I sighed and turned away from the bathroom mirror. You can take only so much from your own conscience.
Feeling a little cross with myself I went to find Jérôme 2 — or whatever the hell his name was — and then have it out with him.
28
As I passed the master bedroom I saw the door was open a few centimetres and, peering through the gap, I glimpsed Jérôme 2 lying fast asleep on his bed. For a second or two I contemplated barging in there and waking him up with my hands wrapped around his neck to demand an immediate explanation but a few moments of reflection convinced me that it was probably best to adopt a slightly softer, more laid-back approach than half-throttling him first. Nobody reacts well to being rudely awakened and while I thought I could probably hold my own in a fight with him, I saw little point in exacerbating what already promised to be a delicate situation. And, thinking it might be better if I waited for him to wake up on his own, I went downstairs to search Gui-Jean-Baptiste Target’s extensive drinks tray for a bottle of oak-aged bourbon I’d seen the previous night.
I was about to help myself from a bottle of Elijah Craig when I glanced out of the window and, in the garden lights, caught a glimpse of Charlotte leaving the house with a laden tray in her hands. Given her size she would have been hard to miss. It was like watching a Swiss ball float through the garden. I quickly followed the housekeeper in time to see her place the tray on the lawn and unlock a door near the bottom of the garden before picking the tray up again and going through the door. She closed it carefully behind her and running after her I was just in time to hear the sound of the key turning.
Was the tray for her, I wondered, or for someone else? Maybe she was a live-in housekeeper and these were her quarters. Perhaps she locked the door to ensure some privacy for herself. You could hardly blame her for that. Then again, I remembered her saying goodnight to everyone during dinner last night, and having gone out by the front door. Besides, there was a bottle of beer on the tray and I seemed to recollect Jérôme Dumas saying something about her not touching alcohol. So the beer could not have been for her but for someone else.
As I pondered these circumstances the thought now occurred to me that, perhaps, I had misjudged the situation. It wouldn’t be the first time. Was it possible that Jérôme 1 was being held prisoner, just like the man in the iron mask? Far from being in cahoots with Jérôme 1 perhaps Jérôme 2 was intending to take the place of his twin brother whom he’d incarcerated in order that he might enjoy a taste of the Lamborghini lifestyle himself. Having seen Guadeloupe you could hardly blame him for that. And who would ever know? Even if he wasn’t as talented a player as his twin, Jérôme 2 might even manage to play a couple of games for Barcelona before they concluded he simply wasn’t up to scratch and returned him to PSG. Meanwhile, Jérôme would still be on a hundred grand a week — six or seven times as much as an islander’s average yearly salary. Only a few months earning this kind of loot would probably be enough for any young man living out his days in Pointe-à-Pitre. It might easily leave him set up for life. That’s a lot of temptation for anyone to resist, even a brother. Perhaps especially a brother.
I took a few steps back and surveyed the low, flat-roofed building into which Charlotte had disappeared. It seemed to be a large garage or perhaps a small house that was the twin of the larger one, and, thinking I might gain access to this building more easily from the beach, I walked to the very bottom of the lushly planted garden and used the door through which Grace and I had first entered the house, the previous day.
The beach was clear of French tourists now; a cheap foam mattress lay abandoned; further up the strand I could hear a guitar being strummed and some laughter, and there was a strong smell of dope in the air. I wouldn’t have minded a toke myself. My heart was throbbing in my chest like a squid in a net. Squadrons of pelicans were still hitting the waves in the moonlight like feathered harpoons in search of unwary fish. You had to admire their skill; they seldom came up short. The turbid sea crashed onto the shore and drew back again in a grating, melancholy roar of sand and shingle while the blackening night sky was regularly pierced by a ruby red beam from the island lighthouse that was more than enough to illuminate my new purpose. I walked a few yards along the beach and turned a corner onto some large wet rocks that seemed to cover a long sewage pipe that led into the sea. There I found a steel gate padlocked several times, yet which could easily be mounted provided there was something to cover the no mans’ land of barbed wire that festooned the top.
I went back and fetched the abandoned mattress — but not without getting thoroughly wet from a particularly vigorous wave — and bent it over the coils of barbed wire. With this simple precaution I easily climbed over the gate and dropped onto a concrete path that led up to a series of steps. Near the top of these was a low rectangular building from which emanated a flickering blue light. A few seconds later I was standing beside a sliding glass door. I peered around the edge to see Jérôme 1 watching a movie on television — Goodfellas — and eating a meal off the tray brought to him by Charlotte who now seemed to have gone. He wasn’t wearing an iron mask but a large set of Beats headphones which adorned his unwitting skull as if he’d hoped to prevent the sound of the TV from reaching my inquisitive ears.
I paused to observe his demeanour. It was almost astonishing how alike the two brothers were. But for the absent earrings and watch I would have sworn that this was the same man I had just seen asleep in the master bedroom. He was wearing a Barcelona football shirt and a pair of white jeans. He didn’t look like a prisoner, however. He was laughing; Joe Pesci was in the middle of his ‘I’m funny how?’ scene. Jérôme was too relaxed, too much at home in his comfortable surroundings to look like he was in any kind of trouble. I pushed gently on the polished steel handle of the sliding glass door, just to see if it was open. It was, which proved simultaneously that this man was certainly no prisoner.
‘Fucking bastard,’ I muttered.
The headphones Jérôme 1 was wearing now served my purpose, and a minute or so later I had crept into the room and seated myself silently in an Eames chair immediately behind the sofa on which, deeply absorbed in his movie, he was still ensconced. I could even hear the dialogue in the Beats. I smiled bitterly to myself. I was going to enjoy this moment; no one likes to be hoodwinked. I now had the irrefutable evidence of the existence of Jérôme 2’s twin brother. Evidence I was now determined to make the most of, like Hercule Poirot in the big reveal scene at the end of some crappy movie.
Finally, he took off his headphones, dropped them onto the sofa and just sat there, quite still, as if he suspected he was no longer alone; my aftershave, probably. Creed. It is, as James Bond observes to Mr Wint in Diamonds are Forever, ‘rather potent’. A few seconds more passed like this and then he turned slowly around and met my eyes. For a moment I thought he was going to shit himself.
‘It’s not how it looks,’ he said, quietly.
‘I suppose I should have suspected something like this, given that your name is Dumas,’ I said. ‘What, is your dad related, perhaps? To the famous French author of The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers and yes, The Man in the Iron Mask? Is that where you got this idea, do you think? By the way, Alexandre Dumas was a proper author. Not like that irritating velvet-rope revolutionary you seem to admire so much. Now that we’re all out in the open I can tell you what I really think about Russell Brand. I can’t stand him. All the same, I wonder what he would make of this situation. Are dishonest bankers any worse than dishonest footballers?’ I sighed. ‘Anyway, Dumas would certainly have loved this story. It’s got everything.’