Ten minutes’ walk is enough for Villanelle to dispose of the phone, battery and SIM card in separate restaurant garbage bins. The scrubs, gloves, mask and cap, together with the aluminium CO cylinder, sink to the murky bed of the Huangpu river in a string shopping bag weighted with stones.
Hours have passed, and Villanelle is lying in a claw-footed bathtub in a tenth floor apartment in Shanghai’s exclusive French Concession, meditating upon the murder that she has just committed. The water is scented with essence of stephanotis, the walls are jade-green, silk curtains billow in the faint breeze.
As always on these occasions, the current of Villanelle’s emotions ebbs and flows. There’s satisfaction at a job well done. Detailed research, imaginative planning, and a clean, silent kill. Could anyone else have taken out FatPanda with such style, such frictionless ease? In her mind she replays his last moments. The surprise as their eyes met. Then that curious acceptance as he began the drift into the depths.
There’s satisfaction, too, in the importance of her role. It’s exhilarating to stand at the still centre of the turning world, and to know yourself an instrument of destiny. It makes up for the savage humiliations of her years as Oxana Vorontsova to know that she is not cursed, but blessed with a terrible strength.
Of all those humiliations, it’s her rejection by the French teacher, Anna Ivanovna Leonova, that she still feels most keenly. A single woman in her late twenties, Leonova was more than a little awed by her troubled pupil’s precocious linguistic gifts, and ignoring Oxana’s rudeness and gracelessness, determined to open her eyes to a world beyond the grey confines of Perm. So there were weekend sessions in Anna’s tiny apartment, discussing Colette and Françoise Sagan, and on one memorable occasion a visit to the Tchaikovsky Theatre, to see a performance of the opera Manon Lescaut.
Oxana was bemused by the attention. No one had ever expended so much time on her. What Anna Ivanovna was giving her, she realised, was something selfless, something close to love. Intellectually, Oxana understood such an emotion, but she also knew herself incapable of feeling it. Physical desire, though, was another matter, and she lay awake, night after night, tortured by a raw longing for her teacher that she could find no way of expressing beyond a sullen blankness.
Not that the teenage Oxana was a novice when it came to sex. She had tried both men and women, and found no difficulty in manipulating both. But with Anna she dreamt of a realm of the senses that lay beyond the beery fumblings of bikers behind the Bar Molotov, or the rough tongue of the female security guard at the TsUM department store who had caught her stealing, marched her to the toilets, and buried her face between Oxana’s thighs as the price of silence.
She tried, just once, to take things further with Anna. It was the evening they went to Manon Lescaut. They were sitting in the balcony, in the back row of seats, and towards the end of the opera Oxana had inclined her head against the teacher’s shoulder. When Anna responded by putting an arm around her, Oxana was so overwhelmed she could hardly breathe.
As Puccini’s music swirled around them, Oxana reached out a hand and laid it over one of Anna’s breasts. Gently, but firmly, Anna removed the hand, and equally firmly, a moment later, Oxana replaced it. This was a game she had played many times in her mind.
“Stop it,” Anna said quietly.
“Don’t you like me?” Oxana whispered.
The teacher sighed. “Oxana, of course I do. But that doesn’t mean…”
“What?” She parted her lips, her eyes searching for Anna’s in the half dark.
“It doesn’t mean… that.”
“Then fuck you, and fuck your stupid opera,” Oxana hissed, rage rising uncontainably inside her. Standing, she stumbled towards the exit, and ran down the staircase to the street. Outside, the city was lit by the sulphurous glow of night, and flurries of snow whirled in the car headlights on Kommunisticheskaya Prospekt. It was freezing cold, and Oxana realised that she had left her jacket inside the theatre.
She was too furious to care. Why didn’t Anna Ivanovna want her? That culture stuff was all very well, but she needed more from Anna than that. She needed to see desire in her eyes. To see everything that gave her power over Oxana—her gentleness, her patience, her fucking virtue—dissolve into sexual surrender.
But Anna resisted this transformation. Even though, deep down she felt exactly the same way, and Oxana knew this to be true, because she had felt the flutter of the other woman’s heart beneath her hand. It was intolerable, unbearable. And there in the theatre doorway, one hand thrust down the front of her jeans, Oxana gasped out her frustration until she sank to her knees on the icy pavement.
Anna forgave her for her behaviour at the Tchaikovsky Theatre, but Oxana never quite forgave Anna, and her feelings for her teacher took on a morbid, angry cast.
When Anna was sexually assaulted, matters reached a head. Taking her father’s combat knife, Oxana lured Roman Nikonov into the woods, and put things right. Nikonov survived, which wasn’t part of her plan, but otherwise things went perfectly.
Oxana was never questioned, and if she’d have preferred her victim to die of shock and blood
