There was a lot of blood, and Oxana’s torn lip, stitched without anaesthetic by a medical student from a neighbouring apartment, was slow to heal. Other children stared at her, and by the time the wound ceased to be noticeable Oxana’s mother was dead, her father was in Chechnya and Oxana herself had been consigned to the tender mercies of the Sakharov Orphanage.
Villanelle could easily have her upper lip remodelled by a plastic surgeon, so that it curves into the perfect bow that nature intended, but she hasn’t done so. The scar is the last vestige of her former self, and she can’t quite bring herself to erase it.
From nowhere she feels a morbid crawl of desire. Rolling onto her side on the white leather, she presses her thighs together and clasps her arms across her small breasts. For several minutes she lies like this, her eyes closed. She recognises it, this hunger. Knows that it will tighten its grip unless satisfied.
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
