Flytrap (2016) Novella by Simon Kernick

Author:Simon Kernick [Kernick, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Crime, Mystery & Detective, General, Thrillers, Suspense, Espionage
ISBN: 9781473539891
Google: ex92DQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2016-01-01T22:00:00+00:00

Day One

Tuesday

One

The whole thing started when a young man took his girlfriend of a few months on a trip to Thailand.

This was way back in 1990, in the days when Thailand was still in the process of being ‘discovered’ by backpackers, and mass tourism, with its big hotels, and stag and hen parties, and five-star yogic spas, was pretty much unheard of. The young man’s name was Henry Forbes. He was twenty-five years old and a lecturer in Humanities (whatever that is) at Brighton Polytechnic, as the University of Brighton was called in those days. His girlfriend, who had just finished her last year at the same place, was called Katherine Sinn, but I remember from reading about the case at the time that everyone referred to her as Kitty.

Kitty Sinn. I always thought it was a nice name.

Anyway, the trip was to last two months, beginning just over a month after the end of Kitty’s final exams. We know for a fact that they arrived in Bangkok on the afternoon of Sunday, 29 July 1990 because they were recorded entering the country by Thai immigration, and their passports were stamped. They stayed two nights in Bangkok before taking the overnight train down to the resort of Phuket, where they spent four days at the Club Med on Kata Beach. They were remembered by the staff as a polite, quiet couple who kept themselves to themselves and who seemed very much in love. From Phuket they took a taxi to the Khao Sok National Park, site of Thailand’s oldest rainforest, a two-and-a-half-hour drive north, hoping to see some wildlife as well as the spectacular limestone karsts for which the area is famous. They stayed at what at the time was the park’s only guesthouse, arriving there on Sunday, 5 August.

There were only four other guests there that night: an Australian couple in their sixties and two young Dutch backpackers. All the guests remembered Kitty and Henry having dinner in the restaurant before retiring to their bedroom, where later that night they had a blazing row that was so loud that the guesthouse owner, a local man called Mr Watanna, had to intervene and threaten them with eviction if they didn’t quieten down. According to Henry’s later statement, the row had been over a former girlfriend of his and had got out of control, culminating in him slapping Kitty, something he claimed was totally out of character.

The following morning the row clearly hadn’t been resolved because Kitty asked Mr Watanna to drive her to the coastal town of Khao Lak, offering him five hundred baht in payment as long as he didn’t tell Henry where she was going. She said she needed time to think. Henry tried to stop her leaving, apologizing profusely, at one point getting down on his knees and literally begging her to stay. But, by all accounts, Kitty was adamant and she left with Mr Watanna.

According to Mr Watanna, he dropped her off outside the Gerd and

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