Evening, Eloise
The man on her landing was wearing a coat that cost more than her monthly rent, and he was standing with his hands loose at his sides like someone who had arrived early for an appointment and did not mind waiting.
Eloise had come up the stairs with her keys already out of her bag. It was a habit she had developed during her two months in Frankfurt, a small economy of movement that belonged to her new life rather than one arranged by somebody else. The stairwell smelt of somebody else’s dinner. A television murmured behind the door on the second floor. All of it ordinary. All of it hers.
Then she rounded the last turn and saw the shaved head, the grey eyes, the unmistakable shoulders, and the security she had built over eight weeks abruptly deserted her.
She stopped on the top step. Her keys were still in her hand.
For a long moment neither of them said anything. Briggs waited with the patience of a man who had never once in his professional life needed to fill a silence. He was forty-seven, though the shaved head and impassive expression made him look older. Everything about him was understated, from his expensive but unremarkable shoes to his dark coat. He looked at her as though looking at her were a task on a list, and one that presented no difficulty.
“Evening, Eloise,” he said.
She found her voice, and it came out steadier than she had expected. “What are you doing here?”
“Mr Heller sent me.”
The words landed in her chest like a dropped stone. She had known the answer before she asked. There was only ever one reason Briggs Drury appeared on somebody’s doorstep, but hearing it confirmed made the landing feel suddenly smaller. For two months she had allowed herself to believe that the distance was the point. London was somewhere she had left behind, and she had wanted to believe the separation was permanent. She had done it properly: no forwarding address, no shared accounts left open, a mobile number she had changed twice because she could never quite believe the previous one was safe.
And now here was the man who did Dominic’s unhappier work, standing outside her flat, looking as though he had simply come to collect her for an appointment.
Anger arrived before fear did, which she chose to regard as progress.
“So he’s finally worked out that the world isn’t arranged around him,” she said. “I’d have thought it would take longer.”
Something moved at the corner of Briggs’s mouth. It was not a smile. “He’d like you back in London.”
“No.”
“Arrangements have been made.”
“Arrangements.” She heard herself repeat the word and disliked the sound of it in her own mouth, as though saying it made it real. “What arrangements?”
“A flight,” Briggs said. “Tomorrow evening. Transport from here to the airport at four. Instructions about your belongings — a removal firm, if you’d prefer it, or a case if you’d rather travel light. Mr Heller was conscious that you left some things behind.”
She thought of the flat behind her with its unopened boxes and its charity-shop crockery and the lamp she had bought on her third day because the overhead light was too harsh. She thought of the fact that she had left everything behind because there had been no time and no space and no freedom in which to choose what to take.
“I have a job,” she said. “I have a tenancy agreement. I have a life here, Briggs. He can’t simply decide that I’m coming back.”
Briggs listened without reacting. “I’ve been instructed to bring you back.”
“Then you’ve wasted the journey.”
“Perhaps.”
“Does he think I’ll just get in the car?”
“I imagine he does, yes.”
“Then he’s wrong.” She heard her own voice climb and pulled it back down. She was aware, suddenly and acutely, of the shape of the moment: she was standing outside her own front door, in her own building, in a city where Dominic could not simply summon her to his Mayfair house, and no one in the world had the authority to move her from it. That knowledge felt like a physical thing. “What happens if I refuse?”
Briggs considered the question with the seriousness he gave to everything. “I report your refusal to Mr Heller.”
“Then report it.”
“Yes,” he said. “That’s what I’ll do.”
He did not move. For a moment she had the impression that he was simply waiting for her anger to run its course. And she understood, with a clarity that was almost pleasant, that he had made no attempt to step past her. There was no second man on the stairs. There was no hand on her arm. Whatever Dominic had sent him for, it was not to drag her bodily onto a plane — not yet, not this time. That was information. She filed it away.
“Tell him something else for me,” she said.
“I will.”
“Tell him his happiness stopped being my responsibility the day I left.”
Briggs inclined his head a fraction. “Noted.”
“And tell him not to send anyone else.”
“I’ll tell him what you’ve said.” A pause, very slight. “He won’t be pleased.”
“No,” Eloise said. “I don’t imagine he will.”
She put her key in the lock. It took her a moment to find the hole, which she hated, and she did not look at him while doing it. Then she stepped inside, drew the door closed behind her — without slamming it or giving him the satisfaction of seeing how badly he had shaken her — and turned the deadbolt with a deliberate, unhurried click that she was almost certain he heard.
She stood in the hallway and listened.
Nothing. No footsteps, no knock, no patient wait on the other side of the wood. She counted to sixty. Then she counted to sixty again, which was the sort of thing she would never have admitted to anyone.
She put her bag on the little table by the door and took off her jacket and hung it on the hook, because that was what she did when she came home. The flat was small and warm and entirely hers: one bedroom, a sitting room with a window onto the courtyard, a kitchen that opened off it in an L. On the counter her kettle sat where she had left it that morning. On the sill a sprig of rosemary in a glass of water, rooting patiently. On the floor by the window, two boxes she had not yet opened, because there was no urgency about them and it had begun to seem like a good thing that there wasn’t.
She walked through it and checked every room, one after the other, in a manner she was careful not to interrogate too closely.
Then she sat down on the sofa without turning on the light and asked herself the questions she had been holding back.
How had he found her?
She had been careful. She had been so careful. She had taken a job that did not require a professional profile, used an old address that no longer led to her, paid a deposit in cash. She had not written to anyone. She had not been in touch with a single person from that other life. She had believed — had needed to believe — that she had left no thread for anyone to pull.
But Dominic employed people who could find connections she would never have thought to conceal. And if Briggs knew where her flat was, then Briggs had known for how long? A week? A month? Since the beginning?
Does he know where I work?
She looked around the sitting room and found that everything in it had become testimony. The mug she had bought in the second week. The coat on its hook, bought with the first money she had ever earned in a currency with no history behind it. The rosemary, rooting. None of it was beautiful and none of it had belonged to anybody else. It had not been given to her. That was the entire point of it.
Her mobile vibrated against the table.
She knew the name before she turned it over. She had changed her number twice; evidently, even the latest one had not stayed private. That was the sort of thing the number was now for.
For a moment she considered letting it ring. She had done that, in the first weeks — sixteen calls in three days, and she had watched all of them expire with her palms sweating and her mouth dry and something close to triumph pressing against the inside of her ribs. But that had been a different woman, one who still believed distance was the same as having left. This evening there had been a man in her building, and Eloise had learned in the intervening weeks that silence is only a strategy for as long as the other person is still choosing to talk.
She answered.
“Briggs tells me you were rude to him.”
“He was standing outside my flat.”
“He says you closed the door in his face.”
“Not in his face. In his presence. There’s a distinction.”
A short breath down the line, which on anyone else would have been a laugh. She had spent long enough beside Dominic Heller to know the difference. “You’ve got a great deal more confidence than you used to have.”
“I’ve got a great deal more distance than I used to have.” She sat forward, the phone warm against her ear. “What do you want, Dominic?”
“You know what I want. I want you home.”
“Frankfurt is home.”
“Frankfurt is a hotel you’ve been living in for two months.”
“It’s a flat with my name on the tenancy.”
“And a job with someone else’s name above the door.” She heard him settle, the small sounds of a man changing position in a leather chair. “This has gone on long enough, Eloise. You’ve made your point. I’ve been very patient with it — more patient than I’ve been with anything in fifteen years — and now it’s finished. There’s a flight tomorrow evening.”
“I’m not on it.”
“There’s a flight tomorrow evening,” he repeated, evenly, as though she had simply misheard.
“You don’t get to decide where I live.”
“I’d suggest I’m the only person who’s ever had an opinion on it.”
“That’s exactly the problem.” Her voice had risen; she let it. The window was a dark rectangle with the courtyard light suspended in it, and somewhere below a bicycle went past. “You think — you genuinely think — that I’ll come back because you’ve arranged it. Because you’ve put a car on the street at four o’clock. That’s not a decision you’re making for me, Dominic. That’s a decision you’re making about me. I’m telling you, in plain words, that I’m not coming. Not tomorrow. Not ever.”
“Eloise.”
“No. Listen to me instead of waiting for your turn. I am not coming back to London. I am not coming back to you. And I want you to understand something, because I think you’ve been assuming the opposite for two months.” She paused, and made herself slow down. “I kept my word. I signed what Payton put in front of me, and I have never said a word about that night to anybody, and I never will. That was the arrangement. I’ve held up my end of it. So don’t stand there and tell me about flights, as though signing a piece of paper and disappearing from the country were the same as belonging to you.”
The silence that followed was real, not a rhetorical pause. She had said it out loud — not the thing she had seen, but the fact of the promise she had made about it — and it felt like opening a window in a sealed room.
“Nobody’s sent anyone else,” Dominic said at last. His voice had not changed at all. “You were looked for, Eloise. That was all. I wanted to know you were alive.”
“Sending Briggs to my landing isn’t checking whether I’m alive.”
“No,” he agreed. “That’s being collected.”
“Then we’re finished. And Dominic — the deal holds. It holds from my side. But it was a deal, not a dowry, and it doesn’t entitle you to my address.”
“I wonder,” he said, with a mildness she distrusted more than anything in the world, “whether you’ve thought about how much of your life there you’d have to be able to defend.”
“Goodbye, Dominic.”
“You’ll want to think about that.”
She ended the call. Then she sat with the phone in her hand for a long time, watching the screen dim and go black, and then wake again when she touched it, and go black again, because there was nothing coming in and nothing going out and no reason at all for her to be holding it.
She was furious. Her hands were not quite steady, and she was furious.
But underneath the anger, unbidden and unreasonable, was something that tasted faintly of victory. She had done it. Two months ago she had crossed Europe in a coach with her knees against a suitcase and no plan beyond the following week, and this evening she had stood in her own hallway and told him no to his face — well, not his face, but closer to it than she had ever managed when he was in the room. He had not been there to fill the space, to arrange his body between her and the door, to make every answer sound like a request. He had made his demand down a telephone line, and she had refused it, and nothing had happened.
Nothing had happened. That was the thing. Nothing at all had happened.
She stood up and went into the kitchen, because she was not going to spend the evening sitting in the dark waiting for him to move again.
She made pasta, badly, with a jar of sauce she had bought for a Euro and thought tasted of nothing. She ate it at the table with the lamp on and her diary open beside her plate. On Thursday there was a team meeting at nine, and she had promised Brandt the revised figures for the Schwerin presentation by then, and there was a note to herself, half-written and underlined, about the courier schedule. Tomorrow was Wednesday. She would be in the office by half past eight, and she would have the figures on the desk before the meeting, and Lukas would read them standing up as he always did, with his reading glasses pushed up into his hair.
Her mobile lit. A message from Sabine, who sat two desks along and had adopted Eloise with the cheerful ruthlessness of a woman who had once been new in the city herself: Still on for Friday? I’ve booked the place with the bad wine on purpose.
Yes, Eloise wrote back. Friday.
She cleared the plate and washed it and left it on the rack. Then she stood at the window for a while with the light off, looking down into the courtyard where nothing was happening, where nobody was standing, where no car waited at the kerb.
She slept badly, and she got up on Wednesday morning at six thirty anyway, and she went to work.
In Mayfair, rain had settled over the evening.
Dominic Heller stood at the window with a glass in his hand and watched the street below do nothing whatever of interest. Behind him the room was exactly as he had left it and exactly as he would want it: the Jaeger-LeCoultre on the mantel, the Chagall small and early and entirely real, the two leather chairs worn in a manner that suggested informal conversation while permitting nothing of the kind. He had bought the house nineteen years ago, when his early successes had begun to provide the sort of money he once considered out of reach, and he had changed very little of it since, because he had found early in his career that a man’s surroundings should do their arguing for him.
The door opened. Briggs came in without knocking, which was permitted, and stood inside it until he was acknowledged.
“Well?”
“She refused.”
Dominic turned. He had expected that, in the way that a man expects news he has already priced in. What he had not expected was the flatness with which Briggs delivered it, as though he were reading out a weather report. “I know but what did she say, exactly?”
“That she has a tenancy and a job and a life there, and that you don’t get to decide where she lives.”
“And?”
“And that you mustn’t send anyone else.”
Something small changed in Dominic’s face. Not much. A tightening at the jaw, a stillness around the eyes; the sort of alteration a man would need to know him well to read at all, and fewer than a dozen people did. Briggs read it, because reading it was his profession.
“Did she appear frightened?”
“No.”
“At all?”
“She appeared angry,” Briggs said. “At the end, mostly angry.”
Dominic set the glass down on the sill and did not drink from it. He had genuinely thought she would be relieved. That was what he had built the arrangement on: that two months in a foreign city with nothing and no one would have worn the shine off it, that she would have had enough of being nobody in a place where nobody knew her, and that a flight home would arrive in her life like a door opening in a wall. He had considered the possibility that she would cry. He had considered that she might negotiate — that was her way, she had always negotiated, at the beginning it had been one of the things he liked best about her.
He had not considered that she would treat the whole business as an inconvenience.
“Did she say anything else?”
“She said your happiness stopped being her responsibility the day she left.”
For a moment Dominic stood very still. Then he walked the length of the room — the flat was large for Mayfair and he had never once regretted the money — and came back, and stood in front of the fireplace with his hands behind him.
France had been easy. Venice had been embarrassing, in the end. Zurich had cost him a great deal of money and goodwill he had not yet finished spending. Everything he had ever been hired to solve had yielded to the same method: find the pressure point, and lean. For fifteen years, it had served him well. The difficulty with Eloise was not that she was complicated. It was that she was not complicated, and the obvious levers had either broken or been refused, and she was still standing there on the other side of them saying no.
“Physical retrieval’s off the table for now,” he said. “You’d have to carry her through an airport, and she’s already told you she won’t go quietly. The last thing I need is a scene on the concourse.”
“Yes.”
“Which leaves the other thing.”
“Yes.”
“She has a job.”
“Executive assistant to the chief executive at Rheinfeld AG,” Briggs said. “Lukas Brandt. Forty-eight. German, unremarkable, well regarded in the region. We established that when she took the position.”
Dominic nodded slowly. He had seen men build lives before, and he had watched most of them do it in the stupidest way available: they built on things that could be taken. Houses, savings, reputations, the regard of other people. All of it confiscable. Eloise had done something rather more clever, or perhaps only something rather more desperate — she had built a life out of a single load-bearing beam, and she had built it somewhere she believed he had no reach.
He looked at the clock on the mantel. Twenty past eight. In Frankfurt it would be twenty past nine, and the lamp would be on in that flat he had not yet seen, and she would be going to bed.
“I want more than the background report,” he said. “Everything there is on Rheinfeld AG. Ownership, structure, contracts, the board, the bank, the works. And everything on her position inside it — what she does, who she works to, who she answers to, what she’s signed, what she could be made to be responsible for.”
“And then?” Briggs said.
“Then we’ll see what she’s actually defending,” Dominic said. “It’s very difficult to hold a job you can’t keep.”
Briggs turned to go. At the door he paused, in the manner of a man weighing something he had decided, on balance, to weigh.
“There’s one more thing,” he said. “She has a colleague. Sabine. They were out for a drink together last Thursday, in Sachsenhausen.”
Dominic looked at him.
“Nothing in it,” Briggs said. “Just the two of them.”
“Last Thursday.”
“Yes.”
Dominic considered that for a moment — the small ordinary fact of it, a woman in a strange city being invited out for a drink, being included, being made to feel that she belonged somewhere. It ought not to have interested him at all.
“Very well,” he said. “Find out what sort of friend she is.”
Briggs went out. Dominic remained at the window, his drink untouched, while rain blurred the rooftops of Mayfair. Eloise had built a life in Frankfurt and mistaken its distance for protection. He intended to find out how much of that life depended upon a job she could lose.
