Research (25 page)

‘You make it sound very simple. But I don’t think it is that cut and dried, Don. He hasn’t ever mentioned divorcing her to marry me. Not once. Unless he’s mentioned something to you.’

I shook my head. ‘Really, I had no idea about you and him until you mentioned it.’

‘Then I don’t know what we’re talking about. And even if I did, I’m not sure I could marry anyone who has been as deceitful as John has been. I really do want children, you know. Like I told you already, I’m not getting any younger.’

‘And you can have children. You see, I was rather hoping that if you married John then you and I might continue to see each other. That we could be lovers. You might have my child. In fact, you could even conceive right now. I certainly haven’t had a vasectomy. And as far as I’m aware there’s nothing wrong with my fertility either.’

I paused, waiting to see if she would actually be dumb enough to swallow that. Dumb or desperate. Either way, she was.

She brushed my cheek with her fingertips and smiled. ‘I see.’

‘It’s perfectly understandable that you should want to have a future. To have a child. I understand all that. It’s what any normal woman wants, isn’t it? To be a mother?’

I looked at her as tenderly as I could manage whilst suppressing a flash of contempt for John who, when he could have had any woman, had chosen someone so unforgivably stupid.

After a while she said, ‘I still don’t quite see why you need to kill her.’

‘Everything I described just now – about a new start for us both – that can quite easily happen, but only if we kill Orla in a way that makes you John’s only alibi. If we kill her in a way that leaves him as the prime suspect and means you’re his best chance – perhaps his only chance – of staying out of jail.’

By now Colette had told me all about John’s habit of sneaking downstairs from his apartment several nights a week, to fuck her while Orla was asleep; and this had given me an idea which I now described to her in detail. She listened attentively and then nodded.

‘That’s so simple it really might work,’ she said, nodding sagely. ‘You’re very clever, Don.’

I pretended to be flattered.

I nodded. ‘From what you’ve told me, John won’t even notice she’s dead when he gets back into bed. He’ll be so anxious not to wake her that he’ll creep in – as you’ve described – and go straight to sleep. By the time he wakes up in the morning, you’ll be miles away, with your family in Marseille, perhaps. Or better still in Paris. Yes, in Paris, I think. But wherever it is, you’ll wait there for a while, until he’s good and desperate of course, and ready to make a deal, and then you can call to offer him the lifeline. In fact you should offer
to say that he was with you for almost the whole night when Orla died. It’s important that you should lie on the record for him. That way he’ll always be in your debt. You can leave it to me to suggest that you and he ought to get married in order to make sure that you never go back on what you tell the police. After all, a wife cannot be forced to give evidence against her own husband.’

Not that it really mattered but I had no idea if this was still true or not.

‘That will make us both look guilty, won’t it?’

‘By then it will be too late. Look here, in the beginning the police will make it rough for you both, but as long as you both stick to your story – that he spent the whole night with you after giving his wife a sleeping pill – then you and he should be in the clear. After all, the autopsy will certainly support John’s story. They’ll find the drugs in her system. And who would give his wife a sleeping pill if he was also planning to shoot her? Why not just give her an overdose and tell the police she had talked of suicide? And who would get back into bed with the body of someone he had already murdered? It just doesn’t make sense, does it?’

‘No, I can see that.’ She paused. ‘How would you kill her?’

‘Do you really want to know?’

She shook her head. ‘No, perhaps not.’

Colette put her feet on the handrail and lit us both a cigarette; she hoovered it into her lungs and then blew the smoke at the sea, where it hung over a little flotilla of boats like a sudden fog.

‘Suppose he doesn’t give himself up to the police after he finds Orla’s body? Suppose he makes a run for it? If he looks as guilty as you say he will, then he might panic and leave
Monaco. On his boat. Or in his plane. I think I would, if I was him. Wouldn’t you?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘What then?’

‘Then he’ll still try to call you, Colette. My guess is that in those circumstances you’ll continue to be the linch-pin – the
déclic
, if you prefer – for his whole future. In fact I should say he’ll be even more desperate to find you than before.’

‘But won’t he suspect that I’ve had something to do with Orla’s murder? Surely I’ll be the obvious suspect in his eyes.’

‘No, not if you think about it logically. Look, before he comes downstairs from his apartment Orla is very much alive, so you’re in the clear then. You’re certainly in the clear while he’s in bed with you here in your apartment, of course. And afterward, when he’s back in bed with her, you’re in the clear then, too. You can hardly murder Orla while he’s lying next to her. He’s your alibi as much as you are his. Don’t you see? That’s what makes it so perfect.’

I paused to let that sink in a bit before adding, ‘But look here, she’s not without enemies. Her family are all Irish republicans. And they have enemies, too. Dangerous enemies in the Irish Protestant community, the UDA and UVF. These people are just as dangerous as the IRA. I should know. I worked with them. Orla has been giving Sinn Féin money for years. When it comes to court I’m sure that this is what John’s defence will rest upon. Orla’s connections in Irish nationalism.’

Colette nodded. ‘Yes. John told me about her family. But won’t it seem suspicious that I went away on the very night his wife was murdered?’

‘Not if you send him a text first thing in the morning; you can tell him that something unexpected came up – your
sister in hospital, something like that. That way your absence will be easily explained. He’ll call you of course. But you won’t answer. Not for a while.’

‘And where will I be?’

‘In Paris. The minute I come back downstairs from John’s apartment we’ll go straight to the airport. You’ll catch the first plane and stay there until I can get to you. Meanwhile I’ll go to London and wait for the police to get in contact with me and the other guys. Which they will, of course. So it’s important I’m there when they make contact. If it comes to that I expect John will call me, too. If he’s on the lam, that is. When he’s needed some dirty work done before I’ve been virtually the first person he calls.’

I described three such occasions to Colette: once when he got done for drink-driving and needed someone to go and collect his car; a second time when he wanted me to hire a couple of students to become his personal sock-puppet, posting five-star reviews for John’s books on Amazon – there’s a lot of that goes on, these days; and a third time when he wanted me to sack one of the writers in the
atelier
. But there were many more I could have told her about.

‘Wait, won’t the police know you were in Monaco on the night of Orla’s murder? Won’t that make you a suspect?’

I shook my head.

‘That might have been the case once. But the staff at British border control don’t bother to record the names of people leaving the UK, so no one will know that I was out of the country. If the Monty cops ask I’ll tell them I spent that weekend at my place in Cornwall. Besides, I’ll be using a false passport. Both John and I managed to get one when we were researching one of his books. No one will ever know I was even here.’

‘You seem to have thought of everything already.’

‘Yes, I think you’re right. And perhaps I have. It is curious that since you mentioned the idea this plan seems to have arrived in my head as one whole, like the plot for a novel.’

‘It seems that you are much better at plots than you thought you were.’

‘Isn’t that interesting? On the other hand maybe it’s not so surprising. After all, I’m beginning to realize that I would do anything for you, Colette. Even commit a murder.’

‘But why do you say so?’

I stood up and surveyed the Legoland scene below. The summer sporting club, on the promontory of land that marked the eastern edge of Larvotto, was no bigger than a one-euro coin, while the old port – Port Hercule – to the west, was the size and shape of a bottle opener. It was not a view for the faint-hearted – anyone with vertigo or acrophobia could never have inhabited the Tour Odéon – but it was the very place a more modern-minded devil might have chosen if he had been looking for a high place to tempt someone with ownership of the whole world. And Monte Carlo is as near to being a holy city as there is for the world’s wealthiest people. It was certainly worth a try. I turned to face her and leaned back confidently on the handrail of the glass balcony; only in a novel would the rail have given way, sending me to a probably well-deserved death a couple of hundred feet below for my Icarus-like hubris. A warm breeze stirred my hair and then hers, but it might as easily have been something altogether more sinister – a subtler, more ethereal ectoplasm that contained the essence of pure temptation.

‘Honestly, Colette, it’s no accident our coming together in the Columbus Bar the other night. No accident at all. The way it happened – John’s book as the nexus of our meeting – that
was fate pure and simple. I know it. You know it. I’ve thought a lot about it and I think it happened because, frankly, it’s within my power to give you exactly what you want in life; to enable you to live the life of luxury you’ve probably always wanted: a beautiful apartment, a lovely town house in Paris, a home in the Caribbean, an expensive sports car,
a child
 – all of these things I will give you, Colette, if you’ll let me help you. And I tell you without fear of contradiction that after all that’s happened to you, you deserve these things. You know it and I know it. But we needn’t dwell on any of that because while material things are important they’re not
that
important. Happiness, fulfilment in life, love – these are the things that really matter. So now I’m going to tell you exactly why I want to help you – why I’m your most devoted servant in this matter. Please don’t be embarrassed if I tell you it’s because I think I love you. What do the French call it?
Un coup de foudre
?’

‘Really? After so short a time?’

‘Is that not how lightning strikes, Colette? Suddenly? Like something which is beyond our control. Perhaps that’s one of the few benefits of being older. You make up your mind about things like that so much more quickly than when you’re a bit younger.
Carpe diem
, so to speak. Anyway, I’d hardly be contemplating such a drastic course of action if I didn’t love you, I think. Do you? Only a truly devoted lover could be willing to do what I am willing to do for you, which is murder, my sweet.’

I was on the verge of mentioning
Thérèse Raquin
 – Zola’s marvellous book about a love triangle and a murder – until I remembered that it hadn’t ended well for any of them. I pressed my belted waist hard against the brushed steel handrail, as if testing the absolute limits of the world I was in.
I remained exactly where I was, with my feet not exactly on the ground but still very firmly on the polished wooden decking of that little twenty-ninth-floor balcony.

‘No, I suppose not.’ She finished her cigarette and smiled. ‘I’m very fond of you, Don. But please, give me a little more time. For my feelings to catch up with yours. Yes?’

‘Of course. I understand.’

‘And look, I think it’s a good plan. But tell me please, is ours a perfect plan? After all, we don’t want to get caught, do we? It’s odd how getting caught never seems to be part of anyone’s plan. I’m terrified of going to jail.’

I wondered if Colette had ever read Camus, like every French schoolchild. I certainly didn’t want to end up in jail like Meursault, talking to a priest about the absurdity of the human condition. Because that’s the part of the plan that
les hommes d’action
always fail to consider; and yet it’s the one that needs debating most of all – the possibility of failure and of being caught. Looking at Colette though, I didn’t think the existential niceties of crime were worth mentioning.

‘The perfect plan?’ I smiled and flicked my still smouldering cigarette in the general direction of Beausoleil, where I hoped it might ignite the lacquered hair of some elderly French matron. ‘It’s an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. It doesn’t exist. Order always tends toward disorder; this is called entropy. So there is only a good plan, and this is a very good plan. But a good plan is only a good plan if it’s flexible enough to deal with something that goes wrong, even sometimes very wrong. In my experience something always goes wrong. That’s why there’s no such thing as a perfect plan. Or a perfect murder. Because something always goes wrong.’

She nodded. ‘When are we going to do it?’

‘When’s he back from Geneva?’ I said.

‘In two weeks’ time, they’re both here for their wedding anniversary, I think.’

‘Then that’s when we’ll do it.’

I picked up the iPad and surveyed the apartment, satisfied that I had everything I had come for. But I didn’t bother searching the place for Colette’s laptop; I knew where it was: she had taken it with her when she had gone with me in the car to Nice Airport. Her leaving the iPad on the kitchen worktop had been a mistake; I simply hadn’t noticed it and nor had she. It had been the kind of thing I’d been referring to when I’d talked to her about entropy and was just one of a couple of things that had gone wrong with the plan immediately after I’d murdered Mrs Orla Houston.

It still felt a little weird saying that. I didn’t regret it for a moment, however. In truth I was having the most fun I’d had since leaving the army. Nothing – not the huckster/wanker world of advertising nor the solitary/autistic life of a writer – can compare with the exhilarating thrill of getting away with murder.