As she walks back towards the range, Richard watches her go. Then he climbs into the Mercedes, switches on the ignition and the windscreen wipers, and begins the drive back to London.
4
Villanelle wakes in a warm tangle of limbs. On the far side of the bed Anne-Laure is lying face down, her hair a honey-coloured swirl, one suntanned arm trailing across Kim’s chest. Where Anne-Laure is all dreamy curves, Kim displays a lynx-like elegance, even in sleep. His features are lean and refined, reflecting his Franco-Vietnamese ancestry, and his limbs are the colour of ivory, their musculature precisely defined in the morning light.
Detaching herself, Villanelle walks to the bathroom, and takes a shower. Still naked, she pads to the tiny galley kitchen, fills the Bialetti coffee maker with Hédiard’s “Sur la Côte d’Azur” blend, and switches on the ceramic hob. At the end of the kitchen a sliding glass door leads to a small terrace, and Villanelle steps outside for a moment. It’s September, and Paris is radiant with the dying summer. The horizon is a pale haze, pigeons are cooing on a neighbouring rooftop, and the faint murmur of traffic rises from the rue de Vaugirard, six storeys below.
Anne-Laure inherited the single-bedroom apartment five months ago, and tells her husband, Gilles, a senior functionary at the Treasury, that she goes there “to write” and “to think.” If Gilles thinks this out of character, and suspects that the place is put to more active use, he doesn’t say so, because he himself has recently taken a mistress. His secretary, to be precise, a plain and unstylish woman with whom he cannot be seen socially, but who, unlike Anne-Laure, never questions or criticises him.
Villanelle stands there, gazing out over the city, until she hears the rasp of the percolating coffee. In the bedroom, Anne-Laure is stirring, her fingers sleepily re-acquainting themselves with the hard contours of Kim’s body. He is twenty-three, and a dancer at the Paris Opera Ballet. Anne-Laure and Villanelle met him twelve hours earlier at a drinks party given by a fashion designer. It took them just three minutes to persuade him to leave with them.
Anne-Laure is astride Kim now, her hands braced against his muscular thighs, her eyes half-closed. Setting the coffee tray down on a bedside table, Villanelle clears the chaise longue of discarded clothes and arranges herself, cat-like, on the soft brocade. She likes watching her friend having sex, but this morning there’s an artificial quality to Anne-Laure’s gasping and sighing and hair-tossing. It’s a performance, and from his blank expression and the dutiful bucking of his hips, Villanelle can tell that Kim isn’t buying it.
Catching his eye, Villanelle hitches her knees up, spreads her thighs, and begins, very slowly and deliberately, to finger herself. Anne-Laure is oblivious to this performance, but Kim stares intently between her legs. Villanelle returns his gaze, notes his anguished look as he tries to hold himself back, and watches as he shudders to a climax. Seconds later, with a plaintive cry, Anne-Laure subsides on top of him.
On the chaise longue Villanelle stretches and licks her finger. Sex, for her, offers only fleeting physical satisfaction. What she finds much more exciting is to look into another person’s eyes and to know, like a cobra swaying in front of its hypnotised prey, that she is in absolute control. But that game gets boring, too. People capitulate so easily.
“Coffee, anyone?” she enquires.
Half an hour later Kim has left for ballet class at the Opera and Villanelle and Anne-Laure are sitting outside on the terrace. Anne-Laure’s wearing a silk kimono, while Villanelle’s in cigarette jeans and a Miu Miu sweater, her hair twisted into a scrappy chignon. Both are barefoot.
“So, does Gilles still fuck you?” Villanelle asks.
“From time to time,” says Anne-Laure. She takes a cigarette from the packet beside her and flicks her gold Dunhill lighter. “He probably thinks that if he stops altogether I’ll suspect something.”
They fall silent. Before them is the roofscape of the Sixième Arrondissement, tranquil in the morning light. It’s a luxury to be able to sit like this, chasing the morning away with inconsequential chatter, and both women know it. Six storeys below, people are racing to work, fighting for taxis, and jamming themselves into buses and Metro carriages. Anne-Laure and Villanelle’s financial needs are well taken care of, so they’re free to abstain from this daily grind. Free to pick through vintage clothes stores in the Marais, lunch at yam’Tcha or Le Cristal, and have their hair done by Tom at Carita.
Over London, a leaden sky promises rain. In her office above Goodge Street Underground station, Eve Polastri wrenches a wad of printing paper from the photocopier and repositions it, but the paper-jam light continues to blink.
“And sod you, too,” she mutters, punching the off button.
Eve’s using the fifteen-year-old copier because the scanner’s given up the ghost and is now lying unplugged on the floor, where sooner or later she’s going to trip over it. She’s put in a request for new office equipment, or at least a budget for repairs, and there have been vague promises from Vauxhall Cross, but given the byzantine arrangement by which the operation is funded, she’s not hopeful.
Today, Eve is to be joined by two new colleagues, both male. Richard Edwards has described them as “an enterprising couple of blokes,” which could mean anything. At a guess, a pair of low-flyers with discipline issues who have failed to adjust to the ordered, hierarchical world of the Secret Intelligence Service. Whatever their history, they’re unlikely to regard Goodge Street as a promotion.
Eve glances at the battered metal desk formerly occupied by her deputy. A scattering of effects—a Thermos flask, a Kylie Minogue mug filled with pens, a Disney “Frozen” snow-globe—stands as he left them, untouched. Seeing this dusty array, Eve feels a vast weariness. There was a time
