by Philip Kerr
‘Forget it. That’s what real friends are for, right?’ I shrugged. ‘It’ll be just like old times. Me and you in a fast car on the A7 to Paris and the atelier, which we’ll start up again, albeit on a rather more modest scale. In London. Only this time I’ll be out front and you’ll be in the backroom. Good for you, good for me.’
CHAPTER 13
The drive to Paris was uneventful with neither one of us saying very much. With me driving for most of the way we reached the outskirts of Paris just after five o’clock on Monday evening and I headed across the river, up the Champs-Élysées. Paris was the usual mess of traffic and attitude, tourists and metropolitan disdain.
‘Where are we staying?’ he asked. ‘Not the George V. They know me there. Or the Crillon. Or the Bristol. The last time I was at the Bristol it was with poor Colette.’
‘The Hôtel Lancaster,’ I said. ‘I stayed there a couple of times with Jenny on those rare occasions when you’d paid me a decent bestseller bonus. It’s on Rue de Berri, near the Arc de Triomphe. There’s an underground parking lot right next door and we can dump the car there. No one at the hotel will even know we arrived by car.’
‘Good idea.’
We checked into separate rooms this time, and after I’d asked the concierge to book us a table at Joël Robuchon, across the Champs-Élysées – of course, in my mind we were celebrating – I lay down for a nap before dinner and went straight to sleep. I hadn’t been asleep for very long when there was an urgent knock at my door. It was John, of course, and he was looking pale and agitated, again. He didn’t say anything. He just pushed past me into the room, and switched on the television.
I guessed what he probably wanted me to see but I thought it was probably best to play dumb. So while he tried to find the right channel I yawned and said, ‘John, if you don’t mind, I’m not really in the mood to watch TV right now.’
He shook his head, silently.
‘As a matter of fact I’m a bit tired after the drive.’
Finally, he found TF1 and stepped back from the screen as if he wanted me to see as much of it as possible.
This time the police line and the news reporters were in Tourrettes-sur-Loup. I recognized the rusting sign at the bottom of Philip French’s drive – the Villa Seurel – but I pretended I didn’t.
‘What is this?’ I asked.
‘That’s Phil’s house.’
‘Is it? Christ, what’s happened?’
‘Phil’s dead,’ said John. ‘He’s committed suicide.’
‘That’s impossible,’ I said.
‘No, it isn’t,’ insisted John. ‘He shot himself. Not only that, but it seems there was some connection between him and Colette. In fact, the police seem to think Phil may have shot Colette. What about that for a fucking plot twist? Talk about truth being stranger than fiction.’
‘You’re joking.’
John pointed at the screen and, as the news report continued, it seemed that he was right.
‘There. What did I tell you? Didn’t you say that he seemed a bit suicidal when you saw him last night?’
‘Depressed, certainly. I mean, he gave up on your twenty grand without much of a fight. Which was odd, yes. And of course Caroline had gone back to England with the kids leaving him to wait on tables. So, naturally he was a bit down in the dumps.’
‘And he was in debt, right?’
‘Yes. According to the cop – Chief Inspector Amalric – he was quite substantially in debt.’
‘I want to ask you a question, Don.’
‘Fire away.’
‘Do you think it could have been him who killed Orla? That he and Colette were in cahoots? That it was Phil who shot her while I was downstairs fucking Colette?’
I shrugged. ‘I suppose – given that he seems to have shot himself – it’s just about possible. Tourrettes isn’t so far from Monaco.’
‘Fifty minutes away by car,’ said John. ‘And he did hate me. You saw how he behaved yesterday.’
‘Yes, but if he hated you, then why did he kill Orla? That doesn’t make sense. Orla never did any harm to anyone. Not that we know of, anyway. Who knows what her fucking Mick brothers did with her money? But why top her? Why not just top you?’
John wagged a forefinger, thoughtfully.
‘Yes, but look here: when you kill someone then your revenge is all over with relatively quickly. Too quickly perhaps. A bullet in my head, and it’s all over, right? There’s no chance to really enjoy something as quick as that. But if you kill a man’s wife, and make it look like he was the murderer, then that’s revenge on a Shakespearean scale. It’s something drawn out, dramatic, even operatic. You make him suffer like he’s on the rack. Which is how I’ve been this past fortnight.’
I shook my head. ‘That’s a little far-fetched, even for you, John.’
‘Is it? Is it? I don’t know.’
‘And what was in it for Colette? Why would she go along with something like that? She loved you, didn’t she?’
‘I think maybe she must have found out that I was planning to leave Monaco and move back to England. Perhaps it was Phil who told her. In the long run, I’d have made sure she was all right, of course, money-wise, but frankly I was looking forward to living a rather less colourful life, if I can put it like that.’
‘All right. That’s possible, I suppose. I didn’t know Colette, so I can’t say if revenge was in her character or not. But I did know Phil. Yes, he was angry with you for ending the atelier. And maybe he did hate you. But I can’t see him hating you enough to do what you’re suggesting. I think I liked Colette’s Russian better for that.’
‘If there ever was a Russian,’ said John. ‘I’m not so sure.’
‘What’s that you say?’
John was plotting now – plotting like he was planning a book. I think it was all he could do not to get out a notebook and start jotting down ideas.
‘If I could come back to Phil’s motive here, for just a moment. If we could focus on that, please.’
I smiled thinly; John might have been discussing a character in one of his books. He looked as if at any second he was going to have what he used to call a ‘sumimasen moment’ – after the word that Japanese waiters cry out to new customers – when he would punch a fist into the palm of his hand and shout a word of thanks to his muse for giving him the inspired plot twist that was going to stun and amaze his readers.
‘Yes?’
‘There’s something I’ve never told you before, Don. Something that’s relevant to all this, I think. A couple of years ago, I bumped into Phil’s wife, Caroline, when she was shopping in Cannes. Except that she wasn’t shopping. Not like any woman I’ve ever seen. Not for anything decent. She was looking for bargains in some cheapo place on the Rue d’Antibes. Zara, or somewhere equally ghastly, the sort of place where they dress women of a certain size and budget. So I—’
I groaned. ‘Please tell me you didn’t fuck her.’
John took a deep breath and looked very sheepish.
‘Oh, for Pete’s sake. You did fuck her, didn’t you?’
‘She was lonely, Don. Lonely and neglected by her clod of a husband. So I took her to Chanel on the Croisette, bought her a nice dress and a handbag, gave her lunch at the Carlton, treated her like someone very special and then took her to a room upstairs.’
‘You cunt.’
‘Yes, you’re right. It was a despicable thing to do. And believe me I regretted it later. But you’ve no idea how much it all seemed to cheer her up. I mean, she was a very different woman afterward.’
‘Yes. She was someone who had committed adultery.’ I shrugged. ‘But I don’t suppose it matters now, does it?’
‘No. Still, I thought I ought to mention it. Get it off my chest. It makes things easier to understand, doesn’t it?’
‘Yes. That’s what I call a motive. You’re right. The poor bastard had every reason to hate your guts. If he did know.’
‘There’s something else.’
/>
‘What?’
‘No, it’s just that – look, I’m not trying to vindicate what happened, but she was too fast for someone like Phil. Caroline French was someone who liked the good things in life. He couldn’t ever have held on to a woman like her.’
I could see that he’d wanted to tell me something else in the way of a confession and then thought better of it, and in that very same instant I knew with one hundred per cent certainty that I’d been right about him and Jenny – that he’d fucked my wife, too. That he had done my office between my sheets. It was the way John had described Caroline as ‘too fast’ for Phil. Once, after Jenny had left me for her High Court judge, and John had tried to suggest that I was probably better off without her, he’d described her in those very same terms, as someone who was ‘too fast’ for someone like me. Of course this telling remark implied that by contrast with dullards like Phil or me, a man as sophisticated as John was more than equal to the task of dealing with fast women like Caroline or Jenny. And possibly he was, too. It’s amazing how women behave in a posh shop when there’s a rich man around with a limitless credit card. Either way this was, for me, a moment of both vindication and pain, and having been proved right in my suspicion that Houston had indeed fucked my wife it was all I could do not to punch him right there and then. I hated him now more than ever I had hated anyone who wasn’t Irish and I was glad he felt he was on the rack. I was enjoying my own Richard Topcliffe moment and poor John was my Catholic recusant. But I was not and never have been the type to let a mere hors d’oeuvre of hatred come before the full banquet of my revenge: long ago I had decided that this was a painstakingly prepared dish that would be served with such anaesthetic cold my victim would not even know that he had eaten it.
‘So, then,’ I said. ‘Maybe you’re right after all. What is it Iago says about Othello? “I do suspect the lusty Moor Hath leap’d into my seat: the thought whereof Doth, like a poisonous mineral, gnaw my innards; And nothing can or shall content my soul Till I am even’d with him, wife for wife.”’
‘Precisely so,’ said John. ‘That’s exactly what I’m on about, old sport. That silly bitch Caroline must have told him I’d shagged her, and when I put an end to the atelier he probably decided to pay me back in grief and pain. There’s no other explanation for it.’ He shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he was already waiting in Colette’s apartment when I went down there, grabbed the key from my tracksuit pocket, nipped upstairs and shot Orla while I was still on the job. Nor would I be surprised if all that Russian stuff – the champagnski, the ciggies, the newspaper – was just set-dressing to make me think her Ivan had turned up and to put the wind up me so that I would go on the run. That was clever. Very clever.’
I nodded. ‘And immediately afterward Phil drove Colette to the airport car park where he shot her? In cold blood? I suppose it’s just about possible. But this only makes sense to me if they were both after money – to blackmail you in return for her admission to the police that she was your alibi.’
‘Yes. That’s right. She must have got cold feet about the whole idea. Threatened to go to the police with her story. Either that or she wanted more money. Or money up front which Phil simply didn’t have.’
John grinned and started to jog on the spot, like a boxer, as if for the first time he could run toward some light at the end of the tunnel. His leather shoes squeaked like springs that needed oiling, but for a big man he was surprisingly light on his feet.
‘This is good for me, old sport. This is a real break, you know. Now I can hand myself in to the police. It’s obvious that if the two of them were acting together it leaves me in the clear. More or less. Don’t you see? He was in possession of my watch. Not to mention my bag and my gun. Christ, Don, he must have used the Walther to kill himself. The police will have to conclude that he took them all from my apartment. I shall just tell the cops that I was shit-scared and took off to Switzerland to wait for the truth to come out; and that when I saw they were both dead I put two and two together and decided to give myself up.’
I nodded patiently and tried to remain calm. I hadn’t reckoned on this. I went to the window and moving the net curtain I stared out at the hotel’s small but elegant garden. Here and there were iron statues of peacocks, which I rather preferred to the real thing, they being so much quieter. The laurel bushes and tree ferns were such a brilliant, almost artificial shade of green that you half expected to see a man being stalked through the undergrowth by a tiger or a jaguar – which was pretty much how I felt, most of the time. As if at any moment my ambitious revenge might swallow me whole. I opened a window and lit a cigarette so that any other sharp intakes of breath might seem smoking-related rather than the corollary of my almost shredded nerves.
‘Look, John, there’s something I haven’t told you. Because I didn’t want to depress you any more.’
John stopped jogging and frowned. ‘What’s that?’
‘I think you’d better sit down. Because you’re not going to like this.’
John sat down on the edge of my bed. I turned off the TV and returned to the window.
‘What the fuck is it? Tell me.’
‘When I first met the Monty cops in London I maintained your innocence so vehemently that they felt obliged to share with me some forensic evidence they hadn’t released to the newspapers. Apparently they found blood and gunpowder on the sleeve of your tracksuit.’
John shook his head. ‘No problem. Phil could have put on my clothes while I was busy banging Colette. Yes, that’s it. He must have been wearing my tracksuit when he shot Orla. To help implicate me.’
‘If that was all there was then I’d agree you should hand yourself in to the cops and take your chances.’
‘What else is there?’
I blew smoke out of the window; it was supposed to be a non-smoking room and I had enough trouble on my hands without setting off the alarm that was attached to the ceiling, blinking red like the tail light of an aircraft. I caught sight of my own reflection in a mirror on the inside of the closet door. Wreathed in a little halo of blue cloud I looked more in control of myself than I might have supposed. Like someone or some thing infernal. As usual the cigarette was having an effect, helping me to form ideas out of nothing more than smoke and mirrors.
‘The fact is, John, it’s not just your chances any more. It’s mine, too.’
John shook his head. ‘I don’t follow you, old sport. I’ve said I’ll leave your name out of it and I will. If it makes any difference you can keep that twenty grand when you fuck off back to London. There’s no reason you should be involved in any of this. I’m more than capable of facing this on my own now.’
‘But I am involved. Very much more involved than you know.’
‘What are you talking about, old sport?’
‘Last night, when I went to see Phil he was in an extremely difficult frame of mind. He’d been drinking a lot. Smoking a lot of dope, too. I didn’t know he smoked weed, did you? Anyway, he told me that I could stuff your twenty grand because the Chief Inspector from the Monaco Sûreté Publique was coming to see him at ten o’clock on Monday morning and that he was going to tell him that you were staying in Vence, at the Château Saint-Martin. Yes, that’s what he said. He told me he’d thought it all over and he couldn’t bring himself to forgive you for destroying his life as a writer, not to mention destroying his life as a man. He told me then that he’d found out you’d fucked Caroline and said that no amount of money could compensate for the pain he’d felt – that a man he considered to be his friend could have betrayed him quite so egregiously.
‘I tried to reason with him. I said that what was done was done. I’m afraid I even told him about my plan to hide you away in Cornwall and that we could reinstate the atelier with him as one of your writers. I said everything would be just like it was before and that in the fullness of time, if he was writing and making a decent living again, Caroline might even come back to him. But he wasn’t
interested in any of that. He told me the only writing he was capable of doing these days was jotting down a lunch order at the Château Saint-Martin. Tempers got a bit frayed and he started to shout at me.
‘I only meant to threaten him with the gun – your gun, which I’d found in your bag when I was taking the money out to give it to him. I told him that he might manage to get you arrested but that he’d better think twice if I was going to allow him to grass me up. Or words to that effect. I said that if I did get nicked he could be sure that eventually I’d come back there and kill him. Anyway, he was pissed and stoned like I said – which is probably why he tried to take the gun off me. We wrestled a bit, in his study and that was when the gun went off. It seemed you’d left a bullet in the breech. I should have checked it before I pointed the thing at him but I didn’t. There wasn’t time.’ I shrugged. ‘It was me who shot Philip French, John. It was me who killed him.’
‘Jesus.’
‘After that I set about trying to make it look like a suicide. I put the gun in his hand, let off another shot for the forensics boys. I left your bag and your watch in the hope that it might persuade the police – as it seems to have managed to persuade you – that Phil had something to do with Orla’s death. It was the same gun after all. There was an unsent draft of a rather self-pitying email he’d been composing to his wife on his computer which he’d insisted on reading to me as a way of explaining that he was finished as a writer; I don’t think he’d ever intended sending it to Caroline; so I sent it, for appearance’s sake, you understand. Then I left. That’s why I was so fucking panicky when I came to fetch you in the village square last night. And why I started bricking it when I saw that copper and realized he was already in Tour-rettes. Because I’d just shot Phil.’
John nodded. ‘I see. Fuck me. You had quite an evening, didn’t you? But where do you think the cops got the idea that Philip French had anything to do with Colette Laurent’s death?’
‘The circumstances, I suppose. You’re the missing link, after all. You knew Phil and I dare say they’ll have worked out that you knew Colette, too; and intimately. They must have found her laptop when they came across her body. It’s just a suspicion I have, but I rather think Chief Inspector Amalric might be playing a clever game here. He could be hoping you’ll hear on the news that the cops think Phil had something to do with Colette’s death and that, as a result, you’ll think it’s now safe to hand yourself in. And look, for all I fucking know, they don’t really believe that Phil killed himself either. I have no idea what kind of fist I made of making his death look like a suicide. My expertise in these matters only extends to writing thrillers. They’re not stupid, these people. So it’s not just you who’s now facing jail, it’s me, too.’ I shook my head and added, ‘They’re not actually looking for me, of course. Not yet. And before you ask I have no more intention of handing myself in than you have. Or had.’