I knew where she was going. I couldn’t telephone the police, and I couldn’t wait for Finn. The Lagonda sat at the curb below.
I stuffed Violette’s telegram into my pocket, snatched the car keys from the bedside table in my room, and ran.
CHAPTER 40
EVE
It was, Eve supposed, a dirty trick.
“Faster,” she told the cabdriver, tossing a handful of francs into the front seat. She didn’t care if she spent every coin she had. She wouldn’t need any for a journey back.
The cab sped along as Eve sat relishing the comforting weight of the Luger in her lap, her eyes dry. All those crocodile tears, easily shed and just as easily wiped away. Underhanded and unscrupulous, but she’d seen no other option as she looked at Charlie standing implacably between her and the door, soft mouth set in a firm line. Eve smiled. What a different girl from the truculent, uncertain little thing she’d first found on her doorstep.
I’m sorry I won’t ever see you again, she thought. I am so sorry for that.
“You look very serious this evening, madame,” the cabdriver said, jocular. “Didn’t you say you were going to visit a friend?”
“Yes.”
“A long visit?”
“Very.” Eternal, in fact. Eve had no intention of leaving René Bordelon’s house once she entered it. That was the reason she didn’t fear prison. A dead woman couldn’t be put behind bars.
The Luger held seven shots. Six were for René, and it might take all six—evil men clung hard to life. The last shot, Eve was saving for herself.
“Just like you, Cameron,” she murmured aloud, not seeing the darkening streets of Grasse slipping by. Instead she saw a grainy headline from a newspaper clipping: “Soldier’s Death.” When had that been, ’22? No, ’24. The words had stabbed Eve through a massive hangover. Concerning the death of Major C. A. Cameron—
The world had disconnected. Eventually Eve had managed to pick up the clipping again—from an overseas paper, mailed to her by a solicitor—and read through dry, burning eyes. There was a strangled sound, and it took her a moment to realize it was coming from her own throat.
—death of Major C. A. Cameron of the Royal Field Artillery, who died at Sheffield Barracks as the result of a revolver wound; the coroner returned a verdict of suicide.
Cameron, dead. Cameron with his warm eyes and his Scottish lilt. Cameron kissing her bruises away, murmuring, You poor brave girl . . .
By ’24 they hadn’t seen each other in what, five years? Not since that day in Folkestone. But they’d telephoned sometimes, generally in the small hours of the night when one of them was drunk. Eve had known he was back from Ireland; he’d talked a little of his training school, talked with more excitement of being made military attaché to Riga . . .
But instead, he’d blown his brains out.
The evidence shows that the deceased had brooded over his nonappointment as an attaché at Riga, the newspaper announcement read, canceled due to his having undergone a sentence of penal servitude.
The army had punished him for the old sin, Eve had thought bitterly. They didn’t mind an officer with a soiled reputation if there was a war on, but afterward he was just an embarrassment.
I’ll go on working until I can’t anymore. His voice rang in her ears once again, so loud and clear he might as well have been sitting in the cab with her. Then I suppose I’ll die. Bullets, boredom, or brandy—that’s how people like us go, because God knows we aren’t made for peace.
“That we aren’t,” Eve murmured.
It wasn’t until the solicitor arrived on her doorstep the following day that she fell apart completely. The solicitor who had mailed her the announcement of Cameron’s death in the first place, now bringing legal papers and assuring her of his complete discretion . . . telling her that the pension paid to her account for the last five years had not come from the War Office after all, but from Cameron. That he had ensured it to continue after his death, tied it up in his will in a private bequest without his family’s knowledge and separate from his widow’s funds. That it was well-invested, the earnest solicitor intoned, and should continue for Eve’s life.
She chased the solicitor out, shrieking, and then she collapsed utterly, crawling into her bed like a wounded animal and hiding there for months. How did you do it, Cameron? she’d wondered, staring at her own Luger. Barrel to the temple? Under the chin? Or between the teeth, the kiss of cold steel and gun oil the last sensation on earth? Eve had played those games often in the years that followed, on dark nights when the guilt wouldn’t let her sleep. Putting the Luger through the paces of suicide . . . but she had never quite pulled the trigger.
Too much of a stubborn bitch, she used to think. No fatal streak of romanticism or nobility in her soul, not like Cameron’s. But now, as the cab streaked out of Grasse and past the mimosa fields, Eve wondered if it had been not stubbornness but fate. Maybe guilt and grief could not be sated until justice had its turn first. Maybe it was the cold spy-trained part of her brain whispering that despite Cameron’s decades-long lie, an enemy was still out there to be dealt with. And until he was, the bullet between the teeth could not be fired.
Well, tonight the enemy would die. For Lili, for Rose, for Charlie, for Eve. Tonight, Evelyn Gardiner’s fight would be finished. More than thirty goddamned years past due, but better late than never.
She thought of the last bullet, knowing Charlie would hate her for firing it and so would Finn—but it was partly for them, as they’d realize later. A murderer dead next to her victim left them utterly in the clear. No one would be punished for this but the guilty. They could swan off into the sunset together, bless them.
“Madame, we have arrived.”
The cab halted at the end of an access path that led perhaps a quarter mile toward a gracious little jewel of a villa. Its white walls shone in the moonlight, and its roof peaked against the dark sky. Several windows showed light through the curtains. He was home. Eve wondered how long René had sat in that restaurant nibbling his toast points after she and Charlie left. Not long, she suspected. That told her something: he was still frightened of her.
You should be, she thought.
“Shall I drive you to the doorstep, madame?”
“I’ll walk,” she said, and swung out of the cab.
CHAPTER 41
CHARLIE