‘Paul?’ She smoothed her hair, aware that I was watching her with interest. ‘What is it?’
‘Nothing … Let’s go. They’re heading for the beach road to Juan. We’ll follow.’
‘Why? We’ve lost them, thank God. Those big cars look nasty.’
‘They weren’t after us. They were chasing the Audi. You were right all along – it’s a ratissage …’
Watched by the perplexed attendant, we left the Tétou car park and drove into Golfe-Juan. Despite the film festival, most of the restaurants facing the marina had closed for the night. Guests were leaving a party aboard a motor yacht, tipsily making their way down a gangway, visitors to a white township that emitted an ivory light like a floating cemetery.
‘They’ve gone.’ Frances searched the darkness for a turning. ‘We’ll go back to the RN7.’
‘They’re up ahead. I want to see what happens.’
‘Forget about it! Did you recognize the man in the Audi?’
‘Some tired dentist on his way home.’
‘He followed us. Why?’
‘You, not us. A midnight blonde on her way back from the festival with her pimp. Our vigilantes must have seen him and didn’t approve. He looked a little Maghrebian – they’ll teach him a lesson in racial respect.’
Reluctantly, Frances drove along the darkened front. At the eastern edge of Golfe-Juan a new apartment complex stood on the site of the ceramics factory I had once visited with my parents. The Audi was circling a nearby roundabout, chased by one of the Mercedes. Almost rolling the limousine onto its side, the driver rammed the rear of the Audi. The second Mercedes blocked the exit of the return road to Golfe-Juan. Its headlights shone on a violent game, a private demolition derby played out beneath the palm trees. Shards of broken glass from the Audi’s taillights lay on the road, spitting like embers of a fire as the tyres raked across them.
‘Hold back for a second.’ I tried to steady Frances, who seemed disoriented by the harsh collisions. ‘He’s decided to cut and run …’
The Audi swerved from the roundabout, struck the kerb and set off towards Juan-les-Pins. The two Mercedes hurtled after it, engines blowing with an elephant-like roar, headlights picking out their quarry.
‘Frances … let’s move.’
‘Why?’ She sat stiffly at the wheel, refusing to look at the windscreen. ‘They’re crazy, Paul …’
‘They’re trying to be crazy – that’s the point. We need more evidence.’
‘Evidence?’ Frances hunted the gearbox until I rammed the lever through its gate. ‘On top of everything else?’
‘Just keep going.’
We followed the deranged motorcade as it moved along the beach road. Waves broke on the strip of sand, their foam sluicing through the debris of beer cans and forgotten rubber flippers where the ageing Picasso had once played with Dora Maar and his children. The rotating beam of the lighthouse at La Garoupe swept along the shore, illuminating the closed bar-cabins and the low sea wall.
Frances slowed when one of the limousines ran alongside the Audi, jostling it as the second Mercedes accelerated and braked, lunging at the rear bumper. On our left, across the railway line, was the apartment complex of Antibes-les-Pins. A single light shone above a balcony, where some insomniac neighbour of Isabel Duval sat alone in her high-security apartment. I searched the balconies, distracted by a rush of noise as the Nice to Paris express emerged from the darkness. It thundered past us in a roar of steel rails and sped away into the night.
Stunned by the sound, Frances lost control of the car as the black vacuum in the wake of the express sucked the BMW from her hands. She gripped the wheel and shouted: ‘He’s going to crash! Paul!’
‘Where?’
She pointed to the road ahead, where brake lights flared in alarm. The Audi overran the stone kerb, struck the sea wall and whirled into the air before plunging onto the beach below.
I took the wheel from Frances’s hands and steered the BMW onto the pedestrian walkway. The two Mercedes slewed around each other and stopped, for a moment vanishing into the darkness as they switched off their lights. We rolled to a halt beside a derelict bar, its wooden walls covered with fading posters for the Juan jazz festival. I turned off the engine and stepped onto the sea wall. Frances sat stiffly over the wheel, staring at the instrument panel. She touched the brake lever, as if convinced that her clumsy driving had led to the accident.
Leaving her, I walked down the beach and let the cold sea sluice across my feet, soaking the rope soles of the espadrilles. I ran along the dark sand, the night air cutting through the open seams of Greenwood’s dinner jacket.
The Audi lay on its back in the shallow waves, flames lifting from the engine compartment. When the water retreated, I saw the driver’s body trapped under the rear seat, an arm pressed to the passenger window. The dying flames flowed across the water that swilled around the car.
Two men in dinner jackets stepped from the first Mercedes, scaled the sea wall and walked to the water’s edge, where one of them began to film the scene with a camcorder, waiting until the La Garoupe beam lit the stage for him. When I was twenty yards away he turned the camera and filmed me as I stood exhausted in the sodden espadrilles, my back to the lights of Golfe-Juan. I walked towards them, pointing to the trapped driver, but the two men climbed the beach and returned to their car.
‘Paul! Help him!’
Frances ran along the sand, a high-heeled shoe in each hand, throat muscles working while she gasped at the night air. She strode into the waves and gestured with her shoes at the car.
‘My God, they killed him …’
I held her as the waves broke around our knees, and steered her through the undertow onto the beach. A vehicle with a pulsing emergency light moved along the road from Golfe-Juan, slowing to a stop when it approached the burning car.
‘Paul, it’s the police … talk to them.’
‘They aren’t police.’ I watched the occupants step from the vehicle. ‘It’s the ambulance you ordered. We saw it outside the Villa Grimaldi …’
We stood at the water’s edge as the paramedics pulled the dead driver from the Audi. He was a large, fleshy man in his fifties, and his pallid skin seemed to have been immersed in the sea for days. His dinner jacket clung to one arm, lying beside him like the wing of a drowned bird. The paramedics turned him onto his back and began to work at his chest. On the collars of their white overalls were printed the name and telephone number of an emergency ambulance service in Toulon.
Looking down over their shoulders, I recognized the blanched features of Pascal Zander.
I stared into the security chief’s eyes. Once so sharp and devious, they now gazed at nothing, the flat pupils like empty windows. All the memories of his professional life, the secret codes and misdemeanours, were being washed away by the sea. One of the paramedics, a blond young man with a surfer’s physique, pointed to my feet, and I realized that I was standing on Zander’s hand. I counted the pudgy fingers, their skin impressed with the sole pattern of my espadrilles, and realized that a few hours earlier they had probably fondled my wife’s breasts.
Giving up their attempt to revive the dead man, the paramedics returned to the ambulance, where they lit cigarettes and spoke into their radio. I heard Frances gasp as she stood beside me, and turned to see her running along the beach to her car.
‘Frances, wait! We’ll call the police …’
Carrying her shoes, I set off towards the BMW. I was fifty yards away when I heard its engine begin to race. Frances waved me away, ran the car off the kerb and pulled out to pass the ambulance. In the pale light reflected from the waves I could see her face, almost stiff with shock. She swerved around the two Mercedes limousines and set off at speed towards Juan-les-Pins.
A mile away, beyond the Golfe-Juan marina, the siren of a police car seesawed through the night. The driver of the second Mercedes stepped from the car and opened the passenger door, beckoning to me. I stared at the dead man
on the sand, at his overweight, deflating body. The floating sleeves of his dinner jacket semaphored as the waves swilled up the beach, signalling a death to the sea. I held Frances’s shoes to my face, smelling the perfumed insoles and the fresh scent of brine.
The chauffeur waited while I climbed the sea wall to the Mercedes. He wore evening dress under his bowling jacket, and as I stepped up to him I saw his face and overlit eyes.
‘Halder? What are you doing here?’
‘Time to leave, Mr Sinclair.’
‘You were driving the car? I thought you were guarding Zander …’
I pointed to the dead man on the sand, his exposed torso washed by the waves. Halder’s face was expressionless. In the headlights of the approaching police car he resembled an accident bystander already bored by the tableau around him, the overturned Audi, a body and the waves. Too distracted to face me, he had distanced himself from any judgement on events.
‘We’re leaving, Mr Sinclair.’ He gestured towards the open passenger door. ‘It’s best if you come with us.’
A strong hand reached from the rear seat and gripped my wrist. Too tired to resist, I watched myself step into the car.
‘Paul …’ Alain Delage drew me towards the jump seat. ‘I’m glad we waited for you. I told Jane you’d join us.’
His composed face glowed in the police headlights. As I sat down he smiled with the ready sympathy of a rescuer reaching from a liferaft to help a survivor from the sea.
Facing me, squeezed together in the rear seat, were Jane and Simone Delage, the camcorder across their laps. Jane still wore her black silk dressing gown, and lay half-asleep against Simone’s shoulder. Recognizing me, she raised a hand in welcome, and managed a faint flicker of her bloodless lips. I realized that I was still holding Frances Baring’s shoes, and placed them on the floor at Delage’s feet.
Half a mile behind us, the spotlight of the police car lit up the shacks along the beach. When Halder started the engine of the Mercedes I drummed on the glass behind his head.
‘Alain – the police are on their way. We need to talk to them.’
‘Not now, Paul.’ Delage signalled to Halder. ‘The ambulance men will tell them everything. It’s been a long day for you …’
He sat back, larger and more confident than I remembered him. The overturned Audi had moved into the deeper water, and the paramedics returned to the beach. They knelt beside the dead security chief, taking a blood sample from his thigh. Zander’s dinner jacket had at last detached itself from his arm. It floated off, working its way across the waves, sleeves moving in a wavering breaststroke, determined to reach the safety of the open sea.
We sped on into an even deeper night.
34
Course Notes and a Tango
‘MR SINCLAIR, YOU’VE been most helpful.’ Sergeant Jucaud paused at the door and tucked his notebook into his jacket. ‘Pascal Zander was a close friend of the Cannes police.’
‘As he often said – I’m glad to tell you all I know …’
I shook the young detective’s hand and watched him walk back to his car. He paused by the Jaguar, admiring its lines, and knelt by the rear wing. Something out of the ordinary had caught his trained eye, perhaps an unpaid parking ticket snagged by the boot handle. With a small knife he teased a paint fleck from the chromium bumper, then raised it to the sunlight and waved reassuringly to me. The array of dents and scratches marking the Jaguar’s venerable bodywork were too slight to suggest that the car had been involved in a serious collision. The miscreant paint fleck had probably come from Wilder Penrose’s fibreglass door, still bearing its open wound like a duelling scar. Besides, as Sergeant Jucaud knew, I could hardly have reversed the Audi into the sea.
Careful to remain calm, and glad of the day’s first injection, I returned the sergeant’s salute. I waited until he had driven away, and then strolled back to the pool. I stared at my reflection in the water, trying to accept that I had spoken for twenty minutes to the sergeant and told him absolutely nothing about the true cause of Zander’s death.
A publicity plane was carrying out its morning tour of Eden-Olympia, advertising a clay-pigeon range in the hills beyond Grasse. I lay on the sun-lounger, feeling the guilt and pain ebb from my knee. A faint steam rose from the wet footprints Jane had left on the tiles. Looking at the tiny insteps, I thought of Frances Baring’s shoes, with their scent of toes and midnight sea, now wrapped in a supermarket bag in the Jaguar’s boot.
In the five days since Zander’s death, Frances had not once returned to her office. Her secretary told me that she had taken a fortnight’s leave, but her telephone at Marina Baie des Anges had been disconnected. I could still hear her cry of fear when she recognized Zander’s body, and her panic as she ran blindly to her car. I needed to see her again, and somehow reassure her that Zander’s death had been an accident. Already I had largely convinced myself.
A lethal evening had turned into an even stranger night. I remembered the drive back to Eden-Olympia, when I had been too stunned to demand that Halder stop the car and report the incident to the police. I stared into the night, at the closed filling stations and supermarkets, while Alain Delage flexed his thighs and the two women huddled together in the back of the Mercedes, a secure enclave in a world of violent men. Simone had watched Jane protectively, like a mother with a tired child, warning me away when I tried to take her hands.
As we reached Eden-Olympia I expected a detachment of French gendarmerie to be waiting for us. Too tired to join the others for a nightcap, I climbed the stairs to my bedroom and fell asleep with the light on. I woke an hour later, and heard the sprinklers playing on the cycad below my window. Dance music came from the lounge, the sweet strains and swoops of a 1940s tango. I went downstairs, still wearing David Greenwood’s kelp-stained dinner jacket, and found that Jane had revived. She was dancing with Halder, one arm outstretched as he bowed her backwards across his thigh.
The Delages sat side by side in the armchairs, watching the dance like impresarios trying out a scene from a new musical, a tale of tragic love across the divide set in a shabby Buenos Aires dance hall. Halder moved with his light-footed grace, but he looked ill at ease, well aware that the dance might continue once the music had stopped. Alain Delage was filming the tango, and behind the camcorder his face bore the same expression that I had seen during the beating of the African trinket salesman.
I realized that a target was being primed. I stepped through the cigarette smoke and slipped my arm around Jane, who moved through a deep dream of her own and scarcely seemed to notice that her partner had changed. Responding to my clumsy steps, she smiled at me as if recognizing an old acquaintance who had strayed briefly into her life. But Halder bowed to me from the door, all too aware of the danger he had faced.
Alain Delage had taken over as Eden-Olympia’s security chief, and Wilder Penrose’s prize pupil was now his most eager collaborator. The introverted and mousy accountant so despised by Frances Baring had turned into a confident and well-adjusted sociopath.
I lay on the sun-lounger, listening to Jane’s shower, and glad to have shared a late breakfast with her. Sergeant Jucaud had called at seven, delaying the start of her professional day and providing a small window of opportunity to revive a fading marriage. Sitting with us in the kitchen, the sergeant questioned me about Zander’s ‘state of mind’, a euphemism for drunkenness. Analysis of the dead man’s blood had indicated a high level of alcohol in his system. There were no witnesses to the accident, Jucaud told us, and it seemed likely that Zander had fallen into a stupor at the wheel of the Audi and met his death alone on the night sand.
Jane nodded her agreement, but I was surprised to learn that she had signed the death certificate. According to the official account, she was driving along the coast road and saw the paramedics beside the overturned car, stepped out and confirmed that Zander had died from severe head and chest injuries.
I listened to all this without comment. Sergeant Jucaud was a
graduate of an elite police college, and certainly no part of any conspiracy between Eden-Olympia and the Cannes police. But one offhand remark unsettled me. Senior officers at the Villa Grimaldi had reported that I was one of the last people to speak to Zander, and had even seemed to threaten him.
Jane emerged from the terrace, dressed in a cream linen suit, hair tied with a black silk ribbon. She carried her coffee cup but barely needed the stimulant, moving in an easy, amphetamine stride. As always, I was amazed by how quickly she could recover her poise and energy. She waved cheerfully to the gardener, Monsieur Anvers, and threw her biscuit to a sparrow watching from the rose pergola. Once again I felt all my old affection for her, a warmth that transcended Eden-Olympia and everything that had happened to us.
At the same time, I could see how much she had changed. She had put on weight, and the skin of her face seemed grey and toneless. She often apologized for the bloody stools in the lavatory that she forgot to flush away, and blamed the constipating diamorphine. Without thinking, she tossed her coffee dregs into the swimming pool.
‘Paul … do you think Jucaud was satisfied?’
‘Our stories matched. You sounded very convincing.’
‘They weren’t stories. It was an accident.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I was there.’ Jane leaned her head back and let the sun play on her pallid skin. ‘We were overtaking and he lost control. I didn’t tell Jucaud because it would drag in everyone else.’
‘That’s thoughtful of you. Who was driving?’
‘Alain, I think. Zander was very drunk. I could smell it on the beach.’
‘I didn’t like his cologne either. I’m surprised you could smell it from the car – you never left it.’
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