The English Girl

The pool lay beside me, so calm that a film of dust lay on the surface. Through the cool depths I could see a small coin on the sloping floor, perhaps a one-franc piece that had slipped from the pocket of Greenwood 's swimsuit. Burnished by the pool detergent, it gleamed like a node of silver distilled from the Riviera light, a class of pearl unique to the swimming pools of the rich.

I listened to the vacuum cleaners working in the bedroom, a relentless blare that had driven the echoes of the Harvard's engine from my mind. The two Italian maids arrived each morning at ten o'clock, part of the uniformed task force that moved from villa to villa. A gardener, Monsieur Anvers, appeared on alternate days, watered the grass and shrubs, and cleaned the pool. He was unobtrusive, an elderly Cannois whose daughter worked in the Eden-Olympia shopping mall.

One of the maids stared cheekily at me from a bathroom window, as if puzzled by my life of ease. Already the concept of leisure was dying in the business park, replaced by a grudging puritanism. Freedom was the right to paid work, while leisure was the mark of the shiftless and untalented.

Deciding to drive into Cannes, I gathered my proof pages and made my way back to the house. Señora Morales, the Spanish housekeeper, moved busily around the kitchen, checking the cartons of groceries delivered from the supermarket. The ever-watchful but tolerant gaze of this middle-aged Spanish woman reminded me of my prep-school matron, translated from the gloom of West Hampstead to the sun terraces of the Mediterranean. She was helpful but garrulous, and I often heard her talking to herself in the kitchen, using a confused mix of Spanish and English.

She nodded approvingly as I took the soda-water siphon and a bottle of rosé Bandol from the refrigerator. Clearly she assumed that any Englishman of quality would be drunk by noon.

'My car,' I explained. 'It's very old. A few drinks make it go better.'

'Of course. You come to Valencia and open a garage.' She watched me raise my glass and toast the morning light. 'It's always good weather at Eden-Olympia.'

'That's true. Except for one very stormy day last May.' I felt the bubbles play against my nostrils and sipped the aerated wine.

'Señora, how long have you been at Eden-Olympia?'

'Two years. I was housekeeper for Mr and Mrs Narita.'

'The family next door, before the Yasudas? Dr Penrose told me – they were unhappy and moved back to Paris. It must have been a shock, like one of those comics the Japanese read.'

Señora Morales lowered her eyes to the figs and fennel. 'Before that I worked for Monsieur Bachelet.'

I put down my drink, remembering that Guy Bachelet, the head of security at Eden-Olympia, had been one of Greenwood 's victims. 'I'm sorry, señora. How terrible for you.'

'Worse for him.'

'I was thinking of you. The pain you must have felt when you heard he'd been murdered in his own office.'

'No.' Señora Morales spoke firmly. 'Not in his office. He died at his house.'

'You weren't there, I hope?'

'I was coming from Grasse.' As if to justify her lucky escape, she said: 'I start at nine o'clock. Already the police were at the house.'

'That's right. It was very early. So Monsieur Bachelet was…?'

'Dead, yes. And Dr Serrou.'

'Dominique Serrou?' Penrose had mentioned Greenwood 's partner at the La Bocca refuge. 'She was shot at the clinice?'

'No.' Señora Morales inspected the fading bloom on a peach, as if tempted to return it to the supermarket. 'Also in the house.'

'I thought everyone was killed at Eden-Olympia? Dr Serrou lived in Le Cannet.'

'Not at her house.' Señora Morales pointed through the windows at the rooftops of the residential enclave. 'At Monsieur Bachelet's house. Four hundred metres from here.'

'They died there together? Dr Greenwood shot them both?'

'At the same time. Terrible…' Señora Morales crossed herself.

'Dr Serrou was very kind.'

'I'm sure. But what was she doing there? Was she treating him for something?'

'Something…? Yes.'

I walked to the window and listened to the sprinklers refreshing the lawns and washing away the dust of the night. I assumed that Bachelet had fallen ill, perhaps with a sudden angina attack, and called an emergency number. Dominique Serrou had driven over, in what would be her last house call, just as another, deranged doctor was making his first of the day.

'Señora Morales, are you certain they died at Bachelet's house?'

'I saw the bodies. They took them out.'

'Perhaps they were taking them in? Bringing Bachelet home from his office? In the confusion you might easily -'

'No.' Señora Morales stared at me stonily. She spoke in a surprisingly strong voice, as if seizing her chance. 'I saw their blood. Everywhere… pieces of their bones on the bedroom wall.'

'Señora please…' I poured her a glass of water. 'I'm sorry I raised this. We knew Dr Greenwood. My wife worked with him in London.'

'They told me to go away…' Señora Morales stared over my shoulder, as if watching an old newsreel inside her head. 'But I went into the house. I saw the blood.'

'Señora Morales…' I poured my spritzer into the sink. 'Why did Dr Greenwood want to kill so many people? Most of them were friends of his.'

'He knew Monsieur Bachelet. Dr Greenwood visited him many times.'

'Was he treating him? Medically?'

Señora Morales shrugged her broad shoulders. 'He went in the morning. Monsieur Bachelet waited for him. Dr Greenwood lent him books, about an unhappy English girl. Always talking back to the queen.'

'An unhappy English girl? Princess Diana? Was he a royalist?'

Señora Morales raised her eyes to the ceiling. The vacuum cleaners had locked horns, expiring in a blare of noise that was followed by fierce shrieks. Excusing herself, she left the kitchen and strode towards the stairs. I paced the tiled floor, and listened to her raised voice as she berated the maids. Talking to me had released the tension of months.

Before leaving, she paused at the front door and treated me to a sincere, if well-rehearsed, smile.

'Mr Sinclair…'

'Señora?'

'Dr Greenwood – he was a good man. He helped many people…'

As I changed in the bathroom I could still hear the odd inflections in Señora Morales's voice. She had gone out of her way to raise my doubts, as if my louche and anomalous position at Eden-Olympia, my role as pool-lounger and morning drinker, made me the confidant she had been searching for since the day of the tragedy.

Already I believed her account. If, as she hinted, Dr Serrou had spent the night with Bachelet, the inexplicable brainstorm might have stemmed from a _crime passionel_. As Greenwood and Dominique Serrou gave their free time to the children's refuge at La Bocca, a warm affair could easily have sprung from their work.

But perhaps Dr Serrou had tired of the earnest young doctor and found the security chief more to her taste. Once Greenwood had shot his rival and former lover he had rushed headlong into a last desperate rampage, murdering his colleagues in an attempt to erase every trace of a world he hated.

As for the book about the unhappy English girl, I guessed that this was a dossier on a child at the refuge, the abused daughter of some rentier Englishman, or the surviving victim of a car crash that had killed her parents.

At the same time, it surprised me that Penrose had confided nothing of this to Jane. But a sudden brainstorm was less threatening to future investors at Eden-Olympia than a tragedy of sexual obsession.

Satisfied that I had virtually solved the mystery, I took a rose from the vase on the hall table and slipped it through my buttonhole.

Дата добавления: 2015-09-07