Jack and Robyn spoke every few days on the phone and at first Robyn was happy enough that his father had someone to cook and clean for him and to show him around. But Robyn’s happiness was short-lived when Jack dropped the bombshell that he and Ying had become more than just good friends. They were in love, Jack was going to marry her and as soon as the winter was over, he planned to bring her back to the UK. Jack was especially pleased that Ying was only a few years younger than Robyn’s wife so she wouldn’t be lonely.
That’s when Robyn got in touch with me. He realised that if the marriage went ahead, the family estate would quite probably end up in the hands of a twenty-something Thai girl.
Like Robyn, I was hearing alarm bells ringing. A ten-year age gap is perfectly acceptable in a relationship. I’ve known marriages work where the husband is twenty years older than the wife. But Jack was half a century older than Ying, and I doubted that it was his wrinkles or shrunken gums that she fancied. You didn’t have to be a private eye to realise that Jack had been hooked by a gold-digger, but the old man was clearly thinking with his dick rather than his brain, so the son wanted me on the case. He’d found my firm on the internet and called me straight away. Robyn had already done a bit of detective work himself. His wife had recommended the apartment block to Robyn’s father and she’d telephoned the staff there to get the low down on Ying. The staff didn’t think much of Ying, apparently, and were fairly sure that she had a Thai boyfriend. I assured Robyn that I’d be able to help and gave him my bank details.
As soon as the retainer had been transferred I phoned my contact at the British Embassy. Generally the embassy officials are not too helpful to guys like me but over the years my contact Clive had been less obstructive than most. I ran Jack’s situation by Clive and asked him what the chances would be of Miss Ying getting a visa to the UK. ‘About the same as a snowball in hell,’ said Clive. In cases like that-which were not unusual in Thailand-the embassy would keep on stalling, hoping that the husband-to-be would come to his senses. I passed that information on to Robyn so that at least he could stop worrying about anything happening in the short term.
The next step was to have chat with Jack. I caught a VIP bus to Cha Am, then paid ten baht for a motorcycle taxi to take me to the apartment block. I asked the girls at the reception desk to phone Jack’s room and five minutes later we were sitting at a beachside bar enjoying a couple of beers. I told him that I was from the British Embassy and that I had a few questions about his application for a visa for Ying. He didn’t question the fact that I had a New Zealand accent, and he was eager to chat. I figured that during the weeks he’d been in Thailand he’d been starved of intelligent conversation. We chatted about his life in Cha Am, his family back in Oxford, rugby, football, and then eventually we got around to the subject at hand. Miss Ying.
It was Jack’s first trip to Thailand, so I explained the basics to him. There are no pensions, unemployment benefits or sickness payments, so Thai girls would do whatever they had to do to survive and to support their families. And attaching herself to a wealthy older man was a much better option than planting rice by hand.
Jack shook his head, refusing to accept that I might be telling the truth. At his age he deserved a little pampering, he said. And he was sure that while Ying might not yet be in love with him, she would make a perfect wife.
According to Jack, she phoned him every morning, then came around in the early afternoon. Most days she went downstairs to the local hair salon to make herself look good for him. They would eat together most evenings, and then at ten o’clock she’d head off to her own room. They had become lovers he admitted coyly, but she didn’t want to move in with him until after they were married. That set more alarm bells ringing in my cynical head. Ten o’clock was the perfect time for a young lady to head off to a nightclub with her Thai beau.
I had a couple of more beers with Jack and I told him a few horror stories of farang men who’d lost everything to their Thai wives or girlfriends, but he just laughed and said that Ying was different. If I’d had a dollar for every guy who’s told me that his girl was different, I’d be a hell of a lot richer than I am. I didn’t tell Jack that, though. I wished him well, told him that his application was working its way through the system, and I went off to phone Robyn.
I told Robyn that his father was still determined to marry Ying and that the next stage would be to start checking her background. He was keen for me to proceed and agreed to wire over further funds. I already had a game plan. In my experience, girls having their hair done tended to chat away merrily. In the past I’d tried using my wife to glean information from various hairdressers but she tended to march in and tell all and sundry that her husband was a private eye and ask her questions point blank. Her elder sister Boo was a bit more devious, though, and in recent years she’d had many a free cut and blow dry courtesy of my investigations. I left it until Friday afternoon, figuring that was a dead cert for a day that Miss Ying would get her hair done. I took the VIP bus down to Cha Am with Boo. I showed her a photograph of Ying and made sure that she was in the salon by three o’clock.
Half an hour after Boo had sat down, Ying walked in. She was obviously well known and as luck would have it she sat down next to my sister-in-law. I love it when a plan comes together!
As it happened, Boo didn’t have to do any fishing. It turned out that Ying loved the sound of her own voice and she wanted to tell all and sundry about her good fortune. She had a hooked a rich old farang, there was a huge dowry on the horizon and she was going to be moving to the UK before long.
I’d briefed Boo to see what the hairdressing girls knew, so she used delaying tactics and asked for a dye job. They were still working on her hair when Ying dropped a big tip and headed into the apartment block for her rendezvous with Jack.
It was easy enough then for Boo to get the full scoop on Miss Ying. Later, as we sank a couple of congratulatory Jack Daniels, Boo told me what she’d learned. According to the girls, who were getting a bit fed up with Ying’s boasting, she was the long time mia noi, minor wife, of a local car dealer and that he was also planning to move to the UK to set up a business exporting cars back to Thailand. The farang was old and according to Ying wouldn’t be alive much longer and that she and her boyfriend would have the lot. I gave Boo a 1,000-baht bonus and complemented her on her red hair.
I put Boo on the bus back to Bangkok and staked out the apartment block in a rental car. If I had Miss Ying right, she’d be hanging out with Jack until ten o’clock and then she’d be out on the town with Mr Car Dealer. I couldn’t stop myself grinning when at ten thirty an older model BMW arrived in front of the block, and a few minutes later Ying hurried out and climbed in to give the driver a peck on the cheek. Bingo.
I followed them to a trendy bar-restaurant where a local band belted out pretty good cover versions of Eighties songs to a packed house of middle-class Thais. I got a seat by the bar and munched on my favourite snacks-gung shar nam pla, or raw prawns marinated in fish sauce and chilli, with lashings of raw garlic. Lovely.
Miss Ying and Mr Car Dealer sat at a table and sipped champagne as they listened to the band. There was a large group at the neighbouring table that were celebrating a birthday and at midnight a big cake was taken to their table and everyone began singing ‘happy birthday’. I took the opportunity to pop over with my digital camera and join the other revellers who were taking photographs. I managed to fire off a few shots that clearly showed Miss Ying and Mr Car Dealer together.