Super-Cannes

Fortunately, Mr Yasuda had not been injured in the accident, as I had seen a few hours earlier. Still awake at three that morning, I left Jane asleep, face down like a teenager with a pillow over her head. Wandering naked from one room to the next, I was still trying to come to terms with the ugly incident in the clinic car park.

The display of brutality had unsettled me. I said nothing to Jane as we drove into Ca

Slipping on my bathrobe, I kissed Jane's small hand, still faintly scented with some hospital reagent, and watched her fingers jump in a childlike reflex. I went downstairs, opened the sun-lounge door and strolled across the lawn, past the pool with its sealed surface like a black dance floor. I opened the wire gate into the te

A car approached the Yasudas' house, its engine labouring.

It limped along in low gear, metal scraping a tyre as it turned into the drive. A table lamp lit up Mrs Yasuda's first-floor study, where she had been sitting in the darkness, perhaps watching her English neighbour prowl the baselines of his mind. She moved to the window, and waved to her husband when he stepped from the damaged car.

A few minutes later I saw them through the slatted blinds of their bedroom. Still wearing his leather jacket, the stocky businessman strode around the room, gesticulating as his wife watched him from the bed. He seemed to be enacting scenes from a violent martial-arts film, perhaps shown that evening to the Japanese community in Ca

They began to make love, and I left the te

Señora Morales was giving the morning's instructions to the Italian maids. For an hour they would work downstairs, leaving me with ample time to shave, shower and muse over the possibilities of the day. The flow of faxes and e-mails from London had begun to fall away, and with my agreement Charles had taken over the editorship of the two aviation journals.

Faced with the imposed boredom of Eden-Olympia, I lay back on the bed, feeling the warm imprint of Jane's body beside me. We, too, had made love on returning from Ca

As the floor-polishers drummed away, I strolled through the empty bedrooms, searching for further traces of David Greenwood.

I sat on the draped mattress in the children's room, surrounded by a frieze of cartoon figures – Donald Duck, Babar and Tintin – and thinking of the child that I hoped Jane would bear one day, and how it would sleep and play in a room as su

Next to the bathroom was a fitted cupboard, decorated with Te

The copies were well thumbed, loaned to the youthful readership at the La Bocca children's refuge. The flyleaves were marked with names, in what I guessed was David's scrawl.

' Fatima… Elisabeth… Véronique… Natasha…'

'Curiouser and curiouser…' Jane ran a hand over the books in the cupboard. 'This Russian who mugged you turns out to be a devoted father, trying to borrow a library book for his daughter Natasha.'

'It does look like it.'

'Come on, Paul. You jumped into the deep end and went straight to the bottom. Not every Russian on the Côte d'Azur is a mafioso. The poor man was introducing Natasha to an English classic. You make fun of his teeth, steal one of his shoes, and launch a full-scale manhunt.'

'I know. I regret it now.'

'At least they didn't catch him. Halder looks as if he'd love to beat the hell out of someone.'

'I'm not so sure.' I straightened the row of books. 'For a library user, the Russian I saw was amazingly aggressive.'

'Of course he was.' Jane lay back on the bed, savouring her triumph. Still wearing her white hospital coat, she had come home to change before a conference in Nice. 'The Russians had to fight for the right to read… Mandelstam, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn. Think of it, Paul. You were lining up with all those KGB types against this poor migrant worker and little Natasha.'

'You win.' I sat beside Jane and massaged her calves. 'It's a touching thought, all those Alice books in the refuge, pored over by Véronique and Fatima. Where are they now?'

'Working in some awful factory, I imagine, packing espadrilles for five francs an hour, while they wonder what happened to the kind English doctor. Don't think too badly of David. He did some good things here.'

'I accept that. How well did you really know him?'

'We worked together. Paul, what are you driving at?'

'Nothing. I've always been curious.'

'You know I don't like that. David isn't coming back, so forget about him.' Irritated by me, Jane rose from the bed and took off her white coat. She seemed older than I remembered, her hair neatly groomed, the scar from her nasal ring concealed with cosmetic filler. She raised a hand as if to slap me, then relented and took my arm. 'I keep telling you – I never had many lovers.'

'I thought you had an army of them.'

'I wonder why…' She stood by the window, looking across the business park towards the sea. 'You're still locked into the past. It's a huge phantom limb that aches and throbs. We're here, Paul. We breathe this air, and we see this light…'

I watched her chin lift as she spoke, and realized that she was staring, not at the handsome headland of Cap d'Antibes and the pewter glimmer of the sea, but at the office buildings of Eden-Olympia, at the satellite dishes and microwave aerials.