Cocaine Nights
J. G. BALLARD

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in hardback in Great Britain by Flamingo 1996

Copyright © J. G. Ballard 1996

Introduction copyright © James Lever 2014

Interview copyright © Travis Elborough 2006

Cover by Stanley Donwood.

Photography by Medemea

J.G Ballard asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this e-book has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9780006550648

Ebook Edition © JUNE 2012 ISBN: 9780007378814

Version: 2016-10-10

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction by James Lever

1 Frontiers and Fatalities

2 The Fire at the Hollinger House

3 The Tennis Machine

4 An Incident in the Car Park

5 A Gathering of the Clan

6 Fraternal Refusals

7 An Attack on the Balcony

8 The Scent of Death

9 The Inferno

10 The Pornographic Film

11 The Lady by the Pool

12 A Game of Tease and Chase

13 A View from the High Corniche

14 A Pagan Rite

15 The Cheerleader’s Cruise

16 Criminals and Benefactors

17 A Change of Heart

18 Cocaine Nights

19 The Costasol Complex

20 A Quest for New Vices

21 The Bureaucracy of Crime

22 An End to Amnesia

23 Come and See

24 The Psychopath as Saint

25 Carnival Day

26 The Last Party

27 An Invitation to the Underworld

28 The Syndicates of Guilt

Keep Reading

Interview with J. G. Ballard

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION BY JAMES LEVER

‘I COULD SUM UP the future in one word,’ J. G. Ballard said in 1994, during an interview collected in Extreme Metaphors, the indispensable anthology of Ballard’s conversation, ‘and that word is boring. The future is going to be boring.’ The gated communities of the Costa del Sol which form the backdrop of Cocaine Nights are the most extreme visualization in his whole body of work of what he elsewhere pictured as ‘the whole planet … turning into a vast Switzerland’. Here, in the ‘fortified enclaves’ where ‘all space has been internalized’, none of the holiday villas even look out to the sea, a hundred yards distant. ‘The residents of the Costa del Sol lived in an eventless world … a world beyond boredom, with no past, no future and a diminishing present … Nothing could ever happen in this affectless realm.’ They are ‘refugees from time … needing only that part of the external world that was distilled from the sky by their satellite dishes … already the ghosts of themselves.’ One of the great and disorienting pleasures of reading Ballard – and especially disorienting in an essentially realistic book like Cocaine Nights – is finding oneself at a loss to identify exactly where the surreal or fantastical begins, or if indeed it even has. Passages that read like wild satirical exaggeration solidify, on second glance, into clear-eyed reportage.

Ballard might have dreamed up these deserted pueblos, ‘their architecture dedicated to the abolition of time’, using the de Chiricos and Hoppers his imagination was stocked with, but in fact he knew the resorts of the Costas well. By the time he wrote Cocaine Nights, he’d been making trips to the Mediterranean for over thirty years, taking annual family holidays in Marbella, and then, when the children had grown up, on the French Riviera with his partner Claire Walsh. ‘I’m always much happier in the south – Spain, Greece – than I am anywhere else,’ he remarked, Englishly. These holidays helped generate several precursors to Cocaine Nights, beginning with the abandoned Costa Brava of ‘Low-Flying Aircraft’ (1975) and the Hitchcockianly erotic ‘The 60 Minute Zoom’ (1976) – two little masterpieces – and then a pair of more closely related stories, ‘Having a Wonderful Time’ (1978) and ‘The Largest Theme Park in the World’ (1989).

The former may well be inspired by the collapse in August 1974 of the Court Line group, pioneers of the cheap-and-cheerful package-tour, which left 50,000 Britons marooned on the beaches of the Med, far from the stagflation and three-day week of home. It describes, via a series of postcards sent by a British tourist ostensibly stranded in the Canaries, the clandestine relocation of the economically superfluous classes of Europe to the continent’s beach-resorts, where these unemployables, unaware of the huge experiment in which they’re participating, blossom into creative fulfilment. The later story inverts the idea: Europe’s holidaymakers refuse to return home, creating a militant totalitarian society based around the cult of physical perfection and occupying ‘the linear city of the Mediterranean coast, some 3,000 miles long and 300 metres wide’ – a typically catchy image Ballard had been chewing over and trying out for fifteen years. And throughout Cocaine Nights you can hear the authorial thrill at the sheer infinity-tending scale of this two-dimensional city – ‘a hundred miles of white cement’, ‘the surfaces of a thousand swimming pools’, ‘fifty thousand Brits, one huge liver perfused by vodka and tonic’, ‘a billion balconies facing the sun’. The coastal megalopolis is a zone of infinite repetition, the sort of non-space that barely possesses any geographical reality at all. But it is also therefore a space vulnerable to sudden and rapidly-spreading psychic contagions. This is the sort of place that excites Ballard – since the greater the homogeneity of an environment or the inner-space of its inhabitants, as with the African desert of The Day of Creation or the Shepperton of The Unlimited Dream Company, the greater the potential transformative energy of the eventual psychic dam-burst. That’s the excitement that powers Cocaine Nights, lined with a dismay which perhaps explains why this particular novel’s iteration of that stock Ballard character, the messianic or psychopathic anti-hero intent on waking a community from its slumber, is one of its author’s most sympathetic utopians.

In fact, despite the multiple murders at its heart, this is one of Ballard’s most relaxed works, inaugurating what you might call his late period – that slight flattening of style and deceleration which mark his four last, and four longest, fictions. Artists’ late periods, so the cliché goes, are often signalled by a wintry brevity that denotes either an impatience with inessentials or a general loss of energy; on the other hand, writers (and especially those who flirt with genre-structures) can equally tend to a late-middle-aged spread, a comfortable couple of inches around the narrative waistline. This is Ballard’s beach read, designed to be picked up at an airport, consumed poolside and left, mottled with Ambre Solaire and disintegrating, its binding-glue long melted, on a shelf in the villa between the Dibdins and Rendells it is slyly constructed to resemble. For a novel about leisure – Ballard’s only full-length work explicitly about this lifelong preoccupation – the subtly parodic chunky-thriller rhythms and unhurried mystery-story plotting are a perfect fit: it’s a holiday book satirizing the ritual of the holiday book. Even Cocaine Nights’ title, which the reader will soon realize is barely relevant, functions as camouflage – an artfully slovenly mass-market formulation that ought to be embossed on the cover in gold foil, advertising cheap thrills it has no intention of delivering. (Ballard’s timing is as uncanny as ever: 1996, the date of publication, is pretty much exactly when cocaine-use in Britain could be said to have definitively shifted from a supposedly glamorous drug-of-the-elite to the everyday mainstream.) And the book, Ballard in a slightly mellower key, was a hit – its author’s biggest seller after Empire of the Sun and Crash.

Unforgiving or even uncharitable as the vision of opiate-addicted expats ‘sleeping through the longest afternoon in the world’ may sound, the leavening kindness always audible in Ballard’s prose, that bass-note of decency, occasionally seems to modulate in Cocaine Nights into something approaching tenderness. In Super-Cannes, Ballard takes a moment to allow his two main characters to trade some astutely-chosen quotes from Cyril Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave – ‘“Peeling off the kilometres to the tune of ‘Blue Skies’, sizzling down the … Nationale Sept, the plane trees going …” “Sha-sha-sha …” I completed, “She with the Michelin beside me, a handkerchief binding her hair …”’ To a surprising number of British readers of the immediate post-war period, those very sentences were a touchstone expressing the atavistic national yearning to travel south that must at the time have seemed almost like a destiny. The speed with which that thrilling promise of renewal and self-transformation was superseded by a kind of reflex contempt for the Ballardian realities of mass tourism (can any word have been pronounced more sneeringly by the British mouth than ‘Torremolinos’?) has ever since seemed like an obscurely shaming wrinkle in the national unconscious – witness the way the BBC’s early-nineties soap Eldorado, confidently premised on the abiding glamour of the Costa del Sol, was silenced by a collective groan of disgust, and not just because it was so staggeringly boring. Ballard’s memory of the innocence and excitement of the British population’s first collision with the Mediterranean is what gives Cocaine Nights its most intriguing effect – which is that the novel seems to be set simultaneously in the 1990s and the mid-century.

Of course, this effect is a signature of Ballard’s genius, never more richly and bewilderingly used than in the retro-futurism (a completely inadequate term for the intricate swirl of history Ballard blends together) of Vermilion Sands. But in the non-surreal setting of Cocaine Nights, it becomes central to the book’s peculiar and wrong-footing affect. ‘I have often thought,’ Ballard said, casually lapidary as usual, ‘that writers don’t necessarily write their books in their real order. Empire of the Sun may be my first novel, which I just happened to write when I was fifty-four. It may well be that Vermilion Sands is my last book.’ In which case, Cocaine Nights was written some time in the sixties by a young Ballard under the influence of Alistair MacLean and Desmond Bagley. The slightly stilted, thrillery dialogue, with its old-fashioned overuse of the vocative, is peppered with Little Englander near-archaisms: ‘the sheer neck of it’, ‘their parties are rather good shows’, ‘Good God!’ and the cultural allusions of an earlier generation: ‘Chin up. This isn’t the House of Usher’, ‘You could become … the Savonarola of the Costa del Sol.’ Elsewhere, disorientating obsolescences abound: ‘cine-photography’, ‘porno-cassette’, ‘disco’, ‘a signed photograph of a punk rock group’. The anti-hero is dismissed with an incomparably 1970s sentence: ‘The tennis bum who’s taken an Open University course in Cultural Studies and thinks paperback sociology is the answer to everything.’

One could argue that this is simply the way Ballard writes, and that many of his anachronisms are merely ingrained, or oversights, but that would be to miss the lovely conceptual coup of Cocaine Nights. The community of Estrella de Mar, roused from the narcotized daze of the Costa del Sol by the interventions of the novel’s charming messiah/psychopath, doesn’t wake up to the present tense so much as a nostalgic dream of the twentieth century’s greatest hits. ‘In many ways Estrella de Mar was the halcyon county-town England of the mythical 1930s, brought back to life and moved south into the sun.’ Ballard’s quietly hilarious emblem of the community’s spiritual awakening and artistic efflorescence is amateur dramatics: everywhere you go in Estrella de Mar you will find a once cutting-edge play – Beckett, Orton, Eliot, Stoppard – being proudly revived as proof of cultural vigour. (‘“A month ago they were dozing in their bedrooms … waiting for death. Now they’re putting on the plays of Harold Pinter. Isn’t that an advance?” “I suppose so.”’) The open-air cinema shows Renoir and classics from the Golden Age. The disco isn’t a mislabelled nightclub, it’s a disco. It is a porno-cassette, not a porn-tape. The whole place is a fondly observed anachronism, and so is the novel in which you’re reading about it. The cliffhangers, red-herrings and misdirections of Cocaine Nights’ murder-mystery structure are so cursory and obvious, and the plot-recaps so obsessively frequent, that they amount to a wry subversion of the novel’s own pretensions to old-fashioned page-turning pleasure: if you aren’t a Ballard devotee, you’ll probably have worked out whodunnit after about a hundred pages. If you are, you’ll know by the end of the first chapter. It’s a book about boredom, or boredom as an outcome of capitalism’s natural tendency to isolate and encourage an obsession with security in its consumers, and about the stimuli required to counteract that. As such the book is happy to enact those stimuli itself. A glance down the list of chapter-titles (and one should always take time to read Ballard’s Contents pages, which constitute introductory poems to his novels) gives you a selection of tawdry but irresistible enticements – ‘The Scent of Death’, ‘The Pornographic Film’, ‘The Lady by the Pool’, ‘Cocaine Nights’ – each one the title of a cheap thriller, good for the beach.

Meanwhile, the novel’s ostensible centre of interest, a Durkheimian interrogation of the importance of transgression and crime to social cohesion, plays out according to a classic Ballard schema: there’s a psychopathic Prospero figure, a protagonist who comes to act as his Ariel, an authorial ambivalence about the violence and uncontrollability of the transformative magic, a climactic blood-sacrifice demanded by the tribe. But this takes place in a more restrained register than usual: armies of robot American presidents do not assassinate the incumbent, birds of paradise don’t throng the Shepperton skies, Alsatians are not on the menu. In truth, this is not brick-through-your-mind Ballard. Instead, it offers the beautiful spectacle of an accurate prophet come face to face with a future he intuited and which is already receding into the past, growing dated. Ballard strolls around the leisureworld of Estrella de Mar (and what a gorgeous name, by the way: like one of those reclusive screen-goddesses who inhabit Vermilion Sands) as if delighted to find himself for the first time in a (pretty much) realistic landscape which contains so many of his imagination’s old obsessions: here are paranoid zones of surveillance, home-made pornography on an industrial scale, blood-spattered tennis courts, avenues of empty villas, universal recreational drug-use and so many swimming pools (both full and empty) he can put one on virtually every page. Even for Ballard, Cocaine Nights is a novel of endless, artful repetitions and reiterations, as if he simply can’t bear to stop taking holiday snap after holiday snap after holiday snap of this place so beautiful it’s like something he once made up.

Paris, 2014

1 Frontiers and Fatalities

CROSSING FRONTIERS is my profession. Those strips of no-man’s land between the checkpoints always seem such zones of promise, rich with the possibilities of new lives, new scents and affections. At the same time they set off a reflex of unease that I have never been able to repress. As the customs officials rummage through my suitcases I sense them trying to unpack my mind and reveal a contraband of forbidden dreams and memories. And even then there are the special pleasures of being exposed, which may well have made me a professional tourist. I earn my living as a travel writer, but I accept that this is little more than a masquerade. My real luggage is rarely locked, its catches eager to be sprung.

Gibraltar was no exception, though this time there was a real basis for my feelings of guilt. I had arrived on the morning flight from Heathrow, making my first landing on the military runway that served this last outpost of the British Empire. I had always avoided Gibraltar, with its vague air of a provincial England left out too long in the sun. But my reporter’s ears and eyes soon took over, and for an hour I explored the narrow streets with their quaint tea-rooms, camera shops and policemen disguised as London bobbies.

Gilbratar, like the Costa del Sol, was off my beat. I prefer the long-haul flights to Jakarta and Papeete, those hours of club-class air-time that still give me the sense of having a real destination, the great undying illusion of air travel. In fact we sit in a small cinema, watching films as blurred as our hopes of discovering somewhere new. We arrive at an airport identical to the one we left, with the same car-rental agencies and hotel rooms with their adult movie channels and deodorized bathrooms, side-chapels of that lay religion, mass tourism. There are the same bored bar-girls waiting in the restaurant vestibules who later giggle as they play solitaire with our credit cards, tolerant eyes exploring those lines of fatigue in our faces that have nothing to do with age or tiredness.

Gibraltar, though, soon surprised me. The sometime garrison post and naval base was a frontier town, a Macao or Juarez that had decided to make the most of the late twentieth century. At first sight it resembled a seaside resort transported from a stony bay in Cornwall and erected beside the gatepost of the Mediterranean, but its real business clearly had nothing to do with peace, order and the regulation of Her Majesty’s waves.

Like any frontier town Gibraltar’s main activity, I suspected, was smuggling. As I counted the stores crammed with cut-price video-recorders, and scanned the nameplates of the fringe banks that gleamed in the darkened doorways, I guessed that the economy and civic pride of this geo-political relic were devoted to rooking the Spanish state, to money-laundering and the smuggling of untaxed perfumes and pharmaceuticals.

The Rock was far larger than I expected, sticking up like a thumb, the local sign of the cuckold, in the face of Spain. The raunchy bars had a potent charm, like the speedboats in the harbour, their powerful engines cooling after the latest high-speed run from Morocco. As they rode at anchor I thought of my brother Frank and the family crisis that had brought me to Spain. If the magistrates in Marbella failed to acquit Frank, but released him on bail, one of these sea-skimming craft might rescue him from the medieval constraints of the Spanish legal system.

Later that afternoon I would meet Frank and his lawyer in Marbella, a forty-minute drive up the coast. But when I collected my car from the rental office near the airport I found that an immense traffic jam had closed the border crossing. Hundreds of cars and buses waited in a gritty haze of engine exhaust, while teenaged girls grizzled and their grandmothers shouted at the Spanish soldiers. Ignoring the impatient horns, the Guardia Civil were checking every screw and rivet, officiously searching suitcases and supermarket cartons, peering under bonnets and spare wheels.

‘I need to be in Marbella by five,’ I told the rental office manager, who was gazing at the stalled vehicles with the serenity of a man about to lease his last car before collecting his pension. ‘This traffic jam has a permanent look about it.’

‘Calm yourself, Mr Prentice. It can clear at any time, when the Guardia realize how bored they are.’

‘All these regulations …’ I shook my head over the rental agreement. ‘Spare bulbs, first-aid kit, fire extinguisher? This Renault is better equipped than the plane that flew me here.’

‘You should blame Cadiz. The new Civil Governor is obsessed with La Linea. His workfare schemes are unpopular with the people there.’

‘Too bad. So there’s a lot of unemployment?’

‘Not exactly. Rather too much employment, but of the wrong kind.’

‘The smuggling kind? A few cigarettes and camcorders?’

‘Not so few. Everyone at La Linea is very happy – they hope that Gibraltar will remain British for ever.’

I had begun to think about Frank, who remained British but in a Spanish cell. As I joined the line of waiting cars I remembered our childhood in Saudi Arabia twenty years earlier, and the arbitrary traffic checks carried out by the religious police in the weeks before Christmas. Not only was the smallest drop of festive alcohol the target of their silky hands, but even a single sheet of seasonal wrapping paper with its sinister emblems of Yule logs, holly and ivy. Frank and I would sit in the back of our father’s Chevrolet, clutching the train sets that would be wrapped only minutes before we opened them, while he argued with the police in his sarcastic professorial Arabic, unsettling our nervous mother.

Smuggling was one activity we had practised from an early age. The older boys at the English school in Riyadh talked among themselves about an intriguing netherworld of bootleg videos, drugs and illicit sex. Later, when we returned to England after our mother’s death, I realized that these small conspiracies had kept the British expats together and given them their sense of community. Without the liaisons and contraband runs our mother would have lost her slipping hold on the world long before the tragic afternoon when she climbed to the roof of the British Institute and made her brief flight to the only safety she could find.

At last the traffic had begun to move, lurching forward in a noisy rush. But the mud-stained van in front of me was still detained by the Guardia Civil. A soldier opened the rear doors and hunted through cardboard cartons filled with plastic dolls. His heavy hands fumbled among the pinkly naked bodies, watched by hundreds of rocking blue eyes.

Irritated by the delay, I was tempted to drive around the van. Behind me a handsome Spanish woman sat at the wheel of an open-topped Mercedes, remaking her lipstick over a strong mouth designed for any activity other than eating. Intrigued by her lazy sexual confidence, I smiled as she fingered her mascara and lightly brushed the undersides of her eyelashes like an indolent lover. Who was she – a nightclub cashier, a property tycoon’s mistress, or a local prostitute returning to La Linea with a fresh stock of condoms and sex aids?

She noticed me watching her in my rear-view mirror and snapped down her sun vizor, waking both of us from this dream of herself. She swung the steering wheel and pulled out to pass me, baring her strong teeth as she slipped below a no-entry sign.

I started my engine and was about to follow her, but the soldier fumbling among the plastic dolls turned to bellow at me.

‘Acceso prohibido …!’

He leaned against my windshield, a greasy hand smearing the glass, and saluted the young woman, who was turning into the police car park beside the checkpoint. He glared down at me, nodding to himself and clearly convinced that he had caught a lecherous tourist in the act of visually molesting the wife of his commanding officer. He moodily flicked through the pages of my passport, unimpressed by the gallery of customs stamps and visas from the remotest corners of the globe. Each frontier crossing was a unique transaction that defused the magic of any other.

I waited for him to order me from the car and carry out an aggressive body-search, before settling down to dismande the entire Renault until it lay beside the road like a manufacturer’s display kit. But he had lost interest in me, his spare eye noticing a coach filled with migrant Moroccan workers who had taken the ferry from Tangier. Abandoning his search of the van and its cargo of dolls, he advanced upon the stoical Arabs with all the menace and dignity of Rodrigo Diaz out-staring the MOOR at the Battle of Valencia.

I followed the van as it sped towards La Linea, rear doors swinging and the dolls dancing together with their feet in the air. Even the briefest confrontation with police at a border crossing had the same disorienting effect on me. I imagined Frank in the interrogation cells in Marbella at that very moment, faced with the same accusing eyes and the same assumption of guilt. I was a virtually innocent traveller, carrying no contraband other than a daydream of smuggling my brother across the Spanish frontier, yet I felt as uneasy as a prisoner breaking his parole, and I knew how Frank would have responded to the trumped-up charges that had led to his arrest at the Club Nautico in Estrella de Mar. I was certain of his innocence and guessed that he had been framed on the orders of some corrupt police chief who had tried to extort a bribe.

I left the eastern outskirts of La Linea and set off along the coast road towards Sotogrande, impatient to see Frank and reassure him that all would be well. The call from David Hennessy, the retired Lloyd’s underwriter who was now the treasurer of the Club Nautico, had reached me in my Barbican flat the previous evening. Hennessy had been disturbingly vague, as if rambling to himself after too much sun and sangria, the last person to inspire confidence.

‘It does look rather bad … Frank told me not to worry you, but I felt I had to call.’

‘Thank God you did. Is he actually under arrest? Have you told the British Consul in Marbella?’

‘Malaga, yes. The Consul’s closely involved. It’s an important case, I’m surprised you didn’t read about it.’

‘I’ve been abroad. I haven’t seen an English paper for weeks. In Lhasa there’s not much demand for news about the Costa del Sol.’

‘I dare say. The Fleet Street reporters were all over the club. We had to close the bar, you know.’

‘Never mind the bar!’ I tried to get a grip on the conversation. ‘Is Frank all right? Where are they holding him?’

‘He’s fine. On the whole he’s taking it well. He’s very quiet, though that’s understandable. He has a lot to think over.’

‘But what are the charges? Mr Hennessy …?’

‘Charges?’ There was a pause as ice-cubes rattled. ‘There seem to be a number. The Spanish prosecutor is drawing up the articles of accusation. We’ll have to wait for them to be translated. I’m afraid the police aren’t being very helpful.’

‘Do you expect them to be? It sounds like a frame-up.’

‘It’s not as simple as that … one has to see it in context. I think you should come down here as soon as you can.’

Hennessy had been professionally vague, presumably to protect the Club Nautico, one of the more exclusive sports complexes on the Costa del Sol, which no doubt depended for its security on regular cash disbursements to the local constabulary. I could well imagine Frank, in his quizzical way, forgetting to slip the padded manila envelope into the right hands, curious to see what might result, or omitting to offer his best suite to a visiting commandant of police.

Parking fines, building-code infringements, an illegally-sited swimming pool, perhaps the innocent purchase from a dodgy dealer of a stolen Range Rover – any of these could have led to his arrest. I sped along the open road towards Sotogrande, as a sluggish sea lapped at the chocolate sand of the deserted beaches. The coastal strip was a nondescript plain of market gardens, tractor depots and villa projects. I passed a half-completed Aquapark, its excavated lakes like lunar craters, and a disused nightclub on an artificial hill, the domed roof resembling a small observatory.

The mountains had withdrawn from the sea, keeping their distance a mile inland. Near Sotogrande the golf courses began to multiply like the symptoms of a hypertrophied grassland cancer. White-walled Andalucian pueblos presided over the greens and fairways, fortified villages guarding their pastures, but in fact these miniature townships were purpose-built villa complexes financed by Swiss and German property speculators, the winter homes not of local shepherds but of Düsseldorf ad-men and Zürich television executives.

Along most of the Mediterranean’s resort coasts the mountains came down to the sea, as at the Côte d’Azur or the Ligurian Riviera near Genoa, and the tourist towns nestled in sheltered bays. But the Costa del Sol lacked even the rudiments of scenic or architectural charm. Sotogrande, I discovered, was a town without either centre or suburbs, and seemed to be little more than a dispersal ground for golf courses and swimming pools. Three miles to its east I passed an elegant apartment building standing on a scrubby bend of the coastal road, the mock-Roman columns and white porticos apparently imported from Las Vegas after a hotel clearance sale, reversing the export to Florida and California in the 1920s of dismantled Spanish monasteries and Sardinian abbeys.

The Estepona road skirted a private airstrip beside an imposing villa with gilded finials like a castellated fairy battlement. Their shadows curved around a white onion-bulb roof, an invasion of a new Arab architecture that owed nothing to the Maghreb across the Strait of Gibraltar. The brassy glimmer belonged to the desert kingdoms of the Persian Gulf, reflected through the garish mirrors of Hollywood design studios, and I thought of the oil company atrium in Dubai that I had walked through a month earlier, pursuing my courtship of an attractive French geologist I was profiling for L’Express.

‘The architecture of brothels?’ she commented when I told her of my longstanding plans for a book during our rooftop lunch. ‘It’s a good idea. Rather close to your heart, I should think.’ She pointed to the retina-stunning panorama around us. ‘It’s all here for you, Charles. Filling-stations disguised as cathedrals …’

Could Frank, with his scruples and finicky honesty, have chosen to break the law on the Costa del Sol, a zone as depthless as a property developer’s brochure? I approached the outskirts of Marbella, past King Saud’s larger-than-life replica of the White House and the Aladdin’s cave apartments of Puerto Banus. Unreality thrived on every side, a magnet to the unwary. But Frank was too fastidious, too amused by his own weaknesses, to commit himself to any serious misdemeanour. I remembered his compulsive stealing after we returned to England, slipping corkscrews and cans of anchovies into his pockets as we trailed after our aunt through the Brighton supermarkets. Our grieving father, taking up his professorial chair at Sussex University, was too distracted to think of Frank, and the petty thefts forced me to adopt him as my little son, the sole person concerned enough to care for this numbed nine-year-old, even if only to scold him.

Luckily, Frank soon outgrew this childhood tic. At school he became a wristy and effective tennis player, and sidestepped the academic career his father wanted for him, taking a course in hotel management. After three years as assistant manager of a renovated art deco hotel in South Miami Beach he returned to Europe to run the Club Nautico at Estrella de Mar, a peninsular resort twenty miles to the east of Marbella. Whenever we met in London I liked to tease him about his exile to this curious world of Arab princes, retired gangsters and Eurotrash.

‘Frank, of all the places to pick you choose the Costa del Sol!’ I would exclaim. ‘Estrella de Mar? I can’t even imagine it …’

Amiably, Frank always replied: ‘Exactly, Charles. It doesn’t really exist. That’s why I like the coast. I’ve been looking for it all my life. Estrella de Mar isn’t anywhere.’

But now nowhere had at last caught up with him.

When I reached the Los Monteros Hotel, a ten-minute drive down the coast from Marbella, there was a message waiting for me. Señor Danvila, Frank’s lawyer, had called from the magistrates’ court with news of ‘unexpected developments’, and asked me to join him as soon as possible. The over-polite manners of the hotel manager and the averted eyes of the concierge and porters suggested that whatever these developments might be, they were fully expected. Even the players returning from the tennis courts and the couples in towelling robes on their way to the swimming pools paused to let me pass, as if sensing that I had come to share my brother’s fate.

When I returned to the lobby after a shower and change of clothes the concierge had already called a taxi.

‘Mr Prentice, it will be simpler than taking your own car. Parking is difficult in Marbella. You have enough problems to consider.’

‘You’ve heard about the case?’ I asked. ‘Did you speak to my brother’s lawyer?’

‘Of course not, sir. There were some accounts in the local press … a few television reports.’

He seemed anxious to steer me to the waiting taxi. I scanned the headlines in the display of newspapers beside the desk.

‘What exactly happened? No one seems to know.’

‘It’s not certain, Mr Prentice.’ The concierge straightened his magazines, trying to hide from me any edition that might reveal the full story of Frank’s involvement. ‘It’s best that you take your taxi. All will be clear to you in Marbella …’

Señor Danvila was waiting for me in the entrance hall of the magistrates’ court. A tall, slightly stooped man in his late fifties, he carried two briefcases which he shuffled from hand to hand, and resembled a distracted schoolmaster who had lost control of his class. He greeted me with evident relief, holding on to my arm as if to reassure himself that I too was now part of the confused world into which Frank had drawn him. I liked his concerned manner, but his real attention seemed elsewhere, and already I wondered why David Hennessy had hired him.

‘Mr Prentice, I’m most grateful that you came. Unfortunately, events are now more … ambiguous. If I can explain –’

‘Where is Frank? I’d like to see him. I want you to arrange bail – I can provide whatever guarantees the court requires. Señor Danvila …?’

With an effort the lawyer uncoupled his eyes from some feature of my face that seemed to distract him, an echo perhaps of one of Frank’s more cryptic expressions. Seeing a group of Spanish photographers on the steps of the court, he beckoned me towards an alcove. ‘Your brother is here, until they return him to Zarzuella jail in Malaga this evening. The police investigation is proceeding. I am afraid that in the circumstances bail is out of the question.’

‘What circumstances? I want to see Frank now. Surely the Spanish magistrates release people on bail?’

‘Not in a case such as this.’ Señor Danvila hummed to himself, switching his briefcases in an unending attempt to decide which was the heavier. ‘You will see your brother in an hour, perhaps less. I have spoken to Inspector Cabrera. Afterwards he will want to question you about certain details possibly known to you, but there is nothing to fear.’

‘I’m glad to hear it. Now, what will they charge Frank with?’

‘He has already been charged.’ Señor Danvila was staring fixedly at me. ‘It’s a tragic affair, Mr Prentice, the very worst.’

‘But charged with what? Currency violations, tax problems …?’

‘More serious than that. There were fatalities.’

Señor Danvila’s face had come into sudden focus, his eyes swimming forwards through the thick pools of his lenses. I noticed that he had shaved carelessly that morning, too preoccupied to trim his straggling moustache.

‘Fatalities?’ It occurred to me that a cruel accident had taken place on the notorious coastal road, and perhaps had involved Frank in the deaths of Spanish children. ‘Was there a traffic accident? How many people were killed?’

‘Five.’ Señor Danvila’s lips moved as he counted the number, a total that exceeded all the possibilities of a humane mathematics. ‘It was not a traffic accident.’

‘Then what? How did they die?’

‘They were murdered, Mr Prentice.’ The lawyer spoke matter-of-factly, detaching himself from the significance of his own words. ‘Five people were deliberately killed. Your brother has been charged with their deaths.’

‘I can’t believe it …’ I turned to stare at the photographers arguing with each other on the steps of the courthouse. Despite Señor Danvila’s solemn expression, I felt a sudden rush of relief. I realized that a preposterous error had been made, an investigative and judicial bungle that involved this nervous lawyer, the heavy-footed local police and the incompetent magistrates of the Costa del Sol, their reflexes confused by years of coping with drunken British tourists. ‘Señor Danvila, you say Frank murdered five people. How, for heaven’s sake?’

‘He set fire to their house. Two weeks ago – it was clearly an act of premeditation. The magistrates and police have no doubt.’

‘Well, they should have.’ I laughed to myself, confident now that this absurd error would soon be rectified. ‘Where did these murders take place?’

‘At Estrella de Mar. In the villa of the Hollinger family.’

‘And who were the victims?’

‘Mr Hollinger, his wife, and their niece. As well, a young maid and the male secretary.’

‘It’s madness.’ I held Danvila’s briefcases before he could weigh them again. ‘Why would Frank want to murder them? Let me see him. He’ll deny it.’

‘No, Mr Prentice.’ Señor Danvila stepped back from me, the verdict already clear in his mind. ‘Your brother has not denied the accusations. In fact, he has pleaded guilty to five charges of murder. I repeat, Mr Prentice – guilty.’

2 The Fire at the Hollinger House

‘CHARLES? DANVILA TOLD ME you’d arrived. It’s good of you. I knew you’d come.’

Frank rose from his chair as I entered the interview room. He seemed slimmer and older than I remembered, and the strong fluorescent light gave his skin a pallid sheen. He peered over my shoulder, as if expecting to see someone else, and then lowered his eyes to avoid my gaze.

‘Frank – you’re all right?’ I leaned across the table, hoping to shake his hand, but the policeman standing between us raised his arm with the stiff motion of a turnstile bar. ‘Danvila’s explained the whole thing to me; it’s obviously some sort of crazy mistake. I’m sorry I wasn’t in court.’

‘You’re here now. That’s all that matters.’ Frank rested his elbows on the table, trying to hide his fatigue. ‘How was the flight?’

‘Late – airlines run on their own time, two hours behind everyone else’s. I rented a car in Gibraltar. Frank, you look

‘I’m fine.’ With an effort he composed himself, and managed a brief but troubled smile. ‘So, what did you think of Gib?’

‘I was only there for a few minutes. Odd little place – not as strange as this coast.’

‘You should have come here years ago. You’ll find a lot to write about.’

‘I already have. Frank –’

‘It’s interesting, Charles …’ Frank sat forward, talking too quickly to listen to himself, keen to sidetrack our conversation. ‘You’ve got to spend more time here. It’s Europe’s future. Everywhere will be like this soon.’

‘I hope not. Listen, I’ve talked to Danvila. He’s trying to get the court hearing annulled. I didn’t grasp all the legal ins and outs, but there’s a chance of a new hearing when you change your plea. You’ll claim some sort of mitigating factor. You were distraught with grief, and didn’t catch what the translator was saying. At the least it puts down a marker.’

‘Danvila, yes …’ Frank played with his cigarette packet. ‘Sweet man, I think I’ve rather shocked him. And you, too, I dare say.’

The friendly but knowing smile had reappeared, and he leaned back with his hands behind his head, confident now that he could cope with my visit. Already we were assuming our familiar roles first set out in childhood. He was the imaginative and wayward spirit, and I was the stolid older brother who had yet to get the joke. In Frank’s eyes I had always been the source of a certain fond amusement.

He was dressed in a grey suit and white shirt open at the neck. Seeing that I had noticed his bare throat, he covered his chin with a hand.

‘They took my tie away from me – I’m only allowed to wear it in court. A bit noose-like, when you think about it – could put ideas into the judge’s mind. They fear I might try to kill myself.’

‘But, Frank, isn’t that what you’re doing? Why on earth did you plead guilty?’

‘Charles …’ He gestured a little wearily. ‘I had to, there wasn’t anything else I could say.’

‘That’s absurd. You had nothing to do with those deaths.’

‘But I did. Charles, I did.’

‘You started the fire? Tell me, no one can hear this – you actually set the Hollinger house ablaze?’

‘Yes … in effect.’ He took a cigarette from the packet and waited as the policeman stepped forward to light it. The flame flared under the worn hood of the brass lighter, and Frank stared at the burning vapour before drawing on the cigarette. In the brief glow his face seemed calm and resigned.

‘Frank, look at me.’ I waved the smoke aside, a swirling wraith released from his lungs. ‘I want to hear you say it – you, yourself, personally set fire to the Hollinger house?’

‘I’ve said so.’

‘Using a bomb filled with ether and petrol?’

‘Yes. Don’t ever try it. The mixture’s surprisingly flammable.’

‘I don’t believe it. Why, for God’s sake? Frank …!’

He blew a smoke ring towards the ceiling, and then spoke in a quiet and almost flat voice. ‘You’d have to live for a while at Estrella de Mar even to begin to understand. Take it from me, if I explained what happened it would mean nothing to you. It’s a different world, Charles. This isn’t Bangkok or some atoll in the Maldives.’

‘Try me. Are you covering up for someone?’

‘Why should I?’

‘And you knew the Hollingers?’

‘I knew them well.’

‘Danvila says he was some sort of film tycoon in the 1960s.’

‘In a small way. Property dealing and office development in the City. His wife was one of the last of the Rank Charm School starlets. They retired here about twenty years ago.’

‘They were regulars at the Club Nautico?’

‘They weren’t regulars, strictly speaking. They dropped in now and then.’

‘And you were there on the evening of the fire? You were in the house?’

‘Yes! You’re starting to sound like Cabrera. The last thing an interrogator wants is the truth.’ Frank crushed his cigarette in the ashtray, briefly burning his fingers. ‘Look, I’m sorry they died. It was a tragic business.’

His closing words were spoken without emphasis, in the tone he had used one day as a ten-year-old when he had come in from the garden and told me that his pet turtle had died. I knew that he was now telling the truth.

‘They’re taking you back to Malaga tonight,’ I said. ‘I’ll visit you there as soon as I can.’

‘It’s always good to see you, Charles.’ He managed to clasp my hand before the policeman stepped forward. ‘You looked after me when Mother died and in a way you’re still looking after me. How long are you staying?’

‘A week. I should be in Helsinki for some TV documentary. But I’ll be back.’

‘Always roaming the world. All that endless travelling, all those departure lounges. Do you ever actually arrive anywhere?’

‘It’s hard to tell – sometimes I think I’ve made jet-lag into a new philosophy. It’s the nearest we can get to penitence.’

‘And what about your book on the great brothels of the world? Have you started it yet?’

‘I’m still doing the research.’

‘I remember you talking about that at school. You used to say your only interests in life were opium and brothels. Pure Graham Greene, but there was always something heroic there. Do you smoke a few pipes?’

‘Now and then.’

‘Don’t worry, I won’t tell Father. How is the old chap?’

‘We’ve moved him to a smaller nursing home. He doesn’t recognize me now. When you get out of here you must see him. I think he’d remember you.’

‘I never liked him, you know.’

‘He’s a child, Frank. He’s forgotten everything. All he does is dribble and doze.’

Frank leaned back, smiling at the ceiling as his memories played across the grey distemper. ‘We used to steal – do you remember? Strange that – it all started in Riyadh when Mother fell ill. I was snatching anything I could lay my hands on. You joined in to make me feel better.’

‘Frank, it was a phase. Everyone understood.’

‘Except Father. He couldn’t cope when Mother lost control. He started that weird affair with his middle-aged secretary.’

‘The poor man was desperate.’

‘He blamed you for my stealing. He’d find my pockets full of candy I’d pinched from the Riyadh Hilton and then accuse you.’

‘I was older. He thought I could have stopped you. He knew I envied you.’

‘Mother was drinking herself to death and no one was doing anything about it. Stealing was the only way I could make sense of how guilty I felt. Then she started those long walks in the middle of the night and you’d go with her. Where exactly? I always wondered.’

‘Nowhere. We just walked around the tennis court. Rather like my life now.’

‘Probably gave you a taste for it. That’s why you’re nervous of putting down roots. You know, Estrella de Mar is as close to Saudi as you can get. Maybe that’s why I came here

He stared bleakly at the table, for the moment depressed by all these memories. Ignoring the policeman, I reached across the table and held his shoulders, trying to calm the trembling collarbones. He met my eyes, glad to see me, his smile stripped of irony.

‘Frank …?’

‘It’s all right.’ He sat up, brightening himself. ‘How is Esther, by the way? I should have asked.’

‘She’s fine. We split up three months ago.’

‘I’m sorry. I always liked her. Rather high-minded in an unusual way. She once asked me a lot of strange questions about pornography. Nothing to do with you.’

‘She took up gliding last summer, spent her weekends soaring over the South Downs. A sign, I guess, that she wanted to leave me. Now she and her women friends fly to competitions in Australia and New Mexico. I think of her up there, alone with all that silence.’

‘You’ll meet someone else.’

‘Maybe …’

The policeman opened the door and stood with his back to us, calling across the corridor to an officer sitting at a desk. I leaned over the table, speaking quickly. ‘Frank, listen. If Danvila can get you out on bail there’s a chance I can arrange something.’

‘What exactly? Charles?’

‘I’m thinking of Gibraltar …’ The policeman had resumed his watch over us. ‘You know the special skills there. This whole business is preposterous. It’s obvious you didn’t kill the Hollingers.’

‘That’s not quite true.’ Frank drew away from me, the defensive smile on his lips again. ‘It’s hard to believe, but I am guilty.’

‘Don’t talk like that!’ Impatient with him, I knocked his cigarettes to the floor, where they lay beside the policeman’s feet. ‘Say nothing to Danvila about the Gibraltar thing. Once we get you back to England you’ll be able to clear yourself.’

‘Charles … I can only clear myself here.’

‘But at least you’ll be out of jail and safe somewhere.’

‘Somewhere with no extradition treaty for murder?’ Frank stood up and pushed his chair against the table. ‘You’ll have to take me with you on your trips. We’ll travel the world together. I’d like that …’

The policeman waited for me to leave, carrying my chair to the wall. Frank embraced me and stood back, still smiling his quirky smile. He picked up his cigarettes and nodded to me.

‘Believe me, Charles, I belong here.’