He's obviously in a hurry, preferring to walk between the traffic rather than along the crowded pavement.
The girl's long, dark hair swishes round his back. Suddenly, she pops up her head, grins and then flops back, making no attempt to free herself. She seems little more than a teenager.
'It's OK, she's fine,' says the man, without slowing down. 'Another 200 yards and that's my hotel.' Hardly anyone one bothers to look - not much in Pattaya merits a second glance. This is the resort, a two-hour drive from Bangkok, where another middle-aged Brit loved to spend his holidays - Derrick Bird, the Cumbria killer.
Carried away: A Briton picks up a young Thai girl for the night in Pattaya
'
Thailand's capital of fun' is how the pocket guidebook to the town describes the place, which attracts a million visitors a year. A less kind, but more accurate, description would be one huge brothel.
The average visitor appears to be male, 40 or more, probably losing his hair, frequently fat, very likely British and there for one reason only - to buy sex with young Thai women.
Though there are many other nationalities there, the town is geared to the Brits. Pubs offer heart-clotting all-day breakfasts and giant portions of toad in the hole to set up holidaymakers for a long night cruising the streets crammed with massage parlours and bars, many with names too crude to mention.
There are two kinds of bar in Pattaya. Bird apparently preferred the quieter sort, the oddly named bar-beers, over the brasher go-go bars.
On his numerous holidays there, Bird drank in the Kennel Club, run by Dave Mackie, one of many expats who own bars in the resort. There's a Scotland flag on the wall and bar stools covered in tartan plastic.
Dave has throat cancer and was driving to the local hospital for radiotherapy, his car radio tuned to BBC World, when he heard about the shootings in Whitehaven. Dave has had most of his voice box removed and can only whisper, but he's firm in his answers.
'I never thought Derrick would be involved - he was just a normal bloke,' he says.
In Dave's bar there are two BGs - bar girls. The women who work in the bar-beers are older, less glam and wear more clothes than the go-go girls, but they're also selling sex.
Sex for sale: Cumbria killer Derrick Bird with On, his 32-year-old Thai bar girlfriend
It was in the Kennel Club three years ago that Derrick Bird met a bar girl called On, aged about 30. He apparently fell in love, sending her money when he returned to Britain, planning a future with her. But a few months ago, she dumped him by text, saying she'd found someone else.
On hasn't worked in the Kennel Club for a couple of years, but Dave remembers her fondly.
'She wasn't a hardened whore,' he says. 'She was fatter than most of the punters wanted, but she was quiet and sweet. Derrick was really taken with her.'
But On's tariff would have been the same as everyone else's. It starts with the bar fine. The man pays 300 baht - £6 - to the bar owner to have a drink with a girl and she earns about 60p for every drink he buys her. To make real money, she has to offer sex.
'Short time' in a room over the bar costs £20. To go back to the man's hotel for 'long time' will cost around £30. One long-time customer will earn half of what a girl would make in a whole month of ordinary bar work.
Bird came to Pattaya with a group of fellow taxi drivers - this is not somewhere to bring your wife or girlfriend. Down the road, in one of the glitzier gogo bars, Matt from Wolverhampton is with three of his mates, all of them in their 50s.
Prostitution is illegal in Thailand and bar owners pay to be left alone
On a raised platform in the centre of the bar, well out of groping range, the girls gyrate listlessly to a thumping music track.
They're wearing the standard uniform of a frilly thong, exposing their perfect, cellulite-free bottoms, see-through bra, stockings and high heels or PVC boots. They appear to be aged from 18 up to their early 20s and they're all long-limbed, slender and stunningly pretty.
Two of Matt's friends have paid the bar fine and have girls curled round them - delicate hands busy doing indelicate things. One of the men stands up and the girl leads him away to a room for 'short time'. Matt's not interested.
'I don't take these girls, I prefer the older ones in the bar-beers. They're usually about 30, so you can have a bit of a conversation.'
He started visiting Pattaya four years ago after his divorce. His daughter, who's in her 30s, even accompanied him once.
'She was worried she'd end up with a 23-year-old stepmother, but I told her there's no danger of that. I want to pick and choose, it's just holiday fun.'
The bar owner is also a Brit - Stan from the West Country. He's married to a Thai woman, but says 'the missus was never a working girl'.
He's proud of his bar: 'There's no hassle to buy a girl and they're all checked monthly, inside and out, if you know what I mean.'
He says his only problems come from 'sorting out the police'. Prostitution is illegal in Thailand and bar owners pay to be left alone - not that the authorities would close down the one industry around which this town revolves.
Geared for Brits: Pattaya's pubs sets up holidaymakers for a long night cruising the streets crammed with massage parlours and bars
There's even an official tourist police force, many of whom are long-term British residents, who patrol the streets around the sex bars.
Outside, two middle-aged men flag down one of the songtaew buses that cruise round the downtown area. They're heading back to their hotel with two girls.
One man is hugely fat, sweat oozing across his T-shirt where his man-boobs droop down onto his beer belly. The girls are tiny, beautiful and snuggle up adoringly.
'I'm exhausted. I'll need a holiday when I get back,' says the fat man in a Merseyside accent.
His pal laughs. 'And you'll never be able to tell anyone why - what happens in Pattaya has to stay censored for them back home.'
To his annoyance, his girl answers her mobile phone. It's obviously another punter.
'Hi honey,' she coos. 'No, I not work tonight, I sick.' Her friend giggles and the woman shushes her.
'No, you my number one man, I see you very soon, honey, I miss you.' She hangs up and cosies back up to her new number one man.
Like Derrick Bird, many of the men who come to Pattaya are lonely and delusional enough to mistake a transaction for a relationship.
The women may promise to stay off the game if the men continue to send them money when they get back to Britain, as Bird did. On apparently told him she needed money to do up her house so they could live there, happily ever after.
'I'd like to find a foreigner to be my partner so we can care for each other'
That's a line that could have come straight out of an extraordinary little book that's hard to find, but much sought after in Pattaya.
It's called Get Rich Quick English For Bar Girls. It's a Thai-English dictionary for seduction, sex and survival.
Si works in a bar-beer and the other girls recommended the book. She is exactly the kind of woman Derrick Bird seems to have been searching for.
Aged 25, sweet-faced, rounded and gentle, she says her marriage broke down a few months ago and her husband disappeared. Her two children, both under five, live with their grandparents back in her home in rural north-east Thailand, several hours' drive away.
Si thought she would get work as a waitress in Pattaya, but quickly realised she wouldn't earn enough to keep herself, let alone send money home for her children. She has to sell sex to farang - foreigners. And the little phrasebook has taught her how.
There's a list of names for relevant body parts - anatomical and swear versions. Other chapters have useful phrases such as: 'You're the man of my dreams'; 'I love you, not your money'; and 'I never slept with a foreigner before, I'm still a virgin'.
Then there's a whole section on how to ask for money, which includes: 'My father is in hospital'; 'My brother needs school books'; and 'I have really bad toothache and need to pay the dentist'.
Si says she tried working as a labourer and looked for jobs in one of Thailand's huge electronics factories, but only sex pays a living wage. She claims she's been with only three men since she came to Pattaya two months ago because she hates it so much.
'If most girls are honest, they hate it, too. I'd like to find a foreigner to be my partner so we can care for each other,' she says, as tears well up in her eyes. It's probably true, but unfortunately it sounds just like a line from her little book.
Dangerous: A go go dancer performs outside a bar in Pattaya, where there are few attractions-other than sex on offer
There are a few attractions-other than sex on offer in Pattaya. One of them is a shooting range a few miles out of town - another place Bird visited. Pick a pistol and you can fire at a life-sized cut-out of a man, then take the target home as a souvenir, which Bird did.
Or you can blast away with a pump-action shotgun - the kind of weapon Bird used on his murderous rampage.
You aim at metal squares - a paper target would be no good because one hit from a powerful cartridge would shred the target.
One of the unexpected things about Pattaya is that there's nothing threatening or violent about the atmosphere.
Sat at a crowded bar at 2am is Peter. He's a quietly spoken, neat man in his early 60s from Derby, whose wife died from cancer 11 years ago. When one of the BGs asks if he 'wants to play', he nods enthusiastically. As a regular visitor, he knows what will happen next.
From under the bar she pulls out a game of Connect 4 and the pair of them giggle away while she thrashes him at noughts and crosses.
He might pay for 'short time' a bit later, but many evenings he just sits and chats. He says his wife is irreplaceable and: 'Britain is going to the dogs - can you imagine if this was Derby on a Friday night?'
And in many ways he's right. In most British cities, the street would be full of girls brawling, sprawling and spewing. In Pattaya, they're smiling, decorous and attentive.
Clearly all sorts of men go there as sex tourists, not just social misfits. But Derrick Bird isn't Pattaya's only notorious visitor.
In the mid-Nineties, a young QE2 steward came ashore and discovered a lust for prostitutes. His name was Steve Wright - he's better known as the Suffolk Strangler, who murdered five women in Ipswich in 2006.
And Josef Fritzl also enjoyed himself there, while the daughter he repeatedly raped and the children she bore as a result remained locked in a cellar back home in Austria.
In one of the posh hotels at the nicer end of town, a fat man with skinny white legs comes down to breakfast with a Thai woman less than half his age.
'I'll say something in English and you teach me the Thai,' he says. She smiles in agreement.
He picks a phrase that's probably already in the Get Rich Quick handbook: 'Go to the bedroom.' ( dailymail.co.uk )
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