Ford said it looked too complicated.
Eric quickly explained. ‘It’s just basic substitution. There are ways of making it tougher. You can pick a word with no repeating letters. Something you aren’t going to forget. Hideout. What’s that? Seven. A hideout. Eight.’ He wrote in his notebook A-H-I-D-E-O-U-T, a single letter above each number. ‘And again, if there’s a repetition you skip or substitute a number or a letter, but you use a word as the key. So if you know the key word you can work out the rest of the alphabet. I have a different code for each notebook, a different sequence. You get used to it pretty quickly.’ Eric copied the numbers from the other tags, keeping to the sequence. ‘It’s fairly simple, it wouldn’t take anything to crack. But it’s enough to stop them reading.’
‘Who?’
‘Nathalie and Martin. They go through my stuff all the time. It’s the only way to keep anything private. Plus it keeps them on their toes. They get paranoid about anything they can’t understand. They think everything is about them.’
‘Nathalie said you’re interviewing terrorists?’
‘Terrorists?’
‘That’s what she said. Terrorists.’
‘No, not terrorists.’ Eric, already relaxed, began to giggle.
‘In the eyes of the Turks?’
‘That’s a whole different issue.’ Eric considered for the moment, the joint poised between fingers. ‘The Turks are worse than Martin. They wouldn’t like any of this. The whole idea of the project would be a problem. These men are just…’ He took in a long draw. Ford waited for the end of the sentence. ‘… I don’t know, they’re just Kurds. And the Turkish Kurds have pretty much lost everything, they’ve been cleared out of their villages. So yeah, whatever. Terrorists.’ Eric slipped lower down the lounger, his knees up, his hand resting on his chest. ‘The thing about all of this — I mean what really makes this funny — is that he doesn’t have any idea about what’s going on. He talks to all of these people, Kurds, Iraqis, Palestinians — he talks to people who have lost everything and he still doesn’t have a clue because it’s all about him and how stupid he is. The entire project is driven by his stupidity.’
‘Martin?’
‘Doesn’t have a clue—’ Eric suddenly froze. ‘You hear something? Are they back?’
They both listened and heard nothing.
‘We’ve had our bags searched almost everywhere we’ve gone. The digital stuff isn’t a problem, we can store that stuff as soon as it’s taken, more or less, and we’ve a couple of hard drives, so everything can be backed up. The material we have on film is trickier. He insisted on using film even though it’s not practical. There are these shots he wants of the landscape and they have to be taken with film. Each time we go through a security check they expose the film, but he still keeps using it for these landscape shots. I’ve been back to Kopeckale three times to get the same shots because they keep exposing the film. See what I mean? Stupid or what? The Turks don’t like the idea of anyone talking with these people. That’s what they don’t like. If they had any idea about who we’re speaking with we’d all be in trouble. That’s probably what will make this project work. Nothing to do with him being a genius or anything, but because he’s so fucking stupid—’ Eric suddenly sat upright. ‘Shit. They’re back.’
Nathalie and Martin came into the courtyard before Eric could hide the washbag. Martin walked directly to his room, upright and tight-mouthed.
‘What is this?’ Nathalie dropped a newspaper on the table with a slap. ‘He could hear every word you said. What are you thinking?’
* * *
Eric and Ford kept to their room and waited for supper. Eric, flat on his back, scribbled in his notebook and softly swore to himself, leaving Ford contented with the silence.
‘What do you think they heard? You think they heard everything?’
‘That’s what she said.’
‘Shit,’ he swore slowly. ‘Everything? You think he heard everything? I can’t remember what I said. He’ll be impossible now. I can’t wait for this to be done. I’m going to Malta. My mother has found this villa, this old palazzo or something. No one uses it. No one lives there. It’s totally isolated. I can stay as long as I like. Free. No neighbours, no nothing. No one will even know I’m there. I can’t wait.’
Eric curled up with embarrassment, the newspaper on his lap crackling as he hugged his legs. After a while Ford thought he had gone to sleep, but the boy turned over and offered him the newspaper.
‘You should read this.’
Less vexed than earlier, Ford didn’t want to move. So, he had one chance left. He only needed to log in once. If that failed, he’d get in contact with Geezler. He’d have no choice.
‘That writer.’ Eric shook the paper. ‘He’s really disappeared. Honest to god. He was supposed to be at some conference but didn’t show up. This is that book I told you about, where the writer disappeared, I thought it was a publicity stunt, but he’s really disappeared. They’ve reprinted an interview where he talks about the book and the murders.’ Eric looked up. ‘It’s like everyone hates him because he stayed in this palazzo in Naples and wrote about a murder everyone wanted to forget. He basically solved who did it, although he doesn’t have their names or anything. Mr Rabbit and Mr Wolf.’
‘If he solved it then why is he in trouble?’
‘Because he’s more or less disproved what the police said. It’s like these two guys just take a story from a book and then copy it, and everyone who lived in the palazzo at the time just turned a blind eye while it happened.’ He looked at Ford as if this were all crazy. ‘How insane is that? Nobody wants to know. These two psychopaths copy a murder from a book and everyone is like OK, that happened, let’s all move on now. You should read it? You really should.’
Ford said he wasn’t much of a reader and anyway didn’t read thrillers.
‘It’s nothing like a thriller. It’s about a writer who stays in this place in Naples and finds out all of this information. All anyone knows about this murder is that someone has disappeared, he’s gone, murdered, and pieces of him start appearing on the street. A tongue. A room with blood all over it. His clothes on some wasteland.’
‘And this happened?’
‘Right. Yes. That’s what I’m saying. Some guy, they don’t even know who, was chopped up. Just nasty.’ Eric stretched out his legs. ‘I’d like to meet him. The writer. I’d like to talk with him because I bet there’s stuff he couldn’t publish.’
Ford couldn’t follow the logic.
Eric looked up from his newspaper, mouth slightly open, halfway through some thought. ‘What are you thinking?’
‘I’m relaxing.’
‘You’ve got her wrong, you know. Martin’s the prize, Nathalie’s just some project. Something he’s working on.’ Eric rolled onto his back. ‘Doesn’t seem right, does it?’ His voice sounded flat as he explained that prior to Nathalie, Martin’s taste ran to boys, his students in fact. But that didn’t mean that Nathalie wasn’t complicated in her own right. Her partner, Mathieu, worked at the same university in the same department, and she’d been humiliated by his affairs. Mathieu was the same as Martin, no different, only he picked his entertainment from Nathalie’s students, and starting with the research assistants he’d worked his way down to her graduate students — until she confronted him, publicly, at one of his lectures. Are you fucking my students? ‘It was,’ Eric spread his fingers in a small explosion, ‘spectacular.’ Although he admitted that he hadn’t seen it himself and wasn’t exactly sure when it had happened.