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that she’d gone back home, to Chiang Mai. So far, so good.
    I had a haircut and a face massage, a manicure and a pedicure. All at the client’s expense, of course. I walked out smelling like a tart’s boudoir with the full background on Joy. She’d met a farang called Bill, fallen in love with him and had gone back home to stay with her parents until they got married. So far as the beauty parlour girls knew. Joy had never had a serious boyfriend and had never been married. She’d always enjoyed dancing and discos, and had gone out with several farangs, but there had been nobody regular and she didn’t have anyone sending her money from overseas. It was starting to look as if Joy really was on the level and that Bill had found the rarest of jewels, a Thai girl who was a virgin and who loved him.
    I caught a taxi to the airport and got the next flight to Chiang Mai. It was late evening by the time I arrived so I checked into a small hotel and drank the best part of a bottle of Jack Daniels before retiring to bed. Three times during the night small cards mysteriously appeared under my door offering visiting massage services but a good nights sleep was all the relaxation I needed.
    Joy had told Bill that she was from Chiang Mai, but in fact she’d been born in a small town about forty miles away. There is nothing unusual or suspicious about that, most Thais would give the nearest big city as their place of birth. But it meant that I’d have to go to the local municipal office rather than the big one in Chiang Mai.
    I had the hotel’s buffet breakfast and then went out on to the street to negotiate with a taxi driver. I promised him 500 baht for a half day, plus another 200 to take me to the airport once I’d finished.
    For starters we took a drive past the house where Joy was living. I didn’t stop because a farang visitor would have attracted too much attention. It was a three-storey shophouse with the noodle shop in the ground floor. I saw a Thai man in his sixties, who I guessed was the girl’s father, ladling soup into a line of chipped bowls, but there was no sign of Joy.
    The driver took me to the municipal office, the Tee Wah Garn, a grey concrete building with two Thai flags and a life-size painting of the King above the main entrance. On the way we stopped off at a supermarket and I bought two bottles of Johnnie Walker Black Label whisky, making sure that I kept the receipt.
    The driver offered to go inside with me but I told him to wait outside. There are times when it pays to play the naïve foreigner, so I wasn’t planning to let on that I spoke pretty fluent Thai and I didn’t need an interpreter. The information on the government computers is supposedly confidential but a couple of bottles of imported whisky and a lot of smiling tends to get me what I need.
    There was a reception desk that stretched across the main room behind which were a couple of dozen men and women tapping away at computer terminals. On the public side of the room were lines of plastic chairs where a handful of farmers waited patiently for whatever business they were hoping to transact. Overhead a couple of fans tried in vain to stir the stifing air.
    I caught the eye of a middle-aged man with slicked-back hair and circular glasses, gave him a beaming smile, and went into my prepared speech. My brother, I said, was about to marry a local girl but his family was worried that she might be taking advantage of him. I passed over the carrier bag containing the two bottles of whisky, which disappeared under the counter without a word. I gave him another beaming smile and explained that I just wanted to know if the bride-to-be had been married or if she had registered any children.
    ‘No problem,’ the man said. ‘I’ll need her full name and date of birth.’
    I had the name written in Thai and English, and her birth date. He frowned. ‘No record,’ he said.
    ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘She’s definitely from here.’
    ‘The family