Research

Chapter 1

After publishing more than one hundred books you might be forgiven for thinking I’d know how to begin a story, but with this one I’m not at all sure how or where. I’ve always believed that a bad beginning makes a bad ending. You know me, Don: I like to start with a title and a great first line — something that really arrests you. I think my favourite first line in all literature must be ‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.’ Christ, I wish I could write something as simple but as good as that.

I suppose I could start from the moment you and I last saw each other, old sport, in the Aston on the French autoroute, when I told you that I was shutting down the atelier; but I could as easily start a few weeks after that, from the moment when I arrived in Geneva for the first time, to begin writing The Geneva Convention — which was before Orla’s murder — because it seems to me now that a number of strange things happened to me here in Switzerland that could be easily connected with her death. Then again if this was film noir I’d probably begin the story in medias res, as Horace has it — with the night of her death. You know? The poor husband comes back home in the wee small hours to find his wife dead. Now that’s what I call a cold opening. Except that I didn’t find her dead when I came home. Not exactly. When I came home I thought Orla was asleep. She was in bed and it was dark after all; and I had good reason not to want to wake her. The plain fact of the matter is that when I got back into bed beside her she was more than likely already shot. And if I hardly thought it unusual she didn’t stir when I climbed into bed beside her that’s because she never did, on account of the fact that she took sleeping pills: Halcion. When Orla took Halcion there was very little that could wake her for several hours. Only who would believe that? Certainly not the police. That’s what happened, however, and frankly if I’d been going to kill my wife I’d hardly have done it in a way that left me looking as guilty as Crippen — I’d have pushed her out of a high window, or something; I mean, I’m a thriller writer so it’s second nature to me to analyse the circumstances of the crime and offer a critique of her homicide, right? But you can’t tell the cops that. Suggesting an alternative and better way of killing your own wife — moreover one you stood a better chance of getting away with — doesn’t exactly encourage them to think you’re innocent. Cops are the purest form of the bourgeoisie, for whom fiction is the frivolous privilege of aristocracy, or people who play at being aristocrats, like writers. In their eyes an allegiance to hard facts is what distinguishes honest, ordinary folk.

I don’t know what the Monty cops have told you about what happened in the hours leading up to Orla’s murder. On a Friday night we often went to Joël Robuchon at the Hôtel Métropole on Avenue de la Madone. I don’t know why we went there so often. Robuchon is ridiculously expensive but the reason I hated going there with Orla was not because of the food — which is excellent — but because there is something slightly corrupt about the atmosphere. It always made me feel like one of the old roués who go there with their very much younger mistresses and rentals like characters from the pages of Nana; I felt like some old fool in love — Comte Muffat or La Faloise. Also, they give you a delicious lemon cake when you leave, which Orla always insisted on taking although it was never her who ate it, but me, who could least afford to consume the extra calories. But Orla truly loved the place. She enjoyed dressing up and people-watching, which is a serious sport at Joël Robuchon. And since she seldom drank anything it was also an excuse for Orla to get behind the wheel of her Ferrari. Frankly we could have walked there in about the same time it took to drive there. People watch the Monaco Grand Prix and imagine the place is some kind of motoring Valhalla; but driving in Monaco is a bit like shifting your car around one enormous parking lot.

On the telly I saw that Orla’s local fans have been leaving flowers and photographs to her memory in front of the entrance to the Odéon Tower, Diana-style. I don’t know why I’m surprised about that. Orla was one of the few people I ever met who actually liked living in Monaco. After we moved there she developed a thing for Grace Kelly. Orla always believed she bore a strong resemblance to her. She was just as bad a driver. And of course she was in that disastrous remake of Rear Window, which only contributed to her stupid little conceit. There were certainly other people in Monaco who commented on the resemblance and perhaps that’s why she took the place to heart. On the walls of her dressing-room at the Tour Odéon she had hung some framed movie posters of Grace Kelly in High Society and To Catch a Thief, although, in retrospect, Dial M for Murder might have been more appropriate. And I suppose that in the eyes of the public I’m just as much of a cad now as Ray Milland was in that movie. More so, if the truth was known.

Anyway, she really didn’t like the idea of us moving back to London — not one bit — and when we were in the restaurant we argued about it. Orla was dead against the idea. As you know she had no great love for the English and was even less enthusiastic about the weather, not to mention the tax situation. People seem to have forgotten that Orla was quite a wealthy woman in her own right. She made a ton of money from that stage musical about WikiLeaks that she invested in: WikiBeats.

Anyway, the argument became quite loud and at one point I grabbed her by the ear and twisted it, which she didn’t take kindly to and kicked me hard on the shin. I let out quite a yelp because Orla could always give as good as anything she got. She called me an arrogant cunt and I called her a fucking cow and then the maître d’ came and asked us to keep our voices down. No doubt the cops have already told you about that. There’s nothing like a lover’s tiff in public to provide a convenient background for a murder. It’s pure Agatha Christie. You have an argument, perhaps a face is slapped, some harsh things get said, very probably you meant some of them and therefore you must have killed her. The way the cops are you’d think a bit of a barney between husband and wife was one of Aristotle’s four fucking causes.

Actually, it was a fairly wide-ranging sort of argument, and not just about the move back to Blighty. I’d found out that Orla was giving money to all sorts of people and institutions I didn’t much care for. UNESCO was something we were both passionate about and we were actively involved in events like World Book Day and International Literacy Day. But I’m rather less keen on the RSPCA, the Labour Party, Julian Assange and Sinn Féin. Probably it was just her way of making me pay more attention to her, which I admit sometimes I didn’t do enough of; quite the opposite. But I’m not telling you this to excuse what I’m going to tell you, old sport, merely to illustrate that my relationship with Orla was occasionally tempestuous. I was capable of driving her mad; she was capable of irritating the hell out of me, but not enough to kill her. Jesus, no. As George Clooney says in From Dusk to Dawn, ‘I may be a bastard but I’m not a fucking bastard.’

As we were leaving the restaurant I made some tasteless remark about Irish republicans which she greeted with silence. That wouldn’t have been so bad, but Orla can make a silence as cold and loud as a blast of air conditioning. Then, outside the hotel entrance, as we were waiting for the valet to bring us the car, Orla hit me with the Robuchon carrier bag containing the lemon cake. Hard enough to knock me off balance. I expect the doorman saw this and then me trying to laugh it off. Now a Ferrari is not a good car to drive when you’re angry — especially when it’s almost new — so I thought it best to apologize and, to my surprise, she started to cry, accepted my apology, told me she was sorry for hitting me with the cake, and then handed me the car keys. I don’t expect anyone saw us make up in the car.

When we were back home I apologized again, for good measure, and I really thought everything between us was all right and that everything had blown over. We even had a good laugh about the incident and reflected it was fortunate that the Daily Mail weren’t there to see what happened. I made a joke about it being lucky it was a Robuchon lemon cake and not one cooked by her mother — who’s the world’s worst baker — which Orla thought was very funny. Then we kissed and made up again — I swear that’s exactly what happened, although in view of what now took place you could be forgiven for thinking our making up was hardly sincere on my part.

I went into my study and checked my emails and read a bit while Orla had a bath. Then she took the sleeping pill so I knew she would be soundly asleep for several hours. Which left me with ample opportunity to do what I often did when she took Halcion, which was to go out again; at least out of our apartment — which, as you may remember, is the sky duplex on the forty-third floor of the Tour Odéon — and down to an apartment on the twenty-ninth which is occupied — for the time being — by a friend of mine, a girl called Colette Laurent.

At least it was; Colette Laurent seems to have disappeared.

Until the night of Orla’s death I’d been seeing her for a while. Colette was originally set up in the Tour Odéon by a Russian oligarch called Lev who abandoned her, although it’s hard to imagine why, because girls don’t come looking any more spectacular than Colette Laurent. I used to see her in the Odéon’s gymnasium and it was lust at first sight on my part. One day we got talking. She’s a French-Algerian who looks a bit like Isabelle Adjani. Tall, shapely — I mean she had tits to die for, real ones — and as fit as a butcher’s dog. After we got to know each other a little better I agreed to offer her some help with her English and at first that’s all that happened. Everything was above board between us for almost a month — I mean it was like the matchmaker was keeping her beady eye on us; but I’m only human and one thing led to another and before very long we were sleeping together at least once or twice a week. At first it was only on the boat, but one day Orla showed up and almost caught us at it; after that I only saw Colette at her Russian’s apartment in the Tour or occasionally in Paris: she’d fly up for the weekend to the house in Neuilly-sur-Seine, when there was no one working there. It was an arrangement that suited us both because her job left her with little opportunity or energy for a social life. Colette was a yoga teacher and a masseuse and in Monaco that can keep you very busy; it’s possible to make at least a thousand euros a day. But I’d also give her a bit of money now and then, just to tide her over when the poor thing had to miss a client to see me.

On what turned out to be my last night in Monaco there was nothing that seemed at all unusual. At about 11.30 when I was satisfied Orla was genuinely asleep — she snored — I swallowed a tablet of Cialis and armed with nothing more than a cold bottle of Dom I took the stairs down to the twenty-ninth floor, which is what I always did — to avoid nosy-parker neighbours and the CCTV. No one ever takes the stairs in our building. Most of the other residents would need a defibrillator if they climbed into their beds a bit too quickly. But not as quickly as I did when I saw Colette. She was wearing a baby-doll nightdress that was as light as a summer morning mist and I spent a very happy thirty minutes mapping every inch of her fabulous body. And before you say anything, old sport, yes, I know, it was a dreadfully deceitful and underhand thing to do, like something from the pages of the Decameron. Peronella, is it, who tells her husband how to clean a large wine jar that he’s inside while she’s being fucked from behind by her lover? That’s what it was like. I really do feel ashamed of myself; and yet I know I’d probably do it again if I ever got the chance. That’s the funny thing about being a bloke; to some extent we’re ruled by our pricks. I’ve tried to understand it but I’m afraid I still haven’t found a better description of male-pattern sexuality than what John Lewis says in That Uncertain Feeling by Kingsley Amis when he asks himself why he likes women’s breasts. ‘I was clear on why I liked them, thanks, but why did I like them so much?’ That’s it, in a nutshell. We know we shouldn’t fuck around but we do and then end up rather pathetically feeling ashamed of what we’ve done and hoping for the best. You might just as well call the male libido Russia and say that it’s a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.

At about two o’clock I went back upstairs to my own apartment. Again, nothing seemed unusual. No, that’s not quite true. I stepped in some dog shit; the dogs — who slept in Orla’s dressing room — were always crapping in the apartment and I spent the next ten minutes tracking it down and cleaning it off the fucking carpet before I went back into the bedroom. As usual our bedroom was like a fridge so I put on a T-shirt and some pyjama bottoms, slipped into bed and went straight to sleep. I awoke at about 7.30, got up, made myself a cup of tea and cleaned some more dog shit off the carpet. I bet the cops loved that. Traces of fucking bleach all over the place as if I’d tried to clean away something incriminating. Anyway, at that stage, as far as I was aware, Orla was still asleep. Again, there was nothing unusual about that. After she’d taken a sleeping pill it would have been quite usual for her to have slept through until about eleven. I had a shower and went into my study to work, like I always did. I emerged at around two and was a little surprised to find Orla wasn’t around. It simply didn’t occur to me that she was lying dead in our bed. I assumed she must have gone out somewhere. And besides, I couldn’t hear the dogs. If that sounds at all unlikely you have to remember that this is an apartment that’s twelve hundred square metres, which is about five tennis courts.

I made a bite of lunch, watched a bit of TV and then went back into my study for a couple of hours. At around five I came out again and still finding no sign of Orla I called her mobile to find out where she was, and when I heard it ringing in her dressing room I realized something was very wrong, especially when I came across the bodies of her pet dogs. It was only now that I went into the bedroom and found her lying just as I had left her earlier that day, facing the curtains and away from my side of the bed. I drew the curtains and saw that she’d been shot at close range, as if she’d been executed. My own gun — a twenty-two calibre Walther — was lying on the floor. Orla’s skin was cold to the touch and it was clear she’d been dead for several hours.

For a while I just sat there on the floor beside her body and wept like a baby. I was horrified. It’s a sight that will stay with me for as long as I live. Every time I close my eyes I can see her beautiful face and the bullet hole in the centre of her forehead, like a dreadful caste mark. I hope to God it never happens to you that you see something like that. The only consolation I have is that I’m certain Orla was asleep when it happened and that she could have experienced neither fear nor pain. After a while I took off my shirt and covered her beautiful face with it, almost as if I wanted to preserve her dignity and give Orla some privacy from those who were going to come into our home now and look at her. Crazy I know. After all the crime scenes I’ve described in my books you’d think I’d know exactly what to do. But in truth I wasn’t thinking straight at all. The cliché ‘I was beside myself’ describes me very well; it was like I was hardly functioning in my own skin. My hands and my feet hardly seemed to belong to me at all. I remember pouring myself a stiff drink and going out onto the balcony to get some fresh air before I called the police. For a while I watched the swallows dive-bombing the air for insects near the top of the tower; out in the sea a pod of dolphins was clearly visible in the water; and I wondered how it could be such a beautiful evening when one of the most beautiful women in the world had just died so horribly.

I picked up the phone and was about to call the police and then it dawned on me that Orla must already have been dead when I returned from Colette’s apartment. Clearly I must have got into bed with a corpse. It was obvious that the only time Orla could have been murdered was when I was downstairs with Colette, but I didn’t think the cops were going to buy that. The more I thought about it the more I realized that I was about to become their number one suspect: my wife, my bedroom, my gun, my opportunity and, I dare say, with a little help from the staff and customers at Joël Robuchon, my motive, too.

I considered calling Ince & Co, who are my lawyers in Paris and Monaco, and asking their advice about what to do next; but then I decided to go down to Colette’s apartment and discuss what to do with her. She was my alibi for the time that Orla had been murdered after all, although the precise time of death was going to be difficult to prove. Of course, my alibi in such an alluring shape as Colette was equally problematic; there’s nothing cops like more than a lover’s triangle.

I had a key to Colette’s apartment but she wasn’t at home. That wasn’t unusual, she often worked on a Saturday. I was going to call her on my mobile and then changed my mind on the assumption that, if I was arrested by the police, my call would probably incriminate her. I tried to use Colette’s landline but for some reason it wasn’t working, so at around 5.30 I walked out onto the Boulevard d’Italie and called Colette’s mobile from a payphone next to the BNP Paribas bank. Again, I wasn’t alarmed that she didn’t answer. I assumed she had a client and that she would be free to talk on the hour. I walked a bit further down the boulevard to an Italian restaurant called Il Giardino, had a coffee and then called her again at exactly six o’clock. Several times, without reply. I called her again at seven and when she still didn’t answer I went back to the Odéon where I checked her car-parking space and saw her car wasn’t there. I went back to Colette’s apartment and it was now, as I searched the place for some clue as to where she might have gone, that I made a very unwelcome discovery: an empty bottle of Russian Shampanskoye in the very same ice-bucket I’d used to chill the Dom. You know? That awful sweet fizz that Russians call champagne and that frankly only they find palatable. When I first saw it I thought it was the Dom. But as soon as I realized what it was it was clear that someone else had visited Colette after I had left her and that more than likely this someone was Russian.

You might wonder why a man whose wife had just been murdered would devote any thought to something as trivial as a bottle of Russian champagne.

I can assure you it wasn’t out of jealousy. After seeing the bottle of Russian champagne I decided to take a good look around the apartment and see what else I could find. In the wastepaper bin I came across an empty packet of Russian fags. And some other stuff, too. A book. A newspaper. The Moscow Times. And it was now that I began to consider the frightening possibility that Colette’s former boyfriend, Lev Semyonovich Kaganovich was now back from Russia and had returned to his apartment. Thinking I’d better make myself scarce, I went back up to my apartment, made myself a drink and considered my options.

Was it possible that Lev’s arrival back in Monaco was connected with Orla’s death? Was it possible that Lev had intended to frame me for my wife’s murder? Not for a moment did I think that Colette had killed Orla by herself. The only time I’d been out of my apartment was when I was with her. I was her alibi, as much as she was mine. But I could hardly ignore the idea that Lev had turned up while I was fucking his girlfriend and perhaps killed Orla in revenge. According to her he was like all Russians — a very violent man with connections in the world of organized crime; I’d only ever started seeing Colette on the understanding that Lev was completely off the scene. But it was now perfectly obvious to me that he wasn’t and before very long I was absolutely shitting myself.

To be honest I’d never been completely satisfied at Colette’s explanation concerning Lev’s protracted absence. According to her, Lev was the kind of man who had a girl in every port and she was required to look after the apartment and him whenever he was in Monaco. But the telephone number she had for Lev in Moscow had been disconnected and the email address he had given her no longer functioned either. The service charge on the apartment in the Odéon was paid up until the end of the year, at which point it looked probable that she would have to leave Monaco and return to her family home in Marseille. I didn’t mind that Colette was obviously looking for someone to replace Lev and that I might be it. I’d already considered the possibility of renting her a small place in Beausoleil. What I did mind hugely was the idea that a Russian gangster might now have me in his sights.

For several minutes I wandered through my apartment in a cold sweat and trying to figure out what to do. I don’t mind telling you, I was sick with fear, old sport. I mean I actually vomited with fear. Since there was no sign of a break-in at my own apartment, it was clear that whoever had killed Orla must have had a key and that more than likely this was the key I had left on the hall table while I was fucking Colette.

Until now I don’t suppose I had even considered robbery as a motive, so I went to the safe and found everything there that should have been there: a couple of thousand euros, some chequebooks, and a few smaller pieces of Orla’s jewellery — all of the decent stuff was in a security box at Jacob Safra’s Bank. None of the pictures were missing. What kind of burglar was it who ignored a decent-sized Picasso on our living-room wall and yet was compelled to shoot a sleeping woman? There were no answers that came my way. Just more questions, and one thing was soon obvious: the only way I had a chance of answering any of them and clearing my name was not to contact the police. Whichever way I looked at it I was squarely in the frame for my wife’s murder, which bore all the hallmarks of a professional hit. For this reason it seemed to me that there was also a very real possibility that I was in danger myself. All of this meant I had to get out of Monaco, and fast.

I packed a bag, returned to Colette’s apartment and waited around in the hope she might come back; I even took a gun with me in case Lev showed up. But by midnight I was convinced that something must have happened to her, too, and the possibility that I might find myself incriminated in two murders seemed all too possible. Perhaps her body was already lying in a cabin in my boat and I’d be kneeling there on the floor holding her body in one hand and a knife in the other like Roger Thornhill in North by Northwest when the cops showed up.

So I went down to the garage, where I got into my car and drove straight here.

Chapter 2

Not exactly straight, no; the obvious route from Monaco to Geneva would have been on the A10, via Italy. Instead, I took a much longer route along the coast road west — there are lots of traffic cameras on the A8 out of Monaco — and then north, through the Écrins National Park, to avoid any toll roads. That’s another way they have of tracking you. I mean things have changed a bit since Tom Ripley went on the lam. Not that anyone was looking for me when I got here — and I figured I had seventy-two hours before the maid found Orla’s body — but Interpol can be quite tenacious when it sets its mind to catching someone. There was always a slim chance that the Monty cops would pay the French some serious cash to spend thousands of man-hours combing through CCTV footage of the roads in and out of the principality. Stranger things have happened. I recently read a couple of excellent thrillers by a fellow named Mark Russinovich — Zero Day and Trojan Horse — that really made me think about digital forensics, old sport. Russinovich is a PhD computer scientist and Microsoft Technical Fellow and really knows his stuff. There’s not much the geeks can’t find out with their drones and their satellites and their ‘digital bloodhounds’. You should check him out before you write the next Jack Boardman. Some of that high-tech stuff I put in the outline already looks like an old version of Windows.

Anyway, by the time poor Orla’s body was found in the Tour Odéon I was safely hidden here in Collonge-Bellerive, which really is one of the most private places in the world; forget South America — you could hide the whole of the ODESSA here, in Jerry uniform, too, and no one would be any the wiser. Bob Mechanic — the guy who owns this place — has lived in this house for five years and he’s never even seen his fucking neighbours. For all he knows he could be living next door to Joseph Kony and he wouldn’t have a clue. And he’s so bloody paranoid about being spied on he has his own pet geeks at the hedge fund’s office in Geneva block Google Earth street views; the image that’s on the site right now is at least a year or two old.

When the cleaner turns up I lurk down in Mechanic’s study where she’s forbidden to go in case she ever tries to dust his PC, which is on twenty-four hours a day, and Mechanic loses some important data. I think he must log into it remotely from an internet café on the Ross Ice Shelf to check his trades. Anyway, she’s also the one who fills the fridge, not me. Mechanic had a butler for a while. So, as you can see, this is an ideal place to hide when you’re a wanted man. It was an ideal place to write, too, which is why I came here in the first place. I just wish I’d stayed on to work through the summer instead of going back to Monty that weekend. I wouldn’t have gone at all, but it was our wedding anniversary — something the cops don’t seem to have noticed. I mean why would I have murdered Orla on her wedding anniversary? If I stayed on here in Switzerland then perhaps none of this would have happened. I wrote at least thirty thousand words of The Geneva Convention before Orla was murdered. Frankly, it’s the best work I’ve done in a long time. Seriously, old sport, if you want to drive life and all its attendant cares into a remote corner, forget Walden Pond, this is it. This is what I call a writer’s retreat. You can really think in a place like this, which is all I’ve been doing, of course, since I left Monaco.

I paused and waited for Don to say something. His habitual demeanour is always pretty calm and unflappable, as befits a former army officer with two tours of Northern Ireland under his belt. Don’s more of a Guy Crouchback than a Christopher Tietjens, but he was looking even more composed and unemotional than was normal even for him. His fingers were laced and his thick forefingers were touching the end of his square jaw, like a man contemplating a chess move. To my surprise he was still wearing his wedding ring, although Jenny, his wife, gave him the heave-ho more than eighteen months ago. Found herself someone else, apparently — and of all people he was a High Court judge, with a title, so the former Mrs Irvine is now Lady Somebody with a nice house in Kensington and a holiday home in Fiesole. Frankly I think she did him a favour; Jenny was always a bit too fast for old Don. On one occasion she even made a pass at me.

‘I can imagine,’ was all he said.

I rather doubted that. Don was never all that imaginative. I sometimes think he and the others would never have managed to become writers at all if not for me. And too late I’d realized that was the real thing I’d taken away from them when I closed the atelier; it wasn’t the money they missed most, it was the delusion that any of them could hack it as proper writers. It’s one thing to take away a man’s livelihood; but it’s something else — something terrible — to take away his dreams.

‘At least say that you believe me, old sport.’

His cornflower-blue eyes narrowed; he tried a smile, then thought better of it, as if remembering that my wife was dead after all.

‘It’s not me you have to convince, John. It’s the police. Frankly, I really don’t give a damn if you killed her or not. I mean, it hardly matters between you and me. But if you’re suggesting that this Lev character killed your wife and framed you in revenge for shagging his girlfriend, I just don’t buy it. And for fuck’s sake, when will you learn not to shit on your own doorstep? Why fuck a girl who lives in your own building? It’s bloody madness. What on earth possessed you to do something so utterly crazy? Didn’t I always say that something like this would happen? That you would always be getting into scrapes so long as you believed that you did things to girls instead of with them? You were crazy to get involved with this woman.’

‘You have to be a bit crazy to fall in love with anyone, don’t you think?’

But Don wasn’t really listening. ‘No, the idea that Lev killed Orla simply because you were shagging some bimbo he doesn’t sound as though he cared two kopecks for makes no sense to me at all. It’s a serious crime for a pretty trivial motive, if you don’t mind me saying so. Not all Ivans are as crazy or as lethal as the ones Jack Boardman meets in your novels.’

Don shook his head and drank some wine. He was wearing his usual uniform: beige chinos, a plain white shirt, and a blue blazer. His brown brogue shoes were beginning to seem rather more venerable than sensible and the watch on his wrist looked like a knock-off. But he looked pretty fit, as always; every year he did a triathlon in the Cornish town where he had a small holiday home; I looked it up online one year after he’d told me he’d finished near the back of the field and was surprised to discover he’d actually come third. That said something important about old Don. There was more to him than met the eye. It was easy to underestimate him.

‘Mind if I smoke?’ he said.

‘Go ahead.’

Don took out a silver cigarette case — he was the only person I knew who used one; he said it meant he could ration his day’s smoking — and lit one with a silver Dunhill I’d given him for his fortieth birthday; I was touched to see he was still using it. He puffed, licked his lips and continued speaking:

‘And forgive me, John, but it’s really not like he could have killed Orla without Colette’s help, is it? Think about it for a moment. Lev would have to have pinched your key while you were shagging her, nipped upstairs, shot Orla and the dogs, come back downstairs, returned your key without you noticing, and hidden somewhere until you’d gone home. And she helps him to do all this because what — she’s afraid of him? If any of that was true she could have told you and then dialled 112. It’s John Houston’s basic rule to writing a thriller, number one; the whole house of cards falls down if you can’t answer a simple question: why didn’t X or Y call the police? And here’s another thing: are you seriously suggesting that the first thing Lev does after killing Orla is open a bottle of Russian champagne? That doesn’t strike me as very likely either. It doesn’t matter who you kill, champagne — cheap or otherwise — is not and never has been a post-homicidal drink. You drink a scotch or a brandy, or maybe even vodka to calm your nerves but you don’t crack open a bottle of bubbles.’

I nodded. ‘Yes, you’re right, Don. None of it makes any sense when you think about it.’

‘Oh, I didn’t say it didn’t make any sense. I just don’t think it makes the sort of sense you think it does. I believe it’s quite possible that the champagne bottle was a message, for you. That maybe Colette meant you to see the bottle and to put two and two together and make pyat. A Russian code. A message from Otto Leipzig. Tell Max that our Russian friend is back in town.’

‘You mean, she meant me to think that Lev had returned to Monaco and was now on the scene with malice aforethought.’

‘Exactly. She would have known the effect that seeing something Russian like that bottle would have on you. Because it was her who gave you the legend about Lev in the first place — his connections to the mafia, the fact that he was a violent man, an oligarch with an attitude. And just to underline that she leaves an empty packet of Russian cigarettes in the wastepaper bin and a recent copy of The Moscow Times.’

‘But Colette couldn’t have killed Orla. Could she?’

Don shrugged and hurried some tobacco smoke down into his lungs. He wasn’t a heavy smoker so much as an enthusiastic one. He enjoyed smoking in the same way that I enjoy a plate of perfectly baveuse scrambled eggs.

‘I don’t know. You’re assuming Orla and the dogs were shot while you were shagging Colette. But she knew your habits and Orla’s too. Isn’t it possible that she might have carried out the shooting while you were working in your study? You said yourself that it’s a large apartment. My own recollection of being in the Tour Odéon is that the walls and doors are rather thick. I also seem to recall the research you carried out for one of your early books — The Lethal Companion, was it? An experiment with a Walther nine-mill. You fired a whole clip of blanks from the Walther in the study of your old house in London while your ex-wife was serving Sunday lunch in the dining room upstairs; nobody heard a thing because nobody ever really expects to hear gunshots. And remember what happened in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. The hired hand didn’t hear the twelve-gauge that killed the Clutter family even though he lived fairly close by.’

‘Yes, that’s true,’ I said. ‘I remember that. There are lots of things you can mistake a gunshot for. A car backfiring; a balloon bursting; a door being slammed. And now I come to think of it, I always had a mid-morning nap on the day after I’d shagged Colette. Forty winks at eleven.’

‘Would she have known that, do you think?’

I nodded. ‘For sure. She used to make a joke about it. Jesus. She made a lot of jokes about my nap. At the time I thought they were affectionate but now I’m not so sure.’

‘You’re right not to be sure. Even if Colette didn’t pull the trigger it’s entirely conceivable she’s in this up to the neck of her womb. She could have had an accomplice who carried out the murder while you and she were on the job. It doesn’t have to be Lev who murdered Orla. In fact, I’m sure it wasn’t. She could have had a younger boyfriend who put her up to it.’

‘But why?’

‘She needed money, of course. You said yourself she was little better than a squatter in that apartment. What was going to happen to her when the service charge wasn’t paid at the end of the year? The building management would have kicked her out on her shell-like. And then what would have happened to her? No, wait, you were going to buy her an apartment in Beausoleil. Jesus that’s generous of you, John. Not. From Monaco to Beausoleil — that’s a hell of a change in lifestyles. An eighteen-million-euro apartment swapped for something costing less than a tenth of that, I’ll bet. Fuck off. She knew you were loaded. I’ll bet she wanted a lot more than you were planning to give her.’

‘And she was going to get it by killing my wife? That makes no sense at all.’

‘Sure it does, if you’re stuck in the frame for it. Think about it, John. This could be blackmail. After all, she’s your alibi. It could be that she’s planning to contact you and tell the Monty cops you spent the night with her just as soon as she’s negotiated a pay-off. In fact she might already have tried to do so. But perhaps she didn’t anticipate that you would have turned off your phone to stop the cops from tracking you. No, that would seriously interfere with her plans.’

Don stubbed out his cigarette in a big glass ashtray and leaned forward on the sofa, as if warming to his theme. Most of the time he was a strait-laced, poker-up-the-arse sort of bugger, but I had the strong impression from his rather animated demeanour that he was taking some pleasure in pointing out my naïveté. Like I really was the complete cunt he’d called me earlier on. Naturally I’d considered Colette’s involvement — indeed, I’d been planning to suggest that he helped me track down her family in Marseille — but I felt rather chastened by Don’s persuasive analysis and all right, yes, a bit of a cunt for not seeing what now seemed obvious. Plots were supposed to be my department, not his.

‘But look here, if I turn the fucking phone on to find out if she’s called or sent a text then the cops will get a fix on my electronic exhaust and I’ll be arrested, won’t I?’

‘Have you tried calling her again?’

‘Of course. Several times. But on Mechanic’s landline. There’s no chance of anyone ever tracing that. He has a scrambler on all his telephone lines — here, and at the office in Geneva.’

‘Did you leave her a message?’

‘No, I didn’t like to. Just in case I dropped her in the oomska.’

‘In which case she could be hiding out somewhere, until she’s negotiated a deal with you for her cooperation. Maybe in Marseille like you said.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s a nice scheme, if it’s true. After all, just how much money would you be prepared to pay to have her stand up in a Monaco courtroom and tell the jury that she spent the night with you? Not just a couple of hours but the whole shagging night. A million euros? Five? I mean what’s money versus the next twenty years in your very own salon privé?’

‘Jesus Christ, the little bitch. After all I’ve fucking given her — cash, a nice watch, a new laptop, some expensive earrings from Pomellato — and this is how she repays me.’

‘But to be quite frank with you, the shooting of the dogs is what puzzles me the most,’ said Don. ‘In a Silver Blaze sort of way.’

‘Silver Blaze? I don’t think I understand.’

‘Sherlock Holmes? The curious incident of the dog in the night time?’

‘Oh, yes,’ I said, although I still didn’t know what Don was driving at.

‘Think about it, John. What was the possible motive for shooting the dogs? If the shooting occurred while you were shagging Colette then her accomplice — supposing that she had one — would surely have known that Orla had taken a sleeping pill, in which case he would hardly have shot the dogs because he was worried the sound of their barking would awaken her.’

‘Good point.’

‘But if the shooting occurred at around eleven in the morning, while you were taking a nap in your study, is it likely that the murderer would have risked waking you by firing four shots instead of one? Shooting the dogs makes a lot more sense if you were in bed with Orla at the time — between the hours of 2 and 7.30 a.m. — in which case it seems more than probable that the murderer must have used a sound suppressor. I assume you don’t own one for any of your weapons.’

‘No, of course not. And the weapon I found on the floor wasn’t fitted with a sound suppressor.’

‘Did you check to see if it had been fired?’

‘What, you mean did I sniff the barrel? Come on, Don, that stuff is for amateurs. There was a spent cartridge on the floor of the bedroom and four more on the floor of Orla’s dressing room. The brass certainly looked like it had come from the Walther. I mean it was the right size. Besides, I checked the Walther’s magazine. There were five bullets missing.’

‘Perhaps. But the murderer would hardly have risked bringing along a sound suppressor in the hope that it might fit one of your guns. Ergo if a suppressor was used then almost certainly the gun used to kill Orla was not your own. So, perhaps the murderer merely wanted you to think your gun was the murder weapon. Now you see why I was thinking about the curious incident of the dogs in the night time. I think if we could figure out why they were killed then we’d be a lot closer to working out exactly what happened.’

‘I’m glad you think so, old sport. Jesus Christ, Don. You’re doing my fucking head in.’

‘I’m not trying to confuse you, John. I’m just trying to think through all of the possible permutations. That’s fair, isn’t it? After all, before advertising, before the army, I did train to be a lawyer.’

Don took off his blazer and tossed it down on the sofa. It was a blazer I recognized. The label said Huntsman of Savile Row but I was certain Don had been wearing that jacket for at least twenty years. The buttons were brass, regimental ones. He had been out of the army for even longer but he always managed to make his clothes look like military attire. He smoothed his hair; once a very English shade of blonde, it was now streaked with grey, but there was something — a firm set to his jaw, a clipped way of speaking, his wiry frame, a lean ascetic way about him — that made me think he could easily have taken command of a brigade of guardsmen. Don refilled his glass from the bottle, sniffed the bouquet for a moment and then swallowed a generous mouthful.

‘Sorry, Don. I know you’re only trying to help.’

‘Look, I’m not saying that this is what happened, John. I’m just saying that it could have. Painting a picture for you. But it might not be like that at all. For all I know the girl is completely innocent and worships the fucking ground you walk on. And perhaps there’s a simple explanation for Colette’s protracted absence. Then again she might be dead after all. Although now we can at least be sure that her body is not on your boat — the police have already searched that.’

I got up and went to the window again, trying to get my head around the idea of Colette’s duplicity. I was also obliged to concede Don’s argument: the idea that Lev might have killed Orla was ridiculous. It was a rare occasion in which I’d been the victim rather than the beneficiary of my own imagination. Perhaps I’d been too hasty in fleeing from Monaco after all.

‘I was going to ask you to help me try to find Colette,’ I said. ‘But maybe I should just hand myself in after all and take my chances with a trial. Hire that French lawyer, Olivier Metzner — the one who defended Dominique de Villepin when he was accused of a conspiracy to defame Nicolas Sarkozy. He’s supposed to be the best defence attorney in France.’

‘I think that would be a mistake,’ said Don. ‘I really can’t see that handing yourself in now is going to be any better for you than in a few days’ time. Besides, I happen to know that Metzner won’t take your case.’

‘Oh? Why’s that?’

‘Because he was found dead in the waters around his private island in Brittany, just a year or two ago.’ Don shrugged. ‘No, if you decide to hand yourself in, John, you’ll have to think of someone else. The best firm in France is probably Baker and McKenzie. And a female attorney would play better with a jury than a man. Like the one Phil Spector had when he was tried for the murder of Lana Clarkson. What was her name? Linda Kenney Baden.’

‘Sure. I’ll find a fright wig-maker now, shall I? Besides, she can’t have been that good. The guy’s in jail, isn’t he?’

‘Yes, however the first time he went to trial she got him off. Which has to count as some kind of fucking miracle, right? I mean he was much guiltier-looking than you are. Spector’s chauffeur saw him with the murder weapon in his hand. Anyway, all that’s beside the point. Until you’ve told me about some of the other strange things you mentioned that have happened to you here in Switzerland, I’m not sure I can properly judge your best course of action.’

‘What’s that?’

‘When you were starting your story earlier on you said that some strange things had happened to you here in Switzerland that you thought might be connected with Orla’s death.’ Don shrugged. ‘Look, if this was a military operation we’d certainly want to gather all the intelligence before we sent a patrol into the Bogside to snatch a couple of Paddies, so to speak.’

‘There were a couple of things that seemed unusual, yes.’

I pressed my head against the windowpane. To my surprise the glass wasn’t cold and didn’t shift under the weight of my skull; it was clearly thicker than I had expected. Might it also have been bulletproof? I tapped it with my finger experimentally. The glass sounded reassuringly dull and solid; and bulletproof. I don’t know why I was at all surprised. I certainly wouldn’t have put having bullet-proof glass windows beyond someone as security-conscious as Bob Mechanic. When I’d first arrived at the house in Collonge-Bellerive I’d had a good nose about the place. As well as a rather ornate safe in Mechanic’s study that was formerly the property of the Emperor Louis Napoleon the Third but was just for show, there was also a more substantial Stockinger in the wine cellar that would have been the envy of many a small bank. The house itself had more security cameras than the London Underground. But most impressive of all was a panic room with a tunnel that led to a secret boat house — you probably wouldn’t have found it from the garden — where a high-performance RIB with a powerful Yamaha 350 outboard could have provided an immediate getaway onto Lake Geneva, although from what I wasn’t quite sure. Whoever or whatever it was that Bob had prepared for — the Swiss financial authorities, Interpol, the mob — it was clear he wasn’t about to risk being arrested or worse for lack of careful preparations for a swift exit, and I almost wished that I’d been able to ask for his advice instead of Don’s.

‘Such as?’ said Don. ‘Give me an example.’

‘Such as ...’ I sighed wearily. ‘I can’t think. I thought things would seem a little clearer when you got here, Don. But they’re not. Not so far. Look, I need to take a break. And I need some fresh air. You go and change and in a short while I’ll order in. And we can resume this conversation after dinner. Okay?’

‘Sure, John. Whatever you say.’

Chapter 3

I went for a walk across the sloping lawn, past the sleeping swans and down to the neat shores of the shimmering blue lake where there was a short dog-leg of a stone jetty built at right angles to the house so that Mechanic’s moneyed, pampered visitors might arrive by boat even more discreetly than via the lightly travelled road. A soft, Alpine breath of cool wind stirred the tops of the recently pruned trees and somewhere in the distance I could hear the clamour of some local children playing. As if inspired by that very un-Swiss, carefree sound I walked to the end of the jetty and down the polished stone steps to the water’s edge, where I took off my shoes and socks and paddled in the lake, and sat there in a solitary vigil, brooding on the charmed life I had once known and might never know again. I was bound to be convicted, I could see that. How could I hope to escape? And I wanted the whole thing to come to an end. What was the point of going on? I knew how this story was going to finish, so why see it through to the credits?

To give up and to disappear for ever, was that so bad? I had escaped from Monaco and the Monty police. Could I also now escape from myself?

It was odd how my feet had almost vanished in the seductive water, as if, with a little more effort, the rest of me might also disappear underneath the icy surface. The water — from the Rhône glacier, and a thousand feet deep at the lake’s deepest point — was remarkably cold for a summer’s day and seemed to slowly anaesthetize my feet, so much so that I wondered how painless and easy it would be just to step off the jetty and into the lake, to swim away from the house and then perhaps, when I could swim no more, to let myself sink into the black depths to meet a quiet, cold and very private death. Something had broken in my soul — assuming I had a soul — and I wanted to fall asleep for a very long time. To escape from everything. To avoid that final, judicial moment when all that I had was taken away from me. The relentless, inductive truths offered by Don Irvine in the brisk, no-nonsense manner of a serving army officer were more than I could stand. Talking to him I felt like I was back before the headmaster at school. It was only too easy to see that this was how it was going to be from now on: cunts who were friends offering me advice, cunts who were policemen asking me questions, cunts who were lawyers and journalists and God knows who else commenting on my inadequacies as a husband, as a man, as a human being, and as a writer. It really didn’t bear thinking of.

Then, a neighbour’s peacock called for help and it was as if my own soul had cried out in agony — or so I thought, but for only a moment; the next second I began to laugh at my own stupid conceit and loathsome self-pity; for wasn’t this the very kind of hackneyed, pathetic-fallacy bullshit scene I had banned from ever being written in my own novels?

‘You’re not Gerald Crich,’ I murmured. ‘Nor are you Oliver fucking Reed. And this is not Women in Love.’

I collected my shoes and socks, stood up, and walked back to the house to order sushi and tell Don the next chapter of my story.

Chapter 4

After dinner from Uchitomi, and another bottle of Mechanic’s best white Burgundy, I ushered Don into the living room and hauled a fur throw over myself.

‘This place is never as warm as it ought to be,’ I said. ‘Even in summer. And smoke if you want. Bob likes a good cigar so I doubt he’ll object to you having another fag. Matter of fact I think I’ll have one myself. I really think a smoke might help.’

‘Sure,’ said Don, and offered me one from his cigarette case.

I lit us both with a silver table lighter the size of Aladdin’s magic lamp and puffed happily for several seconds.

‘Orla would kill me if she saw me now,’ I said. ‘Smoking, I mean. She was a real fascist where smoking was concerned.’

‘Don’t I know it,’ said Don. ‘But that was probably just one of many reasons why she didn’t like me.’

I didn’t contradict him. Don Irvine’s army service in Northern Ireland during the Troubles had made him persona non grata as far as Orla and her family were concerned; my old advertising colleague had done his best to avoid confrontation — he was the least confrontational person I’d ever met — but that was never easy with Irish nationalists, especially when they’d had a drop of the hard stuff. Frankly there wasn’t one of Orla’s murderous clan I wouldn’t cheerfully have punched on the nose.

We smoked in silence for another moment before Don glanced around and shivered. ‘Christ, I don’t know how you can stand it here. On your own. Rattling around in a house as big as this. And I thought Cornwall was fucking quiet.’

‘You’ve still got your place down in Fowey? Mandalay, isn’t it?’

‘Manderley. The same as in Rebecca. And actually it’s in Polruan, which is on the other side of the estuary from Fowey.’

I nodded, but really not giving a shit about the difference. Cornwall was just Cornwall to me: a care-in-the-community, backward, Go-Between sort of place — all right, that was Norfolk, but you get the picture — full of red-faced, cider-drinking, deliberate people. With my parents, I’d often visited Cornwall on holiday as a boy but I had no interest in ever visiting the county again. It wasn’t just the past that was a foreign country, it was Cornwall, too, where they were so independently-minded and did things so differently from anywhere else in England that it might as well have been fucking Hungary. Don being Don was suited to living there, I thought. Me, I’d have hated it.

‘It was a couple of weeks after terminating the atelier that I fetched up here,’ I said, beginning the next chapter of my story ‘You can imagine how that went. Telling Hereward and Bat that I was calling time on our heroic little enterprise. They were fit to be tied. Bat told me I’d ruined his life and destroyed the company. Which was nonsense, of course. People wind up successful rock bands all the time. The Beatles. Pink Floyd. Guns N’ Roses. The Smiths. Bowie pulled the rug on the Spiders while they were on tour, at the peak of their success. This wasn’t any different from that.

‘Anyway, I came back to Monaco, collected some clothes and some papers, and my laptop, of course, and drove up here the very next day to start work writing the book. By myself. Not that Orla wanted to come. She’s always hated Switzerland and the Swiss. Which is why we had a ski chalet in Courchevel 1850 instead of Gstaad or St Moritz. Colette Laurent did want to come with me, however. But if she had I’d never have got any writing done. Plus she’d have been bored. That’s the thing about writing people just don’t understand. It’s about making yourself so bored that there’s nothing else to do except to write. You can’t do it when there are any distractions. At least that’s how it is for me. Colette would have been itching to go shopping in Geneva every day and that would have been distracting. So, I was determined to come and do it by myself — write, I mean — in the way I’d done when I first got started. On retreat. Like a monk. Without so much as a choirboy’s arse to divert my mind. Actually, I was really looking forward to it. I had a hollow craving for loneliness and self-sufficiency. I’d been here before of course, when I was writing the plot of The Geneva Convention. Mechanic had listened and he made a few suggestions and he was full of admiration for what I’d come up with. He made a few suggestions but he left me with the clear impression that he thought that the new kind of hedge fund I described to him might actually have worked. I mean he got the idea right away. Bob is nothing if not quick. In fact he’s quite devious and a natural plotter. Anyway, it’s a stand-alone thriller and you know the story. Of course you do. At one stage you thought you were going to write this book yourself.’

‘Actually,’ said Don, ‘it’s been a while since I read the seventy-page outline, John.’

‘Ninety-five,’ I said. ‘That outline was ninety-five. I expanded it quite a lot after you read it. I was going to make this one a bit more of a doorstop than some of the others. You know: airport-sized. Like Wilbur Smith when Wilbur Smith used to write the books himself.’

‘In which case perhaps it would be useful if you refreshed my memory. About the plot. It might be relevant. I do remember that it’s rather complicated. And a bit technical. But skip the algebra if you would. There’s no need to include the algorithm. I only just passed O-level maths.’

‘Oh, the algorithm is gone, old sport. No, I decided that was just too much for my readers to cope with. An equation in a thriller is about as welcome as a skid mark on a wedding dress. I learned that with Ten Soldiers Wisely Led when I put in all that stuff about how modern cryptographic software — and in particular the Hermetic Algorithm — is now regarded as a munition by the US government and subject to arms-trafficking export controls. You look on the Amazon reviews and that’s the bit they always complain about: not knowing what the fuck an algorithm is.’

‘I’m not sure I know myself.’

‘Doesn’t matter.’ I took another of Don’s cigarettes and lit it. ‘So, to come back to the story of The Geneva Convention, Charles Colson is a hedgie who lives and works here in Geneva. He’s an alpha type: an orphan, and near-genius — mildly Asperger’s, probably. His fund is called the Geneva Convention and it’s one of the most successful in the world, with forty billion dollars’ worth of assets under management. In spite of the name there’s nothing particularly benign or humanitarian about Colson’s Geneva Convention. It’s simply a large group of very wealthy people who share a common interest, which is to become even wealthier. Don’t they always?

‘Now, as you might expect, Charles is a ruthless investor and a bastard with several Geneva Convention subsidiary companies that lend money to some of the worst people in the world: dictators to start up joint-venture oil and mining companies, that kind of thing. He does business in North Korea, Equatorial Guinea, Zimbabwe, Paraguay, El Salvador and nearly all of the Stan countries. If you were looking for a model of the detestable capitalist you couldn’t do better than Charles Colson, which is why in the book the Guardian newspaper names him on their own version of the ST Rich List as the one of the top ten hate figures of the liberal left.

‘But Colson’s Geneva Convention is about to get even richer, after Colson acquires a company called Galatea Genomics run by two geneticists — Daniel Weinreich and William Williams. Weinreich, who deeply disapproves of Colson, disagrees with the board of Galatea and leaves the company. Then, with Williams’s help Colson constructs an innovative and highly confidential computer program that’s soon the basis of what the two men believe is nothing less than a new social science they now dub Phenomics.

‘Now, the big drawback of conventional economics of course is that it doesn’t act like a science at all, because human activity makes economic agents much too unpredictable. Put another way, Adam Smith was simply wrong because he believed that it was possible to make laws and rules for economies of the kind that Sir Isaac Newton had established for the universe. It just isn’t. Economies don’t behave like that with physical laws — with forces that act in a mechanistic and predictable way. If you’ve ever talked to three economists you’ll know what I’m talking about; they’ll all hold very different opinions about everything from unemployment to the price of eggs, which proves that economics really isn’t a science at all but a form of clairvoyance.

‘In my story Colson and Williams believe Phenomics remedies the defects of economics because the essence of the analysis is not the observation of rational laws that make economies easy to predict, but of the kind of human irrationality that makes economies impossible to predict — at least by the application of conventional economic principles. Crudely speaking, Phenomics purports to provide its inventors with a data-based method of making economics work as a true science. Without wanting to get too technical the Phenomics program is able to analyse companies as organisms with genetic codes that can be mapped, just like the DNA of a sheep or a human being. It’s Phenomics that provides Colson with an ensemble of observable characteristics displayed by a company; the program looks for company phenotypes, which is to say it attempts to identify the composite of a company’s observable characteristics and traits such as its morphology, heredity, development, business cycles, investment behaviour, products and personnel. Using an enormous amount of accumulated data the Phenomics program looks to predict those company phenotypes and the effect the company will have on the outside world — and, by extension, its chances of becoming a successful corporate organism.

‘Of course, this is fiction, and the beauty of this fiction is that since there are very few people who understand how hedge funds and their products actually work, this is the kind of story where the reader really does have to suspend disbelief. Especially my fucking readers. But after all that is the novelist’s job. Making people believe the unbelievable is no trick, it’s work. Damn right. So that when the Phenomics program makes the Geneva Convention the most successful hedge fund in the world, it doesn’t strain credibility too much.

‘Colson and Williams create a special tracking fund of 100 million dollars using Phenomics as the basis of its investment philosophy, and within just six months this shows a forty per cent return. Colson and Williams now proceed to sell Phenomics as the basis of modern investment to GC’s investors. And all goes smooth. Until it doesn’t. And of course this is where one says bollocks to Christopher Booker’s idea that there are seven basic plots. Frankly that just looked like rehashed Quiller-Couch, anyway. There is only one fucking plot in the whole of literature: in fiction nothing is what it ever seems to be. I mean everything comes down to that, right?

‘And this is where everything in the story gets turned upside down. In the book we’ve always known that Charles Colson has a skeleton in his closet; but now we discover that this is almost literally true. Charles once had an identical twin brother called James. As boys James and Charles had concluded that they could never live normal lives just as long as they were both alive. They did too many weird things to make people feel comfortable around them and decided that one of them should disappear. So they tossed for it and James lost; soon after that he vanished. Charles was even suspected of killing his twin. But a body was never found.

‘Now, using international criminal DNA databases, one of the people who worked for Galatea Genomics — Daniel Weinreich — has found out about the twin and traced him to Casuarina Prison in Western Australia, where he’s serving a sentence for a bank robbery he didn’t commit; he was framed by his brother Charles, to make sure he kept out of the way for ever. Weinreich and a bunch of people get together and spring James Colson, to take his brother’s place. They also kidnap Charles, take him to a motel in the outback, and then inform the police, who naturally assume they’ve caught his brother, James, who returns to Geneva with his liberators, where he assumes the place of his brother Charles; he starts to use the Geneva Convention money for good. Charles, locked up in Casuarina — which is the hardest prison in Oz — protests that he’s someone else; but of course, the prison officers assume he’s gone nuts and ignore him.

‘Of course, it’s the same story as The Man in the Iron Mask, in which the King’s musketeer, Aramis, substitutes the twin brother of Louis XIV, Philippe, for the king. This was always one of my favourite stories when I was a boy. And it’s long seemed to me that the founders and owners of modern hedge funds are the modern equivalent of the aristocracy and royalty that once ruled Europe.’

Don nodded. ‘It’s a good story. Your novel, I mean. I always liked it.’

‘I wish to God I’d let you write it, Don, like you wanted to. Seems like everything’s gone wrong since I started this fucking project. The minute I got here, shit started to happen.’

‘Such as.’

‘The very first night in Geneva. It had turned a little chilly and so I borrowed Mechanic’s coat to walk into the village and have dinner at the Café des Marronniers. Just before I went out I caught sight of myself in the mirror in the hall and thought how like Bob Mechanic I looked wearing his overcoat. And that might have been funny except that between here and there someone fucking mugged me. They didn’t get much. Just a couple of hundred euros. Fortunately, I wasn’t wearing this watch.’

I lifted my wrist to show Don the Hublot Caviar watch I was wearing. With a case made entirely of black diamonds which glistened in the light it did indeed look like a little pot of Beluga caviar.

‘Did you report it to the police?’ asked Don.

‘No. It was my own fault. It’s dark and very quiet around here at night and everyone in Geneva knows that people in Collonge-Bellerive have more money than sense. At the time I thought nothing about it. But then I got a call from Mechanic on his satellite phone warning me to be careful; he’d received an email from Keith Levin, the head of security at the Mechanism — that’s the name of Bob’s fund — advising him of the existence of a boiler-room company called Mechanism New Investment Capital that was offering discounted securities to UK investors. In other words these were scammers who were pretending to work for Bob Mechanic’s hedge fund. The head of security at the Mechanism thought it possible that the scammers were taking advantage of Bob being in the Antarctic to operate the boiler-room scam. When Bob told me this I rang Keith and told him about the mugging and Keith said it was quite possible that these two events were connected; and that I shouldn’t go anywhere on foot while I remained in Geneva. After that I didn’t go out for several days. I had my head down and wrote the best part of ten thousand words. Good stuff, too. Not just dialogue — which is easier to write, of course — but narrative. It was the best writing I’d done since I first started. After a while I felt I’d earned myself a break. I’d thought about taking a trip down to Lyon to see Philip French. He was always inviting me to his house in Tourrettes-sur-Loup. Anyway I didn’t go. Besides, it was my wedding anniversary and I had to go back to Monaco.’

‘It’s probably good you didn’t go and see Phil,’ said Don. ‘The last time we spoke he was very bitter about what had happened. He told me he would never have bought that house in Tourrettes if he’d had any idea that you were going to close the atelier. I think you’d have got a poor reception.’

‘Yes, I know. That’s what Munns said in the Daily Mail. How much did it cost, anyway?’

‘The house? About a million euros. Which was pretty much all he had saved. I haven’t seen the place myself. But I understand he’s had to take a local job, as a waiter, to help with the maintenance.’

‘That’s too bad. But what about the redundo money I gave him?’

‘Most of that went to pay the builders for the swimming pool he’d had built.’

‘That’s too bad,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’

Don shrugged. ‘It’s not your fault, John. No one asked him to buy that house. Or install a pool. Frankly, a freelance writer should know better than to buy anything like that. What did Robert Benchley say? The freelance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.’ He shrugged. ‘Is that it, then? The sum total of the strange things that have happened to you while you were in Geneva?’

‘You think I’m paranoid, don’t you?’

‘I can see why you think there might be a connection. If someone was trying to scam the Mechanism fund then it might be useful to have Bob Mechanic — or even someone who looked like Bob Mechanic — out of the way. One way or the other.’

‘But actually that’s just the half of it,’ I said.

Don smiled. ‘I don’t suppose there’s a shaggy dog around here, is there?’

‘Not so much as a bloody campfire,’ I admitted. ‘This is all on the level, unfortunately.’

‘And what you’re going to tell me now — this also happened in Geneva? Is that right?’

I nodded. ‘There’s a club in the Calvin district of Geneva called the Baroque, popular with Middle Eastern types. I don’t know why I went there. Yes, I do: Mechanic said that there were always plenty of beautiful girls in the Baroque. They have these girls called ambassadors, although for what, I’m not quite sure, since they never seem to want to negotiate anything, if you know what I mean. There was one girl called Dominique who worked there who had a body from your best wet dream: not so much an hourglass figure as a twenty-four-hourglass figure. Anyway, it must have been about two or three in the morning and there was a guy on the next table who seemed to have gathered quite a crowd of girls around him, which was hardly surprising given the size of the bottle of champagne on his table. He seemed to be Indian or Pakistani — I wasn’t quite sure, at the time — and he was accompanied by a couple of bodyguards. Anyway, he was having a good time — a better time than me — and I was just about to call it a night when he put his feet up on the table and I noticed his shoes. The heels of his white loafers were encrusted with diamonds, Don. And if that wasn’t bad enough he seemed to be looking not at the girls, who were all very pretty, but straight at me.’

I paused, assuming that Don would realize why this was significant. He didn’t.

‘Don’t you remember? The character of the arms dealer, Dr Shakil Malik Sharif, in Ten Soldiers Wisely Led? He had diamond-encrusted crocodile leather shoes, too. They were especially made for him by Amedeo Testoni at three million dollars a pair.’

Don shrugged. ‘So?’

‘Maybe I never told you, old sport, but Dr Shakil Malik Sharif was based on a real guy — someone who people told me about when I was doing my research in Islamabad. You know how it is with me and research. I like to make things as accurate as possible. I become my characters. If my characters are involved in a dodgy arms deal then you can bet your bottom dollar that I was involved in one myself. And I was. With this guy’s representative in Islamabad. Now this was a man I never met myself but whose reputation went before him like a troop of Janissaries. His name was Dr Haji Ahmad Wali Khan, and he’s a major player in international arms trading. The South Asian press call him King Khan while the Western media refer to him rather less affectionately as Doctor Death. He owns a company called gunCO which deals in everything from gold-plated handguns to ballistic missiles. I remember when the book was published my Pakistani source — a useful fellow named Shehzad who works at the Serena Hotel in Islamabad — rang me up and said that Khan had recognized the portrait of himself in my book and was none too pleased by it. Or by me. And there he was now, sitting at the next fucking table, and giving me the bad eye.’

‘How do you know it was the same guy? Perhaps Aldo were having a sale of diamond-encrusted shoes that week.’

‘I asked Mehdi, the club manager, and he confirmed that it was Dr Khan and that he was celebrating a major deal with the new government of a flea-bitten, fucked-up somewhere. Not that Khan only deals with governments. It’s said he deals with everyone from Somali pirates to Al-Qaeda Al-Shabaab. That man would sell a gun to Anders Breivik.’

‘Please tell me you got up and left,’ said Don.

‘Of course I did. The only thing is that to book a table at the Baroque you have to give your name and address and mobile number, right? So it’s quite possible that if Khan did recognize me, he could easily have persuaded the club to give him my address here in Collonge-Bellerive.’ I shrugged. ‘Which must have been what happened, because a couple of days later I went out to the wheely bin on the other side of the front gate here to put a bag of trash in it and inside, lying on top of the other trash bags, was a copy of my book.’

‘You mean, Ten Soldiers Wisely Led?’

‘Yes.’

‘Ah. A critic.’

‘Critics I can handle. Even that cunt of a woman who used to work for VVL who described me in The Times as a cancer on the face of publishing. What was her name?’

‘Helen Channing-Smith.’

‘Exactly. No, people like that I can take. That’s the game we’re in, after all. Someone doesn’t like your stuff, that’s fine. You read critics, it can make you strong. And my book in the garbage, I can deal with that shit, too. Only someone had given my book the Richard Ford treatment. There was a bullet through it.’

‘I remember,’ said Don. ‘That was Alice Hoffman’s book, wasn’t it? After she gave him a lousy review for The Sportswriter in the New York Times, he shot her book with a 38 and sent it to her in the mail.’

‘It doesn’t matter whose fucking book it was,’ I said. ‘It’s the bullet hole that matters. And by the way this was bigger than a 38. This was a rifle bullet. Maybe even a Barratt 50-calibre. It went straight through the first letter “O” in my fucking surname. Like a scene from Winchester ’73.’

‘And you think that might have been this arms dealer fellow with the diamond-encrusted loafers — Dr Haji Khan?’

‘Don’t you?’

Don shrugged. ‘Maybe. Yes, probably I do. Then again, shooting a book — your book — it’s not like he shot you, is it? It seems to me that if he wanted you dead, he’d have had some hit man shoot you when you went to the gate to put out the trash. Instead of which he told you — rather stylishly, it seems to me — exactly what he thought of you and your book. I mean, hasn’t every writer wanted to do something like that to a critic? I know I have. I always rather admired Richard Ford for doing that.’

‘I thought maybe you’d be a little more sympathetic. You did write Ten Soldiers Wisely Led, in case you’d forgotten.’

‘Yes, but your name is on the cover.’

‘Thanks, old sport.’

‘You know, it has to be said, John, yours is an interesting life. In a Chinese curse sort of way. Much more interesting than mine. If it wasn’t for you the most interesting thing in my life would be my daily newspaper.’

‘To that extent, you’re a typical writer, Don. Being boring is an essential prerequisite to getting any writing done. Whenever I meet creative writing classes I always tell them the same thing: don’t think that to be a writer you have to be like Ernest Hemingway. If you want to write a book don’t do anything, don’t go anywhere, don’t talk to anyone, don’t tell anyone you’re writing a book, just stay home with a pencil and paper. Thanks to my interesting life I may never write again.’

‘I can’t see that happening.’

‘I’m glad you think so.’

‘At the very least you should get a fascinating memoir out of this story. Like Jeffrey Archer. He managed to publish three volumes of his prison diaries. They were the funniest books I’ve read in a long time. Made me laugh, anyway.’

‘Oh, I see.’

‘My God, John, you’ve given me a lot to think about. Russian gangsters. Pakistani arms dealers. Boiler-room scammers. Wannabe femmes fatales. Friends in the French DGSE. To say nothing about all of the people Mike Munns identified as your enemies when he wrote that piece of poison for the Daily Mail. Disgruntled publishers and agents and ghost-writers. Irish republicans.’ He frowned. ‘Do tell me if there’s anyone I’ve left out, John.’

‘Yes, I see what you mean, old sport.’

‘I need to think about everything you’ve told me, John. I can’t imagine more plot for plot’s sake outside of a novel by Agatha Christie. You’ve got a whole Orient Express of likely suspects there. I’ll have to spend some time with my own little grey cells before I can suggest your best course of action. Until then I’d like a cognac. Ever since I sat down I’ve been wondering what some of that bottle of old Hine on the drinks tray tastes like.’

I got up and fetched a bottle of cognac and a couple of brandy glasses off the silver tray by the mantelpiece.

‘You’ve a good eye, Don. This is a 1928. And I’m going to have to leave Mechanic several hundred euros when I leave because I’ve already had a couple of glasses of it myself.’

‘From what you’ve told me it sounds like you needed it. So. Let’s talk about this again over a decent breakfast. And I don’t mean a bowl of fucking Alpen.’

We both laughed; for a while we’d both worked on the Weetabix advertising account writing commercials for muesli.

‘It’s not the tastiest hamster food for nothing,’ I said, bowdlerizing the slogan we’d helped to devise.

Don laughed some more. ‘That’s the thing I never get about Mad Men,’ he said. ‘They take all that shit so seriously. We never did. Did we?’

‘Never.’ Still shaking my head, I handed Don a glass of Mechanic’s best cognac and then toasted him. ‘Thanks, Don. You know, I really appreciate you coming here. I don’t know what I’d have done without you.’

‘You already thanked me.’

‘So, I’m thanking you again. If I ever manage to clear my name you won’t find me ungrateful.’

‘All right, but promise me one thing: if you do decide to write a prison diary, don’t for Christ’s sake say that I used to work on the Weetabix account. Come to think of it, don’t mention any of the advertising accounts I used to work on. That kind of shit can follow you around. Remember Salman Rushdie and his naughty but nice cream cakes and his fucking Aero chocolate bars? Of course you do. Everyone does. The poor bastard. Forget the Ayatollah Khomeini and his bloody fatwa, that’s the sort of stuff that can really harm us. Crummy advertising slogans stay with a writer like a dose of herpes.’

Chapter 5

In the morning I worked hard in the gym as though trying to punish myself for my earlier crimes and misdemeanours; after all, there were so many; Colette, me going on the lam, me going to the Baroque — what was I thinking of, looking for girls at my age? — me alienating the very people who ought to have been most on my side: Hereward, Bat, Munns, Stakenborg, French — I was spoiled for choice; and severe punishment was what I most deserved. A heart attack after forty minutes on the running machine might have solved all of my problems. And, after I’d checked into a posh Swiss hospital and kept the police and an extradition to Monaco nicely at bay for several more weeks without compromising my own legal defence, I could have engaged a team of private detectives to find Colette Laurent, not to mention some forensic evidence that might even clear me.

Heart attacks were on my mind again when I surveyed the breakfast that Don had cooked in Mechanic’s dauntingly minimalist kitchen: eggs, bacon, sausage, mushrooms, tomatoes, fried bread, buttered toast and plenty of hot coffee.

‘Jesus, Don, you weren’t kidding about breakfast, were you? I haven’t seen so much cholesterol since I left fucking Yorkshire. Do you eat like this in Putney?’

‘Sometimes. At weekends. When I’m on my own. Which is pretty much all the time, these days. Women don’t go in much for the full English any more. Not the ones I know. Not that I know very many. Since Jenny walked out that whole area of my life seems to have been closed down pretty comprehensively.’

‘Perhaps I should have married you instead of Orla. She couldn’t abide the smell of fried food, even when it was what I most wanted in the world. You’d think — her being a Mick — that she’d have liked the smell of a good fry-up.’

‘That and the stink of a fucking petrol bomb,’ observed Don.

‘You old racist, you.’ I grinned. ‘But entirely bloody accurate, of course. She used to cheer when she saw nationalists on the telly throwing Molotov cocktails at the security forces. Can you believe it?’

‘Yes,’ said Don. ‘I can.’

I sat down in front of a generously heaped plate and inhaled happily.

‘Jenny was just the same — about a fry-up,’ said Don. ‘She said the smell of frying bacon and eggs stuck to her hair and to her clothes.’ He shrugged. ‘Not that she had many good clothes. But that’s one of the reasons she left me, I think. To get herself a better wardrobe.’ He sat down and started to eat his own breakfast. ‘Anyway, we ought to have a good meal inside us, when we get on the road.’

‘Are we going somewhere? Geneva’s not exactly a tourist city, old sport. The Ron Jeremy memorial fountain just shoots its load all day and the Rolex factory isn’t much fun unless you’re going to buy a watch. I’d buy you one myself — as a thank you — but I figure the money you brought from London is going to have to last me an unfeasibly long time.’

‘Yes. We are going somewhere.’

‘Where? Do tell? But it will have to be somewhere better than this. I’m feeling just a bit like Le Grand Meaulnes now that the prospect of leaving this particular lost domain has been mooted.’

‘When we first talked, John, you mentioned trying to find Colette Laurent.’

‘Yes. I did.’

‘I think that’s a good idea. I think it’s best to be proactive in this situation. Everything else I can think of involves doing nothing very much except sit here on our arses. You said this girl had family in Marseille, so that’s where I think we should go and search for her.’

‘Okay, Popeye, but the trouble is Marseille is a city of one and a half million frogs and I don’t have an address.’

‘That’s a pity.’

‘But I do know where I could find one. In her apartment.’

‘At the Tour Odéon? In Monaco?’

‘Of course, she might actually be there. Just not answering her phone. Wouldn’t that be interesting? But her iPad was lying on the kitchen worktop when I left. That’s got her diary on it. And an address book. We might also look for her Apple Mac. The one I bought her. If it’s not there we’ll know for sure she’s not dead.’

‘How’s that?’

‘She took it everywhere. It had her whole life on it.’

Don was nodding, thoughtfully. ‘It’s risky.’

I shrugged. ‘Yes, but it’s almost the last place the Monty cops will expect to find me. And after all I still have a key for her apartment. Not to mention a pass for the Odéon’s underground garage. If we wait until this afternoon before we leave, we can arrive in Monaco when it’s dark. There’s less chance of me being recognized then.’

Don shook his head. ‘There’s no question of you going in the building. That would be crazy. You can wait in that wop restaurant around the corner you mentioned before.’

‘Il Giardino.’

‘I’ll go in your building, fetch her iPad from the apartment, and her laptop if it’s there. Then we can get the hell out of Monaco. Spend the night in a hotel in Beausoleil, finding an address on Colette’s iPad. And head to Marseille in the morning.’

‘Using what? Your hired car?’

‘Of course. Why not?’

‘We can do better than that, I think. And as a matter of fact, I rather think we should.’

After breakfast I led Don to Mechanic’s garage, opened the side door, and switched on the light to reveal a whole series of Top Gear: Ferraris, Astons, Lamborghinis, Bentleys, there was even a Bugatti Veyron. ‘Bob Mechanic’s an even bigger petrol-head than I am.’

‘Magnificent,’ said Don. ‘It’s like Jay Leno’s garage. Christ, there must be at least a million quid’s worth of cars in here.’

‘Two million. You’re forgetting the Veyron.’

‘He won’t mind if you borrow one of these?’

‘Mechanic is worth at least a couple of billion dollars. He once left a new Porsche Turbo in the car park at Nice airport and forgot all about it. By the time he remembered he’d run up a bill for almost seven thousand quid. So, no, he won’t mind at all. Anyway, I have the best part of two million quid invested in his Mechanism fund. If we wreck his fucking car he can deduct the cost from my year-end dividend. Besides, if we’re going to drive into the Tour Odéon, we’d better do it in a car that looks like it belongs there. And that also means we’d better stay somewhere other than Beausoleil. Èze, probably. I hear Le Château Chèvre d’Or is pretty good. I should think they’re used to smart cars there. And in Marseille, we’d better stay at Villa Massalia; they have an excellent business centre. It actually works, unlike most business centres in France. It’s just the spot to do a bit of research, if necessary.’

‘Makes sense.’

‘We’ll drop your car off at the airport and take the A1 out of Geneva.’ I watched as Don ran his hand along the wing of the Bugatti, open-mouthed with envy. ‘But not this one, obviously. Even in Monaco this will attract a lot of attention. I think we’d better borrow the Bentley. They’re ten a penny on the Côte d’Azur. And unlike the Ferrari the boot offers room for more than just a tart’s clean panties.’

‘One thing before we go, John.’

Don was looking grave again. Resentful, even. To be honest, it was his natural default expression, but on this occasion he had also deployed an accusatory forefinger, like I was a soldier in his platoon who was now on report.

‘What’s that, old sport?’

‘I want your word of honour. Yesterday, when I said that I didn’t care if you killed your wife or not, it didn’t, but I think it matters now, if I’m going to help you like this, don’t you? I think it matters a lot. So I want your word that you didn’t murder Orla. If it doesn’t sound too much like a cliché I want to be sure that I’m not helping a murderer to escape justice instead of enabling an innocent man to find it. That you’re not making a complete fucking chump out of me, old sport.’

In my head I tapped a little tuning fork, stood it on the rough surface of my conscience and listened to the clear, true sound of the times when I had been less than honest with poor Don Irvine. He was quite right of course — what he’d said about me the previous day. On occasion I had behaved badly toward him just the way Harry Lime had behaved to Holly Martins in The Third Man: not like a real friend at all; there had been several times when I had treated Don like a chump. He’d chosen exactly the right word. Times when I’d regarded him as someone to use and exploit and ultimately betray. I don’t know how else you can describe paying him so very, very little to do something for which I was being paid so much. I felt bad about that now — especially now that I desperately needed him to help me. For a moment I considered a confession and an apology for all those years when I’d taken ruthless advantage of him, but the words melted in my mouth, and when I swallowed, they were gone, like a single Malteser. Of course, he was right, it did sound exactly like a cliché, but I could see that he really did need to know I was innocent and so I did my best to look honest, and steadfast. This is certainly not my natural default expression. I’m much too much of a cynic to look anything but world-weary and contemptuous — even Orla had accused me of smirking at her in front of the altar on our wedding day, as if I’d been amused at her dress; she was wrong, of course; she’d looked wonderful; all the same I’d had the devil of a job to assure her that this was just the way my face was — but for a brief moment I think I did manage to appear to be as honourable and trustworthy as Don seemed to require me to be. I thought that was best.

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I understand perfectly. And I certainly don’t blame you for asking, old sport. I rather think I would, if I was in your shoes. So, to answer your question: no, I did not murder Orla. On my honour, Don. On a stack of bibles, Don. I’m innocent. I’m guilty of a lot of things — you know that more than anyone. But a murderer I’m not.’

‘All right.’ He smiled. ‘That’s all I need to know.’

And then we shook hands on it, just to make sure the bond of trust was firmly there between us.