I looked at the immaculate gravel, and almost heard the crunch of Greenwood 's steps as he approached the house, rifle in his hands. I folded the Riviera News transcript, aware that the typewritten text no longer matched the reality of the killing ground. An upstairs window opened, revealing the geisha-like face of a middle-aged Japanese woman wearing a mask of white cream. With the windows closed to seal in the air-conditioning, the brief sounds of gunfire would have been barely audible.

'Mrs Oshima… I don't suppose a well-bred Japanese woman would show us round her bedroom.'

'I doubt it.' Halder pulled a large manila envelope from the instrument panel shelf. He slid out three black-and-white photographs. 'These might give you a feel for the atmosphere.'

I lowered the sun visor to shield my eyes from the afternoon light. Taken by a police cameraman, the first photograph showed a forty-year-old man lying across a double bed, his back to the pillows. An overnight growth of beard stained his chin, and his handsome face was disfigured by the blood that flushed his nose and mouth. This was Guy Bachelet, the former security chief at Eden-Olympia, whose picture I had last seen in the framed group portrait at the La Bocca refuge.

Two bullet holes marked his barrel chest, one in his breastbone and the other below his left nipple. Neither had led to heavy bleeding, but a third bullet wound to his right thigh had leaked a pool of blood that covered his legs in a black mantle.

I assumed that Greenwood had shot Bachelet from the bedroom doorway, first hitting him in the thigh. As blood pumped from his victim's femoral artery Greenwood had taken more careful aim, then shot him twice through the chest.

The second photograph showed an almost naked woman sprawled on the tiled floor beside the bed. She lay face up, one hand pressed against the carved oak footboard, the other raised to her face, as if trying to ward away any further bullets.

Her mouth was open, exposing a gap in her upper teeth, where a partial dental plate had fallen onto the floor. Her pale skin was speckled with black dots, but her face was clearly that of an intelligent Frenchwoman of the professional class.

She had been shot once through the heart at close range, and burns from the explosive charge had seared the white skin around the wound. She wore a cupless black brassiere that exposed her small breasts, one of them licked by the tongue of blood that flowed from the entry wound. I guessed that she and Bachelet had been playing some erotic game the previous evening, and that she had been too sleepy or too drugged to remove the garment.

The third photograph was a close-up of the bedside table.

Behind the digital clock, a corporate gift from Monsanto, were a crack pipe and a plastic bag holding half a dozen cocaine pellets. Matches, paper spills and twists of silver foil filled an ashtray, and a video remote control rested on two cassettes with handwritten labels. Below, lying in the open drawer, was a collection of jewellery, triple-stranded pearl necklaces, diamond chokers and emerald pendants, all with their sales stickers still attached.

'Sweet dreams…' With a shudder, I held the photographs at arm's length. 'What films were they watching?'

'Does it matter?' Halder frowned at my morbid question. 'If you want, I can find out.'

'Forget it – I think we know. Where did you get hold of the prints?'

'The security files. There are other sets. No one knows I borrowed them.'

'These scene-of-the-crime photos freeze the blood. We're looking into Greenwood 's head.'

' Greenwood 's?'

'More than the victims'.' I ran my finger over the background details, the deco lamp on the bedside table, the marks on the wall where the headboard had chafed the plaster, perhaps during bouts of cocaine-driven sex between the security chief and his mistress. The spectacle of their intimate clutter, the crack pipe and cassettes, must have burned themselves into Greenwood 's mind. Only this blood-stained tableau was left, the postures of death and the peek-a-boo bra of a middle-aged doctor.

'Dr Serrou…' I commented. 'The selfless lady of the refuge.'

'She was. People have private lives, Mr Sinclair. Even you. It's possible he didn't mean to kill her. She just picked the wrong bedroom to wake up in.'

'I don't think so.' I pointed to the floor around the bed.

Bloody footprints marked the tiles, so clear that even Dr Serrou's quirky toes, hooked by a lifetime of ward rounds and constricting shoes, were clearly visible. 'Imagine what happened. The first shot wakes her up. Bachelet's blood is pumping all over the bed, her legs are covered with the stuff. Then Greenwood steps forward and shoots Bachelet through the chest. There's a roar of noise, a red spray in her face. Greenwood turns the rifle on her, but perhaps he hesitates – after all, they were colleagues, they'd started the refuge together. She looks pleadingly at this English doctor she knows so well, now obviously out of his mind. She gets off the bed and walks towards him, leaving footprints in her lover's blood. Somehow she hopes to calm him.'

'And then?'

'He shoots her dead. At the last moment she realizes that friendship counts for nothing and that she's about to fade into Greenwood 's dream of death.'

'So…' Halder pinched his nose, and calmed his fluttering nostrils. 'Was it a crime passionnel?'

'No, it wasn't. I was wrong there. Completely wrong.'

'He would have shot her first?'

'Not necessarily. But she and Bachelet weren't having a secret affair. This was a long-standing relationship – the crack pipe, the porno-cassettes, the underwear. These were two people who'd spent a lot of time exploring each other. She owed nothing to David Greenwood.'

'Then why did he kill her?'

'That I can't say. But it looks as if…'

'He killed some of the others? Maybe all of them? And there wasn't a conspiracy?'

'It's possible.' I stared at the photograph of the bedside table.

'There are too many question marks and no answers. These necklaces and chokers – they still have their price tags on.'

'They come from a jewellery heist in Nice. About three weeks before the murders.'

'Why are they here?'

'Maybe Bachelet was holding them for a French undercover team.'

'And you believe that?'

'I don't have to.' Halder moved restlessly in his seat, as if we had spent too long at this first murder site. 'I don't know why any of this happened. Greenwood didn't leave a suicide note.'

'He thought he'd get away with it.'

'Never. Greenwood was no fool. At the end he didn't have enough time. That's always the trouble with mass-killers. They run out of time.'

'He hated something about Eden-Olympia. I think you know what it was.'

'He never told me.'

I handed the photographs back to Halder. 'Any others I can see?'

'A few. We'll wait till we get there.' Halder started the engine with a flourish, and waved to Mrs Oshima, watching us suspiciously from her bedroom window. 'We need fresh air, Mr Sinclair. Fresh air and fresh minds…'

Drugs and Deaths

The early day shift was leaving the clinic, nurses and technicians driving from the exits in their identical small cars. A young houseman wearing his white coat and name-tag walked past us towards the apartment houses beside the lake. He was barely an arm's length from the Range Rover, but so self-engrossed that he failed to notice when Halder saluted him.

'That says a lot about Eden-Olympia…' I watched the distracted medico stride away, oblivious to the lake and parkland, his head responding only to the flicker of a lizard beside the path.

'People are so immersed in their work they wouldn't recognize the end of the world. It explains why no one saw anything unusual about Greenwood. There's no civic sense here.'