Philip Kerr - Research

‘But Colette couldn’t have killed Orla. Could she?’

Don shrugged and hurried some tobacco smoke down into his lungs. He wasn’t a heavy smoker so much as an enthusiastic one. He enjoyed smoking in the same way that I enjoy a plate of perfectly baveuse scrambled eggs.

‘I don’t know. You’re assuming Orla and the dogs were shot while you were shagging Colette. But she knew your habits and Orla’s too. Isn’t it possible that she might have carried out the shooting while you were working in your study? You said yourself that it’s a large apartment. My own recollection of being in the Tour Odéon is that the walls and doors are rather thick. I also seem to recall the research you carried out for one of your early books — The Lethal Companion , was it? An experiment with a Walther nine-mill. You fired a whole clip of blanks from the Walther in the study of your old house in London while your ex-wife was serving Sunday lunch in the dining room upstairs; nobody heard a thing because nobody ever really expects to hear gunshots. And remember what happened in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood . The hired hand didn’t hear the twelve-gauge that killed the Clutter family even though he lived fairly close by.’

‘Yes, that’s true,’ I said. ‘I remember that. There are lots of things you can mistake a gunshot for. A car backfiring; a balloon bursting; a door being slammed. And now I come to think of it, I always had a mid-morning nap on the day after I’d shagged Colette. Forty winks at eleven.’

‘Would she have known that, do you think?’

I nodded. ‘For sure. She used to make a joke about it. Jesus. She made a lot of jokes about my nap. At the time I thought they were affectionate but now I’m not so sure.’

‘You’re right not to be sure. Even if Colette didn’t pull the trigger it’s entirely conceivable she’s in this up to the neck of her womb. She could have had an accomplice who carried out the murder while you and she were on the job. It doesn’t have to be Lev who murdered Orla. In fact, I’m sure it wasn’t. She could have had a younger boyfriend who put her up to it.’

‘But why?’

‘She needed money, of course. You said yourself she was little better than a squatter in that apartment. What was going to happen to her when the service charge wasn’t paid at the end of the year? The building management would have kicked her out on her shell-like. And then what would have happened to her? No, wait, you were going to buy her an apartment in Beausoleil. Jesus that’s generous of you, John. Not . From Monaco to Beausoleil — that’s a hell of a change in lifestyles. An eighteen-million-euro apartment swapped for something costing less than a tenth of that, I’ll bet. Fuck off. She knew you were loaded. I’ll bet she wanted a lot more than you were planning to give her.’

‘And she was going to get it by killing my wife? That makes no sense at all.’

‘Sure it does, if you’re stuck in the frame for it. Think about it, John. This could be blackmail. After all, she’s your alibi. It could be that she’s planning to contact you and tell the Monty cops you spent the night with her just as soon as she’s negotiated a pay-off. In fact she might already have tried to do so. But perhaps she didn’t anticipate that you would have turned off your phone to stop the cops from tracking you. No, that would seriously interfere with her plans.’

Don stubbed out his cigarette in a big glass ashtray and leaned forward on the sofa, as if warming to his theme. Most of the time he was a strait-laced, poker-up-the-arse sort of bugger, but I had the strong impression from his rather animated demeanour that he was taking some pleasure in pointing out my naïveté. Like I really was the complete cunt he’d called me earlier on. Naturally I’d considered Colette’s involvement — indeed, I’d been planning to suggest that he helped me track down her family in Marseille — but I felt rather chastened by Don’s persuasive analysis and all right, yes, a bit of a cunt for not seeing what now seemed obvious. Plots were supposed to be my department, not his.

‘But look here, if I turn the fucking phone on to find out if she’s called or sent a text then the cops will get a fix on my electronic exhaust and I’ll be arrested, won’t I?’

‘Have you tried calling her again?’

‘Of course. Several times. But on Mechanic’s landline. There’s no chance of anyone ever tracing that. He has a scrambler on all his telephone lines — here, and at the office in Geneva.’

‘Did you leave her a message?’

‘No, I didn’t like to. Just in case I dropped her in the oomska.’

‘In which case she could be hiding out somewhere, until she’s negotiated a deal with you for her cooperation. Maybe in Marseille like you said.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s a nice scheme, if it’s true. After all, just how much money would you be prepared to pay to have her stand up in a Monaco courtroom and tell the jury that she spent the night with you? Not just a couple of hours but the whole shagging night. A million euros? Five? I mean what’s money versus the next twenty years in your very own salon privé ?’

‘Jesus Christ, the little bitch. After all I’ve fucking given her — cash, a nice watch, a new laptop, some expensive earrings from Pomellato — and this is how she repays me.’

‘But to be quite frank with you, the shooting of the dogs is what puzzles me the most,’ said Don. ‘In a Silver Blaze sort of way.’

‘Silver Blaze? I don’t think I understand.’

‘Sherlock Holmes? The curious incident of the dog in the night time?’

‘Oh, yes,’ I said, although I still didn’t know what Don was driving at.

‘Think about it, John. What was the possible motive for shooting the dogs? If the shooting occurred while you were shagging Colette then her accomplice — supposing that she had one — would surely have known that Orla had taken a sleeping pill, in which case he would hardly have shot the dogs because he was worried the sound of their barking would awaken her .’

‘Good point.’

‘But if the shooting occurred at around eleven in the morning, while you were taking a nap in your study, is it likely that the murderer would have risked waking you by firing four shots instead of one? Shooting the dogs makes a lot more sense if you were in bed with Orla at the time — between the hours of 2 and 7.30 a.m. — in which case it seems more than probable that the murderer must have used a sound suppressor. I assume you don’t own one for any of your weapons.’

‘No, of course not. And the weapon I found on the floor wasn’t fitted with a sound suppressor.’

‘Did you check to see if it had been fired?’

‘What, you mean did I sniff the barrel? Come on, Don, that stuff is for amateurs. There was a spent cartridge on the floor of the bedroom and four more on the floor of Orla’s dressing room. The brass certainly looked like it had come from the Walther. I mean it was the right size. Besides, I checked the Walther’s magazine. There were five bullets missing.’

‘Perhaps. But the murderer would hardly have risked bringing along a sound suppressor in the hope that it might fit one of your guns. Ergo if a suppressor was used then almost certainly the gun used to kill Orla was not your own. So, perhaps the murderer merely wanted you to think your gun was the murder weapon. Now you see why I was thinking about the curious incident of the dogs in the night time. I think if we could figure out why they were killed then we’d be a lot closer to working out exactly what happened.’

‘I’m glad you think so, old sport. Jesus Christ, Don. You’re doing my fucking head in.’