The Feng Shui Detective's Casebook (31 page)

It took fifty-five minutes to arrive at the built-up centre of Samut Prakarn. Joyce was delighted when Phaarata suggested they transfer into a tiny three-wheeled taxi for the rest of the ride. The vehicle into which she climbed was a cross between a motorbike and a rickshaw, and had a blue and white striped awning over a small plastic sofa. ‘These bike things are
soo
like cute.’

‘Tuk-tuks.’ The reporter ordered the driver to go to a temple called Wat Chai Mongkon. ‘This you must see. It’s very beautiful. Very old. Built in 1350.’

‘Thirteen-fifty. Wow. That’s like—well, really,
really
old. I used to live in Hong Kong where nothing’s old. In Hong Kong, if a building is thirty, no one wants it and no one can get a mortgage to buy it and they have to pull it down.’

The buzzing, insect-like vehicle scuttled awkwardly around several corners, its engine straining and stuttering, its gears making an ear-piercing racket. But it weaved in and out of the traffic efficiently and they quickly found themselves in front of a bright, white temple with a multi-layered golden roof.

‘It’s just gorgeous,’ said Joyce. The temple was a clean, well-kept structure with six separate layers of overlapping, sloping roofs, each of which had its own upward-sweeping architectural flourishes. ‘Why has it got so many roofs? Do things leak here a lot?’

‘That’s the way they made them. It makes a place more grand to have roof on top of roof, people believe in Thailand. Protects us from bad influences, lift us nearer to heaven.’

The reporter scribbled an address on the front of her notebook and tore off the page for Joyce. ‘If you get time before you have to fly back, go to see the Wat Asokaram in Tambon Taiban. It’s not far. It’s worth seeing. It has bones of Buddha inside. It was built in 1955 by Phra Suttithama-rangsrikhampeeramaethajarn.’ ‘Who?’

‘Phra Suttithamarangsrikhampeeramaethajarn.’

‘That’s easy enough for you to say.’

‘What?’

‘It’s all right. I was just making a joke.’

They hailed another tuk-tuk and scooted along Phrakhonchai Road before tipping right into Sukhumwit Road and left into Phraeksa Road. Ten minutes later they were in a more rural area and the reporter led the tuk-tuk to a small house by the roadside on a street with no name and no kerb. Instead of ringing a doorbell, Phaarata stood outside a small terraced home and shouted through the window in the local language. To Joyce’s ear, the language sounded as if it was entirely made of
cheh
and
keh
and
meh
sounds and had to be spoken at breakneck speed.

Unable to understand a word of the conversation between Phaarata and Boonchoob Chuntanaparb’s mother, she cast her eyes around and looked at the curious world in which she found herself. The building was one of a row of miniature homes in a dusty, baked landscape where tiny slices of lush jungle were cramped by large factories and industrial buildings.

This is how some people live, she thought, suddenly amazed. I could live like this if I wanted to. There are many different ways people can live. This is one of them. This is their choice. It could be my choice. There are many choices. How big the world is. The thought made her simultaneously excited and terrified.

She turned back to face the discussion as the voices became louder and more animated. She still couldn’t follow what was being said. But the tone of the conversation made one point abundantly clear: Boonchoob was not there. Eventually the reporter thanked the woman of the house, bowed politely in her direction, and turned to her companion.

‘He’s gone out?’ guessed Joyce.

‘No. He never arrived home. He seems to have fled.’

‘Aha!’ said Joyce. ‘Weird—and suspicious, right?’

‘Weird? Why do you think that?’

‘Well, think about it. If he’s run off, it means he’s probably guilty of something. We just gotta work out what.’

Phaarata shook her head. ‘No. He is not guilty of something. Not like how you say. Sometimes when there is a car crash, the drivers flee. It happens.’

‘Why?’

‘Drivers, they think they are going to be in trouble. Especially big trouble if their passenger is someone important. Or if they destroy someone’s expensive car.’

‘Oh. So you think he ran away because he thought he would get into trouble?’

‘I’m sure. His passengers were stars and the car was wrecked. It is no surprise he ran away.’

‘Where will he go?’

‘In Thailand, very easy to hide. This is a big country. Many small-small villages. Some in the forests, jungles. He will hide for a few weeks, few months, until all this fuss is over. Then he will quietly come back. It’s the Thai way.’

Joyce nodded. ‘Oh. I see. Well then, I guess this lead turned out to be a dead end. I just hope my boss is having a more successful time.’

Wong had not had a successful time.

He had left the grotesque, head-filled mansion and been driven back to Bangkok in a police vehicle. There he had met up again with Suchada Kamchoroen, who had taken him out of the theatre for some lunch at Anna’s Café in Soi Saladaeng, close to Silom Road’s busy office and shopping area.

Phaarata delivered Joyce to the group at the café on her way back to the newspaper office.

Hot and sweaty, the
feng shui
master’s assistant was rapturous about the drink she was handed. ‘I used to hate these,’ she said noisily slurping a cendol. ‘I think it was the idea of beans in a soft drink. And also the yucky feeling of lumps of jelly mixed in. But now I like them. I think I must have become truly half-Asian or something.’

On the way back into town, Phaarata had given Joyce a quick Thai lesson and she was anxious to share what she had learned. The words filled her with giggles. ‘There are thirteen words for
me
or
I.
The word for
me
if you are a guy is
pom
. Can you believe it? And if you are speaking to your younger sister, the word for
I
is
pee.
If you are talking to a mate, you say
goo,
and if you are a woman talking to an older person you say
noo
, which means
mouse.
Who made up this language, anyway? Whoever he was, you can tell it was a
guy
. It is like
soo
sexist.’

Wong wasn’t listening. He was frustrated. There had been no obvious clues at all at Pansak’s luxury home. A lengthy examination of the rooms the three stars had occupied revealed little of relevance. A detailed questioning of the servants had only raised three small points of interest, and two of them concerned the car, not the house.

First, both Khoon Boontawee and Warin Krungwong may well have had a very pleasant stay at the house—their rooms were well designed and suited their profiles adequately. The actress, Ing Suraswadee, might have been slightly less comfortable—she had an L-shaped room with an indentation in the south, crushing the
ch’i
and making it difficult for her to achieve recognition for her achievements while she was there.

Second, it appeared that the car had stopped somewhere, briefly, between leaving home and being attacked. The evidence for this was that two servants indicated that when the car left, Khoon Boontawee and the actress Ing Suraswadee were sitting in the back seat, and Warin Krungwong was sitting next to the driver. Yet when the attack happened, the driver’s statement revealed that Warin had joined the others in the back of the car. Where did they stop and rearrange themselves, and, more to the point, why?

Third, during the drive from the house to the spot where the car had been found, Wong had timed the journey. It took seven-and-a-half minutes. Officials said the traffic might have been slightly heavier the previous day, so it may have taken about nine minutes. Yet the official record of events suggested that close to twenty minutes passed before the crash. What happened in the intervening ten minutes?

Realising that her boss was not in a communicative mood, Joyce put her personal stereo headphones into her ears. Wong, detecting the
shh-chka-shh-chka
sound he so hated, shuffled further away.

The young woman decided to scan the two English newspapers. They had similar front page headlines: KHOON KIDNAPPED and TOP MOVIE CAST SNATCHED. The
Bangkok
Post
, the
Nation
and the Thai language papers all had front-page photographs of the three actors too and speculation about what might have happened, with illustrations of black-masked villains snatching drugged stars from a car.

She then picked up Suchada’s voluminous files, which contained detailed profiles, photographs and other information about the missing actors. ‘Phwoar,’ she said, looking at a bare-chested picture of Warin Krungwong. ‘Tasty or wot.’

Suchada nibbled her fingernails, tense and confused. ‘How on earth did they do it without being seen? That’s what baffles me. The kidnappers would have had to lie in wait, catch up with the car, shoot the gas canister thing into it, ram the car off the road, stop their own car, grab the actors, and then race off. They managed all of that without being seen, on a busy road in the biggest, most traffic-congested place in the world.’

‘Outside Bangkok not so congested as inside,’ Wong said.

‘Yes, but the difference is not much these days,’ Suchada replied.

‘Phwoar!’ said Joyce even more loudly, discovering a picture of Warin in a loincloth. The others looked at her. ‘Sorry.’

She flicked through the rest of the photographs at speed, rapidly falling in love. While Khoon Boontawee may have been the big name among the three, Warin Krungwong was much more enticing. ‘He’s kind of a hunk,’ she said to the theatre manageress, slipping her headphones off. ‘And look at his expression. His eyes always look teary. And his hair flops over his forehead. That’s the sign of a truly brilliant actor.’

The Thai woman laughed.

‘You find the others,’ Joyce told Wong. ‘I’ll rescue Warin. Is that a deal?’

The
feng shui
master continued to ignore his assistant.

‘How was your trip to see the car driver, what was his name, Boonchoob?’ Suchada asked.

‘Oh. No good,’ said Joyce. ‘He scarpered. Apparently drivers in Thailand do that a lot. When they’ve crashed.’

‘Sometimes,’ Suchada said, shrugging.

Wong, desperate for a lead, looked over at his assistant. ‘You find anything interesting at house of driver? You go where?’

‘We went to a place called Samut something. Actually, it’s a funny word, Samut. My mum’s from England, and in the north of England “summat” means “something”.’

‘What?’

‘In England, summat means “something”.’

‘But what?’

‘Something. It means
something.
’

‘But wha—never mind.’

Joyce continued: ‘And they call the temples “wats”. That’s funny too, if you think about it. You know,
what
and
wat.
’

‘What?’

‘Yeah.’

At this point, Wong tuned out of the conversation, which was beginning to hurt his head. ‘There is video shop on next street, to east side,’ he said. ‘Why not you go see if you can find Khoon Boontawee movies? Do some background study.’

‘Good idea. Or maybe movies with Warin, even better.’

She picked up her bag and sauntered out of the café. The
shh-chka-shh-chka
noise faded.

The
feng shui
master breathed a sigh of relief and got back to staring at his
lo shu
charts for the three actors and the driver.

Major questions remained unanswered. He looked at the route map between Pansak’s house and the link roads to the New Petchburi Road. Somewhere on this route, the car stopped, the passengers swapped seats, and assailants appeared. But at which point? And most important of all, where did they take their victims? The questions gave him a headache.

And he felt terrible for another reason—an issue that no one had yet raised. It would only be a matter of time before it occurred to one of his paymasters, he thought grimly. Why had he, one of Singapore’s allegedly top-rated
feng shui
masters, been so wildly wrong in determining Khoon Boontawee’s fortune? The birth chart, which Wong had checked and double-checked, said that the film star’s Friday would turn out fine—but it had been a disaster.

He was checking flying star natal charts for all three actors for a third time when Joyce returned from the shops carrying three disks in thin plastic film. ‘VCDs are really cheap here, aren’t they? I hope the quality’s okay.’

‘Hmm: No guarantees,’ Suchada told her.

Wong looked up, irritated that the teenager was back so soon. ‘You buy disk of
Street Fighting Dragon
?’

‘Naah, that’s not available yet. Give’m a chance. It was only premiered last night. I got some movies with Warin Krungwong in them.’ She held up some disks of action movies. ‘Actually it was really hard to find them. Had to go to loadsa shops. Warin doesn’t actually star in any movies. He’s always the co-star. But there’s a picture of him on the back of this one. I wonder if he would sign it for me?’

‘If we get him back,’ said Suchada.

‘Oh, yeah.’

Joyce sat down and asked the theatre manageress to translate the text on the back of the VCD packs.