‘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.’