1998. Koh Samui. Room No. 22 

‘In one hundred years from now somebody else will own my house, sit where I sit and own what survives of my possessions – if I’m lucky I might be remembered too.’  

Senior Nurse Sawa was routinely patrolling her wards and tired after a busy night. Walking alone through the dimly lit corridors, paying attention to nothing in particular, drifting off into deep random thoughts in-between checking on individual patients. 

‘I wonder who these people are? Desperate people. People hoping to last longer on this planet, irrespective of quality. People hoping to add a few more chapters to their book of life. 

God forbid if I’ve shortened any lives through a mistake…changed their book by shortening it. I guess in reality I’m adding chapters for these people… funny how we’re all born knowing the ending of our book, death, yet we have no idea what the book is going to be about or how long it’s going to last.’  

She shook her head at the thought and peered through another ward door with patients, who were either asleep or staring motionless at the ceiling. 

‘I wonder how many chapters in my book? It would be interesting if I knew when my last day will be. Bet I’d do things differently. I wonder what the last word will be that passes my lips? My last thoughts? Perhaps…’

Then she stopped suddenly.  

She instinctively felt something wasn’t right about the door behind her. She retraced her steps, still holding the coffee she had collected moments earlier, and stood outside Room Number 22.  Sawa stared at the door with its fireproof glass window, a door she knew well. She rubbed her shoulder and had a premonition that something in there was going to change her life – the beginning of an unforeseen chapter in her life.  

She knew that if she walked on, nothing would happen and that somebody else would ‘take the baton’ and have their life changed instead. She hesitated to wonder whether it be for better or for worse, should she intervene. Feeling the answer to be bad, like a moth to a flame, she inexplicably turned her body to face the door. She brought her hand up to her face to shield the outside glare and peered through the ‘forbidden’ window.  

What Sawa saw startled her, two unconscious people lying motionless in separate beds. What Sawa didn’t understand was how on earth they got there, as only minutes before, on her way to get the coffee, she’d seen no one in the room. Stranger still, the two people now in occupation looked as if they had been there for quite a while. She broke off her stare and questioned her judgement about what had just happened and decided to seek counsel from other staff before going in. Maybe they would know something about these people.  

Nurse Sawa was stationed at Nathon Hospital, Koh Samui, which stood in isolation behind a deserted pristine white sandy beach, with its only means of access being via a narrow road through the dense jungle that lay behind.  At the end of the jungle road sat an ancient wooden village where children played barefoot in the heat outside. 

Further down the road towards Chaweng the jungle thinned out and was replaced by an old palm tree plantation which stopped at the tourist port of Nathon. Here a freelance Detective called Gunn worked from a police station located at its centre .  

The events unfolding at the nearby hospital were also about to draw Gunn in, and inadvertently confirm his intricate understanding of the powers of coincidence, which he realised to be perpetual. He was never surprised by what life threw at him and was ready for any new directions to be forced upon him by unrelated events that didn’t adhere to the boundaries of time and distance.