by Philip Kerr
I rather doubted that. Don was never all that imaginative. I sometimes think he and the others would never have managed to become writers at all if not for me. And too late I’d realized that was the real thing I’d taken away from them when I closed the atelier; it wasn’t the money they missed most, it was the delusion that any of them could hack it as proper writers. It’s one thing to take away a man’s livelihood; but it’s something else – something terrible – to take away his dreams.
‘At least say that you believe me, old sport.’
His cornflower-blue eyes narrowed; he tried a smile, then thought better of it, as if remembering that my wife was dead after all.
‘It’s not me you have to convince, John. It’s the police. Frankly, I really don’t give a damn if you killed her or not. I mean, it hardly matters between you and me. But if you’re suggesting that this Lev character killed your wife and framed you in revenge for shagging his girlfriend, I just don’t buy it. And for fuck’s sake, when will you learn not to shit on your own doorstep? Why fuck a girl who lives in your own building? It’s bloody madness. What on earth possessed you to do something so utterly crazy? Didn’t I always say that something like this would happen? That you would always be getting into scrapes so long as you believed that you did things to girls instead of with them? You were crazy to get involved with this woman.’
‘You have to be a bit crazy to fall in love with anyone, don’t you think?’
But Don wasn’t really listening. ‘No, the idea that Lev killed Orla simply because you were shagging some bimbo he doesn’t sound as though he cared two kopecks for makes no sense to me at all. It’s a serious crime for a pretty trivial motive, if you don’t mind me saying so. Not all Ivans are as crazy or as lethal as the ones Jack Boardman meets in your novels.’
Don shook his head and drank some wine. He was wearing his usual uniform: beige chinos, a plain white shirt, and a blue blazer. His brown brogue shoes were beginning to seem rather more venerable than sensible and the watch on his wrist looked like a knock-off. But he looked pretty fit, as always; every year he did a triathlon in the Cornish town where he had a small holiday home; I looked it up online one year after he’d told me he’d finished near the back of the field and was surprised to discover he’d actually come third. That said something important about old Don. There was more to him than met the eye. It was easy to underestimate him.
‘Mind if I smoke?’ he said.
‘Go ahead.’
Don took out a silver cigarette case – he was the only person I knew who used one; he said it meant he could ration his day’s smoking – and lit one with a silver Dunhill I’d given him for his fortieth birthday; I was touched to see he was still using it. He puffed, licked his lips and continued speaking:
‘And forgive me, John, but it’s really not like he could have killed Orla without Colette’s help, is it? Think about it for a moment. Lev would have to have pinched your key while you were shagging her, nipped upstairs, shot Orla and the dogs, come back downstairs, returned your key without you noticing, and hidden somewhere until you’d gone home. And she helps him to do all this because what – she’s afraid of him? If any of that was true she could have told you and then dialled 112. It’s John Houston’s basic rule to writing a thriller, number one; the whole house of cards falls down if you can’t answer a simple question: why didn’t X or Y call the police? And here’s another thing: are you seriously suggesting that the first thing Lev does after killing Orla is open a bottle of Russian champagne? That doesn’t strike me as very likely either. It doesn’t matter who you kill, champagne – cheap or otherwise – is not and never has been a post-homicidal drink. You drink a scotch or a brandy, or maybe even vodka to calm your nerves but you don’t crack open a bottle of bubbles.’
I nodded. ‘Yes, you’re right, Don. None of it makes any sense when you think about it.’
‘Oh, I didn’t say it didn’t make any sense. I just don’t think it makes the sort of sense you think it does. I believe it’s quite possible that the champagne bottle was a message, for you. That maybe Colette meant you to see the bottle and to put two and two together and make pyat. A Russian code. A message from Otto Leipzig. Tell Max that our Russian friend is back in town.’
‘You mean, she meant me to think that Lev had returned to Monaco and was now on the scene with malice aforethought.’
‘Exactly. She would have known the effect that seeing something Russian like that bottle would have on you. Because it was her who gave you the legend about Lev in the first place – his connections to the mafia, the fact that he was a violent man, an oligarch with an attitude. And just to underline that she leaves an empty packet of Russian cigarettes in the wastepaper bin and a recent copy of The Moscow Times.’
‘But Colette couldn’t have killed Orla. Could she?’
Don shrugged and hurried some tobacco smoke down into his lungs. He wasn’t a heavy smoker so much as an enthusiastic one. He enjoyed smoking in the same way that I enjoy a plate of perfectly baveuse scrambled eggs.
‘I don’t know. You’re assuming Orla and the dogs were shot while you were shagging Colette. But she knew your habits and Orla’s too. Isn’t it possible that she might have carried out the shooting while you were working in your study? You said yourself that it’s a large apartment. My own recollection of being in the Tour Odéon is that the walls and doors are rather thick. I also seem to recall the research you carried out for one of your early books – The Lethal Companion, was it? An experiment with a Walther nine-mill. You fired a whole clip of blanks from the Walther in the study of your old house in London while your ex-wife was serving Sunday lunch in the dining room upstairs; nobody heard a thing because nobody ever really expects to hear gunshots. And remember what happened in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. The hired hand didn’t hear the twelve-gauge that killed the Clutter family even though he lived fairly close by.’
‘Yes, that’s true,’ I said. ‘I remember that. There are lots of things you can mistake a gunshot for. A car backfiring; a balloon bursting; a door being slammed. And now I come to think of it, I always had a mid-morning nap on the day after I’d shagged Colette. Forty winks at eleven.’
‘Would she have known that, do you think?’
I nodded. ‘For sure. She used to make a joke about it. Jesus. She made a lot of jokes about my nap. At the time I thought they were affectionate but now I’m not so sure.’
‘You’re right not to be sure. Even if Colette didn’t pull the trigger it’s entirely conceivable she’s in this up to the neck of her womb. She could have had an accomplice who carried out the murder while you and she were on the job. It doesn’t have to be Lev who murdered Orla. In fact, I’m sure it wasn’t. She could have had a younger boyfriend who put her up to it.’
‘But why?’
‘She needed money, of course. You said yourself she was little better than a squatter in that apartment. What was going to happen to her when the service charge wasn’t paid at the end of the year? The building management would have kicked her out on her shell-like. And then what would have happened to her? No, wait, you were going to buy her an apartment in Beausoleil. Jesus that’s generous of you, John. Not. From Monaco to Beausoleil – that’s a hell of a change in lifestyles. An eighteen-million-euro apartment swapped for something costing less than a tenth of that, I’ll bet. Fuck off. She knew you were loaded. I’ll bet she wanted a lot more than you were planning to give her.’
‘And she was going to get it by killing my wife? That makes no sense at all.’
‘Sure it does, if you’re stuck in the frame for it. Think about it, John. This could be blackmail. After all, she’s your alibi. It could be that she’s planning to contact you and tell the Monty cops you spent the night with her just as soon as she’s negotiated a pay-off. In fact she might already have tried to do so. But perhaps she didn’t anticipate that you would have turned off your phone to stop the cops from tracking you. No, that would seriously interfere with her plans.’
‘But look here, if I turn the fucking phone on to find out if she’s called or sent a text then the cops will get a fix on my electronic exhaust and I’ll be arrested, won’t I?’
‘Have you tried calling her again?’
‘Of course. Several times. But on Mechanic’s landline. There’s no chance of anyone ever tracing that. He has a scrambler on all his telephone lines – here, and at the office in Geneva.’
‘Did you leave her a message?’
‘No, I didn’t like to. Just in case I dropped her in the oomska.’
‘In which case she could be hiding out somewhere, until she’s negotiated a deal with you for her cooperation. Maybe in Marseille like you said.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s a nice scheme, if it’s true. After all, just how much money would you be prepared to pay to have her stand up in a Monaco courtroom and tell the jury that she spent the night with you? Not just a couple of hours but the whole shagging night. A million euros? Five? I mean what’s money versus the next twenty years in your very own salon privé?’
‘Jesus Christ, the little bitch. After all I’ve fucking given her – cash, a nice watch, a new laptop, some expensive earrings from Pomellato – and this is how she repays me.’
‘But to be quite frank with you, the shooting of the dogs is what puzzles me the most,’ said Don. ‘In a Silver Blaze sort of way.’
‘Silver Blaze? I don’t think I understand.’
‘Sherlock Holmes? The curious incident of the dog in the night time?’
‘Oh, yes,’ I said, although I still didn’t know what Don was driving at.
‘Think about it, John. What was the possible motive for shooting the dogs? If the shooting occurred while you were shagging Colette then her accomplice – supposing that she had one – would surely have known that Orla had taken a sleeping pill, in which case he would hardly have shot the dogs because he was worried the sound of their barking would awaken her.’
‘Good point.’
‘But if the shooting occurred at around eleven in the morning, while you were taking a nap in your study, is it likely that the murderer would have risked waking you by firing four shots instead of one? Shooting the dogs makes a lot more sense if you were in bed with Orla at the time – between the hours of 2 and 7.30 a.m. – in which case it seems more than probable that the murderer must have used a sound suppressor. I assume you don’t own one for any of your weapons.’
‘No, of course not. And the weapon I found on the floor wasn’t fitted with a sound suppressor.’
‘Did you check to see if it had been fired?’
‘What, you mean did I sniff the barrel? Come on, Don, that stuff is for amateurs. There was a spent cartridge on the floor of the bedroom and four more on the floor of Orla’s dressing room. The brass certainly looked like it had come from the Walther. I mean it was the right size. Besides, I checked the Walther’s magazine. There were five bullets missing.’
‘Perhaps. But the murderer would hardly have risked bringing along a sound suppressor in the hope that it might fit one of your guns. Ergo if a suppressor was used then almost certainly the gun used to kill Orla was not your own. So, perhaps the murderer merely wanted you to think your gun was the murder weapon. Now you see why I was thinking about the curious incident of the dogs in the night time. I think if we could figure out why they were killed then we’d be a lot closer to working out exactly what happened.’
‘I’m glad you think so, old sport. Jesus Christ, Don. You’re doing my fucking head in.’
‘I’m not trying to confuse you, John. I’m just trying to think through all of the possible permutations. That’s fair, isn’t it? After all, before advertising, before the army, I did train to be a lawyer.’
Don took off his blazer and tossed it down on the sofa. It was a blazer I recognized. The label said Huntsman of Savile Row but I was certain Don had been wearing that jacket for at least twenty years. The buttons were brass, regimental ones. He had been out of the army for even longer but he always managed to make his clothes look like military attire. He smoothed his hair; once a very English shade of blonde, it was now streaked with grey, but there was something – a firm set to his jaw, a clipped way of speaking, his wiry frame, a lean ascetic way about him – that made me think he could easily have taken command of a brigade of guardsmen. Don refilled his glass from the bottle, sniffed the bouquet for a moment and then swallowed a generous mouthful.
‘Sorry, Don. I know you’re only trying to help.’
‘Look, I’m not saying that this is what happened, John. I’m just saying that it could have. Painting a picture for you. But it might not be like that at all. For all I know the girl is completely innocent and worships the fucking ground you walk on. And perhaps there’s a simple explanation for Colette’s protracted absence. Then again she might be dead after all. Although now we can at least be sure that her body is not on your boat – the police have already searched that.’
I got up and went to the window again, trying to get my head around the idea of Colette’s duplicity. I was also obliged to concede Don’s argument: the idea that Lev might have killed Orla was ridiculous. It was a rare occasion in which I’d been the victim rather than the beneficiary of my own imagination. Perhaps I’d been too hasty in fleeing from Monaco after all.
‘I was going to ask you to help me try to find Colette,’ I said. ‘But maybe I should just hand myself in after all and take my chances with a trial. Hire that French lawyer, Olivier Metzner – the one who defended Dominique de Villepin when he was accused of a conspiracy to defame Nicolas Sarkozy. He’s supposed to be the best defence attorney in France.’
‘I think that would be a mistake,’ said Don. ‘I really can’t see that handing yourself in now is going to be any better for you than in a few days’ time. Besides, I happen to know that Metzner won’t take your case.’
‘Oh? Why’s that?’
‘Because he was found dead in the waters around his private island in Brittany, just a year or two ago.’ Don shrugged. ‘No, if you decide to hand yourself in, John, you’ll have to think of someone else. The best firm in France is probably Baker and McKenzie. And a female attorney would play better with a jury than a man. Like the one Phil Spector had when he was tried for the murder of Lana Clarkson. What was her name? Linda Kenney Baden.’
‘Sure. I’ll find a fright wig-maker now, shall I? Besides, she can’t have been that good. The guy’s in jail, isn’t he?’
‘Yes, however the first time he went to trial she got him off. Which has to count as some kind of fucking miracle, right? I mean he was much guiltier-looking than you are. Spector’s chauffeur saw him with the murder weapon in his hand. Anyway, all that’s beside the point. Until you’ve told me about some of the other strange things you mentioned that have happened to you here in Switzerland, I’m not sure I can properly judge your best course of action.’
‘What’s that?’
‘When you were starting your story earlier on you said that some strange things had happened to you here in Switzerland that you thought might be connected with Orla’s death.’ Don shrugged. ‘Look, if this was a military operation we’d certainly want to gather all the intelligence before we sent a patrol into the Bogside to snatch a couple of Paddies, so to speak.’
‘There were a couple of things that seemed unusual, yes.’
>
I pressed my head against the windowpane. To my surprise the glass wasn’t cold and didn’t shift under the weight of my skull; it was clearly thicker than I had expected. Might it also have been bulletproof? I tapped it with my finger experimentally. The glass sounded reassuringly dull and solid; and bulletproof. I don’t know why I was at all surprised. I certainly wouldn’t have put having bullet-proof glass windows beyond someone as security-conscious as Bob Mechanic. When I’d first arrived at the house in Collonge-Bellerive I’d had a good nose about the place. As well as a rather ornate safe in Mechanic’s study that was formerly the property of the Emperor Louis Napoleon the Third but was just for show, there was also a more substantial Stockinger in the wine cellar that would have been the envy of many a small bank. The house itself had more security cameras than the London Underground. But most impressive of all was a panic room with a tunnel that led to a secret boat house – you probably wouldn’t have found it from the garden – where a high-performance RIB with a powerful Yamaha 350 outboard could have provided an immediate getaway onto Lake Geneva, although from what I wasn’t quite sure. Whoever or whatever it was that Bob had prepared for – the Swiss financial authorities, Interpol, the mob – it was clear he wasn’t about to risk being arrested or worse for lack of careful preparations for a swift exit, and I almost wished that I’d been able to ask for his advice instead of Don’s.
‘Such as?’ said Don. ‘Give me an example.’
‘Such as …’ I sighed wearily. ‘I can’t think. I thought things would seem a little clearer when you got here, Don. But they’re not. Not so far. Look, I need to take a break. And I need some fresh air. You go and change and in a short while I’ll order in. And we can resume this conversation after dinner. Okay?’
‘Sure, John. Whatever you say.’
CHAPTER 3
I went for a walk across the sloping lawn, past the sleeping swans and down to the neat shores of the shimmering blue lake where there was a short dog-leg of a stone jetty built at right angles to the house so that Mechanic’s moneyed, pampered visitors might arrive by boat even more discreetly than via the lightly travelled road. A soft, Alpine breath of cool wind stirred the tops of the recently pruned trees and somewhere in the distance I could hear the clamour of some local children playing. As if inspired by that very un-Swiss, carefree sound I walked to the end of the jetty and down the polished stone steps to the water’s edge, where I took off my shoes and socks and paddled in the lake, and sat there in a solitary vigil, brooding on the charmed life I had once known and might never know again. I was bound to be convicted, I could see that. How could I hope to escape? And I wanted the whole thing to come to an end. What was the point of going on? I knew how this story was going to finish, so why see it through to the credits?