They descended to the steep pebbled beach and strolled across banks of rank-smelling olivine seaweed, passing through pools of shadow cast by the cypress trees that grew behind the walls of secretive villas. Out of the sunlight, the air was chill.
“Who do you think lives there?” asked Ryan, jumping in an impossible attempt to see through the railings.
“Rich people, honey, no-one we’re ever likely to meet. They hide behind their high walls and don’t talk to people like us. Actually, I don’t think they’re here out of season. All the windows are shuttered, see?” ‘Then where are they?“ ’At other houses, in other countries.” ‘What do they need more than one house for?“ ’Good question. To get away from each other, I guess.” She thought about the world she had left behind. Back at the Elephant & Castle, Madeline’s days were split between her supermarket shifts, working afternoons in East Street Laundromat and evenings in The Seven Stars, a deafening bar popular with the area’s young professionals. Jack, her husband, changed oil and tyres at the local MOT centre, answering to a boy ten years younger than himself. The marriage had failed years earlier, largely because Jack could never control his drinking or his unfocussed anger, and after one remorseful fight too many she had pushed for a legal separation. Things had soured between them when her promised support payments failed to materialise.
When Jack’s brother turned up in the bar to tell her that she was a headcase, and accused her of trying to destroy their family, the escalation of hostility was so unnerving that she had grabbed Ryan from school, borrowed some cash from her mother and booked an easy Jet flight from the nearest Internet cafe. They had ended up in the South of France because a flight to Nice was affordable and available, but living here was almost as expensive as in London, and she was running low on funds.
All she could do was wait for the cheque to clear in her bank account, knowing that Jack would try to cancel it when he realised where she had taken Ryan. They had caught a train east, along the coast, looking for somewhere cheap to stay, and disembarked from the first tiny station they reached, the village of Eze-sur-Mer.
High above them-an hour’s walk into the Savaric cliffs- was the other Eze, an ancient
It was the perfect place to hide away, a town as lost from recollection as any oubliette.
Mme Funes, the sticklike proprietor of L’Auberge des Anges, had a permanently puckered look on her face that might have been due to excessive sunlight or general disapproval of the world. She wore a dead auburn wig that made her resemble the corpse of Shirley Bassey, and was always to be found lurking behind the bar within clawing distance of the cash register. Whenever Madeline addressed her, Mme Funes headed off any attempt to speak French with a barrage of tangled English that was presumably less offensive to her ears. Her grey-skinned husband possessed a similar air of resurrection, and had the habit of peering through the hatch of the kitchen like a surprised puppeteer whenever Madeline passed. His presence in the kitchen obviously had nothing to do with cooking, as
Before dinner, Madeline and her son risked further disapproving looks by venturing out to the little village park, where they sat watching distant cruise ships pass between San Remo and Nice like floating fairgrounds. The temperature, so long as you stayed in sunlight, remained at eighteen degrees centigrade. The flower beds were immaculately trimmed, banks of pink and saffron petals ruffled around the stems of attenuated palms in a colour combination that seemed to exist only in France. As distant church bells rang, a solemn procession passed their bench, something to do with the patron saint of bees. Fat paper statues were solemnly held aloft in displays of orange and yellow artificial flowers, a reminder that the customs of other countries would forever remain mysterious to outsiders.
Ryan watched in amazement as purple bougainvillea petals were scattered by a troop of surpliced choristers following a giant paper bee perched on a honeypot, in a blessing ceremony that appeared to dovetail artisanship and religion. Moments after the priests and children had been lost from view, Madeline realised that her handbag had been taken from beside her feet.
“It’s got everything in it,” she said, scanning the surrounding grass, “my passport, my paperback, all our remaining money.”
“Why would you do that?” Ryan accused.
“I didn’t trust the hotel, I thought it would be better with me. Help me look.”
They were still searching the ground when she raised her eyes and saw the bag held in his tanned fist. He gave a tentative smile, and despite his white teeth, she had an impression of darkness. She thought perhaps he was a delivery man, because he wore a scuffed brown leather satchel across his chest.
“You are looking for this?” he asked in good English. He was younger than she, but only by a year or two, perhaps twenty-eight. Mediterranean colouring, black cropped hair, black eyebrows almost touching green eyes, curiously baby-faced. He was slender, dressed in jeans, a navy blue bomber jacket and pristine white sneakers, entirely unthreatening, yet there was something studied in the way he regarded her.
“Thank you, I thought I’d lost it.” She took back the bag and instinctively drew Ryan to her side. The park had emptied now, and the evening felt suddenly cooler.
“It looks very nice here, very safe, but you must still be careful,” he told her. “Thieves come over the border from Italy, and there are Gypsies. They will take anything, especially during a saint’s parade.”
“I’ll remember that-‘
“Johann. My name is Johann Bellocq.” His smile faded, and he turned, walking away as abruptly as he had appeared.
“Let’s go and eat.” She patted Ryan on the head, but looked back at Johann Bellocq as they crossed the deserted main road.
6
The sky above the unit glowed with an eerie sulphurous light. Behind the cardinal tiles of Mornington Crescent station, the detectives had arrived for the start of a dark, miserable week.
“We’re a public service; you can’t just shut us down willy-nilly,” complained Bryant, cracking his briar pipe down on the mantelpiece in an effort to unbung it.
“I’m not doing this out of caprice,” Land told him. “Your IT chap, Mr. Banbury, wants to upgrade the PCU’s computer system and link it to the Met’s area-investigation files. Apparently it’s not going to cost anything because he’s downloading some dubious piece of software to do so.” He eyed the mountainous stacks of books bending Bryant’s shelves. “It all sounds very dodgy, but I harbour a fantasy about you running a paper-free office.”
Bryant blew hard into his pipe bowl, scattering bits of burnt tobacco onto Land’s head. “Come off it, Raymondo, you know there’s no such thing. Be honest, you just fancy a few days off with your feet up. I need another decent case for my biography. Just think how disappointed my readers would be to find an entry saying February nineteenth, all murder investigations stopped due to Acting Head Raymond Land’s need for a lie-down.”
“That’s another thing I’ve been meaning to speak to you about,” said Land. “Your biography. I read your account of the business you’ve chosen to call
“What were you doing reading my notes?” asked Bryant, appalled. “That’s a work in progress.”
“Too right it is. Murderous barbers and starving tigers? You’ve made most of it up. You can’t go around doing that.”
“I may have ameliorated some parts for dramatic effect,” Bryant admitted, “a bit of creative licence. It would have been a rather boring case history otherwise.”
“But you’re passing it off as fact, man! All right, it’s true that a painting at the National Gallery was vandalised,
