Villanelle stares at it. The sprinkles look like multiplying bacilli. The installation, or sculpture or whatever it is, conveys nothing to her.
“Are you coming in?”
The woman—late thirties, black cocktail dress, wheat-blonde hair pulled back in a chignon—is leaning out of the glass door of the gallery, holding it half-closed to keep the cold air at bay.
Shrugging, Villanelle enters the gallery, losing sight of the woman almost immediately. The place is packed with prosperous-looking invitees. A few are looking at the paintings on the walls but most are facing inwards, conversing in tight groups as catering staff edge between them with canapés and bottles of cold Prosecco. Sweeping a glass from one of the trays, Villanelle positions herself in a corner. The paintings seem to have been reproduced from blown-up press photographs and blurry snatches of film. Anonymous, faintly sinister groupings, several with the faces blacked out. A man in a velvet-collared coat is standing in front of the nearest painting, a study of a woman in the back seat of a car, her shocked features lit by photo-flash, her arm raised against the invading lenses of the paparazzi.
Studying the man’s expression—the faint frown of concentration, the unwavering gaze—Villanelle duplicates it. She wants to be invisible, or at least unapproachable, until she’s finished her drink.
“So what do you think?”
It’s the woman who invited her in. The man in the velvet-collared coat moves away.
“Who is she, in the painting?” Villanelle asks.
“That’s the point, we don’t know. She could be a film star arriving at a premiere, or a convicted murderer arriving for sentencing.”
“If she was a murderer she’d be handcuffed, and she’d arrive at the court in an armoured van.”
The woman looks at Villanelle, takes in the chic Parisian crop and the Balenciaga biker jacket, and smiles. “Are you speaking from experience?”
Villanelle shrugs. “She’s some burnt-out actress. And she’s probably wearing no pants.”
There’s a long moment’s silence. When the woman speaks again, the register of her voice has subtly changed. “What’s your name?” she asks.
“Manon.”
“So, Manon. This event will take another forty minutes, and then I’m closing the gallery. After that I think we should go and eat yellowtail sashimi at Nobu in Berkeley Street. What do you say?”
“OK,” says Villanelle.
Her name is Sarah, and she had her thirty-eighth birthday a month ago. She’s talking about conceptual art, and Villanelle is nodding vaguely but not really listening. Not to the words, anyway. She likes the rise and fall of Sarah’s voice, and she’s touched, in an abstract sort of way, by the tiny age-lines around her eyes, and by her seriousness. Sarah reminds her, just a little, of Anna Ivanovna Leonova, a teacher at Industrialny District secondary school, and the only adult, except her father, to whom she’s ever formed a real, unsimulated attachment.
“Is that good?” Sarah asks.
Villanelle nods and smiles, examining a pearlescent sliver of raw fish before crushing it, pensively, between her teeth. It’s like eating the sea. Around them, soft lights touch surfaces of brushed aluminium, black lacquer and gold. There’s a whisper of music; conversation rises and falls. Sarah’s lips form words, and Sarah’s eyes meet hers, but it’s Anna Ivanovna’s voice that Villanelle hears.
For two years the teacher nurtured her charge’s exceptional academic gifts, and showed endless patience for her graceless, barely socialised behaviour. Then one day, Anna Ivanovna wasn’t there. She’d been attacked and sexually assaulted while waiting for a late bus home from school. In hospital the teacher was able to describe her assailant to the police, and they arrested an eighteen-year-old former pupil named Roman Nikonov, who had boasted of his intention to show the unmarried teacher “what a real man felt like.” But the police botched the forensics, and in the end Nikonov was released on a technicality.
“Manon!” She feels Sarah’s cool hand take hers. “Where are you?”
“Sorry. Miles away. You remind me of someone.”
“Someone?”
“A teacher at my school.”
“I hope she was nice.”
“She was. And she looked like you.” Except that she didn’t. She was really nothing like Sarah. Why had she thought that? Why had she said that?
“Where did you grow up, Manon?”
“St. Cloud, outside Paris.”
“With your parents?”
“With my father. My mother died when I was seven.”
“Oh my God. That’s awful!”
Villanelle shrugs. “It was a long time ago.”
“So what did she…”
“Cancer. She was just a couple of years younger than you.” Cover stories are part of Villanelle’s life now. Clothes she puts on, takes off, and hangs up for next time.
“I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be.” Withdrawing her hand from Sarah’s, Villanelle opens the menu. “Look at this! Wild strawberry sake jelly. We have to have some.”
She’s always regretted that it was too dark to see Roman Nikonov’s expression when she castrated him in the woods by the Mulyanka river. But she remembers the moment. The smell of the mud, and of the exhaust from his Riga moped. The pressure of his hand on her head, forcing her to her knees. The throttled screams, carrying far out over the water, as she pulled out the knife and hacked his balls off.
Sarah lives in a tiny flat over the gallery. As they walk back there, hand in hand, they leave dark footprints in the new snow.
“OK, I get the paintings, but what’s that?” Villanelle asks, pointing to the cryptic installation in the gallery window.
Sarah keys a code into the keypad by the door. “Well… the stuffed weasel was a present, given to me as a joke. And the sprinkles were in the kitchen. So I put them together. Quite fun, don’t you think?”
Villanelle follows her up a narrow flight of stairs. “So it doesn’t mean anything at all?”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t think anything. I don’t care.”
“So what do you—”
Villanelle half-turns and pins her to the wall, silencing her with her mouth. It’s a moment that’s been inevitable, but Sarah’s still taken by surprise.
Much later, she wakes to see Villanelle sitting upright in bed, her lean upper body silhouetted against the first dawn light. Reaching for her, Sarah runs a hand down her arm, feels the hard curves of her deltoid and bicep. “What exactly was it that you said you did?” she asks wonderingly.
“I didn’t say.”
“Are you going?”
Villanelle nods.
“Will I see you again?”
Villanelle smiles, and touches Sarah’s cheek. Dresses quickly. Outside, in the little square, there’s virgin snow, and silence. Back at the South Audley Street apartment, she kicks off her clothes and is asleep within minutes.
When she awakes it’s past noon. In the kitchen there’s a half-full cafetière of Fortnum & Mason’s Breakfast Blend coffee, still warm. Several sizeable carrier bags stand by the front door, where Konstantin has left them.
She checks the goods. A pair of tortoiseshell-framed glasses with pale-grey lenses. A parka with a fur-trimmed hood. A black polo-neck sweater, a plaid skirt, black woollen tights and zip-up boots. She tries it all on, walks around, accustoms herself to the look. The outfit needs wearing in, so she drinks a cup of the cooling coffee, leaves the apartment building, and makes her way across Park Lane to Hyde Park.
Again, that umber sky, against which the avenues of leafless beeches and oaks are a darker grey-brown. It’s early afternoon but the light is already ebbing. Villanelle walks fast along the slush-banked paths, hands in pockets, head down. There are other walkers, but she barely glances at them. At intervals statues loom out of the dimness, their outlines blurred with encrusted snow. On a balustraded bridge across the Serpentine she pauses for a moment. Beneath a cracked and starred pane of ice the water is a lightless black. A realm of darkness and forgetting to which, on days like this, she feels herself almost hypnotically drawn.