CHAPTER 14
Ritchie Nolan left his suit behind in London.
For his flight to Bangkok, he wore Converse trainers, black jeans, white tee shirt and a black, nylon jacket ‘accessorised’ with dark glasses and a Star Wars baseball cap worn back to front. “Look the part, Ritchie,” Mark Dobson had advised.
On arrival, the old and dilapidated ‘Sabaidee Mansion’ in a side street off Lat Krabang in the eastern suburbs of Bangkok and close to the airport would not have been Richie’s choice of hotel but it had been checked by Colin Asher for suitability. Booking was not necessary. It was almost empty.
Once up the cracked and crumbling steps, Ritchie’s first impressions were that its facilities were limited. The entrance area was provided with three red plastic chairs, a table and a drinks and snacks machine. To the left of the front door was a window into a small, dark office. Ritchie bent down and peered through it. Unable to see anything with his dark glasses on, he took them off and dropped them into the top pocket of his jacket.
In the improved light he could see a Chinese waving cat, a bunch of plastic orchids and what he took to be the Sabaidee’s receptionist spoon-feeding herself something from a plastic dish. Ritchie coughed. She didn’t get up but pushed her dish aside, continued chewing and looked at him. Ritchie handed his passport through the window. She took it, opened it, sprayed soggy rice grains over it, brushed them off with her hand and tried to read the name. "How long you stay Mr…ah, Pakka?"
Richard ‘Ritchie’ Nolan, aka Michael ‘Micky’ Parker had, of course, no idea. "I don't know," he said.
“Must pay deposit.”
“And how much is the deposit.”
“One thousand baht.”
Ritchie handed over a thousand baht note.
"Room 20. First floor. Have a nice stay, Mr...ah, Pakka.”
Ritchie nodded, took the length of dirty string that the key hung from, picked up his bag and headed for the concrete stairs next to the vending machine. He inserted some coins, pressed a button that said Fanta and a can rattled heavily into the box. He retrieved it, pulled the ring, swallowed some and wiped his mouth with his hand. That was when he spotted someone sitting behind the machine reading a newspaper.
“Good evening,” Mark Dobson said.
Ritchie nodded but, as instructed, ignored him and took the stairs.
Micky Parker. Aged twenty-six. British passport, third generation West Indian, skin paled from its original chocolate brown by various mixed liaisons over those three generations. Course black hair, the vestiges of African curls, cut short at the back and sides but longer on the top where four inches of ginger rinse had recently added three extra inches to his height. He almost made six feet three. The coloured beads and strings had gone and this more recent and modern hair styling was by Scissors of Tottenham, the gel from a tub by Gillette and the rimless Jaguar shades from John Lewis of Brent Cross.
Ritchie replaced the Jaguars, mounted the stairs and, because things had turned dark again, took the wrong direction at the top of the stairs. First, he turned left - odd door numbers to the left, even ones to the right, but then retraced his steps to try again - odd numbers to the right, even ones to the left.
Micky Parker’s destination was, of course, door number 20 and when he arrived, he finished the last drops of orange Fanta and, because he needed both hands, he put the can by the door, pushed it against the wall with his foot, found his key and entered his room. Then he retrieved his empty can, closed the door behind him, leaned on it and looked around.
“Fuck me.”
It was a good start because his opening words were undoubtedly what Micky Parker would have said. Richie was already acting, feeling his way, dipping his toe in the character and mannerisms of Micky Parker.
The character had been Mark Dobson’s idea because a middle-aged man who sat watching others and tried mixing with certain types of perhaps a younger generation was too easily picked out for what he really was however much he tried. And Dobson really did not look good in trainers, sunglasses, ear studs and a baseball cap. Bangkok had enough suspicious-looking middle-aged, male foreigners without him adding to the numbers.
Right then, though, Richie Nolan only had a vague idea about what he was to become involved with. Whatever it was, and he was to find out sooner rather than later, he suspected he’d already failed as Micky Parker because Micky Parker would have kicked that empty Fanta can right down the corridor just to see how far it travelled without bouncing. Richie Nolan, on the other hand, had retrieved it and looked for the nearest trash bin. On the plus side, however, Micky Parker would definitely have said, “Fuck me,” at the sight of his room because the room was clearly not in the price bracket of the suave Sheraton or the Hilton hotel which Richie imagined he could expect in his new job as an international commercial crime investigator. His room at the Sabaidee Mansion offered little more than a single bed and a window with flimsy curtains that would never meet in the middle.
It was also swelteringly hot but there was an air conditioner, which he switched on, and a wet room of sorts with tiling done by someone learning the trade. It had a toilet with no paper but what was known in those parts as a bum gun that, depending on the variable water pressure either dribbled out or shot such a force of water up your backside that it almost came out of your ears. It had a sink with a single tap, a small, thin rectangle of wrapped soap and a blue plastic pipe that emerged through the concrete wall terminating in a shower head. And there was a faint odour of mould mixed with air that had passed through the air-conditioner. The single bed was covered with a white duvet so Richie flung it back to check beneath. No stains, no hair, no undue wrinkles. OK. It was sleep-able.
He parked his bag by the bed, removed his jacket and tee shirt and checked his phone. There was nothing so, he pulled back the net curtain and looked out.
The view was what Micky Parker would probably have called ‘a fucking donkey’s asshole of a mess’ but not unusual for a cheap, urban hotel in back-street Thailand. This might be a modern suburb close to the international airport but there were still large areas undergoing modernisation and Thais still kept their long-legged chickens and dirty, scratching dogs.
There were clumps of weeds in corners shaded by dark, rough wood, a ubiquitous 7-Eleven plastic bag lying flattened in a pool of blackish water from a dripping air conditioner. And everything of course was covered in dust, pigeon shit, lumps of waste construction material and other crap.
Micky Parker’s personal habits were unlikely to surpass this so Richie practiced the donkey’s arse comparison aloud in his best north London. “Jesus, what a fucking donkey’s asshole.” He’d forgotten to add ‘of a mess’ but he was, after all, still rehearsing the part. That’s when Richie’s phone rang. It did so with a blast of electronically generated noise that no sane human could have composed. But Richie was particularly pleased with the ring tone that had taken him an hour at Heathrow Airport to find. Richie didn’t like it but Micky Parker would have done. He swiped the phone. “Yo.”
“Are you in?”
“Just arrived, bruv. Saw you downstairs lurking like a fucking peasant with a fetish for young boys.”
Mark Dobson wasn’t sure he liked being addressed like that, especially by a new recruit, but he rose above it.
“Right. Instructions. Head east along Lat Krabang road towards the airport turn off around nine o’clock. Look for the Peacock It’s a big, brash place and unmissable. Snooker and bar on the street front, another bar up the stairs. Loud music everywhere. You’ll love it. Go to the upstairs bar. It’s recently become popular with drinkers of the type we’re interested in. Russians and Pattaya-types. Mingle. Sniff around. Get cosy. Casual chatting. You’re in business, wheeling and dealing, looking for opportunities. You know the score, just like we discussed. Drink Tiger beer with plenty of ice to keep a clear head. Sit and play with your phone. If it looks good, I’ll phone you to perform the way we rehearsed.”
“Where will you be?”
“Close by. You beginning to feel like Micky Parker yet, Richie?”
“Just don’t fucking mess with me, bruv, OK? Shut the fuck up.”
“Not bad but try making it a bit more Dagenham, Essex.”
“So where are you staying, Mark?”
“Room 42 above.”
“What here? In this same bleedin’ dump?”
“Dump Richie? You’re on generous Asher & Asher expenses. Be grateful for the nice room with views over the bright city lights.”
“Yeh. One fucking cockerel that looks like Roadrunner and a rabid dog with a skin condition. You think I should try rubbing some Vital Cosmetics moisturiser cream around his balls?”
“Not his balls, Richie. They’re far too sensitive. You don’t want to catch rabies on your first day at work. It won’t look good on your CV. But it must be the same cockerel and dog I’m looking at from up here. But if you see me, don’t even nod, OK? We don’t know each other. We pass like strangers in the night until I tell you otherwise. Understand?”
“So how long are we staying, Mark?”
“As long as it takes, Ritchie. Stay cool. And, by the way, our dear friend Professor Eddie Higgins is flying here in a couple of days though I’ve not yet decided how to use his own unique set of skills.”
“What’s good enough for the staff is good enough for the management,” Colin Asher had told Ritchie during his interview.
Mark Dobson, lying on the bed in his room on the floor above Richie’s, decided that was easy for Colin to say, after all he never travelled far from the office.
He thought about Isobel Johnson - Baroness Johnson of Amberley, to give her the full title. She’d called him twice since their meeting in Oxford and again at the airport to wish him luck. Not many clients did that so Dobson decided that either she realised his nasty side was well meant or she just liked mean men. He’d called Eddie again after the meeting at her lawyer’s. After finishing the factual parts, it had been Eddie who started on Isobel’s looks and personality. “She’s too hung up on physical appearance,” he’d said.
“Did you know she was once a fashion model, Eddie?”
“A what?”
“She modelled for a few years in her late teens and early twenties.”
“I find boardwalks extremely distasteful,” Eddie said.
“Do you mean catwalks?”
“Probably. Rich posers and attention seekers, all of them. And no-one ever wears the stuff they strut about in. It’s outrageous publicity.”
“But she’s right to worry about the state of the company,” he’d replied. “If true and if it got out, she might have to resort to her maiden name of plain Ms Johnson.”
“You can buy titles,” Eddie had replied. “I once came across a firm that types up all the right certificates and attaches free red ribbons. Baron Dobson of Edgware Road would make it sound like you knew a thing or two, Mark.”
“And how about Lord Huggy?”
Mark sat up and switched on his laptop, logged onto the encrypted area of the A & A website and found that Colin Asher had uploaded a short video starring himself. When he hit ‘play’, Asher’s face appeared – white, full frontal, eyes wide, hair on end like he’d just seen his ex-wife.
“Remember Q?” Asher said.
Q was a contact with whom they occasionally shared mutually useful bits of information. Hassan El Kufra was a Libyan who had seen the writing on the wall long before Muammar Gadaffi was found hiding in a drain pipe and then killed, some say sodomised, with a bayonet. He was now in his late fifties, a dapper little guy who lived in Milan and tended a small black moustache and a mop of curly hair. He spoke good Italian, Arabic and English and was a wheeler dealer and commission agent of the sort that sailed close to the wind, but he had done well and knew people
“I suddenly remembered something,” Asher said on the video. “Remember when we last met him at Heathrow? I recorded it. Q was talking like he had verbal diarrhoea thinking we had connections and you were giving him your usual top-quality bullshit. I just played it back. You were very convincing, though not enough that he’s felt the need to contact us since. But you know what, buddy? There was a Chinese man on Q’s list called Ho Lee Chiang. Remember? Who’s the manager of Vitals’ Malaysian set-up? Food for thinking about. I’ll leave it with you.”
The mention of Ho Chiang again had been enough to set Mark Dobson’s mind in motion doing extrapolations and flying off at tangents. “What brings you to London?” he’d asked Q at Heathrow as Q drank wine and Colin and he drank beers.
“An Italian company,” Hassan had said. “Cosmetics and food supplements. They’re looking for distributors and takeovers. You know anyone?”
“What’s the company’s name?” Mark has asked, without expecting Hassan to reveal it. For commission agents, supplier’s names were kept secret until everyone signed an agreement or flashed some money but, in this instance, Hassan had dropped a hint.
“A Russian business. Russians everywhere these days, man. No good.”
“You have a problem with Russians, Hassan?”
“Ingannati e manipolati,” was the reply. Hassan, the street-wise wheeler-dealer who knew a Chinese called Ho Lee Chiang had felt he was being duped. By Russians in the cosmetics business, in Italy.