‘Please do not oblige me to arrest you, Pol,’ Léanne said. ‘My colleague here is impatient to recommence his interrogation. And in France, the judges are not troubled by a few marks on the face of a suspect.’
Leather Jacket nodded and grinned.
‘What do you want me to do?’ I asked.
‘You must simply promise that you will tell M nothing about this. And you must quit the island tomorrow morning. Alone.’
‘What?’
‘You will take the first boat. You will be contacted and we will organize the – what do you say? – la suite.’ She meant what came next, the immediate future. ‘But first, you must call M now. She has left a message for you.’
‘Oh.’ I delved into my pocket. Of course, like a gentleman – especially one on a date with a lady other than his partner – I’d switched off my phone.
‘Then you must dine with her.’
‘Another dinner?’
‘Yes. This is the natural thing to do. She must think you are waiting for her, alone.’
‘But I can’t eat another dinner. And this is the only restaurant on the island that’s open in the evening. I can’t go in there again. They’ve all seen me eating with you.’
‘So you refuse?’ Léanne looked sad, but in a very menacing way. She turned to Leather Jacket, and spoke to him in French. ‘You deal with the suspect,’ she said. ‘I’m like the President – too friendly with the Anglais.’
5
The whole planet felt warped. Not just overheated by electric lights, but bent and buckled, spinning off-centre, heading for a collision with the moon. And I was alone with the knowledge, and not allowed to tell a soul.
I was down on the quayside, massaging my aching arm. Apart from the pain in my elbow and the taste of leather in my mouth, it was as if Léanne and her colleagues had never been there. As soon as I’d agreed to help them, they’d spirited away into the darkness, to be out of sight when M arrived.
The ferry docked in the miniature harbour, looking exactly as it had done when M and I had arrived the day before. Yet somehow it was profoundly different. At least one of the passengers on there, or a crew member, would be a cop. And M was no longer a lone scientist hurrying back from a meeting, she was caught up in a spiralling galaxy of people and events.
‘Hi.’ She strolled down the wide metal gangway and kissed me. ‘We finished early. I told you we might.’
‘Great. Did you learn anything new? Decide anything?’ It was painful to look her in the eye.
‘Bof,’ she said evasively, and looked away. I was reminded of what Léanne had said about her not being English.
‘Did you talk about the sturgeon in the Camargue? Getting an aerial survey?’
‘Things don’t happen that quickly,’ she said.
Especially if you’re not really trying to organize them, I thought.
‘Weren’t you going to tell them that you wanted out?’ I asked. The idea came like a revelation. If she really was opting out, we could both offer to help Léanne. All I had to do was come clean with M, and we’d be off the hook.
She shrugged. Another French reflex. ‘It’s not that simple,’ she said. ‘They won’t let me give up just yet. God, I’m starving.’ She changed the subject brusquely. Or tried to, anyway.
‘They can’t force you to carry on if you don’t want to, can they?’ I asked.
‘Force me? No. But you know how it is. When you’ve been working on a project for a while, you can’t let people down.’
‘I thought they were the ones letting you down, being too slow and not taking you seriously?’ I blundered on, challenging her to convince me that she was for real. My theory about knowing when women were lying to me was being disproved before my very eyes.
She tutted. ‘It’s too depressing to talk about.’ As usual, when it came to specifics, she clammed up. ‘Have you eaten?’
Decision time.
What would happen if I told M all about my dinner with the mystery woman I’d seen in Collioure? Would she confess everything and appeal for help, or would she have some totally different explanation for what had been going on?
What if Léanne had simply got it all wrong?
So many questions, so little time to imagine the answers. I could only trust my instincts.
‘No, I haven’t had dinner yet,’ I said.
It was done. The deception was beginning.
The same waitress escorted us to the same table as if she’d never seen me before in her life. The other diners, though, had not been briefed, and a few of them stopped in mid-chew to gape. One woman frowned disapprovingly, while her husband gave me a discreet nod. I understood why. First the tête-à-tête with a half-naked brunette, now candlelit supper with a curvaceous blonde. Smooth operator indeed.
‘The wine list, Sir?’ the waitress enquired.
‘Why don’t you choose?’ I gave the list to M. I couldn’t even face reading the names of all those bottles.
She began perusing the food and wine menus. I observed her, almost admiringly. She had to be under insane pressure, even more than usual if she’d genuinely told her bosses that she wanted out of her role in the assassination plot. And yet she was perfectly able to focus on what she was going to eat. Unless it was a displacement activity. Yes, that would explain her lapses into moodiness. What an idiot I’d been, believing that all her stress was caused by a fish.
‘Are you having a starter?’ M asked, and I felt my digestive tract whimper in pain.
‘No, I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘I had quite a lot of peanuts with my aperitif.’
‘What are you having, then?’ she asked, as I resigned myself to reading the list of tortures on offer.
‘Just a salad. I don’t feel too good.’ Which was the first true word I’d spoken to her all evening.
‘So how many aperitifs did you have with your peanuts?’ She looked at me teasingly.
‘Three Muscats at least.’ I tried to look guilty. ‘And I had some squid at lunchtime that wasn’t all that fresh.’ Back on the lies again.
‘Shame. Because I feel like eating something big and bloody.’ Was it my overheated imagination, or did she have a murderous glint in her eye as she said it?
‘I’d have thought that you’d be a prime candidate for being a veggie,’ I said. ‘You know, an English ecologist working in London, studenty background.’ I watched her carefully.
‘No,’ she said. ‘There aren’t as many veggies as before, I find. Not now there’s so much organic meat around. And Brits are much more into the taste of things these days, don’t you think?’
Good evasive answer, I thought. Like all her answers seemed to be.
‘I fancy a nice juicy steak to put me in the mood.’ M was leaning in close. ‘Tonight, I’m going to be the hunter, you’re the prey. I want your body.’ I must have been blanching, because she looked hurt. ‘Don’t you want my body?’
‘Yes, of course,’ I said quickly. ‘I’m just feeling a bit, you know …’
She examined my face. ‘You do look rather pale – like you did after you got arrested. No one’s arrested you here, have they?’ She laughed, and then narrowed her eyes at me. Her joke had turned into a serious question.
I forced a laugh. ‘Wine,’ I said. ‘I think I need to get drunk.’
‘That’s more like it.’ M waved for the waitress and ordered a bottle of île des Embiez rosé. I saw the waitress bite her tongue so as not to say, ‘Ah, Monsieur’s usual?’
M devoured an undercooked steak with potato purée aux truffes, followed by a fruity mousse and a mountain of miniature macaroons with her coffee. I picked my way through a green salad.
On the way back to our room in the annex, M suggested a walk around the island.
‘It’s so quiet here,’ she said. ‘It feels like we’re a million miles from all the headaches of life.’ If only she knew that a headache for her was hiding behind every shrub on the island. ‘Let’s walk along the seashore,’ she went on.
‘It’ll be dark, and there’s no one about.’ She slid her arm round my waist. ‘We can make love on the rocks.’
Under normal circumstances, of course, nothing would have given me greater pleasure, but the idea of doing so while being observed – filmed, even – by a bunch of French cops would send anyone’s libido diving for cover.
‘Come on, lover,’ M said, pulling at my arm.
‘Oh God,’ I groaned. ‘Sorry.’ I clutched my stomach, puffed out my cheeks, and tried to look green. ‘That squid. And the wine.’
I turned and ran for the hotel, remembering at the last minute to limp like a man whose entrails are being attacked from within by squirming hordes of bacteria.
6
The sky was the lightest blue I’d ever seen, a shade so pale and transparent that a paint manufacturer would have got himself sued for putting the word ‘blue’ on the lid. Across this silky background, like an accident on a Fauvist’s palette, lay a long splash of pineapple-yellow cloud, its edges tinged with coral pink.
It was seconds before dawn. I was sitting on the first ferry off the island, shivering slightly, both because of the cool air and the thought of what I was doing.
I was sneaking off. Something I hadn’t done since I was a student and owed a month’s rent to a landlord who refused to fix my heating in the middle of February.
I’d left a note for M at the foot of the bedroom door, apologizing for the previous night’s fiasco. I’d taken all kinds of stomach pills that the hotel had kindly provided, and made frequent noisy visits to the bathroom to spit them out before they did any damage. Poor M had not had the fun soirée she’d hoped for.
My note said that Elodie had called in the middle of the night, in floods of tears, and that I’d promised to catch the first boat to go and sort things out in Saint Tropez. I told M to call me as soon as she woke up, though I wasn’t sure whether I’d have the guts to answer.
I was sorely tempted to give Saint Tropez a miss and head to the nearest airport. Like page two of my passport said, Her Majesty requires all those whom it might concern to offer the bearer assistance and protection in times of trouble. I figured that now was the perfect time for Air France to heed the old girl’s request and find me a seat on the first plane out of there.
The ferry pulled away from the quayside, and I shot a guilty glance up at the window of the bedroom I’d just left. It was still dark. M was asleep in there, dreaming of either endangered fish or an endangered President. One day I might find out whether she was English, French, a scientist or a booking agent for assassins, but for the moment it hardly seemed to matter.
The boat picked up speed. I touched my passport in my jacket pocket, making sure my escape route was open.
‘Bonjour, Pol. I am happy that you are here.’
Léanne had appeared beside me, and laid a denim-jacketed arm almost tenderly across my shoulders. She was wearing jeans now, and had washed off her femme fatale make-up, but seemed to be making an effort to appear less steely than the night before.
‘I hope it will be a bon jour,’ I told her. ‘And I’m glad to see you, too. I want to ask you a few questions. And I warn you, I can always tell whether a woman is telling me the truth or not.’
I hoped Léanne wouldn’t see through the lie.
On the mainland, a car was waiting for us, its engine running. It was a small grey Renault, driven by a large, snow-white man. He was one of the gay twins from the Collioure hotel, and nodded to me as I got in the back. The man in the passenger seat swivelled to scowl at me with a look that said ‘I’ve got my eye on you’. It was the leather-jacketed cop.
‘Take us to the anse,’ Léanne said, getting in beside me. I hoped this wasn’t a southern word for dungeon or torture chamber.
In fact, it couldn’t have been further from a dungeon. It was a secluded, almost circular bay just outside the centre of Bandol. The sea was deep blue in the middle of the anse, and the lightest turquoise around the sandy edge, a colour so refreshing that I wanted to drink it, or at the very least lie down and let the cool, still water soothe away my worries.
The car dropped us off at the top of a small cliff overlooking the beach. It was edged with giant rounded pines so fragrant that the word could have been invented to describe this warm, green smell.
‘Let us talk in peace,’ Léanne said, pointing to a flight of concrete steps. She told the other two guys to wait by the car.
Below the pines were terraced gardens, one of which belonged to a hotel built into the cliff. It had as many rooms below the road line as above – the guests on the ground floor could probably have reached out of their rooms and dipped their toes in the water.
Down on the beach, I took off my shoes and did just that, wiggling my toes in the chilly sea and feeling that at least ten small parts of my body were free.
Léanne sat on a rock at the water’s edge and watched me.
‘Why can’t I just go and confront M?’ I asked. ‘It’d be a pleasant change to know what’s really going on for once. And by the way, have you got some ID this morning?’
She smiled patiently and pulled out an ID card decorated with red, white and blue stripes. I went to sit beside her, to get a closer look.
‘Brigade Anti-Criminalité,’ the card read. ‘Commissaire Cogolin, Léanne’. The mugshot was so grim that the ID had to be real. No faker would use that bad a photo of themselves.
‘No, you cannot confront her,’ she said. ‘I understand that you want to know the truce’ (despite my lessons, she still couldn’t pronounce ‘th’) ‘but it is not time for a confrontation yet. Imagine that you are a French husband.’
‘What?’
‘You are a French husband, and you have discovered that your wife has a secret lover. You must follow her, observe her, but not confront her before you find his name and you are certain that he exists.’
‘It’s not the same thing at all,’ I objected. ‘I know French lovers don’t have a good reputation, but not many of them are planning to kill the President. This is a bit more serious than trying to find out if my wife’s shagging her Pilates instructor.’
When I’d expressed this in simpler English, Léanne agreed.
‘Yes, you’re right, it is much, much more serious.’ She picked up a handful of coarse, white sand and threw it into the water. A shoal of tiny green fish darted out of the way. ‘Let me tell you some things about M,’ Léanne went on. ‘You believed she is English, yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘No. She is half-French. Her father was French.’
‘Was?’
‘He is dead.’
‘How did he die? When?’
‘You must ask her. It is not good if I tell you and then you accidentally reveal that you know it, you see?’
I nodded. I could see the logic.
‘And you believed she was in London before Collioure, yes?’ Léanne asked.
‘Yes,’ I agreed.
‘No. She was already in the thouse of France, on a yacht in Saint Tropez.’
Now Léanne mentioned it, M’s all-over tan did tally more with a couple of months on the Med than a rainy summer by the Thames.
‘The first time we heard of her,’ Léanne continued, ‘was when a dealer was arrested, and he revealed some things to us that he had heard on the yacht.’
‘What things?’
‘I cannot tell you.’
‘Well whose boat was it?’
‘Sorry.’ She shook her head. ‘Let us just say, a person who has no reason to be happy with our President, or any part of the French government.’
‘A terrorist? A criminal? The husband of one of the President’s mistresses?’
In reply, she only shrugged her unwillingness to answer.
‘And M was on this yacht?’ I asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Doing what?’
‘We do not know, exactly, but she was there, and when she quitted the boat, she started her mission.’
‘And her missi
on is to hire a hitman?’
‘Hitman?’
I mimed a sniper taking out a distant target.
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘But why should M work for them? You said she has a reason to hate the President.’
‘A President of any country has many enemies,’ she said evasively. ‘Anyway, I am more concerned by practicalities. We know who she sees when she goes to her meetings, but these are not the leaders. They are the – how do you say? – midwives?’
‘Middle men.’
‘Yes. We need for you to become an espion – how do you say?’
‘Spy?’
‘Yes, a spy. We know who the middle men are. You must try to find out who is their chef.’ I guessed that she didn’t mean their cook.
‘How am I supposed to do that?’
‘You must listen, ask some questions, try to discover when is her next meeting. Not too many questions, though. She must not – what do you say? – doubt?’
I was the one with doubts. If I’d still been working in London, I would have been sure that it was all a wind-up, a huge piss-take organized by some twisted bastard in the office. But the French don’t go in for practical jokes like that. And Léanne’s ID was no joke at all. Neither was her determination to use me. I wondered how far she would have gone to get information if she’d thought I was part of the plot. That backless dress hadn’t just been for decoration.
I looked across the water, where a solo swimmer was doing a lazy crawl towards the open sea. It would be great, I thought, to dive in and follow him, and not stop swimming till all this nonsense had gone away.
‘Wait here a moment,’ Léanne said. She stood up and made a phone call, and a few seconds later, the leather-jacketed cop came bounding down the steps on to the beach. ‘Keep an eye on him,’ Léanne ordered. The guy nodded and came to stand over me as though I might suddenly leap into the sea and splash to freedom.
It was tempting. I saw that the lone swimmer had reached the edge of the bay. He was now having a rest, floating on his back and gazing up into the cloudless sky. I could imagine the sense of blissful achievement he would be feeling – the pure, tingling pleasure of being alive. A piercing envy shot through me, from my throbbing head to my impatiently twiddling toes. No, it wasn’t envy exactly, it was an urgent need to share that all-over tingle, to prove to myself that I was, for the moment at least, still in control of my nerve endings.