Killing Eve: Resurrection (6)

The sixth instalment of a new Killing Eve story, published exclusively on Substack

Over the next three days Villanelle runs every morning, checks the Twelve number station at eight hour intervals, dreams intermittently about Eve, plays fourteen games of online chess (winning eleven of them), and bakes a lemon drizzle cake. This is an act of revenge on Villanelle's part, because although not an especially good cook, Eve is always ready with sage advice about the arts of the kitchen. One of her more irritating sayings is "you can't bake when you're angry," and Villanelle is incandescent when she bakes the lemon cake. She rages against Eve, against Max and Maria, against the Twelve, against whoever's responsible for her forced and humiliating inaction, against everyone who's ever underestimated her. She beats the butter and the caster sugar until her arm aches, folding in the eggs and sifting in the flour with icily controlled fury. The drizzle cake turns out fabulously well, and Villanelle eats the whole thing, slice after moist lemony slice, while watching a pirated movie about lesbian nuns in Renaissance Italy.

            On the third morning, she interrupts her run to gaze at the sea, narrowing her eyes against its sharp glitter.

           I feel empty, exhausted by anger. Life in the flat was stifling and claustrophobic, but there was always Eve to sink my claws into. We drive each other crazy, but there's something about our relationship - an itch that has to be scratched, a longing that only the other can satisfy - which overrides all other considerations. I'll die before admitting it, but I'm transfixed by her absence. It's a blade in the guts.  It really hurts.

            When she turns back, a silent figure is waiting for her. A thin, pale boy, wearing a threadbare children's sailor suit, like a party costume. He stares at Villanelle, his gaze frozen, and holds out an envelope, which she takes. The frayed silk ribbon on his cap reads СТАНДАРТ. The Standard. A distant memory flickers. 'Who are you?' Villanelle asks, but the boy is already walking away, his shoes crunching on the shingle. She tears the envelope open. It contains a ticket to the State Russian Museum in Arts Square. On this someone has scrawled: 'Today 16:30'. 

Villanelle is there early, a watchful figure in the museum shop. From here she has a clear view of the sunlit entrance hall of the former imperial palace. She picks absently through the postcards, pausing on an eighteenth century portrait of a teenage girl, Anna Vorontsova. It's a common enough surname, but Villanelle wonders if this enigmatic young noblewoman might be her ancestor.

            She's had enough of keeping a low profile, of wearing ugly civilian clothes. She wants to have nice things again, although in truth what she wants is not Loro Piana sweaters or Alexander MacQueen boots but to feel as wild and heedless as she did in the Paris days, when money was for spending and Eve Polastri was just a name. Images of Eve flood her consciousness. Her eyes, sleepy behind reading glasses. The curve of her cheek. The faint lines at her throat. 'I can feel love,' Villanelle whispers to Anna Vorontsova. 'I can be wounded. Like ordinary people.' But Anna just smiles her secret smile, and Villanelle stuffs her back in the postcard rack.

            She clocks the guy a few seconds before he sees her. Fortyish, steel-grey hair, round spectacles and a vaguely academic air. He glances towards the bookshop, and his gaze slides over Villanelle before lifting to the pillared balcony. How does she know that this is the person she's supposed to be meeting? She's not sure, but she does. She moves unhurriedly towards him and they draw alongside each other at the foot of the grand staircase.

            'Sergei,' he says.

            'OK.'

            They climb the stairs to the first floor, and come to a halt in front of an Ilya Repin portrait of Alexandra Feodorovna, the last Tsarina of Russia.

            'Another world,' Sergei says.

            'I could have lived very happily at the court of the Tsar.'

            'I'm sure.' He removes his spectacles, polishes them with a square of crumpled silk, and replaces them. 'We haven't got Polastri. We're aware of the situation, but it wasn't us.'

            'Who's us?'

            'You know very well who we are.'

            'People keep saying that to me.'

            'We are who we've always been. The people who came for you in prison. The people who gave you a new name and a new life. Keep walking, don't look at me.'

            They stop in front of another portrait, this time of a full-figured man with an upswept moustache. 'Philippe de Lyon,' Sergei says. 'An interesting character.'

            'Not to me, he isn't. Answer my question. Where is she?'

            'Please,' murmurs Sergei, as members of a tour group approach. He indicates the painting. 'Philippe was brought from France to St Petersburg in 1903 by the Tsarina because she believed that he could influence the sex of children at an early stage of pregnancy. She and Tsar Nicholas, you see, were desperate for a male heir.'

            The tourists linger. They have the wide-eyed, uncertain look of provincial visitors. Villanelle glowers at them until, one by one, they withdraw. 'So who's got Eve?'

            'The short answer is that we're not sure. What I can tell you is that the people you were with at Apokalipsis are not ours.'

            'Right.' Villanelle's tongue touches the scar on her lip.

            'Go home. We need answers too. When we've got them we'll contact you.'

            'That's all?'

            'For now, yes.' He moves away, and is quickly lost amongst the other visitors. For the next hour Villanelle paces the gallery in a cold fury, staring intently at the paintings and seeing none of them.

            Why did I let Eve into my life? Why did I steal her away from her country and her people? Because I was bored? Because I was, God forbid, lonely? Before, everything was so good. A voluptuously comfortable life, sex whenever I felt like it, and the regular satisfaction of my darkest and most violent instincts. All of it in balance. All controllable. And now my world is in pieces. It's not as if Eve is beautiful, or even super-pretty. She can be unbelievably annoying. But she's Eve, she's mine, she's gone, and it's unbearable.

The story continues…