Dead and Kicking by Geoffrey McGeachin Read Free Book Online Page A

words ‘hotel’ and ‘taxi’ several times and one of the cops flagged down a bright yellow Vina cab, which was fine by me as I was well over the romance of the cyclo for the time being.
    Both police officers saluted me as I closed the door. I smiled and waved and if I hadn’t been so well brought up I would have dropped my trousers right then and there to let the chilled air inside the taxi swirl around my aching groin.

ELEVEN
    A note from Jack was waiting for me at the hotel reception desk when I collected the key for room 427. He and VT had checked out right after lunch and were heading north in the Huey. Jack had tracked down another place with connections to the Tranh fish-farming enterprise somewhere outside Hanoi, and he wanted to look into it. He finished by saying he’d keep in touch.
    When I travel I’ve got a bit of a reputation for keeping a rather messy hotel room, but even by my standards room 427 was a real pigsty. Ransacked is such an evocative word, and if my room was anything it was well and truly ransacked. Drawers had been opened and their meagre contents dumped on the floor, the mattress had been pulled away from the bed and my portable printer was broken into bits. A quick hunt around revealed that my laptop was missing. Also missing, and obviously jimmied away from the wall, was the room’s small electronic safe.
    I’d been in Saigon for eight weeks, staying in this hotel the whole time, and suddenly tonight I get mugged and robbed and my room gets tossed. I was mulling over the implications of this with the assistance of my minibar and the wonderful people from the Glenfiddich distillery, when there was knock on the door. A glance through the peephole revealed it was the cops, or one cop in particular.
    ‘Miss Hoang, this is most unexpected.’
    ‘Mr Murdoch,’ she said, ‘according to a police report, a man named Alby Murdoch was attacked and robbed earlier this evening. I doubt that our city is playing host to two men with that name so I decided to see if you were okay.’
    She was wearing a sky-blue
ao dai
embroidered with a delicate floral pattern over white trousers. It was just as stunning as her last outfit, maybe more so, and I still couldn’t spot any concealed firearms.
    ‘May I come in?’ she asked.
    I opened the door wide. ‘The place is a bit of a mess, I’m afraid. I was going to call housekeeping, but I didn’t want to spoil someone else’s evening as well.’
    Nhu ran a copper’s well-practised eye over the place.
    ‘The door to the room was not forced?’
    I shook my head.
    ‘The wall safe is gone?’ she asked.
    I nodded.
    ‘Were you keeping anything of value inside?’
    ‘Inside a hotel wall safe?’ I said.
    She nodded. ‘Most wise.’
    I closed the door. There were a couple of light cotton hotel robes in the open closet and she handed me one.
    ‘Perhaps you should take a long hot shower to relax your muscles. It will make you feel better. I will phone in a report so that you can claim for any valuables on your insurance.’
    I really didn’t have anything to claim for, apart from my laptop and printer, as everything else had been packed up and collected for shipping back to Australia. I decided to follow Nhu’s suggestion about the hot shower, and she was right. I let the water run over me for a good fifteen minutes and it did make me feel better.
    After towelling off and running a brush through my hair, I pulled on the bathrobe and walked back into my room. Nhu had used the time to neatly remove all evidence of the break-in. I’m sure the people from
CSI Miami
or New York or Broken Spoke, Wyoming, wouldn’t approve, but this was Saigon and it was her city. The mattress was back in place, the bed made up, the drawers returned to their appropriate positions and my few clothes were hanging neatly in the closet. As was Nhu’s
ao dai
.
    The lights in the room had been dimmed and she was waiting for me on the bed. Besides baguettes it looked like the