Philip Kerr - Research

When we were back home I apologized again, for good measure, and I really thought everything between us was all right and that everything had blown over. We even had a good laugh about the incident and reflected it was fortunate that the Daily Mail weren’t there to see what happened. I made a joke about it being lucky it was a Robuchon lemon cake and not one cooked by her mother — who’s the world’s worst baker — which Orla thought was very funny. Then we kissed and made up again — I swear that’s exactly what happened, although in view of what now took place you could be forgiven for thinking our making up was hardly sincere on my part.

I went into my study and checked my emails and read a bit while Orla had a bath. Then she took the sleeping pill so I knew she would be soundly asleep for several hours. Which left me with ample opportunity to do what I often did when she took Halcion, which was to go out again; at least out of our apartment — which, as you may remember, is the sky duplex on the forty-third floor of the Tour Odéon — and down to an apartment on the twenty-ninth which is occupied — for the time being — by a friend of mine, a girl called Colette Laurent.

At least it was; Colette Laurent seems to have disappeared.

Until the night of Orla’s death I’d been seeing her for a while. Colette was originally set up in the Tour Odéon by a Russian oligarch called Lev who abandoned her, although it’s hard to imagine why, because girls don’t come looking any more spectacular than Colette Laurent. I used to see her in the Odéon’s gymnasium and it was lust at first sight on my part. One day we got talking. She’s a French-Algerian who looks a bit like Isabelle Adjani. Tall, shapely — I mean she had tits to die for, real ones — and as fit as a butcher’s dog. After we got to know each other a little better I agreed to offer her some help with her English and at first that’s all that happened. Everything was above board between us for almost a month — I mean it was like the matchmaker was keeping her beady eye on us; but I’m only human and one thing led to another and before very long we were sleeping together at least once or twice a week. At first it was only on the boat, but one day Orla showed up and almost caught us at it; after that I only saw Colette at her Russian’s apartment in the Tour or occasionally in Paris: she’d fly up for the weekend to the house in Neuilly-sur-Seine, when there was no one working there. It was an arrangement that suited us both because her job left her with little opportunity or energy for a social life. Colette was a yoga teacher and a masseuse and in Monaco that can keep you very busy; it’s possible to make at least a thousand euros a day. But I’d also give her a bit of money now and then, just to tide her over when the poor thing had to miss a client to see me.

On what turned out to be my last night in Monaco there was nothing that seemed at all unusual. At about 11.30 when I was satisfied Orla was genuinely asleep — she snored — I swallowed a tablet of Cialis and armed with nothing more than a cold bottle of Dom I took the stairs down to the twenty-ninth floor, which is what I always did — to avoid nosy-parker neighbours and the CCTV. No one ever takes the stairs in our building. Most of the other residents would need a defibrillator if they climbed into their beds a bit too quickly. But not as quickly as I did when I saw Colette. She was wearing a baby-doll nightdress that was as light as a summer morning mist and I spent a very happy thirty minutes mapping every inch of her fabulous body. And before you say anything, old sport, yes, I know, it was a dreadfully deceitful and underhand thing to do, like something from the pages of the Decameron . Peronella, is it, who tells her husband how to clean a large wine jar that he’s inside while she’s being fucked from behind by her lover? That’s what it was like. I really do feel ashamed of myself; and yet I know I’d probably do it again if I ever got the chance. That’s the funny thing about being a bloke; to some extent we’re ruled by our pricks. I’ve tried to understand it but I’m afraid I still haven’t found a better description of male-pattern sexuality than what John Lewis says in That Uncertain Feeling by Kingsley Amis when he asks himself why he likes women’s breasts. ‘I was clear on why I liked them, thanks, but why did I like them so much?’ That’s it, in a nutshell. We know we shouldn’t fuck around but we do and then end up rather pathetically feeling ashamed of what we’ve done and hoping for the best. You might just as well call the male libido Russia and say that it’s a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.

At about two o’clock I went back upstairs to my own apartment. Again, nothing seemed unusual. No, that’s not quite true. I stepped in some dog shit; the dogs — who slept in Orla’s dressing room — were always crapping in the apartment and I spent the next ten minutes tracking it down and cleaning it off the fucking carpet before I went back into the bedroom. As usual our bedroom was like a fridge so I put on a T-shirt and some pyjama bottoms, slipped into bed and went straight to sleep. I awoke at about 7.30, got up, made myself a cup of tea and cleaned some more dog shit off the carpet. I bet the cops loved that. Traces of fucking bleach all over the place as if I’d tried to clean away something incriminating. Anyway, at that stage, as far as I was aware, Orla was still asleep. Again, there was nothing unusual about that. After she’d taken a sleeping pill it would have been quite usual for her to have slept through until about eleven. I had a shower and went into my study to work, like I always did. I emerged at around two and was a little surprised to find Orla wasn’t around. It simply didn’t occur to me that she was lying dead in our bed. I assumed she must have gone out somewhere. And besides, I couldn’t hear the dogs. If that sounds at all unlikely you have to remember that this is an apartment that’s twelve hundred square metres, which is about five tennis courts.

I made a bite of lunch, watched a bit of TV and then went back into my study for a couple of hours. At around five I came out again and still finding no sign of Orla I called her mobile to find out where she was, and when I heard it ringing in her dressing room I realized something was very wrong, especially when I came across the bodies of her pet dogs. It was only now that I went into the bedroom and found her lying just as I had left her earlier that day, facing the curtains and away from my side of the bed. I drew the curtains and saw that she’d been shot at close range, as if she’d been executed. My own gun — a twenty-two calibre Walther — was lying on the floor. Orla’s skin was cold to the touch and it was clear she’d been dead for several hours.

For a while I just sat there on the floor beside her body and wept like a baby. I was horrified. It’s a sight that will stay with me for as long as I live. Every time I close my eyes I can see her beautiful face and the bullet hole in the centre of her forehead, like a dreadful caste mark. I hope to God it never happens to you that you see something like that. The only consolation I have is that I’m certain Orla was asleep when it happened and that she could have experienced neither fear nor pain. After a while I took off my shirt and covered her beautiful face with it, almost as if I wanted to preserve her dignity and give Orla some privacy from those who were going to come into our home now and look at her. Crazy I know. After all the crime scenes I’ve described in my books you’d think I’d know exactly what to do. But in truth I wasn’t thinking straight at all. The cliché ‘I was beside myself’ describes me very well; it was like I was hardly functioning in my own skin. My hands and my feet hardly seemed to belong to me at all. I remember pouring myself a stiff drink and going out onto the balcony to get some fresh air before I called the police. For a while I watched the swallows dive-bombing the air for insects near the top of the tower; out in the sea a pod of dolphins was clearly visible in the water; and I wondered how it could be such a beautiful evening when one of the most beautiful women in the world had just died so horribly.