Why, she isn’t completely sure. Perhaps because she can’t imagine taking a human life herself, she is fascinated by the notion of a woman for whom killing is unexceptional. Someone who could get up in the morning, make coffee, choose what to wear, and then go out and cold-bloodedly put a total stranger to death. Did you have to be some kind of anomalous, psychopathic freak to do that? Did you have to be born that way? Or could any woman, correctly programmed, be turned into a professional executioner?
Since taking over P3 from Bill, Eve has conducted a discreet but exhaustive search of the live case files for any further suggestion of female involvement in an assassination, and has flagged two references. The first involves the shooting in Germany of Aleksandr Simonov, a Russian business oligarch suspected of funding Chechen and Dagestani militants as part of a deal relating to oil and gas concessions. The assassin, who fired a burst of six rounds from an FN P90 sub-machine gun into Simonov’s chest outside the Frankfurt headquarters of the AltInvest Bank, was wearing despatch-riders’ waterproofs and a full-face motorcycle helmet, and raced away on a machine later identified as a BMW G650Xmoto. Of the dozen or so onlookers questioned afterwards, two stated that they “had the impression” that the shooter was a woman.
The other case, the close-up slaying in Sicily of a Mafia boss named Salvatore Greco, is apparently non-political. Local innuendo attributes the slaying, directly or indirectly, to the dead man’s nephew, Leoluca Messina, who has since assumed the leadership of the Greco clan. But there has also been speculation in the press about an accomplice, the so-called “woman in the red dress.” According to the investigators of the DIA, the Direzione Investigativa Antimafia, Greco was found dead in a private box at the Teatro Massimo in Palermo, following an opera performance. He had been shot in the heart at close range with two low-velocity .22 rounds. His two bodyguards were also found dead on the floor of the box, despatched with single shots to the base of the skull.
Leoluca Messina is known to have been at the theatre that night, and a witness has described seeing him in the bar shortly before curtain-up, talking to a striking dark-haired woman in a red dress. It appears that they were not sitting together, but CCTV footage shows Messina leaving the theatre via the stage door shortly after the final curtain. A couple of paces behind him is a blurred figure: a woman in a red dress, dark hair swinging around her shoulders. Her face is invisible, masked by the opera programme that she’s holding up as if to fan herself.
Which, Eve reflects, is certainly no accident. The woman is well aware that the CCTV camera is there. But the really strange detail is one that the DIA have not made public. Before Greco was killed, he was immobilised with a lethal tranquilliser apparently delivered via a custom-made device that was found buried in his left eye. A photograph of this device is in the online case-file, along with details of its inner workings. It’s a sinister-looking thing: a curved and hollowed steel spike containing an inner reservoir and armed with a tiny plunger.
Why was it necessary to incapacitate Greco in this way before shooting him? It’s a question that’s nagged Eve for some time, and she’s no nearer to finding an answer than she was on the day that she first read the file. Given that the assassination took place in an essentially public location, wouldn’t it have made sense to get it over with quickly? Why, with discovery possible at any moment, would the killer want to drag things out?
Eve is still pondering this question when she arrives back at the flat in Finchley a few minutes before eight o’clock. Her husband, Niko, is not there; he’s gone ahead to the bridge club where he instructs three evenings a week. He’s left a pierogi—a Polish dumpling dish—in the oven, which Eve retrieves gratefully. She’s not much of a cook and hates having to prepare meals from scratch when she arrives back after a long day at Thames House.
As she eats, she watches the eight o’clock news summary on the BBC. There’s a warning of a cold front coming in from the east (“Make sure your boilers are serviced!”), an overwhelmingly bleak piece about the economy, and an imported clip of a rally in Moscow, where an impassioned, bearded figure is addressing an attentive crowd in a snow-whitened square. A blurry caption identifies him as Виктор Кедрин.
Eve leans forward in her seat, a forkful of pierogi suspended in her hand. Despite the poor image-quality, Viktor Kedrin’s magnetism is palpable. She strains to hear his words behind the commentator’s voice-over, but the clip cuts to a story of an orphaned kitten adopted by a chihuahua.
When she’s finished eating, Eve exchanges her work clothes for jeans, a sweater and a zip-up windproof jacket. The result is unsatisfactory, but she can’t be bothered to give it more thought. She looks around the flat, from the waist-high stacks of books in the narrow front hall to the clothes hanging from the drying-rack in the kitchen. If and when I get pregnant, she tells herself, we’re going to need somewhere bigger. For a moment, she allows her thoughts to linger on the airy red-brick mansions in Netherhall Gardens, just five minutes’ walk away. A first-floor apartment in one of those would be perfect. And about as likely to come into her and Niko’s possession as Buckingham Palace. The combined salaries of a Security
