Killing Eva Read Online Free PDF Page A

could not see any of his features. He looked almost as if he had none. Eva was frightened.
    Then, without warning, the man turned and walked in the opposite direction, his hands in his pockets. Eva watched him go. The gaggle of Wednesday night revellers hustled past the alley, obscuring her vision of the departing man. None of them noticed the lone woman who had retreated, shaking, into the shadows. When they had moved on, she scanned the street for several minutes but could see nothing at all.
    Her flat was just minutes from where she was standing. She could move, or she could remain cornered in that cold alleyway. She started to run. When she reached her front door, she drove the key home and flung open the door. It squeaked on its hinges. She leaped inside and felt for the handle behind her. A gust of wind blew in her face and, suddenly, she felt as if she was being pushed back, the door wrenched from her grasp. She felt a scream settle in her throat as she expected to see that empty hood appear around the door. The gust of wind died away. Quietly, Eva closed the door.
    Once she had downed a glass of brandy to steady her nerves, Eva sat on her Swedish designed sofa and tried to stop shaking. The entire experience of the last hour was unpleasant, but what had shaken her most was that the man had done nothing. Perhaps he had been interrupted by those kids, but she wasn’t sure. He had not tried to mug her, he had not tried to hurt her, he was apparently not trying to commit an opportunistic crime but just to intimidate. That meant there was another reason for his presence. Once again, Eva felt things slipping from her grasp. The steady, normal life she had constructed for herself over the past year seemed to be going up in smoke. Something was happening, she could feel it. Something she had no control over.
    Her mind flicked back to the dying man at Waterloo Station earlier in the week. That seemed to be the point at which things had started to change.
    She poured herself another drink and leaned back into the sofa. Then she stood up, walked to the kitchen and flicked the heating switch on the boiler before returning to the sofa and her drink. She tried to remember the man’s face but it was difficult. She thought of his battered hat lying on the floor and felt sadness that someone in such a state could still do something as quaintly well mannered and old fashioned as wear a hat.
    Where had he come from?
    Again, Eva heard the word that he had said to her as he died, ‘kolychak’. She realised she had said it out loud.
    She leaned over and opened the notes app on her phone and typed it into the lined yellow page. She stared at it. It meant nothing to her. But it had meant something – at the time. Or had she imagined that in the drama of the moment.
    She stood up, walked over to a vintage chest of drawers and pulled it open, the pale wood so smooth under her touch, contrasting with the clean modernist lines of the sofa. It was a contrived ‘look’ but she quite liked it. She retrieved a piece of paper and a black pen and wrote the word, first in large capital letters and then in standard sized text. She propped the sheet of paper on the arm of the sofa next to her and continued to stare. She was sure she knew that word. She had heard it before. But where had she heard it and what did it mean?
    When she finally persuaded herself to go to bed an hour later, she took her laptop with her. She had bolted, locked and chained her front door, checked every window and even picked up an empty wine bottle and a kitchen knife, a small arsenal of weapons, ‘just in case’. And she could use them, she knew that now – she had killed two people in Paris.
    In the warm light of the cosy bedroom, she began to search the internet for the word ‘kolychak’. She passed the term through several search engines but soon felt her mind begin to slow. The brandy was relaxing her body and she now realised