On the jump seat sat Pascal Zander, eyes fixed on Jane's cleavage.

He was aggressively drunk, gesturing in a coarse way at Alain Delage, who seemed bored by him. Simone held Jane's hand, trying to distract her from Zander, murmuring a commentary on the crowd into her ear.

When the traffic failed to move, Alain spoke to the chauffeur.

The front passenger door opened and Halder stepped from the car, smartly dressed in dinner jacket and black cummerbund, gold cufflinks flashing at his wrists. He noticed me on the steps of the apartment building, and glanced at the display of film titles hanging from the balconies. Barely pausing, he raised his palms to the night air, as if puzzled by my choice of film fare for the evening.

'Paul, who was that?' Frances waved as the limousine moved off. 'I think I saw Halder…'

'Jane with the Delages and Pascal Zander. She seemed very happy.'

'Good. No one died of boredom during the film. They're off to the party at the Villa Grimaldi.'

'Zander looked drunk. Too drunk for a security chief.'

'People worry about him. They say he's going to be replaced. Pity me, Paul. I have to see him at the party. Those roving hands should be up there on the Noga Hilton with the samurai…'

I watched the tail lights of the limousine, and for a moment thought that Jane had turned to look back at me. 'The Villa Grimaldi? I'll come with you.'

'Did they send you a ticket?'

'I'll gate-crash.'

'You haven't seen the gates.' She stared gloomily at my stained shirt and leather sandals. 'I can get you in, but it's black tie.'

'They'll think I'm one of the security guards.'

'They're dressed like Cary Grant.' She pondered this sartorial impasse, still trying to integrate me into her scheme. 'We'll go back to Marina Baie des Anges. David's old dinner jacket is there. I think you're allowed to borrow it.'

'David's old tux…?' I took her arm. 'Yes, I'd like to wear it. Something tells me it's going to fit…'

32 A Dead Man's Tuxedo

Behind us, Marina Baie des Anges wrapped itself into the night, its curved towers enclosing a deeper darkness of sleep, dreams and seconal. We set off towards Antibes on the RN7, the beach of Villeneuve-Loubet to our left. A windsurfer tacked across the waves, watched by his wife and teenage son, sitting on the shingle slope below their parked car. As the sail caught the shifting air it seemed to vanish for a few seconds, then appeared again as if emerging from a defective space-time.

Frowning at the prospect of the Villa Grimaldi party, Frances leaned into the steering wheel, following the BMW's headlamps as they swerved across the steep camber. I lay back in the passenger seat and let the night air sweep across me, carrying away the last musty scents of Greenwood 's dinner jacket.

The dead man's tuxedo was a tight squeeze, the seams straining against my armpits. Frances had taken the suit from the wardrobe in her bedroom, holding the garment to her shoulders and reluctant to share it with me. She sat on the bed and watched while I smoothed the bruised lapels. A scent of past time clung to the fabric, memories of medical society dinners in London, cigar smoke and long-forgotten aftershave that rose from the worn silk lining.

Yet I felt surprisingly comfortable in the dead doctor's hand-me- down. Gazing at myself in the wardrobe mirror, I sensed that I had become Greenwood and assumed his role. Frances was almost deferential, aware that through me her former lover had returned to her bedroom.

With one of her white yachting shirts and a black tie fashioned from a crepe hatband, I passed muster. We were leaving the flat when I noticed my leather sandals.

' Jesus, Frances – my feet!'

'So? You've got two of them.'

'Look at those toes – they're the size of lobsters.'

'It's a crowded party. Who's going to notice them?' Frances stared at my toes. 'They're prehensile… is that genetic?'

By chance, she found a pair of black espadrilles that I wrenched into shape. As we took the lift to the basement garage she touched the dinner jacket, trying to calm a fleeting ghost. For a moment she seemed to see my face for the first time.

My own memories of Greenwood were less pressing. The booster dose of painkiller that I injected in the bathroom had induced a pleasant torpor. The world could deal with itself, and make its own accommodation with the deranged doctor. When we reached Antibes, passing the harbour and the modest apartment building where Greene had spent his last years, I thought of the two Asian women, sitting like furies at the baize table, guarding their ugly sideshow to the film festival as Greenwood chuckled his way round the video-horrors.

We waited at the long traffic lights near the bus depot in Golfe- Juan. Under the sodium glare Frances smiled approvingly at me.

'You look so smart, Paul. Even your wife might fancy you.'

'I sleep in the children's room now. It's sunny and cheerful, like going back to infancy – Babar, Tintin and Rupert Bear watch over me…'

'The frieze? It's sweet. I helped David put it up.'

'Why, though? He wasn't married. It's an odd thing for a bachelor to do.'

'He had friends in London who came down.'

'The refuge at La Bocca – did any of the girls stay at the house?'

'With their uncles, now and then…'

'Migrant Arab labourers? It's hard to believe.' We were climbing the heights of Super-Cannes, along a smoothly paved road that curved past palatial villas, lit like spectres by firework displays.

'This Alice obsession, lending these incomprehensible books to the teenage girls. He was a one-man British Council, and about as much use. Those tough teenagers can't have made head or tail of them.'

'So why did he bother? Go on, Paul… you're thinking of the Reverend Dodgson and his other interests.'

'It did occur to me.'

We reached the Villa Grimaldi and joined the queue of cars and taxis waiting to enter the estate. In the darkness, the VIP guests sat in their limousines like deposed minor royalty. Security men in Eden-Olympia uniforms took Frances 's invitation and waved her through the gates into the drive, where she handed the BMW to a squad of hyperactive valet-parkers.

Three marble terraces, the lowest enclosing a swimming pool, looked out over a shelving lawn towards La Napoule Bay. Cannes lay beneath us, a furnace of light where the Croisette touched the sea, as if an immense lava flow was moving down from the hills and igniting at the water's edge. The Palais des Festivals resembled a secondary caldera, and the rotating strobes on its roof vented a gaudy fountain above the Vieux Port.

Frances and I strolled forward, eyes stung by the flashes of chemical colour from a firework display. Five hundred guests packed the terraces, some dancing to the music of a marimba band, others helping themselves to champagne and canapés. A forced intimacy ruled the night, an illusion of good humour that seemed part of a complex social experiment.

On the lowest terrace were the business park's more workaday guests, the bureaucracy of local police chiefs, magistrates and senior civil servants. They and their carefully groomed wives stood with their backs to the Croisette, staring coolly at the actors, directors and film agents who occupied the middle terrace. I failed to identify any of the actors, aspiring newcomers who were still prepared to fraternize with their public but displayed the nervy jauntiness of celebrities forced to accept that no one recognized them or had seen their out-of-competition films. They in turn kept a careful watch on the upper terrace. Here an elite of film producers, bankers and investors endured the noise, a collective roar of inaudible voices. The Cannes Film Festival, like the Academy Awards in Los Angeles, momentarily confused them with the suggestion that film was about something other than money.