I promised to do what I could to get her back pay, so she let me rummage through the desks. There were no clues as to where the elusive Reverend Armitage might have gone, but on one of the desks was an old computer. I plugged it in. It was password protected but Nid had that so I was able to get into the email programme and pull out his contacts list. There were two Armitages on the list, which I figured would be close family. I showed the names to Nid and she confirmed that they were both his brothers. One was in Montreal, the other lived in Singapore.
Nid also told me that her boss had a girlfriend from Udon Thani but she didn’t know the girl’s name. From the description-tall, leggy, long hair and a tattoo of a scorpion on one shoulder-it sounded as if the Reverend Armitage was either rescuing wicked women or he’d fallen for the charms of a bargirl.
I headed off to the Canadian Embassy but they were in no mood to help. I explained that Armitage had left a decent middle-class Thai woman penniless but the young Canadian guy behind the glass window just shrugged and told me that they didn’t give out information to third parties. I went to an internet cafA© where I downed a couple of strong coffees and fired off emails to the two brothers.
I knew that both guys received the emails but neither got back to me. I didn’t have an office back then, I worked out of my apartment and used computers in local internet cafes. I’d pop in every few hours to see if there was a reply but after a couple of days it became clear that they were ignoring me. The one person who kept calling me was Khun Bua, who was becoming increasingly frantic. I tried to calm her down but I knew that it wasn’t going to be an easy case to crack. I had no idea where he was, and even if I did find him, I was only a private eye. To force him to hand back Khun Bua’s money I’d need the backing of the police, and that was easier said than done.
Thai police precincts don’t cooperate especially well with each other. They prefer to operate as separate entities. As the money had been taken in Bangkok, I’d have to register the complaint at the Thonglor police headquarters. But it looked as if Armitage had fled Bangkok, and that being the case the Thonglor cops wouldn’t go out of their way to pursue him. Equally, if he was picked up outside Bangkok for anything else, it wasn’t a foregone conclusion that the upcountry cops would check back with Bangkok. I needed an arrest warrant, and for that I needed a judge. Then I had a stroke of luck. Khun Bua was on the edge of a nervous breakdown so I offered to take her for a coffee. I was shocked when I saw her. She’d aged a good ten years since our first meeting. She’d developed a stammer and I swear her hair was now streaked with grey. I explained the position to Khun Bua, and she told me that one of the owners of the magazine company was related to a Supreme Court Judge. Bingo! Getting things done in Thailand is all a matter of who you know and who you’re related to. As a farang, I was short of top-level contacts, but Khun Bua had come up trumps.
I took Khun Bua to the police station and made an official complaint. As part of the deal Khun Bua agreed to pay the station a small percentage of any money recovered. Par for the course in Thailand. The cops gave us a copy of the complaint and Khun Bua went with her boss to see the judge who happily signed an arrest warrant. Now all I had to do was to find the elusive Reverend Armitage. I remembered what Nid had said about Armitage having a girlfriend from Udon Thani. It was a fair bet that if he was still in Thailand he’d gone back to her home town. That being the case he’d have to do a visa run every few months, and most long-stay expats in Udon Thani crossed the border at Nong Khai to visit Laos, get a new visa and then return to the Land of Smiles.
I took a train to Nong Khai-twelve hours on a hard seat on a rattling train that at times rumbled along at barely more than walking pace-and then paid a motorcycle taxi to drive me out to the border. On the way we stopped off at a local supermarket and picked up two bottles of Johnnie Walker Black Label-the universal sweetener.
My Thai was good enough to get me ushered into the local immigration chief’s office and I handed him the whisky and the warrant. I told him the full story, how Armitage had ruined the life of a sweet little old lady, and that I was pretty sure that he’d be crossing the border at some point. I told him that Khun Bua was well in with a Supreme Court Judge and, naturally, promised him a share of any money recovered. And that was all I could do. I caught the next train back to Bangkok and waited. Khun Bua kept calling me but I explained that it was now in the hands of the immigration officers at Nong Khai. She promised to pray for my well being, and for Armitage to be apprehended.
The private-eye business is all about waiting. You wait for clients, you spend hours, sometimes days, waiting outside a building for your target to appear, you wait at airports, you wait outside hotel rooms, you wait to get paid. You need the patience of a saint, and I was never a particularly patient guy.
I first arrived in Thailand in the late eighties. I was born in Cambridge, a small town in New Zealand that produces most of the country’s thoroughbred horses. Most of the town’s 5,000 or so population are involved with horses in one way or another, so it was no surprise that I became a trainer. Hand on heart, I wasn’t averse to bending the rules, if not exactly breaking them, something that stood me in good stead when I later became a private eye. If a borderline legal painkilling injection meant that a horse of mine stood a better chance of winning than not, then I’d give the injection. I trained for a few Asian owners and with them, winning was the only thing that mattered. If I didn’t come up with winners, they’d take their business elsewhere. I’m not making excuses, I’m just telling you the way it was. Thing is, word got around that I was sailing close to the wind and all my winners began to be tested and the chief steward started making frequent trips to the centre where I trained my horses. It was time to look for pastures new.
One of my Asian clients told me he was going to visit his mia noi-a minor wife, or mistress-in Thailand and offered to take me with him. We flew into Bangkok and it was an eye-opener. While my client enjoyed himself with his mistress, I made full use of the city’s go-go bars, massage parlours and nightclubs. After almost forty years in New Zealand and Australia, I was like a kid in a sweetshop.
In between watching girls dancing around silver poles I decided to take a look at the local horse scene. My client took me to a huge stable in Siricha owned by a wealthy Thai who, as it happened, had gone to university in New Zealand. He loved horses but spent so much time building hotels and office blocks that he had no time to manage his stock and they were a pretty rough collection of horseflesh. In no time he offered me a job, and I moved to Thailand.
I hit the ground running. I trained during the week, we went to the Bangkok racetracks every Sunday, and on Monday-my day off-I stayed over in the Grace Hotel with a succession of temporary girlfriends plucked from the hotel’s disco. Spending so much time with jockeys and bargirls, neither of whom spoke much English, my Thai language skills improved by leaps and bounds.
The client’s horses were okay, but in most cases were just a few generations removed from Mongolian ponies and they weren’t a patch on the thoroughbreds I’d worked with in New Zealand. The problem was, for a horse to race in Thailand, it had to be born in the country. It didn’t take me long to spot the loophole in that regulation, so I flew over a pregnant mare and trained up her foal. She was a little beauty and on her first big race she was a firm favourite. Then, in typical Thai fashion, disaster struck. A jing jok, a tiny lizard that loves to climb across ceilings, fell on top of our jockey. The Thais regard that as just about the worst possible bad luck, equivalent to a farang breaking a mirror or walking under a ladder. The jockey rushed of to the local temple on the back of a motorcycle but crashed on the way back. He was still able to ride but crashed his horse into the back of one of the front runners and shattered her knee. She had to be put down and my client came in for all sorts of flak from his friends along the lines of ‘you’ve got an expensive farang trainer but your horse still dies’. Needless to say it was a massive loss of face and the only solution was to let me go.