The assassin didn’t put much credence in anything beyond the five senses but the woman disturbed him. He knew who she was; he’d seen her photographs. But he’d never been face-to-face with her. There was no way she could have known him from any other complete stranger. Yet in her eyes at the foot of the stair there’d been knowledge. More than suspicion; certainty. It was there as if she could read him like cold type.
He drifted into the hunt room and took a glass of sherry from a servant’s tray and walked through the crowd carrying it-not drinking. He overheard snatches of talk-the weather at Marbella, the rationing under Vichy-and he put on a pleasant face but spoke to no one.
He took his sherry back along to the ballroom and saw the woman in red dancing with an old gentleman. He turned away, not so quickly as to bring attention to himself, and retreated from her sight. He argued with himself: there was no mystery to it, it had been coincidence; she was the sort of woman whose face could create imagined trouble-as if her inscrutable beauty were meant to be invested with whatever you chose to read into it. He had to dismiss her from his concentrations.
But he couldn’t. It stayed in the back of his mind that the woman could spoil it.