She wanted me.
Niko loved me, and I’d always felt safe in his arms, but the games that Villanelle played were satanically addictive. It took Simon’s murder to awaken me to the boundless range of her psychopathy. I hated her after that, which was what she intended. She wanted to show me the worst of herself, to see if I’d back off. Of course I only came after her all the harder, which delighted her, but then Villanelle never drew any distinction between hate and desire, between pursuit and courtship, and in the end, neither did I.
When did I lose perspective? Was it in Venice, when I discovered that she’d been there a month earlier with another woman, a lover, and I found myself transfixed with jealousy? Or was it earlier, by the side of the motorway, when she told me that after climbing into my hotel room on that monsoon night in Shanghai, she’d sat and gazed at me as I slept? It doesn’t matter anymore. What matters is that when Villanelle asked me to come with her, to walk out of my life and leave behind everything and everyone I’d ever known, I did so without hesitation.
I knew, by then, that I’d been living a lie. That from the time I’d first been approached by Richard Edwards, I’d been brilliantly, artfully deceived. When Richard asked me to investigate Villanelle and the Twelve I flattered myself that he was impressed by my intuitive and deductive skills. In fact he’d been a fully paid-up asset of the Twelve all along, and wanted to use me to test the organization’s security. It was a classic false flag operation, and by conducting it off the books, for reasons that made perfect sense to me at the time, he ensured that no one at MI6 got wind of it.
I had begun to suspect that I’d been used in this way, but it was Villanelle who finally confirmed it. She’s a psychopath and a habitual liar, but she was the only one who told me the truth. She showed me, dispassionately, just how easily I’d been manipulated. Listening to her was like watching an elaborate stage set being dismantled, and suddenly seeing ropes and pulleys and raw brickwork. She told me that she’d been given her next target, and that it was me. I’d discovered more than I was meant to. I wasn’t the Twelve’s dupe any longer, I was a liability.
The encounter, and its aftermath, was classic Villanelle. I’d just returned from a horrendous few days in Moscow, and when I got back to my flat I found her in the bath, washing her hair. A 9mm Sig Sauer was lying between the taps, and she was wearing latex gloves. I was pretty sure she meant to shoot me. Villanelle is coy about how many people she’s killed. She just says “normal amount,” but I’d guess that the figure is nineteen, maybe twenty victims.
We had to stage my death. Then we had to disappear.
So that’s what we did, and soon we were racing through the night on her Ducati motorcycle, my arms wrapped tightly around her, heading north. Villanelle didn’t really give me a choice, but then I didn’t want her to. I was ready to cut the ground from beneath me. I was ready to fly.
I’ve often wondered, since that day, what would have happened if I’d stayed. If I’d begged Niko’s forgiveness, and gone to the police, or perhaps even the newspapers, with my story. Would I have survived? Or would it have been the car that didn’t stop, the heart attack on the way to the supermarket, the apparent suicide? And if the Twelve had finally decided that I wasn’t worth killing, and had engineered things so that I looked and sounded like a conspiracy theorist, just one more recruit to the sad, twilight army of the deluded, would Niko ever have trusted me? Or would I have forever felt his eyes on me, watching and wondering, as we made small talk over dinner, or endured endless evenings at the bridge club?
We stowed away at Immingham, a port in Lincolnshire. It cost us the motorcycle and the remains of my dignity. The guy was a deckhand, on shore with a crew visa. We hooked up with him in a pub outside the terminal, a fake Irish establishment so depressing it was almost funny. We’d been nursing a couple of beers for the best part of an hour when the guy came