Johnny looks down at his knife and fork. He takes his linen table napkin and lays it carefully across his knees.
Eve turns to Oxana. ‘Angel, tell me this isn’t true.’ Her voice is shaking and unrecognisable, even to herself.
Oxana lifts her hands from the tablecloth and lets them fall. Her grey eyes meet Eve’s. ‘It is true. I’m sorry.’
Eve stares at her, speechless. ‘Why?’ she whispers eventually. ‘Why did you agree to it? Not for the money, surely. We?—’
Oxana’s gaze is steady. ‘It’s who I am,’ she says quietly. ‘It’s what I do.’
For a long moment, time stands still. Something inside Eve is in freefall, plummeting into a void, into darkness. She feels herself reach for the bag beside her chair. She feels her hand close around the rolled leather handles. She feels the pressure on her heels as she stands. It’s as if her body is acting independently of her. She looks from Johnny to Oxana, but whatever she’s looking for, she doesn’t find it in their faces. She turns her back on them, and somehow her legs carry her from the dining room, through the tall double doors, and down the front stairs of the club. As she passes the desk, she gives the reception staff a frozen smile, then proceeds to the street. A taxi is dropping passengers off nearby, and she raises her hand.
London passes in a blur. The walk from the road to the mansion block smells of green leaves and summer. The lift sighs and wheezes as it always does, as if nothing has changed. Inside the flat it’s cool and utterly silent. There’s a breath of Oxana’s Annick Goutal scent in the air. Eve makes coffee, her movements calm and methodical, and again there’s that sense of her body acting independently of her will. It knows what to do, and it gets on with it.
Finally, when the coffee has been made and poured, Eve sits on the arm of a chair and stares out of the window, at the motionless trees and the distant people and the dogs windingtheir way through the grass. She sees everything but feels nothing.
Oxana left me with no choice. The lie, and the scale of the lie. The fact that she made a deal with the Twelve and didn’t tell me about it? What does that make me? Who am I, in her life? The casual ease with which she was ready to launch herself, without me, into a suicidally dangerous mission. Leaving me… what? Sitting around in the flat, agonising? I can guarantee that she didn’t give me, or my feelings, a second thought. For her, it would have been all about the challenge. She’s always been up for anything, crazily so. Her mind doesn’t process danger in the usual way. It doesn’t convert it to fear. She doesn’t experience what I do: the dry mouth, the racing heart, the sick apprehension. Everything’s reduced to calculation. This makes her supremely good at what she does but leads her to make terrible decisions. Decisions that any normal person would instinctively reject.
That response. ‘It’s who I am… It’s what I do.’ It’s her way of telling me that all the things we’ve shared – the wild days, the blissful nights – count for nothing. I’ve reached for her, but I haven’t touched her, not deep inside, and I certainly haven’t changed her. The way she cut me out and turned me into a side-player in my own life, was the ultimate fuck you. Well, fuck you too, Oxana. I can’t do this any more. For my own self-preservation I have to leave. It’ll kill me, but I have to go.
She’s businesslike now, unhurried and organised as she changes out of her suit into jeans and a track top, and packs a cabin bag. She’s not yet sure where she’s going, but she knows what she needs. Ordinary, unremarkable clothes and shoes. Washbag. Laptop. Phone.
Everything’s going fine until, on the bedside table, Eve finds a small tortoiseshell clip in which a single blonde hair has been trapped. She sits down on the edge of the bed, slowly turning the clip in her hands, unable to stem thoughts of Oxana, and the bullet scar on her cheek, and her bravery, and her idiocy, and the things she doesn’t understand, and the multiple ways in which she can be hurt, and the way that she reaches for Eve like a blind kitten when she wakes. It’s all so unbearable and heart-twisting that Eve lowers her head to her hands and weeps uncontrollably for several minutes before forcibly halting herself, wiping her eyes, and continuing to pack.
When she’s ready to leave, she rolls back the bedroom carpet, and opens the combination safe that has been sunk, near-invisibly, into the floor. Ignoring the Glock and Sig Sauer handguns, the boxes of 9mm ammunition and the bundled passports, she reaches for the cash. There’s £20,000 in new notes, and she takes exactly half of them, before locking and closing the safe and replacing the carpet.
She walks out of the building without looking back and drags the cabin case behind her to Hampstead underground station. When she exits at Waterloo, her track top has been replaced by a raincoat, there’s a baseball cap on her head, and she’s wearing sunglasses. After studying the rail map carefully, she queues in the ticket hall and buys a single ticket to Exeter forcash, ensuring as she does so that the peak of her cap is pulled down well over her eyes. By 3.30p.m. she’s sitting in a half-full second-class train compartment with the cabin case on the seat next to her, and a cup of takeaway coffee and two packets of Waitrose shortbread fingers on the table in front of her. As the train pulls out of Waterloo Station into the sudden brightness of the afternoon, she leans back in her seat. She closes her eyes, and the full import of what she’s done rushes over her like a cold Atlantic breaker. She can’t breathe, she’s drowning, she’s made a horrible mistake, Oxana is Oxana and it can all be worked out.
But it can’t. Not any more.
3
Johnny and Oxana are having coffee in the club library. The room is dim and quiet, with deep Victorian armchairs and tall bookcases full of leather-bound volumes. Faded curtains flank tall windows, admitting shafts of dusty light.
‘Are you sure you’re OK?’ Johnny asks.
‘I am OK. But I need to speak to Eve. She’s upset.’
‘I think that’s understandable,’ Johnny says delicately.
‘I suppose it is.’
‘May I offer a word of friendly advice?’
‘Of course.’
‘Tell her the whole truth. Whatever it is, even if she’s not going to like it, tell her. Bad news only gets worse.’
Oxana nods, her expression subdued.
Johnny smiles. ‘I’m sure you can sort this out. Because overall, I think things have turned out well. The Twelve are the future, and they have bottomless resources. They respect us, and we respect them.’
Oxana bites her lip. She stares down at her pink-heeled Chanel mules.
‘She’ll come around, Oxana. But you have to make things right.’
‘I know.’ She closes her eyes. ‘I know.’
Shit. Shit, shit, shit, shit… This whole situation with Eve was avoidable. The truth is that I never really thought of the deal with the Twelve as a deal, more of a friendly conversation. Yes, Gladstone made it clear that the Twelve wanted me back, and yes, the figure of five million pounds was quoted, and yes, that very amount appeared in the bank account that Eve and I share, but indolent bitch that I am, I chose to view it as more of a goodwill gesture than an actual, binding retainer. Not that I’m blaming myself, but…