Hungry Ghosts (5 page)

Her husband
.

S
ometime soon she would have to tell him about the cancer.

She had no idea how he would react.

Kat sipped her coffee and smiled at her friend.

*       *       *       *       *

While his wife was drinking coffee in a Bangkok restaurant, Police Chief ‘Papa Doc’ Charoenkul was trying out Samui’s newly-opened floodlit driving range.

He was not in a good mood and this was affecting his swing.

Thwack.

The third ball in a row went spinning off to the left.

He relaxed his shoulders and rotated his neck, feeling the vertebrae crack. Sucking in his ample belly, he took a deep breath and exhaled slowly.

The next shot went straight and true
; but the following one again curved and faded to the left.

He shook his head, threw his driver disgustedly into the golf bag and headed for the
clubhouse. It was ridiculous for him even to
attempt
to play golf with all the things he had buzzing around in his brain. Perhaps a drink might help clear his head.

There were several reasons for
Deng Charoenkul’s lack of concentration and ill-temper.

First
, he had hoped that his wife’s absence in Bangkok for a few days would allow him some bedroom time with his mistress Mariam in Lamai. But she was temporarily out of action due to it being her time of the month.

“Perhaps tomorrow,
tirak
,” she had said plaintively down the phone.

Women: nothing but trouble and disappointment
, he thought downing his first whisky and ordering a second.

Papa Doc stroked his goatee beard
and caught sight of himself in the mirror of the clubhouse bar.

My wife is, however, right about the fuller moustache
and beard: I do look more distinguished
, he mused, examining his fine physiognomy from several angles.
Maybe it even makes me appear younger.

His mistress,
however, was less than enthusiastic about his new look. She had said it was like kissing a goat. Or a pirate.

However, i
n spite of the aggravation of now having to dye not only his hair, but also his beard, he was still inclined to take his wife’s view on the matter. This was partly because Kat was renowned for her good sense of aesthetics, but more because it fuelled his Napoleonic vanity.

He scratched his hairy chin.

Kat.

When
his wife had started making trips to Bangkok to visit her cancer-ridden friend Sumalee, Papa Doc had become suspicious. This unease had been stoked further when he had received an anonymous letter saying Kat was being unfaithful. He had paid the island’s English Private Investigator, Braddock, to follow his wife on one of her visits to the capital to see if there was indeed any substance to the poisonous missive.

But Braddock’s report had given Kat a clean bill of health; and there had been no further letters.
Charoenkul was inclined to see the note as the work of someone with a grudge against him – and there were more than a few of those  on Samui.

In fact his opinion o
f the letter chimed perfectly with his world view.
They are out to get me.

To Papa Doc’s narcissistic and p
ersecution-obsessed psyche, a conspiracy was the only explanation as to why he had not been promoted to a role in Bangkok befitting his talents. Instead his career had been left to moulder on this small island in the Gulf of Thailand. Jealousy and envy within the Royal Thai Police stood between him and the higher office he craved. Having cleared up the case of the Samui ‘burning murders’ earlier in the year, his star should be rising, his contribution recognised. Yet the hierarchy remained stubbornly silent on the topic of his future. He had every right to fume about this injustice!

This was the
story he told himself, and the view he had lovingly nurtured through his years of frustrated ambition.

On some days, however, a more objective light shone through
this self-delusional narrative. He knew, for instance (although he currently chose to ignore it), that the ‘solving’ of the ‘burning murders’ actually comprised the fitting up of a dying tramp with responsibility for the violent deaths of three
farangs
.

Who the real murderer was, Charoenkul had no idea. But for two months there had been no further murders, and
as the days passed he lived with increasing hope that this state of affairs would continue. Although he was outwardly in denial, a part of him knew his status and prospects depended on the island’s charred body count staying at three.

He ordered another whisky.

*       *       *       *       *

Constable Daeng Tathip desperately needed a drink, but he knew now was not the time to have one.

His wife was putting the children to bed while he sat on the sofa watching football on his television. He was dressed in an old Manchester United football shirt and faded, shapeless jogging bottoms, but his mind was not on the game.

The following
morning, his family was leaving to stay with his wife’s sister in Surat Thani for a long weekend. He was not going with them.

Part of Tathip was relieved about this. He didn’t get on with his wife’s sister or her husband, and he was weary of his sister-in-law’s lectures on his drinking and his brother-in-law’s thinly-veiled contempt for his lack of advancement.

Another part of him, however, was consumed with anxiety over his wife’s impending absence. Her visits to her sister seemed to be becoming more frequent. Perhaps one time she may not come back.

Their marriage had not been happy for some time, and as his drinking
had increased the gap between them had grown wider. His repeated promises of foregoing alcohol were all quickly broken; in turn leading to further cycles of recrimination, argument and guilt. Mrs. Tathip had long ago ceased to love her husband, but lately any lingering faith in him had also evaporated. It was clear to her that Daeng Tathip was an alcoholic. He could not be trusted.

In truth, it was difficult to understand quite why he had
come to seek solace in alcohol. His life was not particularly tragic. Without doubt he was a weak and ineffective man, who would never see promotion in the Royal Thai Police. He had long ago accepted that he would always be just a constable. But none of this really explained his addiction. A more likely explanation was that he was simply unable to cope with the day-to-day responsibilities of life. He found the world threatening and incomprehensible and he lacked the character and confidence to confront it. To his children he was a ghost in the house, a peripheral figure who rarely came to school events and showed only a passing interest in their welfare.

T
athip’s thoughts were interrupted as the woman of the house put her head around the door and announced, “I’m going to bed.” He nodded and indicated vaguely in the direction of the television, but she had already gone.

He waited
ten minutes then, leaving the burbling, inane match commentary, he collected a bottle of whisky from its hiding-place and went out to the
sala
in his neglected garden.

Tathip unscrewed the top and took a drink straight from the bottle. He sat back on the rickety chair in the darkness and tried to relax. He looked around. The neighbourhood was dingy and rather run-down, but fairly quiet in spite of being a stone’s throw from one of the main roads into Chaweng. A curtain twitched in a nearby window, but then the light was switched off. He could hear a distant siren and the barking of a dog, neither of which held his attention.

He looked down at his hands. There was an unmistakable tremor, and despite his best efforts he could feel the tightness in his neck and a fluttering in his chest. He scratched his skinny arms and worked to force back the rising waters of panic.

He took another swig from the bottle and put his hand to his brow in a gesture of hopelessness.

In recent months he had had good cause to drink. Tathip was carrying around with him a frightening secret; one with which a strong man would have struggled. And Tathip was not a strong man. He was a weak man. And keeping silent on the matter was consuming him; the daily contemplation of it eating at him him like a disease.

Constable Daeng Tathip was an accomplice to four murders.

Some months before, Preechap Chaldrakun, Tathip’s brutal partner in the Samui Police had begun a killing spree of foreigners –
farangs
– who had got too close to a Thai bargirl with whom he was infatuated. And Tathip, terrified of the gorilla with whom he daily shared a police car, had found himself an unwilling confederate in the murders. Chaldrakun had used his position as a police officer to ‘arrest’ the men, before beating them to death in coconut groves and torching the bodies. Tathip had taken no part in the actual killings, but
he had been there
when it was happening. Three
farangs
had died that way.

In the fourth murder – that of Chaldrakun himself – Tathip had taken a more active role. The English PI Braddock had discovered the identity of the murderer, and along with the brother of one of the victims had killed Chaldrakun while Tathip called him on his cell phone. It was the price of Tathip’s
pardon. The officer’s death had been made to look like an accident.

W
hen Police Chief Charoenkul announced that the case of the ‘burning murders’ had been solved – with the killings being pinned on a dying tramp – it looked as though Tathip’s horrendous ordeal might be over, and his life could return to its alcohol-soaked normality.

That had turned out not to be so straightforward.

In the first place and given the death of his partner, Tathip’s colleagues in the Samui Police now regarded him as an
unlucky
person to be around and none of them wanted to work with him. In fairness, none of them had really wanted to work with him before, his uncontrolled drinking and generally-perceived uselessness being considered an impediment to their own careers.

But things had
worsened. Recently he had been reduced to traffic detail, and although he no longer retained any illusions of promotion, this latest slap in the face stung what little remained of his pride.

To cap it all, he had had to
meet Bumibol Chaldrakun when he came to the island to bury his brother. Tathip’s shattered nerves had barely carried him through that occasion. And Bumibol had scared him badly. It was clear the brother had no inkling of what had really happened, but Tathip had glimpsed in that huge man the same barely-suppressed violence and disregard of consequences so obvious in Preechap.

If Bumibol Chaldrakun ever discovered the truth, Tathip was in no doubt he would be a dead man.

But fortunately the brother had returned to Bangkok, and to whatever dubious living he earned there. For Tathip the danger had passed. But he was finding it hard to live with all the knowledge he possessed, and which he could not share with anyone, least of all his wife. Tathip was not very bright, and not much given to introspection, but he recognized that his anxiety was continuing to grow, not recede. At some point he would hit a wall.

He raised the whisky bottle to his lips.

*       *       *       *       *

Anna Holland was angry.

She was angry with David, but she was also angry with herself.

I am a ridiculous middle-aged schoolgirl
with a crush
, she thought.

She looked out of the window of her
second-floor office at the jammed London traffic below and the motley collection of people nudging past each other on Bedford Square. Somebody was digging up the road a little way along from their building and she could hear the irritating buzz of jackhammers vibrating through the tarmac and concrete. A few drivers pressed on their horns to announce their impatience.

Anna’s desk at
Bright Sparks Publishing was piled high with manuscripts and the floor groaned under precarious towers of paper. Although the company was dragging itself into the twenty-first century by accepting digital submissions, many wannabe writers still liked to send their masterpieces in a paper form for reasons that were not entirely obvious. Perhaps it gave them a feeling that their writing was somehow more real; that they had
created a
book
, and not merely some digital phantom floating around a quadrant of indifferent cyberspace. Anna was one of the editors pushing hard to exile paper from the business, and not just because she disliked clutter. She had no doubt that ebooks were the future. The writing was on the wall for the paperback, she thought. UK sales were declining slowly year-on-year as digital publishing continued its remorseless advance. The US was in the vanguard of this, but Europe would follow.