A Foreign Country

38

The cab driver dropped Kell at a three-star hotel en route to the Gare Saint-Charles. He bid the Americans goodbye, handed a twenty-euro note to Harry, waved away Penny’s objections that he was paying ‘way too much’, then stood on the pavement with his bags while taking a non-existent call on his mobile. Turning to face the oncoming traffic, Kell looked carefully for vehicles pulling over, of possible watchers on foot or bike, for furtive movements of any kind, all the time reciting some favourite lines from Yeats into the receiver to give the impression of an ongoing conversation. When he was satisfied that there was no apparent threat, he walked into the hotel, booked himself a bed for the night, rode the lift to the third floor and unpacked his bags in a room that smelled of detergent and stale cigarettes.

Claire’s message still scratched at him like the bite on Harry’s arm, a calculated insult to his pride, to his fidelity. Richard Quinn, the hedge fund bachelor with two ex-wives and three sons at St Paul’s, was the primary weapon in Claire’s extra-marital armoury, a background threat to whom she would turn whenever Kell looked like leaving her on a permanent basis. Richard knew of Kell’s background in MI6 and plainly viewed it as an affront to his ego, as though Her Majesty had made a grave error of judgement in failing to recruit him into the Secret Service some thirty years earlier. Now fifty-five and rich beyond imagination, he regularly tried to lure the newly single Claire to five-star hotels in Provence and Bordeaux, whenever his so-called ‘professional interest in wine’ took him overseas. In an unguarded moment, returning from one such trip to Alsace, Claire had begged Kell for forgiveness and confessed that she found Quinn ‘boring’.

‘Then why the hell do you fuck him?’ Kell had shouted, to which his estranged wife, so shattered by unhappiness, had replied: ‘Because he is there for me. Because he has a family.’ Kell could summon no adequate response. The logic of her grievances was so chopped, her despair so wretched and apparently incurable, that he had simply run out of ways to console her. Quinn could no more give her a child than any of the other men she had turned to in her desperate promiscuity; the infertility was hers, not his. Kell loved her more deeply than perhaps he had ever said, but had reached the conclusion that their only viable future lay apart. The thought of such a failure, the thought of divorcing Claire, was enervating.

His mobile was ringing. Only a handful of people had the number.

‘Stephen?’

The accent was unmistakable.

‘Madeleine. How nice to hear your voice.’

‘Of course!’ It sounded as though she was calling from a residential street. Kell heard the wasp buzz of a passing moped, the larger echo of the city. ‘So you would like to meet for dinner, as we talked about? Are you free? I can take you to have la bouillabaisse.’

‘Sounds great. I’d love to. I’ve just checked into a hotel …’

‘… Oh, which one? Where are you?’

Kell told her, because he had no choice in the matter. Luc and his pals would now have a fix on his position and would surely lose no opportunity in taking another crack at Kell’s laptop. Though he was certain that the computer could not incriminate him, he would have to carry it with him and remove anything sensitive from his room whenever he left the building.

‘I’ve got no idea what street it’s on,’ he said. ‘A cab dropped me at the edge of the Arab quarter, about half a mile from the station …’

‘Never mind,’ Madeleine interrupted. ‘I can find it. I will come to pick you up at seven o’clock and we can walk to Chez Michel. It’s on the other side of the port. Not far.’

‘Seven o’clock,’ Kell confirmed.

That gave him five hours. After eating lunch in a café two blocks from the hotel, Kell returned to his room and used the telephone beside his bed to ring the backstop number for Uniacke’s family, a line that existed solely as an answering service for the benefit of snooping spooks. Kell heard the pre-recorded voice of a female colleague at SIS masquerading as Uniacke’s wife.

Hello. You’ve reached Stephen and Caroline Uniacke. We’re not at home at the moment, but if you’d like to leave a message for us, or for Bella and Dan, please speak after the beep.

Kell did what he had to do.

Hi, sweetheart, it’s me. Are you there? Pick up if you are. [An appropriate pause] OK. I just got off the boat and wanted to see how you are. I’m going to stay in Marseille tonight, then perhaps stop off in Paris on the way home. There’s a client I want to see, but he doesn’t know whether he’s going to be in town. I might get a flight back to London tomorrow and be home for supper or I might be in Paris for a couple of days. Anyway, I’ll let you know. Beautiful weather here, going for bouillabaisse tonight. Call my mobile if you get the chance or try the hotel. Cheaper that way. It’s the Montand. I’m in room 316.

He left the number of the hotel, blew a kiss to his phantom wife, told her that he loved her and that he missed ‘Bella and Dan’, then hung up and changed into a fresh shirt.

Five minutes later, carrying his laptop and mobile phones in a shoulder bag, Kell was en route to La Cité Radieuse, a Marseille landmark for architecture buffs, and the perfect place for the auto-didact in him to kill a couple of hours before meeting Madeleine at seven. The twenty-something cab driver he flagged down on Rue de la Republique was new in town and had never heard of Le Corbusier, so Kell put him in the picture.

‘Every tower block in the world, every thirty-storey high-rise built to house the urban working class in the last sixty years, looks like it does because of the Cité Radieuse.’

‘It’s true?’ The driver was looking at Kell in his rear-view mirror, eyes narrowed against the sun. It was hard to tell if he was interested or just being polite.

‘It’s true. From Sheffield to Sao Paulo, if you grew up on the tenth floor of a concrete housing scheme, Le Corbusier put you there.’

‘I grew up outside Lyon,’ said the driver. ‘My father owns a shop,’ which was where the more enlightened section of their conversation ended. Thereafter he was intent only on talking about football, pointing out the Stade Velodrome on Boulevard Michelet, home to Olympique de Marseille, and complaining that Karim Benzema, once the darling of Lyon’s supporters, had ‘whored himself to Real Madrid’. Moments later the driver had dropped Kell at the entrance to the Cité Radieuse.

‘This is it?’ he said, peering up at the building with evident suspicion. ‘Looks like every other fucking tower in Marseille.’

‘Exactly,’ Kell replied. Two hundred metres back along the road, two men on mopeds had pulled over on Boulevard Michelet. Kell was certain that he had seen one of the drivers, wearing a blue crash helmet, tailing the cab on Place Castellane. The two mopeds disappeared out of sight down a side street and Kell paid the driver.

‘Good to talk to you,’ he said.

The Cité Radieuse was situated in a small, poorly maintained municipal garden, set back from Boulevard Michelet behind a screen of trees. Kell found the entrance and was soon in the third-floor restaurant eating a sandwich and drinking a cup of coffee. This section of the building operated both as an upmarket boutique hotel and as an area in which visitors to the complex could look at examples of Le Corbusier’s work. The rest of Cité Radieuse was still a fully functioning apartment building, complete with a rooftop kindergarten and a row of shops. Kell, breaking a minor law of trespass, took an interior staircase to one of the upper storeys so that he could snoop around without feeling like a tourist.

This was a mistake. Emerging into a long, black-red corridor, dark as a throat, he found himself entirely alone, with little sound except the occasional murmur of a television or radio in one of the apartments. Halfway down the corridor, which was blocked off at the far end, Kell heard a noise behind him and turned to see two young Arab men in tracksuits moving towards him. He thought immediately of the moped drivers. One of them, brandishing a metal pole said, in English: ‘Hello, mister, can we help you?’ but Kell was under no illusion that they were residents. La Cité Radieuse was too affluent for a couple of migrant kids in tracksuits to be renting an apartment.

‘I don’t think so,’ he said, replying in French but already setting his shoulder bag on the ground so that he could move and react more freely. ‘I’m just looking around. Big fan of Corbusier.’

‘What have you got with you?’ said the older of the two men, nodding at Kell’s bag. Kell saw the glint of a knife in his left hand, the blade briefly catching the dull yellow glow of a light in the doorway of an apartment.

‘Why?’ he replied. ‘What’s on your mind?’

Nothing more was said. They came for him. Kell picked up the bag and threw it very quickly across the floor, hard enough that the man with the knife was briefly knocked off balance. Rather than turn to retaliate, however, the man moved several paces back down the corridor and picked up the bag, leaving his friend to fight alone. The second Arab was older, but shorter and more agile than the first. Kell felt the numb slowness of his middle-aged bones as he wheeled to confront him. There was noise now, Kell shouting loudly in French to alert the residents, projecting strength, watching the metal bar and looking constantly for the flash of a second blade. He was effectively trapped at the end of the corridor, with nowhere to turn, no space in which to run. In front of him, about ten metres down the corridor, silhouetted by a distant whitewashed wall reflecting outdoor light, the younger man shouted out: ‘OK, I’ve got it,’ just as his accomplice moved in to strike. Rather than use it as a weapon, he hurled the bar, but Kell had time to duck as it whistled past him, clanging into a door at the back of the corridor. The Arab came at him now, throwing a punch that Kell took in the ribs. He was able to catch his attacker in his momentum, to grab at him. They were thrown to the ground and Kell, drawing on some vague and distant memory of a Fort Monckton fight class, pressed a finger into the man’s left eye and drove it deep into the socket.

‘Let’s go!’ his accomplice shouted. Kell saw the younger man at the edge of his vision, as he drove his hand up into his attacker’s throat, pushing his neck backwards. At the same time, a knee thumped into his groin, slowly and almost without force, but pain was soon shunting into Kell’s gut and spine so that he groaned and swore, again trying to gain a hold on the Arab’s neck. His assailant somehow freed himself, days-old sweat like a taste in Kell’s mouth, and launched a kick directly into his face. Kell brought his arms up around his head, trying to get to his feet, but the younger man had joined them and was standing above him, swearing triumphantly in high-pitched Marseille Arabic and landing heavy kicks repeatedly into Kell’s arms and legs. He was terrified that he would now use the knife.

Just then, a commotion behind them, a door opening in the black-red corridor. There was a voice in the dark.

‘What the fuck is going on?’ a woman shouted in French and the two assailants ran, scooping up the shoulder bag and taking it with them, trainers squeaking on the linoleum. Kell swore after them, defeated and lying on the ground. They had the laptop, the camera, the Marquand mobile, the Uniacke passport. They had everything.

The woman came towards him.

‘Jesus,’ she said. ‘Are you all right?’