J.G. Ballard - Super-Cannes

So Jane, as I guessed, had already decided to stay on at Eden-Olympia. She had assumed that I would return to London with the Jaguar and had rented the little Peugeot, the first unilateral decision of our marriage.

Trying not to face the implications of this minor betrayal, I opened the valise, a gift from Jane's mother. Inside was a clutter of prescription pads and a carton containing a collection of diamorphine syrettes and a dozen ampoules of pethidine. A hypodermic syringe lay inside a leather wallet, part of a cache of sedative drugs that Jane had probably found in Greenwood 's desk at the clinic and brought back to the villa for safekeeping.

Holding one of the ampoules to the light, I remembered my early career as a drug dealer during the first unsettled term at my prep school. Left alone at home with a bored au pair, I searched my mother's bedside table. There I found a selection of slimming pills, and without thinking I swallowed several of the drinamyl tablets. Ten minutes later I was soaring around the house like a bird, my mind a window filled with light. I raced into the garden, pursued by the au pair, my feet scarcely touching the ground. Years later, when I took up gliding, I realized what had spurred me on. The stolen tablets established my authority at school, and my mother's repeated attempts to diet provided an unlimited supply. The older, teenage boys were experienced users of alcohol and pot, but I was the youngest dealer in the school. When my mother took herself off the contraceptive pill, in a desperate throw of the sexual dice, I at last came to grief. I squeezed the tabs from their foil wrapper and passed them off to my seven-year-old classmates as a new psychedelic. Panic followed when a senior boy explained the true role of the contraceptive pill. With a straight face he told us that the pill's effects were reversed by the male endocrine system and we would all become pregnant…

I put away the pethidine ampoule and closed the valise. Jane's pocket radio lay at the bottom of the waste basket. Retrieving it, I reset the batteries, and searched the waveband for Riviera News. I listened to the stream of pop music and plugs for video-rental shops and pool cleaners. Snatches of international news broke the flow, references to civil war in the Cameroons and an assassination attempt on the Israeli prime minister, but they seemed inconsequential compared with the graphic accounts of a yacht fire in the Golfe-Juan marina, or a landslip at Théoule that had cracked a swimming pool. On the new Riviera, only the trivial had any importance.

Yet David Greenwood had sat at this dressing table, perhaps with a high-powered rifle across his knees, looking out at the office buildings of Eden-Olympia. I switched off the radio and threw it back into the waste basket. I still approached the murders as if they were a momentary aberration, a paroxysm of anger in the executive washroom. To understand Greenwood I needed to think of other assassins, those deranged men who stared through the telescopic sights of their sniper's rifles, ready to grace with their own madness the last moments of a president or a passing pedestrian. I needed to trap the ghost of the young doctor in whose bed I slept. Above all, I needed to dream the psychotic's dream.

The children's carousel rotated in the Place des Martyrs, a gilded roundabout untouched by time. A small boy sat solemnly in a miniature aeroplane, circling to the same music I had first heard thirty years earlier. Antibes never changed, perhaps the reason why Greene, who spent his life seeking change, had settled there so contentedly.

I left the Jaguar in the underground car park near the Post Office and walked through the streets of the Old Town to the Place Nationale, where the restaurant tables were laid out under the plane trees. My parents and I had eaten lunch here during a sudden cloudburst, as raindrops danced in our soup.

I found the offices of Riviera News above an outboard-motor dealers in a side street off the Avenue de Verdun. The manager, Don Meldrum, was an affable Australian with a drinker's puffy face disguised by a tennis tan. A Fleet Street veteran of the hot-metal days, he had moved to the Mediterranean and spotted an anglophone niche among the marinas and yacht brokers.

He beckoned me into his cupboard of an office, where I sat with my back to a partition wall and my knees against his desk.

'If you're in pain, let out a shout. You need to be a contortionist here, and I'm not talking about the programmes.' He pressed his head to the wall and listened to the commercial break from the adjacent studio, advertising a gourmet caterer eager to perform his magic in the smallest yacht-galley. 'So, Mr Sinclair… you're reporting in from the battle-front?'

'Is there a war on?'

'Bet on it. Eden-Olympia versus the rest of the Côte.'

'Who's winning?'

'Need you ask? Whatever the physicists say, time here runs one way, head-first into the future. There's no looking back, and almost everyone knows it.'

'Almost?'

'A few old-fashioned folk still think people come to the Côte d'Azur to have a good time. You and I know they come here to work. This is Europe's California. High-tech industries, an army of people programming the future, billions surfing on a silicon chip.'

'And once a year you have the movies?'

'Exactly.' Meldrum tapped his veined nose. 'But forget about Hollywood and the Palme d'Or. I'm talking about one-man-and-a-dog operations from the Philippines. If I wanted to be accurate I'd say one-woman-and-a-dog. Now, I hear you're a close friend of David Greenwood. Or were.'

'To be honest, I hardly knew him. I was trying to impress your secretary.'

'You did. She has more news sense than I do. She tells me your wife took over from Greenwood at the Eden-Olympia clinic. A nifty berth. Some say the best hospital on the coast. When Jacques Chirac sprained his thumb opening an oyster at the Colombe d'Or that's where they took him. I hope they gave you a luxury flat.'

' Greenwood 's old villa. Nothing else was available.'

'Makes sense – just about. A cold lot of fish, but that's corporate life. At least someone in the family can look after you if things go wrong.'

'I hope nothing does.' I waited until a timeshare commercial came to an end. 'I'm keen to know what happened on May 28. That's one day when something did go wrong.'

'For Greenwood, and ten other poor sods.' Meldrum fiddled with a transcript on his desk. 'So you're having a quiet rake through the ashes. Can I ask why?'

'He was a fellow Brit. My wife knew him. I sleep in the man's bed, eat at his breakfast table, shit in his toilet. I'd like to know the truth.'

'Sounds like a personal crusade. Worst reason for getting involved. I take it you've come up with something? A diary? Confessional tapes?'

'Sorry. But there are things that don't add up.'

'Such as?'

'Motive. There isn't one.'

'Or one you understand. If I were you, I'd stay close to the nearest piña colada.'

Ignoring this, I said: 'I've talked to people who knew Greenwood, doctors who worked with him. No one has any idea why he went berserk. They're not covering up, but…'

'There's nothing to cover up.' Tiring of me, Meldrum stared at the Arab yachts in the harbour. 'For once, you can believe the official story. This young English doctor, practically the Albert Schweitzer of the Côte d'Azur, was working too hard for his own good. One day a fuse blew and the lights went out.'

'Or another set of lights came on. Brighter and harder lights that made everything seem very clear. Especially inside his own head.'

Meldrum laughed ruefully at this. 'Mr Sinclair, you should be working for one of those concierge rags in Paris. My reporter spent a lot of time at Eden-Olympia. It was a big case. CNN, the London tabloids, all the news agencies. They found nothing.'