‘You’re right, it does,’ she says, staring out towards the dim, urban horizon. ‘Can I ask you something?’
‘Go on.’
‘About Russia.’ She takes a bite of cake.
‘What about it?’
‘Have you ever heard of anything or anyone called the Twelve?’
‘The poem, you mean?’
‘What poem?’
‘Dvenadtsat. The Twelve, by Aleksandr Blok. He was an early twentieth-century writer who believed in the sacred destiny of Russia. Pretty crackpot stuff. I read him at university, during my revolutionary poetry phase.’
Eve feels a coldness at the back of her neck. ‘What’s it about?’
‘Twelve Bolsheviks pursuing some mystical quest through the streets of Petrograd. At midnight, as far as I remember, and in a snowstorm. Why?’
‘Someone at work today referred to an organisation called the Twelve. Some political group. Either Russian, or Russian-connected. I’d never heard of it.’
Niko shrugs. ‘Most educated Russians would know the poem. There’s nostalgia for the Soviet era right across the political spectrum.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘That a group calling itself after Blok’s midnight ramblers could be of almost any complexion from neo-communist to outright fascist. The name doesn’t tell you much.’
‘So do you know where I could . . . Niko?’
But Thelma and Louise are butting at his knees and bleating for his attention.
Tea in hand, Eve goes through the flat. It’s a small place, and although it’s crammed with stuff, mostly Niko’s, it doesn’t look like anything has been moved or stolen. She visits the bedroom last, checking under pillows and in drawers, and paying particular attention to her modest stock of jewellery. She’s furious at the theft of her bracelet, and still can’t begin to process the knowledge that a professional killer broke into her Shanghai hotel room while she slept. Imagining that woman staring at her with those flat, affectless eyes, and perhaps even touching her, makes her feel faint.
‘You looked so adorable, with your hair all over the pillow . . .’
Eve opens the wardrobe and flips through her dresses, tops and skirts, sliding the hangers along one by one. And comes to a disbelieving halt. On a shelf with her belts, gloves and a straw hat from the previous summer is a small package wrapped in tissue paper, which she has definitely never seen before. After pulling on one of the pairs of gloves, she carefully lifts the package, weighs it in one hand, and unwraps it. A dove-grey box bearing the words Van Diest. Inside, on a pillow of grey velvet, an exquisite rose gold bracelet, set with twin diamonds at the clasp.
For several heartbeats, Eve stares. Then, twitching off her left glove, she slips her wrist into the bracelet and snaps the clasp into place. The fit is perfect, and for a moment, languidly extending her arm, she thrills to the look and the delicate weight of it. In the folds of tissue paper, its corner just visible, is a card. The note is handwritten.
Take care, Eve – V
Eve stands there, the bracelet on her wrist, the card in her gloved hand, for a full minute. How should she interpret those words? As flirtatious concern, or outright threat? On impulse, she lowers her face to the card, and detects expensive, feminine scent. Her hand shaking, she replaces the card in the box, possessed by emotions she can’t immediately identify. Fear, certainly, but an almost stifling excitement, too. The woman who chose that beautiful, feminine object and wrote that message is a murderer. A stone-cold professional assassin whose every word is a lie, and whose every action is calculated to unsettle and manipulate. To meet her gaze, as Eve did just hours ago, is to look into a heart-freezing void. No fear, no pity, no human warmth, only their absence.
Just metres away on the patio, talking enraptured nonsense to the goats – the goats – is the best and kindest man that Eve has ever known. The man into whose warm body, familiar but still mysterious, she moulds herself at night. The man whose unaccountable love for her has no horizon. The man to whom she now lies with such fluency that it’s almost second nature.
Why is she so stirred by this lethally dangerous woman? Why do her words cut so deep? That cryptic V is no accident. It’s a name, if only a partial one. A gift, like the bracelet. A gesture at once intimate and sensual and profoundly hostile. Ask and I will answer. Call and I will come for you.
How have the two of them locked themselves so inescapably into each other’s lives? Could it be that, in some bizarre way, V is reaching out to her? Raising her arm, Eve touches the smooth gold to her cheek. What can this lovely, luxurious object have cost? Five thousand pounds? Six? God, she wanted it. Couldn’t she perhaps just not say anything? Now that she’s committed herself to a completely unprofessional course of action by unwrapping the thing in the first place, and quite possibly compromising forensic evidence, wouldn’t it be easier to just . . . keep it?
With a flush of shame and regret, she removes the bracelet and places it back in its box. Fuck’s sake. She’s reacting precisely as her adversary wants her to. Falling for the most blindingly obvious temptation, and personalising the situation in a completely irrational fashion. How egotistical and delusional, to think that she, Eve, is the object of this V person’s affection or desire. The woman is without doubt a narcissistic sociopath, and attempting to undermine Eve through passive-aggressive taunting. To think otherwise, even for an instant, flies in the face of everything Eve has ever learned as a criminologist and an intelligence officer. She takes a carrier bag from the floor of the wardrobe and stuffs the box, card and tissue inside with a gloved hand.
‘Anything?’ Niko calls out from the kitchen.
‘No,’ she says. ‘Nothing.’
On the Eurostar, no one takes much notice of the young woman in the black hoodie. Her hair is greasy, her pallor unhealthy, and there’s something indefinably dirty about her. She’s wearing scuffed black motorcycle boots, and her insolent posture
