‘Frances, it wasn’t an accident. They killed him.’
‘Yes…’ Blood flushed her cheeks, and she stared at herself in the driving mirror. Embarrassed, she opened the door and stepped out, then bent down and said to me: ‘Yes, they killed him. But I helped them, Paul. I set it up for them …’
37
A Plan of Action
I FOUND FRANCES by the telescope, pacing to and fro under the trees, fingers tearing a pine cone she had picked from a branch. The black-clad women were walking towards the church, bereaved wives and mothers making their annual visit to the Virgin of La Garoupe.
Frances stared irritably at the women, unable to face this chorus of the undead. Aware of her blonde hair and tailored trouser-suit, she pulled at her buttons and scuffed through the gravel to the telescope. Leaning against the brass barrel, she stared across the bay to Golfe-Juan, searching for Zander’s overturned car. I realized that she had chosen La Garoupe as our meeting place in order to punish herself.
‘Frances, come on. Be honest, you loathed Zander …’
‘Where is it?’ She pushed me away, and tossed the pine cone from one hand to the other. ‘A grey Audi – I can’t see it.’
‘It’s in a police lab – they must be checking the brakes and steering.’
‘Why? We can tell them all they need to know. Or will we, Paul? Somehow I doubt it…’ She slapped the telescope, and her rings sent out a sharp metal cry that drew the eyes of the widows. ‘Give me a coin – ten francs. The car must be there …’
I held her shoulders and steered her to the wooden bench on the observation platform. ‘Let’s rest here. There’s nothing on the beach: I went back to have a look. Frances, we were two hundred yards away when it happened.’
‘It was a set-up. Didn’t you guess?’ Her moment of panic had passed, and she spoke calmly. ‘I was the decoy. While you were looking for Jane, I played the vamp with Zander. I told him to follow me back to Marina Baie des Anges.’
‘And that’s why he trailed us? He must have seen me in the passenger seat.’
‘He didn’t mind. I said you were a great fan of threesomes.’
‘So all that roaming around Super-Cannes in the dark? The back streets near the Vallauris road …?’
‘I was giving everyone time to catch up. Alain Delage told me to take the coast road to Juan-les-Pins. Drink-drivers are always ending up in the sea.’ She raised her arm and threw the pine cone down the slope, watching it bounce into the deep ferns. ‘Believe me, I didn’t think they planned to kill him.’
‘So you knew nothing – don’t blame yourself.’
‘I should have known!’ Disgusted with herself, she turned her eyes from the beach. ‘Until then I could cope with Eden-Olympia. But the waves were on fire. Paul, that was a warning – these people have to be stopped, or others are going to die.’
‘They’ll pull back now. Delage took a risk in killing Zander. He was head of security.’
‘Acting head. He knew too much, and that made him greedy. He had all the videotapes, and he’d started to put pressure on the smaller companies. He wanted huge share options built into his salary package. Besides, there was one other mark against him.’
‘He was just another Arab? Still, Yasuda is Japanese. There are Hong Kong and Singapore Chinese in every boardroom. A Mexican CEO lives on my avenue.’
‘But they’re paid-up members of the new elite. They’re the corporate chosen people. Zander ran a security firm in Piraeus before he came here. He was technical services, one up from the janitors. The top managements at Eden-Olympia are deeply racist, but in a new way. The corporate pecking order is all that counts. They know the world would collapse without them, and think they can get away with anything.’
‘They probably can.’
‘No!’ Frances pulled at my shirt. ‘Listen to me. Some of the therapy groups are starting to stockpile weapons. They’re setting up “hunting lodges” near the immigrant housing estates in La Bocca and Mandelieu. Technically, they’ll be safe depositories for pharmaceuticals and industrial diamonds, and the guards will be heavily armed.’
‘But their real role will be to provoke the local criminals and layabouts?’
‘And then take on the immigrant population as a whole. We’re back in Weimar Germany, with a weekend Freikorps fighting the Reds. Sooner or later some corporate raider with a messianic streak will turn up, backed by all the natural gas in Yakut, and decide that social Darwinism deserves another go. Listen to Alain Delage and Penrose talking together and you know they’re just waiting for him to arrive.’
‘Dictators always step into an open jackboot. How many executives are involved in the therapy classes?’
‘Something like three hundred. A lot are off on overseas trips, but most weekends at least a hundred take part. They’re operating as far away as Nice and St-Raphaël. There’s some grim stuff going on – nasty child porn, rapes of young Arab wives …’
‘The police will step in.’
‘They’re looking the other way. Eden-Olympia is expanding. Destivelle and the holding company are buying thousands of hectares to the west of the D103, right up to the edge of Sophia-Antipolis.’ Grimly, Frances gestured towards the open hinterland beyond the coast. ‘The taxes paid by Eden-Olympia amount to billions of francs. They pay for new schools and colleges and sports stadia. That’s why we’re so popular. Wilder Penrose and Delage have to be stopped, along with their lunatic scheme. Not because it’s crazy, but because it’s going to work. The whole world will soon be a business-park colony, run by a lot of tight-lipped men who pretend to be weekend psychos.’
She stared fiercely at the beaches of Juan and Cagnes-sur-Mer, as if hoping for a tsunami to appear and wash the entire coastline into the sea. I remembered the bored and moody woman I had met at the Palais des Festivals, feigning an interest in me as she pondered how to take her revenge on Eden-Olympia. But Zander’s death had driven her to the edge. For the first time she had looked down at her feet and was ready to jump.
‘We’ll stop them, Frances. But we need hard evidence. The testimony of Philippe Bourget and a couple of chauffeurs’ widows won’t be enough.’
‘The evidence is there. All the ratissages are filmed. There must be a thousand tapes at the Villa Grimaldi. In Menton I went to see a retired judge I met when we bought his old house. He used to be vice-president of the Alpes-Maritimes Development Council, but fell foul of Jacques Médecin and his gangster cronies. They forced him to resign. He was very interested in what I told him.’
‘Be careful, Frances. I need to think of Jane. I’ll try to get her back to London.’
‘She won’t go. You know that.’ Frances drummed her fists together, tired of my obtuseness. ‘She’s one of their main targets. They’ve given her this huge diagnostic project.’
‘It’s not a front. The system will work.’
‘Naturally! It’s a brilliant way of recruiting new entrants to the therapy classes. “Too many summer colds, feeling a little seedy? Try one of our special workouts, rubber truncheons provided.” Jane is perfect for them.’
‘She’s pretty spirited.’
‘Not any more. For God’s sake, Paul, she’s a heroin addict. They need a compliant doctor. One who’ll supply all the hard drugs they want, ask no questions about strange bruises and find a hospital bed for any whore who gets hurt when some sadistic game goes wrong. They like a paediatrician who can deal with any underage girls and boys who catch VD. And it’s always useful to have a doctor who’ll sign death certificates when they’re needed. Jane will do all that for them.’
‘She’s already started. She signed the attestation for Zander’s death.’
‘She saw what happened?’
‘No. She was asleep in the back of Delage’s Merc. Still, she was there.’
‘That’s why Alain brought her along. And she genuinely thinks it was an accident?’
‘I’m not sure …’ I watched the first of the old women leave the churc
h and make their way back to their coach. ‘Frances, there’s one thing I’ve never understood. Why did David try to kill you?’
Frances stared me out, barely masking the self-contempt in her face. ‘Did he?’
‘You know he did. He was on his way to shoot you when he tried to get into the Siemens building.’
‘Maybe he was looking for someone else. I can’t say. I let him down.’
‘That’s hard to believe. You loved him, and yet he broke things off. A few weeks later he tried to kill you.’
‘I wish he had. He knew I’d gone too far. I showed him a secret self he’d never seen before.’
‘If not drugs, then what? Anything to do with the refuge?’
‘Everything to do with it. All those nubile thirteen-year-olds, dying for sex and ready to go all the way for a new sound system. At first I thought I’d put the idea into his head, but it was there all along. The only thing it needed was a helping hand from Wilder Penrose. Then the whole horror of it stepped out of the daylight and stared David full in the face. Poor, sweet man, he was too honest.’
‘Thirteen-year-olds? Are you saying that …?’
‘Yes!’ Frances almost shouted at the widows, as if wanting to shock them out of their pious grief. ‘I’m saying it. I encouraged him, the way I encouraged you. I loved David, and I wanted him to be happy. If a thirteen-year-old made him happy, why not? At first David didn’t like it, so he went to see Penrose.’
‘And Wilder said it was just what he needed? When did this start?’
‘Six months before he died. It was a secret thing between us. We never talked about it, even though we knew it was going on.’
‘Didn’t the nuns try to stop him?’
‘They didn’t know. The girls soon grew up, there was a huge turnover. It all took place at Eden-Olympia.’
‘At the house?’
‘It started there. He’d bring one of the girls back for the weekend to help with her English. They’d read Through the Looking-Glass together, which they all thought was a scream. David fitted out one of the bedrooms for them. One thing led to another. Penrose told him not to feel guilty. Being true to himself did him good, and fired up his creativity. To begin with it was very innocent.’
‘And then? It’s not hard to guess.’
‘Penrose said he knew a senior executive who’d like to help the girls with their English. Lewis Carroll was surprisingly popular among the CEOs. The girls could see the joke, but they liked their presents. They realized they were meeting some very important men.’
‘So within a short time there was—’
‘A full-scale paedophile ring.’ Frances shook her head, as if despairing over a strange newspaper report. ‘David organized everything. He distributed the Alice books and the lending library became the booking system. If you wanted to give an English lesson you picked your favourite copy. David arranged for the particular girl to be driven to you. Door-to-door service. Beats anything laid on for the Caliph of Baghdad.’
‘The Alice books were the reservation system? That explains the Russian who came to the house. He assumed I’d taken over, and offered me little Natasha. I wanted to get her to the police.’
‘That confused a lot of people. Paedophiles we could cope with, but acting out of genuine selflessness? Far too original for Eden-Olympia.’
‘But David cared for the orphans. Everyone said so. If you knew what was going on, why didn’t you stop him?’
Frances stood up and gripped the telescope in her hands. She stared at the apartment houses at Antibes-les-Pins, as if wishing that she could hide herself for ever behind their cameras. She seemed exhausted by everything she had told me, but determined that I hear her out.
‘Why? Because I was fond of him. I was like those affectionate wives who look the other way when their husbands stand a little too close to an attractive young man. Most of the time we met at my apartment. I didn’t want to know.’
‘But that wasn’t enough to save you?’
‘He blamed me. I was too tolerant, I was involved in the deep sickness of Eden-Olympia. The last time we met I could see the disgust he felt for me. I was his Hindley or Rosemary West, I’d turned him into this perverted librarian. He wanted to destroy all those sick people playing their deranged games – Wilder Penrose, our nail-biting Dr Death. Guy Bachelet, the security chief who ran the robbery circus. Olga Carlotti with her call-girl ring. Charbonneau and Robert Fontaine, with their racist plans. And the others.’
‘Dominique Serrou? His partner at the refuge. Was she involved in the paedophile business?’
‘She was the recruitment officer. She toured the foster homes around Cannes and Nice, looking for likely talent. Girls with abusive “uncles” or histories of VD.’
‘A doctor? It’s hard to believe.’
‘She was vulnerable.’ Frances raised her hands in a gesture of sympathy. ‘A plain woman who knew she was getting older. Every day dying a little inside. She saw Bachelet losing interest and moving away from her like a ship in a fog bank. She’d have paid any price to bring him back. Penrose convinced her the health of the senior executives depended on certain special therapies. She went along with it.’
‘And that made her a target. So May 28 was David’s attempt to clean the stables and wipe out the self-hatred he felt.’
‘He wanted to kill the people who’d corrupted him. At least five or six had to die, to make the kind of splash that would reach the evening news and stay there.’ Frances sat next to me and held my hands, her face as bleak as a tired child’s. ‘If it hadn’t been for me he might have pulled it off. For a few seconds he lowered his guard, just long enough for Halder to kill him.’
‘Frances, don’t blame yourself. You didn’t pull the trigger.’
‘Maybe not.’ She inhaled the pine-scented air, trying to rally herself. ‘But I have to finish David’s work. The madmen are still walking around Eden-Olympia. Paul, I need your help.’
‘You have it. But it’s hard to know what exactly we can do. People look at the Dow and the Nikkei and think everything is fine. Eden-Olympia is very powerful.’
‘And over-confident. Penrose and Alain Delage think nothing can stop them. We need tapes of the special actions, the more violent the better. They incriminate everyone – the senior executives with the big companies, the security guards and off-duty local police.’
‘And me. Don’t forget that.’
‘You’re an observer. You sit in the back seat of the Merc while the heavy mob go in. We’ll make copies of the tapes and send them to the head offices of Shell and Monsanto and Toyota.’
‘That’s more or less what Zander planned to do. The tapes are hidden away in the Villa Grimaldi. Security is tight.’
‘We’re not going to pick the locks.’ Irritated with me, Frances kicked the ground. ‘You’re close to Penrose. He likes you, because you’re so easily impressed. You half-believe his scary ideas. Go along with him, play more of a part in the ratissages.’
‘Frances, I couldn’t.’
‘They won’t expect you to rape some old whore. Just move into the front seat of the Merc. Help with the planning sessions, offer to look after the cameras. That should get you nearer the tapes. Find out the targets, especially the racist ones. We’ll get our own film crew on the scene, some renegade BBC team. Sooner or later Penrose will make you his assistant. Like all great visionaries, he needs a disciple.’
‘He does – you’re right. The sad thing is, I think he’s found one.’
‘You?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Paul, what is it?’
‘I’m thinking of Jane.’
‘Good. She’s Simone Delage’s lover. Alain is at the heart of everything now. Use Jane to get closer to him.’
‘I don’t want to use her. She’s my wife. I want to save her and get her back to London.’
‘You will. Paul, it’s the only way.’
‘The only way to get her struck off the register. Plus a lo
ng spell in a French jail. I can’t involve her.’
‘Fair enough. But why so much husbandly concern?’ Frances peered at me with a surprisingly cold eye. ‘You’ve watched her turn into a heroin addict.’
‘She’s not an addict. Doctors work hard, and a lot of them take something to ease the stress. She talked it over with Wilder – it’s all under control. You’re asking me to incriminate her. Jane is—’
‘It’s not Jane! It’s nothing to do with her.’ Frances shook my shoulder, as if trying to rouse a dozing sleeper. ‘You’re thinking of Penrose. You don’t want to damage him.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘Part of you believes in his lunatic ideology. That’s why you’ve been so passive from the start. They corrupted your wife and you sat back and watched. I always wondered why.’
‘You say I’m a voyeur.’
‘That’s not the reason. You secretly think Penrose is right, and a new kind of world is being born here, based on psychopathology. You’re deeply impressed by Eden-Olympia. These vast companies with their powerful executives, sitting in their glass atriums like so many minotaurs. Once a year there has to be a sacrifice of six maidens. Except that it isn’t once a year. It’s every weekend, in the back streets of La Bocca. Still, who cares if a few teenage whores disappear into the labyrinth?’
‘I care. Frances, I can see the flaws in Wilder’s scheme.’
‘Can you?’ She turned to stare at me, as if understanding me for the first time. ‘I know him a lot better than you do.’
‘I’m sure you do. Did you have an affair with him?’
‘Nearly.’ She nodded bleakly to herself, unsettled by the memory. ‘He helped me after the divorce. I needed support, and he was generous with his time. Wilder Penrose can be very attractive.’
‘And very dangerous?’
‘He frightened me. One moment there was all that smiling charm, the gentle giant with the strange new take on the world. The next moment he was going to hit me. I laughed at him over something and he raised his fist. I got out fast.’
Super-Cannes Page 34
