Standing there on the rooftop, in her cage of snow, Villanelle feels the longed-for power-surge. The feeling of invincibility that sex promises, but only a successful killing truly confers. The knowledge that she stands alone at the whirling heart of events. And looking around her, with the dead men at her feet, she sees the city resolved into its essential colours. Black, white and red. Darkness, snow and blood. Perhaps it takes a Russian to understand the world in those terms.
That Saturday is, without exception, the worst day of Eve Polastri’s life. Four men shot dead on her watch, an A-grade assassin on the loose in London, her MI5 superiors incandescent, the Kremlin no less so, a COBRA group convened, and—it goes without saying—her Thames House career fucked.
When the office ring to tell her that Viktor Kedrin has been found shot dead in his hotel room, she’s still in bed. At first she thinks that she’s going to faint, and then, staggering to the bathroom, and finding the corridor blocked by Niko’s bicycle, she vomits all over her bare feet. By the time Niko reaches her, she’s crouched on the floor in her nightdress, ash-grey and shaking. Simon rings while Niko is sitting with her in the kitchen. They agree to meet at the Vernon Hotel. Somehow, she manages to get dressed and drive there.
There’s quite a crowd in Red Lion Street, held at bay by a barrier of crime-scene tape and two police constables. The senior investigating officer at the scene is DCI Gary Hurst. He knows Eve, and hurries her into the hotel, away from the probing camera lenses. In the reception area, he directs her to a banquette, pours her a cup of sugary tea from a Thermos flask, and watches as she drinks it.
“Better?”
“Yeah. Thanks, Gary.” She closes her eyes. “God, what a shit-storm.”
“Well, it’s a colourful one. I’ll say that.”
“So what have we got?”
“Four dead. Shot at close range, all headshots, definitely a pro job. Victim one, Viktor Kedrin, Russian, university professor, found dead in his room. With him, victim two, late twenties, looks like hired muscle. On the roof, victims three and four. We think three is Vitaly Chuvarov, supposedly a political associate of Kedrin’s, but almost certainly with organised crime connections. Four is more muscle. All armed with Glock 19s except for Kedrin. The pair on the roof discharged seven shots between them.”
“Must have picked up the weapons here.”
The DCI shrugs. “Easily done.”
“Suggests they were expecting trouble.”
“Maybe. Maybe they just feel happier if they’re carrying. Do you want to get suited up and go upstairs? The other Thames House guy’s waiting for you up there.”
“Simon?”
“Yeah.”
“Sure. Where do I change?”
“Staging area that way.” He points. “I’ll be up in a minute.”
In the staging area Eve is handed a white Tyvek coverall, a mask, gloves and bootees. When she is finally suited up, dread floods through her. She’s seen plenty of photographs of gunshot victims, but never any actual corpses.
She copes, though, and with Simon standing businesslike and imperturbable beside her, makes herself remember the details. The raised, greyish rims of the entry wounds, the thin trails of blackened blood, the faraway expressions. Kedrin, his sightless eyes directed at the ceiling, has a slight frown on his face, as if he’s trying to remember something.
“You did your best,” says Simon.
She shakes her head. “I should have insisted. I should have made the right decision in the first place.”
He shrugs. “You made your concerns known. And you were overruled.”
She’s about to answer when DCI Hurst calls her name and beckons to her from the top of the stairs.
“Thought you’d like to know. Julia Fanin, twenty-six. Left the hotel in the early hours of the morning. Bed not slept in, but an empty overnight bag left in her fourth-floor room. Forensics in there now.”
“What do the front desk say?” Eve asks.
“They say she’s a looker. We’re going through the CCTV footage.”
A dark certainty fills Eve. She feels beneath her Tyvek suit for her phone. Calls up the photograph of the woman at the meeting. “Could that be her?”
The DCI stares at it. “Where did you get this?”
Eve is telling him about the meeting when his phone rings, and he holds up a hand. Listens in frowning silence.
“OK,” he says. “Turns out the credit card she showed the hotel when she checked in yesterday was stolen at Gatwick airport a week ago, from the real Julia Fanin. But we’ve got fingerprints and hopefully DNA from the overnight bag, and we’re soon going to have some CCTV stills. Can you stick around?”
“For as long as it takes.” She glances at Simon. “I’m afraid that shopping trip’s going to have to wait.”
That afternoon Eve attends a meeting at Thames House, in the course of which she is questioned in detail as to her decision concerning Kedrin’s protection and her subsequent change of mind, debriefed about the police inquiry, and finally, ordered to take ten days’ home leave. That she will return to the office to discover she has been demoted or reassigned is a foregone conclusion.
At home, she can’t settle. There are a hundred things to do about the flat—sorting, storing, cleaning, tidying—but Eve can’t bring herself to embark on any of them. Instead she goes for long, directionless walks through the snow on Hampstead Heath, constantly checking her phone. She’s given Niko the bare bones of the situation and he doesn’t press her for more, but she can tell that he’s hurt and frustrated by his inability to help. She’s always known that the secrecy aspect of intelligence work imposes its own unique strains on a marriage; what’s shocking is just how corrosive it proves to be. How her silence eats away at the very foundations of the trust between herself and Niko.
The accommodation that they reached, early on in their marriage, was that while her working hours belonged to Thames House and the Service, at the end of the day she came home to him. What they shared—the complicity and intimacy of their evenings and nights—was infinitely more important than the things that they couldn’t.
But the Kedrin murder spreads like a toxin into every aspect of her life. At night, instead of slipping into bed beside Niko and healing the rifts of the day by making love, she stays up until the early hours of the morning scanning the Internet, and hunting for new reports on the killings.
The Sunday papers make what they can of the case. The Observer hints at possible Mossad involvement, and the Sunday Times speculates that Kedrin might have been eliminated on the orders of the Kremlin because his increasingly fascist outpourings were beginning to embarrass the president. The police, however, release no more than the barest details. Certainly nothing about a female suspect. And then, on Wednesday morning, just as her toast is beginning to brown—Niko usually prepares breakfast, but he’s already at work—Eve gets a call from DCI Hurst.
The DNA analysis on the hair samples found in the valise, a rush job by the forensic lab, has come up with a match on the UK database. An arrest has been made at Heathrow. Can Eve come to Paddington Green Police Station to assist with identification?
Eve can, and as she replaces the receiver, the smoke alarm goes off. Throwing the burning toast into the sink with a pair of salad tongs, she opens the kitchen window, and stabs vainly at the alarm with a broom-handle. I’m really not cut out for this domestic stuff, she thinks bleakly. Perhaps it’s just as well I’m not pregnant. Not that that’s exactly a likelihood, with the way things are going.
Paddington Green Police Station is a brutal, utilitarian building that smells of anxiety and stale air. Beneath ground level is a high-security custody suite where prisoners suspected of terrorist offences are held. The interview room is grey-painted and strip-lit; a one-way glass window takes up most of one wall. Eve and Hurst sit beneath it, with the prisoner sitting opposite them. It’s the woman who was at Kedrin’s lecture.
Eve is expecting to feel a fierce triumph at the s
ight of her. Instead, as at the Conway Hall, she’s struck by her beauty. The woman, probably in her mid-twenties, has an oval, high-cheekboned face, framed by a dark, glossy bob. She’s simply dressed in black jeans and a grey T-shirt that shows off her slender arms and neat, small-breasted frame. She looks tired, and more than a little confused, but no less graceful for all that, and Eve is suddenly conscious of her own shapeless hoodie and untended hair. What would I give to look like that? she wonders. My brain?
Hurst introduces himself and “my colleague from the Home Office,” and switching on the voice-recorder, officially cautions the suspect, who has elected to dispense with the services of a lawyer. And looking at her, Eve suddenly knows that something is wrong. That this woman is as incapable of murder as she is. That the police case is about to fall apart.
“Please state your name,” Hurst says to her.
The woman leans forward towards the voice-recorder. “My name is Lucy Drake.”
“And your profession?”
She darts a look at Eve. Her eyes, even beneath the strip-lights, are a vivid emerald. “I’m an actress. An actress and model.”
“And what were you doing at the Vernon Hotel in Red Lion Street, last Friday night?”
Lucy Drake gazes thoughtfully at her hands, which are folded on the table in front of her. “Can I start at the beginning?”
Even as her heart sinks at how completely she and the police have been blindsided, Eve can’t help but admire the elegance of the deception.
It all started, Lucy explains, with a call received by her agent. The client represented himself as belonging to a production company that was making a television series about different aspects of human behaviour. In this connection, they needed an attractive, confident young actress to undertake a series of social experiments, in which she would play a number of roles. The filming would take place over five days in London and Los Angeles, and the successful applicant would be paid four thousand pounds a day.
“It was all a bit vague,” Lucy says. “But given the fee, and the exposure the programme would bring, I wasn’t too worried. So that afternoon I took the tube from Queen’s Park, where I live, to the St. Martin’s Lane Hotel, where they were holding the interviews. The director was there—Peter something, I think he was Eastern European—and a cameraman who was videoing everyone. There were several other girls there, and we were called in one by one.
“When it came to my turn Peter asked me to role-play a couple of scenes with him. One where I was booking into a hotel and I had to make the desk guy fall for me, and one where I had to approach a speaker after a lecture and seduce him, basically. The idea in both scenarios was to be super-flirty and charming but not come across like a hooker. Anyway, I gave it my best shot, and when I’d finished, he asked me to wait downstairs in this Cuban teahouse place and order anything I wanted. So I did, and forty minutes later he came down and said congratulations, I’ve seen everyone and the job’s yours.”
Over the next two days “Peter” went through everything that Lucy was required to do. She was measured for the clothes that she would wear, and told that this “costume” had to be precisely adhered to, with no changes or substitutions. On Friday afternoon she was to book into the Vernon Hotel under the name of Julia Fanin and take an overnight bag up to her room. Peter would provide the credit card that she would use and also the bag, which she was not under any circumstances to open.
Leaving the bag in the room, she was to walk to the Conway Hall, around the corner in Red Lion Square, and buy a ticket to the 8 p.m. lecture given by Viktor Kedrin. After the lecture she was to gain personal access to Kedrin, charm and flatter him, and arrange to meet him at his hotel later that night. With that done, she was to meet Peter on the corner of the square, give him her hotel room key-card, and take a taxi home to Queen’s Park.
The following morning, Lucy was told, Peter would pick her up early, drive her to Heathrow, and put her on a plane to Los Angeles. There she would be met, put up at a hotel, and given instructions for the second stage of filming.
“And that’s how it worked out?” asks Hurst.
“Yes. He came round at 6 a.m. with a first-class return to LA, and I was in the air by nine. I was met at the airport by a driver who took me to the Chateau Marmont, where I got a message that the filming had been cancelled, but I was welcome to stay on at the hotel. So I used the time to go and see some acting agents, and at midday yesterday caught the return flight to Heathrow. Where I was, um… arrested. For murder. Which was kind of a surprise.”
“Really?” asks Hurst.
“Yes, really.” Lucy wrinkles her nose and looks around the interview room. “You know, there’s a really weird smell of burnt toast in here.”
An hour later, Eve and Hurst are standing on the steps at the rear of the police station, watching as an unmarked BMW turns out of the car park, headed for Queen’s Park. Hurst is smoking. As the BMW passes, Eve catches a final glimpse of the flawless profile that she photographed in the Conway Hall.
“Do you think we’re ever going to get a useful description of this Peter character?” Eve asks.
“Unlikely. We’ll bring Lucy back to help us make up a Photofit when she’s had a few hours’ sleep, but I’m not hopeful. It was all far too well planned.”
“And you really don’t think she was in on any of it?”
“No. I don’t. We’ll check her story out in detail, obviously, but my guess is that she isn’t guilty of anything except naivety.”
Eve nods. “She so much wanted it to be true. The successful audition, the big break into TV…”
“Yeah.” Hurst treads out his cigarette on the wet concrete step. “He played her just right. And us, too.”
Eve frowns. “So how do you think two of Lucy’s hairs came to be in that overnight bag, if she never opened it?”
“My guess would be that Peter, or one of his people, took the hairs during the fake audition, perhaps out of her hairbrush. And then our shooter drops them in the bag after she’s taken Lucy’s place in the hotel. And here’s a question for you. Why Los Angeles? Why go to the trouble of flying that girl halfway round the world when she’s already played her part?”
“That’s easy,” says Eve. “To make sure she’s out of the picture by the time the news of the murder breaks. They can’t risk her reading about it online, or hearing about it on the radio, and going straight to the police with what she knows. So they make sure that she’s taking off for LA—an eleven-hour flight—at the precise time that the murder’s discovered on Saturday morning. Which not only renders Lucy incommunicado, but also sets a perfect false trail, giving the real killer and her team plenty of time to cover their tracks and vanish.”
Hurst nods. “And once she’s at the swanky Sunset Boulevard hotel…”
“She’s going to stay for the duration, exactly. She may, just possibly, see or read something about Kedrin, but that’s all happening on the other side of the world. Meanwhile, she’s got Hollywood agents to see. That’s what’s going to be uppermost in her mind.”
“And then, when they’re ready, and the DNA results are in, they serve her up to us on a plate.” He shakes his head. “You have to admire their cheek.”
“Yeah, well, cheeky or not, that woman shot four foreign nationals dead on our turf. Can we go back and see that CCTV footage again?”
“Absolutely.”
It’s been edited into a single, silent loop. Lucy Drake walking into the hotel foyer in her parka, carrying the valise, and checking in, the suggestiveness of her body language apparent. Lucy exiting the lift on the fourth floor and walking to Room 416. Lucy leaving the hotel without the valise, raising the hood of her parka as she goes.
“OK stop,” Eve says. “That’s the last of her, agreed? From now on the woman in the parka is our killer.”
“Agreed,” says Hurst.
He runs the footage in x16 slow-motion. Infinitely slowly, as if moving through treacle, the hooded figure enters the hote
l, lifts a blurry hand in the direction of the front desk, and vanishes out of shot. Her face is invisible, as it is throughout the footage in the hotel corridors.
“Look at her planting that bug outside Kedrin’s room,” says Hurst. “She knows she’s on camera, but she doesn’t care, she knows we can’t make her. You have to admit, Eve, she’s good.”
“You weren’t able to pull any prints off the bug, or anywhere else?”
“Look closely. Surgical gloves.”
“Motherfucker,” Eve breathes.
Hurst raises an eyebrow.
“She’s a murdering bitch, Gary, and she’s cost me my job. I want her, dead or alive.”
“Good luck with that,” says Hurst.
At their Avenue Kléber apartment, Gilles Mercier and his wife Anne-Laure are entertaining. Among those at dinner are a junior minister from the Department of External Trade, the director of one of France’s major hedge funds, and the executive vice president of Paris’s most important fine art auction house. Given the company, Gilles has gone to considerable trouble to ensure that everything is just so. The food has been catered by Fouquet’s on the Champs-Élysées, the wine (2005 Puligny-Montrachet, 1998 Haut-Brion) is from Gilles’s own carefully curated cellar, and precisely dimmed spotlights pick out the cabinet of ormolu clocks and the two Boudin oils of the beach at Trouville, which the executive vice president has recognised as fakes, and indeed has whispered as much to his younger male companion.
The conversation among the men has covered predictable ground. Immigration, the fiscal naivety of the socialists, the Russian billionaires forcing up the price of holiday homes in Val-d’Isère and the Ile de Ré, and the upcoming season at the Opéra. Their wives and the executive vice president’s friend, meanwhile, have covered the new Phoebe Philo collection, the fabulousness of Primark pyjamas, the latest Ryan Gosling film, and a charity ball that the hedge-fund director’s wife is organising.
Codename Villanelle Page 9
