J.G. Ballard - Cocaine Nights

I watched the rape run its course, trying to avoid the desperate eyes crushed into the satin bedspread. The bride was no longer acting or colluding with the camera. The lesbian porno-film had been a set-up, designed to lure her to this anonymous apartment, the mise-en-scene for a real rape for which the bridesmaids, but not the heroine, had been prepared.

In turn the men assaulted the dishevelled bride, moving through a pre-arranged repertoire of sexual acts. Their faces never appeared on screen, but the dark-skinned man was of middle age, with the swarthy, fleshy arms of a nightclub bouncer. The younger of the two, with his tubular English body, seemed to be in his early thirties. He moved like a professional dancer, swiftly manipulating the victim's body as he found another posture, another forced entry point. Irritated by her frantic gasps, he seized the veil and stuffed it into her mouth.

The film ended in a mélée of copulating bodies. In a bizarre attempt at an artistic finale, the camera moved around the bed, briefly pausing beside the mirrored door. The photographer, I realized, was a woman. She wore a black bikini, and a battery pack hung on a leather strap from her shoulder. A faint surgical scar ran from the small of her back and around her waist to her right hip.

The film came to its final moments. The men withdrew from the room, a blur of greasy thighs and sweating buttocks. The bridesmaids waved at the camera, and the large-breasted blonde lay back and sat the teddy bear astride her midriff, laughing as she jiggled the stuffed toy.

But I was looking at the bride. Set in her bruised features was a face still full of spirit. She wiped her eyes with a pillow, and rubbed the torn skin of her arms and knees. Mascara ran in black tears on to her cheeks, and the smudged lipstick slewed her mouth to one side. Yet she managed to smile at the camera, the plucky starlet facing the massed lenses of Fleet Street, or a brave child swallowing an unpleasant medicine for her own good. Sitting with the crushed wedding dress in her hands, she turned from the camera and grinned at the man whose shadow could be seen on the wall beside the door.

Her face shaded by a wide-brimmed hat, Elizabeth Shand dozed at the lunch table beside the swimming pool, her unblemished white skin set off by an ivory swimsuit. Like a jewelled cobra half-asleep on an altar, she watched me walk across the lawn, and began to rub sun-oil into the backs of the two young men stretched out behind her. As she kneaded the oil into their heavily-muscled shoulders, ignoring the pained murmurs, she might have been grooming a pair of sleek racing hounds.

'Mrs Shand will see you now.' Sonny Gardner was waiting for me by the pool. He beckoned me towards the lunch table. 'Helmut and Wolfgang – two friends from Hamburg.'

'I'm surprised they aren't wearing dog-collars.' I scanned Gardner 's watchful, babyish face. 'Sonny, we haven't seen you at the Club Nautico for a while.'

'Mrs Shand decided I should work here.' When a bird began to flutter in the rose pergola he raised his mobile phone to his lips. 'More security after the Hollinger fire 'Good idea.' I looked back at the handsome villa with its magnificent skyline views over Estrella de Mar and the Shand empire. 'We wouldn't want this place to burn down.'

'Mr Prentice, do join us…' Elizabeth Shand called to me across the pool. She wiped her hands on a towel and tapped the young Germans on the buttocks, dismissing them from her presence. They passed me as I circled the pool, but avoided my eyes, immersed in their own bodies and the play of muscle and oil. They sprinted across the lawn and stepped through a garden door into the courtyard of a two-storey annexe to the villa.

'Mr Prentice – Charles, come and sit next to me. We met at that dreadful funeral. In a way I feel I've known you as long as I've known Frank. I'm delighted to see you, though sadly I've nothing very useful to add to what you've already learned.' She crooked a finger at Gardner. 'Sonny, a tray of drinks…'

She gazed at me guilelessly when I sat beside her, running through an inventory that began with my thinning hair, moved to the fading bruises on my neck and ended with the dusty heels of my brogues.

'Mrs Shand, it's kind of you to see me. I'm worried that Frank's friends in Estrella de Mar have more or less closed the door on him. For three weeks now I've been looking for something that might help him. To be honest, I've got absolutely nowhere.'

'Perhaps there isn't anywhere to go?' Mrs Shand bared her over-large teeth in what passed for a concerned smile. 'Estrella de Mar may be a heavenly little place, but it's a very small heaven. There aren't that many hidden corners, more's the pity.'

'Of course. I assume you don't believe Frank set fire to the Hollinger house?'

'I don't know what to believe. It's all so horrific. No, he can't have done. Frank was much too gentle, too sceptical about everything. Whoever set fire to the house was a fanatic I waited as Gardner set out the drinks and then resumed his patrol of the garden. On a balcony of the annexe the young Germans were examining their thighs in the sun. They had flown in from Hamburg two days earlier and had already been involved in a brawl at the Club Nautico disco. Now Mrs Shand had confined them to quarters, where she could literally keep her hands on them. Raising the brim of her hat, she watched them with the proprietary gaze of a madam supervising the leisure moments of her charges.

'Mrs Shand, if Frank didn't kill the Hollingers, who did? Can you think of someone with a strong enough grudge against them?'

'No one. I can't honestly think of anyone who'd want to harm them.'

'They weren't popular, though. People I've talked to complain that they were a little stand-offish.'

'That's absurd.' Mrs Shand grimaced at the silliness of this. 'He was a film producer, for heaven's sake. She was an actress. They loved Cannes and Los Angeles and all those widescreen hustlers. If they kept aloof it was because they saw Estrella de Mar becoming a little too 'Bourgeois?'

'Exactly. It's all so earnest and middle-class now. The Hollingers came here when the only other Brits were a few remittance men and a couple of burnt-out baronets. They were the ancien regime, they remembered Estrella de Mar before the cordon bleu classes and the 'Harold Pinter revivals?'

'Too true, I'm afraid. I don't think the Hollingers ever really got the hang of Harold Pinter. For them the arts meant the California of black-tie subscription concerts, fine art foundations and Getty money.'

'What about business rivals? Hollinger owned a lot of land around Estrella de Mar. He must have been a brake on development here.'

'No. He was resigned to what was going on. They did keep to themselves. He was happy with his coin collection and she worried about her face-lifts coming apart.'

'Someone told me they were trying to sell their stake in the Club Nautico.'

'Frank and I were about to buy them out. Remember, the club had changed. Frank brought in a younger and livelier crowd who danced to a different tune.'

'I hear it every night when I'm trying to sleep. It's certainly a lively tune, especially when played by Bobby Crawford.'

'Bobby?' Mrs Shand smiled to herself in an almost girlish way. 'Sweet boy, he's done so much for Estrella de Mar. How did we get on without him?'

'I like him. But isn't he a little… unpredictable?'

'That's just what Estrella de Mar needs. Before he arrived the Club Nautico was dead on its feet.'

'How did he get on with the Hollingers? I don't suppose they cared for the drug-dealers at the club.'

Mrs Shand stared at the sky, as if expecting it to retreat from her gaze. 'Are there any?'

'You haven't seen them? I'm surprised. They're sitting around the pool like Hollywood agents.'