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Authors: Angela Savage
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anything. Or so Jayne thought.
But why hadn’t Didier told her about the assault on his father? She wondered if that was why he’d left Quebec in the first place, and had never gone back.
‘You could have told me, Didi,’ Jayne said.
With a lump in her throat, she stubbed out her cigarette and picked up the Sherlock Holmes book, stopping at a passage marked in pencil in the margin:
‘Circumstantial evidence is a very tricky thing,’ answered Holmes thoughtfully; ‘it may seem to point very straight to one thing, but if you shift your point of view a little, you may find it pointing in an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different…’
Was Didier sending her a message? She recalled the Police Lieutenant Colonel’s response when asked if Didier had killed Nou: ‘All evidence points in that direction.’
‘And what if you shift your point of view a little?’ she said aloud.
Jayne returned to the desk and reread her notes from the paper. She added points from the Channel 4 report, together with what Max had told her. The TV stations would still be closed, so she switched on the radio, jotting down more information as it came through.
She watched the first news bulletins before taking a shower and washing her hair. The bathroom mirror showed the colour had returned to her face. There was determination in her mouth and jaw—an expression Jayne’s mother said made her look stubborn as a child—and her eyes were clear. She dressed quickly, slung a Do Not Disturb sign on her door and sprinted to a nearby 7-Eleven for the morning papers and coffee.
By 9am, Jayne had mapped out the case against Didier. She considered each piece of evidence on its own then examined how it all fitted together, coming up with as many holes in the case as police claimed to have leads. Jayne was no lawyer, but she knew that in the absence of either eyewitnesses to the murder or a full confession, everything became circumstantial, even the alleged discovery of the murder weapon at Didier’s house. As for the previous assault record, Max was wrong: while it might not look good, the bottom line was the charges were never substantiated.
If she assumed her friend was not guilty—not even of resisting arrest, let alone murdering his lover—Jayne could conclude Didier had been killed either by accident, the police fabricating a case to cover their own arses, or through some kind of conspiracy.
She thought of the steely-eyed lieutenant colonel. He didn’t come across as the sort of person who made mistakes. To her mind, the police blunder theory only held if the lieutenant colonel was covering up for someone else—a nervous rookie, for example. But it didn’t explain Nou’s death, which was why the police went to interview Didier in the first place. It all happened too fast and was too seamless to look like damage control.
That left her with the conspiracy theory: that Didier was set up to get him out of the way. But why not simply kill him? With Chiang Mai a hub for heroin trafficking in the region, it was not unprecedented for foreigners to be killed in drug-related attacks. A few years earlier, three US Drug Enforcement Agency officials had been executed, Mafia-style, in the area. Why go to the trouble of killing Nou as well and framing Didier for the murder?
Didier must have been considered so dangerous, it wasn’t enough to kill him: his character and his credibility had to be destroyed as well. But how could he have posed such a threat? His friends used to joke that he was more Thai than Thai because he was so respectful of local culture. To Jayne’s knowledge, Didier’s willingness to rock the boat didn’t extend beyond covertly distributing explicit pamphlets on AIDS prevention.
She picked up the phone and placed another call to Bangkok.
M ax fumbled with the receiver, still groggy after a dose of Valium the night before. A strange voice said something in Thai, before a familiar one took its
But why hadn’t Didier told her about the assault on his father? She wondered if that was why he’d left Quebec in the first place, and had never gone back.
‘You could have told me, Didi,’ Jayne said.
With a lump in her throat, she stubbed out her cigarette and picked up the Sherlock Holmes book, stopping at a passage marked in pencil in the margin:
‘Circumstantial evidence is a very tricky thing,’ answered Holmes thoughtfully; ‘it may seem to point very straight to one thing, but if you shift your point of view a little, you may find it pointing in an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different…’
Was Didier sending her a message? She recalled the Police Lieutenant Colonel’s response when asked if Didier had killed Nou: ‘All evidence points in that direction.’
‘And what if you shift your point of view a little?’ she said aloud.
Jayne returned to the desk and reread her notes from the paper. She added points from the Channel 4 report, together with what Max had told her. The TV stations would still be closed, so she switched on the radio, jotting down more information as it came through.
She watched the first news bulletins before taking a shower and washing her hair. The bathroom mirror showed the colour had returned to her face. There was determination in her mouth and jaw—an expression Jayne’s mother said made her look stubborn as a child—and her eyes were clear. She dressed quickly, slung a Do Not Disturb sign on her door and sprinted to a nearby 7-Eleven for the morning papers and coffee.
By 9am, Jayne had mapped out the case against Didier. She considered each piece of evidence on its own then examined how it all fitted together, coming up with as many holes in the case as police claimed to have leads. Jayne was no lawyer, but she knew that in the absence of either eyewitnesses to the murder or a full confession, everything became circumstantial, even the alleged discovery of the murder weapon at Didier’s house. As for the previous assault record, Max was wrong: while it might not look good, the bottom line was the charges were never substantiated.
If she assumed her friend was not guilty—not even of resisting arrest, let alone murdering his lover—Jayne could conclude Didier had been killed either by accident, the police fabricating a case to cover their own arses, or through some kind of conspiracy.
She thought of the steely-eyed lieutenant colonel. He didn’t come across as the sort of person who made mistakes. To her mind, the police blunder theory only held if the lieutenant colonel was covering up for someone else—a nervous rookie, for example. But it didn’t explain Nou’s death, which was why the police went to interview Didier in the first place. It all happened too fast and was too seamless to look like damage control.
That left her with the conspiracy theory: that Didier was set up to get him out of the way. But why not simply kill him? With Chiang Mai a hub for heroin trafficking in the region, it was not unprecedented for foreigners to be killed in drug-related attacks. A few years earlier, three US Drug Enforcement Agency officials had been executed, Mafia-style, in the area. Why go to the trouble of killing Nou as well and framing Didier for the murder?
Didier must have been considered so dangerous, it wasn’t enough to kill him: his character and his credibility had to be destroyed as well. But how could he have posed such a threat? His friends used to joke that he was more Thai than Thai because he was so respectful of local culture. To Jayne’s knowledge, Didier’s willingness to rock the boat didn’t extend beyond covertly distributing explicit pamphlets on AIDS prevention.
She picked up the phone and placed another call to Bangkok.
M ax fumbled with the receiver, still groggy after a dose of Valium the night before. A strange voice said something in Thai, before a familiar one took its
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