down my toilet, relabelled my sandwich box with plague bacillus warnings, hid whoopee cushions in my cadaver drawers and retuned my radio to receive fake ”end of the world“ bulletins. No wonder I’ve never had any respect around here. Poor Raymond Land, I’ve finally come to understand exactly how he feels.”
“You’d better sit down, Oswald, you’ve gone scarlet. You don’t want to have a heart attack the week before your retirement, eh? Everyone knows that your sense of humour petrified as soon as death’s dark caul wrapped itself around you. Besides, you know I only play jokes because I respect you. You’ll be sorely missed.” Bryant had secretly petitioned the Home Office to have Finch’s pension increased. “At least we’ve got young Giles Kershaw to take over the position. I was thrilled to nominate him in your place.”
“I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that. I’m afraid I turned down Kershaw’s application.”
“What on earth did you do that for?”
“In my opinion, he doesn’t have enough experience.”
“But he’ll be devastated, Oswald. The job was all but promised to him.”
“Then it will teach him not to be so ambitious,” said Finch. “These overbearing young graduates come along thinking the world owes them a living, when they have to pay their dues.”
This wasn’t like Oswald. Bryant assumed that the pathologist was out of sorts because the reality of his long- pending resignation had finally sunk in. Everyone knew he was happiest when he was elbow-deep in somebody’s chest. Physical and mental health problems had a way of crowding in when one’s purpose in life was removed, and Finch’s purpose was to provide resolutions to unfortunately truncated lives.
“You’re looking done in, old friend,” said Bryant gently. “Why don’t you go and put your feet up?”
“I don’t trust you when you’re nice to me,” Finch complained. “Besides, I can’t. It’s my last week, and the workload will be starting up again.”
“I haven’t seen any cases come in this morning.”
“That’s because the unit’s officially shut from today, so Faraday has been instructed to release me to the Met, to help out with their overload. That means I’ll be dealing with Sergeant Renfield, God help me. I daresay I’ll be kept busy right up until the moment of my departure.”
“Then you should have shared your work with Kershaw. I think I’d better have a talk with him. You’ve made a wrong call there, Oswald. He’s a bright lad and deserves to go far, even though that upper-class accent makes him sound as if he’s being strangled. He did a great job on that business with the Highwayman. I hope you won’t have disappointed him too much.”
“What about me? I was having a farewell party on Friday, but now there won’t be anyone here to see me off.”
“Never mind,” said Bryant jovially. “We’ll post your cake to Hastings.”
8
The morning sky was such an impossibly deep shade of blue, it seemed as if the earth’s atmosphere was barely thick enough to protect them from the cruel infinity of space. Madeline and Ryan sat on an outside table at La Vieille Ville and enjoyed the sun’s warmth on their faces. The scent of pomegranates and jasmine blossom hung in the warm air. In the kitchen behind them, Momo the chef was stirring the bouillabaisse he prepared for the village’s housebound residents once a week.
“I think I could live here.” Madeline pushed back her book and rested her chin on her hands. “Clean air, birds singing, lots of flowers, no litter. Do you like it?”
“There’s no-one to play with. We’re stuck here without a car. There’s nowhere to go. You’re always reading.” Ryan stirred the long spoon about in his ice cream. His complaints had become a refrain the past few days. During the winter season, the trains only called at the little station once an hour, turning every outing into a day trip, and day trips became expensive.
“You would like to go somewhere?”
She looked up and saw the young man who had rescued her handbag at the parade. He was wearing the same clothes, even down to the leather satchel at his side.
“There is a very beautiful building on Cap Ferrat, the Villa Rothschild. It has many gardens and a waterfall, and is open to the public. I have a car.” He pointed back at the blue open-topped Peugeot. “We could drive there.”
She saw the boy’s face brighten and realised how much he still missed his father. Ryan had seen a lot more of his good side, and was young enough to be able to forget the bad. Jack Gilby had portrayed himself as a hero to the boy, turning her into a villain in the process.
“Can we go, Madeline?” Ryan was already pushing his ice cream aside and rising from the table.
She regarded the young man with a cool eye, but he did not move beneath her critical gaze. “That’s a pretty underhand trick, Mr. Bellocq,” she told him as Ryan began tugging at her hand.
“Please, call me Johann.” He gave a tentative smile, anxious to be accepted.
As they drove, he thought back to the first time he had seen her, standing on the empty railway platform with a map and a backpack, the boy’s hand held tightly in hers. Her floral dress was English and cheap, her trainers disproportionately large for her thin bare legs. After he had spoken to her, he’d realised that she was everything he had ever wanted in a woman. Down here, away from the mountain villages, there were only blank-eyed American tourists and pompous English couples in ridiculous straw hats. The permanent residents were elderly and sour, too rich to concern themselves with being pleasant. This one-the boy called her Madeline-was different. There was an innocence, a vulnerability about her. She had been hurt by a man and left without money or confidence. She would not sneer at him as others had done. The boy was the key-he needed male companionship; otherwise, he would get on her nerves and drive her away from the village.
He had broken into the garage of a locked-up summer home in Rocquebrune and taken the Peugeot, carefully repairing the door behind him, knowing it would be weeks, possibly months, before anyone realised it was missing. The vacation villas of the wealthy provided him with everything he needed. From Marseilles to Monte Carlo there were thousands of poorly protected properties, and each fell under a different police jurisdiction. Half the time, the prefectures failed to maintain proper contact with one another. People travelled during the winter months, and the gendarmeries were short-staffed. It was the time of
He turned to smile at the boy in the passenger seat, sensing that he had already won the battle for her heart.
“I don’t know, he seems like some kind of exile. From the way he speaks English I suppose he’s French, but there’s another accent. Did I tell you he has pale green eyes? Hold on, I’m lighting a cigarette.” Madeline tucked the mobile under her right ear and dug for a throwaway lighter. Her one extravagance was a weekly phone call to her half sister in Northern Spain. The pair of them would have gone to visit, but Andrea had married a taciturn mechanic from Bilbao whose eyes had followed Madeline a little too closely when she last stayed there. “Well, he stands out, I suppose. There aren’t many people out on the streets down here, or in the houses by the look of it, and Jack’s settlement cheque hasn’t come through yet so I’m pretty much stuck here. Of course I look! I go to the bank in Beaulieu every other morning but there’s nothing.” She checked to make sure that Ryan was not within listening distance. “Well, I don’t know, he’s a typical Mediterranean type I suppose, rather good-looking, a little younger than me, and I have the feeling he’s just as lonely. Far from home. I know, of course I’ve got Ryan, but I need adult company as well. No, I don’t know if I’d go out with him, he hasn’t asked me. It’s just that-I always seem to be running into him. It’s a small village, there aren’t that many places you can go, but even so. I hardly ever see the same people twice in London. It just seems a bit odd that we keep bumping into each other.”
The problem was, she had forgotten how to be single. Besides, she had Ryan to look after, and the boy was already getting stir-crazy. She stepped back from the balcony into the neat little room, hemmed between the sheer
