by Joan Collins
‘No one will give up Saint-Tropez,’ said Khris Kane. ‘It’s an institution – it’s legendary. There will never be a place to rival its uniqueness, its glamorous reputation and fame.’
‘Ah, but remember the shit weather last season,’ said Roberto. ‘How many people upped sticks and went to Greece or Ibiza?’
‘That is true,’ agreed Charlie Chalk sadly.
‘You could hardly get your yachts out of port,’ scoffed Roberto. ‘There was one mistral after another – it was tragic.’
‘My God, but what will happen to the season in Saint-Tropez if people leave?’ asked Charlie. ‘So many locals depend on it for their living. We need the tourists and the high rollers to live here in their villas and give their dinners and parties here. Thousands of people rely on them.’
Roberto shrugged. ‘Not my problem, Charlie,’ he grinned, clapping the comedian on the back, ‘and not yours either, dear boy. Just enjoy it while it lasts.’
At 10.30 p.m. the thirty guests sat down to a dinner of oysters on the half-shell, followed by bouillabaisse, the classic Côte d’Azur dish prepared by the owner of a small beach shack commonly regarded as making the most authentic example of this delectable fare. They dined on the moonlit terrace while Mina’s surplus entourage was placed at another hastily cobbled-together table in the main salon.
A dozen white-clad waiters busied about, including François from the Sénéquier Café. He gave Lara a knowing, saucy smile as he set her oysters before her.
‘What’s with him?’ asked Fabrizio, annoyed. Although a championship flirt in his own right, it irritated him when any man put the moves on Lara.
‘Nothing, caro,’ she mollified. ‘I have no idea who he is,’ she added with sincere befuddlement, as she indeed had no memory of that May morning at Sénéquier. She put her hand soothingly on what Fabrizio often referred to as ‘my noble tool’.
During the second course, a young magician entertained the guests at the table, because God forbid they’d have to rely on conversation. Brilliant bons mots at these parties usually consisted of celebrity gossip, scintillating questions such as, ‘When did you get here?’, ‘How long are you staying?’, and comments about the weather.
Carlotta was enthralled, Mina was bored, and Sophie was irritated. She hated magicians. Many years ago she had taken one as a lover and had had to watch over and over again as he practised his silly card tricks on her and the dogs. The dogs seemed far more interested in the tricks than she was, as he whisked playing cards from behind their ears and under their tails. Fed up one night, she rubbed his nether regions with bacon fat while he was sleeping and he woke up to find the entire menagerie fighting to get at his genitalia. Needless to say, she never saw him again.
The magician, aware of Sophie’s basilisk stare that telegraphed unequivocally get near me, kid, and I will have your balls for dinner, and recalling the fate of the hapless magician who had shacked up with her, instead opted for Mina as his foil pour la nuit and was directing most of his magic to her.
Mina yawned behind her big fan, always a useful device to deflect attention and to swat away over-eager fans if her entourage failed to jump to it. She feigned interest. For 250,000 euros, she could feign anything, and watching the conjurer was preferable to engaging in small talk with Harry, the ghastly arms-dealer host, or the even more ghastly oligarch Sergei Litvak sitting on the other side of her. The conjurer was taking control of the table, asking people to choose a card, which would magically appear, half-covered in saliva from under his tongue. After masticating several cards and regurgitating them in this fashion, which was met with limited applause, he started doing disgusting things with balloons.
‘Regardez,’ beamed the magician proudly as he blew up a red balloon into a long sausage shape and swallowed the entire thing as the guests watched in shock and amazement.
‘Revolting,’ growled Sophie, sitting the other side of Harry, who was like a pig in clover sandwiched between the two divas.
‘How does he do that?’ asked Carlotta.
‘Years of practice, my dear,’ Maximus grinned knowingly. He knew this kid. The conjurer had been in his stable of cute rent boys several years ago. No wonder he was good at what he did with balloons.
Sophie shot her ‘come near me at your peril’ look at Maximus, whom she also loathed. She had overheard his earlier comment to Carlotta about Mina’s vast fee. Last year, she had suggested that she might receive a little ‘present’ for attending an oligarch’s party that Maximus was organising. He had practically laughed in her face and told her she was far too old to be interesting to the Russians. He was a pig. A fat, faggoty pig, and one day he’ll get what’s coming to him, thought Sophie darkly.
Sophie and Maximus went back a long way. Back, in fact, to when they were young and gorgeous in Rome in the 1960s. They were both living the good life. Rome was known as Hollywood on the Tiber and the bustling studios of Cinecittà and Scalera thronged with moviemakers, moguls and starlets, all waiting for a break. Sophie, at the height of her beauty and fame, could have any man she wanted, and one night at a party at the Grand Hotel what she wanted was young Maximus.
At dinner they flirted, chatted, and got along so well that Max was not at all surprised when she invited him back to her hotel for a nightcap. Soon they were in her bed, but in spite of Sophie’s expert ministrations, Max was unable to perform, much to her chagrin.
He managed to escape from her clutches with some semblance of dignity, for she took it as a personal rejection and made spiteful comments to him as he slunk out of the door. Soon Sophie let slip to the gossipmongers of the Via Veneto that not only was Maximus Gobbi impotent, but that his equipment was no bigger than a child’s. He had never forgotten that, so he had started a counter-rumour that Sophie was a lesbian who only pretended to like men and hated sex. They had been icy to each other ever since.
The magician finally retrieved the balloon from the depths of his throat and presented it to Mina with a tiny bow. With her fan she swatted it over to Harry with an offended squawk. The balloon burst in his face and the other guests giggled at his discomfort.
For his finale, the magician let off a series of tiny firecrackers behind several of the ladies’ ears, which caused them all to shriek and hold on to their hairpieces.
‘Enough!’ thundered Khris finally to Harry. ‘Isn’t it time to hear Mina’s new record?’
‘Of course. Let’s have dessert in the living room,’ Harry said smoothly.
They gathered in the huge open living room in which every surface was covered in glass and gold bric-a-brac and the soft furnishings were made from the skin of nearly extinct animals. Harry’s sound system was state of the art and soon the CD of Mina’s amazing voice echoed throughout the marble hall and carried down to the beaches. Her first ballad was a thinly disguised tale of her problems with an abusive husband, who got her hooked on coke. It brought tears to everyone’s eyes, except Sophie, whose eyes were boring jealous holes into Mina’s back.
Several classic standards performed in an innovative modern style were greeted with appreciative applause, and then an upbeat eighties disco-style song brought the normally blasé revellers to their feet; in classic Saint-Tropez style they started dancing and waving their arms in the air.
Maximus fancied himself as a cool mover and shaker, and in spite of his bulk, he shook his massive booty in front of a slightly embarrassed Carlotta.
Fabrizio reluctantly pranced with Lara, who always became a total exhibitionist on the dance floor, waving her disastrously bingo-winged arms above her head in a wild yet catastrophic facsimile of a teenybopper and flashing sun-damaged thighs in her sparkly red mini-dress. The seven vodkas she’d consumed added to her lunatic abandonment.
As the music became more frenzied, so did the dancing, and Mina’s golden voice and her strong backing singers even drowned out the relentless sounds of the cicadas.
Then, almost as one, several of the dancing guests bent over, clutching their
stomachs in agony. Some of them ran into the garden to vomit into the azaleas, while the other guests watched in horrified amazement.
‘My God!’ shrieked Sophie.
‘It’s the plague,’ screamed Fabrizio, a total hypochondriac. Running to the onyx swimming pool, he threw up into it, then tumbled in.
Suddenly over half the guests were in paroxysms of pain; those who weren’t tried to assist each other with the help of the waiters who seemed unaffected.
‘Somebody call an ambulance,’ yelled Harry.
‘We need more than one!’ gasped Maximus, through a paroxysm of pain.
Lying on the ground, face up, Britain’s favourite comic, Charlie Chalk, his white face now matching his last name, lay completely still. His Australian lover Spencer cast himself, weeping, on to the vast expanse of his lover’s inert body. ‘Are you alright, darling?’ he wailed. ‘Please don’t die, love.’ As if to set his mind at rest, Charlie let out a loud burp and opened his eyes weakly. ‘Thank God! I couldn’t live without you!’ Spencer started laughing and hugging Charlie’s huge bulk, which made the comedian break some fierce wind.
Half an hour later, a phalanx of ambulances screeched to a halt as the retching and nausea reached a climax, coinciding with the final wailing soprano notes of Mina’s CD.
At least everyone thought it was the final wailing notes of the CD, until Khris noticed that the music system had stopped and what could be heard was Mina herself, wailing in some undetermined location accompanied by a chorus of cicadas.
They started to search, but the young pop star’s injured moans had stopped. Then a paramedic raised the alarm as he discovered Mina sprawled beside a lavender bush. He started frantically administering CPR as the stunned guests rushed down the incline to watch, then he shook his head gravely. ‘I’m afraid she’s gone.’
The assembled partygoers gasped in horror.
‘Oh, my God!’ shrieked Khris Kane. ‘I’m ruined. What’s going to happen to my tour?’
CHAPTER EIGHT
The day after the first party
Although Mina Corbain’s death seemed like a straightforward case of severe food poisoning, under French law it immediately triggered an investigation.
When Captain Poulpe and his daughter Gabrielle arrived, they asked all the guests what they had eaten during the party.
Captain Poulpe was a short, stocky man of few words and many actions. He had been with the Saint-Tropez Gendarmerie for over thirty years and knew where the metaphorical bodies were buried. He had thinning black hair swept back from a broad intelligent brow and small brown eyes that seldom missed a trick. Invariably he wore a navy blue or grey three-piece suit even on the hottest of summer days. Everyone in town respected him because he never turned a blind eye whenever corrupt officials interfered with the small-business and beach-restaurant owners, who depended on making their money in the few precious months between April and September, which made them easy prey to coercion. He didn’t tolerate the practice of baksheesh that seemed always to be prevalent in places that depended on tourism for their livelihood.
Gabrielle, his daughter, differed from him in that she was tall and lanky. She was a true tomboy, with flaming red hair that ran wild with curls and a sprinkle of freckles on her pretty, unmade-up face. But beneath the huckleberry exterior she was a good cop, and highly respected by those who knew her.
‘There is no question that something poisonous in the food or drink has caused this mass outbreak. I note that none of the healthy guests has eaten the oysters,’ Poulpe announced to the shaken guests, who had not been allowed to leave. ‘There were plenty of other dishes that everyone had eaten but it seems that, of the unaffected guests, none had touched the oysters, so the source was unmistakable.’
He and Gabrielle then thoroughly queried each of the guests’ activities on the day of the party to ascertain that none of them had anything to do with the preparation of the food. Having satisfied himself that none of them would fall under immediate suspicion, he allowed them to go home at four a.m., dazed and confused about the horrifying night. He even gallantly escorted Sophie to Adolpho and Frick’s awaiting ministrations; much as he admired her, he had to place her on his list of suspects as well – now everyone was on it.
After the guests departed, Captain Poulpe returned to Harry Silver’s staff waiting at the mansion. The chef told him that he had received the oysters from his regular party supplier the previous day.
‘I thought they came from the Nice fish market, but I wasn’t sure, so I kept them in ice for all that time,’ he bleated. ‘They couldn’t possibly have gone bad.’
‘Well, they did,’ snapped Captain Poulpe. ‘They most certainly did. Thirty people don’t become extremely sick, with one dying, unless they’ve gone bad.’
The chef moaned, terrified of losing his job. ‘It’s not my fault, I’ve never had a problem before and I’ve been serving oysters for Mr Silver for five years.’
‘I know, I believe you.’ Poulpe actually did believe the Algerian chef, a small, timid man, in France illegally. After all, he would be foolish to jeopardise his tenuous hold on residency.
‘Understand that you are under suspicion – you’ll be watched. If you as much as step out of the country, even out of this area, I will know about it,’ he warned the chef, as he had all the other staff.
‘I’m wondering whether someone tampered with the food,’ Captain Poulpe told his daughter. ‘It just seems odd that so many of the guests had such a violent reaction – so many, but not all. It would be understandable if one or two oysters had been contaminated, or one or two people were allergic; or indeed for everyone to fall ill if the whole batch was contaminated. But to have about half the guests falling sick – well, that seems really strange.’ He would make sure the coroner checked all the possibilities at Mina’s post-mortem.
Although the Mayor wanted this incident brushed under the carpet as quickly as possible to avoid the bad publicity that was sure to follow, Poulpe was certain this evening was far from accidental.
‘No one is above suspicion,’ he sighed to Gabrielle. ‘Keep your eyes open for a very twisted mind.’
It was the day after Mina’s tragic death and Gabrielle had started the morning investigating the fishmongers who plied their trade in the ancient fish market situated behind the popular Sénéquier Café. The fishmongers displayed their wares beautifully, with every kind of fish laid out geometrically on marble slabs. The market was no more than a tiny alleyway from the main street leading to a small square where flowers, cheese and every kind of bread and pastry were sold. Work started at six a.m. and finished at two p.m., by which time the ground was awash with dirty, smelly water. Although the tradesmen cleaned the pavement, walls and surfaces of the alleyway assiduously with powerful lye, the odour of fish lingered in the aged tiled walls. At night the alley was dark and ominous, and few people fancied taking the stinking shortcut.
Gabrielle asked all the vendors to whom they had sold oysters within the past two days, but it appeared that the only bulk buyer had been a cook from a giant cruise ship that had departed before Harry Silver’s party began. All other purchases had been small, but she logged them dutifully as her father had taught her.
Gabrielle finished her inquiries with each fishmonger and decided she merited a drink at Sénéquier. Everyone who was anyone – and plenty who weren’t – visited the legendary Sénéquier Café. This area was truly the heart of the village, constantly bubbling with life. In the middle of the busy cobble-stoned street, and right in front of the port where the big white gin palaces lay at anchor, next to dozens of chic boutiques and restaurants, stood the Sénéquier, which had been feeding Saint-Tropez visitors since 1887.
She joined Charlie and his blond-headed lover Spencer, who sat at a table in the front of the Sénéquier sipping kirs and watching the world stroll by.
Cuddly Charlie Chalk, one of England’s best-loved comedians, lived on a hill above Saint-Tropez, with his much younger civil pa
rtner Spencer Brown, in a small but beautifully decorated villa within walking distance of the town.
In the 1980s Charlie had made his money in England with a camp comedy sitcom called Charlie’s World. He had invested shrewdly in that decade, a time when investments actually paid off, and now he and Spencer lived an idyllic life all year round, either in Saint-Tropez or travelling to exotic climes.
Gabrielle gently and casually started questioning Charlie and Spencer about the previous night as they sipped their kirs.
‘It was a nightmare,’ Charlie sighed, ‘insane – I’m still feeling queasy. Poor, poor Mina! Such a great talent.’ He sighed again, slightly more theatrically this time. ‘But in spite of all the horror, the south of France is still the best place in the world to live. J’adore Saint-Tropez,’ said Charlie, breaking out his execrable French accent.
‘Oh, Lord, why don’t you learn how to speak French properly?’ sighed Spencer in exasperation. ‘You’ve lived here long enough.’
Charlie was so popular that he spent his days accepting – and very occasionally declining – the myriad invitations he received. This also guaranteed that Spencer would always be around for the fun. Charlie was the life and soul of every lunch, cocktail soirée and dinner, and the confidant of many of Saint-Tropez’s elite. When he wasn’t socialising or travelling, he spent his time cultivating beautiful English roses, a difficult task in a Mediterranean climate, particularly since nests of wasps lived in the old stone walls of his garden.
‘Don’t you miss England then?’ Gabrielle giggled, slightly forgetting the interrogation in her amusement. Charlie could make the most banal remarks entertaining with his theatrical delivery. Round and ruddy-faced, he was always beaming, and had a hearty laugh that announced his arrival at any gathering.
