Yesterday's Spy

Chapter 10

He was wearing a short fur coat, and a black kerchief knotted cowboy-style, right against the throat. It was a measure of their subtlety that they sent along a man so unlike any policeman I’d ever seen. This youngster was completely different from the wrestlers of the Police Judiciaire in Marseille, or the hatchet-faced PJ boys who work in Nice. I’d noticed him the previous evening. He’d been drinking straight cognac at the far end of the bar when I went in to ask the Princess for the key of my room. It was a bad sign — cognac, I mean; I like my cops to stick to rot-gut.

He was in the same seat next morning, drinking coffee and smiling apologetically, as if he’d been there all night. ‘Monsieur Charles Bonnard?’ he said.

That was my wartime name: I thought I’d seen the last reel of that one, but now the nightmares came back. He didn’t wait for my reply. ‘My name is Fabre. Inspector Fabre, Renseignements Généraux, Lyon.’

‘That’s a relief,’ I said. ‘Just for a moment I thought you were from the Gestapo.’

He smiled again. ‘We weren’t quite sure what name you’d be using this time.’

‘Well, I’m glad to hear someone wasn’t,’ I said.

‘You’ll have to come to Lyon, I’m afraid,’ he said.

He could have been no older than twenty-five, but his youth, like his bizarre outfit, made him a likely recruit for the political undercover work of the RG. He was tall and broad-shouldered, but the slim hips would have suited a dancer or acrobat. His handsome bony face was white. In the north it would have gone unremarked, but here in the Riviera it seemed almost perverse that anyone should so avoid the sunshine.

He rubbed his fingers nervously. ‘You’ll have to come with us,’ he said apologetically. ‘To Lyon,’ he told me again. He stopped rubbing his hands together for long enough to reach into an inside pocket for a tin of throat lozenges. He tore the silver wrapping from two of them, and popped them into his mouth in swift succession.

‘You’ll need overnight things,’ he said.

I smiled. The Princess came in and put my coffee on the counter. She looked from one to the other of us and left without speaking. ‘Why not pay your bill now?’ he said. ‘I’ll make sure they hold your room for a few days. I mean, if you are not back tonight, why pay these hotel bastards?’

I nodded and drank some more coffee. ‘Have you worked very long for the RG?’ I asked.

He swallowed his throat lozenges. ‘Forget checking me out,’ he said. ‘I don’t know anybody important there. That’s why I get lousy jobs like bringing you in.’

There was no sign of the Princess. From behind the cash register I took the handful of cash slips that were marked ‘Charles’. I added fifteen per cent and signed. ‘No need to hold the room,’ I said. ‘They are not expecting a tour-bus.’

He looked around the bar. There was enough daylight to expose the sleazy fly-blown wallpaper and the cracked lino. He smiled, and I smiled back, and then we went up to get my baggage.

Once inside my room, he became more confidential. ‘You must be someone important,’ he told me, ‘judging by all the teleprinter messages and what I hear about the cabinet du préfet complaining to London.’

‘Why are you telling me?’ I asked.

‘Cops should stick together,’ he said. He opened the door of the battered wardrobe, and spent a moment or two looking at his brown-speckled reflection. ‘Last year I followed a suspect to Aachen, in Germany. I grabbed him and brought him back across the border in my car. There was no end of fuss. But luckily the Aachen CID lied their heads off for me. Cops have to stick together; bureaucrats arrest only pieces of paper.’

He pulled my suit out of the wardrobe and folded it carefully while I packed my case. ‘They’ll take you up to Paris, I think. If you want to make a quick phone call, I won’t hear you.’

‘No, thanks,’ I said. I went into the bathroom and threw my shaving gear into the zip bag. His voice was louder when he next spoke and I could tell he’d started a new throat lozenge. ‘And if you have a gun, I’d get rid of it. It will just give them something to hold you for.’

‘I don’t carry a gun,’ I called from the bathroom. I could hear him going all through the drawers of the wardrobe.

I closed the bathroom door. Then I released the plastic bath panels with my knife. I reached into the dust and dead spiders to get the plastic bag I’d hidden there. I didn’t have to swing out the cylinder, I could see the 125 grain round-nosed bullets that I’d loaded into the .38 Centennial Airweight. I stuffed the pistol into the waistband of my trousers and quickly replaced the panel. Then I flushed the toilet and emerged from the bathroom. It had taken me no more than ten seconds.

Fabre said, ‘Because if they find a pistol anywhere in the room here, they can hold you under the new emergency laws — one month it is.’ He slammed the last drawer closed, as if to punctuate the warning.

‘I don’t carry a pistol. I don’t even own a pistol. You know English policemen don’t have guns.’

‘I was forgetting,’ he said. ‘And you have habeas corpus and all that crap, too. Hell, what a life for a cop. Are you sure you don’t want to make a phone call? Call London if you want, but make it snappy.’

‘Are you in traffic?’

‘Renseignements Généraux,’ he said. ‘I told you I was from RG. Why?’

‘Because you come on like a courtesy cop,’ I said.

He smiled. ‘I’m one of the graduate entries,’ he said. He gave a self-conscious smile. ‘I don’t believe in rough stuff, unless it’s absolutely necessary.’

‘Have you got a car here?’

‘And a driver. We must stop in Nice, at the Palais de Justice. I must sign the forms and go through the formalities. You don’t need gloves: it’s not that cold.’

‘I’ve got a circulation problem,’ I said.

It was a black Citroën. The driver was a mournful Negro of about fifty. He took my case and locked it in the boot. His skin was bluish black and his eyes heavy-lidded. He wore a shabby raincoat and battered hat. He hardly looked at us as we got into the car. The young one continued talking. ‘The other day someone said that we were the Jews of Western Europe. Palais de Justice, Ahmed.’

‘Who?’ I said.

‘Cops. The Jews of Western Europe; we’re blamed for everything, aren’t we? Everything, from traffic jams to strike-breaking — it’s convenient to have someone to blame.’

I grunted.

‘Park in the usual space, Ahmed,’ he told the driver, as we turned into the Place du Palais. To me he said, ‘I’ll be as quick as I can. You wait with Ahmed.’

I nodded.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ he said. ‘A pain in the guts? Indigestion?’

‘Could you get me something? It’s an acid stomach. There’s a chemist at the end of the street.’

Fabre looked at me for what seemed like a long time. Then he reached into a pocket of his fur coat and found a plastic box. ‘You need two of these,’ he said. ‘I carry all that kind of junk; I’m a hypochondriac.’

‘Thanks,’ I said. He tipped two small multi-coloured capsules into the palm of my gloved hand.

‘They melt at different times,’ he explained, ‘so you get this continuous anti-acid together with minute doses of regular aspirin and buffer — you must have seen the adverts …’

I put them into my mouth with my left hand and tried to look like a man who was holding on to his belly-ache with the other hand, rather than one who had been a little too premature in checking the butt of a .38 Centennial Airweight.

‘Shellfish,’ I said. ‘That always does it. I’m a fool, really.’

Fabre nodded his agreement, slammed the car door, and walked off across the square to the police offices. The driver was still looking at me. I smiled at him. He touched the evil-eye beads that dangled from the driving mirror, and then gave his whole attention to the horse-racing section of his paper.

Whatever Fabre did inside that imposing building took no more than five minutes. The driver had the engine running by the time Fabre got back in. ‘We’ll take the autoroute, Ahmed,’ Fabre told the Negro. ‘You’ll see the Grasse exit marked.’

We followed the Mediterranean coast as far as Cannes, and then turned north, into the land of truffles, baccarat and fast cars that stretches from Mougins to Vence. No one spoke. I looked out of the window.

‘This is Grasse,’ said the driver. He turned to look back over his shoulder, and gave me a sad smile.

Palm Springs on a French hill-top. Daubed on a wall there was a slogan: ‘Arabs Keep Out of Grasse.’ It was raining in Grasse. We didn’t stop.

‘We’ll be there by lunchtime,’ said Fabre.

I tried to wet my lips and smile back, but my tongue was dry. These boys were all soft lights and sweet music, but I had the feeling that it was going to go dark and quiet at some chosen place on the highway north. And they weren’t planning to leave long-stemmed roses to mark the spot.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

The driver kept to a steady speed and showed impeccable road manners. To them, it might have seemed convincingly like police procedure, but to me it looked as though they were extremely careful not to be booked on a traffic offence at a time when they had another crime in operation.

‘Sorry about what?’ I croaked.

‘Mentioning food — when you have a crise de foie,’ he said.

‘Is that what I have?’

‘I think so,’ he said.

Instinct said use the gun and get out of here, but training said find out who, what and where.

The driver chose the N85, the route Napoléon. As we climbed away from the sheltered Riviera coast, a hell’s kitchen of boiling storm-clouds came into view. The mountain peaks were white, like burned soufflés that some chef had hidden under too much powdered sugar. The sky became darker and darker, and the cars coming south had their headlights on. The rain turned to hail that beat a tattoo on the roof of the car, and at the La Faye pass the mountains echoed with the sound of thunder. Great lightning flashes froze an endless line of toy motor-cars that were crawling up the far side of the gorge. The wiper blades stropped the glass, and the engine’s note changed to a whine that provided an undertone of hysteria.

‘We’ll be late,’ the driver warned. It was the hard consonantal French of the Arab.

‘It will be clear beyond Barrême.’

‘Barrême is a long way,’ said the driver. ‘We’ll be late.’ He paddled the brake and swung the steering wheel as the tyres slid on a patch of ice. He lost enough speed to have to change down. There was the scream of a power-horn, and a small Renault sped past us on the wrong side of the road. There was a thud as his slush hit the door, and a fanfare of horns as the Renault prised open the traffic to avoid an oncoming bus. ‘Bloody idiot,’ said the driver. ‘He won’t get to Castellane, except in a hearse.’

The equinoctial storms that lash the great limestone plateau of Provence provide Nice with a rainfall higher than even London. But as we hurried north the black clouds sped over us, tearing themselves to shreds to reveal their sulphur-yellow interiors and, eventually, the sun. The inland roads were dry, and as the traffic thinned out we increased speed. I watched the fields, and the huge flocks of birds that circled like dust-storms, but my mind calculated every possible way in which the threat of death might come.

At first they pretended that it would be faster to take to the minor roads, but by the time we were as far as the military exercise zone they had grown tired of their game, or had decided that it was no longer necessary.

Fabre, in the back seat with me, was watching the road with unusual attention. ‘You missed the turn-off,’ he told the driver. He tugged at his finger joints one by one, as if he was field-stripping his hand to clear a blockage.

The driver made no sign that he’d heard, until finally he said, ‘I didn’t miss anything. There’s that tumbledown shrine and the wire, then comes the turn-off.’

‘Perhaps you are right,’ said Fabre. His face was even whiter than white, and he chewed down on one of his tablets in a rare display of emotion. He became conscious of my stare and turned to me. ‘We must get the right road or we’ll be lost — it’s one of those short-cuts.’

‘Oh, one of those short-cuts,’ I said. I nodded.

He rubbed his hands together and smiled. Perhaps he’d realized that there had been undertones in that last exchange which denied any last chance that they were policemen.

Fabre spotted a wayside shrine with a few miserable wild flowers in a tin at the foot of a tormented Christ. ‘You’re right,’ he told the driver. We turned on to the narrow side road.

‘Take it easy,’ Fabre said to the driver, his face tightening as the suspension thumped the rutted track. He was nervous now, as the time came closer. They were both nervous. The driver had stiffened at the wheel, and he seemed to shrink even as I watched him.

‘Not the right-hand fork,’ Fabre warned the driver. And then I suddenly recognized the landscape. A few stunted trees on rolling hills: I’d not seen this place since the war. We were taking the high road to the west side of the Tix quarry: Champion’s quarry, as it now was. The old open-cast workings had been abandoned since the late ’fifties, and the mine had proved so expensive that it had closed a few years later. The quarry: it would be an ideal place.

As we came up the slope to the brink of the quarry I saw the same dilapidated wooden huts that had been there ever since I could remember. Fabre squirmed. He thought he was a hell of a hard kid, pulses racing and eyes narrowed. I saw him as a grotesque caricature of myself when young. Well, perhaps I was the same ‘yesterday’s spy’ that Champion was, but my heart wasn’t pounding. Shakespeare got me all wrong: no stiffening of the sinews, no summoning of the blood, not even ‘hard favour’d rage’. There was only a cold sad ache in the gut — no longer any need to simulate it. And — such was the monumental ego a job like mine needs — I was already consoling myself for the distress that killing them would inevitably cause me.

I was concentrating on the pros and cons of striking while the driver had his hands full of car, and Fabre had his attention distracted. But because they were watching the road ahead, they took in the scene some five seconds before I did — and five seconds in this job is a long weekend elsewhere — ten seconds is for ever!

‘Merde!’ said Fabre softly. ‘She’s escaped.’ Then I saw all: the woman in the short fur coat, identical to the one that Fabre was wearing, and the man on his knees, almost hidden in the thorns and long grass. The man kicked frantically to free himself. There were two loud bangs. The man in the grass convulsed at each gunshot and fell flat and out of sight. Then there came the thump of the wooden door, as the fur-coated woman disappeared into the hut.

Fabre had the car door open by that time. The car slewed to a stop in thick mud, almost sliding into a ditch. Even before he was out of the car Fabre had his Browning Model Ten automatic in his hand. Well, that was the right pistol! I knew plenty of French cops with those: smooth finish, three safeties and only twenty ounces in your pocket. A pro gun, and this one had long since lost its blueing. It was scratched, worn shiny at the edges, and I didn’t like it. Fabre stood behind the open car door, ballooning his body gently, so as never to be a static target. He was squinting into the dark shadows under the trees. Only men who have been in gunfire do that instinctively as this man was doing it.

The clouds parted to let the sun through. I glimpsed the face at the hut window. I remember thinking that it must be Madame Baroni, the mother of Caty and Pina, but she had died in Ravensbrück in 1944. Two more shots: one of them banged into the car body, and made the metal sing. Not Pina’s mother but Pina herself, Caty’s sister, her face drawn tight in fear. There was a flash of reflected light as the sun caught the nickel-finish revolver that she levelled through the broken window.

She depressed the gun and fired again at the man in the undergrowth. I remembered the German courier she’d killed, when we were together at the farmhouse. She’d shot him six times.

‘You cow!’ Fabre’s face contorted, and he brought his Browning up in a two-hand clasp, bending his knees slightly, FBI target-shooting style. He’d need only one shot at this range. His knuckles were white before I made my decision.

I pulled the trigger of my revolver. The noise inside the car was deafening. At a range of less than two yards, the first bullet lifted him under the arm like a bouncer’s grip. He was four yards away, and tilted at forty-five degrees, as the second shot collapsed him like a deckchair and threw him into the ditch. My ears rang with the noise. There was the smell of scorched cloth, and two holes in my coat.

Ahmed jumped out of the car at the same moment I did. With the car between us, he was able to cover a lot of ground before I was able to shoot. The bullet howled into the sky, miles away from him. I cursed, and moved back to the place where Fabre had fallen. I was cautious, but I needn’t have been. He was dead. The Browning was still gripped tight in his hands. He was a real gunny. His mouth was open, teeth clenched, and his eyes askew. I knew it was another nightmare. I steeled myself to see that face again in many dreams, and I was not to be wrong about it.

Cautiously I moved up the track towards the wooden shack, keeping low and behind the scrub. I was on the very brink of the quarry before the door opened. Pina emerged, tight-lipped, dishevelled, her fur coat ripped so that its lining hung below the hem. The man she’d shot was dead: a dark-skinned youth in leather jacket and woollen hat, his tweed trousers still entangled in the thorns.

‘Charlie! Charlie! Oh, Charlie!’ Pina pushed the revolver into her pocket and then washed her dry hands, in some curious rite of abnegation. ‘They were going to kill me, Charlie. They were going to kill me. They said so.’

‘Are you all right, Pina?’

‘We must get away from here, Charlie.’

There was a flash of lightning and a prolonged rumble of thunder.

Pina mumbled a prayer into my shirt-front. I held her tight, but I didn’t relax. From here I could see right down to the puddles in the bottom of the quarry. It was a spooky place for me, its vast space brimful of memories and fears. In the war I’d hidden here, listening to the barking of the search dogs, and the whistles of the Feldgendarmerie as they came, shoulder to shoulder, across these very fields. Pina clutched my hand, and she felt there the anxious sweat that my memories provoked.

‘But where?’ she said. ‘Where can we go?’ Again, lightning lit up the underside of the dark clouds, and a perfect disc of its blue light flashed from the bracken a few yards in front of me. Violently I pushed Pina to the ground, and threw myself down into firing position. With one hand I pushed my spectacles against my face and capped one eye. With the other hand I put the pistol’s foresight near the place where I’d seen the glint of reflected light. I pulled the trigger three times.

The sound of the gunfire was reflected off the sloping ground: three loud bangs, and the echo of them came rolling back from the far side of the quarry. Pina crawled nearer. ‘Keep down,’ I said.

‘This grass! I’m soaked,’ she complained.

‘It’s a sniperscope, a perfect disc of light. It must have been sighted on us.’

I rolled over enough to get some bullets from my pocket and push them into the chamber. Then I picked up the empty cases and wrapped them in my handkerchief. There was no point in trying to be clever about powder traces — the bullet holes in my pocket would be enough.

‘They will try to get to the car,’ said Pina. ‘If you could get to that bracken you’d shoot anyone who tried to get down to the track where the car is.’

‘You’re riding the wrong sideshow,’ I growled. ‘I’m selling tickets for the tunnel of love.’

‘You’re going to let them take the car?’

‘I’ll check their oil, and polish the windscreen for them.’

Pina gave that sort of whistle that well-bred French ladies resort to when they want to swear. It was then that the Negro driver broke cover and went racing off down the slope towards the main road. If there was more than one man, this had to be the moment to rush them. I jumped up and ran as fast as I could to where I’d seen the glint of light. Pina followed me.

‘I don’t understand,’ she said.

I said nothing; I didn’t understand, either. There was no sniperscope, no high-powered rifle, no lethal weapons at all. The lightning had reflected from the front element of a zoom-lens fitted to a Beaulieu 16 mm movie camera. I fidgeted with the magazine until I got it open and then I pulled the grey film out into the daylight. A considerable footage had passed through the film-gate but the bulk of it was in the top magazine. Whatever it was intended to film had not yet happened.

I unlatched the camera from its pan and tilt head, and lifted it on to my shoulder. Then, in some irrational fit of destructive anger, I pitched the valuable movie camera over the side of the quarry. It hit an outcrop and bounced high into the air, spilling lenses and sprockets and trailing a long tail of film. It bounced a second time and then fell out of sight before landing with a thud.

Pina gave me the big pistol she had used. ‘It’s his,’ she said, indicating the body of the dark-skinned man, ‘I got it away from him.’ After wiping it carefully, I threw it into the wooden hut. There was a new plastic-topped table there and two kitchen chairs. Cigarette ends, pieces of loaf and the remains of hard-boiled egg littered the table top, and a length of rope was on the floor. ‘I tricked him,’ said Pina. ‘They had me tied up at first.’

‘Go and wait in the car, Pina,’ I said.

She shuffled off like a sleepwalker. Half-heartedly, I pressed my .38 into the dead Arab’s hand and threw my cotton gloves down alongside the body, to account for its powder-free hands. But I didn’t fool myself that I was achieving anything more than a couple of hours at double-time for some junior assistants in the local forensic lab.

I started the Citroën. There was a full minute of wheel-spinning before the old brute crawled out of the mire and waddled off down the track, spewing mud in every direction. We left everything the way it was, the fur-coated gunny head-down in the ditch, the camera-operator — for so I had decided was the man Pina had killed — stiff in the long grass.

‘What did it all mean?’ Pina asked me, as we reached the main road.

I looked at her and then back down the road. ‘You know what it means, Pina,’ I said. ‘And, by God, I’m going to wring it out of you, so just start getting used to the idea of telling me.’

We were both silent for a long time. I suppose we were both thinking about the Negro driver, and what he might do. Pina finally said, ‘He’ll not tell the police anything, unless they squeeze it out of him. They were there to kill you, Charlie. They grabbed me this morning on my way to the hairdresser’s.’

‘Why you, Pina?’

She didn’t answer. My thoughts moved on to more urgent matters.

‘Is there a plane service to Paris from Grenoble?’ I asked her.

‘Air Alpes fly Marseille-Grenoble-Metz, and connect with an Air France Düsseldorf flight. I did that last year.’

‘No good,’ I said, thinking better of it. ‘Passports, credit cards and cheques — a trail of paper.’

‘I’ve got a lot of cash,’ she said.

‘Give me a minute to think.’

‘You’d better think fast, petit, or we’ll be in Valence. And that’s on the autoroute. It will be thick with cops.’

‘I wish I knew whether this was a stolen car.’

‘Don’t be silly, Charlie. You saw those men. They don’t work with stolen cars: they are assassins — cent-mille francs a time men — they don’t use stolen cars.’

‘Who are they, Pina?’

She picked at the dried mud that was plastered on her fur coat. ‘It’s no good shouting at me as if I was a juvenile delinquent,’ she said.

‘You killed that man, Pina,’ I said.

She didn’t answer. I found it difficult to be patient with her, and yet I knew there was no other way. I said, ‘The Tix quarry … Pina, and not far away, the mine, and the house where Champion lives. What the hell are you doing there?’

A police car came speeding towards us, with siren and light going. I watched it in the mirror until it disappeared over the hill. ‘And the camera,’ I said. ‘I think you took it up there to spy on Champion. Is that it?’

She turned her head to see me more clearly.

‘You and Champion are in it together,’ she said, as if the idea had just occurred to her.

‘In what?’ I demanded.

She shook her head. Then she looked at her gold wristwatch and fidgeted with it, so that it jangled against the bracelets on her arm.

‘You tell me,’ she mumbled.

The rain mottled the windscreen and I switched on the wipers and the heater. She loosened her coat. ‘OK,’ I said, ‘I’ll tell you. You’ve always blamed Champion for the death of Marius. But your brother was arrested hours before Champion, and you know it because you saw it happen. And I saw it, too.’ I waited for her to admit it, but she didn’t.

She forced herself to smile. ‘I was mad about Champion,’ she protested. ‘I loved him, you know I did.’

‘And that’s all part of the vendetta,’ I said. ‘You never forgave him for marrying your sister.’

She gave a little hoot of laughter. ‘Jealousy!’ she said. ‘What a joker you are!’ She took out a tiny handkerchief and wiped her nose. Only after she had taken a quick look at herself, run a fingertip over her eyebrows and clicked her handbag closed, did she speak again. ‘It’s the way he’s treated Caterina that I resent so much. Have you seen her lately?’

‘A week or so ago.’

‘He’s made her life hell, and it shows on her face.’

‘No, Pina,’ I said. ‘She’s just getting old, that’s all.’

‘You’re pitiless, Charlie, do you know that?’ It was a pleasant conversational voice she used. ‘You don’t have flesh and blood, you have clockwork. You don’t live, you tick.’ She wiped her nose again. ‘Tell me, Charlie: do you ever love, or hate, or weep? Tell me!’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I just blow a fuse.’

‘And each time you do it, someone comes along and fits you with a bigger fuse, and finally you can tick-tock your life away, Charlie, without any problems of conscience, or morals, or thought of tomorrow.’

‘It’s a funny thing, Pina,’ I said. ‘Every time someone puts a bomb in a supermarket or machineguns a few airline passengers, it turns out that they are doing it on account of their conscience, or their morals, or some goddamned twisted idea of a new Jerusalem.’

I’d said it simply out of anger, but the reference to Jerusalem caused her to react.

‘Me?’

Her eyes opened wide and her mouth slackened with amazement and indignation. ‘You think I’m working with the Palestinian terrorists?’

‘Then who are you working for?’

‘The autoroute will be best,’ she said. ‘The car’s not stolen, I’m sure of it. We’d best make for Paris.’

‘Who?’ I said again. ‘Who are you working for, then?’

Pina had said too much and she knew it, and now she hunched forward in her seat and began to worry. The moment had passed.

For a few minutes she was very still. Then she turned her head to see the road behind us.

‘I’ll watch the road, Pina. You try and rest for a few minutes.’

‘I’m frightened, Charlie.’

‘It will be all right,’ I said. ‘Try to get some sleep.’

‘Sleep,’ she said. ‘It’s ten years since I was able to sleep without my pills.’

‘Well, don’t take any of those. We might need to be wide awake.’

A helicopter came over the road and then made off towards the autoroute. Pina leaned close to the window to watch it fly over.

‘Traffic police,’ I said.

She nodded and leaned back in her seat, her head resting against the window. I glanced at her. Her hair was knotted and her lipstick smudged. In her lap, her hands were clasped too tight, the knuckles criss-crossed with the marks of her nails. When she spoke it was in a different sort of voice, and I glanced across her to see that she had not opened her eyes. ‘I must have a drink, Charlie. I must.’

‘In Lyon.’

‘You don’t understand!’ She rummaged through the rubbish and dog-eared papers in the car, as if hoping to find a bottle or a hip-flask.

‘We’ll find somewhere,’ I said.

‘Soon, Charlie.’

Her hands were shaking, in spite of the strength she used to clench them together. And I saw the way that her face was stiff as if with pain.

‘The first place we see,’ I promised.

‘Oh, yes, petit.’

It was an elegant and yet a forbidding place. A pox of tourist-club badges studded the portals, and the flags of the world’s richest nations flew from the battlements. The gravel was freshly raked and the grass clipped short.

‘Let’s go,’ I said. I had already given her my lecture on being inconspicuous — don’t over-tip, thank anyone or converse too long with the waiter — and we’d stopped a moment or two while she combed her hair and used tissues to clean her face. After that, we’d gone a couple of miles up the road, in order to enter the drive from the north, and so be remembered as a southbound car.

She left her muddied coat in the car. We came, huffing and puffing from the cold, into the warmed and scented air of the lobby. The tiles were polished and the carpets brushed. Behind the desk a middle-aged man looked up and reached for his jacket. He put it on before greeting us. ‘Yes?’ he said, as if he could think of no possible reason why people should break their journey there.

‘Can we get a drink?’ I said.

‘I’ll see,’ he said, and disappeared through a door marked ‘Private’.

There was a smell of disaster in the air, along with the scent of tile polish and coffee. About thirty tables had been set with cloths and cutlery but only one table had been used. On it there were two used cups, a coffee-pot and a newspaper folded so that the classified columns could be read.

A second man appeared from the service doors. Behind him there was the sudden sound of water going into a pot and a clatter of plates.

‘A table for two?’ He gave us a dignified smile. He was about sixty, a balding man with pale face and red hands: the legacy of a lifetime of steamy kitchens and hot water.

‘Yes,’ I said.

He raised a hand, turned on his heel and led us through the empty dining-room to a table near the window, as if we’d have had little chance of finding an empty seat without his assistance.

‘Omelette fines herbes,’ he suggested. His collar was twisted, as if the coat had been put on hurriedly.

‘Give me a brandy,’ said Pina, ‘a fine. We just want a drink.’ She sighed, and dumped her handbag on the table with a thud that knocked the cutlery askew. Then she opened the bag and began to search for cigarettes.

The waiter was patient. He handed me a menu.

‘Two omelettes,’ I said. ‘And I’d like a glass of red wine.’

‘Fleurie,’ he suggested.

‘And a green salad.’

‘Perfect,’ said the old man.

Pina found her cigarettes and lit one. She watched the old man stride away with his order. ‘You just gave him his big moment of the week,’ she said.

‘The way you say it, it sounds like I gave him leprosy.’

She touched my hand on the table-top. ‘You were being nice. And I’m being …’ She shook her head, unable to think of a word, and inhaled on the cigarette again. She propped her hand under her chin, and did not turn her eyes away from the kitchen door, shivering so violently that, for a moment, her whole body trembled.

‘Relax, Pina, relax,’ I said. But she did not relax until the old man emerged with the drinks. When he placed the brandy before her, she reached out to touch the stem of the glass, and as she did so — just with the possession of the drink — I saw the tension die within her. As if exercising masterful restraint she raised the glass slowly and met my eyes before taking a sip of it.

‘It’s a good brandy,’ she said.

‘Drink it down, Pina, you need a drink.’

But she didn’t gulp it. She pushed her gold cigarette case towards me, to offer me one.

‘No thanks,’ I said. ‘I’m trying to give it up.’

She smiled, as if at some secret joke, and placed the jacket of the black Dior suit over the back of her chair, carefully enough for the label to be on display. ‘Have a cigarette.’ She touched her hair as if it was herself that she was offering.

‘I’m trying to give it up,’ I said again, but I opened the case and took one, in just the same way that I’d ordered the omelette: to be obliging.

The afternoon sun came through the window and lit up her hair. And it lit up the strange grey eyes. ‘And what else are you trying to give up?’ she said, and waved away her cigarette smoke and my answer with it. ‘No, don’t tell me, darling, let me find out.’

It would have been difficult to guess Pina’s age. She needed no girdle, nor skin treatments. Neither the tiny wrinkles around her eyes, nor the freckles on her cheeks, were disguised under make-up. And when she’d combed through her hair, and tidied up in the car mirror, she’d done so without the narcissistic alarm that you see in the eyes of so many women over thirty. In Pina I could still see quite a lot of the foul-mouthed tomboy who had so alarmed me when I was a teenage subaltern.

‘Go and wash your face,’ she commanded. ‘When I look at the mess you’re in, I’m surprised they didn’t ask us to pay for the meal in advance.’

I looked at my watch.

‘They’ll be ages yet,’ she added caustically. ‘They’ll have to go and buy some eggs.’

Unlike the French restaurants that persist in modernizing dining-rooms while retaining medieval toilets, this place had reversed that configuration. The antique wood carvings, dark panelling and worn flagstones of the dining-room ill prepared me for the brilliantly lit stainless-steel sinks, the tinted mirrors and scented air of a washroom designed to look like a space-station.

I used the silver-backed hairbrush provided by the management, and stared at my reflection as I went over the events for the thousandth time. I’d put on my gloves before being brought out of the hotel and I had not taken them off until the shooting was done. Therefore no dabs on the car or at the scene of the crime. My Centennial Airweight had been bought new — in 1968 from a man in Rue Paradis, Marseille. He was well known, and well paid, for his skill at removing numbers from metal, and going deep enough to remove the impacted metal under the numbers. The gun had lived in a rented cash-box deep under a bank in suburban Lyon, until I collected it a week before using it. The gun was all right. They’d discover nothing from that. I stopped brushing my hair to finger the blackened holes in my coat pocket. All that would go for nothing, if the police lab got a sniff at my clothes. Oh, well.

Behind me, the toilet door creaked softly. In the mirror I saw it open just enough for someone to see inside. I turned. Perhaps I would have been fast enough, and even heavy enough, to handle one such man, but there were three of them. They were motorcycle cops: giants in boots, breeches, black leather coats and shiny crash helmets. I thrashed about, until a butt in the face with a helmet, and a nicely timed kick behind the knee, tumbled me to the floor. As they pulled me to my feet they had me pinioned so tight I could hardly breathe.

There were two other men behind the cops. They were small, white-faced men, with tight-fitting overcoats and expensive gloves. One of them bent down to pick up my spectacles. He examined them to be sure they were not cracked and then placed them on my face. The other civilian advanced upon me, clutching a handful of paperwork, as a priest might brandish a crucifix at a malevolent Lucifer.

I protested as much as a man can protest when he has a blue uniformed arm choking the life out of him, and the hard corner of a sink prising his vertebrae apart.

And they were still crowding into the place: autoroute police, motor-cyclists, civilians and helicopter pilots. ‘Is this the one?’ a voice asked, and they shuffled about until the person questioned could get a look at me.

He must have nodded, for another voice said, ‘You know that under French law you can be held for questioning for up to forty-eight hours without charges being preferred against you.’

I was gasping for air. I got my arm free, and tried to loosen the arm round my throat. My captor mistook this for an attempt to escape. He gave me a kidney punch, nicely calculated to be less than lethal.

Now I was bent almost double. I could no longer see any of the men. ‘This is a murder charge,’ said another voice. ‘Mrs Helen Bishop, alias Melodie Page, murdered in flat seven, twenty-three Victoria Terrace Gardens, London South-West. It’s all here … French magistrate’s signature, préfecture, as well as the extradition … You just cool it. We’re taking you to Lyon airport, and then to London. You just cool it, or I’ll beat you unconscious personally. Got it?’

It was the voice of Colonel Schlegel. The grip on my throat was loosened so that I could answer.

‘OK, OK,’ I croaked.

‘Get the cuffs on the bastard,’ said Schlegel. ‘And if he looks like he’s even thinking of escaping, beat him senseless.’

They let me straighten. There was a ghoulish smile on Schlegel’s face. If he was trying to convince these French policemen that this wasn’t a way of getting a colleague out of trouble, he was overdoing it.

I took a few deep breaths. Over Schlegel’s shoulder I could see through the open door into the dining-room beyond. Pina had gone.