Jimm Juree 01; Killed at the Whim of a Hat

and ended with a tale of revenge. It concerned me that Mair should choose that particular night to tell that particular story. If she’d been capable of humiliating a professor when her mind was still in reasonable working order, I wondered what her unfastened self might think suitable for a dog killer. It was time for me to keep a close eye on my mother.
    ♦
    I was woken early the next morning by the steel drum version of ‘Mamma Mia’ on my mobile phone. We were five kilometers from the nearest landline but some communications billionaire had acupunctured our country with cell phone towers. I could see the nearest from my window, its regal rust-orange beauty marred only by the unsightly mountain view behind it. The call was from my former colleague, Dtor. She was breathless to tell me that our Government House had been invaded by old yuppies in yellow shirts overnight. Politics used to be a lot more complicated before the recent introduction of the English Premiership system of colored shirts which helped no end to know who was who. The yellows, headed by a media magnate and backed discreetly by the military, were locked in battle with the red shirts, mostly from the north, backed by an ex-football-club owner, ex-prime-minister, ex-telecommunications czar, ex-policeman currently in exile. It was a matter of time before we got the black and white stripe and the large pink polka dot factions. I kept thinking, “If you could just give them a ball…”
    According to Dtor, during the night, the yellow shirts had strolled through police lines, staged a bloodless takeover of our seat of power and changed the curtains. The Bangkok middle classes had revolted. It might help to think of it like the Richard Branson party staging a sit-in at the Houses of Parliament in Westminster. Couldn’t happen, right? That’s what I’d thought. But there they were. Thai politics. I’d had the opportunity to switch to the political desk. They’d told me crime wasn’t safe for a wee girl. I fought them out of the idea. The point was, in Thailand, murder and theft and violence were tangible. Politics was all smoke and mirrors and, basically, silly.
    What worried me about the situation in Bangkok, apart from the fact we’d be a laughingstock in the world press, was that important things like police inquiries and monk murders and autopsies would no longer be getting any attention. All the policemen would be lined up around Government House in their macho black riot gear. And nobody knew who was in charge. The incumbent prime minister and well-respected television chef was being ousted for cooking on prime time while the country fried around him. Police chiefs were being replaced and dispatched to inactive posts with such regularity that there were more inactive police generals than active ones. So it seemed to me we’d be on our own in Pak Nam for quite some time.
    Oh, and one more thing Dtor told me; the head in the plastic bag at the end of a rope? It was a suicide.
    My second call of the morning was from Sissi. We had a bit of a chuckle about politics but finally moved on to something serious. The Chinese family, Chainawat, who had sold the land to Old Mel was based in Ranong on the Andaman coast. She gave me an address and several phone numbers for Chainawat Inc. and the personal number for Vicha, the current CEO. The family had, at one time, been involved in a variety of small businesses and investments but had recently amalgamated all their efforts into the fishing and real estate industries. They had some fourteen thousand hectares of land held in speculation in the south and operated a fleet of deep-sea beam trawlers that dragged enormous nets across the seabed and devastated the corals. Good for profits, sorry about the environment. Sissi hadn’t been able to find any other dirt about the company’s holdings but she was still digging.
    Blissy Travel, the company mentioned in the ganja papers, was dissolved in the late seventies when the expected tourist boom in the south didn’t happen. Blissy had been set up by a local Surat businessman called Somjit Boondet. He seemed to have vanished after that for twenty-odd years until, in the year 2002, a Somjit Boondej arrived on the business registry as the district manager of the Surat branch of the Home Art Building Accessories Mega Store.
    “I see this a lot,” Sissi told me. “These slight inconsistencies in spelling. It could be a legitimate clerical error – happens