Super-Cannes. Ali Smith

Чтение книги онлайн.

       7 Incident in a Car Park

      ‘THEY’RE RIFLE BULLETS, steel-capped,’ I told Jane in her office at the clinic. ‘Probably fired from a military weapon. Two of them were in the pumphouse. The third I fished out of the pool an hour ago.’

      Jane watched me as I leaned across her desk and placed the three bullets in her empty ashtray. Stolen from a pub in Notting Hill, the ashtray was a reassuring presence, proof that a small part of Jane’s rackety past still survived in this temple of efficiency.

      Jane sat calmly in her white coat, dwarfed by a black leather chair contoured like an astronaut’s couch. She touched the bullets with a pencil, and raised a hand before I could speak.

      ‘Paul – take it easy.’

      Already she was playing the wise daughter, more concerned about my adrenalin-fired nerviness than by the unsettling evidence I had brought. I remembered her under the roadside plane trees near Arles, calmly sucking a peach as the engine steamed and I rigged an emergency fan belt from a pair of her tights.

      She prodded the bullets, moving them around the ashtray. ‘Are you all right? You should have called me. This Russian – what’s Halder playing at?’

      ‘I told him not to worry you. Believe me, I’ve never felt better. I could easily have run here.’

      ‘That’s what bothers me. The Russian didn’t hurt you?’

      ‘He brushed my shoulder, and I slipped on the grass.’

      ‘He spoke English?’

      ‘Badly. He said his name was Alexei.’

      ‘That’s something.’ Jane stood up and walked around the desk. Her small hands held my face, then smoothed my damp hair. She paused at the swollen bruise above my ear, but said nothing about the wound. ‘Why do you think he was Russian?’

      ‘It’s a guess. He mentioned someone called Natasha. Do you remember those touts near the taxi ranks at Moscow Airport? They had everything for sale – drugs, whores, diamonds, oil leases, anything except a taxi. There was something seedy about him in a small-time way. Poor diet and flashy dentistry.’

      ‘That doesn’t sound like Eden-Olympia.’ Jane pressed my head against her breast and began to explore my scalp. ‘Awful man – I can see he upset you. He might have been lost.’

      ‘He was looking for something. He thought I was David Greenwood.’

      ‘Why? There’s no resemblance. David was fifteen years younger …’ She broke off. ‘He can’t have met David.’

      I rotated my chair to face Jane. ‘That’s the point. Why would David have any contact with a small-time Russian crook?’

      Jane leaned against the desk, watching me in a way I had never seen before, less the tired house-doctor of old and more the busy consultant with an eye on her watch. ‘Who knows? Perhaps he was hoping to sell David a used car. Someone from the rehab clinic might have mentioned his name.’

      ‘It’s possible. Doctors doing charity work have to mix with a lot of riffraff.’

      ‘Apart from their husbands? Paul, these bullets – don’t get too involved with them.’

      ‘I won’t …’

      I listened to the lift doors in the corridor as Jane’s colleagues left the clinic after their day’s work. Somewhere a dialysis machine moved through its cleaning cycle, emitting a series of soft grunts and rumbles, like a discreet indigestion. The clinic was a palace of calm, far away from the pumphouse and its bullet-riddled sack. I gazed through the cruise-liner windows at the open expanse of the lake. A deep shift in the subsoil sent a brief tremor across the surface, as a pressure surge moved through a ring main.

      Proud of Jane, I said: ‘What an office – they obviously like you. Now I see why you want to spend your time here.’

      ‘It was David’s office.’

      ‘Doesn’t that feel …?’

      ‘Strange? I can cope with it. We sleep in his bed.’

      ‘Almost grounds for divorce. They should have moved you. Living in the same villa is weird enough.’ I gestured at the filing cabinets. ‘You’ve been through his stuff? Any hints of what went wrong?’

      ‘The files are empty, but some of his records are still on computer.’ Jane tapped a screen with her pencil. ‘The La Bocca case histories would make your hair curl. A lot of those Arab girls were СКАЧАТЬ