I can’t do this any more. I need my life back. I need my husband back. I need a routine, familiar things and places, a hand to hold on icy pavements, a warm body next to mine at night. I’ll make it up to you, Niko. I promise. All those evenings I spent whispering into my phone and staring at my laptop screen. All the secrets I kept, all the lies I told, all the love I withheld.
Reaching into her bag she searches for her phone, determined to draft a text to Niko, but her fingers find the envelope from Vadim Tikhomirov, which she has forgotten to open. Inside is a single sheet of paper. No message, just a black and white line illustration of a canary in a cage.
What does Tikhomirov mean? What is he not telling her, and why? Who, or what, is the canary?
And that woman in the photograph. Not Larissa Farmanyants, but Oxana Vorontsova, the Perm University gold medallist. Now dead, according to FSB records, but the doppelgänger of the woman she saw in Shanghai on the night Simon Mortimer was killed. Or is she imagining that, and making connections that simply aren’t there? She only saw the woman momentarily, after all. Eve winces with frustration. None of it quite fits together. From having too little information to work with, she’s now got too much.
Just as well then, that it no longer matters. Just as well that on Monday morning she is going to schedule a meeting with Richard Edwards, at which she is going to admit to him what she has finally admitted to herself, that she is out of her depth. That she’s decided to walk away from Goodge Street, MI6, and this whole toxic, terrifying mess, and reclaim her life.
At London City airport, she sends Richard an encrypted text to say that she’s back, and takes the tube home. Her phone battery’s dying, she’s starving and she desperately needs Niko to be at home, preferably cooking and with a bottle of wine open. At Finchley Road station she drags her case up the steps to the exit. Outside, the pavements are shining with rain, and she puts her head down and half walks, half runs through the illuminated darkness. Turning into her street, the wheels of her suitcase whirring and skidding behind her, she sees the unmarked van parked a few cars down from her building, and, for the first time, feels truly grateful for the watchers’ presence. Then, seeing that the lights in the flat are unlit, her step slows.
Inside, the air is still and cold, as if long undisturbed. On the kitchen table there’s a note, secured in place by a vase of dying white roses whose fallen petals obscure the words.
Hope your trip went well, though don’t expect to hear the details. Have taken car and goats, and gone to stay with Zbig and Leila. Not sure how long I’ll be gone. Hopefully long enough for you to decide whether you want us to go on being married.
Eve, I can’t continue like this. We both know the issues. Either you choose to live in my world, where people do normal jobs, and married couples sleep together and eat together and see their friends together and yes, perhaps it is a bit boring at times, but at least no one’s getting their throat cut. Or you choose to continue as you are, telling me nothing and working day and night in the pursuit of whatever and whoever, in which case sorry, but I’m out. I’m afraid it’s that simple. Your call. N.
Eve stares briefly at the note, then goes back and double-locks the door to the flat. A quick scavenge through the kitchen produces a tin of tomato soup, three limp samosas in an oily bag, and a date-expired blueberry yoghurt. She wolfs down the samosas and the yoghurt while the soup is heating on the stove. As if in reproach of her habitual untidiness, Niko has left the flat in scrupulous order. In the bedroom the bed is made and the blinds are lowered. Eve considers running a bath but gives it a miss; she’s too tired to think, let alone dry herself. After attaching her phone to the charger she takes the Glock automatic from her bedside drawer, and slips it under her pillow. Then she pulls off her clothes, and, leaving them in a pile on the floor, climbs into bed and is instantly asleep.
She’s woken around nine thirty by the chattering of the fax machine that Richard has insisted she install, on the basis that it’s supposedly more secure than encoded email. It’s a hastily scrawled invitation to a private view at an art gallery in Chiswick, west London, where, from midday onwards, Richard’s wife Amanda is exhibiting her paintings and drawings. ‘Come if you’re free, and we can chat,’ Richard signs off.
Chiswick is at least an hour away, and Eve doesn’t much feel like making the journey, but it will be a chance to tell Richard her decision in a neutral setting. ‘See you then,’ she faxes in response, then crawls back to bed, burying herself under the sheets for another hour. Fear, she’s discovering, is not a constant. It comes and goes, kicking in at odd moments with paralysing suddenness, and then receding, tide-like, to the point where she’s barely conscious of it. In bed, it takes the form of a fluttery nervousness just insistent enough to keep her awake.
The desire for breakfast eventually gets the better of her, and she pulls on a tracksuit, drops the Glock in her bag, and makes for the Café Torino in Finchley Road. Richard’s watchers know their stuff, surely? And if they don’t, and she’s beaten to the draw by a torpedo, it’s going to be with a large cappuccino and a cornetto alla Nutella inside her.
Appetite assuaged, she dials Niko’s number. When there’s no answer,
