In a twist that would make even the most cynical crime novelist clutch their pearls, the Land of Smiles has found itself host to a grim fairy tale of greed, Gucci, and gore. A British millionaire playboy, whose wallet is as fat as his conscience is thin, stands accused of stuffing a lady into a suitcase. Not a metaphorical suitcase of the heart, you understand, but a literal, zippered, hard-shelled case that one might use for a weekend in the Maldives or, apparently, for disposing of an inconvenient lover.
The charge: murder. The victim: a Thai woman whose only crime was loving a man with more money than morals. The British Consul, no doubt nursing a lukewarm cup of Typhoo, is now monitoring the case with all the urgency of a sloth on sedatives.
The authorities are baffled, the press is frenzied, and I am currently testing the gin content at Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi Airport. The playboy, whose name must be Googled but whose surname rhymes with 'greed', claims he is innocent, that the whole affair is a misunderstanding, a tragic mix-up of luggage tags perhaps. But let us be clear: this is not a lost baggage claim.
This is a life. The Thai police, to their credit, seem less starstruck than the British tabloids. They are proceeding with the sort of slow, methodical care that suggests they have seen enough farang with fat wallets to know that justice is not for sale.
Yet. Meanwhile, the millionaire’s legal team, paid for by a trust fund the size of a small principality, is already painting a picture of a man wronged, a victim of a miscarriage of justice, a lamb led to the slaughter by a woman of easy virtue. It is a story as old as colonialism, with a new coat of Prada.
The British Consul, that bastion of stiff-upper-lip diplomacy, is said to be 'monitoring' the case. I can imagine them monitoring it from a leather armchair, a glass of single malt in hand, tutting at the inconvenience of it all. Meanwhile, the woman’s family waits.
They wait for answers. They wait for the system to work. And they wait for a man in a thousand-pound suit to look them in the eye and tell them why their daughter ended up in a Samsonite.
I have seen many things in my career: politicians who lie like rugs, bankers who steal with a smile, and journalists who confuse opinion with fact. But this, this is a new nadir. A man accused of taking a life, treating a person like a parcel.
And we are meant to believe it is a mystery? It is not a mystery. It is a tragedy dressed in a tuxedo.
And I, for one, am not laughing.
