I told her that I was still a bit confused by Thai money. Had it cost 5,000 or 50,000? The woman laughed and said it was definitely 50,000-the bracelet was solid gold with real diamonds.
I emailed Helmut with the news that his wife had indeed paid out 50,000 baht. He said he’d do a little auditing on the home front and get back to me. A week later he got back to me. There were discrepancies in the accounts of a couple of the restaurants that Mem was managing. And the takings of her restaurants seemed to be well below the levels of the others in the chain. He was pretty sure that she was skimming money, but he wanted to be one hundred per cent sure before he confronted her. He had the number of her bank account in Bangkok-would I be able to get a copy of her statement? I said that in Thailand anything was possible providing you had enough money. Helmut said that money was no object and he wired me the funds.
I had a good contact within the bank that Mem used and for half the money that Helmut sent I was able to get a digital photograph of the screen showing her account. It contained a very modest 30,000 baht, which meant that she was hiding her ill-gotten gains elsewhere.
Then I got another email from Helmut. He had spoken to a trusted member of his staff, who told him that Mem had mentioned building a new home in Khon Kaen. Helmut wanted me to carry on digging and he agreed to send me enough cash to cover me for two more days.
I took a plane to Khon Kaen and hired a taxi driver at local rates once I’d shown that I was fluent in his Isarn dialect. Our first stop was the area municipal office where all housing plans have to be registered. It didn’t take long for me to ascertain that Mem was indeed having a new dwelling built. The land ownership office was along the corridor and it only took another fifteen minutes to find out who owned the land where Mem was building the house. It belonged to Mem’s former husband. And that was most definitely a red flag that something was rotten in the state of Austria. Or Khon Kaen, anyway.
I got the driver to run me out to the site, expecting to see the usual Thai home being built-a slab of concrete acting as a foundation, a living room and a kitchen with one or two bedrooms and a bathroom, total cost about 100,000 baht. What I found was a mansion under construction with more than a dozen young workers scurrying around under the watchful eye of a middle-aged foreman wearing a Chang Beer baseball cap.
I wandered over and told the foreman that I was impressed by the quality of his work and that I was also thinking of having a house built. Thais are as susceptible to flattery as anyone and he was quite happy to tell me that Miss Mem’s mansion had a two million baht price tag. That was quite reasonable by European standards, but it would make it the most expensive house in the village by a long way. The foreman was busy and didn’t have time to chat, but he was happy enough for me to take a few pictures with my digital camera. I headed back into town, booked into a hotel and emailed the pictures to Helmut.
My driver picked me up at eight o’clock in the evening and we headed back to the building site with a couple of dozen bottles of Chang Beer and several bags of fried grasshoppers. As I’d suspected, the foreman had gone home leaving his workers camped around the site. My beer and snacks were well received and I sat down with them and started chatting in their native Isarn. They had seen the wealthy Thai woman who was building the house, but didn’t know her name. She lived abroad, was married to the village headman and would soon be returning to live in the house with her husband. It looked as if poor old Helmut was being well and truly shafted. I figured that as soon as the house was finished, Mem intended to take as much money as she could from Helmut and hightail it back to Khon Kaen.
I left the labourers with the beer and insects and went back to the hotel to send another email to Helmut. I didn’t tell him the bad news about Mem but asked him to email me with any bank details he had for his stepdaughter. I figured that Mem had to be getting Helmut’s money into the country somehow, and she clearly wasn’t using her own account.
I spent a very enjoyable evening in a local disco entertaining a bevy of beauties at Helmut’s expense, and woke with a major hangover at midday, too late to enjoy the hotel’s complimentary buffet breakfast. I wandered down to a Dunkin Donuts outlet, stocked up on coffee and carbohydrates, and then visited an internet cafA©. There was an email from Helmut waiting for me. He’d sent money to his stepdaughter’s account in Khon Kaen a few years earlier so he had her account details. I went to the branch shortly after they opened and played the part of a dumb farang. I spotted a rather plain middle-aged Thai woman, waied her and gave her one of my winning smiles and a box of imported chocolates. I asked her if she spoke English and she said a little. I said she spoke it really well and we were soon on great terms.
I gave her Mem’s daughter’s full name, address and account number and explained that my brother had just transferred a large amount of money to the account to pay for the construction of his new home. I said that I had spoken to the site foreman who had complained that his men’s wages hadn’t been paid. My new best friend dutifully keyed in the details and I saw her eyebrows head skywards.
‘How much he send?’ she asked me.
I shrugged and took a stab at one million.
‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘There is twenty million baht in the account but no transfer this week.’
Twenty million was a big chunk of change, all right. I gave the cashier another winning smile and said that there was no problem, that she was probably waiting to earn some interest before paying the workers, and that all was well with the world.
I didn’t tell Helmut how easy it had been to check his stepdaughter’s account, of course. There’s no point in letting the client think that the job’s easy. And besides, it had been a quiet month. I stayed in Khon Kaen for another day at Helmut’s expense and went back to see the cuties at the local disco, and then sent him a full report and a bill for the job that guaranteed I’d be keeping the wolf from the door for a few months.
Helmut was devastated by what I told him. He’d honestly believed that he’d found the perfect wife in Mem, but she’d lied to him and stolen from him. He’d gone back through all the accounts and it was now clear that she had been skimming money from the restaurants from the day that she’d started working for him. She become greedier in recent months, a sure sign that she was planning to leave Helmut for good. He’d always thought that he had a good relationship with his stepdaughter, too, but she had obviously been more than happy to help steal from him.
Looking at it from Mem’s point of view, I guess she was just doing whatever she could to make a better life for her family. Her Thai husband was more concerned with his status in the village than what his wife was doing overseas, and he knew that she would be coming back to him one day. Helmut was nothing more than a golden goose, and so far as they were concerned he had more money than sense. What they didn’t bank on was him having enough sense to employ yours truly.
According to Helmut, she hit the roof when he confronted her with what he knew. At first she tried to lie about it, but the photographs of the Khon Kaen house and the land ownership records put paid to that. Then she begged for his forgiveness, promising that she really loved Helmut and would happily divorce her Thai husband. When that didn’t work she told him that she wanted half of everything he had or she’d have him killed. Helmut just threw her out of his house, changed the locks and hired a good lawyer. Last I heard Helmut was fit and well and hadn’t paid her a euro.
THE CASE OF THE PERSISTENT SPONSOR
When I first set up as a private eye in Bangkok, I didn’t run to luxuries like an expense account, an office or even a half-decent pair of shoes, and I certainly didn’t have an advertising budget. Not for me the delights of a full-page advert in the Bangkok Post or a twenty-second commercial in the middle of a popular Thai soap opera. I made do with a strip of stickers that said ‘When You Are Away-Does Your Girl Play?’ and gave my mobile phone number and my website address. Whenever I passed an ATM or visited a toilet I’d leave behind one of my stickers. It was one of my strategically placed stickers that brought in Hank, a frequent visitor to the Land of Smiles. Hank was at the airport waiting to catch a plane to New Zealand but he wanted to meet me. He agreed to pay for my fare to and from the airport and for my time so quicker than you could say ‘I’ve an electricity bill that has to be paid by Wednesday or they’ll cut off my power’ I was in a cab heading for the airport.