The Noble Path: A relentless standalone thriller from the #1 bestseller by Peter May (learn to read books .TXT) 📕

Downmarket, it transpired, was one of the better massage parlours on Patpong Road. A girl rose from a desk, pressed her palms together, and bowed as Grace led them in. ‘Madame,’ she said deferentially.

‘These gentlemen would like to see the facilities we offer here,’ Grace said.

‘Of course.’ The girl led them through to a red-carpeted lounge dotted with deep, soft sofas and armchairs. A crimson flock wallpaper covered three walls and the ceiling. The fourth wall was a large window looking on to a chamber where something like a hundred girls sat in tiers, chatting idly. Each had a number pinned to her dress. Some were plain, some pretty, others indifferent. Most looked bored, and all were very young. None, Elliot thought, over twenty.

‘Here, discretion is assured,’ Grace said. ‘Our customers need not feel embarrassed, for the girls cannot see them.’ She ran a cool hand lightly across the glass. ‘A two-way mirror. All they can see is a reflection of themselves.’ But Elliot noticed that none of the girls looked in their direction. Perhaps they were ashamed of their own reflections. ‘A man may choose a girl by her number, and he will be taken to a small room where the girl of his choice will shower him and then give him a body massage. Soap or oil is applied for maximum lubrication. Any further activity is a matter for private negotiation between the girl and the customer. Naturally we take ninety per cent. And, of course, our girls are very clean. They are checked regularly by our doctor.’

‘I’ve heard,’ Elliot said, ‘that many of these girls are sold to establishments like this by their families. Peasant girls straight from the paddies. Bought and sold like slaves.’

Grace looked at him with feigned surprise. ‘Do I detect a hint of disapproval, Mr Elliot?’ She shook her head. ‘Do you really think they would be better off in the paddies, working from dawn till dusk, thigh-deep in water, legs scarred by leeches, skin burned by the sun? Such women are old by the time they are thirty, dead by fifty – if they are lucky. Here they make more money than they could ever have dreamed, are well fed, receive the best medical care.’

‘And end up in squalid little klong houses, working sleazy bars up dark alleys when they are no longer young enough or attractive enough for your customers.’

Grace smiled and turned to Slattery. ‘Are there any of my girls who catch your eye, Mr Slattery?’

‘Two of ’em, actually, ma’am.’

She called over the girl who had shown them in. ‘See to it that Mr Slattery has everything he wants, with my compliments.’

The girl bowed and Slattery grinned. ‘See you back at the hotel, then, chief.’

In the car Grace said to Elliot, ‘I thought we would never get rid of him.’

*

Her room was on the first floor of her rambling mansion house, known throughout Bangkok as Chez La Mère Grace. ‘It was what they called my house in Phnom Penh,’ she said. ‘The house there was my mother’s really, and I took on the name when she died and left me the business. She called herself Grace. She wanted an English name. She thought it very chic.’

‘She was a Cambodian, your mother?’

‘Oh, yes. Her real name was Lim Any. I was the result of a liaison with a high-ranking French diplomat. But they never married.’ She finished pouring their drinks at a glass cabinet, kicked off her shoes, and padded across the thick-piled carpet to kneel opposite him on one of the huge soft cushions scattered around a foot-high circular table. The room was sumptuous. Velvet drapes, antique cabinets, exotic trunks with gold clasps. There were mirrors everywhere you looked, even on the ceiling above an enormous circular bed spread with red silk sheets and white cushions. Two or three discreetly placed lamps cast light on key areas, and left others in pools of mysterious darkness.

‘You would have loved Cambodia,’ she said. ‘The Cambodia I knew.’

‘Tell me about it.’ He settled back with his drink.

Her smile seemed distant as she drifted back to a world gone for ever, a world she had loved like life itself, and for which there could never be a satisfactory replacement. ‘Were you ever in Phnom Penh?’ He shook his head. ‘It was a beautiful city, Mr Elliot. It had all the grace and style of the French, the brashness of the Chinese, and yet at its heart was still very Cambodian, full of history. You have seen photographs of Angkor Wat?’

‘Sure.’

‘Then perhaps you will understand a little of Cambodia. But you must see it to feel it. The temples symbolize everything that was great about a race that once ruled the whole of Indochina. Then, lost for hundreds of years, they were rediscovered in the last century by a French explorer, a mirror on a long-forgotten past.’

‘I think we could skip the history lesson,’ Elliot said.

She smiled with something like condescension. ‘Perhaps you have to be Cambodian to understand.’ She sipped her drink thoughtfully. ‘The Fifties and Sixties were a golden era in our more recent history, under the rule of that fat little man, Prince Sihanouk.’

‘I heard he was a bit of an eccentric.’

‘Oh, yes, he was eccentric, Mr Elliot. But you mustn’t mistake eccentricity for stupidity. The Prince was successful in keeping Cambodia out of the war in Vietnam for nearly twenty years before the Americans bombed our country in 1970. Oh, some people thought him mad. He had a penchant for making his own movies, in which he nearly always starred himself as some awful gangster. Of course, I was invited to the palace on the banks of the Mekong many times with my mother. I saw several of his films. They were truly dreadful. He played the saxophone, too. Not badly. And wrote music for performances by the Royal Dancers. He preserved many of the traditions of Cambodia. The people turned out in their thousands every