Philip Kerr - Research

I chuckled. ‘And goodbye.’

The second dog uttered a rather pleasing yelp as I shot the first twice in the chest. Then I pumped two into the second mutt, and I must have hit the dog’s aorta or something because in the seconds before the thing died it started haemorrhaging blood all over the place. I’d never shot an animal before; not even for sport. I never see the point of all that Glorious Twelfth stuff where you shoot as many grouse as you can. But it gave me enormous pleasure to silence these two dogs, for ever. This wasn’t exactly akin to Atticus shooting the mad dog in To Kill a Mockingbird — besides, that dog is only really a metaphor for the lynch mob that features earlier on in the book — but both of ‘the boys’ badly needed killing; and suddenly the world felt like it was a less malodorous and canicular place without such loathsome creatures in it. Quieter, too.

I made the little Walther safe and, unscrewing the silencer — after just five shots it was surprisingly hot to the touch — I pocketed it, went back into the bedroom, and tossed the .22 onto the carpet on Orla’s side of the bed, where it was not likely to be discovered immediately. Job done.

And yet you might say it was the dogs who had the last laugh, for as I made my way out of the door and hurried back along the corridor and downstairs I realized that I’d stood in some of their shit. This discovery caused me to slip and almost fall down a whole flight of steps, and I pulled a muscle in my shoulder as I held on to the handrail, narrowly arresting my fall. I turned around and saw a neat series of footprints ascending the stairs behind me like a trail of stinking breadcrumbs. I took off my shoes and for a moment I stood there debating with myself what to do next. This would have been funny if it hadn’t been so forensically awkward. You didn’t have to be working in CSI to see that.

‘This never happens in Agatha Christie,’ I said. ‘Talk about the curious incident of the dog in the night.’

But there was little time for any postmodern analysis of my predicament. It seemed I had little option but to return to John’s apartment, find some cleaning materials and try to erase my footprints. To do otherwise would have left the police in no doubt that Orla’s murderer had left her apartment after killing her, which might easily have left John in the clear.

I left my shoes where they were and ran back upstairs in my socks; in John’s apartment I switched on my flashlight and went into the kitchen where I found some rags and some bleach. By now I had decided that I hardly needed to clean the dog shit from the carpet in the apartment; that could have happened to anyone, including John himself; it was the shitty footprints between the front door and the door to the fire stairs that were the real problem, and inside the apartment I restricted myself to dabbing a bit of dog shit on one of his shoes. But in the corridor outside the apartment I spent the next ten minutes cleaning away my own footprints, and it was fortunate for me that the owners of the sky duplex next to John’s were — according to Colette — away for the summer on a yacht in St Barts. Glancing at my watch, I saw that I’d been gone for just over thirty minutes.

I moved out onto the fire stairs and worked my way carefully down almost ten flights, checking each step with my flashlight for traces of shit; and only when I was satisfied that every trace of the stuff was gone did I pick up my shoes and open the fire door on 29.

Then, if all that wasn’t enough, outside Colette’s door I couldn’t make her key work and another nervous minute passed before I discovered it was actually John’s key I was using and not hers, since the two were more or less identical. These small errors can mean the difference between success and failure, of course; they’re not exactly Freudian slips — I had no subconscious desire to get caught — more what you might call fate’s attempts to trip you up. That’s what makes life interesting; and of course murder creates its own unique gestalt. The Gestalt of Murder ; it’s probably the title of a crime novel by John Creasey; with more than six hundred novels to his name something usually is.

In Colette’s apartment I placed John’s key on the table by the door where I’d found it, jumped out of his tracksuit, tossed it back on the floor and, breathing a little heavily now, went back into the spare room, where I dressed in the dark and waited for him to finish what he was so vociferously doing in the bedroom. It didn’t bother me that he was fucking Colette; on the contrary it meant that she was playing her part right and that he was quite unaware that his wife was dead.

Sitting in the dark I felt quite at home. Some people don’t like the dark at all, but I have always loved it. I feel comfortable there. The thicker and more palpable the darkness around me, the better. As a boy I used to sit in the dark and without the distraction of light and colour I would make all sorts of plans for my life that seemed altogether more possible. It was a little like dreaming without being asleep. I still find a mental clarity in darkness that is hard to find anywhere else. Let’s face it, after life is over the darkness is all there is, so you’d better get used to it. Jenny used to think it was creepy, my fondness for the dark. She would open a door and find me there in the dark and scream with fright, which is why she took to calling me ‘the bat’. Another reason why she left me, probably. No one likes bats very much.

The medieval village of Èze lies along the famous Moyenne Corniche and is the perfect antithesis of Monaco glitz. Friedrich Nietzsche was fond of Èze, and it’s easy to see why. Perched on a rock fourteen hundred feet above sea-level, Èze is built around the ruins of a twelfth-century castle and commands perhaps the best view of anywhere on the Côte d’Azur, which probably went to Nietzsche’s head; either way it’s just the kind of high and magical place to write some unreadable German nonsense about God and the philosophical importance of having goblins around you. This and the lack of glamour, and two celebrated local perfumiers, make Èze popular with the older sort of tourist, which could explain the defibrillator you see on a wall as you begin to climb the steep, labyrinthine streets, although you would be forgiven for thinking that this might be more usefully located nearer the top of the hill.

Èze is also home to a famous hotel, the Château de la Chèvre d’Or. The Château is actually a haphazard series of jasmine-covered buildings, saucer-sized sun-terraces, fountains, waterfalls, private suites and precipitous Moroccan-style gardens that seem to be part of the village and yet somehow also manage to be very private. With its immaculate green lawns, giant-sized chess-set, croaking toads and crappy modern sculptures it all reminded me — a little — of Port-meirion in North Wales. It’s the kind of place where you expect to see Number Six from The Prisoner striding around in a neat blue blazer and roll-neck sweater, although, according to the guidebooks, Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio are more likely to be seen there.

We checked in, sharing a room with twin beds to save money and because that’s all they had; then we went to dinner in the hotel’s terrace restaurant, Les Remparts, which enjoyed a spectacular view of St-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. Rather more than we enjoyed the food, thus confirming a prejudice I have long held that the quality of food declines in inverse proportion to the altitude at which it is served. I think the three worst dinners I ever had were up the Eiffel Tower, at the top of the Shard, and in the Piz Gloria revolving restaurant at the summit of the Schilthorn, in Murren.