‘How’s it going down there?’
Martha was leaning out of the window. She had put her hair up and was wearing a necklace of pale stones that showed off her tanned neck.
‘Hello!’ he said. ‘You two ready for dinner?’
‘Looks like you are,’ she said, and Kite didn’t know how to take the remark. It was almost as if she knew how important the meal was going to be in terms of his first engagement with Eskandarian.
‘Ali just got here,’ he said. ‘And his special friend.’
‘Special friend?’ Martha asked, lowering her voice to a stage whisper.
‘You’ll see,’ he said. ‘Come down and have a drink. I’ll explain everything.’
39
Kite did not get to sleep until four o’clock the following morning. The dinner finished by midnight, but Xavier kept him up by the pool, smoking the rest of the hash, working his way through half the duty-free Jim Beam, smoking cigarettes whenever he wasn’t drawing on a joint and singing Leonard Cohen songs to the quiet, shuttered neighbourhood. Martha and Jacqui had followed Eskandarian and Hana to bed, pleading tiredness after the long drive from Paris. The bodyguard – whose name turned out to be Abbas – had taken the room across the hall from Kite. Luc attended to what he called ‘some business’ in his office, then joined Rosamund upstairs. Kite had craved sleep, not solely so that he could avoid waking up with a hangover, but because he was genuinely tired. Yet he felt that he could not abandon Xavier, both out of a sense of friendship but also to avoid arousing his suspicion.
He had set an alarm for seven-thirty, having agreed with Strawson and Peele that he would appear at the house at eight o’clock on the first morning. He woke with an ice-pick headache and stumbled downstairs in search of food and water. He found Hélène in the kitchen with a basket of fresh pastries and several baguettes. She gave him a pain au chocolat and a bottle of Badoit. The pastry was still warm. Kite took them back to his room and changed into his running gear. Heading back downstairs, he passed Rosamund coming in the opposite direction.
‘You’re up early,’ she said.
Kite was aware that he looked bleary-eyed and probably stank of booze and cigarettes.
‘Yeah. Couldn’t get back to sleep,’ he said.
‘Really? But you were both so late to bed.’ She allowed Kite to absorb the fact that she had heard them coming in from the pool in the dead of night. ‘I thought I heard an alarm clock.’
Kite was hyped up and keen to reach the safe house but needed to find an adequate excuse to explain the alarm.
‘I stupidly forgot to switch it off,’ he said. ‘Woke me up ten minutes ago. I’m off for a run.’
‘Very American of you to go jogging, Lockie. But I suppose if it helps clear your head …’
Kite had never been able to work out whether or not Rosamund liked him. She had the habit he had noticed in posh English women of treating everyone she met with the same bland courtesy and studied warmth, as though people were best held at arm’s length and inspected carefully for traps and flaws.
‘I’m an elite athlete, Ros,’ he grinned. ‘Keep myself in prime condition.’
‘Lucky us,’ she replied. Kite trotted out of the door before the conversation could go any further.
It was hot, even at this hour. Kite stretched beneath the lime tree, casually looking up at Martha’s bedroom window. The shutters were open but her room was dark. He jogged down the drive, discovering the Audi Quattro parked in a lay-by on the far side of the gates. Abbas was already awake and seated in the driver’s seat. Kite proffered a friendly wave, but the bodyguard remained impassive as Kite ran past. He hoped that he would not get out of the car and watch where he was going. The map Kite had seen of the safe house put it six hundred metres down the long stretch of road beyond the Bonnard house. If Kite ducked in through the gates, Abbas might see him.
To Kite’s relief, the ground fell away more than he had anticipated. There were several houses jigsawed into the hillside and by the time he had arrived at the sign saying ‘Cassava’, Kite was well out of sight of the Audi. There was nobody else on the road, no engine noise to indicate an approaching vehicle. He stopped running, as if working out whether or not to continue downhill or to go back in the direction from which he had come, took one last glance behind him to make sure that he was not being followed, then hurried through the open gate.
The house was much smaller and more modern than the Bonnard villa. Olive trees and rosemary bushes lined a whitewashed wall separating the property from the road. A pale blue Peugeot was parked on the drive. Kite knocked on the door and stood in a shaded porch for no more than a few seconds before it was opened by Carl, who nodded him inside. He had a tea towel in his hand. The house smelled of fried bacon.
