She showers, dresses, and slicks back her hair. The lift conveys her soundlessly to the ground floor, and the street. She blinks as the first whirling snowflakes find her face. Cars pass with a faint hiss of tyres, but there aren’t many people on foot, except a prostitute in a faux leopardskin coat and platform heels waiting on the corner of Tilney Street, patiently eyeing the forecourt of the Dorchester Hotel. Walking northwards, navigating on impulse, Villanelle turns from South Audley Street into Hill Street, then through an archway into a narrower road leading to a square so small it’s almost a courtyard. One side is taken up by a brightly illuminated gallery window, beyond which a private view is taking place. There’s a single spotlit object in the window: a stuffed weasel on a plinth, strewn with bright, multicoloured cupcake sprinkles.
Villanelle stares at it. The sprinkles look like multiplying bacilli. The installation, or sculpture or whatever it is, conveys nothing to her.
“Are you coming in?”
The woman—late thirties, black cocktail dress, wheat-blonde hair pulled back in a chignon—is leaning out of the glass door of the gallery, holding it half-closed to keep the cold air at bay.
Shrugging, Villanelle enters the gallery, losing sight of the woman almost immediately. The place is packed with prosperous-looking invitees. A few are looking at the paintings on the walls but most are facing inwards, conversing in tight groups as catering staff edge between them with canapés and bottles of cold Prosecco. Sweeping a glass from one of the trays, Villanelle positions herself in a corner. The paintings seem to have been reproduced from blown-up press photographs and blurry snatches of film. Anonymous, faintly sinister groupings, several with the faces blacked out. A man in a velvet-collared coat is standing in front of the nearest painting, a study of a woman in the back seat of a car, her shocked features lit by photo-flash, her arm raised against the invading lenses of the paparazzi.
Studying the man’s expression—the faint frown of concentration, the unwavering gaze—Villanelle duplicates it. She wants to be invisible, or at least unapproachable, until she’s finished her drink.
“So what do you think?”
It’s the woman who invited her in. The man in the velvet-collared coat moves away.
“Who is she, in the painting?” Villanelle asks.
“That’s the point, we don’t know. She could be a film star arriving at a premiere, or a convicted murderer arriving for sentencing.”
“If she was a murderer she’d be handcuffed, and she’d arrive at the court in an armoured van.”
The woman looks at Villanelle, takes in the chic Parisian crop and the Balenciaga biker jacket, and smiles. “Are you speaking from experience?”
Villanelle shrugs. “She’s some burnt-out actress. And she’s probably wearing no pants.”
There’s a long moment’s silence. When the woman speaks again, the register of her voice has subtly changed. “What’s your name?” she asks.
“Manon.”
“So, Manon. This event will take another forty minutes, and then I’m closing the gallery. After that I think we should go and eat yellowtail sashimi at Nobu in Berkeley Street. What do you say?”
“OK,” says Villanelle.
Her name is Sarah, and she had her thirty-eighth birthday a month ago. She’s talking about conceptual art, and Villanelle is nodding vaguely but not really listening. Not to the words, anyway. She likes the rise and fall of Sarah’s voice, and she’s touched, in an abstract sort of way, by the tiny age-lines around her eyes, and by her seriousness. Sarah reminds her, just a little, of Anna Ivanovna Leonova, a teacher at Industrialny District secondary school, and the only adult, except her father, to whom she’s ever formed a real, unsimulated attachment.
“Is that good?” Sarah asks.
Villanelle nods and smiles, examining a pearlescent sliver of raw fish before crushing it, pensively, between her teeth. It’s like eating the sea. Around them, soft lights touch surfaces of brushed aluminium, black lacquer and gold. There’s a whisper of music; conversation rises and falls. Sarah’s lips form words, and Sarah’s eyes meet hers, but it’s Anna Ivanovna’s voice that Villanelle hears.
For two years the teacher nurtured her charge’s exceptional academic gifts, and showed endless patience for her graceless, barely socialised behaviour. Then one day, Anna Ivanovna wasn’t there. She’d been attacked and sexually assaulted while waiting for a late bus home from school. In hospital the teacher was able to describe her assailant to the police, and they arrested an eighteen-year-old former pupil named Roman Nikonov, who had boasted of his intention to show the unmarried teacher “what a real man felt like.” But the police botched the forensics, and in the end Nikonov was released on a technicality.
“Manon!” She feels Sarah’s cool hand take hers. “Where are you?”
“Sorry. Miles away. You remind me of someone.”
“Someone?”
“A teacher at my school.”
“I hope she was nice.”
“She was. And she looked like you.” Except that she didn’t. She was really nothing like Sarah. Why had she thought that? Why had she said that?
“Where did you grow up, Manon?”
“St. Cloud, outside Paris.”
“With your parents?”
“With my father. My mother died when I was seven.”
“Oh my God. That’s awful!”
Villanelle shrugs. “It was a long time ago.”
“So what did she…”
“Cancer. She was just a couple of years younger than you.” Cover stories are part of Villanelle’s life now. Clothes she puts on, takes off, and hangs up for next time.
“I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be.” Withdrawing her hand from Sarah’s, Villanelle opens the menu. “Look at this! Wild strawberry sake jelly. We have to have some.”
She’s always regretted that it was too dark to see Roman Nikonov’s expression when she castrated him in the woods by the Mulyanka river. But she remembers the moment. The smell of the mud, and of the exhaust from his Riga moped. The pressure of his hand on her head, forcing her to her knees. The throttled screams, carrying far out over the water, as she pulled out the knife and hacked his balls off.
Sarah lives in a tiny flat over the gallery. As they walk back there, hand in hand, they leave dark footprints in the new snow.
“OK, I get the paintings, but what’s that?” Villanelle asks, pointing to the cryptic installation in the gallery window.
Sarah keys a code into the keypad by the door. “Well… the stuffed weasel was a present, given to me as a joke. And the sprinkles were in the kitchen. So I put them together. Quite fun, don’t you think?”
Villanelle follows her up a narrow flight of stairs. “So it doesn’t mean anything at all?”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t think anything. I don’t care.”
“So what do you—”
Villanelle half-turns and pins her to the wall, silencing her with her mouth. It’s a moment that’s been inevitable, but Sarah’s still taken by surprise.
Much later, she wakes to see Villanelle sitting upright in bed, her lean upper body silhouetted against the first dawn light. Reaching for her, Sarah runs a hand down her arm, feels the hard curves of her deltoid and bicep. “What exactly was it that you said you did?” she asks wonderingly.
“I didn’t say.”
“Are you going?”
Villanelle nods.
“Will I see you again?”
Villanelle smiles, and touches Sarah’s cheek. Dresses quickly. Outside, in the little square, there’s virgin snow, and silence. Back at the South Audley Street apartment, she kicks off her clothes and is asleep within minutes.
When she awakes it’s past noon. In the kitchen there’s a half-full cafetière of Fortnum & Mason’s Breakfast Blend coffee, still warm. Several sizeable carrier bags stand by the front door, where Konstantin has left them.
She checks the goods. A pair of tortoiseshell-framed g
lasses with pale-grey lenses. A parka with a fur-trimmed hood. A black polo-neck sweater, a plaid skirt, black woollen tights and zip-up boots. She tries it all on, walks around, accustoms herself to the look. The outfit needs wearing in, so she drinks a cup of the cooling coffee, leaves the apartment building, and makes her way across Park Lane to Hyde Park.
Again, that umber sky, against which the avenues of leafless beeches and oaks are a darker grey-brown. It’s early afternoon but the light is already ebbing. Villanelle walks fast along the slush-banked paths, hands in pockets, head down. There are other walkers, but she barely glances at them. At intervals statues loom out of the dimness, their outlines blurred with encrusted snow. On a balustraded bridge across the Serpentine she pauses for a moment. Beneath a cracked and starred pane of ice the water is a lightless black. A realm of darkness and forgetting to which, on days like this, she feels herself almost hypnotically drawn.
“Tempting, isn’t it?”
Villanelle turns, amazed to hear her thoughts so precisely echoed. He’s about thirty, lean-featured, in a well-cut tweed coat with the collar turned up.
“I wasn’t planning on doing any swimming.”
“You know what I mean. ‘To sleep: perchance to dream…’” His eyes are steady, and as dark as the frozen waterway.
“You admire Shakespeare?”
He wipes snow off the balustrade with his sleeve, and shrugs. “He’s a good companion in a war zone.”
“You’re a soldier?”
“Used to be.”
“And now?”
He lifts his gaze to the distant glow of Kensington. “Research, you might say.”
“Well, good luck with that…” She rubs her ungloved hands together, and blows into them. “The light’s going. And so should I.”
“Home?” The broken smile suggests they’re sharing a private joke.
“That’s right. Goodbye.”
He raises a hand. “See you around.”
Hunching into her parka, she walks away. Just some fucked-up weirdo hitting on her. Except that he wasn’t. With that lethal English courtliness of his, he’s both more and less threatening than that. And familiar, somehow. Is it possible that she’s seen him before, perhaps in the course of the counter-surveillance exercises that she performs, almost subconsciously, wherever she goes? Is he MI5?
Angling sharply southwards, she glances back at the bridge. The man has disappeared, but she still senses his presence. Heading northwards for the nearest exit she performs a cleaning run, designed to shake off any tail that she might have picked up. No one follows, no one changes direction, no one speeds up to match her pace. But if they’re serious, whoever they are, they’ll have a primary team foot-following, and a secondary team on static surveillance, ready to latch on if she burns the primaries.
Turning eastwards, Villanelle walks along Bayswater Road towards Marble Arch. Not racing, but fast enough to make any tail pick up his or her speed. She stops briefly at a bus stop as if resting her legs, discreetly checking the area for anyone in the calculatedly drab plumage of the professional pavement artist. There’s no one obvious, but then if she had one of MI5’s A4 teams locked on to her, there wouldn’t be.
Forcing herself to breathe steadily, she makes for the Marble Arch underpass network. With its multiple exits, it’s a good place to expose and lose a tail. Descending the steps at Cumberland Gate she surfaces beside the Edgware Road, and hovers in a sports shop entrance, watching the reflection of the underpass exit in the plate-glass window. No one glances at her, no one breaks step. Strolling to the Marble Arch entrance, she speed-walks the hundred-odd metres through the underpass, cuts back on herself by Speaker’s Corner, and makes for the tube station. On the westbound Central Line platform she lets the first two trains pass, scanning the platform for stay-behinds. The line’s busy, and there are several possibles. A young woman in a grey windproof jacket, carrying a backpack. A bearded guy in a reefer jacket. A middle-aged couple holding hands.
Stepping onto the third train, she travels as far as Queensway, and then just as the doors are closing, squeezes out between them. Crossing the platform, she returns eastbound to Bond Street, surfaces, and hails a taxi in Davies Street. For the next ten minutes she sends the driver on a circuitous route through Mayfair. A grey BMW follows them for a time, but then turns eastwards on Curzon Street with an irritable growl. A minute later a black Ford Ka appears in the wing-mirror, and three turn-offs later is still there. As they coast into Clarges Mews, a choke-point, Villanelle hands the driver a fifty-pound note and issues swift instructions. Thirty seconds later the taxi drifts to a halt, blocking the road, and the engine dies. As Villanelle slips out of a rear door, she hears the angry blare of the Ka’s horn, but no one follows her down the narrow, brick-walled passageway, and when she doubles back five minutes later, the mews is deserted.
And perhaps, she tells herself later in the South Audley Street apartment, no one was following me anyway. What would be the point? If the UK Intelligence Services know who and what I am, then it’s all over. There won’t be an arrest, just a visit from a Special Forces action team, probably E Squadron, and cremation in a municipal waste incinerator. This, according to Konstantin, is the British way, and nothing that Villanelle has seen of the British gives her the slightest reason to doubt him.
But the E Squadron scenario is not going to happen, and with a smooth effort of will, she erases the apprehensions prompted by the afternoon’s encounter. Curled like a panther on the white leather Eames chair, she raises a glass of pink Alexandre II Black Sea champagne to the fading light. The wine is neither distinguished nor expensive, but it’s a symbol of everything that in her other, earlier life she could never have dreamed of.
And it suits her mood. She’s in lockdown now, her focus already narrowing to the moment-by-moment details of the next day’s action. Anticipation rises through her, as sharp and effervescent as the bubbles prickling to the surface of the champagne, and with it the ache of the hunger that never completely goes away. She coils and uncoils on the white leather. Perhaps she’ll go out and have some more sex. It will help kill a few hours.
Eve groans. “What time is it?”
“Six forty-five,” murmurs Niko. “Like every day at this time.”
Eve buries her face in the warm valley between his shoulder blades, clinging to the last vestiges of sleep. The strangulated coughing of the espresso machine overlays the measured tones of Radio 4’s Today programme. She’s decided, during the night, to put an SO1 Protection team on Viktor Kedrin.
“Coffee’s done,” Niko says.
“OK. Give me a couple of minutes.”
Returning from the bathroom, she smacks her shin, not for the first time, on the low, glass-fronted fridge that he bought a month earlier on eBay.
“Shit, Niko, please. Do we have to have this… thing here?”
He rubs his eyes. “Not if you don’t want milk in your coffee in the morning, myszka. Besides, where else would you like me to put it? There’s no room in the kitchen.”
Ensuring that the blind is down—it has a habit of shooting up without warning—Eve lifts her nightdress over her head, and reaches for her underwear. “I’d argue that we don’t need a medical standard refrigeration unit to cool one little milk jug. And if there’s no room in the kitchen, it’s because it’s full of all your stuff.”
“Ah, suddenly it’s all my stuff?”
“OK, Swedish cookbooks? That solar-powered microwave…”
“They’re Danish. And that microwave is going to save us money.”
“When? This is London NW3. There isn’t any frigging sun for eleven months of the year. Either we get rid of some of your stuff, or we move somewhere bigger. And a lot less nice.”
“We can’t move.”
She dresses quickly. “Why not?”
“Because of the bees.” He knots a dark-brown tie over a silver-grey shirt.
“Niko, please. Don’t get me started on those fucking bees. I
can’t go into the garden, the neighbours are terrified of being stung to death…”
“One word, myszka. Honey. This summer, we could harvest fifteen kilos per hive. I’ve spoken to the deli, and—”
“Yes, I know it all makes sense in the future. Your five-year economic plan. But it’s the here and now we have to deal with. I can’t live like this. I can’t think straight.”
They cross the tiny landing, stepping over a stack of back issues of Astronomy Now and an ancient, dented cardboard box marked Oscilloscope Testing Equipment/ Cathode Ray Tube, and descend the stairs.
“I think the First Directorate is working you too hard, Evochka. You need to chill out.” He checks the knot of his tie in the hall mirror, and gathering up a pile of exercise books from a shelf, shunts them into a battered Gladstone bag. “You are going to make it back in time for the tournament at the club tonight, aren’t you?”
“Should do.” The calculation being that with an SO1 team on Kedrin, she won’t feel duty-bound to attend his lecture, or political rally, or whatever it is.
Eve pulls on her coat, and Niko sets the state-of-the-art alarm that Thames House has thoughtfully provided. The front door closes, and hand in hand, their breath vaporous, they make their way through the half-light of morning towards Finchley Road tube station.
In the P3 office at Thames House, Simon Mortimer looks inscrutable as he puts down the receiver. “Unless you can come up with a specific reason for changing your mind on Kedrin, it’s no go,” he tells Eve. “Too short notice.”
Eve shakes her head. “That’s ridiculous. SO1 could easily have a team in place at half a day’s notice. Is the foot-dragging coming from our end, or theirs?”
“Ours, as far as I can tell. There’s hesitation to deploy SO1 on the basis of, um…”
“Of what?”
“The phrase used was ‘female intuition.’”
She stares at him. “Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
She closes her eyes.
“On the positive side, you have made your concern known. Your ass, if I may refer to it as such, is covered.”
Codename Villanelle Page 7
