Tivoli, 30 Seconds Later
The clamor of wings erupted from the cracked dome a second time, offering a tacky final ovation to her curtain call. Face down in the dirt, Eve used the remaining fragments of her will to do nothing at all as she felt life itself oozing out of her.
She was only aware of the commotion approaching her by the vibrations on the ground. There were hands on her, as in more than two, moving her, pressing down on her, roughly removing her hair off her face. She would have protested more, but all that came out was a pathetic, wheezy whine. The appealing thing about darkness, however, was how welcoming it was, how you wanted to snuggle up to its warm embrace.
Slough, 345,600 seconds later
The flock of mourners started filing into an unremarkable, orange brick house, and she watched them from across the road, unimpressed both by their gaudy fashion and their modest number. Sat astride a mint green bicycle, with the lush scent of flowers invading her sense of smell, Villanelle waited until most of them had gone through the door to swipe the kickstand with her foot and dismount. She pulled out a bouquet of white flowers from the bike basket and followed the mossy path that led to the house.
She stood in the vestibule for a brief moment, evaluating what everyone was doing. Some were already congregated around the buffet, because nothing seemed to whet some people's appetite like interring a full-course dinner for the worms. A small cluster was fussing over a particularly peacockish woman, trying to get her to sit on the sofa – the widow, no doubt. Villanelle chose to follow a different set of women into the kitchen, where she busied herself with finding a vase-like container.
"Those flowers are a beauty, love," said the old woman who was right next to her on the kitchen counter.
"Well, it's the least I could do," Villanelle said, slipping into her English accent but modulating its poshness. In reality, the bouquet was just a potential excuse to get her foot through the door.
Although these people all seemed as commonplace as their surroundings of lace doilies and little, propped up porcelain plates, it was precisely the mediocre ones one had to watch out for. And there was plenty of mediocrity to choose from here. Since hers was not among the most conspicuous outfits and because the smart thing to do was to keep moving around like she had a right to be there, she offered to carry several batches of beverages from the kitchen to the sitting room.
The widow was providing an incessant background noise to the scene by wailing into an embroidered cushion. Simultaneously, a bunch of red-faced children were running from the garden to the house and back, sometimes getting tangled in the skirts of her flowy dress. But she kept a demure and understanding smile all along, forbearing from smashing their little heads in with a bottle. Which, by the way, wouldn't have made them uglier than they already were.
"And how did you know Mr. Algaron?" asked a youngish man who was wearing a soccer jersey under his suit jacket.
"Darling Raymond, he gave me valuable career advice." Lucky for her, Aaron Peel had shown her Raymond's full name, together with his chinchilla-looking face. Villanelle turned to the picture they had placed on the mantel with wistful eyes, visualizing that head completely frittered on the floor. How had they justified the state of the body? "I used to have this corporate job. The money was good, but everyone was trying to tie me down all the time, you know? So I went freelance for a while, but I'm thinking about doing my own thing now."
"Right, be your own woman, like."
"My own woman..." Munching on a tea sandwich, she wagged her finger at the guy. "That's right."
Yes, she was trying to do that. But there were things she had to do first, which was good, because being aimless made her morose, and that was too close to boredom, which made her want to lash out, and right now she needed to be focused.
Enough with the mingling shit. She took a fake sip that caused some of the awful wine to spill down her front and stealthily made her way upstairs, because how could she know that there was a perfectly functional bathroom on the bottom floor?
After poking her head around a couple of doors—children's rooms—Villanelle stepped into the master bedroom. They had somehow managed to make the decor of this section of the house more distasteful than the lower part, but she was positive there was something of value amid the rubbish, since she had already swung by Raymond's official workplace in London and found nothing.
She opened the drawers of both bedside tables and examined them thoroughly, as well as both alarm clocks, the bedside lamps, framed photographs, and telephone. She then looked in the closet, slid under the bed, probed the mattress, groped every throw pillow, and finally stood on the bed to inspect the baroque chandelier. Nothing.
Villanelle exhaled in frustration, reviewing the inoffensive items in the room from her relative height. She really didn't want to have to come back when the house was empty and go at it with a screwdriver. That was when she noticed a pair of marble-like eyes staring at her, and then another, and yet another.
"What a freak," she whispered to herself, and chuckled lightly.
There were three Jack Russell terriers on top of the wardrobe, each atop its own little wooden platform. They were identical—white, with brown around the eyes and ears—and they were stuffed and mounted. Raymond really did look the type to taxidermize his dogs after they died. And to name them the same way, she noted, for on each platform there was a plaque that read "Ringo I", "Ringo II", and "Ringo III", respectively. However, Ringo the First was considerably heavier than his successors.
Realizing that she'd been gone for too long and that anyone could walk in on her sharing the bedspread with three dead dogs, Villanelle made a practical choice. The bedroom window looked out on the front part of the house, and she checked that there was nobody there before dropping the stuffed dog on one of the bushes. Then, she crept downstairs and waved goodbye to the few people she had interacted with, doing that thing where you pretended to be too far away to hear or speak properly, and so you could only mouth something like, "I've got to go, sorry."
After fishing Ringo the First from the depths of the bush, Villanelle stepped over a garden gnome and marched down the stone pathway to her bike. She did a figure eight and zipped away, standing on the pedals and skimming over the pavement like a skate blade on ice. The dog fit perfectly inside the basket – in fact, she was the object of several tender looks from people who no doubt believed it to be alive, and she smiled back at them.
