Research (31 page)

‘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.’

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 …’