Jim left after they’d spent time admiring the documents and speculating on what they meant and what Bottle had been up to.
“I’m done here,” Jim had said. “Got to go and do some work. Some Australian bloke wants to look at a flat on Wireless Road and none of my girlies can handle him. He’s a bit intense.”
“Thanks, I’m really grateful for what you’ve done,” Scrimple said.
“Get yourself sorted with a crossing into Cambodia as soon as you can. Leave the keys in the letter box. Call me when you’re on your way.”
For another fifteen minutes Scrimple sat and smoked his Mild Sevens trying to understand the Thai documents in front of him.
He had to get to a place he’d heard about on Khao Sarn road where all the backpackers stayed. The place was a travel agency with a sideline in helping people who had visa problems. Now that he had some cash from his office safe he’d be able to pay the man, no questions asked. Or that’s what he hoped.
But what to do about the documents he’d discovered? Were these what William had been after all this time and were they worth all the killing that had taken place? How much were they worth?
He considered how to best take advantage of the circumstances. Given the trouble he was in with the Thai police the more money he could obtain the better. Was it worth the risk to try and sell the documents back to William? Wouldn’t they just double cross him and kill him?
Then what about the girl Pim? Was she working with William? She was interested in the documents so maybe he could sell them to her. If she gave them to William or used them against him that wasn’t really Scrimple’s concern. He didn’t want to be part of all this mess.
Of course the documents were Bottle’s so Scrimple had no right to sell them to anybody except for the damn fact that it was Bottle’s fault that he was now wanted across Thailand for multiple murder. He should really get the documents back to Bottle, but make the old man pay through his nose for the nightmare Scrimple was now living. Had that always been Bottle’s intention? To set him up? Or was Scrimple a convenient diversion and things had gone wrong?
Jim didn’t think that Bottle was alive any more. That was certainly likely. William and Chisin would have found him and beaten him to death for the location of the documents by now. He may not have told them of course—he was a tough old bird—and then all they had was the lead to Scrimple. It was certainly a theory but that’s all it was at this point.
Strangely he felt his thoughts going back to all those years ago when he’d first tangled with William and there had been a girl. She’d been a nightclub girl and there had been something about her Scrimple could never forget. What had William done to her? Or where was she? He’d never seen or heard from her again despite remaining in Hong Kong a further fifteen years. Had William killed her or sold her to a nightclub in Japan or had she managed to get away to Canada or Australia after all?
He smoked a cigarette and drank one of the Singha beers Jim had brought, thinking wistfully of Mabel, remembering how he’d come home from work one day to find a strange naked woman in his bed. And she had been strange, and a little special—and then she’d disappeared from the face of the earth.
Scrimple worried some more about how to best leverage his advantage, now that he’d found the documents. At last he came to the conclusion to leave any decision about this until later. He returned them carefully in the secret compartment of the briefcase then hid it in the back of a cupboard behind a heap of clean linen.
There was one other thing he needed to do which he’d been avoiding. He had to call his direct boss in Hong Kong and at least try and explain. He put on the baseball cap and glasses, grabbed everything he needed and locked the apartment door carefully behind him.
The late afternoon streets were teeming with people, tourists and Thais in equal proportion. Nobody gave him a second glance because there was nothing remarkable about him around here. Scrimple found a phone box next to a Seven Eleven and purchased a long-distance calling card. He didn’t have to look up the number.
The phone was answered quickly by a female voice with a strong Scottish accent. Jane Ferguson had joined her family’s firm a few years back and eventually volunteered for the Hong Kong-based job when the previous manager had been headhunted away by a major retailer.
She’d only been in the post six months and Scrimple hadn’t made up his mind yet if he liked her. They’d met four or five times and there was still a touch of frost in their relationship. She was a thirty-year old graduate from Edinburgh University and he was a jaded middle-aged expat who came from an earlier decade and whose management style was grounded in old colonial habits.
“Bloody hell, Scrimple,” she said sharply. “Please tell me this is a case of mistaken identity. We’ve been trying to reach you for the last twenty-four hours.”
“Jane,” he said. “I can’t talk very long. I’m on a calling card. I just want to say that I’m very sorry about all of this—”
“It’s unbelievable,” she broke in. “The news says you’re implicated with eight murders? Have you gone mad? Are you doing drugs?”
“That’s all rubbish. My friends have been murdered and I’m being set up. It’s all about some property deeds that somehow have come into my possession. I can’t explain, it’s all screwed up.”
“Give yourself up to the police. I’m thinking about your own good. I can’t even start to think what effect this will have on the company.”
“Look, I’m really sorry. I can’t go to the police. They’ll lock me up and throw away the key without a trial. I must come to Hong Kong where I’ve got a chance to sort this out.”
“How will you come here?” she said, sounding suddenly wary.
“There are ways. Remember I’m a former police officer. There are people who can help me. In the meantime, I just want to say sorry again. You need to get someone else to keep an eye on the office. I guess I’m handing in my resignation.”
She made a disgruntled noise at the other end of the line. “Thanks for calling,” she said. “I’d like to give you the benefit of the doubt but it all sounds incredible.”
“Jane, it’s complicated. Please trust me. I’ve got involved with some Chinese gangsters and it’s not my fault. I’ll call you when I reach Hong Kong. Good-bye.”
He hung up before she could say anything else. Short phone calls were always the best. Tossing the calling card into the bin, he shook his head. What else could he say? At least he had to tell her what was going on so she could work on some damage limitation for the business. The company had been involved in a disaster before and that’s when Scrimple had come on board. Any publicity was good publicity, someone said, but another series of murders linked to the firm and people would start thinking there was a curse on McPherson Ferguson.
He grabbed a green taxi and it took him over to Khao Sarn road, stopping and starting in the stodgy traffic. The driver fingered his Buddha amulet which hung from the rear view mirror and Thai pop music blared from the speakers behind Scrimple's head.
His destination was an ant heap of backpacker hostels. Cheap internet and travel shops vied for shop space with doss house lobbies billing themselves as hotels. For every Thai person selling or offering something there were four Westerners with rucksacks and unwashed hair. It was a curious quarter that had emerged to cater for a particular segment of the great tourist dollar. Ordinarily Scrimple would never have come here. He glared disdainfully at the happy, drunk and drugged teenagers who were on their gap year and partaking in excesses that would normally be denied them back home in the ordered worlds from where they came.
It took a while to find the travel agent he was looking for, tucked in between a foot massage shop and a restaurant serving Issan food to customers who sat on the street on folding stools and tables.
Declan, bless the man, had told him about this place and gone into much detail about how a friend of his had managed to cross the border without any valid travel documents. At the time Scrimple had assumed the person was a pedophile or some other known criminal who’d wanted a visit to the depravities that could be found in Cambodia without drawing attention to himself in any computer. For all its supposed incompetence and anecdotal corruption the Royal Thai Police was very good at passing on information to other police forces or government agencies when it wanted to.
He entered the travel agency and asked the girl for Khun Winn at. She pointed at the back room while keeping her eye on the text she was typing on her mobile phone.
A fat, sweaty man sat at a large table and watched a Thai boxing match on a small color television. He was bald, with blank piggy eyes and wiped his gleaming dome periodically with what appeared to be a dish cloth. On the table in front of him was a styrofoam container of half-eaten rice sprinkled with chicken feet. Four mobile phones lay in a row on the table. He eyed Scrimple briefly but continued watching the boxers dancing around, occasionally flicking their legs out at each others’ bodies.
“Khun Winnat, my name is Bob and I want to make a trip to Phnom Phen,” said Scrimple standing at the side of the desk.
“You talk to my girl outside. She make bus booking. We good and cheap.”
Winnat didn’t make eye contact. He rubbed his sweaty head with the grimy tea towel.
“My friend told me you were the special guy to talk to. You can fix problems for people who want to cross the border.”
Winnat barely turned his head but gave him a hard, searching stare. “You have problem with your visa?”
“Sort of.”
“This is illegal action you know. Cross border without passport or visa? Is that what you mean?”
“Yes, something like that.”
“Illegal things are very expensive. Somebody have to pay police.”
“You can pay the police?”
Winnat blinked slowly a few times. “Somebody can pay the police. Very risky.”
“Can you get me across the border to Phnom Phen without a passport or visa?”
“Can, if you have money.”
“How much money?”
Winnat sucked his teeth and rubbed his head with the tea towel. “Two thousand dollar American.”
“One thousand.”
“Two thousand.”
“One thousand.”
Winnat shrugged and turned to his boxers.
“One thousand five hundred,” Scrimple said.
“Two thousand.”
“Okay, two thousand.”
“You come here tomorrow morning at six with money and we go.”
Winnat dismissed him with a wave of his tea towel then picked up one of his four mobiles.
* * * *
The next job came through the safe email account and even for a man who had seen and done much in his time, it came as a surprise.
The killer sat up with a start and knocked over his glass of wine. It fell into the sand and began staining the yellow powder with a rust color that could have been blood.
He stared at the photo and he carefully read the details again. He knew the man, had worked with him, had given him the respect due to a senior officer. It was a photo of an old Caucasian man who still looked fit but had the creases of age around his face. The man was in a group of people, stern faced as if he was giving instructions. The other people were all Asians, listening to him respectfully except for an older woman, nearly as old as the man, in her sixties perhaps. She was talking on a mobile phone, an angry expression clouding her features.
There were a few more photos, mainly of the man, some also showing the woman. Close-up pictures of his face—usually he was scowling. He didn’t seem to smile and the assassin thought that was how he always remembered the old man—as a stern, demanding boss who was rarely satisfied.
The killer studied the photos for a while and read the accompanying instructions. They told him that this man was believed to be leading a gang of Chinese triads even though he was a former policeman from Hong Kong. They had taken over control of many of the real estate projects that were going up in the Pattaya region. They had bribed the local police and many politicians. The man’s name was Cliff Bottle and he had to be killed.
The assassin got up and got himself a new glass of wine from the living room. The girl was watching a Thai soap opera and lying on the sofa in a pair of shorts that left nothing to the imagination. He paused for a moment and looked at the perfect pair of buttocks. A twinge of lust ran through him and then he put it aside. She was busy and there would be time later.
He stood in the kitchen sipping from the glass, staring out at the front garden which was green and vibrant and well manicured. The gardener came every day and spent hours watering the plants, pruning with a careful pair of shears. His work was not unlike that of the assassin who considered that what he did benefited society, removing the weeds choking up the flower beds of ordinary life.
And now he was to kill Cliff Bottle? It was a strange assignment and once again he wondered who was choosing his targets and if they were really all as bad as their biographies stated. Had Bottle really strayed that far from his former occupation where he’d been sworn to uphold truth and justice? Had he really become a criminal after all the years he’d spent in the Force? It was hard to believe but not impossible. The Royal Hong Kong Police had attracted all sorts in its time and moral perfection hadn’t been a defining criteria.
But killing a former boss and colleague wasn’t the same as strangling or shooting a stranger. Was he going to do it? Did he want to take on the assignment? He pondered for a while and then, without reaching a conclusion put the matter aside, went into the spare bedroom and began packing his dive gear. He’d planned a trip to the Philippines. It was time for a change of scenery and a change of company.
* * * *
Scrimple had bought a few items of clothing and then went to a Boots pharmacy to get soap, toothpaste, painkillers and some more analgesic cream. The bruises made by William and his henchman's beatings were purple as plums now.
From a tourist stall he got a decent sized rucksack and in a Seven Eleven he purchased more top-up for his SIM cards, and bottles of water, cans of beer and Oreo biscuits, just in case. He was ready for the journey as much as it pained him to run away from his comfortable life in Bangkok. It was all a disaster now and he had to protect himself first and foremost. If the police caught him again they would lock him in the worst hell hole, feed him fish bones and hot water and throw away the key. The image of that alone made him break out in a sweat.
He’d read the books of drug dealers arrested and sentenced to years in a Thai jail and it was a living hell. It was Dante’s inferno and the worst visions of tortured souls painted by mediaeval artists all rolled up into one, but real and present here in Bangkok. He shook his head to clear the terror from it as he pressed the button for the lift. The security guard didn’t bother looking up, he was busy watching a soap opera on the portable television at the end of his desk.
Scrimple locked and bolted the door and sat down on the sofa, lining up a row of cans of beer that he intended to drink. He lit a Mild Seven and considered for a moment how nice it would be if this was his apartment and he had just come back from the office with nothing on his mind except some problems with shipping schedules and whether he would chase down one bar girl or another who’d taken his fancy.
He flicked on the television with the remote and watched the Thai news, checking if there was anything about him. The main stories were political. Although he couldn’t understand what was being said he could guess from the footage. There was something going on with a political leader called The Monk. He was a retired Army general who’d professed himself an enemy of corruption and government incompetence. The Monk had founded a new political party that protested against the current Prime Minister and claimed that the recent elections had not been fair and honest. The Monk was seen on the news wearing his customary orange-yellow garments and shaven head. He was addressing a huge rally of his supporters that was blockading one of the government buildings.
To Scrimple the political uncertainties of Thailand were irrelevant. It had been over two years since an army-led coup had kicked out the incumbent Prime Minister Thaksin while he was on an overseas trip, on the grounds that he was enriching himself too much. The main catalyst had been his supposed lack of respect for the ancient and venerated King and the traditionalists who surrounded him.
Scrimple watched the images on the news with a sense of dreadful anticipation. At any moment he expected to see his picture flashed on to the screen but in the end that never happened. There were other more important items than a dangerous, murdering falang, it seemed. Or perhaps the police were downplaying his escape because it made them look stupid and ineffective.
Pim had said she’d paid off Somchai and as incredible as this sounded at the time there was a certain logic to it. His escape from arrest had all been a bit too easy. Somchai wouldn’t be the first Asian policeman to take a backhander for looking the other way.
He thought about calling the girl again and offering her the briefcase with the documents if she could come up with some serious money. But it was risky, very risky. He had no idea of what further complications that could bring. It was a tempting thought though and he didn’t entirely rule it out yet. First he wanted to get out of the country and then he could still sell the bloody paperwork to the highest bidder. Only once he felt safe was it worth the risk of dealing, approaching the people again who had gotten him in this trouble.
There was another option but it was a long shot and he wasn’t sure he was ready to make that call. He needed help but getting it from that quarter was a potential Faustian bargain. It could be close to selling his soul to the devil.
* * * *
Six Singha beers had made it easier for Scrimple to sleep. Now, waking up at five in the morning he wasn’t sure the fizzy formaldehyde-laced liquid had been the right thing.
He brushed his teeth and threw the various new belongings he’d purchased into the medium-sized rucksack. The documents were back in the secret compartment of the briefcase and he’d take that as it was.
He was worried that things might not go as smoothly as he hoped but what other choice did he have? He had to trust Winnat and the Cambodia run and hope the money was sufficient to grease all the palms involved. The man had a successful sideline smuggling people out of Thailand. It had to be a worthwhile activity and he would value his reputation for repeat business. Scrimple hoped Winnat wasn’t into ripping off his customers. It was a risk and all Scrimple could do was keep a wary eye open for anything dodgy.
He got to Winnat’s shop by six. The street was still asleep although a few food stalls were opening. Most of the travelers were still in their bunk-beds sleeping off the drugs and drink they’d indulged in the night before.
Scrimple rapped on the glass door and a bleary-looking Winnat opened it and waved him in.
“You come early,” the Thai man said.
Scrimple shrugged. He was on time but then the Thais had a different approach to punctuality.
“You wait there. We have two more people come and van not here yet,” Winnat explained. He cleared his throat and spat into a corner missing by about a foot a rubbish bin that was placed there.
Scrimple nodded and ostentatiously made a call to an imaginary person telling them he would be on the way soon but they were still waiting for the van. He wanted Winnat to know that people were expecting him. That others were aware of his itinery.
Fifteen minutes went by. Winnat was in a back room talking on one of his many phones. It sounded as if he was yelling at someone, the van driver perhaps who was late and pretending to be stuck in traffic. People went to work early in Bangkok to beat the traffic but it had not been that bad coming over.
There was a knocking from the front of the shop and Winnat emerged, grumbling to let the person in.
Scrimple thought it must be the other people but there was only one person and it was an older Thai man. He had a gnarled face, as if in his youth he hadn’t been a good boxer but still insisted on doing all the fights. His shifty eyes came to rest on Scrimple who returned the gaze evenly.
“You go to Cambodia today?” the newcomer said.
“I guess so,” Scrimple answered.
“I come with you.” The man studied Scrimple for a while as he took out a packet of Khrong Thep cigarettes. “You like Cambodia?”
“It’s okay. I’ve been a few times.”
“Cheap girls. And young,” the man said and coughed on his cigarette for half a minute as if he shouldn’t be smoking and still was.
“I like them normal age and cheap does not always mean clean,” Scrimple said, getting irritated with the conversation. He hoped the man was not so talkative on the journey. “My name is Bob, what is yours?” he said in order to gain the initiative.
The man coughed some more, his face partially hidden by the smoke from his cheap cigarettes. “You can call me Lung. That is Thai for Uncle.” He laughed as if it was something especially funny. Scrimple nodded and got out one of his own Mild Sevens.
Winnat came back into the room and said, “Van here. Only two people. You go now. Driver will find a special place on the border where the guards are easy. When he tells you to hide, follow instruction. Everything smooth. We pay money to the guards and we go nearly every day.” He said something to Lung which sounded like further instructions. Scrimple couldn’t get the Thai words.
“Pay two thousand dollar now. Give tip to driver if you happy,” Winnat said and waited. Scrimple assumed he was paying for the ride and Lung was just a free-loader.
From his new rucksack he produced the envelope in which he’d put the money. It was lucky that he always kept American dollars in his safe at the office for those awkward customs clearances and special occasions where a Thai Baht just didn’t have the same clout as the dirty old greenback.
Winnat riffled through the crispy notes and appeared satisfied. For a second Scrimple expected him to look up and ask for an additional premium now that he had his customer on the hook and the cash in his hand. Winnat just nodded and led them out to the back alley where a beat-up Toyota van was standing. The windows were covered in a layer of plastic to keep the sun out and stop anyone from looking in. When the side-door was slid back it revealed ratty seats but nobody else apart from the driver who sat in the front drinking from a bottle of Pepsi while he admired himself in the rear-view mirror.
Scrimple tossed his rucksack and briefcase onto the rear bench and climbed up next them. Lung followed and took over the middle bench having tossed his cigarette stub before getting in the van.
The door was pulled shut and with a mashing of gears the van lurched forward.
We’re on our way, Scrimple thought. Now this had better go as smoothly as Declan boasted and Winnat promised.