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"We have to make a quick stop," Alice said, with the deliberate, exaggerated inflection of someone who was pretending to be impulsive — which, in Alice's mouth, was that of a sociopath humouring social niceties. John knew and she knew he knew, but there was no stopping Alice on a new game, only the mitigation of damage.
"How quick?" he asked, because a bullet wound put a right damper on his running speed.
She glanced at his thigh. "For as long as I take to finish what needs to be done. It's a quiet house in a quiet street — oh, you'll hate it." Her mouth curled, feline. "Where would you like to go next?"
*
"It" was The Hague, the seat of the International Criminal Court, and John appreciated the joke almost as much as Dr Bloem, who did house calls and sat up straighter whenever Alice came by to cajole him into accepting a cup of tea.
"You're healing very nicely," Dr Bloem said, redressing the wound in efficient, bird-like movements. His black hair and eyes gleamed silver under the bedroom light. "Such a terrible coincidence — the robbery, your wife having to move here — I hope you're not finding the stairs too much of a strain."
"I'll manage," John said, having mouthed wife? to Alice over Dr Bloem's head. "Can't have the missus here on her lonesome."
"You'll find, Dr Bloem," Alice said, ever the sociopathic charmer, "that it's the other way around — I leave him alone for a few months, and he's shot by a very bad man."
"Well, if you say so," the doctor said, doubtful. "There's not much by way of distractions around here, if you can't get around. You shouldn't — that leg needs to heal completely."
Alice had brought him to Galvanistraat in Duinoord, in a neighbourhood with streets named after scientists and narrow houses put together like books on a shelf. John was too fucked on painkillers to remember much of their arrival, except Alice pointing out Archimedesstraat, the endless stairs up to their flat and then their bedroom, and John asking if she'd murdered anyone in the bed before passing out on it.
In the morning, aching but sober, John surveyed the layout of the flat. The rooms were small and compact, furnished in the manner of a young, well-to-do professional with a distressing love for the modern Scandinavian style. He briefly surveyed the books on the shelves — mostly astrophysics-related — then opened all the cabinet doors. No visible weapons, but then Alice never needed much to get to work.
He limped down the stairs into the dining room, leaning against the banisters as he went. A grandfather clock, painted green, filled the room with a steady, mechanical heartbeat. The long dining table faced a gracious, well-lit bay window that looked out into the neighbours' flats. Below was a severely symmetrical garden that presumably belonged to the occupant of the ground-floor flat, a fair-skinned woman with an elderly hound who loped after her as she watered flowers.
A narrow, chrome-plated kitchen yielded tea and toast, and an array of freshly-sharpened knives. His mobile phone lay on the kitchen bench, next to a neat pile of tourist brochures. John stared at the phone for a good long while, longer than he wanted to admit, then slipped it into his pocket, still switched off.
When Alice returned, bearing a load of groceries, John was leaning against the dining table, watching the neighbours. She looked pleased.
"You'll have a better view if you stand ten centimeters to your right," she said, unwinding a scarf from around her neck.
"I already tried that," he said, turning to watch her instead. Alice putting away milk and bread and tomatoes was an unexpectedly arresting sight, incongruous in its appearance of domesticity and the reality of her. She slept only a few hours every night, never seemed to tire, and regarded both babies and murders with the same calculating stare, but her mammalian body still needed sustenance and warmth. Gave warmth, too.
"But?" she prompted.
"I'm interested in that flat," he said, pointing at a blue-framed window. A woman with curly hair and teakwood skin was standing with her back to it, reading a piece of paper.
Alice came to stand beside him, her red hair brushing his shoulder. "Ah," she said, "the delectable Jasmijn de Vries. Good choice."
He glanced at her. She was smiling.
*
Dr Bloem was right to express doubt over John's ability to traverse the narrow, steep stairs to the flat: after four painful attempts, it was clear that his leg needed to heal more than he wanted to go out, and it would take its time to do so. He refused painkillers after the first week.
Instead John mapped out the flat and its environs, all that he could see from the windows. Scores of schoolchildren trooped past his front door to a nearby school, and he timed recess by their high-pitched voices at play. The woman in the flat below flirted daily with one of the schoolteachers, who tugged at her sleeves and looked embarrassed but delighted at the attention. After two weeks of this, one evening John caught her and the teacher heading out arm-in-arm, presumably for a date.
A family of four lived next door, in the ground-floor flat. The father was blond and sour-faced, the mother had a brave smile permanently affixed to her face. They had two rambunctious boys who were often turned out into the garden to mess around among scraggly herbs, while the sound of a loud argument filtered through the adjoining wall. The man's eyes looked especially pinched around the end of the month — money problems, most likely, exacerbated by what was likely to be a high rent. John gathered from snatches of overheard conversation that the man was Dutch, the woman American. Their sons looked happy enough, so the parents must be keeping the worst of it away from little ears.
A saturnine, string-thin man lived above the family. He wore well-cut suits and carried a leather briefcase that matched his expensive shoes. A diplomat? Or a lawyer — John met men like him through Zoe, once upon a time, men who wrote memoirs about defending some poor bugger in apparently less-developed democracies, and retired to expensive rooms in London not far away from boys being done in for being too poor and of the wrong colour. The man next door left early in the morning and returned late in the evening, always alone.
Jasmijn de Vries never had visitors. Her flat was sparsely and cheaply furnished, a rarity in the moneyed neighbourhood. The window that faced John's revealed a long dinner table that doubled as a work desk, two wooden chairs, and a sofa facing a flatscreen TV placed on a book cabinet. He occasionally saw her typing away at a shiny silver MacBook, headphones on and facing the door. Books were piled in neat stacks on the floor, arranged in rows against the wall. A blue pot with a flourishing coriander plant was placed on a stool next to the window.
It was genteel, middle-class poverty, paid for by a parent's indulgence. It ought to have been comfortable. But a comfortable, sheltered young woman didn't constantly watch the door and change the multiple locks herself, nor install discreet security cameras on the walls either.
*
One morning, John woke up to Alice steaming open Jasmijn's letters: mostly utility bills, the odd letter or two from her university, no rental notice. Jasmijn was a History student at Leiden University, where Alice apparently had "business" John fruitlessly interrogated her on.
"No murder, I promise," she said, and grinned.
Alice kept close to him while John recuperated, like a predator circling protectively around her young. She was at the university three days a week, but otherwise seemed content to work in her small study or the living room while John prowled the windows and watched. She was always there: in John's space, in bed with him, in the questions strung up in silence between them.
Occasionally, she came home with the odd thing or two: a novel, figs they ate baked with honey and cheese, a small white-and-blue porcelain windmill, a new stack of travel brochures for him. Alice acted on her impulses without impulsiveness, and so John quietly filed the observation in the mental case file he was building on her latest scheming.
"You never told me how you knew her," John said, as they flipped through terrible Dutch TV shows. "Jasmijn."
Next to him, Alice stretched out on the sofa and placed her feet on his lap. "Anomalies interest me. She's out of place here — here, in a street full of expats and transients. And I was bored."
"You broke into her flat."
"Well, yes." The corners of her mouth twitched. "I was sure I wasn't caught, but she changed the locks, after."
He gave her a long look. "And of course you broke in again."
"Naturally. How could I resist a challenge?"
On the TV screen, a girl in dreadlocks was earnestly nodding at another woman's apparent advice. Once there were ideologies, John thought. Now there was reality TV, transcending boundaries.
"Alice. Why are we here?"
"The healthcare services are admirable."
"I'm not in the mood to be playing your games," he snapped, tipping her feet onto the floor as he stood. He grimaced, and nearly fell over — his leg did not appreciate the movement.
She tilted her head. "Good, because I'm not playing either."
*
John cut up the brochures Alice brought home to him, arranging the pictures in a caterpillar-like collage across the dining room table. Kelimutu, Indonesia. Machu Piccu, Peru. The city of Petra, Jordan. Nara, Japan. Alice once tempted him with the knife-edge thrill of fugu, delicious death on a plate. The promised taste was cold and briny on his tongue.
He opened a leaflet exhorting a once-in-a-lifetime tour of the Gobi Desert and imagined snow on the dunes, a cold desert far from hot sand and sun-bleached rocks he'd always wanted to touch. But the vastness was the same — he'd never been anywhere empty from the din of human voices, and the only absolute silence he'd ever known was the moment before a gunshot, or a fist to the jaw.
He missed Justin Ripley's funeral. Had to. And here he was, deciding on a holiday spot with Alice Morgan, leaving everything he was behind him.
"What choices did you have to make?" he murmured to Jasmijn de Vries, across their separation, watching her sling her backpack over a chair. As if hearing him, she paused at her window, chin bowing down in thought.
Alice's key rattled in the lock. A moment later, the front door closed with a click, and John followed her light-footed tread up the stairs, where it paused.
"There's a strange man lurking about the neighbourhood," she said — cool, considering. "About 180 centimetres tall, white, dark hair, speaks Dutch. Wears a grey windcheater."
John's spine straightened, and he instinctively, decisively jumped to his feet.
"Just remember you're to stay off your feet," Alice said brightly, over his pained groan, and laughed.
*
The family of four next door went to bed early, the parents no doubt eager for an hour or two of blessed relief from their boys. The woman downstairs kept late hours, and sometimes walked her dog at night, generally going quiet at around two in the morning. The diplomat-or-lawyer occasionally went out again after returning from work, but more often John would see a delivery man from a nearby Thai restaurant ringing his doorbell.
Jasmijn never seemed to sleep through the night. John would sometimes limp down for a cup of tea when his leg was bothering him too much for a restful sleep, and see light slating across the darkened garden from her window. That night, though, she seemed to have decided to turn in early, her lights going out just after eleven.
John dragged a chair to his window and waited, dimming the lights. Adrenaline fizzled in his blood, thoughts popping with every spike. Alice leaned against the glass, angling herself to watch both him and Jasmijn's window. Her icy eyes shone with hidden mirth, or perhaps — he thought — the prospect of murder.
The clock's hands ticked past midnight. John said, abruptly, "Your patience for a pay-off never ceases to a thing that fascinates."
"Are you referring to us stalking Ms. de Vries, or…" she waved a hand at the space between them.
"Both. And one other thing you're not telling me."
"Let's not get ahead of ourselves." She stiffened, abruptly, like a tiger about to pounce. "John—"
"I see it," he said, grim. A torch's beam cut through the darkness in Jasmijn's flat, glinting off the glass of the window. It illuminated a glimpse of a grey windcheater and, as they watch, the sudden outline of Jasmijn's body.
The light of the torch swung up, to the side, and jittered before falling away. "I've seen enough," John snarled, pushing himself up, the chair bouncing off the floor with a loud, dull thump. "I'm going in."
"Wait," Alice said. She opened the window. In her hand, he saw, was the porcelain windmill she'd brought home. "Do sit down, John."
The windmill was tourist tat of the worst kind, utterly lacking in any true aesthetic value. But it made a more than adequate missile, waking up the entire neighbourhood as it crashed through Jasmijn's window and — more importantly — hit the intruder's head with a dead-on crack.
*
Later, after the Dutch police had taken statements and gone, and the neighbours had come to a consensus that it was a boyfriend, or possibly a husband, or a crazed stalker; Alice made him a cup of tea. It was sweet, and hot.
"When transplanting seedlings from a seed flat," she said, "appropriate treatment is necessary for their recovery. Acclimatisation."
He eyed her over the steaming liquid. "This is your idea of acclimatisation."
"Well. One has to make do with what's at hand."
"This is not acclimatisation, Alice." Flakes of blood had drifted from Jasmijn's fingernails as she shivered in ambulance. She'd fought off her attacker with her bare hands, and even before Alice intervened, she'd gouged into the man's eyelids.
She smiled, clearly unrepentant. "To be fair, I was also thinking about your recovery. You did manage to stay put far longer than I thought you'd last, and all because you were watching our neighbour. Well done."
The brochures on the table swam before his eyes. He heard her stand, then walk around the table to him. She pressed a kiss to the centre of his brows, tenderly.
"Where would you like to go?" Alice said. He tilted his head back to watch her. His nose brushed her jawline, smelled the chilly, verdant embrace of her perfume. "We have a whole world to see, John."