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agreed on a very reasonable 100,000 baht. Reasonable for a farang, that is. Thais usually paid about 20,000 in poorer families.
    MacKay was sure that his bride-to-be was a good girl and not involved in the island’s thriving sex industry. Estimates of the number of prostitutes working in Phuket vary from 4,000 to 20,000, but Joy had never danced in a go-go bar or worked up a lather in a massage parlour. But even good girls can be won over by handsome strangers so he didn’t want her to stay in Phuket while he was back in Scotland. I guess he figured that if he could win her heart in just a few short weeks, another visitor might just be as lucky. He had given her 50,000 baht and told her to quit her job and stay with her parents while he was away. MacKay planned to be in Scotland for two months, and then return with his parents for a big Thai wedding. He’d do the paperwork with the embassy and if all went well he and Joy would return to Glasgow to start a new life together. He owned a big house on the outskirts of the city and planned to set Joy up with her own beauty parlour and then live happily ever after. But he’d heard all the horror stories about men being ripped off by Thai brides, taken for a ride while a husband or boyfriend waited in the background, maybe with a kid or two. So the day before MacKay was due to fly back to Scotland, he came around to my office and plonked down the holiday snaps and a 30,000-baht retainer on my desk.
    ‘I want to know if she’s got any skeletons in her closet,’ he said.
    ‘Like a husband?’ I said.
    ‘Anything,’ said MacKay. ‘I’m sure I’ve got nothing to worry about, but better safe than sorry, as my mother always says.’
    ‘Forewarned is forearmed,’ I said. ‘Has she ever given you any reason to suspect that there might be a problem?’
    MacKay shook his head emphatically. ‘She’s never asked me for money, never given me any reason to suspect that she might be hiding anything.’ He leaned across my desk and lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘And so far as I know, she’s still a virgin.’
    My eyebrows headed skyward. Joy wasn’t a sex worker but she’d clearly had no reservations about going out with a farang, and that suggested she had at least some sexual experience. I’d never met a Westerner before who’d claimed that his girlfriend was a virgin. But I’ve never seen the Taj Mahal and everyone tells me that exists, so I was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt.
    ‘You haven’t slept together?’
    He flashed me an embarrassed smile. ‘We’ve slept together loads of times, but we’ve never …’ He nodded like a woodpecker getting busy on an oak. ‘You know …’
    I nodded. I knew. But it sounded unlikely. Lots of Thai girls were virgins when they married. In Thai society, it was pretty much the norm. But Thai girls weren’t usually so coy with Westerners. And real virgins generally didn’t share a bed with their boyfriends.
    ‘She does things …’ he said. ‘You know …’ He nodded encouragingly. ‘Things.’
    ‘Things?’
    ‘You know. Oral.’
    I winced. More information than I needed.
    ‘She loves oral. It’s just that she says she doesn’t want to go the whole way, not until we’re married.’
    ‘Right,’ I said. ‘I get the picture.’
    ‘She’s really good at it. I mean, the fact that we haven’t had sex yet doesn’t worry me. She says she loves me.’
    ‘Got it,’ I said.
    ‘Spends hours going down on me, that’s not a problem, but she won’t allow, you know, penetration.’
    Far more information than I needed. I stood up and shook his hand and ushered him out of the office, promising to call him once I’d run a check on the lovely Joy.
    First things first. I bought a Thai Airways ticket from Bangkok to Phuket, Phuket to Chiang Mai, and Chiang Mai to Bangkok, then flew down south and wandered into the beauty parlour where she worked. There was no sign of her and when I asked for her I was told