Luc followed Rosamund from Vence and they reached the villa only minutes apart. Jacqui immediately went to bed. She hugged her mother but not her father. She said nothing to Xavier but embraced Kite in the hall before going upstairs. Martha could see that she was needed and went with her, kissing Kite goodnight. Xavier found a bottle of red wine in the kitchen and was about to take it out to the pool when his mother told him that it was late, that everybody needed to get some rest and should go to their respective rooms. Kite and Xavier were suddenly children again and did as they were told. Xavier embraced him on the first-floor landing and held him for a long time.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. The apology sliced through Kite like a cut to his eyes. ‘It was meant to be fun. It was meant to be a good holiday for you …’
Kite could hardly stand what he was hearing.
‘It’s not your fault,’ he said, stepping back and holding Xavier by the shoulders. He looked at him with as much sincerity as he could find. ‘Nobody knew this was going to happen. We’ll all get over it. We’ll look after each other.’
‘I’ve never seen a dead body before.’
‘Me neither,’ said Kite. Even this was a lie. He thought of his father laid out on a stretcher at the hotel, a sheet covering his face. The eleven-year-old Kite had pulled it back and seen the cuts on his cheeks, the skin chalk white, all the laughter and vitality withdrawn from his eyes.
‘See you in the morning.’ Xavier went into his room. ‘Poor Ali. Mum’s worried sick. What do you think they’ll do to him?’
‘I dread to think,’ Kite replied.
He slept deeply, woke up before seven, put on his running shoes, a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and went out outside. He still had the roll of film and took it with him. This time there was no Rosamund drinking English Breakfast tea in the kitchen, no Abbas parked at the end of the drive. Kite jogged down the road, checked that nobody had followed him, then ducked into the garden of the safe house.
The Peugeot was not parked outside. Kite stood in the shaded porch and knocked gently on the door. Nobody answered. He remembered the smell of fried bacon on his first visit to the house, barely a week earlier. There was no breeze, only the trilling of cicadas and birdsong. The olive trees lining the whitewashed wall were perfectly still. Kite knocked again, this time more loudly. Again there was no response.
He stepped towards the closest window and looked inside. No shoes in the hall, no keys on the table or jackets on hooks. He walked round to the living-room window, stood on a concrete ledge and peered through a gap in the curtains. The room looked as if it had been cleaned. The cushions on the sofa and armchairs were plumped up and the books on the coffee table divided into two neat piles. Peele and Carl had gone. Kite was sure of it. There was nobody home.
He returned to the front door and knocked again. He walked around to the back of the house, looked through the window and saw that the kitchen had also been thoroughly cleaned. It was like changeover day on a summer rental; the existing tenants had left, a maid had been in to wash the sheets and hoover the carpets, a new family would be arriving later in the day.
Kite jogged back to the house. He stopped at the gates and saw that the chalk mark had been removed from the wall. He felt utterly isolated, still in a state of shock about Abbas’s murder and the kidnapping of Eskandarian, and now bewildered by the vanishing act of BOX 88. Peele had not written him a note, made a call to the house nor given Kite any indication that he was clearing out. Perhaps this was the way it would always be. At some point in the near future, when it was safe to do so, Peele would explain why he had left the safe house so quickly and without warning. It was undoubtedly because his mission had failed. He and Carl were most likely already on their way to The Cathedral, ready to face the music.
It was decided that Martha and Kite would fly home from Nice at lunchtime. Back at the house, with Luc eating breakfast alone and his children still asleep in their beds, Kite packed up his belongings and left a fifty-franc note in his room as a tip for Alain and Hélène. The Nintendo had been left on his bed, like an admission of defeat. Kite wondered what to do about the lamp in the attic, the ghetto blaster by the pool. He assumed that someone from BOX 88 would come to the house and deal with them as soon as the coast was clear. He felt that they were not his responsibility.
The police came as Martha and Kite were leaving by taxi for the airport. Three cars, six men, no sirens. Kite knew that they intended to arrest Luc. Martha was oblivious to the accusations against him and assumed that the police had come to the house merely to further their investigation into the awful events of the previous evening. They sat in the back of the cab holding hands, talking about Jacqui and Xavier, about who may or may not have been responsible for kidnapping Ali. Kite was of course obliged to feign ignorance, to claim that he had no more idea who was behind the attack than she did. He did not feel bad lying to her; he did not want to expose Martha to any more suffering. What troubled him was not being able to discuss his
