represent signals. The thing was old and so grubby that it was hard to read the names in a lot of places. Underneath it there was a bank of desktop PCs and consoles where the dispatchers worked. They took shifts, making sure that someone was there twenty-four hours a day to keep an eye on the traffic, or what there was of it. Whenever the wind blew, which was seldom, the whole structure creaked and groaned.
"There was a duty station manager (Lek) who came from just outside Udon Thani, plus three dispatchers. Lek was close to retirement. He'd requested the post so that he could cultivate his garden in his spare time, and spend his days off getting blind drunk with his cousins out in Nong Khon Kwang. The senior dispatcher was a woman called Pink. I quite liked her. She'd been a mia noy at some point, if not an actual prostitute—I think that's how she funded her studies. I'm almost certain that she was still supplementing her wages that way—she had a couple of sugar daddies locally and one who'd come up from Bangkok to visit now and then. One of them had paid for a set of enormous false breasts for her—honestly, it was a wonder she could get near the console. I assume 'Pink' was her working name—I once heard one of her relatives call her by some painfully traditional diminutive like Birdy or Mouse or something like that.
"Then there were the two junior dispatchers, Tuy and Ice. They were both local too, serving time until they could get a posting somewhere thrilling and cosmopolitan like Nongkhai."
"Hah."
"Precisely. Now I come to think of it, I never actually found out any of their real names, though I dare say it's noted down in the police reports. All I have are the nicknames."
"Police reports?"
"I'm getting to that. Where was I?"
"You'd done four out of five."
"Ah yes. The last one was something special. Maew, the engineer. All of the others were your stereotypical Isaan types—squat and dark and rustic. Maew, on the other hand, could probably have passed for Korean. He looked like the models you see in the ads on the Bangkok MRT, you know the type? He wasn't Thai-looking at all, much less Isaan. He must have been about thirty, and all the local farm girls would stare at him as though they'd never seen anything like it in all their born days." D'Aumetz allowed a complacent expression to flicker on his face for a second or two, as though he had encountered the phenomenon himself with some frequency. Benedict continued: "He spoke in the purest Krungthep Thai too, unlike the others, who I had trouble understanding half of the time."
"All in all, too good to be true," d'Aumetz commented thoughtfully.
"Well may you say that… Anyway, I hadn't the foggiest idea what he was doing out there in the back of beyond, and from what I could gather the others weren't sure either. They loathed him, of course. A mixture of redneck resentment and the fact that he never gave them an opening. He wasn't exactly congenial, but he was always perfectly polite.
"Maew was the only one living on-site. There was plenty of room downstairs, but when I asked the others they all made excuses about preferring to be in a town or near their relatives, even if it meant they had a twenty-mile commute each day.
"I have to say, it didn't take me long to grow heartily sick of spending every moment I wasn’t at work with Bounmi's extended family, and after a couple of weeks I proposed moving into the dispatch centre building myself. Maew politely offered to get a room ready for me, but all of the others gave him a collective Look of Death, and started wittering on about how I'd be far more comfortable in a hotel in town, or staying with Lek's cousin, or in a bathysphere at the bottom of Lake Huron… Anywhere but in the dispatch centre, in fact. This made me wonder a bit. They were so suspiciously keen to keep me out. For a while I suspected that there must have been an illegal still or a meth lab or something hidden down there somewhere. Anyhow, I backed off diplomatically.
"That evening, Bounmi announced that he'd heard on the grapevine that I wanted to leave, and looked so soulful and puppy-dog-eyed that of course I had to tell him that his house was a delight and my only regret was that I would have to depart at the end of my contract. Later on I found out that he was being paid six hundred and fifty baht a month to put me up, but of course it was too late by then: I was committed.
"I soon got into a routine. I'd get up at the crack of dawn and fight about eight generations of Bounmi's friends and relations for the bathroom, before sitting on the veranda and watching the sun rise and burn away the mist over the fishpond. Bounmi would drive me down to the dispatch centre, and I'd get a little maintenance engine from one of the sheds and go out to do my surveying until about ten. Then I'd come in, write up my results and have my lunch and a siesta, and then go back out around four. Even in December, fart- arsing around with a theodolite out on the tracks is no picnic, I can tell you.
"Sometimes Maew came out to help. I think he was pretty glad to be out of the office, to be honest; the others were desperate to get a rise out of him any way they could. They'd do silly, childish things like messing with the settings on his computer. I think it was wearing him down a bit.
"I'd finish up around seven, after it had got dark, and Bounmi would arrive in his pick-up to drive me home in time to enjoy whatever was left over from the family meal. Then I'd go to bed and get ready to do the exact same thing the next day. I was hoping that I would have finished the job by the time the monsoon rolled round. Working out on the tracks was unpleasant enough in December, but it would have been hellish in a tropical downpour.
"One morning, we were getting ready to set off for the dispatch centre when Bounmi's daughter, who happened to be back from university, asked why on earth we were leaving so early. She pointed out that it should only take us five minutes to get there. Bounmi looked really pissed off and kept insisting that it took twenty. She was insisting that she could do it in five on her scooter. It was obvious that she was just teasing him, but I was still curious. She was saying that her route was the best, and he was looking at me out of the corner of her eyes and telling her to shut up. He sounded angry and embarrassed at the same time, if you see what I mean. I didn’t want to collude in tormenting the old chap, but by this point I was desperate to know why he insisted on going the long way round every time. She laughed and told me that it was because he was an old peasant, and he was terrified of the Cat Spirit House, just like all the locals. I looked inquisitive. I had noticed the dilapidated little shrine by the tracks, well away from the dispatch centre itself. She was fiddling with her phone, talking without looking at either of us. According to her, even the railway employees were terrified of the Ghost Cat. She giggled again; clearly she considered herself to be the sophisticated urban gadabout of the family.
"Bounmi would clearly rather have avoided the subject altogether. His daughter told the tale with relish, however.
"It appeared that when the north-eastern line was still under construction, a British administrator and his wife had taken up residence in the old Station 58 building—since demolished—to supervise the arrangements. The administrator was, by all accounts, one of those bluff, hearty, Empire-building types who think that a bout of dengue is a jolly jape. His wife, on the other hand, was fragile and neurotic, and seems to have hated every second of her time in the colonies. The house boys at the station picked up on this, of course. They saw it as racial snobbery, and of course played up to it no end. They'd torment her by deliberately misconstruing her requests, or letting the doors slam to make her jump—things like that. Her husband, quite reasonably, perhaps, felt that she invited a great deal of this, and insisted that she would have far fewer difficulties if she toughened up a bit. She didn't dare yell at them, but she'd get her revenge by having her husband take away their days off, or confiscate their alcohol. It wasn't long before a bitter mutual hatred developed. Soon every bad dinner or hour of unpaid overtime was being attributed to the administrator's wife, whether it was really her fault or not.
"The couple had no children, but the administrator's wife had a pet cat of which she was very fond. It was just a local stray that had taken to hanging a
round the station kitchen for scraps, but for her it was something that was happy to give and receive unconditional affection (as long as the food kept coming), and that, apparently, was enough. She'd brush its fur with a little silver hairbrush, and feed it pieces of chicken breast on a china plate. Of course, the houseboys soon came to hate the cat with just as much passion as they hated its mistress. It is not easy to watch a fleabag refuse the finest cuts of meat when you are entirely convinced that its owner has just condemned you to a week of rice-and-water.
"One evening in Summer, a few of the servants were drinking by the train tracks, out in a little dried up gully just out of sight of the station. After a while, the cat wandered by. They managed to entice it over, and finally it came close enough for one of them to grab it."
"Oh dear," d'Aumetz put in sadly. "I think I can see where this is going…"
"Quite. They probably tortured it a bit first, but it wasn't long before one of them had a bright idea. There was a supply train leaving in a few minutes for Bangkok, and so the group of them decided that it would be amusing to attach the creature's collar to the back of the train and its back legs to one of the