Research

by Philip Kerr

  I paused to let that sink in a bit before adding, ‘But look here, she’s not without enemies. Her family are all Irish republicans. And they have enemies, too. Dangerous enemies in the Irish Protestant community, the UDA and UVF. These people are just as dangerous as the IRA. I should know. I worked with them. Orla has been giving Sinn Féin money for years. When it comes to court I’m sure that this is what John’s defence will rest upon. Orla’s connections in Irish nationalism.’

  Colette nodded. ‘Yes. John told me about her family. But won’t it seem suspicious that I went away on the very night his wife was murdered?’

  ‘Not if you send him a text first thing in the morning; you can tell him that something unexpected came up – your sister in hospital, something like that. That way your absence will be easily explained. He’ll call you of course. But you won’t answer. Not for a while.’

  ‘And where will I be?’

  ‘In Paris. The minute I come back downstairs from John’s apartment we’ll go straight to the airport. You’ll catch the first plane and stay there until I can get to you. Meanwhile I’ll go to London and wait for the police to get in contact with me and the other guys. Which they will, of course. So it’s important I’m there when they make contact. If it comes to that I expect John will call me, too. If he’s on the lam, that is. When he’s needed some dirty work done before I’ve been virtually the first person he calls.’

  I described three such occasions to Colette: once when he got done for drink-driving and needed someone to go and collect his car; a second time when he wanted me to hire a couple of students to become his personal sock-puppet, posting five-star reviews for John’s books on Amazon – there’s a lot of that goes on, these days; and a third time when he wanted me to sack one of the writers in the atelier. But there were many more I could have told her about.

  ‘Wait, won’t the police know you were in Monaco on the night of Orla’s murder? Won’t that make you a suspect?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘That might have been the case once. But the staff at British border control don’t bother to record the names of people leaving the UK, so no one will know that I was out of the country. If the Monty cops ask I’ll tell them I spent that weekend at my place in Cornwall. Besides, I’ll be using a false passport. Both John and I managed to get one when we were researching one of his books. No one will ever know I was even here.’

  ‘You seem to have thought of everything already.’

  ‘Yes, I think you’re right. And perhaps I have. It is curious that since you mentioned the idea this plan seems to have arrived in my head as one whole, like the plot for a novel.’

  ‘It seems that you are much better at plots than you thought you were.’

  ‘Isn’t that interesting? On the other hand maybe it’s not so surprising. After all, I’m beginning to realize that I would do anything for you, Colette. Even commit a murder.’

  ‘But why do you say so?’

  I stood up and surveyed the Legoland scene below. The summer sporting club, on the promontory of land that marked the eastern edge of Larvotto, was no bigger than a one-euro coin, while the old port – Port Hercule – to the west, was the size and shape of a bottle opener. It was not a view for the faint-hearted – anyone with vertigo or acrophobia could never have inhabited the Tour Odéon – but it was the very place a more modern-minded devil might have chosen if he had been looking for a high place to tempt someone with ownership of the whole world. And Monte Carlo is as near to being a holy city as there is for the world’s wealthiest people. It was certainly worth a try. I turned to face her and leaned back confidently on the handrail of the glass balcony; only in a novel would the rail have given way, sending me to a probably well-deserved death a couple of hundred feet below for my Icarus-like hubris. A warm breeze stirred my hair and then hers, but it might as easily have been something altogether more sinister – a subtler, more ethereal ectoplasm that contained the essence of pure temptation.

  ‘Honestly, Colette, it’s no accident our coming together in the Columbus Bar the other night. No accident at all. The way it happened – John’s book as the nexus of our meeting – that was fate pure and simple. I know it. You know it. I’ve thought a lot about it and I think it happened because, frankly, it’s within my power to give you exactly what you want in life; to enable you to live the life of luxury you’ve probably always wanted: a beautiful apartment, a lovely town house in Paris, a home in the Caribbean, an expensive sports car, a child – all of these things I will give you, Colette, if you’ll let me help you. And I tell you without fear of contradiction that after all that’s happened to you, you deserve these things. You know it and I know it. But we needn’t dwell on any of that because while material things are important they’re not that important. Happiness, fulfilment in life, love – these are the things that really matter. So now I’m going to tell you exactly why I want to help you – why I’m your most devoted servant in this matter. Please don’t be embarrassed if I tell you it’s because I think I love you. What do the French call it? Un coup de foudre?’

  ‘Really? After so short a time?’

  ‘Is that not how lightning strikes, Colette? Suddenly? Like something which is beyond our control. Perhaps that’s one of the few benefits of being older. You make up your mind about things like that so much more quickly than when you’re a bit younger. Carpe diem, so to speak. Anyway, I’d hardly be contemplating such a drastic course of action if I didn’t love you, I think. Do you? Only a truly devoted lover could be willing to do what I am willing to do for you, which is murder, my sweet.’

  I was on the verge of mentioning Thérèse Raquin – Zola’s marvellous book about a love triangle and a murder – until I remembered that it hadn’t ended well for any of them. I pressed my belted waist hard against the brushed steel handrail, as if testing the absolute limits of the world I was in. I remained exactly where I was, with my feet not exactly on the ground but still very firmly on the polished wooden decking of that little twenty-ninth-floor balcony.

  ‘No, I suppose not.’ She finished her cigarette and smiled. ‘I’m very fond of you, Don. But please, give me a little more time. For my feelings to catch up with yours. Yes?’

  ‘Of course. I understand.’

  ‘And look, I think it’s a good plan. But tell me please, is ours a perfect plan? After all, we don’t want to get caught, do we? It’s odd how getting caught never seems to be part of anyone’s plan. I’m terrified of going to jail.’

  I wondered if Colette had ever read Camus, like every French schoolchild. I certainly didn’t want to end up in jail like Meursault, talking to a priest about the absurdity of the human condition. Because that’s the part of the plan that les hommes d’action always fail to consider; and yet it’s the one that needs debating most of all – the possibility of failure and of being caught. Looking at Colette though, I didn’t think the existential niceties of crime were worth mentioning.

  ‘The perfect plan?’ I smiled and flicked my still smouldering cigarette in the general direction of Beausoleil, where I hoped it might ignite the lacquered hair of some elderly French matron. ‘It’s an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. It doesn’t exist. Order always tends toward disorder; this is called entropy. So there is only a good plan, and this is a very good plan. But a good plan is only a good plan if it’s flexible enough to deal with something that goes wrong, even sometimes very wrong. In my experience something always goes wrong. That’s why there’s no such thing as a perfect plan. Or a perfect murder. Because something always goes wrong.’

  She nodded. ‘When are we going to do it?’

  ‘When’s he back from Geneva?’ I said.

  ‘In two weeks’ time, they’re both here for their wedding anniversary, I think.’

  ‘Then that’s when we’ll do it.’

  CHAPTER 4

  I picked up the iPad and surveyed the apartment, satisfied that I had everything I had come for. But I didn’t bother searching the plac
e for Colette’s laptop; I knew where it was: she had taken it with her when she had gone with me in the car to Nice Airport. Her leaving the iPad on the kitchen worktop had been a mistake; I simply hadn’t noticed it and nor had she. It had been the kind of thing I’d been referring to when I’d talked to her about entropy and was just one of a couple of things that had gone wrong with the plan immediately after I’d murdered Mrs Orla Houston.

  It still felt a little weird saying that. I didn’t regret it for a moment, however. In truth I was having the most fun I’d had since leaving the army. Nothing – not the huckster/wanker world of advertising nor the solitary/autistic life of a writer – can compare with the exhilarating thrill of getting away with murder.

  I used the Judas hole in Colette’s door to check that the corridor was empty and thinking the coast on floor twenty-nine was clear I went out of the apartment and closed the door behind me.

  ‘Hello at last,’ said an American voice.

  I turned to see a smallish man in a grey suit with a Van Dyck beard, a paunch and an unlit Cohiba shuffling toward me. He was perspiring heavily and in his other hand was a handkerchief as big as a flag of truce. He looked like a Confederate Army general.

  ‘You must be my Russian neighbour – Mr Kaganovich, isn’t it?’

  I fixed a smile to my face and nodded, vaguely.

  ‘Colette – Miss Laurent has told me so much about you, but I was beginning to think you didn’t exist.’ He smiled. ‘Unless you’re a ghost.’

  I smiled, enjoying the irony and said, ‘There are no ghosts in this building.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be too sure about that.’

  He held out a hand that only just cleared the sleeve of his ill-fitting jacket. ‘Michael Twentyman. Originally from New York but now of no fixed abode. Hey, but we all are if we’re here in Monaco, right?’

  ‘Lev,’ I said, shaking Twentyman’s hand. ‘Originally from Smolensk, but now mostly travelling somewhere on business. Pleased to meet you.’

  I’d always been quite good at imitating accents; back in my advertising days, I’d often voiced a radio commercial when the so-called acting talent couldn’t quite manage it to my high standard. Most of the actors who do voice-overs are drunken has-beens you haven’t seen for so long they look like Dorian Gray’s picture. In truth I’d never done a Russian accent, professionally, but seeing The Hunt for Red October on television as many times as I had, I figured I only had to be as good as – or no better than – Sean Connery or Sam Neill to persuade the American that I was the genuine article. With any accent, less is more.

  I turned and walked toward the lift.

  ‘Not as pleased as I am,’ said Twentyman. ‘I’m having a few friends over for Sunday night cocktails in my apartment tomorrow. And then we’re going to dinner at Joël Robuchon. My girlfriend is from Kharkov. So it’d be great if you could join us.’

  It figured that someone like him would have had a Russian girlfriend and, for a brief second, I tried to picture her: blonde, blue-eyed, glass-cutting cheekbones, with hooks and gut-suckers like a liverfluke – which is a parasite in sheep almost impossible to be rid of. Russian girls in Monaco would have looked at Twentyman the way a wolf on the steppe might have seen a lost lamb.

  ‘I’d love to,’ I said. ‘But I’m on my way somewhere.’

  ‘Business or pleasure?’

  ‘Is there a difference?’

  Twentyman laughed. ‘You’re right. Not in Monaco.’

  The lift arrived and we stepped inside. I pressed the button to take us down to the Odéon garage.

  ‘I’m headed out myself.’

  I nodded politely.

  ‘I assume you heard about our news,’ he said.

  ‘What news might that be?’

  ‘What news?’ Twentyman laughed. ‘My God, you have been away, haven’t you? Why our murder, of course. Mrs Houston. The actress. In one of the sky duplexes nearly two weeks ago. That’s why I mentioned ghosts.’

  ‘I did hear about that, yes. Terrible. I hadn’t met the poor lady myself. But it was my information that the husband did it. The writer. And that he’s still at liberty.’

  ‘He’s the number one suspect, yes. But that’s the French police for you. The husband is always the number one suspect, right? This is the home of le crime passionnel. But if you ask me, the culprit could be anyone in this building. The first twenty floors are affordable housing. For Monégasques. Which means this place is hardly as exclusive as I’d hoped it might be when I bought it. All right, maybe the locals have a different elevator, but you wouldn’t ever get this kind of European social engineering in an apartment building on Park Avenue. It smacks of communism.’

  ‘You think it is one of them, perhaps? The locals?’

  ‘Why not?’

  I shrugged. ‘Then perhaps it’s good that I have alibi. I was in Geneva when this happened. At least that’s what my wife thinks.’

  Twentyman laughed. ‘Who knows? Maybe we’ll all need an alibi before this is over. It’s almost two weeks since it happened but the police are still here and no further forward with their inquiry. Asking questions and being a general pain in the ass. I mean you can’t blame them, they’re just doing their jobs. But I really hate cops. You don’t want to hear about that right now. Suffice to say that I’ve been thinking of getting out of town for a while. Until today there were television cameras outside the front of our building. And I just hate that.’

  ‘Me, too,’ I said. ‘If my wife saw me here she would also kill me.’

  The lift door opened not in the garage but in the ground-floor lobby; with its geometric bronze wall patterns which might have signified some ancient hermetic meaning and enormous beige marble pillars, it resembled something from a big-budget sci-fi movie. Whenever I was in it I half expected to see Mr Spock standing on the polished floor; instead I caught sight of someone who was just as unwelcome as any extraterrestrial creature: it was Chief Inspector Amalric and he was talking to the concierge by the front desk.

  ‘That’s him there,’ said Twentyman. ‘The Chief Inspector of Police. His name is Amalric and he’s a suspicious son of a bitch. Shit. He’s seen me. Hell, now I really am going to be late.’

  ‘Monsieur Twentyman, hello.’

  Amalric’s gravelly voice echoed through the lobby; he was wearing a little straw hat and holding a glass of water in his hand.

  ‘Chief Inspector,’ Twentyman said weakly. ‘How are you?’

  I pressed myself into the side of the lift, hiding behind the side wall and control panel as the Monaco detective set out across the enormous floor toward us. I was pretty sure he hadn’t yet seen me but I figured it was only a matter of seconds before he did and Twentyman introduced me as his neighbour, Lev Kaganovich, which was going to be very hard to explain. I was surely the living proof of the old wives’ tale that murderers always return to the scene of the crime.

  ‘Good, thank you. Could I have a word with you, please?’

  ‘It’s a little inconvenient right now,’ he said. ‘I’m just on my way out somewhere.’

  ‘It won’t take a moment,’ insisted Amalric, nearer now. ‘I just have a few questions to ask you.’

  I’d already pressed the close doors button, several times, and to my immense relief the doors started to slide shut.

  ‘Attendez un moment.’

  Twentyman pushed his face close to the narrowing gap between the doors and called out ‘Perhaps later’ and ‘Sorry’ before they closed completely and the lift continued smoothly down to the Odéon garage.

  ‘That was fast work,’ said Twentyman and chuckled. ‘I can see you’re a good man in a tight spot, Lev, my friend. But for your nifty work with those elevator buttons I’d have been stuck with that fucking nosy cop for twenty minutes.’

  ‘Why does he want to speak to you anyway? The twenty-ninth floor is a long way from those sky duplexes.’

  ‘Because I knew her. Mrs Houston was a fellow Tifosi – like me a keen supporter of the Scuder
ia Ferrari. We met in the Ferrari hospitality suite at the Hôtel de Paris during the last Grand Prix. I imagine the Chief Inspector thinks that I can shed some light on some of the people she knew here in Monte Carlo.’ He chuckled. ‘Even if I could, I’d rather not, if you know what I mean. One question leads to another and before you know it, you’re in handcuffs. I had a similar experience on Wall Street a few years ago. I went from witness to wanted in twenty-four hours. So fuck that, right?’

  ‘I just hope I haven’t got you into trouble.’

  ‘Hey, you’re not the only guy who can produce an alibi,’ said Twentyman as the car arrived in the garage. ‘It so happens I was in the library with Colonel Mustard at the time.’

  I frowned as though not understanding what he’d said. ‘Please?’

  ‘American humour,’ said my putative neighbour. ‘Come to think of it, Chief Inspector Amalric didn’t see the joke either.’

  ‘French, Russian – cops are the same all over. The only jokes they like are the ones they make up themselves. In Russia we sometimes call these jokes “evidence”.’

  Twentyman laughed again. ‘That’s very good. Are you sure you can’t come along tomorrow night? My girlfriend, Anastasia, would love to meet you. More importantly so would her friends.’

  ‘You’re forgetting about my wife. One murder in the Odéon is quite enough, don’t you think?’

  Twentyman was still laughing as he walked toward a red Ferrari 599 GTO. ‘Knock me up next time you’re in town, as the actress said to the bishop.’

  ‘I will,’ I said.

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘Scout’s honour.’

  I followed Twentyman’s Ferrari out of the garage and into the street, where it was as if his V12 engine was in competition with my W12 for the amount of high-performance noise they could both generate. The roundabout in front of the Odéon echoed with a din that was like a very small and exclusive Grand Prix.