I booked into a hotel at Robyn’s expense and the following day headed back to Bangkok. I emailed Robyn a full report and copies of the photographs I’d taken. I figured that would be the end of the case. As it happened, I was wrong. I hadn’t taken into account how attached Jack was to young Miss Ying. When Robyn had told his father about Ying’s boyfriend, Jack point blank refused to believe him. Ying had told him that the man was her brother, and that Jack was the only man she loved. Jack believed her, which just goes to show that there’s no fool like an old fool. It’s a standard lie for Thai girls to pass off their boyfriends, or even husbands, as their brothers. ‘Oh, I share my room with my brother’ they’ll tell their farang sponsor. Bullshit. I’ve been at airports on surveillance jobs when I’ve seen a bargirl tearfully wave off her farang lover, accompanied by her ‘brother’. As soon as the farang has passed through Immigration, the ‘brother’ and the bargirl are at it like dogs in heat.
Anyway, Robyn was starting to panic as he realised that he was faced with the loss of his inheritance. He wanted to know what I thought he should do. I said that if he sent me another 10,000 baht I’d head back to Cha Am and speak to the girl. I might have given Robyn the impression that I was going to get heavy with Miss Ying, but in fact I was just going to play a mind game on her. It was clear from what Boo had told me that Ying wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer so I figured she’d be gullible to fall for any line I gave her.
I waited until the money had come through before catching the VIP bus back to Cha Am. I’d put on a suit and carried a briefcase and added a pair of spectacles to give me added authority. I knocked on Miss Ying’s door, gave her the ‘I’m from the British Embassy and I’m here to talk about your visa application’ speech. I had a fistful of leaflets that I’d picked up last time I’d been at the embassy, and I gave them to her.
Part of me felt sorry for the girl. She was only doing what she had to do to survive. If she’d been born in the West I doubt that she’d have thrown herself at an old fart like Jack or a married man like Mr Car Salesman. But Thailand wasn’t the West and she would soon be thirty and in Thailand a thirty-year-old woman is well over the hill. But Miss Ying wasn’t paying my wages and Robyn was so I hardened my heart and lied to her. I told her that she wasn’t going to get a visa to the UK because the embassy was unhappy at the huge age gap between Jack and herself. I also told her that Jack had very little money, and that he lived off a small allowance. If he’d told her that he was wealthy, he was lying, I said. And I told her that any assets he had in England would, under English law, go to his children on his death. Even if they did go ahead with the marriage, all she would be entitled to would be half of any money that Jack had in Thailand. And there wouldn’t be much of that.
She took it quite well, under the circumstances. She nodded and smiled, fluttered her eyelashes and asked me if I was married. A real trooper.
Jack returned to the UK a few weeks later. I got an email from Robyn saying that I’d killed the romance stone-dead and that his father was busy sending off angry letters to the British Embassy complaining about no-good interfering busybodies and threatening to sue them. It would be water off a duck’s back and I doubted that he’d ever get a reply. I figured Jack had had a lucky escape. He seemed healthy for his age and I got the feeling that Ying might well have been tempted to hurry things along, death-wise. It wouldn’t be the first time that an old farang had been found dead at the bottom of the stairs by a tearful Thai wife. Divorce Thai-style, they call it.
THE CASE OF THE BAD GOOD GIRLS
I’ve lost count of the number of times over the years that guys have said to me that they were ninety-nine per cent sure that their Thai girlfriends weren’t fooling around ‘because she’s a good girl.’ They’re not making a moral judgment, of course. What they mean is that she wasn’t dancing around a silver pole when they met. She wasn’t a bargirl. And, their logic goes, if she wasn’t a bargirl, then she must be a good girl. The problem with that argument is not all bargirls are bad girls. And not all bad girls work in the bars. There are plenty of girls in regular jobs, or going to college, who are every bit as dangerous as the most hardcore go-go dancer.
There’s a pattern to my ‘good girl’ investigations. I’m usually hired by guys who’ve made several visits to Thailand and who have got bored with the bar scene. Bored with watching beautiful semi-naked girls dance around silver poles, I hear you cry. Never! Nah, it’s true. After a while they get bored of hanging out with hookers, and they dream of having a true ‘girlfriend experience’. They start to look elsewhere for female companionship. They pick up a smattering of Thai and start to strike up conversations with shop girls in the local Robinsons department store, or the girl who cuts their hair, or the receptionist in their hotel. One thing leads to another and before long the love-struck tourist is taking the ‘good’ girl to the movies, to dinner, and eventually, to bed. He can’t believe his luck. He’s going out with a regular girl. A girl who hasn’t slept with thousands of other farangs, who doesn’t have a tattoo of a scorpion on her shoulder or stretch marks across her stomach. A girl who says that she loves him, who doesn’t demand a bar fine before going out with him or 2,000 baht every time they have sex.
Stop right there.
What’s wrong with this picture?
I’ll tell you what’s wrong. Despite what most tourists believe, Thai girls are not easy. They do not fall into bed with handsome strangers. They do not fall head over heels in love with men twice their age, five times their weight or one tenth as attractive. Good Thai girls from good families are choosy about who they date. And they generally have higher moral standards than their Western counterparts. Good Thai girls do not hold a man’s hand in the street, they would not go out with a man, Thai or Westerner, without a couple of chaperones in tow, and they would not have sex until they are married, or at the very least, engaged. Good Thai girls do not fall into bed with farangs. But bad girls do. Hundreds of them, every year. Thousands.
Usually the tourist has gone home and is staying in contact by phone or via email. More often than not there are requests for money. Sometimes the girl switches off her mobile phone at night. Or in the evenings. Sometimes a man answers her phone and claims to be her brother. Suspicions are raised, but the tourist consoles himself be thinking that his girlfriend is a ‘good’ girl. But the suspicions festers like an open wound, and that’s when they call me. They always start the conversation the same way. ‘I know I’m worrying about nothing, because she’s a good girl. She isn’t a bargirl.’
Rule number one of the private-eye game: if you think that your girlfriend is being unfaithful, she almost certainly is. I don’t tell them that, of course. I don’t want to burst their bubble. Besides, if I did tell them the cold, hard truth there’d be no point in them wiring me a retainer, would they?
Anyway, one day I was sitting at my desk wondering whether two o’clock in the afternoon was too early to open a bottle of Jack Daniels when my mobile rang. It was a Danish guy who said he was heading back home the following day and would appreciate a few minutes of my time. He had a Thai girlfriend, ‘a real girl, not a bargirl,’ he stressed. He planned to marry her and take her back to live in Denmark, and in the meantime had agreed to support her. His name was Lars and he said he wasn’t far from my office having coffee at a Delifrance outlet. I said I’d be there within half an hour, figuring that if nothing else I’d get a free coffee and a croissant.