Authors: Philip Kerr
Anyway, the argument became quite loud and at one point I grabbed her by the ear and twisted it, which she didn’t take kindly to and kicked me hard on the shin. I let out quite a yelp because Orla could always give as good as anything she got. She called me an arrogant cunt and I called her a fucking cow and then the maître d’ came and asked us to keep our voices down. No doubt the cops have already told you about that. There’s nothing like a lover’s tiff in public to provide a convenient background for a murder. It’s pure Agatha Christie. You have an argument, perhaps a face is slapped, some harsh things get said, very probably you meant some of them and therefore you must have killed her. The way the cops are you’d think a bit of a barney between husband and wife was one of Aristotle’s four fucking causes.
Actually, it was a fairly wide-ranging sort of argument, and not just about the move back to Blighty. I’d found out that Orla was giving money to all sorts of people and institutions I didn’t much care for. UNESCO was something we were both passionate about and we were actively involved in events like World Book Day and International Literacy Day. But I’m rather less keen on the RSPCA, the Labour Party, Julian Assange and Sinn Féin. Probably it was just her way of making me pay more attention to her, which I admit sometimes
I didn’t do enough of; quite the opposite. But I’m not telling you this to excuse what I’m going to tell you, old sport, merely to illustrate that my relationship with Orla was occasionally tempestuous. I was capable of driving her mad; she was capable of irritating the hell out of me, but not enough to kill her. Jesus, no. As George Clooney says in
From Dusk to Dawn
, ‘I may be a bastard but I’m not a fucking bastard.’
As we were leaving the restaurant I made some tasteless remark about Irish republicans which she greeted with silence. That wouldn’t have been so bad, but Orla can make a silence as cold and loud as a blast of air conditioning. Then, outside the hotel entrance, as we were waiting for the valet to bring us the car, Orla hit me with the Robuchon carrier bag containing the lemon cake. Hard enough to knock me off balance. I expect the doorman saw this and then me trying to laugh it off. Now a Ferrari is not a good car to drive when you’re angry – especially when it’s almost new – so I thought it best to apologize and, to my surprise, she started to cry, accepted my apology, told me she was sorry for hitting me with the cake, and then handed me the car keys. I don’t expect anyone saw us make up in the car.
When we were back home I apologized again, for good measure, and I really thought everything between us was all right and that everything had blown over. We even had a good laugh about the incident and reflected it was fortunate that the
Daily Mail
weren’t there to see what happened. I made a joke about it being lucky it was a Robuchon lemon cake and not one cooked by her mother – who’s the world’s worst baker – which Orla thought was very funny. Then we kissed and made up again – I swear that’s exactly what happened, although in view of what now took place you could
be forgiven for thinking our making up was hardly sincere on my part.
I went into my study and checked my emails and read a bit while Orla had a bath. Then she took the sleeping pill so I knew she would be soundly asleep for several hours. Which left me with ample opportunity to do what I often did when she took Halcion, which was to go out again; at least out of our apartment – which, as you may remember, is the sky duplex on the forty-third floor of the Tour Odéon – and down to an apartment on the twenty-ninth which is occupied – for the time being – by a friend of mine, a girl called Colette Laurent.
At least it was; Colette Laurent seems to have disappeared.
Until the night of Orla’s death I’d been seeing her for a while. Colette was originally set up in the Tour Odéon by a Russian oligarch called Lev who abandoned her, although it’s hard to imagine why, because girls don’t come looking any more spectacular than Colette Laurent. I used to see her in the Odéon’s gymnasium and it was lust at first sight on my part. One day we got talking. She’s a French-Algerian who looks a bit like Isabelle Adjani. Tall, shapely – I mean she had tits to die for, real ones – and as fit as a butcher’s dog. After we got to know each other a little better I agreed to offer her some help with her English and at first that’s all that happened. Everything was above board between us for almost a month – I mean it was like the matchmaker was keeping her beady eye on us; but I’m only human and one thing led to another and before very long we were sleeping together at least once or twice a week. At first it was only on the boat, but one day Orla showed up and almost caught us at it; after that I only saw Colette at her Russian’s apartment in the Tour or occasionally in Paris: she’d fly up for the weekend
to the house in Neuilly-sur-Seine, when there was no one working there. It was an arrangement that suited us both because her job left her with little opportunity or energy for a social life. Colette was a yoga teacher and a masseuse and in Monaco that can keep you very busy; it’s possible to make at least a thousand euros a day. But I’d also give her a bit of money now and then, just to tide her over when the poor thing had to miss a client to see me.
On what turned out to be my last night in Monaco there was nothing that seemed at all unusual. At about 11.30 when I was satisfied Orla was genuinely asleep – she snored – I swallowed a tablet of Cialis and armed with nothing more than a cold bottle of Dom I took the stairs down to the twenty-ninth floor, which is what I always did – to avoid nosy-parker neighbours and the CCTV. No one ever takes the stairs in our building. Most of the other residents would need a defibrillator if they climbed into their beds a bit too quickly. But not as quickly as I did when I saw Colette. She was wearing a baby-doll nightdress that was as light as a summer morning mist and I spent a very happy thirty minutes mapping every inch of her fabulous body. And before you say anything, old sport, yes, I know, it was a dreadfully deceitful and underhand thing to do, like something from the pages of the
Decameron
. Peronella, is it, who tells her husband how to clean a large wine jar that he’s inside while she’s being fucked from behind by her lover? That’s what it was like. I really do feel ashamed of myself; and yet I know I’d probably do it again if I ever got the chance. That’s the funny thing about being a bloke; to some extent we’re ruled by our pricks. I’ve tried to understand it but I’m afraid I still haven’t found a better description of male-pattern sexuality than what John Lewis says in
That Uncertain Feeling
by
Kingsley Amis when he asks himself why he likes women’s breasts. ‘I was clear on why I liked them, thanks, but why did I like them so much?’ That’s it, in a nutshell. We know we shouldn’t fuck around but we do and then end up rather pathetically feeling ashamed of what we’ve done and hoping for the best. You might just as well call the male libido Russia and say that it’s a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.
At about two o’clock I went back upstairs to my own apartment. Again, nothing seemed unusual. No, that’s not quite true. I stepped in some dog shit; the dogs – who slept in Orla’s dressing room – were always crapping in the apartment and I spent the next ten minutes tracking it down and cleaning it off the fucking carpet before I went back into the bedroom. As usual our bedroom was like a fridge so I put on a T-shirt and some pyjama bottoms, slipped into bed and went straight to sleep. I awoke at about 7.30, got up, made myself a cup of tea and cleaned some more dog shit off the carpet. I bet the cops loved that. Traces of fucking bleach all over the place as if I’d tried to clean away something incriminating. Anyway, at that stage, as far as I was aware, Orla was still asleep. Again, there was nothing unusual about that. After she’d taken a sleeping pill it would have been quite usual for her to have slept through until about eleven. I had a shower and went into my study to work, like I always did. I emerged at around two and was a little surprised to find Orla wasn’t around. It simply didn’t occur to me that she was lying dead in our bed. I assumed she must have gone out somewhere. And besides, I couldn’t hear the dogs. If that sounds at all unlikely you have to remember that this is an apartment that’s twelve hundred square metres, which is about five tennis courts.
I made a bite of lunch, watched a bit of TV and then went back into my study for a couple of hours. At around five I came out again and still finding no sign of Orla I called her mobile to find out where she was, and when I heard it ringing in her dressing room I realized something was very wrong, especially when I came across the bodies of her pet dogs. It was only now that I went into the bedroom and found her lying just as I had left her earlier that day, facing the curtains and away from my side of the bed. I drew the curtains and saw that she’d been shot at close range, as if she’d been executed. My own gun – a twenty-two calibre Walther – was lying on the floor. Orla’s skin was cold to the touch and it was clear she’d been dead for several hours.
For a while I just sat there on the floor beside her body and wept like a baby. I was horrified. It’s a sight that will stay with me for as long as I live. Every time I close my eyes I can see her beautiful face and the bullet hole in the centre of her forehead, like a dreadful caste mark. I hope to God it never happens to you that you see something like that. The only consolation I have is that I’m certain Orla was asleep when it happened and that she could have experienced neither fear nor pain. After a while I took off my shirt and covered her beautiful face with it, almost as if I wanted to preserve her dignity and give Orla some privacy from those who were going to come into our home now and look at her. Crazy I know. After all the crime scenes I’ve described in my books you’d think I’d know exactly what to do. But in truth I wasn’t thinking straight at all. The cliché ‘I was beside myself’ describes me very well; it was like I was hardly functioning in my own skin. My hands and my feet hardly seemed to belong to me at all. I remember pouring myself
a stiff drink and going out onto the balcony to get some fresh air before I called the police. For a while I watched the swallows dive-bombing the air for insects near the top of the tower; out in the sea a pod of dolphins was clearly visible in the water; and I wondered how it could be such a beautiful evening when one of the most beautiful women in the world had just died so horribly.
I picked up the phone and was about to call the police and then it dawned on me that Orla must already have been dead when I returned from Colette’s apartment. Clearly I must have got into bed with a corpse. It was obvious that the only time Orla could have been murdered was when I was downstairs with Colette, but I didn’t think the cops were going to buy that. The more I thought about it the more I realized that I was about to become their number one suspect: my wife, my bedroom, my gun, my opportunity and, I dare say, with a little help from the staff and customers at Joël Robuchon, my motive, too.
I considered calling Ince & Co, who are my lawyers in Paris and Monaco, and asking their advice about what to do next; but then I decided to go down to Colette’s apartment and discuss what to do with her. She was my alibi for the time that Orla had been murdered after all, although the precise time of death was going to be difficult to prove. Of course, my alibi in such an alluring shape as Colette was equally problematic; there’s nothing cops like more than a lover’s triangle.
I had a key to Colette’s apartment but she wasn’t at home. That wasn’t unusual, she often worked on a Saturday. I was going to call her on my mobile and then changed my mind on the assumption that, if I was arrested by the police, my call would probably incriminate her. I tried to use Colette’s
landline but for some reason it wasn’t working, so at around 5.30 I walked out onto the Boulevard d’Italie and called Colette’s mobile from a payphone next to the BNP Paribas bank. Again, I wasn’t alarmed that she didn’t answer. I assumed she had a client and that she would be free to talk on the hour. I walked a bit further down the boulevard to an Italian restaurant called Il Giardino, had a coffee and then called her again at exactly six o’clock. Several times, without reply. I called her again at seven and when she still didn’t answer I went back to the Odéon where I checked her car-parking space and saw her car wasn’t there. I went back to Colette’s apartment and it was now, as I searched the place for some clue as to where she might have gone, that I made a very unwelcome discovery: an empty bottle of Russian
Shampanskoye
in the very same ice-bucket I’d used to chill the Dom. You know? That awful sweet fizz that Russians call champagne and that frankly only they find palatable. When I first saw it I thought it was the Dom. But as soon as I realized what it was it was clear that someone else had visited Colette after I had left her and that more than likely this someone was Russian.
You might wonder why a man whose wife had just been murdered would devote any thought to something as trivial as a bottle of Russian champagne.
I can assure you it wasn’t out of jealousy. After seeing the bottle of Russian champagne I decided to take a good look around the apartment and see what else I could find. In the wastepaper bin I came across an empty packet of Russian fags. And some other stuff, too. A book. A newspaper.
The Moscow Times
. And it was now that I began to consider the frightening possibility that Colette’s former boyfriend, Lev Semyonovich Kaganovich was now back from Russia and had
returned to his apartment. Thinking I’d better make myself scarce, I went back up to my apartment, made myself a drink and considered my options.
Was it possible that Lev’s arrival back in Monaco was connected with Orla’s death? Was it possible that Lev had intended to frame me for my wife’s murder? Not for a moment did I think that Colette had killed Orla by herself. The only time I’d been out of my apartment was when I was with her. I was her alibi, as much as she was mine. But I could hardly ignore the idea that Lev had turned up while I was fucking his girlfriend and perhaps killed Orla in revenge. According to her he was like all Russians – a very violent man with connections in the world of organized crime; I’d only ever started seeing Colette on the understanding that Lev was completely off the scene. But it was now perfectly obvious to me that he wasn’t and before very long I was absolutely shitting myself.