‘I don’t think he’d be in it to play around with the stuff himself. Go on, what else did you find out?’
‘He talked to Madame a bit, in French. He speaks good French- she said it was good, and they don’t go in for that sort of praise much, the French. I said sil voo play and got laughed at. Anyway, he went to Antibes and a place called Cap Ferrat. Want to know why?’
I thought about it while I worked on my whisky. I was getting ready to take over her abandoned one too. Cap Ferrat-easy-Somerset Maugham lived there for years. Antibes-something to do with Picasso? Then I remembered the paperbacks in Mountain’s study-the foot or so of orange-covered Penguin editions of Graham Greene. Graham Greene lived in Antibes.
‘Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene,’ I said. ‘He went to look at their houses.’
She almost dropped the new cigarette she was fiddling with. ‘That’s right! That’s right!’ She lit the cigarette and didn’t protest when I took over her whisky. ‘How did you know that?’
I waved her smoke away airily. ‘Nothing to it; you say Aries you mean Van Gogh, you say La Jolla you mean Raymond Chandler.’
She looked at me through the haze. ‘You are like him, that’s the sort of trick he could do.’
‘Go on. He went to look at a couple of writers’ houses. Then what?’
‘Then nothing. He told Madame that’s what he was doing. He watched TV with her and he fucked her.’
‘She said so?’
‘No, but I could tell, just from the way she looked, the way she said things. I could tell. That’s my trick.’
‘Useful too. Does that change anything for you?’
‘No.’
‘Pity.’
‘Why?’
‘I told you he went to see his sister. She’s a pretty hopeless sort of case. Scared of everything. He certainly didn’t give her any comfort.’
‘He’s not the sort of man who gives comfort, he gives energy and interest. Bit like you again.’
I coughed. ‘Thanks.’
She got up off the couch and crossed to my chair. I could see her small breasts moving under the loose shirt and I wanted to touch them. She crouched in front of me.
‘Touch.’
I touched. She took my hands away, lifted her shirt and spread my fingers and palms over her naked breasts. She was warm and when I bent down to kiss her she opened her mouth and locked on to me fiercely.
In bed she was enthusiastic and experienced. She slithered around, changing positions and exciting me with her small, hard body. She came in harsh, gasping spasms and I was only a moment behind her. I propped up and looked down at her creamy oval face with the perfect cheekbones and brown smiling lips.
‘Good?’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘Good.’
She squirmed out and pulled me down and went to sleep with her head on my shoulder. I went to sleep a little later when the sounds of the world that we’d blotted out started to filter back through to me. I knew that I’d been part of Erica Fong’s revenge on William Mountain, but I didn’t care.
15
She wasn’t in the bed when I woke up. I put on my old towelling dressing gown and went downstairs towards the smell of brewing coffee. She was in the kitchen, fully dressed except for shoes and smoking her first fag of the day. She jumped when she saw me in the doorway; her slept-on hair was spiky here and matted flat there, like badly cut grass. She ran her hand over her head nervously.
‘That was just…’
‘I know.’ I went over and kissed the top of her head. I smoothed down some of the spiky hair. ‘It’s all right, Erica. Probably very good for both of us. No harm done.’
She put one arm around me, turned her head, inhaled and blew a stream of smoke away from me. ‘Phew, thought it might be messy.’
‘No. Let’s have some coffee.’
Over the coffee I told her about my theory that Mountain was writing again.
‘Madame didn’t mention it.’
‘Those little typewriters are silent, and you can fit one in an overnight bag.’
She nodded. ‘Isn’t that good, that he’s writing?’
‘The psychiatrist says it could go either way. I suppose it depends on what he’s writing about.’
Her answering nod was glum, and we sat in silence for a while. I was conscious of a slight headache, maybe the result of sleeping on a stomach that was empty apart, from some whisky. Toast and eggs suddenly appealed but I’d have been happier with a good idea.
‘I can’t imagine Bill not drinking,’ Erica said. ‘It’d be like Max not barking. I can’t imagine what he’d do with the time.’
I nodded. I could remember the first few heaving days of nicotine withdrawal and the desperate cravings of the few times I’d been alarmed by my alcohol consumption and had sworn off the stuff-life had seemed flat and the days full of dark, empty holes. I got up and put some stale bread in the toaster. Erica shook her head when I held up an egg.
‘Bugger everything,’ she said.
I started scrambling three eggs. ‘How much ready money would he be likely to have?’
‘Oh, tons. He made heaps from the TV writing and he didn’t just do that one soapie. He did re-writes for other shows, script doctoring.’
‘But he didn’t get no satisfaction?’
She smiled. ‘He said you patch shit up with more shit. He’d have plenty of cash and credit cards galore. I didn’t find his cards in the house.’
‘And nothing unusual apart from the notes?’
‘Just one thing, a docket for a video camera, but no camera.’
The eggs were ready and the toast wasn’t too black. I poured us both more coffee and sat down with the food. ‘Maybe he went to New York to film Norman Mailer.’
She shook her head. ‘No, he’s here somewhere. ‘Ome.’
‘What?’
‘That’s what Madame told me-he said he was going ‘ome.’
We arranged that she’d go home and feed Max and I’d have another shot at Mai. As a double act it wasn’t much of a show but it was the best we could do. We went to the front door together, still talking. I reached past her and opened the door; she started to go through when the door suddenly swung in hard and threw her back at me. She dropped her bag and stumbled over it. I used both hands to catch her and my flabby friend from the car park stood in the doorway with a gun in his hand. The bitter-faced man stood beside him, and my brain, which had been too slow to anticipate exposing Erica to this sort of danger, worked fast enough to register that this must be Carl Peroni. He leered as Erica disentangled herself from me.
‘Like to eat Chinese, do you, Hardy?’ He laughed at his own joke, then he stepped back towards the gate and spoke in a respectful tone to someone in the street. ‘It’s okay. He’s here and we’re in.’
Flabby gestured with the gun which I noticed then was the Colt from my car, and Erica and I backed down the hallway. Peroni stood with his back to the wall to allow a small, thick-set man dressed in a dark, three-piece suit to pass him. He did so and moved past me on towards the back of the house as if he made forcible entries like this at least three times a day. His step was jaunty, and I stood in the hall and watched him check the kitchen and living room quickly before coming back and stepping neatly sideways through the first door off the hallway.
Flabby stood with his back to the front door and Peroni moved restlessly like a sheep dog yapping at heels, almost herding us into the front room. Erica stood close beside me; Peroni leaned against a wall and the small man in the suit stood in the middle of the room. He had an old-young face, unlined but jowly; his hair was white but thick, his eyes were deeply sunk but of a clear, untroubled blue.
‘Mr Hardy, you can call me Mr Grey.’ He had a light, prissy voice and speaking style with some traces of accent, possibly English.
‘I can think of some other things to call you.’
‘I daresay.’ He looked at Peroni whose eyes were fixed on Erica. ‘I want you to locate the telephone and unplug it. Then come back in here. Understand?’