Frankfurt to the precinct, which was famous the world over for its sex clubs, hustlers, tarts and transvestites. Thai boys thrust cards in tourists’ hands promising ‘Elephant smokes hash’, ‘Love with a goldfish’, and other unlikely delights. The clubs, supposedly illegal, were Patpong’s attraction. The atmosphere was relaxed and cheerful, with men and a few couples served drinks by Thai waitresses while naked women on stage light-heartedly penetrated each other with dildos or inserted goldfish into their vaginas and then flipped them into buckets across the stage. Using the same highly trained kegel muscles, performers could puff cigarettes or pop ping-pong balls across the room.
When Dominique came out of the shower, Marie-Andrée was up frying eggs and making the morning coffee.
‘How was last night? Where did you go?’ he asked.
‘To a sex club,’ she said, indicating by the tight set of her mouth that she was in no mood to elaborate. Marie-Andrée was angry with her husband again, he thought. There was psychological warfare going on between those two and he couldn’t quite work it out. Sometimes he watched them go off into their bedroom and lock the door, and he heard low, angry voices. She was always sulking while Charles rarely dropped his friendly, warm-hearted sociability.
Marie-Andrée measured his medicine, a half glass of Kaopectate for his diarrhoea, and pushed it across the breakfast bar.
‘Here you are, Dominique,’ she said with brisk efficiency. He took a sip and decided to save the rest until he had eaten, thinking to himself that despite her cool manner, his hostess had a heart of gold. Without her he never would have remembered the medicine. His own memory often lapsed these days – but she never forgot.
The phone rang and he hurried to answer it, trying to make himself useful. A girl’s voice asked in French, ‘Is Charles there, please?’
‘Charles?’ Dominique replied, not connecting the name to his host Alain. ‘There’s no one named Charles living here.’
Charles’ voice called from the bedroom, ‘Tell whoever it is to hang on a minute.’ A few seconds later he hurried out and took the phone.
‘Yes? Oh, it’s you. Yes, I’m here. No, I don’t like the name Charles, so I have my friends call me “Alain”. How are you this morning? What are you doing? Well, why not come up now. My wife is just making some coffee.’
When he put the phone down he told Dominique that he had met a French girl who lived downstairs. She could be useful in his gem business.
In the apartment below, twenty-one-year-old Nadine Gires hung up the receiver and stood in front of the bedroom mirror, tidying her brown hair and hurrying on some pink lipstick. She was tall, with an olive complexion, an attractive face and a straightforward gaze. She had been married for two years to a chef named Remy, and after he had been appointed chef at the Oriental Hotel, had lived in Bangkok for the past eighteen months. Remy worked long hours in the kitchens, and Nadine was lonely in 307a, their tiny Kanit House apartment. She had grown up in a suburb of Paris, the eldest of four daughters of a baker and a lady’s maid, and was used to the convivial conflicts of a hardworking but happy family. So, the life of enforced leisure in Bangkok had been getting on her nerves. Sometimes she worked part-time at the Laotian embassy, translating English press cuttings into French. She attended the activities of the Alliance Française, but most of the French people she met there were of another generation and another world. They were snobbish and stylish. She had no patience with the fashion-plate diplomats in their white suits and their wives for whom Asia was a place to collect antiques.
Yesterday, she and Remy had been on their way out when a neighbour had come up and introduced himself as a fellow Frenchman. He was charming and very friendly and told them he was starting a cut-rate gem business. He flattered them by asking their advice as long-term residents of Thailand. Did they know of a printer for his gem catalogues? What did they think of the Thais?
‘Don’t trust them,’ Nadine and Remy had said laughingly.
After he had come down and had coffee with them, he had suggested that since Nadine was at home alone most of the day, he might be able to offer her some work. She had asked him his name and he said it was Charles.
The upstairs apartment was on the opposite side of the building, and to reach it Nadine had to cross an open-air walkway that lined the two wings. She looked down over iron railings at the swimming pool, a small orange spirit house on its pedestal, and the car park. She disliked Kanit House, but it was cheap and close to the Oriental Hotel so Remy could walk to work and avoid the hellish traffic jams. Passing down a dim concrete hallway to the end of the wing, she reached number 504 and knocked on the turquoise door.
Charles opened it with a welcoming smile, dressed as he had been yesterday in dark slacks and an open-neck business shirt. A flat gold Rolex watch glinted on his wrist, hinting at a prosperity that was not echoed inside the apartment. It was much larger than her own, and a door opened onto a cement balcony that ran the length of the living room, shaded by white aluminium awnings. But the room was shadowy and dank and she was surprised to see a black punching bag hanging near the door. It seemed to be the only personal touch apart from a dog-eared stack of gemology magazines and books on the coffee table. In the corner stood a grey metal filing cabinet.
A dark-haired European woman looked up from the kitchenette where she was busy with cups and a jar of Nescafé. Charles introduced his wife, Monique, and his house-guest, Dominique, a thin, apologetic young man with a kind face. Then he disappeared back into the bedroom saying he had to finish getting ready for an appointment.
Marie-Andrée put the mugs on a tray. She did not look very friendly.
‘I told you to take your medicine,’ she said to the house-guest, adding the glass of milky liquid to the tray, which she set down on the coffee table.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ Nadine asked.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ the boy smiled self-deprecatingly. ‘My latest theory is malaria. I caught it in Chiang Mai three weeks ago, and I’ve been staying here ever since.’
‘Haven’t you been to the hospital?’ Nadine asked.
‘He doesn’t need to do that,’ Marie-Andrée said quickly. ‘My husband is an expert on Asian diseases, and we’re already looking after him here. Why should we pay for a hospital as well?’
‘I’m quite willing to make a contribution for my upkeep,’ Dominique interjected. ‘Alain is taking care of my money, and …’
‘My wife is a little bad-tempered this morning,’ Charles said, coming swiftly out of the bedroom, his hair combed and shoes on.
The four of them sat drinking coffee. Ajay’s bedroom door was closed. He was either still asleep or out. Sometimes he stayed overnight at the Hotel Malaysia.
Charles questioned Nadine about the French community in Thailand while Marie-Andrée played with the dog. He was curious about the contacts Nadine had made through the Alliance Française and the embassies she had worked for.
‘Diplomats make great customers,’ he said, holding a ruby up to the light. He was selling quality gems at wholesale prices, he told her. If she brought him customers, he would give her a 10 per cent commission. Apart from the sapphires and rubies he bought at the mines in Chanthaburi and the diamonds he got from Hong Kong, he had his own goldsmith in Bangkok who could design the settings according to his customers’ specifications, or to his own.
‘Well, think about it, Nadine, and we’ll talk again later. It was lucky that we met, don’t you think? Not that I believe in luck.’
Kissing Marie-Andrée lightly and picking up his attaché case, Charles excused himself, saying he had a business appointment. Nadine wondered if she should leave, but decided to stay since it was pleasant, sitting around, talking French. She lit another cigarette and walked to the windows overlooking the balcony. In a cage beside the railing she noticed a small monkey with its head in its hands. Marie-Andrée began clearing away the coffee cups.
‘You should have been here last night,’ said Marie-Andrée, who had started to enjoy Nadine’s company. ‘There was an American girl, Teresa. She told us such funny things about her sex life.’
‘Americans are so outspoken,’ Nadine smiled. ‘How long have you been married to Alain?’
‘Oh, we’re not married. He just calls me his wife. He says that in Asia it’s better for business. It makes a better impression. I’ve been living with him for a few years now,’ she lied. ‘I used to be a nurse in Canada.’ That was another lie.
As she helped her clear up, Nadine thought that Marie-Andrée seemed nice, but there was a pained, resentful expression in her blue eyes. If they became friends, perhaps she would confide in her. It would be fun to have a girlfriend in Bangkok, Nadine thought.
After her first visit to number 504, its occupants became a part of Nadine’s life and she dropped in every day. She was friendly with people from the airlines and embassies who were always looking for bargains to take back to Paris, so she agreed to work for Charles.
One morning Nadine went up to find that the monkey, Coco, had died. Marie-Andrée was very upset. ‘It’s your fault,’ she said to Dominique, who, Nadine noticed, seemed to be wasting away from his illness. ‘You always leave your medicine around. Coco must have drunk it.’
On 18 October, five days after Teresa had first visited Kanit House, a fisherman dragged his small wooden boat into the gentle waves off Pattaya Beach. The red and yellow prayer flags knotted around the prow floated on top of the transparent green water as he threw his nets out and hauled them in.
It was a rhythm Chid Chamuen had known since he was a boy. He rowed adjacent to the beach, south of the resort area where the long white strip of sand was usually deserted. The sun was rising over the distant mountains as he passed the Sea Gull Bungalows, which were newly built and still secluded. Once Pattaya had been miles of white beach backed by jungle: no speedboats, no tourists. Now seafood restaurants lined the strip of Pattaya Beach. Chid had grown wealthy selling his catch directly to their kitchens. He rowed on, trailing his nets. Then, looking to the left, he saw something floating in the water. He rowed towards it. Sometimes the turtles came in, turtles as big as men. Their shells were valuable. As he came closer, he saw that it was not a turtle, but the body of a girl in a bikini, a drowned farang. She was floating face-down in the warm green water.
Blue blotches mottled the body. The short brown hair looked like seaweed as it washed back and forth. Chid believed it was bad luck to touch a corpse. He took the rope that was coiled under the seat and looped it around the body’s neck and tied it to the side of the boat. With the red and yellow prayer ribbons floating beside it, the body was brought back to land and laid out on the beach in the sun. The local people gathered around in their sarongs and bamboo hats, looking curiously and hurrying away.
At 8.30 a.m. the local police arrived. There was no sign of injury on the body except a small cut on the neck believed to have been caused by the fisherman’s rope. The fingers and toes were already turning blue. The eyes were closed. The right earlobe was pierced, but there was no jewellery on the body, nothing to identify the tourist who had apparently drowned. The sergeant in charge took a photograph of the body with his Instamatic.
On 4 November the Bangkok Post, an English-language daily, carried the photograph of Teresa lying on her back in a bikini with her arms outstretched. Unable to identify the body, the police had sent the picture to the newspaper. ‘No traces of any foul play and police and doctors inspecting the body concluded she must have drowned,’ the newspaper reported. An appeal was made for anyone who recognized the body to contact the police.
How did the body of Teresa Knowlton come to be floating in the water that morning? Later, in another country, Charles would offer a confession: knowing Teresa would check into the Hotel Malaysia, he had sent Ajay to captivate her with his talk of cheap gems. After she had visited his apartment, Teresa had been delighted to accept Charles’ invitation to join him for a weekend at Pattaya. With Ajay he had picked Teresa up at the Hotel Malaysia. He could not remember the exact date. Teresa was surprised that Monique was not going with them to the beach resort. Charles said she had stayed behind at Kanit House to look after their sick house-guest.
With Teresa sitting between the two men, Charles drove the rented Holden Torana south along Sukhumvit Highway, leaving the city at 6.30 p.m. The road passed through rice paddies with black buffaloes plodding through the water. During the journey Teresa put her hand on his thigh, but he pushed it away, saying, ‘No, Teresa, not now.’ He thought she was a nymphomaniac.
Teresa talked cheerfully and Ajay sat quietly, staring out the window, ready for whatever his boss might ask him to do. He was a smart fellow, Charles thought, and he would claim later that the Indian had been sent to him as an able assistant by the men in Hong Kong.
There could be few more romantic bars than the one to which Charles said he and Ajay took Teresa for her last drink. Under the roof of thatched palm leaves, the view from the bar swept across the Gulf of Thailand, through the silhouettes of palm trees that lined the beach, to the sun setting behind the jagged offshore islands. To the left, the black sweep of the beach continued, unpopulated. Music from nightclubs and discos on the docks hung in the air. It was not the Asia that Teresa loved, the austere beauty of the Himalayas, the temple bells, the silence of the lamas at their ancient meditations. It was tourist Asia at its most seductive. As she looked across the bar, where the fishermen pulled their boats onto the beach, Charles dropped a sedative into her drink.
‘I’ve got business on the strip,’ Charles said. ‘Let’s meet back here at midnight and we’ll drive to the bungalow. Maybe we’ll have a swim before we sleep.’
He strolled to the Sandbox, a nearby disco where local rock bands blared out Western hits. During a break in the music a sheet of canvas was rolled out on the dance floor, and the crowds returned to their tables or sat close to the improvised boxing ring. Two teenagers with quivering muscles and bright satin shorts came on stage. With a quick balletic gyration each one made the ritual sign of homage and then they began to punch and kick each other. As bets were placed, money flashed among the audience as Charles filled in the hours until it was late enough to finish off his business with Teresa.
It was nearly twelve when he walked back to the car, where the smiling American girl and Ajay were waiting for him. They were leaning against the hood, joking with the strolling bar-girls and the children hustling cut-glass ‘diamonds from Burma’.
‘OK, let’s go,’ Charles said.
He drove south again, along Sukhumvit Highway towards Cambodia. Because of the fear of bandits who roamed the surrounding jungle, few people strayed from their homes or the brightly lit tourist areas, and traffic was sparse.
After about ten minutes, Charles turned towards the ocean at an ornate Buddhist temple on the side of the road, its five flashy pagodas standing out against the sky. He drove for 3 kilometres until he reached the edge of the beach, where the road was briefly paved. He drove past two construction sites for new tourist bungalows. He kept going for a short distance until the road reverted to dirt and there was no sign of settlement. It was deserted although less than a mile from the Sea Gull Bungalows. After bumping across a field he turned off the lights and the engine. The field faced a long, grey strip of beach that stretched away endlessly to the horizon and down the coast towards Cambodia.
Charles would later claim that he could remember his last conversation with Teresa quite clearly.
‘Do you know the reason I brought you here?’ he asked as they got out of the car.
‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘for a weekend at the beach.’
‘There is something else, too,’ Charles said, moving around the car to her side. ‘Who do you work for?’
‘What do you mean?’ she asked, surprised. ‘I’m not working. I’m on my way to Kathmandu. I’m going into retreat at Kopan Monastery, to teach the children.’
‘Teresa, I don’t think you are telling me the truth,’ he said softly, putting his hand on her shoulder as if she were a little girl.
‘Yes, I am.’
‘You know, this really doesn’t interest me. I’ve been engaged in illegal matters for a long time now, and I know you came here to do a little business.’
‘Oh, well, sometimes I have done some business,’ she agreed.
‘Yes, and many people who have lived in Kathmandu like to take a little powder through,’ he said.
‘You mean from here to there?’ she asked.
‘Yes. It’s easier to take from Kathmandu to Europe. From here direct is getting difficult.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Tell me, Teresa, do you have to take something from here to Kathmandu this time? Do you?’
‘No,’ she said, and continued to deny that she was involved with heroin. But Charles was not to be convinced.
‘Come, Teresa, I think you have to do a little business,’ he said, his voice low but resolute. Ajay was staring straight ahead.
‘No, Alain, you’re crazy,’ she insisted, shaking her head at his questions, starting to feel foggy and confused from the capsule he had dropped in her drink.
‘I think you do have to carry some powder, Teresa, and you are silly to hide this from me. You see, I already know the one who has to give it to you.’
‘You do?’
‘Yes, I know.’
They stayed silent for a while. There was just the sound of the waves. When she seemed to relax again, Charles said, ‘Teresa, how do you like Kathmandu? How do you like the life there?’
‘It’s good,’ she said. ‘I can’t wait to get back.’
‘Don’t you think what you are doing now could harm another human being? You know what it’s like at the other end of the heroin market. You say you study meditation, and part of this philosophy is to respect the human being. Don’t you think that what you do is contrary to this respect?’
This was a game he loved – ensnaring people in their own contradictions.
‘Well, you know, Alain, I only do it for the money.’ And then she said, ‘Did you put something in my drink? I’m feeling weird.’
‘It was only to relax you, Teresa, because I must tell you that I think I have to do something bad to you.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Well, you choose your way of making money. You know the risk of it. Sometimes the risk can be high.’
‘What are you going to do to me?’
‘It’s not my fault. I have the order to do something to you, and I have to carry out my order.’
‘Are you going to beat me up?’
‘No, Teresa, I am not going to beat you.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘Something better.’
Ajay opened a vacuum flask and poured coffee into a cup, then he took three capsules from his pocket. In each of these, according to the story Charles would later tell, was fifty milligrams of Mogadon, five tablets ground to powder and packed inside. Charles dropped these capsules into the coffee.
‘Drink it,’ he commanded.
‘I don’t drink coffee,’ she said.
‘This time you will have to make an exception, Teresa.’
‘What will it do?’
‘You will just sleep. I want to keep you asleep.’
‘What for?’
‘We are going to visit some people now to talk business. I don’t want you to see the way. Afterwards, we will ask you some questions, and you can go.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, Teresa. Just drink up and it will all be over soon.’
Later Charles described how he and Ajay undressed Teresa Knowlton, put her in a bikini and removed her jewellery. She didn’t struggle. Then he took a two-way radio from the back of the car and walked through the prickly pear bushes and low scrub to the road. Ajay stripped to his underpants. Charles searched for signs of traffic or people, and then whispered the signal to Ajay, who backed the car onto the road and parked it on the grassy bank by the beach.
‘Take her for a swim,’ he told Ajay, who put her arm around his shoulder and his hand around her waist. He helped her from the car and down the embankment. Then he dragged her across the sand to the water’s edge, picked her up, carried her into the water and swam out with her. Then he let her go.
On 18 October Teresa was found by the fisherman. Charles would claim he killed Teresa on the same night he collected her from the Hotel Malaysia, but records show that she checked out on 14 October – four days earlier. Her whereabouts during those days remain a mystery.
With no responses to the Bangkok Post story forthcoming, Teresa’s unidentified corpse was wrapped in a plastic bag and buried in the local Sawang Boriboon Cemetery. On the day she was buried, her grandmother, Emma Knowlton, wrote to her at Kopan Monastery: ‘I am very worried about you. I haven’t heard from you since you left, and I can’t understand it. Anyway, we are fine here. Steve and Grandpa are getting on well, and the garden has been lovely, with a big crop of courgettes.’
For seven months the body of Teresa Knowlton rested anonymously in the overgrown field.