The Grey Man by John Curtis

an underlying hint of Asia.
    â€˜Thanks,’ he said.
    â€˜I'm thinking of buying into a bar myself,’ I said, ‘and I'd love to know who your decorator is.’ I had a hunch.
    â€˜Oh, my partner Richard did all this. He's got great taste.’
    Bingo. ‘I'd love to meet him and have a chat. I'd be willing to pay him to do something in my place if I buy it,’ I said.
    â€˜I'm sure Richard would be happy to help out, but he's overseas now. He's back in January.’
    Afterwards I did some more checking and confirmed that the ‘Richard’ the man had spoken about was indeed Davenport. I took Panom back to the bar a few days later, on the pretext of another casual visit, and introduced him as my business partner to the same man I'd met previously. I didn't know if I would still be working for IJM, or even if I'd still be alive in January 2005 when Davenport was due to return, so I wanted to give Panom the inside running on the operation so he could take over from me if I wasn't around. I hoped he'd be able to meet Davenport, and put him away.

FOUR
    The Grey Man
    After about a month of my doing surveillance work for IJM, Frank Weicks offered to take me on as a paid employee, but I told him I was there to rescue kids, not find a job. I still had money to burn from my army pay so I didn't need to be earning a salary.
    I continued to help out IJM now and again while I searched for kids to rescue, and Frank gave me a lead on the possible presence of children in a brothel masquerading as a hotel in a small town in central north Thailand called Uttaradit. I went there with Panom and Rick and a female operative, a Thai woman in her late forties who had served in the military and was very fit. It took us about four hours to get there and find the hotel in question. We all checked into the hotel for three nights. While Panom and Rick checked out rumours of an underage brothel near a lake, the female operative and I went for a massage at a place we were told we could find young girls. The masseuse took a fancy to me and I had to pretend that the Thai woman with me was my wife. Our enquiries came to nothing and it pretty soon became apparent that there was nothing much going on in this town. IJM's intelligence had failed again. I still hadn't rescued a child, but I did have my first try at singing karaoke. I picked an Elvis song, ‘Suspicious Minds’. I was crap, but the small crowd in the hotel restaurant applauded politely.
    In Chiang Mai I went back onto the streets on my own, which was how I preferred it. I must have visited at least a hundred brothels in those early days The brothels were relatively clean for the most part, if a bit spartan, with concrete floors and bare walls. In some of the places the owners had gone to a bit of effort and put up a few pictures on the walls or invested in soft furnishings. Most of the girls I met were nice enough, with a few hard ones thrown in every now and again. They all had their stories – broken relationships, fatherless children to raise, parents to support, debts to pay – though some just wanted to make money to buy phones, clothes and a motorbike. If the job of sex worker was not stigmatised and was subject to fair and regulated labour laws then it would simply be another job. However, the fact that the commodity being sold is sex means that this industry pushes the buttons of many people with strong views about the place of sex in society.
    I'd originally thought that those girls who weren't trafficked and forced into brothels, the ones who entered the profession of their own free will, did it simply because they were poor. I put this theory to some girls I knew who worked in a clothing shop and they all said I was wrong.
    Women do make choices, they told me. Women in Thailand are traditionally seen as second-class citizens, but they can elevate their social standing through wealth. The clothing-shop girls pointed out that not every poor