Philip Kerr - Research

‘That’s quite a conversation piece,’ I said.

‘It’s by Mauro Perucchetti,’ said John. ‘Bob is quite a collector. This house is full of modern art. Some of it is worth a small fortune.’

‘This one looks like a bad trip to the hairdressers.’

John laughed and pointed at the large stairway on the opposite side of the hall. ‘She gave me quite a start the other night when I came down here in the dark. Her body is made of Swarovski crystal which was catching the moonlight through the window and makes her look rather ghostly. For a moment I thought it was Orla. I nearly had a heart attack.’

‘Sounds like a guilty conscience. You sure you didn’t shoot her?’

‘Funny, but not funny.’

He led me into a kitchen which could have served a good restaurant and poured me a glass of cold wine from a bottle of Corton-Charlemagne that was cooling in a refrigerator as big as a bank vault. The kitchen was immaculately clean and it was hard to imagine that anyone was actually living here. Even the stainless steel sink was gleaming like a suit of armour at Windsor Castle.

‘Cheers.’ He raised his glass and I caught sight of the massive Hublot on his wrist; it looked like a Range Rover parked on a beach towel.

I drank some of the wine and nodded appreciatively.

‘It’s the ’85,’ he said.

‘I think that being a fugitive has some very obvious advantages if this is what you’re drinking.’

‘There are worse places to go into hiding,’ he admitted. ‘Bob keeps a superb cellar here. I’ll say that for him.’

He was leaning nonchalantly against a white marble worktop except that the nonchalance never lasted for longer than a few seconds. He was too restless to quite pull that off. There was always an oven clock to adjust, a glass to top up, a mark on the marble to wipe, a shirt cuff to correct, and once a handful of vitamins to swallow.

‘I’m taking these because I need to stay sharp,’ he explained. ‘Three times a day. The stress I’ve been under, I haven’t been eating very much.’

‘That would explain why the kitchen is so neat,’ I said. ‘I thought you’d lost a few pounds. It suits you. Unlike that suit.’

‘What’s wrong with it?’

‘Nothing. I’m sure they wear that kind of thing at Bal-moral all the time.’

‘I had to leave Monaco in a bit of a hurry. I was stuck with the winter wardrobe I’d already brought here on a previous trip.’

‘That’s what it looks like.’

He was looking at my cabin luggage.

‘It’s all in there? In that toilet bag you call a suitcase?’

‘Everything except the gun. I chucked that off Putney Bridge. Not that it would have worked anyway.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Your nice Brocock Magnum with the inox finish. It had been deactivated.’

‘What? I paid two grand for that off some natty dredd on the Barking Road.’

‘You were done. He saw you coming. He sold you a weapon that was perfectly legal. You’d have needed someone with a lathe and the curiosity of a dead cat to make that thing fire again.’

I laughed and so did John.

‘You’re right. I was so fucking nervous when I bought it that I didn’t think to actually test-fire the thing.’

‘That’s not so easy to do, even in Newham.’

‘So why did you chuck it if it didn’t work?’

‘Because these days the Met is very trigger-happy. They shoot you dead when you’re only carrying a table leg. It’s best not to have anything that even looks like a gun. They shot a blind man the other day because he was carrying a white stick.’

‘Buying a gun is so much easier in Monaco.’

‘Evidently. Or we wouldn’t be talking like this now.’

‘Point taken.’

I put my hand in my jacket and brought out my passport-wallet, from which I withdrew John’s passport and then his driving licence. He frowned.

‘You brought it through customs like that?’

I shrugged. ‘Of course. Best place for a passport, wouldn’t you say? A passport-holder.’

‘But where’s your own passport?’

‘In my other pocket. They make you take it out of the holder when they look at it anyway. So what the fuck? I figured no one is going to look in the passport-holder if they’re already holding your passport.’ I shrugged. ‘That’s just the Father Brown principle of concealment. G. K. Chesterton? The Innocence of Father Brown ?’

John started to nod. ‘Where does a wise man hide a leaf? Sure. I remember.’

He looked at the picture in his false passport and nodded. ‘It’s lucky I wore my glasses and grew a beard for my passport picture.’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘Not that I’ve ever dared use this, you know. I mean, I stuck to the Jackal’s recipe, for how to get one. PO Box and everything. I mean it ought to be kosher enough. But I really don’t know for sure.’

‘You could try to assassinate the President of France. That’s one way of finding out if it works like a passport should.’

‘The way things are going there right now, they’d probably give me the Légion d’honneur .’

‘Or you could go back to the UK, like any other British passport holder. That’s probably the best road test you could give it. On the other hand if you want to use it without anyone actually looking at it, then Corfu is your best bet. No one ever looks at your passport when you fly there. The Greeks are glad to see anyone who’s going to spend some money. Robert Mugabe could fly into Corfu without a problem.’

John didn’t answer and I wondered where he was thinking of going. South Africa? Colombia? New Zealand? What was the destination of choice these days for people who wanted to do a Lord Lucan?

I put the Mont Blanc on the worktop and lifted my case onto the kitchen table. I unzipped the case and placed Charles Moore’s biography of Margaret Thatcher in his hands.

‘What’s this? A joke? You know I couldn’t stand that woman.’

‘Oh, I think you’ll like this book, John. In fact, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that’s the most absorbing biography you’ll read all year. Especially chapters ten to thirty.’

‘Ah.’ He flicked open the book and tugged out one new 500-euro bill. ‘Yes, I see what you mean. God bless Mrs T. Thanks, Don. Without a credit card I’ve been paying for nearly everything with Bitcoin until now.’

‘Where do you get a hundred thousand euros in new bills anyway?’

‘You remember that trip I made to the Lahore Literary Festival? The French DGSE got me to do a job for them while I was there.’ He shrugged. ‘Can’t say any more than that.’ John grinned. His grin got even wider when he unscrewed the pen and emptied the five stones onto the marble worktop. ‘Thanks again, old sport.’

‘And the diamonds?’

‘I bought them in Amsterdam. I was going to have them set in a necklace for someone.’

‘For Orla?’

‘No,’ he said, quietly.

‘So,’ I said. ‘What happened to her? And don’t tell me you were cleaning the gun and it went off. Cleaning the kitchen I might believe, but not a 22 automatic. According to the cops she got it right between the eyes and probably while she was asleep. I’ve seen the pictures.’

‘Look, I’ll tell you the truth. About everything, Don, I promise. And then I’m going to ask you another big favour. But why don’t I show you around first? Take you to your room and let you unpack. You can see some of Bob Mechanic’s art collection. Then we’ll order in some sushi from Uchitomi. It’s Geneva’s number one Japanese takeout. And the best part is, it’s on Bob’s account. Now that you’re here at last I’m starting to feel hungry again.’

‘All right.’

I shrugged. I’ve never cared very much for modern art, by which I mean the sort of crap that wins the Turner Prize. The last twentieth-century artist I had any time for was David Hockney.