J.G. Ballard - Cocaine Nights

'Was this Hollinger's study?' I asked Cabrera. 'Or Mrs Hollinger's sitting room?'

'No-this was Mr Sansom's bedroom. He was the male secretary.'

'And Mrs Hollinger was found here?'

'She was on the bed.'

'And Sansom?' I searched the floor, almost expecting to find a body against the skirting-board.

'He was also on the bed.'

'So they were lying together?'

'In death, certainly. Her shoes were still in his hands, clenched very fiercely Surprised by this, I turned to speak to Paula, but she had left to make a last circuit of the other rooms. I knew almost nothing about Roger Sansom, a bachelor in his fifties who had worked for Hollinger's property company and then accompanied him to Spain as his general factotum. But to die in bed with his employer's wife showed an excessive sense of duty. It was too easy to visualize their last moments together as the lacquered screen burst into a fiery shield.

'Mr Prentice…' Cabrera beckoned me to the door. 'I suggest you find Dr Hamilton. She is very upset, it's a big strain for her. Meanwhile, you will have seen enough-perhaps you'll speak to your brother. I can oblige him to meet you.'

'Frank? What is there to talk about? I assume you've described all this to him?'

'He too has seen everything. On the day after the fire he asked me to take him around the house. He was already under arrest, charged with possessing an incendiary device. When he reached this room he decided to confess.'

Cabrera was watching me in his thoughtful way, as if expecting that I, in turn, would admit my role in the crime.

'Inspector, when I meet Frank I'll say that I've seen the house. If he knows I've been here he'll realize how absurd his confession is. The idea that he's guilty is preposterous.'

Cabrera seemed disappointed in me. 'It's possible, Mr Prentice. Guilt is so flexible, it's a currency that changes hands… each time losing a little value.'

I left him poking into the drawers of the bedside table, and made my way along the catwalk in search of Paula. Mrs Hollinger's bedroom was empty, but as I passed the niece's room I heard Paula's voice on the terrace below.

She was waiting for me by her car, talking to Miguel as he tried to clear the blocked vents of the swimming pool. I walked to the window and leaned out between the shreds of charred awning.

'We're through now, Paula. I'll be down in a minute.'

'Good. I want to go. I thought you were watching television.'

She had recovered her self-control, and smoked a miniature cigar as she leaned against the BMW, but her eyes avoided the house. She strolled towards the pool and wandered among the chairs on the terrace. I guessed that she was searching for the exact spot where she had stood at the moment the fire erupted.

Admiring her, I rested against the sill, and tried to loosen the orthopaedic collar around my neck. Looking down at the TV set, I noticed that a cassette protruded from the mouth of the video-recorder, ejected by the mechanism when the intense heat confused the circuitry. Dismayed by the destruction around them, and the grim task of removing bodies, the police team had missed one of the few objects to survive both the blaze and the deluge of water that followed.

I held the cassette and drew it carefully from the recorder. Its casing was intact, and I raised the shroud to find the tape still held tightly between the spools. The TV set was visible from the bathroom, and I imagined Anne Hollinger staring at the screen as she sat on the toilet and injected herself with heroin. Curious to see this last programme she had watched before the fire seized her life from her, I slipped the cassette into my pocket and followed Cabrera down the stairs.

The chauffeur's scoop roamed across the surface of the pool, its ladle filled with debris, relics of a drowned realm salvaged from the deep: wine bottles, straw hats, a cummerbund, patent-leather shoes, gleaming together in the sunlight as the water streamed away. Miguel decanted each netful on to the marble verge, respectfully laying out the residues of a vanished evening.

His eyes scarcely left me as I rested beside Paula in the car. I listened to Cabrera's noisy Seat hunting the palm-lined avenues below the Hollinger estate. His departure seemed to expose us again to the full horrors of the burned mansion. Paula's hands gripped the upper quadrant of the steering wheel, fingers tightening and relaxing. The house was behind us, but I knew that her mind was roving through its gutted rooms as she carried out her own autopsies on the victims.

Trying to reassure her, I put my arm around her shoulders. She turned to face me, smiling in a distracted way like a doctor only half-aware of the attentions of an amorous patient.

'Paula, you're tired. Shall I drive? I'll leave you at the Clinic and take a taxi from there.'

'I can't face the Clinic.' She leaned her forehead against the wheel. 'Those desperate rooms… I'd like everyone in Estrella de Mar to walk around them. I keep thinking of all those people who drank Hollinger's champagne and thought he was just another old blimp with an actressy wife. I was one of them.'

'But you didn't start the fire. Remind yourself of that.'

'I do.' She sounded unconvinced.

We drove down to Estrella de Mar, as the sea trembled beyond the palms, and passed the Anglican church, whose members were arriving for choir practice. At the sculpture studio another young Spaniard in a posing pouch flexed his pectorals for the earnest students in their artists' smocks. The open-air cinema was alternating Renoir's he Regie du Jen with Gene Kelly's Singing in the Rain, and one of the dozen theatre clubs announced a forthcoming season of plays by Harold Pinter. Despite the Hollinger murders, Estrella de Mar was as serious in its pleasures as a seventeenth-century New England settlement.

From the balcony of Frank's apartment I looked down at the swimming pool, where Bobby Crawford, megaphone in hand, was training a team of women butterfly swimmers. He raced along the verge, cheerfully bellowing instructions to the thirty-year-olds who wallowed in the chaotic water. His commitment was touching, as if he genuinely believed that every one of his pupils had the ability to become an Olympic champion.

'That sounds like Bobby Crawford.' Paula joined me at the rail. 'What's he up to now?'

'He's exhausting me. All this physical keenness and that thudding tennis machine. It's a metronome, setting our tempo-faster, faster, serve, volley, smash. There's something to be said for the retirement pueblos… Paula, can we take off this collar? I can't think with the damned thing on.'

'Well… if you have to. Try it for an hour and see how you feel.' She unclipped the collar, grimacing at the livid bruises. 'Cabrera could almost lift a set of fingerprints – who on earth would want to attack you?'

'As it happens, quite a few people. There's another side to Estrella de Mar. The Harold Pinter seasons, the choral societies and sculpture classes are an elaborate play-group. Meanwhile everyone else is getting on with the real business.'

'And that is?'

'Money, sex, drugs. What else is there these days? Outside Estrella de Mar no one gives a damn about the arts. The only real philosophers left are the police.'

Paula's hands rested on my shoulders. 'Cabrera may be right. If you're in danger you ought to leave.'

She had revived after the visit to the Hollinger house and watched me as I paced restlessly around the balcony. I had assumed, misguidedly, that her interest in me was partly sexual, perhaps because I prompted memories of happier days with Frank. I now realized that she needed my help in some scheme of her own, and was still deciding whether I was astute and determined enough for her.