‘Has he got married?’ Xavier asked.
‘Who, Ali?’ The windows were not particularly clean and Luc was checking for dust on the sills. ‘No. He likes women too much. He was engaged to a girl in Paris eleven years ago, but when he went home to Iran, she didn’t go with him.’
This was new information. BOX 88 knew that Eskandarian was a ladies’ man who preferred to remain single. On trips to Europe and Asia in the previous six years, surveillance reports had mentioned women in Eskandarian’s entourage with whom he was casually involved. As far as Kite was aware, there was no record on file of a fiancée.
‘Is she still around?’ Xavier asked. He was checking out the bathroom, picking up bottles of bath salts, turning the ancient taps at the sink.
‘Non,’ Luc replied, continuing in French: ‘She moved to Barcelona. Married a Catalan nationalist and had a baby. She likes politicians.’
Kite didn’t know what a Catalan was but resolved to elicit the woman’s name for his morning report. He would need to ask the question without it sounding nosey and unnatural. With luck, she would come up in conversation at a later point.
‘OK, now we swim,’ Xavier announced and immediately called out Jacqui’s name. His voice boomed around the attic. ‘We’re going to the pool!’ he shouted. ‘Mum! You coming?’
‘There’s no need to shout, darling.’ Rosamund had appeared at the bottom of the stairs, looking as serene and composed as ever. ‘Yes, we’re all going.’
Martha was beside her, a towel looped around her neck. She had already changed into a pale cream summer dress. A dark blue swimsuit was visible in silhouette underneath. She stared directly at Kite as she looked up the stairs.
‘Hi. I’m Lockie.’
‘I know. I’m Martha.’
‘We’ve actually met before,’ he said.
‘Really?’
‘Yeah. At a party in London last year.’
‘Oh? I don’t remember.’
Xavier was standing beside him. Kite felt his cheeks flush. He was slightly crushed that Martha had no recollection of their meeting, although she seemed embarrassed by her failure to remember, rather than indifferent.
‘Hi, Xav,’ she said, adjusting her hair as she looked up the stairs.
‘Hey.’ Xavier walked down towards her and they hugged in a way that made Kite edgy. ‘Good flight?’
‘Fine, thanks. So lovely to be here. The house is amazing.’
Kite wanted to play it cool but found himself following Xavier downstairs and nodding at Martha, aware that he probably looked like a lovesick puppy. She smiled at him, as if apologising for the effect she was having, and walked off. Luc emerged from the master bedroom.
‘You coming, Papa?’ Xavier asked.
‘Maybe,’ Luc replied. ‘I have a lot to do. I have to find my trunks.’
‘Come,’ said Kite. He was impatient to clear the house. ‘You’ve driven for eight hours. It’ll be good to swim it off.’
To his relief, Luc agreed and assured both of them that he would appear at the pool ‘before too long’.
‘Great,’ Xavier told him. ‘So let’s go.’
Kite took his time, changing into swimming trunks, putting sun cream on his pale Scottish skin, listening out to see if Luc was on his way to the pool. Xavier appeared wearing a pair of canary yellow Bermuda shorts, a towel clutched in his right hand, a packet of cigarettes in the other.
‘Ready?’
‘Sure.’
Kite had no alternative but to go with him. Walking the narrow paths of the garden, bordered by rosemary bushes and olive trees, he could hear the splashes and laughter of Jacqui and Martha up ahead in the pool. Luc and Rosamund were still in the house. They would probably spend at least half an hour unpacking and talking to the staff, then go for a swim. Kite looked at his watch. It was past five-thirty. Eskandarian would be landing in Paris in less than an hour. That left a three-hour window in which to switch the lamps, but no clear opportunity in which to do so. Kite wanted to prove himself to Peele and Strawson. He thought of Carl on the motorway and didn’t want to let him down. The cicadas were still humming in the hills. He ducked beneath the fallen branches of a palm tree and emerged into a clearing in front of the pool. The door to the swimming hut was already open.
‘Look what I found,’ said Jacqui, triumphantly carrying the ghetto blaster. Kite hoped she didn’t trip and fall in the water or accidentally drop the stereo and smash it on the concrete paving.
‘At least we’ll have music down here,’ Xavier said. ‘How’s the temperature?’
Martha was nowhere to be seen. Kite assumed she was taking photographs in the garden. He took off his T-shirt and walked to the edge of the pool, bending down to stick his hand in the water. The next thing he knew Xavier had pushed him and Kite was surfacing to uproarious laughter.
‘Right!’ he shouted and sprung out of the water, chasing the cackling Xavier around the edge of the deep end, only to collide with Martha as she emerged from the hut.
‘Shit, sorry,’ he said, grabbing her shoulders to halt his momentum yet covering her in droplets of cold water.
‘That’s OK,’ she replied nonchalantly and dived into the pool with the ease and grace of a kingfisher. Kite had a nose full of her perfume, the astonishing sensation of her skin on the tips of his fingers. He caught up with Xavier only to see brother and sister jump into the water simultaneously. Kite bombed in to join them. For the next twenty minutes he showed off in front of Martha, beating Xavier in a swimming race, holding his breath underwater for two minutes, ducking him from behind whenever his friend wasn’t looking. His exploits seemed to have no effect on her. Martha mostly chatted to Jacqui and appeared to ignore him. Eventually Rosamund emerged from the garden, keeping her Paris salon haircut bone-dry as she swam an elegant, upright breaststroke. Kite sat on the steps of the pool listening to a Neil Young cassette which Xavier had grabbed from the house. Waiting for Luc to come to the pool was like waiting for a train that would never come. Kite had to stop himself looking up at the house every time he heard movement in the garden.
Finally, at around six-fifteen, Xavier’s father emerged in a pair of dark red Speedos and dived in with an almighty patriarchal splash. Kite instantly stood up, announced that he was going to the house, and prayed that nobody would follow him. To his relief, both Xavier and Jacqui seemed keen to join their father in the pool. Rosamund was happily talking to Martha about photography.
‘Can you bring more cigarettes?’ Xavier called out.
‘Sure,’ Kite replied.
As soon as he was past the palm tree, he ran along the narrow paths of the garden towards the rear of the house. At the veranda, he took off his espadrilles and wiped his feet on the mat. The house was still and silent. Kite walked quickly through the sitting room to the hall, bounded up the stairs two at a time, checked that each of the bedrooms on the first floor was empty. Then he went into his room and unplugged the lamp. Still wearing his damp swimming shorts, he carried it up the narrow staircase to the smaller of the two attic bedrooms and placed it on the floor. He unplugged the lamp behind the door in Eskandarian’s makeshift office and carried it out onto the landing. Having plugged in the modified lamp, he left the room as he had otherwise found it.
A noise below. Kite stopped moving. As noiselessly as possible, he picked up the lamp from the landing and darted into the bathroom. Somebody was walking up the stairs. He could lock the door and pretend to be using the toilet, hoping that whoever was coming up wouldn’t hear him. The person had reached the landing. Kite had no choice other than to close the door and slide the lock as deliberately as possible. He couldn’t hide. It would be disastrous to be caught sneaking around.
‘Bonjour?’
A woman’s voice, tentative and confused. Hélène. There was a low glass table beside the bathroom window with a small plastic tray on it. Kite put the lamp on the tray and allowed the flex to fall behind the table so that if the housekeeper came in she might not not
ice that the lamp was out of place. He thought of Strawson testing him in the Churchill bathroom. This was a different order of anxiety.
‘Oui?’ he said.
‘Monsieur Bonnard?’
‘No, it’s Lachlan. Xavier’s friend,’ Kite replied in French. ‘I’m just using the bathroom.’
Hélène said something in response that Kite could not understand. He heard her moving around in the office. He prayed that she would not notice the switched lamp. A woman like that, who had worked in the house for so long, would surely know every piece of furniture in every room. If the Bonnard family now came back to find Kite trapped in the bathroom, with a lamp missing from his bedroom and another mysteriously moved to the attic, it would take a miracle of quick thinking to dig himself out of trouble.
Relax, he told himself. Be cool. He remembered conversations with Peele about controlling his breathing and took a deep breath through his nose. He continued to listen as Hélène moved around the office. Was she putting sheets on the unmade bed? That would take at least five minutes. Christ, maybe she was going to sweep the floors and clean the windows? Kite knew that he should make some noise and lifted the toilet seat. What was she doing that was taking so long?
Footsteps on the stairs. Was somebody else coming up or was Hélène finally going down? He waited, listening at the door. Kite’s whole future seemed to depend on the next few moments. He was sure that she had gone, yet he needed to be certain. He kept listening out but there was no further sound.
At last he made his decision. He flushed the toilet and ran the tap at the sink to make it sound as though he was washing his hands. Kite then opened the door. There was laughter in the garden. Xavier was coming back. Kite remembered what Peele had told him. We think you won’t panic if you find yourself under pressure. Time to prove him right.
Kite went out onto the landing and down to the first floor, leaving the lamp behind. He could neither see nor hear Hélène, but was sure that at least two people were now entering the house.
He had to take the risk. He sprinted back up the stairs, grabbed the lamp, pulled the flex free from the table and waited on the landing, listening out for Hélène. He could hear Xavier laughing somewhere downstairs. Luc was with him. They were making so much noise it was impossible to hear anything else. Kite had no choice. Moving as quickly as he could, he carried the lamp down to the first floor. At the bottom of the stairs he waited again, saw that the coast was clear and hurried across the corridor to his room, closing the door behind him. He dropped the lamp on the bed and sat beside it, breathing hard. He felt as though he had walked through deep mud across a vast open field, exposed and vulnerable. Xavier was bounding up the stairs.
‘Lockie?’
Kite picked up the lamp, put it behind the door and said: ‘Yeah?’ with as much nonchalance as he could summon.
‘You OK? You didn’t come back.’
‘Sorry. Thought I’d lost my headphones.’
‘Ah, OK. We’re going into town. Want to come?’
‘Sure.’
If only he had waited, he could have stayed behind while everyone went to Mougins. Kite put his head in his hands. He again controlled his breathing in the way Peele had taught him: a deep breath in through the nose, holding it for a count of seven, then slowly out through the mouth. ‘Buddhist mumbo-jumbo but it works,’ he had said, turning the doubling dice to sixty-four in yet another backgammon triumph. Kite looked up at the ceiling. He had done it. He had successfully switched the lamps. The sense of achievement, after so many weeks of study and preparation, was exhilarating.
He changed into a pair of trousers and put on a clean T-shirt. Hélène was placing fresh flowers in a vase outside Luc and Rosamund’s bedroom. She had a quick, bustling manner and seemed to have been waiting for him to emerge from his room.
‘There is a toilet just here, sir,’ she said in French, indicating the bathroom door beside them. To Kite’s relief, it was evident that she thought he had simply lost his bearings and wandered into the wrong area of the house.
‘I realise that now,’ he replied. ‘Thank you.’
Seconds later, Xavier emerged from his room.
‘What was that about?’ he asked. Hélène had gone into the empty spare room to close the shutters.
‘Nothing,’ he replied. ‘I was just introducing myself. Let’s go into town.’
37
Isobel heard the car pulling up outside the cottage. For a short, sweet instant she imagined that it was Kite coming home to save her, but then the youngest of the three men, the one with the acne and the narrow chin, stood up and walked towards the door.
‘Who is it?’ Isobel asked him.
The man pressed a finger to his lips and looked at her accusingly, urging her to keep quiet. It had been easy to unsettle and annoy them in this way. From the moment the men had surrounded her outside the house and dragged her back inside, she had known that she would have to resort to manipulations. She had grown up with two older brothers and knew how to deal with men. She was a pregnant woman who had worked in paediatrics for almost six years. She knew that she could feign illness and hysteria, play on their sentimental weakness for their mothers and sisters, make them think that she would lose the baby if they did anything to hurt her.
The baby. Right from the start, Rambo had kept kicking, almost as if he knew that his mother needed support and encouragement. When the oldest of the three thugs had grabbed her and pushed her up against the car, Isobel’s belly had compressed against the metal. Initially, she had feared an abruption, but once she was back inside the house – screaming at them to let her go, calling them every name under the sun, making out that she would die if she didn’t immediately lie down – Rambo had given her a sequence of kicks, almost like an acknowledgement of the brilliance of her performance, and Isobel had felt a wave of relief.
As the day proceeded, she kept up the act. She groaned in pain whenever she moved. She went into the bathroom and came out complaining that she was bleeding and needed to go to hospital. The leader didn’t fall for that, but it didn’t matter. What was important was to keep up the show, to make them feel guilty for what they were doing to her, to make them imagine what it would be like to live the rest of their lives knowing that they had been responsible for the death of a woman and her unborn child. One of the guards, Karim was his name, was kinder and less volatile than the others. She made him fetch pillows, water and food. She sobbed and told him she was in constant pain. He liked football. He had told her that he supported Arsenal. She had promised him that she would make sure her son supported the club for life if only they would let her go.
Soon their patience wore out and, before Isobel could do anything to stop him, the leader had jabbed a needle into her thigh. She quickly lost consciousness. Yet even this played into her hands. When she woke up, she was groggy and worried about the child. Almost immediately, she felt Rambo kick, but continued to act as though the baby had been dangerously sedated, that she needed sugar and water and proper medical care. At one point, two out of the three goons watching her – ‘goons’ was a favourite word of Lockie’s – were rushing around the kitchen like waiters in a bad farce variously searching for non-existent glucose tablets, biscuits, bags of decaffeinated green tea.
‘What did you put into me?’ she demanded of them. ‘My leg aches. I can hardly move. What kind of man puts a needle into a pregnant woman? You could have killed both of us!’
They spoke to one another in Farsi, telling her nothing about why they had seized her husband or where he was being held. Isobel knew that it was connected to Lockie’s work. ‘I’ve made enemies,’ he had once told her. ‘I’ve made mistakes. I’ve enjoyed successes. One day people might try to come after me. The rules have changed. In the old days, people like us were off limits. Not any more.’ When he didn’t respond to their emails and messages, they would wonder what had happened to him and send someone to the cottage to investigate. Isobel had to believe that. The alternativ
e was too awful to contemplate.
Eventually the effort of keeping up the act began to wear her out. Even Rambo grew tired. Isobel could tell that the baby had gone to sleep. One of the guards had gone upstairs to rest. Karim was beside her, flicking through the sports pages of The Times. That was when the car pulled up outside, bright lights against the closed curtains.
‘Stay where you are,’ Karim told her. ‘A friend has come to help us.’
38
Luc stayed behind at the villa and Rosamund drove Kite, Xavier, Martha and Jacqui into town. While she bought English newspapers at a shop on the outskirts of Mougins, Xavier stocked up on vodka and absinthe at the local supermarket. Jacqui pointed out that he and Kite had already bought bottles of duty-free Smirnoff and Jim Beam at the airport; why did they need even more alcohol when there was plenty in the house? Xavier told his sister that she was ‘boring’ and should mind her own business. They had a brief, bickering argument beside a chicken rotisserie while Kite and Martha looked on. Kite realised that Xavier was still thinking like a schoolboy, hoarding alcohol in secret rather than realising that he could go out and buy it whenever and wherever he pleased. He watched him put the bottles into Jacqui’s tote bag, pleading with her to keep it quiet. Jacqui complained that they were too heavy, so Martha hid the absinthe in her bag. Her friendship with Jacqui was a mystery to Kite. Xavier’s sister was conservative and short-tempered, an academic goody two shoes with straight A’s from birth. Martha, on the other hand, seemed to possess the loose, easy nonchalance of the free spirit. Xavier had told him that the two had met at Roedean when they were eleven. Martha had been expelled a few years later for reasons which remained shrouded in mystery. Kite concluded that it was probably one of the lasting effects of boarding school; lifelong friendships were forged regardless of temperament or circumstances.
Box 88 : A Novel (2020) Page 27