By the time Lance drops her off at her house, Eve is exhausted. She’s also furious, apprehensive, and faintly nauseous from the nicotine smell of Lance’s car. There’s a horrendous conversation with Richard still to be had – he’s coming by the office at 6 p.m. – but the most shaming admission that Eve has had to make is to herself. How easily, how effortlessly and contemptuously, she has been played. How naive she has been. How utterly unprofessional.
She should have known, from Cradle’s bullish manner, that he had sounded some sort of alarm, and expected to be exfiltrated. Rather than congratulating herself on having uncovered his treachery, she should have been expecting precisely the sort of audacious manoeuvre that had been mounted against her. How could she have been so ill-prepared? And then there’s that surreal encounter on the A303, which has left her shot through with emotions she can’t begin to define.
So she’s in no mood for Niko’s hostility when he lets her into the flat. ‘I rang you four and a half hours ago,’ he tells her, pale-faced with suppressed tension. ‘You said you’d be here by midday, and it’s nearly three.’
She forces herself to breathe. ‘Look, I’m sorry, Niko, but explanations are going to have to wait. If you’ve had a bad day, trust me, I’ve had a worse one. Since we spoke I’ve had my car keys and my phone stolen, and I’ve spent an hour beside a busy main road, trying to wave down a car so that I could get help. And that’s just the start of it. So just tell me, without getting angry, what’s going on.’
Niko compresses his lips, and nods. ‘As I told you on the phone, Mrs Khan reported seeing a young woman climbing out of our window at about ten thirty this morning, and rang the police. Two police officers called round at the school, picked me up, and drove me here. They were obviously taking the whole thing quite seriously, because there was a forensics person waiting outside when we got back. Perhaps they’ve got our address on file because of your old job at MI5, who knows? Anyway, they went through the flat with me, room by room, and the forensics woman did her stuff on the door handles and the front room window and various other surfaces, looking for fingerprints, but she found nothing. She told me the intruder must have been wearing gloves. She’d undone the window lock, but nothing else had been disturbed, as far as I could see, and nothing taken.’
‘Thelma and Louise?’
‘Fine, just chilling outside. They made a big impression on the cops, as you can imagine.’
‘They left, these cops?’
‘Ages ago.’
‘So how do they think the intruder got in?’
‘Through the front door. They had a close look at the lock and they reckon she picked it. Which makes her a professional, not some teenager looking for phones and laptops.’
‘Right.’
‘So . . . do you have any idea who she might be?’
‘I don’t know any professional burglars, no.’
‘Please, Eve, you know what I mean. Is this something to do with your work? Was this woman looking for something specific? Something . . .’ His voice trails off, and then, as she watches, a darker suspicion takes hold. ‘Was this . . . that woman? The one you were after? Probably still are after? Because, if so . . .’
She meets his stare calmly.
‘Tell me the truth, Eve. Seriously, I need to know. I need you, just this once, not to lie.’
‘Niko, truthfully, I have absolutely no idea who this was. Nor is there any reason whatsoever to connect this with my work, or the investigation you were talking about. Do you know how many break-ins were reported in London last year? Almost sixty thousand. Sixty thousand. That means that statistically—’
‘Statistically.’ He closes his eyes. ‘Tell me about statistics, Eve.’
‘Niko, please. I’m sorry you think I lie to you, I’m sorry some burglar broke into our house, I’m sorry we don’t have anything worth stealing. But this is just some random fucking London event, OK? There is no explanation. It just . . . happened.’
He stares at the wall. ‘Maybe the police will—’
‘No, the police won’t. Especially if she didn’t take anything. They’ll log it, and it’ll go in the files. Now let me have a look round the place, and make sure nothing’s missing.’
He stands there, breathing audibly. Finally, slowly, he bows his head. ‘I’ll make some tea.’
‘Oh, yes please. And if there’s any of that cake left, I’m starving.’ Stepping behind him, she puts her arms around his waist and lays her head against his back. ‘I’m sorry, I’ve really had the most horrendous day. And this just makes it worse. So thank you for coping with the police and everything, I honestly don’t think I could have managed.’
Opening the back door, she smiles as Thelma and Louise come bounding towards her and nose inquisitively at her hands. They really are very hard to resist. On the far side of the wall bordering the tiny patio there’s a drop of some twenty metres to the overground railway track. Its proximity to the line, the letting agent explained to them when they moved in, was the reason that the flat was cheaper than others in the area. Eve no longer hears the trains; their rattle and thrum has long been subsumed into the ambient noise that is London. Sometimes she sits out here and watches them, soothed by the ceaselessness of their coming and going.
‘When did we last spend a weekday afternoon together?’ Niko asks, handing her a cup of tea with a slice of cake balanced on the saucer. ‘It seems
