J.G. Ballard - Super-Cannes

'Señora, how long have you been at Eden-Olympia?'

'Two years. I was housekeeper for Mr and Mrs Narita.'

'The family next door, before the Yasudas? Dr Penrose told me – they were unhappy and moved back to Paris. It must have been a shock, like one of those comics the Japanese read.'

Señora Morales lowered her eyes to the figs and fennel. 'Before that I worked for Monsieur Bachelet.'

I put down my drink, remembering that Guy Bachelet, the head of security at Eden-Olympia, had been one of Greenwood 's victims. 'I'm sorry, señora. How terrible for you.'

'Worse for him.'

'I was thinking of you. The pain you must have felt when you heard he'd been murdered in his own office.'

'No.' Señora Morales spoke firmly. 'Not in his office. He died at his house.'

'You weren't there, I hope?'

'I was coming from Grasse.' As if to justify her lucky escape, she said: 'I start at nine o'clock. Already the police were at the house.'

'That's right. It was very early. So Monsieur Bachelet was…?'

'Dead, yes. And Dr Serrou.'

'Dominique Serrou?' Penrose had mentioned Greenwood 's partner at the La Bocca refuge. 'She was shot at the clinice?'

'No.' Señora Morales inspected the fading bloom on a peach, as if tempted to return it to the supermarket. 'Also in the house.'

'I thought everyone was killed at Eden-Olympia? Dr Serrou lived in Le Cannet.'

'Not at her house.' Señora Morales pointed through the windows at the rooftops of the residential enclave. 'At Monsieur Bachelet's house. Four hundred metres from here.'

'They died there together? Dr Greenwood shot them both?'

'At the same time. Terrible…' Señora Morales crossed herself.

'Dr Serrou was very kind.'

'I'm sure. But what was she doing there? Was she treating him for something?'

'Something…? Yes.'

I walked to the window and listened to the sprinklers refreshing the lawns and washing away the dust of the night. I assumed that Bachelet had fallen ill, perhaps with a sudden angina attack, and called an emergency number. Dominique Serrou had driven over, in what would be her last house call, just as another, deranged doctor was making his first of the day.

'Señora Morales, are you certain they died at Bachelet's house?'

'I saw the bodies. They took them out.'

'Perhaps they were taking them in? Bringing Bachelet home from his office? In the confusion you might easily -'

'No.' Señora Morales stared at me stonily. She spoke in a surprisingly strong voice, as if seizing her chance. 'I saw their blood. Everywhere… pieces of their bones on the bedroom wall.'

'Señora please…' I poured her a glass of water. 'I'm sorry I raised this. We knew Dr Greenwood. My wife worked with him in London.'

'They told me to go away…' Señora Morales stared over my shoulder, as if watching an old newsreel inside her head. 'But I went into the house. I saw the blood.'

'Señora Morales…' I poured my spritzer into the sink. 'Why did Dr Greenwood want to kill so many people? Most of them were friends of his.'

'He knew Monsieur Bachelet. Dr Greenwood visited him many times.'

'Was he treating him? Medically?'

Señora Morales shrugged her broad shoulders. 'He went in the morning. Monsieur Bachelet waited for him. Dr Greenwood lent him books, about an unhappy English girl. Always talking back to the queen.'

'An unhappy English girl? Princess Diana? Was he a royalist?'

Señora Morales raised her eyes to the ceiling. The vacuum cleaners had locked horns, expiring in a blare of noise that was followed by fierce shrieks. Excusing herself, she left the kitchen and strode towards the stairs. I paced the tiled floor, and listened to her raised voice as she berated the maids. Talking to me had released the tension of months.

Before leaving, she paused at the front door and treated me to a sincere, if well-rehearsed, smile.

'Mr Sinclair…'

'Señora?'

'Dr Greenwood – he was a good man. He helped many people…'

As I changed in the bathroom I could still hear the odd inflections in Señora Morales's voice. She had gone out of her way to raise my doubts, as if my louche and anomalous position at Eden-Olympia, my role as pool-lounger and morning drinker, made me the confidant she had been searching for since the day of the tragedy.

Already I believed her account. If, as she hinted, Dr Serrou had spent the night with Bachelet, the inexplicable brainstorm might have stemmed from a _crime passionel_. As Greenwood and Dominique Serrou gave their free time to the children's refuge at La Bocca, a warm affair could easily have sprung from their work.

But perhaps Dr Serrou had tired of the earnest young doctor and found the security chief more to her taste. Once Greenwood had shot his rival and former lover he had rushed headlong into a last desperate rampage, murdering his colleagues in an attempt to erase every trace of a world he hated.

As for the book about the unhappy English girl, I guessed that this was a dossier on a child at the refuge, the abused daughter of some rentier Englishman, or the surviving victim of a car crash that had killed her parents.

At the same time, it surprised me that Penrose had confided nothing of this to Jane. But a sudden brainstorm was less threatening to future investors at Eden-Olympia than a tragedy of sexual obsession.

Satisfied that I had virtually solved the mystery, I took a rose from the vase on the hall table and slipped it through my buttonhole.

The sprinklers had fallen silent. All over the residential enclave there was the sound of mist rising from the dense foliage, almost a reverse rain returning to the clouds, time itself rushing backwards to that morning in May. As I left the house and walked towards my car I thought of David Greenwood. The conversation with Señora Morales had brought his presence alive for the first time.

During the weeks since our arrival, as I lay by the pool or strolled around the silent tennis court, the young English doctor had been a shadowy figure, receding with his victims into the pre-history of Eden-Olympia.

Now Greenwood had returned and walked straight up to me. I slept in his bed, soaped myself in his bath, drank my wine in the kitchen where he prepared his breakfasts. More than mere curiosity about the murders nagged at my mind. I thought again of his friendship with Jane. Had we come to Eden-Olympia because she was still fond of the deranged young doctor, and curious about his motives?

I walked past the garage, aware that I had never been tempted to raise the roller doors. Rebuilt or not, this macabre space was a shrine to the four men who had died inside it. One day, when my knee was stronger, I would use the remote control now resting in a bowl on the kitchen table.

The Jaguar waited for me in the sun, its twin carburettors ready to do their best or worst. Starting this high-strung thoroughbred was a race between hope and despair. By contrast, thirty feet from me, was the Delages' Mercedes, as black and impassive as the Stuttgart night, every silicon chip and hydraulic relay eager to serve the driver's smallest whim.

Simone Delage stood beside it, briefcase in hand, dressed for a business meeting in dark suit and white silk blouse. She stared at the damaged wing of the Mercedes like a relief administrator gazing at the aftermath of a small earthquake. A sideswipe had scored the metal, stripping the chromium trim from the headlights to the passenger door.

For once, this self-possessed woman seemed vulnerable and uncertain. Her manicured hand reached towards the door handle and then withdrew, reluctant to risk itself on this failure of a comfortable reality. The car was as much an accessory as her snakeskin handbag, and she could no more drive a damaged Mercedes to a business meeting than appear before her colleagues in laddered stockings.