Kell ordered a room service club sandwich and called Jimmy Marquand, updating him on the progress of the search. A database trawl at SIS had turned up just one photograph of François Malot, which Marquand sent as a JPEG to Kell’s laptop and mobile.
‘Good-looking bastard,’ he said as he clicked on the attachment. The photograph showed Malot in a group of four other men, all wearing business suits; they were captioned as IT consultants. Malot was in his early thirties, with a full head of dark hair, parted to one side, five o’clock shadow on a strong jaw and the ghost of a self-satisfied smile playing at the edge of his mouth. Just Amelia’s type, Kell thought and Marquand seemed to read his mind.
‘You suspect an affair?’
‘I don’t know what I suspect.’ Kell picked at a loose strand of fabric on the chair beside his desk. ‘She may not even be here. Malot could be a wild-goose chase.’
‘You don’t think there’s anything sinister in the murder of his parents, a connection of some kind?’
‘Isn’t that what I’m here to find out?’
The sandwich arrived and Kell rang off. Why was London so convinced that Amelia’s disappearance had a sexual element? As far as Kell was aware, in her long career Amelia had been involved in serious relationships with only two men other than her husband: an American businessman, recently settled in Oregon, and a close friend of Kell’s at SIS, Paul Wallinger, now Head of Station in Ankara. Yet that had been enough to earn her a reputation among the all-male inmates of the SIS asylum as a brazen seductress. Besides, how had she found time, on her schedule, to begin an affair with a Frenchman at least twenty years her junior?
There were other possibilities, of course: that Malot was a colleague in French Intelligence – either DGSE or DCRI – with whom she was running an operation. That would explain why there was so little information about Malot on the SIS database. But why comfort him in the aftermath of his parents’ murder? There had to be some kind of emotional connection between them, something more than mere business.
His bags unpacked, his sandwich eaten, Kell decided to spend the late afternoon walking around the hotel, to familiarize himself with the layout, and to look for Malot at the Ramada Plaza. Wearing a sunhat bought from the gift shop, he took a path from the swimming pool down to the beach, where hotel staff were serving drinks to guests assembled on deckchairs and loungers set out in rows on the sand. Donkeys and emaciated camels were available for hire. A bikini-clad model with long black hair and bright red lipstick was having her photograph taken in the shallows; kite surfers were ripping past on broken waves in vain attempts to impress her. Kell took off his shoes and walked along the hot sand, a warm westerly wind against his back. Within two hundred metres he came across a similar scene, this time at the entrance to the Ramada: more guests sunbathing in dazed rows, staff preparing drinks and snacks in a wooden cabin erected on stilts, more donkeys, more camels, all of them touting for business. He thought of Philippe and Jeannine Malot, attacked on a stretch of beach similar to this one, murdered within a stone’s throw of the sanctuary of a five-star hotel, beaten and robbed for a few pieces of silver.
The Ramada was visible from the beach as a white outcrop above a line of palm trees. Kell found himself on a narrow path bordered by dune grasses and clumps of bamboo. An elderly lady wearing a white headscarf, walking in the opposite direction, greeted him with a cheery ‘Hello there’ as if they were on Camber Sands. To his left, Kell could hear the slow, regularly interrupted thock of tennis being played badly, almost certainly by overheated geriatrics. Eventually the path opened up at the edge of a crowded figure-of-eight swimming pool considerably larger than the one visible from his room at the Valencia. There were more plastic loungers and tables arranged around the perimeter, the great mass of the hotel surrounding it on three sides. As a man walking alone, neither dressed for the beach nor the pool, Kell was aware that he was conspicuous, particularly in such an open environment. He stopped at a small hut at the side of the swimming area and took a seat at the counter. It was fiercely hot. An Italian-made coffee machine and some soft drink bottles were visible on a shelf at the back, ceramic ashtrays piled up beside a small sink. He scanned as many of the loungers as he could see, looking for Amelia, looking for a man resembling Malot. But it was almost impossible to pick out faces. At least half of the guests were tanning their backs or asleep on their sides; of the rest, many had heads obscured by novels or newspapers. Kell stood up and decided to keep moving, taking a side door into the main body of the hotel.
The lobby was an altogether more sober affair than the Valencia, akin to a business hotel in the centre of a large city. A couple in the reception area were arguing in Russian. The woman, bottle blonde and upholstered in white leather, was far younger than her partner and wore the spoiled-milk look of a mistress growing tired of her role. The other clientele appeared to be mostly retired couples from the United Kingdom; five of them were perched on an L-shaped sofa in the centre of the lobby, surrounded by wheeled suitcases and plastic bags stuffed with booze and Tunisian bric-a-brac. Kell walked past them towards the automatic doors at the entrance of the hotel and found himself in a car park overlooking the southern façade of the Valencia Carthage. He walked towards the road dividing the two hotels, past a lone official in a whitewashed security booth operating a traffic barrier. Then he saw what he was looking for. Seven yellow taxis lined up in the street beyond him, waiting for guests to emerge from either hotel. Kell fell among the drivers, talking in French to the nearest of them about nothing more pressing than the length of time it would take to reach central Tunis by car.
‘You are looking for a taxi, sir?’
The driver who had asked the question was in his late twenties and wore a Barcelona football shirt, a pair of white Adidas trainers and stonewashed jeans. Probably a veteran of the Jasmine Revolution, but certainly too young and excitable for the task Kell had in mind.
‘Not right now. I’m just interested in how long it would take.’
His appearance had drawn the attention of an older man, bald and squat, wearing a collared shirt and pressed trousers. Kell nodded him over. Quick, intelligent eyes, a lazy smile and an ill-concealed pot belly attested to the sort of personality Kell was looking for. He needed somebody with experience of the world, somebody who wasn’t going to go talking to his friends about all the money he was about to make.
‘Bonjour.’
‘Bonjour,’ the man replied.
In the late afternoon sun, beneath the scarlet dazzle of a bougainvillea in full bloom, the three men had a brief conversation about tourist attractions in Tunis. In due course, the younger of the two drivers was distracted by a call on his mobile and Kell was left alone with the older man.
‘You work these hotels on a regular basis?’ he asked. They had switched to Arabic.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘What kind of hours?’
The driver shrugged, as though the concept of the nine-to-five was alien to him.
‘Can you take me into La Marsa?’
It was a risk, of course, but Kell needed a driver on call, somebody who could keep tabs on Malot. Usually SIS would have provided a support agent, but with the Amelia operation off the books, Kell was obliged to improvise. It was just a question of whether or not this man could be trusted as a second pair of eyes. Kell climbed into the passenger seat of a well-maintained Peugeot 206 and instructed him to head towards the beach. He introduced himself as ‘Stephen’ and they shook hands over the gearstick.
‘Sami.’
A mile from the hotel, beyond the security roadblock, Kell asked the driver to pull over.
