Philip Kerr - Research

‘This was at the Houston office?’

‘Yes. Me, I’d have fired him. But Houston showed great restraint and kept him on. He said that writers are passionate and that sometimes you have to respect that.’

I paused and drank some more of the excellent Burgundy. The bottle was empty and Amalric was already beckoning another from the sommelier. I had to hand it to Amalric, he was very different from the kind of policemen we were used to in London. It’s not many cops who have a taste for Vosne-Romanée and Hermès ties, and who can quote Molière and Voltaire.

‘Tell me more about the Houston office,’ he said.

‘You mean before he closed it down?’

Amalric nodded; Savigny checked the Marantz recorder and then replaced it on the table.

‘At the Houston office he employed a couple of secretaries — both English and rather fetching — and a couple of webmasters, who were Dutch. They did all the things that VVL didn’t do for John; which isn’t much. But he liked to keep a close eye on his public image. Whenever John wanted a meeting with one of the writers, which was probably once a fortnight, we would get the Eurostar to Paris — standard-class, John could be a tightwad with the expenses like that — and meet him there; he would drive up from Monaco, or from some location where he’d been doing research for a book, in his latest supercar. A Lamborghini. A Ferrari. An Aston Martin. You name it, John drove it. Usually he drove back to Monaco in a different car from the one he’d arrived in. That was part of the fun. John liked to have fun. And he loved that drive. He used to see how fast he could do it, of course, and try to beat his previous record. I think eight hours was about the record. I did that drive with him a couple of times and it scared the shit out of me. He tended to use the plane only to fly straight to London, or to Corfu where he had a place. Anyway, we would meet him — sometimes there were two or three of us there at the one time. He would read through what we’d written, making notes, and we’d wait for his comments, a little anxiously. It was like being back at Cambridge, for your supervisor’s assessment of an essay you’d written. If he was pleased with your progress he would take you out to lunch or dinner. Somewhere expensive. La Grande Cascade, Lapérouse, Alain Ducasse, La Tour d’Argent. John liked his food almost as much as he liked his fast cars. You could always tell just how much he liked what you’d written by the price of the wine he ordered.

‘At other times, when he was too busy to come to Paris, or had used up his tax-free visits — John was very scrupulous like that — I, or one of the others, would fly to Nice, hire a car and drive to Monaco for a meeting there.’

‘Which is why you had to stay in Beausoleil.’

I nodded. ‘Sometimes he went to London from Paris, on the Eurostar. To see his children. He was close to them. Tried his very best for them. But quite frankly, they’re a shiftless, idle lot. Sometimes I look at them and think how lucky I am that I don’t have any kids myself. John’s children have always got their hands out for something. The ex-wives aren’t much better. I once heard John lament that he had brought up the largest family with the smallest disposition for doing anything for themselves. In that respect at least he’s rather like Charles Dickens, whose sons all inherited their grandfather’s Micawberish trouble in handling their finances. But John has always tried his best for them. They all had trusts and flats and cars, and a few had expensive drug habits, too. For example, his eldest son, Travis, got a place to study history at Queens’ College, Cambridge; but after a failed career as a rock star he’s now in rehab at some place on the island of Antigua founded by Eric Clapton that costs $24,000 a month. He’s been there for a while now. All paid for by his pa.’

‘So, what went wrong?’ asked Savigny. ‘Why did he decide to stop writing books?’

‘He didn’t,’ I said. ‘He just decided to stop producing as many. To change his whole modus operandi.’

‘All right,’ said Savigny. ‘Why did he do that? Give up on the big money. His agent said Houston just walked away from being the richest writer in the world. He said he thought that Monsieur Houston had suffered a midlife crisis, perhaps.’

I laughed. ‘I’m afraid John was a little too old for one of those. If it comes to that, so am I.’

‘Or a nervous breakdown,’ suggested the sergeant.

I shook my head. ‘That’s another cute explanation. People like the easy explanations that you can fit into a magazine headline. It restores a sense of order in the universe to think that things can be so easily explained philosophically, I tend to adhere to the A. A. Milne explanation of the universe which goes something like this: “Rabbit’s clever,” said Pooh thoughtfully. “Yes,” said Piglet, “Rabbit’s clever.” “And he has a brain.” “Yes,” said Piglet. “Rabbit has a brain.” There was a long silence. “I suppose,” said Pooh, “that that’s why he never understands anything.”’

Savigny was looking blank but Amalric was smiling. ‘That’s wonderful,’ he said.

‘With all due respect to Hereward Jones, it’s more complicated than a midlife crisis or a nervous breakdown.’ I shrugged. ‘John is a complicated man. And you might say that it was an existential choice, although I hesitate to argue such a thing before two Frenchmen.’

‘What do you mean by that?’ asked Savigny.

‘I have to go to the bathroom, first.’

On my way to the men’s room in Claridge’s I checked my phone for text messages and thought a little about what I had just said and tried to remember exactly what John had told me before telling everyone else that he was closing the atelier . I wanted to get it right for the cops; as Raymond Chandler might have said in The Long Goodbye — more realistically, perhaps — it’s advisable not to invent too much when you are talking to them.

I drank some water from the tap — quite a lot — to help keep my head clear; I wouldn’t have put it past the wily Chief Inspector to try to loosen my tongue with fine wine. A mixture of Louis Roederer and Vosne-Romanée was an excellent way of doing it, too; what writer could ever have resisted something as subtle as that? And looking like a fox as much as he did, I didn’t doubt that Chief Inspector Amalric could probably smell a lie with almost as much certainty as he would recognize the bouquet of a good red. Two bottles of hundred-quid Burgundy were probably a much more cost-effective means of conducting an interview than paying someone to operate a polygraph machine.

I drank some more water and then washed my face.

It wasn’t that I was lying — not exactly — but then I’d hardly been honest either because, in spite of what I had told the Chief Inspector, there wasn’t a doubt in my mind that before very long John Houston would telephone me; nor did I have any doubt that I would never have betrayed him to the Monty cops.

I went back to the table, where I found Savigny had gone and my glass had been refilled with wine. For a moment I left it alone and waited to resume my story.

‘Where’s the sergeant?’

‘He’s gone outside for a cigarette.’

‘Shall I wait for him?’

‘No. Besides, it will be his job to transcribe what’s on the tape. I mean the digital recorder. He will hear everything you say again soon enough. That’s another reason I brought him to London. Savigny’s English is almost as good as mine. His mother is Canadian. From Quebec City.’

‘I thought they spoke French in Quebec.’

‘Oh, they do. But Didier’s mother was raised to be bilingual. And so was he. So, I think you were about to tell us about John Houston’s existential choice.’