Philip Kerr - Research

‘Have you any idea of how painful IVF can be?’ she asked. ‘You have to inject hormones into the wall of your stomach. No doubt John had persuaded my doctor not to say anything about his own little problem. It was all a way of keeping me quiet. So now I feel destroyed. Il m’a prise pour une belle connasse .’

An hour or so later, when she was chopping cucumber for salade niçoise , I saw her holding the big Sabatier in a way which made me think that if John had been standing in front of her she would have pricked him with it, right through his cheating heart.

There’s something about the whole idea of murder that just arrives in the atmosphere, unbidden, like a ghost, and starts to shadow everything you do. That’s how it was with us. I knew what she was thinking because after a couple of years in County Fermanagh, when I was operating off-reservation with the Int and Squint boys, I’m a bit like a Geiger counter where that kind of thing is concerned. I only have to detect just a few homicidal particles in the air and I start to amplify that effect. Back then nobody ever said ‘We’re going to kill some left-footers tonight’; nobody had to; it happened as a sort of malign understanding between like-minded people, as if you were playing a rather lethal game of bridge. You might be in a pub talking about football with a few loyalist boys and then, an hour later, opening the boot of a taxi to reveal some trussed-up Mick you and them had snatched off the street; you would have questioned the bastard first, but no one there would have been in any doubt that someone — usually me, as it happened — was always going to trepan the fucker’s head with a bullet. But there are ad campaigns I wrote that I regret more than any one of those killings. For a while, after Warrenpoint, I really learned how to hate.

But on my third morning with Colette we were eating breakfast on the balcony staring out to sea when she finally brought the subject a little more into the open.

‘When you were in Ireland, Don, did you ever shoot anyone?’

I stood up silently and, leaning over the handrail, looked up and then down to see if there was any chance we might be overheard.

Colette shook her head. ‘I’ve never seen anyone on these balconies,’ she said. ‘Most of the people who live here don’t actually live here, if you know what I mean.’

‘Your Russian included.’

She shrugged. ‘I don’t know anything about what happened to him. I tried to ask around — you know, there are lots of Russian girls in Monaco. I even tried to watch the Russian news on TV. But I think he’s dead. I really do. I was desperate. And then I met John. He seemed like the answer to my prayers.’

I sat down and lit a cigarette and waited for her to say something else, and when she didn’t I started to steer the conversation back in the fatal direction I wanted.

‘You were asking me if I’d ever shot someone. The answer is that I have.’

And then I told her the truth. In fact it all came out; oddly, she was the first person I’d ever spoken about it with. But unlike my wife Jenny, who’d certainly guessed about what I’d done, Colette didn’t look shocked or revolted. In fact, she looked excited, even a little pleased, at what I’d told her.

‘I thought as much,’ she said. ‘My grandfather was in the Foreign Legion. He was in Algiers, in the mid-1950s. And I think he did some bad things there, too. He had the same faraway look in his eyes that you do.’

‘Of course,’ I added, ‘in Algeria and Ireland it was a damn sight easier to get away with that kind of thing. Back in the day, they were finding bodies all over the province. Not just the ones we did, but the ones they did, too. I lost several friends to IRA murder squads. It was like bloody Chicago. They’d hit one of ours and we’d hit one of theirs and so on.’

‘And since then? Have you ever been tempted to kill anyone else?’

I smiled. ‘When I worked at the ad agency there were several account executives I’d cheerfully have killed. One guy in particular. He hated my guts and enjoyed tearing a strip off me in front of everyone. More than once he tried to get me fired. He usually worked late, so one night I waited for him near his car in St James’s Square, close by the office. I was going to kill him but, at the last minute, I changed my mind and gave him a good working over instead. Took his wallet to make it look like a mugging. He was lucky I only put him in hospital. It could so easily have been the morgue. I regretted that a little afterward. Not killing him, I mean.’

‘So, you’re not so squeamish about such things?’

‘Me, squeamish? No. But don’t get me wrong. I’m no psychopath. All of the people I’ve killed really needed killing.’

‘Did you ever want to kill John?’

‘Once or twice, maybe. But not seriously. To be sure, he can be an infuriating man. But now that you’ve suggested this—’

‘You mistake me, Don. I haven’t suggested anything of the kind.’

‘Colette. Please. You’ve every right to feel upset. It’s perfectly normal that you should want to hit back. If something like that happened to me I’d be as angry about it as you are. But I think we both know why you’re asking these questions. And I understand that, too. What he did was quite unforgivable.’

She didn’t contradict any of this. Instead she started to cry. So I put my arm around her and hugged her close, and kissed the back of her neck for a while until she stopped; and then I wiped her eyes with my handkerchief, and stroked her hair.

‘You’ve been through a lot,’ I said. ‘I can tell. I’ve seen it before. And there’s no need to feel ashamed about what’s in your mind right now. Not a bit. However, I’m thinking that John’s hardly the best person to kill in this particular situation. Not if it’s your own future you’re really concerned about.’

‘He isn’t?’

‘No. It seems to me that John is our golden goose. And you don’t kill your golden goose so long as he keeps on laying golden eggs. It’s the giant you want to kill. The giant that owns the goose. The one who collects the eggs.’

Colette thought for a moment, but without any apparent result. It might have been the language barrier or maybe she was even less bright than I thought she was. She looked like I’d handed her a particular fiendish Sudoku puzzle.

‘Who is it who benefits most from all those golden eggs that John lays, right now?’ I asked her patiently.

‘You mean Orla, don’t you?’

We were on the same wavelength, at last.

‘Precisely.’

‘But she hasn’t done anything, to either one of us.’

‘You might think so. But now that I come to think about it, with Orla out of the way a lot of problems — yours and mine — are solved.’

‘They are?’

‘Oh yes. Besides, I’m quite sure it’s her who’s behind this move back to London. This would certainly explain why he hasn’t told you about it. From one or two things he said to me at the time I think it was probably Orla’s idea that they should move back to London, not his, and that he was simply too scared to tell you about it. In some ways she’s a very intimidating woman. And John hates confrontation.’

I paused to allow that to sink in. You have to take a conversation like ours very carefully. There’s no sense in rushing things. It’s like painting an enamel miniature. You need fine sable brushes and a very steady hand.

‘Perhaps, if Orla was off the scene, things might be very different. In fact I’m quite sure of it. For one thing you might even marry John. And once you were married to him you could easily persuade him to restart the atelier . You could get your man and secure your own future and I could get my old job back. John could start earning the top money once more and you could avoid going back to work in a Marseille estate agent’s.’