While still holding the phone to his ear, he got up and walked towards Fara and her two friends. Fara’s phone stopped ringing. The policeman redialed again, and yet again, Fara’s phone rang. He stood in front of Fara, hung up the call and redialed just to hear Fara’s phone ring again.
“Miss, why your phone ring? Please come with me,” he told Fara.
Without saying a word, Fara got up and followed the policeman. Isabelle and Trinity sat there, struck dumb with disbelief. Then, the policeman turned to them and ordered, “You two come too!”
Three policemen escorted the three friends to a small desk. The policeman holding the dead man’s phone asked again, “Why your phone ring, miss? Do you know dead man?”
“Uh, no…” lied Fara.
“You not lie to me, miss,” the policeman told Fara.
Fara looked at her two friends and sighed. “He was my old boyfriend. I swear I did not kill him. I didn’t even know he would be here in the same hotel as us.”
The two friends looked at Fara. They had never known Fara to have a boyfriend. She was always the studious type, serious only about her maths and academic work.
“We were in the same university. He was in social studies and I was, of course, in maths. He pursued me and I eventually fell in love with him. He was a total geek but I changed him, made him outgoing, changed his nerdy looks, gave him confidence, moulded him into the suave, handsome man he is now,” Fara told them.
“Goodness! Fara, you never told us about him. We thought you’d die a spinster, married to maths!”
“I wanted to tell you gals about him but once I had changed him, he ran off with that woman over that,” explained Fara while pointing her pouting lips at the victim’s wife.
“Where were you this morning, miss?” asked the policeman.
“We went out for breakfast and then to the aquarium,” Fara said,
“But before we left the hotel,” Isabelle volunteered, “you went off to the toilet while Trin and I went to ask the concierge for…”
Fara and Trinity glared at her. Isabelle stopped talking and sucked in her lips, realising what she had done. She was a sweet girl but sometimes she could be somewhat doozy.
The Thai policeman arched his eyebrows and summarised, “And instead of going toilet, you went meet your old boyfriend and poisoned him. Poison is usual using by lovers.”
Before anything else could be said, in walked a group of policemen with the fat guest and his big suitcase.
Isabelle whispered to Fara, “Don’t worry. He’s guilty and you’ll be scot-free!”
Fara just gave her a sideways glare.
It took two policemen to lug the big suitcase behind the fat man. He looked dejected as if guilty of murder.
The police announced loudly in broken English to the fat man, “We knowing what you did!” and the man hung his head. “You committing big crime last night and this morning you trying to run from Thailand. Luckily, we get you in airport.”
The big bag was placed in front of him and a policeman proceeded to open it. What everyone saw shocked them all. The suitcase was full of hotel shampoo bottles and bath soap cakes!
There was a hot exchange of Thai words among the policemen. Then, they simultaneously turned to look at Isabelle.
“Eep!” was all Isabelle could say.
The police walked over to talk to Isabelle and she had a hard time explaining why she thought the fat man had stuffed a dead man into his suitcase. Suddenly, she became a suspect and the police wanted to know her whereabouts since she arrived in Phuket. “You try to put police investigation on someone else, miss?” one policeman asked her. “Maybe you poison lady’s husband!”
Trinity tried to rescue her friends and told the police, “Maybe the lady poisoned her own husband. Maybe for insurance money.”
The two policemen nodded to each other and approached the victim’s wife.
At the same time, the fat man asked one of the policemen, “What’s going on?”
A policeman took out his phone and showed him a photo of the dead man. “We look for man’s killer. Him poisoned. Dead this morning.”
The fat man looked at the man in the photo. “That’s Ringo! I know him! He goes to the same gym as me.”
That sent the Thai police in the hotel into another exchange of words in Thai. Then, a policeman announced, “You all come to police station!”
The fat man, the victim’s wife together with Fara, Isabelle and Trinity were loaded into a small police van and brought to the station. At the station, the toxicology report was waiting on the sergeant’s desk. It reported, in Thai, that the poison was a type that made its victim hallucinate before sending him into a deep sleep from which he would not wake up from unless an antidote was administered.
Now that the police knew what type of poison it was, they could simply find the poison’s container in any one of the four’s possessions to catch the killer. The police felt that the fat man could have hidden the poison in his suitcase of stolen hotel shampoo. The wife could have murdered him for insurance money. Fara could have killed him for revenge for breaking her heart. And Isabelle could also be the killer since she was so eager to distract the police. The only person there who wasn’t a suspect was Trinity. Well, a beauty like her could hardly be a stone-cold murderer.
The fat guest was the first to be interrogated.
“How you know the victim?” asked the Thai police.
“He and I go to the same gym. I hate him,” the fat man told the police. “He would always come around to my workout area and say, ‘Oi! Fat Lard! Don’t break the treadmill now!’ The ladies loved him, of course. But I hated him.”
“Hate enough to kill him?” asked the policeman.
“No, no! I didn’t even know he was in the same hotel!” cried the fat man.
“We will find inside your bag the poison.”
The police launched an islandwide search. While a group of policemen searched the rooms in the hotel, those at the station busied themselves searching through the fat man’s many small hotel shampoo bottles. Another group searched the popular beaches on the island. After all, if an empty bottle of poison was thrown into the sea, it would float and wash up on the beach.
Then they interrogated the victim’s wife. They suspected her of poisoning her husband for insurance money.
“What money?” she protested. “We hardly had any money for food even. He spends all our money keeping himself beautiful, going for facials, buying thousands of dollars of supplements, paying gym fees and whatnot. We don’t even have money to pay the rent. Our credit cards are maxed out. Do you think we could afford the buy insurance by the way he spent money?”
A check found her story to be true. The couple did have insurance many years ago but it lapsed due to non-payment. Now that her husband is dead, the insurance was not obligated to pay out for his death.
Next they questioned Fara.
“Tell us about your old boyfriend,” instructed the policeman.
“I did not know he was staying in the hotel!” protested Fara.
“Come on, miss! First the fat man say he not know him stay in hotel and now you tell you not know him stay in hotel too!”
“It’s true! I swear it! I did not even see him but he saw me last night. I was surprised to see him. He held my arm and made me agree to meet him after dinner last night but I was too drunk and went to sleep in my room. The next morning he rang me and sounded drunk. I told him to meet me at the hotel lobby’s toilet. I was concerned for him because he talked a bunch of nonsense, probably from the effect of the hallucinating poison. I looked for him but he was nowhere to be found. So I went back to my friends and we went for breakfast,” explained Fara.
“Maybe you did meet him and give him poison to drink,” the policeman suggested and proceeded to look through the three women’s handbags. He did not find any empty poison bottle.
The three friends could prove they were not at the hotel last night because the waiters at their restaurant remembered them, especially beautiful Trinity. And they could produce the tickets to the aquarium this morning.
Pepper's World. Notes to myself. 