You are a spy, an inner voice whispers. It’s what you always wanted. You’re here because you chose to be here. Because, in the face of wiser counsel, you insisted on it. You wanted this.
‘Please,’ she says again in halting, pleading Russian. ‘Where are we going?’
Once again the pig-men ignore her. Her heel hurts badly now, the pain driving upwards like a blade. But the pain is nothing compared with the fear. One of the men presses the elevator’s call button, and there’s a distant mechanical clanking. Eve’s shaking now. The possibility of imposing herself on the situation has evaporated. She feels utterly, mutely helpless.
The service elevator doors open with a metallic shriek, and Eve is led inside. The doors close and the elevator begins a slow, grinding descent, the pig-men leaning against the dented walls with folded arms and blank faces. From somewhere in the building Eve senses a mechanical pulse. Faint at first, but growing louder as the elevator moves downwards. The noise becomes a roar, making the elevator shudder. She digs her fingernails into her hand. This is the twenty-first century, she tells herself. I’m an Englishwoman with a husband, a Debenhams store card, and a kilo of fresh tagliatelle in the freezer. Everything will be all right.
No, the voice whispers. It fucking well won’t. You’re a pathetically amateurish spy, hopelessly out of your depth, and now you’re paying the price of your fantasies. This nightmare is real. This is really happening.
Finally, the doors open. They’re in an atrium identical to the one they left just minutes ago. The light is a sulphurous mustard colour, and the noise, relentless and terrifying, is all around them. The pig-men march Eve into yet another corridor, and she follows them as best she can. If the journey is grim, she’s certain that the arrival will be worse.
Ten minutes later, she’s utterly disoriented. She senses that they’re underground, but that’s all. The mechanical roar is quieter now, although still audible, and the place seems to have other occupants. She can hear doors rattling and creaking, and a faint sound that could be shouting. They turn a corner. A tiled floor underfoot, the peeling walls suffused in that horrible mustard-coloured light. At the head of the corridor a door is open, and her guards pause long enough for Eve to look inside. At first glance the interior resembles a shower room, with a sloping concrete floor, a drain, and a coiled hose. But three of the walls are padded, and the fourth is made of splintered logs.
Before Eve has time to guess at the implications of this room, she’s moved into a row of cells, with reinforced doors and observation hatches. The pig-men stop outside the first of these, and pull it open. Inside there’s a stoneware basin, a bucket and a low bench against one wall. On the bench is a soiled palliasse. Light is provided by a low-wattage bulb protected by a wire grille. Open-mouthed and disbelieving, Eve allows herself to be manhandled inside. Behind her, the door slams shut.
Locking and bolting the door of her Paris apartment behind her, Villanelle drops her bag and curls, catlike, into a grey leather and chrome armchair. With her eyes half closed she looks around her. She’s grown very attached to its restful sea-green walls, anonymous paintings and worn, once-expensive furniture. Beyond the plate-glass window, framed by heavy silk curtains, is the city, silent in the twilight. She gazes for a moment at the faint shimmer of the illuminations on the Eiffel Tower, and then dips into her bag for her phone. The SMS message is still there, of course. The one-time burn code dispatched with a single keystroke.
They were in bed together in Venice when Lara showed Villanelle her phone. ‘If you ever get this text, I’ve been taken and it’s all over.’
‘That won’t happen,’ Villanelle replied.
But it has happened, and here is the text. ‘I love you.’
Lara did love her, Villanelle knows. She still does, if she’s alive. And for a moment, Villanelle envies her that capacity. To share another’s happiness, to suffer another’s pain, to fly on the wings of real feeling rather than to be forever acting. But how dangerous, how uncontrollable, and ultimately how ordinary. Better, by far, to occupy the pure, arctic citadel of the self.
It’s bad that Lara’s been taken, though. Very bad. Rising from the grey leather chair, Villanelle walks to the kitchen, and takes a bottle of pink Mercier champagne and a cold tulip glass from the fridge. In thirty-six hours she flies to London. There are plans to be made, and they are complex.
In Eve’s cell, the light flickers and goes out. She has no idea what time it is, or even if it’s night. No guards have returned with food, and although she’s painfully hungry, she’s also desperate to avoid the shame of having to empty her bowels into the bucket. Thirst has forced her to take sips from the tap in the basin. The water is brownish and tastes of rust, but Eve is beyond caring.
She seems to have been lying on the hard bench for hours, her mind alternately racing off at frantic tangents and sinking into a sick fog of despair. At intervals, she’s overtaken by shaking fits, caused not by the cold, although it is cold, and her sweater painfully thin, but by the endlessly reshuffling memory of events in the metro. Nothing in her life has prepared her for the flutter of a bullet parting her hair. For the sight of an infolding face, and outpouring brains. Who was he, the old man with the pale eyes, whose last living act was to smile at a stranger? Who was the man she killed? Because I did kill him, Eve tells herself. I killed him with my stupid, misplaced self-belief, as surely as if I shot him myself.
She stands up in the dark, endures another bout of the
