Inside, a series of informal talks is under way. As Villanelle enters the reception area to report to Birgit that her rooms have all been cleaned, the tiny Italian fascist Leonardo Venturi is holding forth to half a dozen admirers.
‘Then, finally, the old order will fall,’ he declaims. ‘And a new golden age will come into being. But this will not be painless. For the new Imperium to be born, the roots of the old must be cut away without pity.’
‘Without what, old chap?’ asks Orr-Hadow.
‘Without pity. Without mercy.’
‘Sorry, thought for a moment you said without PT.’
‘What is PT?’
‘Physical training. At my prep school we had it every day. The instructor was an ex-military policeman, and if you didn’t do your press-ups properly you had to report for a cold shower. And he’d jolly well watch to make sure you stood there for a full five minutes, too. Marvellous old boy. Sorry, you were saying?’
But Venturi has lost his train of thought, and in the brief hiatus Villanelle makes her way across the reception area to the desk.
Birgit looks up, her expression frosty. ‘Room Seven. A complaint. You need to go straight away and deal with it.’
‘Yes, Birgit.’
Room Seven is Petra Voss’s. When Villanelle knocks on the door and opens it with her pass key, Petra is lying on the bed, smoking. She’s wearing jeans and an ironed white shirt.
‘Come over here, Violette. That is your name, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
Petra stares at her. ‘You’re quite a piece of work in that uniform, aren’t you? Quite the Aryan cutie-pie.’
‘If you say so.’
‘I do say so. Bring me something I can use as an ashtray.’
In response, Villanelle reaches forward, and takes the cigarette from Petra’s mouth. She walks over to the window, opens it, admitting a blast of cold air, and throws the cigarette out into the snow.
‘So. You don’t approve of me.’
‘You’re a guest. Obey the rules.’
Petra smiles. ‘Actually, I’m not a fucking guest. I’m paid to be here. A lot.’
‘Whatever.’
‘Such attitude from the maid.’ Languidly, Petra swings her legs from the bed, and stands so that she is eye to eye with Villanelle. Very slowly and deliberately, she draws Villanelle’s black neckerchief through its woven leather knot. ‘But then I’m your type, aren’t I?’
Villanelle considers. According to the hotel schedule the afternoon’s guest entertainment is an hour-long helicopter flight through the high peaks of the Tyrol and Carinthia, hosted by Linder. It’s due to depart from the landing strip at 2 p.m. She’s got, perhaps, an hour.
‘You might be,’ she says.
‘Konstantin Orlov,’ says Richard. ‘How strange to hear his name after all these years.’
He and Eve are sitting at a window table in a department store café. The café is on the fourth floor, overlooking Oxford Street. Eve is drinking tea, and Richard is staring without enthusiasm at a plate of reheated shepherd’s pie.
Eve smiles. ‘You’re wishing you hadn’t ordered that now, aren’t you?’
‘I panicked. Embarras du choix. Orlov’s dead, you say.’
‘Apparently, yes. Killed in unexplained circumstances, near Odessa.’
‘Sadly appropriate. His life was a series of unexplained circumstances.’ He looks out over the rooftops for a moment, then takes up his fork and determinedly addresses his meal. ‘So what’s his death got to do with our enquiry?’
‘He was killed in the house of a Ukrainian gangster called Rinat Yevtukh. A nasty piece of work.’
‘As they so often are. Go on.’
‘Last month Yevtukh vanished off the face of the earth while on holiday in Venice, after taking off in a motor launch with an unknown, and reportedly glamorous, young woman. Now we know that our female assassin was in Venice at that time, and I’m wondering if she killed Yevtukh as some kind of punishment for Orlov’s death.’
‘That presupposes a connection between her and Orlov. Is there any reason to think that such a connection exists?’
Eve sips her tea and lowers her cup to its saucer. ‘Not yet. But bear with me. We know that our female assassin – who we’re calling Villanelle, by the way, for reasons that I’ll explain – was in Venice. We know that she’s employed by the Twelve, the organisation that Cradle told us about.’
‘Whoever they might be.’
‘Yes. Now suppose, for argument’s sake, that Orlov worked for them too.’
‘Yes, I can see that if you suppose that, you can construct a revenge motive. But just because this woman and Orlov both had a connection to, um . . .’
‘Yevtukh.’
‘Exactly, to Yevtukh, it doesn’t mean to say that they knew each other. Equally, just because she’s in Venice at the same time as Yevtukh, it doesn’t mean she . . .’
They fall silent as an elderly woman pushes a shopping trolley very slowly past their table. ‘I had the cauliflower cheese,’ she confides to Eve. ‘It tasted of nothing at all.’
‘Oh dear. My friend’s enjoying his shepherd’s pie.’
‘That’s nice.’ The woman peers at Richard. ‘Bit simple, is he?’
They watch her go. Eve swallows the last of her tea, and leans forward. ‘Of course she killed him, Richard. He went off with her and never came back. The whole affair has her name written all over it.’
‘So what is her name again?’
‘I’m pretty sure that the name she uses professionally, or as a codename, is Villanelle.’
‘How did you arrive at that?’
She explains.
He puts down his fork. ‘You’re doing it again.’
‘What?’
‘This woman leaves you a card, sprayed with her scent and signed V. You discover that she uses a scent called Villanelle, so you conclude that she calls herself the same thing. That’s guesswork, not a logical consequence of the known facts. And the same is true of the connection between the woman—’
‘Villanelle.’
‘All right then, if you insist, between Villanelle and Orlov. You want it to be so, so you deduce that it is so.
