Super-Cannes

by J. G. Ballard

  ‘Then why did he kill her?’

  ‘That I can’t say. But it looks as if…’

  ‘He killed some of the others? Maybe all of them? And there wasn’t a conspiracy?’

  ‘It’s possible.’ I stared at the photograph of the bedside table. ‘There are too many question marks and no answers. These necklaces and chokers – they still have their price tags on.’

  ‘They come from a jewellery heist in Nice. About three weeks before the murders.’

  ‘Why are they here?’

  ‘Maybe Bachelet was holding them for a French undercover team.’

  ‘And you believe that?’

  ‘I don’t have to.’ Halder moved restlessly in his seat, as if we had spent too long at this first murder site. ‘I don’t know why any of this happened. Greenwood didn’t leave a suicide note.’

  ‘He thought he’d get away with it.’

  ‘Never. Greenwood was no fool. At the end he didn’t have enough time. That’s always the trouble with mass-killers. They run out of time.’

  ‘He hated something about Eden-Olympia. I think you know what it was.’

  ‘He never told me.’

  I handed the photographs back to Halder. ‘Any others I can see?’

  ‘A few. We’ll wait till we get there.’ Halder started the engine with a flourish, and waved to Mrs Oshima, watching us suspiciously from her bedroom window. ‘We need fresh air, Mr Sinclair. Fresh air and fresh minds …’

  21

  Drugs and Deaths

  THE EARLY DAY shift was leaving the clinic, nurses and technicians driving from the exits in their identical small cars. A young houseman wearing his white coat and name-tag walked past us towards the apartment houses beside the lake. He was barely an arm’s length from the Range Rover, but so self-engrossed that he failed to notice when Halder saluted him.

  ‘That says a lot about Eden-Olympia …’ I watched the distracted medico stride away, oblivious to the lake and parkland, his head responding only to the flicker of a lizard beside the path. ‘People are so immersed in their work they wouldn’t recognize the end of the world. It explains why no one saw anything unusual about Greenwood. There’s no civic sense here.’

  ‘There is.’ Halder pointed to a nearby surveillance camera. ‘Think of it as a new kind of togetherness.’

  Halder had recovered from his nervousness outside the Bachelet house, and was ready to humour me and resume his role as tour guide to an obsession. He opened his envelope of photographs, waiting for me to calm myself. By abandoning the conspiracy theory I had returned to earth, a hard landing that had wrecked my hopes of finding a larger explanation for David Greenwood’s psychotic behaviour. But the authority of the murder photographs was overwhelming. A violent rage had written itself across the blood-stained walls, a death warrant signed in fragments of bone and gristle.

  ‘All set, Mr Sinclair? Good … I’ll take it slowly.’ Halder spoke in a low, unemotional voice, as if describing a minor traffic incident. ‘The third person to die was Professor Berthoud, chief pharmacist at the clinic. An inside security camera caught Greenwood entering the lobby at 7.52. No weapon was visible, but we assume he carried the rifle under his white coat.’

  ‘The metal detectors didn’t pick it up?’

  ‘None are installed. This is a hospital. Metal objects are everywhere – emergency trolleys, hip replacement pins, oxygen cylinders …’

  ‘Fair enough. Go on.’

  ‘Berthoud was in his private office in the pharmacy on the sixth floor, next to the strongroom where all the drugs at Eden-Olympia are held. He was sitting at his desk when Greenwood fired at him through the outer glass door.’

  ‘Why didn’t he go straight in?’

  ‘The door was electronically locked from Berthoud’s desk. It gave access to the office and a side corridor to the drugs room.’

  ‘Berthoud would have buzzed him in.’

  ‘Greenwood needed surprise. He must have known how shaky he was starting to feel. Berthoud might have guessed something was wrong and alerted security.’

  ‘And Wilder Penrose?’ I asked. ‘Greenwood wounded him.’

  ‘He was in the corridor, coming back from the drugs room. He probably caught a look at the rifle barrel, stepped back and was cut by the flying glass.’

  ‘But Greenwood didn’t see him, or he would have finished him off. Why didn’t Greenwood look for Penrose in his office?’

  ‘Maybe he did. But he had to move fast. Security would start closing around him at any moment. From now on he was after targets of opportunity.’

  ‘That makes sense.’ I stared at the surveillance camera near the Range Rover, realizing that Halder and I were being watched in the security building. Our battlefield tour had almost certainly been authorized by Pascal Zander. ‘Anyway, imagine Greenwood’s state of mind. He’s just killed three people. He can’t think coherently, but he knows he has to make it to the next target. One thing bothers me – why didn’t Penrose raise the alarm?’

  ‘Greenwood locked the outer doors when he left, trapping Penrose in the corridor. The security people found him an hour later, practically unconscious, trying to tourniquet his arm with his coat sleeves. He only just made it.’ Halder shook his head in genuine admiration. ‘You need to be a psychiatrist to cope with something like that.’

  ‘But no one heard anything? Isn’t that a little strange?’

  ‘This is a hospital,’ Halder again reminded me. ‘The walls are well insulated. So the patients don’t hear machinery or …’

  ‘… other patients in pain. Are there any photos?’

  ‘Just one.’ Halder’s hands were on the steering wheel, and he made an effort to control his fretting fingers. He wiped the thin film of sweat from his face, and then opened the manila envelope. ‘I don’t know if it says much.’

  I held the photograph against the instrument panel. The pharmacist’s office was a windowless room filled with metal cabinets and bookshelves stacked with pharmaceutical directories, drug manuals and updated regulations of the French Ministry of Health.

  Professor Berthoud sat at his desk, face and torso turned to the camera, as if noticing someone at the glass door. He was a plump, suave-looking man in his late forties, with a neat moustache and even neater desk, in the centre of which lay a metal suitcase. Berthoud had removed the jacket of his dove-grey suit, and wore a striped shirt and paisley tie. He had yet to put on his lab coat, suggesting that he was about to carry out a private task before taking up his official duties.

  Whatever the task, he had not been able to see it through. His head and shoulders rested against the ventilation shaft behind his desk. His mouth was open, as if he had been trying to call to someone in the next room. His tie hung vertically from his tight collar, with the small knot of a punctilious and pedantic man.

  I could see the bullet hole that punctured one of the whorls of the paisley pattern. Blood ran onto his lap, flowing down one leg to form a pool between his feet, but the neatness of this trimly professional man was preserved in death. His cheeks had slipped down his face, losing their hold on the underlying muscles, yet his hands remained calmly on the desk, protecting a plastic sachet filled with a chalk-like powder. A dozen or so sachets lay inside the suitcase.

  I pointed to a set of electronic scales on the desk. ‘He was weighing something. What exactly was in the sachets?’

  Halder pinched his nostrils, and shrugged with studied vagueness. ‘I guess … pharmaceuticals?’

  ‘But what kind? It looks as if Greenwood walked in on a drug-running operation.’

  ‘Mr Sinclair … a lot of white powders are moving around. Some have Max Factor printed on them. Industrial chemicals, detergents used to clean out dialysis machines …’

  ‘And all in special packs with the manufacturer’s brand-name and seal. Why would Berthoud be using the scales?’

  Halder leaned against his headrest and turned to watch me. ‘You think the powder was cocaine or heroin?’
/>
  ‘It looks like it. Something illicit was going on. And Penrose must have known about it.’

  ‘You ought to talk to him, Mr Sinclair.’

  ‘I will, when the time is right. I’m surprised the investigating judge wasn’t more interested. But why would a man as senior as Berthoud risk everything on a small consignment of illegal cocaine, when he could legitimately order the stuff by the hundredweight? This suitcase and the scales are amateurish. It’s as if he was playing a game out of sheer bravado.’

  Halder nodded approvingly, pleased by my progress through the obstacle course. ‘Go on, Mr Sinclair …’

  ‘How is it that Greenwood arrived just as Berthoud is getting his shipment ready? That’s quite a coincidence. And what was Penrose doing in the drug store?’ I handed the photograph back to Halder. ‘Where did these photos come from?’

  ‘The Cannes police. Their eyes aren’t as sharp as yours.’ He started the engine of the Range Rover. ‘We ought to move on. Ghosts are walking around Eden-Olympia …’

  The TV centre’s car park was full, and Halder paused in an access lane fifty yards from the mirror-clad building. The international soccer results and the digests of German, Japanese and French news bulletins were broadcast from the basement, a maze of airless recording studios and edit suites. Here I had once lost myself after being interviewed about my first impressions of Eden-Olympia. Wandering through the wrong doors, I found myself an involuntary guest on a wine-tasting programme run by two strong-minded Swiss women.

  ‘The TV centre, Mr Sinclair,’ Halder told me. ‘It’s where I came in …’

  I waited for him to drive towards the entrance, but he was staring in an oddly fixed way at the revolving doors. The muscles of his face had tightened, pulled by a set of interior strings he could barely control.

  ‘Halder, can we park in the shade?’ I pointed to the awning over the entrance. ‘It’s getting hot out here, in all senses …’

  ‘Not yet.’ Halder opened his door and touched the tarmac with his foot. ‘This is where I parked on May 28. Right here. A kind of personal ground zero, Mr Sinclair.’

  ‘Halder, relax …’ Concerned for him, I held his wrist as he drummed his foot against the ground. ‘You were waiting here when Georges Vadim was shot?’

  ‘We arrived ten minutes later. Vadim was already dead, and Greenwood had gone.’

  ‘What time was this?’

  ‘About 8.35 a.m.’ Halder closed the driver’s door and composed himself, his hands gripping the steering wheel. When he spoke he seemed to be addressing himself rather than me. ‘I checked into the security office at eight. At 8.30 a sound engineer contacted a guard on duty outside the TV centre. He reported a rifle shot in one of the studios. The guard assumed he’d heard gunfire coming from a movie soundtrack. But Captain Kellerman sent three of us over to check things out.’

  ‘You went into the building?’

  ‘I was the rookie – I’d been at Eden-Olympia only two weeks. The other two, Henri Gille and a Spaniard called Menocal, left me sitting in the car. Seconds later, they rushed out in a panic. They said the general manager had shot himself. They’d found Vadim in an edit suite with a Remington pistol. It was his personal weapon, registered with security. I radioed through to Captain Kellerman, and he tried to contact Bachelet.’

  ‘And Bachelet wasn’t answering his phone?’

  ‘We thought he was in the pool or having a shower.’

  ‘But why no general alert?’

  ‘Vadim’s death looked like suicide. We had orders to act normally and hush everything up. Captain Kellerman came over. He checked the Remington and knew it hadn’t been fired. Then Menocal found a rifle cartridge behind the door. It looks as if Greenwood spoke to Vadim long enough for him to get out the pistol.’

  ‘So Greenwood shot him dead.’ I gazed at the revolving door, and imagined the white-coated doctor with the rifle under his arm, blinking at the bright May sunlight as he emerged from the building. ‘I’ve always thought he was mad, but he must have been very controlled.’

  ‘Greenwood was unlucky.’ Halder spoke in a neutral tone, as if describing a conflict between strangers. ‘The sound engineer was walking down the corridor, or no one would have heard about the shooting.’

  ‘How did Greenwood know Vadim would be in that particular edit suite? I’ve been down there – the place is a maze of cubicles and double doors.’

  ‘Vadim’s secretary said he always used that suite to check out new videos. Stuff made by amateur film groups at Eden-Olympia.’

  ‘So Greenwood knew he’d be there. Any photos?’

  ‘None. Someone held them back.’ Halder shrugged tolerantly. ‘I heard they showed certain “forbidden” things, the kind that would be bad for Eden-Olympia’s image. Gille told me he switched on the edit machine. It played some very interesting material.’

  ‘Films for the evening’s adult channel?’

  ‘More interesting than that.’ Halder spoke without irony. His face was toneless, a hollowed black stone. All emotion had withdrawn from his features, hiding behind the sharp bones of his nose and cheeks. He seemed to have aged in the brief time we had toured the murder sites of Eden-Olympia.

  Making a guess, I asked: ‘Something to do with children?’

  ‘I think so. Keep it to yourself.’

  ‘No wonder the photos are missing.’

  A security guard emerged from the TV centre and scanned the parked cars. He noticed the Range Rover and strolled towards us, then saluted when Halder waved to him.

  ‘Time to leave,’ Halder said. ‘After May 28 they have … expectations of violence. It’s the perfect set-up for another David Greenwood. Even the guards don’t trust each other.’

  ‘You’ll be able to take over. I imagine Captain Kellerman is no longer working for us.’

  ‘He left in June. How did you know?’

  ‘I assumed the pension package was too generous to turn down.’

  ‘You’re right. He’s running a bar in Martinique. Eden-Olympia helped with the finance.’ Halder started the engine and drove between the lines of parked cars towards the exit. ‘“Take over…” That’s a fascinating idea, Mr Sinclair.’

  ‘Thank you. The most interesting one I’ve had? I dare say you’ve given it a lot of thought …’

  22

  The Roof Deck

  WE CIRCLED THE perimeter road, taking a last look at the TV centre, and then drove down the main avenue, past the office blocks set so securely in their plots of parkland. Halder stopped outside a seven-storey building sheathed in pale travertine marble. The imposing structure overlooked a landscaped roundabout that marked the western limit of the avenue. The administrative headquarters of Eden-Olympia displayed an almost imperial grandeur, with its classical pilasters rising to a stylized post-modern pediment. This was the first office building to be constructed at the business park, but after a bombastic overture the architecture that followed was late modernist in the most minimal and self-effacing way, a machine above all for thinking in.

  As a nerve jumped in his cheek, Halder left the engine running and scanned the satellite dishes hiding behind a Grecian colonnade. I suspected that he had volunteered his services to Pascal Zander, offering to take me around the murder route, but now regretted the decision. The blood-steeped circuit had become an unwelcome tour of the memories inside his own head.

  ‘The main administration building,’ I commented. ‘The brain centre of Eden-Olympia. This is where Charbonneau and Fontaine died?’

  ‘Impressive, isn’t it? Don’t believe what you see. The place looks as tight as Fort Knox but it’s as easy to step into as a Vegas hotel.’

  ‘Even so, how did Greenwood get in? These were the two most senior people in the business park. A full-scale alert must have been under way.’

  ‘Not yet. Greenwood was fifteen minutes ahead of us.’ For once, Halder sounded almost defensive. ‘Remember, we still hadn’t found Bachelet or Professor Berthoud. We didn’t know
who Vadim’s killer was or whether he had any more targets. Greenwood was a doctor at the clinic, with top-level clearance, wearing a name-tag and a white coat, carrying an electronic pass-key that could get him through any door.’

  ‘So no one tried to stop him when he walked in.’ I thought of Greenwood, parking here only a few months earlier. He had moved around Eden-Olympia like a messenger from the dark gods, leaving little parcels of death. ‘Where did he shoot Charbonneau – in his office?’

  ‘In the private suite next door. A six-room apartment fitted with gym, massage table, Jacuzzi. Greenwood told the secretary he’d brought a new prescription. He took Charbonneau into the bathroom, made him strip and shot him dead in the Jacuzzi. The suite was soundproofed.’

  ‘Why was that?’

  ‘For private reasons. The secretary didn’t know what had happened until the security alert ten minutes later. Then she had a nervous breakdown.’

  ‘Grim.’ I stared up at the roof. ‘She was having a nightmare and no one told her she was awake. Any photos?’

  ‘Not available. Charbonneau was naked. I hear the photos are … indelicate.’

  ‘Unpleasant wounds?’

  ‘Not the kind caused by gunshots.’

  ‘What other kind are there?’

  ‘Let’s say, recreational.’

  ‘He was into S/M?’

  ‘That kind of thing. Not a good advertisement for Eden-Olympia.’

  ‘That explains the soundproofing.’ I reached across Halder and switched off the engine, glad to have a moment’s silence. ‘Then Greenwood moved off to find Robert Fontaine?’

  ‘He didn’t have far to go. Fontaine had a penthouse on the seventh floor.’

  ‘And he let Greenwood in?’

  ‘Greenwood was treating him for prostate problems. Bear in mind it’s only 9.05. Captain Kellerman was still trying to contact Bachelet.’

  ‘So Greenwood shot Fontaine dead. In bed?’