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the lad was on his own, and she, well, sort of kept him company until I showed up. We just got chatting. Wayan reckons you’re quite a detective, sort of Samui’s answer to Sherlock Holmes. Although perhaps she exaggerates a bit, eh?”
    “Well let’s see.” I lay down my fork, pause, and look at him. “Shall we try some deduction?”
    “If you like,” he says.
    I pause another moment or two for effect, and then I say, “Alice,”
    “What?”
    “Your boy is reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland at the moment.”
    “Is he? That’s more than I know.”
    “Yes, he is.”
    “How do you know that?”
    “Just very simple deduction,” I say smoothly. “I happen to know the manager of the local bookshop. About three weeks ago I was in there and he had just had a big delivery of Alice in Wonderland books. When I asked him about it, he said it was an order for Year 4 at the English School. If your son is nine, that puts him in Year 4, and given that Wayan never ventures any further than Chaweng, and always follows the same route into town, she probably met him outside the English School. In these circumstances, he is reading Alice in Wonderland . I could also add – although this is only a guess – that given the ethnic mix of children at the school, there is a high probability that your wife is Thai, and, given your son’s age, at least ten years your junior. Finally, having observed the stain on your shirt, I surmise that you may have had spaghetti for dinner.”
    Sinclair is staring at me. “Bloody hell,” he says.
    “Impressed?”
    “Very.”
    “Before you get too impressed perhaps you should ask your son if he really is reading that book.”
    I resume my meal and try to look nonchalant.
    “You like them mouse shit peppers?” he asks irrelevantly, indicating the prik knee noo on my plate. “Too hot for me.”
    I nod, and Sinclair scratches his chin thinking of what to say next.
    Since my uninvited companion shows no sign of moving, and is obviously too thick-skinned to take a subtle hint, I look over toward the Ocean Pearl and abruptly take on the aspect of a man who has just seen something important. I snatch up my camera, mumble an ‘excuse me’ and start snapping shots. He finally takes the hint. “Oh, well, I can see you’re busy. Erm ... sorry.”
    Keeping my attention focused, so to speak, on the camera, I produce a business card and hold it out to him. “It’s OK, I’m afraid I need to concentrate on this. Call my office. My assistant will schedule an appointment at the office and we can talk properly.”
    He takes the card. “Ah yes, well, I might feel a bit awkward coming to your office in broad daylight, and I was wondering ...” He tails off as I continue to be highly attentive to my camerawork.
    Eventually he says, “I’ll call then. Goodnight, Mr . Braddock.”
    “Goodnight, Mr . Sinclair.”
    I stay in position until I am sure he has gone, then I delete all the meaningless photos I’ve just taken and turn back to my steak; but I have lost my appetite. I tell the waiter to take away the plate . I order a cappuccino and light up a cigarette. David Bowie’s ‘Ashes to Ashes’ starts playing.
     
    I muse on how ridiculously easy it is to impress some people, at least some of the time. How desperately they want to believe in magic. Maybe we all do. Conceivably we’d all be a lot happier if the world were made up entirely of smoke and mirrors. Logic is, after all, an unsatisfying substitute for a magician’s wand. If Sinclair had applied Occam’s Razor, he could easily have concluded that my ‘deductions’ had come principally from a conversation with Wayan and that, accordingly, I am a second-rate detective but a first-rate psychologist. How often – I continue reflecting – is it that we see what we want to see, rather than what is really before our eyes. In the trade we call this confirmation bias , and our brains are riddled with it. We take a position on something