A Season in Hell. Jack Higgins

with it.’

      ‘I can’t watch,’ she said. ‘I can’t.’

      ‘Suit yourself,’ he told her calmly.

      She turned away and he took the boy by the arm and led him down the slipway. The boy followed without hesitation. When they reached the end, Valentin paused, then said, ‘All right, in you go.’

      Talbot stepped off the edge and disappeared. He surfaced a moment later and gazed up at the Frenchman with unseeing eyes. Valentin went down on one knee at the edge of the slipway and leaned over, putting a hand on the boy’s head.

      ‘Goodbye, my friend.’

      It was so shockingly easy. The boy went under as Valentin pushed, stayed under with no struggle at all, only air bubbles disturbing the surface until they, too, stopped. Valentin towed the lifeless body round the edged parapet and left it sprawled on the end of the slipway, almost entirely submerged.

      He walked back to Agnès, drying his hands on a handkerchief. ‘You can make your phone call. I’ll see you at my place later.’

      She waited until the sound of his footsteps had faded and then started to walk along the quay. There was a movement in the shadows of a doorway and she recoiled in panic. ‘Who’s there?’

      As he lit a cigarette, the face of the man who’d been sitting in the café was illuminated. ‘No need to arouse the neighbourhood, old girl.’

      He spoke in English, the kind that had a public school edge to it, and there was a weary good humour there, tinged with a kind of contempt.

      ‘Oh, it’s you, Jago,’ she replied in the same language. ‘God, how I hate you. You talk to me as if I was something from under a stone.’

      ‘My dear old thing,’ he drawled. ‘Haven’t I always behaved like a perfect gentleman?’

      ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘You kill with a smile. Always very good-mannered. You remind me of the man who said to the French customs officer: no I’m not a foreigner, I’m English.’

      ‘To be perfectly accurate, Welsh, but you wouldn’t appreciate the difference. I presume Valentin has been as revoltingly efficient as usual?’

      ‘If you mean has he done your dirty work for you, yes.’

      ‘Not mine, Smith’s.’

      ‘The same difference. You kill for Smith when it suits you.’

      ‘Of course.’ There was a kind of bewildered amusement on his face. ‘But with style, my sweet. Valentin, on the other hand, would kill his grandmother if he thought he could get a good price for her body at the School of Anatomy. And while we’re at it, remind that pimp of yours that I expect him to keep in close touch, just in case the court processes the body sooner than usual.’

      ‘He’s not my pimp, he’s my boyfriend.’

      ‘A third-rate gangster, walking the streets with those friends of his, trying to imagine he’s Alain Delon in Borsalino. If it wasn’t for the girls he couldn’t even pay for his cigarettes.’

      He turned and walked off without another word, whistling tunelessly, and Agnès left too, pausing only at the first public telephone she came to, to call the police.

      ‘Emergency?’ she demanded. ‘I was just walking past the slipway up from Rue de la Croix when I saw what looked like a body in the water.’

      ‘Name, please,’ the duty officer said, but she had already replaced the receiver and was hurrying away.

      The duty officer filled details of the incident on the right form and passed it to the dispatcher. ‘Better send a car.’

      ‘Do you think it might be a crank?’

      The other shook his head. ‘More likely some whore doing the night beat by the river who just doesn’t want to get involved.’

      The dispatcher nodded and passed the details on to a patrol car in the area. Not that it mattered, for at that very moment, the gendarme who had spoken to Eric Talbot earlier walked down the slipway for the purposes of nature and discovered the body for himself.

      Given the circumstances, the police investigation was understandably perfunctory. The gendarme who had found the body interviewed Marie at La Belle Aurore, but she had long since learned that in her line of business it paid to see and hear nothing. Yes, the young, man had visited the café. He’d asked where he might get a room. He’d seemed ill and asked for a cognac. She’d given him a couple of addresses and he’d left. End of story.

      There was the usual postmortem the following morning, and three days later, an inquest at which, in view of the medical evidence, the coroner reached the only possible verdict. Death by drowning while under the influence of alcohol and drugs.

      The same afternoon the body of the boy known as Walker was delivered to the public mortuary in the Rue St Martin, a superior name for a very mean street, where appropriate documentation was to be prepared for the British Embassy. Not that such documentation ever arrived, thanks to a cousin of Valentin, an old lady employed as a cleaner and washer of bodies, who intercepted the necessary package before it left the building.

      No possible query could be raised the following morning when Jago presented himself, in the guise of a cultural attaché from the British Embassy, with all the necessary documentation. The much respected firm of undertakers, Chabert and Sons, would take charge of the body, providing it with a suitable coffin. The grief-stricken family had arranged for it to be flown by a charter aircraft the following day from a small airfield called Vigny, a few miles out of Paris. From there, the flight plan would take it to Woodchurch in Kent where the remains would be received by the funeral firm of Hartley Brothers. All was in order. The documents were countersigned, the regulation black hearse appeared to bear the body away.

      The premises of Chabert and Sons were situated by the river and, by coincidence, not too far away from where Eric Talbot had met his death. The building dated from the turn of the century, a splendid mausoleum of a place, with twenty chapels of rest where relatives could visit the loved one to mourn in some decent privacy before the burial.

      As with many such old-established firms in most European capitals, Chabert’s had a night attendant, a row of bells above his head. There was a bell for each chapel of rest, a cord plated between the corpse’s hands against the unlikely event of an unexpected resurrection.

      But at ten o’clock that evening, the attendant was snoring loudly in a drunken stupor, thanks to the bottle of cognac thoughtfully left on his desk by some grieving relative. He was long gone when Valentin carefully unlocked the rear door with a duplicate key and entered, followed by Jago. They each carried a canvas holdall.

      They paused beside the glass-walled office. Jago nodded at the attendant. ‘He’s well away.’

      ‘Bloody old drunk,’ Valentin said contemptuously. ‘One sniff of a barmaid’s apron is all he needs.’

      They proceeded along the corridor flanked by chapels of rest on either side. There was the smell of flowers everywhere and Jago said in French, ‘Enough to put you off roses for the rest of your life.’

      He paused at the door of one chapel and glanced in. The coffin was raised on an incline, the lid half down, a young woman visible, the face touched with unnatural colour by the embalmer.

      Jago lit a cigarette with one hand and paused. ‘Like a horror movie,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Dracula or something like that. Any minute now, her eyes will open and she’ll reach for your throat.’

      ‘For God’s sake, shut up,’ Valentin croaked. ‘You know I hate this part.’

      ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Jago told him as they continued along the corridor. ‘I think you’ve done very well. What is this, the seventh?’

      ‘It doesn’t get any easier,’ the Frenchman said.

      ‘Intimations of mortality,