The Troika Dolls - Miranda Darling [125]
‘It doesn’t look like it was an inside job.’ Henning poured a cup of tea from the pot. ‘Someone fired an RPG from the next building straight into Kozkov’s office. Not very subtle, but very effective. Nothing left of the office, let alone any papers in the safe.’
‘Everything gone. The list would have been destroyed, too.’ Stevie paused to take a bite of cake. It was quite delicious, buttery and sweet and full of freshly roasted walnuts.
‘You know, Henning, they went after me, too—on the same day. I suppose it was meant to be a simultaneous attack.’ She raised a pointed eyebrow. ‘Very tidy.’
Henning’s face grew still with concern. ‘What happened?’
‘They came for me at the polo. Oh, at first I thought they were after the Hammer-Belles . . .’ She took a small sip of her coffee then abruptly dropped the cup into its saucer.
‘Ech!’ Stevie screwed up her pale face.
‘Too bitter?’
‘No. They’ve put sugar in the coffee.’ She was indignant. ‘I can’t stand sugar in my coffee—what a silly mistake. And in Switzerland of all places.’ She stopped herself, realising she sounded a little hysterical.
‘Henning,’ she leaned in towards him and blinked in appeal, ‘may I have a cup of your tea instead?’
Stevie flung the offending contents of her cup into the fire, rinsed it with Henning’s hot water and poured tea from his pot. She took a sip and rid her mouth of the sweet coffee taste.
‘That’s better.’
She sat back and stretched her toes towards the fire. ‘Yes,’ she repeated, ‘they came for me at the polo, a single—’
Suddenly pain seared through her stomach followed by a wave of nausea. She tried to swallow but her throat refused, as if paralysed. Stevie’s head began to swim.
‘Hen—’ Her lips felt too numb to move properly. ‘I don’t—’
She stood and steadied herself on the mantelpiece over the fire. She felt weak as a kitten, her legs shaking. Then her face began to tingle.
‘Oh—the tea!’
With a slow grace—gold cigarette in one hand, tea cup in the other—she crashed to the floor. The cup shattered on the stone hearth and her head missed the iron fire poker by millimetres.
Stevie lay face down, spread-eagled on the floor, her cigarette smouldering on the carpet. The toe of her ballet slipper touched the corner of a burning pine log and quietly caught fire.
Her little body was convulsing now in sharp bursts, as if she were attached to invisible electric wires. The pain and anxiety Stevie had felt were gone, replaced by a complete lassitude. Nothing mattered now, not even that funny darkness that was creeping up all around her.
Henning was kneeling beside her, tipping her head back, putting his mouth on hers.
Stevie sat straight up like a shot.
‘I’m perfectly—’
Then she let out a groan, her eyes rolled back into her head and she fell into a bottomless abyss.
Consciousness crept into her mind like dawn through curtains. Stevie slowly became aware of her lips—parched and peeling and tight. Then of her big toe. It stung. She tried to open her eyelids but they were too heavy, sticky. She stopped trying to move and tried to think.
This was no ordinary morning waking . . . all she could remember was sitting by the fire with Henning, then a rather blissful state of floating, from the light, into the darkness. There had been a vivid dream about hundreds of grey and black cats swarming though a roundabout, over and over again.
‘Stevie?’ Henning’s face appeared close to hers, feathered and fringed through Stevie’s eyelashes.
Her eyes fluttered open. ‘I’ve been poisoned.’
‘Yes, yes, you have.’
Suddenly she remembered. ‘The tea! Are you alright?’
‘It wasn’t the tea, Stevie. I’m fine. The poison was in the coffee. Thankfully you didn’t drink the whole damn pot. The sugar must have been put in to mask the taste.’
A voice came from the end of the bed. ‘You would be dead if you had had more than a sip.’
Henning took Stevie’s