He wasn’t expecting a woman to come for him, but he certainly isn’t complaining, given what he’s seen of this one. She certainly put that Polastri bitch in her place. And what genius to send her in the guise of a traffic-cop.
They ride for almost an hour, before stopping by a bridge over a river outside the Surrey town of Weybridge. The woman pulls the BMW onto its stand, then removes her helmet and jacket, tugs off her face-mask, and shakes out her hair. Taking off his own, borrowed, helmet, Cradle stares at her appreciatively.
He considers himself something of a connoisseur of the female form, and this one scores highly. The dark blonde hair sweaty, but nothing he can’t work with. The eyes a bit frozen and weird, but that mouth suggesting whole realms of sexual possibility. The tits? Sweet as apples beneath the tight T-shirt. And what man didn’t feel a stirring in his Calvins at the sight of a girl in leather trousers and biker boots? Dressed like that, she has to be up for it. And he is, effectively, a single man again.
‘Let’s walk,’ she says, glancing at the BMW’s satnav. ‘The rendezvous for the next stage of your journey is up this way.’
A path leads from the road down to the side of the River Wey. The water is dark olive, the current so slow that the surface looks still. The banks are shadowed by trees, and overgrown with cow-parsley. At intervals, narrowboats and barges lie motionless at anchor.
‘So where am I going?’
‘I can’t tell you that.’
‘Perhaps, if we meet again . . .’ he begins.
‘Yes?’
‘Bite of dinner? Something like that?’
‘Perhaps.’
They continue along the sun-splashed path, passing no one, until arriving at a broad weir-pool fringed with bullrushes and flag-iris.
‘This is the rendezvous,’ she says.
Cradle looks around him. The river, its waters moving smoothly towards the rushing weir, has the keen, indefinable smell of such places. Mud, vegetation and rot. There’s a timelessness about the scene that reminds him of his childhood. Of The Wind in the Willows, of Ratty, Mole and Toad. And that chapter he never quite understood: ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’. Cradle is pondering this enigma when a police-issue baton, swung with extreme force, connects with the base of his skull. He pitches almost noiselessly into the river. His half-submerged body hangs there for a moment, and then, as Villanelle watches, begins its inexorable drift towards the crest of the weir, where it is immediately drawn deep underwater. She stands there, imagining his body turning and turning in the vortex, far beneath the glassy surface. And then she holsters the baton, and unhurriedly makes her way back along the path.
By the time Lance drops her off at her house, Eve is exhausted. She’s also furious, apprehensive, and faintly nauseous from the nicotine smell of Lance’s car. There’s a horrendous conversation with Richard still to be had – he’s coming by the office at 6 p.m. – but the most shaming admission that Eve has had to make is to herself. How easily, how effortlessly and contemptuously, she has been played. How naive she has been. How utterly unprofessional.
She should have known, from Cradle’s bullish manner, that he had sounded some sort of alarm, and expected to be exfiltrated. Rather than congratulating herself on having uncovered his treachery, she should have been expecting precisely the sort of audacious manoeuvre that had been mounted against her. How could she have been so ill-prepared? And then there’s that surreal encounter on the A303, which has left her shot through with emotions she can’t begin to define.
So she’s in no mood for Niko’s hostility when he lets her into the flat. ‘I rang you four and a half hours ago,’ he tells her, pale-faced with suppressed tension. ‘You said you’d be here by midday, and it’s nearly three.’
She forces herself to breathe. ‘Look, I’m sorry, Niko, but explanations are going to have to wait. If you’ve had a bad day, trust me, I’ve had a worse one. Since we spoke I’ve had my car keys and my phone stolen, and I’ve spent an hour beside a busy main road, trying to wave down a car so that I could get help. And that’s just the start of it. So just tell me, without getting angry, what’s going on.’
Niko compresses his lips, and nods. ‘As I told you on the phone, Mrs Khan reported seeing a young woman climbing out of our window at about ten thirty this morning, and rang the police. Two police officers called round at the school, picked me up, and drove me here. They were obviously taking the whole thing quite seriously, because there was a forensics person waiting outside when we got back. Perhaps they’ve got our address on file because of your old job at MI5, who knows? Anyway, they went through the flat with me, room by room, and the forensics woman did her stuff on the door handles and the front room window and various other surfaces, looking for fingerprints, but she found nothing. She told me the intruder must have been wearing gloves. She’d undone the window lock, but nothing else had been disturbed, as far as I could see, and nothing taken.’
‘Thelma and Louise?’
‘Fine, just chilling outside. They made a big impression on the cops, as you can imagine.’
‘They left, these cops?’
‘Ages ago.’
‘So how do they think the intruder got in?’
‘Through the front door. They had a close look at the lock and they reckon she picked it. Which makes her a professional, not some teenager looking for phones and laptops.’
‘Right.’
‘So . . . do you have any idea who she might be?’
‘I don’t know any professional burglars, no.’
‘Please, Eve, you know what I mean. Is this something to do with your work? Was this woman looking for something specific? Something . . .’ His voice trails off, and then, as she watches, a darker suspicion takes hold. ‘Was this . . . that woman? The one you were after? Probably still are after? Because, if so . . .’
She meets his stare calmly.
‘Tell me the truth, Eve. Seriously, I need to know. I need you, just this once, not to lie.’
‘Niko, truthfully, I have absolutely no idea who this was. Nor is there any reason whatsoever to connect this with my work, or the investigation you were talking about. Do you know how many break-ins were reported in London last year? Almost sixty thousand. Sixty thousand. That means that statistically—’
‘Statistically.’ He closes his eyes. ‘Tell me about statistics, Eve.’
‘Niko, please. I’m sorry you think I lie to you, I’m sorry some burglar broke into our house, I’m sorry we don’t have anything worth stealing. But this is just some random fucking London event, OK? There is no explanation. It just . . . happened.’
He stares at the wall. ‘Maybe the police will—’
‘No, the police won’t. Especially if she didn’t take anything. They’ll log it, and it’ll go in the files. Now let me have a look round the place, and make sure nothing’s missing.’
He stands there, breathing audibly. Finally, slowly, he bows his head. ‘I’ll make some tea.’
‘Oh, yes please. And if there’s any of that cake left, I’m starving.’ Stepping behind him, she puts her arms around his waist and lays her head against his back. ‘I’m sorry, I’ve really had the most horrendous day. And this just makes it worse. So thank you for coping with the police and everything, I honestly don’t think I could have managed.’
Opening the back door, she smiles as Thelma and Louise come bounding towards her and nose inquisitively at her hands. They really are very hard to resist. On the far side of the wall bordering the tiny patio there’s a drop of some twenty metres to the overground railway track. Its proximity to the line, the letting agent explained to them when they moved in, was the reason that the flat was cheaper than others in the area. Eve no longer hears the trains; their rattle and thrum has long been subsumed into the ambient noise that is London. Sometimes she sits out here and watches them, soothed by the ceaselessness of their coming and going.
‘When did we last spend a weekday afternoon together?’ Niko asks, handi
ng her a cup of tea with a slice of cake balanced on the saucer. ‘It seems like for ever.’
‘You’re right, it does,’ she says, staring out towards the dim, urban horizon. ‘Can I ask you something?’
‘Go on.’
‘About Russia.’ She takes a bite of cake.
‘What about it?’
‘Have you ever heard of anything or anyone called the Twelve?’
‘The poem, you mean?’
‘What poem?’
‘Dvenadtsat. The Twelve, by Aleksandr Blok. He was an early twentieth-century writer who believed in the sacred destiny of Russia. Pretty crackpot stuff. I read him at university, during my revolutionary poetry phase.’
Eve feels a coldness at the back of her neck. ‘What’s it about?’
‘Twelve Bolsheviks pursuing some mystical quest through the streets of Petrograd. At midnight, as far as I remember, and in a snowstorm. Why?’
‘Someone at work today referred to an organisation called the Twelve. Some political group. Either Russian, or Russian-connected. I’d never heard of it.’
Niko shrugs. ‘Most educated Russians would know the poem. There’s nostalgia for the Soviet era right across the political spectrum.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘That a group calling itself after Blok’s midnight ramblers could be of almost any complexion from neo-communist to outright fascist. The name doesn’t tell you much.’
‘So do you know where I could . . . Niko?’
But Thelma and Louise are butting at his knees and bleating for his attention.
Tea in hand, Eve goes through the flat. It’s a small place, and although it’s crammed with stuff, mostly Niko’s, it doesn’t look like anything has been moved or stolen. She visits the bedroom last, checking under pillows and in drawers, and paying particular attention to her modest stock of jewellery. She’s furious at the theft of her bracelet, and still can’t begin to process the knowledge that a professional killer broke into her Shanghai hotel room while she slept. Imagining that woman staring at her with those flat, affectless eyes, and perhaps even touching her, makes her feel faint.
‘You looked so adorable, with your hair all over the pillow . . .’
Eve opens the wardrobe and flips through her dresses, tops and skirts, sliding the hangers along one by one. And comes to a disbelieving halt. On a shelf with her belts, gloves and a straw hat from the previous summer is a small package wrapped in tissue paper, which she has definitely never seen before. After pulling on one of the pairs of gloves, she carefully lifts the package, weighs it in one hand, and unwraps it. A dove-grey box bearing the words Van Diest. Inside, on a pillow of grey velvet, an exquisite rose gold bracelet, set with twin diamonds at the clasp.
For several heartbeats, Eve stares. Then, twitching off her left glove, she slips her wrist into the bracelet and snaps the clasp into place. The fit is perfect, and for a moment, languidly extending her arm, she thrills to the look and the delicate weight of it. In the folds of tissue paper, its corner just visible, is a card. The note is handwritten.
Take care, Eve – V
Eve stands there, the bracelet on her wrist, the card in her gloved hand, for a full minute. How should she interpret those words? As flirtatious concern, or outright threat? On impulse, she lowers her face to the card, and detects expensive, feminine scent. Her hand shaking, she replaces the card in the box, possessed by emotions she can’t immediately identify. Fear, certainly, but an almost stifling excitement, too. The woman who chose that beautiful, feminine object and wrote that message is a murderer. A stone-cold professional assassin whose every word is a lie, and whose every action is calculated to unsettle and manipulate. To meet her gaze, as Eve did just hours ago, is to look into a heart-freezing void. No fear, no pity, no human warmth, only their absence.
Just metres away on the patio, talking enraptured nonsense to the goats – the goats – is the best and kindest man that Eve has ever known. The man into whose warm body, familiar but still mysterious, she moulds herself at night. The man whose unaccountable love for her has no horizon. The man to whom she now lies with such fluency that it’s almost second nature.
Why is she so stirred by this lethally dangerous woman? Why do her words cut so deep? That cryptic V is no accident. It’s a name, if only a partial one. A gift, like the bracelet. A gesture at once intimate and sensual and profoundly hostile. Ask and I will answer. Call and I will come for you.
How have the two of them locked themselves so inescapably into each other’s lives? Could it be that, in some bizarre way, V is reaching out to her? Raising her arm, Eve touches the smooth gold to her cheek. What can this lovely, luxurious object have cost? Five thousand pounds? Six? God, she wanted it. Couldn’t she perhaps just not say anything? Now that she’s committed herself to a completely unprofessional course of action by unwrapping the thing in the first place, and quite possibly compromising forensic evidence, wouldn’t it be easier to just . . . keep it?
With a flush of shame and regret, she removes the bracelet and places it back in its box. Fuck’s sake. She’s reacting precisely as her adversary wants her to. Falling for the most blindingly obvious temptation, and personalising the situation in a completely irrational fashion. How egotistical and delusional, to think that she, Eve, is the object of this V person’s affection or desire. The woman is without doubt a narcissistic sociopath, and attempting to undermine Eve through passive-aggressive taunting. To think otherwise, even for an instant, flies in the face of everything Eve has ever learned as a criminologist and an intelligence officer. She takes a carrier bag from the floor of the wardrobe and stuffs the box, card and tissue inside with a gloved hand.
‘Anything?’ Niko calls out from the kitchen.
‘No,’ she says. ‘Nothing.’
On the Eurostar, no one takes much notice of the young woman in the black hoodie. Her hair is greasy, her pallor unhealthy, and there’s something indefinably dirty about her. She’s wearing scuffed black motorcycle boots, and her insolent posture suggests that she might use them on anyone rash enough to approach her. To the middle-aged couple sitting opposite her, working their way through the Daily Telegraph cryptic crossword, she’s exactly the type of person that makes train travel so unpleasant. Unwashed. No consideration whatever for those around her. Forever on her phone.
‘Give us another clue,’ the husband murmurs.
‘Thirteen across: “Eliminate a flock of crows”,’ says his wife, and they both frown.
Villanelle, meanwhile, having disabled the location tracker on Eve’s phone and read all her disappointingly boring texts and emails, is thumbing through her photographs. Here’s Niko, the Polskiy asshole, in the kitchen. Here’s an Eve selfie at the optician’s, trying on new glasses (please, angel, not those frames). Here’s another of Niko with the goats (and what the fuck is with those animals, anyway? Do they mean to eat them?). And then there’s a whole series of celebrity portraits, which Villanelle guesses Eve has snapped from magazines so that she can show her hairdresser. Who’s this one? Asma al-Assad? Seriously, sweetie, that look is so not you.
Looking up, Villanelle sees from the high-rise blocks and graffiti-tagged walls that the train is entering the outer Parisian suburbs. Pocketing Eve’s phone and taking out her own, she rings her friend Anne-Laure.
‘Where have you been?’ Anne-Laure asks her. ‘I haven’t seen you in an age.’
‘Working. Travelling. Nothing interesting.’
‘So what are you doing this evening?’
‘You tell me.’
‘The prêt-à-porter shows start tomorrow, and tonight some of the younger designers are having a party on my friend Margaux’s boat at the Quai Voltaire. It’ll be fun, everyone will be there. We could dress up and have dinner at Le Grand Véfour, just the two of us, and go on to the party afterwards.’
‘That sounds nice. Margaux’s cute.’
‘Are you up for it?’
‘Definitely.’
The train
is pulling into the Gare du Nord. Emboldened by their incipient arrival, the middle-aged couple look at Villanelle with frank dislike.
‘That crossword clue,’ she says to them. ‘ “Eliminate a flock of crows”. Did you work out the answer?’
‘Er, no,’ the husband says. ‘We didn’t, actually.’
‘It’s “murder”.’ She flutters her fingers. ‘Enjoy Paris.’
‘Run me through that again,’ says Richard Edwards. An intelligence officer of the old school, he is a vaguely patrician figure with thinning hair and a velvet-collared overcoat that has seen better days. ‘You say you were stopped by a person you thought was a police officer on a motorcycle.’
He, Eve, Billy and Lance are sitting in the Goodge Street office. A strip light casts a sickly glow. At intervals, there’s a muted rumbling from the Underground station beneath them.
‘That’s right,’ says Eve. ‘On the A303 near Micheldever. And I’m pretty sure it was a real police uniform and bike. The shoulder number and the plates both check out. They belong to a Road Policing Unit of the Hampshire Constabulary.’
‘Not easy to nick, I wouldn’t have thought,’ says Billy, leaning back in the computer chair that almost seems part of him, and absently fingering his lip-piercing.
‘Unless you’ve got someone inside that particular force.’
‘Lance is right,’ says Richard. ‘If they’ve penetrated MI5, then they’re certainly going to have people in the police.’
They look at each other. Eve’s earlier exhilaration is now just a memory. What possessed me? she wonders. This whole situation is a catastrophe.
No Tomorrow: The basis for Killing Eve, now a major BBC TV series (Killing Eve series Book 2) Page 5
