The Sunshine Cruise Company (23 page)

Later it would be hard for Boscombe to recall who threw the first punch. Either way, a couple of minutes later, guests arriving at the Carlton were stunned to hear sirens ripping through the summer air as two police cars pulled up at the hotel just in time to meet the departing Detective Sergeant Hugh Boscombe, British CID. He was being carried – struggling and screaming – by four security guards now. He had a black eye and a cut, bruised face. Security had got a bit carried away. ‘LET ME GO!
LET ME GO, YOU FUCKING BASTARD CUNTS!’

Two policemen joined the hotel bouncers in trying to bundle the berserk, flailing Boscombe into the first patrol car.

‘
Qu’est-ce que c’est?
’ a bellboy asked Claude who was overseeing the operation.

‘
Le pédophile,
’ Claude replied quietly.

‘
Mon Dieu!
’

‘YOU FUCKING CUNNNTTTSSSSS!’ Boscombe screamed.

This scream marked Boscombe’s last real contribution to the fight as the lead policeman shrugged, stood back, drew his taser, and fired a full charge into the good sergeant’s arse.

‘Urrrnnnnn,’ Boscombe said as he went limp.

Almost immediately the air was filled with a terrible stench as 400-odd volts of electricity achieved what superhuman doses of Ex-Lax hadn’t been able to touch the sides of.

‘Jesus,’ one of the policemen said, turning his face away.

Five hundred yards along the Croisette, Wesley was contentedly savouring the last of his third cup of delicious
café au lait
when he heard the police car go screaming past, sirens blaring, blissfully unaware that his unconscious boss was sprawled flat across the back seat with two or three pounds of mayhem caked in his pants.

‘Go on, lads,’ Wesley said, raising his coffee cup in salute. ‘Give ’em hell.’

‘BUT DON’T … DON’T
you have
security
? To make sure this sort of thing doesn’t happen?’ Susan spluttered. She was finding it surprisingly easy to muster a good level of faux indignation.

‘Madame, I … I can assure you …’ Claude spluttered in return. He was standing in the doorway to their suite, flanked by the two guards who had just thrown a fairly decent beating into Boscombe. Behind Susan, in the background, Vanessa was still sobbing in Julie’s arms on one of the enormous, overstuffed sofas, flanked by Ethel and Jill.

‘I mean, we come to stay here, paying goodness knows how much money and –’

‘I do not know how ziz man came to be in our hotel but I can assure you …’ Claude went on, detailing how thorough their search was going to be, how no stone would be left unturned, how they would be prosecuting the disgraceful pervert to the full extent of the law. Claude’s investigation would have had a great deal more clarity, would have been far more simple, had he known that at that very moment, seven floors below, having enjoyed two Camels on the trot and a lengthy phone conversation with his mistress arranging an assignation for later that evening, Charles the concierge had wandered back into the lobby having completely missed the whole altercation. Unable to find the rude, badly dressed English detective he had simply assumed he had wandered off for a moment. Charles patted his inside pocket, checking Boscombe’s identification and letter were still there, and joined a couple of members of junior staff near the main entrance where they were discussing all the excitement Charles had just missed. Something about a sex offender wandering into the ladies’ changing rooms.

‘I don’t know,’ Ethel said, trundling forward in her wheelchair, stopping beside Susan as she prepared to play their trump card. ‘I really think I need to have a word with Monsieur Ferrat about all of this.’

The mention of the dread name stopped Claude mid-babble. ‘
Mesdames
,’ he said with tremendous gravity, ‘firstly let me assure you that you will be receiving no bill in connection with your stay here. Secondly –’

‘IT WAS HARD!’ Vanessa wailed in the background.

‘God knows what the press will make of all this,’ Julie said.

‘Secondly,’ Claude swallowed, ‘I would like to extend these terms to allow you to stay with us here as long as you like.’

Ethel and Susan looked at each other. ‘Thank you,’ Susan said, ‘we’ll think about it. Now, please, if we could just have some peace and quiet for a moment …’

‘But of course. If there is any –’

‘Thank you,’ Susan said, closing the door as Claude retreated, palms spread out before him in a gesture of supplication.

The moment the heavy door closed Vanessa stopped crying, looked up at the others and gave a sheepish grin. There was a moment for the collective sigh of relief before Ethel said, ‘Yeah. Ladies? Let’s get the fuck out of here.’

APPROXIMATELY ONE HOUR
behind all of this, back on good old British Summer Time, Chief Inspector Wilson was having lunch at his desk. It was a basic affair that would surely have offended many Frenchmen: a tuna-salad sandwich and a few grapes accompanied by a bottle of still mineral water. The wife was always on at him – and not without reason – about the cholesterol, the blood pressure. Part of the reason for the blood pressure, and the whole reason why he was having lunch at his desk, rather than down the Joiner’s Arms or at the Fox, towered to his right elbow: a teetering stack of paperwork. As he ate Wilson took the top sheet from the pile, glanced over it, and then either signed and placed it in his ‘OUT’ tray or frowned and placed it in his ‘ACTION’ tray if it was something that merited further discussion. It was an archaic system – most of his peers spent the day peering at screens of emails – but one that Wilson had been using since the late 1970s and that worked well for him. He had tried to go down the electronic route but found that he needed a piece of paper in his hand in order to properly concentrate. Subsequently he had ended up just printing off all the emails he received and adding them to his ‘PENDING’ tray, which, as his eldest daughter said, rather defeated the whole point.

He took a document from the top of the pile and saw that it was a bill for several thousand pounds for the charter of the light aircraft used to take Detectives Boscombe and Wesley to France a couple of days ago. With only a tremor of the eyelid, a slight increase in the heart rate, Wilson scribbled his signature in the box marked ‘Approved’. Just as he did this, at the very moment his eye was still hovering on the dread word ‘Boscombe’, there was a knock at the door. ‘Come!’ Wilson shouted, not even needing to look up to know that it would be Sergeant Tarrant.

‘Ah, sir, do you have a moment?’

‘Out with it, Tarrant,’ Wilson said, not looking up. He hated preambles and throat-clearing.

‘It’s about Sergeant Boscombe …’

The slight tremor of the eyelid, the feeling of blood being pumped a little faster through his heart.

‘Yes?’

‘Well, he, I don’t quite know how to put this, sir.’

‘Oh, do get on with it, Tarrant. What’s he done now? Urinated on the Arc de Triomphe?’

‘Ah, not exactly, sir, no. He’s been arrested in the South of France for sexually assaulting a fifteen-year-old girl.’

Wilson looked up. He was conscious of a light-headedness, of spots dancing in the periphery of his vision. ‘Ah,’ he said simply, setting his pen down and leaning back in his chair. ‘I see.’ He sat there, motionless for a moment. Tarrant shifted uncomfortably in the doorway, still holding the email he’d received from Cannes Gendarmerie. He’d printed it off, as per his boss’s preferred modus operandi. His boss who was now sitting there, quite still, seeming to look through Tarrant, through the outer office, all the way to France itself.

‘Sir?’ Tarrant said after what felt like a very long time. He noticed that colour seemed to be gradually returning to CI Wilson’s face. Indeed, perhaps a little too much colour …

‘Just give me a moment please, Tarrant,’ Wilson said, sounding distracted, as though he were focusing on a much greater, more pressing problem.

Another moment passed before, far away in the outer office of Wroxham police station, the rest of the staff collectively jumped as they heard Wilson’s voice roaring
‘BAAAASSSTAAAARRRRDDDDD!!!’
at an inhuman pitch, the roar accompanied by a metallic clang followed by a thud that only Tarrant knew was made by Wilson booting a metal wastepaper basket across the room and into the wall of his office.

MARSEILLES, A LITTLE
less than two hours’ drive from the manicured beauty of Cannes and home to one and a half million souls. The seaport was also home to much of the wretched villainy that passed through this part of Europe. The Mos Eisley of France indeed. Since antiquity the underbelly of the world had been flocking here to trade commodities as diverse as silks, spices, drugs, guns and humans.

And now it was – briefly – home to one and a half million and five souls.

At Susan’s insistence they had taken far less grand lodgings here: a three-star hotel on a shadowy backstreet near the Old Port. It was here that they stashed the money and the bag containing Nails’s guns underneath a few sweaters in the bottom of the wardrobe and went over their plan again.

Someone would always remain in the room with the contraband. As Susan and Julie were meeting Terry’s Mr Tamalov at a nightclub he owned (which was, unpromisingly, called ‘Le Punisher’) and Ethel and Vanessa were ‘starving’, Jill was taking first shift guarding the weapons and cash while the oldest and youngest members of the team slurped bouillabaisse near the seafront.

In the morning Jill was going to take a taxi to Nice airport and get the first available flight back to England. In a day or two they would wire the thirty thousand Jill needed for Jamie’s operation to an account she would open back home. Then, using their new identities purchased from Tamalov, Susan, Julie and Ethel would board a flight to a South American destination yet to be agreed upon. The only other point yet to be agreed upon was exactly how they were going to get several million in cash out of the country.

It was this subject Susan and Julie were discussing while they sat in the empty nightclub waiting for Tamalov. ‘Could we buy something big and hide it inside it and then have it shipped to wherever we’re going to be?’ Susan asked.

‘Ooh, don’t know about that,’ Julie said. ‘You fancy chancing that?’

‘No. Stupid idea. Sorry.’

Around them cleaners were hoovering and staff were collecting glasses, their feet making a ripping, Velcro sound as they trod across the sticky carpeting. Some of the cleaners were blasting air-fresheners into the darker recesses, trying to overpower the odours of alcohol, tobacco, sweat and desperation. Nightclubs weren’t called nightclubs by accident, Susan thought. They worked in the dark: pounding neon chambers, impossible paradises of music, seduction and sophistication. By day they were revealed for what they were – tawdry sex abattoirs. Not her environment. Julie, on the other hand, felt perfectly at home here. She watched the cleaners with some affection, having done similar jobs many times, in London, Sydney, San Francisco.

‘Or how about –’ Susan began again, but whatever she was about to say was cut off by a loud voice booming ‘LADIES!’ They turned to see a figure coming across the deserted dance floor, looming out of the semi-dark.

Tamalov was, in some respects, exactly what you’d expect of a middle-aged Russian man of dubious business background. (And, let’s face it, that ‘dubious background’ could apply to pretty much all Russian businessmen. A country that went from wheat and dung beetles to the greatest military superpower in the world in thirty years? That later went from full-blown communism to crazed full-bling capitalism in less than twenty? There had to be a certain moral flexibility afoot here.) He had a silvery beard and a drift of (thinning) white hair. A gold chain as thick as clothes-line rope hung around his neck. His watch, Julie thought – as he came into their booth, grinning, urging them not to stand up, extending his hand to shake theirs, getting their names straight, and urging them to call him Alexei – it looked like a dial prised from the control panel of a nuclear submarine and then encrusted with enough jewels to make a supermodel vomit. He wore a Ralph Lauren Polo shirt (stretched taut over a thrusting pot belly), chinos and brown leather loafers without socks – the uniform of the wealthy in hot climes. The only jarring note was that he appeared to be exactly five feet high. Tamalov slid into the banquette across from Susan, next to Julie, who did her best to slink down against the wall in order not to tower over him. ‘So!’ he said. ‘You are the friends of Terry’s?’

‘Yes,’ Susan said.

‘Old friends,’ Julie stressed.

‘Very good, very good. I have not seen Terry in, oh, five or six years. We first did business together back in the early nineties. Shipping Range Rovers into the former Soviet Union. A lot of money. A lot of money. Anyway, we –’ He stopped and frowned, looking at the table, seeming to notice something for the first time. ‘But you have no drinks. Many apologies. This is terrible.’

‘No, no, we’re fi—’ Julie began.

‘Please, some champagne?’

‘Oh, that’s very kind. But maybe just a Coke, thank you,’ Susan said.

‘COKE!’ Tamalov barked. ‘Coke is for children! Come, please, I have some excellent Pol Roger.’

‘I could go for a glass of champagne,’ Julie said.

‘Very good!’ Tamalov said. ‘This one here –’ he smacked the table in front of Julie – ‘she has a look. In the eye. Much trouble, I think.’

‘You’ve no idea,’ Susan said.

‘DOMINIC!’ Tamalov shouted. A guy of around thirty, tanned and handsome, appeared from around the bar, his teeth glinting white in the murky neon of the club. ‘Champagne. From my office. Not the syrup you sell behind that fucking bar. Excuse me, ladies. So, Terry is well, yes?’

‘Very well,’ Susan said. ‘He sends his regards.’

‘And you must give him mine. The old bastard! Do you mind?’ He had produced a pack of Sobranie, the cigarettes pastel-coloured, in greens and pinks, yellows and blues with a gold band near the filter, which he surprised them by breaking off.

‘No, please,’ Susan said.