‘Does it hurt?’
‘Yes. But it’ll be okay.’ She paused. ‘Yes, I’ve been expecting you.’
‘Why?’
‘Your men who are so good at finding out about Presidents and Popes don’t cover their tracks very well. I knew they’d been making inquiries in London.’
It was lie number one. She could well have known that someone was inquiring, but no World News people had been anywhere near her. But I couldn’t challenge it without revealing my own lie and admitting that the CIA was involved.
‘I’m sorry if my people embarrassed you.’
‘At least they didn’t try to choke me to death.’
‘There’ll be others,’ I said. ‘Reporters. Not just World News. Police too, if they haven’t already been. That’s why I came to see you: I wanted to warn you. Tell you what’s happening.’
When she didn’t react, I decided to plunge on. I was getting nowhere. I had to get into it. I gave her what Ryder had called version A: how the party was going to turn into a scandal, because of stories being peddled in Fleet Street; how Louise Allenby was supposed to have suffocated in a sleeping bag while she was high on dope.
She listened, still with no sign of surprise, then she said quietly: ‘So what do you want from me? Do you want me to lie? Say you weren’t there? That I met you somewhere else?’
‘No. That’s not possible.’
‘Then what?’
I knew I was in a corner. She was too quick, too abrasive. I still didn’t know why she had been expecting me and already version A was useless. I wasn’t ready to jump straight to version B, so I decided to improvise a middle ground.
‘I do need an alibi,’ I said. ‘The police aren’t satisfied that Allenby died accidentally. They believe she may have been murdered.’
‘And you think you’re a suspect?’
‘Yes. It’s possible. I knew her slightly.’
So there’s no motive?’
‘I’m open to suggestions. So apparently are the police.’
‘You’ve been questioned by the police?’
‘Not officially. Not directly about the murder. Only hints.’
‘Then why do you think they’re after you?’
‘The hints were very strong. And I’ve had other information.’
‘And you want an alibi.’
‘Possibly, yes.’
She smiled. It was what I had learned to call her Seagull smile, a warm laughing smile which set the edges of her mouth into an unusually steep curve. It was the first hint since I’d arrived in St. Tropez of the woman I had thought I’d known.
‘No problem at all,’ she said, ‘I’ll be glad to help.’ She paused, then said in a mock Cockney accent she had used before to tease me: ‘Yes, your honour. You see, we was in this sleeping bag and we never got out because he’d won me, see, and, I mean he wouldn’t want to pass up free nooky, I mean, would ‘e? So he couldn’t have done it. We were in there fucking our brains out the whole time. Err.. yes, your honor, he did get out twice… once to go to the loo and once to get some more grass. No, your honour, he wasn’t away long. Not long enough to kill anyone, I’m sure. The grass? Yes, your honour. Marijuana. No, it was mine. When I said he went to get some more, I meant from my handbag. Yes, your honour. He likes to smoke but he never buys his own, on account of ‘im being respectable.’
She broke off, still laughing. ‘Did that sound all right, or should I rehearse some more?’
But her smile didn’t last.
‘And you talk about me playing games,’ she said angrily. ‘You wanted to talk straight. So talk straight.’
‘All right,’ I said, stung at being taken in by the smile. ‘Let’s start from the beginning. How did you know I was coming here?’
‘There were questions in London, I told you.’
‘That’s not good enough.’
‘No, it bloody well wasn’t good enough. Whoever it was, they weren’t just looking for my new address. They’ve been to Scotland asking questions about my mother. They’ve been to my schools; places I grew up; they’ve been sniffing round friends. Yes, they could have been reporters, but they weren’t, were they? They weren’t just asking about me. They were asking about us. And they weren’t just plain old-fashioned coppers either, were they?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘What do I mean?’ she sneered. ‘I mean that if it were an ordinary murder inquiry, I wouldn’t have Americans, posing as reporters, asking questions about me right here in St. Tropez. For God’s sake, John, don’t be naive. St. Tropez, my St. Tropez, is a village. You might as well try to make discreet inquiries in Chipping Magna. And if I hadn’t worked it out for myself, I’d have known anyway that intelligence were involved.’
‘How? How would you have known?’
‘A phone call,’ Seagull said. ‘A phone call from Kate. A Kate in total panic who’d just skipped out of Cairo because the CIA were about to get the Egyptians to arrest her. She wanted to know what the hell you’d done.’ She smiled. ‘That can’t surprise you. You know Kate. She’s never short of men who care about her welfare. One of them was in Egyptian security.’
I listened with growing alarm. People as far on the fringe as a security official in Cairo knew I was being investigated; it might be only days before hints started appearing in the press. The French scandal sheets would float anything. They’d probably announce I was also the Queen’s secret lover as well as a spy, just for good measure. And still I was no further with Seagull. Everything she said was plausible. The CIA and MI6 could have been that clumsy; they were in a hurry and Ryder had admitted they were desperate. Kate could have called Seagull; they were supposed to have been friends since school. Or it could all be a professional’s defense, one so carefully constructed that I would have to believe it.
I knew it was confrontation time. I got up from the chair. ‘Seagull, could I have another drink? I want to get something from the car.’
She read my look. ‘So we’re getting to the nitty-gritty at last? I’m getting through to you?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘you’re getting through to me.’
Copies of Ryder’s photographs were in a document case in the trunk and as I walked over to get them I wondered how I should show them to her. Would she be expecting this? Had she a defense for this too? Though the sun was already low on the horizon and the first cicadas were beginning to crackle in the woods, it was still hot enough to feel my pale skin tingle through the back of my shirt.
In the bay there were more whitecaps than before, but the woods around the house were sheltering the tent from the stiffening breeze. There were more cars too in the lane we had driven up, presumably the beach crowd dispersing to villas in the hills. I watched for a moment, enjoying a break in the tension of fencing with Seagull, then I saw the Citroen parked under some trees about a mile down the hill. Or at least I saw a Citroen roof, a fragment of metal caught by the sun. There was no way of being sure. The model was one of the most popular larger cars in France and metallic silver one of the standard color options. If we hadn’t noticed the Citroen outside Ste. Maxime, I might well not have noticed this one. There were other cars parked on the hillside—lovers perhaps, or people enjoying the view from one of the deeper patches of shade.
I heard Seagull’s voice behind me. ‘Well, what do you have to show me?’
I wondered suddenly if she was speaking for the record. Could the Citroen be watching out for her, with a gun mike trained on the tent, waiting to step in if her defenses didn’t convince me?
I took the document case from the trunk and went back to the little terrace of the tent. Seagull had poured another drink but it was tepid and the tonic had gone flat.
I left it on the table and reached down for the document case, glancing down the valley to see if the Citroen was still there. At first I thought I saw the roof, then I realized it was a trick of the sunlight; the Citroen had gone.
‘What’s the matter?’ Seagull said.
> ‘Nothing.’
‘So what do you have to show me?’
‘Some photographs,’ I said, laying them out on the table. ‘I came to ask you to explain these.’ It was impossible to tell if she went white; her tan was too deep to betray any change in skin tone. But her eyes and her mouth were enough to tell me how scared she was.
‘I’ve nothing to say,’ she said. ‘Those photographs belong to the past. They have no connection with the party or Louise Allenby or you.’
‘Seagull, I want to believe that,’ I said. ‘But saying it isn’t enough. You have to explain.’
‘They’re the past,’ she said. ‘The past is closed.’
‘It’s being reopened. By me, now. By others if you won’t tell me.’
‘I won’t reopen the past. Not for you, or anyone. Take the photographs. I don’t want to see them.’
I turned, looking for words that would get through to her, trying at the same time to control my own anger.
Then the dart hit the back of my thigh.
Darts are supposed to sting, but this one felt as though an iron bar had been laid across the muscle. I yelled ‘Shit’ and stumbled forward, the leg buckling under me. The pain seemed to go both up and down, affecting my toes and stinging right into my groin. I remember thinking, I’ll get Seagull for this, then I saw the second dart hit her. It struck her in the softest part of the hip and the impact tore a hole in the muslin and actually took fragments of fabric into the hole it made in the skin. When the blood came, the hole seemed to explode like a lanced boil and she screamed and put her hand over it and pitched forward onto the floor.
I was already losing consciousness when I saw the flames in the tiny kitchen of the tent. I’d no idea how they’d started; my head was swimming and I couldn’t focus or hear properly, but I could see the fire catching the end of the canvas partition. Seagull was on the tarpaulin floor of the terrace; I had fallen inward and my head and shoulders were inside the tent. I was closest to the fire, five or six feet away at most, but the difference was academic; with the breeze and dry canvas and grass, the tent would be our funeral pyre. But whoever had shot the darts and started the fire had reckoned without my father. Later, as I lay delirious in the hospital, I said a prayer to him, telling him it was finally all right. We were finally quits.
As a child of five or six, he had once summoned me sharply as I sat playing by the hearth instead of coming for a meal; scared by his voice I had got up too quickly, tripped over the curb, and plunged arms first into the fire, I’d been almost a year in the hospital and it had grieved my father right up to his death that he should have left the fire unguarded and caused me so much suffering as well as giving me a fear of fire that had never left me. Over the years I had tried to master it, but in battle zones it was always the flamethrower or the burning building that made my guts dissolve, more than any shelling or machine-gun fire.
In the tent, it was the fear that saved me. As the flames approached, blind panic fought with the effects of the drug and gave me the strength to drag Seagull and myself out of the tent, when I should have been lying helplessly in the path of the fire.
I remember nothing clearly about the escape, but one image was strong and sharp: that kitchen was the blazing hearth and I could not, would not fall into it again.
The rest was fragments in a delirium. With hindsight, I can put them into a kind of sequence; at the time, there was only confusion and strange shapes and noise.
The monstrous black shape soaring over the trees I know now was a twin-engined Canadair rigged for firefighting. Later I saw press pictures of two of them doing their spectacular water-collecting belly flops in the bay of St. Tropez before skimming back to the hills and opening their gigantic bomb doors to let thousands of gallons of seawater spray onto the blazing trees. When I first became aware of the plane, I must have known subliminally what it was because I remember trying to turn face upwards. I wanted water, refreshment, and though my arms were almost paralyzed from the drug I tried to roll over and turn Seagull so that she could enjoy it too. Then there was the roar of the engine and I saw the doors opening over the tree tops like a vision in a science fiction movie and I thought, ‘No. That’s not right. This is going to hurt. It’s too heavy.’ As I tried to turn back, I remembered stupidly the Bob Dylan song, ‘A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall.’ And I thought I was shielding my face when the water did fall, but I must have hardly moved my limbs except in my imagination because the rain fell on my back, stinging and cutting.
After that I lay still, enjoying the slippery feel of the soaking grass until I looked up and saw more fire, still in the trees, and I somehow got the idea that my chest was soaked with blood, not water, and I tried to move so I could wipe it away.
The next fragment was an argument. I could see, just, but it was like the view through a car windshield in a storm when the wipers are not working. I was in an ambulance and someone was trying to get in the back doors but a male nurse with a Red Cross armband was barring the way. Outside, I could hear French voices shouting angrily and someone else, a woman, crying and there were sirens and the sound of horns honking. It was a tableau I could make no sense of at all and I had to be told much later that the ambulance bringing us from the fire had been involved in a traffic accident; an injured man was being put with us, but the driver was refusing to let the relatives in. The nurse told me afterwards that I’d raised an arm and said petulantly, ‘This, is my room. I paid for it. Go and sleep somewhere else.’
After that, there was the hospital. The first time I opened my eyes, I saw Seagull lying in a bed next to mine and I thought stupidly, ‘If this was an English hospital, we’d be in separate rooms,’ then Cox appeared, blurred but reassuring, and said, just as I fell unconscious again, ‘It’s okay, Chief, you’re not burned. Neither is she. You made it.’
The second time I came to, I thought I was still in the middle of a bizarre dream, because Armand Celestin, the WN Paris bureau chief, was standing there, looking as he always did as though waiting for the long-overdue summons to the Quai d’Orsai for his appointment as the next French foreign minister. Cox again, I thought. The ever-resourceful Cox. If you needed someone to browbeat the local gendarmerie, who better than Celestin, the diplomat manque, friend and confidante of three French presidents.
When I slept again, the journalist in me took over my dreams and I found myself writing press reports of the fire. ‘Police in St. Tropez said tonight they were waiting to question two English campers in connection with the forest fire which destroyed several thousand hectares of forest in the Var Department yesterday…’ and so on. I started an argument with myself at one point about whether names should be used in the story: local reporter versus Paris bureau chief; one wanting a good byline story, the other concerned about libel if police had gotten the foreign names wrong, as they often did. Then the dream faded and I imagined the Canadair dropping fire bombs to dry out a wet forest, and the next thing I remember I was on a stretcher being put into the back of a camper van.
The stretcher was halted with me halfway into the van. I could see the French license plate and the ‘F’ plaque, then Celestin came into view, then Cox, then another stretcher with Seagull sleeping soundly, her face flat on a narrow white pillow.
I remember Celestin looking distastefully at the camper van. He had never, I’m sure, vacationed in anything less comfortable than a five-star hotel, and he seemed uncertain that a human being could be allowed to travel in anything quite so inadequate.
Then Cox came over to the stretcher, holding a piece of paper.
‘Can you hear me?’ he whispered.
‘Yes.’
‘Last-minute formalities. You have to sign this. The police are letting us take you away, but you have to sign a medical release.’
I managed a nod, but found I couldn’t move my arm.
Cox glanced around, then shifted his position so that his back was between the stretcher and the policeman and scrawled a signature on the for
m. ‘I’ve done Seagull’s,’ he said. ‘Okay, we’re all set.’
‘Where are we going?’ I said, hearing my voice sounding faint and hoarse.
‘Italy. Over the frontier via Menton. Quickest way of getting you out of French jurisdiction. It was a helluva fire. Everyone’s very jumpy.’
‘Cox,’ I whispered, ‘have you ever considered getting a job as someone’s exec?’
Cox grinned. ‘Not fucking likely. I’m for the quiet life. Give me El Salvador any time.’
11
By the time I was fully conscious and able to grasp events again, the camper van had transformed itself into the cabin of a Lear executive jet. We were on the ground—I had no idea where—and I could hear the engines warming up for takeoff. I was in a berth and, for the first time since the fire, I felt comfortable. I had a slight headache, but the pain had gone from my leg and I could see clearly and I felt quite cheerful—until I saw Cox.
When he stepped through the partitioned door into the cabin, he looked more worried than I had ever seen him. There was no sign of the relaxed, wisecracking Cox. He looked tired, which was understandable enough, but there was obviously much more wrong than that.
He sat down on a folding seat beside the berth and leaned over as though to talk confidentially. When I tried to thank him for what he had done in France, he brushed it aside and said, ‘Chief, there’s no time right now. All hell’s breaking loose.’ I was going to make some comment about where had the ‘serious but not solemn Cox gone,’ but I could see that whatever had happened had really got to him.
‘What’s happened?’
‘What hasn’t.’
‘Where are we?’
‘Genoa. We’re taking off for Stelstead. It was the nearest quiet field to London.’
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