Читать книгу Cocaine Nights - J. G. Ballard, John Lanchester, Robert MacFarlane - Страница 9

ESTRELLA DE MAR was coming out to play. From the balcony of Frank’s apartment, three floors above the swimming pool, I watched the members of the Club Nautico take their places in the sun. Tennis players swung their rackets as they set off for the courts, warming up for three hard-fought sets. Sunbathers loosened the tops of their swimsuits and oiled themselves beside the pool, pressing their lip-gloss to the icy, salty rims of the day’s first margaritas. An open-cast gold mine of jewellery lay among the burnished breasts. The hubbub of gossip seemed to dent the surface of the pool, and indiscretion ruled as the members happily debriefed each other on the silky misdemeanours of the night.

To David Hennessy, who hovered behind me among the clutter of Frank’s possessions, I commented: ‘What handsome women … the jeunesse dorée of the Club Nautico. Here that means anyone under sixty.’

‘Absolutely, dear chap. Come to Estrella de Mar and throw away the calendar.’ He joined me at the rail, sighing audibly. ‘Aren’t they a magnificent sight? Never fail to make the balls tingle.’

‘Sad, though, in a way. While they’re showing their nipples to the waiters their host is sitting in a cell in Zarzuella jail.’

Hennessy laid a feather-light hand on my shoulder. ‘Dear boy, I know. But Frank would be happy to see them here. He created the Club Nautico – it owes everything to him. Believe me, we’ve all been hoisting our piña coladas to him.’

I waited for Hennessy to remove his hand, so soft against my shirt that it might have belonged to the gentlest of importuning panders. Bland and sleek, with an openly ingratiating smile, he had cultivated a pleasant but vague manner that concealed, I suspected, a sophisticated kind of shiftiness. His eyes were always elsewhere when I tried to catch them. If the names in his Lloyd’s syndicate had prospered, even that unlikely outcome would have had an ulterior motive. I was curious why this fastidious man had chosen the Costa del Sol, and found myself thinking of extradition treaties or, more exactly, their absence.

‘I’m glad Frank was happy here. Estrella de Mar is the prettiest spot that I’ve seen on the coast. Still, I would have thought Palm Beach or Nassau more your style.’

Hennessy waved to a woman sunbathing in a pool-side lounger. ‘Yes, friends at home used to say that to me. To be honest, I agreed with them when I first came here. But things have changed. This place isn’t like anywhere else, you know. There’s a very special atmosphere. Estrella de Mar is a real community. At times I think it’s almost too lively.’

‘Unlike the retirement complexes along the coast – Calahonda and so on?’

‘Absolutely. The people of the pueblos …’ Hennessy averted his gaze from the poisoned coast. ‘Brain-death disguised as a hundred miles of white cement. Estrella de Mar is more like Chelsea or Greenwich Village in the 1960s. There are theatre and film clubs, a choral society, cordon bleu classes. Sometimes I dream of pure idleness, but not a hope. Stand still for a moment and you find yourself roped into a revival of Waiting for Godot.’

‘I’m impressed. But what’s the secret?’

‘Let’s say …’ Hennessy checked himself, and let his smile drift across the air. ‘It’s something rather elusive. You have to find it for yourself. If you have time, do look around. I’m surprised you’ve never visited us before.’

‘I should have done. But those tower blocks at Torremolinos throw long shadows. Without being snobbish, I assumed it was fish and chips, bingo and cheap sun-oil, all floating on a lake of lager. Not the sort of thing people want to read about in The New Yorker.’

‘I dare say. Perhaps you’ll write a friendly article about us?’

Hennessy was watching me in his affable way, but I sensed that a warning signal had sounded inside his head. He strolled into Frank’s sitting room, shaking his head over the books pulled from the shelves during the police searches, as if enough rummaging had already taken place at Estrella de Mar.

‘A friendly article?’ I stepped over the scattered seat cushions. ‘Perhaps … when Frank comes out. I need time to get my bearings.’

‘Very sensible. You can’t guess what you might find. Now, I’ll drive you to the Hollingers’. I know you want to see the house. Be warned, though, you’ll need to keep a strong grip on yourself.’

Hennessy waited as I made a last tour of the apartment. In Frank’s bedroom the mattress stood against the wall, its seams slit by the police investigators searching for the smallest evidence that might corroborate his confession. Suits, shirts and sportswear lay strewn across the floor, and a lace shawl that had belonged to our mother hung over the dressing-table mirror. In the bathroom the hand-basin was filled with shaving gear, aerosols and vitamin packs swept from the shelves of the medicine cabinet. The bathtub was littered with broken glass, through which leaked a stream of blue shower gel.

On the sitting-room mantelpiece I recognized a childhood photograph of Frank and myself in Riyadh, standing with Mother outside our house in the residential compound. Frank’s sly smile, and my owlish seriousness as the older brother, contrasted with our mother’s troubled gaze as she strained to be cheerful for Father’s camera. Curiously, the background of white villas, palms and apartment houses reminded me of Estrella de Mar.

Beside the row of tennis trophies was another framed photograph, taken by a professional cameraman in the dining room of the Club Nautico. Relaxed and pleasantly high, Frank was holding court in his white tuxedo among a group of his favourite members, the spirited blondes with deep décolletages and tolerant husbands.

Sitting beside Frank, hands clasped behind his head, was the fair-haired man I had seen on the tennis court. Frozen by the camera lens, he had the look of an intellectual athlete, his strong body offset by his fine-tuned features and sensitive gaze. He lounged back in his shirtsleeves, dinner jacket slung over a nearby chair, pleased with the happy scene around him but in some way above all this unthinking revelry. He struck me, as he must have done most people, as likeable but peculiarly driven.

‘Your brother in jollier times,’ Hennessy pointed to Frank. ‘One of the theatre club dinners. Though photographs can be misleading – that was taken a week before the Hollinger fire.’

‘And who’s the brooding chap beside him? The club’s leading Hamlet?’

‘Far from it. Bobby Crawford, our tennis professional, though he’s far more than that, I may say. You ought to meet him.’

‘I did this afternoon.’ I showed Hennessy the sticking-plaster which the concierge had pressed against my bleeding palm. ‘I still have a piece of his tennis racket in my hand. I’m surprised he plays with a wooden one.’

‘It slows down his game.’ Hennessy seemed genuinely puzzled. ‘How extraordinary. Were you on the courts with him? Bobby does play rather fiercely.’

‘Not with me. Though he was up against someone he couldn’t quite beat.’

‘Really? He’s awfully good. Remarkable fellow in all sorts of ways. He’s actually our entertainments officer, and the absolute life and soul of the Club Nautico. It was a brilliant coup of Frank’s to bring him here – young Crawford’s totally transformed the place. To be honest, before he came the club was pretty well dead. Like Estrella de Mar in many ways – we were turning into another dozy pueblo. Bobby threw himself into everything: fencing, drama, squash. He opened the disco downstairs, and he and Frank set up the Admiral Drake regatta. Forty years ago he’d have been running the Festival of Britain.’

‘Perhaps he still is – he’s certainly preoccupied with something. Yet he looks so young.’

‘Ex-army man. The best junior officers stay young for ever. Strange about that splinter of yours …’

I was still trying to prise the splinter from my hand as I stared at the charred timbers of the Hollinger house. While Hennessy spoke to the Spanish chauffeur on the intercom I sat in the passenger seat beside him, glad that the windshield and the wrought-iron gates lay between me and the gutted mansion. The heat of the conflagration still seemed to radiate from the bruised hulk, which sat atop its hill like an ark put to the torch by a latter-day Noah. The roof joists jutted from the upper walls, a death-ship’s exposed ribs topped by the masts of the chimneys. Scorched awnings hung from the windows like the shreds of sails, black flags flapping a sinister semaphore.

‘Right – Miguel will let us in. He looks after the place, or what’s left of it. The housekeeper and her husband have gone. They simply couldn’t cope.’ Hennessy waited for the gates to open. ‘It’s quite a spectacle, I must say …’

‘What about the chauffeur – do I tell him that I’m Frank’s brother? He may …’

‘No. He liked Frank, sometimes they went scuba-diving together. He was very upset when Frank pleaded guilty. As we all were, needless to say.’

We entered the gates and rolled on to the thick gravel. The drive rose past a series of terraced gardens filled with miniature cycads, bougainvillea and frangipani. Sprinkler hoses ran across the hillside like the vessels of a dead blood system. Every leaf and flower was covered with white ash that bathed the derelict property in an almost sepulchral light. Footprints marked the ashy surface of the tennis court, as if a solitary player had waited after a brief snowfall for an absent opponent.

A marble terrace ran along the seaward frontage of the house, scattered with roof-tiles and charred sections of wooden gabling. Potted plants still bloomed among the overturned chairs and trestle tables. A large rectangular swimming pool sat like an ornamental reservoir beside the terrace, constructed in the 1920s, so Hennessy told me, to suit the tastes of the Andalucian tycoon who had bought the mansion. Marble pilasters supported the podium of the diving board, and each of the gargoyle spouts was a pair of carved stone hands that clasped an openmouthed fish. The filter system was silent, and the surface of the pool was covered with waterlogged timbers, floating wine bottles and paper cups, and a single empty ice-bucket.

Hennessy parked the car under a canopy of eucalyptus trees whose upper branches had been burned to blackened brooms. A young Spaniard with a sombre face climbed the steps from the pool, gazing at the devastation around him as if seeing it for the first time. I expected him to approach us, but he remained thirty feet away, staring at me stonily.

‘Miguel, the Hollingers’ chauffeur,’ Hennessy murmured. ‘He lives in the flat below the pool. A little tact might be in order if you ask any questions. The police gave him a hell of a time.’

‘Was he a suspect?’

‘Who wasn’t? Poor chap, his whole world literally fell in on him.’

Hennessy took off his hat and fanned himself as he gazed at the house. He seemed impressed by the scale of the disaster but otherwise unmoved, like an insurance assessor surveying a burned-out factory. He pointed to the yellow police tapes that sealed the embossed oak doors.

‘Inspector Cabrera doesn’t want anyone sifting through the evidence, though God only knows what’s left. There’s a side door off the terrace we can look through. It’s too dangerous to go inside the place.’

I stepped over the shattered tiles and wine glasses at my feet. The intense heat had driven a jagged fissure through the stone walls, the scar of a lightning bolt that had condemned the property to the flames. Hennessy led the way towards a loose French door levered off its hinges by the firemen. Wind gusted across the terrace, and a cloud of white ash swirled around us like milled bone, restlessly hunting the air.

Hennessy pushed back the door and beckoned me towards him, smiling in a thin way like a guide at a black museum. A high-ceilinged drawing room looked out over the sea on either side of the peninsula. In the dim light I found myself standing in a marine world, the silt-covered state-room of a sunken liner. The Empire furniture and brocaded curtains, the tapestries and Chinese carpets were the decor of a drowned realm, drenched by the water that had poured through the collapsed ceiling. The dining room lay beyond the interior doors, where an oak table carried a pile of laths and plaster and the crystal debris of a chandelier.

I stepped from the parquet flooring on to the carpet, and found my shoes sinking as the water welled from the sodden fabric. Giving up, I returned to the terrace, where Hennessy was gazing at the sunlit peninsula.

‘It’s hard to believe one man started this fire,’ I told him. ‘Frank or anyone else. The place is completely gutted.’

‘I agree.’ Hennessy glanced at his watch, already keen to leave. ‘Of course, this is a very old house. A single match would have set it going.’

The sounds of a tennis game echoed from a nearby court. A mile away I could make out the players at the Club Nautico, a glimmer of whites through the haze.

‘Where were the Hollingers found? I’m surprised they didn’t run on to the terrace when the fire started.’

‘Sadly, they were upstairs at the time.’ Hennessy pointed to the blackened windows below the roof. ‘He was in the bathroom next to his study. She was in another of the bedrooms.’

‘This was when? About seven o’clock in the evening? What were they doing there?’

‘Who can say? He was probably working on his memoirs. She might have been dressing for dinner. I’m sure they tried to escape, but the intense blaze and the ether fumes must have driven them back.’

I sniffed at the damp air, trying to catch a scent of the hospital corridors of my childhood, when I had visited my mother in the American clinic at Riyadh. The air in the drawing room carried the mould-like odours of a herb garden after a rain shower.

‘Ether …? There’s something curious about that. Hospitals don’t use ether any more. Where was Frank supposed to have bought all this bottled ether?’

Hennessy had moved away, watching me from a distance as if he had realized for the first time that I was a murderer’s brother. Behind him Miguel stood among the overturned tables. Together they seemed like figures in a dream-play, trying to remind me of memories I could never recover.

‘Ether?’ Hennessy pondered this, moving aside a broken glass with one shoe. ‘Yes. I suppose it does have industrial uses. Isn’t it a good solvent? It must be available at specialist laboratories.’

‘But why not use pure petrol? Or lighter fuel for that matter? No one would ever trace the stuff. I take it Cabrera tracked down the lab that’s supposed to have sold this ether to Frank?’

‘Perhaps, but I somehow doubt it. After all, your brother pleaded guilty.’ Hennessy searched for his car keys. ‘Charles, I think we ought to leave. You must find this a dreadful strain.’

‘I’m fine. I’m glad you brought me here.’ I pressed my hands against the stone balustrade, trying to feel the heat of the fire. ‘Tell me about the others – the maid and the niece. There was a male secretary?’

‘Roger Sansom, yes. Decent fellow, he’d been with them for years – almost a son.’

‘Where were they found?’

‘On the first floor. They were all in their bedrooms.’

‘Isn’t that a little odd? The fire started on the ground floor. You’d expect them to climb out through the windows. It’s not that long a jump.’

‘The windows would have been closed. The entire house was air-conditioned.’ Hennessy tried to steer me across the terrace, a curator at closing time ushering a last visitor to the exit. ‘We’re all concerned for Frank, and absolutely mystified by the whole tragic business. But try to use a little imagination.’

‘I’m probably using too much … I assume they were all identified?’

‘With some difficulty. Dental records, I suppose, though I don’t think either of the Hollingers had any teeth. Perhaps there are clues in the jawbone.’

‘What were the Hollingers like? They were both in their seventies?’

‘He was seventy-five. She was quite a bit younger. Late sixties, I imagine.’ Hennessy smiled to himself, as if fondly remembering a choice wine. ‘Good-looking woman, in an actressy way, though a little too ladylike for me.’

‘And they came here twenty years ago? Estrella de Mar must have been very different then.’

‘There was nothing to see, just bare hillsides and a few old vines. A collection of fishermen’s shacks and a small bar. Hollinger bought the house from a Spanish property developer he worked with. Believe me, it was a beautiful place.’

‘And I can imagine how the Hollingers felt as all this cement crawled up the hill towards them. Were they popular here? Hollinger was rich enough to put a spoke into a lot of wheels.’

‘They were fairly popular. We didn’t see too much of them at the club, though Hollinger was a major investor. I suspect they assumed it was going to be for their exclusive use.’

‘But then the gold medallions started to arrive?’

‘I don’t think they worried about gold medallions. Gold was one of Hollinger’s favourite colours. Estrella de Mar had begun to change. He and Alice were more put off by the art galleries and the Tom Stoppard revivals. They kept to themselves. In fact, I believe he was trying to sell his interest in the club.’

Hennessy reluctantly followed me along the terrace. A narrow balcony circled the house and led to a stone staircase that climbed the hillside fifty feet away. A grove of lemon trees had once filled the bedroom windows with their oily scent, but the fire-storm had driven through them, and now only the charred stumps rose from the ground like a forest of black umbrellas.

‘Good God, there’s a fire escape …’ I pointed to the cast-iron steps that descended from a doorway on the first floor. The massive structure had been warped by the heat, but still clung to the stone walls. ‘Why didn’t they use this? They would have been safe in seconds.’

Hennessy removed his hat in a gesture of respect for the victims. He stood with his head bowed before speaking. ‘Charles, they never left their bedrooms. The fire was too intense. The whole house was a furnace.’

‘I can see that. Your local fire brigade didn’t even begin to get it under control. Who alerted them, by the way?’

Hennessy seemed hardly to have heard me. He turned his back on the house, and gazed at the sea. I sensed that he was telling me only what he knew I would learn elsewhere.

‘As a matter of fact, the alarm was raised by a passing motorist. No one called the fire services from here.’

‘And the police?’

‘They didn’t arrive until an hour later. You have to understand that the Spanish police leave us very much to ourselves. Few crimes are ever reported in Estrella de Mar. We have our own security patrols and they keep an eye on things.’

‘The police and fire services were called only later …’ I repeated this to myself, visualizing the arsonist making his escape across the deserted terrace and then climbing the outer wall as the flames roared through the great roof. ‘So, apart from the housekeeper and her husband there was no one here?’

‘Not exactly.’ Hennessy replaced his hat, lowering the brim over his eyes. ‘As it happens, everyone was here.’

‘Everyone? Do you mean the staff?’

‘No, I mean …’ Hennessy gestured with his pale hands at the town below. ‘Le tout Estrella de Mar. It was the Queen’s birthday. The Hollingers always threw a party for the club members. It was their contribution to community life – a touch of noblesse oblige about it, I have to admit, but they were rather nice shows. Champagne and excellent canapés …’

I cupped my hands and stared at the Club Nautico, visualizing the entire membership decamping to the Hollinger mansion for the loyal toast. ‘The fire took place on the night of the party … that was why the club had closed. How many people were actually here when it started?’

‘Everyone. I think all the guests had arrived. I suppose there were about … two hundred of us.’

‘Two hundred people?’ I walked back to the south face of the house, where the balcony overlooked the swimming pool and terrace. I imagined the trestle tables decked in white cloths, the ice-buckets gleaming in the evening lights, and the guests chattering beside the unruffled water. ‘There were all these people here, at least two hundred of them, and no one entered the house and tried to save the Hollingers?’

‘Dear boy, the doors were locked.’

‘At a party? I don’t get it. You could have broken in.’

‘Security glass. The house was filled with paintings and objects d’art, not to mention Alice’s jewellery. In previous years there’d been pilfering and cigarette burns on the carpets.’

‘Even so. Besides, what were the Hollingers doing indoors? Why weren’t they out here mingling with their guests?’

‘The Hollingers weren’t the mingling type.’ Hennessy gestured patiently. ‘They’d greet a few old friends, but I don’t think they ever joined the other guests. It was all rather regal. They kept an eye on things from the first-floor veranda. Hollinger proposed the Queen’s toast from there, and Alice would wave and acknowledge the cheers.’

We had reached the swimming pool, where Miguel was raking the floating debris from the water at the shallow end. Piles of wet charcoal lay on the marble verge. The ice-bucket floated past us, an unravelled cigar inside it.

‘David, I can’t understand all this. The whole thing seems …’ I waited until Hennessy was forced to meet my eyes. ‘Two hundred people are standing by a swimming pool when a fire starts. There are ice-buckets, punchbowls, bottles of champagne and mineral water, enough to dowse a volcano. But no one seems to have moved a finger. That’s the eerie thing. No one called the police or fire brigade. What did you do – just stand here?’

Hennessy had begun to tire of me, his gaze fixed on his car. ‘What else was there to do? There was tremendous panic, people were falling into the pool and running off in all directions. No one had time to think of the police.’

‘And what about Frank? Was he here?’

‘Very much so. We stood together during the Queen’s toast. After that he started circulating, as he always does. I can’t be sure I saw him again.’

‘But in the minutes before the fire started? Tell me, did anyone see Frank light the fire?’

‘Of course not. It’s unthinkable.’ Hennessy turned to stare at me. ‘For heaven’s sake, old chap, Frank is your brother.’

‘But he was found with a bottle of ether in his hands. Didn’t it strike you as a little odd?’

‘That was three or four hours later, when the police arrived at the club. It may have been planted in his apartment, who knows?’ Hennessy patted my shoulders, as if reassuring a disappointed member of his Lloyd’s syndicate. ‘Look, Charles, give yourself time to take it all in. Talk to as many people as you want – they’ll all tell you the same story, appalling as it is. No one thinks Frank was responsible, but at the same time it’s not clear who else could have started the fire.’

I waited for him as he walked around the pool and spoke to Miguel. A few banknotes changed hands, which the Spaniard slipped into his pocket with a grimace of distaste. Rarely taking his eyes from me, he followed us on foot as we drove past the ash-covered tennis court. I sensed that he wanted to speak to me, but he operated the gate controls without a word, a faint tic jumping across his scarred cheek.

‘Unnerving fellow,’ I commented as we rolled away. ‘Tell me, was Bobby Crawford at the party? The tennis professional?’

For once Hennessy answered promptly. ‘No, he wasn’t. He stayed behind at the club, playing tennis with that machine of his. I don’t think he cared overmuch for the Hollingers. Nor they for him …’

Hennessy returned us to the Club Nautico, and left me with the keys to Frank’s apartment. When we parted at the door of his office he was clearly glad to be rid of me, and I guessed that I was already becoming a mild embarrassment to the club and its members. Yet he knew that Frank could not have suited the fire or taken even the smallest role in the conspiracy to kill the Hollingers. The confession, however preposterous, had stopped the clock, and no one seemed able to think beyond his guilty plea to the far larger question mark that presided over the gutted mansion.

I spent the afternoon tidying Frank’s apartment. I replaced the books on the shelves, remade the bed and straightened the dented lampshades. The grooves in the sitting-room rugs indicated where the sofa, easy chairs and desk had stood before the police search. Pushing them back into place, I felt like a props man on a darkened stage, preparing the scene for the next day’s performance.

The castors settled into their familiar ruts, but little else in Frank’s world fitted together. I hung his scattered shirts in the wardrobe, and carefully folded the antique lace shawl in which we had both been wrapped as babies. After our mother’s death Frank had retrieved the shawl from the bundle of clothes that Father had consigned to a Riyadh charity. The ancient fabric, inherited from his grandmother, was as grey and delicate as a folded cobweb.

I sat at Frank’s desk, flicking through his cheque-book stubs and credit-card receipts, hoping for a pointer to his involvement with the Hollingers. The drawers were filled with a clutter of old wedding invitations, insurance renewal notices, holiday postcards from friends, French and English coins, and a health passport with its out-of-date tetanus and typhoid vaccinations, the trivia of everyday life that we shed like our skins.

Surprisingly, Inspector Cabrera’s men had missed a small sachet of cocaine tucked into an envelope filled with foreign stamps that Frank had torn from his overseas mail and was evidently collecting for a colleague’s child. I fingered the plastic sachet, tempted to help myself to this forgotten cache, but I was too unsettled by the visit to the Hollinger house.

In the centre drawer was an old photographic album that Mother had kept as a girl in Bognor Regis. Its chocolate-box coven and marbled pages with their art nouveau frames seemed as remote as the Charleston and the Hispano-Suiza. The black and white snaps showed an over-eager little girl trying hopelessly to build a pebble castle on a shingle beach, beaming shyly by her father’s side and pinning the tail on a donkey at a birthday party. The flat sunless world was an ominous start for a child so clearly straining to be happy, and scant preparation for her marriage to an ambitious young historian and Arabist. Prophetically, the collection came to a sudden end a year after her arrival at Riyadh, as if the blank pages said everything about her growing depression.

After a quiet dinner in the deserted restaurant I fell asleep on the sofa, the album across my chest, and woke after midnight as a boisterous party spilled from the disco on to the terrace of the swimming pool. Two men in white dinner jackets were splashing across the pool, wine glasses raised to toast their wives, who were stripping to their underwear beside the diving board. A drunken young woman in a gold sheath dress tottered along the verge, snatched off her stiletto shoes and hurled them into the water.

Frank’s absence had liberated his members, transforming the Club Nautico into an intriguing mix of casino and bordello. When I left the apartment to return to Los Monteros an amorous couple were testing the locked doors in the corridor. Almost all the staff had left for home, and the restaurant and bridge rooms were in darkness, but strobe lights from the disco veered across the entrance. Three young women stood on the steps, dressed like amateur whores in micro-skirts, fishnet tights and scarlet bustiers. I guessed that they were members of the club on the way to a costume party, and was tempted to offer them a lift, but they were busily checking a list of telephone numbers.

The car park was unlit, and I blundered among the lines of vehicles, feeling for the door latch of the rented Renault. Sitting behind the wheel, I listened to the boom of the disco drumming at the night. In a Porsche parked nearby a large white dog was jumping across the seats, unsettled by the noise and eager to see its owner.

I searched the shroud of the steering column for the ignition switch. When my eyes sharpened I realized that the dog was a man in a cream tuxedo, struggling with someone he had pinned against the passenger seat. In the brief pause between the disco numbers I heard a woman’s shout, little more than an exhausted gasp. Her hands reached to the roof above the man’s head and tore at the fabric.

Twenty feet away from me a rape was taking place. I switched on the headlamps and sounded three long blasts on the horn. As I stepped on to the gravel the Porsche’s door sprang open, striking the vehicle beside it. The would-be rapist leapt from the car, the tuxedo almost stripped from his back by the frantic victim. He swerved away through the darkness, leaping between the Renault’s headlamps. I ran after him, but he raced across the knoll beside the gates, straightened the tuxedo with a careless shrug, and vanished into the night.

The woman sat in the passenger seat of the Porsche, her bare feet protruding through the door, skirt around her waist. Her blonde hair gleamed with the attacker’s saliva, and her blurred lipstick gave her a child’s jamjar face. She pulled her torn underwear up her thighs and retched on to the gravel, then reached into the back seat and retrieved her shoes, brushing the torn roof liner from her face.

A few steps away was the booth from which the parking attendant kept watch on his charges during the day and evening. I leaned across the counter and snapped down the master switch of the lighting system, flooding the car park with a harsh fluorescence.

The woman frowned at the sudden glare, hid her eyes behind a silver purse and hobbled on a broken heel towards the entrance of the club, creased skirt over her ripped tights.

‘Wait!’ I shouted to her. ‘I’ll call the police for you …’

I was about to follow her when I noticed the row of parked cars that faced the Porsche across the access lane. Several of the front seats were occupied by the drivers and their passengers, all in evening dress, faces concealed by the lowered sun vizors. They had watched the rape attempt without intervening, like a gallery audience at an exclusive private view.

‘What are you people playing at?’ I shouted. ‘For God’s sake …’

I walked towards them, angry that they had failed to save the bruised woman, and drummed my bandaged fist on the windshields. But the drivers had started their engines. Following each other, they swerved past me towards the gates, the women shielding their eyes behind their hands.

I returned to the club, trying to find the victim of the assault. The fancy-dress whores stood in the lobby, phone lists in hand, but turned towards me as I strode up the steps.

‘Where is she?’ I called to them. ‘She was damn nearly raped out there. Did you see her come in?’

The three gazed wide-eyed at each other, and then began to giggle together, minds slewing across some crazed amphetamine space. One of them touched my cheek, as if calming a child.

I searched the women’s rest-room, kicking back the doors of the cubicles, and then blundered through the tables of the darkened restaurant, trying to catch the scent of heliotrope that the woman had left on the night air. At last I saw her beside the pool, dancing shoeless on the flooded grass, the backs of her hands smeared with lipstick, smiling at me in a knowing way when I walked towards her and tried to take her arm.