A Foreign Country (21 page)

‘Monsieur Uniacke is a British national. He was visiting La Cité Radieuse when he was attacked by two Arab youths. They took his bag, but it looks like he got lucky.’

‘It does look like that, yes,’ Luc replied, this time in French. He had the cracked, gravelly voice of a heavy smoker and was studying Kell’s face intently, as though delaying the inevitable moment when he would expose him as a liar. Laurent had unzipped the bag.

‘Would you like to check that nothing is missing?’

He passed the bag across the desk and Kell quickly began to remove the contents and to place them, one by one, amid the paperwork and mugs in front of him. The laptop was the first item to emerge, not damaged in any way. Next came the camera, then the Marquand mobile, which was still switched on. He placed it beside his London phone on the table.
The Scramble for Africa
was at the bottom of the bag, wedged in next to a tourist map of Marseille. Finally, from a zip-up interior pocket, he retrieved the Uniacke wallet.

‘Two cell phones?’ said Luc, a rising note of suspicion in his voice. Kell knew that he was in a scrap potentially far more dangerous than his earlier fight in the corridor. The SIM would have been checked and traced and he prayed that Marquand had erased Uniacke’s trail through Nice. It was only by sheer luck that Kell’s London phone had not been stolen; had Luc been given access to that, it would have been game over.

‘That’s right,’ he said, picking up the Marquand phone and inspecting it. ‘I have one for work, one for personal stuff.’

There was an unread text message on the screen and he opened it. It was from Marquand himself:

You were right. Everyone safely back in town. See you next week.

‘Personal stuff,’ Luc repeated, in English, as though Kell had employed a euphemism. The smell of a recently extinguished cigarette was on his breath.

‘This is fantastic,’ Kell said, trying to ignore Luc’s cynicism by channelling the innocent relief and enthusiasm of Stephen Uniacke. ‘Everything seems to be here. My laptop, my camera …’ He checked the wallet next, flicking through the books of stamps, the membership of Kew, the various Uniacke credit and debit cards. Inevitably, more than four hundred euros had been removed. ‘Fuck, they took all my fucking money,’ he said. ‘Excuse my language.’

Laurent smiled. ‘No problem.’ He looked quickly at Luc, as though tacitly asking permission to speak. ‘You have insurance, yes?’

‘Of course.’

‘How much is missing?’ Luc asked. ‘How much did they take?’

‘I think about four hundred euros. I took five hundred out of an ATM this morning but spent some …’

‘Put a thousand on the form,’ Luc said grandly, nodding towards Laurent. It was a smart, if obvious psychological move.

‘I’m not sure I approve of that,’ Kell replied, but the smile on his face belied any ethical reservations he might have possessed. He turned the smile into a grateful nod of the head, saying: ‘Thank you’ to Luc with as much sincerity as he could muster. To bolster his image as a family man, he then laid out the frayed photographs of ‘Bella’ and ‘Dan’, his phantom son and phantom daughter, and said: ‘These are the most valuable things in my wallet. I’m just glad I didn’t lose those.’

‘Of course,’ Laurent replied quickly, with what sounded like genuine sincerity, and even Luc seemed moved by Kell’s devotion to his family.

‘What about the computer?’ he asked. ‘Is it damaged in any way?’

This was the most vulnerable moment in the interview, the point at which the DGSE could easily catch him out. They had stolen Kell’s bag in order to examine the laptop. He was convinced of that. He was also convinced that they would not have returned the computer to him unless they had failed to crack the encryption. Even had they done so, it was unlikely that French tech-ops would have found anything incriminating. In the hotel, Kell had run an SIS-installed software programme that erased the user’s digital footprints, replacing them with a series of benign cookies and URLs; the DGSE would have found only the emails and search engine history of Stephen Uniacke, marketing consultant and family man, reader of the
Daily Mail
and occasional gambler with Paddy Power. The Uniacke legend was so watertight it even had an account with Amazon.

‘Is it working?’ Luc asked, rising to his feet after Kell had flipped the lid and powered it up. It was obvious that he was coming round the desk in order to watch Kell typing in the password. Kell had no choice but to do so without complaint, tapping in the ten-digit code right under Luc’s direct and unembarrassed gaze.

‘Why do you have a password, if I may ask?’

‘I work as a consultant,’ Kell replied, again channelling his alter-ego’s guileless integrity. ‘We have a lot of high-net-worth clients who wouldn’t want information about their businesses falling into the wrong hands.’ He remembered the moments he had spent staring at the laptop screen in his cabin, under the possible surveillance of a DGSE camera, and found a way of explaining it: ‘Trouble is, I always forget the code because it’s so bloody long.’

‘Of course,’ said Luc, who hadn’t moved an inch.

‘Is there something you wanted to see?’ Kell asked, looking back over his shoulder with what he hoped was the mild suggestion that Benedict Voltaire of the Marseille constabulary was beginning to encroach on his privacy. ‘Everything seems to be working fine.’

This was enough to deter him. Reaching up to stroke the beard that was no longer there, Luc walked towards a double-glazed window at the southern end of the room and looked out over the back of the building. He tapped a couple of fingers on the glass and Kell wondered how he would make his next move. Surely the DGSE was now convinced of his innocence? Surely he had nothing to link him to Amelia or Malot?

‘What were you doing in Marseille, Mr Uniacke?’

Kell’s instinct was to insist that he had already answered such questions many times since the attack, but it was vital not to rise to Luc’s provocations.

‘I was in Tunisia on holiday. I came over on the ferry last night.’

Luc turned to face him. ‘And was there anybody on the ferry who may have antagonized you? Who may have had a reason to follow you in Marseille and to attack you?’

It was not the line of enquiry that Kell had expected. Where was Luc going with this?

‘I don’t think so. I talked to a couple of people in the bar, to some others in the queue while we were waiting to disembark. Otherwise, nobody. I was mainly reading in my cabin.’

‘No arguments? No problems on the boat?’

Kell shook his head. ‘None.’ It was almost too easy. ‘No arguments,’ he said, a sudden wince of pain in his knee.

In a room nearby, a man suddenly raised his voice in violent anger, as though enraged by a wild injustice. The building then became quiet again.

‘You said to my colleague that you are on your way to Paris?’

This was a slip. Kell had told Laurent of his plan to leave Marseille before Luc had arrived. Clearly he had been eavesdropping on the formal police interview.

‘Yes. I have a client in Paris who may be in town over the next few days. I was going to go up there to meet him. If he doesn’t show up, I’ll probably just go home.’

‘To Reading?’

‘To Reading via London, yes.’

Kell was suddenly tired of the second-rate interrogation, of Luc’s supercilious machismo. It was obvious that they had nothing on him. He longed to be free of the now-stifling room, of a long afternoon of violence and bureaucracy. He wanted to find Malot.

‘So I wish you good luck, Mr Uniacke,’ Luc said, apparently arriving at the same conclusion. ‘I am sorry for the trouble we have put you through. Truly.’ There was a strange moment here, a look of intense hidden meaning directed towards him that Kell could not untangle. ‘My colleague, Laurent, will take you back to your hotel. Thank you for your time. I do trust you will enjoy the rest of your visit to France.’

At Kell’s request, Laurent dropped him at the corner of Rue Breteuil and Quai des Belges so that he could walk back to his hotel past the old port. He was already over an hour late for Madeleine Brive and wanted to cancel their plan for dinner, using the excuse that he had been robbed and beaten up. There was no advantage to be gained from meeting her: the DGSE held all the cards and she would simply oblige him to spend several more hours masquerading as Stephen Uniacke.

As it transpired, Madeleine was not answering her phone and Kell left a long message apologizing for cancelling the dinner and explaining what had happened at La Cité Radieuse. He hoped that they might have a chance to meet again one day and wished Madeleine a safe journey home to Tours.

The port at night was crowded with drifting couples, tourists in their best shirts, children tossing coins at the feet of weary buskers. The market stalls selling fish from ice-strewn tables at the eastern end of the marina had long since been packed away and the ferries had brought back the last of their passengers from sightseeing trips to the Calanques and Chateau d’If. At a
tabac
on the Quai des Belges, Kell bought a télécarte and went in search of a public phone. The first two were vandalized beyond repair, but at the north end of Rue Thubaneau he found a functioning France Telecom booth in a quiet side street opposite a shuttered pharmacy. He closed the door, set his bag on the ground and dialled the number for the taxi company Malot had used at the ferry terminal.

A woman answered, fifth ring, and Thomas Kell weaved his tall tale.

‘Hello, yes. I hope that you can help me.’ As a schoolboy, Kell had been told by a teacher that his spoken French sounded like a British Spitfire pilot who had crash-landed in Normandy. For the purposes of the conversation he tried to recreate a similar effect. ‘I was in Marseille last week and rented one of your taxis outside Chez Michel at about half-past eleven on a Friday night. It was a white Mercedes. The driver was West African, an incredibly nice man …’

‘Maybe Arnaud, maybe Bobo, maybe Daniel …’

‘Yes, maybe. Do you know who I’m talking about? He was around fifty or fifty-five …’

‘Arnaud, then …’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘What about him?’

‘Well, I’m British …’

‘I can tell this …’

‘And I work for Médecins sans Frontières. Arnaud gave me his card because I promised to get in touch with regard to some friends he was very concerned about in the Ivory Coast.’

‘Oh, OK …’

That did the trick; the merest suggestion of possible human rights abuses had transformed the receptionist’s previously indifferent attitude.

‘It’s just that I’ve lost the card and have no way of contacting him. Would you be able to ask him to ring me here in London or, if that’s going to be too expensive, do you have a number or an email where I could reach him in Marseille?’

As a ruse, it wasn’t watertight, but Kell possessed enough of an understanding of the French character to know that they would not refuse such a request purely on the basis of protecting Arnaud’s privacy. At worst, the receptionist would ask for Kell’s number and promise that Arnaud would call him back; at best, she would put them directly in touch.

‘He’s not working tonight,’ she said, which gave him hope that a number might be forthcoming.

‘That’s fine,’ Kell replied. ‘I can always call him on Monday when I’m back at my desk. I have all the files on the computer in my office …’

‘Hold on please.’

The line suddenly switched to an old Moby track; it wasn’t clear whether the receptionist was taking another call or had gone in search of Arnaud’s number. Within thirty seconds, however, she was back, saying: ‘OK, do you have a pen?’

‘I do.’ Kell allowed himself a quiet smile of satisfaction. ‘Thank you so much for going to all this trouble. I really think Arnaud will be pleased.’

Arnaud was in what sounded like a crowded restaurant or café and wasn’t much interested in taking a call from a complete stranger at nine thirty on a Sunday night.

‘Who?’ he said for the third time when Kell told him that he was a British journalist looking for information about one of Arnaud’s passengers, and willing to pay five hundred euros simply for the opportunity to sit down over a beer and talk.

‘What, now? Tonight?’

‘Tonight, yes. It’s urgent.’

‘This is not possible, my friend. Tonight I relax. Maybe you should too.’

A resident had emerged from one of the apartment buildings adjacent to the phone box. He turned the throttle on a motorbike and Kell had to shout above the noise of the revving engine.

‘I’ll come to you,’ he said. ‘Just tell me where you are, I’ll meet you near your home. It won’t take more than ten minutes.’

A contemplative silence ensued, which Kell eventually ventured to break by saying: ‘Hello? Are you still there?’

‘I’m still here.’ Arnaud was enjoying all the attention.

‘A thousand,’ Kell said, running out of Marquand’s money.

That did the trick. There was enough of a pause, then. ‘Which passenger do you want to know about?’

‘Not on an open line,’ Kell replied. ‘I’ll tell you when I see you.’

A forty-five euro, forty-minute cab ride later, Kell was deep in the Quartier Nord, miles from the yachts and the Audis and the tennis court villas of the Corniche, in a thankless landscape of breeze-block towers and litter-strewn streets; everything that Le Corbusier, in the zeal of his idealism, had failed to imagine.

Arnaud was drinking pastis at a café in the basement of a slate-grey tower block patrolled by bored, undernourished youths wearing tracksuits and state-of-the-art trainers. One of the windows of the café had a pane of shattered glass; the other was obscured by a metal shutter daubed in graffiti: MARSEILLE. CAPITALE DE LA CULTURE ou DU BETON. Kell told his driver to wait on the street and ran a gauntlet of clicks and stares, entering the café in the expectation of total silence, of doors swishing behind him like a western saloon. Instead, he was greeted by the exclusively African clientele with half-interested nods of welcome. Perhaps Kell’s pronounced limp and the cut above his eye leant him the air of a man who had endured more than his fair share of misfortune.