Everyone Burns (39 page)

In
karmic terms, perhaps that had merit. Although as the monk Bodhidharma observed to the Emperor nothing
really
earns you merit; and there is
nothing
holy. His answer to the question ‘Who are you?’ was the same as the Mad Hatter’s to the riddle of the raven and the writing-desk:
I haven’t the slightest idea
.

Which is exactly where
I still am on the identity of the anonymous letter-writer. Many issues seem to have been cleared up in the last few days, but this isn’t one of them.

His
most recent missive, now stowed in the file in the locked drawer, was at least direct:

DAVID BRADDOCK, I KNOW YOU KILLED YOUR WIFE

I wander out into the garden and light a cigarette.

Wayan’s shapely figure is attending to the spirit house. Despite the perturbations of the world, life goes on.

The sky presents an endless canopy of translucent blue. The still air is suffused with sunshine.

Perhaps
tomorrow the beneficent clouds will gather and it will finally rain. The earth will cool and revive and in that seminal moment all our sins perchance will be washed away.

It might happen.

But somehow I doubt it.

David
Braddock returns in

HUNGRY GHOSTS

The second book in the
Time, Blood and Karma
series.

Read on to see the first chapter of
Hungry Ghosts.

1

Unquiet Slumber

It was 2:30am in Bangkok.

Away from the booming nightclubs of the City of Angels, in the north-western suburb of Bangkok Noi the night was quiet.  In this poor, workers’ area of the capital the only things to be heard were the occasional motorbike or the whine of an unhappy dog. Even the drug-dealers and opportunistic rapists that hung around Soi Charan Sanit Wong 37 had strutted home to their beds.

A few hundred metres from that ill-lit and abused thoroughfare a man was sitting on one of the fourth floor balconies of a crumbling residential block. Most of the building was in darkness, including the man’s apartment, and on the empty road below only a few of the street lights were working. The balcony overlooked only derelict tenement, and waste ground strewn with building debris and dusty rubbish.

This man was not there for the view.

The night-owl was a big Thai with coarse, acne-scarred features, a shaved head and limbs the thickness of tree-trunks. He was wearing only a faded, sweat-stained vest and boxers, and his wide buttocks spilled over the cheap plastic chair that barely supported his bulk.

He lit a cigarette and wiped the perspiration from his brow with a tattooed forearm. The air was humid and uncomfortable, but that was not the principal reason for his night-sweats.

Bumibol Chaldrakun was being stalked by a ghost.

Of late his dreams, and occasionally his waking hours, had been haunted by an apparition possessed of a dogged determination. The ghost was that of his younger brother, Preechap Chaldrakun, who in life had been a police constable on the island of Samui.

Preechap had died a few weeks ago in a freak accident, his neck broken after falling down the staircase outside his apartment. He was chasing some children who had been letting off firecrackers for Chinese New Year near his door, and he had lost his footing. One of his police colleagues had been on a cell
phone call to him at the time and had raised the alarm. But there was nothing to be done, and the children in question unsurprisingly could not be traced.

That, at least, was the
official
story.

Bumibol had gone to the island to make arrangements for his brother’s cremation in a state of shock, a sort of deep trance. He had sleepwalked his way through the proceedings which had been a penurious, poorly-attended and desultory affair. His brother was the only family he had, and of course, vice versa. Accordingly, only three monks from a local temple, Preechap’s police colleague Tathip, and a couple of ancient female hangers-on, had been in attendance. Tathip – who had been on the phone to Preechap at the time of his death – was nervous and trembling throughout and couldn’t wait to get away. Bumibol had taken an instant dislike to this feeble, twitchy policeman who according to previous conversations with his brother had a drink problem, but he had managed to be civil to him in his own gruff way. The island police force had sent flowers and other marks of respect, but this felt like a half-hearted gesture to the bereaved Bumibol. He knew his brother had not been popular. He was not popular himself. Both brothers were loners.

They were also peas in a pod. Both were violent men; both were bitter at a world which denied them respect and what they regarded as their due. Neither had a woman to love them; and both were scornful of foreigners and of those that were ‘different’. After a childhood of poverty in the slums of Bangkok, one had clawed his way into the Royal Thai Police while the other had become an enforcer for a drug gang. Neither saw any paradox or irony in this, their world view being that money and power were the true differentiators, not right and wrong. Their career paths may have diverged, but the grudges they carried against an indifferent world were the same.

And now the surviving brother was completely alone.

Chaldrakun flicked away his cigarette butt and spat over the balcony. From somewhere in the thin-walled apartment block he heard some excited matrimonial yelling, followed by a door slam and then silence. He ran a hand over his head and wiped the sweat onto his boxer shorts.

The haunting had begun after he had returned to Bangkok, and the vision was always the same.

His brother appeared to him barefoot and swathed in dirty rags, the bloated body covered in welts and sores. The ghost’s eyes were red and burning and the lips had been crudely sewn together by some demonic seamstress. In his left hand he carried some kind of stick or metal rod, and with his right hand he pointed first at his brother and then indicated something off in the distance to which he wanted to draw attention. This action was repeated endlessly. The backdrop to the apparition was a rough stone pit of smouldering embers and black smoke.

Chaldrakun had no idea what certain aspects of the vision meant, but he was sure of two things. First, his brother was in torment, and secondly he was calling out to him to
do
something.

He was also convinced that, unless he acted, the phantom would continue to deny him rest.

Chaldrakun cleared his throat and spat again.
This all must be to do with Preechap’s passing,
he thought.
What else can it be?

His starting-point had to be to look more closely into the circumstances of his brother’s death. The enforcer needed to turn detective.

He would go back to Samui.

He would talk to Tathip.

He would find out what had
really
happened.

HUNGRY GHOSTS

For the last half-hour my mind has been playing games with me. I keep thinking I see Claire at the periphery of my vision, but when I turn my head she vanishes. But then of course she would. She is a ghost, after all.

It is the spring of 2005 and the macabre ‘burning murders’ have ended. Life has apparently returned to normal for the Thai island of Samui.

For private investigator David Braddock ‘normal’ means finding a missing drug smuggler, sleeping with the Police Chief’s wife and ensuring his office manager’s latest money making scheme doesn’t bankrupt him.

For Police Chief Charoenkul it means resuming his seemingly-endless wait for that elusive promotion to Bangkok.

However, the peace is destined to be short-lived. Unbeknown to both men, karmic storm clouds are gathering and murderous forces are about to be unleashed which could destroy them both ...
 

Hungry Ghosts
is the second book in John Dolan’s
Time, Blood and Karma
series.

A POISON TREE

“You kill my wife and I’ll kill yours.” You must admit, as a proposition, it has an alluring symmetry to it.

It
is 1999, and as the Millennium approaches, old certainties wither. For family man, David Braddock, his hitherto predictable world is undergoing a slow collapse. The people closest to him seem suddenly different. As desires and aspirations tangle around each other like parasite stems, betrayal is in the air.

And so is murder.

Fans of Braddock will finally learn the sequence of events that drove him into exile in Asia, while for new readers,
A Poison Tree
is the perfect introduction to the
Time, Blood and Karma
series.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

“Makes a living by travelling, talking a lot and sometimes writing stuff down. Galericulate author, polymath and occasional smarty-pants.”

John Dolan hails from a small town in the North-East of England. Before turning to writing, his career encompassed law and finance. He has run businesses in Europe, South and Central America, Africa and Asia. He and his wife Fiona currently divide their time between
Thailand and the UK.

You can follow John’s ramblings on Twitter
@JohnDolanAuthor

or see his Author Page on
Amazon
or
Goodreads
or
Smashwords