Killers of a Certain Age

The narrative returns to Zanzibar in 1981, where Billie and her team are once more underground, using a tunnel to enter the baroness’s estate. They enter the house through the cellar, and Mary Alice cuts the phone line. The baroness wakes instantly when Billie and Vance enter. She shoots at Vance, so Billie approaches and stabs her to death with her knitting needles. Vance, outraged, tells Billie, “you are not my equal and don’t you ever make the mistake of thinking you are” (275). They escape the house and prepare the paintings for shipment to a Museum warehouse so the organization can return them to any remaining owners. The last painting, The Queen of Sheba Arising, has been “nicked by the baroness’s bullet,” and the narrator says, “it will be almost forty years before [Billie] will see it again” (277).

Back at Benscombe, Billie and the others are exhausted and irritable. She takes a packet of cigarettes and the dossier she stole from Carapaz to an outdoor shed, thinking about her history with files and dossiers. In the past, the team received detailed files from Provenance with coded imagery of “a young girl looking over a flock of sheep.