‘Why not suicide?’ I asked.
‘The dogs, monsieur. Why would she kill her own pet dogs?’
‘If she was going to kill herself she might have reasoned that John wasn’t likely to care for them himself. I’ve already told you about those dogs; he was none too fond.’
‘And the sleeping pill? How do you explain that?’
‘She takes a pill out of habit before she decided to do it. And maybe she shoots herself in bed in order to embarrass her husband. To put him in a tight spot, if you like.’
‘For what reason?’
‘John would have given her plenty of reasons. Other women, perhaps. He was always a bit of a pussy-hound.’
Savigny frowned and spoke in French to Amalric, who provided what I presumed was the translation; my French isn’t bad but the Chief Inspector was too quick for me.
Savigny smiled. ‘It’s an interesting theory but for one thing: the gun is missing.’
‘I see. But that still doesn’t rule out suicide. Not entirely. How about this, for example? John takes the gun when he finds out that Orla has killed herself. He takes it because it’s his gun. Or at least one he’d purchased. I’m not sure if he owned a Walther 22, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised. He owned quite a few weapons.’
Amalric nodded. ‘Yes, he owned a Walther 22.’
‘Anyway, he leaves Monaco because he recognizes that he’s in a tight spot and takes the gun with him so that there’s less evidence against him other than the mere fact of his flight.’ I shrugged. ‘Tosses it into the sea from the car window as he drives along the Croisette.’
‘I can see how it is that you are a writer, Monsieur Irvine,’ said Amalric.
‘I have my moments. But to be honest plotting is not my strong suit. That was John’s particular forte.’ I finished my champagne and sat back on my chair. ‘Or how about this? Someone else killed her while John was asleep. They didn’t always share the same bed. Sometimes he slept alone. So maybe John wakes up after hearing the shots – although the shots from a 22 aren’t so very loud. And it’s a big apartment. He gets up. Finds her dead. Reasons that he’s the most obvious suspect, panics and decides to take off. Can’t say I blame him. Because in spite of all I’m saying I admit the case against him is strong.’ I shrugged. ‘But you know, from what he had told me they’d had some problems with the CCTV in that building, so it’s going to be hard to prove he didn’t go straight out again after they came home from Joël Robuchon.’
‘Not problems. Issues. The residents of the Tour Odéon objected to their being filmed. They felt that the use of CCTV in that building invaded their privacy and so the system was switched off a while ago everywhere but the garage. Many of the other residents had bodyguards, of course, some of whom also lived in the tower. Others like Monsieur Houston made do with the security on the front desk.’
‘Isn’t that convenient for whoever shot Orla Houston? Doubtless her murderer was aware of this, too.’
‘This is typical of people who live in Monaco, of course. They are very private people.’
‘Those are the ones who usually have something to hide,’ I said.
‘Yes. You’re right. And without them I would be out of a job.’
I shrugged. ‘And that’s it? This is all you have?’
Amalric smiled sheepishly. ‘There were other forensics, which I can’t go into right now. But it’s already quite a lot, don’t you think? A murdered wife. A missing husband. It’s only in books that one can afford to ignore the convenience of such an obvious suspect as Monsieur Houston. And until we find him we have to go about building a picture of their marriage and what might have made him kill her. That’s fair, surely?’
‘Which is why we’re here in London,’ said Savigny, tucking into his scallop starter.
‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, with better cars,’ I said. ‘That’s a picture of their marriage.’ I shrugged. ‘At least it’s the only one I ever saw. I don’t know what else I can tell you about their marriage.’
‘Perhaps nothing, but according to Monsieur Munns, you know all there is to know about Houston himself,’ said Amalric. ‘So why don’t you tell us the whole story? From the very beginning. How you two met. The way things worked and then the way things changed. Recently, wasn’t it? When he made the decision to wind up the atelier?’
‘Il était une fois, as it were,’ I said.
‘Exactly. This is your métier, after all. And there’s nothing policemen like more than to listen to a story. It strikes me that this might be quite a good one, too. One minute Houston is the most successful writer in the world, making millions of dollars every year, and the next he decides to throw it all up. Why?’ Amalric sniffed the wine as it was poured by the waiter and nodded his approval. ‘I have the strong feeling that this is the key to everything. Yes, indeed, I have the distinct sense that once one understands this then much else will become clear. And perhaps we will have a good idea of where to find the elusive Monsieur Houston.’
CHAPTER 4
My father died while I was still studying law at Cambridge. He left my mother very little and joining the army on an undergraduate bursary was the only way of finishing my degree; for this I had to give the army three years, but I ended up giving them six. I went to Sandhurst in September 1976, and stayed in the army until 1982 when I met a rather marvellous man called Perry Slater, who had known my father during national service in the Royal Scots Greys. Perry was the kind of chap who knew everyone and who everyone seemed to like. He’d been a keen motorcyclist, as was I – we’d both ridden bikes at the Isle of Man TT – and was famously a sports commentator for the BBC; he was also an advertising executive with an agency called D’Arcy MacManus Masius and he kindly managed to find me a job as an account executive in the summer of 1982.
In the late Seventies and early Eighties British advertising was undergoing something of a revolution; thanks to entrepreneurs like the Saatchi Brothers and commercials directors like Alan Parker and Ridley Scott, London’s agencies were making much more creative work than their Madison Avenue counterparts and suddenly it was cool to be an advertising man.
At least it was unless you worked for Masius, which was known in the business as the civil service of advertising agencies; Masius looked after clients such as Pedigree Petfoods, Peugeot, Mars, Beechams, Kimberly-Clark and Allied Breweries whose brands were long-established and distinguished by their dullness and conservatism. It might have been the after-effects of my military service – back then we hadn’t a clue about PTSD – but the tedium and monotony of my new career left me rather depressed and, after a year as an account executive, I persuaded someone to let me become a copywriter. That was how I first met John Houston. He was my creative director, which is to say he was the person to whom I reported and to whom I was supposed to present the press advertisements, TV and radio commercials that I had written for various clients. I liked working for John, but only in so far as he let me do what I liked, and I quickly learned that John himself was interested in advertising in so far as it enabled him to pay his bills; his real interest was writing not advertising copy but a novel to which he had devoted every weekend and evening for almost two years. I’d been writing something myself, and jealously I was spurred to greater effort by the thought that John might beat me into print. From time to time after that we would each politely enquire how the other’s novel was coming along; but John always played his cards close to his chest and I had no idea that his book was as advanced as it turned out to be. Because one day, to everyone’s surprise but mine, he announced that this novel – The Tyranny of Heaven – was going to be published and simultaneously handed in his notice. It was, as John himself describes, his Keep the Aspidistra Flying moment, which is a novel by George Orwell wherein the hero, Gordon Comstock, quits an advertising agency and takes a low-paid job so that he can write poetry instead. Of course the major difference between John Houston and Gordon Comstock was that there was nothing low-paid about John’
s future prospects; he had obtained a lucrative three-book deal with a leading British publisher and very soon he landed similarly generous deals with American, Japanese, German and French publishers which seemed likely to make my former boss a millionaire before the first book was even published. But still he was not satisfied; he quickly discovered that publishers possessed none of the marketing and advertising skills that John himself had; in those days publishing was full of gentlemen with bow-ties and cigarette-holders who had an eye for good books but no idea how to sell them. And it was typical of the man that instead of spending his advance money on a house or a car John used it all to advertise The Tyranny of Heaven on television and radio, with the result that it was soon a number one bestseller. After that the people at John’s publishers were not inclined to disagree with him about anything very much.
It was about this time that John called me up and invited me out to lunch. He told me he wanted to pick my brains about my army service in Northern Ireland for his follow-up novel and I pretended I was happy to let them be picked, although in truth I rather envied his success and hardly wanted to see him for fear that this might show. On the principle that lightning never strikes in the same place twice I’d let myself imagine that John’s being published made it much less likely that the same good fortune would happen to me. But I put a smile on my face and went along to a restaurant near Masius in St James’s Square called Ormond’s Yard, bit my tongue and congratulated him effusively and thanked him for the signed copy of his novel which, of course, I’d not dared read in case it was actually any good. I’m afraid this is a very typical reaction among writers. No one reads anyone else’s stuff if they can possibly avoid it: we’re an insecure, spiteful, jealous lot. Nothing confounds like a good friend’s success; and as Gore Vidal once said, ‘Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.’
‘The Tyranny of Heaven? What’s that?’ I asked John. ‘Shakespeare?’
He shook his head. ‘John Milton. If you’re looking for a good title you’ll find there are lots of good titles in Milton, old sport. Shakespeare, no. Don’t waste your time looking for a title in fucking Shakespeare. He’s been raped more than a Berlin housewife. But Milton’s great. Nobody reads Milton these days.’
‘Congratulations,’ I said, inspecting the signature and the dedication in his novel. ‘I understand it’s already a bestseller.’
‘True. But it’s America where I want to make it big, not here. In publishing terms this country is a sideshow with goldfish.’
‘Easier said than done.’
‘Not really. Whatever it is you’re writing my advice is to make the thing American-centric, if you’ll pardon that word. Get yourself an American hero and you’re halfway to the big money, old sport.’
Old sport. He used to say that a lot; and since John’s favourite book is The Great Gatsby and ‘old sport’ seems to be Jay Gatsby’s favourite phrase, I sometimes wonder how much of Gatsby there is in John. He is as he would tell you himself, entirely self-invented: describing his own humble Yorkshire origins he used to say, ‘It doesn’t matter where the fuck you come from; what matters is where you’re going.’ And that is John’s whole philosophy, in a nutshell.
‘I just happen to be English, old sport. But that’s not who I am or who I want to be. Yorkshire is a dump. I hate the place. Never want to see it again. Cold. Miserable. Men in flat caps with pigeons and racing dogs and ill-fitting false teeth and homespun philosophy that all sounds like a Hovis commercial. The only people who care about it are the poor bastards who have to live there. Not me. I can’t wait to live somewhere else. Tuscany. Provence. The Bahamas. To live somewhere else and be someone else. That’s the great thing about being a writer, Don. You have a perfect excuse not just to make up the story that’s in the fucking novel but your own story, too. You can invent yourself at the same time as you create the novel. It’s wonderfully liberating to become someone else. You haven’t asked my advice but I’m going to give it to you anyway. Make yourself more American, yes, even to the extent of using American spelling. After all, it’s America where a publishing fortune is still to be made. Which is why I’ve already mortgaged my house to pay for the advertising campaign that will accompany the book’s publication in the US.’
‘Jesus, John, is that wise?’
‘Probably not. But I don’t think that making big money has very much to do with wisdom, do you? It’s about having the balls to take a risk. History shows that all great fortunes are based on taking risk. What is it that T. S. Eliot says? Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go. I truly believe that, Don. The greatest danger would be not to take a risk at all. Of course, the ad spend would be doubly effective if I had a paperback and a hardback out at the same time. I mean you can always sell the paperback on the tail of the hardback. So it’s a bit unfortunate that the money I’m spending will be only half as effective as it might have been. That’s my one regret about all this: that I didn’t have two products ready when I made the publishing deals.’
John sighed and lit a cigarette and stared across the yard because it was a nice day and we were sitting at the three or four tables that were grouped outside Ormond’s’ front door. His use of the word ‘products’ was telling. John has never quite lost the adman’s phraseology; even today when you meet him – twenty years after he left Masius – it’s more like talking to David Ogilvy than David Cornwell. Some writers talk about metafiction and genre and romans à clef and unreliable narrators, but John talks about the USP and the brand and focus groups and distribution and point-of-sale.
‘So what is it that you want, John? You’ve dug your tunnel out of the advertising Stalag. You’re out and you’re as free as Steve McQueen on a motorcycle and yet you don’t really seem like you’re happy although there is any number of copywriters who would love to change places with you. Even the ones who are gods at trendier ad agencies like GGT and AMV. To me who’s going back to write a couple of shitty radio commercials this afternoon for Ribena it seems like you have it all, pal: a three-book deal, plenty of money, some social significance, no boss, no nine-to-five, no Monday morning client meetings at fucking Perivale.’
Perivale in West London was where another dull-as-ditchwater Masius client was to be found: Hoover.
‘I could go on with that list but I would only depress myself so much that I’d feel obliged to fall on my Mont Blanc.’
John shrugged. ‘I want what anyone in this business wants, old sport: success, money, and then lashings more of both. I want the same thing that Ken Follett, Jeffrey Archer, Stephen King want when they sit down in front of the word-processor: one international bestseller followed quickly by another. My only regret right now is that I can’t write these books any faster. I mean, I’ve got this three-book deal that’s worth a million bucks if you add together the Yanks and the Brits and the Japs and the Krauts. But at the rate it takes to write a book I’m going to need at least another eighteen months to write the next two because quite frankly the actual writing part leaves me cold. I’m someone who needs a damn sight more than a room with a fucking view to make me write five hundred words a day. I mean I’m only human, right? Of course, I figure there will be some royalties by then; even so, the big money – the fuck-off money, which is a really substantial advance against future royalties – is still a way off. Meanwhile I’ve got all these ideas for half a dozen other books down the road. No, really, I’ve got files full of ideas. Sometimes it seems there are just not enough days in the week.’ He grinned. ‘Sorry, old sport. I know that’s not what you want to hear when you’re trying to finish and publish your own book. But that’s just the way it is right now. I’m older than you by a decade, which means that I’m a man in a hurry. I want a taste of that outrageous Stephen Sheppard type money while I’m still young enough to enjoy it.’
Stephen Sheppard was a British novelist who wrote a novel called The Four Hundred that, back in 1976, Ed Victor, the literary agent, had
famously – every newspaper in Britain had covered the story – sold for one million pounds.
I thought for a minute. ‘There is a solution, perhaps.’ I said. ‘Albeit an unorthodox one in the ascetic, left-liberal world of publishing.’
‘Oh? I’d like to hear it.’
‘At the English bar there exists a practice called devilling, when a junior barrister undertakes paid written work on behalf of a more senior barrister. The instructing solicitor is not informed of the arrangement and the junior barrister is paid by the senior barrister out of his own fee, as a private arrangement between the two. It’s a way older barristers have of making themselves even richer than ought to be possible. So, why not something similar for you? In other words you could pay me a fee to write one of your books. You give me the plot in as much detail as you can manage and then I do the hard slog of knocking out one hundred thousand words; I give it back to you six months later and you edit the manuscript I’ve provided to your own satisfaction – putting in a few stylistic flourishes to make it truly yours. Or taking a few out, as the case may be. It’d be like what Adam Smith says regarding the division of labour in the manufacture of pins. It strikes me that you’ve always been the one with a powerful – not to say overactive – imagination and that you’re better at creating stories than you are at writing them. Which is where I might come in. In a sense you would just carry on being the creative director, so to speak, and no one need ever know. I can even sign some sort of non-disclosure agreement. Meanwhile, you write the other book; then you hand both books to your publisher in quick succession and claim the balance of the advance.’