CHAPTER 16
As Eddie packed clothes for his flight to Bangkok, Ritchie was changing from his travel wear into clothes more suitable for Micky Parker’s evening out.
He still wore the Converse trainers but he’d put on a pair of tight black jeans and a grey tee-shirt with ‘Chang’ printed across the front. His hair was freshly spiked and gelled and the red colouring glistened in the light from the Sabaidee’s vending machine.
Mark Dobson’s evening attire hadn’t changed. He was reading a week-old copy of the Bangkok Post when, at eight-thirty, Ritchie trotted down the stairs with the small bag slung over his shoulder. After having spent the last hour watching himself in the bathroom mirror and further developing the Micky Parker character, Ritchie was convinced he looked awesome.
Along the short, rubble-strewn track from the Sabaidee was the hectically busy Lat Krabang road, a noisy and brightly lit dual carriageway, an east-west artery into and out of Bangkok that passed close by Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi International Airport.
It was busy night and day. At night, bright, coloured lights dazzled from cars, motorcycles, shops, 7-Elevens, bars and cafes. Charcoal smoke from food stalls curled past bare light bulbs hung on wires, plastic bag fly deflectors whirled above meat and sausage stalls and the nearer you got to the night-market, the walkway become a dark, crowded and greasy obstacle course of broken concrete where no-one looked where they were going because they were all on mobile phones. Cars, taxis, buses and motorcycles roared past, stopping only when the lights at the main turn off to the airport turned red. Away from the main road Lat Krabang was a modern suburb with gated residential areas and high apartment blocks. It was cosmopolitan and a certain type of foreigner loved it.
Richie heard the Peacock long before he saw the lights. Brightly lit peacocks in pink, red, green, purple and blue stood or perched everywhere as western music blared from loudspeakers. It was definitely a Micky Parker type of place so Richie took a quick stroll past to get the feel.
The front of the establishment was separated from the walkway by a thin line of gold coloured chain-link fencing. Behind that were the LED peacocks and tables and chairs occupied by girls in short skirts sitting with their legs crossed, eyeing passers-by over drinks that they sipped slowly through plastic straws. The eyes watched Ritchie pass by and he wondered what they thought. Was Micky their sort. Probably. They’d do anything for five hundred baht – or less.
As he sauntered by, Ritchie thought about Eddie and wondered if he had ever visited a place like the Peacock. Even if he had, it would be easy to forget such places existed when cycling in the rain along Oxford High Street and Rose Lane towards the Oxford Botanic Garden.
What was it that Mark Dobson had told him? “For a crime investigator like you, Ritchie, places like the Peacock are good fishing grounds, not just for the sport itself but for the netting and landing of big fish.”
If you fancied a quiet evening drink after a hard day then the Peacock was not for you but this was definitely the place Mark had described so Ritchie, with his bag slung across his shoulder, strolled back. He raised his John Lewis shades to wink at the front line of girls, lowered them again and walked in. As expected, one of the girls sprang to her feet, pulled her skirt down an inch and followed him to the bar. When he arrived, she was right there, alongside him, looking up with dark brown eyes topped by a neatly cut fringe of jet-black hair. Ritchie raised his glasses once more and looked down.
She was about five feet two because instead of high heels like the others she was wearing a pair of fancy flip-flops covered in sequins that sparkled in the flashing lights. “How’re you, sweetie?” Ritchie said in excellent east London. “You drinking cheap cheap or peng peng?”
“It depend,” said his new friend with the short flowery skirt and tiny cleavage. “You rich rich or poor poor?”
That was quite clever, Richie thought, and he liked her already, but duty called. He nodded towards the spiral staircase. “Anyone upstairs?”
“Maybe.”
“You work upstairs or downstairs?”
“Up up and down down.”
“Nicer up up, eh? Better than down down or out out, I always say. Air tamashad, too. Good view. Can watch Thai Airways taking off and crashing. What are you drinking, darling?”
“Sply.”
Richie gave her five hundred baht. “OK, order a Tiger and a Spry and bring both upstairs, OK? Don’t run away.”
He smiled an evil-looking Micky Parker smile, stuck a spearmint gum in his mouth, adjusted the backpack on his shoulder, pushed his shades over his head to watch her flip flop away and went upstairs to find a table.
Ten minutes later Richie was making good headway with the girl whose name was On, but he was also looking around. Mark was right. This was definitely a meeting place of big men. Foreigners with beer bellies, pink skin, well-filled shirts, blonde hair, grey hair, dark hair, little hair or no hair at all. There was one big, brunette woman in a scarlet tee shirt and tight white shorts with her hair done in neat, beaded plaits probably by a hairdresser on a beach somewhere.
They were split into three groups with the biggest, in the corner. There were five men with one Thai girl at the corner table. It was covered in bottles of Singha beer and Russian and other English accents floated across and mixed with the din from below and outside. The Thai girl was sat with her arms around a big man with a mop of thick fair hair, the front pushed into a low wave that could only be staying in place with a touch of gel.
Ritchie looked away because On was returning with another tray. She sat down, close to him, crossed her legs and pulled her tiny skirt down a fraction. “Who’s the girl?” Ritchie asked her, nodding towards the table in the corner.
“You like her?”
“No. Just asking. She needs longer arms if she wants her hands to meet around the back.”
On didn’t get the joke. “Her name Om.”
“Same as you, huh?”
“No, I’m On, she Om.”
“Ah, got it. Who’s her boyfriend?”
On shrugged. She didn’t know. “What your name?” she asked.
“Micky.”
“Like Micky Mouse.”
“That’s it. You wanna be Minnie?”
The humour was lost.
“Where you come from? Africa?”
“Nah, London.”
“You know the Queen?”
“Only the band.”
“I like Africa hair. Nice colour, how you make?”
“Stood on my head and dipped it in a bowl of Heinz tomato soup. You like?”
She ruffled the top, wiry strands and it moved as much as the twigs on a garden broom in a hurricane. “Nice.”
“Mind you don’t cut your fingers, darling.”
They sat for a while. Conversation was limited but On seemed comfortable enough and Ritchie thought they were getting on famously She seemed to like the music, jigged about and smiled a lot. Then she patted his knee. “You want another beer? I get.”
“OK. And bring more ice.”
“You wait, huh? Not go away.”
“No chance. You’ve still got the change from my five hundred baht.”
As she flip-flopped her way back down the spiral stairway, Richie took another look at the group in the corner.
“Magic,” he thought, “First bar I try and there he is. Mark was right and he looks just like the photo. It’s the Donald Trump look-alike.”
Ritchie drained his bottle and summoned the courage to do what they’d agreed in London. He didn’t normally smoke but he’d been practicing for a full week in front of the mirror. In one day, he’d got through six packs because Colin had said he could put them on expenses. Afterwards, his breath had smelled foul, his mouth tasted like sewer water and he’d felt more ill than the trip he’d made on a ferry across the Irish sea in November, but his technique had improved no end. He’s asked Colin what he thought and Colin had pointed to the non-smoking sign but he now felt like he’d been smoking since he was six.
He flipped a cigarette out, slipped it between his lips, flicked a plastic lighter, blew a plume of blue smoke into the air and then lay back as far as the seat would allow without toppling. Then he glanced over his shoulder at the fair-haired Russian and their eyes met briefly.
At the same time, the short-armed girl called Om, got up. “I get more beer, OK, dalling?” he heard her say. And, with that, she wriggled away from the Russian’s left hand that Richie hadn’t seen because it had been lodged in the back of her tight denim shorts. Om was a big girl with big thighs that filled her shorts. It looked uncomfortable if not painful and Ritchie definitely preferred On.
She passed Richie’s table, gave him a scarlet-lipped smile and, at the top of the stairs, dragged the denim fabric of her shorts from the crevice of her bum. It was just the cue Ritchie needed. He leaned over to the gang behind him and pointed. “That’s the nicest bloody wedgie I’ve seen in a long while,” he said in his best east London. Then he raised his empty bottle.
The Russians may not have understood ‘wedgie’ but the two English or whatever nationality they were, seemed amused enough. They nodded. The others were too busy downing their beers. If, on the other hand, the blonde Russian was upset by impertinent comments about his girlfriend’s arse, then so be it. Richie would just have to face the consequence.
Ritchie turned back, took another drag on another foul tasting cigarette and gave one last thought to what Mark had told him about the local Russians.
“They stick together,” he’d told him. “Wives, girlfriends, they’re all there. There are thousands of them. They’re difficult to track as they mix with the thousands of Russian tourists and all the other beach and bar types. There’s a hardcore living permanently around Pattaya and the other resorts, many of them in businesses of some sort – seedy stuff, often illegal - spending money and mixing it with ill-gotten gains from back home or elsewhere. Amongst them are some big-time international crooks with rings of protection spun around them. Pattaya is ideal. Sun, sex, money and beaches far from the dark and the snow and the ice. They’re organised.”
“But we’re organised too,” Mark had told him. “Jeffrey got some addresses. I then got our Thai man, Sannan, to ask around. There were comings and goings at one particular address, a big villa to the east of Pattaya. The place was owned by a Thai but rented out to foreigners, mostly Russian. Big cars came and went but locals didn’t know anything. Typical Thai. If you don’t know anything you can’t be accused of anything. But Sannan recently stuck a tracker on a white Toyota Camry parked outside the villa and tracked it to the Novotel at the airport. We then got a good sighting of the driver and Sannan got a photo.
“At the time, we only had suspicions about who he was. He stayed at the Novo for several nights but we’re thin on the ground and Sannan only has one set of eyes. But one night he followed him to the Peacock. A few questions of the staff with some incentives and we learned he was a regular and met upstairs with friends. That’s why you’ll be taking a closer look.”
“So, who is he?” Richie had asked.
“We’re ninety percent sure it’s Dimitri Medinski.”
“And we think Medinski’s involved with the Vital business?”
“Maybe. And maybe Kenny Tan’s Red Power business as well. If not then we’ve got other leads we can follow. But if Medinski’s involved at all then it won’t be just a small part. Medinski would want to run things, at least locally. “
For Richie, it was time to go to work. For Mark Dobson, as soon as he’d watched Ritchie walk off into the night it was time to phone Sannan.
While Jeffrey in Malaysia was a man of infinite patience, Sannan, was a master of blending in, of going unnoticed and of strenuous ingenuity. If access to a third-floor downtown Bangkok window was necessary, Sannan would become a Thai electrician for an hour and walk across the spider’s web of electrical cables that stretched past the third-floor window. It was dangerous work but, being Bangkok, no-one ever reported a man in black tight-roping across power lines with a set of professional-looking tools hanging from his belt.
“Sannan’s like a forty-year old Jackie Chan,” he’d told Ritchie. “I’ve never seen him climb vertical walls, do multiple somersaults whilst wielding a Samurai sword or jump from a skyscraper and land on his feet like Jackie Chan but then I’ve never seen Jackie Chan open a Chubb safe like it was a box of oranges. He lives in Pattaya which is one of the most dangerous places in the world to operate as a private investigator. Most local investigators will only touch low level jobs like bar activities and extramarital affairs. Few are willing to help with the sort of thing Asher & Asher does but Sannan is not so choosy. He’ll do anything - political intrigue, bank accounts, intellectual property or inside surveillance and phone tapping that Colin then supports from the London office. That way, he can hide his work from anyone, including the Thai police who get seriously upset if someone is seen to be treading on their toes. In return, he helps me and he actually prefers the dangerous world of organised crime. He’s learned a bit of Russian over the years and will drop everything to follow a link with a Russian gang.”
Sannan had recently been working as a part-time barman in a hotel bar in Pattaya frequented by Russians whilst running a parallel job for a wealthy Russian woman from Moscow who suspected her husband was spending more time with Thai women than on the construction project he was supposed to be managing.
“It’s a good deal,” Sannan had told him. “I get ten thousand baht for every photo I take of him with a woman. So far I’ve sent her thirteen photos.”
When Mark Dobson called Sannan from outside the Sabaidee Mansion all he could hear was the sound of glasses clinking and loud voices overriding thumping background music. Between it all, though, came Sannan’s voice. “Any news?”
“Micky’s in place. We need to meet.”
“Poonee,” Sannan replied, “Bang Pakong. 10am”
That was it. Fixed for 10am the next day at a hotel in Bang Pakong just off the Bang-Na - Chonburi Expressway and half way to Pattaya.
With that fixed Mark returned inside and, on his way, up the stairs, his phone buzzed. It was Colin Asher in London.
“KRJ Capital,” Colin said. KRJ Capital was the investment management company Isobel had said her sister ran.
“Chief Executive is Kathrine Elizabeth Johnson, Baroness Isobel’s sister. We already know that. There are three other main directors – her husband, Peter James Lester, someone called Michael Steven Connor Jefferson and Maria Stephanie Benelli. They lend money - commercial mortgages and such like. They have strong Italian connections. Maria Benelli is Italian. But…”
“Go on.”
“There are tenuous links with all sorts of overseas businesses. It took us so long because it got complicated. I’m talking offshore stuff - Singapore, Gibraltar, Caymans, Bermuda and so on. You know what it’s like. We ran into brick walls of mundane-sounding offshore company names. How far do we go with this one?”
Mark was now sitting on his bed. “Could all be perfectly legal, of course.”
“It’s nearly always legal.”
“But?”
“But often a smoke screen. So, I ask again. How far do we go?”
“That’ll do for now, Colin. Let’s see what crops up.”
“Righty ho. How’s the recruit?”
“I’m about to find out.”