Next stop was the Calais–Dover night ferry, by her calculations an eight-hour drive, including meal stops, from here. In planning the trip with her husband and Denempont, they had discussed ways to handle a difficult customs official. They had discussed the possibility of a bribe, which was in general how it worked in Italy, and she had a large wad of lire with her, which had not been needed, as well as a large sum in French francs.
But they had ruled out any attempt to bribe either Swiss or British customs officials as too risky. If it backfired in either of these countries, she could risk arrest, and the consequences of that were unthinkable. She was going to have to rely on her charm which, with her handsome looks and aristocratic pedigree, she knew how to turn on to maximum effect, and as a fall-back, on a cunning plan that had been suggested by Denempont.
Even so, as she hit the road once more, she felt an increasing knot of anxiety with every kilometre that drew her nearer to Calais. She arrived at the port shortly after 11 p.m., an hour ahead of her estimate, and pulled into a quiet area of the ferry port car park, near some lorries. She wanted to arrive in Dover, as discussed with the art dealer, at 3 a.m., when the customs officers would be at their tiredest. With the one-hour time difference that meant catching the 2.30 a.m. boat. Three and a half hours to kill.
She could murder a coffee, but she was nervous about leaving the car unattended, so instead she sat in the car, in the darkness, listening to music on the radio, ate the baguette she had bought earlier at a filling station, sipped on a bottle of mineral water and chain-smoked until it was time to board.
She switched on the ignition and pressed the starter button. The engine turned over several times without firing and she felt a deep stab of panic. She tried again, heard the starter motor whirring and smelt a stench of petrol. No. Oh God no! She had flooded the engine. She tried again. Then again. Then again. Lorries were firing up their engines all around her and starting to roll forward.
Then the battery gave out.
She jumped out of the car and waved her arms up at a driver in his cab. He climbed down and asked her, in French, what the problem was. She explained.
A couple of minutes later he had recruited two other drivers. They told her to switch the ignition on and put the car into second gear, then they pushed. As the car gained momentum she let out the clutch and, to her intense relief, the engine fired. She sat still, soaked in perspiration, revving the engine hard, thick exhaust smoke billowing past her. She thanked them and drove forward, up to the ticket barrier.
A few minutes later she felt the reassuring judder as she drove over the ramp and down into the belly of the ferry, where she was waved forward until she was close to the rear of a Volkswagen camper van. She then climbed out and locked the car, debating whether to risk leaving the suitcase in the boot or take it with her. She realized she had not discussed this in advance. But then, she thought, it might look odd for her to be lugging the case upstairs to the passenger area. So instead, she double-checked that the boot was securely locked and made her way up the steps, her nostrils filled with the smell of spent exhaust fumes, varnish and paint, she was feeling sick with nerves.
She went to the lounge, which had a bar, and sat down nearby, waiting for it to open, badly in need of a large brandy and a double espresso. Twenty minutes later, as the ferry sailed, she sipped the espresso and drank the brandy straight down, then she went up on deck, into the salty wind and the darkness, and walked to the stern. She stayed there a long time, watching the lights of Calais disappear, and the intermittent flashes from a lighthouse, until she was shivering with cold. Then she went back below.
She bought a second double espresso and chanced another brandy. Somehow, between them, they calmed her down, yet kept her wide awake and fully alert – and confident.
Her nerves were jangling, but she thought to herself, over and over, It is going to be all right! Just remain calm. Calm.
The sea was calm and she could barely detect any motion, just the juddering of the boat’s engines somewhere below her and the faint vibration of her seat.
Then she heard the tannoy announcement.
‘Will all drivers please go down to A and B decks to their vehicles.’
Suddenly, she felt paralysed with fear. Please start, she thought, opening the boot of her car and checking the cases were there and undisturbed. Oh God, please start!
To her relief, the engine fired instantly, and she said a short, silent prayer of thanks. She felt the ferry yaw, then come to a juddering halt. Within moments the brake lights of the camper van in front of her came on, then it moved forward. She put the Alfa into gear and followed it – she was regretting having had that second double espresso, because her hands were shaking.
She drove up the ramp, waved forward by dock workers with batons, past a big warning sign beneath a Union Jack emblem, saying, DRIVE ON THE LEFT. A short distance ahead she saw the customs shed, with a lane divide. One was marked, with a green background, NOTHING TO DECLARE. The other with a red background, GOODS TO DECLARE.
She chose green, following the camper van through it. On her right was a long metal table extending the entire length of the shed and manned by a solitary, dozy-looking customs officer. He barely glanced at the van as it drove past him. She held her breath and tried to stare dead ahead, then, to her horror, she saw the official raise his arm and wave her over.
For a moment she thought she was going to throw up and began to shake uncontrollably. He was walking around to her window and signalling for her to lower it.
Taking a deep breath and trying to calm herself down, she obeyed and did her best to muster her most charming smile. ‘Good evening, officer,’ she said pleasantly.
But he didn’t smile back. He had an intensely serious face; it was long and mournful beneath his peaked cap, rather like a horse. ‘Where have you come from, Madam?’
‘Italy,’ she said in her broken English. ‘Near Firenze – Florence.’
‘And what is the purpose of your visit to England?’
‘I have family here,’ she said, delivering her carefully rehearsed script. ‘My sister has recently lost her husband. I’m taking her on a motoring holiday up to Scotland.’
He gave her a look she could not read, but there was an element of scepticism in it. ‘A motoring holiday in Scotland in November? Not the best of months to choose for the weather.’
‘No!’ she said, and gave a nervous laugh. ‘Not the best month at all.’
He did not smile back. Instead he asked, ‘May I see your passport, please.’
She handed it to him. He studied it carefully and slowly, flicking through page after page after page. ‘Why did you choose to drive, Contessa? It’s a long journey.’
She shrugged. ‘I like driving.’
He looked at the Alfa. ‘Nice car. Fast?’
‘Yes, quite fast.’
He nodded and handed her passport back. She felt a tiny bit of relief. He was letting her go. Then that was shattered.
‘May I see in the boot, please?’
‘Yes, yes, of course, yes,’ she stammered, opened the door and climbed out.
‘Are you feeling all right?’ he asked.
‘Yes, yes, thank you.’
‘You seem to be shaking.’
‘I think I drank too much coffee – to keep awake.’
‘Is there a reason why you have taken such a late ferry?’
She showed him her hands, which she had blackened again earlier. ‘I should have taken a much earlier one, but I had a puncture, and it took me a long while to fix it. Luckily I was eventually helped by a lorry that stopped.’
Without commenting he walked around to the rear of the car and opened the boot lid. ‘I’d like to look inside your cases,’ he said.
She felt as though an ice-cold lead weight had dropped down inside her stomach. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, of course.’
He lifted the top one out and placed it on the metal table. ‘Is it locked?’
‘No.’
He popped the catches and raised the lid. Under her watchful eye he began working his way with his fingers down through the layers of clothes, lifting them up and peering beneath. Then he undid the securing straps and lifted the clothes out, placing them on the table, followed by her shoe bags and then her washbag. He removed each pair of shoes in turn and looked inside them, before replacing them in their bags. Satisfied all was in order he began to put them back a tad clumsily.
Finally, he nodded at her. ‘OK, you may close it.’
For an instant, she hoped that was it, then her heart sank as he returned to the rear of her car and hauled out the second suitcase.
Now she was really trembling in terror. ‘It’s pretty much more of the same,’ she said lamely.
He did not respond. Instead he placed it alongside the first case and again popped the catches.
She took a step back, her vision blurred, conscious that she was perspiring. Once more he began his almost creepy fingering through her dresses and her underwear, getting further and further down the contents. Any moment, she thought.
Oh God, any moment.
Suddenly he turned and stared hard at her. ‘Oh?’ he said. Then he lifted out the entire top layer of clothes that were covering the first canvas, and laid them on the table. Then he lifted up the canvas, holding it high by the two top corners.
It was an unfinished, unsigned Monet. It depicted a hazy stony bridge over a bleached-out, shimmering river. Its provenance was beyond doubt, catalogued extensively around the globe, and one of the French painter’s most important works. When James Denempont had flown over to Italy to view and value their collection, he had been close to ecstatic when he had seen this particular canvas. He, too, shared the view that it was the original, and was probably the most valuable of all the canvases in their very considerable collection.
The customs official turned to her and stared hard into her eyes. His face was the very picture of cynicism. ‘And what, exactly, is this, Contessa?’
‘I’m having painting lessons,’ she said, putting on her most charming smile. ‘I’m bringing a few pieces to show my sister, who is a very talented artist, how I am progressing. I’m hoping to do some painting while I am in Scotland.’
‘Painting lessons?’
His words hung in the cold air of the shed for some moments. He locked her eyes with his own. Then his inquisitor mask slipped a little and he said, ‘Hmmm.’
She shrugged, and did her best to give him a disarming smile.
He did not respond but instead began to examine the canvas even more carefully, holding it close to his face. As he did so she could feel her legs threatening to buckle. He continued to inspect it for what seemed an eternity. She felt a terrible, deep sinking feeling.
Then, suddenly, to her utter amazement, he placed the canvas back into the case, and began, slowly and carefully, to replace the clothes he had removed. When he had finished he tugged the restraining straps tight, lowered the lid and pressed the catches home. When he had finished he yawned, then turned to her and said, ‘OK, thank you, that’s it, we’re done.’
He helped her put the cases back into the boot, then she climbed back into the driving seat, her hands shaking so much she could barely turn the ignition key. As the engine fired, the officer suddenly leaned in through her window and gave her a wry smile.
‘Those painting lessons you’re having, lady?’
‘Yes?’
‘Don’t take this the wrong way. But I’d have a few more, if I were you.’
DREAM WIFE
Imagine your ideal mate . . . I mean really your ideal mate . . . genetically engineered to your own specifications . . . a looker of your wildest dreams . . . who would pander to your wildest whim. Imagine someone you would be incessantly proud of . . . who would constantly adore you . . . who will never stray . . . who satisfies you intellectually . . . who is an incredible cook . . . who never ages, never gets mad at you . . . who, in short, would make your life more complete than you could ever have hoped . . .
Clive Marples sat in his den, staring at the advertisement on his computer screen, and tried to imagine it, liking what he imagined a lot. Really a lot. That could be him, he thought, having this woman. Having a whole new life. The life he had always dreamed of, with the wife he had always dreamed of.
There was just one small problem. He already had a wife.
To be fair, Shirley had once been a stunning looker. And in those early days he had been incessantly proud of her. But that had been twenty years ago, when she was fifty pounds lighter and kept herself in shape. In recent years she had become lazy, guzzling chocolates and Chardonnay and doing little else. She was like a sloth, lounging around the house and by the pool, day in, day out, when she wasn’t out lounging around somewhere else with her friends.
There wasn’t a labour-saving device she had not bought. A robot vacuum cleaner was one of the latest. She regularly scoured the adverts on television and at the back of her magazines for anything at all that could make her life even lazier than it already was. Clive was sure that if it was possible to buy eggs already boiled, from Waitrose or Tesco, she would do that to save the effort of boiling them herself.
They had little to talk about because she never watched the news any more. She never read a paper at all, except to see who Simon Cowell might be dating, or what the Duchess of Cambridge was wearing, or which A-list celebrity was divorcing who. He couldn’t remember the last conversation they’d had about anything important that was happening in the world, beyond the pages of Hello! and OK! magazines.
Shirley had never wanted children. He’d been ambivalent about them until his friends had started having them. Watching some of his mates become fathers did not exactly fill him with a craving to do the same. Neat family homes suddenly transformed into crèches, filled with screaming and the smell of sick and poo and laundry. When friends who were now parents came over with their sprogs, laden with rucksack baby-carriers, buggies, bags of nappies and toys and God knows what else, it was like a small army moving in for a few hours of manoeuvres.
His best mate, Charlie Carter, told him that with all his friends starting to have kids, he’d be feeling broody soon, too – and Shirley even more so. But it was the opposite with Shirley; she saw the sheer amount of effort having children took – starting with the act of giving birth itself. Any time she saw it happen in a documentary or film on TV, she would shake her head and say, ‘Not for me, thanks!’ Then she would quote Woody Allen’s line about ‘aimless reproduction’ and shrug. ‘And what’s it all for?’ she would ask. ‘Become a slave to the bloody little monsters for the next twenty years? Then they either despise you and sod off, become drug addicts, or are a constant financial drain on you. And what if you got a wonky one? Subnormal or deformed? I couldn’t cope with one of those. I wouldn’t have the patience.’
The sister of one of her best friends had a Down’s Syndrome child. Another had a boy quite seriously on the autism spectrum. Another had a daughter who would forever have a mental age of six months old. That made Shirley even more adamant never to take the risk. ‘And on top of that,’ she would say, ‘having babies destroys your bloody sex life. If you don’t have a Caesarean, your vagina gets stretched and it never fully recovers. And if you do have a Caesarean, your stomach muscles never recover from being cut through and you end up with a pot belly when you get older. It can’t exactly be a turn-on for a bloke to watch a bloody, slimy baby being pulled out of your twat, can it?
‘Most of my friends say they’re not interested in sex after they’ve had all their children. One of them, Maggie, actually reads a book while her husband’s shagging her. Babies? Not for me, thank you very much.’
And not for Clive, either. He was fine with that, despite the occasional bit of grief from his mother about waiting to become a gran. He was content with his life, or at least he had been, until recently. His climb up the corporate ladder of the global IT giant he worked for was going
well, and he was earning a big salary and even bigger bonuses. He and Shirley had not long moved into their latest house on the property ladder, a swanky senior management home, The Cedars, with a Georgian portico, three-car garage and five-vehicle carport, in a smart, gated estate off Brighton’s Dyke Road Avenue, called The Foresters. The property included a large, well-stocked garden with an infinity pool, a Zen water feature, three mature cedar trees and a view across the rooftops of Hove to the sea.
All the other houses were similar, but not completely identical. Each had its own idiosyncratic features and name, rather than a street number, to make it sound classier – The Oaks, The Firs, The Pines, The Willows, The Elms, The Maples, The Aspens – with, of course, the appropriate three trees in the garden. All their carports boasted latest, top-of-the-range Beemers, Audis, Jags, Mercs, Lexuses and Porsches, all gleaming, as if fresh out of their boxes.
All the occupants of The Foresters lived, it seemed to Clive Marples, high on the hog. In winter there were plentiful drinks and dinner parties. In summer, a constant round of barbecues and pool parties. All the residents took regular, expensive holidays. And, Clive assumed, they were all getting plenty of sex – until the kids came along, of course.
His problem was an increasing belief that everyone on the estate was actually having a better, happier and more fulfilled life than himself. As well as all the other members of his golf club, where he played a regular game on Sunday mornings.