Super-Cannes

Super-Cannes Ali Smith J. G. Ballard A high-tech business park on the Mediterranean coast is the setting for a most disturbing crime in this bestseller from the master of dystopia, J.G. Ballard.A disturbing mystery awaits Paul and Jane Sinclair when they arrive in Eden-Olympia, a high-tech business park in the hills above Cannes. Jane is to work as a doctor for those who live in this ultra-modern workers’ paradise. But what caused her predecessor to go on a shooting spree that made headlines around the world? As Paul investigates his new surroundings, he begins to uncover a thriving subculture of crime that is spiralling out of control.Both a novel of ideas and a compelling thriller that will keep you turning the pages to the shocking denouement, Super-Cannes is an extraordinary satire from the bestselling author of Drowned World, Cocaine Nights and Crash. Extreme Metaphors, a collection of interviews with Ballard, will be published in 2012 Super-Cannes J.G. BALLARD Copyright (#ulink_9e856d65-f870-5b8d-8849-1eada197ffbf) Fourth Estate An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road, London W6 8JB 4thestate.co.uk (http://4thestate.co.uk) This edition published by Fourth Estate in 2014 First published in Great Britain by Flamingo in 2000 Copyright © J. G. Ballard 2000 The right of J. G. Ballard to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988. Introduction © Ali Smith 2014 ‘The Enormous Space’ © J. G. Ballard 1989 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. 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Cover by Stanley Donwood Ebook Edition © May 2013 ISBN: 9780007322183 Version: 2014-08-14 Table of Contents Cover (#udc7527eb-aced-5396-9cf3-c577f9ffd2d8) Title Page (#u7a40075d-2574-5ba6-a744-8d8841e074b4) Copyright (#u6fc9e0ff-392f-5501-9e6f-c8baf322b173) Author’s Note (#uee4885e3-abfc-5dc7-9816-4416d360f5f5) Introduction by Ali Smith (#u1cc45d88-e4df-5f45-84c8-75026e85c710) PART I (#u4ca2904f-79db-5c1d-b867-54578779e79d) 1 Visitors to the Dream Palace (#u65abfdc9-0d31-5753-bb99-9da0cbaf22bc) 2 Dr Wilder Penrose (#u1b9c511a-4b4e-5821-b148-1ebafc2d19b8) 3 The Brainstorm (#ud37ce6c4-0e55-5479-8ec8-3c0768e803bd) 4 A Flying Accident (#u110bbb0c-02a5-540b-8e7b-16b8d1561537) 5 The English Girl (#u316b67d5-8e42-557f-a672-748299744bef) 6 A Russian Intruder (#u26ed4c82-5b8f-5bd6-a313-750135735191) 7 Incident in a Car Park (#ub14ac85a-2ada-5fa7-8ba4-c1e514e531a3) 8 The Alice Library (#u58098d49-cdab-5b95-a5ae-d0854460a789) 9 Glass Floors and White Walls (#ub3f93bf5-9983-535c-9cc2-504e57a79421) 10 The Hit List (#ud1cf1485-3c70-53ec-8e3f-2d28f85c5629) 11 Thoughts of Saint-Exup?ry (#litres_trial_promo) 12 A Fast Drive to Nice Airport (#litres_trial_promo) 13 A Decision to Stay (#litres_trial_promo) 14 Riviera News (#litres_trial_promo) 15 A Residential Prison (#litres_trial_promo) 16 Widows and Memories (#litres_trial_promo) 17 Refuge at La Bocca (#litres_trial_promo) 18 The Street of Darkest Night (#litres_trial_promo) 19 Elopement (#litres_trial_promo) 20 The Grand Tour (#litres_trial_promo) 21 Drugs and Deaths (#litres_trial_promo) 22 The Roof Deck (#litres_trial_promo) 23 The Confession (#litres_trial_promo) 24 Blood Endures (#litres_trial_promo) 25 The Cardin Foundation (#litres_trial_promo) 26 Flying Again (#litres_trial_promo) 27 Darkness Curves (#litres_trial_promo) 28 Strains of Violence (#litres_trial_promo) 29 The Therapy Programme (#litres_trial_promo) 30 Nietzsche on the Beach (#litres_trial_promo) PART II (#litres_trial_promo) 31 The Film Festival (#litres_trial_promo) 32 A Dead Man’s Tuxedo (#litres_trial_promo) 33 The Coast Road (#litres_trial_promo) 34 Course Notes and a Tango (#litres_trial_promo) 35 The Analysis (#litres_trial_promo) 36 Confession (#litres_trial_promo) 37 A Plan of Action (#litres_trial_promo) PART III (#litres_trial_promo) 38 The High Air (#litres_trial_promo) 39 A New Folklore (#litres_trial_promo) 40 The Bedroom Camera (#litres_trial_promo) 41 The Streetwalker (#litres_trial_promo) 42 Last Assignment (#litres_trial_promo) ‘The Enormous Space’ by J. G. Ballard (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) Author’s Note (#ulink_5e45fb12-9f4d-534d-99b1-f145a00d383a) A NOTE ON the local geography. Frequent visitors to the French Riviera will be familiar with Marina Baie des Anges, the vast apartment complex that lies like a second Colosseum under the Nice Airport flight path. The Pierre Cardin Foundation, at Miramar to the west of Cannes, is difficult to find but well worth a visit, and must be one of the strangest buildings in Europe. Port-la-Gal?re, nearby, is another architectural oddity, with its honeycomb facades worthy of Gaudi. Antibes-les-Pins, at Golfe-Juan, is part of the high-tech C?te d’Azur that is rapidly replacing the old. An even better example, and the inspiration for Eden-Olympia, is the landscaped business park of Sophia-Antipolis, a few miles to the north of Antibes. Super-Cannes is a luxury enclave on the heights above the Croisette, but the term might well refer to that whole terrain of science parks and autoroutes on the high ground above the Var plain. Together they make up Europe’s silicon valley, a world away from the casinos and belle ?poque hotels that define the Riviera of old. Nostalgic Aviation, a cheerful museum of aircraft memorabilia, stands at the entrance to Cannes-Mandelieu Airport, and is a haven for flying buffs. On the new Riviera, even aviation is now consigned to a fondly remembered past. J.G. Ballard INTRODUCTION (#ulink_82ebcc4d-686e-5961-8a2d-8b69d6561fbf) BY ALI SMITH ‘There’s something about the novel that resists innovation,’ J. G. Ballard said. He said it more than once; it was something he was fond of saying even as he himself innovated, working away beneath and pulling up the floorboards of literary tradition, one eye on the contemporanea his novels happened to inhabit and the other on a very different clock, one ‘whose movements are virtually imperceptible but which cover giant periods of time as the human race evolved.’ Super-Cannes, which he published on the cusp not just of a new century but a new thousand years, makes inquiry into both – the time we inhabit and our place in evolutionary terms. It parallels the ancient mysteries of Eros and Thanatos alongside what’s called human progress. It rewrites (it seems literally to do this as it unfolds) the speed and expectations of English narrative while examining our warmth towards, our desire for, and the naivety and comfort in our nostalgia about, the novel form. It’s as if he’s questioning the form’s uses to us, now, the postmodern, evolved, post-Nietzschean so-civilised human beings of the beginning of the next millennium, as he put it in an interview with John Gray: We inhabit a house in which there are rooms that have never been unlocked, down in the basement. Now and then we’ve had a glimpse in these rooms and there are strange old cabinets and odd musical instruments. What sort of tunes do they play, one wonders, lying in the dust? … There is a darker corner of the human psyche which intrigues us, and which we feel might benefit us if we started to explore it. It’s almost a kind of murder mystery investigation. A crime happened, perhaps, or some strange event in the human past, and we are drawn to try and understand what happened. What will happen when we go down to play in the dark of the self? What will happen when Nietzsche collides with the expectations of the super-rich exclusive-set beach-read? This: a brilliant hybrid, a glistening, riotous and deadpan piece of visionary slipstream – a brand-new kind of crime novel. Super-Cannes is the keystone of Ballard’s trilogy about gated communities, along with Cocaine Nights (1996) and Millennium People (2003), all three of which examine, via this gated microcosm, time, crime and psychopathology. It takes as its subject the liberal (seeming) nature of the giant corporations up against the truth about human instinct and human nature. An exemplary good sort called David Greenwood has run amok, killing several work colleagues in Eden-Olympia, a science/business park plus paradisal residential complex nestling among the swimming pools in the hills above Cannes in the well-heeled south of France. Paul, an aviator who has badly damaged his knee (in a crash in a plane before it even left the ground), and his new and much younger wife, Jane – the middle-aged Paul is having what might be called a late romance – arrive in Super-Cannes from MaidaVale in their old classic Jaguar. It’s as if they’ve arrived in the future in a gorgeous clunky time-machine, ‘still locked into the past’, a past that’s ‘a huge phantom limb that aches and throbs’, so shockingly suddenly gone it’s like it’s been amputated. Jane is taking Greenwood’s job. They inherit the mystery. Why would a good man living in a ‘suburb of paradise’ go mad, they wonder, looking down at how the ‘hundreds of blue ovals trembled like damaged retinas in the Provencal sun.’ The very first paragraph announces a collision between notions of heaven and territories of mental state. It declares a ‘waiting madness’, a ‘state of undeclared war’. It veers, in a few lines, from heaven via psychiatry all the way to murder, asking the question along the way about what shape an ‘intelligent city’ might take and tossing in – quite casually – a collision of ancient and modern cultural and aesthetic references from the mythical god of communication and the dead via the surrealists to The Tempest, the last of Shakespeare’s own late romances. This novel is full of resonances from and references to novels and texts (as well as all the film narrative riffs which might be expected in any suburb of Cannes); it’s actually a very bookish novel; a library literally litters it: Defoe, Saint-Exup?ry, Connolly, Fitzgerald, Greene, Spark, Hardy, Stevenson, Proust, Conrad and Carroll – above all, Carroll: since this is a novel which deals simultaneously with the form’s real and seeming innocences, its nostalgias, its fetishised and subterranean urges, with its own very specific ‘Alice library’ at its core. ‘The French see the Alice books as a realistic picture of English life,’ Wilder Penrose says. He’s the park psychiatrist, the mindman, the Prospero, or puppetmaster, or God, of Super-Cannes (and a clinical, rational, reassuringly white-coated version of Angela Carter’s foul and clever dream-inventor in The InfernalDesire Machines of Doctor Hoffman).Names of characters in Ballard’s work tend to be almost camp in their resonances; the corrupted good man is inevitably called Greenwood, the protagonist and his wife have single-syllable-resonance names rather like children just arrived in this heaven/hell from a ‘How To Read’ infant primer. Penrose himself bears the name of one of the few truly revolutionary British surrealist artists of the twentieth century. But even here Ballard wants something beyond expectations. He wants a wilder Penrose, something even more surreal than surrealism itself, and maybe also a wilder kind of pen, to rise to the challenge of this newfound mystery territory (not forgetting all the attendant sexual punning too). It looks, on the surface, like naturalism. It’s not long before it’s become much richer and stranger, a prose that reads as part clinical, part ritualised. But even as it’s all being spelled out to us, in a prose so seemingly utilitarian that it hides nothing, and even with our rather lame protagonist, a pawn ‘primed with fresh information’ so holy-fool-like that he blurts out the truth every time he gets closer to the mystery, something begins to form that’s well beyond the genred notions of murder mystery, something mysteriously uncategorisable (well, as anything other than Ballardian). Meanwhile Super-Cannes acts as fictive parody, even self-parody, with as many warnings and Scooby-Doo clues and red herrings as the average Agatha Christie. Its warning is both melodrama and truly urgent. ‘Read this … you may be in danger.’ Its revelation is the dilettante, distracting nature of the usual kinds and mechanics of fiction. ‘Satisfied that I had virtually solved the mystery, I took a rose from the vase on the hall table and slipped it through my buttonhole,’ Paul says, like an idiot, on only page 50 in a novel which, while pointing out the inescapability of role, anatomises all role play and performance in a determination to get closer to what acting and action really are. Such solvings, such performances of control act as distractions from a frank reality which, as Ballard is at pains in his foreword to point out, is the root source of this thriller that writes itself, foresteps its own footprints, lets us know repeatedly, ritualistically, fetishistically, like a dripfeed, that we’re only being told so much, then unwinds like an increasingly wild and fevered nightmare in a prose so spareseeming and at the same time so near parody that the baroqueness of the truth, and its simultaneous mundanity, aren’t so much revealed as simply apparent, if we just look. It’s a display of narrative’s irrelevant yet crucial effect on its readers in the face of the open secret, the lack of mystery at the heart of this novel, where Penrose, in Ballard’s brilliant anatomising of psychopathy, simply legitimises every possible taboo and crime in the name of entertainment – or maybe even just the dispelling of boredom. In this, Super-Cannes performs, critiques, then effortlessly outsteps expectations of the novel form. Angela Carter, who recognised Ballard as one of the writers ‘the times shine through … so that we think they see more clearly than we do, whereas in reality they are making us see more clearly’, quotes him in an essay she wrote in the Orwell year, 1984: ‘I wanted a revolutionary fiction; I wanted the recognition of the whole domain of the unconscious, something British naturalistic fiction never attempted. I wanted a fiction of the imagination which would tell us the truth about ourselves.’ Will Paul escape? What will happen, in the novel’s vicious circling? ‘High up here in Super-Cannes, nothing matters.’ Its revelations aren’t revelations – deep down we knew them all along – and they’re coruscating, blasting, and very everyday. Its long-view version of the human story blows the fictions out of the water. It both rips up and pays homage to the library. It tells no lies. It transforms the act of fiction. What a great novel. Cambridge, 2014 Quotes are from Extreme Metaphors, and Shaking a Leg: AngelaCarter’s Collected Journalism and Writings PART I (#ulink_515e770f-7b1d-50f3-9b33-dfc7a904350d) 1 Visitors to the Dream Palace (#ulink_0531df5b-7cb5-5890-aa3e-0f2d4c93598c) THE FIRST PERSON I met at Eden-Olympia was a psychiatrist, and in many ways it seems only too apt that my guide to this ‘intelligent’ city in the hills above Cannes should have been a specialist in mental disorders. I realize now that a kind of waiting madness, like a state of undeclared war, haunted the office buildings of the business park. For most of us, Dr Wilder Penrose was our amiable Prospero, the psychopomp who steered our darkest dreams towards the daylight. I remember his eager smile when we greeted each other, and the evasive eyes that warned me away from his outstretched hand. Only when I learned to admire this flawed and dangerous man was I able to think of killing him. Rather than fly from London to Nice, a journey as brief as a plastic-tray lunch, Jane and I decided to drive to the C?te d’Azur and steal a few last days of freedom before we committed ourselves to Eden-Olympia and the disciplines of the Euro-corporate lifestyle. Jane was still unsure about her six-month secondment to the business park’s private clinic. Her predecessor, a young English doctor named David Greenwood, had met a tragic and still unexplained death after running amok with a rifle. By chance, Jane had known Greenwood when they worked together at Guy’s Hospital, and I often thought of the boyishly handsome doctor who could rouse an entire women’s ward with a single smile. Memories of Greenwood were waiting for us at Boulogne as the Jaguar left the cross-Channel ferry and rolled its wheels across the quayside. Going into a tabac for a packet of Gitanes – illicit cigarettes had kept both of us sane during my months in hospital – Jane bought a copy of Paris Match and found Greenwood’s face on the cover, under a headline that referred to the unsolved mystery. As she sat alone on the Jaguar’s bonnet, staring at the graphic photographs of murder victims and the grainy maps of the death route, I realized that my spunky but insecure young wife needed to put a few more miles between herself and Eden-Olympia. Rather than overheat either Jane’s imagination or the Jaguar’s elderly engine, I decided to avoid the Autoroute du Soleil and take the RN7. We bypassed Paris on the P?riph?rique, and spent our first evening at a venerable hotel in the forest near Fontainebleau, spelling out the attractions of Eden-Olympia to each other and trying not to notice the antique hunting rifle on the dining-room mantelpiece. The next day we crossed the olive line, following the long, cicada miles that my mother and father had motored when they first took me to the Mediterranean as a boy. Surprisingly, many of the old landmarks were still there, the family restaurants and literate bookshops, and the light airfields with their casually parked planes that had first made me decide to become a pilot. Trying to distract Jane, I talked far too much. During the few months of our marriage I had told my doctor-bride almost nothing about myself, and the drive became a mobile autobiography that unwound my earlier life along with the kilometres of dust, insects and sun. My parents had been dead for two decades, but I wanted Jane to meet them, my hard-drinking, womanizing father, a provincial-circuit barrister, and my lonely, daydreaming mother, always getting over yet another doomed affair. At a hotel in Hauterives, south of Lyons, Jane and I sat in the same high-ceilinged breakfast room, unchanged after thirty-five years, where the stags’ heads still gazed over shelves stocked with the least enticing alcohol I had ever seen. My parents, after their usual bickering breakfast of croissants and coffee helped down by slugs of cognac, had dragged me off to the dream palace of the Facteur Cheval, a magical edifice conjured out of pebbles the old postman collected on his rounds. Working tirelessly for thirty years, he created an heroic doll’s house that expressed his simple but dignified dreams of the earthly paradise. My mother tipsily climbed the miniature stairs, listening to my father declaim the postman’s naive verses in his resonant baritone. All I could think of, with a ten-year-old’s curiosity about my parents’ sex-lives, was what had passed between them during the night. Now, as I embraced Jane on the parapets of the dream palace, I realized that I would never know. Cheval might have survived, but the France of the 1960s, with its Routier lunches, anti-CRS slogans and the Citro?n DS, had been largely replaced by a new France of high-speed monorails, MacDo’s, and the lavish air-shows that my cousin Charles and I would visit in our rented Cessna when we founded our firm of aviation publishers. And Eden-Olympia was the newest of the new France. Ten miles to the north-east of Cannes, in the wooded hills between Valbonne and the coast, it was the latest of the development zones that had begun with Sophia-Antipolis and would soon turn Provence into Europe’s silicon valley. Lured by tax concessions and a climate like northern California’s, dozens of multinational companies had moved into the business park that now employed over ten thousand people. The senior managements were the most highly paid professional caste in Europe, a new elite of administrators, ?narques and scientific entrepreneurs. The lavish brochure enthused over a vision of glass and titanium straight from the drawing boards of Richard Neutra and Frank Gehry, but softened by landscaped parks and artificial lakes, a humane version of Corbusier’s radiant city. Even my sceptical eye was prepared to blink. Studying the maps, I propped the brochure on my knee-brace as Jane steered the Jaguar through the afternoon traffic on the Grasse road. The stench of raw perfume from a nearby factory filled the car, but Jane wound down her window and inhaled deeply. Our disreputable evening in Arles had revived her, swaying arm in arm with me after a drunken dinner, exploring what I insisted was Van Gogh’s canal but turned out to be a stagnant storm-drain behind the archbishop’s palace. We had both been eager to get back to our hotel and the well-upholstered bed. The colour was returning to her face, for almost the first time since our wedding. Her watchful eyes and toneless skin were like those of an over-gifted child. Before meeting me, Jane had spent too many hours in elevators and pathology rooms, and the pallor of strip lighting haunted her like a twelve-year-old’s memories of a bad dream. But once we left Arles she rose to the challenge of Eden-Olympia, and I could hear her muttering to herself, rehearsing the risqu? backchat that so intrigued the younger consultants at Guy’s. ‘Cheer me up, Paul. How much further?’ ‘The last mile – always the shortest one. You must be tired.’ ‘It’s been a lot of fun, more than I thought. Why do I feel so nervous?’ ‘You don’t.’ I pressed her hand against the wheel, steering the Jaguar around an elderly woman cyclist, panniers filled with baguettes. ‘Jane, you’ll be a huge success. You’re the youngest doctor on the staff, and the prettiest. You’re efficient, hardworking … what else?’ ‘Slightly insolent?’ ‘You’ll do them good. Anyway, it’s only a business park.’ ‘I can see it – straight ahead. My God, it’s the size of Florida…’ The first office buildings in the Eden-Olympia complex were emerging from the slopes of a long valley filled with eucalyptus trees and umbrella pines. Beyond them were the rooftops of Cannes and the ?les de L?rins, a glimpse of the Mediterranean that never failed to lift my heart. ‘Paul, down there …’ Jane pointed to the hillside, raising a finger still grimy from changing a spark plug. Hundreds of blue ovals trembled like damaged retinas in the Proven?al sun. ‘What are they – rain-traps? Tanks full of Chanel Number 5? And those people. They seem to be naked.’ ‘They are naked. Or nearly. Swimming pools, Jane. Take a good look at your new patients.’ I watched one senior executive in the garden of his villa, a suntanned man in his fifties with a slim, almost adolescent body, springing lightly on his diving board. ‘A healthy crowd … I can’t imagine anyone here actually bothering to fall ill.’ ‘Don’t be too sure. I’ll be busier than you think. The place is probably riddled with airport TB and the kind of viruses that only breed in executive jets. And as for their minds …’ I began to count the pools, each a flare of turquoise light lost behind the high walls of the villas with their screens of cycads and bougainvillaea. Ten thousand years in the future, long after the C?te d’Azur had been abandoned, the first explorers would puzzle over these empty pits, with their eroded frescoes of tritons and stylized fish, inexplicably hauled up the mountainsides like aquatic sundials or the altars of a bizarre religion devised by a race of visionary geometers. We left the Cannes road and turned onto a landscaped avenue that led towards the gates of the business park. The noise from the Jaguar’s tyres fell away as they rolled across a more expensive surface material – milled ivory, at the very least – that would soothe the stressed wheels of the stretch limousines. A palisade of Canary palms formed an honour guard along the verges, while beds of golden cannas flamed from the central reservation. Despite this gaudy welcome, wealth at Eden-Olympia displayed the old-money discretion that the mercantile rich of the information age had decided to observe at the start of a new millennium. The glass and gun-metal office blocks were set well apart from each other, separated by artificial lakes and forested traffic islands where a latter-day Crusoe could have found comfortable refuge. The faint mist over the lakes and the warm sun reflected from the glass curtain-walling seemed to generate an opal haze, as if the entire business park were a mirage, a virtual city conjured into the pine-scented air like a son-et-lumi?re vision of a new Versailles. But work and the realities of corporate life anchored Eden-Olympia to the ground. The buildings wore their ventilation shafts and cable conduits on their external walls, an open reminder of Eden-Olympia’s dedication to company profits and the approval of its shareholders. The satellite dishes on the roofs resembled the wimples of an order of computer-literate nuns, committed to the sanctity of the workstation and the pieties of the spreadsheet. Gravel tore at the Jaguar’s tyres. Waking from her reverie, Jane braked sharply before we reached the gatehouse, sending the old sports saloon into a giddy shunt. Two uniformed guards looked up from their electronic screens, but Jane ignored them, readying a two-finger salute that I managed to conceal. ‘Jane, they’re on our side.’ ‘Sorry, Paul. I know, we want them to like me. Open your window.’ She grimaced at herself in the rear-view mirror. ‘That cheap perfume. I smell like a tart …’ ‘The most gorgeous tart on the C?te d’Azur. They’re lucky to have you.’ I tried to settle her hands as she fretted over her lipstick, obsessively fine-tuning herself. I could feel the perspiration on her wrists, brought out by more than the August sun. ‘Jane, we don’t have to be here. Even now, you can change your mind. We can drive away, cross the border into Italy, spend a week in San Remo …’ ‘Paul? I’m not your daughter.’ Jane frowned at me, as if I were an intruder into her world, then touched my cheek forgivingly. ‘I signed a six-month contract. Since David died they’ve had recruitment problems. They need me …’ I watched Jane make a conscious effort to relax, treating herself like an overwrought patient in casualty. She lay against the worn leather seating, breathing the bright air into her lungs and slowly exhaling. She patted the dark bang that hid her bold forehead and always sprang forward like a coxcomb at the first hint of stress. I remembered the calm and sensible way in which she had helped the trainee nurses who fumbled with my knee-brace. At heart she was the subversive schoolgirl, the awkward-squad recruiter with a primed grenade in her locker, who saw through the stuffy conventions of boarding school and teaching hospital but was always kind enough to rescue a flustered housekeeper or ward orderly. Now, at Eden-Olympia, it was her turn to be intimidated by the ultra-cerebral French physicians who would soon be her colleagues. She sat forward, chin raised, fingers drumming a threatening tattoo on the steering wheel. Satisfied that she could hold her own, she noticed me massaging my knee. ‘Paul, that awful brace … we’ll get it off in a few days. You’ve been in agony and never complained.’ ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t help with the driving. Cannes is a long way from Maida Vale.’ ‘Everywhere is a long way from Maida Vale. I’m glad we came.’ She gazed at the office buildings that climbed the valley slopes, and at the satellite dishes distilling their streams of information from the sky. ‘It all looks very civilized, in a Euro kind of way. Not a drifting leaf in sight. It’s hard to believe anyone would be allowed to go mad here. Poor David …’ David Greenwood’s death dominated our time at Eden-Olympia, hovering above the artificial lakes and forests like the ghosts of Princip over Sarajevo and Lee Harvey Oswald over Dallas. Why this dedicated children’s doctor should have left his villa on a morning in late May and set out on a murder rampage had never been explained. He had killed seven senior executives at Eden-Olympia, executed his three hostages and then turned his rifle on himself. He had written no suicide note, no defiant last message, and as the police marksmen closed in he had calmly abandoned himself to death. A week before our wedding, Jane and I had met him at a London reception for M?decins Sans Fronti?res. Likeable but a little naive, Greenwood reminded me of an enthusiastic Baptist missionary, telling Jane about the superb facilities at the Eden-Olympia clinic, and the refuge for orphaned children he had set up at La Bocca, the industrial suburb to the west of Cannes. With his uncombed hair and raised eyebrows, he looked as if he had just received an unexpected shock, a revelation of all the injustices in the world, which he had decided to put right. Yet he was no prude, and talked about his six months in Bangladesh, comparing the caste rivalries among the village prostitutes with the status battles of the women executives at Eden-Olympia. Jane had known him during their internships at Guy’s, and often met him after she enrolled with the overseas supply agency that recruited Greenwood to Eden-Olympia. When she first applied for the paediatric vacancy, I had been against her going, remembering her shock on hearing the news of Greenwood’s violent death. Although she was off-duty for the day, she had taken a white coat from the wardrobe in our bedroom and buttoned it over her nightdress as she laid the newspapers across my knees. The entire London press made the tragedy its main story. ‘Nightmare in Eden’ was the repeated headline above photographs of Riviera beaches and bullet-starred doors in the offices of the murdered executives. Jane hardly spoke about Greenwood, but insisted on watching the television coverage of French police holding back the sightseers who invaded Eden-Olympia. Blood-drenched secretaries, too speechless to explain to the cameras how their bosses had been executed, stumbled towards the waiting ambulances, while helicopters ferried the wounded to hospitals in Grasse and Cannes. The investigating magistrate, Judge Michel Terneau, led the inquiry, reconstructing the murders and taking evidence from a host of witnesses, but came up with no convincing explanation. Greenwood’s colleagues at the clinic testified to his earnest and intense disposition. An editorial in Le Monde speculated that the contrast between the worldly power of Eden-Olympia and the deprived lives of the Arab immigrants in Cannes La Bocca had driven Greenwood into a frenzy of frustration, a blind rage at inequalities between the first and third worlds. The murders were part political manifesto, so the newspaper believed, and part existential scream. When the case at last left the headlines Jane never referred to Greenwood again. But when the vacancy was advertised she immediately called the manager of the supply agency. She was the only applicant, and quickly convinced me that a long break in the Mediterranean would do wonders for my knee, injured in a flying accident nine months earlier and still refusing to mend. My cousin Charles agreed to take over the publishing house while I was away, and would e-mail me copy and proof pages of the two aviation magazines that I edited. Eager to help Jane’s career, I was happy to go. At the same time, like any husband from a different generation, I was curious about my young wife’s romantic past. Had she and Greenwood once been lovers? The question was not entirely prurient. A mass-murderer had perhaps held her in his arms, and as Jane embraced me the spirit of his death embraced me too. The widows of assassins were forever their armourers. On our last night in Maida Vale, lying in bed with our packed suitcases in the hall, I asked Jane how closely she had known Greenwood. She was sitting astride me, with the expression of a serious-minded adolescent on her face that she always wore when making love. She drew herself upright, a hand raised to hit me, then solemnly told me that she and Greenwood had never been more than friends. I almost believed her. But some unstated loyalty to Greenwood’s memory followed us from Boulogne to the gates of Eden-Olympia. Baring her teeth, Jane started the engine. ‘Right … let’s take them on. Find the clinic on the map. Someone called Penrose will meet us there. Why they’ve picked a psychiatrist, I don’t know. I told them you hate the entire profession. Apparently, he was hurt in David’s shoot-out, so be gentle with him …’ She steered the Jaguar towards the gatehouse, where the guards had already lost interest in their screens, intrigued by this confident young woman at the controls of her antique car. While they checked our documents and rang the clinic I stared at the nearby office buildings and tried to imagine Greenwood’s last desperate hours. He had shot dead one of his colleagues at the clinic. A second physician, a senior surgeon, had suffered a fatal heart attack the next day. A third colleague had been wounded in the arm: Dr Wilder Penrose, the psychiatrist who was about to introduce us to our new Eden. 2 Dr Wilder Penrose (#ulink_36cfd73a-e06c-5c66-97a0-f8d5a0acfee1) A ROBUST, BULL-BROWED man in a creased linen suit strode from the entrance of the clinic, arms raised in a boxer’s greeting. I assumed he was a local building contractor delighted with the results of his prostate test and waved back as a gesture of male solidarity. In reply, a fist punched the air. ‘Paul?’ Jane sounded wary. ‘Is that …?’ ‘Wilder Penrose? It probably is. You say he’s a psychiatrist?’ ‘God knows. This man’s a minotaur …’ I waited as he strode towards us, hands raised to ward off the sun. When Jane unlatched her door he swerved around the car, displaying remarkable agility for a big man. His heavy fists took on an almost balletic grace as they shaped the dusty contours of the Jaguar. ‘Magnificent … a genuine Mark II.’ He held open Jane’s door and shook her still grimy hand, then smiled good-naturedly at his oil-stained palm. ‘Dr Sinclair, welcome to Eden-Olympia. I’m Wilder Penrose – we’ll be sharing a coffee machine on the fourth floor. You don’t look tired. I assume the Jag sailed like a dream?’ ‘Paul thinks so. He didn’t have to change the spark plugs every ten miles.’ ‘Alas. And those twin carburettors that need to be balanced? More art than science. The old Moss gearbox? Wonderful, all the same.’ He strolled around the car and beckoned to the clouds, as if ordering them to listen to him, and declaimed in a voice not unlike my father’s: ‘Peeling off the kilometres to the tune of “Blue Skies”, sizzling down the … Nationale Sept, the plane trees going …’ ‘Sha-sha-sha …’ I completed. ‘She with the Michelin beside me, a handkerchief binding her hair…’ ‘Mr Sinclair?’ Leaving Jane, the psychiatrist came round to the passenger door. ‘You’re the first literate pilot here since Saint- Exup?ry. Let me help you. They told me about the accident.’ His strong upper arms lifted me easily from my seat. He wore sunglasses of pale plastic, but I could see his eyes scanning my face, less interested in the minor flying injuries to my forehead than in whatever strengths and weaknesses were written into the skin. He was in his late thirties, the youngest and by far the strongest psychiatrist I had met, a giant compared with the grey-haired specialists who had examined me at Guy’s for the Aviation Licensing Board. His welcoming banter concealed a faintly threatening physical presence, as if he bullied his patients to get well, intimidating them out of their phobias and neuroses. His muscular shoulders were dominated by a massive head that he disguised in a constant ducking and grimacing. I knew that the tags we had swapped from The Unquiet Grave had not impressed him as much as the Jaguar, but then his patients were among the best-educated people in the world, and too distracted for vintage motoring. When I swayed against the car, feeling light-headed in the sun, he raised a hand to steady me. I noticed his badly bitten fingernails, still damp from his lips, and backed away from him without thinking. We shook hands as I leaned on the door. His thumb probed the back of my hand in what pretended to be a masonic grip but was clearly a testing of my reflexes. ‘Paul, you’re tired …’ Penrose raised his arms to shield me from the light. ‘Dr Jane prescribes a strong draught of vodka and tonic. We’ll go straight to the house, with a guided tour on the way. Freshen up, and then I’ll borrow your wife and show her around the clinic. Arriving at Eden-Olympia is enough culture shock for one day …’ * * * We settled ourselves in the car for the last lap of our journey. Penrose climbed into the rear seat, filling the small space like a bear in a kennel. He patted and squeezed the ancient leather upholstery, as if comforting an old friend. Jane licked her thumb for luck and pressed the starter button, determined to hold her own with Penrose and relieved when the overheated engine came to life. ‘Culture shock …?’ she repeated. ‘Actually, I love it here already.’ ‘Good.’ Penrose beamed at the back of her head. ‘Why, exactly?’ ‘Because there isn’t any culture. All this alienation … I could easily get used to it.’ ‘Even better. Agree, Paul?’ ‘Totally.’ I knew Jane was teasing the psychiatrist. ‘We’ve been here ten minutes and haven’t seen a soul.’ ‘That’s misleading.’ Penrose pointed to two nearby office buildings, each only six storeys high but effectively a skyscraper lying on its side. ‘They’re all at their computer screens and lab benches. Sadly, you can forget Cyril Connolly here. Forget tuberoses and sapphirine seas.’ ‘I have. Who are the tenants? Big international companies?’ ‘The biggest. Mitsui, Siemens, Unilever, Sumitomo, plus all the French giants – Elf-Aquitaine, Carrefour, Rh?ne-Poulenc. Along with a host of smaller firms: investment brokers, bioengineering outfits, design consultancies. I sound like a salesman, but when you get to know it you’ll see what a remarkable place Eden-Olympia really is. In its way this is a huge experiment in how to hothouse the future.’ I turned to glimpse a vast car park concealed behind a screen of cypresses, vehicles nose to tail like a week’s unsold output at a Renault plant. Somewhere in the office buildings the owners of these cars were staring at their screens, designing a new cathedral or cineplex, or watching the world’s spot prices. The sense of focused brainpower was bracing, but subtly unsettling. ‘I’m impressed,’ I told Penrose. ‘It beats waiting at tables or working as a checkout girl at a Monoprix. Where do you get the staff?’ ‘We train them. They’re our biggest investment. It’s not so much their craft skills as their attitude to an entirely new workplace culture. Eden-Olympia isn’t just another business park. We’re an ideas laboratory for the new millennium.’ ‘The “intelligent” city? I’ve read the brochure.’ ‘Good. I helped to write it. Every office, house and apartment cabled up to the world’s major stockbrokers, the nearest Tiffany’s and the emergency call-out units at the clinic.’ ‘Paul, are you listening?’ Jane’s elbow nudged me in the ribs. ‘You can sell your British Aerospace shares, buy me a new diamond choker and have a heart attack at the same time …’ ‘Absolutely.’ Penrose lay back, nostrils pressed to the worn seats, snuffling at the old leather smells. ‘In fact, Paul, once you’ve settled in I strongly recommend a heart attack. Or a nervous breakdown. The paramedics will know everything about you – blood groups, clotting factors, attention-deficit disorders. If you’re desperate, you could even have a plane crash – there’s a small airport at Cannes-Mandelieu.’ ‘I’ll think about it.’ I searched for my cigarettes, tempted to fill the car with the throat-catching fumes of a Gitanes. Penrose’s teasing was part camouflage, part initiation rite, and irritating on both counts. I thought of David Greenwood and wondered whether this aggressive humour had helped the desperate young Englishman. ‘What about emergencies of a different kind?’ ‘Such as? We can cope with anything. This is the only place in the world where you can get insurance against acts of God.’ I felt Jane stiffen warningly against the steering wheel. The nearside front tyre scraped the kerb, but I pressed on. ‘Psychological problems? You do have them?’ ‘Very few.’ Penrose gripped the back of Jane’s seat, deliberately exposing his bitten fingernails. At the same time his face had hardened, the heavy bones of his cheeks and jaw pushing through the conversational tics and grimaces, a curious display of aggression and self-doubt. ‘But a few, yes. Enough to make my job interesting. On the whole, people are happy and content.’ ‘And you regret that?’ ‘Never. I’m here to help them fulfil themselves.’ Penrose winked into Jane’s rear-view mirror. ‘You’d be surprised by how easy that is. First, make the office feel like a home – if anything, the real home.’ ‘And their flats and houses?’ Jane pointed to a cluster of executive villas in the pueblo style. ‘What does that make them?’ ‘Service stations, where people sleep and ablute. The human body as an obedient coolie, to be fed and hosed down, and given just enough sexual freedom to sedate itself. We’ve concentrated on the office as the key psychological zone. Middle managers have their own bathrooms. Even secretaries have a sofa in a private alcove, where they can lie back and dream about the lovers they’ll never have the energy to meet.’ We were driving along the shore of a large ornamental lake, an ellipse of glassy water that reflected the nearby mountains and reminded me of Lake Geneva with its old League of Nations headquarters, another attempt to blueprint a kingdom of saints. Apartment houses lined the waterfront, synchronized brises-soleils shielding the balconies. Jane slowed the car, and searched the windows for a single off-duty resident. ‘A fifth of the workforce live on-site,’ Penrose told us. ‘Middle and junior management in apartments and townhouses, senior people in the residential estate where you’re going. The parkland buffers the impact of all the steel and concrete. People like the facilities – yachting and water-skiing, tennis and basketball, those body-building things that obsess the French.’ ‘And you?’ Jane queried. ‘Well…’ Penrose pressed his large hands against the roof, and lazily flexed his shoulders. ‘I prefer to exercise the mind. Jane, are you keen on sport?’ ‘Not me.’ ‘Squash, aerobics, roller-blading?’ ‘The wrong kind of sweat.’ ‘Bridge? There are keen amateurs here you could make an income off.’ ‘Sorry. Better things to do.’ ‘Interesting …’ Penrose leaned forward, so close to Jane that he seemed to be sniffing her neck. ‘Tell me more.’ ‘You know …’ Straight-faced, Jane explained: ‘Wife-swapping, the latest designer amphetamines, kiddy porn. What else do we like, Paul?’ Penrose slumped back, chuckling good-humouredly. I noticed that he was forever glancing at the empty seat beside him. There was a fourth passenger in the car, the shade of a doctor defeated by the mirror-walled office buildings and manicured running tracks. I assumed that Greenwood had suffered a catastrophic cerebral accident, but one which probably owed nothing to Eden-Olympia. Beyond the apartments was a shopping mall, a roofed-in plaza of boutiques, patisseries and beauty salons. Lines of supermarket trollies waited in the sun for customers who only came out after dark. Undismayed, Penrose gestured at the deserted checkouts. ‘Grasse and Le Cannet aren’t far away, but you’ll find all this handy. There’s everything you need, Jane – sports equipment, video-rentals, the New York Review of Books …’ ‘No teleshopping?’ ‘There is. But people like to browse among the basil. Shopping is the last folkloric ritual that can help to build a community, along with traffic jams and airport queues. Eden-Olympia has its own TV station – local news, supermarket best buys …’ ‘Adult movies?’ Jane at last seemed interested, but Penrose was no longer listening. He had noticed a trio of Senegalese trinket salesmen wandering through the deserted caf? tables, gaudy robes blanched by the sun. Their dark faces, among the blackest of black Africa, had a silvered polish, as if a local biotechnology firm had reworked their genes into the age of e-mail and the intelsat. By some mix of guile and luck they had slipped past the guards at the gate, only to find themselves rattling their bangles in an empty world. When we stopped, pointlessly, at a traffic light Penrose took out his mobile phone and pretended to speak into it. He stared aggressively at the salesmen, but the leader of the trio, an affable, older man, ignored the psychiatrist and swung his bracelets at Jane, treating her to a patient smile. I was tempted to buy something, if only to irritate Penrose, but the lights changed. ‘What about crime?’ I asked. ‘It looks as if security might be a problem.’ ‘Security is first class. Or should be.’ Penrose straightened the lapels of his jacket, ruffled by his involuntary show of temper. ‘We have our own police force. Very discreet and effective, except when you need them. These gewgaw men get in anywhere. Somehow they’ve bypassed the idea of progress. Dig a hundred-foot moat around the Montparnasse tower and they’d be up on the top deck in three minutes.’ ‘Does it matter?’ ‘Not in the way you mean. Though it’s irritating to be reminded of the contingent world.’ ‘A drifting leaf? A passing rain-shower? Bird shit on the sleeve?’ ‘That sort of thing.’ Penrose smoothed himself down, hands pressing his burly chest. ‘There’s nothing racist, by the way. We’re truly multinational – Americans, French, Japanese. Even Russians and east Europeans.’ ‘Black Africa?’ ‘At the senior level. We’re a melting pot, as the Riviera always has been. The solvent now is talent, not wealth or glamour. Forget about crime. The important thing is that the residents of Eden-Olympia think they’re policing themselves.’ ‘They aren’t, but the illusion pays off?’ ‘Exactly.’ Penrose slapped my shoulder in a show of joviality. ‘Paul, I can see you’re going to be happy here.’ The road climbed the thickly wooded slopes to the north-east of the business park, cutting off our view of Cannes and the distant sea. We stopped at an unmanned security barrier, and Penrose tapped a three-digit number into the entry panel. The white metal trellis rose noiselessly, admitting us to an enclave of architect-designed houses, our home for the next six months. I peered through the wrought-iron gates at silent tennis courts and swimming pools waiting for their owners to return. Over the immaculate gardens hung the air of well-bred catatonia that only money can buy. ‘The medical staff…?’ Jane lowered her head, a little daunted by the imposing avenues. ‘They’re all here?’ ‘Only you and Professor Walter, our cardiovascular chief. Call it enlightened self-interest. It’s always reassuring to know that a good heart man and a paediatrician are nearby, in case your wife has an angina attack or your child chokes on a rusk.’ ‘And you?’ I asked. ‘Who copes with sudden depressions?’ ‘They can wait till morning. I’m in the annexe on the other side of the hill. North facing, a kind of shadow world for the less important.’ Penrose beamed to himself, happy to speak frankly. ‘The company barons who decide our pecking order feel they’re beyond the need of psychiatric attention.’ ‘Are they?’ ‘For the time being. But I’m working on it.’ Penrose sat up and pointed through the plane trees. ‘Slow down, Jane. You’re almost home. From now on you’re living in a suburb of paradise …’ 3 The Brainstorm (#ulink_61679cfe-18f3-5270-9b3d-c607f496c0fd) A GIANT CYCAD threw its yellow fronds across the tiled pathway to a lacquered front door, past a chromium statue of a leaping dolphin. Beyond the bougainvillaea that climbed the perimeter wall I could see the streamlined balconies and scalloped roof of a large art-deco villa, its powder-blue awnings like reefed sails. The ocean-liner windows and porthole skylights seemed to open onto the 1930s, a vanished world of Cole Porter and beach pyjamas, morphine lesbians and the swagger portraits of Tamara de Lempicka. The entire structure had recently been repainted, and a phosphor in the white pigment gave its surface an almost luminescent finish, as if this elegant villa was an astronomical instrument that set the secret time of Eden-Olympia. Even Jane was impressed, smoothing the travel creases from her trousers when we stepped from the dusty Jaguar. The house was silent, but somewhere in the garden was a swimming pool filled with unsettled water. Reflections from its disturbed surface seemed to bruise the smooth walls of the house. The light drummed against Jane’s sunglasses, giving her the edgy and vulnerable look of a studio visitor who had strayed into the wrong film set. Almost without thinking, Penrose stepped forward, took the glasses from Jane’s face and placed them firmly in her hands. A concrete apron sloped from the road to the aluminium shutters of a three-car garage. Parked on the ramp was an olive-green Range Rover of the Eden-Olympia security force. A uniformed guard leaned against the driver’s door, a slim, light-skinned black with refined and almost east African features, a narrow nose and steep forehead. He picked the dust from the buttons of his mobile phone with a pocket knife, and watched without comment as we surveyed the house. Penrose introduced us, his back to the guard, speaking over his shoulder like a district commissioner with a village headman. ‘Jane, this is Frank Halder. He’ll be within radio call whenever you need him. Frank, help Dr Sinclair with her luggage …’ The guard was about to step into his Range Rover. When he opened the door I noticed a copy of Tender is the Night on the passenger seat. He avoided my eyes, but his manner was cool and self-possessed as he turned to face the psychiatrist. ‘Dr Penrose? I’m due in at the bureau. Mr Nagamatzu needs me to drive him to Nice airport.’ ‘Frank …’ Penrose held his fingernails up to the sun and examined the ragged crescents. ‘Mr Nagamatzu can wait for five minutes.’ ‘Five minutes?’ Halder seemed baffled by the notion, as if Penrose had suggested that he wait for five hours, or five years. ‘Security, doctor, it’s like a Swiss watch. Everything’s laid down in the machinery. It’s high-class time, you can’t just stop the system when you feel like it.’ ‘I know, Frank. And the human mind is like this wonderful old Jaguar, as I keep trying to explain. Mr Sinclair is still convalescing from a serious accident. And we can’t have Dr Jane too tired to deal with her important patients.’ ‘Dr Penrose …’ Jane was trying to unlock the Jaguar’s boot, hiding her embarrassment over this trivial dispute. ‘I’m strong enough to carry my own suitcases. And Paul’s.’ ‘No. Frank is keen to help.’ Penrose raised a hand to silence Jane. He sauntered over to Halder, flexing his shoulders inside his linen jacket and squaring up to the guard like a boxer at a weigh-in. ‘Besides, Mr Sinclair is a pilot.’ ‘A pilot?’ Halder ran his eyes over me, pinching his sharp nostrils as if tuning out the sweat of travel that clung to my stale shirt. ‘Gliders?’ ‘Powered aircraft. I flew with the RAF. Back in England I have an old Harvard.’ ‘Well, a pilot …’ Halder took the car keys from Jane and opened the boot. ‘That could be another story.’ We left Halder to carry the suitcases and set off towards the house. Penrose unlocked a wrought-iron gate and we stepped into the silent garden, following a pathway that led to the sun lounge. ‘Decent of him,’ I commented to Penrose. ‘Is humping luggage one of his duties?’ ‘Definitely not. He could report me if he wanted to.’ Enjoying his small triumph, Penrose said to Jane: ‘I like to stir things up, keep the adrenalin flowing. The more they hate you, the more they stay on their toes.’ Jane looked back at Halder, who was steering the suitcases past the gate. ‘I don’t think he does hate you. He seems rather intelligent.’ ‘You’re right. Halder is far too superior to hate anyone. Don’t let that mislead you.’ A spacious garden lay beside the house, furnished with a tennis court, rose pergola and swimming pool. A suite of beach chairs sat by the disturbed water, damp cushions steaming in the sun. I wondered if Halder, tired of waiting for us, had stripped off for a quick dip. Then I noticed a red beach ball on the diving board, the last water dripping from its plastic skin. Suddenly I imagined the moody young guard roaming like a baseline tennis player along the edge of the pool, hurling the ball at the surface and catching it as it rebounded from the far side, driving the water into a state of panic. Penrose and Jane walked on ahead of me, and by the time I reached the sun lounge Halder had overtaken me. He moved aside as I climbed the steps. ‘Thanks for the cases,’ I told him. ‘I couldn’t have managed them.’ He paused to stare at me in his appraising way, neither sympathetic nor hostile. ‘It’s my job, Mr Sinclair.’ ‘It’s not your job – but thanks. I had a small flying accident.’ ‘You broke your knees. That’s tough.’ He spoke with an American accent, but one learned in Europe, perhaps working as a security guard for a local subsidiary of Mobil or Exxon. ‘You have a commercial licence?’ ‘Private. Or did have, until they took it away from me. I publish aviation books.’ ‘Now you’ll have time to write one yourself. Some people might envy you.’ He stood with his back to the pool, the trembling light reflected in the beads of water on the holster of his pistol. He was strong but light-footed, with the lithe step of a professional dancer, a tango specialist who read Scott Fitzgerald and took out his frustrations on swimming pools. For a moment I saw a strange image of him washing his gun in the pool, rinsing away David Greenwood’s blood. ‘Keep flying speed …’ He saluted and strode away. As he passed the pool he leaned over and spat into the water. We sat on the terrace beneath the awning, listening to the gentle flap of canvas and the swish of lawn sprinklers from nearby gardens. Far below were the streets of Cannes, dominated by the twin domes of the Carlton Hotel, a nexus of noise and traffic that crowded the beach. The sun had moved beyond La Napoule and now lit the porphyry rocks of the Esterel, exposing valleys filled with lavender dust like the flats of a forgotten stage production. To the east, beyond Cap d’Antibes, the ziggurat apartment buildings of Marina Baie des Anges loomed larger than the Alpes-Maritimes, their immense curved facades glowing like a cauldron in the afternoon sun. The swimming pool had calmed. Halder’s glob of spit had almost dissolved, the sun-driven currents drawing it into a spiral like the milky arms of a nebula. An eager water spider straddled one of the whorls and was busy gorging itself. Penrose’s tour of the house had impressed Jane, who seemed stunned by the prospect of becoming the chatelaine of this imposing art-deco mansion. I hobbled after them as Penrose guided her around the kitchen, pointing out the ceramic hobs and the control panels with more dials than an airliner’s cockpit. In the study, virtually a self-contained office, Penrose demonstrated the computerized library, the telemetric links to hospitals in Cannes and Nice, and the databanks of medical records. Sitting at the terminal, Jane accessed the X-rays of my knees now held in the clinic’s files, along with an unforgiving description of my accident and a photograph of the ground-looped Harvard. Tapping her teeth, Jane read the pathologist’s analysis of the rogue infection that had kept me in my wheelchair for so many months. ‘It’s right up to date – practically tells us what we had for breakfast this morning. I could probably hack into David’s files …’ I clasped her shoulders, proud of my spirited young wife. ‘Jane, you’ll tear the place apart. Thank God it doesn’t say anything about my mind.’ ‘It will, dear, it will …’ Gazing at the garden, Jane finished her spritzer, eager to get back to the terminal. ‘I’ll give you a list of interesting restaurants,’ Penrose told her. He sat by himself in the centre of the wicker sofa, arms outstretched in the pose of a Hindu holy man, surveying us in his amiable way. ‘T?tou in Golfe-Juan does the best seafood. You can eat Graham Greene’s favourite boudin at Chez F?lix in Antibes. It’s a shrine for men of action like you, Paul.’ ‘We’ll go.’ I lay back in the deep cushions, watching a light aircraft haul its advertising pennant along the Croisette. ‘It’s blissful here. Absolutely perfect. So what went wrong?’ Penrose stared at me without replying, his smile growing and then fading like a dying star. His eyes closed and he seemed to slip into a shallow fugue, the warning aura before a petit-mal seizure. ‘Wilder …’ Concerned for him, Jane raised her hand to hold his attention. ‘Dr Penrose? Are you –?’ ‘Paul?’ Alert again, Penrose turned to me. ‘The aircraft, they’re such a nuisance, I didn’t quite catch what you were saying.’ ‘Something happened here.’ I gestured towards the office buildings of the business park. ‘Ten people were shot dead. Why did Greenwood do it?’ Penrose buttoned his linen jacket in an attempt to disguise his burly shoulders. He sat forward, speaking in a barely audible voice. ‘To be honest, Paul, we’ve no idea. It’s impossible to explain, and it damn near cost me my job. Those deaths have cast a huge shadow over Eden-Olympia. Seven very senior people were killed on May 28.’ ‘But why?’ ‘The big corporations would like to know.’ Penrose raised his hands, warming them in the sun. ‘Frankly, I can’t tell them.’ ‘Was David unhappy?’ Jane put down her glass. She watched Penrose as if he were a confused patient who had wandered into Casualty with a garbled tale of death and assassination. ‘We worked together at Guy’s. He was a little high-minded, but his feet were on the ground.’ ‘Completely.’ Penrose spoke with conviction. ‘He loved it here – his work at the clinic, the children’s refuge at La Bocca. The kids adored him. Mostly orphans abandoned by their north African and pied-noir families. They’d never met anyone like David. He helped out at a methadone project in Mandelieu …’ Jane stared into her empty glass. The sticky bowl had trapped a small insect. ‘Did he ever relax? It sounds as if the poor man was overworked.’ ‘No.’ Penrose closed his eyes again. He moved his head, searching the planetarium inside his skull for a glimmer of light. ‘He was taking Arabic and Spanish classes so he could talk to the children at the refuge. I never saw him under any stress.’ ‘Too many antidepressants?’ ‘Not prescribed by me. The autopsy showed nothing. No LSD, none of the wilder amphetamines. The poor fellow’s bloodstream was practically placental.’ ‘Was he married?’ I asked. ‘A wife would have known something was brewing.’ ‘I wish he had been married. He did have an affair with someone in the property-services division.’ ‘Man or woman?’ ‘Woman. It must have been.’ Jane spoke almost too briskly. ‘He certainly wasn’t homosexual. Did she have anything to say?’ ‘Nothing. Their affair had been over for months. Sadly, some things are fated to remain mysteries for ever.’ Penrose scowled at the pool, and chewed on a thumbnail. The garden was now in shadow as the late-afternoon light left the valley of Eden-Olympia, and the top floors of the office buildings caught the sun, floating above the trees like airborne caravels. Our conversation had drained the colour from Penrose’s face. Only his hands continued to move. Resting on the cushions beside him, they flinched and trembled with a life of their own. ‘Was anyone else involved?’ I pointed towards Cannes. ‘Coconspirators on the outside?’ ‘The investigating magistrate found nothing. He spent weeks here with his police teams, staging reconstructions of the murders. A strange kind of street theatre, you’d think Eden-Olympia was taking over from the Edinburgh Festival. Meanwhile, foreign governments were pressing hard for a result. Half the world’s psychologists jammed the baggage carousels at Nice Airport. There was even a televised debate in the conference room at the Noga Hilton. They came up with nothing.’ ‘He tried to kill you.’ Jane pushed her glass away, distracted by the insect’s angry buzzing. ‘You were wounded. How did he look when he shot you?’ Penrose sighed, his heavy chest deflating at the memory. ‘I didn’t see him, thank heavens. I’m not sure that I was one of his targets. A glass door blew in while I was checking something in the pharmacy. David was firing from the outside corridor at Professor Berthoud. By the time I stopped bleeding he’d gone.’ ‘Grim …’ I felt a sudden sympathy for Penrose. ‘A nightmare for you.’ ‘Far more for David.’ Penrose watched his restless hands and then nodded to me, grateful for this display of fellow-feeling. ‘Paul, it’s impossible to explain. Some deep psychosis must have been gathering for years, a profound crisis going back to his childhood.’ ‘Did David know any of the victims?’ ‘He knew them all. Several were patrons of the La Bocca refuge, like poor Dominique Serrou, the breast cancer specialist at the clinic. She gave a lot of her free time to the refuge. God only knows why David decided to kill her.’ ‘Was Eden-Olympia his real target?’ Jane carried her glass to the open air and released the trapped insect. ‘I love it here, but the place is disgustingly rich.’ ‘We thought of that.’ Penrose watched the insect veer away, smiling at its angry swerves and dives. ‘Eden-Olympia is a business park. This isn’t Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Drive to Le Cannet or Grasse and you’ll find a dozen old “zincs” where you can enjoy your pastis and bet on the horses at Longchamp.’ ‘Third-World politics?’ I suggested. ‘Multinational corporations make a perfect terrorist target.’ ‘IBM Europe? Nippon Telegraph?’ Penrose reluctantly shook his head. ‘Companies here aren’t involved with the Third World. None of them are sweating rubber or bauxite out of a coolie workforce. The raw material processed at Eden-Olympia is high-grade information. Besides, political terrorists don’t rely on people like David Greenwood. Though you have to admire the way he carried it off. Once the alarm was raised he must have known all the doors would shut around him.’ ‘Which they did?’ ‘Tighter than a nun’s knees. When he realized it was over, he came back here and killed his hostages, a couple of off-duty chauffeurs and a maintenance engineer. Why he seized them in the first place no one knows …’ ‘Wait a minute …’ Jane stepped forward, pointing to Penrose. ‘Are you saying …?’ ‘Tragically, yes. He killed all three.’ ‘Here?’ Jane seized my wrist, her sharp fingers almost separating the bones. ‘You’re saying this was David’s villa?’ ‘Naturally.’ Penrose seemed puzzled by Jane’s question. ‘The house is assigned to the clinic’s paediatrician.’ ‘So the murders began …’ Jane stared at the white walls of the sun lounge, as if expecting to see them smeared with bloody handprints. ‘David lived in this house?’ Penrose ducked his head, embarrassed by his slip of the tongue. ‘Jane, I didn’t mean to alarm you. Everything happened in the garage. David shot the hostages there, and then killed himself. They found him inside his car.’ ‘Even so …’ Jane searched the tiled floor at her feet. ‘It feels strange. David living here, planning all those terrible deaths.’ ‘Jane …’ I took her hands, but she pulled them away from me. ‘Are you going to be happy? Penrose, can’t we move to another house? We’ll rent a villa in Grasse or Vallauris.’ ‘You could move, yes …’ Penrose was watching us without expression. ‘It will create problems. Houses here are at a premium – none of the others are vacant. It’s a condition of Jane’s contract that she stay within Eden-Olympia. We’d have to find you an apartment near the shopping mall. They’re pleasant enough, but … Jane, I’m sorry you’re upset.’ ‘I’m all right.’ Jane took a clip from her purse. Staring hard at Penrose, she smoothed her shoulder-length hair and secured it in a defiant bunch. ‘You’re sure no one was killed here?’ ‘Absolutely. Everything happened in the garage. They say it was over in seconds. A brief burst of shots. Heart-rending to think about.’ ‘It is.’ Jane spoke matter-of-factly. ‘So the garage …?’ ‘Virtually rebuilt. Scarcely a trace of the original structure. Talk it over with Paul and let me know tomorrow.’ ‘Jane …?’ I touched her cheek, now as pale as the white walls. Her face was pointed, like a worried child’s, and the spurs of her nasal bridge seemed sharp enough to cut the skin. ‘How do you feel?’ ‘Odd. Don’t you?’ ‘We can move. I’ll find a hotel in Cannes.’ Penrose took out his mobile phone. ‘I’ll get Halder to drive you to the Martinez. We have several guest suites there.’ ‘No.’ Jane brushed me aside, and took the phone from Penrose. ‘I’m too tired. We’ve both had a long drive. We need time to think it through.’ ‘Good. You’re being very sensible.’ Penrose bowed in an almost obsequious way. Despite his concern, I was puzzled by his behaviour. He had deliberately concealed from us the crucial fact that David Greenwood had lived in this house and died within its grounds. No doubt Penrose had feared, rightly, that Jane would never have accepted the post at Eden-Olympia if she had known. I examined the chairs and tables in the sun lounge, pieces of department-store furniture in expensive but anonymous designs. I realized that Jane was as much the hired help as Halder and the security guards, the murdered chauffeurs and maintenance man, and was expected to keep her sensitivities to herself. Ambitious dentists did not complain about the poor oral hygiene of their richer clients. I remembered Halder’s sceptical gaze as he lounged by the Range Rover, making it clear that we were lucky to be admitted to this luxury enclave. Penrose said his goodbyes to Jane and waited by the pool as I found my walking stick. He had replaced his sunglasses, hiding the sweat that leaked from his eye-sockets. In his creased linen suit, with its damp collar and lapels, he seemed both shifty and arrogant, aware that he had been needlessly provocative but not too concerned by our reactions. Joining him, I said: ‘Thanks for the tour. It’s a superb house.’ ‘Good. You’ll probably stay. Your wife likes it here.’ ‘I’m not sure.’ ‘Believe me.’ His smile drifted across his face like a dismasted ship, detached from whatever he was thinking. ‘You’ll be very happy at Eden-Olympia.’ I walked Penrose down to the avenue, and waited while he called the nearest patrol car. ‘One thing …’ I said. ‘Why did you tell Halder that I was a pilot?’ ‘Did I? I hope that wasn’t indiscreet.’ ‘No. But you made a point of it.’ ‘Halder is a difficult man to impress. He has the special kind of snobbery that servants of the rich often show. As your security man it’s important he take you seriously. I thought it might break the ice.’ ‘It clearly did. Is he an amateur pilot?’ ‘No. His father was in the US Air Force, stationed at a base near Mannheim. The mother was a German girl working in the PX. He abandoned her and the baby, and now runs a small airline in Alabama. He was one of the few black commissioned officers. Halder’s never met him.’ ‘An airline? That’s impressive.’ ‘I think it has two planes. For Halder, flying is confused with his wish to confront his father.’ ‘A little pat?’ Penrose playfully punched my shoulder, a hard blow that made me raise my stick to him. He stepped out of my way and signalled to an approaching patrol car. ‘Pat? Yes. But I’m not speaking as a psychiatrist.’ ‘Are you ever?’ With a stage laugh, Penrose drummed his fist against the roller doors of the garage. He swung his large body into the passenger seat of the Range Rover, sprawling against the driver. The sound of his mocking cheer, good-humoured but derisory, was taken up by the vibrating metal slats, a memory of violence that seemed to echo from the sealed garage, eager to escape into the warm August air. Jane had left the sun lounge and was sitting by the computer in the study, choosing a new screensaver. I limped towards her, already tired by the spaces of the large house. Jane raised a hand to me, her eyes still fixed on the screen. Alone in this white room, she seemed at her prettiest, a charming ing?nue in a modern-dress version of a Coward play. I leaned against her, glad to be alone with my sane young wife. ‘What was all that, Paul? You weren’t hitting him?’ ‘As it happens, he punched me.’ ‘Vile man. Are you all right?’ She took the walking stick and pulled up a chair for me. ‘Speaking of punches, Dr Wilder Penrose was a bit below the belt.’ ‘Not telling us straight away about David? That’s obviously his style — watch out.’ I sat beside Jane, and stared at the complex patterns that revolved like a Paisley nightmare. ‘What did you make of him?’ ‘He’s an intellectual thug.’ Jane massaged my knee. ‘That set-to over our bags with Halder. And the nasty way he stared at the African salesmen. He’s racist.’ ‘No. He was trying to provoke us. Visitors from liberal England, we’re as naive as any maiden aunt, an unmissable target. Still, he’s your colleague now. Remember that you have to get on with him.’ ‘I will. Don’t worry, psychiatrists are never a threat. Surgeons are the real menace.’ ‘That sounds like hard-won experience.’ ‘It is. All psychiatrists secretly dream of killing themselves.’ ‘And surgeons?’ ‘They dream of killing their patients.’ She rotated her seat, turning her back to the computer. ‘Paul, that was a weird afternoon.’ ‘Very weird. I don’t know whether you noticed, but a rather odd game is being played. Penrose is testing us. He wants to see if we’re good enough for Eden-Olympia.’ ‘I am.’ Jane’s chin rose, exposing a childhood scar. ‘Why not?’ ‘So you want to stay?’ ‘Yes, I do. There are possibilities here. We ought to explore them.’ ‘Good. I’ll back you all the way.’ Jane waited as I embraced her, then held me at arm’s length. ‘One thing, Paul. It’s important. We don’t talk about David Greenwood.’ ‘Jane, I liked him.’ ‘Did you? I’m not so sure. Face it, we’re never going to know what happened to him. He’s not coming back, so stop worrying about him. Agreed? Let’s go upstairs and unpack.’ Jane led the way, hefting her leather suitcase while I limped after her, stick in one hand and two of the soft bags in the other. Once we reached our bedroom Jane collapsed onto the ivory-white sofa. She ran her cheek along the silk cushions. ‘Paul, isn’t this a little lavish for a member of staff? Have you wondered why?’ ‘Are they trying to bribe us? I seriously doubt it. You’re a consultant paediatrician, one of the new professional elite.’ ‘Come off it.’ Jane unbuttoned her shirt. ‘I’m a barefoot doctor with a short-service contract. Still, sitting in the sun will do you good. Before we leave, you’ll be playing tennis again.’ ‘I might even beat you.’ ‘Losing to their favourite patients is part of a doctor’s job. It happens every day in Bel Air and Holland Park.’ I wandered around the air-conditioned suite, with its dressing room and double bathroom. Despite Jane’s comments, the furniture was more Noga Hilton than Versailles, and I guessed that the originals had been replaced. But there were faint ink-marks from a ballpoint pen on the fabric of an armchair by the window. I moved the chair to one side, then knelt down and felt the dents in the carpet, deep and smoothly polished by the castors. David Greenwood had probably slumped in this chair at the end of a long day, ticking off the latest bulletins from M?decins Sans Fronti?res. One May morning he sat with a rifle across his knees and a map of Eden-Olympia, working out a special itinerary. Jane stood beside me, her dark hair falling to her bare shoulders. She had stepped from the dressing room and held her nightdress to her chin, admiring herself in the full-length mirror like a child trying on her mother’s clothes. ‘Paul, are you there?’ Concerned, she took my hands, as if leading me out of a dream. ‘You were asleep standing up. This house does odd things to people …’ She let the nightdress fall to the floor and drew me towards the bed. I lay beside her, resting my face against her small breasts, with their sweet scents of summer love. Once again I wondered how well she had known David Greenwood. It occurred to me that three of us would sleep together in this large and comfortable bed, until I could persuade David to step out of my mind and disappear for ever down the white staircase of this dreaming villa. 4 A Flying Accident (#ulink_0bba4330-b37f-5886-9b11-3ee2bc0070a0) SUNLIGHT WAS INFILTRATING the misty lakes and forests of Eden-Olympia, probing the balconies of the residential enclave as if trying to rouse the company chairmen and managing directors, calling them out to play. I stood in the open doorway of the breakfast room, letting the warm air bathe my legs. An advertising plane was taking off from the Cannes-Mandelieu airfield, and I realized that my shadow was probably one of the few human silhouettes still visible from the sky over the business park. It was 7.45, but my neighbours had already left for work. Long before the sun reached across the Baie des Anges the senior executives had finished their croissants and muesli, their mortadella and noodles, and set off to another long day at the office. As I settled myself in a poolside chair the sun seemed to pause, surprised to find someone not already bent over a boardroom table or laboratory bench. Along the Croisette in Cannes the day would hardly have begun. The waiters at the Blue Bar would be pausing for a cigarette before they set out the table placements, and the water trucks would still be spraying the side roads off the Rue d’Antibes. But in Eden-Olympia the mainframes would be wide awake, the satellite dishes draining information stored in the sky. A busy electronic traffic was already sluicing through the cabled floors, bringing the Dow and Nikkei indexes, inventories of pharmaceutical warehouses in D?sseldorf and cod depositories in Trondheim. Thinking of Jane, who had been up at six and off to the clinic before I woke, I eased myself onto the sun-lounger and lifted my right leg above the foam rubber cushion. After only three weeks at Eden-Olympia, as Jane had promised, I was free of the metal brace. Now I could drive the Jaguar and give Jane a rest from the heavy steering wheel. Above all, I was able to walk, and keep up with her as we strolled down the Croisette towards the seafood restaurants of the Vieux Port. I counted the titanium claws that held the kneecap together. My wasted right calf was as thin as my forearm, and gave me a rolling, seadog gait. But exercise would strengthen the muscles. One day I would be able to work the heavy brake pedals of the Harvard and win back my private pilot’s licence. In the meantime I explored Eden-Olympia on foot, logging miles along the simulated nature trails that ended abruptly when they were no longer visible from the road. Ornamental pathways led to the electricity substations feeding power into the business park’s grid. Surrounded by chain-link fences, they stood in the forest clearings like mysterious and impassive presences. I circled the artificial lakes, with their eerily calm surfaces, or roamed around the vast car parks. The lines of silent vehicles might have belonged to a race who had migrated to the stars. By the early afternoon Charles’s e-mails brought me final proof pages, cheery gossip about the latest office romances, and queries over the editorial copy of our aviation journals. I missed Jane, who never returned home before seven o’clock, but I was happy to doze on the sun-lounger and listen to the droning engines of light aircraft trailing their pennants across the cloudless sky, news from the sun of furniture sales, swimming pool discounts and the opening of a new aqua-park. A lawnmower sounded from a nearby garden as the roving groundstaff trimmed the grass. Sprinklers hissed a gentle drizzle across the flowerbeds of the next-door villa, occupied by Professor Ito Yasuda, chairman of a Japanese finance house, his serious-faced wife and even more serious three-year-old son. On Sundays they played tennis together, a process as stylized as a Kabuki drama, which involved endless ball retrieval and virtually no court action. My other neighbours were a Belgian couple, the Delages, among the earliest colonists of the business park. Alain Delage was the chief financial officer of the Eden-Olympia holding company, a tall, preoccupied accountant lost somewhere behind the lenses of his rimless glasses. But he was kind enough to give Jane a lift to the clinic each morning. I had met the couple, Delage and his pale, watchful wife Simone, but our brief conversation across the roof of their Mercedes would have been more expressive if carried out by semaphore between distant peaks in the Alpes-Maritimes. Intimacy and neighbourliness were not features of everyday life at Eden-Olympia. An invisible infrastructure took the place of traditional civic virtues. At Eden-Olympia there were no parking problems, no fears of burglars or purse-snatchers, no rapes or muggings. The top-drawer professionals no longer needed to devote a moment’s thought to each other, and had dispensed with the checks and balances of community life. There were no town councils or magistrates’ courts, no citizens’ advice bureaux. Civility and polity were designed into Eden-Olympia, in the same way that mathematics, aesthetics and an entire geopolitical world-view were designed into the Parthenon and the Boeing 747. Representative democracy had been replaced by the surveillance camera and the private police force. By the afternoon, all this tolerance and good behaviour left me feeling deeply bored. After a light lunch I would set off on foot around the business park. A few days earlier, while circling one of the largest lakes, I came across a curious human settlement in the woods. This was the lavish sports centre advertised in the brochure, a complex that contained two swimming pools, saunas, squash courts and a running track. It was fully staffed by helpful young instructors, but otherwise deserted. I assumed that the senior administrators at Eden-Olympia were too tired after a day’s work to do more than eat supper from a tray and doze in front of the adult movie channel. Jane had been swiftly drawn into this regime of fulfilment through work. She was stimulated by the new corporate ethos, so different from the shambles of a London teaching hospital. Guy’s was a city under siege, filled with the sick, the lost and the confused, a shuffling host perpetually on the move in a vast internal migration. At Eden-Olympia the medical staff were calm and unrushed, as I found when my knee was X-rayed. The lakeside reception area resembled the sun deck of a cruise liner. The cheerful young Frenchwoman who settled me on the X-ray table chatted to me about my flying days in the RAF and her own hang-gliding weekends at Roquebrune. I had the strong sense that we were friends who had known each other for years. Yet I had forgotten her face within seconds of leaving her. Jane met me afterwards, barely recognizable in trim business suit and court shoes. I thought fondly of the hippie doctor I had met at Guy’s, a chocolate bar next to her stethoscope in the frayed pocket of an off-white lab coat. She introduced me to the director of the clinic, Professor Kalman, a distracted but amiable man in his sixties who was a specialist in preventive medicine but had somehow failed to anticipate the outbreak of sudden death on his own premises. Jane accepted his generous compliments, and then proudly showed me round her comfortable suite with its bathroom and kitchen, almost as much a home as the villa we shared. Four months earlier it had been David Greenwood’s office, and it surprised me that he had seen enough of his colleagues to dislike them, let alone set about killing them. That evening, I drove Jane into Cannes. Holding her arm, I swung myself through the crowds on the Croisette. We drank too many Tom Collinses on the Carlton terrace, ate seafood from metal platters at a quayside restaurant, feeding each other titbits of petite friture, sea urchins and crayfish. We wandered tipsily around the Vieux Port, and I remade Jane’s lipstick before showing her off to the Arabs lolling with their women on the white-leather after-decks of their rented yachts. I knew we were very happy, but at the same time I felt that we were extras in a tourist film. A blind shivered behind a bedroom window on the first floor of the Delages’ house. It rose and fell, manipulated by someone tired of the darkness but unimpressed by the possibilities of the day. The blinds settled themselves, and Simone Delage stepped onto the balcony, a dressing gown around her shoulders. She had slept late, and her cheeks seemed blanched by whatever exhausting dreams had drained away the night. Her handsome face, as grave as a cancer specialist’s secretary, showed no expression when she noticed the Riviera coast, and her eyes scanned the contour lines of the Alpes-Maritimes in the way she might have glanced through a suspect biopsy. She had scarcely acknowledged my existence, and often sunbathed naked on the balcony, as if the anonymity of Eden-Olympia made her invisible to her neighbours. Was she aware of me watching her? I suspected that this private and moody woman – a trained mathematician, according to Jane, with a doctorate in statistics – took a perverse pleasure in exposing herself to the solitary man lying by the pool with his apparently withered leg. At night she and her accountant husband would wander naked around their bedroom, visible through the slatted blinds like figures on a television screen, unconcerned by their own bodies as they discussed sink funds and tax shelters. She loosened her robe, then noticed a light aircraft that was circling Eden-Olympia, advertising a satellite-dish agency in Cagnes-sur-Mer. She retreated into her bedroom and stood by the window, smearing face cream onto her cheeks with an automatic hand. I put aside the page proofs and watched the Cessna climb the hills above Grasse, its pennant shivering in the cooler air. The ligaments in my knee had begun to ache — more a response to stress, Jane told me, than a sign of recurring infection. I missed my old Harvard, now abandoned in its storage hangar at Elstree aerodrome, which I had bought by telephone at an aircraft auction in Toulouse. Once it had trained Nato pilots in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, and later posed as Zero and Focke-Wulf fighters in countless war movies. Traces of its film-studio livery, the rising-sun roundels and iron crosses, clung to its fuselage. I spent countless hours refitting the heavy-winged trainer, with its huge radial engine, pitch prop and retractable undercarriage, but I knew now that I might never take its controls again. The Harvard had nearly killed me, on an autumn weekend a year earlier, when I set off to an aviation fair near St-Malo. Distracted by gossip of Charles’s faltering marriage, and the financial settlement that would virtually break the firm, I had forgotten to file a flight plan. The tower recalled me, and I missed my take-off slot. Impatient to be airborne, I was heavy-handed with the throttle and pitch settings. As the powerful engine hurled me down the runway I lost control in a crosswind. I slewed into the deep grass, throttled up again to regain runway speed, tried to abort the take-off and ground-looped through the perimeter fence. The Harvard slid across an empty dual carriageway into the garden of a bungalow owned by a retired air-traffic controller. He had watched my botched take-off from his bedroom window, and his testimony sealed my fate. By the time the ambulance and fire trucks arrived my flying career was over. But at least the crash had brought me to Jane, one of the teenage doctors, as I called them, who wandered around the surgical ward at Guy’s. She was twenty-seven years old, but could have passed for seventeen, slumming through the ward in worn sandals with dirty toes and lank hair, lunching off a chocolate bar as she studied my temperature chart. Looking up from my pillow into her sceptical gaze, I wondered why a beautiful young woman was disguising herself as a hippie. She was gentle enough when she examined my knee. Her small hands with their chipped nails deftly removed the drainage tubes. She finished her chocolate, screwed up the wrapper and dropped it into my half-empty teacup. ‘This knee needs to be flexed more – I’ll get on to physio.’ She studied my admission notes, tapping a pencil between her strong teeth. ‘So you’re the pilot here? You crash-landed your plane?’ ‘Not exactly. The plane never left the ground.’ ‘That must be quite an achievement. I like pilots – Beryl Markham is my hero.’ ‘A great flyer,’ I agreed. ‘Totally promiscuous.’ ‘Aren’t all women, if they want to be? Men have such a hang-up about that.’ She stuffed my file into its rack at the foot of the bed. ‘They say flying and sex go together. I don’t know about that side of your life, but it’s going to be a while before you fly.’ ‘I’m set to lose my licence.’ ‘How sad.’ She took a syringe from the kidney dish and eyed the meniscus. ‘I’m sorry. Flying must be important to you.’ ‘It is. By the way, is that needle clean?’ ‘Clean? What an idea…’ She eased the antibiotic into my arm. ‘No one cleans hospitals these days – this isn’t the 1930s. We spend the money on important things. Fancy wallpaper for the managers’ dining room, new carpets for the senior consultants …’ Already I was staring at the high forehead she disguised behind a dark fringe, and the quick but oddly evasive eyes. I liked the bolshie cast of her mouth, and the lips forever searching for the choicest four-letter word. Her unlined face was pale from too many cigarettes, too many late nights with boring lovers who failed to appreciate her. Despite the name tag – ‘Dr Jane Gomersall’ – I almost believed that she was one of those impostors who masquerade so effortlessly as members of the medical profession, some renegade sixth-form schoolgirl who had borrowed a white coat and decided to try her hand at a little doctoring. Keen to meet her again, I was soon out of bed, and spent hours in my wheelchair hunting the corridors. Sometimes I would see her loafing on a fire escape with the younger surgeons, laughing as they smoked their cigarettes together. Later, when we talked near the soft-drinks machine outside the lifts, I learned that she was not a hippie, but adopted her scruffy style to irritate the hospital administrators. She had specialized in paediatrics, but ward closures had reassigned her to general duties. Her clergyman father was the headmaster of a Church of England school in Cheltenham, and the role of rebel and classroom agitator had come early to her. On my last day, a few minutes before Charles collected me, I heard the familiar flip-flop of worn sandals, and limped to the door as she sauntered past. She waited amiably for me to speak, but I could think of nothing to say. Then she raised her fringe, as if cooling her forehead, and suggested that I show her around Elstree Flying Club. The next weekend she drove me from my house in Maida Vale to the airfield in north London. She was surprised by the aircraft in the hangars, by their rough, riveted skins and the harsh reek of engine coolant and lubricating oil. My Harvard, still stained by the traffic controller’s rhododendrons, especially intrigued her. One of the watching mechanics helped her into the cockpit. Without a parachute to sit on, she was barely visible through the windscreen. She pushed back the canopy, stood on the metal seat-base and flung out an arm, in the posture of the winged woman screaming to her followers on the Arc de Triomphe. The sculpture had deeply impressed her during a school visit to Paris, and I only wished I could have supplied her with a sword. Later she dressed in my white overalls and put on an old leather flying helmet, lounging around the Harvard like the women pilots in aviation’s heroic days, smoking their Craven A’s while they leaned against their biplanes and gazed at the stars. We were married within three months. I was still on my crutches, but Jane wore an extravagantly ruched silk dress that seemed to inflate during the ceremony, filling the register office like the trumpet of a vast amaryllis. She smoked pot at the reception held at the Royal College of Surgeons in Regent’s Park, sniffed a line of cocaine in front of her mother, a likeable suburban solicitor, and gave an impassioned speech describing how we had made love in the rear seat of the Harvard, a complete fiction that even her father cheered. During our Maldives honeymoon she snorkelled on the outer, and dangerous, side of the reef, and befriended a female conger eel. More out of curiosity than lechery, she set my camcorder to film us having sex in our bamboo hut, watching me like a lab technician who had grown attached to an experimental animal. Sometimes I sensed that she might walk off into the sea and vanish for ever. At Maida Vale, a week after our return, a policeman called to question her, and she admitted to me that she supplied tincture of cannabis to psoriasis sufferers and had tried to grow hemp plants in a disused laboratory at the hospital. Already I guessed that the urge to work abroad was part of the same restlessness that had led her to marry me, a random throw of the dice. ‘Paul, be honest,’ she said when she learned of the Eden-Olympia vacancy. ‘How do you feel? Dissatisfied?’ ‘No. Are you?’ ‘We all are. And we do nothing about it. You’ve stopped flying, and keep getting these knee infections. I’m a trained paediatrician and I practically carry bedpans. Think of something really perverse I could do.’ ‘Have a baby?’ ‘Yes! That’s rather clever, Paul. But I can’t. At least not now. There are problems.’ ‘Medical ones?’ ‘In a way …’ But I had seen Jane inserting her coil and could feel the drawstring emerging from her cervix. Now, following David Greenwood, we had arrived in Eden-Olympia, among the most civilized places on the planet and one that promised to stifle the last vestiges of her hunger for freedom. The heroine of ‘La Marseillaise’ was about to sheathe her sword. 5 The English Girl (#ulink_1c28f2e2-52eb-567e-8c46-74f41d1975f8) THE POOL LAY beside me, so calm that a film of dust lay on the surface. Through the cool depths I could see a small coin on the sloping floor, perhaps a one-franc piece that had slipped from the pocket of Greenwood’s swimsuit. Burnished by the pool detergent, it gleamed like a node of silver distilled from the Riviera light, a class of pearl unique to the swimming pools of the rich. I listened to the vacuum cleaners working in the bedroom, a relentless blare that had driven the echoes of the Harvard’s engine from my mind. The two Italian maids arrived each morning at ten o’clock, part of the uniformed task force that moved from villa to villa. A gardener, Monsieur Anvers, appeared on alternate days, watered the grass and shrubs, and cleaned the pool. He was unobtrusive, an elderly Cannois whose daughter worked in the Eden-Olympia shopping mall. One of the maids stared cheekily at me from a bathroom window, as if puzzled by my life of ease. Already the concept of leisure was dying in the business park, replaced by a grudging puritanism. Freedom was the right to paid work, while leisure was the mark of the shiftless and untalented. Deciding to drive into Cannes, I gathered my proof pages and made my way back to the house. Se?ora Morales, the Spanish housekeeper, moved busily around the kitchen, checking the cartons of groceries delivered from the supermarket. The ever-watchful but tolerant gaze of this middle-aged Spanish woman reminded me of my prep-school matron, translated from the gloom of West Hampstead to the sun terraces of the Mediterranean. She was helpful but garrulous, and I often heard her talking to herself in the kitchen, using a confused mix of Spanish and English. She nodded approvingly as I took the soda-water siphon and a bottle of ros? Bandol from the refrigerator. Clearly she assumed that any Englishman of quality would be drunk by noon. ‘My car,’ I explained. ‘It’s very old. A few drinks make it go better.’ ‘Of course. You come to Valencia and open a garage.’ She watched me raise my glass and toast the morning light. ‘It’s always good weather at Eden-Olympia.’ ‘That’s true. Except for one very stormy day last May.’ I felt the bubbles play against my nostrils and sipped the aerated wine. ‘Se?ora, how long have you been at Eden-Olympia?’ ‘Two years. I was housekeeper for Mr and Mrs Narita.’ ‘The family next door, before the Yasudas? Dr Penrose told me – they were unhappy and moved back to Paris. It must have been a shock, like one of those comics the Japanese read.’ Se?ora Morales lowered her eyes to the figs and fennel. ‘Before that I worked for Monsieur Bachelet.’ I put down my drink, remembering that Guy Bachelet, the head of security at Eden-Olympia, had been one of Greenwood’s victims. ‘I’m sorry, se?ora. How terrible for you.’ ‘Worse for him.’ ‘I was thinking of you. The pain you must have felt when you heard he’d been murdered in his own office.’ ‘No.’ Se?ora Morales spoke firmly. ‘Not in his office. He died at his house.’ ‘You weren’t there, I hope?’ ‘I was coming from Grasse.’ As if to justify her lucky escape, she said: ‘I start at nine o’clock. Already the police were at the house.’ ‘That’s right. It was very early. So Monsieur Bachelet was…?’ ‘Dead, yes. And Dr Serrou.’ ‘Dominique Serrou?’ Penrose had mentioned Greenwood’s partner at the La Bocca refuge. ‘She was shot at the clinic?’ ‘No.’ Se?ora Morales inspected the fading bloom on a peach, as if tempted to return it to the supermarket. ‘Also in the house.’ ‘I thought everyone was killed at Eden-Olympia? Dr Serrou lived in Le Cannet.’ ‘Not at her house.’ Se?ora Morales pointed through the windows at the rooftops of the residential enclave. ‘At Monsieur Bachelet’s house. Four hundred metres from here.’ ‘They died there together? Dr Greenwood shot them both?’ ‘At the same time. Terrible …’ Se?ora Morales crossed herself. ‘Dr Serrou was very kind.’ ‘I’m sure. But what was she doing there? Was she treating him for something?’ ‘Something …? Yes.’ I walked to the window and listened to the sprinklers refreshing the lawns and washing away the dust of the night. I assumed that Bachelet had fallen ill, perhaps with a sudden angina attack, and called an emergency number. Dominique Serrou had driven over, in what would be her last house call, just as another, deranged doctor was making his first of the day. ‘Se?ora Morales, are you certain they died at Bachelet’s house?’ ‘I saw the bodies. They took them out.’ ‘Perhaps they were taking them in? Bringing Bachelet home from his office? In the confusion you might easily—’ ‘No.’ Se?ora Morales stared at me stonily. She spoke in a surprisingly strong voice, as if seizing her chance. ‘I saw their blood. Everywhere … pieces of their bones on the bedroom wall.’ ‘Se?ora please …’ I poured her a glass of water. ‘I’m sorry I raised this. We knew Dr Greenwood. My wife worked with him in London.’ ‘They told me to go away …’ Se?ora Morales stared over my shoulder, as if watching an old newsreel inside her head. ‘But I went into the house. I saw the blood.’ ‘Se?ora Morales …’ I poured my spritzer into the sink. ‘Why did Dr Greenwood want to kill so many people? Most of them were friends of his.’ ‘He knew Monsieur Bachelet. Dr Greenwood visited him many times.’ ‘Was he treating him? Medically?’ Se?ora Morales shrugged her broad shoulders. ‘He went in the morning. Monsieur Bachelet waited for him. Dr Greenwood lent him books, about an unhappy English girl. Always talking back to the queen.’ ‘An unhappy English girl? Princess Diana? Was he a royalist?’ Se?ora Morales raised her eyes to the ceiling. The vacuum cleaners had locked horns, expiring in a blare of noise that was followed by fierce shrieks. Excusing herself, she left the kitchen and strode towards the stairs. I paced the tiled floor, and listened to her raised voice as she berated the maids. Talking to me had released the tension of months. Before leaving, she paused at the front door and treated me to a sincere, if well-rehearsed, smile. ‘Mr Sinclair …’ ‘Se?ora?’ ‘Dr Greenwood – he was a good man. He helped many people …’ As I changed in the bathroom I could still hear the odd inflections in Se?ora Morales’s voice. She had gone out of her way to raise my doubts, as if my louche and anomalous position at Eden-Olympia, my role as pool-lounger and morning drinker, made me the confidant she had been searching for since the day of the tragedy. Already I believed her account. If, as she hinted, Dr Serrou had spent the night with Bachelet, the inexplicable brainstorm might have stemmed from a crime passionel. As Greenwood and Dominique Serrou gave their free time to the children’s refuge at La Bocca, a warm affair could easily have sprung from their work. But perhaps Dr Serrou had tired of the earnest young doctor and found the security chief more to her taste. Once Greenwood had shot his rival and former lover he had rushed headlong into a last desperate rampage, murdering his colleagues in an attempt to erase every trace of a world he hated. As for the book about the unhappy English girl, I guessed that this was a dossier on a child at the refuge, the abused daughter of some rentier Englishman, or the surviving victim of a car crash that had killed her parents. At the same time, it surprised me that Penrose had confided nothing of this to Jane. But a sudden brainstorm was less threatening to future investors at Eden-Olympia than a tragedy of sexual obsession. Satisfied that I had virtually solved the mystery, I took a rose from the vase on the hall table and slipped it through my buttonhole. 6 A Russian Intruder (#ulink_db3a1bc7-fc70-5ce0-b602-f3a30a781b02) THE SPRINKLERS HAD fallen silent. All over the residential enclave there was the sound of mist rising from the dense foliage, almost a reverse rain returning to the clouds, time itself rushing backwards to that morning in May. As I left the house and walked towards my car I thought of David Greenwood. The conversation with Se?ora Morales had brought his presence alive for the first time. During the weeks since our arrival, as I lay by the pool or strolled around the silent tennis court, the young English doctor had been a shadowy figure, receding with his victims into the pre-history of Eden-Olympia. Now Greenwood had returned and walked straight up to me. I slept in his bed, soaped myself in his bath, drank my wine in the kitchen where he prepared his breakfasts. More than mere curiosity about the murders nagged at my mind. I thought again of his friendship with Jane. Had we come to Eden-Olympia because she was still fond of the deranged young doctor, and curious about his motives? I walked past the garage, aware that I had never been tempted to raise the roller doors. Rebuilt or not, this macabre space was a shrine to the four men who had died inside it. One day, when my knee was stronger, I would use the remote control now resting in a bowl on the kitchen table. The Jaguar waited for me in the sun, its twin carburettors ready to do their best or worst. Starting this high-strung thoroughbred was a race between hope and despair. By contrast, thirty feet from me, was the Delages’ Mercedes, as black and impassive as the Stuttgart night, every silicon chip and hydraulic relay eager to serve the driver’s smallest whim. Simone Delage stood beside it, briefcase in hand, dressed for a business meeting in dark suit and white silk blouse. She stared at the damaged wing of the Mercedes like a relief administrator gazing at the aftermath of a small earthquake. A sideswipe had scored the metal, stripping the chromium trim from the headlights to the passenger door. For once, this self-possessed woman seemed vulnerable and uncertain. Her manicured hand reached towards the door handle and then withdrew, reluctant to risk itself on this failure of a comfortable reality. The car was as much an accessory as her snakeskin handbag, and she could no more drive a damaged Mercedes to a business meeting than appear before her colleagues in laddered stockings. ‘Madame Delage? Can I help?’ She turned, recognizing me with an effort. Usually we saw each other when we were both half-naked, she on her balcony and I beside the pool. Clothed, we became actors appearing in under-rehearsed roles. For some reason my tweed sports jacket and leather-thong sandals seemed to unnerve her. ‘Mr Sinclair? The car, it’s … not correct.’ ‘A shame. When did it happen?’ ‘Last night. Alain drove back from Cannes. Some taxi driver, a Maghrebian … he suddenly swerved. They smoke kief, you know.’ ‘On duty? I hope not. I’ve seen quite a few damaged cars here.’ I pointed across the peaceful avenue. ‘The Franklyns, opposite. Your neighbour, Dr Schmidt. Do you think they’re targeted?’ ‘No. Why?’ Uncomfortable in my presence, she hunted in her bag for a mobile phone. ‘I need to call a taxi.’ ‘You can drive the car.’ Trying to calm her, I took the phone from her surprisingly soft hand. ‘The damage is superficial. Once you close the door you won’t notice it.’ ‘I will, Mr Sinclair. I’m very conscious of these things. I have a meeting at the Merck building in fifteen minutes.’ ‘If you wait for a taxi you’ll be late. I’m leaving now for Cannes. Why don’t I give you a lift?’ Madame Delage surveyed me as if I had offered my services as the family butler. My exposed big toes unsettled her, flexing priapically among the unswept leaves. She relaxed a little as she slid into the leather and walnut interior of the Jaguar. Unable to disguise her thighs in the cramped front seat, she beamed at me pluckily. ‘It’s quite an adventure,’ she told me. ‘Like stepping into a Magritte …’ ‘He would have liked this car.’ ‘I’m sure. It’s really a plane. Good, it goes.’ The carburettors had risen to the occasion. I reversed into the avenue, dominating the gearbox with a display of sheer will. ‘It’s kind of your husband to give Jane a lift to the clinic.’ ‘It’s nothing. Already we’re very fond of her.’ ‘I’m glad. She’s talked about getting a small motorcycle.’ ‘Jane?’ Madame Delage smiled at this. ‘She’s so sweet. We love to hear her talk. So many schoolgirl ideas. Look after her, Mr Sinclair.’ ‘I try to. So far, she’s been very happy here. Almost too happy – she’s totally involved with her work.’ ‘Work, yes. But pleasure, too? That’s important, especially at Eden-Olympia.’ For all her armoured glamour, Simone Delage became almost maternal when she spoke of Jane. Her eyes followed the road towards the Merck building, but she was clearly thinking of Jane. ‘You must tell her to relax. Work at Eden-Olympia is the eighth deadly sin. It’s essential to find amusements.’ ‘Sports? Swimming? Gym?’ Madame Delage shuddered discreetly, as if I had mentioned certain obscure bodily functions. ‘Not for Jane. All that panting and sweat? Her body would become …’ ‘Too muscular? Would it matter?’ ‘For Jane? Of course. She must find something that fulfils her. Everything is here at Eden-Olympia.’ I stopped under the glass proscenium of the Merck building, an aluminium-sheathed basilica that housed the pharmaceutical company, an architect’s offices and several merchant banks. Simone Delage waited until I walked around the car, as if opening the Jaguar’s door was a craft skill lost to Mercedes owners. Before releasing the catch I rested my hands on the window ledge. ‘Simone, I meant to ask – did you know David Greenwood?’ ‘A little. Dr Penrose said that you were friends.’ ‘I met him a few times. Everyone agrees that he lived for other people. It’s hard to imagine him wanting to kill anyone.’ ‘A terrible affair.’ She appraised me with the same cool eyes that had gazed at the Alpes-Maritimes, but I sensed that she welcomed my interest in Greenwood. ‘He worked too hard. It’s a lesson to us …’ ‘In the days before the tragedy … Did you see him behave strangely? Was he agitated or –?’ ‘We were away, Mr Sinclair. In Lausanne for a week. When we came back it was all over.’ She touched my hand, making a conscious effort to be friendly. ‘I can see you think a lot about David.’ ‘True. Living in the same house, it’s hard not to be aware of what happened. Every day I’m literally moving in his footsteps.’ ‘Perhaps you should follow them. Who knows where they can lead?’ She stepped from the car, a self-disciplined professional already merging into the corporate space that awaited her. She briefly turned her back to the building and shook my hand in a sudden show of warmth. ‘As long as you don’t buy a gun. You’ll tell me, Mr Sinclair?’ I was still thinking about Simone Delage’s words when I returned from Cannes with the London newspapers. I left my usual route across the business park and drove past the Merck building, on the off chance that she might have finished her meeting and be waiting for a lift home. In her oblique way she had urged me to pursue my interest in David Greenwood. Perhaps she had been more involved with David than I or her husband realized, and was waiting for a sympathetic outsider to expose the truth. I parked the Jaguar outside the garage and let myself into the empty house, pausing involuntarily in the hall as I listened for the sounds of a young Englishman’s footsteps. The Italian maids had gone, and Se?ora Morales had moved on to another family in the enclave. As I changed into my swimsuit I heard a chair scrape across the terrace below the bedroom windows. Assuming that Jane had called in briefly from the clinic, I made my way down the stairs. Through the porthole window on the half-landing I caught a glimpse of a man in a leather jacket striding across the lawn to the swimming pool. When I reached the terrace he was crouching by the doors of the pumphouse. I assumed that he was a maintenance engineer inspecting the chlorination system, and set off towards him, my stick raised in greeting. Seeing me over his shoulder, he kicked back the wooden doors and turned to face me. He was in his late thirties, with a slim Slavic face, high temples and receding hairline, and a pasty complexion unimproved by the Riviera sun. Beneath the leather jacket his silk shirt was damp with sweat. ‘Bonjour … you’re having a nice day.’ He spoke with a strong Russian accent, and kept a wary eye on my walking stick. ‘Doctor –?’ ‘No. You’re looking for my wife.’ ‘Natasha?’ ‘Dr Jane Sinclair. She works at the clinic.’ ‘Alexei … very good.’ He was staring over my shoulder, but held me in his visual field, the trick of a military policeman. His smile exposed a set of lavishly capped teeth that seemed eager to escape from his mouth. Despite his sallow skin, imprinted with years of poor nutrition, he wore gold cufflinks and handmade shoes. I assumed that he was a Russian emigr?, one of the small-time hoodlums and ex-police agents who were already falling foul of the local French gangsters. He raised his hand as if to shake mine. ‘Dr Greenwood?’ ‘He’s not here. Haven’t you heard?’ ‘Heard nothing …’ He stared cannily at me. ‘Dr Greenwood live here? Alexei …’ ‘Alexei? Listen, who are you? Get out of here …’ ‘No …’ He moved around me, pointing to the scars on my injured legs, confident that I was too handicapped to challenge him. Burrs covered the sleeves of his jacket, suggesting that he had not entered Eden-Olympia through the main gates. ‘Look …’ I moved towards the terrace and the extension phone in the sun lounge. The Russian stepped out of my way, and then lunged forward and struck me with his fist on the side of my head. His face was cold and drained of all blood, lips clamped over his expensive teeth. I felt my ringing ear, steadied myself and seized him by the lapels. The three months I had spent in a wheelchair had given me a set of powerful arms and shoulders. My knees buckled, but as I fell to the grass I pulled him onto me, and punched him twice in the mouth. He wrestled himself away from me, clambered to his feet and tried to kick my face. I gripped his right foot, wrenched his leg and threw him to the ground again. I began to punch his knees, but with a curse he picked himself up and limped away towards the avenue. I lay winded on the grass, waiting for my head to clear. I fumbled for my walking stick, and found myself holding the Russian’s calf-leather shoe. Tucked under the liner was a child’s faded passport photograph. ‘Taking on intruders is a dangerous game, Mr Sinclair.’ Halder surveyed the diagram of scuff-marks on the lawn. ‘You should have called us.’ ‘I didn’t have time.’ I sat in the wicker armchair, sipping the brandy that Halder had brought from the kitchen. ‘He knew I was on to him and lashed out.’ ‘It would have been better to say nothing.’ Halder spoke in the prim tones of a traffic policeman addressing a feckless woman driver. He examined the leather shoe, fingering the designer label of an expensive store in the Rue d’Antibes. Voices crackled from the radio of his Range Rover, parked in the drive next to the Jaguar. Two security vehicles idled in the avenue, and the drivers strode around in a purposeful way, chests out and peaked caps down, hands over their high-belted holsters. But Halder seemed unhurried. Despite his intelligence, there was a strain of pedantry in the make-up of this black security guard that he seemed to enjoy. He switched on his mobile phone and listened sceptically to the message, like an astronomer hearing a meaningless burst of signals from outer space. ‘Have they caught him yet?’ I poured mineral water onto a towel and bathed my head, feeling the bubbles sparkle in my hair. Surprisingly, I seemed more alert than I had been since arriving at Eden-Olympia. ‘He called himself Alexei. He shouldn’t be too difficult to find. A man strolling around with one shoe on.’ Halder nodded approvingly at my deductive powers. ‘He may have taken off the other shoe.’ ‘Even so. A man in his socks? Besides, it’s an expensive shoe – welt-stitched. What about your surveillance cameras?’ ‘There are four hundred cameras at Eden-Olympia. Scanning the tapes for a one-shoed man, or even a man in his socks, will take a great many hours of overtime.’ ‘Then the system is useless.’ ‘It may be, Mr Sinclair. The cameras are there to deter criminals, not catch them. Have you seen this Alexei before?’ ‘Never. He’s like a pickpocket, hard to spot but impossible to forget.’ ‘In Cannes? He may have followed you here.’ ‘Why should he?’ ‘Your Jaguar. Some people steal antique cars for a living.’ ‘It’s not an antique. In a headwind it will outrun your Range Rover. Besides, he didn’t come on like a car buff. Not the kind we’re used to in England.’ ‘This isn’t England. The C?te d’Azur is a tough place.’ Concerned for me, Halder reached out to pluck some damp grass from my hair, and then examined the blades in his delicate fingers. ‘Are you all right, Mr Sinclair? I can call an ambulance.’ ‘I’m fine. And don’t worry Dr Jane. The man wasn’t as strong as I expected. He’s a small-time Russian hoodlum, some ex-informer or bookie’s runner.’ ‘You put up a good fight. I’ll have to take you on my patrols. All the same, you’re still getting over your plane crash.’ ‘Halder, relax. I’ve wrestled with some very tough physiotherapy ladies.’ I pointed to the faded passport-booth photo on the table. ‘This child – it looks like a girl of twelve. Is that any help? He mentioned the name “Natasha”.’ ‘Probably his daughter back in Moscow. Forget about him, Mr Sinclair. We’ll find him.’ ‘Who do you think he is?’ Halder stroked his nostrils, smoothing down his refined features, ruffled by the effort of dealing with me. ‘Anyone. He might even be a resident. You’ve been wandering around a lot. It makes people curious.’ ‘Wandering? Where?’ ‘All over Eden-Olympia. We thought you were getting bored. Or looking for company.’ ‘Wandering …?’ I gestured at the wooded parkland. ‘I go for walks. What’s the point of all this landscape if no one sets foot on it?’ ‘It’s more for show. Like most things at Eden-Olympia.’ Halder stood with his back to me, searching the upstairs windows, and I could see his reflection in the glass doors of the sun lounge. He was smiling to himself, a strain of deviousness that was almost likeable. Behind the brave and paranoid new world of surveillance cameras and bulletproof Range Rovers there probably existed an old-fashioned realm of pecking orders and racist abuse. Except for Halder, all the security personnel were white, and many would be members of the Front National, especially active among the pieds-noirs in the South of France. Yet Halder was always treated with respect by his fellow guards. I had seen them open the Range Rover’s door for him, an act of deference that he accepted as his due. Curious about his motives, I asked: ‘What made you come to Eden-Olympia?’ ‘The pay. It’s better here than Nice Airport or the Palais des Festivals.’ ‘That’s a good enough reason. But …’ ‘I don’t look the type? Too many shadows under the eyes? The wrong kind of suntan?’ Halder stared at me almost insolently. ‘Or is it because I read Scott Fitzgerald?’ ‘Halder, I didn’t say that.’ I waited for him to reply, watching while he twisted the Russian’s shoe in his hands, as if wringing the neck of a small mammal. When he nodded to me, accepting that he had tried to provoke me, I turned my bruised ear towards the intercom chatter. ‘I meant that it might be too quiet here. Your men have a job pretending to be busy. Apart from this man Alexei, there doesn’t seem to be any crime at Eden-Olympia.’ ‘No crime?’ Halder savoured the notion, smirking at its naivety. ‘Some people would say that crime is what Eden-Olympia is about.’ ‘The multinational companies? All they do is turn money into more money.’ ‘Could be … so money is the ultimate adult toy?’ Halder pretended to muse over this. He was intrigued by the stout defence I had put up against the intruder, but my excited sleuthing irritated him, and he was clearly relieved when the guards in the avenue walked up to the wrought-iron gate and signalled the all-clear. ‘Right…’ Halder glanced around the garden and prepared to leave. ‘Mr Sinclair, we’ll be stepping up patrols. No need for Dr Jane to worry. The Russian must have gone.’ ‘Why? He could be sitting by any one of a hundred pools here. He’s looking for David Greenwood – he didn’t even know the poor man was dead.’ ‘So he went back to Moscow for a few months. Or he doesn’t watch television.’ ‘Why would he want to see Greenwood?’ ‘How can I say?’ Wearily, Halder tried to disengage himself from me. ‘Dr Greenwood worked at the methadone clinic in Mandelieu. Maybe he gave the Russian a shot of something he liked.’ ‘Did Greenwood do that kind of thing?’ ‘Don’t all doctors?’ Halder touched my shoulder in a show of sympathy. ‘Ask your wife, Mr Sinclair.’ ‘I’ll have to. How well did you know Greenwood?’ ‘I met him. A decent type.’ ‘A little highly strung?’ ‘I wouldn’t say so.’ Halder picked up the Russian’s shoe. He stared at the blurred photograph of the girl, rubbing her face with his thumb. ‘I liked him. He got me my job.’ ‘He killed ten people. Why, Halder? You look as if you know.’ ‘I don’t. Dr Greenwood was a fine man, but he stayed too long at Eden-Olympia.’ I stood by the pool’s edge, and searched the deep water. The strong sunlight had stirred up an atlas of currents that cast their shadows across the tiled floor, but I could see the wavering outline of the silver coin below the diving board. Behind me the sprinkler began to spray the lawn, soaking the pillows of the chairs that Halder had moved in his hunt for evidence. The grass still bore the marks of colliding heels, the diagram of a violent apache dance. The raw divots reminded me of the Russian’s frightened body, the reek of his sweat and the sharp burrs on his leather jacket. I left the pool and retraced the Russian’s steps to the pumphouse. The wooden doors had jumped their latch, exposing the electric motor, heater and timing mechanism. The cramped space was filled with sacks of pool-cleaner, the chlorine-based detergent that Monsieur Anvers poured into the loading port. Twice each day the soft powder diffused across the water, forming milky billows that dissolved the faint residues of human fat along the water-line. I ran my hand over the nearest wax-paper sack. Its industrial seals were unbroken, but a stream of powder poured onto the floor from a narrow tear. Sitting down, my legs stretched out in front of me, I gripped the sack and pulled it onto the cement apron. A second vent, large enough to take a child’s index finger, punctured the heavy wrapper, and the cool powder flowed across my knees. I tore away the paper between the holes, and slid my hand into the sticky grains. They deliquesced as I exposed them to the sunlight, running between my fingers to reveal a bruised silver nugget like a twisted coin. I cleaned away the damp powder, and stared down at the deformed but unmistakable remains of a high-velocity rifle bullet. I upended the sack and let the powder flow across the apron. A second bullet lay between my knees, apparently of the same calibre and rifling marks, crushed by its impact with a hard but uneven structure. I laid the bullets on the ground and reached into the pumphouse, running my hands over the remaining sacks. Their waxed wrappers were unbroken, and the pumping machinery bore no signs of bullet damage. I assumed that the stock of detergent had remained here when the pool motor was switched off after David Greenwood’s death. Restarting the motor a few days before our arrival, Monsieur Anvers had decided to leave the punctured sack where it lay. I turned to the wooden doors, feeling the smoothly painted panels, fresh from a builder’s warehouse. The chromium hinges were bright and unscratched, recently reset in the surrounding frame. With my hand I brushed away the loose grains of powder and felt the apron beside the doors. The smooth cement had been faintly scored by a rotating abrader, and the steel bristles had left small whorls in the hard surface, as if carefully erasing a set of stains or scorch-marks. I felt the bullets between my fingers, guessing that they had not been deformed by their impact with the pine doors or the detergent sack. A larger object, with a bony interior, had absorbed the full force of the bullets. Someone, security guard or hostage, had collapsed against the pumphouse doors, and had then been shot at close range, either by himself or others. I listened to the cicadas in the Yasudas’ garden, and watched the dragonflies flitting around the tennis court. According to Wilder Penrose, the three hostages had been killed inside the garage. I imagined the brief gun-battle that had taken place near the house, as David Greenwood made his final stand against the security guards and gendarmes. He had murdered the hostages in an act of despair, and then sat down against the pumphouse, ready to kill himself, staring for the last time at the skies of the C?te d’Azur as the police marksmen approached. But no one, holding a rifle to his own chest, a thumb outstretched to the trigger guard, could shoot himself twice. Whoever the victim, an execution had taken place beside the swimming pool of this quiet and elegant house. A Range Rover of the security force cruised the avenue, and the driver saluted me as he passed. I stood outside the garage, the remote control unit in my hand. The doors rolled noiselessly, and light flooded the interior, a space for three cars with wooden shelves along the rear wall. For all Penrose’s assurance that the garage had been rebuilt, the original structure remained intact. The concrete floor had been laid at least three years earlier, and was slick with engine oil that had dripped from some of the most expensive cars on the C?te d’Azur. Cans of antifreeze stood on the shelves, along with bottles of windscreen fluid and an Opel Diplomat owner’s manual. I carefully searched the floor, and then examined the walls and ceiling for any traces of gunfire. I tried to imagine the hostages trussed together, squinting at the light as Greenwood entered the garage for the last time. But there were no bullet holes, no repairs to the concrete pillars, and no hint that the floor had been cleaned after an execution. Almost certainly the three men, the luckless chauffeurs and maintenance engineer, had died elsewhere. At least one of them, I suspected, had been shot in the garden, sitting with his back to the doors of the pumphouse. I closed the garage and rested against the warm roof of the Jaguar. It was a little after six o’clock, and the first traffic was leaving Cannes for the residential suburbs of Grasse and Le Cannet. But Eden-Olympia was silent, as the senior executives and their staffs remained at their workstations. Jane had asked me to collect her from the clinic at 7.30, when the last of her committee meetings would end. A fine sweat covered my arms and chest as I walked back to the garden, a fear reaction to the garage. I had expected a chamber of horrors, but the ordinariness of the disused space had been more disturbing than any blood-stained execution pit. I stripped off my shirt and stood by the diving board. Calming myself, I stared down at the dappled floor, a serene and sun-filled realm that existed only in the deeps of swimming pools. A water spider snatched at a drowning fly, and then skied away. As the surface cleared, I saw the bright node of the coin, a gleaming eye that waited for me. I dived into the pool, broke through the foam and filled my lungs, then turned onto my side and dived again towards the silver pearl. 7 Incident in a Car Park (#ulink_e72ea974-0428-53c3-a6a1-ebd58919777f) ‘THEY’RE RIFLE BULLETS, steel-capped,’ I told Jane in her office at the clinic. ‘Probably fired from a military weapon. Two of them were in the pumphouse. The third I fished out of the pool an hour ago.’ Jane watched me as I leaned across her desk and placed the three bullets in her empty ashtray. Stolen from a pub in Notting Hill, the ashtray was a reassuring presence, proof that a small part of Jane’s rackety past still survived in this temple of efficiency. Jane sat calmly in her white coat, dwarfed by a black leather chair contoured like an astronaut’s couch. She touched the bullets with a pencil, and raised a hand before I could speak. ‘Paul – take it easy.’ Already she was playing the wise daughter, more concerned about my adrenalin-fired nerviness than by the unsettling evidence I had brought. I remembered her under the roadside plane trees near Arles, calmly sucking a peach as the engine steamed and I rigged an emergency fan belt from a pair of her tights. She prodded the bullets, moving them around the ashtray. ‘Are you all right? You should have called me. This Russian – what’s Halder playing at?’ ‘I told him not to worry you. Believe me, I’ve never felt better. I could easily have run here.’ ‘That’s what bothers me. The Russian didn’t hurt you?’ ‘He brushed my shoulder, and I slipped on the grass.’ ‘He spoke English?’ ‘Badly. He said his name was Alexei.’ ‘That’s something.’ Jane stood up and walked around the desk. Her small hands held my face, then smoothed my damp hair. She paused at the swollen bruise above my ear, but said nothing about the wound. ‘Why do you think he was Russian?’ ‘It’s a guess. He mentioned someone called Natasha. Do you remember those touts near the taxi ranks at Moscow Airport? They had everything for sale – drugs, whores, diamonds, oil leases, anything except a taxi. There was something seedy about him in a small-time way. Poor diet and flashy dentistry.’ ‘That doesn’t sound like Eden-Olympia.’ Jane pressed my head against her breast and began to explore my scalp. ‘Awful man – I can see he upset you. He might have been lost.’ ‘He was looking for something. He thought I was David Greenwood.’ ‘Why? There’s no resemblance. David was fifteen years younger …’ She broke off. ‘He can’t have met David.’ I rotated my chair to face Jane. ‘That’s the point. Why would David have any contact with a small-time Russian crook?’ Jane leaned against the desk, watching me in a way I had never seen before, less the tired house-doctor of old and more the busy consultant with an eye on her watch. ‘Who knows? Perhaps he was hoping to sell David a used car. Someone from the rehab clinic might have mentioned his name.’ ‘It’s possible. Doctors doing charity work have to mix with a lot of riffraff.’ ‘Apart from their husbands? Paul, these bullets – don’t get too involved with them.’ ‘I won’t …’ I listened to the lift doors in the corridor as Jane’s colleagues left the clinic after their day’s work. Somewhere a dialysis machine moved through its cleaning cycle, emitting a series of soft grunts and rumbles, like a discreet indigestion. The clinic was a palace of calm, far away from the pumphouse and its bullet-riddled sack. I gazed through the cruise-liner windows at the open expanse of the lake. A deep shift in the subsoil sent a brief tremor across the surface, as a pressure surge moved through a ring main. Proud of Jane, I said: ‘What an office – they obviously like you. Now I see why you want to spend your time here.’ ‘It was David’s office.’ ‘Doesn’t that feel …?’ ‘Strange? I can cope with it. We sleep in his bed.’ ‘Almost grounds for divorce. They should have moved you. Living in the same villa is weird enough.’ I gestured at the filing cabinets. ‘You’ve been through his stuff? Any hints of what went wrong?’ ‘The files are empty, but some of his records are still on computer.’ Jane tapped a screen with her pencil. ‘The La Bocca case histories would make your hair curl. A lot of those Arab girls were fearfully abused.’ ‘Thanks, I’d rather not see them. What about the children here? Is there a lot of work for you?’ ‘Very little. There aren’t many children at Eden-Olympia. I don’t know why they needed a paediatrician. Still, it gives me a chance to work on something else. There’s a new project using the modem links to all the villas and apartments. Professor Kalman is keen that I get involved.’ ‘Fine, as long as they don’t exploit you. Is it interesting?’ ‘In an Eden-Olympia kind of way.’ Jane played distractedly with the bullets, as if they were executive worry-beads supplied to all the offices. ‘Every morning when they get up people will dial the clinic and log in their health data: pulse, blood-pressure, weight and so on. One prick of the finger on a small scanner and the computers here will analyse everything: liver enzymes, cholesterol, prostate markers, the lot.’ ‘Alcohol levels, recreational drugs …?’ ‘Everything. It’s so totalitarian only Eden-Olympia could even think about it and not realize what it means. But it might work. Professor Kalman is very keen on faecal smears, but I suspect that’s one test too far. He hates the idea of all that used toilet paper going to waste. The greatest diagnostic tool in the world is literally being flushed down the lavatory. How does it strike you?’ ‘Mad. Utterly bonkers.’ ‘You’re right. But the basic idea is sound. We’ll be able to see anything suspicious well in advance.’ ‘So no one will ever get ill?’ ‘Something like that.’ She turned and stared at the lake. ‘It’s a pity about the paediatrics. At times I feel all the children in the world have grown up and left me behind.’ ‘Only at Eden-Olympia.’ I reached out and held her waist. ‘Jane, that’s sad.’ ‘I know.’ Jane looked down at the bullets in her palm, seeing them clearly for the first time. She pressed them against her heart, as if calculating the effect on her anatomy, and with a grimace dropped them into the ashtray. ‘Nasty. Are you going to hand them in?’ ‘To the security people? Later, when I’ve had time to think. Say nothing to Penrose.’ ‘Why not? He ought to know.’ Jane held my wrist as I reached for the bullets. ‘Paul, stand back for a moment. You’d expect to find a few bullets in the garden. Seven people were killed. The guards must have been in a total panic, shooting at anything that moved. Stop putting yourself in David’s shoes.’ ‘I’m trying not to. It’s difficult, I don’t know why. By the way, I’m sure David didn’t shoot the hostages in the garage. I had a careful look inside.’ ‘But Penrose told us the garage had been rebuilt.’ ‘It wasn’t. I’ll show you around.’ ‘No thanks. I’ll stay with Professor Kalman at the colorectal end of things. So where did David shoot the hostages?’ ‘In the garden. One probably died against the pumphouse doors. A second was shot in the pool.’ ‘Bizarre. What was the poor man doing – swimming for help?’ Tired of talking to me, Jane rested her face in her hands. She tapped a computer keyboard, and a stream of numerals glimmered against her pale skin. ‘Jane …’ I held her shoulders, watching the screen as it threw up a list of anaesthetics. ‘I’m badgering you. Let’s forget about David.’ Jane smiled at this. ‘Dear Paul, you’re so wired up. You’re like a gun dog waiting for the beaters.’ ‘There’s nothing else to think about. Lying by a swimming pool all day is a new kind of social deprivation. Let’s drive down to Cannes and have an evening on the town. Champagne cocktails at the Blue Bar, then an a?oli at M?re Besson. Afterwards we’ll go to the Casino and watch the rich Arabs pick out their girls.’ ‘I like rich Arabs. They’re extremely placid. All right – but I have to go back and change.’ ‘No. Come as you are. White coat and stethoscope. They’ll think I’m a patient having an affair with his glamorous young doctor.’ ‘You are.’ Jane held my hands to her shoulders and rocked against me. ‘I need time to freshen up.’ ‘Fine. I’ll get some air on the roof and bring the car round to the entrance in twenty minutes.’ I leaned across her and pointed to the computer screen. ‘What’s all this? I saw David’s initials.’ ‘Eerie, isn’t it? You’re not the only one finding traces of the dead.’ ‘“May 22” …’ I touched the screen. ‘That was a week before the murders. “Dr Pearlman, Professor Louit, Mr Richard Lancaster … 2.30, 3, 4 o’clock.” Who are these people?’ ‘Patients David was seeing. Pearlman is chief executive of Ciba- Geigy. Lancaster is president of Motorola’s local subsidiary. Don’t think about shooting them – they’re watched over like royalty.’ ‘They are royalty. There’s a second list here. But no times are given. When was it typed in?’ ‘May 26. It’s a list of appointments waiting to be scheduled.’ ‘But David was a paediatrician. Do all these people have children?’ ‘I doubt if any of them do. David spent most of his time on general duties. Paul, let’s go. You’ve seen enough.’ ‘Hold on.’ I worked the mouse, pushing the list up the page. ‘“Robert Fontaine … Guy Bachelet.” They were two of the victims.’ ‘Poor bastards. I think Fontaine died in the main administration building. Alain Delage took over from him. Does it matter?’ ‘It slightly changes things. Only two days beforehand David was reminding himself to arrange their appointments. A strange thing to do if he planned to kill them. Jane …?’ ‘Sorry, Paul.’ Jane switched off the screen. ‘So much for the conspiracy theory.’ I turned away and stared across the lake, expecting another seismic shudder. ‘He was still booking them in for their check-ups. All that cholesterol to be tested, all those urinalyses. Instead, he gets up early in the morning, and decides to shoot them dead …’ Jane patted my cheek. ‘Too bad, Paul. So the brainstorm theory is right after all. You’ll have to go back to the sun-lounger, and all that deprivation …’ Waving to the night staff, I walked through the foyer of the clinic to the car-park entrance. As the lift carried me to the top floor I stared at my dishevelled reflection in the mirror, part amateur detective with scarred forehead and swollen ear – the price of too much keyhole work – and part eccentric rider of hobby-horses. As always, Jane was right. I had read too much into the three bullets and the intact garage. A nervy gendarme searching the garden might have fired into the pumphouse when the engine switched to detergent mode, startling him with its subterranean grumblings. The rifle round in the pool could have richocheted off the rose pergola and been kicked into the water by a passing combat boot. The hostages had probably died in the avenue, shot down by Greenwood as they made a run for it. Wilder Penrose’s description of events, the official story released to the world by the press office at Eden-Olympia, was not to be taken literally. The lift doors opened onto the roof, empty except for the Jaguar. The medical staff and visiting senior executives left their cars on the lower floors, but I always enjoyed the clear view over La Napoule Bay, and the gentle, lazy sea that lay like a docile lover against the curved arm of the Esterel. I leaned on the parapet, inhaling the scent of pines and the medley of pharmaceutical odours that emerged from a ventilation shaft. I was thinking of Jane and her new office when I heard a shout from the floors below, a muffled cry of protest followed by the sound of a blow struck against human bone. A second voice bellowed abuse in a pidgin of Russian and Arabic. I stepped to the inner balustrade and peered into the central well, ready to shout for help. Two Eden-Olympia limousines were making their way down the circular ramp. The chauffeurs stopped their vehicles on the third level, slipped from their driving seats and opened the rear doors, giving their passengers a ringside view of the ugly tableau being staged in an empty parking space. A Senegalese trinket salesman knelt on the concrete floor in his flowered robes, beads and bangles scattered around him. Despite the dim light, I could see the streaming bruises on his face, and the blood dripping onto a plastic wallet filled with cheap watches and fountain pens. A dignified man with a small beard, he tried to gather together his modest wares, as if knowing that he would have little to show for the day’s work. Patiently he retrieved a tasselled mask that lay between the booted heels of the security guards who were beating a thickset European in a cheap cream suit. The victim was still on his feet, protesting in Russian-accented French as he warded off the truncheon blows with his bloodied hands. Their blue shirts black with sweat, the three guards manoeuvred him into the corner and then released a flurry of blows that sank him to his knees. I turned away, dazed by the violence, and then shouted to the executives watching from their cars. But they were too engrossed to notice me. Sitting by the open doors of the limousines, they were almost Roman in their steely-eyed calm, as if watching the punishment of a slacking gladiator. I recognized Alain Delage, the bespectacled accountant who gave Jane a lift to the clinic. He and the other executives were dressed in leather jackets zipped to the neck, like members of an Eden-Olympia bowling club. The beatings ended. I listened to the Russian coughing as he leaned against the wall, trying to wipe the blood from his suit. Satisfied, the security men holstered their truncheons and stepped back into the darkness. Starter-motors churned and the limousines swung towards the exit, carrying away the audience from this impromptu piece of garage theatre. I gripped the balustrade and limped down the ramp, searching the lift alcoves for a telephone that would put me through to the emergency medical team. The African was now on his feet, straightening his torn robes, but the Russian sat in his corner, head swaying as he gasped for air. I circled the ramp above them, trying to attract their attention, but a uniformed figure stepped from behind a pillar and barred my way. ‘Mr Sinclair … be careful. The floors are hard. You’ll hurt yourself.’ ‘Halder?’ I recognized his slate-pale face. ‘Did you see all that …?’ Halder’s strong hand gripped my elbow and steadied me when I slipped on the oily deck. His aloof eyes took in my lumbering gait, assessing whether I was drunk or on drugs, but his face was without expression, any hint of judgement erased from its refined features. ‘Halder – your men were there. What exactly is going on?’ ‘Nothing, Mr Sinclair.’ Halder spoke soothingly. ‘A small security matter.’ ‘Small? They were beating the balls off those men. They need medical help. Call Dr Jane on your radio.’ ‘Mr Sinclair …’ Halder gave up his attempt to calm me. ‘It was a disciplinary incident, nothing to concern you. I’ll help you to your car.’ ‘Hold on …’ I pushed him away from me. ‘I know how to walk. You made a mistake – that wasn’t the Russian I saw this morning.’ Halder nodded sagely, humouring me as he tapped the elevator button. ‘One Russian, another Russian … examples have to be made. We can’t be everywhere. This is the dark side of Eden-Olympia. We work hard so you and Dr Jane can enjoy the sun.’ ‘The dark side?’ I propped the door open with my foot and waited for Halder to meet my eyes. ‘Away from the tennis courts and the swimming pools you hate so much? I wouldn’t want to spend too much time there.’ ‘You don’t need to, Mr Sinclair. We do that for you.’ ‘Halder …’ I lowered my voice, which I could hear echoing around the dark galleries. ‘That was a hell of a beating your men handed out.’ ‘The Cannes police would be a lot harder on them. We were doing them a favour.’ ‘And the parked limousines? Alain Delage and the other bigwigs were watching the whole thing. Wasn’t that just a little over the top? It looked as if it was staged for them.’ Halder nodded in his over-polite way, waiting patiently to send me and the lift towards the roof. ‘Maybe it was. Some of your neighbours at Eden-Olympia have … advanced tastes.’ ‘So … it was arranged? Carefully set up so you could have your fun?’ ‘Not us, Mr Sinclair. And definitely not me.’ He stepped away from the lift, saluted and strode down the ramp, heels ringing on the concrete. I settled myself in the Jaguar and inhaled the evening air. The scent of disinfectant and air-conditioning suddenly seemed more real than the sweet tang of pine trees. I felt angry but curiously elated, as if I had stepped unharmed from an aircraft accident that had injured my fellow-passengers. The sweat and stench of violence quickened the air and refocused the world. Without starting the engine, I released the hand-brake and freewheeled the Jaguar along the ramp. I was tempted to run Halder down, but by the time I passed him the Russian and the Senegalese had gone, and the scattered beads lay blinking among the pools of blood. 8 The Alice Library (#ulink_44e97b0e-f1ec-5b1a-9b55-12131d202bac) AS STOICAL AS the wife of a kamikaze pilot protecting the wreckage of his plane, Mrs Yasuda stood on the pavement outside the house and waited as her husband’s damaged Porsche was hoisted onto the removal truck. The winch moaned and sighed, sharing all the pain inflicted on the car. An oblique front-end collision had torn the right fender from its frame, crushed the headlight and frosted the windscreen, through which Mr Yasuda had punched an observation space. Staring at this hole, Mrs Yasuda’s face was without emotion, her cheeks drained of colour, as if the accident to her husband’s sports car had stopped the clocks of human response. When the removal driver asked for her signature she wrote her name in a large cursive script and closed the door before he could doff his cap. Fortunately, Mr Yasuda had not been injured in the accident, as I had seen a few hours earlier. Still awake at three that morning, I left Jane asleep, face down like a teenager with a pillow over her head. Wandering naked from one room to the next, I was still trying to come to terms with the ugly incident in the clinic car park. The display of brutality had unsettled me. I said nothing to Jane as we drove into Cannes for dinner, but a dormant part of my mind had been aroused – not by the cruelty, which I detested, but by the discovery that Eden-Olympia offered more to its residents than what met the visitor’s gaze. Over the swimming pools and manicured lawns seemed to hover a dream of violence. Slipping on my bathrobe, I kissed Jane’s small hand, still faintly scented with some hospital reagent, and watched her fingers jump in a childlike reflex. I went downstairs, opened the sun-lounge door and strolled across the lawn, past the pool with its sealed surface like a black dance floor. I opened the wire gate into the tennis court and paced the marker lines that ran through the moonlight, thinking of the resigned eyes of the old Senegalese. A car approached the Yasudas’ house, its engine labouring. It limped along in low gear, metal scraping a tyre as it turned into the drive. A table lamp lit up Mrs Yasuda’s first-floor study, where she had been sitting in the darkness, perhaps watching her English neighbour prowl the baselines of his mind. She moved to the window, and waved to her husband when he stepped from the damaged car. A few minutes later I saw them through the slatted blinds of their bedroom. Still wearing his leather jacket, the stocky businessman strode around the room, gesticulating as his wife watched him from the bed. He seemed to be enacting scenes from a violent martial-arts film, perhaps shown that evening to the Japanese community in Cannes. He at last undressed, and sat at the foot of the bed, a portly would-be samurai. His wife stood between his knees, her hands on his shoulders, waiting until he slipped the straps of her nightdress. They began to make love, and I left the tennis court and walked back to the house. Lying beside Jane, I listened to her breathy murmur as she dreamed her young wife’s dreams. Somewhere a horn sounded in the residential enclave, followed by another in reply, as cars returned from the outposts of the night. Se?ora Morales was giving the morning’s instructions to the Italian maids. For an hour they would work downstairs, leaving me with ample time to shave, shower and muse over the possibilities of the day. The flow of faxes and e-mails from London had begun to fall away, and with my agreement Charles had taken over the editorship of the two aviation journals. Faced with the imposed boredom of Eden-Olympia, I lay back on the bed, feeling the warm imprint of Jane’s body beside me. We, too, had made love on returning from Cannes, a rare event after her long working days. Sex, at the business park, was something one watched on the adult film channels. But Jane had been excited by the illicit pleasure of leaving for Cannes on the spur of the moment. An impulsive decision ran counter to the entire ethos of Eden-Olympia. When she stepped from the car onto the Croisette she seemed almost light-headed. In a tabac near the Majestic she picked a Paris-Match from the racks and calmly walked out without paying. It lay on our table at M?re Besson beside the a?oli of cod and carrots, and Jane was well aware that she had stolen the magazine. But she shrugged and smiled cheerfully, accepting that a benign lightning strike had illuminated our excessively ordered world. The mental climate that presided over Eden-Olympia never varied, its moral thermostat set somewhere between duty and caution. The emotion had been draining from our lives, leaving a numbness that paled the sun. The stolen magazine quickened our lovemaking … As the floor-polishers drummed away, I strolled through the empty bedrooms, searching for further traces of David Greenwood. I sat on the draped mattress in the children’s room, surrounded by a frieze of cartoon figures – Donald Duck, Babar and Tintin – and thinking of the child that I hoped Jane would bear one day, and how it would sleep and play in a room as sunny as this one. Next to the bathroom was a fitted cupboard, decorated with Tenniel’s illustrations for the Alice books. I opened the doors, and found myself gazing at a modest library, the first real trace of Greenwood’s tenancy. Some thirty copies of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass sat on the shelves, translations into French, Spanish and even Serbo-Croat. Over drinks the previous weekend, Wilder Penrose had told me of David’s enthusiasm for the Alice books, and the Lewis Carroll society he had formed at Eden-Olympia. The Paris surrealists embraced Carroll as one of their great precursors, but Eden-Olympia seemed an unlikely recruiting ground. Perhaps the multinational executives possessed a more whimsical sense of humour than I realized, and saw affinities between the business park and Alice’s hyper-logical mind. The copies were well thumbed, loaned to the youthful readership at the La Bocca children’s refuge. The flyleaves were marked with names, in what I guessed was David’s scrawl. ‘Fatima … Elisabeth … V?ronique … Natasha …’ ‘Curiouser and curiouser …’ Jane ran a hand over the books in the cupboard. ‘This Russian who mugged you turns out to be a devoted father, trying to borrow a library book for his daughter Natasha.’ ‘It does look like it.’ ‘Come on, Paul. You jumped into the deep end and went straight to the bottom. Not every Russian on the C?te d’Azur is a mafioso. The poor man was introducing Natasha to an English classic. You make fun of his teeth, steal one of his shoes, and launch a full-scale manhunt.’ ‘I know. I regret it now.’ ‘At least they didn’t catch him. Halder looks as if he’d love to beat the hell out of someone.’ ‘I’m not so sure.’ I straightened the row of books. ‘For a library user, the Russian I saw was amazingly aggressive.’ ‘Of course he was.’ Jane lay back on the bed, savouring her triumph. Still wearing her white hospital coat, she had come home to change before a conference in Nice. ‘The Russians had to fight for the right to read … Mandelstam, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn. Think of it, Paul. You were lining up with all those KGB types against this poor migrant worker and little Natasha.’ ‘You win.’ I sat beside Jane and massaged her calves. ‘It’s a touching thought, all those Alice books in the refuge, pored over by V?ronique and Fatima. Where are they now?’ ‘Working in some awful factory, I imagine, packing espadrilles for five francs an hour, while they wonder what happened to the kind English doctor. Don’t think too badly of David. He did some good things here.’ ‘I accept that. How well did you really know him?’ ‘We worked together. Paul, what are you driving at?’ ‘Nothing. I’ve always been curious.’ ‘You know I don’t like that. David isn’t coming back, so forget about him.’ Irritated by me, Jane rose from the bed and took off her white coat. She seemed older than I remembered, her hair neatly groomed, the scar from her nasal ring concealed with cosmetic filler. She raised a hand as if to slap me, then relented and took my arm. ‘I keep telling you – I never had many lovers.’ ‘I thought you had an army of them.’ ‘I wonder why …’ She stood by the window, looking across the business park towards the sea. ‘You’re still locked into the past. It’s a huge phantom limb that aches and throbs. We’re here, Paul. We breathe this air, and we see this light …’ I watched her chin lift as she spoke, and realized that she was staring, not at the handsome headland of Cap d’Antibes and the pewter glimmer of the sea, but at the office buildings of Eden-Olympia, at the satellite dishes and microwave aerials. The business park had adopted her. ‘Jane, you like it here, don’t you.’ ‘Eden-Olympia? Well, it has a lot going for it. It’s open to talent and hard work. There’s no ground already staked out, no title deeds going back to bloody Magna Carta. You feel anything could happen.’ ‘But nothing ever does. All you people do is work. It’s wonderful here, but they left out reality. No one sits on the local council, or has a say about the fire service.’ ‘Good. Who wants to?’ ‘That’s my point. The whole place is probably run by a management consultancy in Osaka.’ ‘Fine by me. It might be a lot fairer. At Guy’s there are two sets of stairs. One at the front for the men that goes up to the roof, and the converted servant’s staircase at the back that ends on the third floor. I don’t need to tell you who that’s reserved for.’ ‘Things are changing.’ ‘That old mantra – women have listened to it for too long. How many teaching professors are women? Even in gynae?’ Lowering her voice, she said in an offhand way: ‘Kalman tells me they haven’t filled my post yet. He asked if I’d like to stay on for another six months.’ ‘Would you?’ ‘Yes, if I’m honest. Think about it. More time here would do you good. A mild winter, a couple of hours of tennis every day. We’ll find someone to play with you – maybe Mrs Yasuda.’ ‘Jane…’ I tried to embrace her, but she tensed herself, exposing the sharp bones of her shoulders. ‘I have to get back to London. There’s a business to run. Charles won’t carry me for ever.’ ‘I know. Still, you could fly out at weekends. It’s only an hour from London.’ ‘You work at weekends.’ She made no reply, and stared down at the swimming pool. Her eyes avoided mine, and she seemed to be mentally subdividing her new domain, unpacking her real baggage in the privacy of her mind. ‘Paul, relax …’ She spoke brightly, as if she remembered an exciting experience we had once shared. ‘We stay together, whatever happens. You’re my wounded pilot, I have to sew up your wings. Are you all right?’ ‘Just about.’ For the first time the wifely baby-talk sounded unconvincing. I noticed the transfers of the Hatter, the Dormouse and the Red Queen that Greenwood had pasted to the wardrobe door. Jane was growing up, like the Alice of Through the Looking-Glass, and I sensed something of Carroll’s regret when he realized that his little heroine was turning into a young woman and would soon be leaving him. I closed the library door and said: ‘You’d better change. Kalman’s collecting you in an hour. Before you go, I’d like a printout of that appointments list.’ ‘David’s? Why?’ Jane picked up her white coat. ‘I’m not sure.’ ‘No one will know. Can you access it on the terminal downstairs?’ ‘Yes, but … why do you want it?’ ‘Just a hunch. I need to track it down. Then I can lay David to rest.’ ‘Well … keep it to yourself. These senior people don’t like their medical records floating around.’ ‘It’s a list, Jane. I could have copied it out of the phone book.’ I paused by the stairs. ‘Have you been able to find out why they were seeing David? Was there anything wrong with them?’ ‘Just sports injuries. Nothing else. Skin lacerations, one or two broken bones. There’s some very rough touch rugby being played at Eden-Olympia.’ The pressure of Jane’s mouth still dented my lips as I walked to the car. I thought of her with the computer in the study, watching me warily as she searched through Greenwood’s records. Had she been testing me, with her talk of extending the contract? After another six months she would be as institutionalized as any long-term convict, locked inside a virtual cell she called her office. Eden-Olympia demanded a special type of temperament, committed to work rather than to pleasure, to the balance sheet and the drawing board rather than to the brothels and gaming tables of the Old Riviera. Somehow I needed to remind Jane of her true self. In its way her theft of the magazine from the tabac was a small ray of hope. I tucked the appointments list into my breast pocket and searched for the car keys. Parked behind the Jaguar on the sloping forecourt was Wilder Penrose’s sports saloon, a low-slung Japanese confection with huge wing mirrors, grotesque spoiler and air intakes large enough for a ramjet. To my puritan eye the car was an anthology of marketing tricks, and I refused even to identify its manufacturer. I assumed that Penrose was making a house call on Simone Delage, easing this highly-strung woman through the aftermath of some troubled dream or advising her about the impotence problems of over-promoted accountants. He had deliberately parked a few inches from the Jaguar, rather than on the Delages’ forecourt, forcing me to make a tight turn that would show up the Jaguar’s heavy steering. I started the engine, listening with pleasure to the hungry gasp of the rival carburettors, for once ready to sink their differences against a common enemy. I edged forward and swung the steering wheel, but found my way blocked by the plinth of the dolphin sculpture. I reversed, careful not to touch the Japanese car, but at the last moment, giving way to a sudden impulse, I raised my foot from the brake pedal. I felt the Jaguar’s heavy chrome bumper bite deep into soft fibreglass, almost buckling the passenger door of the sports saloon. It rocked under the impact, its hydraulics letting out a chorus of neurotic cries. Trying to ignore what I had done, but admitting to a distinct lightness of heart, I rolled down the ramp towards the street. 9 Glass Floors and White Walls (#ulink_ac087824-7552-55ca-b557-e72cb49b413d) ‘MR SINCLAIR, THERE’S no crime at Eden-Olympia. None at all.’ Pascal Zander, the new head of security, sighed with more than a hint of disappointment. ‘In fact, I can say that the whole concept of criminality is unknown here. Do I exaggerate?’ ‘You don’t,’ I told him. ‘We’ve been here two months and I haven’t seen a single cigarette stub or bubble-gum pat.’ ‘Bubble gum? The idea is unthinkable. There are no pine cones to trip you, no bird shit on your car. At Eden-Olympia even nature knows her place.’ Zander beamed at me, glad to welcome me to his den. An affable and fleshy Franco-Lebanese, he stood behind his desk, camel-hair coat over his shoulders, more public relations man than security chief. Crime might be absent from Eden-Olympia, but other pleasures were closer to hand. When his secretary, a handsome Swiss woman in her forties, brought in an urgent letter for signature, he stared at her like a child faced with a spoonful of cream. ‘Good, good …’ He watched her leave the office and then turned the same lecherous gaze towards me, letting it linger for a few moments without embarrassment. He sat down, still wearing his coat, and shifted his rump on the leather chair. As he flicked dismissively at the onyx pen-stand he made it clear that both the chair and the desk he had inherited from Guy Bachelet, his murdered predecessor, were too small for him. Already bored by my visit, he stared at the distant rooftops of Cannes, to an older C?te d’Azur where the hallowed traditions of crime and social pathology still flourished. For an unsavoury character, Pascal Zander was surprisingly likeable, one of the few openly venal individuals in Eden-Olympia, and I found myself warming to him. I had intended to report the brutal beatings in the clinic car park, but here was a police chief who sincerely believed that he had abolished crime. He was sympathetic when I described the Russian intruder who punched me, but plainly saw our brawl as little more than an outbreak of personal rivalry between expatriates, probably over the affections of my wife. ‘At Eden-Olympia we are self-policing,’ he explained. ‘Honesty is a designed-in feature, along with free parking and clean air. Our guards are for show, like the guides at Euro-Disney.’ ‘Their uniforms are actually costumes?’ ‘In effect. If you want real crime, go to Nice or Cannes La Bocca. Robbery, prostitution, drug-dealing – to us they seem almost folkloric, subsidized by the municipality for the entertainment of tourists.’ ‘Unthinkable at Eden-Olympia,’ I agreed. ‘All the same, there was one tragic failure.’ ‘Dr Greenwood? Tragic, yes …’ Zander pressed a scented hand to his heart. ‘Every moment I spend in this chair I feel the tragedy. His behaviour was criminal, but of a kind beyond the reach of the law or police.’ ‘What happened to Greenwood? No one seems able to say.’ ‘Speak to Wilder Penrose. A bolt of lightning streaks through a deceased brain. Within minutes seven of my colleagues are dead. Men and women who gave everything to Eden-Olympia. Death stalked us all that morning, with a rifle in one hand and a box of dice in the other.’ ‘The killings were random?’ ‘There’s no doubt. Nothing linked the victims to their murderer.’ ‘Except for one thing – they were his patients. Greenwood may have believed they had some fatal disease.’ ‘They did. But the disease was inside Greenwood’s mind.’ Zander leaned his plump chest across the desk, lowering his voice. ‘We at security were heavily criticized. But how could we predict the behaviour of someone so deeply insane? You knew him, Mr Sinclair?’ ‘He was a colleague of my wife’s in London. He seemed rather… idealistic.’ ‘The best disguise. There are many brilliant people at Eden-Olympia. For a few, their minds are lonely places, the cold heights where genius likes to walk. Now and then, a crevasse appears.’ ‘So it could happen again?’ ‘We hope not. Eden-Olympia would never survive. But sooner or later, who can say? We are too trusting, Mr Sinclair. So many glass floors and white walls. The possibilities for corruption are enormous. Power, money, opportunity. People can commit crimes and be unaware of it. In some ways it’s better to be like Nice or La Bocca – the lines are drawn and we cross them knowing the cost. Here, it’s a game without rules. One determined man could…’ He seemed to stare into himself, then made an obscene gesture at the air and turned to me. ‘You want my help, Mr Sinclair?’ ‘I’m interested in exactly what happened on May 28. The route Dr Greenwood took, the number of shots fired. They might give me a clue to his state of mind. As an Englishman I feel responsible.’ ‘I’m not sure …’ Zander’s hands fretted over his gaudy desk ornaments. ‘Violent assassins renounce their nationality as they commit their crimes.’ ‘Could I talk to the next of kin?’ ‘The wives of the deceased? They returned to their home countries. Grief is all that’s left to them.’ ‘The office staff? Secretaries, personal assistants?’ ‘They’ve suffered enough. What more can they tell you? The colour of Greenwood’s tie? Whether he wore brown or black shoes?’ ‘Fair enough. An overall report of the incident would help me. I take it you prepared one?’ ‘One? A hundred reports. For the investigating magistrate, for the Prefect of Police, for the Minister of the Interior, six foreign embassies, lawyers for the companies …’ ‘So you can lend me one?’ ‘They’re still confidential. International corporations are involved. Claims of negligence may be brought against Eden-Olympia, which of course we deny.’ ‘Then –’ ‘I can’t help you, Mr Sinclair.’ For the first time Zander sounded like a policeman. He studied the scar on my forehead and my still-bruised ear. ‘Does violence intrigue you, Mr Sinclair?’ ‘Not at all. I try to avoid it.’ ‘And your wife? For a few women …’ ‘She’s a doctor. She’s spent years in casualty wards.’ ‘Even so. Some people find violence is a useful marriage aid. A special kind of tickler. You’re so involved with the Greenwood murders, but I’m sure your motives are sincere. Sadly, you are wasting your time. All conceivable evidence was tracked down.’ ‘Not all…’ I took the three spent bullets from my pocket and rolled them across the desk. ‘Rifle bullets – I found them in the garden at our villa. One was lying on the floor of the swimming pool. How it got there is hard to work out. For what it’s worth, I don’t think the hostages were shot in the garage.’ Zander took out a silk handkerchief and vented some unpleasing odour from his mouth. He stared at the bullets but made no attempt to examine them. ‘Mr Sinclair, you did well to find them. My men told me they made a careful search.’ ‘You could match them to Dr Greenwood’s rifle.’ ‘The weapon is held by the Cannes police. It’s best if we don’t involve them again. Other traces of Greenwood will appear. The greater a crime, the longer its effects poison the air. Have you found anything else?’ ‘Not at the villa. But there are one or two odd things going on at Eden-Olympia.’ ‘I’m glad to hear it.’ Zander opened a window and let in the warm air, which he inhaled in short but hungry breaths. Recovering his poise, he turned to escort me to the door. ‘“Odd things” … I’d almost lost hope for our business park. Good news, Mr Sinclair. Keep your eyes open for me …’ ‘I will. Now, the hostages …’ ‘Mr Sinclair, please …’ Zander put an arm around my shoulders, reminding me of the strength that an overweight body can hide. ‘The dead no longer care where they were shot. Tell me about your young wife. Is she enjoying her stay with us?’ ‘Very much.’ I stepped through a side door into the corridor, where a woman assistant was waiting. ‘She works far too hard.’ ‘Everyone does. It’s our secret vice. She needs to play a little more. You’ll have to find some new activity that amuses her. There are so many interesting games at Eden-Olympia …’ His mouth began to purse again, showing the pink lining inside his black lips, but his eyes were fixed upon the three bullets that lay on his desk. 10 The Hit List (#ulink_96764ab2-8030-5998-861b-ab78afbd49ae) AN ALMOST DRUGGED air floated across the lake, a rogue cloud that had drifted down the hillside, carrying the scent of office-freshener from a factory in Grasse. I walked along the water’s edge, attracting the attention of two security men in a Range Rover parked among the pines. One watched me through his binoculars, no doubt puzzled that anyone in Eden-Olympia should have the leisure to stroll through the midday sun. Between the security building and the Elf-Maritime research labs was an open-air cafeteria, a facility intended to soften the public face of the business park and give it a passing resemblance to an Alpine resort. Tired after my meeting with Zander, I sat down and ordered a vin blanc from the young French waitress, who wore jeans and a white vest printed with a quotation from Baudrillard. Zander had told me nothing, as I expected. Even his silences provided no useful clues. By now, nearly six months after the event, a relieved Eden-Olympia had erased David Greenwood from its collective memory, filing the tragedy in some administrative limbo assigned to earthquakes and regicides. I thought of Zander: thuggish, bisexual and corrupt, qualities no doubt essential for any successful police chief. I could smell his aftershave on my right hand, and was tempted to walk to the water’s edge and wash the scent away, but disturbing the surface would probably trigger a full-scale alert. Yet Zander was a potential collaborator, the only person I had met who saw the flaw at the heart of Eden-Olympia. Given the absence of an explicit moral order, where decisions about right and wrong were engineered into the social fabric along with the fire drills and parking regulations, Zander’s job became impossible. Crime could flourish at Eden-Olympia without the residents ever being aware that they were its perpetrators or leaving any clues to their motives. Zander, according to Jane, was the acting head of security, and was still waiting for his appointment to be confirmed. During the interregnum, as he fretted at his desk in his camel-hair coat, he might become a useful ally. I remembered the Alice images I had found in the children’s room. Not for the first time it occurred to me that David Greenwood might never have committed the murders on May 28, and that the surveillance footage that showed him entering and leaving his victims’ offices had been faked. A blonde woman in her thirties, dressed in a dark business suit, sat down at a nearby table. She ordered a cappuccino and exchanged a few words of banter with the waitress, but her eyes were fixed on the top floor of the security building, where Pascal Zander had his office. She opened a laptop computer and tapped the keys, throwing up a sequence of property ads for expensive villas on the heights of Super-Cannes and Californie, all furnished with electric-blue lawns and emerald skies. She stared morosely at the overlit photographs and began a typed dialogue with herself, apparently setting out her day’s schedule and answering her queries aloud in an ironic English voice. I imagined her stepping from her shower, towel twirled around her head, keying in the emotions she would feel that day, the memories to be cued, the daydreams to be assigned a few minutes of too-precious time, the whole programme laced with sardonic asides. During a creative pause she gazed over the tables at me, revealing an attractive but moody face. I marked her down as a professional rebel, who resented the trappings of managerial success, club-class upgrades and company credit cards, the fool’s gold that could buy an entire life and offer no discount for idealism or integrity, and I liked the sombre eye that she levelled at the business park. Her glance took in my open-necked shirt, tweed sports jacket and thong sandals, a garb never worn by anyone in Eden-Olympia at either work or play, but the off-duty dress at my Cyprus RAF base, circa 1978, and the guarantee, I was deluded enough to think, of a certain kind of honesty. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/ali-smith/super-cannes/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. 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