Braving the heat, she set herself up at a table on the veranda of their bungalow, which, though failing to deliver a view of the sea, overlooked a lush garden. She suspected the garden owed its fecundity to poor plumbing—she heard water hit the ground below the bathroom floor whenever she took a shower or used the basin—but she wasn’t complaining. The guesthouse was cheap and clean, and the manager required only a modest bribe to let them register without their passports. There wasn’t enough of a breeze to lift the pages of Pla’s notebook as Jayne worked her way through the translation. With the aid of her dog-eared Thai–English dictionary, it took her the better part of three hours, pausing only to order coffee and replenish her supply of drinking water from the guesthouse café. When she finished, she lit a cigarette and read back over her translation. Her first instincts proved to be correct. Pla’s notes were transcripts of meetings with villagers in relation to an unnamed project in locations she referred to only by initials, the equivalent of ‘Village P’ or ‘Village LK’.
