make it easy for foreigners to succeed in business, but Greig had bucked the trend and made a decent-sized fortune building up a chain of American-style restaurants. You know the sort of thing: racks of ribs, barbecued chickens smeared in hickory sauce, burgers covered in cheese and bacon with French fries the size of a labourer’s fingers. Not that they were called French fries in Knight’s restaurants. Ever since 9/11 they were Freedom fries in all his establishments and there wasn’t a bottle of French wine on the menu. Knight had served in the military-he’d been one of the first soldiers into Kuwait-before deciding that he’d rather take his chances in the Land of Smiles. He landed at Don Muang without being able to speak a word of Thai and a cheque from the US Government in his back pocket. He found a decent hotel, decent beer, but couldn’t find a decent burger despite looking the length and breadth of the city. He figured the only way he was going to get the sort of food he wanted was to cook it himself, so he set up a small burger joint in a soi close to Patpong. He never looked back and now he owns a huge house in one of the more heavily fortified areas of town and flies himself to Hong Kong to watch his racehorses run.
He didn’t tell me who he was when he phoned. He just said that he needed a private detective and asked me to meet him at Starbucks in Soi Thonglor. He said he’d be reading a copy of the Asian Wall Street Journal but his choice of reading material wasn’t important because he was the only farang in the place. I recognised him immediately from photographs in the glossy magazines they leave around in my dentist’s. Usually he was holding court at the opening of one of his restaurants, or attending a function to honour some visiting American dignitary or other, standing with his arm around a leggy Thai beauty queen or a gay DJ raising a glass of champagne to the camera, grinning with a set of teeth so white that they had to have been capped. He was well over six foot tall, greying at the temples with flint-grey eyes that looked at me inquisitively as I walked over to his table. He unwound himself from his chair. He was thin with a runner’s build, and as I knew for a fact that he ate in one of his own restaurants every night, he must have had the metabolism of a humming bird.
‘Greig Knight,’ he said. He nodded at the muscular Thai man who was sitting in the armchair opposite his. ‘This is Gung. My driver.’
Gung stood up and waied me with a cold smile. He didn’t look like a driver. He looked more like a bodyguard and from the way he held himself I figured he was former military or police.
Knight wound himself back into his armchair and waved for me to take Gung’s place. Gung stood slightly to the left of Knight, his arms crossed. He didn’t look like the sort of man you’d want to meet in a dark alley.
‘As you’ve probably guessed, it’s a woman,’ said Knight.
‘It usually is.’ I said.
‘Do you want a coffee?’
‘Black.’
‘You don’t want a cappuccino or a latte?’
‘I’m a traditional sort of guy,’ I said.’
‘Cappuccino is for wimps?’
‘My thoughts exactly.’
Knight grinned and nodded at Gung. ‘Mr Olson will have the same as me,’ he said. ‘Same as we like our heavyweight boxers.’
Gung frowned.
‘Strong and black,’ said Knight, and he tapped the table in front of him with a large ring on his left hand.
I chuckled but Gung’s frown just deepened. He nodded and walked over to the counter.
‘He’s been with me for ten years,’ said Knight. ‘Just so you know, I trust him completely.’
‘Former army?’
Knight nodded. ‘Captain in the Thahan Phran.’
I raised an eyebrow. The Thahan Phran are Thailand’s paramilitary border guards. Hard bastards. You wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of one, dark alley or not.
He steepled his fingers under his chin and leaned back in his chair. ‘I’ve got a live-in girlfriend. Ying.’ He smiled. ‘Beautiful girl. Sexy as hell.’
‘You’re a very lucky man,’ I said.
‘If I thought that, I wouldn’t be having this conversation,’ he said. He sighed. ‘I was in a Humvee, a few years back. Had a sergeant who thought he was Michael Schumacher. Took it as an insult to his manhood if he had to put his foot on the brake. We were heading into Kuwait City, full-pelt. I don’t know what it was, but I just had a feeling that something was wrong. I told the sergeant to stop. He moaned like hell but he pulled over. I went ahead on foot. Fifty feet in front of where we stopped was a landmine. A biggie.’
‘Wow.’
‘Wow is right. Humvees are damn big vehicles but the mine would have blown it to kingdom come. But if the hairs on the back of my neck hadn’t stood to attention, my army career would have come to an abrupt end there and then.’
‘And this Ying is making your hair stand to attention, is that it?’
Knight made a gun out of his right hand and faked shooting me in the face. ‘Got it in one. There’s nothing I can put my finger on, it’s just a feeling.’
He reached into his jacket pocket and took out a couple of photographs and handed them to me. I tried to look at them without drooling. She was beautiful all right. Shampoo commercial hair, toothpaste commercial teeth, moisturiser commercial skin, you get the picture. Drop dead lovely, but as Greig Knight was one of the richest farangs in Thailand, it was only to be expected. The only dogs he’d go near would be at the greyhound track in Macau.
‘I’ve written her Thai name, date of birth and ID card number on the back of one of the pictures,’ said Knight. ‘Look, I pay all her bills, I’ve bought her a BMW, a house for her parents in Surin, and I’ve given her a gold Amex card. She gets an allowance of 200,000 baht a month and I’ve lost count of the gold jewellery I’ve bought for her.’
I tried not to turn green with envy but he was giving her twice what I made in a good month. And I didn’t have a BMW. Or a gold Amex card. But then I didn’t have a body to die for and a face to kill for.
‘She’s as loving as she ever was,’ Knight continued. ‘The sex is great, there are no mysterious late-night phone calls, nothing I can put my finger on.’
‘Just a feeling?’
Knight nodded. ‘That’s right.’
I didn’t say anything to Knight but in my experience once a guy feels that his wife or girlfriend is up to no good, she probably is.
‘I’m flying to Hong Kong this weekend. I asked Ying to go with me but she said she was busy, she’s got a conference in Pattaya that she has to go to.’
‘A conference?’
‘She works for a pharmaceuticals company. Sales director. She doesn’t need to, I’ve told her that, but she wants her independence.’
I wanted to point out that she didn’t want her independence enough to turn down 200,000 baht a month or give him back the BMW, but I kept my mouth shut. Discretion being the better part of not pissing off the client and all that.
‘Anyway, I’m off to Hong Kong, she’ll be in Pattaya, so I want you to follow her. You can do that?’
I smiled confidently. ‘No problem. I’ll need her car registration number.’
‘It’s on the back of the photograph,’ said Knight. He pulled out a thick wallet and flicked his thumbnail across a stack of 1,000-baht bills, counted out thirty and handed them to me. ‘This is on account,’ he said. ‘But money’s no object, I just want to know the truth, one way or another.’
I pocketed the cash and nodded over at the bodyguard. ‘Is Gung going with you?’
‘No, he’s looking after my house.’ I’d seen Knight’s house in one of the glossy magazines. It was in an expensive area of Sukhumvit, a mix of old Thai teak and white minimalist chic, full of modern Asian art and ancient Buddha figures looted from Burma.
‘Get Gung to call me when she leaves the house, and if you can get any details of what hotel she’s staying at, so much the better.’
‘Whatever you need,’ said Knight. He scribbled on the back of an embossed business card and handed it to me. ‘My private number is on there. Gung’s too.’
I shook his hand and headed out. The money was burning a hole in my pocket, I had several bills that were
