LITMIR.BIZ

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together with the reading glasses suggested someone further along in years than her Italian companion.

      A search of the chest of drawers only added to his confusion. Buried beneath some neatly folded men’s socks was a shagreen box containing three pairs of solid gold cufflinks, bone collar stiffeners, a diamond-set money clip, a pearl tie pin, and some silver and onyx dress studs. It didn’t make sense. Who carried such costly accessories with them on a mission of murder? And why so many pairs of socks?

      The long drawer below contained some summer shirts in a variety of colours and materials. Tom opened one up. It had above-elbow sleeves and was cut to fit a tall man of some considerable girth, whereas the Italian had been short and compact.

      He was still struggling to make sense of this when he heard footsteps outside in the corridor. It was probably a guest returning to one of the other rooms, but he folded the shirt as quickly and neatly as possible and silently slid the drawer shut.

      He was right to have anticipated the worst. Someone was now at the door, ferreting for a key in a bag.

      His eyes darted around the room. The bathroom was out of the question, as was the built-in wardrobe; he had no idea what lay behind its louvred doors. The key was turning in the lock as he slid noiselessly beneath the bed.

      It was a woman – wide navy blue cotton slacks breaking on tan leather sandals. She made straight for the desk, not bothering to take a seat. He heard her pick up the telephone receiver and dial a three-digit number. It was a while before she spoke.

      ‘Where are you?’ she asked in German. This was clearly for her own benefit, because she hung up almost in the same breath.

      She skirted the bed, making for the wardrobe. Tom shifted to get a better view, ready to withdraw suddenly if she turned round. Her blonde hair was done in a youthful wave and she had a trim figure, but the hands which now removed a man’s jacket from a hanger were those of a middle-aged woman. She pulled a key from the hip pocket of the jacket – a key attached to an oval metal fob, just like the one that Tom held tightly clenched in his fist.

      This was the last he saw of her. He slunk back as she turned, fearing for a moment that she’d spotted him. She hadn’t, though. She made straight for the door and left the room.

      He was up and after her in an instant, pausing at the door, listening to her footfalls receding down the corridor. Chancing a quick glance outside, he saw her turn down the main staircase. Easing the door shut behind him, he set off in silent pursuit.

      Her destination was a first-floor room towards the front of the hotel, almost directly above the main entrance. In terms of location (and cost, no doubt) it couldn’t have been more different from the one they’d just left. She knocked furtively on the door. When no one responded she let herself in with the key.

      Tom approached just close enough to read the number on the door: 104. Everything told him this was the Italian’s room, and the urge to gain entry to it right now, to force some answers from the woman, was almost overwhelming. Cold common sense prevailed, though. He mustn’t do anything to link himself to the dead man. He knew the rules. He had to remain anonymous, faceless, nameless, at all times. Besides, an idea about the real nature of the woman’s role in this affair was beginning to take shape in his head, and he needed to test the hypothesis first.

      Olivier, the hotel manager, was making conversation with an elderly couple at their table in the dining room, but the moment he saw Tom enter he made his excuses and hurried over, beaming.

      ‘Mr Nash . . .’

      He pumped Tom’s hand.

      ‘After five years, I think you can call me Tom, don’t you?’

      ‘I’m on duty.’

      ‘You spend far too much time on duty, Olivier.’

      ‘What can I say?’ shrugged Olivier, an ironic twinkle in his eye. ‘I’m a consummate professional.’

      ‘Then find me a table on the terrace for breakfast.’

      ‘Find it yourself, connard,’ Olivier fired back, and they both laughed.

      They hadn’t seen each other for a couple of weeks, not since Tom had strolled down to the hotel with his book for a quick dinner, only to end up staggering home in the early hours of the morning after a marathon, and rather drunken, bout of Bezique. They would probably have played right through till daybreak if Olivier’s wife, Nadine, hadn’t searched them out in the bar in her nightdress and summoned her husband to bed.

      Tom opted for the terrace because he suspected Olivier would come and sit with him, and he knew that the guests were obliged to pass across it when making for the beach below. He selected a table near the head of the wide steps which ran down the bluff to the sand, turning his chair to admire the view while waiting for Olivier to return with his coffee and the two fried eggs he didn’t really want.

      He almost never dropped by for breakfast, and he’d thought it wise to play up the occasion: the final meal of the condemned man, condemned for the next few weeks to a string of house guests and other friends in need of near-continuous nourishment and entertainment. This was the still before the storm, and he couldn’t exactly mark it with a solitary café au lait, hence the eggs. He had passed up the offer of a fried slice of pork belly to go with them. The eggs were bad enough, the mere thought of them threatening to unravel the tight knot of nausea which had been sitting low down in his belly for the past few hours.

      He felt bad lying to Olivier, but he could hardly tell him the truth: that he’d killed one of his hotel guests, the man in Room 104, and that the young Italian now lay trussed up in tarpaulin on the sea bed somewhere over there.

      He squinted out to sea, trying to identify the spot. He realized, with a stab of self-reproach, that he should have thought twice before dumping the body where he had. The exact location might not be visible from where he was sitting, but it certainly would be from the villa, whose terracotta roof tiles he could see poking above the pines on the headland around to his left. As long as he lived in Villa Martel he would have a direct line of sight, a constant reminder of his actions.

      He should have gone east towards Cavalaire, around the corner: out of sight, out of mind. He rarely sailed that way, whereas he was always beating to and from the islands. He saw himself as an elderly man sitting hunched at the helm, an arthritic hand on the tiller, still tensing and falling silent every time he passed over the watery grave.

      This vision of his dotage was, he reflected miserably, the very best he could hope for. It assumed that he would still be around to see out his declining years in Le Rayol; it supposed that he would come through the current situation unscathed, and that having done so, Le Rayol and the simple life he’d carved out for himself here would not have been irredeemably tainted. It relied on a lot of things, none of which he could guarantee, or even reasonably hope for.

      He was stirred from his maudlin trance by a voice behind him.

      ‘What are you thinking?’

      It was Olivier with a tray.

      ‘How beautiful it is.’

      There were any number of sandy bays to choose from along this stretch of coast, but none held a torch to Le Rayol. Some were too narrow, too enclosed, or too expansive and exposed, or the hills pressed in too tightly behind, or, as at Cavalaire, their slopes died too far back from the sea. There wasn’t one thing at Le Rayol he would have changed: the lazy arc of the white beach, the gin-clear water, and the proud thrust of its headlands which protected the bay from all but the most southerly winds.

      ‘Yes, and you own a nice big piece of it,’ said Olivier, settling himself down at the table. ‘I wish I could.’

      ‘You can.’

      ‘Not on my salary.’

      Tom didn’t say anything, but he decided then that if he ever had to sell up and leave he would parcel off a bit of his land and gift it to Olivier and Nadine. He knew how much they loved this place. He knew that when they shut up shop in November

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