Dial M for Merde (31 page)

Léanne had told me to watch out for guys that M might not actually approach, people she might just exchange glances with. And back in Bandol, this guy had not only
been exchanging glances. He'd been trying to send semaphore messages with his trouser bulge. What was more, he was edging past Jake towards Léanne, towards the President. And if I wasn't mistaken, he had a bulge in his trouser pocket again. No doubt a gun this time.

‘It's him!' I yelled. ‘Stop him, Jake!'

Although Jake often gives the impression that he is living on another planet, on this occasion he reacted with the speed of an Arles bullfighter. He grabbed the nearest weapon to hand, a plate of round goat's cheese balls covered in olive oil, and rammed it in the new arrival's face. OK, not exactly a weapon of mass destruction, but it did the trick. The guy was stopped in his tracks long enough for the bodyguard to jump on him and flatten him to the ground.

The back door opened and a second guard dashed in to join the fray. Within seconds they had bundled the intruder across the floor and out of the kitchen into the serving room, putting a brick wall between the President and his assailant.

The intended victim froze for an instant, and then relaxed.

‘Alors, là!' The President laughed, no doubt listening to the percentage points ticking upwards in the polls.

Léanne ran out into the serving room to help the guards. I stayed to stare at this man I'd seen so often on TV and in the papers, and who was now reaching out to shake Jake's hand.

‘Merci, Monsieur …?'

‘Jake,' he answered. ‘Aimez-vous la posy?'

The question was so sudden and so weird that the President blinked it away and turned to me.

‘And you, Monsieur?'

‘West,' I said. ‘Paul West.'

He shook my hand. ‘Ah, two Anglo-Saxons? It seems zat you av say-ved me,' he said in English, with an accent that could have been a joke. I didn't dare laugh.

I turned to share my moment of glory with Elodie, and was shocked to see M still there. She was standing by the sink, taking things out of her make-up bag.

Huh, women, I thought. She knows she'll be arrested, and she's putting on her face ready for the cameras.

She turned towards us, a fixed smile on her face.

‘You must have a glass of champagne to celebrate, Monsieur le Président,' she said, walking towards him with a single tall flute in her hands.

She must have opened a bottle herself, I thought. The champagne wasn't supposed to be uncorked until after the President's speech. It's always the way in France – bla-bla first, drinks afterwards.

Sure enough, an open bottle was standing by the sink, next to M's make-up bag and – bizarrely – the bottle of edible sex oil.

‘A votre santé,' she said. Your health. She held out the glass, and the President, obviously entranced by this beautiful girl bearing gifts, let go of my hand and reached for the champagne.

‘No!' I punched it out of his hand.

Valéry, Elodie and Bonne Maman gasped. The Englishman had hit le Président. This meant war, at the very least.

‘Paul! How could you?' For a split second, M looked at me as though she was about to cry, and then she ran out of the kitchen door.

 

There were Bonnepoires all around the house, including kids playing tag in the forest of family legs. I dodged through the crowd as I sprinted after M.

She had gone around the side of the house and was heading for the meadows. By now it was very dark. If she got out on to the marshes where she'd been on so many exploratory walks, it'd be impossible to find her before dawn.

As I ran, I tried to piece things together. Her little bottle hadn't contained edible sex oil after all – it was poison. Lucky I hadn't tasted it. It looked as though Léanne had got things badly wrong – M hadn't been just the cash-delivery girl, she was the back-up, on hand to have a second stab if the main hitman fluffed. Which he had, pathetically.

M was very fit, and was running fast. I had wondered why she'd chosen to wear low-heeled shoes to the wedding. Now I understood. She had already reached the first big drainage ditch. I was a good twenty yards behind, and not gaining. Not losing ground, though. If I kept up my pace, I'd manage to stay close and see where she went.

I heard a muddy splash. M obviously hadn't made it over the ditch. When I reached the edge, I saw that she was trying to climb up the slippery bank.

She stared up at me. It was so dark out here that I could only see her face as a pale shadow.

‘You, Paul?' she said. ‘Of all people, why did
you
have to stop me?'

‘And of all people, why did
you
have to try and kill the President?'

In reply, she only shook her head.

‘You knew that waitress was a cop, didn't you?' she demanded.

‘Yes, I knew. They've been on to you for ages. I've known ever since that night in Bandol. That's when they told me who you really were.'

‘What?' I could see M ticking boxes in her head. My
weird behaviour was all being explained away. ‘What did they tell you?' she asked.

‘That you were travelling around the coast, looking for a hitman.'

She laughed bitterly. ‘Hiring a killer? Bollocks. I wanted to do it myself.'

‘Then who was that twat who just tried to jump the President?'

‘That guy? I don't know who he was or what he was doing. This was a solo job.'

We both heard a shout. I looked towards the house. People were running out into the grounds. Léanne and the other cops, I guessed, searching for us.

Something made me jump into the ditch out of sight. I landed with a cold squelch. So much for my best suit and leather shoes.

‘Who hired you?' I asked.

‘No one
hired
me, Paul.' She tutted in disbelief. ‘This was purely personal.'

‘But what about all your meetings, then? And those guys you were hanging out with last summer in Saint Tropez?'

‘The cops told you about them?' She sounded astonished that she'd been so well researched. ‘Those guys in Saint Tropez were just some dickheads I bumped into while I was working on the caviar investigation.'

‘So all the stuff about sturgeon wasn't just a smoke screen?'

‘No.' In the shadows, I saw her shake her head emphatically. ‘I heard that some people had been boasting about selling illegal French caviar as Iranian, so I went along to listen, and played the bimbo on their yacht for a week. And ever since, I've been begging the scientists down here to help me nail the traffickers with hard evidence. I
haven't been trying to hire a killer, Paul – I've been trying to save an endangered species.'

Which all sounded incredibly noble. But she was forgetting something.

‘I don't get it, though,' I said, shifting uneasily in the cold slop. ‘Why would you want to whack the President of France?'

‘Because it's quicker than whacking the whole French government.' Suddenly she sounded capable of killing with her bare hands. ‘You asked me about my dad's boat accident. Did you ever hear of the
Rainbow Warrior
?'

‘Of course,' I said. The ecologists' boat that was blown up in New Zealand by French saboteurs after it had been protesting against nuclear testing in the Pacific.

‘People think that only one guy was killed, a Portuguese photographer. But there were two. My dad was in a coma for six months before he died. The French government killed him.'

‘Shit.'

‘They've never revealed who actually planted the bombs,' M continued. ‘Only two of the six saboteurs were convicted, and the French wangled their repatriation. Neither of them served more than two years. And who gave the order for the attack? President Mitterrand. Personally.'

She fell silent. In the distance, I could hear Léanne calling my name.

‘But why try to kill the current President?' I asked. ‘After all these years?'

‘The French have just released documents about the bombing,' M replied. ‘With all the important details taken out, of course. And it's sent Maman over the edge. She's started writing letters to Dad, posting them to New Zealand. She's got a whole team of therapists trying to
persuade her that he's not going to come sailing home on the
Rainbow Warrior
. So I thought it was time for some real justice. I bought the poison, and planned to use it when the President came down to his chateau at Brégançon later in the month. But then you handed me the perfect opportunity. Sorry, Paul …'

There was nothing I could say.

‘Are you going to try and take me back to meet your waitress friend?' M asked.

I squelched from one foot to the other. Decision time again. All these heavy moral choices I was being forced to make, when all I really wanted to do down here in the South of France was go snorkelling and organize a barbecue for Elodie.

‘Are you planning to have another go at the President?' I asked.

M laughed. ‘Huh, no. I think I've kind of blown my cover. And I'm really not cut out for this assassination lark.'

All I could see of her was a silhouette standing out against the faint moonglow from the water. It was much too dark to look her in the eye. Anyway, the days when I thought I could tell whether a woman was lying were long gone. She might be pointing some kind of weapon at me, planning to put me out of action if I tried to stop her escaping.

‘I can't let you go,' I said, and took a heavy, wet step towards her.

M tensed.

‘Not without a goodbye hug,' I added.

She sobbed once, loudly, and pressed herself hard to my chest.

I wanted to tell her how I would have loved to help her nail the caviar smugglers or organize a protest about the
Rainbow Warrior
outside the President's chateau. It would have been fun just to be down here in the South of France with her, soaking up the sun and the rosé while campaigning for her good causes. If she hadn't screwed things up with her deception and this botched poisoning, things could have worked out spectacularly well between us.

But there was no time for speeches. The voices were getting closer. The cops were spreading out.

‘You've got to go,' I whispered. ‘I'll stay in the ditch until they find me.'

‘Thanks,' she said.

‘I can't move anyway, my feet are stuck.'

She kissed me hard on the lips, and turned away.

I had the brief pleasure of grasping her backside to give her a heave up the bank, and then she was gone, crouching low as she ran for the cover of the trees.

I peeped over the lip of the ditch, back towards the house. Most of the shadows were dashing in completely the wrong direction, along the drive to the main road. M would get away, I calculated, at least as far as the open marsh. I didn't know what she'd planned after that, but she seemed pretty good at subterfuge. I guessed she'd be OK.

I stood in the mud and wondered why I'd let her get away.

Perhaps all of us Mata Haris were destined to betray France, I thought. The country seemed to bring out the traitor in everyone.

Or maybe my old confusion about how to pronounce the French word for caterer had come home to roost – I really was a
traître
, and not a
traiteur
.

But I had to let M go, anyway, I told myself.

Call me an old-fashioned Englishman and a soft-hearted romantic, but you just don't sleep with a girl and then hand
her over to the cops. Especially not for trying to kill a politician.

5

I was waltzing with Elodie. She'd had five lessons, she told me, but you wouldn't have known it. She was crushing my toes to a blue pulp. All the more so, because they were bare. I didn't have any dry shoes, and was dancing barefoot on the prickly lawn.

‘I don't understand,' Elodie said. ‘M was so friendly to me. Like, all day.'

‘Guilt,' I said. ‘She knew she was going to mess up your wedding.'

‘Well, she was right.' Elodie amputated a couple more of my toes, and then leaned in close for a good weep. She'd been indulging wholeheartedly in this newfound crying habit of hers all evening. She had deposited most of her eye make-up on Valéry's chest, and he was sitting at the table looking as if someone had burnt two huge holes in his shirt with a poker.

I soaked up my share of Elodie's tears, feeling deeply sorry for her. It was after eleven thirty, and she still wasn't married.

Proceedings had, understandably, got a little behind schedule because of the assassination attempt. I'd had to wait the best part of an hour to be discovered in my muddy hiding place. Just before the cop shone his torch over the lip of the ditch, I'd slid forward into the mire and pretended to be semi-conscious.

After that, there had been the de-briefing. All I could remember, I told Léanne and Leather Jacket, was that I'd
chased M as far as the ditch, stumbled, fallen in, and then been pulled out of the water by the kind gendarme with his torch.

How, they asked, had I managed to survive face-down in water for an hour without drowning? It had to be all the snorkelling practice I'd been getting, I told them.

But had they really been listening to M's phone calls, I asked. They seemed to have got things seriously wrong.

Léanne looked uncomfortable and replied that they thought she'd been talking in code.

‘Did M tell you anything new?' she wanted to know.

I shook my head, doing my best to look innocent and ignorant. I felt a twinge of guilt holding out on Léanne, but then she'd withheld plenty of information from me, including some key stuff that might have made me feel sympathy for M. Her dad's identity, for example. It looked as though Léanne had known that all along. So in a way, we were even. An eye for an eye, an untruth for an untruth.

The cops were suspicious, of course, but they had no time to go into details. Leather Jacket took the poison bottle to Marseille to get it analysed. The two white-haired guys were checking through a letter that M had left in Elodie's room, listing the names of every caviar smuggler she'd met in Saint Tropez.