She smiles. ‘You’re just that tiny bit too good to be true, aren’t you? And you’re not quite as young as you’d have me believe, either.’ She mirrors his gesture, running a finger across his cheekbone. ‘How many other women have you brought out here? Quite a few, I’m sure.’
‘You’re a scary woman, Eve. I haven’t even kissed you yet.’
Desire ripples through her with unexpected force. ‘That sounds lovely, but it’s not going to happen.’
‘Seriously?’
She shakes her head.
‘That’s a pity, Eve. For you and for me.’
‘I expect we’ll both survive, one way and another. And now I have to find my friend.’
Looking into the interior, she sees Giovanna moving towards them. ‘And here she is. Claudio, this is—’
‘I know who it is. Buona sera, Giovanna.’
‘Buona sera, Claudio.’ There’s a moment’s silence.
‘I should go,’ Claudio says. He bows, with just detectable irony, to both of them. ‘Arrivederci.’
‘Well,’ says Giovanna, watching him disappear into the crowd. ‘You don’t waste any time. And as it happens, neither do I. I have some news for you.’
‘Tell me.’
‘I was talking to the Contessa di Faenza, a big customer of mine. And I realised that the woman standing next to her was wearing the scent I told you about. The one the Russian who bought your bracelet . . .’
‘Oh my God. Go on.’
‘Well, the contessa is talking to me about some prêt-à-porter show she’s been to in Milan, and I see the other woman walk away. Obviously I can’t just follow her, but I watch her, and remember what she’s wearing, and five minutes later, when the contessa finally lets me go, I set off in search of her.’
‘And?’
‘I can’t find her. I look everywhere, on both floors, but she’s disappeared. And then I go into the Ladies’, and there she is, standing in front of the mirror, actually putting on the scent. So I walk behind her, and check that it’s the one I remembered, and it is.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Absolutely sure. Freesia, amber, white cedar . . . So I tell her how much I like it, we get talking – her name’s Signora Valli, it turns out – and I ask her what her scent is called.’ She hands Eve a folded slip of paper. ‘I wrote the name down this time, to make sure.’
Eve opens the paper and stares at the single word written there. There’s a moment of ferocious clarity, as if ice-water is racing through her veins. ‘Thank you, Giovanna,’ she whispers. ‘Thank you so, so much.’
Oxana is lying on a steel bunk in a Russian stolypin prison train surrounded by grey, indistinct figures. There are no windows; she has no idea of the terrain through which the train is moving, nor does she know how long she has been on the train. Days, certainly, perhaps weeks. The steel-panelled stolypin compartment is her whole world. It smells of shit and piss and rancid bodies, but the cold is worse. The cold is like death, and its icy hand is closed around her heart.
A figure stirs on the bunk opposite her. ‘You’re wearing my bracelet, Villanelle.’
She tries to explain, to show Eve her bare, shackle-bruised wrists. ‘My name is Oxana Vorontsova,’ she says.
‘Where’s Villanelle?’
‘Dead. Like the others.’
Jolting awake, her heart pounding, Villanelle gradually identifies the outlines of her room at the Gasthof Lili. It’s just gone 3 a.m. The room is cold, she’s naked, and the duvet has slipped from the narrow bed onto the floor. ‘Fuck you, Polastri,’ she mutters, pulling on her tracksuit and wrapping herself in the duvet. ‘Get out of my head.’
Four hundred miles away, Eve is also awake, sitting on the side of her hotel bed in her bunny-print pyjamas. Her feet are on the terrazzo-tiled floor and her head is in her hands. She’s pretty sure she’s going to be sick. She closes her eyes. Immediately, her equilibrium goes into free-fall, and she staggers towards the window, bile rising in her throat. A desperate fumble with the shutters, a glimpse of the canal rocking dark and greasy below, and she’s clutching the rail of the balcony, and vomiting, far from silently, into a moored gondola.
Chapter 5
It’s late afternoon, and an animated buzz and the clink of glassware rises from the departure lounge at Flugrettungs zentrum, Innsbruck’s heliport, as Max Linder’s invited guests talk, laugh and sip Pol Roger champagne. Those present are not the entire contingent of guests; some were flown up to the Felsnadel earlier in the day, others will follow tomorrow, and the atmosphere is one of high anticipation. In far-right circles Linder is known as a witty, generous and imaginative host. To be invited to one of his mountain retreats is not only to be identified as one of the elite, it is to be guaranteed a spectacularly good time. Max, everyone agrees, is fun.
No one pays much attention to the slight figure with the scrappy ponytail standing by the plate-glass exit door. Her passive demeanour and her cheap clothes and luggage clearly identify her as a person of no consequence, and she speaks to no one. When she arrived at the heliport an hour ago she identified herself to the Felsnadel Hotel representative as Violette Duroc, a temporary room attendant sent by a local personnel agency. The hotel representative glanced at a clipboard, crossed her name off a list, and made it clear to her that although she was to be flown up to the Felsnadel with the hotel guests, fraternising with them was strictly verboten.
If Villanelle is invisible to her fellow travellers, they are not invisible to her. Over the course of the last fortnight, she has researched most of
