Jimm Juree 01; Killed at the Whim of a Hat

clear plastic over the map and I used a whiteboard pen to give an approximation of the two plots.
    “Aha!” he said. It was that Sherlock Holmes moment when all becomes clear. “You know? This is a truly fascinating area. For the longest time, most of it was nong nam , a type of marshland. Water seeped into it from the river in the rainy season, so for three months a year it was bog. The reason the plots you mention have a regimented common border is that there was once a channel running through it known as a distributary, an offshoot of the main river.”
    He led me to the government survey photographs.
    “These,” he said, “were taken in early nineteen sixty. Here, you can clearly see the stream cutting through what was then largely wilderness. It was when this branch of the Lang Suan River overflowed that the land all around here flooded.”
    “Then how does an entire stream disappear?” I asked.
    “Sometimes it’s natural due to erosion,” he said. “But in the case of the Lang Suan, it was a result of dredging. The larger fishing companies wanted to transport their catch directly to Lang Suan city so it could be shipped faster to Bangkok. The sand and silt they dug up was dumped along the banks. There was no accountability. If enough money changes hands you can get away with any amount of abuse of the environment. And matters haven’t improved, I’m sad to say.”
    “So the silt blocked the mouth of the branch stream?”
    “Exactly. It dried up.”
    “And suddenly all that ex-bog land increased in value.”
    “Right again. And I doubt that was unplanned. A little bit of pre-knowledge and the buying up of marshland for almost nothing.”
    This didn’t make sense.
    “But there is no dried stream bed between the two plots of land I’m referring to,” I said.
    “Of course not. Not now. Not since the storm surge of seventy-eight.”
    “What’s a storm surge?”
    “It’s a sort of underwater mini tsunami that arrives with a storm. But rather than materializing as a huge wave above the water, it’s actually a force that pushes up from the sea shelf as it arrives at the coast. Some surges can cause the tide to rise three meters or more. The water level rises gradually but dramatically. During the surge of seventy-eight the sea level was above that of the river for a long period. The water flowing down the river was confronted by the sea attempting to go the opposite way. There was terrible flooding and a maelstrom of mud and debris. Up in Lang Suan many people lost their homes and many were washed away in the flooding. The surge lasted for no longer than an hour but two hundred and sixty hectares were inundated.
    “There was a national outcry as there always is. Once the river ran low the land barons put pressure on the authorities to conduct a new dredging and reinforce the banks. They commissioned engineers to ensure that the freak conditions of seventy-eight wouldn’t affect their investments again. By the time the new levee was created and the land dried out, the old stream had disappeared completely, filled in by the mud and the silt.”
    So, the land Chainawat sold to Old Mel had once been the bed of a stream that had branched out from the Lang Suan River. But what advantage would there be in selling it to him? The answer to that also came from my ruddy professor.
    “Every year during the monsoons Lang Suan floods,” he said. “No matter what precautions they take, concrete banks, overflow tanks…none of it works. And the simple reason is that the river takes too long to find its way to the sea. In two thousand and two a proposal was put forward to dig a distributary to relieve the pressure on the main river and allow it to drain faster. The geological researchers discovered that there was a natural course which was the cheapest and most logical outlet: the stream running behind your Koon Mel’s plantation. Landowners had appropriated the river land illegally. There would be no recourse for compensation.”
    I smiled and rolled back on my secretary chair. The cunning old witch. Granny Chainawat had somehow acquired a copy of the engineering report and knew there was every possibility she’d have a canal cut through the rear of her land. Before the announcement was made, she’d sold it. Three hectares of land from a cache of fourteen thousand. How tight-arsed can you get?
    There wasn’t a fleet of VW Kombis in the south of Thailand in 1978; in fact there may have been just the