A Foreign Country

40

That Luc had bothered to shave off his beard told Kell everything he needed to know. Malot’s companion from the boat intended to interview him while impersonating a police officer and did not want to run the small risk that Kell would recognize him. He said: ‘Bonjour’ in an upbeat fashion, passed the shoulder bag to Laurent, and introduced himself as ‘Benedict Voltaire’, a pseudonym as preposterous as any Kell had ever encountered.

‘So what happened here please?’ he asked in English, settling into a chair that Alain had vacated, as though making way for a visiting dignitary. Kell noted the extra stripe on Luc’s shoulder, outranking his two putative colleagues. He was either a senior police official or, more likely, a French Intelligence officer who had persuaded Laurent and Alain to let him masquerade as a cop.

‘Monsieur Uniacke is a British national. He was visiting La Cité Radieuse when he was attacked by two Arab youths. They took his bag, but it looks like he got lucky.’

‘It does look like that, yes,’ Luc replied, this time in French. He had the cracked, gravelly voice of a heavy smoker and was studying Kell’s face intently, as though delaying the inevitable moment when he would expose him as a liar. Laurent had unzipped the bag.

‘Would you like to check that nothing is missing?’

He passed the bag across the desk and Kell quickly began to remove the contents and to place them, one by one, amid the paperwork and mugs in front of him. The laptop was the first item to emerge, not damaged in any way. Next came the camera, then the Marquand mobile, which was still switched on. He placed it beside his London phone on the table. The Scramble for Africa was at the bottom of the bag, wedged in next to a tourist map of Marseille. Finally, from a zip-up interior pocket, he retrieved the Uniacke wallet.

‘Two cell phones?’ said Luc, a rising note of suspicion in his voice. Kell knew that he was in a scrap potentially far more dangerous than his earlier fight in the corridor. The SIM would have been checked and traced and he prayed that Marquand had erased Uniacke’s trail through Nice. It was only by sheer luck that Kell’s London phone had not been stolen; had Luc been given access to that, it would have been game over.

‘That’s right,’ he said, picking up the Marquand phone and inspecting it. ‘I have one for work, one for personal stuff.’

There was an unread text message on the screen and he opened it. It was from Marquand himself:

You were right. Everyone safely back in town. See you next week.

‘Personal stuff,’ Luc repeated, in English, as though Kell had employed a euphemism. The smell of a recently extinguished cigarette was on his breath.

‘This is fantastic,’ Kell said, trying to ignore Luc’s cynicism by channelling the innocent relief and enthusiasm of Stephen Uniacke. ‘Everything seems to be here. My laptop, my camera …’ He checked the wallet next, flicking through the books of stamps, the membership of Kew, the various Uniacke credit and debit cards. Inevitably, more than four hundred euros had been removed. ‘Fuck, they took all my fucking money,’ he said. ‘Excuse my language.’

Laurent smiled. ‘No problem.’ He looked quickly at Luc, as though tacitly asking permission to speak. ‘You have insurance, yes?’

‘Of course.’

‘How much is missing?’ Luc asked. ‘How much did they take?’

‘I think about four hundred euros. I took five hundred out of an ATM this morning but spent some …’

‘Put a thousand on the form,’ Luc said grandly, nodding towards Laurent. It was a smart, if obvious psychological move.

‘I’m not sure I approve of that,’ Kell replied, but the smile on his face belied any ethical reservations he might have possessed. He turned the smile into a grateful nod of the head, saying: ‘Thank you’ to Luc with as much sincerity as he could muster. To bolster his image as a family man, he then laid out the frayed photographs of ‘Bella’ and ‘Dan’, his phantom son and phantom daughter, and said: ‘These are the most valuable things in my wallet. I’m just glad I didn’t lose those.’

‘Of course,’ Laurent replied quickly, with what sounded like genuine sincerity, and even Luc seemed moved by Kell’s devotion to his family.

‘What about the computer?’ he asked. ‘Is it damaged in any way?’

This was the most vulnerable moment in the interview, the point at which the DGSE could easily catch him out. They had stolen Kell’s bag in order to examine the laptop. He was convinced of that. He was also convinced that they would not have returned the computer to him unless they had failed to crack the encryption. Even had they done so, it was unlikely that French tech-ops would have found anything incriminating. In the hotel, Kell had run an SIS-installed software programme that erased the user’s digital footprints, replacing them with a series of benign cookies and URLs; the DGSE would have found only the emails and search engine history of Stephen Uniacke, marketing consultant and family man, reader of the Daily Mail and occasional gambler with Paddy Power. The Uniacke legend was so watertight it even had an account with Amazon.

‘Is it working?’ Luc asked, rising to his feet after Kell had flipped the lid and powered it up. It was obvious that he was coming round the desk in order to watch Kell typing in the password. Kell had no choice but to do so without complaint, tapping in the ten-digit code right under Luc’s direct and unembarrassed gaze.

‘Why do you have a password, if I may ask?’

‘I work as a consultant,’ Kell replied, again channelling his alter-ego’s guileless integrity. ‘We have a lot of high-net-worth clients who wouldn’t want information about their businesses falling into the wrong hands.’ He remembered the moments he had spent staring at the laptop screen in his cabin, under the possible surveillance of a DGSE camera, and found a way of explaining it: ‘Trouble is, I always forget the code because it’s so bloody long.’

‘Of course,’ said Luc, who hadn’t moved an inch.

‘Is there something you wanted to see?’ Kell asked, looking back over his shoulder with what he hoped was the mild suggestion that Benedict Voltaire of the Marseille constabulary was beginning to encroach on his privacy. ‘Everything seems to be working fine.’

This was enough to deter him. Reaching up to stroke the beard that was no longer there, Luc walked towards a double-glazed window at the southern end of the room and looked out over the back of the building. He tapped a couple of fingers on the glass and Kell wondered how he would make his next move. Surely the DGSE was now convinced of his innocence? Surely he had nothing to link him to Amelia or Malot?

‘What were you doing in Marseille, Mr Uniacke?’

Kell’s instinct was to insist that he had already answered such questions many times since the attack, but it was vital not to rise to Luc’s provocations.

‘I was in Tunisia on holiday. I came over on the ferry last night.’

Luc turned to face him. ‘And was there anybody on the ferry who may have antagonized you? Who may have had a reason to follow you in Marseille and to attack you?’

It was not the line of enquiry that Kell had expected. Where was Luc going with this?

‘I don’t think so. I talked to a couple of people in the bar, to some others in the queue while we were waiting to disembark. Otherwise, nobody. I was mainly reading in my cabin.’

‘No arguments? No problems on the boat?’

Kell shook his head. ‘None.’ It was almost too easy. ‘No arguments,’ he said, a sudden wince of pain in his knee.

In a room nearby, a man suddenly raised his voice in violent anger, as though enraged by a wild injustice. The building then became quiet again.

‘You said to my colleague that you are on your way to Paris?’

This was a slip. Kell had told Laurent of his plan to leave Marseille before Luc had arrived. Clearly he had been eavesdropping on the formal police interview.

‘Yes. I have a client in Paris who may be in town over the next few days. I was going to go up there to meet him. If he doesn’t show up, I’ll probably just go home.’

‘To Reading?’

‘To Reading via London, yes.’

Kell was suddenly tired of the second-rate interrogation, of Luc’s supercilious machismo. It was obvious that they had nothing on him. He longed to be free of the now-stifling room, of a long afternoon of violence and bureaucracy. He wanted to find Malot.

‘So I wish you good luck, Mr Uniacke,’ Luc said, apparently arriving at the same conclusion. ‘I am sorry for the trouble we have put you through. Truly.’ There was a strange moment here, a look of intense hidden meaning directed towards him that Kell could not untangle. ‘My colleague, Laurent, will take you back to your hotel. Thank you for your time. I do trust you will enjoy the rest of your visit to France.’