J.G. Ballard - Super-Cannes

I eased open the bedroom door. Frances lay asleep across the pillows, an arm stretched out like a child's. In the light of the nearby balconies I could see her white teeth, lips drawn in a sleeping smile. The shower ran in the bathroom, a soft patter like distant rain.

Careful not to wake her, I stepped across the darkened room. I sat on the bed beside her, trying to stop the mattress from sighing under my weight. My hand touched the linen sheet, then flinched from a patch of wetness. The sodden fabric of the under-blanket was still warm, as if soaked with a sticky soup.

' Frances…?'

Her eyes were open, but the pupils were unfocused. The beam of the La Garoupe lighthouse swept the marina, and I stared down at Frances 's bruised face, at her open mouth with its broken teeth and the blood on her forehead. The beam touched her eyes, animating them for the last time, like a passing headlight shone through the windows of an empty building.

'Jesus… God…' I fumbled with the switch of the bedside lamp and flicked it on, only to find that the bulb was missing. I left the bed and stepped to the door, searching the shadows for the wall switch.

A hand gripped my wrist, forcing my fingers against the wall. A slim but athletic man in an Eden-Olympia uniform stepped from the hall and pinned me against the fitted wardrobe. I wrenched myself from him, and raised a fist to strike his face, but he clamped his hand over my mouth, trying to calm me.

'Mr Sinclair… take it easy. I'm with you.'

'Halder?' As the lighthouse beam crossed the room I recognized the security guard. I reached again for the switch but Halder knocked away my arm. 'Leave it, Mr Sinclair. They're watching the apartment – once the lights go on they'll be up here in seconds.'

'Who? Halder…?'

'The people waiting for you. They knew you were coming.'

'Frances…' I stepped towards the bed and stared down at her disjointed arms. Blood covered her breasts in a bodice of black lace. I held her wrist, feeling the loose tendons almost torn from the bones in her struggle, and searched for a pulse.

'Frances, please… Halder, she's still breathing. Call an ambulance. There's a chance…'

Halder steadied me in his strong hands. 'She's dead, Mr Sinclair. She died half an hour ago.'

'Wait. How did she die?' I let her hand fall onto the bloodstained pillow, pulled back the sheet and stared at her broken body. Around her waist was the zebra-striped dress. A man's crumpled dinner jacket lay between her legs, silk facings torn from its lapels by a pair of frantic hands. 'It's Greenwood's. Halder, someone wore it while they killed her…'

I stepped back, and almost knocked over a metal tripod standing by the bedside table. My foot crushed a piece of brittle plastic.

'A video? Good God, what were they doing here?'

'Making a film.' Halder took a lightbulb from his pocket and placed it on the table. 'A film of a very ugly kind.'

'The dress from La Bocca?'

'A costume. I don't think she wanted to wear it. She put up a real fight. Now, let's go. If they find you here they'll kill you as well. Then say you murdered her.'

'Hold on. Were you here when they…?'

'No. I arrived ten minutes ago. The front door was off the latch. They didn't know you had a spare set of keys. I'm sorry, Mr Sinclair. She was dead when I found her.'

'How did she die?'

'The… lover… used a knife. It's in the shower, having the prints washed away. They'll say you made your snuff movie and were washing the knife when they broke in.'

'They?'

'People working for Eden Olympia – under Alain Delage's orders.'

'And if we leave now?'

'They'll call it a burglary that went wrong. They can deal with you another time.'

I picked up the dinner jacket and laid it across the dead woman's shoulders, David Greenwood's final embrace. Halder waited as I stared at Frances for the last time, brushing away the clumps of blonde hair from her scalp that covered the pillow. When the La Garoupe beam turned between the apartment buildings her bruised face seemed to switch itself on and off. The quirky lips had flattened themselves against her teeth, and her features were those of a child of ten. As she grew cold she became younger, slipping away from herself and withdrawing into a greater darkness, carrying in her broken hands the only memories she would take with her into the night.

The doors of the elevator closed, and Halder turned towards me, staring at the blood on my hands as if trying to convince himself that I had taken no part in Frances's death. His slim face was as narrow as an axehead, and his eyes were aroused, roving above his flared nostrils. I was still dazed by the spectacle of the dead woman and the camera tripod beside the bed, and pushed Halder away when he tried to wipe the blood from my chin.

The doors opened at the ground floor, where a dozen residents waited to board the lift. They moved forward, then stopped when they saw me surrounded by a gallery of blood-stained figures multiplied by the mirrors. A woman with a small child shrieked at me, a reflex of panic, and a security man in the lobby strode towards us.

Halder pumped the buttons, and held the doors together when the guard drummed on the echoing metal. 'Mr Sinclair… we have to clean you up. You'll never get out of here.'

He pressed the emergency button, waited for the doors to open and seized my arm. We emerged onto the floor above the mezzanine. We crossed the landing to a service door, closed it behind us and made our way down a metal staircase used by the maintenance staff. Beyond a freight lift were the swing doors at the rear of a restaurant.

We stepped into the clatter of the kitchen, momentarily blinded by the haze of fat and steam. Everyone was shouting at once as scullions hauled racks of plates and cutlery. In the butchery a sous-chef bent over a work table, picking his fillet steaks as the carver in a bloodied apron sliced at the leaking red muscle.

A side of lamb hung from the wall, and Halder seized my hands and pressed them to the marbled flesh.

'Halder…?'

'Move it around, feel the flesh… there's a security man nosing about.'

Halder walked away from me, sidestepping a line of metal trolleys.

Exhausted, I rested against the waxy meat when the security guard emerged from the pantry doors and scanned the crowded work space. His gaze touched me briefly as I pretended to wrestle with the carcass, my bloodied hands gripping the foreknuckles. He spoke to Halder, who pointed to the rear staircase and the freight lift.

A few minutes later, in the staff washroom behind the cold store, Halder watched from the door while I cleaned the blood from my arms and face. Reluctantly I washed away the last traces of Frances that clung to my skin. The swirling water in the deep stone sink carried the dark grains of her blood into the rushing vortex.

Halder turned off the taps and stuffed paper towels into my hands. He was tense but poised, like a gymnast powdering his palms as he prepared to seize the parallel bars. 'That's enough.' He pushed me from the sink as the last blood rilled away. 'Where's your car?'

'On the slip road near the garage exit. Jane's small Peugeot – someone trashed the Jag.'

'I did. It was too easy to follow.' He kicked back the door and propelled me towards the freight lift. 'They would have used it as part of the frame. I'm parked in the basement – we'll go down and wait there. The guard who saw you in the lobby must have called the police.'

'Halder, I need to find Jane.'

'I know.' Halder stared at me while the huge lift, almost as large as an aircraft carrier's, sank towards the basement. 'It's taken you a long time, Mr Sinclair…'

We sat in the front seat of the Range Rover, watching the cars leave and enter the garage. I could smell the detergent on my hands, and tried to remember the scent of the young woman who lay dead in her bedroom, far above me in the curving night.