J.G. Ballard - Super-Cannes

She had been shot once through the heart at close range, and burns from the explosive charge had seared the white skin around the wound. She wore a cupless black brassiere that exposed her small breasts, one of them licked by the tongue of blood that flowed from the entry wound. I guessed that she and Bachelet had been playing some erotic game the previous evening, and that she had been too sleepy or too drugged to remove the garment.

The third photograph was a close-up of the bedside table.

Behind the digital clock, a corporate gift from Monsanto, were a crack pipe and a plastic bag holding half a dozen cocaine pellets. Matches, paper spills and twists of silver foil filled an ashtray, and a video remote control rested on two cassettes with handwritten labels. Below, lying in the open drawer, was a collection of jewellery, triple-stranded pearl necklaces, diamond chokers and emerald pendants, all with their sales stickers still attached.

'Sweet dreams…' With a shudder, I held the photographs at arm's length. 'What films were they watching?'

'Does it matter?' Halder frowned at my morbid question. 'If you want, I can find out.'

'Forget it – I think we know. Where did you get hold of the prints?'

'The security files. There are other sets. No one knows I borrowed them.'

'These scene-of-the-crime photos freeze the blood. We're looking into Greenwood 's head.'

' Greenwood 's?'

'More than the victims'.' I ran my finger over the background details, the deco lamp on the bedside table, the marks on the wall where the headboard had chafed the plaster, perhaps during bouts of cocaine-driven sex between the security chief and his mistress. The spectacle of their intimate clutter, the crack pipe and cassettes, must have burned themselves into Greenwood 's mind. Only this blood-stained tableau was left, the postures of death and the peek-a-boo bra of a middle-aged doctor.

'Dr Serrou…' I commented. 'The selfless lady of the refuge.'

'She was. People have private lives, Mr Sinclair. Even you. It's possible he didn't mean to kill her. She just picked the wrong bedroom to wake up in.'

'I don't think so.' I pointed to the floor around the bed.

Bloody footprints marked the tiles, so clear that even Dr Serrou's quirky toes, hooked by a lifetime of ward rounds and constricting shoes, were clearly visible. 'Imagine what happened. The first shot wakes her up. Bachelet's blood is pumping all over the bed, her legs are covered with the stuff. Then Greenwood steps forward and shoots Bachelet through the chest. There's a roar of noise, a red spray in her face. Greenwood turns the rifle on her, but perhaps he hesitates – after all, they were colleagues, they'd started the refuge together. She looks pleadingly at this English doctor she knows so well, now obviously out of his mind. She gets off the bed and walks towards him, leaving footprints in her lover's blood. Somehow she hopes to calm him.'

'And then?'

'He shoots her dead. At the last moment she realizes that friendship counts for nothing and that she's about to fade into Greenwood 's dream of death.'

'So…' Halder pinched his nose, and calmed his fluttering nostrils. 'Was it a crime passionnel?'

'No, it wasn't. I was wrong there. Completely wrong.'

'He would have shot her first?'

'Not necessarily. But she and Bachelet weren't having a secret affair. This was a long-standing relationship – the crack pipe, the porno-cassettes, the underwear. These were two people who'd spent a lot of time exploring each other. She owed nothing to David Greenwood.'

'Then why did he kill her?'

'That I can't say. But it looks as if…'

'He killed some of the others? Maybe all of them? And there wasn't a conspiracy?'

'It's possible.' I stared at the photograph of the bedside table.

'There are too many question marks and no answers. These necklaces and chokers – they still have their price tags on.'

'They come from a jewellery heist in Nice. About three weeks before the murders.'

'Why are they here?'

'Maybe Bachelet was holding them for a French undercover team.'

'And you believe that?'

'I don't have to.' Halder moved restlessly in his seat, as if we had spent too long at this first murder site. 'I don't know why any of this happened. Greenwood didn't leave a suicide note.'

'He thought he'd get away with it.'

'Never. Greenwood was no fool. At the end he didn't have enough time. That's always the trouble with mass-killers. They run out of time.'

'He hated something about Eden-Olympia. I think you know what it was.'

'He never told me.'

I handed the photographs back to Halder. 'Any others I can see?'

'A few. We'll wait till we get there.' Halder started the engine with a flourish, and waved to Mrs Oshima, watching us suspiciously from her bedroom window. 'We need fresh air, Mr Sinclair. Fresh air and fresh minds…'

Drugs and Deaths

The early day shift was leaving the clinic, nurses and technicians driving from the exits in their identical small cars. A young houseman wearing his white coat and name-tag walked past us towards the apartment houses beside the lake. He was barely an arm's length from the Range Rover, but so self-engrossed that he failed to notice when Halder saluted him.

'That says a lot about Eden-Olympia…' I watched the distracted medico stride away, oblivious to the lake and parkland, his head responding only to the flicker of a lizard beside the path.

'People are so immersed in their work they wouldn't recognize the end of the world. It explains why no one saw anything unusual about Greenwood. There's no civic sense here.'

'There is.' Halder pointed to a nearby surveillance camera. 'Think of it as a new kind of togetherness.'

Halder had recovered from his nervousness outside the Bachelet house, and was ready to humour me and resume his role as tour guide to an obsession. He opened his envelope of photographs, waiting for me to calm myself. By abandoning the conspiracy theory I had returned to earth, a hard landing that had wrecked my hopes of finding a larger explanation for David Greenwood's psychotic behaviour. But the authority of the murder photographs was overwhelming. A violent rage had written itself across the blood-stained walls, a death warrant signed in fragments of bone and gristle.

'All set, Mr Sinclair? Good… I'll take it slowly.' Halder spoke in a low, unemotional voice, as if describing a minor traffic incident. 'The third person to die was Professor Berthoud, chief pharmacist at the clinic. An inside security camera caught Greenwood entering the lobby at 7.52. No weapon was visible, but we assume he carried the rifle under his white coat.'

'The metal detectors didn't pick it up?'

'None are installed. This is a hospital. Metal objects are everywhere – emergency trolleys, hip replacement pins, oxygen cylinders…'

'Fair enough. Go on.'

'Berthoud was in his private office in the pharmacy on the sixth floor, next to the strongroom where all the drugs at Eden-Olympia are held. He was sitting at his desk when Greenwood fired at him through the outer glass door.'

'Why didn't he go straight in?'

'The door was electronically locked from Berthoud's desk. It gave access to the office and a side corridor to the drugs room.'

'Berthoud would have buzzed him in.'

' Greenwood needed surprise. He must have known how shaky he was starting to feel. Berthoud might have guessed something was wrong and alerted security.'

'And Wilder Penrose?' I asked. ' Greenwood wounded him.'

'He was in the corridor, coming back from the drugs room. He probably caught a look at the rifle barrel, stepped back and was cut by the flying glass.'

'But Greenwood didn't see him, or he would have finished him off. Why didn't Greenwood look for Penrose in his office?'