Mark Burnell - The Third Woman

The daughter of a rich arms-dealer, she’d married a Saudi oil billionaire. Stephanie had forgotten his name but remembered that he’d been in his sixties. A student at Princeton, highly academic, very beautiful, Zahani had only been twenty-two or twenty-three. There had been a lot of carping comment. Fifteen years later, following her husband’s death in Switzerland, Zahani had moved to Paris, several billion dollars richer. Since then, the French press had attempted to link the grieving widow with every eligible Frenchman over thirty-five. If she was bored by the facile coverage she received, she never let it show. She seemed content to be seen in public with potential suitors but they rarely lasted more than a couple of outings. There had been no affairs, no scandal.

It was only in the last five years that her business acumen had become widely acknowledged. Now she was regarded as one of the shrewdest investors in France. As Stephanie watched Scheherazade Zahani and Robert Newman, she wondered whether they were discussing the only thing she knew they had in common.

Oil.

I know something’s wrong the moment I enter Leonid Golitsyn’s suite on the fourth floor. I knocked on the door – there was no bell – but got no reply. There are no Ving cards here either, so I tried the handle and the door opened .

Golitsyn is in the bedroom, lying on the floor at the foot of the bed. A large Thomson TV throws flickering light over his body. A game show is on, the volume high, amplified laughter and applause. A large maroon flower has blossomed across his chest. Blood is seeping into the carpet beneath him. There are drops of it on his face, like some glossy pox .

He blinks .

I circle the room slowly and silently, then check the bathroom. The second body is in the bathtub, one trousered leg dangling over the lip. On the floor is a gun. I pick it up, a Smith & Wesson Sigma .40, a synthetics-only weapon, the frame constructed from a high-strength polymer. It hasn’t been fired recently .

The man in the bath is wearing a crumpled suit and a bloodstained shower-curtain. Most of the hooks have been ripped from the rail. There’s blood on the floor and wall. He’s been shot at least three times. Using a very efficient sound suppressor, I imagine, because being a converted townhouse the Lancaster’s sound-proofing is not great .

I return to the bedroom. When I move into his line of sight Golitsyn blinks again and manages to send a tremor to his fingertips .

I crouch beside him. What an impressive man he must have been. Two metres tall, by the look of it, with fine patrician features down a long face, framed by longish snow-white hair and a carefully trimmed beard of the same colour .

I look at the chest wound and then the blood. He should be dead already. There’s nothing I can do for him .

He tries to force a word through the gap in his lips. ‘Ah … ams …’

‘Anders?’

He’d frown if he could move the muscles in his forehead .

I try again. ‘Anders Brand?’

Nothing .

‘You and Anders Brand?’

I kill the volume on the TV .

‘… da … ah … ams …’

This is all very recent .

‘Passage du Caire. Do you understand?’

‘… ter … da … ahm …’

‘Anders Brand. He was there. He was killed. After you saw him.’

In Golitsyn’s eyes the flame of urgency struggles against death’s chilly breeze. ‘… ams … ams …’

‘Who did this? The same people who killed Brand?’

‘… ter … da …’

‘What about the bomb?’

‘Ams … ter …’

‘Amster?’

I see an emphatic ‘yes’ in his eyes .

‘Amster,’ I repeat .

‘Dam.’

It’s almost a cough .

‘Amsterdam?’

He blinks his confirmation because he’s fading fast .

‘What about Amsterdam?’

He tries to summon one last phrase but can’t; the eyes freeze, the focus fails, the fingers unfurl. On the TV screen, a contestant cries with joy as she takes possession of a shiny new Hyundai .

Somewhere out there, a distant siren moans. Not for me, I tell myself. But a part of me is less sure. I take the cash from the table – Petra the vulture, a natural scavenger – and scoop his correspondence and mobile phone into a slim, leather attaché case that has three Cyrillic letters embossed in gold beneath the handle; L.I.G .

I return to the bathroom where curiosity compels me to check the body. Trying my best to avoid the blood, I reach inside folds of shower-curtain and pale grey jacket to retrieve a wallet and passport. I flip open the passport; flat features, light brown hair cut short and parted on the right, small grey eyes .

Fyodor Medvedev .

The man I spoke to … how many minutes ago?

There isn’t time for this. Not now. Get out.

I drop the gun into my black MaxMara bag. Dressed as I am, the attaché case doesn’t look too incongruous. At least something is working out today .

Outside the suite, I close the door and walk calmly to the lift. I press the button. A woman from Housekeeping passes by carrying a tower of white towels .

‘Bonsoir.’

‘Bonsoir.’

I step into the tiny lift with its polished wood and burgundy leather. The unanswered questions are spinning inside my head. The Medvedev in the bath isn’t the Medvedev I spoke to over the phone at the bar. I’m sure of that. Even if he’d been sitting in a car outside the hotel he would barely have had enough time to sprint upstairs and get shot before I found him. So if the corpse in the bath is Medvedev, who was I talking to before?

As for Golitsyn …

The doors open. I step out and head right. There are raised voices coming from reception, which is now just out of sight to my left. Some kind of commotion. I backtrack and go through the bar. The skeletal group are too self-absorbed to have realized anything is wrong but others have noticed; their conversations halting, heads turning. The sofa where Robert Newman and Scheherazade Zahani were sitting is empty. Perhaps they’ve gone through to the restaurant .

I push through the large glass door and head down the short hall towards the exit, catching a glimpse of the reception area to my right; two men are arguing with the woman behind the desk. One of them is showing her something. A card of some sort. She’s speaking into the phone, clearly anxious. Beside her, a man sorts through a collection of keys .

I step onto rue de Berri. To my left, a flustered doorman in a long overcoat is standing by a black Renault. There’s no one in it. Both front doors are open, the front left wheel has mounted the kerb. A blue lamp sits on the dashboard .

Whatever you do, don’t run.

I venture right. I’m a stylish businesswoman carrying an attaché case. In this part of town, that shouldn’t raise an eyebrow. Except my own; above the noise of the city, the sirens are getting louder. Ahead of me, at the junction with Champs Élysées I see the first signs of stroboscopic blue light ricocheting off buildings .

I look over my shoulder. The doorman turns round. We’re fifteen metres apart. He can’t decide whether he’s seen me before. Someone cries out from the hotel. I feel like a rabbit stranded in headlights. Where is Petra?

Next to the Lancaster is the Berri-Washington twenty-four-hour public car-park, a blue neon sign above a long, sloping concrete ramp. My right hand is inside the black leather bag, my fingertips touching the Sigma. The first patrol car enters rue de Berri. There’s another behind it. And I’m going down the ramp .