'Frances, dear…' I held her breasts as she squatted across me, and felt the warm urine on my thighs, hotter than I expected from her cold hands. A quick scent, sweet and ammoniacal, rose from her pubis. ' Frances, give up…'

'No, we don't give up.' She blew the damp hair from her eyes.

'Let your mind drift… you're on the taboo coast, there are dark harbours here. We'll find the door, the special one…'

She stopped, and stared with a look of frustration at my limp penis, then sprang from the bed towards the bathroom.

'Don't move. I'll be back.'

' Frances, please – no shit.'

'No shit, don't worry.'

When the door closed I heard her rooting through the laundry basket. I moved from the urine-damp patch. Beyond the terrace the apartment buildings of Marina Baie des Anges made their curved passage through the night. I had disappointed Frances, though she was taking my failure in good part. Jane still hovered somewhere within my mind, but she had begun to fade from me. My visceral response to the Cardin robbery seemed to justify infidelity. The contingent world, as always, rewrote the rules and sanctioned everything.

I heard Frances switch off the bathroom light. The door opened, and her hand reached to the wall switch, dimming the bedside lamp.

'Right…' Frances stood beside the bed, swaying to the faint North African music that came from an apartment above us.

'Don't tell me you're asleep.'

'I've never been more awake.'

I sat up and leaned against the quilted headboard, feeling its buttons in my back. Frances raised her arms to the ceiling mirror, as if about to join her second self among the clouds. She wore a zebra-striped cocktail dress that exposed her crutch, a parody of a gun-moll's gown in a gangster musical. The cheap fabric clasped her hips and waist, and the plunge neckline almost bared her breasts. Her legs were sheathed in a tattered pair of fishnet tights, holes as large as my hand around patches of pale skin. A slash of two-tone lipstick, scarlet and mauve, turned her mouth into a lurid grimace, a tough-teen fad I had seen in the bars of La Bocca, a convent girl's notion of a streetwalker's smile, alienating and alluring.

'Paul? Still here?'

I placed my feet on the tiled floor. Clasping her hips, I drew her towards me. The acrylic fabric slid like oiled rubber in my hands. I felt the torn mesh of her tights, searching for the pools of smooth skin among the nail-catching threads.

I pressed my lips to the gusset, inhaling the odour of adolescent hormones and cheap perfume that clung to the fabric, the heady, derailing reek of pubescent girls that had filled the refuge, the smells of dust and the ancestral dirt of dormitories, the jarring clash of unwashed underwear discarded by the Alice-reading girls.

'Paul…' Frances stopped me when I searched behind her back for the zip. Holding my now erect penis, she waited as I pressed my face to her pubis, breathing the stale scents on the stained fabric. 'I'll leave the dress on – it took a miracle to get into… How are you?'

'Young again…'

27 Darkness Curves

Darkness curved around the apartment towers of Marina Baie des Anges, one night enclosing another as the realms of physics and the dreamtime merged into each other. The last trains of balcony lights bent into themselves as the people of the cliff face lowered their blinds for bed. A jazz piano sounded faintly from a roof terrace, overlaid by the siren of a cruise liner avoiding a flotilla of fishing craft, carbide lamps over their sterns.

Still wearing the zebra dress, Frances had slept beside me. Her smudged make-up, the streaks of mascara and lipstick on her chin turned her face into an amiable kabuki clown's. She brushed the hair from her eyes and stared at herself in the ceiling mirror.

'Paul? I'll drive you home.'

'I'll find a cab – the concierge can call one.'

'It's better if I take you. Anyway, I need to look in somewhere first.' She ran a hand across my chest, then kissed my nipple in a show of affection. 'You really woke up. I hope it wasn't just this nasty little frock.'

She sat up and let me lower the zip, then eased the tight sheath over her shoulders. She tossed it onto a chair, where it settled into itself, desire deflating.

'Yuck – I'll throw it away.'

'Don't. I like it.'

'Why? I'll get it dry-cleaned. No? Isn't that going a little far?'

Curious to know everything about me, she examined my face in the pale light, her finger tracing the contours of my cheeks and chin. She had moved me a few squares across the board inside her head, at the cost of enormous effort, but her confidence in herself had returned.

'Where did you get the dress?' I asked, certain that I had thrown it away after leaving the refuge. 'And the tights?'

'Not in the Rue d'Antibes. They were in a rubbish bin near La Bocca. '

'You were following me?'

'No. But a lot of people are.'

'Why?'

'They think you may find something.'

'About Greenwood?'

'Maybe. Or something about you.' She sighed and scratched an ear, concerned for my naivety. On the way to the bathroom she collected the zebra dress, and briefly posed with it. 'Your friend Halder saw you stuff it into the bin. He was a bit shocked, so he passed it to me. Of course, I knew exactly what it meant. Does it suit me?'

'After midnight? Absolutely.'

'It makes me look twelve.'

'Thirteen. There's a difference.'

'I suppose there is. Have you ever had sex with a thirteen-year-old?'

'As it happens, I have.'

'Really? I'm impressed. You don't look the type.'

'I was twelve at the time. She was my girlfriend. I always did exactly what she told me.'

'Sensible little chap,' Frances commented. 'No wonder I like you.'

'One day she said we were going to have sex. So we did.'

'Thirteen years old. Any others since then?'

'Of course not.'

'Why "of course"? Let your imagination go out to play. You're not a paedophile.'

'Does that make it all right?'

'In a way, I think it does.'

We sped along the RN7 towards Antibes, past the Casino hypermarket at Villeneuve-Loubet and the Fort Carré. The ceramics shops sat in the darkness, their terracotta urns facing each other across the road like chesspieces. I lay back in the passenger seat of the BMW and let the night air rush into my face, thinking affectionately of Frances. She made love in the same single-minded way that she drove her car, firmly gripping the controls and scanning the road ahead for unexpected potholes.

She was still using me, for reasons I was too tired to fathom, but my head felt clearer than it had for months.

We left Golfe-Juan and its marina, a white city asleep on the water. Near the old Ali Khan mansion, where the prince had first noticed Rita Hayworth's fading mind, Frances turned off the RN7. We began to climb the steep road that led towards the billionaire heights of Super-Cannes. Luxury villas as lavish as palaces stood in their groomed parks. On the wrought-iron gates, surveillance cameras crouched like hawks.

Frances fumbled over the repeated gear changes as we struggled towards the high corniche. She stalled the engine beneath a sallow array of sodium lights at the junction with the Vallauris road.

' Frances, do we need to come this way? It's like Everest without the charm.'

She started the engine again, and tapped a folder filled with property brochures that lay on my lap. 'I promised to leave these with Zander. He's at the Villa Grimaldi – the bigwigs at Eden-Olympia do their entertaining there.'

'They'll all be asleep. It's 3.30. Four hours from now they'll be at their desks.'

'Not tomorrow. They're holding some kind of reunion dinner. Look around the place – you won't have to talk to them.'