Page 75 of Under Her Protection

She went.

The bedroom door closed. The lock of it, Vivienne registered, clicked from the outside, because Leo had done it without asking her to do it.

Vivienne, on the edge of her own bed, naked, in the low November light, did not argue it.

She put her hand flat on her own sternum, where she had put it last night, and the night before, and she breathed once, and she stood up, and she went to the wardrobe, and she dressed.

Grey flannel trousers. A cream silk shirt, the third in the line to the left, which was the one that buttoned highest at the throat. A black wool wrap she pulled off the hook at the end. Hair up, in thirty seconds, with two pins. Signet ring on the right hand. Phone from the bureau, unlocked with a thumb, two messages from Fournier, one from Isabella. No message, this morning, on the private encrypted channel. She marked the absence.

At the edge of the bed, under the pillow, the grey linen still held the shape of two heads.

She did not look at it again.

She went to stand at the French door, where the small balcony sensor Leo had installed on day three was blinking green on the doorframe above her head. Out in the courtyard, Beaumont was on the flagstones with a radio in his hand and his eyes on the south wall. The iron gate to the street was closed. The morning was the morning of Thursday, the twenty-fourth of November, and somebody was inside her service lane.

She did not open the door.

She stood on the inside of the door, hand on the glass, and waited for the woman she had let into her bed to come back for her.

14

The perimeter was a pigeon.

Leo stood on the flagstones of the service lane at seven forty-one with Beaumont at her shoulder and her hand at the base of the motion sensor on the south wall, and the dead pigeon on the paving slab at her boot was what had tripped it. Grey. Large. Not young. Dropped from, Leo guessed without any great interest, the rotten eaves of the neighbour's outbuilding, which she was going to be sending Beaumont to speak with the neighbour about tomorrow. Beaumont picked the bird up by one wing in the back of a glove.

"Copy," Leo said into her ear, for Avery at HQ. "Non-event. Stand the unit down."

"Copy," Avery said.

"I owe you a coffee."

"You owe me six coffees and a serious conversation."

"Noted."

"Leo."

"Yes."

"The thing about non-events is that they are the shape of the next event."

"I am aware."

"Good."

Leo went back inside.

She unlocked Vivienne's bedroom door and opened it, and Vivienne was beautiful in grey flannel and cream silk, and she did not flinch at the opening of the door, and when Leo said "pigeon," Vivienne, who had been watching her in the glass, allowed her mouth to make, at a quarter inch, the almost-smile. Her grey blue eyes lit up.

"A pigeon."

"Yes."

"A live one or a dead one."

"Dead."

"On the sensor."