‘Sounds a bit like you,’ Xavier replied. ‘I must be a chip off the old block, Papa. We have a lot in common.’
Luc’s mood darkened; he did not like to lose face in front of his son. He stepped back inside without responding. Xavier remained in the garden smoking the last of his cigarette, making knowing eye contact with Kite. It occurred to him that Luc was in some way jealous of his son, resentful of his quick wit and essential good nature. How else to explain the thinness of his skin whenever Xavier dared to tease or defy him?
‘Lockie!’
Luc was summoning Kite back into the house. Xavier nodded at him, indicating that he should go inside.
‘I’ll be two minutes,’ he said. ‘Really need to fart.’
Kite was still smiling at this as he made his way into the office. Luc was seated behind a vast teak desk, looking every inch the cat who got the cream.
‘Not bad, huh?’
‘Not bad,’ Kite replied. ‘What a great place to work.’ He clocked a fax machine in the corner, a record player by the window. He knew from his conversations with Peele and Strawson that they had been keen to rig the study: the bookcases and light fixtures, the skirting boards and fax machine, would all have made ideal locations for hidden microphones.
‘Perhaps,’ Luc replied flatly. ‘I prefer not to work on vacation though it is not always possible. I want to enjoy myself, but there is always something to do. I haven’t seen Ali in a long time.’
Right on cue, Hélène, the housekeeper who had disturbed the Falcons, walked into the room. A sharp-eyed, diminutive woman of at least sixty-five, she embraced Luc like a long-lost son, remarked on his good health and asked if Kite was Xavier. Luc laughed and quickly cleared up the confusion, summoning Xavier into the study. Kite had the strange, disconcerting sense that Luc had been embarrassed by Hélène’s mistake, as though Kite were too low-born, too poorly turned-out ever to be considered the son of Luc Bonnard. Xavier duly shook Hélène’s hand, then left his father talking to her as he joined Kite in the last of the rooms on the ground floor, the sitting room in the south-east corner. He was bemoaning the ‘ancient’ TV and the ‘shitty’ video recorder when Kite heard the low rumble of an approaching car and the crunch of gravel under tyres. The shutters in the room were closed against the heat. Xavier opened them with a flourish just as Rosamund switched off the engine on the Citroën.
‘Friends, Romans, countrywomen!’ he shouted through the window. Kite was behind him, nonchalantly staring out at the Citroën and waiting for his first glimpse of Martha. She eventually emerged from the back seat wearing tight denim jeans and a crop top that showed off her stomach. She was as striking as he remembered. She gazed up in awe at the house, immediately taking out a camera and firing off several shots of the entrance, dappled light cutting through the branches of the lime tree and falling on her face. Kite was mesmerised by the way she moved, such confidence and grace it was as if she was deliberately taunting the world with her self-assurance.
‘You’re not watching television, are you, darling?’ said Rosamund peering through the open window.
‘Course not, Mum. We’re doing drugs.’
It wasn’t a taunt that Lady Rosamund found particularly funny. Kite and Xavier lingered in the room as she and Luc unloaded the luggage from the Citroën, carrying it into the house. Kite could hear Martha talking to them, her voice already having a hypnotic effect on him. There was a turntable beside the television. He flicked through a stack of vinyl records, mostly jazz and classical, covers showing Herbert von Karajan conducting the Berlin Philharmonic and Dizzy Gillespie with his cheeks blown out. Xavier went through the drawers of an old armoire, finding a pack of cards, a bottle of white spirit, a rusted tin full of old centimes.
‘This guy just died, right?’ he asked, holding up the Karajan. With this many people in the house, he was wondering when he would ever get a clear opportunity to move the lamp.
‘No idea. Want to see upstairs?’
‘Sure.’
They bumped into Luc in the hall, Jacqui’s voice audible on the terrace at the back of the house. Kite didn’t want to seem to be rushing to the first bedroom. He waited for Luc and Xavier to pass him, then followed them upstairs.
‘Where are we all sleeping?’ Xavier asked.
‘I’ll show you,’ Luc replied abruptly. He was clearly still smarting from Xavier’s remark on the terrace. ‘There’s a cabin at the bottom of the garden but it has no roof yet, so we will all have to be in the house. There’s plenty of room. Lockie, do you want to be in here?’
He indicated the closed door of the first bedroom at the top of the stairs. Xavier opened it and coughed at a small eruption of dust. Kite immediately spotted a lamp on a low wooden table beside the bed identical to the picture Carl had shown him. It wasn’t as big as he had imagined, and noticeably newer than some of the other furniture in the room. The Falcons had either bought it recently or reconstituted an existing lamp from the house.
‘This looks great,’ he replied, slinging his bag on the ground. He assumed that Luc and Rosamund would be in the master bedroom across the corridor on the southern side of the house.
‘Xavier, you will be in here.’ Luc indicated a large bedroom at the end of the passage overlooking the terrace. Kite knew that three empty bedrooms remained on the first floor and that there were two more above them in the attic. Would the girls be upstairs or would Eskandarian take that suite of rooms? If the Iranian was just across the corridor it would make switching the lamps much easier. Kite could
