Super-Cannes. Ali Smith

10 The Hit List

      AN ALMOST DRUGGED air floated across the lake, a rogue cloud that had drifted down the hillside, carrying the scent of office-freshener from a factory in Grasse. I walked along the water’s edge, attracting the attention of two security men in a Range Rover parked among the pines. One watched me through his binoculars, no doubt puzzled that anyone in Eden-Olympia should have the leisure to stroll through the midday sun.

      Between the security building and the Elf-Maritime research labs was an open-air cafeteria, a facility intended to soften the public face of the business park and give it a passing resemblance to an Alpine resort. Tired after my meeting with Zander, I sat down and ordered a vin blanc from the young French waitress, who wore jeans and a white vest printed with a quotation from Baudrillard.

      Zander had told me nothing, as I expected. Even his silences provided no useful clues. By now, nearly six months after the event, a relieved Eden-Olympia had erased David Greenwood from its collective memory, filing the tragedy in some administrative limbo assigned to earthquakes and regicides.

      I thought of Zander: thuggish, bisexual and corrupt, qualities no doubt essential for any successful police chief. I could smell his aftershave on my right hand, and was tempted to walk to the water’s edge and wash the scent away, but disturbing the surface would probably trigger a full-scale alert. Yet Zander was a potential collaborator, the only person I had met who saw the flaw at the heart of Eden-Olympia. Given the absence of an explicit moral order, where decisions about right and wrong were engineered into the social fabric along with the fire drills and parking regulations, Zander’s job became impossible. Crime could flourish at Eden-Olympia without the residents ever being aware that they were its perpetrators or leaving any clues to their motives.

      Zander, according to Jane, was the acting head of security, and was still waiting for his appointment to be confirmed. During the interregnum, as he fretted at his desk in his camel-hair coat, he might become a useful ally. I remembered the Alice images I had found in the children’s room. Not for the first time it occurred to me that David Greenwood might never have committed the murders on May 28, and that the surveillance footage that showed him entering and leaving his victims’ offices had been faked.

      A blonde woman in her thirties, dressed in a dark business suit, sat down at a nearby table. She ordered a cappuccino and exchanged a few words of banter with the waitress, but her eyes were fixed on the top floor of the security building, where Pascal Zander had his office. She opened a laptop computer and tapped the keys, throwing up a sequence of property ads for expensive villas on the heights of Super-Cannes and Californie, all furnished with electric-blue lawns and emerald skies. She stared morosely at the overlit photographs and began a typed dialogue with herself, apparently setting out her day’s schedule and answering her queries aloud in an ironic English voice. I imagined her stepping from her shower, towel twirled around her head, keying in the emotions she would feel that day, the memories to be cued, the daydreams to be assigned a few minutes of too-precious time, the whole programme laced with sardonic asides.

      During a creative pause she gazed over the tables at me, revealing an attractive but moody face. I marked her down as a professional rebel, who resented the trappings of managerial success, club-class upgrades and company credit cards, the fool’s gold that could buy an entire life and offer no discount for idealism or integrity, and I liked the sombre eye that she levelled at the business park. Her glance took in my open-necked shirt, tweed sports jacket and thong sandals, a garb never worn by anyone in Eden-Olympia at either work or play, but the off-duty dress at my Cyprus RAF base, circa 1978, and the guarantee, I was deluded enough to think, of a certain kind of honesty.