by Philip Kerr
‘Tony Blair didn’t murder any of my friends,’ said Colm. ‘And you still didn’t answer my question.’
‘It’s not a proper question for a day like this. We’re supposed to be celebrating, not opening old wounds. But for the record, I’ve never murdered anyone.’
‘If you say so. But it certainly doesn’t sound like you’re denying that you were a Brit soldier in Ireland.’
‘I’m not denying anything.’
‘Then it is true. That you were part of an occupying force in my country.’
‘Please, Colm,’ I said. ‘Let’s not fall out over this. If you want to pick a fight with me then do it later, preferably outside, and I’ll gladly accommodate you, all right? But not now, old son.’
‘No one is falling out over anything. I asked you a civil question, Mr Irvine. The least you can do is to give me a civil answer.’
‘You were hardly being civil when you refused to shake my hand, Colm.’ I held it out once more. ‘Look. There it is again. So, what do you say? Shall we let bygones be bygones, for John and Orla’s sake? After all this day is not about the past, it’s about the future.’
‘Bullshit.’
Colm looked at my hand for a moment and then smacked it away, which transformed my hand into a fist; the next second he had caught me neatly by the wrist and held the fist in front of his face, as if it had been a crucial and damning piece of evidence in a court of law.
‘Go ahead,’ he said, coolly. ‘Punch me. It’s what you want to do, isn’t it, soldier?’
‘I think it’s what you’d like me to do,’ I said pulling my wrist from his wiry fingers. ‘To prove a point to yourself, or perhaps to some of these other people. But you’re not going to do that, Colm. I won’t let you.’
By now several other guests had seen something of this incident and moved to separate us; but for some reason – I’m not sure how – Tadhg McGahern got it into his head that I had threatened his cousin, and it wasn’t long before I was being painted by the wedding’s Irish contingent as the old colonial villain of the piece. Later on, I tried to explain what had happened to Orla, but she wasn’t having any of it; naturally she sided with her chimp of a brother. Blood is thicker than water, although in Northern Ireland it’s more often just thick.
Now, as I watched the television footage of Orla’s body being lifted into a panelled forensic van I heard the reporter’s voice utter some nonsense about how following her tragic murder ‘tributes’ had been paid to ‘the beautiful actress’ by some of the people who worked with her. Then the doors of the van closed on Orla and she was driven swiftly away to her autopsy, which hardly bore thinking of with a woman as stunningly beautiful as she had been. That much was true at any rate. You could hardly blame John for marrying a woman like Orla – especially at his age; at the wedding John had been sixty-two and Orla just thirty-one. There were trophy wives and then there was Orla Mac Curtain, who had been nothing less than the FA Cup.
CHAPTER 2
The next morning I awoke feeling better than perhaps I deserved. I showered, put on a tracksuit, went for a run along the towpath, ate breakfast and tried to work up some enthusiasm for working on my novel. The day was cool and overcast, perfect conditions for standing at my desk; like Erasmus, Thomas Jefferson and Winston Churchill I prefer to stand while I’m writing; the human body is not best served by sitting on your arse all day. But whatever feelings of optimism I possessed about the day ahead lasted only until the moment when Peter Stakenborg telephoned.
‘The bastard’s only gone and written an article about John and us in today’s Daily Mail,’ he said.
‘Who has?’ I asked dimly.
‘Mike fucking Munns, that’s who. Two whole pages of crap that includes several less than choice remarks I made over lunch yesterday that I assumed were made in confidence. About Orla. About John. About his books.’
‘I should have realized he’d do something like this,’ I said. ‘Once a reptile always a reptile. You know, I wondered why he went to the lavatory so often. He must have been taking notes.’
‘Cunt. What amazes me is that he was sober enough to write a piece like that when he got home. Me, I was wasted. I spent the whole evening in front of the telly sleeping it off. Where does he get his stamina?’
‘That’s part of the old Fleet Street training. Even the worst of them can knock out three hundred words on almost any subject when they’re pissed. Some of those hacks write better drunk than when they’re sober.’
‘This is considerably more than three hundred words,’ said Peter. ‘More like nine hundred.’
‘Look, I’ll call you back when I’ve read it.’
‘Do it on my mobile, will you? I’ve got a caller display on that; there are several people I’m going to try to avoid for the rest of the day. Hereward for one. My describing a list of people who might have a reason to murder John himself isn’t likely to make me popular with him or John’s publisher. I was rather hoping VVL might read my own book with some favour. But there’s fat chance of that now, I should say.’
‘Maybe it’s not as bad as you think it is, Peter.’
‘Oh, it bloody is, Don. They’ve even printed pictures of us all at the atelier. I’ll kill that bastard the next time I see him. Read it and weep. All right. Catch you later.’
I put on some clothes and walked around the corner to a newsagent just off the High Street. Putney was a bottleneck of traffic, as always; and yet the river – wider than a ten-lane freeway and running from one end of the city to the other – was almost empty. To that extent London was like a body in which the veins and arteries were hopelessly clogged except for the aorta. I bought all of the newspapers and some cigarettes, which made nonsense of the run earlier on but there we are, I need the occasional ciggie when I’m working on a book. Orla’s murder and John’s disappearance was on the front pages of nearly all of them except the Financial Times and the Guardian. The Sun’s headline brought a half-smile to my lips: HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM. It’s not the half-naked girl on Page Three that sells that paper – not for many years; it’s the anonymous guys who write the headlines. As an anonymous writer myself I always had a soft spot for those guys.
I bought a coffee from a Starbucks and carried it and the papers back to my flat where, after glancing quickly over the other articles, I finally read Mike Munns’s story. The purpose of lunch the previous day was now plain to me: Munns had needed some quotes to spice up his piece, which was every bit as hurtful as Peter Stakenborg had said it was – worse, if you were John Houston, Stakenborg or Philip French. I came out of it marginally better than they did. Oddly the thing that irritated me most was that Munns had attributed Somerset Maugham’s famous quote about Monte Carlo to me; it looked as if I’d tried to pass it off as my own, and since the subtext of the article was that I was the ‘Machiavellian’ mastermind behind a kind of grubby fraud in which a sweatshop of poorly paid, ruthlessly exploited authors wrote all of Houston’s books in order that he might pass them off as his own work, I saw myself portrayed as a sort of literary forger, like Thomas Chatterton or, more recently, Clifford Irving. It mattered not a bit to Munns or to the Mail that over the years, in the many interviews he conducted with the press – including the Daily Mail – John had always been perfectly open about his modus operandi. And after all, what was so wrong with the idea of a writing factory? Hadn’t painters like Van Dyck and Rubens kept ateliers where other artists skilled in painting landscapes or children or animals were employed to fill in the blank spaces on some of those enormous canvases? And like Andy Warhol, didn’t Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst do something very similar to what Van Dyck and Rubens had done? Why in the minds of critics – and the critics had been very critical of John Houston, the author – was it all right for a painter to rely on assistants but not all right for an author to do the same? Would War and Peace have been any less of a great novel if today it were to be revealed that Tolstoy had employed another writer to pen that account of the Battle of
Borodino in exactly the same way that Eugène Delacroix employed Gustave Lassalle-Bordes to help him paint some of his larger murals? I doubted it very much.
But then I would say that, wouldn’t I?
I called Peter Stakenborg back and tried to reassure him the article wasn’t nearly as bad as he had imagined it was; he wasn’t convinced; so I called Mike Munns and left a one-word message on his cellphone that Samuel Beckett informs us was the trump card of young wives. Then I stood in front of my standing desk, switched on my computer and tried to forget the whole wretched affair.
The thing is I feel more alert while I’m standing; when I’m sitting behind my other desk I am too easily distracted by the internet – the PC on the standing desk isn’t connected, so there’s no temptation to send an email, to pay a visit to YouTube or Twitter, or make a bet on the William Hill website. Writing is all about the elimination of distractions. I’m always amazed how some writers have music playing in the background. Like anything else, a standing desk takes a little bit of getting used to; you have to learn not to lock out your knees and to spread the weight between both legs; but there’s no doubt that I feel much more alert while I’m standing. Above my desk there’s a picture of Ernest Hemingway typing something while he’s standing up: the typewriter is balanced on top of a music case which is on top of a set of shelves, and so strictly speaking there’s no desk involved, but it always reminds me that a good writer ought to be able to write anywhere. A standing desk hasn’t made me the writer Papa was, but then again it hasn’t done me any harm either: I couldn’t fall asleep at my desk when I was standing up or browse any online porn. Being on your feet all day – like a beat copper – burns calories, too, and there are already enough lard-arse writers around as it is.
At lunchtime I wandered out onto the High Street and picked up a sandwich from Marks & Spencer; after eating it I had a short nap in my Eames chair, and then continued work until around 4.30. The phone did not ring again until almost six o’clock, which was a bit of a surprise; it was much more of a surprise to discover that it was the cops who were calling me.
‘Monsieur Irvine?’
‘Speaking.’
‘My name is Vincent Amalric and I am a chief inspector of police with the Sûreté Publique in Monaco. My Commissioner, Paul de Beauvoir, has ordered me to investigate the murder of Madame Orla Houston. I believe you knew her quite well, yes?’
It was a masculine-sounding voice, masculine and very French; every few seconds there was a short pause and a quiet inhalation of breath, and I guessed he was smoking a cigarette. Cops should always smoke when they’re working on a case; not because it makes them look cool or anything but because a cigarette is the perfect baton for conducting an interrogation; it gives the smoker pause for thought and a pregnant pause for disbelief, and if all else fails you can always blow smoke in someone’s face or press it into your suspect’s eye.
‘I knew her.’
‘Tell me, monsieur – and forgive me for asking this so soon in our conversation – but has John Houston spoken to you recently?’
‘No, not for several weeks.’
‘An email, perhaps? A text?’
‘Nothing. I’m sorry.’
‘So. I am arriving in London on Saturday. My sergeant and I will be staying at Claridge’s.’
‘Very nice for you both. I can see that life as a policeman in Monaco has its rewards.’
‘Claridge’s is a nice hotel? Is this what you mean, monsieur?’
‘It’s probably the best hotel in London, Chief Inspector. Not quite as opulent as the Hermitage, perhaps, or the Hôtel de Paris, but probably as good as it gets in London.’
‘Bon. In which case I feel there could be no problem in me inviting you there for dinner next Monday evening. I was hoping that you might help me with my inquiries.’
I could have pointed out that this was once a euphemism in English crime reporting – a phrase that implied a degree of guilt – but I felt this was hardly the time to help Chief Inspector Amalric with the subtleties of his English, which anyway was better than my French. Besides, the phrase seemed almost to have disappeared; these days the Metropolitan Police just arrested you and then tipped off the newspapers.
‘Certainly, Chief Inspector. At what time?’
‘Shall we say eight o’clock?’
‘Fine. I’ll be there. By the way, how did you get my telephone number?’
‘Your colleague Mike Munns gave us your contact details. We saw the article in today’s newspaper and spoke to him only a short while ago. He was most helpful. He said that if we spoke to anyone in London we should make sure that we spoke to you, since you have known Monsieur Houston the longest?’
‘Longer than Mike Munns, yes.’
‘And longer than his late wife, too?’
‘Oh yes. I’ve known John for more than twenty years. Since before he became a published author.’
‘Then I have just one more question for the present, sir. Is it possible you have some idea where Monsieur Houston might have gone?’
‘I’ve been thinking about that. I know he’d been working on a book in Switzerland but he didn’t think to tell me where and I didn’t ask. He had a largish boat, as I’m sure you know. The Lady Schadenfreude. And a plane at Mandelieu. A twin-engined King Air 350. With a plane like that he could have gone anywhere in Europe in a matter of hours. In fact I know he used to fly it quite regularly here to London.’
‘The boat is still in its berth in the Monte Carlo harbour. And the plane is still at the airfield. No, we believe Monsieur Houston must have left Monaco by road. A car has been taken from his garage.’
‘Which one?’
‘The Range Rover.’
I smiled. Got that one right. ‘Okay. I’ll see you on Monday. Goodbye.’
‘Goodbye, monsieur.’
Goodbye. Easy. I never quite bought that last line in Chandler’s The Long Goodbye: ‘I never saw any of them again – except the cops. No way has yet been invented to say goodbye to them.’ What does that mean? People give the cops the brush-off all the time; and if anyone was equal to the task of doing it for real it was surely John Houston; the man was very resourceful. Still, Chandler’s is a great title. One of the best I’d say. That and The Big Sleep. Sometimes a good title helps you to write the novel. I wasn’t at all happy with the title of my own novel. I wasn’t happy with the beginning. And I certainly wasn’t happy with the hero – he was too much like me: dull and pompous with a strong streak of pedantry. John was always picking me up for that when, earlier in our working relationship, he read a draft I’d written for one of his own books:
‘As usual you’ve made the hero much too professorial, Don. He’s a bit cold. Not likeable at all. You need to go back and make us like him more.’
‘I don’t know how to do that.’
‘Sure you do, old sport. Give him a pet dog. Better still let him find an abandoned kitten. Or have him call his mother up. That always works. Or maybe there’s a kid he knows who he gives a few bucks to now and then. People like that. Shows he’s got a heart.’
‘It’s a bit obvious isn’t it?’
‘This isn’t Nicholson Baker, Don. We don’t sweat the small stuff. We tell it how it is in broad strokes, and people can take it or leave it. I’m not much interested in the finer aspects of characterization any more than I am in winning the Man Booker Prize. We’re not writing for Howard Jacobson or Martin Amis.’
‘But he’s supposed to be a ruthless killer, John.’
‘That’s right.’
I shrugged. ‘Which would imply a degree of unlikeability. Did people like the Jackal in Forsyth’s novel?’
‘I did,’ said John. ‘The Englishman, as Freddie more often calls him, is bold and audacious. Yes, he is cool and self-contained and a cold-blooded killer. But he also has style and considerable charm. Remember that French bird he shags when he’s on the run. When he’s with her he’s a bit like James Bond. Smooth and full of smiles. Ch
arm will take a character a long way. Even when he’s also a bastard. Until I fix them your characters tend to lack charm, Don. A bit like you.’
He chuckled at his little joke.
‘It’s there – the old army officer charm – but you keep it hidden, old sport. It’s buried deep along with a lot of other shit. Look, Don, if we’re going to spend three hundred pages with this guy we have to like him a bit. If you write a biography of Himmler you at least have to find him interesting, right? So, it’s the same with this guy in the novel. He has to be someone you might want to have a beer with. That’s the key to any successful character in fiction, Don. No matter who he is, no matter what he’s done, he has to be someone you might want to sit with in a bar. If it comes to that it’s also how you get elected to be the President of the United States, or the Prime Minister of Great Britain. For that to happen you have to look like someone to have a drink with.’
‘Right.’
‘Remember what we did with Jack Boardman?’
Then there were only two, but Jack Boardman became the hero of six novels, of which the most recent was The Second Archangel: A Jack Boardman Story.
‘Yes, I think so.’
‘We based him on your best friend at Sandhurst. What was his name? Piers something or other? The one who was a lieutenant in the Parachute Regiment.’
‘Piers Perceval.’
‘That’s right. I asked you what it was you liked about Piers and we drew up a list of all the things that made him seem like such a good bloke. And then I suggested you stick to that when you were writing about Jack Boardman. I told you to always be asking yourself, what would Piers have done in a situation like this? If Piers slept with this woman what would he say to her afterward? If Piers was going to tell a joke what kind of joke would it be? That kind of thing. It’s how we put Jack Boardman together.’
