I must say that Warrenpoint affected me very deeply, too. This was what motivated me to volunteer for military intelligence duties in NI when the QOH tour ended; being a Scot I was very good at doing an Irish accent. After an eight-week course with the SAS I returned to the province as part of the 14th Intelligence Company, who used to conduct undercover ops alongside loyalist paramilitaries. Which is an army way of saying we helped the UVF to murder members of the Provisional IRA. I did this until 1982, when I left the army and went into advertising, although at the time I’d wished I’d stayed on, as my regiment went to the Falklands soon after that; I remember them reaching the South Atlantic in July 1982 on the same day that John Houston and I had a meeting on the agency’s toilet paper account – although by then hostilities were over, of course.
‘You’re well out of it,’ said John. ‘You did your best with Jenny, I’m sure. But sometimes women are just like the clients we used to meet when we were in advertising. They really don’t know what the fuck they want. All they know is that it’s not you.’ He laughed. ‘Hey, do you remember the time we did all those commercials for Brooke Bond Red Mountain coffee?’
‘How could I forget? Coffeez never been so full of beanz.’
‘That was a really crappy coffee. How many fucking scripts did you write for it?’
‘Twenty-two. And they still wouldn’t buy one.’
‘I remember you brought a bloody starting pistol to the client meeting and you laid it on the boardroom table and told them that before the meeting was over they were going to buy your commercial. That was very funny.’
I smiled, remembering the incident, but I neglected to add that it hadn’t been a starter’s pistol at all but a real Smith & Wesson 38 – the same weapon I’d used for my wet work in Northern Ireland. I doubt that everyone would have thought this quite so funny if they’d known the gun was loaded with live ammunition and had been used to off more than one Fenian bastard.
‘But still, I learned something important from that whole process,’ I said.
Taking the gun with me had been a test of whether or not I could live again in the normal world. Could I take criticism without using a gun? Fortunately for the Brooke Bond execs, it turned out that I could.
‘Oh? What was that?’
‘How not to take it personally when someone doesn’t like your stuff. How to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again.’
‘I guess you must have done,’ said John. ‘I’ve never known anyone who is as even-tempered as you, old sport. The number of times you must have wanted to kill me.’
‘It never entered my head to kill you,’ I said. ‘Lord, no. That would spoil everything. No, you’re the goose that lays the golden eggs. And will do again, I’m sure of it.’
‘Me, I’m hopeless at taking criticism,’ admitted John. ‘Christ, many’s the time I’ve wanted to kill someone who criticized my work. Most writers do, I think. It’s just that some of them are better than others at pretending they don’t care about that sort of thing. You know, I sometimes think that writers are just people who might have become criminals except for the fact that they were lucky enough to learn how to read and write. Although in my case the Guardian thinks I am a criminal because I learned to read and write. My God, if my critics saw me raise fucking Lazarus from the dead they would say I’d only done it to help promote one of my books.’
‘I think it’s simpler than that. Being a writer is a kind of elegant sociopathy, that’s all. I don’t know how else you’d describe a person who doesn’t care about other people very much, who thinks mainly of themselves, who has a complete disregard for rules, and who lies for a living. Some socio-paths become murderers, it’s true; but probably just as many become writers.’ I laughed. ‘Hell, I know I did.’
After a few miles we changed seats again and we reached the tiny barnacle on the bottom of the hull of France that is Monaco. The sun was setting but John still wore his sunglasses and insisted on putting up the hood, since every single car entering Monaco – even a newish Bentley – is scanned by police CCTV to keep criminals out. High-summer tourists were in more obvious and plentiful supply. Most had come to rub their tattooed shoulders with big money, or so they fondly imagined, and the main square was full of people who were as pink as the Beaux Arts-style casino that occupied its pride of place, taking pictures of anyone loitering on the steps who looked remotely famous or of the several expensive cars that were busy arranging their own very shiny and exclusive Saturday night traffic jam. As always the lawn in front of the Café de Paris was so impeccably green and the fountain so perfectly wet and the surrounding palm trees so uniformly sized it looked as if the whole area had been sponsored by some Qatari irrigation company, or perhaps a Disney cartoon about a cute little talking oasis. It might have been, too, except that Santander and UBS had got there first, like Germans marking their territory on a beach with a strategically placed towel. The sea itself was only a few yards away but it might as well have been somewhere back in Switzerland. You couldn’t see the water for white boats, and any sea breezes had been strictly forbidden by the principality out of deference to hairpieces and hemlines and the more-is-best flower-beds, while the only gull wings in evidence were the doors of outrageous candy-coloured Lamborghinis and top-end Mercedes-Benzes.
‘The horror!’ whispered John as we drove through the dusk. ‘The horror!’
‘Isn’t it just awful?’ I said, but in truth I only half agreed with him: parking my orange Lamborghini in Casino Square and taking some dolly bird shopping at Chopard while sidestepping the holidaying lumpenproletariat looked just fine to me. As Oscar once said: I’m a man of simple tastes; I usually find that the best is quite good enough.
We drove out of the square and past the Métropole Hotel where John had famously argued with Orla in Joël Robuchon’s restaurant. He didn’t mention it so neither did I.
‘Christ, now that I’m back here I’m as nervous as a kitten,’ said John. ‘I couldn’t feel more nervous if I’d actually murdered her.’
‘You’re doing fine.’
‘Suppose someone recognizes me?’
‘They won’t. That beard really does make you look different. Like Orson Welles in Macbeth.’
‘At least you didn’t say Chimes at Midnight.’
‘You’d best keep a hold of that sense of humour,’ I told him. ‘I’ve a feeling you’re in for a nerve-racking wait while I’m in the tower.’
A little further on we drove slowly along the Boulevard d’Italie until we came to a mini-roundabout.
‘You can let me out here and I’ll walk,’ said John. ‘The Giardino is about a hundred metres ahead, just past the Lexus showroom. You can come and find me there when you’re done. I’ll be sitting outside awaiting your return. The Odéon is up the hill to the left.’
I steered the Bentley around the roundabout and pulled up in front of a Maserati showroom; outside the entrance to an apartment building immediately next door, a suntanned woman wearing a white dress and the gold reserves of a small country on her ears and not insubstantial chest was sitting on a bench and smoking a cigarette. A small white dog was sitting beside the six-inch heels of her scarlet-soled Louboutin shoes. She looked like a hooker; but then all of the women in Monte Carlo look like hookers, which is all right with me as that’s the way I like my women to look. These days the only women in Monaco who don’t look like hookers are the hookers.
John twisted around in his seat.
‘Here.’ He handed me his electronic parking fob that would open the door to the Odéon’s garage, and another one for the door to Colette’s apartment. ‘You can take the lift straight up from the garage to the twenty-ninth floor. We need the iPad and, if you can find it, her Apple Mac. That should tell us everything we need to know. And don’t forget the charger, in case the batteries have run down.’
He stepped out of the car and was about to close the door when he remembered something else.
‘And give me
a ring on Bob’s mobile, if everything’s all right.’
We’d found a number of old mobile telephones in Mechanic’s desk drawer – so many they looked like burners – and had borrowed one for John to use on our journey.
‘Define “all right”,’ I said.
‘Ring me when you’re in the flat, and again when you’re on your way back.’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘If it will make you feel any better. But I can’t see what the fuck could go wrong. After all, it’s you the police are looking for, John, not me, and certainly not Colette. The cops don’t even know she exists.’
I drove slowly up the hill in the direction of the tower and, in the rear-view mirror, watched John walk down the Boulevard d’Italie. At the top of the winding Avenue de L’Annonciade, surrounded with several high-rise apartment buildings, and in a small walled garden, was a tiny red stucco chapel. Whenever I saw this little chapel I wondered who went there and how it managed to survive in a country where worship was no longer a special act of acknowledgement of all that lies beyond us but the more everyday response its polyglot citizens made to the glorious reality of zero taxation.
On the opposite side of another mini-roundabout – home to a solitary tree – was the curving, grey glass entrance of the enormous Tour Odéon, a building so tall and featureless and ridiculously expensive it resembled nothing so much as the launching gantry for a Saturn V rocket. Floral tributes, photographs and soft toys for Orla Houston still lay on the ornamental shrubberies in front of the main door and even now were being inspected by her fans or those who were fascinated with premature death or just curious to see what all the fuss was about. I have to confess I was surprised by the reaction to Orla’s death; surprised and more than a little horrified, too; that someone as ordinary as her could in death have generated such an outpouring of grief.
But I was more horrified to see the person of Chief Inspector Amalric coming out of the front door; he even glanced at the Bentley, and it was only the car’s tinted windows that prevented him from having a clear sight of me. This was fortunate, as I would have found it hard to explain exactly what I was doing there. Were there other policemen still in the building – Sergeant Savigny, perhaps? Was it possible the police were still questioning the other occupants of the Odéon about what they had seen, or more likely – this was Monaco – not seen? Were there still scenes of crime officers searching John’s apartment for minute and important clues as to who had killed her?
I almost kept on going round the mini-roundabout and back down the hill to the restaurant. Instead I held my nerve and drove into the Odéon’s underground garage, where I parked the Bentley, closed my eyes and drew a deep breath before deciding what to do next. I tried to telephone John, to let him know what I was doing, but found that I couldn’t get a signal. Not that this mattered much; it suited me nicely to keep him on edge. So I just sat there, listening to the hot, six-litre engine at rest; after almost 300 kilometres without a stop there were so many taps and ticks and knocks it sounded like a tiny silver mine.
Waiting awhile before venturing upstairs seemed the wisest course of action; I had no wish to meet Sergeant Savigny again, least of all in the Odéon lift. Of course, I could easily have driven away without doing anything because I knew exactly where Colette was at that particular moment – she was my accomplice, after all; but to have abandoned my mission to recover her iPad from the apartment would have left what happened next to chance, in which case John might easily have panicked and given himself up to the Monty police, and that was the last thing I wanted. So long as we seemed to have a definite plan about what to do next I had control of things, which, ultimately, was what this was all about.
To my surprise there was a copy of Merrychristmas Makeba’s new novel, Drowning in the Kalahari, in the Bentley’s glovebox underneath the car’s manual. I started to read a chapter – either it was terrible stuff or I was too much on edge because it didn’t make any sense. The Canongate blurb said it was African magic realism, but to me it was more mundane than realistic and had nothing up the sleeve, so that it was rather less magical than a three-card trick. I was puzzled as to why a man like Bob Mechanic should have had a Man Booker shortlisted novel by an African woman writer in his car until I saw that someone called Grace de Beer had written all of her contact details and some kisses, as well as an injunction that Bob should feel free to call her any time, in a neat copperplate hand on the flyleaf. In this, the age of the e-book, it’s reassuring to know that the printed page still has its uses.
After about fifteen minutes I left the car and having checked the garage for police cars – there were none – I went to the lift and rode up to the twenty-ninth floor, where the lift chime quietly announced my arrival like a butler’s cough into a corridor already hushed by an inch-thick Wilton and ostrich-leather walls. It’s only on the streets of Monaco that money talks; in the principality’s more expensive apartment buildings it always lowers its voice discreetly.
I walked to the door of Colette’s apartment and pressed my ear to the kauri wood for a second before touching the keyless lock with the lacquered plastic fob, and then stepped inside with the speed of a tango-dancer. All was quiet as I stood in the tiny hallway and closed the door behind me. Apart from the sour smell of rotting garbage that lingered in the air, everything else was much as I remembered: the balcony sofa where we had sat and planned everything; the little dining room where she had cooked me more than one supper; the bed where I had fucked her several times. The fucking had helped to cement our pact, like Frank and Cora in The Postman Always Rings Twice, which is a pretty good book. Movie’s pretty good, too; as a matter of fact, it’s one of my favourites. When Frank fucks her it’s like he’s wrestling God’s angel. ‘I’m getting tired of what’s right and wrong,’ says Cora. Amen to that, little sister.
I went into the kitchen and double-bagged the contents of the bin to drop into the chute when I left. I even cleaned up a bit and watered her pot plants, which was very considerate of me. At the same time I noted the iPad on the marble worktop where Colette had carelessly left it. But before collecting this and making my exit I opened the doors onto the balcony to let in some air; that was the good thing about the private apartments in Tour Odéon: it was so high above the streets of Monaco that cars and their exhaust fumes were hardly noticeable; even in summer the air was as cool and fresh as if you were standing at the top of a schooner’s main mast listening to the whip and snap of a dozen sails. The air was the best thing about the Tour Odéon; that and the view, of course.
I glanced around the coastline amphitheatre of tall buildings that was Monaco and Beausoleil. It was hard to tell where the backdrop that was France ended and the tax-free principality began. The buildings of Beausoleil were no less ugly or featureless than those of Monaco, and the idea that property in one cost more than four times as much as in the other would have seemed laughable to anyone who had never heard of what the French called l’impôt de solidarité sur la fortune. Whenever I looked at this view – which some consider spectacular – I thought of my financial advisers back in London and the yearly reviews they used to produce with 3-D bar-graphs showing you how much your pension might be worth in fifteen years’ time; or, in my case, how little. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see nineor ten-figure numbers hovering in the sky over the primary-coloured rectangular bar of each building, as if to indicate the collective net worth of its privileged, tax-free occupants.
Beyond the harbour and out to sea, things were rather more obviously picturesque; a slowly shifting constellation of brightly lit boats on the darkening blue surface of the sea looked like an inverse planetarium. Above these the moon was a red circle on the eastern horizon, although any iniquity or spilling of blood that this might have foretold was long past.
I glanced back through the window glass into the apartment and for a moment I caught sight of my reflected self, locked in animated conspiracy with Colette. A moment later we seemed possessed by each other and I dr
ew her into my arms and kissed her before pushing my hand deep between her thighs. She dropped her head back on her shoulders and gave herself up to my impudent fingers before climbing on to my lap. I think at that point I might even have told her I loved her, the way you do sometimes when you’re trying to persuade a nice girl to help you commit a murder.
CHAPTER 3
We met for the first time at the Columbus in Fontvieille Port, which is the best bar in Monaco. I’d flown in for a meeting with John, to discuss the first draft of Dead Red – after him closing the atelier it was to be our last meeting before Orla’s murder – but as usual I was staying in Beausoleil, which meant opportunities for a drink or dinner were limited, and while the Columbus is expensive it’s not as extortionate as a lot of other places in Monaco. Just as importantly, the Columbus serves the best fish and chips on the Côte d’Azur and is a welcome antidote to anything the Hôtel Capitole has to offer. In Beausoleil nightlife is a contradiction in terms, although sometimes there is a certain kind of entertainment to be had when the French police and tax authorities operate night-time spot checks on cars with Monaco licence plates passing through on their way to the clubs in Antibes and Cannes, looking for people who are cheating on their 182 days. You take your pleasures when and where you can.