On Friday afternoon, 12 December 1975, three days after Stephanie Parry had checked out of the President Hotel, Nadine walked up the stairs at Kanit House, curious to meet the new arrivals. The previous evening, Charles had mentioned that he would be picking up a Dutch couple at Don Muang Airport and bringing them back to stay.
She opened the door to the two apartments. Charles now rented number 503 as well as 504, and had built an extended entrance, which joined both of them. As Nadine walked towards the bedroom of 503, she heard voices. Accustomed to the casual atmosphere of the apartment by now, she opened the door. She saw a dark-bearded, heavy-set man in his twenties sitting on the bed talking with Charles. She guessed he must be the Dutchman.
‘Hello,’ she began.
‘Oh, Nadine, please go and see Monique,’ Charles said quickly. ‘We’re discussing business here.’
He seemed angry, which surprised Nadine. He was usually courteous, to the point of excess she sometimes thought.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Excuse me.’ She hurried into the kitchen of the adjoining apartment.
‘Hi, Nadine, coffee?’ Marie-Andrée asked as she made herself a cup of Nescafé.
Nadine sat on a stool at the bar. ‘Alain is in a bad mood today. He just sent me out of the guestroom,’ she said as she crossed her long legs and lit a Gauloise.
‘Oh, you know him. He likes to keep his business private.’
Another woman walked into the room. She had blue eyes and long, fair hair. As she picked up an ashtray and walked back through the door, she smiled warmly at Nadine.
‘Is she Dutch?’ Nadine nodded after the young woman as Marie-Andrée sat down next to her.
‘Yes.’
‘She’s so beautiful.’
‘I must tell you, Nadine, I don’t like these Dutch. They can’t talk proper French.’
‘That’s hardly enough reason to dislike them so soon.’
Marie-Andrée shrugged. She was very tense.
‘I am exhausted physically and morally,’ her diaries would later reveal. ‘I feel sick, depressed and lonely. The dangers and risks of the business mean that I can never relax any more. At every moment I have to play a role. Our business makes me more and more nervous and scared.’
Downstairs in apartment 103, two more of Charles’ house-guests were sitting at the kitchen table discussing how soon they could leave Bangkok. Since his experiment with the Kaopectate, Dominique had only pretended to drink his medicine. He was feeling better and had trimmed his beard. The other man, the stocky, slow-talking François, had just received a refund of $810 on his stolen traveller’s cheques, and a new passport was waiting for him at the French embassy.
‘Now I’ve got to get my passport back from him,’ Dominique was saying to François. ‘I know he’s still got it. It’s in the new safe he’s installed. I’ve given up all hope of getting back my eleven hundred dollars.’
In the past weeks both of them had painted number 504 blue and done other repairs around the two apartments, as well as taking care of most of the shopping and the laundry. Yesterday Charles had asked them not to enter 504. From now on they were to have their meals in 503.
François was also beginning to suspect that as well as Charles’ gem business, which seemed to be flourishing at the moment, he also stole the passports and valuables of tourists. But he did not raise the matter because, in a curious way, he was quite grateful to Charles for having put him up for the past two months, feeding him and giving him cash for odd jobs. Although he did feel sad that he had lost Yannick to Charles, who had just bought Yannick two pairs of new shoes and a suit and employed him as his full-time secretary.
‘You should tidy yourself up a bit,’ Yannick had told François a few days before.
Yannick wasn’t even bothering about the return of his traveller’s cheques and passport. In Asia such formalities required constant pressure and form-filling.
Dominique and François wandered upstairs to prepare dinner. Afterwards Dominique sat on the couch next to the Dutchman, who introduced himself as Henk Bintanja. The two of them discussed the usual subjects, travelling and gem stones. Henk told Dominique that he had been on the road for almost a year now. While they still had some money in the bank, he and Cocky were thinking of making an investment. If they made the right purchases now, later, when their funds ran out, they could make a profit. Henk seemed a nice man, and although the two of them spoke in a halting mixture of French and English, Dominique, who was well disposed towards most people he met, recognized a kindred introvert.
The next morning, Saturday 13 December, Dominique came upstairs to 503 and noticed that the bedroom door was shut.
‘Shall I make coffee for the Dutch couple?’ he asked Marie-Andrée, who was fussing at the stove.
‘No, don’t. They’re sick.’
‘Already? This place is becoming like a hospital,’ he said, immediately regretting his outspokenness.
‘Oh, they take drugs,’ Marie-Andrée said. ‘Marijuana. That’s what makes them sick. And Alain doesn’t like it.’ Everyone who came to Kanit House knew that Charles would not tolerate drug-taking. Dominique remembered the night Ajay, the Turk and some other travellers had hidden in the guest bedroom, furtively passing round joints.
‘Why did he bring the Dutch here, then?’ he asked.
‘Oh, to sell them stones. They have money, and Alain will sell them more than they want,’ Marie-Andrée replied.
Dominique nodded. He had seen Charles in operation. He was uncanny in his talent to make people buy more than they planned. He also had a method for calculating how much money they possessed. By finding out how much they planned to spend on gems and where they were staying, he used a crude index to calculate the total funds at their disposal. Dominique was fascinated by Charles’ almost mystical understanding of money.
Nadine came into the room to say goodbye – she and Remy were leaving for a brief holiday. When she heard the Dutch were sick, she couldn’t help commenting once again on the seemingly inevitable misfortunes of Charles’ guests.
‘It’s because of their drug habits,’ said Marie-Andrée angrily. ‘And Alain’s generosity with travellers who don’t know how to be careful with Asian food.’
‘Or he could be drugging them,’ Dominique said.
‘Oh, really?’ Charles said as he walked into the room.
‘Well, the medicine you gave me, Alain,’ said Dominique, surprised to hear himself speaking up, ‘it never cured me. It must have been mixed with something?’
Nadine smiled uncomfortably but Charles burst out laughing.
‘What a sense of humour, Dominique! It’s good to have you around. That’s why I drug you, so I can support you. That’s why I work hard, to earn enough to buy your toilet paper.’
Everyone was laughing now, even Marie-Andrée.
It’s true – it just doesn’t make sense, Dominique thought to himself. Of course it’s not him. Maybe Monique doesn’t know as much about nursing as she sometimes says she does. Maybe she mixed the medicines up, who knows?
‘Well, I’ll see you all in a week,’ Nadine said, rising from the couch and playfully tousling Dominique’s hair. ‘I’ll think of you all when I’m lying on the sand at Hua Hin.’
‘I have to go too,’ Charles said, opening the door.
As Charles left the room, Marie-Andrée turned to Dominique and said, ‘We have so much important business going on here now, Alain would prefer it if you and François could stay down at 103 for the next few days unless we phone you that it’s OK to come up.’
‘Sure,’ Dominique said, wondering what was going on now.
Nine kilometres south of Pattaya a red dirt road used to run off through the tapioca fields and the scrub of Nipa palms that lie between the highway and the beach. The road was called Haad Sai Thong, Golden Sand Road.
At 6 a.m. on 14 December 1975, a truck driver pulled up on Route 3 beside the small compound of peasants’ houses that stood at the junction and began walking down Golden Sand Road, unzipping his trousers, looking for somewhere to relieve himself. Some of the leaves on the trees that shaded the road were curled into brown cylinders that were the homes of ginger ants. The truck driver took this into account as he looked around for the right spot. A ditch ran on either side of road, dank with tea-coloured water. Fifty metres along the track, the truck driver saw something that made him run back along the road, holding up his trousers. The peasants he alerted in the nearby house rushed back with him, an old farmer and his toothless daughter in their muddy sarongs and bamboo hats. They looked over the edge.
The body of the farang girl lay with its feet pointing at them. This was very bad luck. It lay half in the water, and the girl’s face was submerged, her long brown hair floating, her eyes closed. Her dress was bunched up around her waist revealing a pair of red bikini pants. Ants were crawling all over her.
The next day Reiner, the young German, was packing his bags in the bedroom of 504. He was taking a flight to Frankfurt to be home with his mother for Christmas, although ‘Alain’ had been urging him to postpone the trip. Reiner was excited about the future of his gem partnership with Charles. Already Charles could hardly satisfy his customers’ orders. They had decided to rent office space in the Air Egypt building. He was always planning for the future; looking for furniture, shop space, good gem supplies, machinery, designs, contacts. Reiner had seen how successful Charles had been at the Indra Hotel with the gem cutters from France. He had taken thousands of dollars’ worth of orders.
It was not only Charles’ business sense that gave him confidence in the partnership. Reiner enjoyed being with him. Just the other day, when they were driving around the city speaking in German, Charles had poured out his ideas on philosophy and psychology. The Dutch couple had just arrived in Bangkok and were sitting in the back. When they got out, Charles had turned to him and asked, ‘What do you think of them?’
Typical travellers, he had thought, a bit on the hippie side.
‘I’m thinking of getting them to do some travelling for me,’ Charles had said.
Gems, Reiner thought. Charles was always asking people to smuggle gems for him – to take emeralds and rubies to Iran or fly diamonds in from Hong Kong to save the 25 per cent duty. He had also talked about giving that Turkish fellow, Ved, a job.
He didn’t know much about Charles’ other affairs. But lately Reiner had begun to notice that Charles was gulping down little white tablets. ‘Speed,’ Charles said. ‘This business is getting too big.’ And Charles was certainly rich. Reiner had watched Yannick counting the money in the safe, bundling up wads of 100-baht notes. It must have been 20,000 baht at least. Reiner closed the lid of his suitcase and checked his airline ticket to Frankfurt.
Suddenly there was a shattering scream. A thud. Another scream. A banging noise and someone swearing. He rushed into the living room where Monique was tidying up as if she hadn’t heard a thing.
‘What was that?’
‘Oh, it’s those Dutch drug addicts. I wish Alain would get rid of them, always so sick, and I have to cook for them all the time.’
Reiner stared at her for a moment, uncomprehending, and then walked into the hall and tried to open the door of the adjoining apartment. It was locked.
‘Who’s that?’ Ajay’s voice called out from behind the door.
‘What’s going on?’ Reiner demanded.
‘Oh, nothing much, man,’ Ajay said, coming out of the room and quickly closing the door. ‘The Dutch have had some kind of fit. They’re sick. Alain’s with them now.’
Ajay was grinning and sharply dressed. Partly because the two were among the youngest at Kanit House, Reiner and Ajay had become friends over the past few weeks. Earlier that day they had had lunch together at an open-air restaurant on Silom Road and Reiner had mentioned the Dutch couple.
‘It sounds as if they could be dangerously ill,’ he had told Ajay. ‘Don’t you think you should call a doctor?’
‘Yeah, Alain probably will. He knows about medicine,’ replied the Indian, averting his eyes.
That night Dominique and François sat at the little kitchen table downstairs in 103 discussing their growing realization that Charles was a petty crook.
‘I don’t know why he bothers,’ Dominique was saying. ‘He makes so much profit from selling gems.’
‘Yes, but he throws the money away as quickly as he makes it.’
‘Yes, maybe he enjoys it.’ Dominique was becoming obsessed with trying to figure out the mystery of Charles. ‘I often have the sense he’s playing a game with you and your friend Yannick. He’s fascinated because you were both once policemen.’
François made a quick sign to his friend to lower his voice. Both suspected the apartment was bugged. They sensed Charles didn’t trust them so much any more. In the last two days Dominique had become more and more insistent about having his passport returned. He was determined to get home by Christmas. Even when they were away from Kanit House, they both sensed they were being watched. Two days ago, Charles had given them some money to go to the bars in Patpong. When they came out into the street after a night of chatter with the bar-girls, they bumped into Ajay, who had obviously been following them.
Now the kitchen door opened and Ajay walked into the room.
‘Alain wishes to see you both,’ he said with a cold, formal smile.
‘Sure, let’s go,’ Dominique said casually.
‘No, not together. One at a time. You first, François.’
François slowly got out of his chair and went upstairs. He walked into 504 and saw Charles sitting at his desk. On it was Ajay’s nine-inch flick-knife and a pair of handcuffs. Looking smart in his new suit, his old friend Yannick sat on the couch.
‘Sit down,’ Charles said.
‘I prefer to stand,’ said François. Then nervously he changed his mind and sat on the opposite chair.
Ajay stood near the door.
‘You say you are taking a trip to Penang,’ Charles began. ‘Aren’t you really going to Paris to complain to the French authorities because you know what kind of jobs we do in Bangkok?’ His face and voice were expressionless.
‘You have no need to worry. I’ve suspected that you stole my passport for months now, but I did nothing. I’m going to Penang to have my visa renewed. That’s all. It’s so much easier there than with the Bangkok Immigration.’
Charles smiled. ‘Tell me, François, if a French policeman disappeared in Bangkok, what do you think would happen?’
‘There would be a big search,’ he said. Was Charles serious? No, it must be a game.
‘Not here, François. Who cares about life here?’
‘Interpol would take the case. And, of course, they are very thorough about disappearing policemen. Why do you ask?’
‘I want to know if you can be trusted,’ Charles said.
‘Look, Alain, I’m only in your flat because you promised to help me. When I return from Penang, if you have jobs for me, I’ll stay. Otherwise I’ve got my traveller’s cheques back.’ He shrugged. ‘In the end I’ve lost nothing.’
This answer seemed to appeal to Charles. ‘OK, François, I’ll see what I can do. You don’t seem to be an undesirable.’
‘Sure,’ François smiled with difficulty. He was told to return to 103. He tried to saunter out of the room with his hands in the pockets of his baggy jeans. He avoided Dominique’s questioning glance as he was led into the apartment for fear it would be interpreted as collusion.
Dominique stepped back suddenly when he saw the three men he had thought of as friends looking at him like a tribunal of gangsters.
‘Yannick tells me that if I let you go back to France, you will say a lot of malicious things about me and try to have me arrested,’ Charles said as though he was only mildly interested in the proceedings. ‘He says you will go to the French Ministry of Justice and tell them I steal passports.’
‘That’s not true,’ Dominique said angrily. He looked at Yannick, who did seem embarrassed. He knew that Yannick had said no such thing and that if this was a test it was as much a test of Yannick as himself.
‘And François just said the same thing as Yannick.’
‘No. It’s impossible,’ Dominique said. ‘We never mentioned anything like that.’
Charles repeated the charge, and Dominique kept wracking his brain for the right words.
‘How could I complain about you, when you and Monique have been so kind? I’ve been here now for three months.’
‘So, you will keep your mouth shut?’
‘It’s cool. I know you need passports for your work. It’s none of my business. But I wish you would give mine back now.’
‘OK then,’ Charles laughed. ‘Tomorrow morning, you’ll get it.’
Later Charles would tell the chilling story of the Dutch couple’s last days. ‘I could have easily hidden their bodies in the jungles of Thailand,’ he explained:
I got a message to go to Hong Kong and pick up the Dutch. I didn’t make a profit on that sapphire ring. It was just the bait. I had been told that they were on their way to Chiang Mai to set up a smack deal. After that they would have sent back dates to Amsterdam to the couriers. I could have killed them in Hong Kong, but it’s too small. Although many bodies are dumped in the harbour there, I wanted this cleaning to make a big impression. Another warning. Like the Turk.
Instead, he drugged Cocky and Henk at Kanit House the day after he picked them up at the airport:
I told Yannick we had to keep them a few days, not to kill them, just to get some information. Because of the drugs, it was easy. I used psychology. The guy was a bit scared because he sensed after two days that something was wrong. They were so much under the influence of drugs they couldn’t think coherently, and the questioning was slow. Sometimes Henk would get dozy, and I’d shake him and say, ‘Answer this man, answer this!’
By the time we took them from the house, they were down, although they could just about walk. I’d said to the guy in the morning that they were sick, and I’d take them to the hospital, so in the car they were convinced that’s where they were going. Ha!
Late on the night of Monday 15 December, Charles and Ajay helped Cocky and Henk down the corridor and across the walkway. The city was dark – only street lights, the red tail-lights of cars and the white tower of the Dusit Thani Hotel illuminated with floodlights. Cocky’s head lay on Ajay’s shoulder.
‘Come on – it will soon be over,’ Charles said to her gently.
‘Where are we going?’ she asked, hardly managing to form the words.
‘You’re both very sick, Cocky,’ said Charles. ‘We have to take you to hospital.’ The gentle, caressing voice seemed to reassure her.
Charles drove fast towards Don Muang Airport and continued through rice fields to the small town of Rangsit. The car crossed a canal and passed a police checkpoint on the lookout for overloaded trucks. Traffic was scarce, and the rhythmic acres of paddy fields were broken occasionally by a well-lit junction or a cluster of shops and restaurants open late for truckers hauling teak from the north.
The shadowy pagoda roofs of Wat Kudi Prasit which doubled as the village school were visible from the highway. Two kilometres past this the Toyota, the latest in Charles’ string of rented cars, came to a stop.
Cocky was sleeping deeply with her head on her boyfriend’s shoulder. The back doors were opened, and Ajay and Charles dragged the couple out of the car.
‘What’s this?’ Henk asked. ‘Where are we?’
As Charles would later recall, ‘When the Dutch guy started resisting, I hit him in the stomach, and he fell down. He was stocky, and he started to move, so Ajay kicked him in the stomach and then choked him. But he began to move again. He was strong, even under drugs.’
It had been raining heavily. Charles and Ajay dragged Henk over to a puddle of water and held his head under it.
‘The girl never really knew what was going on. Ajay bashed her over the head, I think. On the side of the road we splashed them with petrol.’
As their car sped back to Bangkok, flames leapt up beside the highway.
At dawn on the Tuesday morning a group of village schoolchildren on their way to Wat Kudi Prasit saw smoke rising from the long grass and found Cocky and Henk lying near the road, side by side, on their backs. The bodies were still smouldering, Henk’s right arm resting protectively on Cocky’s shoulder. His neck was broken in three places. Cocky’s knees were bent as though in fitful sleep. Her teeth were clenched. Her denim skirt, pulled above her thighs, was covered with mud.
Later that morning, at 11 a.m., Dominique went upstairs and knocked on the door of 504 to retrieve his passport.
‘Oh, Alain’s expecting you, but he’s still in bed,’ Marie-Andrée told him, still in her dressing gown as she answered the door.
Dominique went into the bedroom, where Charles was in bed reading a copy of the Bangkok Post in which a story about Stephanie Parry had just been published:
EUROPEAN GIRL MURDERED
The body of a teenage European girl was found lying on a bank of a tidal creek near Pattaya yesterday, and police are treating her death as a case of murder.
Police are working on the theory that a person or persons held her under water until she drowned.
It was only 2 months ago that the body of a second foreign girl was found floating in the sea off Pattaya. The police have still been unable to identify her.
Charles would later claim to have killed Stephanie Parry on 9 December when she checked out of the President Hotel. But her body was found by local villagers on 14 December and she had been dead only a few hours. A similar discrepancy hovered over the timing of Teresa Knowlton’s death.
Charles carefully put down the paper and handed Dominique a manila envelope. ‘Here is your passport,’ he said smoothly, ‘but as you will see, I’ve been using it.’
The young Frenchman opened the envelope and saw what was left of his passport – a loose collection of pages, all falling apart, in different shades of blue, and Charles’ photo stuck where his own should have been. Dominique didn’t know what to say.
‘Don’t worry. I’ll fix the photo for you in a minute,’ Charles said, explaining that he had removed some of the pages with the visas he required to insert them into other passports. ‘So now I have taken some pages from other French passports and put them into yours, see?’ Charles then cut a piece of one of the mismatching blue pages from the passport. ‘I’ll take this to Hong Kong where I’ve got fifty passports and I’ll match the colours.’
‘But, Alain, I want to leave soon.’
‘OK. I’ll be back in a week – next Tuesday. Monique and I will go for Christmas to Hong Kong.’
‘But the passport picture?’
Dominique was amazed that Alain had come out into the open now.
‘I’ll fix it up now for you. Have you got a picture of yourself?’
Dominique handed him a passport photo he had picked up a few days before.
‘OK, you wait next door while I do it,’ he said as he got out of bed.
Dominique knew that Charles kept a lot of seals and stamps and other printing equipment in the refrigerator.
‘What about the Dutch?’
‘Oh, they’re not in there any more. Last night I took them to the hospital.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘These people come to Asia and take too many drugs.’
Dominique went into the apartment next door where he noticed that Henk and Cocky had left some of their bags in the room. A few minutes later Charles called him back into 504 and handed him the passport, which now had his own photo inside and was stamped with the embossed seal of the government of France.
‘It’s not such a good job. I’ll do a better one when I get back.’
They were by the kitchenette, and Dominique noticed a rubber hose-pipe smelling of petrol on top of the refrigerator.
‘Listen, Dominique, could you do me a favour? We leave for Hong Kong tomorrow.’ He handed Dominique a pair of his trousers which were wet and covered with mud. ‘Get these dry-cleaned, please. Same-day service.’
The mud oozed all over Dominique’s hands. Alain was usually so impeccable about his dress. Where on earth had he been?
Two days later, on 18 December, Dominique was downstairs alone in 103 when Yannick burst into the room. ‘You’ve got to go!’ he cried out wildly. ‘You’ve got to get out of here! Today!’
Yannick’s new clothes were crumpled, and his eyes were blazing. His long fair beard seemed scraggy and wild.
‘I am going, Yannick,’ Dominique replied a trifle coldly, ‘but why are you suddenly so interested in what I do?’
‘If you don’t go now, you’ll never go. Look at this.’
Yannick thrust a copy of the Bangkok Post at Dominique.
‘I’ve just come back from driving the three of them to the airport. Alain, Ajay, Monique. I bought a copy of the paper. And I just read this upstairs. Don’t you recognize them?’
Dominique opened the newspaper and saw the headline: ‘Australian Couple Killed and Burned’.
‘Australians? I don’t know any Australians.’
‘Look closely. Can’t you recognize the skirt?’
Dominique went into shock. Yannick was beside himself.
‘It’s Cocky and Henk! Alain and Ajay took them out late that night. I opened the gate of the compound. They were both drugged. Look, read the story.’
The partly burned bodies of a young Australian couple have been found in a ditch alongside a highway 58 kilometres south of Ayutthaya.
Police tentatively identified the couple as Johnson and Rosanna Watson who had apparently been touring the Central Plains.
A ‘Made-in-Holland’ T-shirt worn by the young woman indicated they may have arrived here from Europe on their way back to Australia.
Dominique put down the paper. ‘It says it’s two Australians.’
‘I tell you that’s a mistake,’ Yannick exclaimed, grabbing the paper again and waving it at his friend. ‘Look at this, it says the T-shirt the girl was wearing was made in Holland.’
Dominique tried to take the paper calmly. He saw his friend was right.
‘We’ve got to get out of Bangkok before they get back!’ Yannick shouted hysterically.
‘I’ve got no money,’ Dominique whispered, the awful truth dawning at last. ‘Did he leave you any?’
‘No, just a thousand baht to feed the stupid dog!’ Then Yannick stopped. ‘But I have the key to his safe.’
The two men fell silent. Dominique looked again at the picture of the two burned bodies. The caption read: ‘They had come halfway across the world for a date with death.’
‘Oh, my God! What about François? He was supposed to be going to Penang three days ago. Do you think Ajay really took him to the bus station?’
Three days before Christmas, Nadine and Remy stood on the balcony of a lavish mansion overlooking the Chao Phraya River. Out front on the gravel driveway limousines were lined up, their Thai chauffeurs in crisp white shirts, smoking and talking amongst the shrubbery. Paper lanterns were strung throughout the garden. The lights in the house were blazing and music filled the humid, scented air. Guests laughed and chatted in groups as they took a break from the dancing. Nadine and Remy usually circulated at these parties thrown by French expatriates, but tonight they huddled together, looking out at the lights moving up and down the river.
‘It’s a nightmare,’ shivered Nadine. ‘We must tell somebody.’
‘Not yet, not until we get the whole story,’ Remy replied slowly, smoking his Gauloise. ‘It sounds crazy to say, “Excuse me, there’s a killer next door.”’
That morning when they had returned from their holiday at Hua Hin, they had gone upstairs to ask if anyone in 504 wanted a quick game of badminton before they went to the party.
Yannick was alone in the apartment and looked very strange, his pale-blue eyes unfocussed, his face drained of colour. He told them he couldn’t leave the apartment because he was expecting Charles to phone from Hong Kong. If no one answered the phone, Charles might suddenly return.
‘So what?’ Nadine asked.
‘We’ve all got to get out of here,’ he blurted out. ‘He’s a murderer. He killed the Dutch couple.’
Then he showed them the story in the Bangkok Post.
‘But come back later and I’ll tell you everything.’
Now, as the party inside cranked up, Nadine turned to her husband, desperate for reassurance.
‘What if Yannick is dreaming all of this – and he’s just a homesick detective?’ she asked.
They both jumped when a voice called out from the doorway. It was one of their friends, an ambassador’s wife, elegant in a Thai silk dress.
‘Merry Christmas, you two! But why so miserable?’
‘Oh, nothing,’ they said a little stiffly.
‘Where’s your friend Alain?’ the woman demanded playfully. ‘I’m mad at him. I ordered a heavy gold chain for my husband’s birthday and I’ve not heard from him.’
‘Alain is due back in Bangkok in a few days,’ said Remy quietly.
As soon as they could, the couple left the party and rushed back to Kanit House.
When they returned, it was Dominique who opened the door. He too looked haggard and scared.
‘Why them, not me?’ he kept saying. ‘It’s all I can think about.’
Number 504 was a shambles, cigarette butts spilling out of ashtrays and saucers, dirty dishes, newspapers scattered on the floor. Franky the dog was whining for food, and the place smelled of dog shit.
Dominique took the piece of hose-pipe off the top of the refrigerator.
‘Smell it,’ he said, handing it to Remy. ‘Petrol. It was there this morning after they took out the Dutch. They were going to the hospital, they said. At two in the morning?’ He was shaking. He told them how Charles had handed him the muddy trousers, and how later he noticed that Charles’ shoes were covered with mud.
Yannick stood stroking his wispy beard. ‘I don’t think they were the only ones,’ he said.
They decided to search the two apartments.
In 503 Nadine opened the top drawer of a bureau and saw two hypodermic syringes, a walkie-talkie, some radio microphones and a pair of handcuffs. She picked up a silver necklace.
‘I remember the Turk wearing this, the one who never came back from the gem mines,’ she said turning to Yannick, who pointed to a stack of suitcases in the corner.
‘They belonged to Cocky and Henk,’ he said.
Nadine moved to a handbag on the table and looked inside. There was a purse of Dutch coins, and a package of contraceptive pills. She held them up to show Yannick. She knew the pills did not belong to Marie-Andrée, who had a coil.
‘Why would she leave without taking these?’ she asked.
Back in 504, Yannick led them to the safe and took out a manila envelope. He tipped a pile of passports onto the cocktail bar. His own was among them with Gautier’s picture inside. So were the passports stolen from Nadine and Remy’s friends in Pattaya. Another had belonged to the girl from Formentera, Stephanie Parry.
‘I think this one’s dead, too,’ he said. ‘She came back here one day and later –’ Yannick drew his finger across his throat ‘– she was found strangled near Pattaya.’
‘But why her and not me?’ Dominique asked again. ‘I cost them more than they got out of me.’
‘Why anyone at all?’ Remy said looking through bundles of traveller’s cheques, some wallets and fifteen passports.
Yannick put the envelope back in the safe and sat with Dominique and Nadine round the coffee table. Remy sat on a bar stool under the harsh fluorescent lights from the kitchen.
‘OK, let’s discuss what to do next,’ he said, making an effort to remain calm.
‘That’s just what we’ve been doing since Thursday,’ Dominique blurted out, ‘and every time we decide on a course of action, the consequences rule it out.’
It would be useless, even dangerous, they agreed, to go to the Thai police. The only language they understood was money. What about the French embassy? No, Alain had too many friends there too. Maybe that was why he always sold his gems and gold to French diplomats at cost, often less than cost.
‘What about Interpol, the international police agency?’ Nadine suggested. But they decided that because its headquarters were in France at St-Cloud, operating with a few telex machines, there wouldn’t be a representative in Thailand.
‘When I get back to France I’ll go to Interpol,’ said Yannick. ‘They can send a man out to arrest him.’
‘But Alain and Ajay are coming back tomorrow,’ cried Dominique. ‘We have to get out of here.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Remy said. ‘Tomorrow morning you can come with me to the bank as soon as it opens. We’ll lend you the money for your tickets, and you can be out of Bangkok by tomorrow night.’
Nadine was now in shock, compounded by a terrible sense of guilt. Remy had often warned her about Alain, and she had laughed at him. She had presumed he was jealous. With his big moustache Remy looked like a comic-book French chef. It was true that he spoke only French and worked long greasy hours in the kitchens of the Oriental Hotel. And yet now he did not say, ‘I told you so.’ Instead of voicing recriminations, he had taken control and was calm and rational.
The lights of the city were dimming, and the darkness was brightening into dawn. Dominique made coffee as they sat chain-smoking.
‘When I was driving the three of them to the airport,’ Yannick revealed, ‘Alain told me he was on the way to make the best deal of his life. Then he gave me the keys to the safe and asked me to take care of things here until he got back on Tuesday.
‘I knew something must have happened to the Dutch couple, but Charles insisted they were still in the hospital and that after what he had done, they wouldn’t remember anything for six months. And he told me, “Don’t worry, nothing will happen to me in Thailand. I’m protected.”’
‘But what about François?’ said Dominique. ‘He was supposed to be back from Penang yesterday.’
For half a minute everyone was silent. The same thought had hit them all. The stolid ex-detective was last seen climbing into the car with Ajay.
Nadine and Remy got up to leave. The other two would meet them at the bank at 9 a.m. When they got to France they would go straight to the police – and then they would cable the money back.
On their way out they stepped over Charles’ files, which were scattered all over the floor. Kicking one open, Nadine saw a large glossy photo. She called the others over. It showed a Vietnamese soldier standing in a charred field. In each hand he held a human head, dripping blood.
The next morning Remy went to the bank to meet Dominique and Yannick. Nadine was looking out of the window smoking when she saw a familiar, sombre figure by the pool. It was François. Relieved to see he was safe, she called him up to her apartment and told him what had happened.
‘Everything falls into place,’ said François, shaking his head.
‘What do you mean?’
‘A few days ago, I saw my passport in his room, the passport that was stolen in Pattaya.’
‘It’s so strange,’ said Nadine faintly. ‘I suspected something. So did Dominique, you, Yannick. And yet we all kept quiet about it. Why?’
‘Alain just has a way of making people not see things they don’t want to see,’ said François, with a fatalistic shrug.
When Yannick and Dominique got back to Kanit House their bags were already packed and waiting in the hall downstairs. Their flight was not scheduled to depart until midnight, but they would spend the whole day at the airport where they felt safe. There was one catch – Yannick still had no passport. The one in the safe upstairs had Charles’ picture inside. So he asked François to go with him to the French embassy so that he could get an emergency laissez-passer. Dominique, who had barely slept for days, arranged to meet them at Hua Lamphong railway station. From there they would go straight to the airport.
The three of them said goodbye to Nadine. Dominique kissed her warmly. They had been good friends. He wondered if being close to Nadine had actually saved his life. She would have asked too many questions if he had disappeared.
At the embassy, Yannick was told that his laissez-passer would take days, so with his flair for seizing the moment, he created a scene. He was a detective due back in Paris on urgent police business, he said. He would make a scandal at a high political level if they refused to help him! Within an hour he was issued with the document.
The three frightened men arrived at the airport before lunch. Dominique suggested they check the times of all incoming flights from Hong Kong.
‘I might as well tell you,’ confessed Yannick, twisting a strand of his beard, ‘they haven’t gone to Hong Kong. That was a decoy. They’ve gone to Kathmandu.’
The other two were nonplussed. Why was Yannick issuing such potent pieces of information like this in fits and starts, instead of telling all from the start?
‘Back in Paris I’ll tell you everything I know,’ he promised, fumbling in his pocket as he spoke. He took out a key, the one to the safe at Kanit House, and hurled it in the trash can.
‘Sapphires and rubies,’ he offered when his friends noticed several white envelopes bulging from his pockets. ‘Just part of what Charles owes me for my work.’
That night while the three Frenchmen waited to board their plane, Remy was in the Oriental’s cavernous kitchens supervising chocolate mousse for the Christmas banquet when he was called to the phone.
‘Hi, Remy. This is Alain. I’m just back from Hong Kong. How’s everything?’
‘Fine,’ Remy said, trying to sound relaxed yet busy.
‘Where’s Nadine?’
‘Isn’t she at home?’ asked Remy, knowing that Nadine had agreed to stay away from Kanit House until he could meet up with her later. ‘I guess she must be visiting friends.’
Remy waited.
‘The others seem to have disappeared,’ said Charles calmly. ‘And there’s no sign of Yannick. Did they leave any message?’
‘Non – they told us you phoned them from Hong Kong and asked them to meet you there. Did you miss them?’
There was a pause.
‘OK, thank you so much my friend,’ said Charles. He sighed. ‘I might see you tonight if I’m not too busy.’
At midnight, when Nadine and Remy returned to Kanit House, they saw lights on in the upstairs flat. Remy hauled a huge cupboard across their door. They spent the night huddled tight.
The next morning when they looked through the blinds of their bedroom, they saw Ajay Chowdury walking along with two Thai men in overalls bending under the weight of a two-handled metal tool box.
‘They’ve come to open the safe,’ whispered Nadine, clutching her husband’s arm. ‘Yannick must have had the only key.’
In the early hours of that same morning, Christmas Eve, the three Frenchmen checked in for their flight back to Paris. Dominique had been terrified that the Thai immigration authorities would question Charles’ crude alterations in his passport. But all three boarded without a hitch. They clicked shut their seatbelts, and Dominique buried his head in his hands.
‘Come on, man,’ said François kindly, leaning forward to shield him from the eyes of the other passengers. ‘It’s all over now. We’re safe. We’ve been lucky.’
‘But why not us?’ Dominique muttered, his body convulsing involuntarily. ‘Why not us? Who’s going to stop him?’
‘Try not to think about that until we get to Paris,’ said François sensibly. ‘We can go and see the police and the Minister of Justice. They will have him arrested. And Yannick has promised to pay a personal call on Interpol.’
It was not until he got to Paris, twelve hours later, when he stood outside the railway station saying goodbye to the others, about to begin his journey home alone, that Dominique broke down and wept uncontrollably.