by Faye Brann
Matisse wasn’t sure how he could smell anything with a cigarette dangling from his mouth. She nudged a crystal glass ashtray towards him as he placed the cigarette packet and his gold Cartier lighter down on the counter.
Sacha inhaled deeply. ‘Where is she?’
‘In the bathroom, Sacha. She’s been here since nine. I couldn’t deny her a trip to the toilet.’ Matisse kept the irritation out of her voice, not wanting to rile him with a lit cigarette in his hand. She still had the scars from a previous incident where she’d not been quite so careful.
Sacha shrugged and exhaled. ‘Fair enough. I guess we all have to piss.’ He stubbed out the cigarette, letting it sit folded and half-smoking in the ashtray, and picked up a cupcake from one of the wire racks standing on the centre island. He took a large bite, making a satisfied noise as he swallowed it down. ‘It’s just as well you don’t do this too often,’ he said, patting his stomach. ‘Otherwise I would get fat.’
Matisse didn’t say anything. Sacha helped himself to another cupcake and began peeling the casing away. His phone pinged, and he checked the message, typed a reply, and hit Send, before turning his attention back to Matisse.
‘So, are you all finished here then? What time will she be leaving? Remember, I have someone coming at midday and, anyway, I don’t want her hanging around. She’s been here long enough already.’
‘I know. Don’t worry, she won’t.’ Matisse heard his office phone ringing. ‘Aren’t you going to answer that?’
Sacha grunted and jogged back up the stairs. Matisse put the extractor fan on and busied herself with clearing away the mixing bowls into the sink for Magda to wash. She heard the soft rumble of Sacha’s voice signing off the call and his heavy footsteps coming back down to her.
‘Matisse!’ He hissed at her from the foot of the stairs. ‘She’s still in there. How long does it take to go to the bathroom?’
‘Well, you know, maybe she had to … Well, you know what I am saying, right, Sacha?’
Sacha screwed up his nose and made a sound of disgust. ‘Bloody English. Why can’t they wait to take a shit in their own house?’
‘Hi, Sacha.’ Vicky appeared behind him, and, to Matisse’s satisfaction, Sacha’s cheeks glowed a faint red.
‘Hello, Victoria,’ he said. ‘The baking has been a success, I hear.’
‘If Matisse is even half as good at teaching as she is at baking, everyone might just survive my cakes long enough to enjoy Christmas,’ Vicky said. ‘Matisse, I hate to be rude, but I have to cut and run. I have to be at nursery to pick up James shortly.’
‘Oh, no need to worry, I understand,’ Matisse said. At least the awkward issue of getting Victoria to leave the house had been taken out of her hands. ‘Would you like to take some of the cakes for the children?’
‘Are you sure? They’ll be so surprised.’
‘Of course.’ Matisse counted out a dozen of the cakes and put them into a Tupperware standing by on the counter. Vicky took them from her and began to back out of the kitchen.
‘I can’t tell you how relieved Chris will be to see I’ve produced something edible at long last. Well, good to see you, Sacha.’
Sacha nodded a curt goodbye, his mouth full of the remnants of his third cupcake.
‘I’ll see you out,’ Matisse said.
The two women mounted the stairs and Vicky placed the cakes down to get her shoes back on before standing up again and giving Matisse a rather unexpected kiss.
‘Thank you, Matisse. I had fun.’
‘Me too,’ Matisse said. And, weirdly, she meant it. ‘I’ll see you at pick-up.’
‘Sure, see you then.’ Vicky waved and Matisse pushed the button to open the gate and let her out.
Matisse shut the door just as Sacha was coming back up the stairs.
‘I’m working in my office the rest of the day. The courier’s coming to the service door so tell Magda to buzz me when he arrives, and I’ll send the package down in the lift.’
‘Okay.’
She watched as he moved up the stairs, his large backside swinging from side to side like a rhino, his breath heavy with effort. The office door swung shut behind him. Matisse took off her apron, smoothed her hair, and went back downstairs to give Magda her instructions. It really had been a fun morning. She should do it more often.
Chapter Nine
Vicky allowed herself a small sigh of relief as she got into her car that she’d parked on a side street to the left of the Kozlovsky’s house. She had been lucky earlier, when she found the space; it was perfect for her to see through their small wrought-iron gate to what she assumed was the service door. There were no windows on this side of the house past ground level, and she’d checked the CCTV screens on her way up the stairs from the kitchen and knew they were focused on the entry points to the house – the service door, the main door and the gate – rather than the grounds and surrounds, so she was confident she would be okay to sit here for the short while she needed to be. She guessed that the courier Sacha had mentioned would be sent straight around, so she sat, the smell of the cupcakes wafting from the passenger seat, and waited with her phone in her hand. From a distance, she’d look to anyone like she was consulting Google Maps for divine intervention. But the camera was ready to snap the visitor, when he or she arrived.
It had been an interesting morning. She was genuinely bowled over by the house, which was beautifully put together. Despite being an art-lover, Vicky’s budget only stretched to framed prints bought from museums and galleries; and her own interior design attempts stopped a long way shy of Homes & Gardens. Upgrades to the Turnbull family home mainly consisted of getting Chris to repaint the living room once every few years and paying a visit to John Lewis once in a blue moon to buy some new cushion covers and a fig-scented room diffuser. The Kozlovsky house was something else, though. She hadn’t been inside a house like that in a long time – certainly not at the invitation of the owner, anyway.
She hadn’t expected to be shunted straight off to the kitchen, though. She hoped Matisse might be the sort to want to give her the guided tour of the house renovations, so she could get the lay of the land and maybe see something that might not have been on the schematics JOPS had procured. But Matisse seemed cautious and suspicious of her gushings about the house (which were, on the whole, completely genuine), and Vicky had quickly deduced she was either under instructions to keep Vicky in a restricted area or had made that decision for herself for some reason. It wasn’t a big deal and she didn’t want to push her luck, but it did mean she would need to work a little harder to create an opportunity and gain access to the rest of the house.
It had taken a while, but she’d got there in the end. She’d just asked Matisse if she could use the loo, intending it as a ruse for a quick recce of the house, when Sacha arrived home. She was in the hallway near the front door and about to take a look around when she heard the sound of a key in the lock. Quickly locking herself into the hallway bathroom, Vicky waited to see if she’d missed her moment. Sacha was muttering something; she heard him light a cigarette and smelt the smoke as it leached under the door. The clip-shuffle of his feet on the stairs told her that Sacha had gone upstairs to his office. Right where she’d been headed. Damn. She waited a moment longer and was just about to give up and flush the toilet when she heard him come back down again and continue to the kitchen. It was an opportunity too good to resist, despite the risk. Vicky left the light on and exited the bathroom, using a coin in her pocket to ease the lock shut again from the outside. Anyone who came back up would assume she was still in there, if she was quick about it. She paused for a fraction; her nerves were shredding themselves like cheese through a grater. She could hear voices downstairs and knew she wouldn’t have long – a couple of minutes, maybe, at the most. It was now or never. She took a deep breath and headed for the stairs. Lucky for her she’d taken off her shoes when she arrived, and she moved quickly upwards, sockless and silent, until she reached the now-open do
or.
Sacha’s office. There were paintings lining the panelled walls and shelves near the windows that housed books in Russian, French and English. The laptop sat there, resplendent, in the centre of a regal desk made of carved wood. It was empty aside from the computer and a notepad; Vicky didn’t dare go around the back to check the drawers. She worked quickly, taking an external drive from her pocket and plugging it into the laptop to download the malware that would give them access to Sacha’s every digital move. While it downloaded, she took a panoramic photo of the room with her phone, just as Mike had taught her, and then bent over the laptop and took a photo of that too. As an afterthought, she snapped the notepad as well, and carefully ripped the top page off, folding it and putting it in her back pocket. It was empty of any notes, but a blank page often revealed more than was intended—
The phone on the desk began to ring. Shit. Vicky looked around for a hiding place but all that was available to her was under the desk or behind the door. She chose behind the door; it was a better position from which to attack or escape. Her heart thudded and she waited for the sound of Sacha’s footsteps. Two rings, three rings, four … finally, the phone stopped ringing and she heard Sacha’s voice in the hallway downstairs. An extension. Thank God.
‘Privet.’
Vicky listened through the crack in the door as Sacha switched from Russian to speaking English through what sounded like gritted teeth.
‘I told you not to call me here.’
He lowered his voice even further and Vicky strained to catch anything of the conversation. Who was he on the phone to? Was it Anatoli? A rush of old feelings threatened to surface, followed quickly by shame. What did it matter? He was a traitor, Sacha’s right-hand man, not the person she had known. And, anyway, it wasn’t him; they would be speaking Russian, not English.
She switched her focus to her current predicament. How on earth she was going to get back, Houdini style, into the downstairs cloakroom while Sacha stood in the hallway? Her eyes wandered back to the laptop and she realised she’d left the external drive in the side. A rookie error; if that phone call hadn’t stranded her in the office, she’d still have blown the whole operation.
She still might. Vicky edged her way to the middle of the room, petrified that the slightest creak in the floorboards might give her away. Finally, she reached the laptop and had just grabbed the drive when she heard Sacha’s voice, loud and clear.
‘I will see you on Monday at the club. And don’t call me at home ever again.’
Vicky heard the phone being slammed onto a surface and stood stock still in the middle of the room, waiting for signs of movement.
‘Matisse!’
Vicky breathed a sigh of relief as she heard Sacha’s voice travelling towards the kitchen. She silently raced back down the stairs from the office, opened and closed the bathroom door and flushed the toilet. Her heart was pumping out of control, and she was pretty sure she’d broken a sweat. She opened the door again, audibly this time, and went to join them. When she got back to the kitchen, Sacha made it clear it was time for her to leave.
But she’d accomplished a lot while she’d been here. The spyware was installed, and they had access to Sacha’s laptop. She’d overheard him reminding Matisse about a visitor, and she knew he had a package to give him and a service lift to send it down in. She’d seen the lift doors in his office, forming part of the wood panelling on one wall in between the bookshelves, where a fireplace would normally be. She’d seen the layout of the house already, of course, but now she was starting to get a better idea of how it was all used by the Kozlovskys: the kitchen basement, the maid’s room, utility room; the ground floor with the living and dining rooms and study; the first floor with Sacha’s office. There were other rooms leading off the hallway – maybe a less formal family room or something – Dmitri must hang out somewhere. The plans suggested the top two floors contained the main concentration of bedrooms, five of them, and a few bathrooms too. It was a sizeable house, and that wasn’t counting the indoor pool, linked by a glass-panelled hallway on the front corner of the plot. Whatever Sacha had done in the past, he had done it awfully well.
And what about Matisse? Vicky had watched her carefully during the course of the morning. She was mistrustful of strangers, that much was obvious. There was fear, too, of Sacha; and a little bit of defiance. The comments she had made about him and the palpable tension between the two of them once he got home made Vicky suspect Matisse wasn’t just a pretty face and that Sacha liked to make her pay for that. Whether she was involved or not, Vicky couldn’t say for certain yet. She was keeping secrets, that was for sure. But the phone call, and Sacha’s reaction to being called at home, suggested that maybe they weren’t Sacha’s.
At two minutes to twelve, Vicky saw a bike pull up in front of the Kozlovsky’s side gate. She noted the plate, make and model and realised with horror that it was the same bike that followed her from JOPS HQ.
‘Shit.’ Maybe Sacha was on to her after all. She scrabbled about in her glovebox, wishing she’d brought one of the weapons stashed in the top of her wardrobe. Finding nothing except the car manual and a few empty crisp packets, she began to panic. The rider removed his helmet; keeping one eye on him as he approached the car, she looked around her for anything to defend herself with. She breathed a sigh of relief as she caught sight of Evie’s skipping rope lying in one of the rear footwells. It wasn’t perfect, but it would have to do. She grabbed it, pulled it taut around her hands and slid low in her seat.
The man was tall and slim, moving with an easy stride. He headed towards Vicky’s car and she tensed herself for action. But instead of stopping, the man headed for the Kozlovsky’s gate, checking the number on the entry buzzer and then pushing the button. Vicky relaxed her fingers and let the blood flow back into her hands. He was just a courier. It was coincidence. No threat to her at all. But it wouldn’t hurt to know who he was anyway. She dropped the skipping rope and reached for her phone, taking pictures in bursts just like Mike had told her to, so that she captured as much information as possible.
The gate swung wide, and the man slipped inside and waited at the lift service door. After a few seconds, it opened. Vicky strained to see what or who was inside, but she was too far away. Instead she waited until the gate opened again. The man walked through with a new carrier bag in his right hand, threw his helmet on and headed towards his bike.
Vicky cursed. She wouldn’t be able to follow him in the car – bikes were too nippy – and she really did have to pick James up from nursery on time today. She wished she didn’t have to interrupt things when she was on such a roll. But Jonathan would be happy with the office photos and the intel on the house and on Sacha’s visitor, and maybe she even had enough to get a match on facial recognition, if the guy had a record already. She assumed they had that technology. CSI: Miami had had it for years. Bloody hell, even Facebook tried its best, though it repeatedly tried to tag James as the wife of someone Chris went to university with. But it seemed likely the people in charge of a top-secret military intelligence agency might have access to slightly better software.
Vicky put her phone away and started the engine, easing away from the house. She wove her way through a few side streets to reach the main road again a little further down, not wanting to pull straight out in case Sacha or Matisse happened to look out of the window. As she drove, she burst into a big grin. She’d completed her first proper piece of undercover work in fourteen years, and, bar the odd slip up, it was like riding a bike.
*
The darkening evenings and misty mornings told Vicky that half term was nearly upon them already. She’d decided to cook spag bol for dinner; it was chilly today and she felt like some comfort food. While she prepared the vegetables, Vicky thought about the operation. Since their baking session, Matisse seemed to have relaxed a little. She was still reluctant to indulge in idle chatter at pick-up, but Vicky persisted and, slowly, the odd stilted greeting had been replaced w
ith warmer exchanges. Vicky could see herself growing to like the Frenchwoman. She had a wry sense of humour and a way of seeing through people that Vicky liked a lot. But this was a job, not a friendship. She didn’t want to get to know Matisse any better than she needed to.
The sting of the onion hit her eyes as she chopped and Vicky swept it to one side of the board, blinking away the tears. Grabbing a stick of celery, she cut it in half lengthways and began dicing. Jonathan would be meeting with her tomorrow to talk about next steps. But she was facing a week of school holidays with three kids of disparate ages and interests, locked up in the house watching the rain come down. She had little to no idea how she would ever juggle that with the demands of a surveillance operation.
Vicky grabbed a handful of mushrooms and hacked them up into pieces in a rather cavalier fashion. In the normal scheme of things, she wouldn’t have minded, but for the first time ever she resented having to put the kids first. She was loving being back in the saddle – even now she could still feel the buzz. Jonathan seemed happy with her too; she felt – there were so many words running through her mind – useful, wanted, important. She stuck the knife into the board and picked up the vegetable peeler and a carrot. That sounded so disrespectful to herself and her life as it had been, yet she couldn’t help herself. The battle lines between ‘working mum’ and ‘stay-at-home mum’ were drawn and erased, then drawn and erased; one half of her asking why she should feel bad about doing something for herself for a change, the other asking what was so bad about her life up until now that she was bandying about words like useful, wanted and important, as if she wasn’t all those things before? In any case, surely, she could have the best of both worlds?
She didn’t realise she’d taken the skin of her thumb off with the peeler until the blood dripped onto the cutting board. ‘Shit.’ She grabbed a piece of kitchen roll to stem the bleeding. At least it wasn’t her shooting hand. Not that she needed it; she’d gone to the range the day after she’d been to Matisse’s house and requalified as easily as Jonathan had predicted, but her gun was still waiting for her at HQ. Fashioning garrottes out of skipping ropes and having a stun gun buried in her ski socks was one thing; but a gun … she couldn’t bring herself to have it in the house.
