The launch pulls up, with Atlas at the helm. Emir takes off his shoes, wades out, and climbs in.
‘Goodbye, Defne,’ Oxana says quietly.
Defne looks at her appraisingly, reaches for Oxana’s hand, and folds something small and hard into it. ‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘And goodbye.’
45
Eve isn’t sure that she’s ever seen anywhere as beautiful as the Aegean Sea from the air. The brassy sky, the translucent sea, the precipitous islands with their miniature harbours and their clustered white dwellings. And the dazzling light, pouring into the cockpit of the circling helicopter.
The pilot points downwards. ‘Skila. We land on the beach, OK?’
Eve gives him a thumbs-up. The island’s tiny. A near-vertical cliff sloping down to a beach of bone-white sand, with a single white villa set on a rock shelf. And there, on the beach, a single figure.
The helicopter comes in low over the shallow turquoise waves. Above the beach it levels, seems to rock in the air, and touches down in a whirl of sand.
The pilot reaches across Eve to open the passenger door, and she climbs out. Oxana is standing some distance away, watching with wary, exhausted eyes. She’s unzipped her wetsuit to the waist, revealing a black one-piece swimsuit. Her dark blonde hair is unkempt and stiff with salt. Her face and arms are tannedpinkish-brown, her forehead, nose and shoulders are peeling, and a blackish, bloody line is scored across her upper neck.
Eve approaches her, conscious of each step, feeling her sandals pressing into the thin surface crust of sand. She sees that the line across Oxana’s neck is a bullet track, and a recent one, judging by the raw state of the wound.
Oxana watches her, not moving, not blinking.
‘Johnny said you needed me.’
The faintest of nods.
‘So I’m here.’ Eve holds out a hand. ‘It’s time to go.’
46
They’ve booked into the Hotel Grande Bretagne in Athens. Oxana is lying on the bed in their room with her neck bandaged and sterile dressings on both feet when Eve returns from shopping. It’s a few minutes before 7p.m.
‘What did you get?’ Oxana murmurs suspiciously.
‘Nice things,’ Eve says, lowering half a dozen shopping bags to the floor. ‘The kind you like. Just trust me for once.’
‘Because I literally haven’t got anything. It’s all still on the yacht, in my cabin.’
‘Oxana!Thank me.’
‘Thank you, Eve.’
‘Say it like you mean it.’
‘I do mean it.’ She reaches out her arms to Eve, pulls their faces together, and kisses her. ‘Thank you.’
When the helicopter dropped them at Koropi heliport, a couple of hours earlier, Oxana was wearing only her black one-piece swimsuit and trainers; the wetsuit had been abandoned on the beach at Skila. Impressively, the front desk staff at the Grande Bretagne didn’t bat an eyelid at the sight of a half-naked young woman with matted hair and a badly wounded neck.Instead, a bellboy was dispatched to bring a towelling robe to reception, and the hotel doctor was summoned.
‘May I ask how you came by such a wound?’ the doctor asked mildly, as he stitched Oxana’s neck in the room that Eve has booked. ‘A sporting accident,’ Oxana told him, thinking of the Benelli shotgun that, in other hands, might have killed her outright. ‘I promise I’ll be more careful in future.’
Eve, meanwhile, walked to the Attica department store near Syntagma Square where, the hotel concierge assured her, she would find everything she needed to replace her companion’s lost luggage. And perhaps, given the many luxury brand concessions, to pick out something nice for herself.
In the hotel room, Eve walks to the window. ‘What was the yacht like?’
‘TheMedusa? Amazing. We should get one.’
Eve looks at her sideways. ‘We?’
There’s a long silence. ‘I’m sorry,’ Oxana says.