Research

Chapter 1

It was almost three o’clock on Saturday afternoon when after returning the hire car at Cointrin Airport, we got into the leather-lined passenger cabin of the blue Bentley and, with me at the wheel, started for Monaco. We were soon driving in France. John talked incessantly, excited and happy to be doing something, but his voice was full of anxiety about exactly what we would find in Colette’s apartment and whether or not we could pull off our plan without being arrested and put in prison. With the hood down and wearing Mechanic’s expensive sunglasses — there were several pairs of Persols in the glovebox — we must have looked the very picture of two rich, carefree Swiss friends driving down to the Côte d’Azur or perhaps the Italian Riviera, for the weekend. This was an image we were content to hide behind. A clear and innocent conscience fears nothing, and that’s usually the best way to behave when you have committed or are committing a serious crime. And I know what I’m talking about. After all, I’d been feigning innocence for weeks.

Ever since I murdered Orla.

You might have thought that play-acting has its limits — that it’s only too easy to become weary of constant dissimulation and to get caught out in a lie; but this simply isn’t true. Once you commit to an egregious deception — really commit to it — there’s very little that can break your resolve. The fact is that it’s exactly as Joseph Goebbels said: if you tell a big enough lie and keep repeating it people will eventually come to believe it. The evidence of this was right beside me, in the passenger seat, in the person of John Houston, who was much too naïve ever to have asked me the same question I had asked him. He really did believe I was his protector — the solid, dependable type with a stiff upper lip you see in so many old British films, when in truth I was more of the James Steerforth sort who turns out to have run off with Little Emily. Or put a bullet in her head. And it struck me as ironic, but the man with all the imagination didn’t seem to have considered the possibility that the true author of his misfortunes was not some Pakistani arms dealer, some local hedge-fund scammer, or even a Russian mafioso; it was me, his oldest friend. But there’s a coda to what Goebbels said: the fact is if you tell a big enough lie and keep repeating it, after a while you start to believe that lie yourself. In fact that’s almost necessary if you stand any chance of getting away with it. Honestly, there were plenty of times since my arrival in Geneva when I’d managed to convince myself of the possibility that John might actually have murdered his wife just so that I could look him straight in the eye and treat him exactly like the prime suspect the Monty police thought he was. But if you’re going to kill your friend’s wife and make out that he did it, you have to become a good dissembler: the need to smile and smile and be a villain is found on page one of the Sparknotes on how to play the scoundrel.

‘The quickest route back to Monaco,’ explained John, ‘is via Italy and the A10. We go right through the Alps. Should take us about five hours. It’s one of my favourite drives in the world. Especially in summer. It’s interesting how most of these ski resorts — Chamonix, Courmayeur, Aosta — look completely different at this time of year. And there’s a very good hotel-restaurant in Vercelli we should stop at — the Cinzia — where they serve twenty different kinds of risotto. You’ll love it, Don. Years ago, I had this thing with an Italian publisher who worked for Mondadori — the publishing house in Milan — and that’s where we used to meet. Lovely she was; I think her name was Domitilla.’

‘Not exactly the sort of name you forget,’ I said.

‘Monaco is only sixteen kilometres from Italy and there have been a lot of Italians in my life, one way or another. Sometimes I wonder how I didn’t marry one. I used to go there on the Lady Schadenfreude a lot. To Portofino, Santa Margherita.’

‘You’ve led a charmed life,’ I said. ‘And no mistake.’

‘Until now. If I go down for this it will be my only compensation, old sport. That at least I’ll have lived life to the full, you know?’

‘Anyone can say that, surely.’

‘Yes, but I can say it and mean it. Like Roy Batty in Blade Runner. “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.”’

‘“Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion”.’ I laughed. ‘But if I’m “you people” that must make you a replicant. One thing’s for sure: you’re just as fucking ruthless as Roy Batty.’

‘Me? Ruthless? That’s not how I see myself at all.’

‘John, the last time the two of us were in a car on a French autoroute like this you told me you were closing down the atelier for no other reason than you wanted to leave Monaco and watch bloody Chelsea play football. You knew the damage and disarray that this would cause to those around you: all the people who would lose their jobs because of your decision, the effect it would have on VVL’s share-price, the friendships it was probably going to cost you; but you still went ahead and did it. I seem to recall you even rather relished the damage it might do to poor old Hereward. To say nothing of the damage you must have known it was going to do to me. Now that’s what I call fucking ruthless.’

‘But I compensated everyone, didn’t I? In what way was I ruthless?’

I paused for a moment as I steered the big Bentley into a slower lane. A big truck crept along the near side and the driver’s mate stared down at me. From the look on his dark, unshaven face I was just some rich bastard in a Bentley with no idea of what it was like to really work for a living. His arm was hanging out of the open window and I was close enough to see the pink, bubble-gum patch of eczema on his elbow and the cigarette in his thick, yellowish fingers, but he might as well have been on another planet; there was nothing about what I had to say to John that would have made sense to him and I knew instinctively that he dearly wanted to treat the Bentley like a large, expensive ashtray and tip his fag ash onto our heads. In his position it’s what I would have done. It’s what anyone would do.

‘The trouble with you, John, is that you think that the answer to every problem is to throw money at it.’

‘That’s bollocks.’

‘Really? Has it occurred to you that your relationship with Travis might have been better if you’d just spent more time with the boy and less money trying to please him?’

‘Let’s leave my son out of this, okay, old sport? This has got nothing to do with Travis. And exactly what damage did my closing down the atelier do to you? You had the best compensation package of anyone, Don.’

‘John. You weren’t listening. For me and the people like me — Peter Stakenborg and Philip French — the money was irrelevant. Surely it must have occurred to you that none of us has ever been able to make a decent living from his writing on our own? When you closed the atelier you extinguished the flame that we called an artistic life. You took away all our dreams that we could be something other than nine-to-five men who were part of the awful rat-race called full-time employment — that we too were writers and part of the exclusive club that’s London literary society. It’s one thing to take away a man’s livelihood, John; it’s something else to shatter his dreams. And there’s no amount of money can compensate for something as terrible as that.’

‘You’re exaggerating, surely.’

‘Am I? You turned my life upside down, like a bloody egg-timer. One minute I’m going one way and then the next minute I’m going the other. It’s been months now but I still don’t know where I really am. I’ve been trying to write a novel of my own but I’ve got a dreadful feeling I’ve become hopelessly addicted to John Houston’s crack-pipe. That I can’t do it without the stuff you supply. I might end up having to look for a job myself — like Philip French. I might even have to go back to advertising. At my age. Can you imagine how awful that would be? Me writing copy at sixty. Christ, I’d probably have to work on retail, or below the line.’

‘So what do you want me to do about it now? Jesus, Don, you know how to pick your fucking moments.’

‘I want what any friend would want in a situation like this. Some recognition on your part that you behaved like an arsehole. And an apology. After twenty years of loyal service I think I’m entitled to one.’

Of course this wasn’t what I wanted — not in the least — but, before I put into motion the real point of our journey, it was fun making him jump through yet another hoop like this. Pure sadism on my part.

‘Okay,’ he said impatiently. ‘Yes, you’re right. I was wrong. I behaved badly. And I apologize.’ He paused for a moment. ‘All right?’

I shrugged. ‘It might be, but only if you said it like you mean it.’

Out of the corner of my eye I saw John shrink into the diamond-quilted leather seat and let out a sigh. Then he said:

‘For fuck’s sake, Don, you’ve no idea of the pressure I was under. The pressure to deliver the goods. Again and again. I needed to get out from underneath it all. You remember that scene in A Clockwork Orange when Alex and his droogs tip the bookcase on top of poor old Patrick Magee? That’s what it felt like. A man buried under a whole library of fucking books. But, you’re right. I didn’t ever take into account your feelings, Don; and the feelings of everyone else. And I’m truly sorry about that. It was thoughtless and inconsiderate of me. And I should like to offer you my sincere apology. Okay?’

I nodded. ‘Thank you. Your apology is accepted.’

‘Twenty years,’ he said. ‘I’d forgotten it was that long.’

We both lapsed into silence after that — or as much silence as can be encountered in an open-top sports car travelling at a hundred miles an hour on a French autoroute — and I let my mind drift for a while. You would be forgiven for imagining that I was racked with guilt about Orla’s murder; but I wasn’t. Not for a second. I had no regrets on that score. She’d had it coming for a long time and while it’s true, I’d enjoyed killing her — rather more than I had expected to enjoy it — in truth Orla’s death was only the means to an end. In my defence I should add that it has been a long time since I was obliged to pull the trigger on someone in cold blood — the last time was in Northern Ireland. That was on another Mick, of course, while I was on active service, and not exactly to the sound of trumpets, as what happened with the Int and Squint boys in County Fermanagh was murder pure and simple. I’m not ashamed of what happened there. But all the same if things work out the way I’ve planned then it’s to be hoped I won’t ever have to kill anyone again.

Several minutes passed before John glanced over at the Bentley’s speedometer and said, ‘Better keep to the speed limit, old sport. In case the local filth pull us over. I wouldn’t like to answer a lot of awkward questions about who this car belongs to.’

‘No, you wouldn’t want that, would you?’ I said, and lifting my foot off the gas pedal a little, I let our speed drop back to a more respectable eighty-five miles per hour.

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘That’s always how wanted felons get nicked, you know. Committing some ordinary misdemeanour like that.’

I nodded.

‘I mean, it’s John Houston that Bob Mechanic thinks he’s lent his cars to, not Charles Hanway. Not that Bob’s around to answer any nosy-parker cop questions. But all the same. Best keep our noses clean, eh?’

‘Sure, John, I can do that. As a matter of fact, I’ve been keeping my nose clean for years.’

Chapter 2

We stopped for an early dinner at the Hotel Cinzia, which was a nondescript modern building of red and yellow concrete set back from a deserted crossroads in Vercelli, and not at all what I’d been expecting; it looked about as charming as my local launderette. But after a delicate lemon and asparagus risotto every bit as good as John Houston had said it would be, we drove on, with him at the wheel, which allowed me a chance to doze for a while.

When I opened my eyes again, about an hour later, we were already on the Italian coast and driving west, away from Genoa toward Ventimiglia and France. The Bentley ate up the road with a voracious appetite that showed no sign of abating.

‘Wish I could sleep like that,’ said Don. ‘In the car, I mean. I can manage it at home, in a chair, but never in a car. Especially with the hood down.’ He shrugged. ‘Not that anyone could sleep when Orla was driving. She was a terrible driver.’

‘Me, I can sleep anywhere,’ I said.

‘You must have a clear conscience, old sport.’

I pretended to think about that for a moment. ‘I suppose I have.’

‘It was a joke,’ said John.

‘All the same, there’s nothing much that I do feel bad about. Except perhaps Jenny. Yes, there is Jenny. Perhaps, if I’d fought a little harder to keep her, I might still have her.’ I shrugged. ‘But I don’t blame her for leaving me. Not in the least. No, I expect she needed a bit more excitement than I was able to give her.’

‘With a High Court judge?’ John shook his head. ‘Surely not. He’s seventy-something isn’t he? Lord Cocklecarrot or whatever his name is?’

‘Yes. Seventy-three.’

‘He doesn’t sound very exciting. How old is Jenny? Fifty?’

‘Fifty-one.’

‘So what kind of excitement was it that you were thinking of? I can see what’s in it for him. She’s a very good-looking woman. But I can’t see what’s in it for her. Apart from the thrill of being Lady Cocklecarrot.’

‘I expect they talk. I was never one for talking very much.’

John laughed. ‘So I’d noticed.’

‘And I think they go to Fiesole a lot. Apparently Harold Acton used to be a neighbour, when his lordship’s parents owned the place. I’m told it has a rather fine garden. Not to mention a fantastic, E. M. Forster view of Florence. I think I might easily have left someone like me for something like that. Unlike the Reverend Eager, I’ve always rather liked that particular view of Florence. Of course, I’d have Jenny back in a heartbeat, you know. If that’s what she wanted.’

‘Have you even had another woman since she cleared off?’

‘No.’

‘Christ. What, not even a rental?’

‘I’m not like you, John. I’m not led by my cock.’

‘Oh, I’m not led by my cock. But I do think it’s there to be used, at least while I can. It’s a short time we have on earth, I think, and perhaps it’s just as well that I’ve got a very big cock.’

‘Not that I think Jenny’s coming back any time soon.’

I might have added that the real reason she wasn’t coming back was that I scared her. I’d never told my wife exactly what I did when I was in the army but she knew that there was something I wasn’t telling her. Something importantly horrible. Of course she did; wives always know when they’re being lied to and sometimes they can even see the killer in your eyes. I’m certain mine could.

In July 1977, after Sandhurst, I’d joined the Queen’s Own Highlanders, and I went with them to Belize and then on their second tour of Northern Ireland. We were there until 1980. 1979 was the worst year for British security personnel killed in the province. My own regimental CO, Lieutenant-Colonel David Blair, was one of them. On 27 August 1979 — the same day that the Duke of Edinburgh’s uncle, Lord Louis Mountbatten, was assassinated by the Provos, along with the boatman and three members of his family, in County Sligo — Blair was killed in the Warrenpoint ambush. A British army convoy drove past a 500-pound bomb hidden by the road, killing six members of 2nd Battalion, the Parachute Regiment. Thirty minutes later, the Provos detonated a second bomb, at a nearby command point, killing twelve more soldiers — including my CO, Blair — who’d gone to assist the dead and injured. I was at the scene soon after the second explosion and it was a butcher’s shop, with body parts all over the road, in the River Clanrye, and hanging from the trees. Only one of Colonel Blair’s epaulettes remained to identify him, as his body had almost completely disappeared in the blast. I gave the epaulette to a brigadier from the 3rd Infantry, David Thorne, who took it with him when he briefed Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who apparently wept when she saw it.

I must say that Warrenpoint affected me very deeply, too. This was what motivated me to volunteer for military intelligence duties in NI when the QOH tour ended; being a Scot I was very good at doing an Irish accent. After an eight-week course with the SAS I returned to the province as part of the 14th Intelligence Company, who used to conduct undercover ops alongside loyalist paramilitaries. Which is an army way of saying we helped the UVF to murder members of the Provisional IRA. I did this until 1982, when I left the army and went into advertising, although at the time I’d wished I’d stayed on, as my regiment went to the Falklands soon after that; I remember them reaching the South Atlantic in July 1982 on the same day that John Houston and I had a meeting on the agency’s toilet paper account — although by then hostilities were over, of course.

‘You’re well out of it,’ said John. ‘You did your best with Jenny, I’m sure. But sometimes women are just like the clients we used to meet when we were in advertising. They really don’t know what the fuck they want. All they know is that it’s not you.’ He laughed. ‘Hey, do you remember the time we did all those commercials for Brooke Bond Red Mountain coffee?’

‘How could I forget? Coffeez never been so full of beanz.’

‘That was a really crappy coffee. How many fucking scripts did you write for it?’

‘Twenty-two. And they still wouldn’t buy one.’

‘I remember you brought a bloody starting pistol to the client meeting and you laid it on the boardroom table and told them that before the meeting was over they were going to buy your commercial. That was very funny.’

I smiled, remembering the incident, but I neglected to add that it hadn’t been a starter’s pistol at all but a real Smith & Wesson 38 — the same weapon I’d used for my wet work in Northern Ireland. I doubt that everyone would have thought this quite so funny if they’d known the gun was loaded with live ammunition and had been used to off more than one Fenian bastard.

‘But still, I learned something important from that whole process,’ I said.

Taking the gun with me had been a test of whether or not I could live again in the normal world. Could I take criticism without using a gun? Fortunately for the Brooke Bond execs, it turned out that I could.

‘Oh? What was that?’

‘How not to take it personally when someone doesn’t like your stuff. How to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again.’

‘I guess you must have done,’ said John. ‘I’ve never known anyone who is as even-tempered as you, old sport. The number of times you must have wanted to kill me.’

‘It never entered my head to kill you,’ I said. ‘Lord, no. That would spoil everything. No, you’re the goose that lays the golden eggs. And will do again, I’m sure of it.’

‘Me, I’m hopeless at taking criticism,’ admitted John. ‘Christ, many’s the time I’ve wanted to kill someone who criticized my work. Most writers do, I think. It’s just that some of them are better than others at pretending they don’t care about that sort of thing. You know, I sometimes think that writers are just people who might have become criminals except for the fact that they were lucky enough to learn how to read and write. Although in my case the Guardian thinks I am a criminal because I learned to read and write. My God, if my critics saw me raise fucking Lazarus from the dead they would say I’d only done it to help promote one of my books.’

‘I think it’s simpler than that. Being a writer is a kind of elegant sociopathy, that’s all. I don’t know how else you’d describe a person who doesn’t care about other people very much, who thinks mainly of themselves, who has a complete disregard for rules, and who lies for a living. Some socio-paths become murderers, it’s true; but probably just as many become writers.’ I laughed. ‘Hell, I know I did.’

After a few miles we changed seats again and we reached the tiny barnacle on the bottom of the hull of France that is Monaco. The sun was setting but John still wore his sunglasses and insisted on putting up the hood, since every single car entering Monaco — even a newish Bentley — is scanned by police CCTV to keep criminals out. High-summer tourists were in more obvious and plentiful supply. Most had come to rub their tattooed shoulders with big money, or so they fondly imagined, and the main square was full of people who were as pink as the Beaux Arts-style casino that occupied its pride of place, taking pictures of anyone loitering on the steps who looked remotely famous or of the several expensive cars that were busy arranging their own very shiny and exclusive Saturday night traffic jam. As always the lawn in front of the Café de Paris was so impeccably green and the fountain so perfectly wet and the surrounding palm trees so uniformly sized it looked as if the whole area had been sponsored by some Qatari irrigation company, or perhaps a Disney cartoon about a cute little talking oasis. It might have been, too, except that Santander and UBS had got there first, like Germans marking their territory on a beach with a strategically placed towel. The sea itself was only a few yards away but it might as well have been somewhere back in Switzerland. You couldn’t see the water for white boats, and any sea breezes had been strictly forbidden by the principality out of deference to hairpieces and hemlines and the more-is-best flower-beds, while the only gull wings in evidence were the doors of outrageous candy-coloured Lamborghinis and top-end Mercedes-Benzes.

‘The horror!’ whispered John as we drove through the dusk. ‘The horror!’

‘Isn’t it just awful?’ I said, but in truth I only half agreed with him: parking my orange Lamborghini in Casino Square and taking some dolly bird shopping at Chopard while sidestepping the holidaying lumpenproletariat looked just fine to me. As Oscar once said: I’m a man of simple tastes; I usually find that the best is quite good enough.

We drove out of the square and past the Métropole Hotel where John had famously argued with Orla in Joël Robuchon’s restaurant. He didn’t mention it so neither did I.

‘Christ, now that I’m back here I’m as nervous as a kitten,’ said John. ‘I couldn’t feel more nervous if I’d actually murdered her.’

‘You’re doing fine.’

‘Suppose someone recognizes me?’

‘They won’t. That beard really does make you look different. Like Orson Welles in Macbeth.’

‘At least you didn’t say Chimes at Midnight.’

‘You’d best keep a hold of that sense of humour,’ I told him. ‘I’ve a feeling you’re in for a nerve-racking wait while I’m in the tower.’

A little further on we drove slowly along the Boulevard d’Italie until we came to a mini-roundabout.

‘You can let me out here and I’ll walk,’ said John. ‘The Giardino is about a hundred metres ahead, just past the Lexus showroom. You can come and find me there when you’re done. I’ll be sitting outside awaiting your return. The Odéon is up the hill to the left.’

I steered the Bentley around the roundabout and pulled up in front of a Maserati showroom; outside the entrance to an apartment building immediately next door, a suntanned woman wearing a white dress and the gold reserves of a small country on her ears and not insubstantial chest was sitting on a bench and smoking a cigarette. A small white dog was sitting beside the six-inch heels of her scarlet-soled Louboutin shoes. She looked like a hooker; but then all of the women in Monte Carlo look like hookers, which is all right with me as that’s the way I like my women to look. These days the only women in Monaco who don’t look like hookers are the hookers.

John twisted around in his seat.

‘Here.’ He handed me his electronic parking fob that would open the door to the Odéon’s garage, and another one for the door to Colette’s apartment. ‘You can take the lift straight up from the garage to the twenty-ninth floor. We need the iPad and, if you can find it, her Apple Mac. That should tell us everything we need to know. And don’t forget the charger, in case the batteries have run down.’

He stepped out of the car and was about to close the door when he remembered something else.

‘And give me a ring on Bob’s mobile, if everything’s all right.’

We’d found a number of old mobile telephones in Mechanic’s desk drawer — so many they looked like burners — and had borrowed one for John to use on our journey.

‘Define “all right”,’ I said.

‘Ring me when you’re in the flat, and again when you’re on your way back.’

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘If it will make you feel any better. But I can’t see what the fuck could go wrong. After all, it’s you the police are looking for, John, not me, and certainly not Colette. The cops don’t even know she exists.’

I drove slowly up the hill in the direction of the tower and, in the rear-view mirror, watched John walk down the Boulevard d’Italie. At the top of the winding Avenue de L’Annonciade, surrounded with several high-rise apartment buildings, and in a small walled garden, was a tiny red stucco chapel. Whenever I saw this little chapel I wondered who went there and how it managed to survive in a country where worship was no longer a special act of acknowledgement of all that lies beyond us but the more everyday response its polyglot citizens made to the glorious reality of zero taxation.

On the opposite side of another mini-roundabout — home to a solitary tree — was the curving, grey glass entrance of the enormous Tour Odéon, a building so tall and featureless and ridiculously expensive it resembled nothing so much as the launching gantry for a Saturn V rocket. Floral tributes, photographs and soft toys for Orla Houston still lay on the ornamental shrubberies in front of the main door and even now were being inspected by her fans or those who were fascinated with premature death or just curious to see what all the fuss was about. I have to confess I was surprised by the reaction to Orla’s death; surprised and more than a little horrified, too; that someone as ordinary as her could in death have generated such an outpouring of grief.

But I was more horrified to see the person of Chief Inspector Amalric coming out of the front door; he even glanced at the Bentley, and it was only the car’s tinted windows that prevented him from having a clear sight of me. This was fortunate, as I would have found it hard to explain exactly what I was doing there. Were there other policemen still in the building — Sergeant Savigny, perhaps? Was it possible the police were still questioning the other occupants of the Odéon about what they had seen, or more likely — this was Monaco — not seen? Were there still scenes of crime officers searching John’s apartment for minute and important clues as to who had killed her?

I almost kept on going round the mini-roundabout and back down the hill to the restaurant. Instead I held my nerve and drove into the Odéon’s underground garage, where I parked the Bentley, closed my eyes and drew a deep breath before deciding what to do next. I tried to telephone John, to let him know what I was doing, but found that I couldn’t get a signal. Not that this mattered much; it suited me nicely to keep him on edge. So I just sat there, listening to the hot, six-litre engine at rest; after almost 300 kilometres without a stop there were so many taps and ticks and knocks it sounded like a tiny silver mine.

Waiting awhile before venturing upstairs seemed the wisest course of action; I had no wish to meet Sergeant Savigny again, least of all in the Odéon lift. Of course, I could easily have driven away without doing anything because I knew exactly where Colette was at that particular moment — she was my accomplice, after all; but to have abandoned my mission to recover her iPad from the apartment would have left what happened next to chance, in which case John might easily have panicked and given himself up to the Monty police, and that was the last thing I wanted. So long as we seemed to have a definite plan about what to do next I had control of things, which, ultimately, was what this was all about.

To my surprise there was a copy of Merrychristmas Makeba’s new novel, Drowning in the Kalahari, in the Bentley’s glovebox underneath the car’s manual. I started to read a chapter — either it was terrible stuff or I was too much on edge because it didn’t make any sense. The Canongate blurb said it was African magic realism, but to me it was more mundane than realistic and had nothing up the sleeve, so that it was rather less magical than a three-card trick. I was puzzled as to why a man like Bob Mechanic should have had a Man Booker shortlisted novel by an African woman writer in his car until I saw that someone called Grace de Beer had written all of her contact details and some kisses, as well as an injunction that Bob should feel free to call her any time, in a neat copperplate hand on the flyleaf. In this, the age of the e-book, it’s reassuring to know that the printed page still has its uses.

After about fifteen minutes I left the car and having checked the garage for police cars — there were none — I went to the lift and rode up to the twenty-ninth floor, where the lift chime quietly announced my arrival like a butler’s cough into a corridor already hushed by an inch-thick Wilton and ostrich-leather walls. It’s only on the streets of Monaco that money talks; in the principality’s more expensive apartment buildings it always lowers its voice discreetly.

I walked to the door of Colette’s apartment and pressed my ear to the kauri wood for a second before touching the keyless lock with the lacquered plastic fob, and then stepped inside with the speed of a tango-dancer. All was quiet as I stood in the tiny hallway and closed the door behind me. Apart from the sour smell of rotting garbage that lingered in the air, everything else was much as I remembered: the balcony sofa where we had sat and planned everything; the little dining room where she had cooked me more than one supper; the bed where I had fucked her several times. The fucking had helped to cement our pact, like Frank and Cora in The Postman Always Rings Twice, which is a pretty good book. Movie’s pretty good, too; as a matter of fact, it’s one of my favourites. When Frank fucks her it’s like he’s wrestling God’s angel. ‘I’m getting tired of what’s right and wrong,’ says Cora. Amen to that, little sister.

I went into the kitchen and double-bagged the contents of the bin to drop into the chute when I left. I even cleaned up a bit and watered her pot plants, which was very considerate of me. At the same time I noted the iPad on the marble worktop where Colette had carelessly left it. But before collecting this and making my exit I opened the doors onto the balcony to let in some air; that was the good thing about the private apartments in Tour Odéon: it was so high above the streets of Monaco that cars and their exhaust fumes were hardly noticeable; even in summer the air was as cool and fresh as if you were standing at the top of a schooner’s main mast listening to the whip and snap of a dozen sails. The air was the best thing about the Tour Odéon; that and the view, of course.

I glanced around the coastline amphitheatre of tall buildings that was Monaco and Beausoleil. It was hard to tell where the backdrop that was France ended and the tax-free principality began. The buildings of Beausoleil were no less ugly or featureless than those of Monaco, and the idea that property in one cost more than four times as much as in the other would have seemed laughable to anyone who had never heard of what the French called l’impôt de solidarité sur la fortune. Whenever I looked at this view — which some consider spectacular — I thought of my financial advisers back in London and the yearly reviews they used to produce with 3-D bar-graphs showing you how much your pension might be worth in fifteen years’ time; or, in my case, how little. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see nineor ten-figure numbers hovering in the sky over the primary-coloured rectangular bar of each building, as if to indicate the collective net worth of its privileged, tax-free occupants.

Beyond the harbour and out to sea, things were rather more obviously picturesque; a slowly shifting constellation of brightly lit boats on the darkening blue surface of the sea looked like an inverse planetarium. Above these the moon was a red circle on the eastern horizon, although any iniquity or spilling of blood that this might have foretold was long past.

I glanced back through the window glass into the apartment and for a moment I caught sight of my reflected self, locked in animated conspiracy with Colette. A moment later we seemed possessed by each other and I drew her into my arms and kissed her before pushing my hand deep between her thighs. She dropped her head back on her shoulders and gave herself up to my impudent fingers before climbing on to my lap. I think at that point I might even have told her I loved her, the way you do sometimes when you’re trying to persuade a nice girl to help you commit a murder.

Chapter 3

We met for the first time at the Columbus in Fontvieille Port, which is the best bar in Monaco. I’d flown in for a meeting with John, to discuss the first draft of Dead Red — after him closing the atelier it was to be our last meeting before Orla’s murder — but as usual I was staying in Beausoleil, which meant opportunities for a drink or dinner were limited, and while the Columbus is expensive it’s not as extortionate as a lot of other places in Monaco. Just as importantly, the Columbus serves the best fish and chips on the Côte d’Azur and is a welcome antidote to anything the Hôtel Capitole has to offer. In Beausoleil nightlife is a contradiction in terms, although sometimes there is a certain kind of entertainment to be had when the French police and tax authorities operate night-time spot checks on cars with Monaco licence plates passing through on their way to the clubs in Antibes and Cannes, looking for people who are cheating on their 182 days. You take your pleasures when and where you can.

It had been a long day and all I wanted was to eat a quiet meal and to read, but leaving the Capitole I’d mistakenly brought one of Houston’s books instead of the one I’d been hoping to finish. Not one I’d written, but even so, I had no interest in reading it. So I found a copy of Monaco-Matin — the Monaco edition of the Nice morning newspaper — and settled down on the roof terrace, which enjoys a fine view of the Princess Grace Rose Garden, to try and improve my French, leaving Houston’s latest book unread on the table, where it ended up catching Colette’s eye. As did I.

There were one or two more women around the bar at the Columbus than was usual, but then it was early summer and the fishing fleet of hookers had arrived in port. Whatever naïve ideas John Houston may have entertained about Colette’s profession it was obvious to me the first time I saw her that it could only have been the oldest one. Perhaps the Columbus was her first call on an evening that would have taken in Zelo’s, Jimmy’z, the Buddha Bar, the Crystal Bar at the Hermitage, the Black Legend, the seventh-floor bar at the Fairmont Hotel, and, if things were desperate, the Novotel.

‘Are you a fan of Houston’s work?’ she asked, speaking English.

‘Yes, you could say that.’ I stood up, politely.

‘Which one is your favourite?’

‘That’s quite a hard question. You see, I help Houston write them. As a matter of fact I’ve been helping him to write them for twenty years. I’m a sort of ghost.’

‘That’s where I’ve seen you before,’ she said. ‘You were in the Odéon today, weren’t you?’

‘You’re not supposed to see a ghost,’ I said. ‘That’s rather the point. But yes, I was. Only I don’t remember seeing you.’

‘Colette Laurent.’

‘Don Irvine. Pleased to meet you.’

She sat down and arranged her legs neatly under the table. They were certainly worth a little bit of care and attention; her short black business skirt revealed a pair of bare knees that were as shapely as they were tanned: with legs like that she could have modelled an elasticated bandage and made it look sexy.

‘I got out of the elevator as you and John got in,’ she said. ‘Are you staying here?’

‘No. Are you a neighbour of John’s?’

‘In a way, yes. For now. I’m just looking after the apartment for a friend, until I can find something of my own. I couldn’t possibly afford something like that on my own.’

‘Me neither. Like I said, I’m just the ghost. One of several. There’s a whole haunted house of us.’

‘Yes, he mentioned that. The studio. No, what is it he calls it?’

‘The atelier.’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re friends then, you and he?’

She shrugged. ‘We see each other in the gymnasium almost every day. And now and again we have a drink afterward. Anywhere other than Monaco that would count as an acquaintance. But here, that’s almost a close friend.’

She glanced over her shoulder as if mentioning a drink had prompted her to look for a waiter.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Would you like a drink?’

‘Yes. Thank you. That’s very kind of you. I would.’

I waved a waiter over and she ordered a Badoit, which impressed me, since Cristal seems to be the only drink that most women in Monaco have ever heard of.

‘Your name is Don, you said?’

I nodded.

‘How do you end up being a ghost?’

‘First it’s necessary that you should die,’ I said. ‘As a real writer, I mean.’

It was a joke that everyone in the atelier had made at one time or another, and while it contained an element of truth, I didn’t really expect her to get it; her English was good but I didn’t expect it was equal to my sarcasm. I certainly didn’t expect her to smile and then to say what she said:

‘Yes, that’s what John says about all of you guys.’

‘He does? Oh. I see.’

‘No, I meant, how did you become a ghost for John?’

‘Years ago, we both worked as copywriters for the same advertising agency. In London.’ I shrugged. ‘I’ve known John for a very long time indeed.’

‘Since the very beginning, then.’

I nodded. ‘Since the very beginning. As a matter of fact it was me who gave him the idea of setting up the atelier. For the mass production of bestselling novels.’

‘Very successfully, too.’

‘It was good while it lasted. At one stage we were producing five or six books a year. And selling millions. John is the Henry Ford of publishing.’

The waiter came back with our drinks, shot her and then me a look as if to say ‘You lucky bastard’, and then left us alone. He was right, of course. She was worth a look. Since Colette had sat down I hadn’t once looked at the Princess Grace Rose Garden.

‘It was an excellent arrangement, too. I was never much good at plots. And John never had much patience with nailing himself to a PC and knocking out 3,000 words a day. He always enjoyed the research much more than the writing.’

‘Yes, but you speak about it as if this is over. Are you leaving John’s atelier?’

‘We all are. The atelier is over.’

‘But why? Why, when you’re doing so well?’

‘He wants to go back to basics, apparently, and write something a bit more worthy. Something for posterity. Something that will win him the Nobel Prize for Literature.’

‘And do you think he could?’

‘Win the Nobel Prize?’ I laughed. ‘No. I was joking.’

‘You think he couldn’t?’

‘I know he couldn’t. For one thing he’s not Swedish. The prize committee seems to award the Nobel to a disproportionate number of Swedes you’ve never heard of. And for another — commercial literature makes money, not merit. I’ve got more chance of winning the Euro Millions jackpot than John Houston has of winning a Nobel Prize for Literature. Not that John is about to become poor any time soon. Even if he does start paying lots of income tax.’

Colette shook her head. ‘But I don’t understand. There isn’t any income tax in Monaco.’

‘No, but there is in England.’

‘It can’t be true.’

‘I’m afraid it is. And I should know. I’ve been paying tax there for more years than I care to remember.’

‘No, I meant ... are you saying that John’s going back to live in London?’

‘Yes. At least, that’s what he told me when he said he was closing down the atelier. Misses the football apparently. And the cricket. Not to mention the Garrick Club. He longs for the greenness of his native land, he pines for the Gothic cottages of Surrey; already in his imagination he catches trout and enjoys all the activities of the English gentleman.’

By now I was quoting from the final scene of Lawrence of Arabia; and doing rather a good job of it, too.

Colette smiled faintly. ‘And he misses his children, I suppose.’

‘Them rather less, I think. John has always had a difficult relationship with his kids.’ I laughed. ‘That’s why he had a vasectomy. So he couldn’t have any more. At least, that’s what he told me.’

‘You’re not serious.’

‘I’ve known John for more than twenty years. There’s not much he doesn’t tell me, eventually.’

‘Oh,’ said Colette, as if she’d felt a sharp pain or a heart palpitation. She closed her eyes and looked away for a moment. It was clear from her expression that John’s plan to leave Monaco was a blow to her. Her Colgate smile had quite disappeared, her already noticeable chest had become quite agitated and her neck was turning as rosy as the blooms in the Princess Grace Garden. Without meaning to, I’d said too much. Without intending it, I’d also discovered that John and Colette Laurent had enjoyed or were still enjoying a relationship that went way beyond an innocent chat in the Odéon’s gymnasium of a morning. Looking at her now, I couldn’t find it in myself to blame him for this: the Archbishop of Canterbury would have jumped on the bones of a girl like that and people would have understood.

She stood up, abruptly, let out a deep breath and shook her head.

‘Alors,’ she said quietly.

‘You’re not leaving?’ I said.

‘Yes. I have to go. There’s someone I have to meet.’

‘Not John.’

‘No, not John.’

I stood up and offered her my hand. ‘It was nice to meet you.’

‘Yes,’ she said, distracted as she shook my hand. ‘Yes, it was. Goodbye, Mr Irvine.’

She turned to walk away.

‘Hey, don’t forget your handbag.’

She came back and fetched it, nodding her thanks.

I sat down and watched her go. The waiter came back.

‘That’s a very nice-looking girl,’ he observed with considerable understatement. ‘A friend of yours?’

‘No.’

‘I’ve seen her here before.’

‘She’s gone now.’

‘Better luck next time.’

‘What do you think? Is she a working girl?’

He smiled. ‘Monsieur, this is Monte Carlo. All of the girls who are here are working, one way or another. Even the ones who are married.’ He paused. ‘Perhaps the ones who are married, most of all.’

I picked up my so-called newspaper. I started reading an article about yet another lovely gala evening at the casino. It was for charity, of course, but as always the charity was a way of clearing the conscience, in order that the rich residents might be able to do what rich people like to do, which is to go somewhere smart and eye-wateringly expensive with lots of other rich people and still feel that by doing this they are also doing the world a favour. The celebrities attending the gala were the usual fashionable suspects, which is to say the here today, gone tomorrow crowd of pretty girls and even prettier boys. But after a moment I saw that Colette was back at my table. She was wearing a light pair of wire-framed glasses now and her eyes were red as if she’d been crying, but that didn’t diminish her beauty — at least not in my eyes; indeed, the glasses and the tears made her seem like less of the pneumatic fantasy figure I’d imagined earlier — more real and therefore sexier.

‘That was rude of me,’ she said. ‘Juvenile. You’d just ordered me a drink. And then I left.’

‘Not at all. You were upset. About John going back to England. I could see it came as quite a shock to you.’

She took out her handkerchief, removed her glasses for a moment and dabbed her eyes.

‘It wasn’t only that,’ she said, ‘but yes, it was a little.’ She sat down again. ‘And now I think I should like a real drink. In fact I’m certain of it.’

We waved the waiter back and she ordered a large cognac.

‘I’m sorry. I had no idea that you and he were such good friends.’ I lifted my head to have another look at her. I suppose she was about thirty. Good-looking but perhaps not so very bright either. Her hair was gathered in a ponytail and shone like a newly groomed horse. She was tall and athletic and I wondered not what she was like in bed — I knew the answer to that just looking at her — but what I would be like in bed with her: restored, rejuvenated? There is no Viagra quite as powerful as a woman half your age. ‘I spoke out of turn. Really, it’s none of my business.’

The waiter returned with her cognac. She took it straight off his tray and drank half immediately before placing the glass on the table. Had she not been so unworthy of a famous writer like John I might almost have felt sorry for her.

‘Oh, but it is, I think, Mr Irvine. Your business and mine. We’ve both been disappointed, haven’t we? You as a writer; and me as a GFE.’

‘A what?’

‘Girlfriend experience. That’s the abbreviation men use these days for someone like me who’s effectively a girlfriend for money. In my defence I must say that I did think I was something more than that, but evidently I’m not.’ She tried a smile but it came out ill-shapen and bitter-looking. ‘It seems that I’ve been deluding myself and that after all I’m just a talonneur, like all the rest.’

‘You shouldn’t talk about yourself like that.’

‘I’m just being honest. I’m not an escort. No, I’m not that. At the same time it would be dishonest of me to tell you that I loved John for himself. But I do love him. It’s true, the fact that he is so very rich didn’t discourage this feeling in me. Indeed, it helped convince me that I have feelings for him. Nevertheless I do have feelings for him. Even now that I find he was planning to abandon me. I love him, yes. And that is why this hurts so very, very much.’

‘We don’t know any of what I said for sure,’ I said. ‘For all I know, what he told me was not the whole truth. In fact I’m sure of it. The truth is never whole with John. In fact I think he only gives you half or three-quarters of the truth at any one time, depending who he’s slicing it for. But it’s still the truth. Only not all of it, you see? It’s because he’s a writer, I suppose. A lot of the time his mind is dwelling in some fantasy place — he’s thinking about a book he’s planning, not about anything real. Sometimes the two get blurred. John can tell more truth with a lie than a lot of people can do by telling the truth. So, just because he said that he wanted to move back to London doesn’t mean to say that he was actually going to do it — at least, do it right away. He might just have told me that in order to furnish me and the other guys with an excuse to close down the atelier. To get rid of us with a minimum of explanation. It might be several years before he moves back to London.’ I touched her knee and gave it what I hoped would feel like an encouraging squeeze. In truth I just wanted to feel what her skin was like: it was taut, and slightly moist and when I brushed my nose with the same hand a second later, I could smell the scented body-butter on my fingers. Body butter: just the words made me want to spread her on a thick slice of bread and stuff it in my mouth. ‘Honestly, you should ignore everything I said before. I have no idea what his plans in Monaco are.’

‘You’re very sweet.’ She smiled. ‘And I understand exactly what you say. John lives his life in compartments. You in one. His wife in another. Me in a third.’ She shrugged. ‘Although perhaps I flatter myself. I know there are others beside me, so perhaps I am in a lower number than three. Maybe six or seven, I don’t know. But I haven’t heard so much as a little slice of what you said before. Not even a sliver. The last conversation I had with him, on the subject of him and I, John told me that ...’ She stopped. ‘Or perhaps you don’t want to hear this. You are his friend, after all.’

I made a wry-looking face.

‘I used to think that was true. But the truth is he’s always regarded me not as a friend but as a long-term employee. As half of a professional relationship that has endured. Which isn’t friendship at all — at least not for me — but a kind of indentured servitude. So I do want to hear it. Like you said before, perhaps we have more in common than we know.’

She looked around. ‘Not here,’ she said. ‘I don’t like this place.’

‘No? I quite like it.’

‘That’s because you’re a man. Everywhere seems different when you’re a man. Monaco is a little like the Vatican in that it’s set up for men, not women. But women go along with that. For all the obvious reasons.’

‘All right.’ I stood up and waved the waiter over. ‘Where shall we go?’

‘Your hotel?’

‘The Capitole.’

She frowned. ‘I don’t know that one.’

I grinned. ‘It’s in Beausoleil.’

‘But, I don’t understand. You’re working for John. Why doesn’t he put you up somewhere nice? Somewhere in Monaco. Even this place would be better than Beausoleil.’

‘I have to take care of my own expenses.’

‘Let’s go back to my apartment,’ she said. ‘In the Odéon.’

‘Suppose we bump into John?’

‘Do you really care if we do?’ She shrugged. ‘I know I certainly don’t. Not any more. And if he’s with her, what can he say?’

‘Good point.’

I paid the waiter, who shot me the same ‘lucky bastard’ look he’d given me earlier, only this time it was alloyed with an element of amused respect, as if he’d underestimated me. And her perhaps: the glasses made her look much more formidable.

In the lift, Colette said, ‘But why doesn’t John let you stay in that enormous apartment? Or on his boat? Which is almost as big.’

‘Like I said. It’s a professional arrangement. Not a friendship. Besides his wife, Orla — we don’t exactly get on, she and I. It’s all she can do to say hello to me when I come through the door. Which isn’t very often.’

‘What do you think of her?’

‘Beautiful. Irish. Bitch. To be fair, I only dislike her as much as she dislikes me. You see, I used to be a soldier. In Northern Ireland. And I think she holds me responsible for the death of every Irish man and woman since Oscar Wilde was sent to Reading Gaol.’

We left the hotel and walked east from Fontvieille Port to Larvotto and the Tour Odéon. Colette took my arm, not because she wanted to be close to me but because her high heels made it difficult to walk. It was a fine evening and we walked in companionable silence for a while, enjoying the Silvikrin sunset and the warm air. Out of the corner of my eye I took in the sexy toe-cleavage in her Louboutins, the Fabergé lacquer manicure, the sugar and gold Rolex, the tailoring details on her jacket sleeve; after more than a year of monastic celibacy it felt exciting to be out with a good-looking woman. As we made our way through the streets we got a few looks from other people who were out that evening, which is to say that Colette was the subject of more than a few appreciative glances. But with a much younger woman on my arm — even one wearing eyeglasses — I looked like any other old fool in Monaco: a slightly gnarled olive tree next to a rather luscious pink bougainvillea. If Toulouse-Lautrec had been alive today he might found much to inspire him in the principality.

We went into the Odéon and rode the lift up to Colette’s floor without seeing either John or his wife.

Her apartment was small but nicely furnished, if you like that very French idea of modern living, with several armchairs that were more comfortable than they looked and, above a plain hardwood dining table, a sort of chandelier or light-fitting that resembled Jupiter and its four largest moons. On a coffee table in front of the window was a copy of a stick-thin Giacometti figure that had once inspired me — if that’s the right word — to write a television commercial for a building society using a snatch of music from Lou Reed’s Transformer: ‘Take a walk on the safer side, with the Nationwide’. (I’m always haunted by some of the shit I wrote back then.) On another table — somewhat incongruously — there was small pot-plant holder, shaped like a baby donkey with a basket on its back. I guessed the Giacometti copy was the Russian’s and the stupid donkey planter was hers.

Colette opened a bottle of white wine, which we didn’t drink — at least not right away — because then she went into the bedroom and started to undress. I could hardly ignore that as it wasn’t a big apartment and besides, she rather helpfully left the door open. Even I could recognize where this was going now and about that kind of thing I’m usually laughably slow; at least so I’ve been told — by John, of course. I joined her in the bedroom and swiftly removed her panties, just to be helpful. I stood back and looked at her for a moment, as if appraising a work of art, which wasn’t so very far from the truth. She enjoyed being looked at, too, which hardly surprised me, all things considered. And I did consider them. Very carefully.

‘There’s probably a better way of getting even with Houston than this,’ I said. ‘Although right now I’m not at all inclined to try and think of one.’

‘Shut up and fuck me,’ was all she said.

John left for Geneva the next day; Orla went to visit her family of Fenian fuck-ups in Dublin. Neither of them knew that I had stayed on in Monaco, at the Odéon, fucking Colette and wondering how to broach with her a subject I’d been thinking about for a while — ever since that day on the autoroute when John had told me he was closing down the atelier. Exactly how do you suggest murder to someone? It certainly doesn’t happen the way it does in Hitchcock — all that Strangers on a Train ‘I can’t believe you’re really serious about this’ crap. No, it was much more like The Postman Always Rings Twice.

As things turned out I hardly needed to bring up the subject of homicide at all. There were lots of small, bitter things that Colette said — ‘I hope his brakes fail’ and ‘I wish she’d just go away and die’, that kind of thing — which persuaded me she was on the same wicked wavelength as me.

And she was scared, of course; scared about what was going to happen to her if John went back to England.

‘I’m thirty-four,’ she said. ‘Nearly thirty-five. That’s old for a girl like me in Monte Carlo. That’s right, I’m old. I used to look in the mirror and think it would last for ever. But it doesn’t. It never does. At my age the choices are fewer for a girl than they are when you’re ten years younger. No, really, Don, I’m not exaggerating. Why have a girl in her thirties when there are so many to be had in their twenties? Believe me, in Monaco, if you haven’t met your grand-père gâteau who’s prepared to take care of you by the time you hit thirty-five then you’re probably lying about your age and spending a fortune in the beauty salon and doing escort work: fucking rich Arabs who use women like Kleenex down here. And sometimes worse than that. This is not going to happen to me. But I really thought I could rely on John. I trusted him, you know. He told me he loved me, and that he would look after me. I do not say that he promised to marry me, but he did say he would take care of me — to help me out with some of my expenses, to help me with my English and to find me an apartment of my own when I have to leave this place. If he leaves Monaco then I’ll simply have to go back to Marseille and get a job somewhere. In a real estate office or a travel company. But shall I tell you what really upsets me?’

‘Yes.’

‘It was when you told me he’d had a vasectomy.’

‘Oh, I see. You’d hoped that you and John might eventually have a child together.’

‘No, not eventually,’ said Colette. ‘As soon as possible. I wanted to have a child and that he would help me to support it. That was the express condition of me becoming John’s lover. At my age your biological clock starts ticking quite loudly. But the fact is I’d been on the pill so long I couldn’t conceive. So I was having fertility treatment at a clinic here in Monaco. Paid for by John and from a doctor he knew personally. Of course that now looks like a complete waste of time, given that John is physically incapable of fathering any more children.’

Colette swallowed with difficulty and then started crying again. I let her weep for a while and then handed her my own handkerchief. She wiped her eyes while I fetched her a glass of water.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘I said it looks like a complete waste of time,’ she said. ‘But it’s more than that. What he’s done to me is really criminal, I think.’

I nodded but I have to admit it sounded all too typical of John; and I certainly couldn’t blame him for not wanting any more children at his age. I have to say I’d probably have done the same thing myself.

‘Have you any idea of how painful IVF can be?’ she asked. ‘You have to inject hormones into the wall of your stomach. No doubt John had persuaded my doctor not to say anything about his own little problem. It was all a way of keeping me quiet. So now I feel destroyed. Il m’a prise pour une belle connasse.’

An hour or so later, when she was chopping cucumber for salade niçoise, I saw her holding the big Sabatier in a way which made me think that if John had been standing in front of her she would have pricked him with it, right through his cheating heart.

There’s something about the whole idea of murder that just arrives in the atmosphere, unbidden, like a ghost, and starts to shadow everything you do. That’s how it was with us. I knew what she was thinking because after a couple of years in County Fermanagh, when I was operating off-reservation with the Int and Squint boys, I’m a bit like a Geiger counter where that kind of thing is concerned. I only have to detect just a few homicidal particles in the air and I start to amplify that effect. Back then nobody ever said ‘We’re going to kill some left-footers tonight’; nobody had to; it happened as a sort of malign understanding between like-minded people, as if you were playing a rather lethal game of bridge. You might be in a pub talking about football with a few loyalist boys and then, an hour later, opening the boot of a taxi to reveal some trussed-up Mick you and them had snatched off the street; you would have questioned the bastard first, but no one there would have been in any doubt that someone — usually me, as it happened — was always going to trepan the fucker’s head with a bullet. But there are ad campaigns I wrote that I regret more than any one of those killings. For a while, after Warrenpoint, I really learned how to hate.

But on my third morning with Colette we were eating breakfast on the balcony staring out to sea when she finally brought the subject a little more into the open.

‘When you were in Ireland, Don, did you ever shoot anyone?’

I stood up silently and, leaning over the handrail, looked up and then down to see if there was any chance we might be overheard.

Colette shook her head. ‘I’ve never seen anyone on these balconies,’ she said. ‘Most of the people who live here don’t actually live here, if you know what I mean.’

‘Your Russian included.’

She shrugged. ‘I don’t know anything about what happened to him. I tried to ask around — you know, there are lots of Russian girls in Monaco. I even tried to watch the Russian news on TV. But I think he’s dead. I really do. I was desperate. And then I met John. He seemed like the answer to my prayers.’

I sat down and lit a cigarette and waited for her to say something else, and when she didn’t I started to steer the conversation back in the fatal direction I wanted.

‘You were asking me if I’d ever shot someone. The answer is that I have.’

And then I told her the truth. In fact it all came out; oddly, she was the first person I’d ever spoken about it with. But unlike my wife Jenny, who’d certainly guessed about what I’d done, Colette didn’t look shocked or revolted. In fact, she looked excited, even a little pleased, at what I’d told her.

‘I thought as much,’ she said. ‘My grandfather was in the Foreign Legion. He was in Algiers, in the mid-1950s. And I think he did some bad things there, too. He had the same faraway look in his eyes that you do.’

‘Of course,’ I added, ‘in Algeria and Ireland it was a damn sight easier to get away with that kind of thing. Back in the day, they were finding bodies all over the province. Not just the ones we did, but the ones they did, too. I lost several friends to IRA murder squads. It was like bloody Chicago. They’d hit one of ours and we’d hit one of theirs and so on.’

‘And since then? Have you ever been tempted to kill anyone else?’

I smiled. ‘When I worked at the ad agency there were several account executives I’d cheerfully have killed. One guy in particular. He hated my guts and enjoyed tearing a strip off me in front of everyone. More than once he tried to get me fired. He usually worked late, so one night I waited for him near his car in St James’s Square, close by the office. I was going to kill him but, at the last minute, I changed my mind and gave him a good working over instead. Took his wallet to make it look like a mugging. He was lucky I only put him in hospital. It could so easily have been the morgue. I regretted that a little afterward. Not killing him, I mean.’

‘So, you’re not so squeamish about such things?’

‘Me, squeamish? No. But don’t get me wrong. I’m no psychopath. All of the people I’ve killed really needed killing.’

‘Did you ever want to kill John?’

‘Once or twice, maybe. But not seriously. To be sure, he can be an infuriating man. But now that you’ve suggested this—’

‘You mistake me, Don. I haven’t suggested anything of the kind.’

‘Colette. Please. You’ve every right to feel upset. It’s perfectly normal that you should want to hit back. If something like that happened to me I’d be as angry about it as you are. But I think we both know why you’re asking these questions. And I understand that, too. What he did was quite unforgivable.’

She didn’t contradict any of this. Instead she started to cry. So I put my arm around her and hugged her close, and kissed the back of her neck for a while until she stopped; and then I wiped her eyes with my handkerchief, and stroked her hair.

‘You’ve been through a lot,’ I said. ‘I can tell. I’ve seen it before. And there’s no need to feel ashamed about what’s in your mind right now. Not a bit. However, I’m thinking that John’s hardly the best person to kill in this particular situation. Not if it’s your own future you’re really concerned about.’

‘He isn’t?’

‘No. It seems to me that John is our golden goose. And you don’t kill your golden goose so long as he keeps on laying golden eggs. It’s the giant you want to kill. The giant that owns the goose. The one who collects the eggs.’

Colette thought for a moment, but without any apparent result. It might have been the language barrier or maybe she was even less bright than I thought she was. She looked like I’d handed her a particular fiendish Sudoku puzzle.

‘Who is it who benefits most from all those golden eggs that John lays, right now?’ I asked her patiently.

‘You mean Orla, don’t you?’

We were on the same wavelength, at last.

‘Precisely.’

‘But she hasn’t done anything, to either one of us.’

‘You might think so. But now that I come to think about it, with Orla out of the way a lot of problems — yours and mine — are solved.’

‘They are?’

‘Oh yes. Besides, I’m quite sure it’s her who’s behind this move back to London. This would certainly explain why he hasn’t told you about it. From one or two things he said to me at the time I think it was probably Orla’s idea that they should move back to London, not his, and that he was simply too scared to tell you about it. In some ways she’s a very intimidating woman. And John hates confrontation.’

I paused to allow that to sink in. You have to take a conversation like ours very carefully. There’s no sense in rushing things. It’s like painting an enamel miniature. You need fine sable brushes and a very steady hand.

‘Perhaps, if Orla was off the scene, things might be very different. In fact I’m quite sure of it. For one thing you might even marry John. And once you were married to him you could easily persuade him to restart the atelier. You could get your man and secure your own future and I could get my old job back. John could start earning the top money once more and you could avoid going back to work in a Marseille estate agent’s.’

‘You make it sound very simple. But I don’t think it is that cut and dried, Don. He hasn’t ever mentioned divorcing her to marry me. Not once. Unless he’s mentioned something to you.’

I shook my head. ‘Really, I had no idea about you and him until you mentioned it.’

‘Then I don’t know what we’re talking about. And even if I did, I’m not sure I could marry anyone who has been as deceitful as John has been. I really do want children, you know. Like I told you already, I’m not getting any younger.’

‘And you can have children. You see, I was rather hoping that if you married John then you and I might continue to see each other. That we could be lovers. You might have my child. In fact, you could even conceive right now. I certainly haven’t had a vasectomy. And as far as I’m aware there’s nothing wrong with my fertility either.’

I paused, waiting to see if she would actually be dumb enough to swallow that. Dumb or desperate. Either way, she was.

She brushed my cheek with her fingertips and smiled. ‘I see.’

‘It’s perfectly understandable that you should want to have a future. To have a child. I understand all that. It’s what any normal woman wants, isn’t it? To be a mother?’

I looked at her as tenderly as I could manage whilst suppressing a flash of contempt for John who, when he could have had any woman, had chosen someone so unforgivably stupid.

After a while she said, ‘I still don’t quite see why you need to kill her.’

‘Everything I described just now — about a new start for us both — that can quite easily happen, but only if we kill Orla in a way that makes you John’s only alibi. If we kill her in a way that leaves him as the prime suspect and means you’re his best chance — perhaps his only chance — of staying out of jail.’

By now Colette had told me all about John’s habit of sneaking downstairs from his apartment several nights a week, to fuck her while Orla was asleep; and this had given me an idea which I now described to her in detail. She listened attentively and then nodded.

‘That’s so simple it really might work,’ she said, nodding sagely. ‘You’re very clever, Don.’

I pretended to be flattered.

I nodded. ‘From what you’ve told me, John won’t even notice she’s dead when he gets back into bed. He’ll be so anxious not to wake her that he’ll creep in — as you’ve described — and go straight to sleep. By the time he wakes up in the morning, you’ll be miles away, with your family in Marseille, perhaps. Or better still in Paris. Yes, in Paris, I think. But wherever it is, you’ll wait there for a while, until he’s good and desperate of course, and ready to make a deal, and then you can call to offer him the lifeline. In fact you should offer to say that he was with you for almost the whole night when Orla died. It’s important that you should lie on the record for him. That way he’ll always be in your debt. You can leave it to me to suggest that you and he ought to get married in order to make sure that you never go back on what you tell the police. After all, a wife cannot be forced to give evidence against her own husband.’

Not that it really mattered but I had no idea if this was still true or not.

‘That will make us both look guilty, won’t it?’

‘By then it will be too late. Look here, in the beginning the police will make it rough for you both, but as long as you both stick to your story — that he spent the whole night with you after giving his wife a sleeping pill — then you and he should be in the clear. After all, the autopsy will certainly support John’s story. They’ll find the drugs in her system. And who would give his wife a sleeping pill if he was also planning to shoot her? Why not just give her an overdose and tell the police she had talked of suicide? And who would get back into bed with the body of someone he had already murdered? It just doesn’t make sense, does it?’

‘No, I can see that.’ She paused. ‘How would you kill her?’

‘Do you really want to know?’

She shook her head. ‘No, perhaps not.’

Colette put her feet on the handrail and lit us both a cigarette; she hoovered it into her lungs and then blew the smoke at the sea, where it hung over a little flotilla of boats like a sudden fog.

‘Suppose he doesn’t give himself up to the police after he finds Orla’s body? Suppose he makes a run for it? If he looks as guilty as you say he will, then he might panic and leave Monaco. On his boat. Or in his plane. I think I would, if I was him. Wouldn’t you?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘What then?’

‘Then he’ll still try to call you, Colette. My guess is that in those circumstances you’ll continue to be the linch-pin — the déclic, if you prefer — for his whole future. In fact I should say he’ll be even more desperate to find you than before.’

‘But won’t he suspect that I’ve had something to do with Orla’s murder? Surely I’ll be the obvious suspect in his eyes.’

‘No, not if you think about it logically. Look, before he comes downstairs from his apartment Orla is very much alive, so you’re in the clear then. You’re certainly in the clear while he’s in bed with you here in your apartment, of course. And afterward, when he’s back in bed with her, you’re in the clear then, too. You can hardly murder Orla while he’s lying next to her. He’s your alibi as much as you are his. Don’t you see? That’s what makes it so perfect.’

I paused to let that sink in a bit before adding, ‘But look here, she’s not without enemies. Her family are all Irish republicans. And they have enemies, too. Dangerous enemies in the Irish Protestant community, the UDA and UVF. These people are just as dangerous as the IRA. I should know. I worked with them. Orla has been giving Sinn Féin money for years. When it comes to court I’m sure that this is what John’s defence will rest upon. Orla’s connections in Irish nationalism.’

Colette nodded. ‘Yes. John told me about her family. But won’t it seem suspicious that I went away on the very night his wife was murdered?’

‘Not if you send him a text first thing in the morning; you can tell him that something unexpected came up — your sister in hospital, something like that. That way your absence will be easily explained. He’ll call you of course. But you won’t answer. Not for a while.’

‘And where will I be?’

‘In Paris. The minute I come back downstairs from John’s apartment we’ll go straight to the airport. You’ll catch the first plane and stay there until I can get to you. Meanwhile I’ll go to London and wait for the police to get in contact with me and the other guys. Which they will, of course. So it’s important I’m there when they make contact. If it comes to that I expect John will call me, too. If he’s on the lam, that is. When he’s needed some dirty work done before I’ve been virtually the first person he calls.’

I described three such occasions to Colette: once when he got done for drink-driving and needed someone to go and collect his car; a second time when he wanted me to hire a couple of students to become his personal sock-puppet, posting five-star reviews for John’s books on Amazon — there’s a lot of that goes on, these days; and a third time when he wanted me to sack one of the writers in the atelier. But there were many more I could have told her about.

‘Wait, won’t the police know you were in Monaco on the night of Orla’s murder? Won’t that make you a suspect?’

I shook my head.

‘That might have been the case once. But the staff at British border control don’t bother to record the names of people leaving the UK, so no one will know that I was out of the country. If the Monty cops ask I’ll tell them I spent that weekend at my place in Cornwall. Besides, I’ll be using a false passport. Both John and I managed to get one when we were researching one of his books. No one will ever know I was even here.’

‘You seem to have thought of everything already.’

‘Yes, I think you’re right. And perhaps I have. It is curious that since you mentioned the idea this plan seems to have arrived in my head as one whole, like the plot for a novel.’

‘It seems that you are much better at plots than you thought you were.’

‘Isn’t that interesting? On the other hand maybe it’s not so surprising. After all, I’m beginning to realize that I would do anything for you, Colette. Even commit a murder.’

‘But why do you say so?’

I stood up and surveyed the Legoland scene below. The summer sporting club, on the promontory of land that marked the eastern edge of Larvotto, was no bigger than a one-euro coin, while the old port — Port Hercule — to the west, was the size and shape of a bottle opener. It was not a view for the faint-hearted — anyone with vertigo or acrophobia could never have inhabited the Tour Odéon — but it was the very place a more modern-minded devil might have chosen if he had been looking for a high place to tempt someone with ownership of the whole world. And Monte Carlo is as near to being a holy city as there is for the world’s wealthiest people. It was certainly worth a try. I turned to face her and leaned back confidently on the handrail of the glass balcony; only in a novel would the rail have given way, sending me to a probably well-deserved death a couple of hundred feet below for my Icarus-like hubris. A warm breeze stirred my hair and then hers, but it might as easily have been something altogether more sinister — a subtler, more ethereal ectoplasm that contained the essence of pure temptation.

‘Honestly, Colette, it’s no accident our coming together in the Columbus Bar the other night. No accident at all. The way it happened — John’s book as the nexus of our meeting — that was fate pure and simple. I know it. You know it. I’ve thought a lot about it and I think it happened because, frankly, it’s within my power to give you exactly what you want in life; to enable you to live the life of luxury you’ve probably always wanted: a beautiful apartment, a lovely town house in Paris, a home in the Caribbean, an expensive sports car, a child — all of these things I will give you, Colette, if you’ll let me help you. And I tell you without fear of contradiction that after all that’s happened to you, you deserve these things. You know it and I know it. But we needn’t dwell on any of that because while material things are important they’re not that important. Happiness, fulfilment in life, love — these are the things that really matter. So now I’m going to tell you exactly why I want to help you — why I’m your most devoted servant in this matter. Please don’t be embarrassed if I tell you it’s because I think I love you. What do the French call it? Un coup de foudre?’

‘Really? After so short a time?’

‘Is that not how lightning strikes, Colette? Suddenly? Like something which is beyond our control. Perhaps that’s one of the few benefits of being older. You make up your mind about things like that so much more quickly than when you’re a bit younger. Carpe diem, so to speak. Anyway, I’d hardly be contemplating such a drastic course of action if I didn’t love you, I think. Do you? Only a truly devoted lover could be willing to do what I am willing to do for you, which is murder, my sweet.’

I was on the verge of mentioning Thérèse Raquin — Zola’s marvellous book about a love triangle and a murder — until I remembered that it hadn’t ended well for any of them. I pressed my belted waist hard against the brushed steel handrail, as if testing the absolute limits of the world I was in. I remained exactly where I was, with my feet not exactly on the ground but still very firmly on the polished wooden decking of that little twenty-ninth-floor balcony.

‘No, I suppose not.’ She finished her cigarette and smiled. ‘I’m very fond of you, Don. But please, give me a little more time. For my feelings to catch up with yours. Yes?’

‘Of course. I understand.’

‘And look, I think it’s a good plan. But tell me please, is ours a perfect plan? After all, we don’t want to get caught, do we? It’s odd how getting caught never seems to be part of anyone’s plan. I’m terrified of going to jail.’

I wondered if Colette had ever read Camus, like every French schoolchild. I certainly didn’t want to end up in jail like Meursault, talking to a priest about the absurdity of the human condition. Because that’s the part of the plan that les hommes d’action always fail to consider; and yet it’s the one that needs debating most of all — the possibility of failure and of being caught. Looking at Colette though, I didn’t think the existential niceties of crime were worth mentioning.

‘The perfect plan?’ I smiled and flicked my still smouldering cigarette in the general direction of Beausoleil, where I hoped it might ignite the lacquered hair of some elderly French matron. ‘It’s an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. It doesn’t exist. Order always tends toward disorder; this is called entropy. So there is only a good plan, and this is a very good plan. But a good plan is only a good plan if it’s flexible enough to deal with something that goes wrong, even sometimes very wrong. In my experience something always goes wrong. That’s why there’s no such thing as a perfect plan. Or a perfect murder. Because something always goes wrong.’

She nodded. ‘When are we going to do it?’

‘When’s he back from Geneva?’ I said.

‘In two weeks’ time, they’re both here for their wedding anniversary, I think.’

‘Then that’s when we’ll do it.’

Chapter 4

I picked up the iPad and surveyed the apartment, satisfied that I had everything I had come for. But I didn’t bother searching the place for Colette’s laptop; I knew where it was: she had taken it with her when she had gone with me in the car to Nice Airport. Her leaving the iPad on the kitchen worktop had been a mistake; I simply hadn’t noticed it and nor had she. It had been the kind of thing I’d been referring to when I’d talked to her about entropy and was just one of a couple of things that had gone wrong with the plan immediately after I’d murdered Mrs Orla Houston.

It still felt a little weird saying that. I didn’t regret it for a moment, however. In truth I was having the most fun I’d had since leaving the army. Nothing — not the huckster/wanker world of advertising nor the solitary/autistic life of a writer — can compare with the exhilarating thrill of getting away with murder.

I used the Judas hole in Colette’s door to check that the corridor was empty and thinking the coast on floor twenty-nine was clear I went out of the apartment and closed the door behind me.

‘Hello at last,’ said an American voice.

I turned to see a smallish man in a grey suit with a Van Dyck beard, a paunch and an unlit Cohiba shuffling toward me. He was perspiring heavily and in his other hand was a handkerchief as big as a flag of truce. He looked like a Confederate Army general.

‘You must be my Russian neighbour — Mr Kaganovich, isn’t it?’

I fixed a smile to my face and nodded, vaguely.

‘Colette — Miss Laurent has told me so much about you, but I was beginning to think you didn’t exist.’ He smiled. ‘Unless you’re a ghost.’

I smiled, enjoying the irony and said, ‘There are no ghosts in this building.’

‘I wouldn’t be too sure about that.’

He held out a hand that only just cleared the sleeve of his ill-fitting jacket. ‘Michael Twentyman. Originally from New York but now of no fixed abode. Hey, but we all are if we’re here in Monaco, right?’

‘Lev,’ I said, shaking Twentyman’s hand. ‘Originally from Smolensk, but now mostly travelling somewhere on business. Pleased to meet you.’

I’d always been quite good at imitating accents; back in my advertising days, I’d often voiced a radio commercial when the so-called acting talent couldn’t quite manage it to my high standard. Most of the actors who do voice-overs are drunken has-beens you haven’t seen for so long they look like Dorian Gray’s picture. In truth I’d never done a Russian accent, professionally, but seeing The Hunt for Red October on television as many times as I had, I figured I only had to be as good as — or no better than — Sean Connery or Sam Neill to persuade the American that I was the genuine article. With any accent, less is more.

I turned and walked toward the lift.

‘Not as pleased as I am,’ said Twentyman. ‘I’m having a few friends over for Sunday night cocktails in my apartment tomorrow. And then we’re going to dinner at Joël Robuchon. My girlfriend is from Kharkov. So it’d be great if you could join us.’

It figured that someone like him would have had a Russian girlfriend and, for a brief second, I tried to picture her: blonde, blue-eyed, glass-cutting cheekbones, with hooks and gut-suckers like a liverfluke — which is a parasite in sheep almost impossible to be rid of. Russian girls in Monaco would have looked at Twentyman the way a wolf on the steppe might have seen a lost lamb.

‘I’d love to,’ I said. ‘But I’m on my way somewhere.’

‘Business or pleasure?’

‘Is there a difference?’

Twentyman laughed. ‘You’re right. Not in Monaco.’

The lift arrived and we stepped inside. I pressed the button to take us down to the Odéon garage.

‘I’m headed out myself.’

I nodded politely.

‘I assume you heard about our news,’ he said.

‘What news might that be?’

‘What news?’ Twentyman laughed. ‘My God, you have been away, haven’t you? Why our murder, of course. Mrs Houston. The actress. In one of the sky duplexes nearly two weeks ago. That’s why I mentioned ghosts.’

‘I did hear about that, yes. Terrible. I hadn’t met the poor lady myself. But it was my information that the husband did it. The writer. And that he’s still at liberty.’

‘He’s the number one suspect, yes. But that’s the French police for you. The husband is always the number one suspect, right? This is the home of le crime passionnel. But if you ask me, the culprit could be anyone in this building. The first twenty floors are affordable housing. For Monégasques. Which means this place is hardly as exclusive as I’d hoped it might be when I bought it. All right, maybe the locals have a different elevator, but you wouldn’t ever get this kind of European social engineering in an apartment building on Park Avenue. It smacks of communism.’

‘You think it is one of them, perhaps? The locals?’

‘Why not?’

I shrugged. ‘Then perhaps it’s good that I have alibi. I was in Geneva when this happened. At least that’s what my wife thinks.’

Twentyman laughed. ‘Who knows? Maybe we’ll all need an alibi before this is over. It’s almost two weeks since it happened but the police are still here and no further forward with their inquiry. Asking questions and being a general pain in the ass. I mean you can’t blame them, they’re just doing their jobs. But I really hate cops. You don’t want to hear about that right now. Suffice to say that I’ve been thinking of getting out of town for a while. Until today there were television cameras outside the front of our building. And I just hate that.’

‘Me, too,’ I said. ‘If my wife saw me here she would also kill me.’

The lift door opened not in the garage but in the ground-floor lobby; with its geometric bronze wall patterns which might have signified some ancient hermetic meaning and enormous beige marble pillars, it resembled something from a big-budget sci-fi movie. Whenever I was in it I half expected to see Mr Spock standing on the polished floor; instead I caught sight of someone who was just as unwelcome as any extraterrestrial creature: it was Chief Inspector Amalric and he was talking to the concierge by the front desk.

‘That’s him there,’ said Twentyman. ‘The Chief Inspector of Police. His name is Amalric and he’s a suspicious son of a bitch. Shit. He’s seen me. Hell, now I really am going to be late.’

‘Monsieur Twentyman, hello.’

Amalric’s gravelly voice echoed through the lobby; he was wearing a little straw hat and holding a glass of water in his hand.

‘Chief Inspector,’ Twentyman said weakly. ‘How are you?’

I pressed myself into the side of the lift, hiding behind the side wall and control panel as the Monaco detective set out across the enormous floor toward us. I was pretty sure he hadn’t yet seen me but I figured it was only a matter of seconds before he did and Twentyman introduced me as his neighbour, Lev Kaganovich, which was going to be very hard to explain. I was surely the living proof of the old wives’ tale that murderers always return to the scene of the crime.

‘Good, thank you. Could I have a word with you, please?’

‘It’s a little inconvenient right now,’ he said. ‘I’m just on my way out somewhere.’

‘It won’t take a moment,’ insisted Amalric, nearer now. ‘I just have a few questions to ask you.’

I’d already pressed the close doors button, several times, and to my immense relief the doors started to slide shut.

‘Attendez un moment.’

Twentyman pushed his face close to the narrowing gap between the doors and called out ‘Perhaps later’ and ‘Sorry’ before they closed completely and the lift continued smoothly down to the Odéon garage.

‘That was fast work,’ said Twentyman and chuckled. ‘I can see you’re a good man in a tight spot, Lev, my friend. But for your nifty work with those elevator buttons I’d have been stuck with that fucking nosy cop for twenty minutes.’

‘Why does he want to speak to you anyway? The twenty-ninth floor is a long way from those sky duplexes.’

‘Because I knew her. Mrs Houston was a fellow Tifosi — like me a keen supporter of the Scuderia Ferrari. We met in the Ferrari hospitality suite at the Hôtel de Paris during the last Grand Prix. I imagine the Chief Inspector thinks that I can shed some light on some of the people she knew here in Monte Carlo.’ He chuckled. ‘Even if I could, I’d rather not, if you know what I mean. One question leads to another and before you know it, you’re in handcuffs. I had a similar experience on Wall Street a few years ago. I went from witness to wanted in twenty-four hours. So fuck that, right?’

‘I just hope I haven’t got you into trouble.’

‘Hey, you’re not the only guy who can produce an alibi,’ said Twentyman as the car arrived in the garage. ‘It so happens I was in the library with Colonel Mustard at the time.’

I frowned as though not understanding what he’d said. ‘Please?’

‘American humour,’ said my putative neighbour. ‘Come to think of it, Chief Inspector Amalric didn’t see the joke either.’

‘French, Russian — cops are the same all over. The only jokes they like are the ones they make up themselves. In Russia we sometimes call these jokes “evidence”.’

Twentyman laughed again. ‘That’s very good. Are you sure you can’t come along tomorrow night? My girlfriend, Anastasia, would love to meet you. More importantly so would her friends.’

‘You’re forgetting about my wife. One murder in the Odéon is quite enough, don’t you think?’

Twentyman was still laughing as he walked toward a red Ferrari 599 GTO. ‘Knock me up next time you’re in town, as the actress said to the bishop.’

‘I will,’ I said.

‘Promise?’

‘Scout’s honour.’

I followed Twentyman’s Ferrari out of the garage and into the street, where it was as if his V12 engine was in competition with my W12 for the amount of high-performance noise they could both generate. The roundabout in front of the Odéon echoed with a din that was like a very small and exclusive Grand Prix.

I drove down Boulevard d’Italie in search of Il Giardino — the Italian restaurant where John was awaiting my return. I pulled up in front of a tall privet hedge that shielded the outside tables from the street and started to ring John’s mobile number, but he was already opening the Bentley’s door and dropping into the passenger seat. A strong smell of scotch came with him, not to mention an air of general grievance.

‘Where the fuck have you been?’ he said. ‘It’s nearly nine o’clock. I was beginning to think something had happened to you.’

‘Sorry about that,’ I said. ‘There wasn’t any mobile reception in the garage and then I’m afraid I just forgot about it.’

‘You forgot? Thanks, Don, and fuck you. I’ve been having bloody kittens since you left.’

‘I forgot because your building is still crawling with Monty cops,’ I said. ‘Oddly enough I was rather more concerned with avoiding arrest than with your fucking nerves.’

‘It’s me they want to fucking arrest, old sport,’ protested John. ‘In case you’d forgotten.’

‘Perhaps. But they would certainly want to know what the fuck I was doing in the Odéon, old sport. With your girlfriend’s iPad tucked under my arm. You see, they’re the same cops I met in London. The ones who came to interview me.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because I fucking saw them, you ungrateful cunt. In the lobby. And outside the entrance. I just hope to Christ they didn’t see me.’

‘Oh, Jesus, Don, I’m sorry. I thought they’d have cleared off by now.’

‘They haven’t. Then I got caught by one of Colette’s neighbours. Fellow named Michael Twentyman.’

‘What did you tell him?’

‘Don’t worry, he’s now under the impression that I’m her missing Russian lover, Lev Kaganovich.’

‘How does that happen?’

‘I did my impersonation of Uncle Vanya. Even though I say so myself it was worthy of an Emmy, or whatever it is they give those tossers for a bit of dressing up and make-believe.’

‘Yes. You always fancied yourself as a bit of an actor, didn’t you? When we were in advertising.’

‘Actually, my best performances were done in the army,’ I said, momentarily affecting a Northern Irish accent. ‘But that’s another story.’

John started to relax a little.

‘Michael Twentyman. I recognize that name. I never met him myself but I think Orla used to know him.’

‘Come on. Let’s get out of here before he sees us and invites us to a party.’

As I put the Bentley in gear and accelerated slowly away he found the other end of the Apple wire in Colette’s iPad that I’d positioned down the side of the passenger seat in its faux snakeskin cover.

‘Is this it? Is this her iPad?’

‘Yes.’

‘Thank God for that.’

He plugged it into a charging socket underneath the Bentley’s armrest and pressed the iPad’s home button to start it up, but for now there wasn’t enough power in the thing.

‘We can open that when we get to the hotel in Èze,’ I said. ‘It will give us something to talk about over dinner.’

‘I fucking hope so.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘She had a passcode on her iPad.’

‘Don’t you know the number?’

‘I thought I did. But now, I’m not so sure I haven’t forgotten it.’

‘This is a fine time to forget it given that I just risked my ass retrieving that piece of junk from under the noses of the Monty cops. Because that’s what it is if you can’t remember the goddamn number.’

‘Keep your hair on. I’m sure I’ll remember it.’

‘Let’s hope so. Otherwise this whole journey will have been a waste of time.’

John grunted. ‘Don’t I know it.’

We made our way up the hill into Beausoleil and out of Monaco.

I said, ‘But even if you don’t, it’s only four numbers. How difficult can that be to break?’

John made an error noise.

‘Clearly you know nothing about Apple. If you repeatedly enter the wrong passcode, it disables the iPad. The only way to unlock an iPad that has a passcode, other than by entering the correct passcode, is to restore it to the original factory settings. And that deletes all of the data — which is the very thing we’re after.’

‘Everything?’

‘Everything.’

‘I see.’

‘Did you find her laptop?’ he asked. ‘It might be a different story if we had Colette’s laptop. We could plug the iPad into the computer and that would restore the data.’

‘No sign of that, I’m afraid. And believe me I looked everywhere. She must have taken it with her when she left Dodge. You’d better start trying to think of the right number. Or we’re fucked.’

‘Yes, you’ve made that abundantly clear already, old sport.’

As I steered the Bentley west — toward the small medieval village of Èze — John fell into sombre silence and I guessed he was trying to remember the iPad passcode. I already knew Colette’s passcode, but I was trying to work out how I was going to give him the correct four numbers without drawing suspicion on myself.

Chapter 5

‘What are you doing?’

‘Pulling my cock out. I don’t want to come inside you.’

‘Why the hell not?’

‘Because when John fucks you he’ll notice that someone has fucked you already.’ I paused. Colette was keeping me inside her. ‘Won’t he?’

‘Of course he won’t. Not unless he goes down on me and he never does. With him it’s always the same cinq à sept, douche comprise. It’s become a sort of joke with us. Besides, I don’t want to change these sheets before he comes down here. So, go ahead and come in me.’

I shifted a little, pushed my cock right up to the neck of her womb — thank God for Cialis — and almost immediately rediscovered some urgency in my pelvic movements; a couple of minutes later I was rolling off her and giving her a tissue and struggling back into my underpants — to protect her Frette bed linen.

‘Anyway,’ she added, ‘I thought you’d like the idea of — what’s that disgusting phrase you have in English? Remuant sa soupe.’

‘Stirring someone else’s porridge.’ I laughed. ‘You’re right. Now I come to think of it, I do like that idea. Or else I am a Turk.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Nothing.’ I glanced at my watch. ‘Now then. You’re quite clear about what to do when he gets here?’

‘Yes. Only I’m trying not to think about it. I feel terribly sick when I do.’

‘So, forget about it. Pretend it isn’t happening. That it’s got nothing to do with you. If it makes you feel any better you can ask me not to go through with it.’

‘Please,’ she said. ‘Let’s not do this, Don. Really. I’ve got cold feet about the whole thing.’

‘There you are,’ I said. ‘And now that you’ve asked, I bet you’re feeling better already. Look, I’m happy to have this on my conscience.’

‘I don’t believe you have one.’

‘Not since Warrenpoint, no.’

‘Warrenpoint. That’s the place in Ireland where your friend was killed, wasn’t it?’

I nodded. For a moment I replayed some very vivid frames of that particular horror movie. A beautiful sunny day in August — the bank holiday; and me, an Armalite rifle over my shoulder, a cigarette between my trembling lips, picking through the still smoking, mangled wreckage of a four-ton lorry with a stick, looking for human body parts, finding a man’s hand with a wedding ring on the finger and then vowing eternal, undying hatred for the Irish.

‘Look, I’d better have a wash myself. He’ll be here in less than an hour.’

I showered and dressed and checked over the automatic I’d sourced from a dealer in Genoa. It was a Walther 22, identical to one that John had bought for Orla but still only a back-up weapon in case her gun wasn’t in the bedside drawer where, according to John, she usually kept it. Then I lay down on the bed in Colette’s spare room and read a novel on my Kindle to help take my mind off what I was about to do. The novel was by Martin Amis and, in spite of what the critics had said, I was enjoying it rather a lot. No one writes a better sentence than Marty, even if it does take several attempts to scale the sheer cliff-face of his intellect and know exactly what the fuck it is he’s driving at. Sometimes I wonder who the critics would beat up if they couldn’t beat up Marty.

At about 11.30 I heard a knock on Colette’s front door, and when she went to answer it she was wearing a rather fetching little baby-doll nightdress that had me smiling at the predictability of John’s taste. He’d always had a thing for the kind of sleazy bedroom wear that was hardly worth wearing. She pulled a sheepish, embarrassed sort of face before pushing me back into the room and closing the door. I switched out the bedside light and tiptoed into the en-suite bathroom. Then I heard the low murmur of voices, some laughter, the pop of a champagne cork and then silence as they moved swiftly into the bedroom. Colette had not exaggerated about John getting straight down to business: if anything, cinq à sept was optimistic. A few seconds later I received a text on my phone; it was a prewritten Vas y message from Colette that John’s tracksuit — she hated the fact that he always wore a tracksuit for his midnight visits to see her — containing his all-important door key, was now lying on the drawing-room floor.

I hurried through and searched John’s pockets for his door key, but to my irritation and horror there was no sign of it, and several valuable minutes passed before I spied it lying beside his phone on a table in the hall beside the front door. Then I put on John’s tracksuit, pulled up the hood, picked up my backpack, went out into the corridor and headed up the fire stairs to the forty-third floor. The tracksuit was an inspired, last-minute touch, just in case anyone saw me.

But no one did.

I opened one of the double doors, stepped into the sky duplex and closed the door behind me. None of the curtains or blinds was drawn and it was easy to find my way around the apartment, which was as big as the rooftop palace in a Sinbad movie. I went straight through to the master bedroom. Scenting a stranger in the apartment Orla’s dogs had started to bark and I was half inclined to go back and shoot them in case they woke her up. But opening the bedroom door and illuminating the darker room with a small LED flashlight it was immediately plain that the figure in bed and facing away from the room toward the double-height window was soundly asleep and that the hounds of hell could not have awakened her, let alone a couple of irritating spaniels. They say people with dogs live longer; Orla was about to become the proof that this is not always the case.

It was a while since I had looked at Orla without seeing a scowl appear on her face the moment she saw me; she looked as peaceful as she was undoubtedly beautiful. Her long blonde hair — the roots seemed much darker — was strewn across the white pillow and she was wearing a nightdress made of peach-coloured, almost transparent silk. I was irresistibly reminded of a painting entitled Flaming June by Sir Frederic Leighton and which — thanks to the toxic oleander branch that also features in the picture — symbolizes the fragile link between sleep and death; this seemed only appropriate in the circumstances. I wasn’t about to allow the recollection of a nice pre-Raphaelite painting to stop me, of course. I’ve never believed Ruskin’s nonsense that art is morally improving. The hideous Ulster Museum — is there an uglier building in the whole United Kingdom? — has a rather fine painting of St Christopher carrying the Christ child that I was always rather fond of while I was serving in the province, but it certainly never deterred me from putting a bullet in anyone’s head. Besides, I’d been dreaming of killing Orla for a long, long time; ever since the wedding.

I rolled on a surgical rubber glove, opened her bedside drawer and found the Walther exactly where John had said it was, not to mention a number of sex-toys that had my eyes out on stalks. I fetched the gun, screwed on the Gemtech sound suppressor I’d brought along — there was no point in making more noise than was needed — checked the breech and then racked the slide to put one in the chamber. I’m not a cruel man and I’d already rejected the idea of waking Orla up so that she could see it coming. If it was done it was best done quickly and without much drama, so I pointed the silencer at the centre of her Botoxed forehead, muttered a quiet ‘Good night, you Fenian bitch’ and then — holding a thick square of Kevlar behind her skull, to prevent the possible egress of the bullet — I squeezed the trigger. The gun shifted in my hand with a sharp click almost as if the pistol was empty; with the Gemtech a Walther P22 makes no more noise than a table lighter and certainly nothing like a silencer sounds in movies. Her head jerked a little on the pillow at the impact as though I’d struck her, but the rest of Orla’s body hardly moved; then, slowly, her mouth sagged a little as if the life had indeed gone out of her and pressing a finger against her larynx I felt for a carotid pulse but did not find one.

To my relief her cranium had remained intact. I checked for any blood with my finger but there was none. This was important. Any of the 38s in John’s gun cabinet would have blown the back of her head off, and this, of course, was exactly why I’d preferred to use the smaller, less powerful 22. Meanwhile a small snail trail of blood trickled down her forehead, along the line of her eyebrow and underneath her cheek. Just as crucially, her body remained in the same attitude as when she had been alive, so that it was now quite possible that in the absence of any blood on Orla’s pillow John might climb into bed beside her later on without knowing that she was in fact dead.

‘I’m sorry, Orla,’ I said. ‘It was you or me, I’m afraid.’

I placed the gun on the bed for a moment and, for the forensics, I dabbed a little blood on the right sleeve of John’s tracksuit before hunting for the ejected brass cartridge on the floor; when I found it I used a Q-tip to extract a fine amount of cordite which I smeared on the same sleeve. These days, thanks to people like Patricia Cornwell and Kathy Reichs, everyone’s a scenes-of-crime expert and you wonder how it is that anyone is dumb enough to get caught.

I picked up the Walther and was on the point of making it safe, but the constant barking of the dogs persuaded me I’d always hated her fucking dogs almost as much as I’d hated Orla and that I’d certainly relish killing them, too. So I went along to her dressing room and, carefully, so as not to let the dogs escape, opened the door and switched on the light.

My first thoughts were not of the dogs but of Orla’s wardrobe, which revealed such a large number of dresses, coats and shoes that it looked like a designer sale — albeit a shop with two very irritating dogs. On the only area of the walls not given over to closets were several movie posters featuring Grace Kelly — including Rear Window.

‘Hello, boys,’ I said. ‘I’ve just come to say hello.’

The ‘boys’ — which, nauseatingly, is what Orla used to call them — were black-and-white cocker spaniels and yapped furiously at my ankles. Is there a more irritating breed of dog than a cocker spaniel? I don’t think so.

I chuckled. ‘And goodbye.’

The second dog uttered a rather pleasing yelp as I shot the first twice in the chest. Then I pumped two into the second mutt, and I must have hit the dog’s aorta or something because in the seconds before the thing died it started haemorrhaging blood all over the place. I’d never shot an animal before; not even for sport. I never see the point of all that Glorious Twelfth stuff where you shoot as many grouse as you can. But it gave me enormous pleasure to silence these two dogs, for ever. This wasn’t exactly akin to Atticus shooting the mad dog in To Kill a Mockingbird — besides, that dog is only really a metaphor for the lynch mob that features earlier on in the book — but both of ‘the boys’ badly needed killing; and suddenly the world felt like it was a less malodorous and canicular place without such loathsome creatures in it. Quieter, too.

I made the little Walther safe and, unscrewing the silencer — after just five shots it was surprisingly hot to the touch — I pocketed it, went back into the bedroom, and tossed the .22 onto the carpet on Orla’s side of the bed, where it was not likely to be discovered immediately. Job done.

And yet you might say it was the dogs who had the last laugh, for as I made my way out of the door and hurried back along the corridor and downstairs I realized that I’d stood in some of their shit. This discovery caused me to slip and almost fall down a whole flight of steps, and I pulled a muscle in my shoulder as I held on to the handrail, narrowly arresting my fall. I turned around and saw a neat series of footprints ascending the stairs behind me like a trail of stinking breadcrumbs. I took off my shoes and for a moment I stood there debating with myself what to do next. This would have been funny if it hadn’t been so forensically awkward. You didn’t have to be working in CSI to see that.

‘This never happens in Agatha Christie,’ I said. ‘Talk about the curious incident of the dog in the night.’

But there was little time for any postmodern analysis of my predicament. It seemed I had little option but to return to John’s apartment, find some cleaning materials and try to erase my footprints. To do otherwise would have left the police in no doubt that Orla’s murderer had left her apartment after killing her, which might easily have left John in the clear.

I left my shoes where they were and ran back upstairs in my socks; in John’s apartment I switched on my flashlight and went into the kitchen where I found some rags and some bleach. By now I had decided that I hardly needed to clean the dog shit from the carpet in the apartment; that could have happened to anyone, including John himself; it was the shitty footprints between the front door and the door to the fire stairs that were the real problem, and inside the apartment I restricted myself to dabbing a bit of dog shit on one of his shoes. But in the corridor outside the apartment I spent the next ten minutes cleaning away my own footprints, and it was fortunate for me that the owners of the sky duplex next to John’s were — according to Colette — away for the summer on a yacht in St Barts. Glancing at my watch, I saw that I’d been gone for just over thirty minutes.

I moved out onto the fire stairs and worked my way carefully down almost ten flights, checking each step with my flashlight for traces of shit; and only when I was satisfied that every trace of the stuff was gone did I pick up my shoes and open the fire door on 29.

Then, if all that wasn’t enough, outside Colette’s door I couldn’t make her key work and another nervous minute passed before I discovered it was actually John’s key I was using and not hers, since the two were more or less identical. These small errors can mean the difference between success and failure, of course; they’re not exactly Freudian slips — I had no subconscious desire to get caught — more what you might call fate’s attempts to trip you up. That’s what makes life interesting; and of course murder creates its own unique gestalt. The Gestalt of Murder; it’s probably the title of a crime novel by John Creasey; with more than six hundred novels to his name something usually is.

In Colette’s apartment I placed John’s key on the table by the door where I’d found it, jumped out of his tracksuit, tossed it back on the floor and, breathing a little heavily now, went back into the spare room, where I dressed in the dark and waited for him to finish what he was so vociferously doing in the bedroom. It didn’t bother me that he was fucking Colette; on the contrary it meant that she was playing her part right and that he was quite unaware that his wife was dead.

Sitting in the dark I felt quite at home. Some people don’t like the dark at all, but I have always loved it. I feel comfortable there. The thicker and more palpable the darkness around me, the better. As a boy I used to sit in the dark and without the distraction of light and colour I would make all sorts of plans for my life that seemed altogether more possible. It was a little like dreaming without being asleep. I still find a mental clarity in darkness that is hard to find anywhere else. Let’s face it, after life is over the darkness is all there is, so you’d better get used to it. Jenny used to think it was creepy, my fondness for the dark. She would open a door and find me there in the dark and scream with fright, which is why she took to calling me ‘the bat’. Another reason why she left me, probably. No one likes bats very much.

Chapter 6

The medieval village of Èze lies along the famous Moyenne Corniche and is the perfect antithesis of Monaco glitz. Friedrich Nietzsche was fond of Èze, and it’s easy to see why. Perched on a rock fourteen hundred feet above sea-level, Èze is built around the ruins of a twelfth-century castle and commands perhaps the best view of anywhere on the Côte d’Azur, which probably went to Nietzsche’s head; either way it’s just the kind of high and magical place to write some unreadable German nonsense about God and the philosophical importance of having goblins around you. This and the lack of glamour, and two celebrated local perfumiers, make Èze popular with the older sort of tourist, which could explain the defibrillator you see on a wall as you begin to climb the steep, labyrinthine streets, although you would be forgiven for thinking that this might be more usefully located nearer the top of the hill.

Èze is also home to a famous hotel, the Château de la Chèvre d’Or. The Château is actually a haphazard series of jasmine-covered buildings, saucer-sized sun-terraces, fountains, waterfalls, private suites and precipitous Moroccan-style gardens that seem to be part of the village and yet somehow also manage to be very private. With its immaculate green lawns, giant-sized chess-set, croaking toads and crappy modern sculptures it all reminded me — a little — of Port-meirion in North Wales. It’s the kind of place where you expect to see Number Six from The Prisoner striding around in a neat blue blazer and roll-neck sweater, although, according to the guidebooks, Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio are more likely to be seen there.

We checked in, sharing a room with twin beds to save money and because that’s all they had; then we went to dinner in the hotel’s terrace restaurant, Les Remparts, which enjoyed a spectacular view of St-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. Rather more than we enjoyed the food, thus confirming a prejudice I have long held that the quality of food declines in inverse proportion to the altitude at which it is served. I think the three worst dinners I ever had were up the Eiffel Tower, at the top of the Shard, and in the Piz Gloria revolving restaurant at the summit of the Schilthorn, in Murren.

Then again, our thoughts were not really on food at all but on the iPad we had brought with us to the table; and there was nothing wrong with the wine. We ordered a bottle of delicious Domaines Ott rosé, which is almost ubiquitous in that part of the world, and stared silently out to sea. An Artist of the Floating World. It’s the title of a slight novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, and for a few moments it felt as if we two were at peace and had become so unmoored from the realities of everyday life that we were floating high above the rest of the world. Then again, that’s how most writers feel, most of the time.

‘I gave her this iPad, as a little present, on the twelfth of December,’ said John. ‘Her birthday. But I’m certain the pass-code number isn’t that, and I know it’s not mine because I already tried those numbers.’

I lit a cigarette and nodded; knowing the number — as I did — I now hoped to prod his memory with some helpful suggestions. But while it could easily have been a date, the actual number — 0507 — did not present any other obvious possibilities than a birthday or a significant date in July.

‘I still can’t figure her doing something like this to me,’ he said. ‘After all I gave her. I mean, there was a lot more than a fucking iPad, I can tell you. Money, trips, diamond earrings, clothes, an expensive watch. You name it.’

‘The anniversary of when you met, perhaps,’ I said, helpfully.

‘March something or other.’ John shook his head. ‘Can’t be that. We never really mentioned that kind of thing.’

‘Her telephone number, perhaps.’

He thought about that for a moment, tapped the number into the iPad and then shook his head.

‘How many tries did the internet say you got? Before the thing locks down?’

‘Ten,’ said John.

‘So how many is that now?’

‘Five.’

‘I still can’t figure why she wouldn’t have got in touch with me, either,’ he said. ‘I mean, she knows my email addresses — even the secret one. The Hushmail address I have. Why hasn’t she left a message on that?’

‘What the fuck is Hushmail?’

‘It’s an HIPAA-compliant email service. HIPAA is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which sets the standard for protecting sensitive patient data. Which makes it very fucking private for anyone else who uses it. Hushmail is the email equivalent of a burner phone. I was planning to use it in a novel and then decided not to just to help keep the existence of Hushmail a bit more hush-hush.’ He shrugged. ‘Anyway. I checked. There’s no message from her on that account either.’

‘My guess is that she probably wants to make you sweat a bit. To soften you up so you’ll be more inclined to offer her a decent bit of wedge for an alibi.’

‘She could be dead of course. This whole trip might be a wild goose chase.’

‘Maybe. But we’re doing this to be proactive, right? And because we can’t think of anything else to do in the circumstances.’

John nodded. ‘Think of a number.’

‘Le quatorze juillet.’

John tapped the number into the iPad and shook his head.

‘Six,’ he said. ‘Four strikes left.’

As John refilled our glasses with the excellent rosé my phone started to ring; to my horror this was a number I could easily identify. It was Chief Inspector Amalric. I felt my stomach empty. I excused myself and walked away from the table into a little private garden to take the call.

‘Chief Inspector,’ I said, pleasantly. ‘What a pleasant surprise. How can I help you?’

‘You’re not in London?’ he said.

For a moment I considered the possibility that he really had seen me in the lift, at the Odéon. But then I realized it was just as possible he had made this conclusion based on my ringtone. When you’re in a foreign country the ringtone on an English mobile phone sounds different to the way it sounds when you’re back in the UK.

‘No, I’m in Switzerland. I’d been cooped up writing for too long. Cabin fever, I think. So I decided to get away from London for a couple of days. I needed to get some fresh air and to feel the sun on my face.’

‘But the weather is nice in England right now.’

‘Not in Cornwall it isn’t. And besides, the food isn’t nearly as good.’

‘Oh, I don’t know. That dinner we had at Claridge’s was excellent. That’s why I was calling actually. I’m coming back to London on Wednesday, and I hoped to have dinner with you again. I have some more questions for you. About Mr Houston.’

‘I imagined you might, since you haven’t yet caught him.’

‘Now you sound like my boss, Paul de Beauvoir, the Commissioner. Every day he asks me the same question: where is Houston? I know that sooner or later I am going to answer “Texas” out of sheer frustration and I will be off the case. People are starting to avoid me. After almost two weeks they’re as frustrated with my lack of progress as I am. Why just tonight, a man at the Tour Odéon — someone who knew Madame Houston — he virtually ran away when he saw me.’

When he said this it was as if I’d had a mild electric shock. Had he seen me, too? Or was he just fencing with me?

‘I hope you don’t think that I’m avoiding you, Chief Inspector.’

‘You, monsieur? Why would I think such a thing? You are an English officer and a gentleman.’

‘I was,’ I said. ‘I’m not so sure I’m either of these things now. They both sound like luxuries I can ill afford.’

‘In fact, I would go so far as to say that no one has been as helpful as you have been.’

‘I’m glad you think so.’

‘Certainly not his ex-wives or his children. Nor his publisher. When are you going back to London?’

‘I’m not sure. I’m staying with some friends. In Geneva.’

‘Then perhaps I could meet you there. It’s not so very far away from Monaco, you know. Five or six hours by car.’

‘Yes, of course. But look, could I call you back about when and where? I’m a little tied up with something right now.’

‘I hope she’s nice.’

‘I wish it was like that. But it isn’t. I’m afraid I lead rather a dull life, Chief Inspector.’

‘You? A writer? I don’t believe it. All writers have a mistress, surely?’

‘Not me.’

‘Take it from a Frenchman. Perhaps it’s time you got one.’

‘Thanks for the advice. Look, I’ll call you, okay? Tomorrow. But I really do have to go now.’

‘Certainly. You have my number, of course.’

I ended the call; and then checked several times that the call was actually ended. Sometimes you think you’ve hung up and you haven’t. All the same it had been careless of me to use my own phone in Monaco. It was probably too late but I switched it off anyway. That’s how technology works against you. Did he suspect me? There was just enough in what he’d said to make me think he did but not enough to make me think he didn’t. Surely it was just a coincidence that he had telephoned on the very night I had been in Monaco? I’ve never much liked that word, ‘coincidence’; there’s more comfort to be found in words like ‘fluke’, ‘happenstance’ and ‘accident’; thanks to Jung no one believes in coincidence much any more. But Amalric had been helpful in one respect at least. I’d realized exactly what Colette’s passcode number meant.

I dropped my phone into my jacket pocket and was walking toward the gate when it opened to reveal the one person next to Chief Inspector Amalric and Sergeant Savigny whom I least wanted to see on the whole of the Côte d’Azur.

‘I don’t believe it. Talk about coincidence, you coming here to the Chèvre d’Or. Gee, that’s hilarious. Lev. I never ever see you before and then I see you twice in one evening.’

It was Michael Twentyman and he was accompanied by two permatan blondes wearing tiny skirts and heels as sharp as a leather worker’s awl. They had all just started cigarettes.

‘How the hell are you? Ladies, this is the man I was telling you about. This is Lev Kaganovich. My neighbour from across the hall. Lev? I’d like you to meet a couple of friends of mine. Anastasia and Katya. Say hello to my little friends, Lev. Ladies, Lev is from Smolensk.’

I bowed my head politely. ‘Dobry vecher.’ That and ‘Dobry den’ were two of only three things I knew how to say in Russian. I actually said it twice; perhaps I figured it would make me sound twice as Russian as saying it only once.

One of the women said something back in Russian which of course I didn’t understand.

‘Do you speak any Russian, Michael?’ I asked him.

‘Not a damn word,’ he said.

‘Then ladies, for Michael’s sake, let us speak only in English. Or perhaps French. To do otherwise would be rude.’

‘I don’t speak any French either,’ said Twentyman. ‘No one speaks French in Monaco. And frankly these days, Lev, Russian will get you further than English. That and Arabic, of course. Hey, look, are you with someone? Why don’t we all hook up? We’re having dinner right now in the hotel’s Michelin-starred restaurant and we just came out for a smoke.’

‘Yes,’ said Anastasia. ‘That would be nice.’

‘That’s the great thing about France. No one minds if you smoke outside a restaurant.’

‘I’d really love to, Michael.’ I eyed Katya meaningfully as if nothing would have given me more pleasure than a couple of hours spent with her. ‘But I have an important client waiting on the terrace restaurant downstairs and I’m on the verge of closing a very lucrative deal. So you’ll really have to excuse me.’

I knew that wouldn’t be enough for Twentyman so I took him by the elbow and led him out of the back of the garden to the door of the Michelin-starred restaurant.

‘Give me your card,’ I said. ‘Perhaps, if I can finish my business in time I can join you somewhere afterward. I really like your two friends.’

‘Stasia is my girlfriend,’ explained Twentyman as he opened his wallet and thumbed out a business card that was as thick as an invitation to a royal garden party. ‘But Katya is a great girl. Very warm. You and she would really hit it off.’

‘I think so, too.’

Twentyman handed me his card. ‘Do you have a card?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘In my line of work, it’s best to keep one’s telephone numbers secret. But I will call you later, yes?’

‘Great. Hey, maybe we can go to Studio 47 in Nice.’

‘Sounds like a plan.’

‘By the way, I meant to ask you earlier. Where’s Colette? I haven’t seen her in a while.’

‘She’s with her family, in Marseille.’ I winced. ‘She and I are no longer an item, as you Americans say. To be frank with you, it’s been a little difficult with her.’

‘Sure, I know what that’s like.’

‘See you later, I hope.’

I went back down to the table where I’d left John. He had one of his little Smythson notebooks open on the table in front of him and he was writing something in a small, neat hand.

‘You’re writing?’

‘Keeping notes,’ he said. ‘For research purposes. You never know, some of these experiences might turn out to be useful. For a novel. Or perhaps my prison autobiography.’

‘Or The Geneva Convention, perhaps. I’m sure you can work some of your recent experiences into a plot like that.’

John shook his head. ‘I’m afraid The Geneva Convention is no more,’ he said. ‘It turns out that Robert Harris wrote a thriller called The Fear Index about a Geneva-based hedge fund.’

‘But the plot you outlined to me is very different from his,’ I said. ‘Besides, you’ve always said that you should never be deterred by someone writing a book which is in the same ball-park. That sometimes the second book about something succeeds where the first one fails.’

‘But his one didn’t fail. That’s rather the point, old sport. Anyway, what the fuck took you?’ John drained his glass and poured another. ‘I thought you’d run out on me. The food here’s not that bad.’

‘You know you’re going to have to start trusting me, John.’

He nodded. ‘Fair enough. I’m sorry.’

‘I ran into Michael Twentyman. It seems he’s having dinner with a couple of friends in the other restaurant.’

‘What did you tell him? Suppose he recognizes me?’

‘He doesn’t know you.’

‘No, but my picture has been on the front of Nice-Matin.’

I smiled, wryly. ‘That picture doesn’t do you justice.’

‘I’m glad you think this is funny.’

‘I also had Chief Inspector Amalric on the phone,’ I said. ‘It seems that he wants to question me again.’

‘Jesus. About what?’

‘I rather imagine he thinks I can tell him where you are hiding.’

John bit his lip and looked worried. He turned around in his chair as if expecting to see the Chèvre d’Or terrace surrounded by French gendarmes. ‘Maybe they’re undercover cops,’ he said. ‘These other diners.’

Several of the other tables were occupied by Chinese — imperceptibly different from the Japanese who’d once flocked to Europe. I shook my head.

‘You don’t suppose he’s on to me? Your chief inspector.’

‘No. But I’m not so sure that he wouldn’t like to make me a suspect.’

‘You? What the fuck for? You haven’t killed anyone. At least no one I know about.’

‘I had the sneaking suspicion he might have spotted me in your building. When I was in there fetching that iPad.’

‘Christ, Don.’

John looked around again.

I shrugged. ‘Look, I’m probably imagining it. He didn’t get a good look at me. I’m certain of it.’

‘I hope so.’

‘He’s under a lot of pressure to get a result. From the Police Commissioner. And the Minister of Interior. He probably called me because he can’t think of anything else to do. That’s what cops are like when they’re not getting anywhere. They do everything they did before, again, in case they missed something. At least that’s what the clever ones do, and like I said before, Amalric is nothing if not clever.’

‘You’re not just saying that, are you? To make me feel better. Because as it is I’m not going to sleep a fucking wink tonight. My heart feels like a bloody canary.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It was just a coincidence that he should have called me on the very night we went back to Monaco. Look, if they were really on to us, they’d have arrested us by now, don’t you think? I mean what’s to be gained by not picking us up now? He was on a fucking fishing trip, I’m sure of it. Because of the pressure from the top.’

I was trying to persuade myself of this as much as I was trying to reassure John that everything was all right. I was half inclined to climb in the Bentley and leave Èze as quickly as possible. Suddenly it seemed dangerously near Monaco. But I was dog-tired. Half a bottle of decent rosé will do that to you after a long drive. All I wanted now was to go to bed in a nice air-conditioned bedroom.

But I still had one thing to do.

‘My heart bleeds for him,’ said John.

I laughed. ‘Typical bloody Frenchman though. Always thinking about their cocks. He more or less asked me if I had a mistress. And when I said I didn’t, he suggested I should get one. He sounds like he’s a shagger. A real DSK.’

John frowned. ‘A DSK? What’s that?’

‘Dominique Strauss-Kahn. You know? He was MD of the IMF before he got caught with his trousers down and the French press turned him into Monsieur Cinq-à-Sept.’

‘Oh him, yeah.’ John smiled as light dawned on Marble-head. ‘That’s it, Don, old sport. You bloody genius. I remember now. 0-5-0-7. That’s Colette’s fucking passcode.’

‘You’re not serious.’ I made an innocent face. ‘Really?’

‘That’s what Colette used to call me. Monsieur Cinq-à-Sept. For obvious reasons.’ John was already tapping the number into Colette’s iPad. ‘Brilliant,’ he said. ‘We’re in.’ His smile widened. ‘And here it is. Her list of contacts.’

He scrolled down through the list.

‘This must be it. Didier and Mala Laurent. Boulevard la Savine, in the fifteenth arrondissement. There’s a telephone number.’ John picked up his mobile — the one he’d borrowed from Bob Mechanic — and started to dial.

‘No, wait,’ he said, tossing the phone back onto the table. ‘If she is there and she is involved in some sort of blackmail scam, then I’d just be putting her on alert, wouldn’t I? Better to have this conversation if we’re sitting outside the front door. Might be interesting to see what reaction it provokes.’

‘The fifteenth. That’s northern Marseille, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘There was an article about the Marseille banlieues in the Guardian. Pretty rough area to take a friend’s Bentley.’

John shrugged. ‘So maybe we won’t wash it tomorrow.’

‘But more importantly, have you given any thought to what you’re going to say to Colette when we catch up with her? I mean apart from demanding to know where the hell she’s been for the last two weeks?’

‘No. I can’t say that I have.’

‘Let’s suppose for a moment that she really did have nothing to do with Orla’s murder. In which case she’s probably scared witless that she’s going to be a police suspect, too. It seems to me that she’s not just your alibi, you’re hers, too. In which case it might be better if you were both to say that you spent the whole evening together instead of your just having had a quick shag, like you say you had. In one sense that makes you more of a cunt — the fact that you were prepared to do something like that, under your wife’s nose. But being a cunt doesn’t make you a murderer.’

‘Yes, I can see how that might play.’

‘Then all you’ll have to do is think of a way of making sure Colette stays onside.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘How long have you known her? Less than a year?’

‘Six months.’

I shrugged. ‘If it was me I would want to be sure that she knew that you were going to look after her after this is all over. For a start she’ll need a good lawyer. And she’ll need money. Probably quite a lot of money.’ I laughed and then shook my head as if I’d thought better of saying something.

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

‘No, go on, say it.’

‘Just that it might actually be cheaper if you married her. When this is all over.’

‘What?’

‘No, think about it. A wife can’t give evidence against her own husband. So if she did ever retract her story, there would be no point.’ I shrugged again. ‘It might actually be a good move. After all, it’s not like you have a wife, is it?’

‘You’re a devious fucker, Irvine. Do you know that?’

I smiled. ‘It has been said.’

Chapter 7

‘What’s that book about a road trip?’ asked John.

We were driving west, heading toward Marseille on the busy A8 which, according to the Bentley’s satnav, was a journey of about two and a half hours. I was at the wheel and John had his notebook open on his thigh.

‘There are several. The Hobbit. Travels with Charley.’

‘It’s not The fucking Hobbit.’ John frowned. ‘Travels with Charley. Is that Graham Greene?’

‘Steinbeck. You’re thinking of Travels with My Aunt. Which isn’t a book about a road trip at all.’

‘Think of some others.’

I shrugged. ‘The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho.’

John looked nauseous. ‘Ugh. No. I hate him. That’s a real Richard and Judy book. Zero sugar philosophy for muppets.’

‘The Grapes of Wrath. On the Road.’

‘Kerouac. Yeah, that’s a real life-changing book. After I read it I promised myself I would never waste my time finishing a book I wasn’t enjoying ever again. It’s the kind of road book that would give you road rage.’

I smiled. John’s opinions of books were always amusing.

‘Come to think of it, it’s not a book at all, the story I’m thinking about. It’s Two-Lane Blacktop. A Seventies movie with James Taylor and Dennis Wilson from The Beach Boys.’

‘Haven’t seen it.’

‘Few have. But it’s a cult classic.’

‘What happens?’

‘Not very much. They drive across Route 66 in a ’55 Chevy. Don’t say anything. Get in a couple of races with Warren Oates.’

‘Sounds a bit existential. Not your kind of thing at all.’

‘Nope. It isn’t. But I was thinking. That’s kind of like you and me, old sport. Taylor and Wilson. Except that we’re twice as old as they were in that movie. And this is a much better car, of course. Plus, we’ve got a lot more money. And we don’t have a girl in the back.’

‘Not yet. Maybe we’ll find one on the way.’ I put my foot down. ‘Hey, there’s a green Porsche up ahead. We can race that if you like.’

‘Just keep it to 130.’

We hadn’t driven far past Nice when John noticed a French police car in our mirrors. He turned around in his seat and said, ‘There’s a cop on our tail.’

‘I know.’

‘How long’s he been there?’

‘Couple of miles,’ I said.

‘What’s he doing?’

‘Don’t keep looking at them. It’ll make us look suspicious. Just ignore them.’

‘Easy for you to say.’

‘Easy to say because I’m right.’ I smiled. ‘I know. Let’s play the secret subtitle game. Like we used to do when we were on the road. To keep your mind off them.’

This is a simple game; you give me the title of some worthy book as if it’s the beginning of a sentence which I complete with something funny; extra marks are awarded for vulgarity and political incorrectness. So, for example, if someone said Farewell to Arms, I might reply, ‘Hello, Stoke Mandeville.’

‘I’ll go first,’ I said. ‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.’

John hesitated for only a moment. ‘Because if it doesn’t then we’re going to feed it to the fucking cat.’

‘Excellent,’ I said. ‘Your turn.’

‘And the Mountains Echoed.’

‘With the sound of an enormous fart.’ I thought for a minute. ‘Here’s a hard one for you. Disgrace.’

John smiled. ‘Dat’s Glenda.’ He chuckled. ‘Here’s an easy one. A Million Little Pieces.’

‘Of shit, are what make Kilburn High Road so interesting to walk along. All right I have one for you, John. The Elected Member.’

‘Made the Chinese woman’s vagina wet just to look at it. The Remains of the Day.’

‘Refused to flush away until they found a plumber. How late it was, how late.’

‘Oops. It looked as if she was pregnant after all.’ John smiled grimly. ‘Here’s one you won’t get. The Inheritance of Loss.’

I was quiet for a moment; then I said, ‘Was the leadership of a big band from his father Joe. The Reluctant Fundamentalist.’

‘Was encouraged greatly by the regular application of electricity to his testicles.’

We carried on this childish vein for a while, but after another ten kilometres the police were still there and, despite our laughter, John was now a nervous wreck.

‘What’s their bloody game?’ he said.

‘That’s all it is. A game. Just like ours. You must have encountered this sort of thing before.’

‘No. What do you mean?’

‘When you were making your road trips between Monaco and Paris in your Lamborghinis and Aston Martins. Look, they’re just fucking with us. We’ve got an expensive supercar we can’t drive like an expensive supercar because they’re right behind us. That’s the game. You’ll see, in a few more miles they’ll get bored and move on to someone else.’

‘They’re on to us, I’m sure of it. They’ll probably try to arrest me at the next toll.’

‘You’re paranoid.’

‘I don’t think so. After what you told me last night, about that cop telephoning you, I think the game is up for me, Don. Really I do.’

‘I don’t blame you for being paranoid. But that’s what you are. You’ve got to relax. Close your eyes. Zone out. Pretend they’re not there. Just be calm and I’ll tell you when they’re gone. Look here’s another one. American Pastoral.’

But John wasn’t listening. He delved into the little black Tumi briefcase he’d brought from Geneva and, to my horror, produced an automatic pistol.

‘What the fuck is that?’ I demanded.

‘What’s it look like? It’s Orla’s Walther P22.’

‘Are you crazy?’

‘I’m damned if they’re going to take me without a fight. I can’t spend the next twenty years in jail like Phil fucking Spector.’

‘Put that thing away. You’ll get us both killed.’

‘I fucking mean it, Don. I’m not going to jail. I’m sixty-seven years old. I’d rather go out in a hail of bullets than die in prison.’

I could see he was desperate — desperate enough to do something stupid, and he gave me little choice but to turn sharply off the A8 at the next junction. The cops however stayed on the A8, which left us heading north on the M336 toward St-Paul-de-Vence and me wondering what to do now. But first I needed to get the gun out of John’s hand and him in a slightly calmer frame of mind.

I kept on driving north for about ten or fifteen kilometres. It was an uninspiring landscape typical of the crappy roadside hinterland of the Côte d’Azur: garden centres, Casino markets, builder’s merchants, tyre centres, McDonald’s, car showrooms, petrol stations and banks. The sort of road that makes the south of France look more like a ring road around Hemel Hempstead.

‘They’re gone,’ I said after a while.

‘I know.’

‘The Monty cops said Orla was killed with a 22-calibre Walther,’ I said. ‘Is that the same gun?’

‘Yes.’

‘You brought the murder weapon with you? Shit, John. Are you crazy?’

‘I couldn’t very well leave it on the floor of my bedroom in Monaco,’ said John. ‘There was enough evidence stacked against me already.’

‘Yes, but why didn’t you chuck it in the sea. Or in Lake Geneva?’

‘I told you. I thought Colette’s Russian mafia boyfriend was involved in this. I’m not yet convinced he isn’t.’

‘Fair enough. But put that away, for Christ’s sake, before you shoot someone.’

John put the Walther back in his Tumi.

‘Is it loaded?’

‘Of course it’s fucking loaded.’

I glanced sideways at him.

‘Did you sleep last night?’

‘Not really. I kept thinking that Chief Inspector was about to turn up and put me in manacles.’ He shook his head. ‘Jesus, I need some air.’

‘Why don’t I lower the hood?’

‘Are you kidding? I feel quite exposed enough as it is. Look, let’s stop somewhere. For a coffee.’

‘We’ve been driving for less than an hour.’

‘I know, I know. But — let’s just stop somewhere, okay? Please?’

‘I’ve got an idea. We could have an early Sunday lunch. Perhaps with a glass of wine in you, you’ll relax a bit. Maybe you could have a nap in the car afterward. We could go to the Colombe d’Or, perhaps. That’s not far from here.’

‘No. I couldn’t go there. They know me. I used to go there all the time with Orla.’

‘Of course. Somewhere else then. Somewhere they don’t know you. There’s a café up ahead. With parking.’

John nodded. ‘I’ve got a better idea,’ he said. ‘Head a bit further north, to Vence. We can stop at the Château Saint-Martin. A couple of times I almost went there with Colette. They don’t know me there but I hear they’ve got a pretty good spa and an excellent restaurant. Maybe I can have a massage. I really think that might help. I’ve got a bitch of a tension headache like you wouldn’t believe.’

‘All right. If that’s what you want to do. But I don’t know how you ever made it to Geneva. At this rate we’re never going to get to Marseille.’

‘I know. And I’m sorry. Look, I’ll be a lot better when I’ve got rid of this headache, okay?’

‘Okay, sure.’

The Château Saint-Martin was set amidst the ruins of an old fortress — an antiseptic sort of place in about thirty acres of grounds that looked like any overpriced luxury hotel in Southern California. The lawns were lush and green and so carefully cut they looked less mown than Brazilian-waxed. The Beverly Hills air was augmented by the staff’s ill-fitting beige-coloured uniforms and there was a gift shop selling overpriced silk scarves and straw hats and lots of other stuff including some books you didn’t want. It was the kind of place you went for your second honeymoon and read Fifty Shades of Grey to look for some ideas about how to make your stay more interesting; which was probably why the guests looked so very bored. Several women were doing some yoga in the sun and probably trying to work up an appetite for a light lunch. They were mostly Americans who liked the French but only if they spoke English good enough for them to wish someone a nice day.

John went and booked himself a deep-tissue massage while I sat in the garden restaurant in the shade of some old olive trees and chose a bottle of cold Meursault. Since John was paying I chose the Coche-Dury Meursault 2009, a snip at 500 euros; then I sat and read about another forest fire in The Riviera Times. There are always forest fires in the Alpes-Maritimes and Provence during the summer. This one was in the Forêt de l’Albaréa, near Sospel; 900 hectares of forest and several dozen houses had been destroyed, and the unidentifiable body of a man had been found. I wondered how badly you had to be burned for your body to be unidentifiable. Sometimes life in France seemed very much more precarious than in England. At last John returned from the spa and I waved over the maître d’ and we ordered some gazpacho followed by two chicken salads.

‘You were a while,’ I observed.

‘Got talking to the girl who’s doing my massage,’ he said. ‘Nice-looking bird so I tipped her in advance.’

‘Why?’

‘To double my chance of a happy ending, of course.’

‘Is that a possibility?’

‘It is now. Besides, she’s from Yorkshire.’ He nodded. ‘From Keighley. If there’s one thing I know about it’s women from fucking Keighley.’

‘That’s a surprise. A girl from Keighley, in a place like this.’

‘Isn’t it?’

‘That’s Brontë country, isn’t it?’

‘It is.’

But when the waiter arrived with our food, we were in for a bigger surprise. Because our waiter was none other than Philip French, who had been the fourth musketeer in John’s atelier of Mike Munns, Peter Stakenborg and myself. And it was only now I remembered that French’s home in Tourrettes-sur-Loup was only a few miles away from Vence and the Château Saint-Martin. If either John or I had ever accepted his invitation to visit him there, we would have known that and perhaps avoided the area altogether.

French regarded us both, but more especially John, with something close to loathing before laying the chicken salads very carefully on the table.

‘Bon appétit,’ he said quietly.

‘Christ, Philip,’ said John. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘As you can see, I’m your fucking waiter.’

‘Yes, but why?’

‘I should have thought that was obvious. I need the money, that’s why. I have bills to pay. I can no longer do that with my writing because no one will publish my work. Rather more to the point, what are you doing here? You’re the one who’s wanted for murder by the police. Or was that just some cheap publicity stunt to help you sell more crappy books?’

‘No. Orla’s dead. I really didn’t do it, Phil. I give you my word. Whatever you think of me, I’m not a murderer. We’re on our way to Marseille. To look for someone who’ll help to clear me I hope.’

‘As if I care.’

‘I’m sorry you think that. Look, Phil you won’t — you won’t call the police, will you? At least give me a chance to prove myself innocent.’

‘That’s a good one. You, innocent. An oxymoron if ever I heard one. Sorry. That’s not a word we’re allowed to use in one of your books, is it? Because most of your readers wouldn’t understand it.’

‘Please, Phil. I’m begging you. Don’t give me away.’

‘Did I say I would give you away? Did I?’

‘No, you didn’t. Phil, you’ve got every right to be angry with me. And I apologize if you think I treated you badly. All I can say is that I was under a great deal of pressure at the time. But look here, Don has found it within himself to forgive me. Can’t you?’

French glanced at me and I shrugged back at him as if John was speaking something like the truth.

‘Don was always the best of us,’ said French. ‘I’m made of less noble stuff than he is, I’m afraid.’

That made me smile. It’s funny how people think they know you when in fact they don’t know you at all. There is certainly nothing noble about me; but I’m no psychopath, just someone preternaturally disposed to killing, A hundred years ago, in the trenches, I’d have been up to my neck in death and — I wouldn’t be surprised — quite comfortable with that.

‘If I can clear myself I shall try very hard to make it up to you,’ said John.

I almost laughed. John might have been trying his best to throw himself on Philip French’s mercy but instead he only managed to sound pompous.

French shook his head and then glanced over his shoulder at the maître d’. ‘Look, I can’t talk now, but I’m near the end of my shift. Meet me in the underground parking lot at three o’clock and we’ll talk then. All right?’

‘All right.’

French walked quickly away without a backward glance.

‘That’s all I fucking need,’ said John, and for a moment he buried his face in his hands. After a moment he looked up, tried to eat some lunch and then drained his glass empty. ‘He’s probably calling the police right now.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘No? He hates my guts. Why wouldn’t he?’

I shrugged. ‘Because he said he wouldn’t. More or less. Philip generally means what he says. Besides, does he really want the trouble if he’s working here? The management, the other guests — they might not appreciate it if a hundred gendarmes descend on this place. That might reflect on him, and if he does need the money he also needs the job.’

‘Yes, good point.’

I ate my lunch, most of John’s, lit a cigarette, ordered some coffees and pushed my face outside the shade of our umbrella and into the sun. I realized I was enjoying myself and decided I’d been a little unjust to the Château Saint-Martin. The Coche-Dury and truffle-poached chicken salad had been excellent and the gardens were nice, too. As usual I had more of a taste for expensive places and hotels than I would ever have let on. I decided that when I was in possession of a fortune of my own — which, I hoped, would be quite soon — I would come back to the Château Saint-Martin, perhaps with Twentyman’s shapely young Russian friend Katya, and, in the hotel’s best suite, fuck the arse off her morning, noon and night.

Meanwhile John had gone off and cancelled his massage. There didn’t seem to be much point in having it now, since it seemed unlikely that he would ever relax again.

At three o’clock we both went to the hotel’s underground car park where we had left the Bentley and found Philip French already waiting for us in the cool gloom. He was no longer wearing his waiter’s uniform, but it wasn’t just his own clothes that made him seem different; he was altogether more businesslike, even intimidating. He lit a roll-up and for a moment he just faced us in silence.

‘So then,’ said John, ‘what did you want to talk about?’

French laughed. ‘What do you think?’

‘I really don’t know why you’re taking this tone with me, Phil,’ said John.

‘Don’t you?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘Then I’ll come straight to the point. The price of my silence is 250,000 quid.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘Fine. As soon as you’ve left here I’ll call the police. I don’t think they’ll have too much of a problem finding a nice Bentley like the one you arrived in.’ He walked over to the Bentley and sat on the blue bonnet. ‘You see, I already checked that with the concierge. The Swiss number-plate should make it easy to spot. By tonight you’ll be sharing a sweaty Monaco police cell with some Russian pimp and wishing you’d taken my offer.’

‘So that’s how it is,’ said John.

‘That’s how it has to be,’ said French. ‘I can’t afford it any other way. I’m skint, John. I owe money to all sorts of people down here. Which means I’m desperate. Maybe not quite as desperate as you are, perhaps, but that’s how it is, old sport.’

‘I don’t have that kind of money right now,’ said John.

French stroked the hood of Bentley and smiled. ‘Don’t give me that. This lovely car is worth at least a hundred K.’

‘It’s not mine. If I gave it to you the true owner would eventually report it stolen and then where would you be?’

‘No worse off than I am right now and that’s the truth. Caroline — my wife — she’s left me. Taken the kids and fucked off back to England. All I have down here are debts and dead mosquitoes. I can’t even afford to fill my swimming pool or switch on my air conditioning.’

‘When I closed the atelier I gave you a generous redundancy payment,’ said John. ‘Maybe you’ve forgotten that.’

‘That was taxable, since I am self-employed. Tax down here is something akin to demanding money with menaces. So the French government had more than half of it. But then you wouldn’t know anything about tax, would you? Famously, you don’t pay any tax at all. Besides, what you gave me, after writing all those bestsellers I wrote for you, it was fucking chickenfeed. You know it and I know it and Don knows it. I don’t know why he’s helping you after what you did to the four of us. Unless he has some other agenda. Your biography perhaps, when you’re banged up in a Monaco jail. Yes, that might be it. No one has known you for as long as he has, which would make him best placed to write a book like that.’

‘Please leave Don out of this,’ said John. ‘No one had a better friend than him.’

‘Have it your way, Houston. But my price stands. Two hundred and fifty grand or I telephone the cops. And don’t think I won’t do it. I’ve been on the go since seven o’clock this morning so, believe me, it’ll be the best job I’ve had all day.’

‘You weren’t listening. I simply don’t have that kind of money. Look, use your loaf, Phil, I’m on the run. I’ve got a few thousand and that’s it. The minute I use an ATM I’m toast.’

‘He’s right,’ I said.

‘Do you think I’m stupid? I looked at your fucking lunch bill. It was 650 euros. That’s a week’s wages for me. Including tips.’

‘That was my fault,’ I said. ‘I ordered a bottle of Coche-Dury. I don’t know what came over me. Touch of the sun I think.’

‘In all the years I’ve known you, Don, you never once ordered a really expensive bottle of wine. Not once. Your thrift always impressed me because that’s how I am myself. So if anyone ordered a 500-euro bottle of white Burgundy it wasn’t you.’

‘That doesn’t alter the fact that I don’t have two hundred and fifty grand,’ said John.

‘No?’ French smiled. ‘Then I tell you what, John. I’ll take that famous watch of yours, on account. The Hublot Black Caviar. According to the Daily Mail it’s worth a million dollars. So if I sell it I ought to get how much — maybe 150,000 euros? Who knows? These things are never worth as much second-hand as you think they are. Believe me I know. Lately I’ve had to sell a lot of my possessions on eBay: a nice guitar, a racing bicycle. I’ll take that watch and whatever cash you can raise by nine o’clock tonight. But I’ll be disappointed if it’s not at least 20,000 euros.’

John said nothing.

‘That’s a good offer,’ said French. ‘Best deal you’re going to get from me, anyway. I’d advise you to take it, Houston. Besides, you’ve probably got a whole drawer full of expensive watches at home. Me, I’ve got this fucking ten-euro Casio.’ He held up his wrist to show us a strip of black plastic on his wrist. ‘Matter of fact, why don’t we swap?’

John took off his watch and handed it over to French, who put it on immediately. John looked at the Casio he’d received in return and then hurled it across the garage.

‘Now that’s just stupid,’ said French. ‘You know that watch probably keeps just as good time as your one. Which begs the question. Why spend a million bucks on a watch? It’s not like you get any more time for your money, is it? And you’ll forgive me for saying so, but it’s a million dollars you could have spent giving decent bonuses to the people who made you rich. Mike, Peter, Don and me.’

‘You bastard,’ muttered John.

‘On my new million-dollar watch I make it 3.15,’ said French. ‘I expect to see you both at my house tonight, with the cash. Shall we say nine o’clock?’ He handed me a card with an address and a postcode. ‘Here. Just in case you lose your way. The Villa Seurel. On the Route du Caire. A short way past the Hôtel Résidence des Chevaliers, and on your left. I’ll be expecting you. By the way, don’t count on me giving you any dinner. There’s nothing in the fridge except ice.’

Chapter 8

After John had left Colette’s apartment, I poured a glass of the Dom Pérignon he had left on ice in Colette’s champagne bucket and sat down in the sitting room. At more than a hundred pounds a bottle it seemed a shame to waste it. Meanwhile she took a long shower and then went into the kitchen to make us coffee; it was late and she must have thought we needed to stay awake for the drive to Nice airport. But I think she mostly went into the kitchen because she hardly dared to meet my eye for fear that I would tell her some unpleasant detail that she didn’t want to know about what had happened upstairs in the sky duplex. The sort of details you get in Macbeth about blood, and while the dogs didn’t exactly count as Duncan’s grooms I was sure she wouldn’t have appreciated my shooting them: Colette loved dogs. I could easily understand her reluctance to deal with Orla’s death, and so when she returned to the sitting room with a coffee pot and two cups I was happy to avoid the subject altogether. Indeed I was reading my Kindle when she came in and generally behaving as if the murder had never happened.

She was wearing a nice white blouse that was tight enough to show the swell of her breasts, a pair of neat black tailored pants, sensible ballet pumps, and a single gold bangle that resembled a snake. Her scent was Chanel 19 but I only knew that because there was a bottle of it on her dressing table and because it was exactly the same scent that Orla had worn; it would, I thought, have been typical of John to have given his mistress the same kind of perfume as his wife, just to avoid any cross-contamination. I admired him for that: John did adultery better than anyone I knew.

‘What are you reading?’ she asked.

‘The Information, by Martin Amis.’

‘What’s it about?’

I thought it best not to mention that it was about two authors who hate each other.

‘I think it’s a revenge tragedy,’ I said vaguely. ‘But to be honest I really haven’t figured what the fuck is going on.’

‘I don’t know how you can read at a time like this,’ she said.

‘I can read anywhere.’

I shrugged and watched her pour the coffee; and thinking it was now best to seem very ordinary indeed I told her something about my early life and my love of reading.

‘My mother taught me to read,’ I said. ‘I mean really taught me, so that I could read to her. Like that bloke in A Handful of Dust. Her eyesight wasn’t very good and there weren’t any talking books back then. You might say that I was her talking book. Consequently I read a lot of books that perhaps I shouldn’t have been reading at that sort of age. I mean I never read stuff like Winnie the Pooh or The Lord of the Rings. It was Edna O’Brien and Ian Fleming and Iris Murdoch right from the start. In spite of that I felt like a whole world had been opened to me. Not just a world of books but the world that those books described. As a child it was deeply liberating. As if someone had given me a ticket to a whole different universe. You might almost say I escaped having a childhood altogether. After that I found I could switch off and read at any time and in any place. I never had a problem about detaching myself from the reality of everyday life. It was usually people I had a problem with, not books, which is a common enough experience in Scotland. I was also drawing, playing the piano, or collecting things like stamps and shells and bottle-tops, and numbers of course — I was always collecting car numbers, which was a lot easier than collecting the numbers of trains, because the cars weren’t moving — but in the end it always came back to reading. I’m the kind of person who if ever I were asked on Desert Island Discs would much prefer to be cast away with eight books instead of with eight records. Music I can live without, but reading, no. This is good coffee, thank you.’

‘It’s Algerian coffee,’ she said. ‘I get my mother to send it from home. What sort of books did you read?’

‘I liked histories and biographies, or books about travel and nature. Still do. Oddly I was never much interested in fiction. The other boys were forever reading stories about the Second World War. Not me. I used to like books about wildlife.’

‘You don’t sound like someone who would have ended up in the army.’

‘After school I meant to become a lawyer. I did a law degree, at Cambridge. But my father died, leaving my mother with not very much money; debts, mostly; and luckily for me the army was there to cover the costs of finishing university in return for three years of service as a soldier. At the time it seemed like a fair exchange, although most of my contemporaries thought I was crazy. But I was a rather better soldier than anyone would have imagined. Although not so much a leader of men as an intrepid warrior, so to speak. More your lone wolf. No, I can’t say I was ever interested in leading a band of brothers.’

‘I was never much of a reader,’ she said. ‘My father read the Koran a lot and certainly never encouraged me to read anything. I couldn’t give a damn about the Koran now. It’s not a book for women. The first man who ever gave me a book to read was John. I still have that book. It’s The Great Gatsby.’

I nodded. I hardly liked to tell her that John gave a copy of The Great Gatsby to all of the women he had a thing with. I couldn’t ever love someone who didn’t like that book, he often said. He had a box full of the hardback Everyman edition in his study.

‘Did you read it?’

‘I tried,’ she said. ‘But I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about.’

I smiled and looked at my watch. It was now 3.30 a.m.

‘We’d best leave for the airport. Our cases are already in the car so there’s nothing left to do except lock up and leave.’

‘I can’t find one of my earrings,’ she said. ‘John bought them for me. At Pomellato. They were expensive.’

‘It’ll turn up.’

I stood up and glanced out of the window. Monaco was gilded with light, like the golden collar on the neck of some embalmed princess. I wondered if this was the reason I felt so comfortable in that little principality: I am quite comfortable with the dead. They don’t moan much about the cost of living.

I clapped my hands, businesslike, but rather too loudly for Colette’s nerves, as she gave a start as if something had exploded behind her head.

‘Now then. I’ve got you a ticket on Air France 6201 to Paris, which leaves Nice at 6.15 a.m. so we ought to get you there by 4.30 at the latest. That flight gets you into Orly at 7.40 a.m. I’ll give you the ticket and some money when we get to the airport and you can send John that text saying you’ve gone to visit your sister in Marseille when you’re sitting in the departure lounge. Yes, don’t forget that, will you? This is important, Colette.’

‘Why not now?’

‘Do you want to risk having him come down here again? With me sitting here?’

‘No, I suppose not.’

‘Do it in the departure lounge. When you arrive at Orly take the train into the city — it’s cheaper — and go to the Hôtel Georgette, where I’ve reserved a room for you. It’s a family-run hotel in the Marais — Rue Grenier-Saint-Lazare, number 36 — and while it’s not very expensive, it’s clean and it’s comfortable. I’ve stayed there several times myself and you’ll find that I’ve paid for two weeks in advance.’

‘Thank you, Don. That was very thoughtful of you.’

‘Don’t mention it. Then all you have to do is stick it out and wait for me to get in contact with further instructions. It might be a couple of weeks before I turn up in person. It could even be three. But we’ll speak on the phone long before that. Until then I suggest you go and see some exhibitions. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you about what there is to do in Paris. Only the dead have an excuse for finding nothing to do in Paris. A lot of tourists go to the cemetery of Père Lachaise, but as a writer I always find the one in Montparnasse rather more interesting and certainly less popular with the tourists. Samuel Beckett is buried there, as are Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, in the same plot, which is peculiar since they never actually shared a house when they were alive.’ I smiled. ‘Can you imagine?’

‘And you’re going to London?’

‘That’s right. My flight is a little later than yours. The BA 2621, which leaves Nice at 7.05 and gets into Gatwick at eight. I’ll go back to the flat in Putney and wait for the news to break and then the cops to show up. Which they will. I’m certain of it. There’s no point in us trying to see each other before that’s happened. All of the people who knew John and Orla will be under a certain amount of scrutiny from the police and the press until things die down a bit.’

Colette nodded gravely; she didn’t drink the coffee.

‘Now make sure you’ve got your laptop with you, because I’m going to email you with details of what to say — when eventually you speak to John or to John’s lawyer, depending on where he is. By then he should be a nervous wreck and ready to do anything you want. Once you’ve told him that you’re prepared to say that he was with you for the whole evening, that should go a long way to putting him in the clear; but of course it will draw a whole shit storm down on your head when, eventually, you come back to Monaco to face the music. The police will be quite hard on you, I think. Why didn’t you come forward before? Are you lying to protect him? Did you kill her? That kind of thing. You must be prepared to be bullied. But we’ve spoken about that.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I understand.’

‘If they ask where the hell you’ve been you can say you were scared. You didn’t know what to do. You thought you might be accused of complicity. You were frightened that they might send you to jail for something you had nothing to do with. You can tell the same thing to John. You can even remind him that you’re French-Algerian, which means you come from a family and from a place where people never talk to the police — he’ll believe that because he’s a bit of a racist.’

‘That’s true. The fifteenth — where my family lives — is the banlieue. No one trusts the police in northern Marseille.’

‘But you’ve thought about it now and decided to do the right thing. Because you can’t bear to remain silent any more when a man’s liberty is at stake, and so on and so on.’

She nodded again.

‘Just remember why we’re doing this, Colette. If you lie for him and say he was with you for the whole evening instead of — what was it? — ninety minutes? Then you’ll have something over him. And if you have something over him the best way of making sure you never use that is for him to marry you. Leave it to me to put that thought in his head. After that, he’ll be in the clear.’

We went down to the garage and got into her car, the new Audi A6 that Lev had bought her when he was still around. I sometimes wondered about Lev Kaganovich. Was he even alive? Now that really was a mystery story. She was just about to start the Audi’s engine when I told her I’d forgotten my Kindle.

‘Do you need it?’ she asked.

‘I can tell you’re not a reader,’ I said. ‘It’s got about a hundred books on it.’ I was already getting out of the car. ‘If I don’t fetch it I’ll have nothing to read at the airport and on the plane, and for me that would be a very particular kind of hell. I need a book the way some people need a cup of coffee.’ I bent down and looked into the passenger cabin. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll only be five minutes.’

I waited for a second, smiled and held out my hand. ‘The key. You’ll have to give me the key.’

‘I thought I gave it to you.’

‘You did. But then I gave it back to you.’

She looked in her Chanel purse and nodded. ‘You’re right. You did. I’m sorry. It’s just that I’m so nervous that the police are going to turn up any moment.’ She handed me the key. ‘Please be quick.’

I nodded, returned to the lift, rode up to 29 and let myself back into Colette’s apartment. But the first thing I did was not to find my Kindle but to fetch a bottle of Russian champagne from a bag I’d hidden under Colette’s bed. I opened it, poured some of it down the sink, where it belonged, and then used the half-empty bottle to replace the bottle of Dom in Colette’s ice-bucket. Then I added a few Chekhovian touches to the appearance of the apartment from the same bag: a recent Russian newspaper, some Russian cigarettes — smoked and unsmoked — a half-eaten fifty-gram jar of Beluga caviar (£353), an unopened bottle of Grey Goose vodka, and a packet of Contex condoms in Colette’s bathroom; I even left a copy of Piat`desiat ottenkov serogo on her bedside table, which in case you didn’t know is Fifty Shades of Grey, in Russian. That was a nice touch. It’s surprising what you can get on Amazon.

When I was satisfied that the apartment showed every sign of a recent visit from Colette’s absent Russian boyfriend — more than enough to severely unnerve John, who was convinced he was mafia — I fetched my Kindle from the windowsill where I’d left it and went back down to the garage.

Colette was biting her lip and looking anxious. I kissed her in an effort to reassure her. Was it my imagination or was there just a hint of semen I could taste on her lips?

‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘We can go now.’

She winced. ‘I’m sorry, Don. I left my iPad on the kitchen worktop.’

I shook my head. ‘Not to worry. I’ll go and fetch it now ...’

‘You’re a very thoughtful man, do you know that?’

I took hold of the handle and opened the car door, but Colette clasped my arm and shook her head.

‘On second thoughts, don’t bother. I have my Apple Mac. I’ve got everything on there that I need. I really won’t need the iPad.’

‘If you’re sure.’

‘Yes. Besides, I just want to get away from here. Now.’

‘Really. It’s no trouble. And wait, suppose John finds the iPad. Won’t he worry that you’ve gone away without it?’ I shrugged. ‘Won’t you worry that he might go through your diary?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Besides he doesn’t know the passcode.’ She frowned, ‘At least I think he doesn’t.’ She shook her head. ‘I told him once — but no, he never remembers anything like that. He couldn’t even tell you my mobile number.’

I shook my head. ‘If you’re sure.’

‘I’m sure. Please, Don, let’s just go, huh?’

‘All right.’

Colette started the car and we drove slowly out of the Tour Odéon garage; but instead of turning up the hill and driving through Beausoleil — which would have been the quickest way to the airport — she drove down, toward the sea, and through the city.

‘Why are we going this way?’

‘Because the best time to see Monte Carlo is always in the summer, just before the dawn, at about four in the morning. In fact it’s the only time it looks really beautiful and you have a sense of what it used to be like before money made it so — so nauseating. There aren’t any sweaty tourists greedy for a celebrity at this hour and you can’t smell the stink of gasoline from all those unbearably ridiculous Lamborghinis and Ferraris.’

I nodded and as we came into Casino Square I saw her point; what she’d said — it wasn’t the first line of Casino Royale but still, it was all right. I put my hand on her knee and squeezed it gently.

‘Yes, I agree. It’s quite different. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it like this.’

‘You know something? I’ve never even been into the Casino.’

‘Neither have I.’

‘Let’s do it now,’ she said. ‘Just for ten minutes. We’ll leave the car out front, go in the Salon Privé, and have one spin of the roulette wheel.’

‘Really, we ought to get to the airport. And besides, I’m hardly dressed for it.’

‘Please, Don. I need to feel lucky again. And you are so English — you’ve left us loads of time to get to the airport. At this time of the morning it will take twenty minutes. And your clothes are fine. You’re not wearing jeans. You have a jacket. You don’t have to look like Daniel Craig any more to go in there, you know.’

I smiled at how much like a little girl Colette seemed; it was easy to see why John had fallen for her; I was falling for her, and I wanted to indulge her a little. To encourage her, to enable her to take her mind off things; she’d had a difficult evening and it seemed only fair that we should do something that was important to her.

‘If you like,’ I said. ‘But just a few minutes, mind. We don’t want to miss our planes.’

We parked out front — easy at that time of the morning — and went inside. The casino entrance hall looked more like a nineteenth-century opera house than a place to lose money; then again, when was the last time that opera made money? We presented our passports to the caissier — to prove we weren’t Monégasques, forbidden by law to gamble in the casino — bought a couple of ten-euro tickets for the Salon Privé and passed into a large, high-ceilinged room that was still surprisingly busy with people sitting around blackjack tables and roulette wheels. Some of the gamblers and croupiers looked at Colette with open lust as if wondering how many chips it took to walk in with someone like her. They might have been surprised when I bought Colette a single 500-euro plaque and handed it to her.

‘One spin of the wheel,’ I said.

‘I promise.’

She took a circuit around the room before stopping at one of the many roulette tables, where she put the plaque on black and waited while the croupier turned the wheel and rolled the ball; and when the ball hit black, she squealed so loudly you might have thought she’d beaten Le Chiffre and won millions instead of another single 500-euro plaque. She hugged me excitedly and then we cashed in and left before the temptation to roll again became too great for her to resist.

Outside the sweet early morning air was already warm on the face and the sky was the colour of manuka honey. It was going to be another hot day. A small truck was washing the street in front of the Hôtel de Paris. Consciences are cleaned with equal facility; take it from someone who knows.

‘That was such fun,’ said Colette, as we walked back to the car. ‘I can’t believe I won. Thank you. I feel so much better.’

‘I’m glad,’ I said, and before we got back in the car I kissed her again, only this time I let my hand make free with her breasts.

Less than thirty minutes later we were driving into the long-term underground parking lot at Terminal 2; with its signal-red walls, low ceilings, bright lighting and polished concrete floor, the Nice airport car park was a very pleasant alternative to its malodorous English counterparts. And at that early hour the car park was quiet, with no one else around.

I pointed out a space at the far end of an empty row. ‘There,’ I said. ‘No need to drive any further.’

Colette turned smartly into the spot, switched off the engine and popped the trunk with a button on the driver’s door.

‘I’ll get the luggage,’ I said and jumped quickly out of the car. ‘And I think because you’re earlier than me, I’ll walk you over to your check-in.’

‘You don’t have to.’

‘Nonsense. Besides, I’ve got your ticket.’

I put Colette’s bag on the ground, and then my own, and as she came around the back of the car I pointed at something lying on the floor of the Audi’s big boot.

‘Look,’ I said, pointing at the back of the boot. ‘There’s something shiny lying on the floor. Is that — is that your missing earring?’

Of course, I knew it was her missing diamond earring; I knew because it was me who had placed it there in the boot.

‘Oh, my God. You’re right. It is my earring. How did it get there? Is this my lucky day, or what?’

‘It’s your lucky day, all right. You win five hundred euros and now you find your missing diamond earring. That means something else good is going to happen to you now because these things always happen in threes. Take my word for it.’

‘I hope you’re right.’

‘Of course I’m right.’

Colette leaned into the boot to fetch her missing earring, and as she did I pulled out the silenced Walther P22 from under the back of my belt and shot her twice just behind the ear. She was probably dead before her face hit the carpet and all quite painlessly, I might add. It took only another second to sweep up her legs and tip the rest of her body into the trunk. I lowered the lid for a second, glanced around the car park and having ascertained I wasn’t being watched, lifted the lid once more and shot Colette twice in the chest, just to make absolutely sure. The gun was so silent I might have been pulling the trigger on a gas barbecue. I chucked the gun after her, dumped her case in the boot beside her body and then closed the lid, permanently.

I went through her handbag, took some things I thought might come in useful later — including her laptop — turned off her mobile phone and then stuffed the bag under the passenger seat.

I locked up the car and checked in for my flight back to London.

It was a nice day to fly somewhere.

Chapter 9

Tourrettes-sur-Loup is an attractive higgledy-piggledy village that occupies a high space on the edge of the spectacular Loup valley and seems to grow out of the rocky plateau it’s built on, like a huge and sprawling geranium; it put me in mind of that mystical albeit much colder place, Shangri-La, from James Hilton’s Lost Horizon. I didn’t know if the inscrutable locals enjoyed impossible longevity, as in Hilton’s hugely successful novel, but they seemed no more interested in the outside world than if they had been Tibetans and, in a local restaurant close to the medieval town square where John and I ate an early dinner, the waiters seemed to regard our attempts to speak French as if they themselves continued to speak ancient Occitan, which was once the language in that part of France. Still, the food was good and there was a decent wine cellar from which we had chosen an excellent ten-year-old Bandol. We were sitting on a small terrace at a restaurant called La Cave de Tourrettes, with a view of the valley that would have given a Sherpa vertigo, and in the air was a strong smell of night-scented jasmine which quite overpowered the smoke from my cigarette. I’d just eaten a delicious terrine of crab and was now contemplating the arrival of a gut-busting cassoulet.

‘That cunt,’ muttered John.

‘Who?’

‘Phil. Who do you think? My friend and former fucking colleague.’

‘Perhaps.’ I shrugged. ‘Good writer, though.’

‘Yes,’ John admitted. ‘Good enough. Or at least he was.’

‘I’m surprised he can’t get published.’

‘The whole business is changing. You’ve got to write exactly what they want or you’re fucked.’

‘Maybe. Still, I can easily see why he chose to live here. This is a nice little place — Tourrettes. It’s a bit Name of the Rose, isn’t it? Unlike the rest of this part of the world there’s something completely unspoiled about it.’

‘The same cannot be said of him.’

‘No, perhaps not.’

‘To be frank, I hardly recognized the bastard.’ John shook his head. ‘He’s changed a lot since I last saw him. I had no idea he was quite so bitter. Thinner, too.’

‘It’s not just money that changes people for the worse,’ I said. ‘It’s the lack of money, too. He’s had a rough time of it, these last few months. That much is clear. I mean, I’d no idea that Caroline had cleared off with the kids. Or indeed that he was working as a waiter.’

‘I think I told you that, John.’

He shrugged. ‘Did you? I don’t remember. Anyway, it’s quite a comedown for any writer to endure.’

‘There’s nothing holy about being a writer, Don. And what’s wrong with being a waiter? George Orwell worked as a waiter. Didn’t do him any harm.’

‘No, he was a plongeur. A dishwasher. And besides, the normal trajectory is that you wait on tables on your way to becoming a famous writer, not the other way around.’

‘The world doesn’t owe you a living just because you’re a writer. Besides, your wife cleared off. And it hasn’t made you a cunt like him.’

‘Kind of you to say so, John.’

‘The way he was talking, you’d think his whole fucking life was my bloody responsibility. I mean, Jesus, he was supposed to be self-employed. When I wound up the atelier I was under no obligation to give him a penny. You know that better than anyone, Don. But I felt an obligation to him, for old times’ sake. To soften the blow. Because he’d been with me for almost as long as you have. Twenty grand I gave him. Twenty fucking grand. And how does he repay me? With threats. Blackmail. The cops.’ He frowned. ‘Do you think it’s true? That the French really took most of it in tax?’

‘Depends how much he owed them already. But they’re pretty good at getting tax out of people, the French. Much better than the Italians.’

I took a drag on my cigarette and blew the smoke toward an American woman who must have thought that every country in the world ought to have behaved like the United States and outlawed the habit; she tutted loudly and waved a napkin ostentatiously in front of her face as if I’d directed some neurotoxic gas in her direction. I toyed with trying to update Oscar Wilde’s famous remark about a cigarette, to take account of this kind of thing: ‘A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It irritates Americans. What more could one want?’ But it didn’t really work; it’s always a mistake to think you can improve on anything Oscar said.

‘I read a rather good Elmore Leonard novel about a blackmailer once,’ I said. ‘52 Pickup. Fifty-two is the amount of money in thousands of dollars that two blackmailers ask their victim to pay.’

‘Then that guy got off lightly, didn’t he? Me, I’m down a million-dollar watch. Not to mention another twenty grand at nine o’clock.’ John glanced at the tan mark where his Hublot Caviar watch had been, shook his head and cursed, again. ‘I can’t tell you how gutted I am about that watch. I bought it in Ciribelli. It wasn’t just an impulse thing. It had sentimental value. It really meant something. To me, at any rate. It was a present to myself for selling one hundred million books. I was going to have it engraved to that effect, only I never quite got around to it.’

‘I didn’t know that. I’m sorry.’

‘What really pisses me off is that he’s probably going to sell it for way less than it’s worth.’

I surveyed the red wine in my glass for a moment and then shook my head.

‘Not without the box, he won’t. These days, people who buy that sort of thing second-hand want everything that goes with it. The box, the certificate, the original receipt, the bloody carrier bag and wrapping paper for all I know. It’s the same with books. Try selling a first-edition Brighton Rock without the dust-jacket and see how much you get. I know. I did.’

‘Yes, that’s a point. Without the box he’ll be lucky if he gets a tenth of what the watch is really worth. But with the box it’d be worth at least twice that. Maybe more.’ John laughed bitterly. ‘That’s a happy thought. Thanks, old sport. I’ll be thinking of that tonight, when I hand over the twenty grand.’

‘In 52 Pickup the victim manages not to pay the blackmailers anything at all. That’s why I mentioned it. He tricks them. In fact he goes a lot further than that.’

‘Easier said than done.’

‘I don’t think so. It’s just possible that if we were to offer to get Phil the Hublot box and all the Black Caviar paperwork for your watch he might be persuaded to give up on the twenty grand. That way he’d get much more money when eventually he sells it. And no questions asked, probably.’

‘But I don’t have the box or the paperwork. It’s back at the apartment in Monaco. And there’s no chance of getting it from there.’

‘He doesn’t know that. Look, John, if I went up to Phil’s house on my own tonight I could sell him a story that the box is somewhere else. At the atelier in Paris, perhaps. That only I can get it; and that I’m ready to make a deal with him.’

‘Go on.’

I glanced at John’s Tumi bag, which was on the ground by his leg.

‘Have you got the money in there?’ I asked.

‘Of course.’

‘Give the bag to me.’

John handed over the bag and I took a quick look inside it just to check it was all there, like he said.

‘I’ll show him the twenty thousand, like we agreed. But then I’ll suggest that if he lets me keep the money then I’ll bring him the box and the paperwork. I get to keep the twenty thousand but he stands to make an extra hundred 150,000 when he sells the watch. Maybe more.’

‘So he thinks you’ve double-crossed me for twenty grand?’

‘Exactly. I’m figuring he’s got nothing against me. In fact I’m sure I can persuade him that I’m his friend and that he owes me — something. Without you there to make things personal I’m sure I can get him to believe that the Bentley and the cash are what I’ve been after all along. I’ll tell him I’d forgotten all about the watch. He’ll want to believe that I really hate you as much as he does. And that I’m no better or worse than him when it comes to revenge.’

‘But I already told him the Bentley wasn’t mine.’

‘Of course you did. Only I’ll tell him I know different. Or that I know someone who’ll buy the car with no questions asked, for fifty grand. I’ll tell him I’m willing to settle for the cash and the car if he settles for your watch, in its box.’

‘Yes, that might work. But why would he trust you to come back with the Hublot box?’

‘Because I’m not you. He isn’t a fucking criminal, John. He’s actually quite law-abiding, only right now he’s also desperate. I know him. Phil and I go way back. He used to work at J. Walter Thompson, remember? That’s how he and I met. Besides, I didn’t work in advertising for all those years without becoming just a little bit persuasive.’ I shrugged. ‘Anyway, what have you got to lose?’

‘What happens when you don’t come back to Tourrettes with the Hublot box?’

‘It will be too late by then. Hopefully you’ll have found Colette and your alibi. With any luck you’ll be out on police bail. Facing trial, perhaps, but with every chance of being acquitted. Meanwhile, you can instruct your lawyers in Monaco to threaten Phil with jail unless he returns the watch.’ I finished the wine in my glass. ‘So, what do you say?’

‘Give me a minute to think this over,’ said John. ‘I’m not saying yes. Not yet. Just — give me a minute, okay?’

The cassoulet arrived and I made short work of it while John — ignoring his own main course — concentrated on the Bandol. He was drinking more than was good for him but I could hardly blame him for that; given the strain he was under the surprise was that he wasn’t drunk more often.

Then at 8.45 he ordered another bottle of Bandol and told me he would wait at the restaurant for me. ‘I guess there’s no harm in you trying to talk him around,’ he said. ‘It’s not like I have anything to lose.’

‘Good.’ I picked up the Tumi bag and collected the car keys off the table. ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can.’

‘You do that, old sport. If I’m not here I’ll be at one of those bars on the Place de la Libération.’

Chapter 10

I walked back to the square in front of the church where we had left the Bentley and found some small boys next to it, taking pictures of themselves. One of them even crouched down near the exhaust and filmed the start-up on his mobile phone. Tourrettes wasn’t like Monaco where expensive cars are ten-a-penny; it was altogether smaller and much less glamorous; to that extent it reminded me of Cornwall.

I smiled kindly, steered the car carefully away from the busy square and drove north onto the Route de Saint-Jean and then up the narrow, dry-stoned road that was Route du Caire, in the direction of Phil’s villa. Once or twice I had to move quickly into the side as a van driven by some mad local came hurtling down the road the opposite way. There was no street-lighting, since this was rural France, but there were several houses along the way providing just enough illumination to help me navigate. Soon after the hacienda-style entrance of the Hôtel Résidence des Chevaliers on my right, the road narrowed even further until at the top of the hill, on the left, the Bentley’s headlights picked out a rusting metallic sign that read ‘Le VILLA SEUREL, Propriété privée’; next to this was another sign from Immobilière Azuréenne which read ‘À Vendre’. I steered the car through an open gate and up a narrow twisting drive. Ill-kempt bushes brushed the dusty blue doors of the Bentley as the car crawled up a steep hill until the ground beneath the twenty-one-inch wheels flattened and widened and I was turning onto a gravel parking area in front of a two-storey cream house with pale green shutters. I turned off the engine, collected the Tumi bag off the passenger seat and stepped out of the car to find Philip French standing behind a zigzag wall with a glass of wine in one hand and a roll-up in the other.

‘Where’s John?’

‘I thought it best if I came up here on my own,’ I said. ‘Things being what they are between the two of you it seemed best to avoid a scene.’

‘That’s all we’ve ever had — he and I. He’d think of a scene and I’d write it. Today, in the car park at the Saint-Martin was the first conversation we’ve ever had about something real.’

‘He’s not so bad. He didn’t kill her, you know. He really is an innocent man.’

‘I couldn’t give a fuck if he killed her or not. Since I never met her I have no feelings about the woman one way or the other.’

‘Phil. That’s not worthy of you.’

‘Come to do his dirty work, have you?’

‘Not at all.’

‘I hope you brought the money, for his sake.’

French turned on his heel and walked back onto the terrace, and as I followed him I noticed a strong smell of marijuana in the air.

The house occupied a good space at the top of a hill that provided uninterrupted views of the countryside to the south and probably the sea as well. The garden was not overlooked by anyone or anything as far as I could see, and about the only thing that gave a clue as to the parlous state of the owner’s finances was the empty swimming pool and a second immobilière’s sign that had been placed behind a garden shed, only this one read ‘À Louer’. A wrought-iron balcony ran the length of the front of the house, and underneath this was a refectory-style table on which sat a wine-box, a couple of glasses, some cigarette papers and next to a Rizla rolling machine a plastic bag containing tobacco and whatever else you needed to make a joint these days.

‘Nice place you have here,’ I said.

He smiled and I saw that his teeth were not in the best condition; they were the colour of the keys on an old piano. He was a thin man, even a little cadaverous, with skin as thin as the Rizla papers on his joints.

‘How many square metres have you got?’

‘It’s 4,400 square metres of mostly olive grove. Originally we were going to make our own olive oil, but that was another pipe dream down a long borehole of pipe dreams.’

‘But a great place for writing, I’d have thought.’

‘It might be, if I had anything to write. But I’m all written out, Don. I fear my days of writing anything other than some newlywed’s bloody lunch order are over.’ Phil took a deep drag on the roll-up and I noticed he was still wearing John’s Hublot watch. It stood up from his racket-shaft of a wrist like the lid on an Aga cooker.

‘Yes, I know what you mean. Now that we no longer have John’s outlines to work from I’ve found it hard to get going again myself.’

Phil smiled a cynical smile. ‘Sure. Whatever you say, Don.’

‘Look, Phil, I don’t recall there being any bad blood between you and me. I always did my best for all the guys in the atelier. Perhaps you didn’t know, but it was me who persuaded John to give you that redundo money. He needn’t have given any of us any money at all, since we were all technically self-employed. But if you’re going to behave like a cunt I’ll fuck off now and save us both the emotional energy of an argument. Frankly I’ve got enough on my plate dealing with John without you as well.’

French nodded sullenly and took an asthmatic drag on the joint he was smoking as if he was hoping it might provide some actual nourishment. He looked as if he could have eaten a good meal.

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. And where are my manners? Would you like a drink?’

I nodded.

Phil fetched a glass of red from the wine box and handed it to me.

‘Where is he, anyway?’ he asked.

‘Actually, he’s drunk. I left him back at the Château Saint-Martin sleeping it off. The way he’s been drinking, this might easily have become more unpleasant than it needs to be.’

‘I’m sorry about this afternoon. I don’t regret pinching his watch, but I do regret being so rude to you, Don.’

‘Forget about it.’

I tasted the wine, which wasn’t nearly as bad as it looked.

‘You’re selling the house?’ I said, changing the subject.

‘Have to. Unfortunately my missus left before I could murder her like John murdered his. Lucky bugger. But now she wants her half. Only the property market in this part of the world is fucked now that the socialists are in and screwing the last penny in taxes out of everyone. So, no one’s interested. No one wanted to rent it. No one wants to buy it.’ He looked at the huge watch on his wrist and smiled a fake sort of smile. ‘Until I got this little gewgaw I was actually thinking of applying for the Society of Authors’ hardship fund so that I could afford the fucking ticket home.’

‘And now that you have that watch, what will you do?’

‘Flog it, of course. See what I can get for it in Monaco if I can find out where he bought the thing. I’ve got a day off tomorrow so I figured to check that out on the internet.’

‘Ciribelli,’ I said. ‘That’s the name of the shop where he bought it. Actually there are three stores, but your best bet is probably the one in the Hôtel de Paris.’

‘Oh. Thanks.’ He frowned. ‘Thanks a lot.’

‘Don’t mention it.’

‘Listen, Don, under the circumstances I’m the last person to give anyone advice on their behaviour. But do you know what you’re doing? Since I moved down here I’ve met a few French cops, and they play rougher than our own boys in blue. Aiding and abetting a man who’s wanted for murder and all that; you’re taking a bit of a risk, aren’t you? If the police nick you, they’ll throw the book at you. Not to mention the desk it was resting on. This is a high-profile case. It’s been all over The Riviera Times and Nice-Matin.’

‘I know. But I figure it’s worth the risk. You see I’m not actually helping John. He only thinks I’m helping him. I’ve got plans of my own.’

‘Oh? And what are they?’

‘As a matter of fact that’s what I want to talk to you about. Why I came up here on my own tonight.’

‘You want to smoke a joint while we talk about it?’

‘No thanks. I’ll stick to cigarettes if you don’t mind. For what I’ve got to say I need a clear head.’

‘Sounds ominous.’

I sat down, opened my cigarette case and laid it open on the table like a little jewellery box before taking one and lighting it. I sat back and smoked it as if I had all the time in the world to get to the point.

‘There’s nothing I like more than smoking a cigarette on a terrace in the south of France,’ I said. ‘Unless it’s fucking someone on a terrace in the south of France. But at my age it looks as if I’ll have to settle for the cigarettes, I think.’ I shrugged. ‘Then again, maybe there’s an alternative. Which is what I want to talk to you about.’

Philip French sat down opposite me and started to make another joint. ‘So what is it?’

‘First, the twenty grand you were demanding from John; to stop you going to the police and informing on him — and by extension me.’ I reached into the Tumi bag and tossed the money onto the table between us. ‘There it is. Paid in full.’

‘Thanks.’

I shrugged. ‘Of course, another twenty grand is nothing beside what you could get for that watch if you had the box and all the papers that came with it when John bought it. Without any of that you’ll be lucky to raise a hundred grand, compared with maybe four times as much if you had everything you need to make the thing look kosher.’ I took another drag on the cigarette. ‘But I can get you all that. The box and the papers are in the safe at the atelier in Paris and I still have the key and the combination. The cops are probably keeping an eye on the place, so there’s a risk factor involved. Which means it’s going to cost you, Phil.’

‘How much?’

‘Twenty grand.’

‘Oh, I see. I take the blame with John and you take the cash.’

‘A bargain considering you might raise four hundred grand.’

He smiled.

‘Did I say something funny?’

‘Just that there was I feeling like a fucking criminal and now here you are dealing off the bottom. We make quite a pair.’

‘That’s why I’m here.’

‘Wait. Why aren’t you asking for half of what I can get for the watch?’

‘Because I already have the Bentley.’

‘What? He said it belongs to someone else.’

‘It does. Only I have a buyer who’ll give me fifty grand for it, no questions asked. You get the watch and the box and I get the car and twenty grand. That makes seventy grand for me.’

‘Seventy versus four hundred. It still sounds to me as if you’re coming up short, Don.’

‘Perhaps. You can call it a sign of good faith, if you like.’

‘In what?’

‘First things first: do we have a deal about the money?’

‘Sure. Keep it. If you can get the box and make the watch squeaky clean, so much the better. But don’t take any unnecessary risks.’

‘Okay.’ I put the money back in the black bag. ‘Thanks.’

‘But I still think you’re selling yourself short.’

‘And like I said, that’s a sign of good faith.’

Phil opened his hand as if expecting me to put something other than money in it. ‘In what?’ he repeated. ‘Don’t make me strip naked for it.’

‘In you, Phil. In you. You see I’ve got a nice proposition for you that can make us both much wealthier than a few hundred grand a piece. Enough for you to pay off your wife and to keep this place, if that’s what you want to do.’

‘What kind of proposition? And don’t say a novel, or a script, or I’ll laugh. It’s only the people who’ve got almost nothing to say who are being paid the big money to say it in print: cooks and fucking footballers and national treasure actresses with backsides almost as big as their books. These days the Christmas bestsellers look like they were published by Hello! magazine.’

‘Just hear me out. If you were describing my idea as a plot for a book, you would call it a simple reversal of fortune plot. You know? The Prisoner of Zenda. We put John Houston to work. For us.’

‘And how would that work? He’s a wanted man.’

‘In a way, that’s not true. John Houston no longer exists. John is using a false passport. That’s how we’re getting around without any trouble. At the moment he’s someone called Charles Hanway.’

‘I might have known he’d have done something like that. Yes, I remember him getting that passport for research when he wrote whichever fucking book it was. And he employed the Forsyth method to get it. So that’s how he’s managed to evade capture. He’s nothing if not resourceful, is our John.’

‘My plan is this: we get Charles back to England and we put him up at my place in Cornwall. It’s so out of the way that everything but the rain avoids the fucking place. John keeps that beard going until he looks like all of the other hobbits who live down there. He’d be like the man in the iron mask. He stays there and continues to do what he does best, which is to write story outlines for us. And then we write the actual books. Simple as that. Just like before. Only this time it will be us who reap the benefits. We’ll pay him what he used to pay us. Just enough to enable him to live, reasonably, in Cornwall. Which is to say not very much. Meanwhile you and I will become Philip Irvine — a pseudonym for our writing partnership. I would say Don French, but there’s Dawn French, of course. And we wouldn’t want to be confused with her. Not to mention another pseudonymous writing partnership called French: Nicci French.’

‘Sean French and Nicci Gerrard. Yes, that’s right.’

‘So Philip Irvine it has to be. At least until we can come up with something better. We can write alternate chapters, like they do. It will take a few books and a couple of years to get ourselves properly established, but I reckon if we stick closely to the old Houston formula Hereward can make a deal with VVL. In less than ten years I see no reason why we shouldn’t be as rich as John.’

‘You’re joking, aren’t you?’

‘No, I’m not. I’m perfectly serious. This can really work, Phil. I’m absolutely certain of it.’

‘Suppose we get caught? Christ, Don, we’d go to prison. They’d give us five years for something like this. And the prisons down here are exactly what they say on the tin. There’s none of that open-prison shit you get back home. You serve hard time in the south of France. There’s no telly in a cell, just some jihadi with a hard-on and a welcoming smile.’

‘There’s a book in that, too, I shouldn’t wonder. But I really don’t see how we’d get caught. Like I say, Polruan — that’s where I live in Cornwall — it’s so quiet and out of the way that you could be living next door to Lord Lucan and have no idea.’

‘Have you talked about this with John?’

‘Not yet. I’m waiting for him to get really desperate before I broach the subject. Which he will when we travel to Marseille and fail to find the woman he’s relying on to give him an alibi for where he was and what he was doing on the night Orla was murdered. That’s where he’ll have his meltdown and I point out the many advantages of living in Cornwall.’

‘Suppose he says no?’

‘Frankly, if it’s a choice between a prison cell in Monaco and a life of freedom in Cornwall then Cornwall edges it.’ I laughed. ‘But only just. Seriously though. What would you choose? It’s an offer he can’t refuse.’

French nodded. ‘That’s quite a plot you’ve got there. Although a little far-fetched, perhaps.’

‘It will work.’

He stood up. ‘Come with me, Don. I want to show you something.’

I got up and followed him, pausing only to go back and fetch John’s bag.

‘It’ll be all right there,’ he said.

‘With twenty grand in there, it doesn’t leave my sight,’ I said.

‘Fair enough.’

I picked up the bag and followed French around the back of the house to a neat little cottage bungalow with a flat roof. He opened the door, switched on a light and showed me into an office with everything a writer would have needed: an Apple iMac the size of a window, a Herman Miller Aeron chair, a wraparound desk, a Dyson fan, a Flos Piani desklamp, an Eames lounger and ottoman, and all surrounded with floor-to-ceiling brushed aluminium shelves that were home to a library of beautiful books.

‘This is what I call a writer’s study,’ I said. ‘I’d love to have somewhere like this to work in. It’s fantastic.’

‘I don’t know why,’ he said, ‘but I couldn’t bear to sell any of this shit. Which is absurd when you think about it because I don’t actually write anything. Not any more. I just come in here and read or stare at the walls. You see I meant what I said, Don. About writer’s block.’

‘Oh come on, Phil: writer’s block. That’s just an ignorant question for the literary festivals. Athlete’s foot I believe in. But not writer’s block. Do lawyers get lawyer’s block? Do policemen get policeman’s block? I don’t think so. It’s a bullshit excuse invented to cover up for one’s own laziness. It doesn’t exist.’

‘Maybe not for you. But the thought of sitting down and writing something now fills me with dread. And it’s more than just writer’s block. I’m written out. Finished. I couldn’t write another book if Erle Stanley Gardner was in here to dictate it.’

‘Nonsense. You might just as well say that your heavenly muse has deserted you. There are no muses. All that stuff is for Virgil and Catullus and Dante, not you and me. You don’t need a muse to write what we write any more than there could be a mental block that stops us from doing it. We’re pros. That’s what we do.’

French smiled wearily.

‘This will explain it better, perhaps.’

He leaned over his desk, moved the mouse on its mat and chose a file on the iMac which had simultaneously come to life.

‘It’s an email I wrote to my wife Caroline and never sent. But it explains everything. Forgive the pet names and intimacies. But please read it.’

‘You’re depressed, Phil. That’s all. And who wouldn’t be? I know what I’m talking about because my wife left me, too. That sort of thing affects writers the same way it affects anyone. But it isn’t writer’s block.’

‘Please read it.’

I shrugged and sat down in his chair. It was a nice desk. Everything felt just right.

I stopped reading and shook my head.

‘You’ve been smoking too much weed,’ I said. ‘You’re depressed, Phil. That’s why you can’t work. It’s evident in every word. You need to get away from here — from yourself, for a while. It’s not Viagra you need, it’s a fistful of Prozac. Come back to England with me and John. Forget being a writer for a bit. Do something else. And then, when you’re ready, we’ll give you a story outline and you can start work again. Just like before. Only this time you’ll be working for yourself. Think about it, Phil. There will be lots of other women. Foreign book tours with willing publicity girls. Fancy cars. Expensive houses. You’re not a bad-looking guy. I promise you this will seem like a bad dream in a few months’ time. Just give yourself a chance.’

‘Thanks, Don, but no. It’s a kind offer and I wish you success with it, only I’m through with writing; even if I wasn’t washed up as a writer I’m not sure I could take the pressure of writing two books a year. Not any more. But don’t worry. I won’t tell a soul. Your secret is safe with me.’ He grinned. ‘Besides, it’s so far-fetched who would believe me? Seriously though. Mum’s the word.’

I nodded. ‘I know that, Phil.’

Of course, I didn’t know it at all; I was thinking, ‘Once a blackmailer, always a blackmailer,’ and I could see no option now but to kill Phil as I had killed Colette. That’s the trouble with murder. There’s an exponential factor — the same one that Macbeth encounters. Blood will have blood. If I didn’t kill Philip French then I would have killed both Orla and Colette for nothing. Because this had always been my goal, to have John working for me, just as I’d once worked for him. There was nothing spontaneous about this plan. I’d been working toward this ever since John had closed the atelier. The idea I’d just outlined to Phil had been quite genuine; even the offer I’d made him — that he and I should become writing partners — had been real. At the same time, ever since our unexpected meeting at the Château Saint-Martin I’d always known that killing Philip French was also a possibility; and now that I’d seen the email he’d written — but not sent — to his wife, Caroline, I recognized an opportunity to turn his death to my immediate advantage.

John would cease to be wanted by the Monty police if someone else was held responsible for Orla’s murder. Not to mention Colette’s.

I leaned forward on the desk chair and pointed at the Eames lounger.

‘Sit down,’ I told him. ‘I want to say one more thing and then I’ll leave you alone.’

He nodded and sat down on the Eames.

‘When I’ve got the box and the papers, for the watch, I’ll FedEx them here. All right? I wouldn’t be surprised if the name of Ciribelli, the jewellers, is on them. So that should make things easier for you to get a decent sum for the Hublot.’

‘Thanks a lot, Don.’

‘And by the way, when you’ve got the money promise me that you’ll fix yourself up. Buy some new clothes. Get a haircut. See a dentist. And quickly. All that dope you’re smoking is affecting your gums.’

‘It is?’

‘Yes, I’m afraid so.’

‘It’s been a while since I could afford to see a dentist.’

‘They’re receding badly.’

Philip French touched his mouth.

‘It’s the first thing I noticed when I saw you again, Phil. You know it looks to me that you’re suffering from the same thing Martin Amis had back in 1995, when he spent twenty grand on his teeth. You remember that? Talk about a mountain out of a molehill. The chattering classes thought it was vanity, but of course it wasn’t; it was gum disease: Marty smokes roll-ups just like you. So, see a dentist, Phil. And soon. You wouldn’t want to get an abscess, would you? I’m not so sure you don’t already have one on the way — your face is looking just a little puffy on one side.’

‘What are you, my dentist?’

‘No.’ I smiled thinly. ‘But you’re forgetting that I once studied dentistry. So just occasionally I let my white tunic show.’

‘I thought it was law you studied.’

‘Don’t you think I remember what degree I started?’

‘I didn’t know they did dentistry at Oxford.’

‘They don’t. I was at Cambridge. I couldn’t afford to finish my studies so then I joined the army. That’s why they put me on a toothpaste account when I went into advertising. Because I’d been a dental student.’

French nodded firmly as if he actually recalled my fictional early career as a dental student and said, ‘Yes, I remember now.’

‘It taught me one thing,’ I said. ‘Dentistry, I mean. Not the army. That didn’t teach me anything. Dentistry taught me that there’s so much physiological health that relates to the state of our oral hygiene. Did you know that a lot of heart disease is caused by dental caries? It’s true. Simple flossing is a much more effective way of preventing a heart attack than cutting down on cholesterol. So, if I were you I’d get that swelling seen to as soon as possible, mate. If that’s what it is. I can’t be entirely sure from where I’m sitting.’

Philip French was exploring the state of his gums with his tongue.

‘Look, forget I said anything. It’s probably nothing at all. These things usually are.’

‘Would you take a quick look before you go?’

I shrugged. ‘Really, I’m not qualified, Phil. You should see a professional. If there is the beginning of an abscess you’ll need it properly drained and you’ll need an antibiotic. To stop an infection. Amoxicillin is generally prescribed and is very effective. But if it starts to become painful Nurofen is probably best.’

I knew all this because I’d already endured treatment for a dental abscess the previous summer. As John used to say, in preparing one of his story outlines, ‘There’s no research quite as effective as something you’ve experienced yourself.’

‘Just humour me, Don, please. Just take a quick look and see what you think.’

‘All right. But let me fetch a flashlight from my bag so I can see what’s what.’ I frowned. ‘Have you got any mouthwash?’

‘There’s this,’ he said and held up a bottle of scotch.

‘That’ll have to do.’

We both took a swig and I collected the Tumi bag off the floor.

‘Just lean back on the recliner,’ I said. ‘Now then, open wide and let me take a look.’

He leaned back and opened his mouth.

‘Wider.’

Behind my back I thumbed down the hammer on John’s Walther .22 and slipped off the safety catch. I knew there was already one in the chamber because I’d seen him lock and load the gun when we were on the autoroute. Obviously I’d have preferred a 38 — or better still Hemingway’s twelve-gauge — to shoot a man in the head; and I certainly wouldn’t have trusted a .22 to trepan a male skull; but the soft palate at the back of his mouth was a different story: that was just muscle fibres sheathed in mucus membrane, after which the next stop was a really thin piece of bone the name of which I couldn’t remember, and then the hypothalamus. A lot depends on the ammunition of course; but for what I had in mind the .22 would do just fine.

‘Wider.’

I put the muzzle inside Philip’s mouth — he probably thought it was a flashlight — and quickly squeezed the trigger, shooting him, Hitler style, like he’d actually meant to commit suicide. His body went into spasm for a moment as if the neurons that controlled his nerves had been fried with electricity; his eyes filled with blood and other stuff, and his legs twitched violently for several seconds — so violently that I was obliged to hold them down for fear that he might fall off the recliner and ruin the death scene I’d so carefully contrived. Then his head rolled slowly to one side. After another moment or two his breathing became laboured and messy as blood and cerebrospinal fluid started to drain through the open wound in the palate of his mouth, straight down his throat and into his lungs. A pink bubble formed on his lips and began to enlarge as if it was being inflated by some hidden pump. His chest was struggling to get a hold on the atmosphere. I stood back and waited for the bubble to burst and for him to drown.

As always when I kill someone I felt a tremendous sense of cosmic connection to the world, as vivid and sharply defined as if I had touched the forefinger of my maker. A South Bank Show moment. I don’t normally believe in God, but it’s at moments like these that I do experience a timeless force in the world that is Life itself. You only have to see a human life ebbing away in front of you to feel a tremendous relationship with all of nature, not just the omnipresent cicadas and the strong smell of violets in the air, but the shimmering leaves on the olive trees and the stars in the sky. It is as if life is enhanced and amplified to an almost deafening maximum by the witnessing of its departure. Human existence asserts itself most vigorously in the face of death. I expect that’s why men and women used to attend public executions — as if, in an uncertain world, it was only by seeing someone put to death that they themselves could feel the truly fantastic sensation that is life itself. It is the most beautiful and shattering experience to find yourself so strongly underlined like a great passage of writing in a book that otherwise can sometimes feel just a little ordinary. That’s a shocking admission, I know; but I feel true clarity most when I have a smoking gun in my hand. I’ve noticed how people in movies always do it with a long face and then beat themselves up about it afterward; that’s not how it is at all. From everything I’ve read, most people get off on killing someone. Me, I was grinning like a loon. So much so I felt obliged to offer some sort of explanation to someone I’d known for more than a decade.

‘Sorry, Phil. If you can still hear anything then I just want to say that I didn’t want this at all. You do see that, don’t you? Really. It was a genuine offer I made to you earlier this evening. I’d have much preferred having you as a writing partner, buddy. As it happens I think you were right about that and I was wrong. Now I come to think about it, you were written out. That last novel you wrote for John wasn’t very good. I thought it was just a blip, but John recognized that something more fundamental had happened. So, it looks like I’m going to have to do this by myself, as I don’t much like the idea of sharing anything with Mike Munns. I don’t know about Peter Stakenborg. I’ll have to think about him. He’s harder to control. And I don’t want to do this with anyone I can’t control. That would defeat the whole object of the exercise.’

A sound like the drain in a sink — or perhaps a coffee machine — emanated from the depths of his throat and lasted for almost a minute before, like him, it died. I felt for a pulse, and not finding one I now considered the forensic picture I wanted to paint for the local police, much as I would have done if I’d been writing a novel. The difference was that this was real, although I have usually found that the best way to achieve realism within a text is to imagine oneself carrying out a crime, much like a method actor might have done; in other words, I have always tried to feel what it would be like to have done some dreadful thing in a novel, so much so that I sometimes have trouble separating those people I really killed from those I think I’ve only killed within the context of a story. So I finished my wine, and then began work.

Gunshot residue — GSR — is the burnt and unburnt particles of primer and propellant that are left on a gunman’s hand after a shot has been fired: it’s one of the first things scenes of crime officers look for in determining whether or not someone took their own life with a firearm. So I put the still-cocked automatic in Phil’s right hand and fired the gun out of the open door and into the olive grove. Then I let his arm fall with the gun still in his hand; to my great satisfaction, with his finger hooked through the trigger guard the gun remained firmly in his grip.

Next, I searched carefully for both brass cartridges: two would have made the police suspicious. I didn’t find two, but I found one and pocketed it carefully before seating myself in front of his iMac and typing a few extra lines onto the maudlin and self-pitying email he’d written to his wife Caroline. I added some stuff about John Houston that held him responsible for the things that had gone wrong in Philip’s life; I drew back from a full murder confession, of course. That would have been too much. Then I pressed send.

I wiped the Apple keyboard with some cyber-cleaning compound I found in his desk drawer and then, still carrying my wine glass — which was covered with fingerprints — I went back to the Bentley and dropped the glass into the boot, from where I now retrieved my backpack.

Back on the terrace I retrieved the butt of my cigarette from his ashtray and lit another to help me concentrate. I had all the time in the world, of course. Everything was quiet. The nearest neighbour must have been at least half a kilometre away. There was just the incessant noise of the cicadas and a dog barking in the distance to disturb the peace of the countryside.

Back in the house I placed Colette’s car and door keys in the drawer of a fitted closet in a bedroom upstairs. In another drawer I left her laptop, but not before wiping it carefully, of course. I put her hairbrush beside the sink in the bathroom and one of her lipsticks in the bathroom cabinet. In the kitchen bin I placed the ticket for the parking lot at Terminal 2 of Nice Airport where I had left the Audi and her dead body.

I was on my way out to the garage to add the Tour Odéon in Monaco to the list of favourites on the satnav in Phil’s car when I saw a copy of that day’s Riviera Times on a pile of newspapers by the kitchen door, and I remembered the story about the unidentified body found in the ashes of the forest fire in the forêt de l’Albaréa, near Sospel.

Rereading the story I found that the police thought it unlikely the body would ever be identified, as it was so badly consumed by the enormous heat generated by the fire. This was very much to my advantage. So when I went into the garage to program the satnav I also added the coordinates of Sospel to make it seem as though Phil had visited both of these places. Then I circled the story in the paper and left it where I had found it, on a pile of old newspapers in the kitchen.

It was all circumstantial stuff but, in my experience of dealing with the police — and in particular, the RUC — the circumstances of collecting evidence are such that, short of a full confession on the part of a suspect, there’s seldom any one thing that stands out to the exclusion of everything else. Most cops will tell you that circumstantial evidence will usually do very nicely thank you, and I’d left enough of it scattered around poor Philip’s house to convince Henry Fonda and a whole room full of angry men. As soon as the police located Colette’s body they would conclude that she and French had been co-conspirators; and if I got really lucky they might even conclude that they had killed John and dumped his body in the forêt de l’Albaréa, which was perhaps an hour’s drive north of Monaco.

I went back into Philip’s study to double-check that he was dead. There’s an easy way to do this and it isn’t a pulse. You just put your mobile phone under the victim’s nostrils and then check to see if there’s any condensation on the glass. There wasn’t. He was as dead as the net book agreement.

I pocketed the twenty thousand euros but I left John’s Tumi bag on the floor beside the desk; Tumi luggage and bags all have metal plates containing twenty-digit numbers permanently affixed to a pocket inside so that it’s easy to trace them if they get lost. John’s bag in Philip French’s possession would be another piece of important evidence that he was dead. I’d been with him when he’d bought it in the Hôtel Métropole shopping centre in Monaco.

Another excellent piece of evidence was the million-dollar watch that French had extorted from John; with any luck someone at the Château Saint-Martin or in Tourrettessur-Loup might have seen him actually wearing it. Anyone disposing of John Houston’s body would surely have taken an expensive watch like the Hublot Black Caviar.

But perhaps the best evidence of course was the murder weapon now in Philip’s hand — the same make and calibre of pistol that had been used to murder Colette, not to mention the same ammunition: I’d been quite careful about that.

I walked around the villa trying to think of anything I’d forgotten; but the more I thought about it the more inclined I was to the conclusion that even Inspector Clouseau could have made a good case against Philip French with the picture I’d painted for the local police.

Chapter 11

I was about to get back in the car and leave Philip’s villa when my mobile started ringing. To my horror the caller ID said it was Chief Inspector Amalric. I thought about not answering it but then he’d have only rung again; besides, as Michael Corleone once said, ‘Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.’

‘Chief Inspector,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry. I was going to call you, wasn’t I? I completely forgot. I’m afraid it’s been one of those days.’

‘That’s quite all right, monsieur. Geneva must be a lot more interesting on a Sunday than I remember it.’

‘Not nearly as interesting as Monaco. As a matter of fact I’m going back to London, on Tuesday. It would be difficult to meet on Wednesday, but I could meet you any day after that, if you’re still planning on going to London yourself.’

‘Why don’t I call you as soon as I get to Claridge’s and we can arrange a dinner. Thursday perhaps.’

‘I’m always delighted to have dinner at Claridge’s. I take it that you haven’t yet caught up with him, then. With John Houston.’

‘I regret not. But there’s someone else I’m seeing first thing tomorrow who might be able to help me catch up with Mr Houston, as you say. Someone I haven’t managed to speak to before.’

‘Oh? Who’s that?’

‘Your old friend and fellow writer in Houston’s atelier, Philip French. I have an appointment with him at ten o’clock.’

‘You’re going to Tourrettes-sur-Loup?’

‘Yes. As a matter of fact I’m there right now. You see, I used to live in Tourrettes. My sister still lives here and I’m staying with her tonight. It’s quite like old times.’

‘Oh, I see.’ I swallowed so hard I wondered if he heard it.

‘Before I see him tomorrow, I wanted to ask you a little about him. What’s he like?’

‘I’ve known him for more than ten years. He’s solid. Reliable.’

‘Did you know that he’s working as a waiter? At a hotel in Vence?’

‘No, I didn’t. I knew that since John wound up the atelier money has been tight for him. But I didn’t know things were that bad.’

‘Did you know that he owes the bank a lot of money?’

‘No.’

‘Did you know his wife has left him?’

‘I didn’t know that either. Look, it’s been a while since we spoke.’

‘Would you say that he was the type of fellow to bear a grudge?’

‘Phil? No more than anyone else. Look, if you’re asking me if he’s the type to commit murder then the answer is absolutely not. Besides, if he did have a grudge against John why would he take it out on Orla?’

‘Why indeed?’

‘On the other hand.’

‘Yes?’

‘I was just thinking. No one has seen or heard of John in almost two weeks. To be quite frank with you, Chief Inspector, the last time we spoke I lied to you. I said I didn’t think he would try to get in contact with me. The truth is, I did, kind of. And since he hasn’t I’ve begun to fear the worst.’

‘So have I,’ said Amalric. ‘So have I. Look, I’d better go. My sister is calling. She and I — we’re supposed to meet some old school friends at a restaurant in town tonight.’

‘Oh?’ I was trying to conceal the panic in my voice. ‘Which one? Just in case I ever go back there.’

‘L’Auberge de Tourrettes. Do you know Tourrettes?’

‘A little. It’s very pretty. I’ve always rather envied Philip having a house there.’

‘Yes, that’s the restaurant I’d recommend, if you’re ever back here.’

‘As good as Claridge’s?’

‘In its own way, yes, perhaps.’

‘When you see him, say hello to Philip from me.’

‘I’ll do that.’

‘And enjoy your dinner.’

As soon as the Chief Inspector had rung off I called John to tell him to take a taxi back to the Château Saint-Martin, immediately. But he wasn’t answering, so I sent him a text and asked him to acknowledge it straight away. He didn’t.

At the same time I tried to do a Google search for L’Auberge de Tourrettes on my iPhone, but I had already exceeded my monthly data download limit and I had little choice but to go back into Philip’s study and, ignoring his bloodshot staring eyes, to try and find the restaurant on his iMac. From the Google map it appeared that L’Auberge de Tourrettes, on Route de Grasse, was about 200 metres from La Cave de Tourrettes, on Rue de la Bourgade and on the opposite side of the town square where, earlier on, I’d parked the Bentley. As soon as I had located the restaurant where the Chief Inspector was dining I removed my Google searches from the iMac’s browsing history, just in case some resourceful cop attending the murder scene decided to check that, too. Then I wiped the keyboard and tried to call John again.

The Chief Inspector hadn’t ever met John, but he was a clever man and I was sure that if they did run into each other — in the Place de la Libération, perhaps — a thin beard wasn’t going to fool him, even at night; when cops are looking for missing persons and fugitives they always construct photofits and facial composites of how that person might look with a beard, glasses, or a different hairstyle. Amalric would almost certainly have committed those pictures to memory, and if he hadn’t he would certainly have loaded them onto his smartphone.

Once again John didn’t answer his phone, so I called the restaurant and asked them if the Englishman was still there on the terrace. They told me he’d paid the bill and left about ten minutes before, and I guessed that almost certainly he was now sitting outside one of the many bars on the Place de la Libération, nursing a cognac, girl-watching and probably not even hearing his ringtone. It was more than likely that in just a few minutes John would see Amalric parking his car and — what was worse — that Amalric might see him.

Three murders are quite an investment and it was obvious that all of my efforts to turn John into my secret employee would be rendered futile if he was arrested. Realizing I now had little option but to go back into Tourrettes-sur-Loup and fetch him from under the Chief Inspector’s nose, I cursed loudly, for there was just as great a risk that I myself might bump into him.

I jumped back into the Bentley and took off in a spray of gravel. Naturally I could have wished for a less noticeable car; but with the hood up it was dark inside the passenger cabin and there was every chance of not being recognized.

A few minutes later I entered the Place de la Libération and slowly made my way anti-clockwise around the square, steering carefully around the Sunday night tourists for fear of knocking one down, and pausing in front of one café and then another until I was back where I started, with no sign of John anywhere.

On my third trip around the square — and in front of the Café des Sports — I turned right and drove a short way along the Route de Vence, with still no sign of John. A hundred metres further on I steered the Bentley around a miniroundabout and approached the square again, this time from the east.

‘Where the fuck are you, John?’ I muttered through clenched teeth as once more I entered the square. This time I followed the road into the car park that occupied the centre and circled again. All the time I was repeat-dialling his phone every ten seconds.

Then I saw him sitting on the edge of a water trough next to the Café des Sports like some feckless teenager, except that he had a brandy glass in one hand and a cigar in the other. He was talking to a bicyclist clad from head to toe in matching blue Lycra who was filling his water bottle from the public tap.

I tapped gently on the horn, lowered the passenger window and stopped the Bentley.

‘Get in,’ I said as urgently as I dared in front of the cyclist.

John drained his glass, laid it and a banknote on a table behind the trough, and opened the car door.

‘Quickly,’ I said.

John jumped in, hauled the car door shut and I pressed my foot gently on the accelerator.

‘Where the fuck were you?’ I said. ‘Why didn’t you answer your phone? I’ve been round this fucking square four times.’

‘I was in the public toilet,’ he said. ‘Sorry. Is there a problem?’

I didn’t reply. I’d meant to turn left again — around the square — so as to avoid the Auberge de Tourrettes further on, but the way into the main square was now blocked with traffic and the driver of the van behind me was too impatient to let me wait. So I drove on and, anxious to avoid going past the Auberge on the left, I turned right onto the Route de Saint-John, and along to the Route du Caire, which led up to Phil’s villa. I had no intention of going back there, of course, and the Château Saint-Martin was in the opposite direction, but just then, beside a short rank of parked cars opposite the foot of the Route du Caire, I saw Chief Inspector Amalric get out of a blue Renault with a busty-looking blonde who looked much too young and pretty to be his sister; they paused and then, arm in arm, came toward the Bentley.

‘Christ, there he is,’ I muttered and pulling down the sun-visor, turned sharply up the Route du Caire.

In my rear-view mirror I saw him turn — to look at the Bentley? I told myself Amalric probably had other things on his mind at that moment, such as getting in the blonde’s pants, but I couldn’t be absolutely sure he hadn’t seen my face.

‘Would you mind telling me what the fuck is going on?’ demanded John.

‘That’s one of those Monty cops back there,’ I said.

John let out a curse and turned sharply in his seat to look back, but we were already round the corner.

‘The detective who called me last night in Èze.’

‘What the fuck is he doing here?’

‘He’s going to see Phil in the morning,’ I said.

‘I knew that bastard was going to sell me out,’ snarled John. ‘Fucker.’

‘Relax,’ I said. ‘That’s not going to happen.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because I know Phil. Look, shut up and let me think for a moment, will you?’

I keyed the Château Saint-Martin’s details into the Bentley’s satnav and saw that there was no point in driving on much further, as the road we were on continued away from Vence for several miles; so a bit further up the hill, I turned the car around and drove back the way we came — but slowly, so as not to overtake Amalric and his girlfriend.

Finally, we were back on the road to Vence and the Château and I was able to put my foot down and do some thinking.

‘Maybe we should check out of the hotel,’ said John. ‘Go somewhere else. Or even drive to Marseille tonight.’ He looked at the empty space on his wrist where his watch had been, swore once again and then peered at the clock on the Bentley’s dashboard. ‘We can be at the Villa Massalia before midnight,’ he said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘We’ve both had too much to drink. Besides, that detective — Amalric — he isn’t going to see Phil until ten o’clock tomorrow morning.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because he called me again. While I was at Phil’s house. Wanting to get the low-down on what kind of a bloke he is. Whether he was the type to do you and Orla in. That kind of thing.’

‘Jesus. And what did you tell him?’

‘That he’s not. No more than you are, John.’ I shrugged. ‘At least I think so. Frankly Phil seemed a bit suicidal. I think it was fortunate I went up there and spoke to him.’

‘You’ll forgive me if I don’t set up a collection for him.’

I grunted.

‘Did he go for the deal? The box and the papers for the watch?’

‘The money’s in the glovebox.’

‘Really?’ John opened the glovebox and found his twenty thousand euros. ‘Bloody hell, old sport. How did you talk him out of it?’

‘It’s you he hates. Not me.’

‘So what makes you think he won’t grass me up when that cop goes to his house tomorrow?’

‘Then he won’t get the full bar mitzvah for the Hublot. He’ll be out of pocket by a considerable margin.’ I shook my head. ‘Look, it’s just a coincidence that cop coming here on the same day we did. Amalric hadn’t managed to speak to Phil before, so he’s doing it tomorrow.’

By now I’d decided not to tell John that Phil was dead; at least not for a while, until I had him somewhere less public; I’d had enough of panic for one Sunday evening. And I was dog-tired to boot — too tired to devise an edited version of what had happened. Nervous exhaustion, I imagine. It’s amazing what one simple murder can take out of you. With a gun you’d think there’d be nothing to it. Just pull the trigger and stand back. But not a bit of it. Probably something to do with the adrenalin rush you get when you blow someone’s brains out.

We arrived back at the Château and I dropped John at the front door.

‘I don’t know about you,’ I said, ‘but I need a drink.’

‘I’ll wait for you in the garden.’

‘Order me a large Calvados, will you?’

One of the parking valets offered to park the Bentley for me — the way they do when they know there’s five euros in it for them — but I needed a few minutes to myself. So I declined the offer and drove the Bentley down the ramp into the underground car park myself, and sat in the car’s womb-like, dark interior for a few minutes with eyes closed. Had Amalric recognized me? If so then I would surely be his prime suspect when he found Philip French’s body on Monday morning. Or had he just been admiring the Bentley, like those kids in the square earlier on? I would know which it was soon enough.

I got out of the car, and as I walked to the lift I heard footsteps somewhere behind me. It always makes me nervous when I hear footsteps in the dark. It’s the one legacy of Northern Ireland I know I’ll never be able to shake off: the nerves I get when I hear that sound. It always make me think about what happened to Robert Nairac, an intelligence unit British army captain who was snatched from outside a pub in South Armagh during an undercover op in 1977; he was tortured and killed by the Provos. Nairac is one of nine IRA victims whose graves have never been revealed, although it’s rumoured he ended up being fed to pigs.

I got into the lift and breathed a small sigh of relief when the doors closed and the car delivered me into the hotel’s air-conditioned lobby. At the reception desk, I asked for a six o’clock call in the morning. The girl on duty smiled at me in a way that made me think that I was a decent, law-abiding man; it’s strange how no one can ever tell when you’ve just shot someone dead. It’s one of the things that make life so interesting. I went to the spotless men’s room and devoted a few lubricious thoughts to the receptionist and her panties while I washed my face and hands. I like the smell of gunpowder, in a nostalgic sort of way, but still, I saw no reason to make things easy for the cops in case they did come calling after all.

In the bar a couple of American newlyweds were sitting as close to each other as it was possible to sit without having sexual intercourse; a short distance away, a rather glum-looking couple and their pre-adolescent daughter were having a post-prandial drink with their bodyguard: it was the Cordura gun tote by his leg that gave his game away. He paid me no regard at all, which was a mistake given that I was the only one there — apart from him — who had held a weapon that particular Sunday evening. Even without the tote I would always have picked him out as a shooter; his eyes were always working the room, one way and then the other, like a ventriloquist’s dummy. The tote bag looked like a bad idea: if I’d still had the P22 I could easily have shot his preppy, blazered boss in the time it took for him to unzip his handgun. It might have livened up the dinner for them; certainly the wife didn’t look as if she’d have minded very much. She was probably dying to fuck the bodyguard anyway; the wives usually do.

Outside, the garden was full of the scent of flowers, orange blossom and violets and night jasmine, and made a mockery of the perfumed soap on my fingers. The sky looked like a painting by Van Gogh: yellow and blue with a rolling tsunami of cloud. Already I was feeling much better about what I had done. A large Calvados looked like the perfect way to end what had been an awkward sort of day. Shooting an old friend is always difficult.

John had one foot on a stool and his phone in his hand, out of habit I supposed, as no one but me was going to call him. Not for a long while. I sat down opposite him, fired up a cigarette and blew a couple of smoke rings around the moon and tried to imagine what Vincent would have done with an advertising brief for cigarettes: the world was a much less colourful place without cigarette advertising. I certainly missed the old Benson & Hedges Gold commercials when I went to the cinema. I decided that when my new career as a bestselling thriller writer was up and running I was going to quietly approach a few cigarette companies and offer them a discreet bit of product placement. The Ian Fleming estate were surely missing a trick not trying to get some money out of Liggett who owned Chesterfield, the preferred cigarette of James Bond. Who knows? With a few handsome covers on a new edition of paperbacks they might even have turned that brand around.

‘I’ve been sitting here like that guy in Africa with gangrene,’ said John. ‘Harry what’s his name, in a Hemingway story. Sitting under this yellow mimosa, just a little bit drunk and feeling a little sorry for myself and imagining all of the stories I’m probably not going to write because I’ll be in a prison cell and won’t have done enough research to write them.’

‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro,’ I said.

‘That’s right,’ said John and toasted me with his brandy glass.

‘Don’t be so bloody dramatic. I told you before, Phil made a deal. And he won’t talk. Or maybe you want me to write that down.’

‘I wish I could believe that, old sport.’

‘It’s my ass, too. You can believe that, can’t you?’ I sniffed the Calvados, swirled it around the balloon glass a bit, and then downed it all in one mouthful. ‘Besides, you’re going to write those stories.’

‘I am?’

‘Sure you are. I know it in my bones.’

Chapter 12

We shared a room, again. This was a mistake as, on this occasion, John snored, loudly. I almost felt a twinge of sympathy for Orla, having to endure a sound like that. No wonder she’d taken sleeping pills. And in a way, but for John’s snoring, she might still be alive. At six, not long after I’d finally got off to sleep, I was awoken by the early morning call I’d ordered the night before, and I got up feeling irritable and bad-tempered. Even the magnificent view of the rolling foothills of the Baou des Blancs from the little terrace where I ate breakfast could not improve my humour. And I certainly wasn’t looking forward to a two-hour drive to Marseille — even in the Bentley. Only the prospect of staying at the Villa Massalia — which John had promised was excellent — filled me with any enthusiasm for the Monday ahead of us.

John was watching TV. Even before Orla’s murder he had always watched a lot of television.

‘I get more ideas watching daytime TV shows than any other way,’ he was fond of saying. ‘I always tell kids who want to become writers, you don’t have to hang out with cops, or go to the joint and interview bad guys. And you certainly don’t have to live in a garret in Paris, and have breakfast every morning at the Deux Magots. Sometimes, the best research you can do is at home, sitting on your ass, with a doughnut and a coffee in your hand. Shows like Jerry Springer, Montel Williams, and in the UK Jeremy Kyle, will introduce you to as much low-life, trailer-trash modern-day grotesques as you would ever want to meet in one lifetime.’

John — whose French was better than mine — had been watching an early morning repeat of Ça Va Se Savoir!, which was the French version of a tabloid television show, and it was one he loved; I heard him still laughing as he switched over to watch the seven o’clock news on France 3.

‘What the fuck?’ he exclaimed. ‘Jesus fucking Christ, Don, get in here and look at this.’

I got up from the breakfast table and walked into the sitting room, where John was pointing at the screen and gibbering, and while I didn’t yet know it, my day was about to get very much better.

‘For fuck’s sake,’ he said, and folded his arms womanishly while keeping both eyes on the screen. ‘She’s dead.’

‘Who’s dead?’

‘Colette Laurent.’

It seemed that Colette’s body had been found at last in the boot of a car parked at Terminal 2 of Nice Airport. The Nice police had released very few details beyond Colette’s name and the fact that she had lived in Monaco, but from what the TV reporter was saying, there was little doubt that Colette had been murdered and that the car had been at Terminal 2 for two weeks. But most of the report seemed to concentrate on the disruption the closure of the car park was causing to international flights to and from Nice airport.

‘Jesus Christ,’ muttered John. ‘Poor kid. What a terrible thing to happen to a girl like that. I guess that Russian guy must have killed her after all. Maybe the same night he killed Orla.’

‘It would seem so,’ I admitted.

‘That’s the end of my fucking alibi, isn’t it?’

I shrugged and said nothing. At times like this it was usually best to let his mouth make all the running.

‘I guess there’s no point in us going to Marseille now,’ he said. ‘From the sound of it, she was never there. She’s been in the boot of her car for the last fortnight. Poor kid.’ His nose wrinkled with disgust. ‘And in this weather, too. That’s not good. I mean, can you imagine what this kind of heat does to a body? To be in a space like that all this time? You never met her, Don, but take my word for it, she was so very beautiful.’ He stopped and tried to swallow his emotions whole. ‘Best lay I ever had.’

‘I’m sorry, John,’ I said. ‘Really I am. But none of this alters the fact that we still have to leave here before nine o’clock.’

John stared at me blankly.

‘That cop. Chief Inspector Amalric? From the Monty police? He’s going to see Phil at ten. Remember? I mean Phil probably won’t say anything. But why take the risk, right?’

John sighed a sigh as profound as the view outside, stepped onto the balcony, took hold of the railing with both hands and hung his head. For a moment I thought he was going to jump and I made as if to restrain him. Without him I had nothing. But instead of jumping, he sighed and said:

‘I’ve made up my mind, Don. I’m going to give myself up. I’ve come to the end. I can’t go on. Really I can’t. I mean thanks for everything and I’ll try to keep you out of it, old sport. But there’s no point. Now that Colette has gone the only real option I have of proving I didn’t kill Orla is to take my chances with a jury.’

‘If it was just Orla’s murder, I might agree with you.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You know something? It might be good,’ I said. ‘The hot weather, I mean. Good for you, at any rate. That is, if you fucked Colette without a condom. Did you?’

‘Of course I fucked her without a condom. I had a vasectomy, remember? What are you talking about?’

‘I’m not exactly sure how that works. Did you ejaculate in her body?’

‘Of course I did. Just not with sperm in the ejaculate. Why on earth do you want to know?’

‘Maybe that Russian fucked her, too. In which case you’ll be all right. Otherwise you’ll just have to hope that the heat in the boot of that car has spoiled any of your DNA that might still be in her pussy.’

‘Oh shit. Yes.’

‘Because if there is any DNA in her pussy then there’s every chance they’ll charge you with her murder, as well. With two women dead — one your wife and the other your mistress — I’d say you’ve got even less chance with a jury now than you had before.’

John put his head in his hands and turned in a circle as if he had a terrible migraine.

‘What a mess,’ he said. ‘What a fucking mess. If I knew where my bag was I might fetch my gun and shoot myself.’

‘I gave your bag to Phil,’ I said.

‘What? Why?’

‘But don’t worry, I still have your new passport. I let him have the bag when he was still in two minds about taking the money. The gun was still in the bag I suppose. I forgot about it. After all, there are so many pockets in that bag. Anyway I forgot about the bag when he gave the cash back.’

John sat down abruptly on the floor of the balcony, took hold of the railing again and then pressed his face against the bars.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

‘Getting used to the view. This is what I’m going to be looking at for the next twenty years.’

I switched off the TV, fetched him a little bottle of The Macallan whisky from the minibar and tossed it to him. ‘Here,’ I said. ‘Get that down your neck. Perhaps it will remind you of where your fucking backbone used to be.’

‘Fuck you. Fuck you, Don. You’re not the one facing life imprisonment.’

‘Who says you are? I mean, really — who says you are?’

John unscrewed the little bottle cap, closed his eyes and emptied the contents into his mouth. I sat down on the floor in front of him and took hold of his jacket collar.

‘Listen to me,’ I said.

I slapped him hard, not once but twice, and when at last he opened his eyes they were filled with tears.

At last I had him where I wanted him.

‘Listen to me, you stupid fuck. I didn’t risk my neck to help you without first thinking through all of the possibilities. And I mean all of them. Now I promise you that there’s a way out of this situation, but you’re going to have to keep calm and pay close attention. If you listen to me and do exactly what I say there’s absolutely no reason why you should ever see the inside of a prison cell. Do you understand? You won’t have to go to prison. I promise you.’

He nodded, silently.

‘Now then. Years ago you wrote a storyline for a book called Hidden Genius. Do you remember?’

He nodded again.

‘You’d ripped off the plot from a book by Marguerite Yourcenar, called The Abyss. L’ Œuvre au Noir, in French. The book — your book — was about a nuclear physicist, a genius called Jonathan Zeno, who decides to live under an alias somewhere quiet and out of the way after he decides that what he has discovered is too dangerous for anyone to know.’

‘I remember,’ said John. ‘He gets a job teaching physics at a school near a nuclear power station in the West Country. But then he discovers something that makes him think there’s been a leak of radioactivity and he has to choose between blowing his alias and saving all the kids in his school. Actually only part of it was ripped off from Yourcenar’s book. It’s also ripped off from Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People.’ He shrugged. ‘Anyway, what about it?’

‘There were some interesting observations about aliases and pseudonyms and noms de guerre, and it got me thinking about the whole business of having a pen name, a nom de plume. Samuel Clemens being Mark Twain, Amandine Dupin being George Sand, and more recently J. K. Rowling being Robert Galbraith.’

‘It wasn’t a bad book,’ admitted John. ‘Was it you who wrote that one, or Peter?’

‘Me. And actually it was my best, I think. Not necessarily in terms of sales, but critically.’

‘I suppose that’s why we never did another,’ said John. ‘But what’s your point, old sport?’

‘Like a successful lie, a successful alias requires that you believe it yourself. That you never stop being that other person.’

John was nodding. ‘It’s what the shrinks call reflex conditioning. If you never step out of character you don’t get rumbled.’

‘So then. You have a passport and a driving licence in the name of Charles Hanway. Then why not live as Charles Hanway? Provided you stick to the alias and keep your trap shut you can live, quietly, at my house in Cornwall. And here’s the smart angle. You carry on writing storylines, albeit anonymously, and I carry on writing the books. Just like before. I’ll get Hereward to make a deal with VVL. And I’ll pay you out of what I can make from them. That way you won’t ever have to meet anyone who remembers you. No one but me. And this way we can both benefit. I stay in print, and you stay out of prison. Simple as that.’

‘Someone would be bound to find out.’

‘Not in Cornwall. Nobody knows you in Cornwall. Frankly, they hardly know what fucking day of the week it is down there in the shire. You can go for days without seeing anyone vaguely human. And when you do they tend to keep themselves to themselves. Frankly the place is so out of the way that it’s only the fucking mice who visit. It’s like being back in the 1950s. The very opposite of Monaco.’

‘You really think it would work?’

‘I know it would work, I’ve lived there. Believe me, I know the place. Look, Manderley — that’s the joke name on my front door — is quite comfortable. There’s a good broadband connection, a widescreen telly, Sky TV, a decent wine cellar, a good library, and a nice vegetable garden; the nearest neighbour is Bilbo Baggins, and he’s more than a mile away.’

‘Might work at that.’

‘What’s the alternative? Risk your future to a jury? Fuck that. Rich bastard like you — they’d send you to the guillotine, if they could. Especially in this economic climate. Who knows? After a while they might even declare you dead, which might take some of the heat off you.’

John nodded. ‘You know, you’re right. It might just work.’

‘Of course, you’d have to lie low for a long time. Maybe for ever. No trips up to London. Penzance maybe. Or perhaps Truro. Certainly nothing east of Exeter. But what have you got to lose? It’s me who’s taking the bigger risk. The cops aren’t after me. It’s you they’re after. Right now, I don’t even have a bad credit rating. But if I get nicked hiding you then I’m facing at least five to ten, I reckon. To encourage the others.’

John fetched another whisky miniature from the minibar.

‘I’m not completely convinced,’ he admitted. ‘But so long as the cops are looking for me I can’t think where else to go. Bob Mechanic is bound to turn up in Geneva sooner or later, and if I know Bob the very last thing he’ll want to do is to help a good friend. Not if it might imperil his reputation with the Swiss authorities. He’ll deny he even knows me, if I know Bob.’

‘A friend in need, eh?’

‘That’s Bob’s idea of a nightmare. He’s not in the least like you, old sport. I’m beginning to realize just what a good friend you are, Don.’

‘All right then.’ I glanced at my watch. ‘My suggestion is this. Instead of driving west, to Marseille, we head north, back to England. We can stop overnight in Paris. We’ll dump the Bentley there and take the Eurostar back to London first thing Tuesday. With any luck it might be months before your careless pal Bob Mechanic even notices his car is missing. Like that Porsche Turbo he left at the airport.’

John nodded.

‘This is good of you, Don. I don’t know what I would have done without you.’

‘Forget it. That’s what real friends are for, right?’ I shrugged. ‘It’ll be just like old times. Me and you in a fast car on the A7 to Paris and the atelier, which we’ll start up again, albeit on a rather more modest scale. In London. Only this time I’ll be out front and you’ll be in the backroom. Good for you, good for me.’

Chapter 13

The drive to Paris was uneventful with neither one of us saying very much. With me driving for most of the way we reached the outskirts of Paris just after five o’clock on Monday evening and I headed across the river, up the Champs-Élysées. Paris was the usual mess of traffic and attitude, tourists and metropolitan disdain.

‘Where are we staying?’ he asked. ‘Not the George V. They know me there. Or the Crillon. Or the Bristol. The last time I was at the Bristol it was with poor Colette.’

‘The Hôtel Lancaster,’ I said. ‘I stayed there a couple of times with Jenny on those rare occasions when you’d paid me a decent bestseller bonus. It’s on Rue de Berri, near the Arc de Triomphe. There’s an underground parking lot right next door and we can dump the car there. No one at the hotel will even know we arrived by car.’

‘Good idea.’

We checked into separate rooms this time, and after I’d asked the concierge to book us a table at Joël Robuchon, across the Champs-Élysées — of course, in my mind we were celebrating — I lay down for a nap before dinner and went straight to sleep. I hadn’t been asleep for very long when there was an urgent knock at my door. It was John, of course, and he was looking pale and agitated, again. He didn’t say anything. He just pushed past me into the room, and switched on the television.

I guessed what he probably wanted me to see but I thought it was probably best to play dumb. So while he tried to find the right channel I yawned and said, ‘John, if you don’t mind, I’m not really in the mood to watch TV right now.’

He shook his head, silently.

‘As a matter of fact I’m a bit tired after the drive.’

Finally, he found TF1 and stepped back from the screen as if he wanted me to see as much of it as possible.

This time the police line and the news reporters were in Tourrettes-sur-Loup. I recognized the rusting sign at the bottom of Philip French’s drive — the Villa Seurel — but I pretended I didn’t.

‘What is this?’ I asked.

‘That’s Phil’s house.’

‘Is it? Christ, what’s happened?’

‘Phil’s dead,’ said John. ‘He’s committed suicide.’

‘That’s impossible,’ I said.

‘No, it isn’t,’ insisted John. ‘He shot himself. Not only that, but it seems there was some connection between him and Colette. In fact, the police seem to think Phil may have shot Colette. What about that for a fucking plot twist? Talk about truth being stranger than fiction.’

‘You’re joking.’

John pointed at the screen and, as the news report continued, it seemed that he was right.

‘There. What did I tell you? Didn’t you say that he seemed a bit suicidal when you saw him last night?’

‘Depressed, certainly. I mean, he gave up on your twenty grand without much of a fight. Which was odd, yes. And of course Caroline had gone back to England with the kids leaving him to wait on tables. So, naturally he was a bit down in the dumps.’

‘And he was in debt, right?’

‘Yes. According to the cop — Chief Inspector Amalric — he was quite substantially in debt.’

‘I want to ask you a question, Don.’

‘Fire away.’

‘Do you think it could have been him who killed Orla? That he and Colette were in cahoots? That it was Phil who shot her while I was downstairs fucking Colette?’

I shrugged. ‘I suppose — given that he seems to have shot himself — it’s just about possible. Tourrettes isn’t so far from Monaco.’

‘Fifty minutes away by car,’ said John. ‘And he did hate me. You saw how he behaved yesterday.’

‘Yes, but if he hated you, then why did he kill Orla? That doesn’t make sense. Orla never did any harm to anyone. Not that we know of, anyway. Who knows what her fucking Mick brothers did with her money? But why top her? Why not just top you?’

John wagged a forefinger, thoughtfully.

‘Yes, but look here: when you kill someone then your revenge is all over with relatively quickly. Too quickly perhaps. A bullet in my head, and it’s all over, right? There’s no chance to really enjoy something as quick as that. But if you kill a man’s wife, and make it look like he was the murderer, then that’s revenge on a Shakespearean scale. It’s something drawn out, dramatic, even operatic. You make him suffer like he’s on the rack. Which is how I’ve been this past fortnight.’

I shook my head. ‘That’s a little far-fetched, even for you, John.’

‘Is it? Is it? I don’t know.’

‘And what was in it for Colette? Why would she go along with something like that? She loved you, didn’t she?’

‘I think maybe she must have found out that I was planning to leave Monaco and move back to England. Perhaps it was Phil who told her. In the long run, I’d have made sure she was all right, of course, money-wise, but frankly I was looking forward to living a rather less colourful life, if I can put it like that.’

‘All right. That’s possible, I suppose. I didn’t know Colette, so I can’t say if revenge was in her character or not. But I did know Phil. Yes, he was angry with you for ending the atelier. And maybe he did hate you. But I can’t see him hating you enough to do what you’re suggesting. I think I liked Colette’s Russian better for that.’

‘If there ever was a Russian,’ said John. ‘I’m not so sure.’

‘What’s that you say?’

John was plotting now — plotting like he was planning a book. I think it was all he could do not to get out a notebook and start jotting down ideas.

‘If I could come back to Phil’s motive here, for just a moment. If we could focus on that, please.’

I smiled thinly; John might have been discussing a character in one of his books. He looked as if at any second he was going to have what he used to call a ‘sumimasen moment’ — after the word that Japanese waiters cry out to new customers — when he would punch a fist into the palm of his hand and shout a word of thanks to his muse for giving him the inspired plot twist that was going to stun and amaze his readers.

‘Yes?’

‘There’s something I’ve never told you before, Don. Something that’s relevant to all this, I think. A couple of years ago, I bumped into Phil’s wife, Caroline, when she was shopping in Cannes. Except that she wasn’t shopping. Not like any woman I’ve ever seen. Not for anything decent. She was looking for bargains in some cheapo place on the Rue d’Antibes. Zara, or somewhere equally ghastly, the sort of place where they dress women of a certain size and budget. So I—’

I groaned. ‘Please tell me you didn’t fuck her.’

John took a deep breath and looked very sheepish.

‘Oh, for Pete’s sake. You did fuck her, didn’t you?’

‘She was lonely, Don. Lonely and neglected by her clod of a husband. So I took her to Chanel on the Croisette, bought her a nice dress and a handbag, gave her lunch at the Carlton, treated her like someone very special and then took her to a room upstairs.’

‘You cunt.’

‘Yes, you’re right. It was a despicable thing to do. And believe me I regretted it later. But you’ve no idea how much it all seemed to cheer her up. I mean, she was a very different woman afterward.’

‘Yes. She was someone who had committed adultery.’ I shrugged. ‘But I don’t suppose it matters now, does it?’

‘No. Still, I thought I ought to mention it. Get it off my chest. It makes things easier to understand, doesn’t it?’

‘Yes. That’s what I call a motive. You’re right. The poor bastard had every reason to hate your guts. If he did know.’

‘There’s something else.’

‘What?’

‘No, it’s just that — look, I’m not trying to vindicate what happened, but she was too fast for someone like Phil. Caroline French was someone who liked the good things in life. He couldn’t ever have held on to a woman like her.’

I could see that he’d wanted to tell me something else in the way of a confession and then thought better of it, and in that very same instant I knew with one hundred per cent certainty that I’d been right about him and Jenny — that he’d fucked my wife, too. That he had done my office between my sheets. It was the way John had described Caroline as ‘too fast’ for Phil. Once, after Jenny had left me for her High Court judge, and John had tried to suggest that I was probably better off without her, he’d described her in those very same terms, as someone who was ‘too fast’ for someone like me. Of course this telling remark implied that by contrast with dullards like Phil or me, a man as sophisticated as John was more than equal to the task of dealing with fast women like Caroline or Jenny. And possibly he was, too. It’s amazing how women behave in a posh shop when there’s a rich man around with a limitless credit card. Either way this was, for me, a moment of both vindication and pain, and having been proved right in my suspicion that Houston had indeed fucked my wife it was all I could do not to punch him right there and then. I hated him now more than ever I had hated anyone who wasn’t Irish and I was glad he felt he was on the rack. I was enjoying my own Richard Topcliffe moment and poor John was my Catholic recusant. But I was not and never have been the type to let a mere hors d’oeuvre of hatred come before the full banquet of my revenge: long ago I had decided that this was a painstakingly prepared dish that would be served with such anaesthetic cold my victim would not even know that he had eaten it.

‘So, then,’ I said. ‘Maybe you’re right after all. What is it Iago says about Othello? “I do suspect the lusty Moor Hath leap’d into my seat: the thought whereof Doth, like a poisonous mineral, gnaw my innards; And nothing can or shall content my soul Till I am even’d with him, wife for wife.”’

‘Precisely so,’ said John. ‘That’s exactly what I’m on about, old sport. That silly bitch Caroline must have told him I’d shagged her, and when I put an end to the atelier he probably decided to pay me back in grief and pain. There’s no other explanation for it.’ He shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he was already waiting in Colette’s apartment when I went down there, grabbed the key from my tracksuit pocket, nipped upstairs and shot Orla while I was still on the job. Nor would I be surprised if all that Russian stuff — the champagnski, the ciggies, the newspaper — was just set-dressing to make me think her Ivan had turned up and to put the wind up me so that I would go on the run. That was clever. Very clever.’

I nodded. ‘And immediately afterward Phil drove Colette to the airport car park where he shot her? In cold blood? I suppose it’s just about possible. But this only makes sense to me if they were both after money — to blackmail you in return for her admission to the police that she was your alibi.’

‘Yes. That’s right. She must have got cold feet about the whole idea. Threatened to go to the police with her story. Either that or she wanted more money. Or money up front which Phil simply didn’t have.’

John grinned and started to jog on the spot, like a boxer, as if for the first time he could run toward some light at the end of the tunnel. His leather shoes squeaked like springs that needed oiling, but for a big man he was surprisingly light on his feet.

‘This is good for me, old sport. This is a real break, you know. Now I can hand myself in to the police. It’s obvious that if the two of them were acting together it leaves me in the clear. More or less. Don’t you see? He was in possession of my watch. Not to mention my bag and my gun. Christ, Don, he must have used the Walther to kill himself. The police will have to conclude that he took them all from my apartment. I shall just tell the cops that I was shit-scared and took off to Switzerland to wait for the truth to come out; and that when I saw they were both dead I put two and two together and decided to give myself up.’

I nodded patiently and tried to remain calm. I hadn’t reckoned on this. I went to the window and moving the net curtain I stared out at the hotel’s small but elegant garden. Here and there were iron statues of peacocks, which I rather preferred to the real thing, they being so much quieter. The laurel bushes and tree ferns were such a brilliant, almost artificial shade of green that you half expected to see a man being stalked through the undergrowth by a tiger or a jaguar — which was pretty much how I felt, most of the time. As if at any moment my ambitious revenge might swallow me whole. I opened a window and lit a cigarette so that any other sharp intakes of breath might seem smoking-related rather than the corollary of my almost shredded nerves.

‘Look, John, there’s something I haven’t told you. Because I didn’t want to depress you any more.’

John stopped jogging and frowned. ‘What’s that?’

‘I think you’d better sit down. Because you’re not going to like this.’

John sat down on the edge of my bed. I turned off the TV and returned to the window.

‘What the fuck is it? Tell me.’

‘When I first met the Monty cops in London I maintained your innocence so vehemently that they felt obliged to share with me some forensic evidence they hadn’t released to the newspapers. Apparently they found blood and gunpowder on the sleeve of your tracksuit.’

John shook his head. ‘No problem. Phil could have put on my clothes while I was busy banging Colette. Yes, that’s it. He must have been wearing my tracksuit when he shot Orla. To help implicate me.’

‘If that was all there was then I’d agree you should hand yourself in to the cops and take your chances.’

‘What else is there?’

I blew smoke out of the window; it was supposed to be a non-smoking room and I had enough trouble on my hands without setting off the alarm that was attached to the ceiling, blinking red like the tail light of an aircraft. I caught sight of my own reflection in a mirror on the inside of the closet door. Wreathed in a little halo of blue cloud I looked more in control of myself than I might have supposed. Like someone or some thing infernal. As usual the cigarette was having an effect, helping me to form ideas out of nothing more than smoke and mirrors.

‘The fact is, John, it’s not just your chances any more. It’s mine, too.’

John shook his head. ‘I don’t follow you, old sport. I’ve said I’ll leave your name out of it and I will. If it makes any difference you can keep that twenty grand when you fuck off back to London. There’s no reason you should be involved in any of this. I’m more than capable of facing this on my own now.’

‘But I am involved. Very much more involved than you know.’

‘What are you talking about, old sport?’

‘Last night, when I went to see Phil he was in an extremely difficult frame of mind. He’d been drinking a lot. Smoking a lot of dope, too. I didn’t know he smoked weed, did you? Anyway, he told me that I could stuff your twenty grand because the Chief Inspector from the Monaco Sûreté Publique was coming to see him at ten o’clock on Monday morning and that he was going to tell him that you were staying in Vence, at the Château Saint-Martin. Yes, that’s what he said. He told me he’d thought it all over and he couldn’t bring himself to forgive you for destroying his life as a writer, not to mention destroying his life as a man. He told me then that he’d found out you’d fucked Caroline and said that no amount of money could compensate for the pain he’d felt — that a man he considered to be his friend could have betrayed him quite so egregiously.

‘I tried to reason with him. I said that what was done was done. I’m afraid I even told him about my plan to hide you away in Cornwall and that we could reinstate the atelier with him as one of your writers. I said everything would be just like it was before and that in the fullness of time, if he was writing and making a decent living again, Caroline might even come back to him. But he wasn’t interested in any of that. He told me the only writing he was capable of doing these days was jotting down a lunch order at the Château Saint-Martin. Tempers got a bit frayed and he started to shout at me.

‘I only meant to threaten him with the gun — your gun, which I’d found in your bag when I was taking the money out to give it to him. I told him that he might manage to get you arrested but that he’d better think twice if I was going to allow him to grass me up. Or words to that effect. I said that if I did get nicked he could be sure that eventually I’d come back there and kill him. Anyway, he was pissed and stoned like I said — which is probably why he tried to take the gun off me. We wrestled a bit, in his study and that was when the gun went off. It seemed you’d left a bullet in the breech. I should have checked it before I pointed the thing at him but I didn’t. There wasn’t time.’ I shrugged. ‘It was me who shot Philip French, John. It was me who killed him.’

‘Jesus.’

‘After that I set about trying to make it look like a suicide. I put the gun in his hand, let off another shot for the forensics boys. I left your bag and your watch in the hope that it might persuade the police — as it seems to have managed to persuade you — that Phil had something to do with Orla’s death. It was the same gun after all. There was an unsent draft of a rather self-pitying email he’d been composing to his wife on his computer which he’d insisted on reading to me as a way of explaining that he was finished as a writer; I don’t think he’d ever intended sending it to Caroline; so I sent it, for appearance’s sake, you understand. Then I left. That’s why I was so fucking panicky when I came to fetch you in the village square last night. And why I started bricking it when I saw that copper and realized he was already in Tourrettes. Because I’d just shot Phil.’

John nodded. ‘I see. Fuck me. You had quite an evening, didn’t you? But where do you think the cops got the idea that Philip French had anything to do with Colette Laurent’s death?’

‘The circumstances, I suppose. You’re the missing link, after all. You knew Phil and I dare say they’ll have worked out that you knew Colette, too; and intimately. They must have found her laptop when they came across her body. It’s just a suspicion I have, but I rather think Chief Inspector Amalric might be playing a clever game here. He could be hoping you’ll hear on the news that the cops think Phil had something to do with Colette’s death and that, as a result, you’ll think it’s now safe to hand yourself in. And look, for all I fucking know, they don’t really believe that Phil killed himself either. I have no idea what kind of fist I made of making his death look like a suicide. My expertise in these matters only extends to writing thrillers. They’re not stupid, these people. So it’s not just you who’s now facing jail, it’s me, too.’ I shook my head and added, ‘They’re not actually looking for me, of course. Not yet. And before you ask I have no more intention of handing myself in than you have. Or had.’

‘Yes, I see.’

I flicked the cigarette into the guttering where it lay like an exploded incendiary device waiting to detonate and set the whole building on fire.

‘I do agree with you about one thing, though, John. Phil and Colette certainly do look as if they killed your wife and framed you for it. For whatever reason. Money, revenge — we may never know for sure. But suspecting it is one thing; proving it is something else. With your gun and your bag and your watch all found at the scene of Phil’s homicide a jury might just as easily be persuaded by a good lawyer that you killed all three of them: Orla, Colette and Phil. And make no mistake about it, I shall certainly deny that I had anything to do with Phil’s death. In court. On oath. I’m telling you now, there’s no way I’m going to put my hand up to that. Not while I’ve been assisting a wanted felon to escape from justice. You do see my problem, don’t you? A jury might easily be persuaded that I shot Philip French on purpose. At your behest. To stop him from telling the cops about you. That’s me in a conspiracy to commit murder, which probably carries a life sentence in France, just like in England. I’m not going to take that chance. Not for you. Not for anyone. Me, I’m going back to London on the Eurostar first thing tomorrow morning. You can do what the fuck you like, chum. Come with me. Stay here in Paris. It’s entirely up to you. But I’ve had enough. I’m going straight to Manderley. It will nice to be in a place where nothing ever happens and no one ever does anything. And if you’re sensible you’ll come with me.’

John, who had remained seated on the edge of my bed all this time, got up and helped himself to a miniature of whisky from my minibar.

‘I feel a little like Oscar Wilde,’ he said, pouring the contents into a glass. ‘You remember? At the Cadogan Hotel in 1895. Him being urged to flee for France by Robbie Ross before the coppers could turn up and arrest him for sodomy and gross indecency.’

‘Thanks a lot, chum,’ I said. ‘I always saw myself playing Robbie Ross to your Oscar.’ I smiled thinly. ‘I should like it to be known now that in no circumstances are my ashes to be interred in your tomb, as his are, in Père Lachaise.’

John sipped at the whisky for a moment and then drained the glass.

‘And of course fleeing to Cornwall is rather less glamorous than catching the boat train to Paris.’ He shrugged. ‘But it will have to be that way, I suppose. I regret I can now see no alternative to Cornwall.’