The Third Woman. Mark Burnell
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cloths, cleaning products. She grabbed the coiled washing line from the worktop. On a shelf was a wooden box with household tools, including a roll of black tape, which she also took. Back in the sitting-room, she drew the curtains and dragged a chair to the centre of the floor.
‘Take off your jacket and tie.’
He did, unfastening the top two buttons of his shirt and rolling up his sleeves.
‘What happened to your wrists?’
Around each of them was a bracelet of livid purple scar tissue. She hadn’t noticed them before. He didn’t answer, glaring at her instead, his silence heavy with contempt.
‘Do what I say and I won’t hurt you. Now sit down.’
She bound his wrists with the washing line, securing them behind the back of the chair. Then she taped one ankle to a chair-leg.
‘Don’t make any noise.’
She left him and returned to the kitchen. It was a bachelor’s kitchen, no question: a central island with a slate top; two chopping boards of seasoned wood, both barely scratched; a knife-block containing a set of pristine Sabatier blades. In the fridge were two bottles of Veuve Clicquot, some San Pellegrino, a bottle of Montagny, ground coffee and orange juice. No food.
His suits were hanging in a wardrobe in the bedroom, all tailored. But in another cupboard another Robert Newman existed; denim jeans, scuffed and frayed, T-shirts that had lost their shape and colour, exercise clothing, old trainers.
On the bedside table was a Bang & Olufsen phone, a bottle of Nurofen and a copy of What Went Wrong? by Bernard Lewis. On the other table was a single gold earring. Stephanie picked it up. It curled like a small shell.
In the bathroom, Newman’s things were fanned out across more limestone. But in the cupboard behind the mirror Stephanie found eye-liner and a small bottle of Chanel No.5, half-empty. In the second bedroom, further evidence; a plum silk dress on a hanger, a couple of jerseys, a pair of black Calvin Klein jeans, some flimsy underwear, two shirts, a pair of silver Prada trainers.
She returned to the sitting-room. ‘Who’s the woman?’
‘What woman?’
‘The woman who leaves Chanel No.5 in your bathroom.’ She showed him the earring. ‘This woman.’
‘That could be mine.’
‘Trust me, I’m not in the mood.’
‘It’s none of your goddamn business.’
‘Sure about that?’
‘She’s history.’
‘If she shows up here, she will be.’
‘It’s been over for a while.’
‘It was on your bedside table.’
‘I’m the sentimental type.’
‘Her stuff is still here.’
She saw that he was extremely nervous – the sweat, the shivers – but he was determined to maintain the façade. The pretence was all he had to cling to. ‘You should see what I left at her place.’
There was no answer to that; Stephanie had left pieces of herself everywhere.
There was a large Loewe widescreen TV in the corner of the sitting-room. Stephanie sat on a sofa arm and flicked through channels; France 3, Canal+, France 2, pausing during a news bulletin on TF1. Continued analysis of the bomb in Sentier, riots in Caracas, an oil spill off the coast of Normandy. Then they were watching a female journalist with a red scarf around her throat. She was in rue de Berri, the Lancaster just discernible in the background, beyond the entrance to the Berri-Washington car-park.
The studio anchor was asking a question. The reporter nodded then said, ‘The police will say only that Russian art-dealer Leonid Golitsyn and another unidentified man have been shot dead in what looks like a planned execution.’
‘Have they suggested who might be responsible?’
‘Not yet. All we know is that their bodies were discovered by a member of the hotel staff and that …’
Not true. By the time she’d left Golitsyn’s suite, the police had arrived downstairs. She’d seen plain-clothed detectives at the front desk just seconds after stepping out of the lift. Yet seconds before, on the fourth floor, she’d exchanged a cordial bonsoir with the woman from Housekeeping.
Newman said, ‘No wonder I couldn’t guess what you do.’
‘I didn’t kill them.’
‘This guy Golitsyn – when you thought I was someone else, you thought I worked for him.’
‘When I got to the room, they were already dead.’
She couldn’t believe how guilty she sounded.
Newman stared at the Smith & Wesson. ‘That right?’
‘It hasn’t been fired. It’s not mine. I picked it off the floor.’
‘What are you saying – it was a suicide pact?’
She changed channels, choosing CNN’s coverage of the Sentier bomb. There was footage of the wreckage in Passage du Caire, a reprise of the casualty statistics and still no mention of Anders Brand.
In the CNN studio two experts sat beside Becky Anderson. One was a spokesman for Le Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France (CRIF), the other was a terrorism expert from the London School of Economics. The CRIF spokesman insisted the bomb was part of a growing campaign of anti-Semitic activity in France and went on to castigate the government and – by implication – the public for their lack of outrage.
The LSE analyst focused on the likely provenance of the two fake suspects. Snippets of information were threaded through the theory to lend it credibility; prescient rumours in recent days from sources at Le Blanc-Mesnil, a small town on the northern fringe of Paris with a largely immigrant population, formerly of Sephardic Jews from the north-African colonies, more recently of Muslims, many from the same countries.
The premise sounded convincing; racial hatred boiling over in an area known for it. Le Blanc-Mesnil fell under the scope of District 93, also known as the Red belt from an era when it was controlled by staunchly Communist mayors. Immigrants had always been a pressing problem. The man from the LSE managed deftly to link ill-feeling in Le Blanc-Mesnil to Jewish commercial interests in Sentier. Stephanie was almost persuaded by him until he mentioned the suspects again.
She turned off the television.
Two incidents in one city on consecutive days. Superficially independent of one another but linked by a third incident: the murder of Jacob and Miriam Furst. Not in itself significant enough to make the news – an old couple murdered in their home – but vital to Stephanie because she was the single factor common to all three.
She woke with a start and checked her watch. Three-twenty-five. As a teenager, she’d been a hopeless sleeper. As Stephanie, she still was. But Petra had been trained to take sleep wherever she could, no matter how hostile the environment.
They were in the sitting-room. Newman was slumped in his chair, his head lolling to one side. Stephanie was on the sofa behind him. She’d chosen it deliberately for the small psychological advantage of being invisible to him.
Silently, she rose from the sofa and went to the bathroom. She showered then wrapped herself in one of his towels and sorted through his ex-lover’s wardrobe. The black jeans were the right length but Stephanie’s waist was slimmer. She pulled on a navy long-sleeved T-shirt, a chunky black jersey and the silver trainers.
She felt human