According to an American couple at the next table, a leading Hollywood star had promised to emerge from the front entrance, only to discover that a rival studio's production was advertised on a huge billboard above his head. He had turned back into the hotel and slipped out through a rear exit, leaving a rattled publicity woman to make his apologies. Even as she shouted through her megaphone a dozen hands were rocking a TV location van. A Cannes policeman sprawled across the windscreen like a stuntman, shouting to the hotel's security team as the crowd cheered him on.

Exhausted by the noise, I left the table to a middle-aged German tourist, who managed the feat of sitting in my chair before I could rise fully to my feet. I wiped my hands on his shoulder and limped to the toilets at the rear of the bar. I locked myself into a cubicle, and took the leather hypodermic wallet from my jacket. Leaning against the washbasin, I lifted my injured leg onto the lavatory lid and rolled my trouser to the knee. The surgical scars had faded, but the pain still nagged, a cry for help that sounded steadily from beneath the floorboards of my mind.

I broke the seal on the unlabelled phial and drew three ccs into the hypodermic. Avoiding the cluster of old puncture points, I injected the pale solution into the fold of smooth skin on the inner surface of my knee. I counted to twenty as the subcutaneous shot brought its slow but deep relief, pushing the pain further from me, like furniture moved to the far corners of a stage.

Letting my leg fall to the floor, I shouted through the door at an impatient woman rattling the lock. She stepped into another cubicle, and I sat across the washstand, my back to the mirror, letting the tap water run across my hands. As my chest warmed, I thought of Jane, dazzling as any film star in her minuscule black frock, the fur stole around her shoulders, walking into the Palais des Festivals with Alain and Simone Delage.

I, meanwhile, was stuck in a lavatory on the Croisette, like any junkie after a fix, and with scarcely a greater grip on reality. At Easter my cousin Charles had flown down to visit us, and we amicably agreed that I would give up the pretence of helping to edit the firm's publications. He enjoyed his stay, impressed by Jane's newfound role as international career physician, but puzzled by my transformation into a suntanned but distracted consort, forever listening to the ghosts in the garden. I told him nothing about the secret life of Eden-Olympia.

Meanwhile, my investigation into the Greenwood murders had stalled. Between myself and the truth stood an amiable bully with badly bitten fingernails. Although Wilder Penrose enjoyed my company, and generously allowed me to beat him at chess, I knew that he saw me as another of his experimental animals, to be stroked through the bars as I was fattened for yet another maze.

Trying to lead him on, I listened to him enlarge on his psychopathic credo. He had recruited a dozen more bowling clubs, and I hoped that he would soon overreach himself and drive his demented apocalypse into the buffers. He pressed me to join one of the therapy groups, and I finally gave in, intending to take careful notes of the victims and their injuries.

In the rear seats of cars stolen for the evening, I watched as the photographer – a financial analyst with a Japanese bank – recorded the ratissages on his camcorder. An empty mansion on Cap d'Antibes owned by an Egyptian property tycoon was broken into and thoroughly trashed. Another bowling team, made up of senior managers at Elf-Maritime, carried out a spectacular act of piracy in the Golfe-Juan marina, seizing a motor yacht owned by a family of Omani Arabs. They sailed the gaudy vessel to the Îles de Lérins, where it was beached and set alight. From the terrace of the Villa Grimaldi we watched the flames rise into the night. As sleek in their wetsuits as a chorus line of James Bonds, the corporate perpetrators raised their malt-whisky tumblers and toasted the cause of therapeutic psychopathy.

Gold, I soon noticed, was a special target of the bowling teams.

I pretended to play lookout when a hapless Saudi broker was brutally beaten in the underground garage at the Noga Hilton.

Sexual assaults provided a unique frisson, and older prostitutes received special treatment, for reasons locked deep in childhood pathology. I tried to forget that I had held open the lift doors in a Mandelieu tower block as a handsome Spanish whore who ran a two-room brothel fought to shield her infant daughter.

After this I almost broke with Penrose, warning him that his therapy programme was moving out of control. But he knew that neither I nor any other executives would go to the police. The camcorder footage incriminated us all, as he reminded me, and the radical therapy clearly worked. The members of the bowling teams glowed with health, and Eden-Olympia had never been so successful. The flow of adrenalin, the hair-triggers of fear and flight, had retuned the corporate nervous system and pushed profits to unprecedented heights.

Even I felt better. I sat in the lavatory cubicle in the Blue Bar, listening to the play of water on my hand. As the pain eased, I slipped into a reverie of Jane and our drive through Provence, in those months long ago that now seemed like years…

'C'est stupide… Monsieur!'

'Paul, are you in there? Don't die yet…'

I eased myself from the washbasin, woken by the raised voices.

A fist pounded on the plywood panel. I unlatched the door as a Blue Bar waiter fell against me. He peered into the cubicle, searching the floor between my feet for any sign of an addict's gear.

Behind him stood Frances Baring, blonde eyebrows springing in alarm. She pressed her hands to my cheeks, staring into my still sluggish eyes.

'Paul? You're hiding in here? Is someone after you?'

'No. Why? Sorry, I fell asleep.'

'I thought, maybe…' She slipped a fifty-franc note into the waiter's hand. 'Monsieur is with me. Have a nice day…'

Frances took my arm and eased me out of the cubicle. The scent of her body, the touch of her hands, quickly revived me.

She wore a white trouser suit and sunglasses, as if she had stepped from one of the gangster generals' helicopters. She leaned forward to kiss me, sniffing at my breath before our lips touched.

' Frances, relax…' I noticed the hypodermic wallet jammed behind the washbasin taps and stuffed it into my jacket. 'My knee's been creating hell – I gave myself a shot of Jane's painkiller and drifted off… thinking about you.'

'I hate that stuff. One day we'll be meeting in the local morgue. The barman said he'd seen you – an Englishman, très méchant.'

Still unconvinced, she closed the cubicle door. 'Let's get you out of here.'

'I'm fine, no problems with the knee.' The sleep had refreshed me, and I felt almost euphoric. As we stepped into the crowded restaurant I pointed to the Croisette. 'God, it's dark.'

'It usually is. It's called night.'

Frances steered me to the stools by the bar. Glad to see her, I watched as she fumbled in her purse for cigarettes and lighter.

I liked her quirky humour, her sudden moods of self-doubt when she gripped me tightly and refused to let me leave her bed. She was still trying to turn me against Eden-Olympia, but approved of my taking part in the ratissages, sometimes telling me of a mansion that might be robbed. In return, she asked me to introduce her to some of the pilots at the Cannes-Mandelieu airfield, an engaging crew of French, American and South African flyers who towed the advertising pennants above the beaches of the Côte d'Azur in their ageing Cessnas and met to drink at a Thai restaurant in La Napoule. She commissioned one of the Frenchmen to take aerial photographs of the Var plain near the Sophia-Antipolis science park, ostensibly as part of her property surveys, and later I found his flying jacket at her apartment. But Jane's anaesthetic took care of that pain too…