‘She’ll be found,’ Villanelle says. ‘But not immediately. We should go to the hotel. We’re supposed to be sisters, right?’
‘Yes, I told them I was picking you up from Marco Polo airport.’
‘Wouldn’t I have luggage?’
‘In the locker.’
Villanelle inspects the calfskin Ferragamo bags. ‘So who are we?’
‘Yulia and Alyona Pinchuk, co-owners of MySugarBaby.com, a dating agency based in Kiev.’
‘Nice. Which am I?’
‘Yulia.’
Villanelle settles back against the cream leather passenger seat of the launch. ‘Let’s go. We’re done here.’
In the restaurant of the Hotel Excelsior on the Lido, Villanelle and Lara are sipping pink Mercier champagne, and eating iced frutti di mare from a tiered silver stand. The room, a pillared Moorish fantasia in shades of white and ivory, is not quite full; it’s late in the season and the summer crowd has moved on. There’s an animated buzz of conversation, nevertheless, frequently interrupted by laughter. Beyond the terrace, indistinct in the dusk, is the lagoon, its surface a shade darker than the sky. There’s not a whisper of a breeze.
‘You did well today,’ says Villanelle, spearing a langoustine with her fork.
Lara touches the back of her hand to Villanelle’s warm shoulder. ‘Thank you for mentoring me, kroshka. This whole work experience has been incredibly valuable. I’ve learned so much. Seriously.’
‘You’re certainly starting to dress more stylishly. Not so lesbiskoye porno.’
Lara smiles. In her silk-chiffon dress, with her cropped hair and bared, muscular arms, she looks like some mythical goddess of war.
‘Do you think they’ll be sending you out on solo actions soon?’ Villanelle asks.
‘Possibly. The problem is my languages. Apparently I still speak English like a Russian, so they’ve got me a temporary position as an au pair.’
‘In England?’
‘Yes. Somewhere called Chipping Norton. Have you been there?’
‘No, but I’ve heard of it. It’s one of those dirty-money suburbs like Rublyovka, full of bored housewives snorting cocaine and fucking their tennis coaches. You’ll love it. What does the husband do?’
‘He’s a politik. A Member of Parliament.’
‘In that case you’ll probably have to get him to lick your pussy for kompromat.’
‘I’d rather lick yours.’
‘I know, detka, but work is work. How many kids?’
‘Twin girls. Fifteen.’
‘Well, be careful. Try not to hit them, or not so that it shows. The English are sensitive about that.’
Lara gazes into the oyster shell in her hand, lets a single drop of Tabasco fall into the brine, and watches the oyster’s tiny convulsion. ‘I wanted to ask you something. About today.’
‘Go on.’
‘Why did you have to do that whole poison thing? When you had the gun?’
‘You think I should have just threatened to shoot him if he didn’t talk?’
‘Why not? Much easier.’
‘Think. Play the scenario out in your mind.’
Lara pours the oyster down her throat and gazes out into the soft dusk. ‘Because it’s a stalemate game?’
‘Exactly. They’re tough, these old-school vory,even shit-sacks like Yevtukh, and in that world, face is everything. You can threaten to kill a guy like that if he doesn’t talk, but if he says go fuck yourself, what then? If you kill him, you don’t get his story.’
‘How about you shoot him through the hand or the foot, somewhere super-painful but not life-threatening, and tell him you’ll do the other one if he doesn’t talk?’
‘That’s smarter, but if you’re after the truth, you don’t want your subject in shock from a gunshot wound. People say very weird things when they’re traumatised. The whole point about the poison-antidote play is that it takes the game to him. He’s the one with the hard choice, not you. He may or may not believe you, and by the way there’s no known antidote for a lethal dose of aconitine, but he knows that his only chance of survival is to talk. If he stays silent he definitely dies.’
‘Checkmate.’
‘Exactly. It’s all in the timing. You’ve got to let the poison do its work so that it, and not you, is exerting the pressure. In the end he’ll be so desperate you won’t be able to shut him up.’
Much later, they’re lying in bed. A faint night breeze is agitating the curtains.
‘Thank you for not killing me today,’ Lara murmurs into Villanelle’s hair. ‘I know you considered it.’
‘Why would you say that?’
‘Because I’m beginning to understand how you work. How you think.’
‘So how do I think?’
‘Well, let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that you shot Rinat, like you did, and then you shot me, and you put both bodies on the boat and blew it up . . .’
‘Go on.’
‘When the police investigate the explosion, they’d find the remains of Rinat and a woman. And then when they talked to people at Rinat’s hotel they’d find out that he left by boat this morning with a woman.’
‘OK.’
‘So they’d assume that my remains were that woman’s. And that there had been some kind of fatal accident.’
‘And why would I go to all this trouble, detka?’
‘Well, the police wouldn’t look for you, because they’d think you were dead. And I really would be dead. The only person who knows who you are. The only person who knows that you used to be Oxana Vorontsova from Perm.’
‘I’m not going to kill you, Lara. Truly.’
‘But you thought about it.’
‘Maybe for a second or two.’ She turns to face Lara so that they are eye to eye, mouth to mouth, breathing each other’s breath. ‘But not seriously. You’re soon going to be a fully-fledged soldier for the Twelve. They wouldn’t be very pleased if I blew you into little pieces, now would they?’
‘Is that the only reason?’
‘Mmm . . . I’d miss all this.’ She runs her hand down Lara’s hard belly, her fingertips stroking the warm skin.
‘You’re so beautiful,’ Lara says, after a moment. ‘I look at you, and
