Philip Kerr - Research

‘Look, I’d better have a wash myself. He’ll be here in less than an hour.’

I showered and dressed and checked over the automatic I’d sourced from a dealer in Genoa. It was a Walther 22, identical to one that John had bought for Orla but still only a back-up weapon in case her gun wasn’t in the bedside drawer where, according to John, she usually kept it. Then I lay down on the bed in Colette’s spare room and read a novel on my Kindle to help take my mind off what I was about to do. The novel was by Martin Amis and, in spite of what the critics had said, I was enjoying it rather a lot. No one writes a better sentence than Marty, even if it does take several attempts to scale the sheer cliff-face of his intellect and know exactly what the fuck it is he’s driving at. Sometimes I wonder who the critics would beat up if they couldn’t beat up Marty.

At about 11.30 I heard a knock on Colette’s front door, and when she went to answer it she was wearing a rather fetching little baby-doll nightdress that had me smiling at the predictability of John’s taste. He’d always had a thing for the kind of sleazy bedroom wear that was hardly worth wearing. She pulled a sheepish, embarrassed sort of face before pushing me back into the room and closing the door. I switched out the bedside light and tiptoed into the en-suite bathroom. Then I heard the low murmur of voices, some laughter, the pop of a champagne cork and then silence as they moved swiftly into the bedroom. Colette had not exaggerated about John getting straight down to business: if anything, cinq à sept was optimistic. A few seconds later I received a text on my phone; it was a prewritten Vas y message from Colette that John’s tracksuit — she hated the fact that he always wore a tracksuit for his midnight visits to see her — containing his all-important door key, was now lying on the drawing-room floor.

I hurried through and searched John’s pockets for his door key, but to my irritation and horror there was no sign of it, and several valuable minutes passed before I spied it lying beside his phone on a table in the hall beside the front door. Then I put on John’s tracksuit, pulled up the hood, picked up my backpack, went out into the corridor and headed up the fire stairs to the forty-third floor. The tracksuit was an inspired, last-minute touch, just in case anyone saw me.

But no one did.

I opened one of the double doors, stepped into the sky duplex and closed the door behind me. None of the curtains or blinds was drawn and it was easy to find my way around the apartment, which was as big as the rooftop palace in a Sinbad movie. I went straight through to the master bedroom. Scenting a stranger in the apartment Orla’s dogs had started to bark and I was half inclined to go back and shoot them in case they woke her up. But opening the bedroom door and illuminating the darker room with a small LED flashlight it was immediately plain that the figure in bed and facing away from the room toward the double-height window was soundly asleep and that the hounds of hell could not have awakened her, let alone a couple of irritating spaniels. They say people with dogs live longer; Orla was about to become the proof that this is not always the case.

It was a while since I had looked at Orla without seeing a scowl appear on her face the moment she saw me; she looked as peaceful as she was undoubtedly beautiful. Her long blonde hair — the roots seemed much darker — was strewn across the white pillow and she was wearing a nightdress made of peach-coloured, almost transparent silk. I was irresistibly reminded of a painting entitled Flaming June by Sir Frederic Leighton and which — thanks to the toxic oleander branch that also features in the picture — symbolizes the fragile link between sleep and death; this seemed only appropriate in the circumstances. I wasn’t about to allow the recollection of a nice pre-Raphaelite painting to stop me, of course. I’ve never believed Ruskin’s nonsense that art is morally improving. The hideous Ulster Museum — is there an uglier building in the whole United Kingdom? — has a rather fine painting of St Christopher carrying the Christ child that I was always rather fond of while I was serving in the province, but it certainly never deterred me from putting a bullet in anyone’s head. Besides, I’d been dreaming of killing Orla for a long, long time; ever since the wedding.

I rolled on a surgical rubber glove, opened her bedside drawer and found the Walther exactly where John had said it was, not to mention a number of sex-toys that had my eyes out on stalks. I fetched the gun, screwed on the Gemtech sound suppressor I’d brought along — there was no point in making more noise than was needed — checked the breech and then racked the slide to put one in the chamber. I’m not a cruel man and I’d already rejected the idea of waking Orla up so that she could see it coming. If it was done it was best done quickly and without much drama, so I pointed the silencer at the centre of her Botoxed forehead, muttered a quiet ‘Good night, you Fenian bitch’ and then — holding a thick square of Kevlar behind her skull, to prevent the possible egress of the bullet — I squeezed the trigger. The gun shifted in my hand with a sharp click almost as if the pistol was empty; with the Gemtech a Walther P22 makes no more noise than a table lighter and certainly nothing like a silencer sounds in movies. Her head jerked a little on the pillow at the impact as though I’d struck her, but the rest of Orla’s body hardly moved; then, slowly, her mouth sagged a little as if the life had indeed gone out of her and pressing a finger against her larynx I felt for a carotid pulse but did not find one.

To my relief her cranium had remained intact. I checked for any blood with my finger but there was none. This was important. Any of the 38s in John’s gun cabinet would have blown the back of her head off, and this, of course, was exactly why I’d preferred to use the smaller, less powerful 22. Meanwhile a small snail trail of blood trickled down her forehead, along the line of her eyebrow and underneath her cheek. Just as crucially, her body remained in the same attitude as when she had been alive, so that it was now quite possible that in the absence of any blood on Orla’s pillow John might climb into bed beside her later on without knowing that she was in fact dead.

‘I’m sorry, Orla,’ I said. ‘It was you or me, I’m afraid.’

I placed the gun on the bed for a moment and, for the forensics, I dabbed a little blood on the right sleeve of John’s tracksuit before hunting for the ejected brass cartridge on the floor; when I found it I used a Q-tip to extract a fine amount of cordite which I smeared on the same sleeve. These days, thanks to people like Patricia Cornwell and Kathy Reichs, everyone’s a scenes-of-crime expert and you wonder how it is that anyone is dumb enough to get caught.

I picked up the Walther and was on the point of making it safe, but the constant barking of the dogs persuaded me I’d always hated her fucking dogs almost as much as I’d hated Orla and that I’d certainly relish killing them, too. So I went along to her dressing room and, carefully, so as not to let the dogs escape, opened the door and switched on the light.

My first thoughts were not of the dogs but of Orla’s wardrobe, which revealed such a large number of dresses, coats and shoes that it looked like a designer sale — albeit a shop with two very irritating dogs. On the only area of the walls not given over to closets were several movie posters featuring Grace Kelly — including Rear Window .

‘Hello, boys,’ I said. ‘I’ve just come to say hello.’

The ‘boys’ — which, nauseatingly, is what Orla used to call them — were black-and-white cocker spaniels and yapped furiously at my ankles. Is there a more irritating breed of dog than a cocker spaniel? I don’t think so.