Philip Kerr - Research

I guessed what he probably wanted me to see but I thought it was probably best to play dumb. So while he tried to find the right channel I yawned and said, ‘John, if you don’t mind, I’m not really in the mood to watch TV right now.’

He shook his head, silently.

‘As a matter of fact I’m a bit tired after the drive.’

Finally, he found TF1 and stepped back from the screen as if he wanted me to see as much of it as possible.

This time the police line and the news reporters were in Tourrettes-sur-Loup. I recognized the rusting sign at the bottom of Philip French’s drive — the Villa Seurel — but I pretended I didn’t.

‘What is this?’ I asked.

‘That’s Phil’s house.’

‘Is it? Christ, what’s happened?’

‘Phil’s dead,’ said John. ‘He’s committed suicide.’

‘That’s impossible,’ I said.

‘No, it isn’t,’ insisted John. ‘He shot himself. Not only that, but it seems there was some connection between him and Colette. In fact, the police seem to think Phil may have shot Colette. What about that for a fucking plot twist? Talk about truth being stranger than fiction.’

‘You’re joking.’

John pointed at the screen and, as the news report continued, it seemed that he was right.

‘There. What did I tell you? Didn’t you say that he seemed a bit suicidal when you saw him last night?’

‘Depressed, certainly. I mean, he gave up on your twenty grand without much of a fight. Which was odd, yes. And of course Caroline had gone back to England with the kids leaving him to wait on tables. So, naturally he was a bit down in the dumps.’

‘And he was in debt, right?’

‘Yes. According to the cop — Chief Inspector Amalric — he was quite substantially in debt.’

‘I want to ask you a question, Don.’

‘Fire away.’

‘Do you think it could have been him who killed Orla? That he and Colette were in cahoots? That it was Phil who shot her while I was downstairs fucking Colette?’

I shrugged. ‘I suppose — given that he seems to have shot himself — it’s just about possible. Tourrettes isn’t so far from Monaco.’

‘Fifty minutes away by car,’ said John. ‘And he did hate me. You saw how he behaved yesterday.’

‘Yes, but if he hated you, then why did he kill Orla? That doesn’t make sense. Orla never did any harm to anyone. Not that we know of, anyway. Who knows what her fucking Mick brothers did with her money? But why top her? Why not just top you?’

John wagged a forefinger, thoughtfully.

‘Yes, but look here: when you kill someone then your revenge is all over with relatively quickly. Too quickly perhaps. A bullet in my head, and it’s all over, right? There’s no chance to really enjoy something as quick as that. But if you kill a man’s wife, and make it look like he was the murderer, then that’s revenge on a Shakespearean scale. It’s something drawn out, dramatic, even operatic. You make him suffer like he’s on the rack. Which is how I’ve been this past fortnight.’

I shook my head. ‘That’s a little far-fetched, even for you, John.’

‘Is it? Is it? I don’t know.’

‘And what was in it for Colette? Why would she go along with something like that? She loved you, didn’t she?’

‘I think maybe she must have found out that I was planning to leave Monaco and move back to England. Perhaps it was Phil who told her. In the long run, I’d have made sure she was all right, of course, money-wise, but frankly I was looking forward to living a rather less colourful life, if I can put it like that.’

‘All right. That’s possible, I suppose. I didn’t know Colette, so I can’t say if revenge was in her character or not. But I did know Phil. Yes, he was angry with you for ending the atelier . And maybe he did hate you. But I can’t see him hating you enough to do what you’re suggesting. I think I liked Colette’s Russian better for that.’

‘If there ever was a Russian,’ said John. ‘I’m not so sure.’

‘What’s that you say?’

John was plotting now — plotting like he was planning a book. I think it was all he could do not to get out a notebook and start jotting down ideas.

‘If I could come back to Phil’s motive here, for just a moment. If we could focus on that, please.’

I smiled thinly; John might have been discussing a character in one of his books. He looked as if at any second he was going to have what he used to call a ‘sumimasen moment’ — after the word that Japanese waiters cry out to new customers — when he would punch a fist into the palm of his hand and shout a word of thanks to his muse for giving him the inspired plot twist that was going to stun and amaze his readers.

‘Yes?’

‘There’s something I’ve never told you before, Don. Something that’s relevant to all this, I think. A couple of years ago, I bumped into Phil’s wife, Caroline, when she was shopping in Cannes. Except that she wasn’t shopping. Not like any woman I’ve ever seen. Not for anything decent. She was looking for bargains in some cheapo place on the Rue d’Antibes. Zara, or somewhere equally ghastly, the sort of place where they dress women of a certain size and budget. So I—’

I groaned. ‘Please tell me you didn’t fuck her.’

John took a deep breath and looked very sheepish.

‘Oh, for Pete’s sake. You did fuck her, didn’t you?’

‘She was lonely, Don. Lonely and neglected by her clod of a husband. So I took her to Chanel on the Croisette, bought her a nice dress and a handbag, gave her lunch at the Carlton, treated her like someone very special and then took her to a room upstairs.’

‘You cunt.’

‘Yes, you’re right. It was a despicable thing to do. And believe me I regretted it later. But you’ve no idea how much it all seemed to cheer her up. I mean, she was a very different woman afterward.’

‘Yes. She was someone who had committed adultery.’ I shrugged. ‘But I don’t suppose it matters now, does it?’

‘No. Still, I thought I ought to mention it. Get it off my chest. It makes things easier to understand, doesn’t it?’

‘Yes. That’s what I call a motive. You’re right. The poor bastard had every reason to hate your guts. If he did know.’

‘There’s something else.’

‘What?’

‘No, it’s just that — look, I’m not trying to vindicate what happened, but she was too fast for someone like Phil. Caroline French was someone who liked the good things in life. He couldn’t ever have held on to a woman like her.’

I could see that he’d wanted to tell me something else in the way of a confession and then thought better of it, and in that very same instant I knew with one hundred per cent certainty that I’d been right about him and Jenny — that he’d fucked my wife, too. That he had done my office between my sheets. It was the way John had described Caroline as ‘too fast’ for Phil. Once, after Jenny had left me for her High Court judge, and John had tried to suggest that I was probably better off without her, he’d described her in those very same terms, as someone who was ‘too fast’ for someone like me. Of course this telling remark implied that by contrast with dullards like Phil or me, a man as sophisticated as John was more than equal to the task of dealing with fast women like Caroline or Jenny. And possibly he was, too. It’s amazing how women behave in a posh shop when there’s a rich man around with a limitless credit card. Either way this was, for me, a moment of both vindication and pain, and having been proved right in my suspicion that Houston had indeed fucked my wife it was all I could do not to punch him right there and then. I hated him now more than ever I had hated anyone who wasn’t Irish and I was glad he felt he was on the rack. I was enjoying my own Richard Topcliffe moment and poor John was my Catholic recusant. But I was not and never have been the type to let a mere hors d’oeuvre of hatred come before the full banquet of my revenge: long ago I had decided that this was a painstakingly prepared dish that would be served with such anaesthetic cold my victim would not even know that he had eaten it.