Revenger

4

Samuel Carver had indeed killed a lot of people. His victims had died in cars, planes, helicopters and powerboats. He had dispatched them with bullets, bombs, knives, poisons and nooses. He had even stood and watched in stomach-churning disgust as one had been eaten alive.

But not all of those who had reason to wish Carver harm had paid for their enmity with their lives. And one who had survived against all the odds was at that moment running hard around the lower lake in the Bois de Boulogne — a striking female figure in skintight black training pants and a lightweight turquoise jacket that set off the mane of flaming red hair, gathered into a ponytail, that bounced and swished behind her as she sped through the gathering November dusk.

Her real name was Celina Novak, though she’d called herself Ginger Sternberg when she’d first attracted Carver’s attention at the start of the Malachi Zorn business. Carver had been on holiday at the time, a single man in a beat-up Jeep, taking ferries between the Greek islands with no big plan in mind other than enjoying himself. Ginger had been behind the wheel of a Porsche Boxter in the line for the ferry at Piraeus, the port of Athens. She’d been tanned, carefree, laughing at some private joke when he saw her; mostly she was laughing at how easy it was to catch a man’s eye. She wouldn’t have laughed so much if she’d known how it would all end.

But that was more than two years ago. Now she was in Paris, running at the very limit of her speed and endurance because her fitness at least was something she could control. Then she slowed as an object caught her eye, lying on the ground amidst the brown and russet of the fallen leaves. She stopped and bent down to find a small stuffed monkey in a bright-red jacket — a much-loved toy, to judge by the way its fur had been rubbed almost bare from all the hugs, sucks and kisses it had received.

Novak looked up and saw the monkey’s likely owner a little further up ahead, a girl of five or six walking hand-in-hand with her mother.

‘Excuse me, madam!’ she called out, holding up the monkey so that the mother could see. She added, ‘Your daughter dropped her little monkey!’

The mother smiled and shooed her girl in the direction of Novak, who was crouching down on her haunches, so as to be at the child’s level. The girl gave a shriek of delight when she saw the monkey held out towards her, and hurried back to her favourite toy as fast as her little legs would carry her, her face wreathed in undiluted joy. She grabbed the monkey and held it to her heart. Then she looked at Celina Novak and all the happiness drained from her face. For a second the girl’s eyes seemed uncertain, as if she did not quite know what she was seeing, and then her expression turned to one of fear and revulsion. She shrieked and ran back to her mother in floods of tears, her pleasure at reclaiming her monkey entirely forgotten.

Novak could hear quite clearly as the mother asked, ‘What’s the matter, darling?’

The girl sniffed a couple of times, pouted her lips as she thought, wiped her hand across her nose and then said, ‘That lady is strange, Mummy. I think she’s a wicked witch.’

‘Oh, don’t be silly. Of course she isn’t.’

‘She is! She is! Look!’

Novak found that she could not turn away. Something made her keep looking at the mother and daughter as the girl pointed towards her and the woman gently scoffed at her until she herself caught Novak’s eye and fell completely silent for a second. An instant later, the mother snapped back into life and almost pulled her daughter off her feet as she dragged her away down the path, calling out over frantic squeals of protest, ‘Come on! Come on! We must get back home or we’ll be late for your dinner.’

Celina Novak had never been given to crying — not unless she was doing it deliberately as a means of manipulating someone else. But now she found that there were tears forming in her eyes, and she had to dab her face with the sleeve of her jacket to keep them at bay. For she knew exactly what had made that little girl look at her the way she had. She understood precisely why the girl had run to her mother. And as she thought about that, her pain and humiliation gave way to a rage that drove her to run even harder and push herself even closer to the limit. And as she did so she thought of the people who had made her the kind of person whose face scares small children: that vicious bitch Alexandra Petrova and her bastard lover-boy Samuel Carver.