afraid of realising that she was disappointing her new friend, and hurried on.
“The man screamed and ran. He ran as fast as he could towards the town, and when he finally reached the outskirts he saw a noodle stall with a lantern a little way ahead. He ran towards the stall, shouting, ‘You have to help me! There’s a girl in the ditch back there and she’s got no face!’ The owner of the stall heard him and turned round… And the man saw that he had no face.”
Lucy had put all of her limited gifts for drama into the tale, and looked across to see if the other girl approved. To her surprise, Can Zing appeared to be laughing to herself. Had it really been that bad? Clearly it must have been, since Can Zing did not stop, and eventually buried her head in her hands on the table, shaking silently. Lucy hesitated, uncertain whether her new friend was laughing or crying now.
“Are you… er… I’m sorry. Are you okay?” She reached out across the desk. Finally, Can Zing raised her head.
The computer screen went blank.
5. A Siamese Ghost Story
The Settha Palace Hotel in Vientiane does not live up to its name, in that it looks more like a colonial plantation house than a palace per se. But then, as Sébastien d'Aumetz liked to point out, these things generally involve a certain amount of poetic license. After all, it's a rare town doesn't boast of at least one establishment rejoicing under the title of 'The Warm Welcome' or 'The Cosy Corner' or something similarly cloying, and execrable service can be guaranteed in most, if not all.
A sprawling pile in cream-colored plaster and lacquered wood, the Settha Palace sits a little way back from the street, in the bosky shade of aged acacias and banana plants. The curving driveway is semi-permanently occupied by an old-fashioned and extremely dusty London taxi. Inside the hotel, the brass fittings gleam and staff seem always to outnumber visitors by at least two to one. It is a relic of a more sedate age, and a world away from the fractious, jostling Chinese food stalls that line the road opposite.
D'Aumetz was the only regular in residence when, one evening in early March, Simon Benedict pushed his way through the heavy front doors, nodded irritably to the receptionist, and made his way to the bar. It was growing late, and the shadows slanted steeply across the room. Soon someone would go round and switch the lights on, but for now the last golden rays of sunlight lit up the scene. D'Aumetz—shabby, elegant, expensive—seemed, ironically, to have acquired an almost angelic glow as he sat by the window with a tumbler of scotch and a book.
Sébastien d'Aumetz was the owner of several clothing factories of varying levels of squalor. Benedict suspected that he also beguiled his spare hours by passing information on to the French intelligence services (the man's compatriots were far less generous in their estimations, and he was known behind his back as The Rat).
"Waiting for someone?" Benedict asked.
"Oh no. Avoiding someone. Take a seat."
Benedict did so, cramming his full-backed figure into one of the armchairs, and nodded to the waitress.
"Sounds thrillingly clandestine," he rumbled.
D'Aumetz smiled in a self-deprecating manner. "Not as such. My children are loud and vulgar and dress like ladyboys. Anne-Sophie insists that I am contractually obliged to like them nonetheless. This is impossible to do in close proximity, so I come here to do it instead."
"You look like you are reading Céline," Benedict observed in precise tones.
"I multi-task," d'Aumetz explained complacently. The waitress brought Benedict's glass of beer. Like d'Aumetz, his order never varied. "You have been away?"
"Contract job down in Khon Kaen for Royal Thai Railways."
"The Chinese project?"
"As you say, the Chinese project."
"Will never happen."
"Possibly, but they were still happy to pay sixty thousand for a Thai-speaking engineer to do a few months' surveying work out in the Isaan dustbowl."
"A la votre." D'Aumetz raised his glass. "How was it?" Benedict considered this for a second or two.
"Odd. Or bizarre, as you people would put it."
"Or zarrebi, as my offspring would no doubt say," d'Aumetz confirmed gloomily.
"If you say so." Benedict said rather stiffly. His French stretched little beyond 'Où est la gare?' and the precise nuance of the slang escaped him. Nevertheless, he had been brought up understanding that it was not done to wash one's dirty children in public.
"In what way, then, was it bizarre?"
"Have you ever heard any stories about a cat ghost?"
"A cat ghost?” D’Aumetz considered the prospect. “No. How odd… The Thais seem to have ghosts for every possible occasion, but I have never come across that particular one before." He swirled the dregs around his glass. "No, indeed. I have never heard any stories about a cat ghost. But no doubt you're about to tell me one..?"
"I'm not going to ram it down your throat if you're not interested," Benedict said, sipping his beer sulkily. D'Aumetz smiled quietly to himself.
"I am fascinated. Begin at the beginning and go on 'til you come to the end. Then stop." Benedict settled back and began his tale.
"The job was based at a place called Station 58. It's a little way after Khon Kaen, on the Udon Thani line."
"Aha,” d’Aumetz held up a finger. “Already I detect a mystery, for the station after Khon Kaen is patently and provably Khumpawapi."
"Mmm. I was getting to that… Despite the name, it isn't actually a station. It's a sort of dispatch centre, handling signalling on the Isaan section of the North-eastern Line. It used to be a station, but there I'm getting ahead of myself…
"There were some things I had to take care of in Bangkok before I started the job, so I took the sleeper train up from Hua Lamphong. They made a special stop to set me down. It must have been about four in the morning, and Station 58 is in the middle of nowhere—I mean really in the middle of nowhere, even by Isaan standards. The nearest village is a place called Baan Yang, about twenty miles away. There are a few shabby farms and an old abandoned temple and that's it.
"Anyway, the train rumbled off, and I just stood by the track with my case. I was supposed to get picked up by someone called Bounmi, but clearly he wasn't there yet. The dispatch centre is a in an old, wooden building a few hundred feet back from the tracks, and it works twenty-four hours a day. It looks a bit like a big signal box, you know— everything happens on the second floor, which has windows all along the track side. It was misty, but from where I stood I could even see someone walking around up there. There were two tortoiseshell cats sitting on the other side of the track. Not doing anything, just watching me smugly, like cats do."
"Ah. Ghost cats?"
"Are you taking the piss?"
"I wouldn't dream of it."
"No, they were physical ones, I assume, though I didn't go over and make sure. I was about to head on up to the dispatch centre and see if maybe Bounmi was waiting for me there, when he pulled up in his pick-up truck.
"Bounmi turned out to own a few acres a little way down the road, and would be providing me with a room for the night. I put my bag in the back and we set off. After a couple of minutes I realized that he was taking us the long way round to get to the main road, but I didn't want to start things off by criticizing his driving, so I said nothing. Later on I found out why he did it, but at the time I just kept my mouth closed."
"This sounds promisingly sinister," d'Aumetz commented.
"Hmm. In any case, we got back to Bounmi's farm, and he bundled me into bed. Of course, the family were all up at sparrow-fart, so I didn't have much choice but to drag myself downstairs and join them for breakfast. It turned out that in addition to the farm, Bounmi also owned a few modern houses in Udon Thani that he rented out: pink and white adobe, that sort of thing—I always think of the style as California Thai. His own place, however, was a big, old- fashioned farmhouse on stilts. They added running water in '96, but that was about the only mod con they had. It had one of those low shal
low ponds, surrounded by palm trees and full of fat carp that were hatched, matched and dispatched by means of a couple of rickety wooden jetties with lanterns hanging at the end. Behind the house there were a couple of buffaloes, and some of the family's rice fields. Otherwise it was just grass and dust and scrubby acacias for miles around. It was December then, and relatively chilly by Isaan standards—you know how it is. You seem to go from cool, misty dawn to cool, misty dusk without ever passing through the nice warm bit that's supposed to come in between.
"I'd assumed that Bounmi would drive me out to my billet after breakfast: that was my first shock: I was booked to stay in his spare room for the whole of the contract. I didn't really know how to refuse, so I just said nothing, and resolved to make my feelings plain— loudly and at length—to Royal Thai Railways as soon as I could get hold of them.
"Bounmi had three sons (two grown up and married) and a daughter off at university in Chiang Mai. There was a gaggle of cousins and aunts and things too, but I never learned to tell the difference between them. They're not important to the story, in any case.
"Anyhow, that first morning Bounmi drove me back to Station 58, going the long way round once more, and introduced me to my new colleagues. There were five of them, and they all worked in the upstairs room with the big windows that I had noticed the previous night. It had a big plan of the north-eastern branch line, covered with flashing LEDs to