I went back into the house, wiped my brandy glass and the little Beretta clean of fingerprints, and tossed it onto the floor next to Harold Hennig’s dead body. Then I placed the keys to Spinola’s apartment near the front of Anne’s desk drawer. I also wrote his address onto a card in her Rolodex, in block capital letters. It wasn’t much in the way of evidence for the police, but in my experience you don’t need to be a Georges Simenon to frame someone for murder, just a corpse and a murder weapon and a set of keys and perhaps a woman who’s suddenly left the country. The police love things to be neat like that. This one had crime of passion written all over it. I told myself I might even stay around the Cap just long enough to answer their questions and recall Anne and Herr Hebel in the bar at the Grand Hôtel and perhaps remember something important I must have forgotten, about how Spinola had once mentioned a writer in Villefranche he was seeing sometimes and how he’d had a fight with her new German boyfriend. Threatened him. Either way I could easily cause enough trouble for Anne French to make sure she could never return to France. Or perhaps she would be extradited back to face a murder trial. But to carry off a story like that I would need to speak to someone else first. I would need to speak to a master storyteller. I would need to go and see Somerset Maugham.

THIRTY-THREE

I walked home, washed and shaved, changed into my working clothes, flung a suitcase into the back of my car, and drove up to the Villa Mauresque. It was still early and little was stirring at Maugham’s beautiful house, certainly not the great man himself, or his nephew, or Alan Searle. Only the butler was up and around, and he seemed not at all surprised to see me again, even with a large bruise on my jaw and the suitcase in my hand.

“How is he?” I asked.

“Who?”

“The master, of course.”

“Oh, him. Much better, sir. It was only a mild stroke, I’m happy to say.”

“Good.” I meant it, too.

“Have you come to stay, sir?” he asked, checking the buttons on his white jacket.

“Not this time,” I said, as if nothing much had happened since the last time we’d seen each other. “Mr. Maugham isn’t expecting me, but he’ll want to see me nonetheless. It’s all to do with the events of the other night. When all the other Englishmen were here.”

“I understand. Would you care for some breakfast?”

“Yes, I would.”