Cockroaches(63)

“Old school trick,” he said to a wide-eyed Nho. “You’ll have to take over the negotiations from here. Bloody hell, it’s hot …”

Nho jumped out of the car, and after a short parley he poked his head back in the car, nodded and Harry followed the other two down into the basement, while the attendant kept a glowering eye on, and a suitable distance from Harry.

The video player hummed, and Harry lit a cigarette. He had some notion that nicotine in certain situations stimulated the mental processes. Like when you needed a smoke.

“Right,” Harry said. “So you think Brekke’s telling the truth?”

“You do too,” Nho said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have brought me down here.”

“Correct.” The smoke made Harry’s eyes smart. “And here you can see why I think that.”

Nho looked at the pictures, gave up and shook his head.

“This cassette is from Monday the thirteenth of January,” Harry said. “At about ten in the evening.”

“Wrong,” Nho said. “This is the same recording we saw last time from the day of the murder, the seventh of January. The date’s even on the edge of the picture.”

Harry blew out a smoke ring, but there was a draft coming from somewhere and it collapsed at once.

“It’s the same recording, but the date’s always been wrong. My guess is our pantless friend here can confirm it’s easy for them to change the date and the time on the machine and therefore on the picture.”

Nho looked at the attendant, who shrugged and nodded.

“But that doesn’t explain how you know when this recording was made,” Nho said.

Harry nodded toward the monitor. “I realized when I was woken up this morning by the traffic on Taksin Bridge outside the flat where I’m staying,” he said. “There was too little traffic. This is a six-story car park in a busy business complex. It’s between four and five o’clock and we see two cars pass in an hour.”

Harry flicked the ash of his cigarette.

“The next thing I thought about was these.” He got up and pointed at the screen to the black lines on the cement. “Tracks of wet tires. From both cars. When were there last wet roads in Bangkok?”

“Two months ago, if not longer.”

“Wrong. Three days ago, the thirteenth of January, between ten and half past, there was a mango shower. I know because most of it went inside my shirt.”

“Yes, that’s right,” Nho said. He frowned. “But these video recorders never stop. If this recording is not the seventh of January but the thirteenth, it must mean the cassette that should be there for that time had been taken out.”

Harry asked the attendant to find the cassette with January 13 on, and thirty seconds later they could see the recording had been stopped at 21:30. Followed by a five-second snowstorm before the picture settled down again.

“The cassette was taken out here,” Harry said. “The pictures we can see now are what was on the cassette before.” He indicated the date. “The first of January 05:25.”

Harry asked the attendant to freeze the picture and they sat looking at it while Harry finished his cigarette.

Nho pressed his palms together in front of his mouth. “So someone here has fixed a cassette so that it looks as if the ambassador’s car has never been in the car park. Why?”

Harry didn’t answer. He looked at the time. 05:25. Thirty-five minutes before the new year reached Oslo. Where had he been? What had he been doing? Had he been at Schrøder’s? No, it must have been closed. He must have been asleep then. At any rate he couldn’t remember any fireworks.


The security company was able to confirm that Jim Love had had the night shift on the thirteenth of January, and they gave Nho his address and telephone number without a murmur. Nho rang Love’s place, but no one answered.

“Send a patrol car there and check,” Liz said. She seemed elated to have something concrete to go on at last.

Sunthorn came into the office and handed her a file.

“Jim Love doesn’t have a record,” he said. “But Maisan, one of the undercover guys in Narco, recognized the description. If it’s the same guy he’s been seen at Miss Duyen’s several times.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Harry asked.

“It means he wasn’t necessarily as innocent in that opium story as he made out,” Nho said.

“Miss Duyen’s is an opium den in Chinatown,” Liz explained.

“Opium den? Isn’t that, erm … illegal?”

“Of course.”

“Sorry, stupid question,” Harry said. “But I thought the police were fighting that sort of thing.”