Chapter Sixteen An Unwanted Dinner Guest #2
Viktor met my eyes across the table. Something passed between us, brief and silent an acknowledgment, perhaps, that I was not as easy to read as James. His smile didn’t change, but I had the distinct sensation of being assessed and categorised and filed away for later consideration.
I did not enjoy the sensation.
???
Viktor asked questions the way certain people ask questions; building a picture, filling in gaps, never asking anything directly that he could learn indirectly.
When he wanted to know about the wedding venue, he didn’t ask about the wedding venue.
He asked about James’s family, and James told him about the venue himself, along with the security arrangements, the layout and the precise moment the bride and groom would be alone in the vestry.
James volunteered all of this because James volunteered everything. Viktor simply created the space for it.
He told stories about their ‘childhood’ that were affectionate and detailed and entirely impossible to verify.
A swimming hole near their grandmother’s village.
A dog called Mishka who ate shoes. A winter so cold the river froze and they walked across it to school.
The stories were good. They were vivid and warm and they made Anastasia sound like a real person with a real past, which of course she was.
But Anastasia’s face, while Viktor told them, had the particular blankness of someone hearing a song they didn’t recognise being attributed to their own band.
And here was the thing that troubled me most: Anastasia was afraid of him.
She hid it well. Extraordinarily well. But I had spent enough evenings watching Anastasia across dinner tables to know her baseline and tonight she was operating at a frequency I hadn’t seen before.
Her laughter was a beat too quick. Her contributions to the conversation were a shade too careful.
When Viktor touched her arm, casually, the way a brother might, she didn’t lean in or pull away.
She held perfectly still. As if the touch was something to be endured rather than enjoyed.
James, naturally, saw none of this. James was having the time of his life, delighted to have acquired a brother-in-law who could discuss wine and skiing and the finer points of European property law.
By dessert, they were planning a boys’ weekend in Cap Ferrat.
By coffee, Viktor was practically part of the furniture.
???
We parted on the pavement outside the restaurant. Viktor embraced Anastasia (she held herself very straight) and shook James’s hand with both of his own, the gesture of a man sealing a bond. Then he turned to me.
‘Henry.’ Another handshake, another fraction too long. ‘A pleasure. I look forward to Verbier.’
‘Likewise,’ I said, which was not entirely true.
He walked away into the Mayfair evening, his stride easy and unhurried, a man with nowhere to be and all the time in the world.
I watched him go and felt something I couldn’t quite name.
Not suspicion, exactly. Something more instinctive than that.
The feeling you get when you pick up a beautifully wrapped present and find it’s slightly heavier than it should be.
James was flagging a taxi, one arm around Anastasia, practically glowing. ‘Well?’ he said, turning to me. ‘What did you think?’
I thought about what to say. I thought about telling him that his fiancée’s brother sat like a man who expected to be attacked, asked questions like a man conducting an interrogation and told childhood stories that his own sister didn’t seem to recognise.
I thought about telling him that Anastasia had been rigid with something that looked very much like fear all evening, and that the warmth Viktor projected had the unusual quality of something manufactured rather than felt.
But James was happy. James was always happy, but tonight he was happy in a specific way, the way of a man who believed his fiancée’s loneliness had just been solved.
He had given her something he thought she needed: family.
The idea that this gift might be poisoned was not one he was equipped to consider.
‘He seems great,’ I said.
James beamed.
Anastasia, behind him, caught my eye. Her expression lasted less than a second, a flicker, nothing more, but it contained something that I would think about for a long time afterwards.
Not gratitude, exactly. Not relief. Something closer to recognition.
As if she had looked at me across the pavement and understood that I had seen what James had not and was grateful and terrified in equal measure.
Then the taxi arrived, the moment passed and they climbed in and disappeared into the London night.
I walked home. It was a long walk, Mayfair to my flat in Battersea, but I wanted the time to think.
The evening replayed in my mind, frame by frame: Viktor’s handshake, Viktor’s smile, Viktor’s eyes tracking the room.
The stories that didn’t quite fit. The fear that Anastasia wore like an invisible coat.
Something was wrong. I didn’t know what and I had no evidence beyond the accumulated instinct of an evening spent watching a man who was trying very hard to seem like something he wasn’t.
But something was wrong.
The only thing I could do was keep watching.