Oxana steps away from her, and watches expressionlessly, as with a despondent backwards glance, still speaking into her phone, Inci pulls her dressing gown around her and leaves.
After a few minutes of lip-biting, groaning and swearing into my pillow, I calm down. Maybe, just maybe, this wasn’t the worst thing in the world that could have happened. If Johnny finds Eve, which he will, and if she agrees to come here (which she may not, but if she does), I don’t want to be carrying around an unexploded truth bomb in the form of Inci. I wasn’t lying, I do need Eve. I long for her. But truthfully, if Inci and I hadn’t been interrupted, would I have thrown caution to thewind and let things take their course? Of course I would. In a flash. I’m me, aren’t I?
38
‘Tell me,’ Philippa says, her voice steady.
Eve holds the phone close to her mouth. ‘Someone came here. Looking for… him.’
‘And?’
‘That person’s still here.’
Silence while Philippa digests this information. ‘How is he? The visitor.’
‘Not well.’
‘You?’
‘OK. But I could use help with… with cleaning up.’
A longer silence. ‘Go nowhere. Do nothing. Help will come. Promise you’re OK.’
‘I promise.’
‘Good. Wait. There will be a password. Which you will know.’
‘How will I know?’
‘In the context of your true desire.’
‘What do you?—?’
The phone goes dead.
‘Shit.Shit.’ Eve shoves it helplessly into her pocket. Around her, the room is chaos. Chaos that it’s impossible to focus on, oreven see, because there, in the centre of the floor, his clawed face staring, his right eye surmounted by the hilt of Philippa’s dagger, his mid-region an oozing red swamp, is Finbarr Williams. There’s blood everywhere. On Eve’s hands and arms, on the sleeve of her sweater and the knee of her jeans, on the carpet, on the floorboards, on last week’sRadio Times, on Philippa’s discarded hoodie, and in a thick, darkening pool around the body. On the sofa, Pyewacket is licking his bloody paws.
This is a fucking nightmare. Everything I left London, and Oxana, to avoid. How did I get caught up in it again? To hell with Philippa, her stupid-ass son and her tinpot witchcraft. Why does shit like this follow me around? Seriously. Do I seek it out? Is there something about me which attracts violence and chaos? Because that’s not who I am or have ever been. I came here to reclaim my old self. To be who I once dreamed of being.
But there’s no chance of that now. You don’t get to walk away from something like this. There’s the body of a man stiffening at my feet in several pints of his own blood, and no matter that he was a bad man, a man who destroyed lives without a thought, I can’t get around the fact that I killed him. I will be named, my life will be raked over by tabloid journalists – Ex-Spy in Drug Slaying – and I will be memorialised in a low-budget Netflix true-crime documentary. This is not the future that my parents hoped for me.
It’s nearly midnight when Eve decides to turn herself in. She’s been sitting, almost unmoving, for hours. She’s going to ringJack Demerell, as kind and decent a man as she’s ever met, and ask him to take charge of the situation. Ask him to ring the police and wait for them with her. He’ll be shocked, but he’ll come. She’ll call him, she decides, on the stroke of midnight.
The minutes and the seconds pass, and Eve’s reaching for her phone when there’s a knock at the door. A quiet knock, but Eve almost jumps out of her skin. Heart pounding, she crosses the room, steps into the hallway, and opens the door a crack. Standing outside is a middle-aged female police officer in a yellow high-vis vest.
Eve stares at her, speechless and open-mouthed. She feels an immense, overwhelming tiredness. But it had to end this way. The police officer, who has dark, tightly braided hair, steps closer to the door. ‘Spice Girls,’ she murmurs.
Eve continues to stare.
‘The password, Eve.Spice Girls. Don’t keep me standing here.’
Wide-eyed, Eve opens the door, and the woman hurries inside. She inspects the carnage in the sitting room briskly and professionally, sees Pye watching her from the sofa, and sits down next to him. Unbelievably, she grins. ‘You haven’t got such a thing as a cup of tea, have you?’
Still wide-eyed, Eve nods.
‘Best make a pot. There’ll be a few of us.’
‘You’re… You’re not?—’