The Stag is a building of uncertain age at the south end of Fairley High Street. Eve walks into a stone-floored bar, busy but not overcrowded with customers. She’s fifteen minutes early forher booking, so she sits by the window with a glass of mineral water. The place looks pretty traditional. Antique farming implements on the wall, a nicotine-brown ceiling, and a moth-eaten, glassy-eyed stuffed badger surveying the action from a shelf above the fireplace.
In London, Eve and Oxana never went to pubs. Most play obnoxious music, serve terrible food, and are so jam-packed that conversation is impossible. But this bar is peaceful, and Eve can imagine herself coming here quite often. The other customers aren’t Barbour-jacketed metropolitan escapees, but ordinary, unremarkable people. No one feels the need to shout anyone else down, or to draw attention to themselves. She wouldn’t be invisible here, but people would leave her alone. Was she romanticising this imagined new life?
She’s led to her table by the maître d’hôtel, a man so French, and so outrageously charming, that she’s tempted to burst out laughing. As it is, she bites her lip and follows him demurely to her table. After the comfortable English shabbiness of the bar, the restaurant takes her by surprise. A spacious, sunlit room suspended over the River Avon, enclosed on three sides by the trailing green-leafed branches of a weeping willow, it seems to exist in a dimension entirely its own.
The maître d’hôtel directs Eve to a table overlooking the river, and she takes her seat, enchanted by the way the willow branches seem to echo the long emerald tresses of weed swaying in the current. Most of the other tables are occupied; no one looks up. The maître d’hôtel hands her a menu. She examines it for a moment and then hands it back to him.
‘You know what I’d really like?’
He smiles. ‘Tell me.’
‘I’d like you to choose my meal, the wine, everything. I’d like to be…amazed.’
He inclines his head. ‘It will give me great pleasure, madame. Thank you for your confidence. Do you have any preferences, or dislikes?’
‘I can’t imagine disliking anything here.’
‘Very well. Leave the selection to me. I will instruct your waiter.’
He withdraws, leaving Eve to gaze out over the river. The gin-clear water appears almost viscous.
Oxana drowned a man once. A colleague of mine named Dennis Cradle whom I’d discovered to be in the pay of the Twelve. Cradle was about to face a Security Service interrogation team when Oxana abducted him, battered him senseless, and tipped him into a weirpool on the River Wey in Surrey. He didn’t surface for days. Or was it weeks? That was when she and I were on opposite sides, of course, and our romance was in its infancy. But she was already flirting with me. Laying out the corpses of her victims for me, like gifts. Like a cat bringing home mutilated mice and birds.
I suppressed my responses to her, obviously. Shut them down completely. She was, in a very pure and absolute sense, my enemy. But I knew even then that there was nothing pure or absolute about our connection. She wanted me, that much was clear, but whether as her lover or her torture victim I had no idea.
She broke into the house I shared with Niko – how long ago that seems – and left me a beautiful Van Diest bracelet. In my bedroom drawer, for God’s sake. I pretended to be appalled, and of course I was, but at the same time the intimacy of the act, the sheer insolence of it, left me weak at the knees. It wasn’teven the first time she’d done something like this. She climbed into my hotel room in Singapore and watched me sleep. I should have felt horrified and violated when I discovered what she’d done, but the truth is that I felt faint with excitement at the thought of it. If I’m honest, I was hers thereafter.
And then we were in Russia, and in love. Sharing our lives and sharing the killing. The electrocution and drowning of the Pakhan in the bath house. His lips turning blue. The horrific shoot-out at Dasha’s apartment. The chaos of it. The blood, the bone fragments, the brain matter sliding down the walls…
The food is like nothing Eve has encountered before. A single scallop glazed with emerald-green seaweed that not only tastes of the sea but somehow distils the very essence of the sea. Poached quail eggs with salmon roe. Pigeon breast with white cherries and wild blackcurrant flowers. Course succeeds course, each in its way perfect, each accompanied by its chosen glass of wine.
‘How is everything, madame?’ the maître d’hôtel asks, materialising beside her. ‘Do you approve of our choices?’
‘Oh, I do,’ Eve murmurs, her thoughts swirling pleasurably. ‘I absolutely do. I think you’ve taught me something very important about food.’
He nods encouragingly.
‘That it’s not really about eating, it’s about… connection.’ The moment Eve’s spoken, she wonders if her words are completely banal, and indeed whether they even make sense. ‘I think what I’m trying to say is that the food doesn’t taste of food, but of ideas. Ideas of home, and childhood, and the countryside. Andthe wine tastes of dreams, the dreams you forget when you wake up.’
I’m drunk. I sound ridiculous. It feels so liberating to eat alone, in my own time, ignoring everyone and everything around me, and letting my thoughts swirl wherever. But maybe I just look tragic.
The maître d’hôtel gravely inclines his head. ‘If that is what you feel, madame, then we have succeeded. Thank you, it’s been a privilege.’
She stares at him. ‘Really?’
‘Really, madame.’
15
Oxana sits in the bedroom of the Hampstead flat, staring out of the window. Eve’s phone number is still out of service. In an hour a car will arrive to take her to Heathrow, from where she will fly to Athens. She will stay the night in the city, then take a taxi to the port of Piraeus, where she will be met by a representative of the Yilmaz family, and taken aboard theMedusa.
She runs a last-minute check of her luggage. She has a five-year-old British passport with EU stamps from fictional holidays in Spain and France, her Ruffley Royal graduation certificate, a driving licence, a credit card, a Boots loyalty card, and various other wallet items. All are in her own name and linked to a backstory which will withstand all but the most elaborate, high-tech vetting. The phone she will take has been loaded with contacts and history to support this identity. In her cabin case, neatly packed, is her Ruffley summer uniform, day and evening dresses from Zara, beach-wear from Marks and Spencer, and make-up basics in a Charlotte Tilbury organiser. She’ll be travelling in a pastel sundress and a white pointelle cardigan. She needs to look sensible, practical, and perhaps alittle conservative for her age, which according to her passport is twenty-six. Above all, she mustn’t give the faintest impression of sexual threat. To be fired from the Yilmaz family’s employment on the whim of one of its female members or guests would be a disaster.
Oxana tries ringing Eve’s phone one last time, then takes her own phone to the bedroom and places it on a chest of drawers. Her side of the bed is a mess; Eve’s – if it is still Eve’s – is neat and untouched. Her phone rings within seconds of her putting it down. It’s Johnny, to say that her car is downstairs, and that this is the last that she will hear from him until the job is completed. He asks if she’s heard from Eve, and is silent for several heartbeats when she says that she hasn’t.
On the way to Heathrow Oxana mentally interviews her fictional self. It’s a technique she’s found useful in the past. It helps her to come up with quick, natural-sounding answers when questioned, and the Yilmaz family will certainly question her. The key to surviving this kind of interrogation, she knows, is constant redirection. Fix on the least contentious aspect of the conversation – in this case, probably other people’s children – and don’t let go. Be elaborately boring. Don’t get dragged into troubled waters.
In keeping with her assumed identity, she travels economy class on a budget airline. On her right is a saturnine, exhausted-looking man, on her left a pale young woman with a pierced septum and blue hair. The young woman is reading a paperback calledThe Book of Judith, whose cover pictures a nude woman with dark bangs, holding a double-handed sword.