Philip Kerr - Research

After publishing more than one hundred books you might be forgiven for thinking I’d know how to begin a story, but with this one I’m not at all sure how or where. I’ve always believed that a bad beginning makes a bad ending. You know me, Don: I like to start with a title and a great first line — something that really arrests you. I think my favourite first line in all literature must be ‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.’ Christ, I wish I could write something as simple but as good as that.

I suppose I could start from the moment you and I last saw each other, old sport, in the Aston on the French autoroute, when I told you that I was shutting down the atelier ; but I could as easily start a few weeks after that, from the moment when I arrived in Geneva for the first time, to begin writing The Geneva Convention — which was before Orla’s murder — because it seems to me now that a number of strange things happened to me here in Switzerland that could be easily connected with her death. Then again if this was film noir I’d probably begin the story in medias res, as Horace has it — with the night of her death. You know? The poor husband comes back home in the wee small hours to find his wife dead. Now that’s what I call a cold opening. Except that I didn’t find her dead when I came home. Not exactly. When I came home I thought Orla was asleep. She was in bed and it was dark after all; and I had good reason not to want to wake her. The plain fact of the matter is that when I got back into bed beside her she was more than likely already shot. And if I hardly thought it unusual she didn’t stir when I climbed into bed beside her that’s because she never did, on account of the fact that she took sleeping pills: Halcion. When Orla took Halcion there was very little that could wake her for several hours. Only who would believe that? Certainly not the police. That’s what happened, however, and frankly if I’d been going to kill my wife I’d hardly have done it in a way that left me looking as guilty as Crippen — I’d have pushed her out of a high window, or something; I mean, I’m a thriller writer so it’s second nature to me to analyse the circumstances of the crime and offer a critique of her homicide, right? But you can’t tell the cops that. Suggesting an alternative and better way of killing your own wife — moreover one you stood a better chance of getting away with — doesn’t exactly encourage them to think you’re innocent. Cops are the purest form of the bourgeoisie, for whom fiction is the frivolous privilege of aristocracy, or people who play at being aristocrats, like writers. In their eyes an allegiance to hard facts is what distinguishes honest, ordinary folk.

I don’t know what the Monty cops have told you about what happened in the hours leading up to Orla’s murder. On a Friday night we often went to Joël Robuchon at the Hôtel Métropole on Avenue de la Madone. I don’t know why we went there so often. Robuchon is ridiculously expensive but the reason I hated going there with Orla was not because of the food — which is excellent — but because there is something slightly corrupt about the atmosphere. It always made me feel like one of the old roués who go there with their very much younger mistresses and rentals like characters from the pages of Nana ; I felt like some old fool in love — Comte Muffat or La Faloise. Also, they give you a delicious lemon cake when you leave, which Orla always insisted on taking although it was never her who ate it, but me, who could least afford to consume the extra calories. But Orla truly loved the place. She enjoyed dressing up and people-watching, which is a serious sport at Joël Robuchon. And since she seldom drank anything it was also an excuse for Orla to get behind the wheel of her Ferrari. Frankly we could have walked there in about the same time it took to drive there. People watch the Monaco Grand Prix and imagine the place is some kind of motoring Valhalla; but driving in Monaco is a bit like shifting your car around one enormous parking lot.

On the telly I saw that Orla’s local fans have been leaving flowers and photographs to her memory in front of the entrance to the Odéon Tower, Diana-style. I don’t know why I’m surprised about that. Orla was one of the few people I ever met who actually liked living in Monaco. After we moved there she developed a thing for Grace Kelly. Orla always believed she bore a strong resemblance to her. She was just as bad a driver. And of course she was in that disastrous remake of Rear Window , which only contributed to her stupid little conceit. There were certainly other people in Monaco who commented on the resemblance and perhaps that’s why she took the place to heart. On the walls of her dressing-room at the Tour Odéon she had hung some framed movie posters of Grace Kelly in High Society and To Catch a Thief , although, in retrospect, Dial M for Murder might have been more appropriate. And I suppose that in the eyes of the public I’m just as much of a cad now as Ray Milland was in that movie. More so, if the truth was known.

Anyway, she really didn’t like the idea of us moving back to London — not one bit — and when we were in the restaurant we argued about it. Orla was dead against the idea. As you know she had no great love for the English and was even less enthusiastic about the weather, not to mention the tax situation. People seem to have forgotten that Orla was quite a wealthy woman in her own right. She made a ton of money from that stage musical about WikiLeaks that she invested in: WikiBeats .

Anyway, the argument became quite loud and at one point I grabbed her by the ear and twisted it, which she didn’t take kindly to and kicked me hard on the shin. I let out quite a yelp because Orla could always give as good as anything she got. She called me an arrogant cunt and I called her a fucking cow and then the maître d’ came and asked us to keep our voices down. No doubt the cops have already told you about that. There’s nothing like a lover’s tiff in public to provide a convenient background for a murder. It’s pure Agatha Christie. You have an argument, perhaps a face is slapped, some harsh things get said, very probably you meant some of them and therefore you must have killed her. The way the cops are you’d think a bit of a barney between husband and wife was one of Aristotle’s four fucking causes.

Actually, it was a fairly wide-ranging sort of argument, and not just about the move back to Blighty. I’d found out that Orla was giving money to all sorts of people and institutions I didn’t much care for. UNESCO was something we were both passionate about and we were actively involved in events like World Book Day and International Literacy Day. But I’m rather less keen on the RSPCA, the Labour Party, Julian Assange and Sinn Féin. Probably it was just her way of making me pay more attention to her, which I admit sometimes I didn’t do enough of; quite the opposite. But I’m not telling you this to excuse what I’m going to tell you, old sport, merely to illustrate that my relationship with Orla was occasionally tempestuous. I was capable of driving her mad; she was capable of irritating the hell out of me, but not enough to kill her. Jesus, no. As George Clooney says in From Dusk to Dawn , ‘I may be a bastard but I’m not a fucking bastard.’

As we were leaving the restaurant I made some tasteless remark about Irish republicans which she greeted with silence. That wouldn’t have been so bad, but Orla can make a silence as cold and loud as a blast of air conditioning. Then, outside the hotel entrance, as we were waiting for the valet to bring us the car, Orla hit me with the Robuchon carrier bag containing the lemon cake. Hard enough to knock me off balance. I expect the doorman saw this and then me trying to laugh it off. Now a Ferrari is not a good car to drive when you’re angry — especially when it’s almost new — so I thought it best to apologize and, to my surprise, she started to cry, accepted my apology, told me she was sorry for hitting me with the cake, and then handed me the car keys. I don’t expect anyone saw us make up in the car.