Читать книгу A Foreign Country - Charles Cumming - Страница 20

‘You cannot sleep, Monsieur Uniacke?’

Kell was grateful for the ready-made lie. He braced his hands across the counter at reception, summoned a careworn smile, and explained that insomnia had plagued him for years and that a brisk walk around the block usually cured it.

‘Of course. Let me get the door for you.’

He noted the pristine carpet, cleansed of the remaining glass and potpourri, and again thanked Pierre for clearing it up as he followed him down the short flight of steps towards the entrance of the hotel. Five minutes later he was at the coded gate of his underground car park on Place Marshall, working on the assumption that Amelia would have left her vehicle at the same location.

He was wrong. Descending through four subterranean levels, along a yellow-lit corkscrew of silence and stale air, Kell searched in vain for the winking lights of Amelia’s hire car, pressing repeatedly on the remote-control lock. In the basement of the car park he turned and walked back up to street level, following the same procedure, but again to no avail. A nightwatchman was snoozing in a hutch behind a parking barrier, his feet on the desk, arms folded across a copy of Paris Match. Kell tapped on the window and woke him up.

‘Excusez-moi?’

No part of the nightwatchman’s body moved save for his eyes, which flipped open like a child’s doll.

‘Oui?’

‘I think I parked here this morning, but I can’t find my vehicle. Is there another car park nearby?’

‘Etoile,’ the nightwatchman muttered, closing his eyes.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Nice Etoile. Rue Lamartine. Cinq minutes à pied.’

The second underground car park was equidistant from the Hotel Gillespie, five minutes from Place Marshall. Kell walked there in the still of the night, a stranger on deserted French streets. He followed the same routine, going from floor to floor, pressing the infra-red key, looking for Amelia’s car.

Finally he found it. She had parked on the second lower level. Kell was turning through three hundred and sixty degrees, eyes scanning every corner of the garage, when he saw a set of rear lights morsing in the distance. A dark blue Renault Clio squeezed in between a battered white van and a black Seat Altea with Marseilles plates. A film of dust on the windscreen. Kell went straight to the boot. There was an umbrella in the back and a pair of walking boots. He took them out, placed them on the ground, then lifted up the false floor in order to access the spare wheel. It was screwed in and secured by a plastic clip on a cable looped through the centre of the tyre.

Kell pulled the tyre free, let it spin and rock on to the ground, and immediately saw a cloth package concealed in the hollow. Wrapped in a pillow case from the Hotel Gillespie were Amelia Levene’s passport, her driving licence, her credit cards and house keys. She had placed a SIM in a small protective cover, wrapped three hundred pounds sterling in an elastic band and put her BlackBerry, to which she was usually attached like a drip, inside a padded manila envelope.

Kell put the SIM and the BlackBerry in the pocket of his coat and searched the rest of the car. She had barely driven it. There was a nearly crisp sheet of paper, emblazoned with the Avis logo, still protecting the footwell on the driver’s side. He could see mud on the surface, created by the soles of Amelia’s shoes. Kell replaced the spare wheel, put the pillow case, the umbrella and the walking boots back in the boot, and locked the car. He returned to street level, walked three hundred metres east along Boulevard Dubouchage and rang the doorbell of the Gillespie.

‘So, you feel ready to sleep now?’ Pierre asked him, looking at his watch like a bad actor.

‘Ready to sleep,’ Kell replied, and thought about yawning for effect. ‘Do me a favour, will you?’

‘Of course, Monsieur Uniacke.’

‘Cancel that alarm call. I’m going to need more than three hours’ sleep.’