Luke Jennings - Codename Villanelle

“When it came to my turn Peter asked me to role-play a couple of scenes with him. One where I was booking into a hotel and I had to make the desk guy fall for me, and one where I had to approach a speaker after a lecture and seduce him, basically. The idea in both scenarios was to be super-flirty and charming but not come across like a hooker. Anyway, I gave it my best shot, and when I’d finished, he asked me to wait downstairs in this Cuban teahouse place and order anything I wanted. So I did, and forty minutes later he came down and said congratulations, I’ve seen everyone and the job’s yours.”

Over the next two days “Peter” went through everything that Lucy was required to do. She was measured for the clothes that she would wear, and told that this “costume” had to be precisely adhered to, with no changes or substitutions. On Friday afternoon she was to book into the Vernon Hotel under the name of Julia Fanin and take an overnight bag up to her room. Peter would provide the credit card that she would use and also the bag, which she was not under any circumstances to open.

Leaving the bag in the room, she was to walk to the Conway Hall, around the corner in Red Lion Square, and buy a ticket to the 8 p.m. lecture given by Viktor Kedrin. After the lecture she was to gain personal access to Kedrin, charm and flatter him, and arrange to meet him at his hotel later that night. With that done, she was to meet Peter on the corner of the square, give him her hotel room key-card, and take a taxi home to Queen’s Park.

The following morning, Lucy was told, Peter would pick her up early, drive her to Heathrow, and put her on a plane to Los Angeles. There she would be met, put up at a hotel, and given instructions for the second stage of filming.

“And that’s how it worked out?” asks Hurst.

“Yes. He came round at 6 a.m. with a first-class return to LA, and I was in the air by nine. I was met at the airport by a driver who took me to the Chateau Marmont, where I got a message that the filming had been cancelled, but I was welcome to stay on at the hotel. So I used the time to go and see some acting agents, and at midday yesterday caught the return flight to Heathrow. Where I was, um… arrested. For murder. Which was kind of a surprise.”

“Really?” asks Hurst.

“Yes, really.” Lucy wrinkles her nose and looks around the interview room. “You know, there’s a really weird smell of burnt toast in here.”

An hour later, Eve and Hurst are standing on the steps at the rear of the police station, watching as an unmarked BMW turns out of the car park, headed for Queen’s Park. Hurst is smoking. As the BMW passes, Eve catches a final glimpse of the flawless profile that she photographed in the Conway Hall.

“Do you think we’re ever going to get a useful description of this Peter character?” Eve asks.

“Unlikely. We’ll bring Lucy back to help us make up a Photofit when she’s had a few hours’ sleep, but I’m not hopeful. It was all far too well planned.”

“And you really don’t think she was in on any of it?”

“No. I don’t. We’ll check her story out in detail, obviously, but my guess is that she isn’t guilty of anything except naivety.”

Eve nods. “She so much wanted it to be true. The successful audition, the big break into TV…”

“Yeah.” Hurst treads out his cigarette on the wet concrete step. “He played her just right. And us, too.”

Eve frowns. “So how do you think two of Lucy’s hairs came to be in that overnight bag, if she never opened it?”

“My guess would be that Peter, or one of his people, took the hairs during the fake audition, perhaps out of her hairbrush. And then our shooter drops them in the bag after she’s taken Lucy’s place in the hotel. And here’s a question for you. Why Los Angeles? Why go to the trouble of flying that girl halfway round the world when she’s already played her part?”

“That’s easy,” says Eve. “To make sure she’s out of the picture by the time the news of the murder breaks. They can’t risk her reading about it online, or hearing about it on the radio, and going straight to the police with what she knows. So they make sure that she’s taking off for LA—an eleven-hour flight—at the precise time that the murder’s discovered on Saturday morning. Which not only renders Lucy incommunicado, but also sets a perfect false trail, giving the real killer and her team plenty of time to cover their tracks and vanish.”

Hurst nods. “And once she’s at the swanky Sunset Boulevard hotel…”

“She’s going to stay for the duration, exactly. She may, just possibly, see or read something about Kedrin, but that’s all happening on the other side of the world. Meanwhile, she’s got Hollywood agents to see. That’s what’s going to be uppermost in her mind.”

“And then, when they’re ready, and the DNA results are in, they serve her up to us on a plate.” He shakes his head. “You have to admire their cheek.”

“Yeah, well, cheeky or not, that woman shot four foreign nationals dead on our turf. Can we go back and see that CCTV footage again?”

“Absolutely.”

It’s been edited into a single, silent loop. Lucy Drake walking into the hotel foyer in her parka, carrying the valise, and checking in, the suggestiveness of her body language apparent. Lucy exiting the lift on the fourth floor and walking to Room 416. Lucy leaving the hotel without the valise, raising the hood of her parka as she goes.

“OK stop,” Eve says. “That’s the last of her, agreed? From now on the woman in the parka is our killer.”

“Agreed,” says Hurst.

He runs the footage in x16 slow-motion. Infinitely slowly, as if moving through treacle, the hooded figure enters the hotel, lifts a blurry hand in the direction of the front desk, and vanishes out of shot. Her face is invisible, as it is throughout the footage in the hotel corridors.

“Look at her planting that bug outside Kedrin’s room,” says Hurst. “She knows she’s on camera, but she doesn’t care, she knows we can’t make her. You have to admit, Eve, she’s good.”

“You weren’t able to pull any prints off the bug, or anywhere else?”

“Look closely. Surgical gloves.”

“Mother fucker ,” Eve breathes.

Hurst raises an eyebrow.

“She’s a murdering bitch, Gary, and she’s cost me my job. I want her, dead or alive.”

“Good luck with that,” says Hurst.

At their Avenue Kléber apartment, Gilles Mercier and his wife Anne-Laure are entertaining. Among those at dinner are a junior minister from the Department of External Trade, the director of one of France’s major hedge funds, and the executive vice president of Paris’s most important fine art auction house. Given the company, Gilles has gone to considerable trouble to ensure that everything is just so. The food has been catered by Fouquet’s on the Champs-Élysées, the wine (2005 Puligny-Montrachet, 1998 Haut-Brion) is from Gilles’s own carefully curated cellar, and precisely dimmed spotlights pick out the cabinet of ormolu clocks and the two Boudin oils of the beach at Trouville, which the executive vice president has recognised as fakes, and indeed has whispered as much to his younger male companion.

The conversation among the men has covered predictable ground. Immigration, the fiscal naivety of the socialists, the Russian billionaires forcing up the price of holiday homes in Val-d’Isère and the Ile de Ré, and the upcoming season at the Opéra. Their wives and the executive vice president’s friend, meanwhile, have covered the new Phoebe Philo collection, the fabulousness of Primark pyjamas, the latest Ryan Gosling film, and a charity ball that the hedge-fund director’s wife is organising.