‘Give us another clue,’ the husband murmurs.
‘Thirteen across: “Eliminate a flock of crows”,’ says his wife, and they both frown.
Villanelle, meanwhile, having disabled the location tracker on Eve’s phone and read all her disappointingly boring texts and emails, is thumbing through her photographs. Here’s Niko, the Polskiy asshole, in the kitchen. Here’s an Eve selfie at the optician’s, trying on new glasses (please, angel, not those frames). Here’s another of Niko with the goats (and what the fuck is with those animals, anyway? Do they mean to eat them?). And then there’s a whole series of celebrity portraits, which Villanelle guesses Eve has snapped from magazines so that she can show her hairdresser. Who’s this one? Asma al-Assad? Seriously, sweetie, that look is so not you.
Looking up, Villanelle sees from the high-rise blocks and graffiti-tagged walls that the train is entering the outer Parisian suburbs. Pocketing Eve’s phone and taking out her own, she rings her friend Anne-Laure.
‘Where have you been?’ Anne-Laure asks her. ‘I haven’t seen you in an age.’
‘Working. Travelling. Nothing interesting.’
‘So what are you doing this evening?’
‘You tell me.’
‘The prêt-à-porter shows start tomorrow, and tonight some of the younger designers are having a party on my friend Margaux’s boat at the Quai Voltaire. It’ll be fun, everyone will be there. We could dress up and have dinner at Le Grand Véfour, just the two of us, and go on to the party afterwards.’
‘That sounds nice. Margaux’s cute.’
‘Are you up for it?’
‘Definitely.’
The train is pulling into the Gare du Nord. Emboldened by their incipient arrival, the middle-aged couple look at Villanelle with frank dislike.
‘That crossword clue,’ she says to them. ‘ “Eliminate a flock of crows”. Did you work out the answer?’
‘Er, no,’ the husband says. ‘We didn’t, actually.’
‘It’s “murder”.’ She flutters her fingers. ‘Enjoy Paris.’
‘Run me through that again,’ says Richard Edwards. An intelligence officer of the old school, he is a vaguely patrician figure with thinning hair and a velvet-collared overcoat that has seen better days. ‘You say you were stopped by a person you thought was a police officer on a motorcycle.’
He, Eve, Billy and Lance are sitting in the Goodge Street office. A strip light casts a sickly glow. At intervals, there’s a muted rumbling from the Underground station beneath them.
‘That’s right,’ says Eve. ‘On the A303 near Micheldever. And I’m pretty sure it was a real police uniform and bike. The shoulder number and the plates both check out. They belong to a Road Policing Unit of the Hampshire Constabulary.’
‘Not easy to nick, I wouldn’t have thought,’ says Billy, leaning back in the computer chair that almost seems part of him, and absently fingering his lip-piercing.
‘Unless you’ve got someone inside that particular force.’
‘Lance is right,’ says Richard. ‘If they’ve penetrated MI5, then they’re certainly going to have people in the police.’
They look at each other. Eve’s earlier exhilaration is now just a memory. What possessed me? she wonders. This whole situation is a catastrophe.
‘OK, so this woman searches you, takes your phone and the ammunition clip from your Glock, and gets Dennis Cradle to pocket your car keys and deflate your tyres. You and she then have the conversation that you’ve described to me, in the course of which you notice that she’s wearing a bracelet that belonged to you.’
‘The bracelet was my mother’s, and this woman told me she stole it from my hotel room in Shanghai.’
‘And you never mentioned to her that you’d been to China.’
‘Obviously not.’
Richard nods. ‘So then she gives Cradle her spare crash-helmet, and drives him away on the motorcycle.’
‘That’s about the long and the short of it, yes.’
‘You then manage to wave down a car, borrow a phone, and ring Lance, who collects you in his car and drives you home. You get there at about 3 p.m., at which point you learn of the break-in at your house which took place at around 10.30 a.m.’
‘No. I already knew about that. My husband rang to tell me. That’s why I was driving home early from Dever with Dennis Cradle.’
‘Of course, yes. But there was no sign of anything having been disturbed, or taken from your home?’
‘No, nothing disturbed or taken. But this Van Diest bracelet, and the note, had been placed in my wardrobe.’
‘I suppose there’s no way of knowing where the bracelet was bought?’
‘I’ve checked with the company,’ Eve says. ‘There are sixty-eight Van Diest boutiques and concessions worldwide. It could have come from any one of them. It could have been bought over the phone or online. I suppose it’s a line of enquiry, but—’
‘And there’s absolutely no doubt in your mind that the woman who broke into your house, and the woman who stopped you on the A303 and abducted Cradle, were the same person?’
‘None. The whole thing with the bracelets is very much her style. She’d have calculated that if she was seen climbing out of my flat, and the police were rung, there was a good chance that a message would get to me within an hour or so. She’d guess that I’d drive Cradle straight back to London, and that would give her enough time to get up to the A303 to intercept us. It’d be tight, but it could be done, especially on a police motorcycle.’
‘OK, let’s assume that you’re right, and that this woman who signs herself V is the one we’ve been dealing with all along. The one who killed Kedrin, Simon Mortimer and the rest of them. Let’s further assume that she works for the organisation that Cradle talked about, the one he said was called the Twelve. We still haven’t answered either of the two key questions. One, how did she know that we were
