Philip Kerr - Research

‘He’s right,’ I said.

‘Do you think I’m stupid? I looked at your fucking lunch bill. It was 650 euros. That’s a week’s wages for me. Including tips.’

‘That was my fault,’ I said. ‘I ordered a bottle of Coche-Dury. I don’t know what came over me. Touch of the sun I think.’

‘In all the years I’ve known you, Don, you never once ordered a really expensive bottle of wine. Not once. Your thrift always impressed me because that’s how I am myself. So if anyone ordered a 500-euro bottle of white Burgundy it wasn’t you.’

‘That doesn’t alter the fact that I don’t have two hundred and fifty grand,’ said John.

‘No?’ French smiled. ‘Then I tell you what, John. I’ll take that famous watch of yours, on account. The Hublot Black Caviar. According to the Daily Mail it’s worth a million dollars. So if I sell it I ought to get how much — maybe 150,000 euros? Who knows? These things are never worth as much second-hand as you think they are. Believe me I know. Lately I’ve had to sell a lot of my possessions on eBay: a nice guitar, a racing bicycle. I’ll take that watch and whatever cash you can raise by nine o’clock tonight. But I’ll be disappointed if it’s not at least 20,000 euros.’

John said nothing.

‘That’s a good offer,’ said French. ‘Best deal you’re going to get from me, anyway. I’d advise you to take it, Houston. Besides, you’ve probably got a whole drawer full of expensive watches at home. Me, I’ve got this fucking ten-euro Casio.’ He held up his wrist to show us a strip of black plastic on his wrist. ‘Matter of fact, why don’t we swap?’

John took off his watch and handed it over to French, who put it on immediately. John looked at the Casio he’d received in return and then hurled it across the garage.

‘Now that’s just stupid,’ said French. ‘You know that watch probably keeps just as good time as your one. Which begs the question. Why spend a million bucks on a watch? It’s not like you get any more time for your money, is it? And you’ll forgive me for saying so, but it’s a million dollars you could have spent giving decent bonuses to the people who made you rich. Mike, Peter, Don and me.’

‘You bastard,’ muttered John.

‘On my new million-dollar watch I make it 3.15,’ said French. ‘I expect to see you both at my house tonight, with the cash. Shall we say nine o’clock?’ He handed me a card with an address and a postcode. ‘Here. Just in case you lose your way. The Villa Seurel. On the Route du Caire. A short way past the Hôtel Résidence des Chevaliers, and on your left. I’ll be expecting you. By the way, don’t count on me giving you any dinner. There’s nothing in the fridge except ice.’

After John had left Colette’s apartment, I poured a glass of the Dom Pérignon he had left on ice in Colette’s champagne bucket and sat down in the sitting room. At more than a hundred pounds a bottle it seemed a shame to waste it. Meanwhile she took a long shower and then went into the kitchen to make us coffee; it was late and she must have thought we needed to stay awake for the drive to Nice airport. But I think she mostly went into the kitchen because she hardly dared to meet my eye for fear that I would tell her some unpleasant detail that she didn’t want to know about what had happened upstairs in the sky duplex. The sort of details you get in Macbeth about blood, and while the dogs didn’t exactly count as Duncan’s grooms I was sure she wouldn’t have appreciated my shooting them: Colette loved dogs. I could easily understand her reluctance to deal with Orla’s death, and so when she returned to the sitting room with a coffee pot and two cups I was happy to avoid the subject altogether. Indeed I was reading my Kindle when she came in and generally behaving as if the murder had never happened.

She was wearing a nice white blouse that was tight enough to show the swell of her breasts, a pair of neat black tailored pants, sensible ballet pumps, and a single gold bangle that resembled a snake. Her scent was Chanel 19 but I only knew that because there was a bottle of it on her dressing table and because it was exactly the same scent that Orla had worn; it would, I thought, have been typical of John to have given his mistress the same kind of perfume as his wife, just to avoid any cross-contamination. I admired him for that: John did adultery better than anyone I knew.

‘What are you reading?’ she asked.

‘ The Information , by Martin Amis.’

‘What’s it about?’

I thought it best not to mention that it was about two authors who hate each other.

‘I think it’s a revenge tragedy,’ I said vaguely. ‘But to be honest I really haven’t figured what the fuck is going on.’

‘I don’t know how you can read at a time like this,’ she said.

‘I can read anywhere.’

I shrugged and watched her pour the coffee; and thinking it was now best to seem very ordinary indeed I told her something about my early life and my love of reading.

‘My mother taught me to read,’ I said. ‘I mean really taught me, so that I could read to her. Like that bloke in A Handful of Dust . Her eyesight wasn’t very good and there weren’t any talking books back then. You might say that I was her talking book. Consequently I read a lot of books that perhaps I shouldn’t have been reading at that sort of age. I mean I never read stuff like Winnie the Pooh or The Lord of the Rings . It was Edna O’Brien and Ian Fleming and Iris Murdoch right from the start. In spite of that I felt like a whole world had been opened to me. Not just a world of books but the world that those books described. As a child it was deeply liberating. As if someone had given me a ticket to a whole different universe. You might almost say I escaped having a childhood altogether. After that I found I could switch off and read at any time and in any place. I never had a problem about detaching myself from the reality of everyday life. It was usually people I had a problem with, not books, which is a common enough experience in Scotland. I was also drawing, playing the piano, or collecting things like stamps and shells and bottle-tops, and numbers of course — I was always collecting car numbers, which was a lot easier than collecting the numbers of trains, because the cars weren’t moving — but in the end it always came back to reading. I’m the kind of person who if ever I were asked on Desert Island Discs would much prefer to be cast away with eight books instead of with eight records. Music I can live without, but reading, no. This is good coffee, thank you.’

‘It’s Algerian coffee,’ she said. ‘I get my mother to send it from home. What sort of books did you read?’

‘I liked histories and biographies, or books about travel and nature. Still do. Oddly I was never much interested in fiction. The other boys were forever reading stories about the Second World War. Not me. I used to like books about wildlife.’

‘You don’t sound like someone who would have ended up in the army.’

‘After school I meant to become a lawyer. I did a law degree, at Cambridge. But my father died, leaving my mother with not very much money; debts, mostly; and luckily for me the army was there to cover the costs of finishing university in return for three years of service as a soldier. At the time it seemed like a fair exchange, although most of my contemporaries thought I was crazy. But I was a rather better soldier than anyone would have imagined. Although not so much a leader of men as an intrepid warrior, so to speak. More your lone wolf. No, I can’t say I was ever interested in leading a band of brothers.’

‘I was never much of a reader,’ she said. ‘My father read the Koran a lot and certainly never encouraged me to read anything. I couldn’t give a damn about the Koran now. It’s not a book for women. The first man who ever gave me a book to read was John. I still have that book. It’s The Great Gatsby .’