‘Suits me,’ said Matt, taking her arm. ‘I want to have a closer butcher’s at Braganzi’s house on the way.’
After the day’s relentless heat, the night was warm and sultry. Compared with the stuffiness of the disco the air was sweet and smelt faintly of dew, wild thyme and the sea. The cicadas were cawing in the trees like frogs. Port-les-Pins glittered in its cove ahead of them, and every few seconds its northern jut of rock was bathed in a white beam from the lighthouse. Far above them everything in the sky, stars, planets, Milky Way, moon seemed to be out and twinkling eons away in their own heavens. And I’m so lit up they can probably see me twinkling away down here on earth too, thought Imogen. She was swaying slightly from drink and euphoria, but Matt steadied her, holding her above the elbow, gently stroking the inside of her arm with his thumb. He’s probably so used to caressing Cable, he does it automatically, she thought.
‘You’re too good to be true, can’t take my eyes off you,’ hummed Matt abstractedly.
They could see Braganzi’s house ghostly in the moonlight, its turrets thickly hung with creeper and silhouetted against the sky.
‘Is it really necessary to get to see him?’ said Imogen nervously. ‘Oughtn’t you to be relaxing on your holidays?’
‘All journalists are the same. Once they’ve got on to a scent they can’t let it alone, like dogs with a bitch on heat.’
They were only a hundred yards away now. There were two lights on upstairs with bars like lift gates over the windows. Perhaps one was the Duchess’s bedroom. Imogen imagined her brushing out her long dark hair with silver brushes with coronets on. She longed to open all the shutters like an Advent calendar and perhaps find the little baby asleep in one room or Braganzi plotting some dastardly crime in a black shirt and a white tie in another.
Outside the main gates, they could see a figure walking up and down with an Alsatian on a lead. The dog growled, the man stubbed out his cigarette and looked around. Imogen started to tremble.
‘Let’s have a look round the back,’ whispered Matt.
Fifteen foot high walls with another three feet of iron spikes, and rolled barbed wire on top of that, went almost all the way round the house, then divided at the back, running down to the sea and protecting Braganzi’s stretch of private beach.
‘The only way into the house is from the sea,’ whispered Matt, ‘and I bet that’s guarded night and day. He’s not taking any chances, is he? It’s worse than Colditz.’ He looked at the burglar alarms that clung like limpets to the walls of the house.
The brightness of the moonlight and the sweet heavy smell of tobacco plants and night-scented stocks made it all the more sinister.
‘Do let’s go,’ pleaded Imogen. She was sure the guard dogs could hear the frantic hammering of her heart. They were creeping close to the wall now. Suddenly she heard a tinny sound, as her foot hit something metallic.
‘Bugger,’ said Matt, bending down to look. ‘That’s probably an alarm.’
Next moment there was a frantic barking of dogs, and sounds of a door clanging.
‘They’ve rumbled us,’ gasped Imogen.
‘Come here,’ said Matt, and the next moment he’d pushed her down on the ground and was kissing her, tugging down the top of her dress, baring her shoulders. She could feel the rough scrub against her back, and taste the salt and brandy on his lips.
The growling grew closer and more ferocious.
Imogen wriggled in terror.
‘Lie still,’ muttered Matt, putting his full weight on her. ‘It’s a lovely way to go.’
Next moment the area was flooded with light. The dogs charged forward. It seemed they must rip them to pieces, and then suddenly the ferocious growling stopped not six inches away. Imogen’s French was not particularly fluent, but she could just make out Matt furiously asking what the bloody hell the guards thought they were doing as he pulled Imogen’s dress up over her shoulders.
The guards dragged the dogs off and made her and Matt get to their feet. Matt explained that they were holidaymakers who’d got separated from the rest of the party and decided to walk home, that they were staying at La Reconnaissance in Port-les-Pins. Then the guards frisked Matt and had a look at his wallet and his traveller’s cheques. Imogen nearly fainted when she saw that all four men had guns. They certainly took their time searching her, rough hands wandering into the most embarrassing places until Matt shouted at them to leave her alone.
Finally the guards conferred among themselves for a minute and then told them to be on their way, shouting something after them with a coarse laugh that Imogen didn’t understand. She could feel their eyes following her and Matt like eight prongs sticking into their backs.
‘Keep walking! Don’t look round,’ hissed Matt. ‘Thank Christ I didn’t have my passport on me, or they’d have rumbled us.’
After what seemed an eternity they rounded the corner, out of sight, with Port-les-Pins’s friendly lights winking just below them.
Imogen started to tremble violently.
Matt put his arms round her. ‘Darling, I’m terribly sorry. Are you all right?’
‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘I thought our last moment had come.’
He held her close to him and stroked her hair and her bare arms until the reassuring warmth of his body made her calmer.
‘But your reactions were like lightning,’ she stammered. ‘Pushing me on to the ground like that, then acting dumb and outraged like any old tourist caught in the act.’
Matt laughed and got a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket.
‘I always turn into a bumpkin at midnight. Anyway I’ve talked myself out of much worse trouble spots than that. All the same, I’m really sorry, I shouldn’t have put you through it.’
‘What did they say as we were leaving?’
‘Next time I brought a bird up on to the cliffs for a quick poke to choose somewhere else.’
‘So they really believed you?’
Matt shrugged his shoulders. ‘They won’t tomorrow when they check up with the hotel.’
He was walking along with an arm round her shoulders now, and suddenly she felt choked with happiness almost to the point of tears, as it dawned on her how much, in spite of the danger, she’d enjoyed being kissed by him, and feeling the muscular weight of his body on top of her. She was still trembling, but not from fear.
‘He must be terrified of something to wire a place up like that.’
‘Losing the Duchess, I guess,’ said Matt.
They had dropped down into the port now. Lights from the boats shivered in the black water like fallen earrings; the forest of masts swayed gently against the stars. In the distance they could hear the faint splash of the sea as it rolled over and over on the white sand.
They came to an all-night cafe along the front. A few fishermen were drinking morosely at the bar; a tired- looking waitress had kicked off her shoes and was polishing glasses as though in her sleep.
‘What we need is immediate first aid,’ said Matt, and as he was ordering black coffee and triple brandies for them both, he suddenly turned round and smiled at her. The effect of him that close was so mind-blowing that her knees gave way. She had to fumble for a bar stool and clamber on to it.
‘Will you bother to go and see Antoine’s contact tomorrow?’ she asked, as they got their drinks.
‘If that doesn’t lead to anything, I’ll scrub the whole thing and preserve my energies for squabbling with Mrs Edgworth.’ He took her hand and she hoped he couldn’t feel the tremor that shot through her. ‘Look, angel, I’m really sorry you were frightened. When one’s had scraps with Provos, and white Rhodesians, and even Amin’s henchmen, as I have in my time, Braganzi’s hoods seem pretty small fry, but I know how terrifying it was for you.’
‘Honestly, I’m fine now.’ She could hardly tell him she’d never felt so happy in her life, and she thought he was the nicest man she’d ever met, and if he’d taken her in his arms, and thrown her down on the heath again, she wouldn’t have minded if the entire criminal world formed a shrieking witch’s coven round them. So instead she said, ‘What were Amin’s henchmen like?’
Then he told her about some of the trouble spots he’d been to and they had several more brandies by which time the stars were fading and the horizon was lightening to a pale turquoise. They walked back past the Bar de la
