I nodded. ‘And immediately afterward Phil drove Colette to the airport car park where he shot her? In cold blood? I suppose it’s just about possible. But this only makes sense to me if they were both after money — to blackmail you in return for her admission to the police that she was your alibi.’
‘Yes. That’s right. She must have got cold feet about the whole idea. Threatened to go to the police with her story. Either that or she wanted more money. Or money up front which Phil simply didn’t have.’
John grinned and started to jog on the spot, like a boxer, as if for the first time he could run toward some light at the end of the tunnel. His leather shoes squeaked like springs that needed oiling, but for a big man he was surprisingly light on his feet.
‘This is good for me, old sport. This is a real break, you know. Now I can hand myself in to the police. It’s obvious that if the two of them were acting together it leaves me in the clear. More or less. Don’t you see? He was in possession of my watch. Not to mention my bag and my gun. Christ, Don, he must have used the Walther to kill himself. The police will have to conclude that he took them all from my apartment. I shall just tell the cops that I was shit-scared and took off to Switzerland to wait for the truth to come out; and that when I saw they were both dead I put two and two together and decided to give myself up.’
I nodded patiently and tried to remain calm. I hadn’t reckoned on this. I went to the window and moving the net curtain I stared out at the hotel’s small but elegant garden. Here and there were iron statues of peacocks, which I rather preferred to the real thing, they being so much quieter. The laurel bushes and tree ferns were such a brilliant, almost artificial shade of green that you half expected to see a man being stalked through the undergrowth by a tiger or a jaguar — which was pretty much how I felt, most of the time. As if at any moment my ambitious revenge might swallow me whole. I opened a window and lit a cigarette so that any other sharp intakes of breath might seem smoking-related rather than the corollary of my almost shredded nerves.
‘Look, John, there’s something I haven’t told you. Because I didn’t want to depress you any more.’
John stopped jogging and frowned. ‘What’s that?’
‘I think you’d better sit down. Because you’re not going to like this.’
John sat down on the edge of my bed. I turned off the TV and returned to the window.
‘What the fuck is it? Tell me.’
‘When I first met the Monty cops in London I maintained your innocence so vehemently that they felt obliged to share with me some forensic evidence they hadn’t released to the newspapers. Apparently they found blood and gunpowder on the sleeve of your tracksuit.’
John shook his head. ‘No problem. Phil could have put on my clothes while I was busy banging Colette. Yes, that’s it. He must have been wearing my tracksuit when he shot Orla. To help implicate me.’
‘If that was all there was then I’d agree you should hand yourself in to the cops and take your chances.’
‘What else is there?’
I blew smoke out of the window; it was supposed to be a non-smoking room and I had enough trouble on my hands without setting off the alarm that was attached to the ceiling, blinking red like the tail light of an aircraft. I caught sight of my own reflection in a mirror on the inside of the closet door. Wreathed in a little halo of blue cloud I looked more in control of myself than I might have supposed. Like someone or some thing infernal. As usual the cigarette was having an effect, helping me to form ideas out of nothing more than smoke and mirrors.
‘The fact is, John, it’s not just your chances any more. It’s mine, too.’
John shook his head. ‘I don’t follow you, old sport. I’ve said I’ll leave your name out of it and I will. If it makes any difference you can keep that twenty grand when you fuck off back to London. There’s no reason you should be involved in any of this. I’m more than capable of facing this on my own now.’
‘But I am involved. Very much more involved than you know.’
‘What are you talking about, old sport?’
‘Last night, when I went to see Phil he was in an extremely difficult frame of mind. He’d been drinking a lot. Smoking a lot of dope, too. I didn’t know he smoked weed, did you? Anyway, he told me that I could stuff your twenty grand because the Chief Inspector from the Monaco Sûreté Publique was coming to see him at ten o’clock on Monday morning and that he was going to tell him that you were staying in Vence, at the Château Saint-Martin. Yes, that’s what he said. He told me he’d thought it all over and he couldn’t bring himself to forgive you for destroying his life as a writer, not to mention destroying his life as a man. He told me then that he’d found out you’d fucked Caroline and said that no amount of money could compensate for the pain he’d felt — that a man he considered to be his friend could have betrayed him quite so egregiously.
‘I tried to reason with him. I said that what was done was done. I’m afraid I even told him about my plan to hide you away in Cornwall and that we could reinstate the atelier with him as one of your writers. I said everything would be just like it was before and that in the fullness of time, if he was writing and making a decent living again, Caroline might even come back to him. But he wasn’t interested in any of that. He told me the only writing he was capable of doing these days was jotting down a lunch order at the Château Saint-Martin. Tempers got a bit frayed and he started to shout at me.
‘I only meant to threaten him with the gun — your gun, which I’d found in your bag when I was taking the money out to give it to him. I told him that he might manage to get you arrested but that he’d better think twice if I was going to allow him to grass me up. Or words to that effect. I said that if I did get nicked he could be sure that eventually I’d come back there and kill him. Anyway, he was pissed and stoned like I said — which is probably why he tried to take the gun off me. We wrestled a bit, in his study and that was when the gun went off. It seemed you’d left a bullet in the breech. I should have checked it before I pointed the thing at him but I didn’t. There wasn’t time.’ I shrugged. ‘It was me who shot Philip French, John. It was me who killed him.’
‘Jesus.’
‘After that I set about trying to make it look like a suicide. I put the gun in his hand, let off another shot for the forensics boys. I left your bag and your watch in the hope that it might persuade the police — as it seems to have managed to persuade you — that Phil had something to do with Orla’s death. It was the same gun after all. There was an unsent draft of a rather self-pitying email he’d been composing to his wife on his computer which he’d insisted on reading to me as a way of explaining that he was finished as a writer; I don’t think he’d ever intended sending it to Caroline; so I sent it, for appearance’s sake, you understand. Then I left. That’s why I was so fucking panicky when I came to fetch you in the village square last night. And why I started bricking it when I saw that copper and realized he was already in Tourrettes. Because I’d just shot Phil.’
John nodded. ‘I see. Fuck me. You had quite an evening, didn’t you? But where do you think the cops got the idea that Philip French had anything to do with Colette Laurent’s death?’
‘The circumstances, I suppose. You’re the missing link, after all. You knew Phil and I dare say they’ll have worked out that you knew Colette, too; and intimately. They must have found her laptop when they came across her body. It’s just a suspicion I have, but I rather think Chief Inspector Amalric might be playing a clever game here. He could be hoping you’ll hear on the news that the cops think Phil had something to do with Colette’s death and that, as a result, you’ll think it’s now safe to hand yourself in. And look, for all I fucking know, they don’t really believe that Phil killed himself either. I have no idea what kind of fist I made of making his death look like a suicide. My expertise in these matters only extends to writing thrillers. They’re not stupid, these people. So it’s not just you who’s now facing jail, it’s me, too.’ I shook my head and added, ‘They’re not actually looking for me, of course. Not yet. And before you ask I have no more intention of handing myself in than you have. Or had.’