“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 glasses 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
