Research (24 page)

‘What do you think of her?’

‘Beautiful. Irish. Bitch. To be fair, I only dislike her as much as she dislikes me. You see, I used to be a soldier. In Northern Ireland. And I think she holds me responsible for the death of every Irish man and woman since Oscar Wilde was sent to Reading Gaol.’

We left the hotel and walked east from Fontvieille Port to Larvotto and the Tour Odéon. Colette took my arm, not because she wanted to be close to me but because her high heels made it difficult to walk. It was a fine evening and we walked in companionable silence for a while, enjoying the Silvikrin sunset and the warm air. Out of the corner of my eye I took in the sexy toe-cleavage in her Louboutins, the Fabergé lacquer manicure, the sugar and gold Rolex, the tailoring details on her jacket sleeve; after more than a year of monastic celibacy it felt exciting to be out with a good-looking woman. As we made our way through the streets we got a few looks from other people who were out that evening, which is to say that Colette was the subject of more than a few appreciative glances. But with a much younger woman on my arm – even one wearing eyeglasses – I looked like any other old fool in Monaco: a slightly gnarled olive tree next to a rather luscious pink bougainvillea. If Toulouse-Lautrec had been alive today he might found much to inspire him in the principality.

We went into the Odéon and rode the lift up to Colette’s floor without seeing either John or his wife.

Her apartment was small but nicely furnished, if you like that very French idea of modern living, with several armchairs that were more comfortable than they looked and, above a plain hardwood dining table, a sort of chandelier or light-fitting that resembled Jupiter and its four largest moons. On a coffee table in front of the window was a copy of a stick-thin Giacometti figure that had once inspired me – if that’s the right word – to write a television commercial for a building society using a snatch of music from Lou Reed’s
Transformer
: ‘Take a walk on the safer side, with the Nationwide’. (I’m always haunted by some of
the shit I wrote back then.) On another table – somewhat incongruously – there was small pot-plant holder, shaped like a baby donkey with a basket on its back. I guessed the Giacometti copy was the Russian’s and the stupid donkey planter was hers.

Colette opened a bottle of white wine, which we didn’t drink – at least not right away – because then she went into the bedroom and started to undress. I could hardly ignore that as it wasn’t a big apartment and besides, she rather helpfully left the door open. Even I could recognize where this was going now and about that kind of thing I’m usually laughably slow; at least so I’ve been told – by John, of course. I joined her in the bedroom and swiftly removed her panties, just to be helpful. I stood back and looked at her for a moment, as if appraising a work of art, which wasn’t so very far from the truth. She enjoyed being looked at, too, which hardly surprised me, all things considered. And I did consider them. Very carefully.

‘There’s probably a better way of getting even with Houston than this,’ I said. ‘Although right now I’m not at all inclined to try and think of one.’

‘Shut up and fuck me,’ was all she said.

*

John left for Geneva the next day; Orla went to visit her family of Fenian fuck-ups in Dublin. Neither of them knew that I had stayed on in Monaco, at the Odéon, fucking Colette and wondering how to broach with her a subject I’d been thinking about for a while – ever since that day on the autoroute when John had told me he was closing down the
atelier
. Exactly how
do
you suggest murder to someone? It certainly doesn’t happen the way it does in Hitchcock – all that
Strangers on a Train
‘I can’t believe you’re really serious about
this’ crap. No, it was much more like
The Postman Always Rings Twice
.

As things turned out I hardly needed to bring up the subject of homicide at all. There were lots of small, bitter things that Colette said – ‘I hope his brakes fail’ and ‘I wish she’d just go away and die’, that kind of thing – which persuaded me she was on the same wicked wavelength as me.

And she was scared, of course; scared about what was going to happen to her if John went back to England.

‘I’m thirty-four,’ she said. ‘Nearly thirty-five. That’s old for a girl like me in Monte Carlo. That’s right, I’m old. I used to look in the mirror and think it would last for ever. But it doesn’t. It never does. At my age the choices are fewer for a girl than they are when you’re ten years younger. No, really, Don, I’m not exaggerating. Why have a girl in her thirties when there are so many to be had in their twenties? Believe me, in Monaco, if you haven’t met your
grand-père gâteau
who’s prepared to take care of you by the time you hit thirty-five then you’re probably lying about your age and spending a fortune in the beauty salon and doing escort work: fucking rich Arabs who use women like Kleenex down here. And sometimes worse than that. This is not going to happen to me. But I really thought I could rely on John. I trusted him, you know. He told me he loved me, and that he would look after me. I do not say that he promised to marry me, but he did say he would take care of me – to help me out with some of my expenses, to help me with my English and to find me an apartment of my own when I have to leave this place. If he leaves Monaco then I’ll simply have to go back to Marseille and get a job somewhere. In a real estate office or a travel company. But shall I tell you what really upsets me?’

‘Yes.’

‘It was when you told me he’d had a vasectomy.’

‘Oh, I see. You’d hoped that you and John might eventually have a child together.’

‘No, not eventually,’ said Colette. ‘As soon as possible. I wanted to have a child and that he would help me to support it. That was the express condition of me becoming John’s lover. At my age your biological clock starts ticking quite loudly. But the fact is I’d been on the pill so long I couldn’t conceive. So I was having fertility treatment at a clinic here in Monaco. Paid for by John and from a doctor he knew personally. Of course that now looks like a complete waste of time, given that John is physically incapable of fathering any more children.’

Colette swallowed with difficulty and then started crying again. I let her weep for a while and then handed her my own handkerchief. She wiped her eyes while I fetched her a glass of water.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘I said it looks like a complete waste of time,’ she said. ‘But it’s more than that. What he’s done to me is really criminal, I think.’

I nodded but I have to admit it sounded all too typical of John; and I certainly couldn’t blame him for not wanting any more children at his age. I have to say I’d probably have done the same thing myself.

‘Have you any idea of how painful IVF can be?’ she asked. ‘You have to inject hormones into the wall of your stomach. No doubt John had persuaded my doctor not to say anything about his own little problem. It was all a way of keeping me quiet. So now I feel destroyed.
Il m’a prise pour une belle connasse
.’

An hour or so later, when she was chopping cucumber for
salade niçoise
, I saw her holding the big Sabatier in a way which made me think that if John had been standing in front of her she would have pricked him with it, right through his cheating heart.

There’s something about the whole idea of murder that just arrives in the atmosphere, unbidden, like a ghost, and starts to shadow everything you do. That’s how it was with us. I knew what she was thinking because after a couple of years in County Fermanagh, when I was operating off-reservation with the Int and Squint boys, I’m a bit like a Geiger counter where that kind of thing is concerned. I only have to detect just a few homicidal particles in the air and I start to amplify that effect. Back then nobody ever said ‘We’re going to kill some left-footers tonight’; nobody had to; it happened as a sort of malign understanding between like-minded people, as if you were playing a rather lethal game of bridge. You might be in a pub talking about football with a few loyalist boys and then, an hour later, opening the boot of a taxi to reveal some trussed-up Mick you and them had snatched off the street; you would have questioned the bastard first, but no one there would have been in any doubt that someone – usually me, as it happened – was always going to trepan the fucker’s head with a bullet. But there are ad campaigns I wrote that I regret more than any one of those killings. For a while, after Warrenpoint, I really learned how to hate.

But on my third morning with Colette we were eating breakfast on the balcony staring out to sea when she finally brought the subject a little more into the open.

‘When you were in Ireland, Don, did you ever shoot anyone?’

I stood up silently and, leaning over the handrail, looked
up and then down to see if there was any chance we might be overheard.

Colette shook her head. ‘I’ve never seen anyone on these balconies,’ she said. ‘Most of the people who live here don’t actually live here, if you know what I mean.’

‘Your Russian included.’

She shrugged. ‘I don’t know anything about what happened to him. I tried to ask around – you know, there are lots of Russian girls in Monaco. I even tried to watch the Russian news on TV. But I think he’s dead. I really do. I was desperate. And then I met John. He seemed like the answer to my prayers.’

I sat down and lit a cigarette and waited for her to say something else, and when she didn’t I started to steer the conversation back in the fatal direction I wanted.

‘You were asking me if I’d ever shot someone. The answer is that I have.’

And then I told her the truth. In fact it all came out; oddly, she was the first person I’d ever spoken about it with. But unlike my wife Jenny, who’d certainly guessed about what I’d done, Colette didn’t look shocked or revolted. In fact, she looked excited, even a little pleased, at what I’d told her.

‘I thought as much,’ she said. ‘My grandfather was in the Foreign Legion. He was in Algiers, in the mid-1950s. And I think he did some bad things there, too. He had the same faraway look in his eyes that you do.’

‘Of course,’ I added, ‘in Algeria and Ireland it was a damn sight easier to get away with that kind of thing. Back in the day, they were finding bodies all over the province. Not just the ones we did, but the ones they did, too. I lost several friends to IRA murder squads. It was like bloody Chicago. They’d hit one of ours and we’d hit one of theirs and so on.’

‘And since then? Have you ever been tempted to kill anyone else?’

I smiled. ‘When I worked at the ad agency there were several account executives I’d cheerfully have killed. One guy in particular. He hated my guts and enjoyed tearing a strip off me in front of everyone. More than once he tried to get me fired. He usually worked late, so one night I waited for him near his car in St James’s Square, close by the office. I was going to kill him but, at the last minute, I changed my mind and gave him a good working over instead. Took his wallet to make it look like a mugging. He was lucky I only put him in hospital. It could so easily have been the morgue. I regretted that a little afterward. Not killing him, I mean.’

‘So, you’re not so squeamish about such things?’

‘Me, squeamish? No. But don’t get me wrong. I’m no psychopath. All of the people I’ve killed really needed killing.’

‘Did you ever want to kill John?’

‘Once or twice, maybe. But not seriously. To be sure, he can be an infuriating man. But now that you’ve suggested this—’

‘You mistake me, Don. I haven’t suggested anything of the kind.’

‘Colette. Please. You’ve every right to feel upset. It’s perfectly normal that you should want to hit back. If something like that happened to me I’d be as angry about it as you are. But I think we both know why you’re asking these questions. And I understand that, too. What he did was quite unforgivable.’

She didn’t contradict any of this. Instead she started to cry. So I put my arm around her and hugged her close, and kissed the back of her neck for a while until she stopped; and then I wiped her eyes with my handkerchief, and stroked her hair.

‘You’ve been through a lot,’ I said. ‘I can tell. I’ve seen it
before. And there’s no need to feel ashamed about what’s in your mind right now. Not a bit. However, I’m thinking that John’s hardly the best person to kill in this particular situation. Not if it’s your own future you’re really concerned about.’

‘He isn’t?’

‘No. It seems to me that John is our golden goose. And you don’t kill your golden goose so long as he keeps on laying golden eggs. It’s the giant you want to kill. The giant that owns the goose. The one who collects the eggs.’

Colette thought for a moment, but without any apparent result. It might have been the language barrier or maybe she was even less bright than I thought she was. She looked like I’d handed her a particular fiendish Sudoku puzzle.

‘Who is it who benefits most from all those golden eggs that John lays, right now?’ I asked her patiently.

‘You mean Orla, don’t you?’

We were on the same wavelength, at last.

‘Precisely.’

‘But she hasn’t done anything, to either one of us.’

‘You might think so. But now that I come to think about it, with Orla out of the way a lot of problems – yours and mine – are solved.’

‘They are?’

‘Oh yes. Besides, I’m quite sure it’s her who’s behind this move back to London. This would certainly explain why he hasn’t told you about it. From one or two things he said to me at the time I think it was probably Orla’s idea that they should move back to London, not his, and that he was simply too scared to tell you about it. In some ways she’s a very intimidating woman. And John hates confrontation.’

I paused to allow that to sink in. You have to take a
conversation like ours very carefully. There’s no sense in rushing things. It’s like painting an enamel miniature. You need fine sable brushes and a very steady hand.

‘Perhaps, if Orla was off the scene, things might be very different. In fact I’m quite sure of it. For one thing you might even marry John. And once you were married to him you could easily persuade him to restart the
atelier
. You could get your man and secure your own future and I could get my old job back. John could start earning the top money once more and you could avoid going back to work in a Marseille estate agent’s.’