Richard House - The Kills

Nathalie and Martin came into the courtyard before Eric could hide the washbag. Martin walked directly to his room, upright and tight-mouthed.

‘What is this?’ Nathalie dropped a newspaper on the table with a slap. ‘He could hear every word you said. What are you thinking?’

* * *

Eric and Ford kept to their room and waited for supper. Eric, flat on his back, scribbled in his notebook and softly swore to himself, leaving Ford contented with the silence.

‘What do you think they heard? You think they heard everything?’

‘That’s what she said.’

‘Shit,’ he swore slowly. ‘Everything? You think he heard everything? I can’t remember what I said. He’ll be impossible now. I can’t wait for this to be done. I’m going to Malta. My mother has found this villa, this old palazzo or something. No one uses it. No one lives there. It’s totally isolated. I can stay as long as I like. Free. No neighbours, no nothing. No one will even know I’m there. I can’t wait.’

Eric curled up with embarrassment, the newspaper on his lap crackling as he hugged his legs. After a while Ford thought he had gone to sleep, but the boy turned over and offered him the newspaper.

‘You should read this.’

Less vexed than earlier, Ford didn’t want to move. So, he had one chance left. He only needed to log in once. If that failed, he’d get in contact with Geezler. He’d have no choice.

‘That writer.’ Eric shook the paper. ‘He’s really disappeared. Honest to god. He was supposed to be at some conference but didn’t show up. This is that book I told you about, where the writer disappeared, I thought it was a publicity stunt, but he’s really disappeared. They’ve reprinted an interview where he talks about the book and the murders.’ Eric looked up. ‘It’s like everyone hates him because he stayed in this palazzo in Naples and wrote about a murder everyone wanted to forget. He basically solved who did it, although he doesn’t have their names or anything. Mr Rabbit and Mr Wolf. ’

‘If he solved it then why is he in trouble?’

‘Because he’s more or less disproved what the police said. It’s like these two guys just take a story from a book and then copy it, and everyone who lived in the palazzo at the time just turned a blind eye while it happened.’ He looked at Ford as if this were all crazy. ‘How insane is that? Nobody wants to know. These two psychopaths copy a murder from a book and everyone is like OK, that happened, let’s all move on now. You should read it? You really should.’

Ford said he wasn’t much of a reader and anyway didn’t read thrillers.

‘It’s nothing like a thriller. It’s about a writer who stays in this place in Naples and finds out all of this information. All anyone knows about this murder is that someone has disappeared, he’s gone, murdered, and pieces of him start appearing on the street. A tongue. A room with blood all over it. His clothes on some wasteland.’

‘And this happened?’

‘Right. Yes. That’s what I’m saying. Some guy, they don’t even know who, was chopped up. Just nasty.’ Eric stretched out his legs. ‘I’d like to meet him. The writer. I’d like to talk with him because I bet there’s stuff he couldn’t publish.’

Ford couldn’t follow the logic.

Eric looked up from his newspaper, mouth slightly open, halfway through some thought. ‘What are you thinking?’

‘I’m relaxing.’

‘You’ve got her wrong, you know. Martin’s the prize, Nathalie’s just some project. Something he’s working on.’ Eric rolled onto his back. ‘Doesn’t seem right, does it?’ His voice sounded flat as he explained that prior to Nathalie, Martin’s taste ran to boys, his students in fact. But that didn’t mean that Nathalie wasn’t complicated in her own right. Her partner, Mathieu, worked at the same university in the same department, and she’d been humiliated by his affairs. Mathieu was the same as Martin, no different, only he picked his entertainment from Nathalie’s students, and starting with the research assistants he’d worked his way down to her graduate students — until she confronted him, publicly, at one of his lectures. Are you fucking my students? ‘It was,’ Eric spread his fingers in a small explosion, ‘spectacular.’ Although he admitted that he hadn’t seen it himself and wasn’t exactly sure when it had happened.

Ford doubted that these things had ever occurred. He searched for a word — was ‘cuckold’ specifically masculine? Were women saddled with verbs instead of nouns, with the past-imperfect, the ‘was’ and ‘used to ’ of being cheated, deceived, disappointed. Tired, he wished the boy would let him drowse.

A soft knock came at the door. Nathalie, in a deliberately level voice, asked if she could come in, then edged open the door, anticipating Eric’s reply. She stood with her arms folded and leaned into the room, thin-lipped and matronly.

Prepped with new information Ford sat up, expectant, but Eric’s information didn’t translate to anything that could be read in her gestures and manner. From what he could see she was still angry.

‘How is he?’

‘I don’t know. He has a bad stomach. He’s sleeping now. Things have been difficult for him. You know how he is. What have you been talking about?’

‘That man. The one in the news. The man who disappeared.’

‘The man from Iraq?’

Ford felt his throat constrict. Four simple words. Alarmed by the comment, so sudden and unexpected and so easily presented, he wiped his hands over his face, certain that his expression would expose him.

‘We’re talking about that writer.’ Eric shook his head.

‘I don’t know who you mean?’

‘That writer. The murder. Remember?’ Eric’s tone bordered on sarcasm.

‘That isn’t news,’ she clucked, ‘it’s sensation. It’s just a story.’

Ignoring her, Eric reached for the paper and asked if Ford was done.

Nathalie looked from the Eric to Ford and back to Eric. ‘It doesn’t matter. I don’t want to interrupt anything.’

Eric folded the newspaper and set it aside.

‘What?’ For no reason Eric’s smile appeared to annoy Nathalie. Relieved that the subject had moved on, Ford watched her unfold her hands with a certain haughtiness he hadn’t noticed before, the gesture of someone familiar with humiliation.

‘He could be anywhere. That writer. He could be anyone. He could be here.’

‘I doubt it.’

‘Why not? Think about it. What better place is there? There’s all this distraction going off at the border. It’s a perfect place to disappear. That’s what I’d do.’ Eric looked directly at Ford. ‘Of course. This makes perfect sense. This is what you’re doing.’

‘Me?’

‘You. You’re hiding. You’re in trouble. Mystery solved. You aren’t travelling. You aren’t lost. You’re hiding. Laying low. Why don’t you tell Martin, he can make a film about you?’ Eric lay back, laughing. It was a good joke, wasn’t it? Just a great joke.

3.8

Parson waited in his car outside the hotel with a radio on his lap tuned to BFBS. Every morning he listened to the same content, to sentimental dedications from distant families to serving troops, half-touching but also banal. The town names, King’s Lynn, Bedford, Maidenhead, Hungerford, sounded invented, overly quaint, although he knew and disliked these towns. Occasionally the simplicity of the messages, the pure-heartedness, say, of a daughter’s greeting for her father, made him catch his breath. Tourists walked wide of the row of police vehicles and huddled groups of uniformed men. There were lessons to learn. First among them that he didn’t need to be here, and second, he should keep his work with the Turkish police to its barest minimum. Eager to demonstrate their control over the situation they had provided a squad of seven cars, a whole battalion of men, and assured him that this response was occurring at the very same time in Bodrum, in Izmir, at other places with confirmed sightings. Unsure that this was a good idea, he no longer felt lucky and slumped low in the seat. When he ran his finger inside his shirt collar he found the material soft with sweat.