Philip Kerr - Research

‘But still, I learned something important from that whole process,’ I said.

Taking the gun with me had been a test of whether or not I could live again in the normal world. Could I take criticism without using a gun? Fortunately for the Brooke Bond execs, it turned out that I could.

‘Oh? What was that?’

‘How not to take it personally when someone doesn’t like your stuff. How to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again.’

‘I guess you must have done,’ said John. ‘I’ve never known anyone who is as even-tempered as you, old sport. The number of times you must have wanted to kill me.’

‘It never entered my head to kill you,’ I said. ‘Lord, no. That would spoil everything. No, you’re the goose that lays the golden eggs. And will do again, I’m sure of it.’

‘Me, I’m hopeless at taking criticism,’ admitted John. ‘Christ, many’s the time I’ve wanted to kill someone who criticized my work. Most writers do, I think. It’s just that some of them are better than others at pretending they don’t care about that sort of thing. You know, I sometimes think that writers are just people who might have become criminals except for the fact that they were lucky enough to learn how to read and write. Although in my case the Guardian thinks I am a criminal because I learned to read and write. My God, if my critics saw me raise fucking Lazarus from the dead they would say I’d only done it to help promote one of my books.’

‘I think it’s simpler than that. Being a writer is a kind of elegant sociopathy, that’s all. I don’t know how else you’d describe a person who doesn’t care about other people very much, who thinks mainly of themselves, who has a complete disregard for rules, and who lies for a living. Some socio-paths become murderers, it’s true; but probably just as many become writers.’ I laughed. ‘Hell, I know I did.’

After a few miles we changed seats again and we reached the tiny barnacle on the bottom of the hull of France that is Monaco. The sun was setting but John still wore his sunglasses and insisted on putting up the hood, since every single car entering Monaco — even a newish Bentley — is scanned by police CCTV to keep criminals out. High-summer tourists were in more obvious and plentiful supply. Most had come to rub their tattooed shoulders with big money, or so they fondly imagined, and the main square was full of people who were as pink as the Beaux Arts-style casino that occupied its pride of place, taking pictures of anyone loitering on the steps who looked remotely famous or of the several expensive cars that were busy arranging their own very shiny and exclusive Saturday night traffic jam. As always the lawn in front of the Café de Paris was so impeccably green and the fountain so perfectly wet and the surrounding palm trees so uniformly sized it looked as if the whole area had been sponsored by some Qatari irrigation company, or perhaps a Disney cartoon about a cute little talking oasis. It might have been, too, except that Santander and UBS had got there first, like Germans marking their territory on a beach with a strategically placed towel. The sea itself was only a few yards away but it might as well have been somewhere back in Switzerland. You couldn’t see the water for white boats, and any sea breezes had been strictly forbidden by the principality out of deference to hairpieces and hemlines and the more-is-best flower-beds, while the only gull wings in evidence were the doors of outrageous candy-coloured Lamborghinis and top-end Mercedes-Benzes.

‘The horror!’ whispered John as we drove through the dusk. ‘The horror!’

‘Isn’t it just awful?’ I said, but in truth I only half agreed with him: parking my orange Lamborghini in Casino Square and taking some dolly bird shopping at Chopard while sidestepping the holidaying lumpenproletariat looked just fine to me. As Oscar once said: I’m a man of simple tastes; I usually find that the best is quite good enough.

We drove out of the square and past the Métropole Hotel where John had famously argued with Orla in Joël Robuchon’s restaurant. He didn’t mention it so neither did I.

‘Christ, now that I’m back here I’m as nervous as a kitten,’ said John. ‘I couldn’t feel more nervous if I’d actually murdered her.’

‘You’re doing fine.’

‘Suppose someone recognizes me?’

‘They won’t. That beard really does make you look different. Like Orson Welles in Macbeth .’

‘At least you didn’t say Chimes at Midnight .’

‘You’d best keep a hold of that sense of humour,’ I told him. ‘I’ve a feeling you’re in for a nerve-racking wait while I’m in the tower.’

A little further on we drove slowly along the Boulevard d’Italie until we came to a mini-roundabout.

‘You can let me out here and I’ll walk,’ said John. ‘The Giardino is about a hundred metres ahead, just past the Lexus showroom. You can come and find me there when you’re done. I’ll be sitting outside awaiting your return. The Odéon is up the hill to the left.’

I steered the Bentley around the roundabout and pulled up in front of a Maserati showroom; outside the entrance to an apartment building immediately next door, a suntanned woman wearing a white dress and the gold reserves of a small country on her ears and not insubstantial chest was sitting on a bench and smoking a cigarette. A small white dog was sitting beside the six-inch heels of her scarlet-soled Louboutin shoes. She looked like a hooker; but then all of the women in Monte Carlo look like hookers, which is all right with me as that’s the way I like my women to look. These days the only women in Monaco who don’t look like hookers are the hookers.

John twisted around in his seat.

‘Here.’ He handed me his electronic parking fob that would open the door to the Odéon’s garage, and another one for the door to Colette’s apartment. ‘You can take the lift straight up from the garage to the twenty-ninth floor. We need the iPad and, if you can find it, her Apple Mac. That should tell us everything we need to know. And don’t forget the charger, in case the batteries have run down.’

He stepped out of the car and was about to close the door when he remembered something else.

‘And give me a ring on Bob’s mobile, if everything’s all right.’

We’d found a number of old mobile telephones in Mechanic’s desk drawer — so many they looked like burners — and had borrowed one for John to use on our journey.

‘Define “all right”,’ I said.

‘Ring me when you’re in the flat, and again when you’re on your way back.’

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘If it will make you feel any better. But I can’t see what the fuck could go wrong. After all, it’s you the police are looking for, John, not me, and certainly not Colette. The cops don’t even know she exists.’

I drove slowly up the hill in the direction of the tower and, in the rear-view mirror, watched John walk down the Boulevard d’Italie. At the top of the winding Avenue de L’Annonciade, surrounded with several high-rise apartment buildings, and in a small walled garden, was a tiny red stucco chapel. Whenever I saw this little chapel I wondered who went there and how it managed to survive in a country where worship was no longer a special act of acknowledgement of all that lies beyond us but the more everyday response its polyglot citizens made to the glorious reality of zero taxation.

On the opposite side of another mini-roundabout — home to a solitary tree — was the curving, grey glass entrance of the enormous Tour Odéon, a building so tall and featureless and ridiculously expensive it resembled nothing so much as the launching gantry for a Saturn V rocket. Floral tributes, photographs and soft toys for Orla Houston still lay on the ornamental shrubberies in front of the main door and even now were being inspected by her fans or those who were fascinated with premature death or just curious to see what all the fuss was about. I have to confess I was surprised by the reaction to Orla’s death; surprised and more than a little horrified, too; that someone as ordinary as her could in death have generated such an outpouring of grief.