‘So did you believe everything Alexei told us?’ she asked, wondering for one moment if the restaurant might be bugged.
‘Why on earth would he make up such an elaborate lie?’
She didn’t know the answer to that one.
‘I think he was right that Dominic craved excitement,’ she said thoughtfully.
Elliot nodded. ‘That was probably his original motivation, regardless of what Alexei said about hate. I mean, come on, you’re twenty years old, you like beautiful women and fast cars and someone asks you to be a spy. You’re going to take the offer. Or at least seriously bloody think about it. It fits with everything we know about Dominic. His love of danger, his pursuit of glamour.’
‘Can we not talk about it any more?’ said Abby softly. ‘At least not today. It makes me sad, and we’re here in this beautiful, magical place.’
She watched a boat cruise along the Neva, the soft ripple of music radiating from below deck.
‘You know, if we’d come a few weeks earlier, we would have caught the white nights,’ said Elliot as they finished their main course of veal and potatoes and waved away the dessert menu in place of the bill.
‘White nights?’
‘The sun hardly sets and the air is so milky. You could stay up all night and not notice.’
Abby smiled at the romantic image.
‘I have really got to travel more,’ she said, taking a long, wistful swig of wine.
‘No reason not to. Not in this day and age.’
‘Well, I’ve had a passport since I was sixteen, but I’ve only ever used it four times before this week.’
Elliot sat forward, an amused but fascinated look on his face.
‘So where have you been, Gordon?’
She started counting them out on her fingers.
‘France on a school trip, a girls’ package holiday to Tenerife, New York, and Turkey for my honeymoon.’
‘Well, the Canaries are practically Africa, New York is the centre of the world and Turkey straddles Asia, so you’re more cosmopolitan than you think,’ he said, a smile pulling at the corner of his mouth.
‘You’re laughing at me.’
‘I’m not. Did the travelling stop once you got married?’
‘Not really. We go to Cornwall twice a year,’ she said, suddenly aware that she was using the present tense. ‘Nick is really into surfing and I just love the colour of the sea down there. We always had this dream that we would move there one day, open a café with a surf school. It was a bit of a pipe dream really, because Nick’s business started to do so well that giving it all up to run a hobby horse seemed out of the question. But for four weeks of the year we went and lived the fantasy. This year has been the first year we haven’t done it. Understandably,’ she added quickly.
She fell silent and played with her napkin.
‘Are you okay?’
‘I can’t stop thinking about Dominic. What are we going to tell Rosamund?’
‘We don’t tell her anything yet.’
She glanced up and saw that Elliot was watching her intently.
‘Do you regret finding the picture? Agreeing to work with me?’
‘Not for a minute,’ she said quietly. ‘It’s fortified me.’
She let her eyes drift out across the river and took a sip of her wine before turning back to Elliot.