45
The reason for Hana’s sudden departure became clear the next day.
Kite made it to his morning meeting just before nine o’clock. Over lukewarm coffee, Peele and Carl told him that Eskandarian’s former fiancée had been invited to lunch by Luc and Rosamund. When Hana had found out, she had reacted angrily and announced that she was leaving. Carl had heard the entire argument on the lamp microphone. Kite was relieved to have it confirmed that it had nothing to do with what had happened between Hana and Xavier, an incident which appeared to have escaped the attention of the otherwise eagle-eyed Falcons keeping watch on the house.
Peele also revealed that Bijan was a bona fide member of a large Iranian exile group in Europe targeting regime figures in France. Kite was pleased that he had not been duped but shocked to discover that the seemingly benign Bijan was potentially a man of violence. He was instructed to go back to the villa and to proceed as normal.
‘You did brilliantly in the office yesterday, but we still need hard information,’ Peele told him. ‘Photographs. Documents. Anything and everything you can get your hands on. It might be impossible. You might get a window of opportunity. Improvise.’
Kite made it back in time to sneak into Martha’s room. They had slept apart the previous night, but she had left a note on his bed telling him to join her when he got back from his run. They made love for the second time, silently and deliciously, Kite covering Martha’s mouth as they moved, mindful that Jacqui was still asleep next door.
Just after midday he went downstairs to discover that Eskandarian’s former fiancée had already arrived. Her name was Bita. She was a Frenchwoman of Iranian descent in her late thirties accompanied by two small children: a boy of nine named José and a little girl of three called Ada who clung to her mother’s side at all times. Bita’s Catalan husband had not come with her. She arrived in a hire car from Nice airport, having flown from Barcelona that morning. The other guests, appearing at intervals over the next hour, were a rotund, smartly dressed Frenchman in his fifties named Jacques and a younger French couple – Paul and Annette – who had two children of similar ages to José. Jacques worked as a banker in Paris, Paul in the film industry. Annette was a housewife. Kite had been exposed to the looking-glass world of espionage for long enough to suspect that at least one of them could be an intelligence officer investigating Eskandarian’s alleged links to Lockerbie. On this basis, he had a responsibility to obtain as much information about the guests as possible. That meant finding out how they knew Eskandarian, what they wanted from him, why they had come to the villa, if they were friends of Luc’s, of Rosamund’s – or associates of Eskandarian’s from Paris in the late 1970s. Kite decided to use the Walkman to record whatever conversations took place in the living room during the afternoon. The batteries supplied by BOX 88 would last up to eight hours. It was just a case of going up to his room, inserting the blank cassette provided by the Falcons, bringing the Walkman downstairs concealed among various personal belongings – a copy of Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines, a pair of swimming goggles, a bottle of suntan lotion – and leaving all of them amid the general detritus which piled up during the day on a table near the doors to the terrace. Rosamund and Hélène tended to clear up at the end of every day, but Kite reckoned the Walkman would be left undisturbed until at least six o’clock. The only danger lay in someone picking it up, either to use it or to search for a tape. Xavier often did this when he couldn’t find an album he was looking for or if he had left his own Walkman down by the pool.
Strawson and Peele would also want pictures. Kite had been taking photographs with the Olympus Trip more or less constantly since he arrived in France and snapped half a dozen shots of the group as they gathered for lunch on the terrace. None of them seemed to mind having their picture taken. Martha was also busily taking photographs, so much so that Rosamund jokingly asked if they were both thinking about taking it up as a career. Kite finally understood why Peele had been so interested in this aspect of Martha’s behaviour: BOX were planning somehow to get a look at her photographs once they had been developed, either by asking Kite to obtain them or perhaps by intercepting the rolls of film at whatever chemist or laboratory Martha used to have them developed. Even if Martha never discovered that her pictures had been purloined and copied in such a way, the thought made him queasy. He made a note to tell Peele that her belongings were off limits, even though he knew that such a request would likely fall on indifferent ears.
When the guests had first arrived and were talking on the terrace with glasses of rosé and white wine, Kite had concentrated his attention on Bita and Eskandarian, knowing that BOX would want to know more about their relationship. There was clearly a deep fondness between them, both in the way that they spoke to one another and in their body language. Eskandarian was enormously attentive towards her children, but José quickly grew bored of the grown-up talk and tried to encourage his mother to go for a walk with him in the garden. Sensing an opportunity, Kite offered to play with José and took him down to the pool, where Jacqui and Martha were doing their best to avoid joining the lunch party until the last possible moment.
‘I want to swim!’ José cried out in French when he saw the pool. The two girls instantly stood up from their
