Research (37 page)

‘I’ve been sitting here like that guy in Africa with gangrene,’ said John. ‘Harry what’s his name, in a Hemingway story. Sitting under this yellow mimosa, just a little bit drunk and feeling a little sorry for myself and imagining all of the stories I’m probably not going to write because I’ll be in a prison cell and won’t have done enough research to write them.’

‘
The Snows of Kilimanjaro
,’ I said.

‘That’s right,’ said John and toasted me with his brandy glass.

‘Don’t be so bloody dramatic. I told you before, Phil made a deal. And he won’t talk. Or maybe you want me to write
that
down.’

‘I wish I could believe that, old sport.’

‘It’s my ass, too. You can believe that, can’t you?’ I sniffed the Calvados, swirled it around the balloon glass a bit, and then downed it all in one mouthful. ‘Besides, you’re going to write those stories.’

‘I am?’

‘Sure you are. I know it in my bones.’

We shared a room, again. This was a mistake as, on this occasion, John snored, loudly. I almost felt a twinge of sympathy for Orla, having to endure a sound like that. No wonder she’d taken sleeping pills. And in a way, but for John’s snoring, she might still be alive. At six, not long after I’d finally got off to sleep, I was awoken by the early morning call I’d ordered the night before, and I got up feeling irritable and bad-tempered. Even the magnificent view of the rolling foothills of the Baou des Blancs from the little terrace where I ate breakfast could not improve my humour. And I certainly wasn’t looking forward to a two-hour drive to Marseille – even in the Bentley. Only the prospect of staying at the Villa Massalia – which John had promised was excellent – filled me with any enthusiasm for the Monday ahead of us.

John was watching TV. Even before Orla’s murder he had always watched a lot of television.

‘I get more ideas watching daytime TV shows than any other way,’ he was fond of saying. ‘I always tell kids who want to become writers, you don’t have to hang out with cops, or go to the joint and interview bad guys. And you certainly don’t have to live in a garret in Paris, and have breakfast every morning at the Deux Magots. Sometimes, the best research you can do is at home, sitting on your ass,
with a doughnut and a coffee in your hand. Shows like Jerry Springer, Montel Williams, and in the UK Jeremy Kyle, will introduce you to as much low-life, trailer-trash modern-day grotesques as you would ever want to meet in one lifetime.’

John – whose French was better than mine – had been watching an early morning repeat of
Ça Va Se Savoir!
, which was the French version of a tabloid television show, and it was one he loved; I heard him still laughing as he switched over to watch the seven o’clock news on France 3.

‘What the fuck?’ he exclaimed. ‘Jesus fucking Christ, Don, get in here and look at this.’

I got up from the breakfast table and walked into the sitting room, where John was pointing at the screen and gibbering, and while I didn’t yet know it, my day was about to get very much better.

‘For fuck’s sake,’ he said, and folded his arms womanishly while keeping both eyes on the screen. ‘She’s dead.’

‘Who’s dead?’

‘Colette Laurent.’

It seemed that Colette’s body had been found at last in the boot of a car parked at Terminal 2 of Nice Airport. The Nice police had released very few details beyond Colette’s name and the fact that she had lived in Monaco, but from what the TV reporter was saying, there was little doubt that Colette had been murdered and that the car had been at Terminal 2 for two weeks. But most of the report seemed to concentrate on the disruption the closure of the car park was causing to international flights to and from Nice airport.

‘Jesus Christ,’ muttered John. ‘Poor kid. What a terrible thing to happen to a girl like that. I guess that Russian guy must have killed her after all. Maybe the same night he killed Orla.’

‘It would seem so,’ I admitted.

‘That’s the end of my fucking alibi, isn’t it?’

I shrugged and said nothing. At times like this it was usually best to let his mouth make all the running.

‘I guess there’s no point in us going to Marseille now,’ he said. ‘From the sound of it, she was never there. She’s been in the boot of her car for the last fortnight. Poor kid.’ His nose wrinkled with disgust. ‘And in this weather, too. That’s not good. I mean, can you imagine what this kind of heat does to a body? To be in a space like that all this time? You never met her, Don, but take my word for it, she was so very beautiful.’ He stopped and tried to swallow his emotions whole. ‘Best lay I ever had.’

‘I’m sorry, John,’ I said. ‘Really I am. But none of this alters the fact that we still have to leave here before nine o’clock.’

John stared at me blankly.

‘That cop. Chief Inspector Amalric? From the Monty police? He’s going to see Phil at ten. Remember? I mean Phil probably won’t say anything. But why take the risk, right?’

John sighed a sigh as profound as the view outside, stepped onto the balcony, took hold of the railing with both hands and hung his head. For a moment I thought he was going to jump and I made as if to restrain him. Without him I had nothing. But instead of jumping, he sighed and said:

‘I’ve made up my mind, Don. I’m going to give myself up. I’ve come to the end. I can’t go on. Really I can’t. I mean thanks for everything and I’ll try to keep you out of it, old sport. But there’s no point. Now that Colette has gone the only real option I have of proving I didn’t kill Orla is to take my chances with a jury.’

‘If it was just Orla’s murder, I might agree with you.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You know something? It might be good,’ I said. ‘The hot weather, I mean. Good for you, at any rate. That is, if you fucked Colette without a condom. Did you?’

‘Of course I fucked her without a condom. I had a vasectomy, remember? What are you talking about?’

‘I’m not exactly sure how that works. Did you ejaculate in her body?’

‘Of course I did. Just not with sperm in the ejaculate. Why on earth do you want to know?’

‘Maybe that Russian fucked her, too. In which case you’ll be all right. Otherwise you’ll just have to hope that the heat in the boot of that car has spoiled any of your DNA that might still be in her pussy.’

‘Oh shit. Yes.’

‘Because if there is any DNA in her pussy then there’s every chance they’ll charge you with her murder, as well. With two women dead – one your wife and the other your mistress – I’d say you’ve got even less chance with a jury now than you had before.’

John put his head in his hands and turned in a circle as if he had a terrible migraine.

‘What a mess,’ he said. ‘What a fucking mess. If I knew where my bag was I might fetch my gun and shoot myself.’

‘I gave your bag to Phil,’ I said.

‘What? Why?’

‘But don’t worry, I still have your new passport. I let him have the bag when he was still in two minds about taking the money. The gun was still in the bag I suppose. I forgot about it. After all, there are so many pockets in that bag. Anyway I forgot about the bag when he gave the cash back.’

John sat down abruptly on the floor of the balcony, took
hold of the railing again and then pressed his face against the bars.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

‘Getting used to the view. This is what I’m going to be looking at for the next twenty years.’

I switched off the TV, fetched him a little bottle of The Macallan whisky from the minibar and tossed it to him. ‘Here,’ I said. ‘Get that down your neck. Perhaps it will remind you of where your fucking backbone used to be.’

‘Fuck you. Fuck you, Don. You’re not the one facing life imprisonment.’

‘Who says you are? I mean, really – who says you are?’

John unscrewed the little bottle cap, closed his eyes and emptied the contents into his mouth. I sat down on the floor in front of him and took hold of his jacket collar.

‘Listen to me,’ I said.

I slapped him hard, not once but twice, and when at last he opened his eyes they were filled with tears.

At last I had him where I wanted him.

‘Listen to me, you stupid fuck. I didn’t risk my neck to help you without first thinking through all of the possibilities. And I mean all of them. Now I promise you that there’s a way out of this situation, but you’re going to have to keep calm and pay close attention. If you listen to me and do exactly what I say there’s absolutely no reason why you should ever see the inside of a prison cell. Do you understand? You won’t have to go to prison. I promise you.’

He nodded, silently.

‘Now then. Years ago you wrote a storyline for a book called
Hidden Genius
. Do you remember?’

He nodded again.

‘You’d ripped off the plot from a book by Marguerite Your-cenar, called
The Abyss
.
L’ Œuvre au Noir
, in French. The book – your book – was about a nuclear physicist, a genius called Jonathan Zeno, who decides to live under an alias somewhere quiet and out of the way after he decides that what he has discovered is too dangerous for anyone to know.’

‘I remember,’ said John. ‘He gets a job teaching physics at a school near a nuclear power station in the West Country. But then he discovers something that makes him think there’s been a leak of radioactivity and he has to choose between blowing his alias and saving all the kids in his school. Actually only part of it was ripped off from Yourcenar’s book. It’s also ripped off from Ibsen’s
An Enemy of the People
.’ He shrugged. ‘Anyway, what about it?’

‘There were some interesting observations about aliases and pseudonyms and
noms de guerre
, and it got me thinking about the whole business of having a pen name, a
nom de plume
. Samuel Clemens being Mark Twain, Amandine Dupin being George Sand, and more recently J. K. Rowling being Robert Galbraith.’

‘It wasn’t a bad book,’ admitted John. ‘Was it you who wrote that one, or Peter?’

‘Me. And actually it was my best, I think. Not necessarily in terms of sales, but critically.’

‘I suppose that’s why we never did another,’ said John. ‘But what’s your point, old sport?’

‘Like a successful lie, a successful alias requires that you believe it yourself. That you never stop being that other person.’

John was nodding. ‘It’s what the shrinks call reflex conditioning. If you never step out of character you don’t get rumbled.’

‘So then. You have a passport and a driving licence in the name of Charles Hanway. Then why not live as Charles Hanway? Provided you stick to the alias and keep your trap shut you can live, quietly, at my house in Cornwall. And here’s the smart angle. You carry on writing storylines, albeit anonymously, and I carry on writing the books. Just like before. I’ll get Hereward to make a deal with VVL. And I’ll pay you out of what I can make from them. That way you won’t ever have to meet anyone who remembers you. No one but me. And this way we can both benefit. I stay in print, and you stay out of prison. Simple as that.’

‘Someone would be bound to find out.’

‘Not in Cornwall. Nobody knows you in Cornwall. Frankly, they hardly know what fucking day of the week it is down there in the shire. You can go for days without seeing anyone vaguely human. And when you do they tend to keep themselves to themselves. Frankly the place is so out of the way that it’s only the fucking mice who visit. It’s like being back in the 1950s. The very opposite of Monaco.’

‘You really think it would work?’

‘I know it would work, I’ve lived there. Believe me, I know the place. Look, Manderley – that’s the joke name on my front door – is quite comfortable. There’s a good broadband connection, a widescreen telly, Sky TV, a decent wine cellar, a good library, and a nice vegetable garden; the nearest neighbour is Bilbo Baggins, and he’s more than a mile away.’

‘Might work at that.’

‘What’s the alternative? Risk your future to a jury? Fuck that. Rich bastard like you – they’d send you to the guillotine,
if they could. Especially in this economic climate. Who knows? After a while they might even declare you dead, which might take some of the heat off you.’

John nodded. ‘You know, you’re right. It might just work.’

‘Of course, you’d have to lie low for a long time. Maybe for ever. No trips up to London. Penzance maybe. Or perhaps Truro. Certainly nothing east of Exeter. But what have you got to lose? It’s me who’s taking the bigger risk. The cops aren’t after me. It’s you they’re after. Right now, I don’t even have a bad credit rating. But if I get nicked hiding you then I’m facing at least five to ten, I reckon. To encourage the others.’

John fetched another whisky miniature from the minibar.

‘I’m not completely convinced,’ he admitted. ‘But so long as the cops are looking for me I can’t think where else to go. Bob Mechanic is bound to turn up in Geneva sooner or later, and if I know Bob the very last thing he’ll want to do is to help a good friend. Not if it might imperil his reputation with the Swiss authorities. He’ll deny he even knows me, if I know Bob.’

‘A friend in need, eh?’

‘That’s Bob’s idea of a nightmare. He’s not in the least like you, old sport. I’m beginning to realize just what a good friend you are, Don.’

‘All right then.’ I glanced at my watch. ‘My suggestion is this. Instead of driving west, to Marseille, we head north, back to England. We can stop overnight in Paris. We’ll dump the Bentley there and take the Eurostar back to London first thing Tuesday. With any luck it might be months before your careless pal Bob Mechanic even notices his car is missing. Like that Porsche Turbo he left at the airport.’

John nodded.

‘This is good of you, Don. I don’t know what I would have done without you.’

‘Forget it. That’s what real friends are for, right?’ I shrugged. ‘It’ll be just like old times. Me and you in a fast car on the A7 to Paris and the atelier, which we’ll start up again, albeit on a rather more modest scale. In London. Only this time I’ll be out front and you’ll be in the backroom. Good for you, good for me.’