‘What kind of things are they saying?’ he asked.
‘You can’t know what you shouldn’t know,’ Peele replied. ‘If I tell you what Eskandarian is concerned about, the sorts of things Luc is saying on the telephone, we’d be leading the witness. It’s best you’re left in the dark. You’ll behave more naturally that way.’
‘What’s Luc go to do with it?’ Kite asked.
He recognised the sudden look of regret on Peele’s face. He had seen it before, at Alford, when Peele had told him that Lionel Jones-Lewis was refusing to recommend Kite for a place at Oxford.
‘We’re now looking at Xavier’s father just as much as we’re looking at Ali. That’s all I can say.’
Kite was stunned. ‘At Luc? Why?’
Peele turned the palms of his hands towards Kite, indicating that he had just asked the sort of question he had been told was out of bounds.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said. ‘You’re doing a great job.’
‘I don’t want to do a great job if it gets Xavier’s dad in trouble,’ he said.
Peele deliberately, and very obviously, switched the direction of the conversation.
‘We don’t have much time,’ he said. ‘Coffee?’
‘Of course I worry about it.’
‘If Luc’s father gets into trouble with the law, that’s his fault, not yours.’
‘In trouble how?’
‘Coffee?’ Peele repeated.
‘Fine. Black. Two sugars. Yes, please.’
Kite was still slightly out of breath from the run, but not as exhausted nor as hungover as he had felt on the first morning. There was a bottle of Volvic on the table in front of him. He drank two glasses in quick succession while Peele fetched him a mug of coffee from the kitchen. It was lukewarm. He hadn’t added any sugar. Kite drank it without complaint, remembering Xavier’s stoned, drunken words on the first night: Luc Bonnard is a good man, not a bad man. Daddy never puts a foot wrong. My father does business with Ali Eskandarian.
‘So, Lockie!’ Peele rubbed his hands together expectantly. ‘What’s the news across the road?’
Kite immediately told him about Abbas’s trip to New York. Peele wrote down the flight details, the names of the men mentioned in the letter and the information about Karrubi’s hotel. He checked the spelling of ‘Berberian’ with Kite and said he would pass the information to Rita.
‘Isn’t Ali supposed to be in Lisbon at the end of August?’ Kite asked.
‘Absolutely,’ Peele replied. ‘Either he’s going to have what looks like a last-minute change of heart and get on a flight to New York or Abbas is going alone.’
‘You think he could be scouting the place out, meeting these people to discuss the next steps?’
Peele indicated that he didn’t want to speculate, but Kite judged from his reaction that he was concerned about what Abbas was up to. He finished his coffee and, prompted to move on, recounted the meeting with Bijan, relating in as much detail as possible the content of their conversation, as well as Bijan’s manner and appearance. Peele listened very carefully, occasionally taking notes on a lined yellow pad, but appeared to be less interested in Bijan’s views on life in modern Iran than in his remarks concerning the Bonnard party’s movements around Cannes.
‘He said that he’d seen you eating lunch? Were you aware of anyone watching you?’
‘No. I assumed he’d somehow recognised Eskandarian on the beach and followed us into town, or vice versa. Maybe he saw us in the window of the restaurant and waited.’
‘And he was alone?’
‘As far as I’m aware. He said he lived in Cannes. That France was now his home. He implied that he was part of an opposition to the ayatollah, or whoever is in charge now.’ Peele said ‘Rafsanjani’ and underlined something on the pad. ‘He said that he lived in fear of his life. That his friends had been abducted and tortured by associates of Ali Eskandarian.’
Peele looked up. ‘He used that exact wording?’
Kite paused and tried to remember precisely what Bijan had told him.
‘No. It was more of a general attack on Ali. He’s friends with the Iranian government, therefore he’s responsible for making this guy’s life miserable.’
Peele crossed something out. ‘Go on,’ he said.
‘He mentioned that somebody, an Iranian general who worked for the shah, had been assassinated in Paris, his brother as well.’
‘Gholam Oveissi,’ Peele replied instantly. ‘That was years ago.’
‘Yes. Him.’ Kite had grown so accustomed to the depth of Peele’s memory that he was unsurprised he knew Oveissi’s name. ‘He said the Americans or the British tipped off the Iranians who carried out the assassinations. Is that true?’
‘Highly unlikely,’ Peele replied. ‘On what basis?’
It didn’t look as though he expected Kite to have an answer to this question. Peele turned a page on the pad as a telephone rang upstairs. Kite had yet to see any of the rooms on the upper level of the house. He knew that one of them had been turned into a listening post.
‘Boss?’
It was Carl, shouting from the top of the stairs. Peele called out: ‘Lockie’s here, is it urgent?’ and apologised to Kite for the interruption.
‘Sorry,’ Carl replied. ‘Didn’t realise. I’ll tell her to call later.’
Peele rolled his eyes and indicated that Kite should resume. Kite longed for a cigarette but knew that he couldn’t return from his run stinking of smoke.
‘Bijan said he was worried about another guy in France,’ he said. ‘I can’t remember his name off the top of my head. Another Iranian who worked for the shah. Surname sounded a bit like “baksheesh”.’
‘Shahpour Bakhtiar?’ Peele summoned the name with the same speed with which he had retrieved Gholam Oveissi from the vault of his memory. ‘Yes, he’s a marked man. Why do you think he was telling you all this?’
Kite shrugged. He could feel the sweat on his back cooling beneath his shirt. ‘I dunno. It was like he was lonely or wanted somebody harmless to have a rant at. At the end he gave me his number.’
Peele grinned. ‘Oh good.’
Kite reached into the back pocket of his shorts
