“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 sight 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.
