to kill himself, staring for the last time at the skies of the Côte d’Azur as the police marksmen approached.
But no one, holding a rifle to his own chest, a thumb outstretched to the trigger guard, could shoot himself twice. Whoever the victim, an execution had taken place beside the swimming pool of this quiet and elegant house.
A Range Rover of the security force cruised the avenue, and the driver saluted me as he passed. I stood outside the garage, the remote control unit in my hand. The doors rolled noiselessly, and light flooded the interior, a space for three cars with wooden shelves along the rear wall.
For all Penrose’s assurance that the garage had been rebuilt, the original structure remained intact. The concrete floor had been laid at least three years earlier, and was slick with engine oil that had dripped from some of the most expensive cars on the Côte d’Azur. Cans of antifreeze stood on the shelves, along with bottles of windscreen fluid and an Opel Diplomat owner’s manual.
I carefully searched the floor, and then examined the walls and ceiling for any traces of gunfire. I tried to imagine the hostages trussed together, squinting at the light as Greenwood entered the garage for the last time. But there were no bullet holes, no repairs to the concrete pillars, and no hint that the floor had been cleaned after an execution.
Almost certainly the three men, the luckless chauffeurs and maintenance engineer, had died elsewhere. At least one of them, I suspected, had been shot in the garden, sitting with his back to the doors of the pumphouse.
I closed the garage and rested against the warm roof of the Jaguar. It was a little after six o’clock, and the first traffic was leaving Cannes for the residential suburbs of Grasse and Le Cannet. But Eden-Olympia was silent, as the senior executives and their staffs remained at their workstations. Jane had asked me to collect her from the clinic at 7.30, when the last of her committee meetings would end.
A fine sweat covered my arms and chest as I walked back to the garden, a fear reaction to the garage. I had expected a chamber of horrors, but the ordinariness of the disused space had been more disturbing than any blood-stained execution pit.
I stripped off my shirt and stood by the diving board. Calming myself, I stared down at the dappled floor, a serene and sun-filled realm that existed only in the deeps of swimming pools. A water spider snatched at a drowning fly, and then skied away. As the surface cleared, I saw the bright node of the coin, a gleaming eye that waited for me.
I dived into the pool, broke through the foam and filled my lungs, then turned onto my side and dived again towards the silver pearl.
‘THEY’RE RIFLE BULLETS, steel-capped,’ I told Jane in her office at the clinic. ‘Probably fired from a military weapon. Two of them were in the pumphouse. The third I fished out of the pool an hour ago.’
Jane watched me as I leaned across her desk and placed the three bullets in her empty ashtray. Stolen from a pub in Notting Hill, the ashtray was a reassuring presence, proof that a small part of Jane’s rackety past still survived in this temple of efficiency.
Jane sat calmly in her white coat, dwarfed by a black leather chair contoured like an astronaut’s couch. She touched the bullets with a pencil, and raised a hand before I could speak.
‘Paul – take it easy.’
Already she was playing the wise daughter, more concerned about my adrenalin-fired nerviness than by the unsettling evidence I had brought. I remembered her under the roadside plane trees near Arles, calmly sucking a peach as the engine steamed and I rigged an emergency fan belt from a pair of her tights.
She prodded the bullets, moving them around the ashtray. ‘Are you all right? You should have called me. This Russian – what’s Halder playing at?’
‘I told him not to worry you. Believe me, I’ve never felt better. I could easily have run here.’
‘That’s what bothers me. The Russian didn’t hurt you?’
‘He brushed my shoulder, and I slipped on the grass.’
‘He spoke English?’
‘Badly. He said his name was Alexei.’
‘That’s something.’ Jane stood up and walked around the desk. Her small hands held my face, then smoothed my damp hair. She paused at the swollen bruise above my ear, but said nothing about the wound. ‘Why do you think he was Russian?’
‘It’s a guess. He mentioned someone called Natasha. Do you remember those touts near the taxi ranks at Moscow Airport? They had everything for sale – drugs, whores, diamonds, oil leases, anything except a taxi. There was something seedy about him in a small-time way. Poor diet and flashy dentistry.’
‘That doesn’t sound like Eden-Olympia.’ Jane pressed my head against her breast and began to explore my scalp. ‘Awful man – I can see he upset you. He might have been lost.’
‘He was looking for something. He thought I was David Greenwood.’
‘Why? There’s no resemblance. David was fifteen years younger …’ She broke off. ‘He can’t have met David.’
I rotated my chair to face Jane. ‘That’s the point. Why would David have any contact with a small-time Russian crook?’
Jane leaned against the desk, watching me in a way I had never seen before, less the tired house-doctor of old and more the busy consultant with an eye on her watch. ‘Who knows? Perhaps he was hoping to sell David a used car. Someone from the rehab clinic might have mentioned his name.’
‘It’s possible. Doctors doing charity work have to mix with a lot of riffraff.’
‘Apart from their husbands? Paul, these bullets – don’t get too involved with them.’
‘I won’t …’
I listened to the lift doors in the corridor as Jane’s colleagues left the clinic after their day’s work. Somewhere a dialysis machine moved through its cleaning cycle, emitting a series of soft grunts and rumbles, like a discreet indigestion. The clinic was a palace of calm, far away from the pumphouse and its bullet-riddled sack. I gazed through the cruise-liner windows at the open expanse of the lake. A deep shift in the subsoil sent a brief tremor across the surface, as a pressure surge moved through a ring main.
Proud of Jane, I said: ‘What an office – they obviously like you. Now I see why you want to spend your time here.’
‘It was David’s office.’
‘Doesn’t that feel …?’
‘Strange? I can cope with it. We sleep in his bed.’
‘Almost grounds for divorce. They should have moved you. Living in the same villa is weird enough.’ I gestured at the filing cabinets. ‘You’ve been through his stuff? Any hints of what went wrong?’
‘The files are empty, but some of his records are still on computer.’ Jane tapped a screen with her pencil. ‘The La Bocca case histories would make your hair curl. A lot of those Arab girls were
