of the boat. Hands lifted them from the water and the birthday cake candles went out. There was no attempt to disguise the thieving now.
People were so angry that I expected someone to wade into the water and go after the thieves in a longtail. But nobody moved from the shore.
‘Why would someone do something like that?’ Tess said. ‘Steal a child’s basket?’
‘They steal,’ said Mr Botan. ‘They steal and sell to tourists on the beaches of the south. The tourists who can’t make their own Loy Krathong.’
‘Good business,’ said Mrs Botan, as if it was a racket that was worth getting into.
Then I heard his laughter, out on the water, seeming to enjoy the angry cries of the people on the beach of Nai Yang. I heard his laughter and I saw his small hard body as he pulled himself back into the boat. And as the boat turned away, the moon caught the strange flash of light in his hair and it shone like gold.
My daughter looked up at me.
‘Chatree,’ she said, breathless with excitement.
My son did not take his eyes from the sea.
‘That bad boy,’ he said. ‘He’s so bad. He’ll get punished for being so bad.’
‘Maybe he’s not really bad,’ Tess said. ‘Maybe he’s just trying to feed his family.’
‘They get it in the end,’ said Rory.
8
I rode under the barrier and past the security guard and as I looked up at Farren’s balcony I saw the grey uniform and sunglasses of a member of the Royal Thai Police.
I touched my brakes and sat on the Royal Enfield, the engine still running, staring up at him, and under the crash helmet my face was damp with bike sweat and dread. I glanced back at the security guard in his little hut as if his face might tell me what was happening, but he had gone. I wondered if something had happened to Farren, if there was an innocent explanation to have cops crawling all over his home.
The cop was up there staring at the infinity pool, his thumbs cocked inside his belt, and he seemed to be trying to work out how the trick was done, how this sheet of still water just seemed to stretch out into space and stop there. Then there was another cop, and then one more, all of them looking at the infinity pool and laughing. I swore under my breath, the sickness rising in my throat. I swallowed hard, forcing it back down, torn between running away and going up to the house. Neither of them felt like a good thing. Then I heard another bike.
The rider pulled up beside me and pulled off his helmet, and his face was pale and dark at the same time. The Russian from the night of Muay Thai. He looked briefly at the cops on the balcony and then jammed his helmet back on and rode off, swerving around the security barrier without waiting for the guard to lift it. I watched him go, and the petrol stink of the Royal Enfield mixed with the fear in my gut, making my head feel light and giddy.
‘Tom!’
Jesse was jogging up the dirt-track road that led to the marina. He got on to the back of the bike.
‘Just go,’ he said, indicating the way he had come, and I rode back down the unmade road to the Wild Palm office, sitting among the trees like an air-raid shelter in a rainforest. Inside there was none of the usual babble of cajoling, pleading and promises. The Wild Palm staff talked in lowered voices. The phones were silent.
‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ Jesse said, and I watched him tearing things from his desk and throwing them into a rucksack. They seemed like important things. A passport. Keys. Phone. Thai baht and English pounds. ‘We can take the bike to the end of the road and get out by the marina,’ he said, hefting the rucksack on his back.
‘But we’re not doing anything wrong, are we?’ I said, and he looked at me as if I knew it wasn’t true.
‘Let’s go,’ he said.
I took out my phone as we made for the door, the need to speak to Tess suddenly overwhelming. CALLING HOME, it said on the screen as the police came through the door, and I heard her say my name, once, and then again, with a question mark this time, before the connection was broken.
Without needing to raise their voices, the police were lining up the Wild Palm staff against one of the walls. Nobody was being touched, apart from Jesse. One of the cops was gently lifting his elbow, and at first I thought he was fascinated by the unearthly pallor of my friend’s skin.
But what he was looking at were the three watches Jesse had on his arm, each of them set to a different time zone.
The cops all had a good laugh at that.
Through the barred windows of a police van I saw the name of Phuket Provincial Jail written in Thai script. They had not bothered to spell out the name in English, and looking at the mysterious letters I never felt more like a great big bungling farang. The sinking feeling came to rest in the pit of my stomach.
I was with Wild Palm staff I did not know. We sat opposite each other in the back of a small van with a teenage cop, so young that there was a smattering of acne on his smooth cheeks. None of us talking, all of us in handcuffs, all of us very scared. An Aussie guy. A couple of North Americans. A blonde Kiwi girl, quietly crying to herself.
The van passed through a set of gates, and then another and into a central courtyard. In the front pocket of my jeans, pressed hard against my thigh, I could feel my phone vibrate for a long time and then fall still. I could not reach it, and that made me feel a kind of shameful relief. Because I knew it was Tess calling me back, and I knew that I did not have the words to explain any of this. Tears stung my eyes and I blinked them away. The van came to a halt and they got us out.
There was a queue of women prisoners in the courtyard. All of them locals. Brown uniforms, barefoot, surprisingly cheerful. One of them smiled and laughed and gave me one of those looks that you saw in the bars. A professional look, full of longing and invitation, so well executed that the only way to tell it from the real thing was that you knew it could be switched off or directed elsewhere in a fraction of a moment. Some of them had their ankles shackled. Some of them were not women at all but men banged up between sex-change operations.
‘Kathoeys,’ said the Aussie. ‘The second kind of woman.’ Then he cursed when we saw that some of them were coughing. ‘Jesus Christ,’ said the Aussie. ‘Tuberculosis! They’re checking them for TB! There’s TB in this fucking place!’
I swallowed hard and tried to control my breathing. Breathe in slowly through the nose, let the lungs fill, then exhale slowly through the mouth. Again and again and again. Trying to find control in a world where I had no control.
We were formed into rough rows. There was Farren, his face set into hard lines. Pirin, looking defiant, by his side. Jesse, his face whiter than ever, visibly struggling in the heat. The sun was hot now, and it blinded me after the darkness of the van. Voices called out to us in English. Farang prisoners, gesturing us to come closer, desperate to convince us of their innocence.
But the cops murmured to us in Thai and we were ushered inside the main building, like a tour group in handcuffs, our eyes adjusting to the light, my skin feeling burned after just a few minutes in the courtyard.
Then Farren stepped
