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sleep, her heart-shaped face was paler than usual, making her freckles stand out.
    ‘You’re getting ahead of yourself, Keeney,’ she told her reflection.
    She rearranged her hair with a wide-toothed comb, and pinched her cheeks to put colour in them. As anxious as she was to sort things out with Didier, she needed coffee first.
    Jayne found a cafe near her hotel with tables on the street. She ordered coffee and, taking out her wallet, left her day-pack on a chair to reserve her place while she scanned the headlines of the Thai papers at an adjacent newsstand.
    ‘Local Boy Murdered’. She snatched a copy of Thai Rath and stared at the gruesome front-page photograph. A jacket covered the dead body’s face, though the mutilated groin was clearly visible in the picture. A policeman pointed to the corpse, as if to allay any doubts that the victim might still be alive. The image of the pointing policeman was a feature of Thai press photography that usually amused Jayne, but not now. There was something familiar about the setting, the coasters on the walls, the fountain in the background.
    In a sidebar was a small head-shot like a passport photograph with the caption ‘Sanga Siamprakorn: body found mutilated’. There was no mistaking it. Sanga—or Nou—was dead.
    She leaned against the counter and tried reading the small print for details, but although she spoke Thai with near fluency, the written language was another matter. It was taking too long and she had to get to Didier’s place. She couldn’t begin to imagine the state he’d be in.
    As she folded the paper, her eyes landed on a smaller headline near the bottom of the page, attracted by a single word she recognised easily. Farang. Foreigner. Jayne felt her stomach sink as she forced herself to translate the remaining words. She read ‘Foreign Suspect Killed Trying to Resist Arrest’, before the characters blurred on the page.
    Feeling a hand on her arm, she raised her head. The shopkeeper was staring pointedly at the newspaper in Jayne’s hand, her angular black eyebrows so close together it looked as if the letter M was painted on her forehead.
    ‘ Kor thort na ka ,’ Jayne stammered, wiping her eyes and fumbling for some change. ‘I’m sorry…’
    The woman looked up and the black M split apart. ‘ Mai pen rai ,’ she said, patting Jayne’s arm and giggling in the embarrassed way Thai people did in the face of grief. It was a custom Jayne had never been able to fathom, least of all now.
    She staggered back to her table where her coffee was waiting. The glare of the sun on the white tabletop hurt her eyes and she put on her sunglasses with shaky hands. Then she smoothed the paper out in front of her to translate the Thai script. It was easier to treat it as an academic exercise, consulting her pocket dictionary, detaching herself from the meaning of the English words as she wrote them in a notebook. She even managed to order a second coffee.
    Most of the front-page report was dedicated to graphic descriptions of Nou’s injuries. His body had been found, disfigured and dismembered, in a bar behind the Night Bazaar around 2.15 that morning. ‘Triangular shapes were carved into Khun Sanga’s face with what Scientific Crime Detection Division experts believe was a razor,’ Jayne wrote in her notebook. ‘Police believe the same weapon, which has yet to be found, was used to castrate the body. The male sex organ’—the paper used a formal term for penis that she’d never heard before—‘was found on the ground some distance from the corpse…’
    Jayne closed her eyes and rubbed her temples. She knew the explicit detail, like the gruesome photography, was as an object lesson to remind Thai Buddhist readers of the impermanence of the flesh, but it was hard for her to take.
    Most of information about Didier was on page three.
    Tipped off by eyewitness accounts of a heated argument that took place between Khun Sanga and a foreign man, police