Текст книги "A Foreign Country"
Автор книги: Charles Cumming
сообщить о нарушении
Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 24 страниц)
39
There were police, there were paramedics, there were a great many concerned neighbours from all corners of La Cité Radieuse. There was also, of course, the shame of being mugged, that particular sense of humiliation which comes in the aftermath of a thorough defeat. But mostly Kell felt the dread of bureaucracy, of form-filling, of enforced visits to local hospitals, of the pity and fuss of strangers. He was obliged to see a doctor, who issued a Certificat Medicale which confirmed that Kell had suffered no serious physical damage save for a severe bruise on his left bicep and another on his left thigh, both already the colour of aubergines. His right kneecap had swollen slightly and he had a cut above the eye that did not require stitching. Both Claude, the French paramedic who examined him at the scene, and Laurent, the lugubrious police officer who had only that morning arrested ‘trois putains de beurs’, recommended that Kell stay overnight and submit to a full medical examination in hospital. You could be in shock, said Claude. You ought to have a blood test, said Laurent. There was no way of knowing if Monsieur Uniacke had sustained internal injuries.
Kell, who had spent exactly one day in bed with illness since the age of fifteen, had always been a firm believer in listening to his own body, rather than to the risk-averse counselling of jaded public servants. On this occasion, his body told him what he wanted to hear: that he would be a little stiff in the morning, a little older, and that the injury to his knee would cause him to limp for several days. Otherwise the fight had damaged no more than his pride. It had also placed Thomas Kell in the awkward position of having to give a sworn Procés-Verbal to the Marseille police in the name of Stephen Uniacke. This was contrary to the spy’s DNA, to every impulse he possessed to keep a low profile when conducting an operation overseas. Yet if the DGSE was going to send two Arab thugs to beat him up, Kell figured he didn’t have much of a choice.
It took less than five minutes in Laurent’s spruce Citroën Xsara to reach police headquarters half a mile away, thanks to the traffic-parting wail of a siren. The building was a sandstone, three-storey Hausmann throwback in an otherwise hyper-modern Marseille suburb with a predictable mix of late-afternoon clientele idling in the lobby: jumpy pickpockets; protesting drug dealers; breathalysed post-lunch businessmen; pensioners with a grudge. Kell was fast-tracked into an office on the second floor and interviewed formally by Laurent and his partner, Alain, a thirty-something hard man with salt-and-pepper stubble and a gleaming firearm, which he touched from time to time, like someone stroking a cat. Kell was asked for a full inventory of his shoulder bag and listed the contents as best he could, well aware that Jimmy Marquand and the beancounters at SIS would require a copy of the official police statement in order to reclaim the laptop and camera on insurance; such was the box-ticking small-mindedness that had overtaken the Service in recent years. After thirty minutes he was taken into a second room and shown a series of mug shots of local North African hoodlums, none of whom matched the descriptions of the two men who had assaulted him. It was already seven o’clock by the time Laurent was satisfied that he had covered every detail of the attack, asking Kell to sign the official ‘Plainte Contre X’ and apologizing, much to Alain’s evident distaste, that ‘as a British tourist’ he had fallen prey to ‘an immigrant crime’. Kell, who was in no doubt that his two assailants had stolen his laptop and phones to order, thanked both policemen for their ‘patience and professionalism’, and asked to be driven back to his hotel as soon as possible so that he could rest before travelling to Paris in the morning.
Laurent was on the point of agreeing when the telephone rang. He picked it up and said: ‘Yes?’ then embarked on what Kell assumed was an internal call. ‘Oui, oui,’ the policeman muttered slowly, before a half-smile broke out on his face. Laurent nodded his head and made happy eye contact with Kell. Something had happened.
‘It appears that your bag has been found, Monsieur Uniacke,’ he said, hanging up the phone. ‘It was dropped outside La Cité Radieuse and picked up by a member of the public. One of my fellow officers is bringing it to you now.’
Three minutes later there was a knock at the door and a third police officer walked into the room. He was wearing regulation black boots and a crisp, navy-blue uniform. Like Alain, he carried a firearm on his belt, but looked in every way a more imposing figure, thickset and pitiless. The beard had gone, taking as much as ten years off his face, but Kell recognized the man instantly.
It was Luc.
40
That Luc had bothered to shave off his beard told Kell everything he needed to know. Malot’s companion from the boat intended to interview him while impersonating a police officer and did not want to run the small risk that Kell would recognize him. He said: ‘Bonjour’ in an upbeat fashion, passed the shoulder bag to Laurent, and introduced himself as ‘Benedict Voltaire’, a pseudonym as preposterous as any Kell had ever encountered.
‘So what happened here please?’ he asked in English, settling into a chair that Alain had vacated, as though making way for a visiting dignitary. Kell noted the extra stripe on Luc’s shoulder, outranking his two putative colleagues. He was either a senior police official or, more likely, a French Intelligence officer who had persuaded Laurent and Alain to let him masquerade as a cop.
‘Monsieur Uniacke is a British national. He was visiting La Cité Radieuse when he was attacked by two Arab youths. They took his bag, but it looks like he got lucky.’
‘It does look like that, yes,’ Luc replied, this time in French. He had the cracked, gravelly voice of a heavy smoker and was studying Kell’s face intently, as though delaying the inevitable moment when he would expose him as a liar. Laurent had unzipped the bag.
‘Would you like to check that nothing is missing?’
He passed the bag across the desk and Kell quickly began to remove the contents and to place them, one by one, amid the paperwork and mugs in front of him. The laptop was the first item to emerge, not damaged in any way. Next came the camera, then the Marquand mobile, which was still switched on. He placed it beside his London phone on the table. The Scramble for Africa was at the bottom of the bag, wedged in next to a tourist map of Marseille. Finally, from a zip-up interior pocket, he retrieved the Uniacke wallet.
‘Two cell phones?’ said Luc, a rising note of suspicion in his voice. Kell knew that he was in a scrap potentially far more dangerous than his earlier fight in the corridor. The SIM would have been checked and traced and he prayed that Marquand had erased Uniacke’s trail through Nice. It was only by sheer luck that Kell’s London phone had not been stolen; had Luc been given access to that, it would have been game over.
‘That’s right,’ he said, picking up the Marquand phone and inspecting it. ‘I have one for work, one for personal stuff.’
There was an unread text message on the screen and he opened it. It was from Marquand himself:
You were right. Everyone safely back in town. See you next week.
‘Personal stuff,’ Luc repeated, in English, as though Kell had employed a euphemism. The smell of a recently extinguished cigarette was on his breath.
‘This is fantastic,’ Kell said, trying to ignore Luc’s cynicism by channelling the innocent relief and enthusiasm of Stephen Uniacke. ‘Everything seems to be here. My laptop, my camera …’ He checked the wallet next, flicking through the books of stamps, the membership of Kew, the various Uniacke credit and debit cards. Inevitably, more than four hundred euros had been removed. ‘Fuck, they took all my fucking money,’ he said. ‘Excuse my language.’
Laurent smiled. ‘No problem.’ He looked quickly at Luc, as though tacitly asking permission to speak. ‘You have insurance, yes?’
‘Of course.’
‘How much is missing?’ Luc asked. ‘How much did they take?’
‘I think about four hundred euros. I took five hundred out of an ATM this morning but spent some …’
‘Put a thousand on the form,’ Luc said grandly, nodding towards Laurent. It was a smart, if obvious psychological move.
‘I’m not sure I approve of that,’ Kell replied, but the smile on his face belied any ethical reservations he might have possessed. He turned the smile into a grateful nod of the head, saying: ‘Thank you’ to Luc with as much sincerity as he could muster. To bolster his image as a family man, he then laid out the frayed photographs of ‘Bella’ and ‘Dan’, his phantom son and phantom daughter, and said: ‘These are the most valuable things in my wallet. I’m just glad I didn’t lose those.’
‘Of course,’ Laurent replied quickly, with what sounded like genuine sincerity, and even Luc seemed moved by Kell’s devotion to his family.
‘What about the computer?’ he asked. ‘Is it damaged in any way?’
This was the most vulnerable moment in the interview, the point at which the DGSE could easily catch him out. They had stolen Kell’s bag in order to examine the laptop. He was convinced of that. He was also convinced that they would not have returned the computer to him unless they had failed to crack the encryption. Even had they done so, it was unlikely that French tech-ops would have found anything incriminating. In the hotel, Kell had run an SIS-installed software programme that erased the user’s digital footprints, replacing them with a series of benign cookies and URLs; the DGSE would have found only the emails and search engine history of Stephen Uniacke, marketing consultant and family man, reader of the Daily Mail and occasional gambler with Paddy Power. The Uniacke legend was so watertight it even had an account with Amazon.
‘Is it working?’ Luc asked, rising to his feet after Kell had flipped the lid and powered it up. It was obvious that he was coming round the desk in order to watch Kell typing in the password. Kell had no choice but to do so without complaint, tapping in the ten-digit code right under Luc’s direct and unembarrassed gaze.
‘Why do you have a password, if I may ask?’
‘I work as a consultant,’ Kell replied, again channelling his alter-ego’s guileless integrity. ‘We have a lot of high-net-worth clients who wouldn’t want information about their businesses falling into the wrong hands.’ He remembered the moments he had spent staring at the laptop screen in his cabin, under the possible surveillance of a DGSE camera, and found a way of explaining it: ‘Trouble is, I always forget the code because it’s so bloody long.’
‘Of course,’ said Luc, who hadn’t moved an inch.
‘Is there something you wanted to see?’ Kell asked, looking back over his shoulder with what he hoped was the mild suggestion that Benedict Voltaire of the Marseille constabulary was beginning to encroach on his privacy. ‘Everything seems to be working fine.’
This was enough to deter him. Reaching up to stroke the beard that was no longer there, Luc walked towards a double-glazed window at the southern end of the room and looked out over the back of the building. He tapped a couple of fingers on the glass and Kell wondered how he would make his next move. Surely the DGSE was now convinced of his innocence? Surely he had nothing to link him to Amelia or Malot?
‘What were you doing in Marseille, Mr Uniacke?’
Kell’s instinct was to insist that he had already answered such questions many times since the attack, but it was vital not to rise to Luc’s provocations.
‘I was in Tunisia on holiday. I came over on the ferry last night.’
Luc turned to face him. ‘And was there anybody on the ferry who may have antagonized you? Who may have had a reason to follow you in Marseille and to attack you?’
It was not the line of enquiry that Kell had expected. Where was Luc going with this?
‘I don’t think so. I talked to a couple of people in the bar, to some others in the queue while we were waiting to disembark. Otherwise, nobody. I was mainly reading in my cabin.’
‘No arguments? No problems on the boat?’
Kell shook his head. ‘None.’ It was almost too easy. ‘No arguments,’ he said, a sudden wince of pain in his knee.
In a room nearby, a man suddenly raised his voice in violent anger, as though enraged by a wild injustice. The building then became quiet again.
‘You said to my colleague that you are on your way to Paris?’
This was a slip. Kell had told Laurent of his plan to leave Marseille before Luc had arrived. Clearly he had been eavesdropping on the formal police interview.
‘Yes. I have a client in Paris who may be in town over the next few days. I was going to go up there to meet him. If he doesn’t show up, I’ll probably just go home.’
‘To Reading?’
‘To Reading via London, yes.’
Kell was suddenly tired of the second-rate interrogation, of Luc’s supercilious machismo. It was obvious that they had nothing on him. He longed to be free of the now-stifling room, of a long afternoon of violence and bureaucracy. He wanted to find Malot.
‘So I wish you good luck, Mr Uniacke,’ Luc said, apparently arriving at the same conclusion. ‘I am sorry for the trouble we have put you through. Truly.’ There was a strange moment here, a look of intense hidden meaning directed towards him that Kell could not untangle. ‘My colleague, Laurent, will take you back to your hotel. Thank you for your time. I do trust you will enjoy the rest of your visit to France.’
41
At Kell’s request, Laurent dropped him at the corner of Rue Breteuil and Quai des Belges so that he could walk back to his hotel past the old port. He was already over an hour late for Madeleine Brive and wanted to cancel their plan for dinner, using the excuse that he had been robbed and beaten up. There was no advantage to be gained from meeting her: the DGSE held all the cards and she would simply oblige him to spend several more hours masquerading as Stephen Uniacke.
As it transpired, Madeleine was not answering her phone and Kell left a long message apologizing for cancelling the dinner and explaining what had happened at La Cité Radieuse. He hoped that they might have a chance to meet again one day and wished Madeleine a safe journey home to Tours.
The port at night was crowded with drifting couples, tourists in their best shirts, children tossing coins at the feet of weary buskers. The market stalls selling fish from ice-strewn tables at the eastern end of the marina had long since been packed away and the ferries had brought back the last of their passengers from sightseeing trips to the Calanques and Chateau d’If. At a tabac on the Quai des Belges, Kell bought a télécarte and went in search of a public phone. The first two were vandalized beyond repair, but at the north end of Rue Thubaneau he found a functioning France Telecom booth in a quiet side street opposite a shuttered pharmacy. He closed the door, set his bag on the ground and dialled the number for the taxi company Malot had used at the ferry terminal.
A woman answered, fifth ring, and Thomas Kell weaved his tall tale.
‘Hello, yes. I hope that you can help me.’ As a schoolboy, Kell had been told by a teacher that his spoken French sounded like a British Spitfire pilot who had crash-landed in Normandy. For the purposes of the conversation he tried to recreate a similar effect. ‘I was in Marseille last week and rented one of your taxis outside Chez Michel at about half-past eleven on a Friday night. It was a white Mercedes. The driver was West African, an incredibly nice man …’
‘Maybe Arnaud, maybe Bobo, maybe Daniel …’
‘Yes, maybe. Do you know who I’m talking about? He was around fifty or fifty-five …’
‘Arnaud, then …’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘What about him?’
‘Well, I’m British …’
‘I can tell this …’
‘And I work for Médecins sans Frontières. Arnaud gave me his card because I promised to get in touch with regard to some friends he was very concerned about in the Ivory Coast.’
‘Oh, OK …’
That did the trick; the merest suggestion of possible human rights abuses had transformed the receptionist’s previously indifferent attitude.
‘It’s just that I’ve lost the card and have no way of contacting him. Would you be able to ask him to ring me here in London or, if that’s going to be too expensive, do you have a number or an email where I could reach him in Marseille?’
As a ruse, it wasn’t watertight, but Kell possessed enough of an understanding of the French character to know that they would not refuse such a request purely on the basis of protecting Arnaud’s privacy. At worst, the receptionist would ask for Kell’s number and promise that Arnaud would call him back; at best, she would put them directly in touch.
‘He’s not working tonight,’ she said, which gave him hope that a number might be forthcoming.
‘That’s fine,’ Kell replied. ‘I can always call him on Monday when I’m back at my desk. I have all the files on the computer in my office …’
‘Hold on please.’
The line suddenly switched to an old Moby track; it wasn’t clear whether the receptionist was taking another call or had gone in search of Arnaud’s number. Within thirty seconds, however, she was back, saying: ‘OK, do you have a pen?’
‘I do.’ Kell allowed himself a quiet smile of satisfaction. ‘Thank you so much for going to all this trouble. I really think Arnaud will be pleased.’
Arnaud was in what sounded like a crowded restaurant or café and wasn’t much interested in taking a call from a complete stranger at nine thirty on a Sunday night.
‘Who?’ he said for the third time when Kell told him that he was a British journalist looking for information about one of Arnaud’s passengers, and willing to pay five hundred euros simply for the opportunity to sit down over a beer and talk.
‘What, now? Tonight?’
‘Tonight, yes. It’s urgent.’
‘This is not possible, my friend. Tonight I relax. Maybe you should too.’
A resident had emerged from one of the apartment buildings adjacent to the phone box. He turned the throttle on a motorbike and Kell had to shout above the noise of the revving engine.
‘I’ll come to you,’ he said. ‘Just tell me where you are, I’ll meet you near your home. It won’t take more than ten minutes.’
A contemplative silence ensued, which Kell eventually ventured to break by saying: ‘Hello? Are you still there?’
‘I’m still here.’ Arnaud was enjoying all the attention.
‘A thousand,’ Kell said, running out of Marquand’s money.
That did the trick. There was enough of a pause, then. ‘Which passenger do you want to know about?’
‘Not on an open line,’ Kell replied. ‘I’ll tell you when I see you.’
A forty-five euro, forty-minute cab ride later, Kell was deep in the Quartier Nord, miles from the yachts and the Audis and the tennis court villas of the Corniche, in a thankless landscape of breeze-block towers and litter-strewn streets; everything that Le Corbusier, in the zeal of his idealism, had failed to imagine.
Arnaud was drinking pastis at a café in the basement of a slate-grey tower block patrolled by bored, undernourished youths wearing tracksuits and state-of-the-art trainers. One of the windows of the café had a pane of shattered glass; the other was obscured by a metal shutter daubed in graffiti: MARSEILLE. CAPITALE DE LA CULTURE ou DU BETON. Kell told his driver to wait on the street and ran a gauntlet of clicks and stares, entering the café in the expectation of total silence, of doors swishing behind him like a western saloon. Instead, he was greeted by the exclusively African clientele with half-interested nods of welcome. Perhaps Kell’s pronounced limp and the cut above his eye leant him the air of a man who had endured more than his fair share of misfortune.
‘Over here,’ said Arnaud, seated at the bar beneath a collage of photographs of Marseille footballers, past and present. On a facing wall were pictures of Lilian Thuram, Patrick Vieira and Zinedine Zidane, clutching the 1998 World Cup; next to this, a framed cartoon of Nicolas Sarkozy in exaggeratedly stacked heels, his eyes scratched out by a knife, a biro-drawn phallus swelling from his trousers. Arnaud stood up. He was a tall, well-built man, at least seventeen stone. Wordlessly, he ushered Kell to a formica table at the back of the café. The table was positioned beneath a television that had been bolted to the wall. They shook hands over an ashtray swollen with gum and cigarettes and sat on opposite chairs. Arnaud’s palm was dry and soft, his face entirely without kindness but not lacking a certain nobility. With his dark, indifferent eyes, he looked for all the world like an exiled despot of the Amin school. It made sense. Arnaud was probably losing face by talking to Kell but had calculated that a thousand euros for a ten-minute conversation was a price well worth paying.
‘So you are journalist?’
‘That’s right.’
Arnaud didn’t ask what paper. They were speaking in French, his accent as difficult to unpick as any Kell could remember. ‘And you want to know about someone?’
Kell nodded. Somebody had switched on the television and his reply was partly smothered by the commentary on a game of basketball. Perhaps Arnaud had ordered this so that they might speak in confidence; perhaps it was the manager’s way of expressing his disapproval.
‘This morning, at the ferry terminal, you picked up a man in his early thirties off the boat from Tunis.’
Arnaud nodded, though it wasn’t clear whether or not he remembered. He was wearing a button-down denim shirt and removed a packet of full-strength Winston from the breast pocket.
‘Smoke?’
‘Sure,’ said Kell, and took one.
There was a pause while Arnaud lit their cigarettes – his own first. Then he leaned forward.
‘You feeling nervous in this place? You look nervous.’
‘Do I?’ Kell knew that he didn’t and that Arnaud was trying to wind him up. ‘Funny. I was just reflecting on what a civilized place this is.’
‘Huh?’
Kell looked back at the bar. There was a half-eaten plate of spaghetti on the next-door table, two old men playing backgammon by the door. ‘You can get an espresso. You can smoke. The food smells good.’ He made a point of looking directly into Arnaud’s eyes, so that he wouldn’t have to waste time playing any more of his games. ‘I’m used to places where you can’t drink alcohol, where they don’t allow women to sit with men. I’m used to roadside bombs and snipers lining the white man up for breakfast. I get nervous in places like Baghdad, Arnaud. I get nervous in Kabul. Do you follow?’
The despot shifted in his chair, the plastic squeaking.
‘I remember this guy.’ It took Kell a moment to realize that the driver was talking about Malot.
‘I thought you might. Can you tell me where you drove him?’
Arnaud blew a cloud of smoke past Kell’s ear. ‘That’s it? That’s all you want to know?’
‘That’s all I want to know.’
He frowned, the tops of his soft black cheeks tightening under the eyes. A mixed-race boy, not much older than fifteen or sixteen, came to the table and asked Kell if he wanted a drink.
‘Nothing for me.’
‘Have something,’ said Arnaud.
Kell took a drag on the cigarette. ‘A beer.’
‘Un bière, Pep,’ said Arnaud, as though Kell’s order needed translating. He scratched at something on the side of his neck. ‘It was a long journey, expensive.’
‘How long?’
‘Only got back about two hours ago. We went to Castelnaudary.’
‘Castelnaudary? That’s near Toulouse, right?’
‘Look it up.’
Kell blew the smoke back. ‘Or you could just tell me.’
‘Pay me the money.’
He took an envelope containing the cash from his jeans and passed it across the table.
‘So. For a thousand euros, Arnaud. Where’s Castelnaudary?’
The cab driver smiled, enjoying the game. ‘West of here. Maybe three hours on the autoroute. Past Carcassone.’
‘Cassoulet country,’ Kell replied, thinking of the Languedoc-Roussillon but not expecting much in the way of a reaction. ‘Did you drop him in town? Do you remember the address?’
‘There was no address.’ Arnaud put the envelope in the hip pocket of his chinos and it was as if the weight of the money, the reality of it, jolted him into a greater cooperation. ‘It was strange, in fact. He wanted me to leave him on the outskirts of a village ten kilometres to the south. In a lay-by, in the middle of the countryside. He said that somebody was coming to collect him.’
Kell asked the obvious question. ‘Why didn’t you just take him to where he needed to go?’
‘He said that he didn’t have an address. I didn’t want to argue, I didn’t really care. I had a long drive back to Marseille. I wanted to come home and see my daughter.’
Kell thought about enquiring after Arnaud’s family, to soften him up a bit, but it didn’t feel like a strategy worth pursuing. ‘And what about the rest of the journey? Did you talk on the way? Did he have anything to say to you?’
The African smiled, more broadly now, and Kell saw that his gums were yellowed with age and decay. ‘No, man.’ He shook his head. ‘This guy doesn’t talk. He doesn’t even look. Mostly he sleeps or stares out of the window. Typical racist. Typical French.’
‘You think he was racist?’
Arnaud ignored the question and asked one of his own. ‘So who is he? Why is a British newspaper interested in him? Did he steal something? He fuck Princess Kate or something?’
Arnaud laughed heartily at his own joke. Kell wasn’t much of a royalist but refrained from joining in.
‘He’s just somebody we’re interested in. If I had a map, could you show me exactly where you left him?’
Arnaud nodded. Kell waited for him to make a move. They sat in silence until it became clear that Arnaud was holding out for something.
‘Do you have a map?’ Kell asked.
Arnaud folded his arms.
‘Why would I have one in here?’ he asked, looking down at the floor. The crust of an old sandwich was hardening beneath a torn leather stool. Kell could not get a signal on his iPhone and had no choice but to stand up and leave the café, again running the gauntlet of track-suited youths and unleashed dogs outside. He found his waiting cab and tapped on the window, waking the driver from a brief sleep. The window came down and Kell asked if he could borrow a road map of France. This simple request was met with almost complete contempt, because it required the driver to step out of the vehicle, to open the boot of his Mercedes and to retrieve the map from the boot.
‘Maybe you should keep it in the car,’ Kell told him, and returned to his table in the café. Arnaud took the map, flicked to the index, found Castelnaudary and pointed to the approximate area where he had left François Malot.
‘Here,’ he said, a dry, nail-chewed finger momentarily obscuring the precise location. Kell took the map and wrote down the name of the village: Salles-sur-l’Hers.
‘And it was a lay-by? In the middle of the countryside?’
Arnaud nodded.
‘Anything distinctive about the area that you can remember? Was there a church nearby? A playground?’
Arnaud shook his head, as though he was becoming bored of the conversation. ‘No. Just some trees, fields. Fucking countryside, you know?’ He said the word ‘countryside’ as if it were also a term of abuse. ‘When I turned around to go home, I remember I went past some recycling bins after maybe one minute, two, so that’s how far I dropped him from Salles-sur-l’Hers.’
‘Thank you,’ Kell replied. He passed the number of the Marquand mobile across the table. ‘If you think of anything else …’
‘I’ll call you.’ Arnaud slid the number into the same shirt pocket in which he kept his cigarettes. The tone of his reply suggested that this would be the last time that Thomas Kell ever saw or heard from him. ‘What happened to your eye? The passenger did this to you?’
‘One of his friends,’ Kell replied, rising from the table. His beer had arrived while he was fetching the map. He left a two-euro coin on the table though he hadn’t touched it. ‘Thanks for agreeing to meet me.’
‘No problem.’ Arnaud did not bother standing up. He shook Kell’s hand and with the other, patted the wad of money in his pocket. ‘I should say thank you to your British newspaper.’ Another yellow-gummed smile. ‘Very generous. Very nice present.’
