Kitabı oku: «Super-Cannes», sayfa 2
The investigating magistrate, Judge Michel Terneau, led the inquiry, reconstructing the murders and taking evidence from a host of witnesses, but came up with no convincing explanation. Greenwood’s colleagues at the clinic testified to his earnest and intense disposition. An editorial in Le Monde speculated that the contrast between the worldly power of Eden-Olympia and the deprived lives of the Arab immigrants in Cannes La Bocca had driven Greenwood into a frenzy of frustration, a blind rage at inequalities between the first and third worlds. The murders were part political manifesto, so the newspaper believed, and part existential scream.
When the case at last left the headlines Jane never referred to Greenwood again. But when the vacancy was advertised she immediately called the manager of the supply agency. She was the only applicant, and quickly convinced me that a long break in the Mediterranean would do wonders for my knee, injured in a flying accident nine months earlier and still refusing to mend. My cousin Charles agreed to take over the publishing house while I was away, and would e-mail me copy and proof pages of the two aviation magazines that I edited.
Eager to help Jane’s career, I was happy to go. At the same time, like any husband from a different generation, I was curious about my young wife’s romantic past. Had she and Greenwood once been lovers? The question was not entirely prurient. A mass-murderer had perhaps held her in his arms, and as Jane embraced me the spirit of his death embraced me too. The widows of assassins were forever their armourers.
On our last night in Maida Vale, lying in bed with our packed suitcases in the hall, I asked Jane how closely she had known Greenwood. She was sitting astride me, with the expression of a serious-minded adolescent on her face that she always wore when making love. She drew herself upright, a hand raised to hit me, then solemnly told me that she and Greenwood had never been more than friends. I almost believed her. But some unstated loyalty to Greenwood’s memory followed us from Boulogne to the gates of Eden-Olympia.
Baring her teeth, Jane started the engine. ‘Right … let’s take them on. Find the clinic on the map. Someone called Penrose will meet us there. Why they’ve picked a psychiatrist, I don’t know. I told them you hate the entire profession. Apparently, he was hurt in David’s shoot-out, so be gentle with him …’
She steered the Jaguar towards the gatehouse, where the guards had already lost interest in their screens, intrigued by this confident young woman at the controls of her antique car.
While they checked our documents and rang the clinic I stared at the nearby office buildings and tried to imagine Greenwood’s last desperate hours. He had shot dead one of his colleagues at the clinic. A second physician, a senior surgeon, had suffered a fatal heart attack the next day. A third colleague had been wounded in the arm: Dr Wilder Penrose, the psychiatrist who was about to introduce us to our new Eden.
2 Dr Wilder Penrose
A ROBUST, BULL-BROWED man in a creased linen suit strode from the entrance of the clinic, arms raised in a boxer’s greeting. I assumed he was a local building contractor delighted with the results of his prostate test and waved back as a gesture of male solidarity. In reply, a fist punched the air.
‘Paul?’ Jane sounded wary. ‘Is that …?’
‘Wilder Penrose? It probably is. You say he’s a psychiatrist?’
‘God knows. This man’s a minotaur …’
I waited as he strode towards us, hands raised to ward off the sun. When Jane unlatched her door he swerved around the car, displaying remarkable agility for a big man. His heavy fists took on an almost balletic grace as they shaped the dusty contours of the Jaguar.
‘Magnificent … a genuine Mark II.’ He held open Jane’s door and shook her still grimy hand, then smiled good-naturedly at his oil-stained palm. ‘Dr Sinclair, welcome to Eden-Olympia. I’m Wilder Penrose – we’ll be sharing a coffee machine on the fourth floor. You don’t look tired. I assume the Jag sailed like a dream?’
‘Paul thinks so. He didn’t have to change the spark plugs every ten miles.’
‘Alas. And those twin carburettors that need to be balanced? More art than science. The old Moss gearbox? Wonderful, all the same.’ He strolled around the car and beckoned to the clouds, as if ordering them to listen to him, and declaimed in a voice not unlike my father’s: ‘Peeling off the kilometres to the tune of “Blue Skies”, sizzling down the … Nationale Sept, the plane trees going …’
‘Sha-sha-sha …’ I completed. ‘She with the Michelin beside me, a handkerchief binding her hair…’
‘Mr Sinclair?’ Leaving Jane, the psychiatrist came round to the passenger door. ‘You’re the first literate pilot here since Saint- Exupéry. Let me help you. They told me about the accident.’
His strong upper arms lifted me easily from my seat. He wore sunglasses of pale plastic, but I could see his eyes scanning my face, less interested in the minor flying injuries to my forehead than in whatever strengths and weaknesses were written into the skin. He was in his late thirties, the youngest and by far the strongest psychiatrist I had met, a giant compared with the grey-haired specialists who had examined me at Guy’s for the Aviation Licensing Board. His welcoming banter concealed a faintly threatening physical presence, as if he bullied his patients to get well, intimidating them out of their phobias and neuroses. His muscular shoulders were dominated by a massive head that he disguised in a constant ducking and grimacing. I knew that the tags we had swapped from The Unquiet Grave had not impressed him as much as the Jaguar, but then his patients were among the best-educated people in the world, and too distracted for vintage motoring.
When I swayed against the car, feeling light-headed in the sun, he raised a hand to steady me. I noticed his badly bitten fingernails, still damp from his lips, and backed away from him without thinking. We shook hands as I leaned on the door. His thumb probed the back of my hand in what pretended to be a masonic grip but was clearly a testing of my reflexes.
‘Paul, you’re tired …’ Penrose raised his arms to shield me from the light. ‘Dr Jane prescribes a strong draught of vodka and tonic. We’ll go straight to the house, with a guided tour on the way. Freshen up, and then I’ll borrow your wife and show her around the clinic. Arriving at Eden-Olympia is enough culture shock for one day …’
* * *
We settled ourselves in the car for the last lap of our journey. Penrose climbed into the rear seat, filling the small space like a bear in a kennel. He patted and squeezed the ancient leather upholstery, as if comforting an old friend.
Jane licked her thumb for luck and pressed the starter button, determined to hold her own with Penrose and relieved when the overheated engine came to life.
‘Culture shock …?’ she repeated. ‘Actually, I love it here already.’
‘Good.’ Penrose beamed at the back of her head. ‘Why, exactly?’
‘Because there isn’t any culture. All this alienation … I could easily get used to it.’
‘Even better. Agree, Paul?’
‘Totally.’ I knew Jane was teasing the psychiatrist. ‘We’ve been here ten minutes and haven’t seen a soul.’
‘That’s misleading.’ Penrose pointed to two nearby office buildings, each only six storeys high but effectively a skyscraper lying on its side. ‘They’re all at their computer screens and lab benches. Sadly, you can forget Cyril Connolly here. Forget tuberoses and sapphirine seas.’
‘I have. Who are the tenants? Big international companies?’
‘The biggest. Mitsui, Siemens, Unilever, Sumitomo, plus all the French giants – Elf-Aquitaine, Carrefour, Rhône-Poulenc. Along with a host of smaller firms: investment brokers, bioengineering outfits, design consultancies. I sound like a salesman, but when you get to know it you’ll see what a remarkable place Eden-Olympia really is. In its way this is a huge experiment in how to hothouse the future.’
I turned to glimpse a vast car park concealed behind a screen of cypresses, vehicles nose to tail like a week’s unsold output at a Renault plant. Somewhere in the office buildings the owners of these cars were staring at their screens, designing a new cathedral or cineplex, or watching the world’s spot prices. The sense of focused brainpower was bracing, but subtly unsettling.
‘I’m impressed,’ I told Penrose. ‘It beats waiting at tables or working as a checkout girl at a Monoprix. Where do you get the staff?’
‘We train them. They’re our biggest investment. It’s not so much their craft skills as their attitude to an entirely new workplace culture. Eden-Olympia isn’t just another business park. We’re an ideas laboratory for the new millennium.’
‘The “intelligent” city? I’ve read the brochure.’
‘Good. I helped to write it. Every office, house and apartment cabled up to the world’s major stockbrokers, the nearest Tiffany’s and the emergency call-out units at the clinic.’
‘Paul, are you listening?’ Jane’s elbow nudged me in the ribs. ‘You can sell your British Aerospace shares, buy me a new diamond choker and have a heart attack at the same time …’
‘Absolutely.’ Penrose lay back, nostrils pressed to the worn seats, snuffling at the old leather smells. ‘In fact, Paul, once you’ve settled in I strongly recommend a heart attack. Or a nervous breakdown. The paramedics will know everything about you – blood groups, clotting factors, attention-deficit disorders. If you’re desperate, you could even have a plane crash – there’s a small airport at Cannes-Mandelieu.’
‘I’ll think about it.’ I searched for my cigarettes, tempted to fill the car with the throat-catching fumes of a Gitanes. Penrose’s teasing was part camouflage, part initiation rite, and irritating on both counts. I thought of David Greenwood and wondered whether this aggressive humour had helped the desperate young Englishman. ‘What about emergencies of a different kind?’
‘Such as? We can cope with anything. This is the only place in the world where you can get insurance against acts of God.’
I felt Jane stiffen warningly against the steering wheel. The nearside front tyre scraped the kerb, but I pressed on.
‘Psychological problems? You do have them?’
‘Very few.’ Penrose gripped the back of Jane’s seat, deliberately exposing his bitten fingernails. At the same time his face had hardened, the heavy bones of his cheeks and jaw pushing through the conversational tics and grimaces, a curious display of aggression and self-doubt. ‘But a few, yes. Enough to make my job interesting. On the whole, people are happy and content.’
‘And you regret that?’
‘Never. I’m here to help them fulfil themselves.’ Penrose winked into Jane’s rear-view mirror. ‘You’d be surprised by how easy that is. First, make the office feel like a home – if anything, the real home.’
‘And their flats and houses?’ Jane pointed to a cluster of executive villas in the pueblo style. ‘What does that make them?’
‘Service stations, where people sleep and ablute. The human body as an obedient coolie, to be fed and hosed down, and given just enough sexual freedom to sedate itself. We’ve concentrated on the office as the key psychological zone. Middle managers have their own bathrooms. Even secretaries have a sofa in a private alcove, where they can lie back and dream about the lovers they’ll never have the energy to meet.’
We were driving along the shore of a large ornamental lake, an ellipse of glassy water that reflected the nearby mountains and reminded me of Lake Geneva with its old League of Nations headquarters, another attempt to blueprint a kingdom of saints. Apartment houses lined the waterfront, synchronized brises-soleils shielding the balconies. Jane slowed the car, and searched the windows for a single off-duty resident.
‘A fifth of the workforce live on-site,’ Penrose told us. ‘Middle and junior management in apartments and townhouses, senior people in the residential estate where you’re going. The parkland buffers the impact of all the steel and concrete. People like the facilities – yachting and water-skiing, tennis and basketball, those body-building things that obsess the French.’
‘And you?’ Jane queried.
‘Well…’ Penrose pressed his large hands against the roof, and lazily flexed his shoulders. ‘I prefer to exercise the mind. Jane, are you keen on sport?’
‘Not me.’
‘Squash, aerobics, roller-blading?’
‘The wrong kind of sweat.’
‘Bridge? There are keen amateurs here you could make an income off.’
‘Sorry. Better things to do.’
‘Interesting …’ Penrose leaned forward, so close to Jane that he seemed to be sniffing her neck. ‘Tell me more.’
‘You know …’ Straight-faced, Jane explained: ‘Wife-swapping, the latest designer amphetamines, kiddy porn. What else do we like, Paul?’
Penrose slumped back, chuckling good-humouredly. I noticed that he was forever glancing at the empty seat beside him. There was a fourth passenger in the car, the shade of a doctor defeated by the mirror-walled office buildings and manicured running tracks. I assumed that Greenwood had suffered a catastrophic cerebral accident, but one which probably owed nothing to Eden-Olympia.
Beyond the apartments was a shopping mall, a roofed-in plaza of boutiques, patisseries and beauty salons. Lines of supermarket trollies waited in the sun for customers who only came out after dark. Undismayed, Penrose gestured at the deserted checkouts.
‘Grasse and Le Cannet aren’t far away, but you’ll find all this handy. There’s everything you need, Jane – sports equipment, video-rentals, the New York Review of Books …’
‘No teleshopping?’
‘There is. But people like to browse among the basil. Shopping is the last folkloric ritual that can help to build a community, along with traffic jams and airport queues. Eden-Olympia has its own TV station – local news, supermarket best buys …’
‘Adult movies?’
Jane at last seemed interested, but Penrose was no longer listening. He had noticed a trio of Senegalese trinket salesmen wandering through the deserted café tables, gaudy robes blanched by the sun. Their dark faces, among the blackest of black Africa, had a silvered polish, as if a local biotechnology firm had reworked their genes into the age of e-mail and the intelsat. By some mix of guile and luck they had slipped past the guards at the gate, only to find themselves rattling their bangles in an empty world.
When we stopped, pointlessly, at a traffic light Penrose took out his mobile phone and pretended to speak into it. He stared aggressively at the salesmen, but the leader of the trio, an affable, older man, ignored the psychiatrist and swung his bracelets at Jane, treating her to a patient smile.
I was tempted to buy something, if only to irritate Penrose, but the lights changed.
‘What about crime?’ I asked. ‘It looks as if security might be a problem.’
‘Security is first class. Or should be.’ Penrose straightened the lapels of his jacket, ruffled by his involuntary show of temper. ‘We have our own police force. Very discreet and effective, except when you need them. These gewgaw men get in anywhere. Somehow they’ve bypassed the idea of progress. Dig a hundred-foot moat around the Montparnasse tower and they’d be up on the top deck in three minutes.’
‘Does it matter?’
‘Not in the way you mean. Though it’s irritating to be reminded of the contingent world.’
‘A drifting leaf? A passing rain-shower? Bird shit on the sleeve?’
‘That sort of thing.’ Penrose smoothed himself down, hands pressing his burly chest. ‘There’s nothing racist, by the way. We’re truly multinational – Americans, French, Japanese. Even Russians and east Europeans.’
‘Black Africa?’
‘At the senior level. We’re a melting pot, as the Riviera always has been. The solvent now is talent, not wealth or glamour. Forget about crime. The important thing is that the residents of Eden-Olympia think they’re policing themselves.’
‘They aren’t, but the illusion pays off?’
‘Exactly.’ Penrose slapped my shoulder in a show of joviality. ‘Paul, I can see you’re going to be happy here.’
The road climbed the thickly wooded slopes to the north-east of the business park, cutting off our view of Cannes and the distant sea. We stopped at an unmanned security barrier, and Penrose tapped a three-digit number into the entry panel. The white metal trellis rose noiselessly, admitting us to an enclave of architect-designed houses, our home for the next six months. I peered through the wrought-iron gates at silent tennis courts and swimming pools waiting for their owners to return. Over the immaculate gardens hung the air of well-bred catatonia that only money can buy.
‘The medical staff…?’ Jane lowered her head, a little daunted by the imposing avenues. ‘They’re all here?’
‘Only you and Professor Walter, our cardiovascular chief. Call it enlightened self-interest. It’s always reassuring to know that a good heart man and a paediatrician are nearby, in case your wife has an angina attack or your child chokes on a rusk.’
‘And you?’ I asked. ‘Who copes with sudden depressions?’
‘They can wait till morning. I’m in the annexe on the other side of the hill. North facing, a kind of shadow world for the less important.’ Penrose beamed to himself, happy to speak frankly. ‘The company barons who decide our pecking order feel they’re beyond the need of psychiatric attention.’
‘Are they?’
‘For the time being. But I’m working on it.’ Penrose sat up and pointed through the plane trees. ‘Slow down, Jane. You’re almost home. From now on you’re living in a suburb of paradise …’
3 The Brainstorm
A GIANT CYCAD threw its yellow fronds across the tiled pathway to a lacquered front door, past a chromium statue of a leaping dolphin. Beyond the bougainvillaea that climbed the perimeter wall I could see the streamlined balconies and scalloped roof of a large art-deco villa, its powder-blue awnings like reefed sails. The ocean-liner windows and porthole skylights seemed to open onto the 1930s, a vanished world of Cole Porter and beach pyjamas, morphine lesbians and the swagger portraits of Tamara de Lempicka. The entire structure had recently been repainted, and a phosphor in the white pigment gave its surface an almost luminescent finish, as if this elegant villa was an astronomical instrument that set the secret time of Eden-Olympia.
Even Jane was impressed, smoothing the travel creases from her trousers when we stepped from the dusty Jaguar. The house was silent, but somewhere in the garden was a swimming pool filled with unsettled water. Reflections from its disturbed surface seemed to bruise the smooth walls of the house. The light drummed against Jane’s sunglasses, giving her the edgy and vulnerable look of a studio visitor who had strayed into the wrong film set. Almost without thinking, Penrose stepped forward, took the glasses from Jane’s face and placed them firmly in her hands.
A concrete apron sloped from the road to the aluminium shutters of a three-car garage. Parked on the ramp was an olive-green Range Rover of the Eden-Olympia security force. A uniformed guard leaned against the driver’s door, a slim, light-skinned black with refined and almost east African features, a narrow nose and steep forehead. He picked the dust from the buttons of his mobile phone with a pocket knife, and watched without comment as we surveyed the house.
Penrose introduced us, his back to the guard, speaking over his shoulder like a district commissioner with a village headman.
‘Jane, this is Frank Halder. He’ll be within radio call whenever you need him. Frank, help Dr Sinclair with her luggage …’
The guard was about to step into his Range Rover. When he opened the door I noticed a copy of Tender is the Night on the passenger seat. He avoided my eyes, but his manner was cool and self-possessed as he turned to face the psychiatrist.
‘Dr Penrose? I’m due in at the bureau. Mr Nagamatzu needs me to drive him to Nice airport.’
‘Frank …’ Penrose held his fingernails up to the sun and examined the ragged crescents. ‘Mr Nagamatzu can wait for five minutes.’
‘Five minutes?’ Halder seemed baffled by the notion, as if Penrose had suggested that he wait for five hours, or five years. ‘Security, doctor, it’s like a Swiss watch. Everything’s laid down in the machinery. It’s high-class time, you can’t just stop the system when you feel like it.’
‘I know, Frank. And the human mind is like this wonderful old Jaguar, as I keep trying to explain. Mr Sinclair is still convalescing from a serious accident. And we can’t have Dr Jane too tired to deal with her important patients.’
‘Dr Penrose …’ Jane was trying to unlock the Jaguar’s boot, hiding her embarrassment over this trivial dispute. ‘I’m strong enough to carry my own suitcases. And Paul’s.’
‘No. Frank is keen to help.’ Penrose raised a hand to silence Jane. He sauntered over to Halder, flexing his shoulders inside his linen jacket and squaring up to the guard like a boxer at a weigh-in. ‘Besides, Mr Sinclair is a pilot.’
‘A pilot?’ Halder ran his eyes over me, pinching his sharp nostrils as if tuning out the sweat of travel that clung to my stale shirt. ‘Gliders?’
‘Powered aircraft. I flew with the RAF. Back in England I have an old Harvard.’
‘Well, a pilot …’ Halder took the car keys from Jane and opened the boot. ‘That could be another story.’
We left Halder to carry the suitcases and set off towards the house. Penrose unlocked a wrought-iron gate and we stepped into the silent garden, following a pathway that led to the sun lounge.
‘Decent of him,’ I commented to Penrose. ‘Is humping luggage one of his duties?’
‘Definitely not. He could report me if he wanted to.’ Enjoying his small triumph, Penrose said to Jane: ‘I like to stir things up, keep the adrenalin flowing. The more they hate you, the more they stay on their toes.’
Jane looked back at Halder, who was steering the suitcases past the gate. ‘I don’t think he does hate you. He seems rather intelligent.’
‘You’re right. Halder is far too superior to hate anyone. Don’t let that mislead you.’
A spacious garden lay beside the house, furnished with a tennis court, rose pergola and swimming pool. A suite of beach chairs sat by the disturbed water, damp cushions steaming in the sun. I wondered if Halder, tired of waiting for us, had stripped off for a quick dip. Then I noticed a red beach ball on the diving board, the last water dripping from its plastic skin. Suddenly I imagined the moody young guard roaming like a baseline tennis player along the edge of the pool, hurling the ball at the surface and catching it as it rebounded from the far side, driving the water into a state of panic.
Penrose and Jane walked on ahead of me, and by the time I reached the sun lounge Halder had overtaken me. He moved aside as I climbed the steps.
‘Thanks for the cases,’ I told him. ‘I couldn’t have managed them.’
He paused to stare at me in his appraising way, neither sympathetic nor hostile. ‘It’s my job, Mr Sinclair.’
‘It’s not your job – but thanks. I had a small flying accident.’
‘You broke your knees. That’s tough.’ He spoke with an American accent, but one learned in Europe, perhaps working as a security guard for a local subsidiary of Mobil or Exxon. ‘You have a commercial licence?’
‘Private. Or did have, until they took it away from me. I publish aviation books.’
‘Now you’ll have time to write one yourself. Some people might envy you.’
He stood with his back to the pool, the trembling light reflected in the beads of water on the holster of his pistol. He was strong but light-footed, with the lithe step of a professional dancer, a tango specialist who read Scott Fitzgerald and took out his frustrations on swimming pools. For a moment I saw a strange image of him washing his gun in the pool, rinsing away David Greenwood’s blood.
‘Keep flying speed …’ He saluted and strode away. As he passed the pool he leaned over and spat into the water.
We sat on the terrace beneath the awning, listening to the gentle flap of canvas and the swish of lawn sprinklers from nearby gardens. Far below were the streets of Cannes, dominated by the twin domes of the Carlton Hotel, a nexus of noise and traffic that crowded the beach. The sun had moved beyond La Napoule and now lit the porphyry rocks of the Esterel, exposing valleys filled with lavender dust like the flats of a forgotten stage production. To the east, beyond Cap d’Antibes, the ziggurat apartment buildings of Marina Baie des Anges loomed larger than the Alpes-Maritimes, their immense curved facades glowing like a cauldron in the afternoon sun.
The swimming pool had calmed. Halder’s glob of spit had almost dissolved, the sun-driven currents drawing it into a spiral like the milky arms of a nebula. An eager water spider straddled one of the whorls and was busy gorging itself.
Penrose’s tour of the house had impressed Jane, who seemed stunned by the prospect of becoming the chatelaine of this imposing art-deco mansion. I hobbled after them as Penrose guided her around the kitchen, pointing out the ceramic hobs and the control panels with more dials than an airliner’s cockpit. In the study, virtually a self-contained office, Penrose demonstrated the computerized library, the telemetric links to hospitals in Cannes and Nice, and the databanks of medical records.
Sitting at the terminal, Jane accessed the X-rays of my knees now held in the clinic’s files, along with an unforgiving description of my accident and a photograph of the ground-looped Harvard. Tapping her teeth, Jane read the pathologist’s analysis of the rogue infection that had kept me in my wheelchair for so many months.
‘It’s right up to date – practically tells us what we had for breakfast this morning. I could probably hack into David’s files …’
I clasped her shoulders, proud of my spirited young wife. ‘Jane, you’ll tear the place apart. Thank God it doesn’t say anything about my mind.’
‘It will, dear, it will …’
Gazing at the garden, Jane finished her spritzer, eager to get back to the terminal.
‘I’ll give you a list of interesting restaurants,’ Penrose told her. He sat by himself in the centre of the wicker sofa, arms outstretched in the pose of a Hindu holy man, surveying us in his amiable way. ‘Tétou in Golfe-Juan does the best seafood. You can eat Graham Greene’s favourite boudin at Chez Félix in Antibes. It’s a shrine for men of action like you, Paul.’
‘We’ll go.’ I lay back in the deep cushions, watching a light aircraft haul its advertising pennant along the Croisette. ‘It’s blissful here. Absolutely perfect. So what went wrong?’
Penrose stared at me without replying, his smile growing and then fading like a dying star. His eyes closed and he seemed to slip into a shallow fugue, the warning aura before a petit-mal seizure.
‘Wilder …’ Concerned for him, Jane raised her hand to hold his attention. ‘Dr Penrose? Are you –?’
‘Paul?’ Alert again, Penrose turned to me. ‘The aircraft, they’re such a nuisance, I didn’t quite catch what you were saying.’
‘Something happened here.’ I gestured towards the office buildings of the business park. ‘Ten people were shot dead. Why did Greenwood do it?’
Penrose buttoned his linen jacket in an attempt to disguise his burly shoulders. He sat forward, speaking in a barely audible voice. ‘To be honest, Paul, we’ve no idea. It’s impossible to explain, and it damn near cost me my job. Those deaths have cast a huge shadow over Eden-Olympia. Seven very senior people were killed on May 28.’
‘But why?’
‘The big corporations would like to know.’ Penrose raised his hands, warming them in the sun. ‘Frankly, I can’t tell them.’
‘Was David unhappy?’ Jane put down her glass. She watched Penrose as if he were a confused patient who had wandered into Casualty with a garbled tale of death and assassination. ‘We worked together at Guy’s. He was a little high-minded, but his feet were on the ground.’
‘Completely.’ Penrose spoke with conviction. ‘He loved it here – his work at the clinic, the children’s refuge at La Bocca. The kids adored him. Mostly orphans abandoned by their north African and pied-noir families. They’d never met anyone like David. He helped out at a methadone project in Mandelieu …’
Jane stared into her empty glass. The sticky bowl had trapped a small insect. ‘Did he ever relax? It sounds as if the poor man was overworked.’
‘No.’ Penrose closed his eyes again. He moved his head, searching the planetarium inside his skull for a glimmer of light. ‘He was taking Arabic and Spanish classes so he could talk to the children at the refuge. I never saw him under any stress.’
‘Too many antidepressants?’
‘Not prescribed by me. The autopsy showed nothing. No LSD, none of the wilder amphetamines. The poor fellow’s bloodstream was practically placental.’
‘Was he married?’ I asked. ‘A wife would have known something was brewing.’
‘I wish he had been married. He did have an affair with someone in the property-services division.’
‘Man or woman?’
‘Woman. It must have been.’ Jane spoke almost too briskly. ‘He certainly wasn’t homosexual. Did she have anything to say?’
‘Nothing. Their affair had been over for months. Sadly, some things are fated to remain mysteries for ever.’
Penrose scowled at the pool, and chewed on a thumbnail. The garden was now in shadow as the late-afternoon light left the valley of Eden-Olympia, and the top floors of the office buildings caught the sun, floating above the trees like airborne caravels. Our conversation had drained the colour from Penrose’s face. Only his hands continued to move. Resting on the cushions beside him, they flinched and trembled with a life of their own.
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