Tim Stevens

Jokerman

One

Tullivant settled his right eye against the telescopic sight and waited.

The car carrying the target crawled along the driveway like the beetle that was making its unhurried way along the twig inches from Tullivant’s face. Tullivant tracked the vehicle in the crosshairs of the scope: an executive car, a silver Mercedes R Class, probably armour plated. In its wake a thin skein of dust dissipated into the morning air.

The Mercedes was moving from right to left, from Tullivant’s point of view. He took his eye away from the scope for a moment to obtain a broad view of the scene again. On the left-hand side of his visual field the driveway expanded into a gravelled forecourt which hugged the front of a large, Georgian-era house. Three more cars were parked before the house, and a knot of people thronged around them.

The Mercedes pulled up on the forecourt and stopped. Across the expanse of lawn, Tullivant heard its engine shut off.

He twitched his neck to one side sharply to get rid of a crick that was threatening to develop, shuffled his shoulders a little, and applied his eye to the scope once more, ignoring the cool sticky sting of sweat which had gathered between his collar and the skin of his throat. Nine in the morning, and the August heat was already threatening to soak the country in lethargy as it had done every day for the last five weeks.

On the distant forecourt, all four doors of the Mercedes had opened and men were getting out. Three of them, including the driver, had the solid sinewy movements of professional fighters. The fourth, like the others in a suit, was smaller, less confident. The cluster of people who’d been standing near the other cars began to move forwards. There were five of them. Once again, the majority had the watchful, springloaded demeanours of warriors; but one was a civilian. A woman.

Tullivant held the scope steady on her profile. She was in her middle fifties, with bobbed highlighted hair and a business suit.

The Home Secretary.

Tullivant had always thought it a strange title for the second most senior member of the government. It sounded like somebody a middle-class professional might employ to manage their household administrative tasks. Her face was impassive, no welcoming smile lighting it up. Not even a politically motivated rictus.

The civilian who’d stepped out of the Mercedes approached, extending his hand. The Home Secretary took it briefly. It was a functional shake, not the faux-hearty grip of a photo-opportunity. There were no cameras to capture this particular meeting.

Well, none if you discounted the hidden CCTV devices trained on the forecourt. The ones Tullivant, more than half a kilometre away, was out of sight of.

His exact distance from the small party in front of the house was six hundred and ten metres. His rifle, a Canadian C14 Timberwolf, was famous for its anti-personnel accuracy at a range of up to 1,200 metres. The margin was a large one.

A modified sports shooting weapon, the Timberwolf had been the standard sniper rifle of the Canadian Armed Forces for nearly a decade. Tullivant hadn’t served in the Canadian army — wasn’t Canadian at all — but he’d developed an affinity for the Timberwolf, and it was now his tool of choice for this type of work.

He felt the first flicker of an increased pulse rate, the swelling in his chest which signalled that his breathing was aligning itself with a state of imminent action, and he knew the moment had arrived.

Tullivant had positioned himself along a thick horizontal branch of an ancient, colossal oak. Among the dense late summer foliage, in his dark green overalls and olive balaclava, he knew he was all but invisible.

Through the scope, the Home Secretary’s face leaned towards that of the small civilian man, as though they were about to kiss. Her lips were moving in a murmur.

Tullivant centred the crosshairs on the side of the head, just in front of the ear.

He drew a moderately deep breath.

Released it slowly.

Squeezed back on the trigger as he did so.

The rifle was fitted with both a muzzle flash hider and a sound suppressor, but the thump and crack of the firing mechanism was startlingly loud in Tullivant’s ear.

The bullet that left the muzzle did so at a velocity of something under one kilometre per second, and was capable of bringing down a large game animal.

The head disappeared from the view afforded by the telescopic sight.

A ragged cluster of yells rose up from the party in the forecourt, sending jackdaws cawing and wheeling up above the trees around Tullivant. Somewhere below the canopy of the forest, some kind of four-legged beast took flight. A deer, perhaps.

Tullivant’s instinct was to drop down off the branch onto the floor of the forest and run.

Instead, he maintained his position, roving with the scope until he saw what he wanted amidst the blur of human movement in front of the house.

The crumpled body, its head an indistinct smear.

Tullivant swung down below the branch, holding on with one hand for a moment while he gripped the rifle in the other, and dropped, landing bent-kneed on the thickly carpeted forest floor.

Near his feet was a canvas bag. He removed the magazine from the rifle and dismantled the weapon quickly, zipping the components into the bag.

Leaving the balaclava on for now, he began to run, loping among the trees, taking just enough care not to trip over a raised root or snap his ankle at the bottom of an unseen hole.

Instead of making his way straight to the road which ran along the edge of the forest, Tullivant headed towards it at a slant, so that at one point he was almost moving parallel to it.

Ahead, through the trees, he saw the van. A plain white van, one of thousands on Britain’s roads this morning or any other.

For an instant, as he emerged from the dense cloak of the trees and scrambled up the ditch beside the road, Tullivant imagined cars screaming to a halt, guns being trained on him, men shouting. But of course that was absurd. Even if the people on the forecourt had worked out which direction the shot had come from, even if they’d made it over the wall surrounding the property, and even if they’d managed to follow Tullivant on his counterintuitive jagged path through the trees… they wouldn’t have been able to summon vehicles, or additional manpower, quickly enough.

Tullivant hefted the canvas bag containing the rifle into the back of the van, stowing it in a specially created compartment under the seat. He stripped off the balaclava and the overalls and stuffed them in the compartment with the rifle. Underneath, he wore paint-stained jeans and an old white T-shirt emblazoned with the logo of a brand of lager.

He fitted a peaked cap to his head. Glancing in the mirror, he saw nothing behind him but the road, winding back and upwards through the forest.

Tullivant started the engine and forced himself to pull away slowly, as the post-adrenaline jitters began to set in.

Two

There was something wrong with the scene, and it perturbed John Purkiss that he couldn’t immediately put his finger on what it was.

Vale had fallen into step beside him as he’d emerged from Warren Street Underground station and turned right down Tottenham Court Road, as he’d been instructed. It was the way Vale often began their meetings, appearing from nowhere like a silent vampire. Even without his customary trenchcoat, which he’d forgone because of the summer heat in favour of an ancient tweed jacket, Vale managed to look sepulchral. Tall, bone-thin and with a hunch that was growing more pronounced each time Purkiss met him, Vale was an oddity for his generation: a sixty-something-year-old member of the Establishment who happened to be of Afro-Caribbean ethnicity.

‘John.’

‘Quentin.’

It was all they ever required for a greeting.

Purkiss let Vale set the pace, turning with him off the noisy chaos of Tottenham Court Road towards the bohemian maze of Fitzrovia. The pavements were cluttered with early lunchers eating al fresco outside the Italian restaurants and French bistros that seemed to make up every second address. Bright, young laughter rang through the streets, the city wallowing in the unusual run of fine weather that had been granted it like the smile of an indulgent god.

Yes, Purkiss thought. There’s something very wrong here.

He’d taken the call from Vale two hours earlier. Weeks, sometimes months would go by without any contact whatsoever. Then, the phone would ring, Vale would request a meeting, and Purkiss would invariably be there. Always in a public place; as far as Purkiss knew, Vale didn’t operate out of an office.

Both men were former SIS, officers of British Intelligence. Each had left the Service for reasons of his own. Vale continued to be retained by the Service in some complicated way Purkiss didn’t fully understand. The Service asked for Vale’s help when there was a problem with one of its agents. A problem which needed to be taken care of discreetly, and outside official channels, to avoid unnecessary public embarrassment.

And Purkiss was the man Vale employed to take care of the problem.

They reached Clipstone Street, the giant Telecom Tower looming ahead, and Vale began to mount a short flight of steps leading up to a boxy, nineteen sixties office-block building. It was then that Purkiss realised what was wrong.

‘You’re not smoking,’ he said.

Vale turned. ‘That’s right. I quit three weeks ago.’

‘Why?’

Purkiss had never seen Vale without a cigarette in his hand. Even indoors, he held one between his fingers, unlit. He smoked with dedication, methodically, not like a craven addict fending off withdrawal symptoms but like a man who gained something positive, even life-affirming from the act.

Vale reached the top of the steps and pressed a button. ‘Angina,’ he said.

Purkiss caught up with him, was about to ask more, when the door buzzed open.

Inside was a gloomily lit lobby, unmanned, with a pair of lifts at the far end. Vale ignored them and turned up the fire stairs to the left, as if to defy the diagnosis he’d been given. They climbed to the second floor. At the top was a glass door, unmarked. Vale pushed through, and Purkiss followed him into an oblong room with a conference table down the middle.

A woman was seated at the table, a notebook computer open before her. Also on the table were a jug of water and three glasses, one of them half full.

Purkiss recognised the woman immediately, even though he’d never met her.

She didn’t get up, but glanced at them in turn.

‘Quentin,’ she said. ‘And John Purkiss.’

Her gaze lingered on Purkiss, roving over his face, as if she was comparing him in the flesh with an image, a file, in her head.

Then she half-rose, reached across the table to shake hands. Her grip was firm, the palm slightly callused.

‘Maureen Kasabian,’ she said.

Her blue eyes were sharp, but the pouches sagged heavily beneath them. In fact her entire face, seamed and weathered, seemed to be slipping downwards, as if she’d lost weight abruptly and the skin hadn’t had a chance to catch up. Slate-coloured hair, functionally trimmed and long enough at the back to be secured in an indifferent pony tail, matched her charcoal trouser suit. The jacket was slung across the chair beside her and she was in white, rolled-up shirtsleeves.

The two men sat. Kasabian indicated the water jug, and Vale poured them each a glass.

Purkiss mentally ran through all he knew about Mo Kasabian. She must be in her early sixties, around Vale’s age, and though her face made her look older, her movements were those of a much younger, more agile woman. A law graduate from Oxford, she had been president of the Students’ Union in the early nineteen seventies, and had earned a reputation as a left-wing firebrand, leading numerous high-profile protest marches against the Vietnam war, apartheid, and British army activity in Northern Ireland. She’d been arrested more than ten times, had convictions for breach of the peace and damage to public property, and narrowly escaped prison time for assault against a police officer.

As a barrister in the nineteen eighties, she’d specialised in cases that took on the Establishment. Victims of police brutality, asylum seekers facing deportation to countries with no concept of human rights, ordinary workers made ill through corporate irresponsibility. Unlike many other lawyers of her type, Kasabian had never gone in for grandstanding, had never worked the media in a self-aggrandising way. Her success rate was better than average.

In the nineties she’d gravitated towards counter-intelligence work, prompted by her interest in exposing extreme right-wing groups. At some point — Purkiss wasn’t sure when, exactly — she’d been recruited by the Security Service. Known popularly as MI5 or just Five, and Purkiss knew even some of the organisation’s employees had started to refer to it as such, it was referred to in Purkiss’s own circles as Big Sister. The larger, better-funded service, as compared to Little Sister, or SIS, or MI6, Purkiss’s own former stamping ground.

And now Kasabian was deputy director of Big Sister. The second-in-command of MI5. One step away from the most senior counter-intelligence position in the country.

Purkiss had been inside Thames House, the Security Service’s headquarters, on one or two occasions. If he was ever going to meet the service’s deputy head, he’d expect it to be there. In a well-appointed office, with a discreet retinue of bodyguards and administrative mavens close at hand. Not here, in a featureless and seemingly deserted office a few blocks away from the West End.

‘How much have you told him?’ she asked Vale. Her voice was a lawyer’s, commanding attention without being loud. The cut-glass vowels had had some of their edges smoothed over the years, as was inevitable nowadays.

‘Nothing,’ Vale said.

‘Okay.’ She drained her glass, sat back in her chair. ‘Mr Purkiss, I realise this meeting must seem unorthodox to you. And it is, of course. I’ll explain the choice of setting in a minute.’

She hesitated a second, as if testing whether Purkiss was the kind of person to jump in with questions. He wasn’t.

Kasabian continued. ‘Yesterday morning, at nine a.m., an agent of the Security Service called Charles Morrow met the Home Secretary at a secret location near Redhill, Surrey. A country home, which several ministers of state use from time to time in order to conduct meetings where absolute security is required. Morrow had approached the Home Secretary personally two days earlier to request the meeting, bypassing the chain of command within the Service. The Home Secretary granted the request. Which indicates the intended topic of conversation was something highly sensitive.’

She paused. Purkiss had the impression of a lawyer delivering a summing-up argument to a jury, making full use of silences for effect.

‘Morrow arrived under a plainclothes Special Branch escort. Just after he got out of the car — when he was shaking hands with the Home Secretary in the forecourt, in fact — he was shot dead by a sniper. The killer was in the forest surrounding the estate, on the other side of the wall. Early forensic reports suggest he, or she, was at least half a kilometre away, possibly more.

‘By the time Special Branch started their search, the sniper was long gone, of course. So far there’s nothing. No evidence anywhere of a clue.’

Purkiss didn’t ask the obvious question, but Kasabian answered it anyway.

‘This wasn’t a failed assassination attempt on the Home Secretary. She was a sitting duck, and the sniper was a professional. Morrow was the intended victim. There’s no question about it.’

‘Did the Home Secretary say what Morrow wanted to speak to her about?’ said Vale.

‘Yes,’ said Kasabian. ‘I was in a meeting with her and the Director last night. Morrow had told her he needed to fill her in about a coverup within the Service. A criminal conspiracy. He gave no more details.’

Purkiss said, ‘But isn’t it unusual that somebody of the Home Secretary’s standing would grant a private audience to someone like Morrow? I’m assuming he wasn’t one of the top echelon. Surely the Home Secretary would want to talk to someone more senior instead. Like yourself.’

Kasabian regarded him. Not with hostility, Purkiss thought; there was fascination in her gaze, as if human beings and their endlessly varied ways of behaving and communicating afforded her a scholar’s delight. ‘Within the Service we have a special number, Mr Purkiss. A hotline, if you like. I imagine there’s something similar within your own organisation. Sorry, your former organisation. It’s for whistleblowers. People who for whatever reason can’t trust their superiors, and need confidential access to the highest level. The penalties for abuse of this number are severe. So anyone using it knows from the outset that he or she needs a very good reason to do so. Morrow used it.’

The silence was longer this time. It gave Purkiss a chance to assimilate and sift through the information, which was no doubt what Kasabian intended.

‘You’ve kept this out of the media,’ he said.

‘Of course.’ Kasabian poured more water for all of them. ‘There are all sorts of reasons why it’s not in the public interest for this to come out at the moment.’

‘You said you met the Home Secretary. And Mr Strang.’ Sir Guy Strang was the director of the Service. Kasabian’s superior.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Plus the Prime Minister, and of course the head of Special Branch and the Chief Constable of Surrey Police. A full police investigation’s been ordered, as well as an internal one within Five.’ She gave the word an ironic twist, as if she was succumbing to the popular terminology while mocking it at the same time.

Purkiss glanced at Vale. His expression revealed nothing.

‘So why am I here?’ asked Purkiss.

Kasabian fixed him with a lawyerly stare, which must have turned more than one person in the witness box into a quivering wreck.

‘Because I need an outsider,’ she said. ‘Someone clean. Untainted by any connection with Five. Morrow was killed by one of our own. I want you to find whomever it is.’

Three

‘Jokerman,’ said Purkiss.

Kasabian shrugged. ‘Every operation needs a name. Even an operation that’s off the books, like this one.’

‘Why that name?’

‘It’s a song title by Bob Dylan,’ she said. ‘You know my background. Lefty counterculture type.’

Again Purkiss looked at Vale. His look said, how much of this did you know about when you called me? Vale gazed back mildly, said nothing.

To Kasabian, Purkiss said, ‘But why have an unofficial investigation at all? Why not just run a parallel one using an outsider?’

‘To answer your second question first,’ Kasabian said, ‘you are an outsider. You’re about as outside as you can be. You’re from the other team. SIS. The dreaded Six. Our main rivals for manpower and funds. You’re also, Mr Purkiss, a highly experienced investigator with a considerable reputation. I know about Tallinn last October, and that New York business in the spring. Yet to most people even within SIS, you don’t exist. You’re a rumour. You’re able to pull off major successes while remaining discreet. And I’m not saying this to massage your ego, by the way. I don’t work that way.

‘As to your first question: why conduct an unofficial investigation?’ Kasabian glanced away, then back. ‘Because I don’t know how high the rot goes. I don’t know who within the Service is implicated in all this. I don’t know how many people are involved. I don’t know what this supposed coverup is all about. And so I don’t trust anyone.’

‘Hold on a moment,’ said Purkiss. ‘Do you mean Strang isn’t aware that you’re approaching me?’

‘Correct. He isn’t.’

Purkiss took a moment to process it. Kasabian nodded.

‘Yes. I’ll say it openly, so we’re quite clear. I can’t be convinced that this conspiracy doesn’t involve the director of the Security Service himself.’

Over his lifetime Purkiss had mastered the art of keeping his feelings and emotional reactions concealed, where necessary. Done too often, too routinely, it froze up the muscles, made spontaneity difficult, which was in itself counterproductive.

This he judged to be an appropriate time to use the technique.

Kasabian studied him for a full ten seconds. Then she laid her palms flat on the tabletop. No wedding band, Purkiss noticed. No jewellery of any kind.

‘I know what it looks like, so I’ll preempt any comments you might make on the subject,’ she said. ‘I’m the deputy. The up-and-comer, angling for the top job. I learn about corruption within the service and I immediately start looking for ways to implicate the boss, so I can get him removed and grab his post for myself. All I can say is… no. I can’t tell you how relieved I’ll be if Guy Strang is shown to have nothing to do with this.

‘And I have no evidence that he is involved. Note that I said I can’t be certain he isn’t. That’s not the same thing.’

‘But you wouldn’t even have mentioned it if you didn’t have a suspicion,’ Purkiss said.

Kasabian dipped her head in acknowledgement. ‘Fair enough. The thing that makes me wonder is this. The hotline, the whistleblower’s access to the Home Secretary, is supposedly confidential. A means whereby any Service employee of even the lowliest level can expose corruption or criminality within the organisation without fear of reprisal. And, by and large, that’s how it works. But I do know that the Home Secretary — not just this one, but her predecessors too — tends to mention any such contacts to the Director as a matter of routine. After all, the likelihood that the problem being reported involves the Director is so remote it’s almost not worth considering. So it’s possible — likely, even — that Mr Strang knew Morrow was going to meet the Home Secretary.’

‘And arranged for Morrow to be killed?’ asked Purkiss.

‘I know. It’s outrageous. And highly unlikely. But it’s not beyond the realm of possibility.’ Kasabian waved a hand. ‘Neither of them, Strang or the Home Secretary, would ever admit they’d discussed it beforehand. It would do violence to the whole sacred notion of the hotline.’

For the first time, Kasabian stood up. She was shorter than Purkiss had been expecting, most of her length in her torso. She went over to the window and gazed out.

With her back to the two men, she said: ‘Mr Purkiss, I’ve studied your background exhaustively, as you might have expected. Not just since yesterday, when Morrow was killed and I first considered approaching you, but over the years. I’ve followed your career, step by step. Though this is the first time we’ve met, I already know you. And as I’ve come to know you, I’ve began to understand fundamentally, in the marrow of my bones, that you and I are the same.

‘I’m a quarter of a century older than you. I’m a woman. My professional training was in the law. But those are details. Ephemera.’ Kasabian turned, began ticking off items on her fingers. ‘We’re both from privileged backgrounds. Both Oxbridge products. Both committed to justice, in our own ways. You could have risen within SIS, could be a senior officer by now, maybe a contender for the top job one day. But you chose instead to work outside the fold. You recognised that the most evil, the most contemptible of enemies is the one within. The worm in the apple. The betrayer of his own people. So you’ve dedicated yourself to rooting out the corruption within SIS itself, instead of focusing on the external threats and neutralising them at source.

‘And for my part, I could have had a stellar career in the legal world. Taken silk, eventually become a judge. But I too chose to confront the internal enemy. The one at the heart of the nation. The one poised to strike from inside the body politic. Which is why I joined the Security Service. Why the majority of the operations I personally conduct and co-ordinate are those against home-grown threats. British Islamist fundamentalists, neo-fascist groups. Eco-terrorists.’

It was an impressive performance, Purkiss thought. The cadences of her speech, the ebb and flow of a rising tide, were masterfully handled. She was becoming impassioned without the need for theatrics.

Kasabian stepped back to the table and rested her flat palms on it once more, leaning forward on straight arms. When she spoke again, it was in a quieter voice, but one no less commanding.

‘So do you see, Mr Purkiss, how much it means to me to find out who killed Morrow? To expose this coverup, whatever it is? We’re the guardians of public safety. If we can’t uphold the very highest moral standards, then there is no more morality.’

She held his gaze for a few seconds, then pulled back the chair and sat down.

‘Will you help me, Mr Purkiss?’

‘No,’ he said.

Four

He wasn’t, Emma reflected for at least the tenth time, at all how she’d expected the head of MI5 to look.

His status, even his name, suggested somebody patrician, with long, swooping grey hair, an aquiline nose, chiselled lips. Perhaps a slightly raffish air. Instead, Sir Guy Strang was a bull. Round-shouldered, hulking and neckless, with a smooth pink pate from which the last die-hard strands of hair had been brutally shaved, he stood six feet two and towered over most people in any room he was in, not just because of his height but by virtue of his massive, imposing persona.

He certainly stood higher than Emma’s five feet six, when he was on his feet. At the moment, however, she was looking down at him.

Sir Guy’s exposed chest was, like his head, pale pink and hairless. Emma fitted the leads into position, holding them in place with discs sticky with gel, and ran the ECG machine.

‘Can I — ?’ he rumbled, but she held a finger to her lips.

When the printout had run its course, Emma detached the leads and handed Sir Guy a fistful of paper towels with which to wipe off the gel. She examined the ECG printout, feeding the flimsy paper through her hands. Very slight ST depression, and the occasional ectopic beat. But not much different from the last one, a month ago.

She nodded and he sat up, began buttoning his shirt. He was peering at Emma’s face, trying to read her expression, and she kept her features neutral for as long as she could before letting a smile break through.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Fine.’

‘Comedian, eh?’ he muttered, fitting his cuff links.

Emma turned her back on him while he dressed, and went over to the counter to write up her notes. The room was a purpose-built medical examination facility deep in the bowels of Thames House. Whatever Emma said she needed, equipment-wise, she got, without question or fuss. It was startling, and a complete contrast to her experience in the NHS.

Dr Emma Goddard had been personal physician to Sir Guy Strang, the Director of MI5, for a little over a year now, and she still couldn’t quite get used to the notion. At the time of her recruitment she’d been a junior partner in a general practice in Wimbledon, a pleasant enough job which was starting to take on the comfortable, undemandingly dangerous feel of a rut. At a cocktail party she’d been introduced to a friend of a friend of a friend, someone who evasively mentioned he was employed in the Civil Service and who took a great interest in hearing about Emma’s own career. A week later she received a letter from the Home Office, asking if she’d be interested in considering a job offer and inviting her to come in to discuss it.

There followed an extraordinary series of meetings and interviews, initially in Whitehall and eventually at Thames House as well. Emma and her husband, Brian, spent long evening discussing the decision she’d have to make. Brian was gently sceptical. Did she really want to give up the relative security of a GP post in the NHS for something as outside the normal range of a doctor’s experience as this? More importantly, did Emma think she’d be happy, attending to just one patient, who in all likelihood would stay fit and healthy anyway? Wouldn’t she miss the hurly burly of GP life, of caring for a host of ills, medical and social, while feeling that she was genuinely making a difference? And it wasn’t as though she could bask in the status afforded to her by being personal doctor to the country’s top counterintelligence officer. She wouldn’t be able to tell a soul.

But Brian let her convince him. The money was good. Better than what she’d been earning in full-time practice, in fact. Much better. It meant she and Brian could now afford a live-in nanny to look after the children. Her duties were, frankly, not all that arduous. Monthly examinations of her patient, including routine blood and other standard tests. Updates on the state of his health to an array of other, handpicked specialists — surgeons, cardiologists, urologists — who would be called upon if he ever needed them. And Emma was aware that she’d be on twenty-four hour call in case of an emergency.

The sudden freeing up of her time would allow Emma the breathing space she’d never had since graduating. To spend time with her and Brian’s children, seven-year-old Jack and his sister Niamh, two years younger. To do some research work. To garden.

So Emma underwent the final, formal interview. She signed the Official Secrets Act. She perfected the cover story she’d been advised to concoct: that she was starting up a private practice and travelling to the homes of assorted Civil Service mandarins and Saudi Arabian dignitaries. And she began the monthly trips from their Wimbledon semidetached home to Thames House, always in a chauffeured car with tinted windows and a rota of politely aloof escorts.

She poked and prodded Sir Guy’s flesh, listened to the thump of his heart and the rasp of his on-off smoker’s lungs, lobbed back his grumbles and sarcastic remarks in the form of jibes of her own. Over the following year, she became genuinely fond of this gruff, sometimes alarming, yet kind man. And she knew he liked her, too, even though it wasn’t in his nature ever to admit it.

Now, writing her notes with Sir Guy dressing behind her, Emma said, ‘How’s the smoking?’

‘Haven’t touched one for three months.’

She turned and gave him a look.

Sir Guy held up his hands in resignation. ‘All right, all right. Two cigars a week. Maximum.’

‘That’s two too many.’

‘Ah, shut up.’

They went back to his office and made small talk for a while. Eventually Sir Guy said, ‘Well. Till next month.’

She smiled.

He pressed a button on his desk. A few seconds later the door opened and a man came in. Of medium height, broad shouldered. Light on the balls of his feet, like a cat. Hair buzzed short in a military style.

‘James,’ said Sir Guy, ‘be a good chap and escort Dr Goddard to the car.’

The man inclined his head. He held the door for Emma and followed her through.

They walked in silence through the murmuring corridors. Halfway along, Emma said, ‘Okay if I pop to the loo?’

‘Of course,’ said James. He indicated down a short passage.

Emma strode towards the restrooms, not looking back. In the women’s room she glanced around, found it empty. She went back to the door and gave a sharp rap on it.

The door opened and James came in.

Quickly she dragged him towards one of the cubicles, pulling him in after her and slamming and locking the door.

His arms were already around her, his hands splaying across her back, roving. She twined her own arms round his neck, her mouth seeking his, hard. Hoisting her thighs up around him, she pressed her pelvis against his.

Somehow she tore her face away and pressed her lips against his ear. ‘Now. Here. I want you.’

‘No,’ he murmured.

‘I want it. You want it.’

‘But we can’t.’

Gently but firmly he gripped her hair and lifted her head back so he could look into her eyes. She saw his pupils, dilated with desire, crowding out the dark blue irises.

‘It’s too risky. This is already too risky.’

‘You’re a soldier,’ she mocked. ‘Risks are what you take.’

‘None of them were ever as big as this.’

She felt him tense, his eyes flicking away. A moment later she heard the door to the restroom open and two chattering women’s voices enter.

Emma was relieved the doors to the cubicles didn’t have large gaps beneath them, so that James’s feet wouldn’t be visible.

They kept very still, while the women’s conversation continued even as they positioned themselves in adjoining cubicles. The toilet sounds, shockingly near, made Emma glance sharply into James’s eyes. He was biting his lip, trying not to laugh, and Emma felt her own face contort. Desperately she forced it under control.

At last the women finished their business, washed their hands and left. Emma released a soft laugh that was more like a sob. James shook his head.

‘Jesus,’ he muttered. ‘One of these days…’

He released her. She clung to his neck but he was already pushing her away.

‘Monday,’ he said. ‘I’m off in the evening.’

‘It’s too long to wait,’ she said.

‘We’ll have to.’ He tipped his head to the door of the cubicle. ‘Go on. You first.’

She gave him a last, lingering kiss, searing his lips with hers, and slipped out. When she’d checked the coast was clear, she rapped on the cubicle door and strode away.

He emerged into the corridor a few seconds later and they continued their journey towards the underground garage where her car was waiting, the chauffeur already behind the wheel. Apart from a brief nod of thanks, she didn’t interact with James again. Didn’t look back as the car pulled away.

In the back of the car she took out a small compact and checked herself in the mirror. Lipstick a little smeared. She’d have to be more careful in future.

She studied her face. Not bad for thirty-seven. Not bad at all. Her skin tone was still fresh, and the lines were minimal, apart from the tiniest wisps radiating from the corners of her eyes when she smiled.

No, she didn’t mind looking at her face at all. Except her eyes. Emma had difficulty gazing into her eyes for any length of time, because of what she saw there.

A woman who was cheating on her husband. With one of the most trusted bodyguards of the Director of MI5.

She forced herself to study her reflection for a few seconds more, then put the mirror away.

Through the window, the great sweep of the Thames drew Emma’s eye northwards. The magnificence of the view crowded out the stab of guilt she’d felt when… well, when she’d remembered what she was, and what she was doing.

Four days. Then she and James would be together, for a few stolen hours.

Until then, it was business as usual. Taking the kids to karate and ballet classes, joshing with Ulyana, their live-in nanny, and maintaining the fiction that she had much in common with the woman, joining the other members of the Residents’ Association to plan their strategy when they confronted the council about the proposed new supermarket in the area.

Living in harmony with Brian. Dependable, affable Brian, who’d never done a single thing to hurt her. And whom she was now deceiving in the most clichéd way.

Emma closed her eyes, leant back in the seat, and gave herself over to thoughts of her next meeting with James.

Five

By the time Purkiss unlocked the door to his house it was a little after seven in the evening. The oppressive, beating heat of the late afternoon had simmered down to a sticky drowse; there was even a hint of coolness in the infrequent breezes that wafted about.

Purkiss lived in Hampstead, a former village long ago incorporated into the hungry expanding beast that was London. High up in the north of the city, it afforded spectacular views from the heath nearby. Often in the evenings, when the weather was cooler, Purkiss would go running through the rambling grassland, but he knew it would be infested now with tourists, dogwalkers and picnickers.

His house was a three-storey Victorian oddity, a turreted hexagon built by an 1870s eccentric with a taste for the Gothic. Purkiss had bought it a decade earlier, its individual character, peaceful location and easy access to central London all appealing to him. The price would have been well out of the range of his then SIS agent’s salary, but his father, a well-off Suffolk farmer and landowner, had died the previous year and left Purkiss a comfortable inheritance.

Four years after purchasing the property, Purkiss was stationed in Marseille and met Claire Stirling, a fellow agent, who was to become his fiancée. They made occasional trips back to England together, and gradually began to piece together the home they would make when their postings in southern France came to an end. Claire loved the Hampstead house, and began adding her personal touches to it: artwork, furniture, an upright piano she in turn had inherited from her parents.

Purkiss and Claire never got to live in the house together. A year after they met, Purkiss walked in on another fellow agent in Marseille, Donal Fallon, killing Claire with his bare hands. Fallon was caught, convicted of murder, and jailed.

For months afterwards Purkiss left the Hampstead house exactly as it was, not even clearing out the few clothes Claire had already moved into the wardrobes. As the years went by, he began to let go, giving away or selling most of the things he and Claire had never got round to sharing. The artwork went, as did most of the furniture she’d picked, and Purkiss had reverted to his old, bachelor’s items.

The one thing he hadn’t thrown out was the piano.

In Marseille, in the rented flat provided for him by SIS, there’d been a piano, too, and he and Claire had spent balmy, wine-mellowed evenings working their way through their small repertoire. Claire was a Debussy admirer, her playing dreamy and impressionistic, while Purkiss preferred spiky, storytelling stuff: Shostakovich, or Liszt’s Etudes. But they both loved Beethoven’s Pathetique sonata, and it became the equivalent of “their” song. They would take turns playing it, each trying to perfect it for the other. Claire was always the better player, which pleased Purkiss. It forced him constantly to raise his game.

Now, standing in the doorway to the living room, he wondered if it was time to get rid of the piano.

For the first time in ten months, he went over to it, sat down, lifted the lid, and began to find the keys with his fingers.

The piano hadn’t been tuned in nearly a year and it showed. But the opening chords of the Pathetique, the Grave theme, flowed instinctively, as if Purkiss had been practising the piece every day. He closed his eyes, let the music draw him after it.

It was Kasabian’s talk earlier that day of treachery, of betrayal, which had driven Purkiss to sit down at the piano once more. He understood this, consciously.

Ten months ago, on a boat in the freezing Baltic, a man named Rossiter had told Purkiss the truth about Claire. That she was a killer. A hitwoman. Part of what the Americans would call a black-ops outfit within SIS, one which had taken it upon itself to kill known and assumed enemies of the British state, illegally and without official sanction.

Rossiter had been Claire’s handler and mentor, and was now in maximum security somewhere, never to be released. But it had taken Purkiss the better part of a year to acknowledge to himself the reality of Claire, and of himself: that he was a dupe, and had allowed himself to fall in love with, and trust, a conscienceless liar. He began to wake at night with the sheets rucked up in his clenched fists, the fury too intense for sleep to contain. Such wakenings would lead to long rambles in the early hours of the morning across Hampstead Heath, until he arrived back home at dawn, drained and exhausted. But instead of catharsis, he achieved a kind of dreary numbness which he knew would only ever be temporary.

Now, Purkiss came to the Allegro of the sonata’s first movement, and he understood something bewildering and, in its way, even harder to bear than the surges of anger he’d been experiencing over the summer. He loved Claire still, despite everything he’d learned about her. Loved her with undiminished intensity. And that impossible, absurd love would keep him imprisoned, stunted and stagnant, forever.

Purkiss reached the second movement, the Adagio, and the slower pace caused his thoughts to drift away from Claire and roam free. They settled on his encounter earlier that day, with Vale and Kasabian.

Kasabian had blinked when Purkiss said no to her request for help, as if she hadn’t been expecting quite so bald a refusal.

‘Might I ask why not?’ she’d said.

‘My brief is to investigate and neutralise rogue elements among current or former members of SIS,’ Purkiss said, trying not to make it sound like a recital. ‘I have no jurisdiction when it comes to the Security Service.’

She raised an eyebrow. ‘One could argue that your jurisdiction within SIS itself is doubtful. Your job hasn’t been approved by Parliament. It doesn’t even exist on paper, as far as I can tell.’

‘That’s not the point.’ Purkiss shifted in his chair, not quite standing up to leave yet but making it clear he was getting there. ‘You’ve got a problem here, I can appreciate that. I fully understand why you’d want an outsider to investigate this, given its sensitive nature. I can even understand why you’ve approached me. But the answer’s no.’

For the first time, the anger he’d seen in her eyes seemed to be directed at him. ‘Is this the old interdepartmental rivalry rearing its head? You can’t help the old enemy? Six versus Five all over again?’

‘Oh, for crying out loud.’ This time Purkiss did stand, and Kasabian reacted as though he’d slapped her. She rose to match him, her face darkening, her eyes wide. Purkiss thought that Mo Kasabian wasn’t used to people terminating meetings with her before she’d given the go ahead. ‘If we’re going to play that game, I could ask you what it would do for relations between SIS and the Security Service if it ever came out that Five’s deputy director had hired a Six man to investigate her own service. You and your organisation would never live it down.’

They held eye contact for several long seconds. At last Kasabian glanced sideways at Vale.

‘Then there’s no more to say. Thank you for your time, Quentin. Mr Purkiss.’

She held a hand towards the door.

As they left, Purkiss gesturing Vale through first, she said to his back: ‘You realise of course that you’re privy to information more properly kept within the Security Service.’

Purkiss stopped, turned.

Kasabian stood at the table, her anger gone, or at least concealed. ‘Information which cannot be allowed to spread further.’

Purkiss had had enough. He said, ‘That sounds like an insult, Ms Kasabian. Or maybe it’s a threat. I don’t take kindly to either.’

On the street, the two men resumed the striding pace they’d adopted before the meeting. This time it was Purkiss taking the lead. But as before, he didn’t know where he was going.

Vale said, ‘That wasn’t very clever.’

‘Why on earth did you agree to the meeting in the first place?’ Purkiss didn’t get angry with Vale, as a rule, but now he felt himself teetering. ‘You must have known I’d say no. And in any case, what I said was right. This is beyond our reach, Quentin. They should clean out their own stables.’

‘The boundaries are shifting, John.’ They were heading towards Oxford Street and Purkiss veered away, to the right. He didn’t need the bustle of a busy shopping thoroughfare just then. ‘We’re no longer in a world of clearly defined roles. The economy’s in a mess. The State’s broke. It’s reasonable for us to muck in, help each other out.’

‘And score points with the deputy head of the Security Service in the process.’

‘That’s not fair, John.’ Purkiss had never seen Vale angry, either. Even now, the older man kept his melancholy composure. ‘Empire building has never been my goal.’

After a beat, Purkiss said, ‘Sorry. That was uncalled for.’ He sighed. ‘I can see your point. Sort of. But there have to be some boundaries. If only to keep the concept alive in people’s minds. Otherwise, the death squads flourish. The Rossiter types. People who see themselves as unlimited by rules, or roles, of any kind.’

‘It’s hardly the same thing,’ said Vale.

But he didn’t push it; didn’t try to argue any further with Purkiss. That was one of the things Purkiss respected about Vale. He respected your decision, even if he didn’t agree with it.

At the piano, Purkiss came to the Rondo, the final movement of the number eight sonata. With the change to a more forceful playing, he felt his mood shift to one of restlessness. He was unsettled by the encounter earlier. It was the first time he’d ever turned down a job Vale had proposed to him. True, he’d never been asked before to track down a rogue agent of the sister service. And it was also true that he wasn’t obliged to take on this or any other job. He was a freelancer.

Nevertheless, Purkiss was conscious of a vague sense of unfinished business. As if he’d let somebody down — Vale, possibly, or even himself — and needed to make amends in some way.

A sound broke through the piano melody. Without pausing in his playing, Purkiss strained to hear.

The scrape of a shoe’s sole on concrete.

Still playing, Purkiss half-rose from the piano chair and craned to peer down the hallway that led to the front door.

Through the opaque glass next to the door he saw the blurred outline of a human shape.

Kasabian’s words recurred to him: You’re privy to information… which cannot be allowed to spread further.

He brought the Rondo to a natural-sounding close, long before it was supposed to end, and moved quietly across the living room and down the hallway.

He opened the door.

Standing on the doorstep was a man of medium height with cropped hair, stubble shadowing grizzled cheeks, and teeth the colours of the coming autumn. He was dressed in camouflage trousers, a denim jacket, and a stale-smelling T-shirt.

‘Prepare to die,’ he said, and raised the object in his hand.

Purkiss stepped aside to let Kendrick in.

Six

‘Bastard.’

Kendrick levelled yellow, vulpine eyes on Purkiss.

Purkiss raised his eyebrows. ‘You’re mellowing. Before, you used to call me far worse things when I was beating you.’

‘You’re not beating me,’ snarled Kendrick. ‘So you can fuck off.’

Purkiss was impressed. Kendrick, playing white, had opened with a Vienna Game. He’d done so with a certain smugness, and Purkiss realised he’d been doing some reading and practising. Purkiss let Kendrick bask in his tricksiness, before transposing into a King’s Gambit Declined. It was a counterintuitive move, Purkiss refusing to take the pawn Kendrick was offering as a sacrificial lamb, and it wasn’t in Kendrick’s script.

Kendrick’s predatory gaze flickered over the chess board. He reached for his glass, Purkiss grimacing as his blindly groping hand nearly knocked it off the coffee table, and took a hit of the Jameson’s he’d brought along with him.

‘You know that one, then,’ he said.

‘The Vienna. Yes,’ said Purkiss, sipping at his own beer. ‘I’ll tell you afterwards why it isn’t a good idea.’

‘I don’t need your lectures,’ muttered Kendrick. But Purkiss knew he’d be interested.

He’d first met Tony Kendrick — Colour Sergeant Kendrick, as he’d been then — in Basra, nearly ten years earlier. Kendrick had been part of Second Parachute Battalion, or Two Para, stationed in the city in the aftermath of the invasion. Purkiss, as an SIS agent of a year’s standing, had been posted there on a British Intelligence mission to develop a network of informers across southern Iraq. As part of an armed forces-SIS liaison exercise, Kendrick and three fellow Paras had been assigned to accompany Purkiss in his ventures into Basra and the other towns and villages in the region. Despite Kendrick’s unrelenting and merciless disparaging of the civilian he was babysitting, he and Purkiss had in fact got along well.

They’d lost touch after Purkiss had finished in Iraq and been assigned to Marseille, where he met Claire. Years later, following Claire’s death and after Purkiss had left the Service and started working freelance for Vale, Purkiss had encountered a demobbed Kendrick again. Vale had given Purkiss discretion to hire his own help in the course of his investigations, and since then Purkiss had made use of Kendrick’s services on numerous occasions, most recently in New York.

A few months previously, Purkiss had mentioned to Kendrick that he was a chess player. Kendrick had pooh-poohed the game instinctively, but as Purkiss explained some of the principles, Kendrick started to show an interest. And so had begun their fortnightly Friday-evening matches, always at Purkiss’s house. (‘Believe me, mate,’ Kendrick had said, ‘you don’t want to see my flat.’)

Kendrick was an aggressive, reckless player, a tactician more than a strategist. His major weakness was his repeated failure to ensure defensive cover for his king and queen, though he was aware of this and was starting to work on it. And every now and again he’d come up with a genuinely surprising move which would catch Purkiss off guard.

But today, disconcerted by the failure of his Vienna opening, Kendrick wasn’t on best form. He made a bizarre move with a bishop, wincing as soon as he’d done it, and Purkiss took one of his knights. Forced into a retreat by the vulnerability of his king, Kendrick began to play a reactive, defensive game. He slowed down, brooding over each move while Purkiss sat back in his armchair and sipped and watched and listened to the evening birdsong outside the window, the murmur of the city below.

‘Giving me a headache,’ said Kendrick. He reached for his glass again, found it empty. The bottle was beside it and he poured. He placed the bottle back on its coaster, but too close to the edge. It tipped over.

‘Shit. Sorry.’ Kendrick lunged to set it upright.

Purkiss lunged instinctively for it, too.

The chessboard exploded between them.

Purkiss registered the spraying black and white pieces even before his consciousness took in the starburst of the window glass blowing inwards, the crash of the wooden board fragmenting, the whine of the projectile as it ricocheted somewhere away past his left ear.

He dived to his right, reflexes hurling him away from what he understood on a primitive level was the direction of a bullet, and hit the uncarpeted wooden parquet floor hard with his shoulder and hip. He rolled, coming up at a crouch behind an armchair.

Kendrick too had flattened himself behind the cover of a chair. He stared at Purkiss.

‘What the fuck?’ he hissed.

Purkiss waited through one long second, then another. A single shot. No ensuing fusillade. His eyes roved over the wall opposite the window through which the shot had come. High up, the plaster was chipped from the ricochet.

‘Rifle,’ he murmured. Kendrick nodded.

Purkiss crawled round the back of the armchair, gripped its sides to brace himself, and raised his head above it before dropping back down. Through the bay window, one pane neatly shattered out, he’d glimpsed the front lawn and driveway, sloping upwards towards the road, the row of elm trees lining the property. Nothing more.

Across the floor from him, Kendrick lunged for his jacket, cast off on the sofa. He reached into one of the pockets and drew out a pistol. A Smith amp; Wesson, by the look of it.

‘You’re carrying?’ Purkiss said.

‘Just as well, ain’t it?’ Kendrick thumbed off the safety. ‘Don’t suppose you’ve got any hardware in the house?’

‘No.’

Kendrick rolled his eyes.

Purkiss glanced at the bullet hole in the wall again. Its position suggested the shot had angled in slightly from the right. Keeping low, he shuffled out from behind the chair and over to the wall to the right of the window. Cautiously he rose, keeping against the wall, and peered through so that the front garden to the left of the window was within his field of vision.

Still nothing to see but the tranquil lawn in the golden early-evening light.

He detected movement on the periphery of his vision and was diving as the second shot came, the suppressed thump of the firing mechanism audible this time and melding into the crash of another pane shattering and an altogether more frightening noise as the bullet hit the piano on the other side of the room. Sprawled on the floor, Purkiss felt his nerves jangling in harmony with the wires of the instrument. From where he lay, he could see the ragged punched hole in the wood of the piano just above the keyboard.

The hole looked like a wound, and Purkiss felt a surge of fury.

They shouldn’t have shot the piano.

As he turned where he was lying, he saw Kendrick on his feet, pistol in a two-handed grip, aiming out the window. The pistol roared twice before Kendrick ducked, another shot smashing through the room and this time connecting directly with the wall opposite, sending plaster showering.

‘How many?’ Purkiss squatted again, casting about for a plan.

Kendrick said, duckwalking over to below the window: ‘One, that I could see. At the far end of the garden, between the trees near the road.’

Purkiss considered. ‘All right. If you’re happy to hold him off, I’ll go out the back. Come up the side and outflank him.

‘There might be others waiting at the back.’

‘I’ll take the chance.’

Stooping, Purkiss made his way towards the doorway of the living room. The whole property was built on the side of a hill, the long rear garden sloping downwards away from the house. Alongside the garden was a narrow lane, well lined with trees. If he got over the wooden fence and up the lane, he might be able to approach the front entrance without being seen.

As he reached the kitchen, Purkiss heard Kendrick’s sudden shout: ‘Whoah, he’s running towards the house.’ Then the noise of the Smith amp; Wesson, twice, three times.

Purkiss raced back to the living room, entered at a crouch again. Kendrick was to one side of the window, using the wall for cover, firing awkwardly through the ruined glass.

A shot cracked through the window, jolting the sofa as it impacted, sending a billow of upholstery blooming. Purkiss saw a blur of movement in the front garden as a man’s shape sprinted and dodged, zig-zagging closer down the slope.

Kendrick, who’d jerked back behind the wall again, took a breath and once more aimed through the window.

The two shots came so close together that their respective sounds were impossible to separate. Kendrick’s gun-arm jerked high, and Purkiss found himself thinking in a detached way: bad control of recoil, there.

Kendrick leaped backwards. Except it wasn’t a leap. Wasn’t a voluntary movement at all.

He landed on his back on a coffee table, the heavy wood splintering and folding under his weight.

Purkiss saw the mess that was Kendrick’s forehead.

He dived for Kendrick’s outstretched arm, caught the pistol before it skittered away across the floor.

Came up on one knee, aiming at the window.

The silhouette bobbed into view, limned by the brightness of the evening sky, and Purkiss fired, getting two shots off in quick succession.

The silhouette disappeared.

Purkiss glanced down at Kendrick, then back up at the window.

He shuffled across, peered over the sill.

The man was sprinting back across the lawn, rifle in hand. Was almost at the road.

Purkiss tensed, gripped the window frame.

Looked back down at Kendrick.

Made his decision.

He knelt beside Kendrick. One of Kendrick’s feet was jerking spasmodically. His head was misshapen, the forehead cratered. In the bog of gore that stretched across his scalp and down over his right eye, white chips of bone glistened.

Purkiss slipped his hands round the back of the stubbled scalp, probing carefully. No exit wound. But then there wasn’t likely to be one in any case. A direct hit from a rifle of this type would destroy the head completely.

Which meant Kendrick hadn’t taken a direct hit. Either the shot had sheared across his forehead, or he’d been struck by a ricochet.

In the side of Kendrick’s neck, a listless pulse rose and fell slowly, irregularly, against Purkiss’s fingertips.

Purkiss pulled out his phone, dialled 999.

Then he dialled Vale’s number.

As the distant sirens began to coalesce, alerted already by the gunfire, Kendrick lay on Purkiss’s living room floor, his head violated, his life ebbing.

Seven

Tullivant had never believed emotions were something to be cauterised out of one’s psyche. Numbness wasn’t a state to be aspired to; it slowed your reflexes, made you less responsive. Which could end up being fatal.

But he did accept there were suitable times for experiencing emotions, and others when they needed to be put aside temporarily.

Tullivant was at the wheel of a Toyota Corolla. The balaclava and gloves he’d worn were stuffed beside the spare wheel under the boot. The Timberwolf rifle was in a holdall on the back seat. He drove neither slowly nor quickly, showing a natural mild curiosity at the screaming emergency vehicles hurtling past in the opposite direction as he headed down Highgate Hill.

Later, he would experience rage, and guilt, and self-doubt. He would indulge them, wallow in them, even, and gradually come to an appreciation of how justified or otherwise they were, and of what they could teach him.

Now, he had to evaluate the extent of his failure, and the implications.

He reached Camden Town, abandoned the Corolla, and transferred to his usual and equally nondescript car, a Mazda. This one had custom-built compartments above the chassis for his gun and other accessories.

Before starting the engine, Tullivant sat behind the wheel, preparing himself for the phone call he had to make.

He’d missed. It was as simple as that. Bad luck had played a part, but bad luck had no place in a sniper’s list of excuses. And once you’d missed the first time, the chances of a successful kill were almost non-existent. Especially when your target was a fellow professional.

Had he made matters worse by approaching Purkiss’s house, rather than hanging back? Tullivant wasn’t sure. He was confident Purkiss wouldn’t be able to describe him except in the most generic way; his face and hair had been hidden by the balaclava, and his build and gait were unremarkable. Nevertheless, the sloppiness of the ensuing carnage troubled Tullivant. Mass destruction was sometimes necessary, but for this type of job, precision was key.

He dialled. It was answered on the third ring.

‘I was unsuccessful,’ Tullivant said.

He gave a concise account of events, answered questions. He didn’t expect an explosion of fury, and he didn’t receive one.

‘Am I to move in again on the target tonight?’ he asked.

No, he was told. But there were further instructions, for another, different target.

Tullivant listened, memorised the details.

Still stationary, he turned on the car radio and listened to the news. There was nothing yet about the episode. Although a veil would be thrown over the whole business, it would be impossible to keep it entirely secret; the genteel burghers of Hampstead would be asking questions about the eruption of gunfire which had disturbed their Friday evening’s peace. Some story would be concocted about terrorist suspects, or perhaps drug dealers, but the police would keep the details under wraps.

Tullivant pulled out. He decided to head to the area where the next target was located. The hit would have to wait until tomorrow, for various reasons, but Tullivant liked to scout out the terrain beforehand where possible.

He headed southeast, avoiding the worst of the Friday evening congestion, and reached the chaotic streets of Lewisham on the other side of the river. All the while, he had a sense of the London crowds gravitating inexorably towards the centre of the city and the West End, like a gently advancing tide.

Locating the street he was looking for, he drove down it at a speed that wouldn’t arouse suspicion. There was the address. Tullivant took pains not to stare too pointedly at the terraced house. There was light behind the drawn curtains, and movement.

Tullivant found a spot to park further along the road, and he watched the entrance to the terraced house in his rear-view mirror. He wanted to get some idea of numbers, and of security arrangements.

Three hours later, having counted the people coming and going, having observed the tottering pile of pizzas delivered by the boy on the moped, Tullivant estimated at least six guards.

The rifle wouldn’t do, this time, then. He’d have to use an altogether… messier method tomorrow.

Eight

‘It’s her,’ said Purkiss. ‘Kasabian. She set me up.’

They were in an office of some sort, which Vale had procured in his usual efficient and mysterious way. Purkiss stood, bouncing on the balls of his feet, restless, wanting to move about. Vale too ignored the chairs in the room, but was quite still, watching Purkiss.

He’d responded immediately, had Vale, reaching the hospital at the bottom of Highgate Hill minutes after Purkiss and the ambulance ferrying Kendrick had got there. The paramedics had stabilised his neck on a stretcher and set up an IV line and assorted monitors. His blood pressure was adequate, but his pulse rate was alarmingly low. And he wasn’t responding to a row of knuckles rubbed sharply down his breastbone, an ominous sign.

The duty surgeon in the Accident and Emergency department took a look at Kendrick and said, ‘Christ. He needs the neurosurgeons.’ He gave orders for Kendrick’s transfer to the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in Bloomsbury.

Purkiss was shooed out of the examination room. He met Vale in the reception area of the casualty department. The police presence which had dogged Purkiss from the scene of the shooting at his house right up to the hospital, had evaporated. Vale’s doing, he thought. He knows it’s not a straightforward police matter and he’s pulled strings.

‘Kasabian,’ Purkiss repeated.

To Vale’s credit, he didn’t argue, didn’t try to placate or humour Purkiss, or even ask what he meant. Instead he frowned faintly and said, ‘It’s a possibility, yes.’

‘It’s more than that.’ Purkiss picked up the polystyrene cup of coffee someone had handed him, found it was empty, and tossed it aside. He was quietly furious to notice a fine tremor in his hand. ‘I turn down a job to find the sniper who shot a Five agent. Hours later, a sniper takes a potshot at me, in my own home. Either someone knows I spoke to Kasabian and is assuming I accepted the job, in which case her security is woeful. Or, more likely, she’s set this up herself. To try to scare me into taking on the job, by making it seem as though I’m in danger too and have a personal stake in this.’

Vale raised his hand to his mouth before seeming to remember he didn’t have a cigarette between his fingers. He closed his eyes briefly, then said: ‘Let’s have a full debrief.’

Purkiss told him everything, including as much as he thought was necessary. Vale listened in silence. At the end, he said, ‘One man.’

‘Yes. And he ran, when I fired on him. He had the sense to know he was outclassed, up close. His rifle would have been no use.’

‘Describe him.’

Purkiss’s mind scrabbled for details. ‘Five ten or — eleven. Perhaps twelve, twelve and a half stone. Solid but not musclebound. As I said, he was wearing a balaclava.’

‘Race?’

‘White.’ Purkiss had seen a flash of the skin around the eyes.

‘Any sense of his age?’

‘From the way he moved, I’d guess anywhere between late twenties and late forties. Fast, agile, but more surefooted than you’d see in a younger man.’

‘Military?’

‘Probably. But then most snipers are.’

Someone tapped on the door and a nurse put her head in. To Purkiss she said, ‘Your friend’s being transferred now.’

‘I’ll give you a lift,’ said Vale.

In the car, which still smelt of old, stale smoke, Vale said, ‘How does it look for him?’

‘He’ll probably die,’ said Purkiss.

The surgeon who’d given Kendrick the once over said it looked as though a low-velocity bullet, which Purkiss knew meant most likely a ricochet, had sheared away part of the right frontal bone and part of the underlying frontal lobe of the brain as well. In addition, it looked as if there were bone fragments in the brain tissue. Apart from the injury itself, there were complications to be considered, including swelling of the brain with compression on vital centres such as the ones controlling breathing, and infection. The likelihood of survival was small. The chances of Kendrick’s escaping without long-term consequences were almost nonexistent.

Vale didn’t say I’m sorry, but his silence implied it. Purkiss remembered he’d met Kendrick once, after the business in Tallinn last autumn when Vale had coordinated the operation to extract Purkiss and Kendrick from Estonia and the enquiries of the local intelligence services. Purkiss also suspected Vale knew everything there was to know about Kendrick’s background, that he quietly vetted all Purkiss’s associates, even though he gave Purkiss a free hand in hiring whomever he wanted.

Thinking aloud, Purkiss said, ‘I’d like to be able to say that bullet was meant for me. But it probably wasn’t. No-one was supposed to get killed. It was Kasabian, scaring me. It feels right.’

At the wheel, Vale said, ‘I’m not so sure. That’s starting to look less and less likely.’

‘Why?’

‘Because of the very fact that Kendrick was shot. A professional wouldn’t have let that happen, if he was simply there to put the frighteners on you.’

‘Kendrick was firing back at him,’ said Purkiss. ‘He might have reacted in self-defence.’

Vale gave a slight shake of his head. ‘Sorry, John. I’m not convinced.’

Purkiss gazed back through the windscreen, at the bustle of Camden High Street, its thronging crowds. The ambulance carrying Kendrick had sped ahead long ago.

‘There’s a quick way to find out.’

‘How’s that?’

Purkiss told him.

For once, Purkiss thought he saw the twitch of a smile at the corner of Vale’s mouth.

‘You’re serious, aren’t you?’ said Vale.

‘Completely.’

Vale drove in silence, considering. Then he said: ‘All right. I’ll set it up first thing in the morning.’

‘No,’ said Purkiss. ‘Tonight.’

‘Ms Kasabian might not be prepared — ’

‘That’s just it,’ said Purkiss. ‘I don’t want her to be prepared.’

Nine

‘A polygraph,’ said Kasabian.

It was just after midnight. The three of them, Kasabian, Vale and Purkiss, were in a second-floor flat near Covent Garden, a venue Kasabian had specified when Vale called her.

Kendrick had gone into the operating theatre an hour earlier. Purkiss hung around outside, talking to an assortment of doctors and nurses none of whom seemed quite sure who he was. He noticed a small squad of armed police in the vicinity, and felt an odd relief, even though getting shot again wasn’t something Kendrick had to worry about in the immediate future. He wondered what the police had been told. Was Kendrick the suspected victim of a drug deal gone wrong, or of a gangland attack?

When it became clear there wasn’t much more he could do to help, or much more information he could glean about Kendrick’s condition, Purkiss left the theatre and went in search of Vale. He found him where he’d left him, in the reception area.

‘Done,’ said Vale. ‘Ms Kasabian will meet us within the hour. And I’m having the equipment delivered here in a few minutes.’

A quarter of an hour later, a silent, stone-faced young man came through the hospital doors, spotted Vale and nodded, and handed over a small suitcase. Purkiss could tell from the way Vale hefted it that its contents were heavy.

To Kasabian now, Purkiss said, ‘That’s right.’

She stared at him, her eyes trying to probe behind his as they’d done at the earlier meeting. Slowly she nodded in understanding.

‘Yes,’ she murmured. ‘You think I set up the shooting.’

‘I do, yes.’

‘All right.’ She was in the same trouser suit as earlier that day, which led Purkiss to suspect she hadn’t been home yet. She slipped off her jacket and began to roll up her sleeves. ‘Let’s do it.’

The flat was sparsely furnished, and was clearly a safe house of some kind, one of countless similar places across the city. A rectangular dining table stood at one end of the living room. Vale placed the suitcase on the table and opened it, and began to unpack the equipment within.

Few countries used the polygraph as part of law enforcement procedures, and even in the United States, where polygraph evidence was admissible in court in nearly half the states and at the discretion of the judge in federal cases, its validity was highly questionable. Purkiss knew this, and knew Kasabian knew it. But he wasn’t looking to achieve a criminal conviction. He just wanted to satisfy himself that she was lying.

And he’d know. So would Vale.

Purkiss stood by while Kasabian seated herself on one of the chairs next to the dining table and Vale attached the cuff round her left upper arm, the straps across her chest, the sensors on the fingers of her right hand. The leads ran to a box on the table which was in turn connected to a laptop computer.

Purkiss and Vale had discussed beforehand how they would conduct the questioning. Vale was the more experienced interrogator, and Purkiss wanted to observe Kasabian’s responses to the questions as they occurred. At a nod from Vale, Purkiss sat down at the table, the laptop open before him. Vale pulled one of the chairs over to the other side of Kasabian and sat facing her, a comfortable distance away.

On the monitor, separate channels displayed Kasabian’s respiratory and pulse rates, blood pressure, and skin conductivity, the latter a measure of the amount of sweat she was exuding. Respiration was fourteen breaths per minute, pulse sixty-six beats over the same time period. Blood pressure was an unremarkable one hundred and twenty-two over seventy-eight. All told, they were the physiological measurements of a relaxed, fit adult. Only the skin conductivity was a little higher than normal. But the night was warm, the flat stuffy despite the air conditioning which Kasabian had switched on when they’d arrived.

Purkiss nodded to Vale, and they began.

‘Please state your name,’ said Vale, in his unhurried voice.

‘Maureen Agnes Kasabian.’

‘Your date of birth, please.’

‘Fourth of April, nineteen fifty-one.’

‘Are you at present the deputy director of the Security Service?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you own a dog?’

‘No.’

‘Have you ever been arrested?’

‘Yes.’

Vale continued in the same vein. These were the control questions, the ones they’d use to establish Kasabian’s normal physiological response when she answered truthfully. Purkiss watched the figures on the screen. A very slight increase in pulse and respiratory rate. Blood pressure held steady, as did skin conductance.

‘Were you born in Britain?’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you ever been to Antarctica?’

‘No.’

‘Do you have any children?’

There was the faintest hesitation, enough to make Purkiss look up from the screen at Kasabian. Her face was impassive. She wasn’t looking at either of them, was just gazing straight ahead as she had been since the start of the test.

‘Yes,’ she said.

On the monitor, pulse and respiration were up, and blood pressure had risen to one twenty-eight over seventy-nine. Skin conductance was unchanged.

Interesting, thought Purkiss. She’s telling the truth. But the question threw her.

He wondered if Vale knew she had children. Purkiss hadn’t been aware.

After five minutes of further questioning, Vale glanced across at Purkiss, who nodded again. There was enough there for a baseline.

Vale said, ‘Ms Kasabian, I’m going to ask you a question now, and I want you to answer it with a lie.’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you the President of the United States of America?’

‘Yes.’

On the monitor, the respiratory rate reached eighteen. Within normal limits. The pulse crept up to seventy-six beats per minute. The blood pressure was one twenty-five over eighty. Skin conductance was up a little.

It wasn’t enough. Purkiss shook his head at Vale. They needed more.

Vale asked a few further questions to which a truthful response was required. On the monitor, Kasabian’s measures dropped back slightly.

Then Vale said, ‘Once again, I’m going to ask you a question and I want you to give a lie as an answer.’

‘Yes.’

‘While at university, did you have a sexual relationship with the former cabinet minister George Jenkins?’

Purkiss watched Kasabian’s face. Her eyes flicked, for a fraction of a second, towards Vale.

‘No,’ she said.

On the monitor, respiration was up to twenty-four, pulse to eighty-six. Blood pressure had risen to one thirty-three over eighty-two. And the fingertips were sweating.

The response was still less extreme than it would have been for many, if not most other people in similar circumstances. But there was a definite difference.

Kasabian’s lie, about being the President, hadn’t evoked much of a physiological change in her because it had no personal meaning for her. But this second question had cut her to the core.

Purkiss marvelled at Vale’s cunning. He assumed Kasabian’s affair with George Jenkins wasn’t widely known of — Purkiss had certainly never heard about it — and she was visibly shocked that Vale had somehow ferreted it out. Purkiss had heard of Jenkins: he was dead now, but he’d served in Harold Wilson’s cabinet in the late nineteen sixties. He must have been thirty years Kasabian’s senior, and had had a reputation as a devoutly pious family man.

With his eyes, Purkiss gave Vale the thumbs up.

Vale began the interview proper, throwing in the occasional mundane question as a control.

‘What’s my name?’

‘Quentin Vale.’

‘Do you know the man sitting across the table?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s his name?’

‘John Purkiss.’

‘Do you know where he lives?’

‘Yes.’

Nothing remarkable about that, Purkiss thought.

‘Does he work for you?’

‘No.’

‘Do you want him to work for you?’

‘Yes.’

‘What colour is blood?’

‘Red.’

‘Did you arrange for John Purkiss to be killed at his home?’

‘No.’

Purkiss watched the monitor. Respiration eighteen, pulse seventy. Blood pressure one twenty-six over seventy-nine. Skin conductance back to baseline.

‘Who was the prime minister of this country during World War Two?’

‘Winston Churchill.’

‘Can snakes fly?’

‘No.’

‘Did you send a man to shoot at John Purkiss in order to convince him that his life was in danger?’

Purkiss watched the monitor.

‘No,’ said Kasabian.

Respiration eighteen. Pulse seventy-two. Blood pressure one twenty-five over seventy-seven. Conductivity low.

‘Did you send a man to John Purkiss’s home to harm or trick him in any way?’

‘No.’

On the monitor, the readings altered minimally, some up, some down.

Purkiss was aware of the countermeasures that could be taken against polygraph equipment. Biofeedback techniques, practised assiduously, gave a person some degree of control over his or her supposedly involuntary processes such as pulse and blood pressure. But Vale’s technique, his rapid-fire switching from drily factual to highly personal topics, would render such measures exceptionally difficult to implement.

Kasabian was telling the truth.

He stood up.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘The show’s over.’

Vale sat back in his chair. Kasabian pulled off the cuff and straps and sensors impatiently, dropping them on the table.

‘You believe me?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ said Purkiss.

‘Look. Purkiss.’ Her tone softened a fraction. ‘I don’t blame you. I know what it looks like. Yes, I was pissed off that you turned my request down. But that was all. To be honest, all I’ve been thinking about for the rest of the day is who I can get instead of you.’ She’d been rolling down her sleeves again, buttoning them, when she paused, and glanced at him. ‘Unless…’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Yes?’

‘Yes. I’ll do it. Jokerman. I’ll find your sniper.’

Ten

As always, afterwards, Emma longed for a cigarette.

She wasn’t a regular smoker, and hadn’t been one since her days as a medical student. And she’d never felt the urge to light up after sex with Brian. But with James… It was a horrible cliché, she knew, but he made her feel both sated and hungry at the same time, and a cigarette provided a diversion before the next bout.

She couldn’t smoke, of course. Couldn’t go home to Brian and the children with the ghost-odour of tobacco wafting around her. She was, after all, supposedly working tonight, attending to her one and only patient, Sir Guy Strang, who’d developed an acute cough which might turn out to be mild pneumonia.

At least, that was what Emma had told Brian when she’d phoned him at three o’ clock. She’d been out all day shopping, and was just on her way home when the office called. Her patient needed her attention. She’d decided to head straight for Thames House rather than come home first. She’d try to be home by mid-evening but couldn’t guarantee it. Could Brian please remember that the kids were staying over at the Finches’ that night, and take them there for six o’clock? It was Ulyana’s night off.

Emma didn’t know what hurt more: the disappointment in Brian’s voice, or the cheerful understanding with which he greeted her message. Yes, of course he’d sort the kids out and get them to their slumber party. No, it didn’t matter about supper; they could always go out for a curry another night. He’d make something for her and keep it in the oven.

She closed her eyes now, picturing him, unable to help herself. Dear, dependable Brian, with his pleasant if not quite handsome face, that neat brown moustache of his which she’d never said a bad word about but which she secretly disliked (after all, how many straight men even had moustaches without beards these days?), his gentle hands. He got angry, sometimes, but even that was a mild, inoffensive sort of anger, not the kind of uncontrollable rage that might spiral out of control.

Dear, dull Brian.

Beside her, James propped himself up on one elbow and gazed down at her. Beneath the line of his black, regulation-short hair, sweat faintly sheened his forehead. He wasn’t conventionally handsome either, but there was an animal appeal to his features which had drawn Emma the first time she’d seen him outside Sir Guy’s office. His was an educated yet tough face, that of a warrior-poet.

God, listen to her. And she didn’t even read romance novels.

In one sense, Emma hadn’t lied to Brian. She had indeed been called that afternoon and asked to attend urgently. But it was James who’d rung. James, whom she’d arranged to meet in a few days’ time, had unexpectedly found some free time later that evening. Could they meet up at say eleven pm?

She could have gone home then, and faked a call from the office later in the afternoon or early evening. But she was too excited to be able to face the banality (yes, she forced herself to allow that word into her thoughts) of her life at home. Brian and the children would wonder what was up, why she seemed to be walking on air. So she called Brian, made her excuses, and spent the rest of the afternoon and evening pampering herself. She bought a new summer dress, perfume, makeup which was slightly more expensive than she was used to paying. And she’d bought discreetly sexy underwear, which was now strewn across the floor of the hotel.

James had chosen a comfortable but far from glitzy four-star chain hotel in Chiswick for their liaison. She’d got there a little early and had a drink at the bar, aware of the glances she was getting from the businessmen scattered around singly or in groups. The setting was perfect: not sleazy, but carrying a thrill of illicitness.

A little after eleven, the barman handed her a phone handset and said there was a call for her.

It was James. ‘Room three-oh-six,’ he said, and hung up. Emma smiled at the faux-mysteriousness of it all. She took her time finishing her drink, feeling the heat of anticipation swelling within her, and headed for the lifts.

In the room, there were no flowers, no champagne on ice, no trappings of romance. There was just James, already naked, and although he smiled, it wasn’t the amused grin they sometimes slipped one another when in company, but rather a dirty, predatory smirk which she found instantly arousing.

They coupled hard and roughly, James pinning her to the bed and keeping her under his weight even after the first time, as if he wasn’t finished with her and didn’t want her to escape. Almost before she was ready they were at it again, and Emma responded in kind, using her nails, her teeth in a way that seemed to urge him on.

She looked up at him now, content to study his face. The ferocity she’d sensed in him had abated, but there was still a lack of ease in his eyes, the impression that he wasn’t yet ready to give himself over to rest.

‘Stressful day?’ she murmured, trying not to make it sound like a rebuke.

He put his hand to her face, traced a fingertip lightly down the curves of her forehead, her nose, her lips.

‘A frustrating day, in some ways.’

‘But you can’t talk about it.’

He raised his eyebrows a little. ‘Afraid not.’

The movement of his hand had caused the cover to slip down and she studied his torso. A taut, hard chest, the belly ridged below it and bisected with a white laparotomy scar. He’d served in Iraq, and sustained blunt trauma to his abdomen during a rocket attack. Messy job, she’d commented when she’d first run her fingers down the scar, appraising it with her doctor’s eye. He’d replied that battlefield surgical facilities weren’t exactly of Harley Street standard.

In turn, James lifted the cover off Emma. She felt a tingle of awkwardness as he exposed her body fully, ran his gaze down it. He was the only man other than Brian to have seen her naked since before she was married; and he looked at her in a different way from Brian, around whom she felt comfortable but not desirable.

James laid the palm of his hand on her belly. Her skin fluttered beneath his touch, the thrill spreading downwards.

Emma said playfully: ‘I suppose you can’t talk about your work any more than I can tell you about the state of your boss’s health.’

‘I know the old goat’s in good health. It doesn’t take a doctor to see that. You just have to look at him.’

‘You’d be surprised,’ she said, catching her breath as his hand moved lower. ‘There can be dreadful things going on under the surface that you don’t find out about until it’s too late.’

‘Sounds ominous,’ he murmured, rolling so that he was above her, propped up on his sinewy arms. ‘But some things it’s better never to know about.’

‘Point taken,’ she moaned, and then giggled at the double meaning of what she’d said. ‘I won’t ask you any more. Because then you’d have to kill me.’

He stopped in mid-stroke, his face tight.

‘James,’ Emma said. ‘What — ?’

‘I don’t like that expression,’ he muttered. ‘Please don’t use it.’

‘I’m sorry.’

The moment slipped away, melted by the heat and growing need of their bodies. But the image of James’s face lingered in her mind. The darkness there, as if she’d touched his soul.

Eleven

Purkiss and Vale had set up a temporary, makeshift base in the Covent Garden flat where they’d questioned Kasabian. (‘It’s as good a place as any,’ she said drily.)

After Vale had put away the polygraph equipment, they discussed strategy.

Kasabian would be their sole and personal point of contact during the investigation. No intermediaries, however seemingly trustworthy, would be involved.

‘You need to find your leak,’ said Purkiss.

‘What?’

‘If you didn’t order the gunman to attack me, then someone else knows I’ve been approached to conduct this investigation,’ Purkiss said. ‘Quentin and I haven’t told anyone. So the leak must have come from your end.’

‘Bullshit,’ said Kasabian flatly. ‘Not possible.’

‘It’s the only explanation.’

She fell silent. Purkiss knew he’d infuriated her with his insistence on the polygraph test, and by pointing out deficiencies in her security measures he was just rubbing salt into her wounds. He didn’t care.

‘I’ll need access to Morrow’s data,’ Purkiss said. ‘Cases he was working, now and previously. Personnel files on him.’

‘Of course,’ said Kasabian. ‘But it’ll have to be paper. All of it. There can be no electronic trail whatsoever.’

‘Agreed.’

Kasabian said she would deliver the files in the morning. Purkiss looked at his watch.

‘No. Tonight,’ he said.

She raised her eyebrows.

He said, ‘I’ll stay here tonight. There’s no point going home. My house is a crime scene, and in any case the rifleman might come back to finish off the job. Before I get some sleep, though, I’d like to skim Morrow’s files. Absorb what’s there and sleep on it.’

‘Fair enough,’ Kasabian said. ‘I’ll have them here within the hour.’

‘What was he like?’ said Purkiss. ‘Morrow.’

She tilted her head. ‘I didn’t know him all that well. I mean, I knew about him — it’s my job to — and I’d met him a few times. Quiet, a solid worker. No spectacular successes, but no cock-ups either. To be honest, he’s the sort of person the Service needs more of. The hard workers, the dogged, incremental achievers. Not the glory seekers, the ones who joined because they imagined they were on a television programme.’

She disappeared to fetch the files.

Purkiss said to Vale, ‘I didn’t know that. About Kasabian having an affair with the politician.’

‘Very few people do.’ Without a hint of smugness, or intrigue, Vale went on: ‘You wouldn’t believe the things that aren’t public knowledge about some of the senior figures in the British Establishment. They’d make your eyes water.’

‘Oh, I’d believe them.’ Something else occurred to Purkiss. ‘Does she really have children?’

‘A son.’

He didn’t say any more, and Purkiss didn’t press him.

Ninety minutes later, Purkiss was alone in the flat with a pile of folders. Kasabian and Vale had both left — Vale had seemed on the point of asking if Purkiss wanted him to stay and camp out on the floor, but thought better of it — and Purkiss had made a call to the National Hospital. Kendrick was still in theatre. There’d be no point in Purkiss’s phoning until the morning, he was told. They promised to ring him before then should things take a turn for the worse.

Purkiss sat at the small dining table they’d used for the polygraph apparatus, and worked his way through the paperwork. He’d taken a speed-reading course at university to help cope with all the reading, and what he’d learned had stayed with him. He wasn’t looking to memorise all the details just yet; rather, he was giving his mind food to digest while he slept. Sometimes answers presented themselves in the morning, sometimes not.

Charles Morrow had been a forty-eight year old, divorced, childless agent of almost twenty-five years’ standing. His ex-wife was Kurdish, a refugee from Saddam’s Iraq, and Morrow appeared to have an abiding interest in the country and its people. Since the 2003 Coalition invasion, the majority of his work had been monitoring expatriate Iraqi groups in Britain for links with the insurgents back in the home country, the ones who were planting bombs in the marketplaces in Baghdad and Basra and gunning down newly recruited policemen.

Many of Morrow’s reports were sketchy, providing gists rather than details. Purkiss could understand this. There were some things that weren’t suitable to be written down, things that might compromise people’s safety if they fell into the wrong hands. Names of informers, for instance, whom Morrow might be paying out of his own pocket.

The thickest document of all was the internal personnel file on Morrow himself. Purkiss was unsurprised at the level of detail recorded. He’d seen similar files within his own former organisation, SIS. It was as if the Service owned you. Morrow’s sexual liaisons featured, of course, none of them especially noteworthy. He hadn’t been subject to any disciplinary proceedings. His estimated alcohol intake was average for a spook, which meant well above the recommended limits, but not spectacularly so. His politics were soft left.

Names, dates, figures… they began to swirl randomly in Purkiss’s head, linking up incorrectly with each other. After an hour’s reading he decided it would be counterproductive to try to absorb any more tonight. It was three in the morning, and six hours earlier Purkiss had been attacked in his own home by a gunman, and seen his friend shot in the head. Like it or not, he needed rest.

He bedded down in the main bedroom. The mattress felt taut, new, the air conditioning still failing to expel the stuffiness of what was clearly a seldom-used flat. Purkiss tossed and turned, unable to get comfortable.

His last waking thought was that of the two people he could plausibly call his friends over the last few years, both had been shot in front of his eyes. And in some way because of him.

Twelve

Purkiss woke at seven o’clock with a name in his head.

Mohammed Al-Bayati.

Pattern recognition was something that had been identified as a strength of his, during Purkiss’s initial evaluation when he’d joined SIS. The ability to differentiate foreground from background when the distinction wasn’t immediately obvious, or indeed was highly obscure. The skill applied to visual patterns as well as aural and verbal ones.

Many names had cropped up time and time again in Morrow’s reports. Yet this one stood out: Mohammed Al-Bayati. Why?

In the flat’s tiny bathroom Purkiss found a new toothbrush, still in its packaging, and a safety razor. He shaved, showered, and examined the contents of the bedroom wardrobe. A few sets of unremarkable clothes, once again all new and waiting for a visiting agent to use. Taller than most, Purkiss found that nothing fit. He settled for the underwear and put his own clothes from yesterday back on.

While he boiled the kettle for instant coffee, Purkiss phoned the hospital. Kendrick had left theatre, had done several hours ago, and was in Intensive Care. The doctor Purkiss spoke to said there was cerebral oedema. Fluid around the brain. If Kendrick did wake up, it wouldn’t be for a while yet.

Over coffee and toast, Purkiss flicked through the Morrow documentation again, this time on the lookout for every mention of Mohammed Al-Bayati he could spot. This was one of the areas where digital records really came into their own, he thought; he’d get what he wanted at the click of a mouse. Perhaps he ought to go out and buy a cheap scanner and laptop? But that would take more time than it was worth. Besides, Kasabian had said there was to be no electronic trail, and there was no point in going against her wishes. Not yet, anyway.

So Purkiss slogged on. He found the name in memos, in email transcripts, in simple lists with cryptic numbers for titles, in notes Morrow had scribbled to himself. It soon became clear that Al-Bayati was both someone Morrow met personally on a frequent basis, and that he was the head of a group based in London calling itself Iraqi Thunder Fist. Or that was the translation from the Arabic, in any case.

Purkiss made some more coffee, then started to look for repeated references to Iraqi Thunder Fist. He found an entire briefing about the organisation, cut and pasted and printed out. The group was based in London, with branches in Amsterdam, Copenhagen and Marseille, Purkiss’s old stamping ground. The London headquarters was the hub of the outfit. Made up of a mixture of exiled members of the Saddam clique, disaffected senior Iraq Army soldiers forcibly demobbed without ceremony after the Coalition takeover, and opportunistic Islamist fanatics, Iraqi Thunder Fist was committed to the overthrow of the existing government in Baghdad and the restoration of what it termed a genuinely representative and patriotic state. Morrow had added amendments to the text, inserting evidence of ITF training activities for guerillas who were sent back to Iraq to plant Improvised Explosive Devices along major thoroughfares, and of fundraising efforts ostensibly meant to provide for the widows of locals killed during the invasion but in fact set up to buy arms from private dealers in Russia, arms destined to be channelled back into the homeland.

Returning to his trawl for the Mohammed Al-Bayati name, Purkiss found no further associations with the Iraqi Thunder Fist group. He did, however, notice another word, Dolphin, which Morrow clearly used as some sort of code, and which cropped up three times in connection with Al-Bayati.

He reached for his phone.

Vale answered, his voice heavy with sleep. It occurred to Purkiss that Vale wasn’t a young man, that it was possible he couldn’t function on minimal sleep the way Purkiss just about could at the moment.

‘Quentin. Sorry. I need to speak to Kasabian, but she didn’t give me a direct number. Can you get hold of her?’

Vale sounded rapidly more awake. ‘Certainly. Have you found something?’

‘I don’t know. But I need to check a code word Morrow used.’

Vale said he’d get in touch with Kasabian and ask her to call Purkiss. Five minutes later Purkiss’s phone rang.

Purkiss asked Kasabian about the term Dolphin.

She paused before replying. ‘Yes. It’s one of several that are used to denote an informant.’

Purkiss said: ‘You hesitated.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Before answering. You held back. Why?’

‘You have to understand, Mr Purkiss,’ she said heavily, ‘it’s not usual for me to divulge information like this to an outsider, someone who’s not part of the Service.’

‘That’s too bad,’ said Purkiss. ‘You invited me in, remember. If I’m to do this job, I need full and unhesitating cooperation from you. That means no squeamishness about divulging secrets.’

‘On a need-to-know basis, of course.’

‘I need to know everything.’

Kasabian said, ‘The other reason I hesitated was that your question interested me. Have you discovered something in Morrow’s files?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Purkiss. ‘Possibly. Look, I need to know from the outset how we’re going to do this. Am I expected to liaise closely with you, reporting back on every scrap of information I uncover? Or can I be allowed to get on with it, consulting you as and when I need to know something?’

‘I’d prefer the former,’ she answered drily. ‘But from what Quentin has said of you, you prefer to work the other way.’

‘It’s speedier,’ Purkiss said. ‘Cleaner. And the fewer contacts you and I have, the less chance there is of someone linking us together.’

‘Point taken.’ She paused again, then said, ‘Anything else?’

‘No. I’ll be in touch through Vale.’ He rang off.

An informant. So was Al-Bayati working for Morrow? Spying on his own organisation, Iraqi Thunder Fist? In any case, did it have anything at all to do with whatever Morrow had wanted to tell the Home Secretary?

Purkiss skimmed the files again, letting his awareness flit over the data, to see if anything jumped out. But there was nothing.

He’d thought already of searching Morrow’s flat, but had rejected the idea. The Security Service would already have trawled through it, and even if they didn’t still have it locked down, they’d almost certainly have surveillance in place on it to see if anyone came visiting. Purkiss couldn’t access the Security Service’s own databases, even if he had somebody with the necessary IT skills to do so; as Kasabian had said, there couldn’t be any electronic trail to point to outside involvement.

So: the only thing he had that remotely resembled a lead was Mohammed Al-Bayati, and the organisation he headed.

Morrow had noted the London address of the Iraqi Thunder Fist headquarters, and Purkiss memorised it. Now, all he needed to do was to find a way to gain access to the organisation and its head.

As a white middle-class Englishman, he knew it was going to be tricky.

Thirteen

Purkiss watched the hissing rise and drop of the ventilator, a strangely jerky movement, and thought: if Abby were here, I’d have access already.

On the hospital bed, Kendrick lay like an insect trapped by a schoolboy, pinned by leads and tubes, the largest of which disappeared down his throat. His head was swathed in bandages, the mattress he was on rippling faintly like cyborg flesh as the bed did its work protecting against the pressure sores that were inevitable if the human body lay pressed against an unmoving surface for too long.

The consultant neurosurgeon who’d led the team operating on Kendrick had been at the end of his ward rounds when Purkiss arrived at the Intensive Therapy Unit. He’d seemed to know that Purkiss was important enough to be kept up to date — Vale’s doing, no doubt — and he’d made time to take Purkiss aside and explain what the done.

Kendrick had sustained damage to the right frontal lobe of his brain, the extent of which was impossible to determine as yet. The actual quantity of brain volume lost had been minimal, but the size of the lesion did not always equate to the degree of dysfunction. The damage to the skull bone had been repaired with a titanium plate. Cerebral oedema, swelling around the brain, was a problem, and was being treated with mannitol and steroids.

There was unlikely to be lasting impairment in movement or in the lower brain functions such as breathing, assuming Kendrick survived this initial post-surgery period and emerged from the coma he was in. Less certain, the surgeon said, was the degree to which other abilities would be affected. The frontal lobes were more fully developed in human beings than in any other organism, and with good reason: they were involved in judgement, impulse control, the inhibition of aggression, as well as attentional mechanisms.

Purkiss understood. He’d seen people with frontal lobe lesions who’d become apathetic shells, and others who’d turned into uncontrollably violent forces of nature. He’d asked the doctor a few more questions, then thanked him and gone in to see Kendrick himself, nodding to the two policeman who sat nearby.

Seated in an armchair next to the bed, lulled by the ventilator’s hypnotic rhythm, his thoughts drifted back towards Al-Bayati and the ITF group.

Yes, if Abby were there, he’d gain access without too much bother. She’d hack the ITF databases somehow, or locate Al-Bayati’s home address, or both.

Abby Holt had been another of Purkiss’s freelance employees, a computer and general electronics geek who’d provided finesse where Kendrick offered muscle and firepower. Together they’d made a formidable team. But Abby was gone now, shot to pieces in Tallinn at the age of twenty-seven, because Purkiss had made a mistake.

The bed was in a large open area rather than in a side room, with plastic curtains half-drawn around it. Purkiss saw one of the curtains twitch aside, and immediately tensed.

You’re too jumpy, he told himself.

A woman stepped in. Looking to be in her mid-thirties but probably younger than that, she had a faded, hard-faced prettiness which even the heavy makeup she wore didn’t conceal.

‘Who’re you?’ she said bluntly.

‘John. A friend of Tony’s,’ he said, rising and offering her the chair. She ignored it, staring at him.

‘You don’t look like no friend of his.’ Her voice was tobacco-roughened and bitter. She looked Purkiss up and down, then turned her attention to Kendrick, prone on the bed.

Purkiss searched his memory. Christine? Kirsty, that was it.

‘You’re Kirsty. Sean’s mother.’

Her glance snapped back to him, full of suspicion and malice. ‘He been talking to you about me?’

‘He’s mentioned you, yes.’ Kendrick had more than just mentioned her. He’d turned the air blue discussing Kirsty’s failings as a partner and mother. They’d been together a couple of years, had produced Sean, now seven, whom Purkiss had never met, and had split acrimoniously. Kendrick paid the child support and in return got to see his son fortnightly. He spoke of the boy with real fondness, and Purkiss had long suspected that Kendrick had a sneaking respect, liking even, for Kirsty, despite his surface griping about her.

She gripped the rail alongside the bed with long-taloned fingers and muttered, ‘Jesus, Kendrick. What did you go and do this for?’

‘It wasn’t his fault,’ said Purkiss.

She appeared to consider for a moment; then she said, flatly: ‘He was at your house, wasn’t he? You’re the one they’re saying was supposed to get shot.’

‘Yes.’

He braced himself, expecting a flurry of accusations, a barrage of slaps and scratches. But she said, simply, ‘Who did this?’

‘I don’t know yet. But I’m going to find out.’

‘Yeah,’ she murmured. ‘You do that.’

They watched Kendrick’s motionless, shrouded form for a few minutes.

Kirsty said, ‘They say he might be a vegetable afterwards.’

Purkiss said nothing.

‘Or that he might be aggressive and rude, with no consideration for other people’s feelings.’

‘Yes,’ Purkiss said.

‘If it’s that, how will we know the difference from normal?’

It wasn’t so much what she said, but rather the way she said it — she wasn’t making a joke, but asking a genuine question — that tore a laugh from Purkiss’s chest. He fought to stifle it, glanced at her in apology. But Kirsty was grinning too, and they let rip for a few guilty seconds, hysteria breaking free through the carapace of numbness.

‘Shut up,’ she spluttered, swiping at his arm. He saw the tears on her cheeks, then the crumpling of her face.

‘He’s an arsehole,’ she whispered. ‘But, God love him, he’s the father of my boy.’

Purkiss held her with the awkwardness of a stranger, while she punched lightly against his chest in time with her sobs, in frustration more than anger.

‘Sometimes the world needs arseholes,’ Purkiss said.

She wasn’t Kendrick’s next of kin because they’d never been married, but, the hospital had agreed to contact her as the mother of Kendrick’s child in case of any change in his condition. Purkiss gave her his number, and asked for hers.

‘So I can let you know when I’ve found the man who did this.’

She nodded.

On the way out, he said to the head nurse at the ITU desk: ‘Sorry about the laughter back there.’

She waved her hand. ‘Happens all the time in here. So much death around.’

Purkiss left the hospital at a quicker pace then when he’d arrived, because his meeting with Kendrick’s ex-girlfriend had given him an idea.

Fourteen

Vale tipped the contents of the cardboard box onto the dining table. They were back in the Covent Garden safehouse-cum-office.

Purkiss rummaged through the pile. There were wallets of various sizes and ages, each containing credit cards in an astonishing assortment of names. Passports, too, with several of them once again carefully weathered to look well travelled. He flipped through them just to admire Abby’s handiwork, and shook his head. Each of them contained his photo, but the names, dates of birth and even sometimes nationalities were different.

Purkiss found fake driver’s licences, National Insurance Number cards, staff ID badges giving him access to banks and military installations. All utterly authentic looking to his eye, and he was used to spotting bogus documentation.

In addition to her prowess as a computer programmer and hacker, Abby Holt had shown a remarkable talent for forgery. She’d supplied Purkiss with a plethora of fake documents, allowing him to slip into and out of both friendly and hostile countries undetected. What he hadn’t realised was the extent of her efforts. She’d clearly manufactured credentials for a greater range of situations than he’d ever needed to use them in, just in case.

After Abby’s killing in Tallinn last October, Vale had arranged for her base in Whitechapel, the flat where she maintained her computer networks and did her forging, to be cleared out quietly, while her grieving parents, who’d known nothing of their daughter’s clandestine sideline, had taken care of the flat in Stoke Newington where she lived, disposing of those personal effects of hers they could bear to throw away.

Purkiss had never asked Vale exactly what he’d found in Abby’s secret hideaway, or what he’d done with it. But, leaving the hospital an hour earlier, he’d been struck by a thought, and had fished out his phone.

‘Yes,’ Vale said. ‘I have the young lady’s effects.’

Keeping the bits and pieces he’d cleaned out of the secret bolthole of someone whom he’d never met before was just the sort of thing Purkiss might have expected Vale to do.

Purkiss asked Vale to bring along anything that looked like forged ID, but to leave behind the computer equipment and whatever else Vale had bagged. He didn’t need that sort of stuff now, though it might prove useful later.

The ideal find would be a tax inspector’s identification card, but although Purkiss didn’t find that, he felt a surge of triumph as he picked up the next best thing. A warrant card with a mug shot of Purkiss, identifying him as Detective Inspector Peter Cullen of the Metropolitan Police. The card even had the holographic emblem of authenticity.

Abby, you’re a diamond, he said silently, as he’d said to her countless times when she’d been alive.

Vale was watching him. ‘Care to tell me what you have in mind?’

‘It’s probably better that I don’t, at this point.’

Vale nodded. ‘Very well.’ He was good that way; he respected Purkiss’s decision to withhold information where necessary. Within reason.

Purkiss said, ‘You might need to do a little damage control later, though.’

‘When people start complaining that a nonexistent Met officer turned up and started throwing his weight around, you mean?’ Vale’s tone was as dry as the tobacco leaves he used to rustle between his fingers before lighting up.

‘Something like that,’ said Purkiss.

At the door, with the box containing Abby’s forgeries in his arms, Vale said, ‘Might I make a suggestion?’

Purkiss waited.

‘You don’t look like a detective, far less a DI. You might want to kit yourself out.’

‘I know,’ said Purkiss.

He left ten minutes after Vale and headed towards the nearest men’s outfitters on Charing Cross Road. There he bought a charcoal suit, priced slightly above the bottom of the range, a pale blue shirt with button-down collar, and a nondescript striped tie.

Purkiss caught the underground to Kennington. The Saturday morning crowds pressed against him and once again he felt himself tense, and forced himself to relax. He’d known of agents, both friendly and hostile, who’d been despatched here on the Tube. It was in many ways an ideal setting, bodies packed so tightly together that one’s hand actions could pass unnoticed as the knife went in.

The office of Iraqi Thunder Fist was a short walk from Kennington Station, through streets already baking in the morning heat. The city smells and the shouts of market traders ranged around Purkiss as he strode towards the address he’d found in Morrow’s records.

Arriving outside a greengrocer’s, Purkiss peered upwards. The office must be above the shop. Beside the grocer’s was a door with an unadorned bell. He pressed the button and waited.

A moment later a voice came over the intercom, a woman’s voice, in a language he didn’t understand. Arabic, it sounded like.

Purkiss said, ‘I need to speak to Mr Mohammed Al-Bayati, please.’

‘He’s not here,’ the woman answered in accented English.

‘This is Detective Inspector Cullen of the Metropolitan Police,’ said Purkiss. ‘May I come in.’ His tone suggested a command, not a question.

‘You have a warrant?’ The woman sounded as if she’d asked it before.

‘I’m not here to search the premises. I just need to talk to Mr Al-Bayati. Or somebody else senior. Just an enquiry.’

There was a long silence. Just when Purkiss was about to press the bell again, and was considering his options if they decided not to let him in, the door buzzed. He opened it and went in.

At the top of a narrow flight of stairs that doubled back upon itself, he found a door with an opaque glass panel, like the entrance to a private eye’s office in a noir film. Cheap lettering had been scratched off the panel, leaving a ghostly trace. Beyond, dark and blurred shapes shifted.

He rapped on the door. It opened and a small woman of about thirty opened it. Her eyes were wary, almost hostile. Not frightened. Purkiss produced the warrant card, held it up so that she could read it.

Wordlessly she stepped aside, holding the door, her eyes roving over Purkiss. In a small reception area stood three young men, also of Middle Eastern origin. They appeared to be waiting for Purkiss. In hooded jackets and jeans or combat trousers, they glared at him from beneath lowered brows, their feet apart, their arms hanging by their sides, fingers curled. Their body language exuded anger and menace.

Purkiss glanced around. The walls of the reception were festooned with garish posters displaying clenched fists, rifles, the crescent symbol. One giant chart showed a screaming woman standing in a pile of rubble and clutching a child shape, and listed figures for the dead, the maimed, the homelss in Iraq since 2003. Another poster consisted of a Photoshopped image of a mushroom cloud rising over the White House.

‘Where’s the other?’ the woman said.

Purkiss frowned down at her.

‘You police always come in pairs,’ she said.

Purkiss had considered it beforehand, and had wondered whether to bring Vale along. But he’d decided the pair of them together would be just too identifiable in future.

‘This isn’t an official line of enquiry or anything,’ Purkiss said. ‘And I’m not here to make trouble. I just need to ask Mr Al-Bayati a couple of questions. Off the record.’

‘I told you,’ said the woman, an edge creeping into her voice. ‘He is not here.’

One of the young men shifted his stance, bouncing a little on the balls of his feet, like a boxer preparing to step into the ring. Purkiss glanced at him sharply, held his gaze. The man didn’t drop his.

Without looking away, Purkiss said to the woman: ‘Then perhaps you can tell me where he is, so I can find him and talk to him.’

Another of the men took a step forwards. ‘He’s not here,’ he said, his accent shot through with South London. ‘We don’t know where he is. So try another time, copper.’

Purkiss took a long look at each of the three men in turn, as though memorising their faces. Then he ostentatiously turned so that his back presented a three-quarter view to them and said to the woman, ‘I’d appreciate it if you’d give me his home address.’

Turning his back had been a deliberate provocation, and it worked. One of the men took a step forwards.

‘Time you were going, copper.’

Purkiss felt the hand descend on his shoulder.

His first thought had been to approach the ITF office in a friendly guise, presenting himself as an interested potential recruit. But his conversation at the hospital with Kirsty, Kendrick’s ex, had given him another idea.

Sometimes the world needs arseholes.

Using the blind sense of spatial awareness you developed after years of fighting in confined spaces — and you developed it, or you didn’t last years — Purkiss aimed the heel of his shoe backwards and downwards in a raking action. It caught the man’s shin and he let out a shriek of pain, his hand dropping away from Purkiss’s shoulder. Purkiss pivoted, saw the man on one knee, clutching at his leg. Beyond him the one who fancied himself as a boxer was darting forwards, fists up and in front of his face.

Purkiss stepped around the man on the ground and snapped a roundhouse kick at the boxer’s knee, pulling it at the last moment so as not to deliver it with full force. The tip of his shoe caught the side of the kneecap and the man screamed, if anything more shrilly than the first one had, his leg giving way entirely so that he tumbled onto his bottom. He rolled, howling, his hands clamped around his drawn-up knee.

Down at Purkiss’s feet the first man crouched, something flashing in his hand. Off to the side the woman hissed ‘No.’ This time Purkiss pistoned his leg, as though pressing down hard on a footpump. His sole caught the man squarely in the face, the force flinging him back, the switchblade skittering from his hand across the lino floor.

Arms folded, Purkiss watched the third man. He’d taken a step back, and stood hunched, eyes darting everywhere like an animal searching for an escape route.

Purkiss went over and picked up the switchblade, folded it closed and put it in his pocket. The man whose knee he’d kicked was still writhing in agony. The one who’d pulled the knife was sitting up against the wall, shaking his head as if it was cobwebbed.

‘And that’s just with my legs,’ Purkiss said. ‘You don’t want to see what I can do to you with my hands.’

The woman too had backed off and was pressed against the door. Purkiss glanced beyond the reception area and down the corridor which led to the rest of the office. Nobody emerged. It must be a skeleton staff, he thought, holding the fort on a Saturday.

He looked at each of them in turn, speaking with quiet authority. ‘Assault on a police officer, and with a blade as well,’ he said. ‘I ought to arrest each and every one of you. And perhaps I should get a search warrant, after all. I’d certainly have grounds now.’ He looked pointedly off down the corridor again. ‘Anything in this office you might want to keep away from prying eyes?’

A few darted glances were exchanged. Purkiss nodded.

‘But I won’t. As long as you give me what I came here for.’

The woman looked back at him blankly.

He said, ‘Mohammed Al-Bayati’s home address.’

After a few seconds’ glaring delay, she stalked over to the reception desk, ripped a sheet of paper off a notebook, and scribbled.

Purkiss took it and looked at it.

He put it away in his pocket. ‘If this is wrong,’ he said, ‘I’ll be back. I guarantee it. And this time I won’t be alone.’

Fifteen

The address for Al-Bayati was in Lewisham, a neighbouring borough. Purkiss decided time was of the essence and flagged down a taxi a couple of blocks from the office. If the woman had given him the correct address, as he suspected she had, then she would certainly be on the phone to Al-Bayati immediately, warning him of the impending police visit. He was unlikely to flee, unless he had something to hide, but he might decide to set an ambush, and Purkiss didn’t want to give him time to plan anything elaborate.

After twenty minutes’ struggle through the Saturday crowds, the taxi reached Lewisham High Street. Purkiss said to the driver: ‘Drop me a couple of blocks away, will you?’

Like so much of London, Lewisham was a clashing mix of the old and the new, exuberant regeneration side by side with depressing urban decay. Purkiss consulted the map feature on his phone and turned off the main thoroughfare, following a grid of side streets until he saw the one he wanted.

He stood at the end and gazed down. A narrow street, lined on either side with parked cars and, further back, terraced houses. Purkiss saw from the way the numbers were arranged that Al-Bayati’s address must be about two-thirds of the way down, on the right.

For a few moments he waited, watching for signs of activity. One or two local residents passed him, glancing curiously at this man in a suit on a hot street. On either side of the street, neighbours chatted languidly, and a trio of small boys kicked ball around in the middle of the road, whooping guiltily as it bounced off the side window of a stationary car.

Purkiss decided to approach the house directly. After all, Al-Bayati was hardly likely to take potshots at him, assuming he was at home at all.

He was a quarter of the way down the street when movement ahead slowed his stride.

A group of men emerged from a house on the right, where Purkiss had estimated Al-Bayati’s place would be. Purkiss counted seven men in all. Four of them were Arabic in appearance, the other three white. All were dressed in suits apart from one of the Middle Eastern men, who wore khaki chinos and a polo shirt. Shaven-headed and with a full beard, he was in the middle of the group, the others flowing around him in formation. All the other men wore dark shades.

Purkiss continued to walk slowly down the street on the opposite side of the road, watching the knot of men in his peripheral vision, pretending to be engrossed in a phone conversation. The men were moving swiftly, purposefully. Just as Purkiss drew level with them, he noticed they’d stopped. He risked a direct look at them and saw they were piling into a huge Range Rover of the stretch variety, big enough to accommodate them all comfortably.

Purkiss made his decision. He reached into his jacket pocket for his false warrant card and held it high, stepping off the pavement onto the road and calling, ‘Police. Wait.’

The windows of the Range Rover were tinted, so he couldn’t see the reaction of the men already inside. But one of the bodyguards — Purkiss assumed that was what they were, and that the man in their midst was Al-Bayati — looked back through the open rear door at him.

The last thing Purkiss remembered with any clarity was the scratchy half-sound of the Range Rover’s ignition turning over, before he was flung sideways and chaos filled the world.

Sixteen

The figure that collided with him was a woman’s. Lighter than him by at least three stone, she nonetheless knocked him off his feet, landing hard on him, the hot tarmac of the road’s surface slamming up at him from below.

A second, less than a second, later, the Range Rover exploded.

The flash of the blast bloomed into an orange and black fireball just as the blast wave howled across Purkiss and the woman who was covering him, the awful ear-punching noise of the detonation following, like the roar of a gigantic jungle predator that strikes its prey motionless with terror.

Black shrapnel spun and whipped in a fan pattern like boiling hail, and Purkiss felt it sting his legs and skitter past his head across the tarmac.

The screaming, the terrible screaming, from all around was joined in discordant harmony by the cacophony of car alarms that started up out of synch along the length of the street.

Purkiss, feeling smothered, rolled aside, trying to get out from under the weight on top of him. Then he felt the intense heat, saw the flicker of flame.

He shoved the woman to one side and rose to a crouch. Another woman stumbled past, shrieking, clutching her head, her face a bloodied caul.

The woman on the ground, the one who’d knocked Purkiss down, was on fire.

She too had risen to her hands and knees, and down her back the flame seared and leaped like a grotesque mohawk hairdo. Purkiss wondered why she didn’t roll on her back to crush out the flame, until he saw the triangle of twisted metal protruding from the back of one thigh.

He pulled off his suit jacket, tearing the cheap material along one seam, and flung it across the woman’s back, tamping it down, feeling the heat lick at the palms of his hands through the fabric.

Lifting the jacket away, he saw nothing but blackened shreds of clothing. He pulled the woman’s shirt out of the waistband of her trousers and looked the smooth curve of her back, crossed by the strap of her brassiere. The skin was seared pink, but that was all. A sunburn, nothing more.

She began to get to her feet, gave a cry and dropped to one knee again. Purkiss crouched to look at the piece of shrapnel jutting from her leg.

Wrapping his jacket around one hand, he grasped the shard, wincing at the hot steel, and tugged hard, once.

She bit back most of the scream so that it sobbed out through her clenched teeth. Flinging away the fragment of metal, Purkiss examined the wound. No gushing of blood. He put an arm across the woman’s back and helped her to her feet.

They hobbled towards the pavement, Purkiss wincing at the tiny slivers of debris he now realised had penetrated his own legs. Around them people ran aimlessly, like ants from a broken mound. The stench of diesel and scorched cloth stung Purkiss nostrils, and the yells and wails were muffled through the high-pitched whine in his ears that was the aftermath of the detonation.

The woman slumped across the bonnet of the nearest car. Purkiss turned to look at the remains of the Range Rover. It was a black metal skeleton, acrid greasy smoke billowing from it to fill the street. Vague, slumped humanoid shapes were visible within it.

Down the street a man’s and a woman’s bodies lay, prone and unmoving, in the middle of the road. The boys who’d been kicking the ball around cowered on the pavement in their respective parents’ arms, their exuberance extinguished.

Purkiss found his mobile phone undamaged in the pocket of his ruined jacket. He punched in 999, gave the address and a brief account — a car bomb, at least two fatalities, probably more — and heard the sirens even before he’d finished speaking. Somebody else must have phoned it in already.

Leaving the woman against the bonnet of the car, he loped over to the bodies in the road. Their eyes were open and dulled in death, and the man had almost been decapitated by a sheet of shrapnel. He scouted around, doing a loose three hundred and sixty degree survey, past faces slack with shock and bewilderment, but saw nobody in critical need of help.

The woman was making an effort to stand upright as he returned to her. For the first time he got a proper look at her. Black, straight hair, shoulder length, a pale face discoloured by smuts from the diesel smoke, high cheekbones. The faintest Eastern cast to her dark eyes, he thought. Age perhaps late twenties, early thirties at most. She was tallish, around five nine, and wore a lightweight trouser suit and shirt, the scorched jacket long discarded.

‘You all right?’ he said, just as she started to ask the same thing. Her voice was muffled through the singing in his ears, which showed no sign of easing yet.

She angled her gaze past him, back down the street. Purkiss looked over his shoulder.

‘See something?’

‘It was probably wired to the ignition rather than remote-controlled,’ she murmured. ‘But it’s possible whoever planted it is nearby, watching the result.’

‘Yes,’ he said, thinking: she’s a professional. Interesting. ‘I was considering that, too. But they’ll be gone now.’

They both looked at the smouldering wreck of the Range Rover.

‘We should get out of here,’ said Purkiss, though he had no idea if she’d agree.

Without a word, she turned with him as he strode off.

Seventeen

Purkiss noticed she was limping slightly.

‘You need that seen to.’

‘I’ll manage.’

They headed directionlessly but with apparent purpose back towards the high street. The rippling crowds ignored their smoky figures, desperate to find out what had caused the bang several blocks away.

Purkiss said, ‘How did you know?’

‘About the bomb? I didn’t,’ she said. ‘I knocked you down because one of those men had a gun. And you were a sitting duck there in the road.’

‘A gun.’ He hadn’t seen it.

‘The one who had the door open and was looking right at you. I could see the gun from the angle I was at. You probably couldn’t.’

She was giving him an excuse, a way to save face. He said: ‘Thanks. For saving my life.’

‘And thanks for stopping me burning.’ It sounded almost farcical, but this time, unlike back in the hospital ITU, Purkiss didn’t give vent to hysterical laughter.

‘John Purkiss,’ he said. He glanced at her, expecting her to nod in recognition, but she didn’t.

‘Hannah Holley,’ she said.

She stumbled a little and he caught her elbow. Spotting a cafe, he steered her in and sat her down at a corner table. She didn’t resist.

Purkiss ordered coffee, black, for them both. Opposite him the woman gazed about distractedly, seldom meeting his eye. What she needed, he thought, was a few minutes alone to vent. To scream, weep, rage. But she couldn’t, here, and certainly not in his presence.

When the coffee came he emptied three sachets of sugar into hers without asking, and pushed it under her nose. She sipped, grimaced, sipped again. The couple at the next table were looking across and Purkiss stared back; their gaze twitched away. Purkiss peered under the table to see if the woman was bleeding on the floor from her leg wound. She wasn’t.

‘So,’ he said. ‘You’d better start.’

Hannah Holley tossed the hair out of her eyes, drained her coffee, looking at him over the cup. He waved the waitress over for a refill.

Holley said, ‘I followed you there. To Al-Bayati’s flat. I saw you approach him and his entourage, and I got in closer to try to hear what was said. That’s when I saw the man in the back drawing the gun.’

‘Where did you follow me from?’ asked Purkiss.

‘The Iraqi Thunder Fist office,’ she said. ‘I’ve had it under surveillance since yesterday. Al-Bayati’s the man I wanted to talk to, but he hasn’t shown up there. Then you arrive. You don’t fit the demographic. I was intrigued. You left with a purpose in your walk. That’s when I thought you’d be worth following.’

Purkiss studied her, knowing the obvious question he had to ask her was the same one she had for him. It was a calculated dance: giving away too much would be risky, but if he didn’t reveal anything, she probably wouldn’t either.

He decided on an oblique approach: ‘You said you had the ITF office under surveillance since yesterday.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Why yesterday, particularly?’

She hesitated, then released a long breath. ‘I’m going to take a leap into the unknown here, and suggest that we both know the name Charles Morrow.’

As she said it, she watched his face intently. Again he was struck by her professionalism. She was interested not so much in his reply as in what his face revealed.

Purkiss said, ‘Yes.’

Holley said, ‘You’re not Security Service. Not Five.’

‘No.’

After another pause, she said, ‘I am.’

‘Then you should be able to find out relatively quickly who I am.’ Though not what I’m doing involved in this mission, he thought.

She shook her head. ‘If you mean, you’re on the Service’s database… no. I can’t access it.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I’m working off the books,’ she said. ‘Freelance. Not even that, because it suggests I’ve been hired. I’m doing this on my own.’

‘Doing what, exactly?’

‘Looking for Charlie Morrow’s killer,’ she said. ‘He was a friend of mine. A decent man.’

‘Your Service must be tearing the country apart looking for the killer,’ Purkiss said. ‘Why not become part of that investigation?’

Instead of answering, she picked up a spoon and stirred her coffee absently, even though she’d already done so. ‘You’re not in the Service,’ she repeated.

‘No.’

‘Are you working for it, though?’

‘No.’ It wasn’t entirely a lie. He was working for Kasabian unofficially, not for the Security Service. The distinction would be a little fine for most people, Purkiss knew. But truth and lies had different meanings in his world.

‘So… what’s your role in this?’

‘I’m looking for Morrow’s killer, just like you.’

‘Why?’

‘I can’t tell you that.’

For the first time he saw a flash of anger in her dark eyes. It faded rapidly. Purkiss suspected she was by nature a fiery person, who had to struggle more than most other spooks to maintain the iron grip of emotional control that was required by the job.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘I owe you. If it wasn’t for you I’d be dead. And to use a cliché, we’re on the same side here. I think we can help one another. But I can’t reveal why I’m involved. Not yet.’

‘Why not?’

‘It would be breaking confidence.’

It sounded so old-fashioned, so out of place in a discussion between two espions, even to Purkiss, that he thought he saw the twitch of a smile at her mouth.

She studied him levelly, appraising. Then she nodded.

‘That I can understand.’

‘I will tell you that my background is with the other side. SIS.’

‘Yes, I suspected that. But you’re not with them any more?’

‘No.’ Through the window over her shoulder, Purkiss saw a fleet of police vans barging its way down the high street. People in the café were turning to look, the buzz in the air rising as word spread. Bomb… terrorist attack…

He spread his hands. ‘Answer this or not, as you see fit… but to go back to what I asked, why are you going it alone? Why not join the official investigation?’

‘Because I suspect someone within the Service is involved in the killing. Possibly more than one person.’

Eighteen

She sat back, leaving the statement between them. If she was expecting surprise from Purkiss, she must have been disappointed. Or intrigued.

‘Why?’ he said.

‘Charlie Morrow and I are — were — friends. We worked together a couple of years ago on some data mining stuff involving new blood in the Egyptian Embassy, and hit it off. Nothing intimate, if you see what I mean. None of that. But we each liked the way the other worked. We had similar values.’ She raised her eyebrows a fraction. ‘It sounds ridiculously naïve, doesn’t it.’

‘Not at all.’

‘We stayed in touch after our work together finished. Met up rarely, exchanged the odd email or text. And it became clear to me that Charlie was unhappy. Not with his day-to-day work itself, not even particularly with his personal life, though he was divorced and lived alone. Rather, he had a problem with the way the Service was run. With its ethos.

‘He wasn’t so green as to imagine that any counterintelligence service was entirely pure, that there weren’t underhand and even morally questionable things that had to be done from time to time in the interests of the greater good. But he felt the Service had become not just the protector of the good, but the determiner of what was good in the first place. It was the old story of how the legislative and executive branches of government need to be kept separate in order for a system to be just. Charlie felt the Service had outstripped its authority. Divorced itself from the need to answer to Parliament. And he didn’t like it.’

She shifted in her seat, and winced. She’d need that wound seen to soon, Purkiss thought. But he didn’t want to interrupt her flow.

‘I’m assuming you know Charlie was deeply interested in Iraq,’ she went on. ‘His wife being Kurdish. She was a refugee from Saddam’s persecution, and was apparently a passionate advocate of his overthrow, for obvious reasons. Like her, Charlie backed the Coalition invasion in 2003. He began to have his doubts in the aftermath, when no weapons of mass destruction were found, when the extent of the failure of the post-invasion planning became glaringly evident. When the bombings and mass slaughter got underway.

‘Charlie had no problem morally with investigating and surveilling dissident Iraqi groups here in London, groups like Iraqi Thunder Fist. He wasn’t one of those who believed that the planting of a bomb in a crowded Baghdad market place was somehow a noble act of resistance. But he was becoming increasingly concerned about the uses to which the intelligence he was gathering was being put. He’d speculate that it was being passed on to the CIA, to some of the Middle Eastern regimes surrounding Iraq, and that it was being used to justify all kinds of things — indiscriminate assassinations, blackmail, kidnapping.’

Purkiss thought about this. In the SIS he’d sometimes seen people start to lose contact with reality. Steeped in a culture of lies, deception, betrayal and ambiguity, eventually they saw treachery and untruth in everybody around them, in every single human interaction.

She sighed. ‘Yes, I know what you’re thinking. And yes, Charlie was paranoid. Particularly after his wife left him and he spent a lot more time on his own. But he was also shrewd. His speculations weren’t altogether implausible. Anyway. Three days ago, he tried to contact me. Left a message on my phone. I was abroad, on a few days’ leave in the South of France. There was no phone reception, something I’d chosen deliberately. I came back the next day, two days ago, and got the message. Shortly afterwards I discovered he was dead.’

‘What was the message?’

‘He said, “Touching down”. Just those two words. It was a kind of code he’d made up. He’d said once that if I ever got that message, it meant he’d gone away, or was about to go away, to a far-off place, and that I was to search his flat immediately.’ She glanced off to one side. ‘I thought he was joking when he said that.’

‘And did you? Search his flat?’

‘Yes. It wasn’t easy. I went straight to his flat in Marble Arch. On the way I learned via the grapevine that he’d been killed that morning. I didn’t get any details, just that he was dead. So I assumed his flat was either about to be searched, or had already been searched and I was walking into a trap. I did as much countersurveillance on it as I could without delaying things for too long, and I went in.’

‘Did you find anything?’

‘A notebook.’ She gave half a laugh. ‘I don’t mean a notebook computer, I mean an actual, old-fashioned paper notebook. Taped in a recess above the toilet pipe as it went into the wall. I’ve got it in a safe place, but so far it hasn’t been much help. Most of it’s written in some kind of personal shorthand. Nothing even a codebreaker could crack, because it’s not designed to be read by a single other human being.’

‘Then why did he want you to find it?’

‘Most of it’s in code. But a few names come up, written in normal language. Iraqi Thunder Fist is one. Mohammed Al-Bayati is another.’

‘So you staked out the ITF office.’

She shrugged. ‘What could I do? From that moment on, I caught Charlie’s paranoia. He’d obviously known he was at risk of being killed, which is why he rang me. Me, not his line of command. It suggested he at least suspected someone within the Service of being an enemy. That meant I had to regard everyone, the whole of the Security Service, as a potential threat. It meant I couldn’t access any of the databases any more, couldn’t search for Mohammed Al-Bayati’s home address, in case it triggered alarm bells. So I had to do it the hard way. Watch the office and see if he turned up.’

Purkiss sifted through the information she’d given him, calculating how much she probably knew, and how much she didn’t.

‘Ms Holley — ’

‘Hannah.’

‘Hannah, what do you know of the circumstances of Morrow’s death?’

‘That he was shot on an estate somewhere in the Home Counties, with a long gun.’

‘And that’s it?’

‘That’s it. Through the grapevine.’

There was no point holding back, Purkiss thought. He said, ‘He was meeting the Home Secretary. He was going to blow the whistle on something within the Service.’

Hannah’s eyes flared. She sat back in her chair, letting out a long breath through pursed lips, managing to sound vindicated and wondering at the same time.

‘Don’t ask me how I know,’ he continued. ‘But it’s one hundred per cent reliable information. And I’m here as an outsider, to find out both who killed Morrow and what he was about to expose.’

When Hannah leaned forwards again there was something gone from her eyes. It was the professional reserve, the forced coolness. Uncovered, the blackness of her dilated pupils threatened to suck Purkiss in.

‘I’ll help you,’ she said. It wasn’t a question.

‘You said “a few” names came up in Morrow’s notebook,’ said Purkiss.

‘Yes.’

‘There are others?’

‘There’s one more.’

Nineteen

Within twenty seconds of the blast, Tullivant was gone, driving at an unhurried pace north towards Greenwich.

He’d been parked for six hours at the end of the street, in the road with which Al-Bayati’s street formed a T, so that he had a clear view of both the Range Rover and of the entrance to the man’s house.

Ten minutes before climbing into his parked car to wait, he’d approached the Range Rover, a leather bag over one shoulder. The street was all but deserted at five thirty in the morning, not even an early jogger or dog walker to be seen. Nonetheless, there were bound to be people up at this hour, some of them even looking out of their windows as they sipped their first mugs of tea, so he had to make everything look as natural as possible.

Tullivant disabled the Range Rover’s alarm and the locking mechanism with a piece of electronic equipment not widely available commercially. He popped the hood, lugged a bottle of windscreen washer fluid round together with a small package which he’d taken from the leather bag concealed against it, and reached under the raised bonnet as though filling up with the fluid. He withdrew the dipstick, muttered as though finding the oil level low, and lowered himself to peer under the chassis, looking for a leak. Quickly, carefully, he fitted the package of C-24 explosive under the chassis.

Back in the car, he prised away the panel around the ignition and wired up the detonator. It wasn’t his favourite type of car bomb. Motion-sensitive ones, triggered by a human bulk lowering itself onto the seat, were more elegant; but in a busy residential street like this one they were too risky. A child climbing onto the bonnet might set it off. And Tullivant had discounted a remote-controlled device, because the signals jammed too frequently.

At that point, Tullivant could easily have driven away. He could have been on the other side of the country by the time the bomb exploded, reducing considerably his chances of being caught. But he needed to see for himself that the hit was successful. So he waited.

Once, during the six hours, the front door of the house had opened, and Tullivant had stiffened in his car seat. But it had only been one of the bodyguards, going out for the newspaper and a bottle of milk. Tullivant was relieved the man went on foot. It would have been embarrassing if he’d blown up the street in the process of popping out for a few essentials.

Around noon, it had all kicked off, and very nearly unravelled.

Al-Bayati and his entourage emerged in a seeming hurry, heading straight for the Range Rover. As they were climbing in, the tall man whom Tullivant had been aware of on the periphery of his vision suddenly stepped onto the road, his hand extended, holding some sort of identification card.

John Purkiss.

The shock of recognition made Tullivant feel disorientated, as if he’d slipped into someone else’s dream.

Reality intruded again. Tullivant had the Timberwolf in the car. If he moved quickly, he could take out Purkiss, and hope that Al-Bayati and his guards took fright and chose to start the car.

A woman was running up the road towards Purkiss, from behind him so that he couldn’t see her. Dark hair, slim build.

She collided with Purkiss and, as if he was the trigger, the car went up.

Tullivant ducked beneath the window, felt the heat sear his head. The roar made his car judder.

He raised his head once more. Dense smoke choked his throat and stung his eyes.

Through the haze he saw the rolling, screaming bodies, the tumbling fireballs of debris.

The frame of the Range Rover loomed into view, haloed in flame.

Satisfied, Tullivant started the engine of his own car and pulled away. Nobody would notice his departure in the chaos.

Negotiating the streets one-handed, he hit the speed-dial key on his phone.

‘Target’s neutralised,’ he said.

‘Good.’

‘One thing,’ said Tullivant. ‘John Purkiss was at the scene.’

He relayed what he’d seen: Purkiss approaching Al-Bayati with some sort of card in his hand, as though posing as a police officer or other figure of authority.

The news was received in silence. Tullivant didn’t ask, do you want me to take Purkiss out? He’d wait for his instructions, without speculation, without pre-emption.

‘Another target.’

‘Yes,’ said Tullivant.

‘This is a little more complicated.’

Tullivant listened, angling towards Rotherhithe and the tunnel that would take him across the Thames. There was a lot of detail to be absorbed. Tullivant had a visual memory, so that he retained facts by converting them into a flowing series of images. He used the system to memorise the target’s name, address, and the specifics of exactly when he was expected to move in and do the hit.

Yes, this was going to be more complicated than the ones so far. But in many ways more interesting, for that very reason.

Twenty

Alone in the house for a final precious few minutes, Emma made herself a cup of green tea and sat at the kitchen counter, looking out over the Common.

The kids had stayed over with their friends, the Finches’ twins, and when Emma had rung that morning to ask about picking them up, Melanie Finch had said, ‘God, no, don’t rush. They’re having a great time. A well-behaved pair you’ve got there, Em.’

Melanie said she’d drop Jack and Niamh back at Emma’s around lunchtime. It was now half past twelve. The live-in nanny, Ulyana, would only be back the next morning.

Emma had arrived home the night before at two-thirty, tiptoeing through the silent rooms, carrying her guilt like a burden she might drop at any moment and wake Brian. She’d slipped in beside him, hoping he wouldn’t wake up, but he’d half-rolled sleepily towards her.

‘Busy night, love?’

For an instant she was convinced he’d smell James in the bed with them, even though she’d showered back at the hotel before changing back into her day clothes. But he turned on his back and put out an arm for her to lie across, and she did so, snuggling into the crook the way she’d done for years, in the beginning.

She felt the slow rumble of his breathing in his chest beside her ear. It was at the same time deeply comforting, and almost unendurable in the way it stoked her guilt and shame.

He hadn’t driven her into James’s arms. Hadn’t done anything except bore her. And he didn’t even do that, really. He was witty, clever, interesting, and interested in her. If his job as a Physical Education teacher at the local private boys’ school didn’t present as obvious a topic of conversation at parties as hers as a GP did… well, so what?

No. Emma was honest enough with herself that she could recognise what a walking cliché she was. It was the danger in James she was attracted to. There was something of the bad boy about him. And like a teenage ingénue, she felt herself drawn in.

When she woke, the slanting sun indicated it was after nine o’clock. Emma glanced across but saw Brian’s side of the bed empty, the pillow neatly plumped.

The relief made her slump back on the sheets, the guilt close behind. Of course. He was coaching cricket today. It meant no awkwardness this morning, no struggling to ignore the lingering sensation of being in James’s arms. By the time Brian got home, she’d have got through a normal day, and would be more herself again.

Sitting at the counter, waiting for the children to arrive, Emma had a sudden, insane urge to phone James.

She suspected he used a special, pay-as-you-go phone to communicate with her, rather than his work one or even his main personal one. It was the sort of thing an agent in his position would do, secrecy coming instinctively. But she knew she couldn’t risk calling him.

She was due to see him again on Monday, two days from now. Last night had been an unexpected bonus, and should be enough to tide her over. But like the opiate addicts she’d seen as patients through the years, she craved James’s company only all the more for the increased exposure.

Emma noticed she’d left her handbag on the shelf where they kept the keys, and went to retrieve it. She looked inside, saw the makeup she’d spent a fair amount of money on yesterday before meeting James. Would Brian notice if she wore a different shade of lipstick from usual? Probably not, or even if he did he’d think she was doing it to please him. But she decided to keep it for her encounters with James.

As she replaced the makeup, her fingertips felt a slight irregularity in the seam of the handbag. She peered in, saw a tiny frayed thread.

Great. The bag was a Louis Vuitton, and hadn’t been cheap.

Pushing the lining of the bag so that it protruded out, she examined the seam. Something looked odd about it. She rubbed a fingertip over it.

A definite bump.

With a fingernail, she prised another thread free. Holding the seam inches from her face, she detected a dull glint from within.

Her nailtips plucked a couple more threads loose, and she worked them into the gap and pulled the object free.

It was a perfectly round, slate-coloured bit of metal, no bigger than a pinhead. Emma turned it round. There were no markings.

Had it been there before last night? She supposed she might not have noticed.

She emptied the bag out on the kitchen counter and turned it inside out. With eyes and fingers she examined every millimetre of the lining, but found nothing else.

She watched the tiny ball, as though she thought it might suddenly start rolling across the granite surface of its own accord.

James. He was the one to ask. James would know whether it was something of significance, or whether she was being ridiculous, fretting over a bead which had found itself in the design of the handbag by accident.

James. She thought of him, among the rumpled sheets last night, managing to look lazy and intense at the same time, watching her as she headed for the shower.

And left him alone. With her handbag.

The thread of unease snapped then, as Melanie Finch’s station wagon pulled into the driveway and the carefree yelling of the children dragged her into a different world.

Twenty-one

Hannah handed Purkiss the small, hardbacked notebook.

‘You have a look through,’ she said. ‘See if you spot what I did.’

They were on a mezzanine level at Victoria Station, seated at a table which was part of the sprawling fast-food dining area. Hannah had rented one of the station’s lockers to keep the notebook in.

‘I didn’t feel safe leaving it at home,’ she said. ‘Nor carrying it around with me.’

They’d left the café and headed for the nearest A amp;E department, where Hannah had been seen promptly and had her leg wound dressed. She’d slipped and fallen at a dump, she said, and cut herself on corrugated iron. None of the staff appeared inclined to disbelieve her, or particularly interested one way or the other. The hum of conversation in the department was about the car bomb and how many likely casualties there were going to be.

While Hannah was being seen to, Purkiss watched a television set on the wall in the triage area. The reporting was all very preliminary, with little to be seen on camera beyond the bustling of the police, ambulance and fire services, but the excited reporter revealed that there appeared to be at least ten people killed or injured.

Hannah emerged, having changed into a pair of jeans she’d bought along the way. She’d washed the dirt off her face and arms, and looked pale underneath.

‘Did they look at your back?’ Purkiss asked.

‘It’s nothing,’ she said. ‘Sunburn.’

At Victoria Station now, Purkiss perused the notebook. Almost every page was crammed with crabby lettering and symbols. Most of it, as Hannah had said, was unintelligible, a highly personal form of shorthand. But he saw the names leap out at times: Al-Bayati, Iraqi Thunder Fist.

And another: Arkwright, preceded once by the first name Dennis.

‘Heard of him?’ asked Purkiss.

‘No.’

The name hadn’t come up in the Morrow files Kasabian had given him.

‘Why would Charlie leave these names unencoded like this?’

Purkiss shrugged. ‘Insurance, I suppose. In case anybody else ever needed to use the information in the notebook. Like us, now.’

She swept a hand across her forehead. ‘If I could only access the Service database… But if this Arkwright is important in some way, his name will be flagged. Any search will not just set off alarms, but will probably lock his data and prevent anyone reading it.’

‘There’s another possibility,’ said Purkiss.

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s a long shot.’ He took out his phone and dialled Vale’s number.

‘John. You’ve heard about the car bomb?’

‘I was there,’ said Purkiss.

‘Are you hurt?’

‘No.’

‘What happened?’

‘The target of the bomb was Mohammed Al-Bayati, the London head of Iraqi Thunder Fist, a dissident group possibly involved in insurgent activity in Iraq. Morrow’s notes suggest Al-Bayati was a Service agent, or at least informant. He had a phalanx of bodyguards with him. I wanted to interview him but he was killed first.’

‘How did the killer know you intended to approach Al-Bayati?’

‘They may not have known. He might have been earmarked for assassination and I just happened to take an interest in him beforehand.’

Vale was silent for a moment. Then he said, ‘Difficult to tie all this together. Morrow’s killing, the attempt on your life, and now this.’

‘Tell me about it.’

‘Is there anything I can do?’

‘Yes,’ said Purkiss. ‘Could you run a name through the SIS database? Dennis Arkwright.’

‘I’ll be in touch,’ said Vale. He didn’t ask any more, and rang off.

It was, as Purkiss had said, a long shot. But it was worth checking. If the coded material in Morrow’s notebook related to Iraq, then it was possible this Arkwright existed in the database of the foreign intelligence service, SIS, as well as the domestic Security Service.

Hannah was watching him. ‘You need to fill me in on a few details,’ she said.

So Purkiss did. He told her about the attack at his home, about Kendrick in hospital, and about the access he’d obtained to Morrow’s files. But he avoided mentioning Kasabian altogether, saying only that he’d obtained the files via a “high-placed source”.

She put her hands together, touched her lips against her fingertips. Shook her head.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘You’re going to have to tell me everything sooner or later. Who you’re working for. Because if this gunman attacked you in your home knowing you were involved in the case, then there’s a leak somewhere. Whoever’s employing you has allowed the opposition to get wind of the fact.’

‘True,’ noted Purkiss, who’d said as much to Kasabian. ‘But I can’t tell you who’s hired me. Not yet. Not until I know I can trust you.’

He expected her to react with anger, but she just nodded.

Vale telephoned back after twenty minutes. Although he was no longer an official SIS employee, he’d retained high-level connections within the service, as well as privileges to access the databases.

‘We have a match,’ he said. ‘But not much detail. Dennis Kincaid Arkwright, born twentieth February 1964. Did some freelance work for the Service — that’s our Service, SIS — in Turkey in the middle years of the last decade. The nature of that work is not recorded. He’s a former Royal Marine, Three Commando Brigade. Dishonourably discharged in 2002 for brawling and insubordination, narrowly avoiding a court martial.’

‘That’s it?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t suppose you have an address for him?’ asked Purkiss.

‘I do, as a matter of fact.’ It wasn’t Vale’s style to sound smug or triumphant, and he didn’t do so now. ‘He draws disability benefit, luckily enough. The Department of Work and Pensions have him living in a village called Dry Perry, in Cambridgeshire.’

He gave Purkiss the exact address. ‘There’s a photo, too. Not a very good one, and a few years old. I’m sending it across.’

Purkiss said, ‘Thanks, Quentin. That’s a great help.’

‘Nine people so far confirmed dead in the car bomb explosion. Seven in the vehicle — I assume that’s Al-Bayati and his bodyguards — and two civilians. Do you think anyone will remember that you were nearby when it happened, John?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Purkiss. ‘In any case, it wouldn’t have looked as though I was involved, if that’s what you’re worried about. I was approaching the Range Rover at the time. Hardly the behaviour of someone who’s wired the vehicle to blow up.’ He paused. ‘There is something, though.’

‘Tell me.’

‘Shortly before the blast, I’d been making enquiries at the Iraqi Thunder Party office, posing as a policeman. I persuaded them to give up Al-Bayati’s home address. That might be why he went to the car when he did — he’d been tipped off, and didn’t want to hang around to be questioned me.’

‘I see,’ said Vale.

‘But it means the ITF staff will suspect me of doing this. One minute they’re giving me their boss’s home address. The next, he’s murdered. I’m just letting you know that there could be fallout from this.’

‘Understood. Thank you.’

Purkiss rang off. A moment later a text message arrived, with an attached photo. It was a blurred three-quarter view of a man’s face. His age was indeterminate, and he had close-cropped soldier’s hair, a truculent jaw, dark eyes. Arkwright, evidently.

Across the table from him, Hannah said, ‘This man you were talking to. Quentin.’

‘Yes.’

‘He seems like a man you can trust.’

‘He’s proved himself trustworthy more times than I can remember,’ said Purkiss.

‘And yet,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘You agreed there’s a leak somewhere. Somehow, the opposition were tipped off about your involvement in this case. It could have come from him. This… Quentin.’

Purkiss shook his head. ‘No, it couldn’t.’

She raised her eyebrows.

Purkiss: ‘It wouldn’t make any sense.’

And as he said it, he saw how it could, indeed, make sense. Vale wanted him to take on the case. Vale could have set him up, just as Purkiss had accused Kasabian of doing.

But he knew Vale, and knew he wouldn’t do such a thing.

Purkiss stood, abruptly. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We’re going to talk to this Arkwright.’

Twenty-two

Beyond Stansted Airport the terrain flattened out, fields of wheat and sheep and yellow rapeseed undulating gently towards the horizon. Hannah drove quickly and smoothly, passing the lumbering queue of lorries crawling up the slow lane.

They’d taken her car, a Peugeot saloon which she’d collected from outside her flat in Kilburn, while Purkiss had taken the tube back to Hampstead and his house. His property was cordoned off, police teams still at work inside and in the front garden. But they let him in, to change his clothes and collect a spare set which he packed in a small holdall. He also threw in his passport, because you never knew.

Purkiss glanced at the piano as he left, at the chipped and puckered scars of the bullet holes in its wood.

Hannah picked him up in the car near the tube station. She’d changed, too, into a lightweight jacket and trousers. She nodded at Purkiss’s bag.

‘Do you think we’ll be staying overnight?’

‘I don’t know what to expect at the moment.’

They drove in silence until they reached the M25, the motorway ringing London. The village where Arkwright lived, Dry Perry, was in rural Cambridgeshire, almost two hours north of the city.

Purkiss said, ‘So what’s your story?’

She glanced across. ‘My story?’

‘How did you come to join the Service?’

She smiled faintly. ‘If I tell you, then you’re going to have to be a little more forthcoming about yourself.’

‘Fair enough.’

‘I’m the daughter of a spook. My father was head of the Service’s Manchester office in the seventies and eighties.’

‘You don’t have an accent.’

‘I grew up here in London. Notting Hill, to be exact. My parents divorced when I was three. I still saw my dad, remained close to him. Still do. He’s retired now.’

‘And he persuaded you to join up?’

‘He didn’t need to,’ she said. ‘I was always fascinated by his work, and I knew from the age of about twelve that I wanted to follow him. My mother wasn’t happy with it. She’s an artist and sculptress, and she wanted me to do something along those lines.’

‘What was it about the Service that interested you?’

‘I used to tell myself the usual things. That I wanted to make a difference, wanted to protect the country I grew up in, give something back. I mean, I do… but it’s the nitty gritty that’s fascinating, really. You know? The tradecraft, the inventiveness you have to display, the sheer deviousness. It’s like being an actor. You take a delight in tricking people. Except an actor’s audience knows it’s being tricked.’ She sighed. ‘It sounds perverse.’

‘I know exactly what you mean.’ He studied her profile, her eyes. ‘Are your parents Eastern?’

‘My maternal grandmother was Burmese. She met my grandfather when he was stationed out there during the war.’ She returned his glance. ‘So. John Purkiss. Your turn.’

There was nothing particularly controversial about the first part of his story. ‘I was recruited to SIS as an undergraduate at Cambridge.’

‘By this man Quentin?’

‘No. He came later.’ Purkiss cast his thoughts back, almost sixteen years. He remembered the reasons he’d believed made signing up worthwhile. Reasons he’d held on to until as recently as last year. That in a world of no certainties, a world of constantly shifting probabilities, it was worth incrementally shifting the balance of probabilities towards a good outcome. Good being a fuzzy concept, something that the majority of reasonable people might agree on.

His beliefs seemed now to him to be at once hopelessly naïve and unnecessarily complicated. Probabilities might be all there were, but human beings weren’t wired to live in a world of probabilities. You had to live as though there were certainties, otherwise you were forever drifting, unanchored and rudderless, a hapless tourist through life.

Hannah’s voice cut through his thoughts. ‘I’m more interested in why you left SIS. You’re too young to be retiring, so that’s not the reason. You might have got fired, but you don’t seem bitter enough for that.’

‘I’m a natural outsider,’ Purkiss said. And although it sounded impossibly trite, and he’d never said anything like it before, he realised at once that it was the truth.

‘So don’t tell me.’ She shook her head, but there was a faint smile at her lips.

The M11 stretched northwards, taking them deeper into fenland. After a few minutes’ silence, Hannah said, ‘Are you armed?’

‘No. You?’

‘You know very well officers of Her Majesty’s Security Service aren’t permitted to bear arms,’ she said mockingly.

Agencies in other countries, like the FBI, were astounded by the British system. Its counterintelligence operatives weren’t even allowed to make arrests, but had to call in the police, specifically Special Branch, to do so.

‘Seriously,’ said Purkiss. ‘Are you carrying?’

In a moment she reached beneath her seat with one hand, her eyes still on the road. She drew out a heavy metal object and tossed it to Purkiss. He caught it.

‘Glock 19,’ he said. ‘Reliable piece.’

‘You know guns?’ she said.

‘Not all that well.’

‘Are you anti them?’

He shook his head once. ‘They’re tools. Nothing more or less.’

‘But…’

‘But, a gun culture isn’t what I’d like to see in this country.’

‘Me neither.’

They lapsed into silence once more. Purkiss had the feeling that something important hadn’t been said yet. He didn’t push it, but handed the gun back. She stowed it under the seat once more.

The late summer afternoon shadows were lengthening, the day still hot and languid, as they crossed into Cambridgeshire. Purkiss used the time to contract and relax the muscle groups in turn: neck, shoulders, arms, chest, abdomen, legs. Usually when he took on a mission he had time, even a few hours, to prepare himself mentally and physically. This time the mission had thrust itself upon him without warning, at his home, and he realised he was off-kilter, unsettled by it. The bombing of Al-Bayati’s car had thrown him more than it should have. He couldn’t have anticipated it; but he needed to get into a mindset in which surprises didn’t wrong-foot him quite so badly.

Because he suspected surprises were waiting for him.

Hannah said, ‘What line are we going to take? With Arkwright, if we find him at home?’

‘Well, you might have another idea, but I thought we’d go for the mysterious no-name agency approach. We let him know we’re from some sort of service, down in London, but we keep its exact identity deliberately obscure. Hint at the possibility of a renewed court martial if he doesn’t cooperate, that sort of thing. It all depends how he reacts to us.’

Hannah tipped her head. ‘Sounds workable.’

‘And I thought you could play bad cop. Arkwright sounds like a macho type. It might catch him off guard if the attractive young woman is the ballbreaker.’

He mouth quirked, but she didn’t say anything.

Twenty-three

Dry Perry made it into the category of village by a hair’s breadth, and fifty years earlier it had probably been a hamlet. It lay to the north-east of Cambridge, well off the motorway and even the A roads. Purkiss had lived for five years in Cambridge, but hadn’t explored the surrounding countryside much. Still, he was familiar with the type of terrain; his own childhood had been spent elsewhere in East Anglia, in the flat fenlands and misty fields of rural Suffolk, with their resemblance more to the landscape of the Netherlands than to the rolling-hill idyll which constituted the popular tourist’s view of England.

They pulled into the village at a little after four o’clock. The day’s heat was at its zenith, the low afternoon sun casting giant shadows. Ducks Crossing read a sign beside a narrow road which ran alongside a sculptured pond. Further ahead, a well-manicured village green was bordered by trees on two sides, a pub on a third.

Hannah slowed to a crawl. The satellite navigation system’s usefulness began to break down; the village was evidently too small for fine details to come up on the screen.

‘Park and walk?’ she suggested.

She pulled in by the side of the green. Purkiss felt the sluggish warmth settle over him like a shroud as he stepped out. He noticed Hannah slipping the Glock inside her jacket.

They walked narrow lanes, the odd passerby glancing at them incuriously. They must look like daytrippers, Purkiss thought, or else possibly a city couple looking for a second home as an investment, neither of which would be uncommon in a village like this. After a few minutes Purkiss peered down a muddy driveway towards a cottage half-hidden by a hedge.

‘That’s it,’ he said.

They made their way down the drive, avoiding neat piles of horse manure. Purkiss wondered whether Arkwright had taken up farming since his discharge from the armed forces. Yes: the driveway opened out into a yard with stables and a small barn. To the left, in a paddock a pair of heavy horses snuffled and drowsed in the heat. On the other side of the cottage, marshland disappeared towards the tree-lined horizon.

The only vehicle in the yard was a rusting pickup truck on flat tyres, which looked like it was there to be tinkered with but of little further use. Purkiss and Hannah stood still, scanning the cottage. The windows were open, suggesting current habitation, but there were no signs of life.

They walked up to the front door, a weighty antique-looking affair with a brass knocker. Purkiss rapped hard, three times.

Immediately a dog’s barking echoed from within. A medium-sized animal, Purkiss guessed: a Labrador or collie. The barking approached the door and continued there.

Nobody opened the door. Hannah stepped back and gazed up at the windows. No head appeared.

They did a quick circuit of the cottage, peering in at the windows. Nothing suggested anyone was home.

Hannah said, ‘Do we wait?’

Purkiss shrugged. ‘Or we could try the local pub. A place this size, someone there is bound to know where Arkwright is.’

The pub, The Green Man, bore the traditional emblem of a bearded and slightly sinister face surrounded by leaves and tendrils. The building appeared authentically old, its Tudor beams listing alarmingly. The doorway was low and Purkiss had to duck as he stepped inside, Hannah behind him.

The scattered late afternoon clientele was as listless as the day outside. Four men sat at the bar counter itself, murmuring their conversation into pint glasses while the florid landlord roved across from them, rubbing crockery dry. A clump of farmers sat around a table to the left, gently joshing one of their number who looked morose. To the right of the counter a girl and a boy, both temporary staff, flirted almost invisibly. A middle-aged tourist couple ate their late sandwich lunches in hasty silence in a booth near the entrance, as if conscious of their outsider status.

One or two of the farmers at the table glanced round as Purkiss and Hannah entered, their gazes lingering on Hannah before they turned back to themselves. A fresh laugh rose from the table.

Purkiss eased himself in among the drinkers at the bar, Hannah beside him. The landlord beamed tiredly.

‘What’ll it be, sir?’

‘We’re looking for Dennis Arkwright,’ said Purkiss, a little more loudly than necessary.

The low hum of conversation in the pub didn’t quite stop entirely, but there was an almost tangible change in the atmosphere, a tightening. Purkiss was aware, on the periphery of his vision, of faces turned towards them.

The landlord’s smile had faded a degree, though it lingered as if unwilling to let go of his face.

Hannah said, ‘Do you know him?’

After a pause, the landlord said: ‘I know him, yes. But he’s not here.’

Purkiss half-turned, addressed the room. One or two more people had wandered in since he and Hannah had arrived. ‘Does anyone here know where Dennis Arkwright might be?’

‘Who wants to know?’ a voice called. It was one of the farmers sitting round the table. Their boozy cheeriness was gone, and they stared at Purkiss and Hannah with open curiosity and a trace of belligerence.

Purkiss held up his fake warrant card. ‘Police,’ he said.

Now all conversation did stop, even the tourists near the door staring across.

The landlord said, quietly, ‘What’s the trouble?’

‘We just need to ask Mr Arkwright a few questions. So if anyone here knows where he might be at the moment, it really would be a great help.’ Purkiss’s tone suggested that, on the other hand, not to reveal where Arkwright was might be seen as obstructive.

One of the farmers pushed his chair back, the legs screeching on the rough wooden floor. He reached for his pocket.

Purkiss tensed. A blade? A gun, even? But the man took out a phone. Holding Purkiss’s stare, he murmured into it, then put it away.

He stood up. Purkiss stepped away from the counter and towards him.

The man was in his late twenties, burly, with the ruddy face and neck of someone who spent most of his day in the sun. His build suggested a life of physical labour.

‘Can you help us?’ Purkiss asked.

The man appraised him, then glanced past him at Hannah who was close behind. He jerked his head.

‘I’m Dennis Arkwright’s son,’ he said. ‘He’ll meet you outside.’

The rest of the farmers didn’t move. All eyes followed the three of them as they made their way to the door, the younger man in the lead. The tourist couple cringed away, not making eye contact as if to do so would rope them into the situation somehow.

The man glanced back to make sure Purkiss and Hannah were with him, and turned left, walking along the road in front of the pub. At the side was an open wooden gate leading into the car park, where a few vehicles were scattered about.

The man stopped, turned.

‘He’s on his way,’ he said.

Purkiss studied him. The photo Vale had sent of Dennis Arkwright had been of low quality, and the man’s features had been so generic that it was difficult to see any resemblance in the son.

‘What’s your name?’ said Purkiss.

The man stared back, said nothing.

‘Behind us,’ murmured Hannah.

Purkiss stepped back and turned, so that he could keep Arkwright’s son in his field of vision.

Walking towards them from the car park gate were two more men, of a similar age to the one who’d led them there. One of the men was taller and even broader than him. The other was smaller, wiry, his face drawn and tight, his eyes glittering.

There was a distinct similarity in the features of all three men.

The bigger man held a crowbar, hanging down by his side so that the end tapped against his leg. A length of chain was wrapped around the fist of the smaller man, the end swinging as he walked.

The first man, the one whom they’d met inside the pub, reached into his pocket, pulled out a small metallic object. The blade sprang free with a snick.

The two newcomers stopped ten feet away from Purkiss and Hannah.

‘Who are you?’ said the big man.

Twenty-four

Using his fingertips, careful not to make the movement look threatening, Purkiss took out his warrant card again and opened it.

‘Detective Inspector Peter Cullen. Metropolitan Police.’

The big man peered at the car from were he stood, but didn’t step closer. He nodded at Hannah.

‘Who’s she?’

‘She can answer for herself,’ said Hannah. ‘Detective Inspector Hannah Holley.’ Her tone was cold, unyielding.

The man didn’t drop his gaze down her body, as Purkiss had expected. He glared at her face as if trying to stare her down. Then he turned his free palm upwards, raised his eyebrows.

‘So where’s your ID?’

Damn, thought Purkiss.

‘You’re not coppers,’ said the smaller man. He gave the chain the slightest tug so that the end flicked through a circle.

Purkiss said, ‘You men need to back down right now. There’s no going back if you cross that line. Assaulting a police officer. That won’t be overlooked, or forgiven.’

‘Impersonating a police officer’s a serious offence, too,’ said the first man, the one with the knife.

The small man smirked.

‘You’re all sons of Dennis Arkwright, I take it,’ said Purkiss. ‘All we want to do is talk to him. We’re not here to arrest him, or to make trouble in any way.’

‘So why are you pretending to be coppers, then?’ said the big man.

Purkiss looked at Hannah.

‘If you’re not going to help us,’ he said, ‘then please let us pass.’

He took a step forwards. The big man, surprisingly, moved aside.

As Purkiss drew level with him he saw the man was grinning.

‘That proves it,’ he said. ‘If you were real coppers you’d have busted us for threatening you.’

It was a cliché: go for the biggest one, the leader, first. And usually it was a sound tactic. Not always, though, in Purkiss’s experience. Sometimes the biggest one, the apparent leader, wasn’t the most dangerous. And Purkiss didn’t like the knife, and would rather have dealt with its wielder first.

Still, the biggest man was also the nearest of the three, and was the one who was initiating the attack, so Purkiss started with him.

The man’s crowbar whipped across sideways rather than downwards onto the crown of Purkiss’s head, in a backhand slash aimed at the face. Purkiss stepped back, arcing his neck away, and felt the end of the bar swipe past inches from his face. The movement left the man’s torso exposed for an instant and Purkiss closed in with a one-two punch, the first landing in the man’s abdomen just below the breastbone, the other connecting with the stubbled jaw as it tipped forwards. The man stumbled, his flailing body uncertain whether to drop to its knees or collapse backwards. Purkiss made the decision for it, crashing a right hook into the side of the man’s head, the blow spinning the man round almost one hundred and eighty degrees to sprawl face-down in the dirt.

Purkiss pivoted just as the chain came whickering down, the end catching his hand as he brought it up in defence. The pain exploded through his knuckles and he leaped back. The man advanced at a crouch, the chain held two-handed like a python, the end whirling.

Beyond him, Purkiss saw Hannah facing off with the knife man in a similar position, the man’s arm darting slashes at her.

The problem with a chain as a weapon was that it was inherently unwieldy. A landed blow could cause intense pain and considerable damage, blindness, even, but the flailing end was difficult to control.

Purkiss watched the links at the end of the chain, not the man.

They described a sudden figure-of-eight and lashed towards Purkiss’s face. He spun, his back momentarily to the man, moving in past the chain and aiming a reverse kick at the man’s head. His aim wasn’t quite true and he caught the man’s shoulder, heard the grunt of pain. The man staggered back but kept his footing.

Purkiss hoped the blow to the man’s shoulder would take some of the force out of his swing, and it proved to be the case: the next flick of the chain was slower, less snappy. Purkiss watched the link at the end until the very last moment before he seized the chain in both hands, wincing at the pain in the one the chain had connected with. The metal was slippery in his hands but he held on, winding it around his fists as he pulled.

The smaller man was strong, and stood his ground, his tiny black eyes blazing. For a few seconds the bizarre tug-of-war seemed to have reached an equilibrium, both men gripping the chain, three feet apart, neither able to pull the other any closer.

Then the man released the chain and leaped forward.

The sudden release of the chain caused Purkiss to stumble backwards. He used the bunched mass of links in his hands as a shield of sorts, but it didn’t stop him losing his footing as the man collided with him. Purkiss landed hard on his back on the dusty, stony ground. The man jackknifed his body around the chain mass and sank his teeth into Purkiss’s upper arm.

In his time with SIS and since, Purkiss had been in more fights than he could remember, or cared to. He’d been punched, kicked, throttled, garrotted, and slashed with sharp objects of various kinds. He’d taken headbutts to the face, elbows to the throat, and knees to the groin.

But he’d never before been bitten.

Somehow, the outrage was worse than the agony. His instinct was to pull his arm away but he understood that if he did so, he’d lose a chunk of flesh from his arm. Instead, Purkiss used his other arm, the right, to bring across the length of chain he was gripping in his right fist. It was an awkward move because he had to sweep his arm round the back of the man’s bristly scalp, but he managed.

The fire in his arm was relentless; he could see blood darkening the material of his suit jacket, staining the man’s face. Like a feral creature the man was snarling, his eyes wide open as he hung on.

Purkiss couldn’t bring the chain through under the man’s chin because there was no room. Instead, he reached between them and looped it up across his assailant’s chest. He grabbed the end and pulled to the right, tightening it.

The man’s snarls grew louder. He began to shake his head, like a dog with a downed duck.

Purkiss hauled on the chain, feeling the links inch themselves across the man’s chest.

A few yards away, Hannah and the knife man were continuing their macabre, circling dance. She closed in every now and again, landing blows but not incapacitating ones. She didn’t seem to have been cut yet.

The man was strong, more so than Purkiss would have expected. Despite the tightening of the chain around his chest he hung on, and kept his legs inside Purkiss’s so that Purkiss had no opportunity to bring his knee up into his opponent’s groin.

Purkiss heaved on the chain with renewed force. His right fist, with the end few links of the chain wrapped around it, was up beside the man’s head. Summoning all the strength he could, Purkiss slammed the chain-clad fist into the man’s left ear.

The pain must have been exquisite, because the man relaxed his jaws around Purkiss’s arm and gave a yelp. It was all the opportunity Purkiss needed.

He wrenched his arm free, wincing as a gout of blood spilled down the torn material of his jacket- and shirtsleeve. Again he punched the man’s ear, splitting the skin of the scalp. He hauled on the chain again, heard the man wheeze, his breath quicken as his ribcage was compressed.

Purkiss heaved, rolling the man off him, and staggered to his feet, still holding on to one end of the chain. The man tried to rise with him and Purkiss kicked him in the stomach, doubling him up. Purkiss swept his feet out from under him with a second kick, and flung the length of chain on top of him.

Satisfied that the man writhing on the ground was out of action for the time being, Purkiss turned to see Hannah kneeling on her opponent, who was prone on the ground, his arm twisted behind him, Hannah’s knee in the small of his back. Her clothes and face were dusty but Purkiss couldn’t see any blood, except at the man’s nose. The switchblade lay in the dirt, several feet away.

Hannah caught Purkiss’s eye and nodded a warning over his shoulder. He saw the big man, the one whom he’d floored first, on his feet and groping for the crowbar.

As Purkiss advanced, another figure appeared at the entrance to the car park. The unmistakeable ratcheting sound of a slide-action shotgun made the big man look round.

The newcomer strode forwards, the shotgun aimed squarely at Purkiss. He stopped ten feet away.

It was Arkwright, but his face bore only a basic resemblance to the picture Vale had sent Purkiss. The features were horribly distorted by a scar that criss-crossed from one ear to the corner of the opposite jaw, cutting across the mouth and dragging the lips sideways. The man’s head was shaven, and also white with scar tissue.

His eyes were bright points.

‘Back down,’ he said thickly.

The big man glared at Purkiss and made to swing the crowbar. The scarred man snarled: ‘You too, Dave.’

He looked down at the smaller man, who was on his knees, taking long, hesitant breaths, spitting blood. My blood, Purkiss thought.

The scarred man raised the barrel towards Hannah. ‘And you. Let him up.’

Hannah stood, the prone man leaping to his feet, grimacing, and turning on her. But he kept back after a glance at Arkwright.

Arkwright searched Purkiss and Hannah with his gaze. Then, as though making a decision, he said: ‘All of you. Come with me.’

Twenty-five

Sometimes coincidences happened, and could be used to great advantage.

Tullivant had spotted them as they stepped out of the Peugeot next to the village green: Purkiss, and the woman Tullivant had seen earlier, when the car bomb had gone off. The woman who’d knocked Purkiss down, and probably saved his life.

Tullivant was walking back to his own car at the time, which he’d left in the pub car park. He didn’t dodge out of sight, because there was no need; his face would mean nothing to either Purkiss or the woman. So he continued towards the car park at an unhurried pace, watching the pair as if he was innocently looking at the green.

They headed in the direction Tullivant had come from, with that typical appearance of people who were looking for a particular address. And Tullivant knew exactly the address they wanted, because he’d just been there himself.

In the car park, he got his car, a VW Golf, and drove in a circuit until he was heading down the street off which Arkwright’s cottage stood. There were Purkiss and the woman, peering down the lane which led to the cottage. Now they were heading towards it.

Tullivant stopped the car, leaving the engine running, took out his phone, and watched the pair’s backs. When the woman turned slightly to say something to Purkiss, Tullivant took a quick series of photos with his phone. The angle wasn’t great, but it would have to do.

He drove on, thinking. They’d knock on the cottage door, find that Arkwright wasn’t home… and then what? Would they force their way in to search the place? Possibly. But they wouldn’t find what Tullivant had left there, because they wouldn’t be looking for something like that. And afterwards? Tullivant doubted they’d turn round and head back to London. More likely, they’d hang around. Perhaps make enquiries in the village.

He hadn’t anticipated that Purkiss would arrive this soon, and had been banking on Arkwright’s being home when Purkiss did turn up. No matter. It was a detail, that was all.

Tullivant parked up another residential lane and sent a text which read: Who’s the woman? He attached a couple of the photos he’d taken.

While he waited for a reply, he considered his options. The obvious thing to do would be to carry on with his original plan: hole up near the cottage and wait for Arkwright to return, and after that Purkiss. But what if Purkiss went in search of Arkwright, found him, and took him somewhere else?

It was a risk too far. Tullivant started the car again and drove back. At the end of Arkwright’s street he saw Purkiss and the woman emerge from the lane once more. He watched them head back in the direction of the green.

This was going to be tricky. Surveillance in a crowded city, whether on foot or by car, was one thing. But in a tiny village like this, he’d be spotted quickly, especially by a professional like Purkiss.

The pub was the obvious place, Tullivant thought. The hub of the village, it would be where a stranger would go to ask questions.

Parking again, he headed straight for the pub without looking around for Purkiss or the woman. On the way, a text message arrived: Can you talk?

He rang the number.

‘The woman is Hannah Holley. A Service agent. Not assigned to the Morrow investigation.’

‘She’s operating off the books?’ asked Tullivant.

‘Apparently.’

‘She was the one who saved Purkiss when the bomb went off,’ said Tullivant.

‘Interesting.’ There was a pause. ‘I’ll have to think about this.’

Tullivant rang off, reached the pub and went inside.

Purkiss was at the bar, the woman beside him.

Twenty-six

‘So talk,’ said Arkwright.

His accent was Merseyside, the catarrhal glottals enhanced by some kind of speech defect. Purkiss wondered if his tongue had been damaged at some point.

They sat around a huge oak dining table, as scarred as Arkwright himself. All the furniture in the cottage looked similarly rustic. Arkwright was across from Hannah and Purkiss, one of his sons — Steve, the one who’d led them out of the pub, the one who’d pulled the knife and whom Hannah had put down — sitting beside him. The other two, Dave the big one and Jimmy the smaller, stood behind Arkwright on either side, like a pair of bodyguards.

Dave had had a tooth knocked out; Jimmy held a wad of cloth to his bleeding ear. Purkiss himself had probed his wounded upper arm gingerly, picking ribbons of cloth out of the punctured flesh. He’d need it seen to. Human bites could be nasty.

The shotgun was on the table, the business end pointing in Purkiss’s direction, though Arkwright wasn’t touching it. He’d walked them all back to his cottage, holding the gun hanging down as if they’d all been out on a hunting trip together with one piece to share.

Purkiss said, ‘So, we wanted to ask you some questions. Your sons attacked us. We put them down. They had it coming.’

On either side of Arkwright the three men stirred. Not looking at them, Arkwright raised a finger.

‘You’re not police,’ he said.

‘No.’ Purkiss folded his hands, leaned forward. ‘We’re not. We’re from an agency that could make life extremely difficult for you if you don’t cooperate with us, Arkwright. As in, revisiting the reasons you were kicked out of the Army and making a persuasive case that criminal charges should be pressed, even at this late stage.’

Arkwright’s face was twisted into a permanent grimace, so it was hard to tell how he reacted to this. He watched Purkiss, his glance flicking occasionally to Hannah.

Purkiss went on: ‘Your sons, reacting the way they did. That suggests they’re protecting you. That anybody who comes round asking questions of you needs to be seen off. It’s the behaviour of a man with a guilty secret. With something to hide.’

‘You said cooperate,’ Arkwright rasped. ‘Cooperate, how?’

‘Just answer some questions.’

The big man, Dave, snorted, rolling his eyes.

Hannah stood up, walked round the table until she was inches from him, stared up into his face.

‘What was that?’ she said. Her voice was quiet, icy with menace.

Dave’s eyes narrowed. His shoulders swelled, his hands bunched into fists.

She laughed at him. ‘You think you’ve seen a fraction of what we’re capable of? The two of us, unarmed, dropped the three of you. We’ll do it again if we have to. But we won’t have to. Because there are others, waiting for the signal. The signal is our failure to make a phone call within — ’ she glanced at her watch — ‘just under thirty minutes from now. If we don’t make that call, our backup arrives. This time you’ll be the ones who’re outnumbered. And they won’t play nice, the way we did.’

He glowered down at Hannah, hate threatening to spill from his eyes and hooked mouth. ‘Jesus, you — ’

‘Shut up. We want to hear from your father, not you.’ Ostentatiously she turned her back to him and went to sit down again next to Purkiss.

Arkwright transferred his gaze from her to Purkiss once more. His jaw worked, as though he was chewing something invisible.

He shrugged. ‘Ask.’

He’s been expecting this, thought Purkiss. He’s resigned to it. Not outraged.

‘Charles Morrow,’ said Purkiss.

He studied Arkwright minutely. The eyes and the scarred flesh around them, the mouth, the hands.

‘Never heard of him,’ said Arkwright.

Nothing moved. There was no tell-tale lifting of the fingers towards the lips to suppress a lie.

Beside Purkiss, Hannah said, ‘Bullshit.’

Arkwright ignored her, holding Purkiss’s stare instead.

Purkiss said, ‘You’ve never heard of Charles Morrow.’

‘No.’

Either Arkwright was telling the truth, or he was such a spectacularly accomplished liar that the whole interview was a waste of time.

‘Charles Morrow was murdered two days ago,’ said Purkiss.

No reaction from Arkwright.

‘Why was your name mentioned prominently in Morrow’s notebook?’

Arkwright leaned forward. He spoke slowly, enunciating each word as though talking to a dim child. ‘I have no idea.’

Purkiss watched him in silence for a full ten seconds.

Then: ‘Mohammed Al-Bayati.’

There it was. A tell-tale shifting of Arkwright’s eyes, just a fraction. He was in control enough not to blink, or to move his hands; but the eye muscles flickered.

‘So,’ said Purkiss. ‘You know Al-Bayati. Or knew him, I should say.’

Still Arkwright said nothing.

Purkiss went on: ‘Al-Bayati was killed by a car bomb less than six hours ago. You may have heard the news? An explosion in South London. That was him.’

The scars streaking Arkwright’s face and scalp made it difficult to be certain, but Purkiss thought he saw the faintest glint here and there.

‘You’re sweating,’ he noted.

Hannah slapped the table with both palms. ‘We’re wasting time here. This is too slow. Let’s just take him in and let the others get to work on him.’

Purkiss glanced at her as though mulling it over. He turned back to Arkwright.

‘If we do what my colleague suggests, you will talk, Arkwright. That’s one hundred per cent certain. You’ve obviously been through a lot of pain, by the look of you. But you really have no idea what pain is. None whatsoever. Trust me on that.’ He shrugged amiably. ‘On the other hand, if you help us a little bit, that can all be avoided.’

Arkwright’s lips were parted half an inch. Purkiss watched the rise and fall of his chest. His respiratory rate had increased. The man was frightened.

‘What’s your connection with Mohammed Al-Bayati?’ Purkiss asked softly.

Arkwright moved his mouth as though tonguing the insides of his cheeks moist once more.

He said, ‘I tortured him.’

Twenty-seven

‘I left the Royal Marines in October 2002.’

‘You were discharged then. Yes,’ said Purkiss.

Arkwright glared at him. One of his sons had brought him a glass of water and he’d gulped it down, held it out for more. It seemed to loosen his tongue.

‘Just missed it,’ Arkwright said, his eyes far away.

‘Missed what?’

‘Iraq. It was the big one. The one we all knew was coming.’ He squinted at Purkiss. ‘You a soldier? No, of course you weren’t. Too soft-looking. But if you’d been one of us, at that time, knowing the momentum was building, that we were going back into the Middle East… Christ, the buzz was like nothing else I’ve ever felt.’ He shook his head savagely. ‘And I missed it.’

‘Through no fault of your own, of course,’ Hannah chimed in. One of the sons, Steve, the one who’d had the knife, clenched his teeth and fists, avoiding looking at her.

Arkwright said, ‘But I wanted to help. Wanted to be part of it, in some way. I tried enlisting again. Said I’d take any job, cleaning out the fucking barrack toilets if I had to. But they didn’t want to know.’

Purkiss waited. Through the cottage’s windows, the sunlight was starting to slant as the afternoon tipped towards early evening.

‘So I did the usual,’ Arkwright continued. ‘Looked for private work. Everyone knew there was going to be plenty of it after the invasion, so with my experience, my background, it wasn’t hard to get a job.’

Purkiss remembered. Ten years ago it had seemed that every other former soldier was setting up his own mercenary outfit, eager for the pickings to be had in the post-Saddam chaos.

‘I signed up, and sat on my arse for the first year. For a while, because Baghdad fell so quickly, it looked possible that things were going to settle down and there’d be less need for us. But when the insurgency got underway, when the roadside bombs started going off, the contracts started pouring in.’

‘So you went.’

‘Yeah. Bodyguard work, mostly, at first. Escorting bigwigs in the new administration to and from meetings. It wasn’t a bad life. There was sunshine, and the pay was good.’

‘What happened to your face?’ said Hannah.

It caught Arkwright off guard. Involuntarily he put a hand up to his cheek, then angrily dropped it again.

‘Al Hillah,’ he said. ‘February 2005. Suicide bombing at a police recruiting station. I caught some shrapnel.’

Purkiss recalled the attack. More than a hundred people had been killed. A Jordanian had been responsible.

‘I came back to have it fixed,’ Arkwright continued. ‘Back to Britain. The firm I worked for paid for the surgery privately. You think this looks bad now, you should have seen it before the doctors got to work on it.’

‘And then you went back?’ said Purkiss.

Arkwright fell silent. His mouth twitched.

‘Back to Iraq?’ Purkiss prompted.

‘No,’ muttered Arkwright. ‘I didn’t.’

Purkiss waited again.

‘I was going to go back,’ said Arkwright. ‘I wanted to get back so badly and kill the bastards. Kill all of them, for what they’d done to me. And I was at the airport, all set to leave. Fighting fit.’

‘But?’

‘Then these men approach me as I’m in line to board the plane. Ask me to come with them. Couple of guys in suits.’ He narrowed his eyes, remembering. ‘They know who I am. That’s obvious. Tell me my life story. They ask me if I’d really, really like to do something useful to get back at the bombers who did this to me. I say yes, of course. For a moment I think they’re going to tell me the military wants me back. Then they tell me I’m not going back to the Gulf. That I’m going to stay here in the UK.’

Arkwright’s voice was rising as he warmed to his story. Around him, his sons gazed at him impassively. Purkiss couldn’t tell whether or not they’d heard this before.

‘They ask me if I’d be willing to help them extract information from prisoners. Terrorists and criminals, and the people who support and enable them. They tell me I have no idea, the public has no idea, how many such people are operating in Britain. That Saddam’s agents are everywhere, feeding off the country like maggots, rotting it away. That if I cooperate, I’ll not only be avenging myself, but that I’ll be doing more of a patriotic service to my country than the bravest soldier out there in the desert.’

He spread his palms.

‘So I said yes. I stayed in Britain, and within a week I started work. I’d get called for a few days’ stint at a time, and they’d bring me whatever equipment I asked for, and I’d do my job. Iraqis, Jordanians, a few British-born Pakistanis. Mostly hard nuts, people they hadn’t managed to get to talk using the normal methods. I asked them about links with terrorist cells here in Britain and the rest of Europe, and connections with the insurgency back in Iraq. And I was good. I got results.’

Purkiss saw a glint in Arkwright’s eyes that hadn’t been there before.

‘How many?’ asked Purkiss.

Arkwright rocked a palm. ‘Over two years… maybe a hundred? One a week. Though they tended to come in batches.’

Purkiss thought quickly. There was a lot of information to be gained here, a lot of detail, and he had to decide what to prioritise while Arkwright was being so forthcoming.

‘Where does Mohammed Al-Bayati fit into this?’

‘He was one of the people I… interrogated,’ said Arkwright. ‘Iraqi ex-pat, living in London.’

Hannah asked: ‘How do you remember him so clearly? If he was one among a hundred?’

Arkwright’s eyes flicked to her, then back to Purkiss. ‘I don’t know.’

‘You’re lying,’ said Purkiss.

‘I don’t know,’ repeated Arkwright.

Purkiss decided to change tack. ‘Who were you working for? These people who approached you at the airport.’

‘They were MI5.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because…’ Arkwright looked at his hands on the table. ‘Because I put two and two together. They were bringing in a steady stream of prisoners for me to interrogate. They were concerned with public security. I didn’t have to sign the Official Secrets Act, obviously, but I still knew who they were. Also — ’

‘Yes?’ said Purkiss.

This time Arkwright took a long breath, sucking air in through his nose, exhaling through his mouth.

‘Sometimes another man came and watched me at work. I got the feeling he was in charge. He never spoke to me, just watched. Through one-way glass. I assumed he wanted to hear for himself, first-hand, the answers I was getting.’

‘And?’

‘I’ve seen his picture in the paper more recently. Couple of years ago. When he was appointed head of MI5.’

Purkiss felt a jolt pass through his chest, sensed Hannah tensing beside him.

‘Guy Strang,’ said Arkwright. ‘Now the MI5 boss. He watched me torture those prisoners. He was in charge.’

Electrified, Purkiss gripped the edge of the table to prevent himself from rising from his chair.

A second later the window exploded inwards.

Twenty-eight

Perhaps it was because Hannah had knocked him to the ground an instant before the bomb in the Range Rover had gone off, or perhaps it was because she was the person closest to him. Whatever the reason, Purkiss collided with her hard, flinging her and the chair she was sitting on sideways, as his brain caught up, registering and processing the data it had received.

The burst of glass from the imploding window, a jarring flashback to the attack on his own house.

The object that came hurtling into the living room, its momentum slowed but not broken by the impact with the window.

The yells from Arkwright and his sons, and their own collisions as the small one, Jimmy, cannoned into his father.

The noise of the shattering glass coupled with the hissing.

The rapidly billowing fog of grey-white cloud that was rapidly filling the room.

On the floor Purkiss rolled off Hannah. She buried her face in her sleeve even as Purkiss felt the first crawling prickle in his nose and ears and throat, the blinding stream of tears as his eyes were stung shut.

CS gas.

He clambered to a kneeling position, resisting the urge to stand up and thereby present a target through the window. From Arkwright and his sons he heard muffled swearing interspersed with coughing, choking sobs.

One arm still held awkwardly across her nose and mouth, her reddened eyes almost shut, Hannah drew the Glock from her jacket.

Purkiss tapped her shoulder to get her attention, pointed at the front door. She nodded.

He meant, get there before they do. Arkwright and his sons were already upright and stumbling for the door.

They had to get out, all of them. There was no question at all of remaining in the cottage. But that was, of course, precisely the intention of whoever had fired the gas grenade through the window. And that meant there’d be someone, perhaps more than one person, waiting outside the front door to pick them off as they emerged.

Hannah hurled herself towards the door, getting there just ahead of Dave, the biggest son. She barged him aside, wrenched at the door and threw it open. Purkiss saw her swing the Glock in an arc, left to right, covering the exterior.

The words registered in Purkiss’s mind like a read-out on a cyborg’s internal computer.

Protect Arkwright.

Purkiss groped unseeingly at the table, found the barrel of the shotgun, lifted it.

The men were trying to crowd out the door, their collisions almost comical. Holding the shotgun in one hand, Purkiss grabbed the collar of Arkwright’s shirt with the other and jerked him back. Arkwright tried to turn, flailing, as though suspecting he was under attack. In front, his sons emerged into the daylight after Hannah. Purkiss pushed ahead of Arkwright and beckoned him to follow, to stay close.

Hannah stood in the middle of the yard, her swollen tear-streaked face contorted, turning slowly with the Glock extended in a two-handed grip. Around her the sons bent over with their hands on their knees, retching, scrubbing at their faces as if trying to rub the torment away with their fingers.

A whoosh, then, followed by a metallic thunk, and a second gas canister skidded across the ground in the middle of the yard. Purkiss barely saw it before the hissing cloud bloomed and the fierce, prickling burning started up again in his nose and eyes.

The first shot hit Steve, the son who’d pulled the switchblade, in the chest, lifting him backwards off his feet to sprawl hard on the gravel. Even before the crack of the shot had reached Purkiss’s ears the second one came, Dave’s head rocking sideways and spraying gore over the rusting pickup truck in the yard.

Arkwright barrelled by Purkiss, snarling in panic. Purkiss rammed an elbow into Arkwright’s abdomen, making him jackknife and drop. Crouching, Purkiss did what he could to shield the man folded on the ground, and peered about through blurred eyes cracked open only millimetres. The shapes around him were by now so hazy that he could barely distinguish male from female.

The roar of another shot assailed his ears. He heard a yell, a man’s voice, and saw dimly yet another figure go down. The third son, Jimmy, he guessed.

‘Purkiss,’ Hannah called, in a muffled croak. ‘Down.’

He ducked, blind, not knowing where the danger was coming from. This is it, he thought. A quick, violent punch in the head and it’ll be over.

From over in the direction Hannah’s voice had come from, a different weapon crashed. The Glock. He heard, and felt, the shot sing past his head. Squinting in the opposite direction, he made out a looming shape diving to one side.

Purkiss aimed the shotgun, keeping low, and pulled the trigger. The gun bucked in his hands, the shot fanning and scattering. He made out movement, a dark shape rolling and rolling and coming up in a squatting position. Purkiss reloaded and fired again, then threw himself flat as the returning salvo began.

Beside and behind him, Purkiss heard Arkwright scream, heard the punch of projectiles through flesh.

Prone, he fired the shotgun again. Using his elbows he wriggled backwards until he came up against Arkwright. The man was burbling liquidly. Purkiss’s groping hand found his face, probed his head. It seemed intact. His fingers moved lower. There was stickiness on the shoulder, and he felt a sudden dip in the chest area.

Rising to his knees, Purkiss reloaded, fired. He did it again. Through the haze in front of him, he sensed a shape scrambling to retreat round the side of the cottage.

One man. There must be only one man, or else surely by now the others would have joined in.

‘Hannah,’ he called, his voice a rasp.

She answered, though he couldn’t make out what she said, as though the tear gas had fogged up his ears as well.

‘Arkwright’s hit. Keep him alive.’

Without waiting for a response, Purkiss got to his feet.

He’d never gone into a gunfight blind before. The odds weren’t appalling. They were utterly insane.

He loped towards the corner of the cottage, the shotgun barrel leading.

As he reached the corner something — a distantly heard sound, a subtle change in the air pressure, pure instinct — made him stoop.

A man stepped out, a handgun aimed at the level Purkiss’s chest would have been.

The range was too close for Purkiss to fire the shotgun. Instead he jabbed the barrel up at the exposed torso.

He could still barely see, and the man was fast, but he was close enough that he made contact. The man’s breath grunted out of him and he reeled back. Purkiss pressed home his advantage and rose, jabbing with the shotgun again, noticing the man’s face was obscured by a gas mask resembling an alien snout. The man swung his arm across to deflect the blow, and Purkiss felt the jarring clang of metal on metal as the shotgun’s barrel struck the gun in the man’s hand.

Purkiss was vaguely aware of an object — the handgun — spinning away, the man leaping after it. Purkiss raised the shotgun to fire. The dim shape of the man changed direction, sprinting away down the side of the cottage.

Purkiss fired, saw the fleeing figure drop, scramble to its feet again, and he knew he’d missed. He blinked, rubbing furiously at his burning eyes. The figure disappeared round the far corner.

As he followed, Purkiss tried to remember the layout at the back that he’d seen when he and Hannah had done a circuit of the cottage earlier. There’d been a small vegetable garden and one or two sheds, beyond which fields had stretched to distant trees.

Purkiss slowed when he reached the corner, risked a quick look round it before pulling back again. The man’s shape was heading for the fence at the far end of the vegetable garden.

He had no hope of hitting the man with a blast from the shotgun at this distance, but if Purkiss went back for the handgun the man had dropped, and managed to locate it in his half-blinded state, he’d lose so much time he might as well not bother. So Purkiss headed after the man at a stumbling run, mindful of the thousand possible traps in his path: uneven ground, wire netting protecting rows of vegetables, exposed roots.

On the other side of the fence a blurred meadow sloped downwards to some kind of riverlet before tilting upwards towards the distant trees. Away from the cloud of teargas, Purkiss found his breathing easier, the intense prickling in nose and eyes fading; but his eyelids remained swollen almost closed, and tears fragmented his vision every time he kept his eyes open for more than a few seconds. The retreating man multiplied before liquefying, over and over again.

Purkiss crawled clumsily over the fence, hooking and tearing his clothes on protruding wire. On the other side the meadow was marshy, the drainage poor. His feet sank into mud and mulch which threatened to drag him down as he hauled his way down the slope. Ahead of him the man appeared nimbler, unencumbered by either a weapon or impaired vision. He weaved and dodged, presenting an unsteady target.

Purkiss gauged the distance between them. Between fifty and a hundred yards, he estimated. He wasn’t certain what type of shotgun he was carrying, or what its exact specifications were, but he knew that at more than forty yards the spray pattern of the buckshot was going to be very broad indeed. His chances of doing any damage were limited.

He decided to risk a shot. Stopping, making sure his stance was steady, he raised the shotgun, aimed, pulled the trigger.

The man dived sideways, and for an instant Purkiss thought he’d got lucky, had caused a significant injury. But no, the man had risen again, was sprinting now, and Purkiss understood: the man had used the shot to gain useful information about how far Purkiss was behind him.

A spike of adrenaline loosened Purkiss’s limbs, drove him forwards so that he rode out the stitch in his side, the leadenness of the muddy ground sucking at his shoes. At the bottom of the slope the man had reached the creek — really a river bed with a desultory, unflowing overlay of water — and was wading through. The water slowed him enough to allow Purkiss to gain some ground, and as he closed the distance he reloaded and took aim and fired once more, still on the move.

He heard the shot speckle the surface of the water, heard a grunt from the man, but saw him crawl out the other side and resume his run. Purkiss saw a narrower stretch of the creek to his left, which would allow him to cross more quickly but meant he’d have to divert from the straight line he was following. He did a quick mental calculation, decided it was worth it, and peeled off to the left.

By fording the creek at this point, Purkiss put himself at an angle from the man, and on the other side he began to close the distance once more. The man had enormous stamina, was showing no signs of flagging, and also seemed to know where he was going. Purkiss thought that if he made it to the trees, he’d get away. The opportunities for camouflage were too great there.

Purkiss drew a breath in through his nose, exhaled through his mouth, centring himself, noticing as he did so the rawness of the lining of his throat and nasal passages. He pictured himself as a spring, compressed and quivering on the point of release. Then he exploded forwards, putting all his concentration, all his energy, into a burst of speed he couldn’t sustain for any great length of time but which might allow him finally to catch up.

The man loomed nearer above him on the slope, but was almost at the trees. Purkiss put his head down, not concentrating on the man but rather on the action of his legs, one in front of the other. At the last minute he looked up through his slowly clearing vision, saw the man at the wooden fence marking the boundary of the meadow, twenty yards away, fifteen. The man had one leg over the fence, and turned the insectoid snout of his gas mask towards Purkiss.

Purkiss snarled like a berserker, raised the shotgun.

The man seized one of the horizontal planks of the fence, tore it free with the ripping sounds of wood splintering around nails, and swung it at Purkiss.

A ragged end slashed across Purkiss’s face, knocking him sideways. Pain exploded in his head and he fought to keep his balance, the shotgun barrel veering away.

The man had dropped off the fence and swung the length of wood in a backhand movement, catching Purkiss across the head again. The world tilted and Purkiss felt the gorge rise in his throat. He stepped towards the man, raising the shotgun once more, but he teetered crazily to one side and dropped to his knee. Through roiling waves of pain and disorientation he saw the man clear the fence, disappear into the woods.

Purkiss slumped forwards, his face making contact with the soggy, bristly ground. For long moments he inhaled the cloying, sweet smell of the wet earth, relishing its raw coolness.

No good. You’ve lost him. It’s no good.

He tried rising, failed once and dropped back, tried again. When he was confident his legs would support him, he leaned on the shotgun and studied the line of trees beyond the fence.

The man was either long gone, or rearming himself from a hidden stash. In neither case did it make any sense for Purkiss to stay there.

Feeling sick, both from the blow and with a sense of failure, of a missed opportunity, he began to make his unsteady way back across the meadow to the cottage.

Twenty-nine

The teargas had largely dissipated, but a lightly stinging haze remained, like a lingering, spiteful spirit. Purkiss picked his way across the yard between the bodies. He identified the three sons, all unstirring in death.

Near the door of the cottage, Dennis Arkwright lay on his back, Hannah crouched beside him, something in her hand. Arkwright’s chest was black with gore, and cavernous. His face was still, not twisted in agony.

Hannah glanced up, surveyed Purkiss, studying his head. Her eyes remained inflamed. ‘What happened?’

Purkiss touched the side of his head and face, felt stickiness. ‘He got away. I’m okay.’ He tipped his head at Arkwright. Hannah shook hers.

‘Died a few minutes ago.’

Purkiss squeezed his eyes shut in frustration.

‘There might be something, though.’ Hannah held up the object in her hand. It was her mobile phone. ‘Listen.’

She touched a key and a rough, ragged recording began to play. At first Purkiss thought it was obscured by static, until he realised he was listening to a dying man’s laboured breathing.

‘Shot… me…’

Hannah’s voice, low and urgent. ‘Tell me again. What you said in there. Who did you see when you were interrogating — torturing — those prisoners? Who was there?’

More rasping, then an explosion of a cough that seemed to go on for an entire minute.

‘Ah, God, that hurts.’

‘Talk to me, Arkwright.’ Hannah. ‘That name.’

‘Something…’

‘Yes?’

‘Tell you… something else.’

A wheeze, then his voice came back, a whisper now: ‘Hospital.’

‘I’ll get you to hospital. Just — ’

‘Hospital.’

A melange of scratchy, unidentifiable noises took over then. Hannah put the phone away.

‘That was all.’

‘Okay. Good thinking.’ Purkiss took out his own phone. He couldn’t hear sirens. ‘A place like this won’t have its own police station, but someone’s bound to have heard the shooting and phoned it in. They’ll be coming from Cambridge or somewhere.’

Vale answered. Purkiss said: ‘I’m at Arkwright’s address. He’s dead, and so are his three sons. I need you, Kasabian or whoever, to pull strings immediately and lock this place down. Keep the local police out, and send in only people Kasabian knows well and can trust.’

‘Understood.’

‘Also, I need a face to face debrief with you and Kasabian at the earliest opportunity.’

‘Done,’ said Vale. ‘Are you intact, John?’

‘Bit jittery, but otherwise fine,’ said Purkiss. ‘One gunman. He killed Arkwright and his sons, and got away. He was the one who attacked me at my house. Who shot Kendrick.’

‘Interesting,’ said Vale.

‘Get a move on, if you could,’ said Purkiss. ‘I can hear sirens.’

He rang off. Hannah, who had risen from Arkwright’s side, said, ‘How do you know it was the same man as the one at your house? You said he was wearing a balaclava.’

‘And this one had a gas mask on,’ Purkiss said. ‘But it was his build, and the way he moved. The same man. I’m almost certain of it.’

Hannah looked around, blinking, rubbing at her eyes. ‘Water helps,’ she said.

They found a tap near the barn and used it to sluice their eyes. As the irritation eased, Purkiss became more aware of his other discomforts: the bite in his upper arm, the head wounds.

He said, ‘The man will have dropped whatever he used to fire the teargas grenades somewhere nearby. Plus, there’s his handgun, which he also dropped.’

There wouldn’t be any prints — the attacker was a professional, and had been using gloves — but the weapons might produce other important information. Purkiss and Hannah were heading round the side of the cottage when his phone rang.

It was Vale: ‘The local police and other emergency services have been ordered to hang back. Special Branch are coming in. You’re to get out of there immediately and not let them see you. Any information they need, Kasabian will relay to them after we’ve met and debriefed.’

‘Thanks, Quentin.’ He put the phone away, said to Hannah, ‘You okay to drive?’

They left the property over a side wall, assuming there’d be a throng of onlookers at the end of the driveway, which turned out to be the case as they crept past. Wherever possible they avoided passing another human being until they made it to the green and Hannah’s Peugeot.

On the journey back to London, Hannah squinting against the setting sun, Purkiss replayed the sequence of what had happened over and over in his mind. He knew false notes, misremembered details, would creep in, as they inevitably did; but he’d found such rehearsal useful for giving a more-or-less accurate account later.

‘It won’t be enough,’ Hannah said.

Purkiss looked at her.

‘What Arkwright said about Sir Guy Strang,’ she said. ‘It isn’t enough for Kasabian to do anything with.’

‘But it’s a start,’ said Purkiss. ‘It’s a pointer in a definite direction.’

He asked for Hannah’s phone, and began to play the recording of Arkwright’s dying words in a loop, holding the device close to his ear so he could pick up any nuances, any background details. He heard, distantly, the boom of the shotgun several times as he fired it at his assailant.

Purkiss focused on the later part of the recording.

‘Something…’

‘Yes?’

‘Tell you… something else.’

Wheeze. ‘Hospital.’

‘I’ll get you to hospital. Just — ’

‘Hospital.’

He played it again.

And again.

‘Hospital.’

It was like three words, the syllables broken up as Arkwright struggled to get them out.

Hos…pi…tal.

Except it wasn’t at all clear that the plosive p was there. It might have been a click or a pop caused by Arkwright’s jagged breathing, or by external interference.

Nor was the final l distinct.

Purkiss rewound to the first time Arkwright used the word, after the long wheeze.

This time there was no mistaking it.

Arkwright hadn’t been saying hospital at all.

Purkiss stared through the windscreen at the lengthening shadows on the motorway, the firefly lights of the cars ahead.

He picked up his own phone. Dialled.

Vale sounded surprised. ‘I haven’t confirmed the rendezvous time with Kasabian yet,’ he said. ‘I told you I’d call — ’

‘You’re not going to believe this,’ Purkiss said.

Thirty

‘It could be coincidence,’ said Vale.

‘It’s him,’ Purkiss said.

‘It certainly sounds like his name, but — ’

‘It’s him.’

‘There must be hundreds, thousands of people with the same — ’

‘Oh, give me a break, Quentin.’ Purkiss paced about the living room of the Covent Garden flat. He’d arrived there half an hour earlier to find Vale already ensconced. Hannah had dropped Purkiss nearby and gone off on her own, to await his call. They’d agreed he wouldn’t say anything about her yet, to either Vale or Kasabian.

Hannah had insisted on the way down that Purkiss have his wounds attended to, and had pressed him, ignoring his protestations until he’d rung Vale once more and asked for a doctor to attend at the flat. The doctor had arrived five minutes after Purkiss and before Purkiss could reveal his discovery to Vale. A middle-aged, taciturn man, the doctor had probed Purkiss’s wounds, asking a few questions about the circumstances in which they’d been sustained but passing no comment. He’d cleaned and dressed them, given Purkiss a tetanus shot even though he was up to date, offered painkillers which Purkiss declined, and handed him two bottles of pills.

‘Antibiotics,’ the doctor said curtly. ‘For the bite. Don’t miss any. If the wound turns septic, seek help at once.’

With a nod to Vale, he’d left.

‘Service?’ Purkiss asked. He meant their service, SIS, not Kasabian’s lot.

‘A friend,’ said Vale.

It was code for one hundred per cent discreet and trustworthy.

Then Purkiss had laid his phone, with the sound file he’d transferred from Hannah’s, on the dining table and hit the play key.

He watched Vale while the older man listened, not getting it the first time.

Purkiss rewound the final exchange and played it a second, and a third time. Vale leaned forward a fraction.

‘Again,’ he murmured.

On the fourth listen, he glanced up at Purkiss, a question in his eyes. Purkiss said: ‘Tell me what you heard.’

‘Not hospital,’ said Vale. ‘Rossiter.’

And he’d started coming up with arguments against it, against the notion that Arkwright’s dying words had referred to Richard Rossiter, the man Purkiss had last seen as they’d both been hauled off a boat on the freezing Baltic Sea. The man who had very nearly succeeded in assassinating the Russian president a few minutes before that.

The man who’d corrupted Purkiss’s fiancée, Claire, and whom Purkiss should have killed when he’d had the chance.

Vale closed his eyes, as though mentally reaching out for possibilities that made sense. He shook his head slightly.

‘Let’s come back to that.’

‘Quentin — ’

‘We’ll come back to it. First, debrief.’

Purkiss didn’t point out that Kasabian hadn’t arrived yet, and that he’d have to repeat the story for her benefit. Hearing the account for a second time, Vale would spot inconsistencies, details that hadn’t been there the first time. Sometimes that led to clues. Breakthroughs, even.

Purkiss related everything he’d learned from Arkwright, virtually word for word. He omitted all mention of Hannah Holley, giving the impression that he’d obtained Arkwright’s name himself from Morrow’s notes. When he reached the remarks Arkwright had made about Guy Strang, Vale reacted almost imperceptibly: he parted his lips, blinked twice. For Vale, that was like slapping the table in delight.

‘My take on it,’ said Purkiss, ‘is that this attacker — the one who killed Arkwright and his sons, the one who came after me at my home — had Arkwright wired. Either him personally, or his cottage. He was holed up close by, and when Arkwright dropped the Strang bombshell, he moved in.’

‘He was well equipped,’ said Vale. ‘Teargas grenades and mask, small arms.’

‘Arkwright was a Royal Marine, remember. And his sons, though they weren’t professional fighters, were experienced brawlers. The attacker knew what he was up against.’

Vale tipped his head in acknowledgement.

‘It bothers me, though,’ said Purkiss. ‘Why would he happen to be holed up just then, when I arrived?’

‘Because he knew somehow you were coming,’ offered Vale.

‘Then why did he wait until Arkwright crossed the line before making his attack? Why not just smoke us all out as soon as he knew I was in the cottage?’

‘Perhaps he wanted to avoid out-and-out carnage.’ Vale shrugged. ‘Perhaps he’d have preferred to wait till you’d left, then pick you off away from the cottage. You forced his hand by getting Arkwright to reveal what he did.’

Purkiss reached for the two-litre bottle of water he’d filled from the tap. Something else was bothering him about the way the whole episode had played out. He grasped at it, but it eluded him.

Kasabian arrived, letting herself in. She looked Purkiss over, noted the dressed arm, the facial plasters and bruises.

Without asking how he was, she got to the point.

‘Quentin here has told me some of it. Earlier he mentioned you were investigating a man named Arkwright, who had SIS connections.’ She took the mug of tea Vale handed her. ‘I’ve searched our files myself, manually. There’s nothing on him.’

‘Nothing,’ said Purkiss.

‘Not a mention of him anywhere. Which is odd. These former high-level military types who get themselves kicked out… they usually come up on our radar. I’m not talking ordinary squaddies who basically joined the armed forces to knock heads together and who’ll have ample opportunity to carry on doing so as civilians. I mean career soldiers. Proud men. They take badly to having their aspirations terminated. Often they set up mercenary groups, and we catch them domestically doing deals with gun runners. Or, they join right-wing extremist outfits. But this Arkwright doesn’t feature at all.’

‘Is it possible all intelligence on him might have been erased from your databases?’ asked Purkiss.

‘Possible, yes.’

That would make sense, thought Purkiss.

She raised her eyebrows, the rest of her pouchy face failing to lift with them. ‘So who is he?’

Purkiss told her.

When he reached the part where Guy Strang was mentioned, her reaction was more conventional than Vale’s had been. She jammed a thumbnail between her teeth and tore it audibly.

‘Fuck me,’ she hissed, her eyes distant.

She took three strides over to Purkiss, seemed about to embrace him, thought better of it and clapped a hand on his uninjured shoulder.

‘Excellent work.’

‘It’s hardly proof,’ Purkiss said, thinking of what Hannah had said.

‘It’s proof enough for me,’ Kasabian breathed. ‘It means I’m right. I knew he was involved.’ She gazed off again, her expression wondering, but also triumphant. ‘It means we’ve got a focus for our efforts.’

Purkiss concluded his account. He described the recording of Arkwright’s last words, and played it back for her. Afterwards she rocked her head.

‘Difficult to tell,’ she said. ‘The two of you are more likely to hear Rossiter than I am, because you’ve had a personal involvement with him.’

‘You know of him, though,’ Purkiss said.

‘Of course. He was very nearly the first person to be tried in this country for high treason since William Joyce in 1946. It would’ve been difficult to keep that secret, though, so the Crown got him on terrorism and murder charges. It’s multiple life sentences either way.’

Purkiss had deliberately been kept from involvement in the proceedings against Rossiter, but he knew the man had undergone due process, in a trial which had been conducted as far as possible out of the public eye.

‘The one thing that does make sense,’ said Vale, ‘is that Arkwright did some freelance work for SIS as well. This would have been later, after the work he alleges he did for Strang. Rossiter was SIS. There might be a connection there.’

‘Okay,’ said Kasabian. She ran a hand through her hair. Purkiss could see she was distracted, her thoughts still on Strang. ‘I’ll see what I can dig up on Rossiter, though I doubt it’ll be much of relevance. He did a pretty good job of covering his tracks. Quentin, maybe you can look at the SIS databases again. See if there’s anything fresh that might link him to Arkwright.’

‘There’s something else we can do as well,’ said Purkiss.

Kasabian looked at him. ‘What’s that?’

‘Get me access to Rossiter.’

They were both silent, Kasabian and Vale.

Purkiss went on: ‘Direct, face to face access. You can swing it.’

Kasabian breathed out, shook her head slowly. ‘There’s no way you’re using duress against him.’

‘I’m not talking about using duress,’ said Purkiss. ‘I won’t be interrogating him at all.’

‘Then… what?’

‘I’ll ask him for his help.’

Kasabian probed his face with her eyes. Vale, on the other hand, looked thoughtful. Purkiss wondered if he knew what Purkiss had in mind.

Purkiss said, ‘Rossiter’s a patriot. A twisted, misguided, delusional patriot, but a patriot nonetheless. He has his own view of what’s best for the country, and he’ll follow that path no matter what. Even at the cost of his own skin. On that boat, in the baltic, he actually asked — begged — me to kill him, rather than bring him in and cast the Service into disrepute.’

Kasabian glanced at Vale, then back at Purkiss. She made a rolling movement with her hand: keep going.

‘If I put it to Rossiter that his cooperation is important to national security, and if I can convince him of it, he’ll play ball. He might try to manipulate me, to play games, but he’ll do it. The hard part will be convincing him of it. Because we don’t know that this does involve national security at all. I’ll have to lie persuasively.’

‘How will you know he’s telling you the truth, rather than feeding you misinformation?’ asked Kasabian. ‘He hoodwinked you before.’

‘I won’t know. I’ll just have to be on my guard.’ Purkiss looked at each of them in turn. ‘Come on. It makes sense. The sooner we do this, the better. In the mean time you can look for connections within the respective services.’

Kasabian was silent for a beat. Then she said: ‘All right. I’ll arrange it.’

‘Thank you.’

‘It’ll be tough,’ she said. ‘Doing it without tipping off Strang… it’ll take some doing.’

‘I’m sure you’ll find a way.’

Kasabian left. Purkiss thought she had a spring in her step.

‘It was risky, telling her,’ said Purkiss.

‘She had to know, John.’

‘Nevertheless.’ Purkiss began to pace again. ‘If she’s not careful, she’ll play straight into Strang’s hands. Make a blunder of some kind.’

Vale said, ‘There’s something else that’s risky. It concerns your meeting Rossiter.’

‘What’s that? If you’re worried I’m going to attack him, finish what I started in Tallinn, forget it. I wouldn’t have the opportunity, anyway. The security around him will be airtight.’

‘It’s not him I’m concerned about,’ Vale murmured. ‘It’s you.’

‘Why?’

‘Coming face to face with him for the first time since… well, since then. You don’t know what it’ll trigger in you.’

Purkiss stopped pacing, faced Vale. ‘I’ve come to terms,’ he said. ‘I’ll be fine.’

‘Very well.’ Vale looked at his watch. ‘I’d better set to work.’

Thirty-one

After Vale had left, Purkiss phoned the hospital and spoke to the registrar on duty in the Intensive Care Unit. Kendrick was still comatose and being ventilated. Brain oedema was still there, but under control. There was otherwise no change in his condition.

Purkiss rang Hannah.

‘Where are you?’

‘Home,’ she said. ‘Marble Arch.’

‘Come round here,’ he said. ‘I’ll update you, and we can go through Morrow’s paperwork together again.’

He gave her directions, not insulting her by advising her to employ countersurveillance methods en route. While he was waiting for her he ordered Chinese takeaway food.

Hannah arrived half an hour later, just after the food. She’d changed into casual trousers and a lightweight sweater which accentuated her slimness.

Over their meal, Purkiss brought her up to speed.

‘You’re going to speak to this Rossiter yourself?’ she asked.

‘Yes. Kasabian’s going to try and arrange it for tomorrow morning.’

‘So what do we do till then?’

‘We wait,’ said Purkiss. ‘As I said, it would be useful if you went through Morrow’s files with me. You might spot something I didn’t.’

They spent a couple of hours sprawled on the uncomfortably new sofas around a low table in the small living room, going over the paperwork again, looking to see if Arkwright’s name came up the way it had in the notebook Hannah had found. There was no mention of the man. Nor was there any hint of a connection with Rossiter.

‘Maybe the notebook was more up to date than any of this stuff,’ Hannah suggested. ‘Charlie might have only discovered the Arkwright link recently.’

‘Possibly. But the most recent memos and email transcripts here are from a couple of days before his death.’

‘Still doesn’t mean much. He wouldn’t necessarily mention Arkwright in every single piece of correspondence.’

Purkiss filled and refilled the coffee. At last he glanced up at the clock, his head swimming, and saw it was almost midnight.

‘We’re not going to find anything here,’ he said. ‘At least not tonight.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Damn it.’

‘You drive here?’

‘Caught the tube.’

‘They’ll still be running, but I can call a cab — ’

She watched Purkiss, her gaze frank.

He felt a slow warmth spread from his chest, upwards through his throat and face, and downwards as well.

Wordlessly he shifted over on the sofa. She rose from hers and sat beside him, leaning in towards him.

For a moment she rested her head in the crook of his arm. He laid his hand along her side, feeling the dip of her ribcage towards her narrow waist. Her hair smelled warm and freshly washed, a spicy scent he couldn’t easily identify.

Purkiss pressed his lips against her hair, let them linger.

Hannah slipped a hand up his chest, stroking lightly. She tilted her head and his lips found her forehead. The fingers of his own hand ran down the smooth softness of her cheek.

Purkiss moved, turning towards her, and she slid her arms around his neck. Their mouths met, probed, her tongue slick against his. He wound his arms around her waist and pulled her hard against him.

Quickly, awkwardly they grappled with their clothes, fumbling and kicking. Hannah frowned as his left arm was exposed, swathed in its bandage. Purkiss’s hands roved over her bottom, her thighs, their smoothness marred only by the dressing on her own wound.

She straddled him and he entered her, groaning. Her feet were on the floor in front of the sofa and provided leverage as she rocked up and down. She flung her head back, her glossy hair writhing, her breasts thrust out. As they approached their peak, Hannah swung forwards, her hair shrouding Purkiss’s face, her mouth seeking his again.

Afterwards she lay slumped across him on the sofa, her breathing synching with his. Purkiss touched the sweat-slick groove of her spine with his fingertips, inhaled her hair once more.

She seemed to sense he was about to say something because she half-lifted her head and said, ‘No talk. Is that all right? No murmurings. Just… it.’

He nodded. Grasping her waist with both hands, he lifted her off him and sat up.

She peered into his eyes. ‘You’re not offended, are you? I didn’t mean to — ’

‘Shh.’ Rising, he took her hand, led her to the bedroom.

Thirty-two

Lying to Brian over the phone on Friday, when she’d called him to say she had to attend Sir Guy and wouldn’t be home till later that evening, had been relatively easy because Emma hadn’t had to see his face. This time it was more difficult.

It was Sunday morning, and the breakfast dishes were piled up ready for scraping and then the dishwasher. Brian had made one of his epic breakfasts for the two of them and the children, and they’d lingered over it, making it last nearly two hours. Niamh and Jack were in the garden, yelling in carefree delight. Their shrieks intensified when Ulyana the nanny arrived.

Emma bustled about the kitchen, stealing glances at her husband’s profile. His face was always utterly relaxed, even when he was concentrating on a task, in this case getting dried egg yolk off a plate. His hair was tousled still, even his moustache a little ungroomed. As usual he was in cargo trousers and a rugby sweatshirt.

After the kids had returned yesterday, Emma had had little time to think about the object she’d found in the lining of her handbag. But its presence in her pocket, where she’d stowed it, nagged at her for the rest of the day. She’d listened to the children’s account of their misadventures at the Finches’ last night, had taken them shopping into Wimbledon that afternoon and spoilt them with treats — something she felt guilty about, because it felt like compensation for her betrayal of her family — and had undergone the protracted process that evening of feeding and bathing them.

Brian arrived home from cricket coaching a little after eight. She’d forgotten there was a match on after the coaching, and he’d bustled in, looking tired but happy.

‘My lot won,’ he said. ‘And just as well, too, considering how much work I’ve put into them.’

She kissed him, made an effort to ask him about his day, apologised once again for missing their evening together the night before. By no means everything she said was insincere. She had a genuine affection for this man, which had never waned even as the physical attraction, the excitement, had. He’d make a good friend, and an occasional confidante, in another life. Some of Emma’s friends had gay male friends, and she thought Brian would fit that particular bill rather well. If he was gay, which he wasn’t.

And if he wasn’t already her husband.

They’d had an enjoyable evening together, watching some rubbish on the television after Jack and Niamh were in bed, and it was only later, in bed, with Brian’s breathing deepening into the rhythms of sleep beside her, that Emma began to think about what she’d found in her handbag.

Like many doctors, she was a mixture of the logical and the irrational. Her job taught her to consider facts and evidence, and to avoid wild conjecture. The fact that she was a human being, with an atavistic inclination towards the superstitious and the fantastical, caused her imagination to spin off into flights of fancy.

The sensible side of her said: it’s a lump of metal in the lining of a handbag. That probably means it isn’t a genuine Louis Vuitton at all, but a tawdry knockoff from some sweatshop in Thailand.

The imaginative part said: it’s a bug. A transmitting device of some kind.

Just putting the thought into words in her mind made Emma realise how stupid, how childish it sounded. And yet… wasn’t there some common ground between the logical and irrational positions? She was, after all, sleeping with a member of the British Security Service. An intelligence agent, and bodyguard to the head of the organisation. And she did, after all, have a premium job as the personal physician to that head.

Sleep claimed her surprisingly quickly, and when she woke in the morning she understood that her mind had wanted her to slip under, to leave the solving of the problem to its unconscious side. For her immediate thought on waking was: I need to ask James about it directly.

That was the straightforward, no-nonsense approach. Bring the issue out into the open, clear the air. She’d show him what she’d found, and ask his opinion.

And if he was the one who’d put it in the lining of the handbag — something she couldn’t help but consider, given that she’d noticed it only after returning home for her most recent tryst with him — then so be it. He might admit it, might confess that it was a security measure, something he was obliged to do to all employees who had close contact with his boss, Sir Guy. She wouldn’t like it… but she could understand, sort of. On the other hand, if he had put it there but didn’t admit it — well, there was nothing she could do about that, but then again she’d never know.

Dimly aware that there was something shaky about her reasoning, Emma rose, stretched, peered across at a still-sleeping Brian, and went into the kitchen to make coffee.

While waiting for it to brew, she considered her options. She was going to meet James tomorrow afternoon; they’d planned it already. But she didn’t want to wait that long, or the handbag problem would gnaw at her, driving her round the bend.

She’d always been reluctant to call James at unscheduled times, however much she craved the sound of his voice. He was a busy man, in an incredibly responsible position, and the last thing she wanted to do was disrupt him at work. She didn’t need him thinking she was a clingy, needy woman; it would drive him away.

On the other hand, he might understand her concerns in this case.

She retrieved her phone from where it had been charging and thumbed in a text message: Sorry to bother you and on a Sunday especially. But I need to talk to you urgently. It might be a security issue.

Emma reread the last sentence. It was unbelievably manipulative, but it was the kind of thing that would get James’s attention.

She hesitated for a few seconds, her thumb over the Send key. Then she pressed it. Immediately afterwards she deleted the message from her Sent folder.

Breakfast passed slowly, a riot of laughter and spilled food and mock recriminations. Emma joined in heartily, stealing glances every thirty seconds or so at the display on her phone. It remained unlit.

Only afterwards, with the dishes piled and Brian hauling a sack of refuse to the outside bins, did her phone chime once. Emma snatched it up, read the message.

Meet me 2 pm outside main entrance of Tate Modern.

She read it several times, as if there might be some coded message underlying the straightforward instruction. Then she replied — Okay — and deleted both James’s text and her response. She looked up and saw Brian amble back in. He gave her a smile. Emma felt her heart hammering, her throat tight.

She sighed, as normally as she could. ‘Lousy news.’ She held up her phone. ‘I’m wanted again.’

The chest pains Sir Guy had been experiencing on Friday, Emma explained, were recurring. This time she was going to insist that the stubborn so-and-so went into hospital, and she didn’t care how busy he was. Brian smiled at her exasperation, but she could see the hurt underneath. Sunday was traditionally a family day, when they’d go to the Common or for a drive, and today they’d been planning to take a trip up to Hyde Park and Kensington Palace Gardens.

‘You and Ulyana take Jack and Niamh,’ Emma suggested. ‘I can meet you there.’

Brian agreed it was an idea.

Emma realised suddenly that she’d made a mistake. She said, suppressing the flame of panic in her, ‘Oh, and I’ve got to take the car. They’re not sending a driver for me today. Short supply on a Sunday, apparently.’

If Brian was surprised, he didn’t show it.

He hurried the children into their clothes while Ulyana prepared a picnic lunch, and Emma made a show of changing into work clothes — nothing fancy, just a blouse and skirt — and checking her medical bag. She kept the metal object from her handbag in her jacket pocket.

The family and nanny hustled into the station wagon, and Emma drove them to the tube station before heading towards the Thames. She could have taken the Underground herself, but it looked better for the show she was putting on if she seemed to be driving there.

Dear God, she thought, how complex these webs of deceit end up becoming.

Emma crossed the river and reached Victoria Station, where she parked. It was a little after one o’clock, an hour before her scheduled meeting with James. She walked the rest of the way, enjoying the sunshine on her upturned face. The South Bank was crowded as ever on a Sunday, the mimes and living statues at the base of Waterloo Bridge appearing suddenly vaguely sinister to Emma, as though they’d been placed there to monitor her progress.

Looming ahead she saw the shape of the old Bankside Power Station which housed the Tate Modern. It was just the sort of venue James would choose, she thought. Emma had dragged Brian along to the gallery once, to a cocktail party hosted by one of her artist friends, and although he’d gamely smiled and feigned interest in the chatter around him, she could see his heart wasn’t in it. James, on the other hand, could hold his own on the subject of modern art, and offer an intelligent opinion on the most obscure and difficult piece even after viewing it only once.

She scanned the throng outside the gallery for signs of James, but any number of dark, good-looking young men turned out not to be him. Emma checked her watch. Ten past two. She was wondering whether to go inside and get a coffee when she felt a hand on her elbow. Before she could turn, James’s low voice murmured in her ear.

‘It’s me. Keep walking in the direction you were going.’

Startled, she complied. He muttered beside her, so quietly she couldn’t hear what he said, but she realised it was for show: they were a couple strolling along, in intimate conversation, so she responded with aimless patter of her own. As he directed her into the building, its cavernous lobby cool and echoing, Emma felt the thrill of his closeness, the warm maleness of his arm against hers, his breath on her cheek.

And she acknowledged the smallest frisson of fear.

Thirty-three

The whole set-up put Purkiss in mind of Spandau Prison.

He wasn’t expecting to see Gothic gates or machine-gun towers, and indeed the building, as it appeared over the rise, didn’t look like a place of detention at all. Rather, it had the appearance of a squat office complex on an industrial estate, the kind normally found on the outskirts of a fair-sized town.

This one, though, was in the depths of the Berkshire countryside.

‘The Room,’ said Vale, in the seat beside him.

Kasabian had suggested Vale take Purkiss there. Although she said she’d cleared the way to allow Purkiss access, there was still the possibility of his being stopped by suspicious or ill-informed personnel along the way. Vale would be able to call in for assistance, pull strings if necessary.

Hannah had slipped out at seven, declining Purkiss’s offer of coffee. She hadn’t quite blown a kiss at the door, but there’d been a mischievous cast to her eyes he hadn’t seen before.

Vale picked Purkiss up in his car at the Covent Garden flat and they made their way west, out of the city, the traffic relatively light at eleven thirty on a Sunday morning. The highrises and estates in the west of the city gave way gradually to the undulating countryside of Royal Berkshire.

Vale began a winding descent towards a pair of high electric gates flanked by kiosks in each of which sat a uniformed police officer. The policemen emerged long before Vale reached the gates. Purkiss noticed they both carried carbines slung across their chests.

The Room, Vale had informed him on the journey, was the place Richard Rossiter was being detained at Her Majesty’s Pleasure. A former safe house and interrogation facility for Soviet defectors during the Cold War, it had sat disused until almost a year ago, when someone had come up with the idea of turning it into a prison for one man. That man was Rossiter.

It wasn’t house arrest, because The Room was nobody’s idea of a home. But it was a step up from a normal prison, even a white-collar one. Rossiter apparently had a large cell, more like a dormitory but with a single bed. He was allowed a small selection of his own clothes to wear. He was permitted fresh air and exercise, books, and television, though no Internet facilities.

Every inch of the property, indoors and out, was covered by closed-circuit television cameras and concealed audio monitors. The reason, Vale surmised, was not so much to anticipate any escape plans Rossiter might be forming, but rather to pick up the smallest scrap of information he might inadvertently reveal about his former collaborators.

Rossiter had been part of an illegal black-operations project within SIS, one which took it upon itself to dispense with legal niceties and due process and to mete out torture and execution in the interests of British state security. Apart from Claire Stirling, Purkiss’s fiancée, whom Rossiter claimed he’d trained and run as one of his own, it wasn’t known who else was involved in the project. Indeed, it wasn’t clear if Rossiter was in charge, a mere underling, or even a lone wolf.

He’d been questioned, threatened, cajoled, offered deals that would allow him an early release. None of it had worked. Rossiter had flatly refused to answer any questions about anybody else he might have operated with. He hadn’t denied there were others involved, nor had he confirmed it. He simply hadn’t discussed the matter at all.

So the hope was, Vale assumed out loud, that Rossiter might betray the identity of others inadvertently. By blurting out their names in his sleep, perhaps.

‘It’s a long shot,’ Purkiss said drily.

‘Indeed.’

Might Rossiter be willing to open up about a dead person, though? In this case, Arkwright? Purkiss hoped so.

The carbine-laden policemen stepped forwards, one peering into Purkiss’s side of the car, the other approaching Vale’s. Purkiss wound down the window.

‘John Purkiss.’ He held up a special laminated card, replete with his mug shot, which Kasabian had supplied for him. He’d brought along his passport, too, just in case further ID was required.

The officer studied it from behind mirror shades, then nodded. ‘Straight through, please, sir. Stop just inside the gates.’

The gates slid sideways. Inside, Vale was asked to hand over the keys. Four more officers, who had appeared from nowhere, took over, one of them driving the car off towards a smaller building of some kind, no doubt for it to be scanned for explosives, the other three escorting Purkiss and Vale to the main block.

Inside, Vale stood to one side, his journey ended for the moment. Silent, unsmiling men in prison officers’ garb took Purkiss’s watch, wallet and mobile phone. He was expertly patted down, had metal detectors as well as a Geiger counter run over every inch of his outline, then told to walk through another doorframe-style scanner.

On the other side, two prison guards and two policemen led him down a brightly lit, institutional corridor to a door at the end. One of the warders touched his fingers against a scanning pad and pushed the door when it buzzed. Purkiss found himself in an airlock. The warder opened the door on the other side similarly.

‘No physical contact whatsoever,’ the warder intoned. ‘No standing until you’re ready to leave. You’ll be under video but not audio surveillance, so your conversation is confidential. But if there’s any sign that things are getting heated in there, that the prisoner’s temper is being roused, my staff and I have discretion to terminate the interview immediately. Understood?’

‘Yes,’ said Purkiss.

He stepped through the door into a square room lit with fluorescent ceiling panels. The room smelled freshly painted and clean. There was no other visible exit. In the centre of the room stood a metal-framed table with a laminated wood surface. On the table, in turn, stood a plastic jug of water and two beakers.

A man stood behind the table. Short, with close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, eyes blue chips that stood out against surprisingly tanned skin. The trace of a smile teasing the thin lips.

Rossiter.

Thirty-four

Up until the moment he entered the room, Purkiss hadn’t known how he was going to feel, despite his reassurances to Vale.

He looked into Rossiter’s eyes, and felt nothing. Because this was a different man.

It was Rossiter, technically speaking; but the eyes were different. When Purkiss had seen them before, in Tallinn, they’d been alive, as though fine blue membranes were providing a precarious barrier between the man’s inner rage and the world outside.

Now they were the same blue, but calmer. Resigned looking.

They stood on either side of the table, watching one another. Rossiter was the first to sit. Purkiss followed.

‘John.’

The voice was quieter, again with none of the seething tension Purkiss remembered. Rossiter looked older, too, and had lost a little weight. He must be around fifty, but he could have passed for five years older.

‘Rossiter.’

It was the point at which two old acquaintances meeting for the first time after a separation would start complimenting one another on how well they looked. Purkiss fought an insane urge to laugh.

‘You know why I’m here?’ he asked.

‘I’ve no idea, no,’ said Rossiter levelly. ‘I must admit to being intrigued, though.’

‘I’m here to ask you some questions.’

‘Not this, surely? Not ten months on?’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Purkiss.

Rossiter placed his palms together, rested his chin on his fingertips. ‘I always wondered why they didn’t send you in to interrogate me back then, John. After I was first taken into custody.’

‘Because I would have killed you,’ said Purkiss.

‘You didn’t kill me on the boat, when you had the chance.’

‘That was a crazy, heat-of-the-moment display of mercy. With time to cool off, I’d have done it.’

Rossiter looked faintly amused. ‘So what’s stopping you from killing me now? Or is that why you’re here?’

‘I don’t want to kill you, Rossiter,’ Purkiss said. ‘Not any more.’

‘Why not?’ Now genuine interest had replaced the amusement.

Purkiss waved a hand, glanced around. ‘All this is death.’

‘It’s really quite comfortable.’

‘Comfortable. This from a man who was prepared to trigger a war between NATO and Russia in order to restore the importance of SIS in the world.’ Purkiss smiled. ‘Comfort isn’t your style. And here you are, in a parody of middle-class suburban hell. Good food, reading material, regular exercise. A stress-free environment, designed to allow you to nurture your spiritual side.’ He sat back, aware he’d been leaning steadily forward and not wanting to attract the disapproval of the watching warders. ‘No, Rossiter. I don’t want to kill you. I’m quite satisfied knowing you’re dying in here. And you’ve got thirty or forty years worth of dying ahead of you yet.’

For an instant, for the briefest beat, Purkiss thought he saw a flash of the old expression in the eyes, a bulging; but it was gone even as he registered it. Rossiter chuckled, a cordial sound.

‘Why the hell didn’t you join us, John? You’d have been an enormous asset.’

‘Us. You said that to me on the boat.’ Purkiss paused. ‘There are others, then.’

‘Good God, of course there are.’ Rossiter looked mildly astounded. ‘I never said there weren’t.’

‘But you won’t reveal their names.’

Rossiter sighed. ‘John, you’re at risk of becoming something I’d never have thought you were capable of. Boring. Are you going to get to the point?’

‘All right. I need your help.’

Purkiss had meant to wrong-foot Rossiter, and if he didn’t quite succeed, he saw from the raised eyebrows that he’d at least surprised the man.

‘Well. That, I wasn’t expecting, I must admit. Full marks for honesty.’

Purkiss took from his pocket the one object he’d been allowed to bring in with him. It was a printout of the photo of Arkwright from the SIS database, the one Vale had sent him. The one showing Arkwright before the scars.

Rossiter took out a pair of glasses and put them on, peering down his nose at the picture. He seemed to consider for a moment; then he said, ‘Dennis Arkwright. In handsomer days.’

‘That’s very forthcoming of you,’ said Purkiss.

Rossiter shrugged. ‘There’s no reason I’d keep his identity secret. He was never a colleague of mine. Just a thug for hire, with a brute talent for interrogation.’

‘He’s dead.’

‘That doesn’t surprise me.’

‘He was shot yesterday. I was there.’

Rossiter waited.

‘What was your connection with him?’

‘Now, now, John.’ Rossiter wagged a finger. ‘You’re going to have to give me a little more.’

‘Before he died,’ said Purkiss, slowing down for emphasis, ‘Arkwright revealed he was hired as a torturer by the current head of the Security Service, Sir Guy Strang.’

And there it was, definitely this time. The force behind the eyes. The roiling, almost feral energy.

Rossiter leaned in.

‘Now you’re being interesting,’ he said.

Thirty-five

‘Istanbul, in early 2007, it would have been. You were in Marseille at the time, weren’t you? Yes. My brief was to investigate the flow of Turkish drug money which was suspected to be helping fund the insurgency in Iraq.’

Rossiter’s gaze was in the distance as he remembered.

‘Our relationship, the Service’s relationship, with the Turkish authorities, was — how can I put it? — complex. Nominally we were allies, and still are. But there was a strong element within the Turkish services which bitterly resented our presence there, even though various pacts and accords enshrined our rights to be involved. So although we were reliant to some extent from the intelligence shared with us by our Turkish counterparts, we couldn’t always fully trust either its accuracy or its completeness.

‘I decided this wasn’t good enough, and developed my own intelligence-gathering network within the city. Off the books, of course. The official SIS line, even internally, was that we were to engage in no underhand operations that didn’t have the approval of the authorities.

‘I used local people for the gathering of intelligence, but outside sources for the extraction of information. I’d tried Turkish interrogators before, but I’d found them either too soft on their compatriots, or by contrast too zealous. One has to strike a balance. So I hand-picked a number of people, mostly Europeans, to carry out the questioning of individuals I’d identified as being involved in the local drug business.’

‘One of them being Arkwright,’ said Purkiss.

‘Yes. He came recommended to me through a complicated series of links, none of which probably have any bearing on the matter at hand. I learned of his background as a Royal Marine Commando, and of his dishonourable discharge. At the time I recruited him, he was working for a low-rent security firm in Saudi Arabia.’

‘Did you discover anything about his involvement with the Security Service?’

‘No. That part was carefully covered up. No doubt he’d had professional assistance in doing so. His CV was a list of short-term contracts with assorted mercenary and security outfits. I looked into one or two of them, they held up, so I didn’t bother vetting him further.’

‘Sloppy,’ remarked Purkiss.

Rossiter turned a palm upwards. ‘Perhaps. But you have to remember, John, I wasn’t hiring an agent to do sensitive, complicated undercover work. I was hiring a torturer. A flavour of the background of such a person is usually all that’s necessary.’

Purkiss thought about it. ‘You recruited Arkwright in early 2007.’

‘March, I believe.’

‘He told me he’d left Iraq in February 2005, after the car bombs at Al Hillah. He returned to Britain to have his injuries seen to. And then, as he was about to go back to Iraq, he was approached by the Security Service.’

‘When was that, exactly?’ said Rossiter.

‘I don’t know. I didn’t get a chance to clarify that point.’ Purkiss counted off on his fingers. ‘But let’s say he was undergoing medical treatment for three months. That’s probably an underestimate, given the apparent extent of his injuries, but we’ll say three months. He’s recruited by the Security Service in May 2005. He told me he worked for them for two years. Till May 2007, that would be. It doesn’t tally with when you say you hired him.’

‘It’s close, though’ said Rossiter. ‘When he told you two years, it might have been an estimate.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘But I take your point. And if he did come to work for me immediately after the Security Service work, it means the last job on his CV — the one in Saudi — was fake.’

Purkiss drew a long breath, released it through his nose. He sifted through the information, trying to find something of use.

‘Why would Arkwright have mentioned you with his dying breath?’ he asked.

‘I’ve been wondering that myself,’ Rossiter said, sounding genuinely intrigued. ‘He obviously wanted you to speak to me, but it’s hard to fathom why.’

‘Did you ever have anything to do with Mohammed Al-Bayati?’

‘No. I hadn’t heard of him until you mentioned his name. I didn’t have a great deal of involvement in the Iraq arena.’

Purkiss ran through the sequence in his mind again. Al-Bayati gets killed. Arkwright, when confronted with Al-Bayati’s name, confesses to torturing him and dozens of others. After being shot, and presumably knowing he’s dying, Arkwright mentions the name of Rossiter, a man he was hired by only after doing the torture work for the Security Service.

It didn’t add up.

Purkiss transferred his gaze to Rossiter across the table.

‘You haven’t told me why you’re interested in this, by the way.’

‘Because it’s a puzzle, and I always like those,’ Rossiter said.

Purkiss shook his head. ‘That’s not the only reason.’

‘No. It isn’t.’ Once more, the cold blaze behind the eyes. ‘The mention of Sir Guy Strang is what got me.’

Purkiss waited.

‘Strang represents everything that’s wrong with the Security Service.’

‘How would you know?’ said Purkiss. ‘You were SIS. You had nothing to do with them.’

Rossiter smiled faintly. ‘Not wanting to boast, John, but an SIS operative of my seniority starts to get roped into interdepartmental liaison more and more. Particularly since the start of the new terror threat, Five and Six have been forging closer links, even as they’ve come to detest one another increasingly. I’ve seen the workings of the Security Service up close.’

‘So what’s wrong with Sir Guy?’

‘Strang is, on the surface, a Churchillian figure. A big, bluff, no-nonsense ox of a man who enjoys a drink and a cigar and has little time for the oily corporatism and middle-management mentality which seems to be suffusing both our services at the moment. He’s a clichéd hate figure, a privileged white middle-class male with High Tory political views and no sensitive feminine side whatsoever.

‘The immense irony is, he’s exactly the same as the careerists and opportunists he affects to despise. He’s all image. All style and no substance. His image is a rebellious, snook-cocking one… but it’s an image, ultimately, and that’s all it is. He’s not serious about the job. He has no principles. He’s easily led. And at a time when the head of Britain’s Security Service cannot afford to be weak, or even show weakness… he’s exactly the wrong person for the job.’

‘It sounds as though he was decisive enough, supervising the torture of prisoners.’

Rossiter wagged his finger again. ‘Don’t confuse ambition with suitability, John. Plenty of ferociously ambitious people have clawed their way into jobs they were eminently unfit for. Look at most of the Cabinets of the last couple of decades. Strang was ruthless enough when he was bulldozing his way to the top job. But now that he’s there… he’s achieved his goal. All his efforts are now focused not on getting the job done, but on staying where he is.’

‘Have you ever met him?’ asked Purkiss.

‘I have, as a matter of fact. Three years ago, about six months before he was appointed as his service’s head. Some joint policy meeting or other. He was both a boor and a bore. I listened to his stupid quips and his pig-ignorant opinions and I thought, my God, we’re doomed.’ Rossiter tilted his head as though realising something for the first time. ‘In fact, that may have partly influenced my decision to do what I did in Tallinn. I came to understand that if Britain was destined to have a third-rate Security Service, it had better have an absolutely top-notch foreign intelligence agency.’

‘Really,’ said Purkiss. ‘I thought you told everyone the reason you tried to murder the Russian president was to avert a nuclear war.’

Rossiter tipped his head in acknowledgement. ‘Ultimately, yes. Nuclear destruction is the only issue that matters in the end. All else is fluff. And nobody’s willing to face up to the fact.’

Purkiss glanced where his watch should be, remembered he’d handed it in at the front. ‘We’re digressing.’

‘Indeed. But I just wanted to answer your question, as to why I’m cooperating with you. You’re unearthing evidence which could well bring Strang down. I’m all for that, in the interests of the body politic.’ Rossiter clapped his hands together. ‘So. Your man Morrow discovers, through his links with Al-Bayati, that Arkwright was a torturer who not only tortured Al-Bayati himself, but did so at the behest of Strang, the head of Five. He — ’

‘We don’t know that,’ said Purkiss.

‘What?’

‘We don’t know Morrow found out about Strang. He may have learned from Al-Bayati only that Arkwright was carrying out the torture on behalf of Five.’

‘Fair point. In either case, Morrow decides to blow the whistle. He requests a clandestine meeting with the Home Secretary. Strang finds out about the meeting — he could have done so in any number of ways, the simplest being that the Home Secretary told him — and arranges to have Morrow killed.’

‘That makes sense so far,’ said Purkiss. ‘But it doesn’t explain how the gunman got on to me, and tried to kill me at my home.’

‘You’re sure Mo Kasabian didn’t send him?’

‘Yes,’ said Purkiss. ‘There’s the evidence of the polygraph, and my own eyes. She was telling the truth.’

‘Then her security’s been breached,’ said Rossiter. ‘Somehow Strang’s found out that you’ve become involved.’

Purkiss sighed. ‘Rossiter, this is all stuff I’ve already figured out. Is there anything you can give me that might help?’

Rossiter thought for a moment. Then: ‘The security firm Arkwright said he was working for at the time I recruited him. The one in Saudi.’

‘What about it?’

‘It exists. I checked it when I hired Arkwright. Even got a reference for him. But if he was really doing Strang’s dirty work at the time, then the firm might be a front. A shell company, designed to provide cover for other activities.’

Purkiss considered it. ‘Yes. It’s a possibility.’

‘The firm’s called Scipio Rand Security. It’s based in Riyadh. I can’t recall its address or contact details but you should be able to find it without difficulty.’

‘All right.’ Purkiss couldn’t bring himself to say thanks.

He studied Rossiter. There really wasn’t anything more to ask, or say.

Purkiss stood. Rossiter gave it a second and then rose too.

Behind Purkiss, the door opened and he felt the warder’s presence.

Quietly, so as not to be overheard, Rossiter said: ‘Get him, John. Get Strang.’

Purkiss turned his back and went out.

Vale was waiting near the entrance, in a small office they’d lent him. He stood when he saw Purkiss.

‘Anything?’ he asked.

‘Maybe,’ said Purkiss. ‘I need a flight to Riyadh.’

Thirty-six

In the Poetry and Dream room, its walls weaving and shimmering with Surrealism, Emma opened her hand. Nestled in her palm was the tiny bead she’d found in the lining of her handbag.

James, close by her side, glanced down at it.

She looked at his profile but it revealed nothing.

James picked the bead out of her hand and peered at it, rolling it between thumb and forefinger.

‘What is it?’ Emma whispered, both out of reverence for the gallery’s atmosphere and because she was reluctant for anyone else to hear.

‘Difficult to say,’ murmured James. ‘Probably nothing. A flaw in the bag.’

‘But it wasn’t there before,’ she said. Before I came home from being with you, she managed to stop herself from saying.

He made a wry mouth. ‘Can you be sure?’

‘It’s part of my training as a doctor to spot things out of the ordinary,’ Emma said. ‘This is definitely something new.’

‘Okay.’

‘Might it be a bug? Some sort of transmitter?’

He sighed. ‘It’s possible. I’ll take it back to the office and have it examined. But more likely you’re reading too much into this.’

Emma gazed at the picture on the wall before her, a nightmarish vision of distorted screaming faces on blurred bodies. She should feel reassured, she knew. But instead she felt uneasy.

‘James.’ She turned to look up at him.

His brow furrowed. ‘Yes.’

‘Did you plant this in my bag? Are you… monitoring me? Spying on me?’

Something changed in his eyes.

He placed a hand on each of her shoulders, drew her nearer. His face grave, his eyes warm again, he said: ‘No. I promise you.’

After a few seconds she said: ‘Okay. I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be.’

They walked hand in hand for fifteen minutes, pretending to look at the exhibits. Emma registered none of them.

There’d been something in his eyes. Something dark, just for an instant.

James’s hand tightened on hers and he stopped.

‘I have to get back now,’ he said.

‘Of course. Sorry to have called you away.’

He kissed her forehead. ‘No problem.’ Pulling away, he raised an eyebrow. ‘Still on for tomorrow?’

‘Wouldn’t miss it.’

He left first, disappearing into the milling visitors at the entrance. Emma watched him go.

She gave it five minutes.

Then she set off, walking rapidly back along the south bank. The afternoon heat cloyed at her, trying to plug her mouth and nose. The crowds felt similarly oppressive.

At Victoria she unlocked her car. Driven by something she couldn’t identify, she began searching. She rummaged in the glove compartment and side pockets, ran her fingers under the seat and dashboard, lifted up the carpets to look underneath.

Nothing. Emma straightened beside the car, wondering at herself.

She got in and drove home. Hurrying inside, she went through to the bedroom and began ransacking her clothes, groping in the pockets, feeling the hems.

She moved on to the bathroom next. Pill bottles, overnight toiletry bags, towels. None of them yielded anything.

It was by chance that she found it. Emma was about to replace the cap of a lipstick tube when she twisted the end the wrong way in her haste.

The end came off. There, affixed to the disc of metal, was another tiny bead, identical to the one from her handbag.

The lipstick was from her overnight bag, a spare. She hadn’t taken it two nights ago, but she had when she’d spent the night with James before. The last time had been about a month ago.

Emma sat heavily on the toilet seat, staring at the floor. She felt lost, and cold.

And afraid.

Thirty-seven

Tullivant walked at a fast clip across the Millennium Bridge towards the north bank, thumbing the speed-dial key.

‘It’s confirmed,’ he said tersely. ‘They’re on to me.’

He explained. There was a silence at the other end.

Then: ‘Not good.’

‘I know.’ A tourist jostled him, wheeling angrily, but Tullivant kept moving. ‘I need to take him down.’

‘No. Not at this point. It’ll just get in the way.’ Another pause. ‘Take precautions. But stay focused on the main game.’

‘So what’s the next move?’ he asked. A busker stepped into his path playing a ukelele and Tullivant veered away.

‘I’m waiting for Purkiss’s next step. That’ll determine ours. But be prepared to move in at short notice. Cancel whatever plans you’ve got for tomorrow.’

‘That’s going to be tricky.’

‘Cancel them. This should soon be over.’

‘Understood.’

Tullivant put his phone away. He cut north-west towards the Strand, burning off adrenaline with each stride. It had been a tough forty-eight hours, all told. First the bungling at Purkiss’s house, then the mess up in Cambridgeshire, and now… this.

At least the targets had been neutralised. At least Arkwright was dead. And by the way things were playing out, Tullivant had got him at just about the right time. But his failure in his battle with Purkiss bothered him. The man had been blinded by teargas, and already weakened by earlier brawling. For Tullivant barely to get away unscathed was shameful. Perhaps he was getting too old; or perhaps Purkiss was simply more than a match for him.

Shame was good, he reflected. Used correctly, and not wallowed in, it stiffened the resolve. He’d learned that during his Army days. If you survived your blunders, you learned from them, did better next time. His next encounter with Purkiss would not result in failure on his part.

His more immediate problem was Emma. She was a loose cannon now, he could tell. Unpredictable, in a different way from Purkiss. And he couldn’t address anything with her directly. Couldn’t confront her.

The charade — yes, that was what it was, even if the word and the concept were distasteful — had to be maintained. The final outcome, however, was going to be most traumatic for all concerned. For Tullivant himself, too; he couldn’t pretend otherwise.

He’d done the odds and ends he needed to do, and was on his way to his destination, when his phone rang.

‘An update.’ Tullivant detected a note of tension that fell just short of urgency. ‘Purkiss is no longer part of the game. You don’t need to concern yourself with him any more.’

Tullivant was intrigued. ‘He’s been taken out?’

‘As good as.’

Thirty-eight

One of the things that impressed, and sometimes astounded, Purkiss about Vale was the speed at which he worked.

On the way out to the car, Vale had rung Kasabian, then handed the phone to Purkiss. Purkiss gave a brief summary of what Rossiter had told him.

‘Riyadh,’ Kasabian said.

‘Yes.’

‘Hell of a long shot.’

‘Better than no shot.’

In the car, while Purkiss used his phone to locate the address of Scipio Rand Security, Vale spoke on his own phone via its hands-free function, cutting from one connection to another, issuing instructions, considering and rejecting suggestions. He fell silent eventually, waiting for a call back.

Purkiss found a stark website for Scipio Rand Security, minimalist in its design yet expertly done. They called themselves one of the leading providers of personal and corporate security in the Middle East, and a link provided examples of their clients: mostly British and American businesses, but there were a few Saudi-sounding names there as well. There were none of the gushing testimonials normally to be found. It made the firm sound somehow more professional.

A telephone number and fax and email addresses were listed. Purkiss memorised them, but didn’t think they’d be of use. Contacting the firm beforehand would be like the police telephoning a suspect in advance to notify him of an impending arrest.

The problem was, despite pictures of a grand-looking complex of office buildings on the website’s home page, which suggested the firm had an actual physical existence, there was no address for the headquarters.

Vale’s phone rang. He hit Receive and a voice filled the car, speaking so rapidly Purkiss couldn’t understand what it was saying.

When it had finished, Vale said: ‘We’re in luck.’ He looked at his watch. ‘There’s a chartered flight to Riyadh leaving from Heathrow at three fifteen. That’s fifty minutes from now. You’ve a seat booked on it.’

‘Good,’ said Purkiss.

Heathrow was this side of London, on the route back. And he had his passport with him.

Vale reached into the pocket in his door, brought something crackling out. It was a pack of cigarettes. He pulled one out with his lips, dropped the pack back into the door pocket, and pressed in the car’s cigarette lighter.

‘I thought you’d quit,’ said Purkiss.

‘I did. Angina, as I told you.’

‘Quentin, it’s not for me to lecture, but…ah.’ Purkiss shrugged.

‘It helps me think better.’

Purkiss thought he detected the tiniest of tremors in the hand that pressed the lighter cylinder to the end of the cigarette.

Vale lowered the window on his side as the acrid fumes began to fill the car. Purkiss gazed through the windscreen.

A tremor?

He’d never seen Vale overtly crave a smoke, not even in these last few days when he’d been off them. So why the jitteriness now?

Purkiss glanced at Vale’s profile. It was gloomily impassive, his default expression.

They drove in silence, something tense and undefinable in the air between them.

At the drop-off area outside Heathrow’s Terminal Five, Vale scribbled down the flight details and handed the slip of paper to Purkiss.

‘Good luck,’ he said.

Purkiss held his gaze for a fraction of a second. There was nothing to read there.

He walked into the cool of the terminal building.

Finding a relatively private spot in a corner, he dialled Hannah’s number. There was a lightness in her tone when she answered, a change since the events of the night before.

Purkiss told her about the conversation with Rossiter. ‘I’m about to board to Riyadh.’

‘I want to be there too.’

He’d already considered it. ‘Okay. You’ll have to catch a separate flight, which would be advisable anyway. Let me know, and I’ll meet you at the airport.’

‘Got it.’

‘One thing. I don’t actually have a physical address for the place, and I won’t be able to hunt for it online while I’m in the air. Could you perhaps see what you can find, while you’re waiting to get a flight?’

‘No problem.’

Purkiss headed for the check-in desk, passport at the ready.

He could have asked Vale to look for the address, but something had stopped him.

Vale’s tension, his sudden resumption of smoking.

Like a child, held helpless before an advancing ogre and trying desperately to twist away from it, Purkiss recoiled from the suspicion that was crawling over him, and from the realisations that were lining up one after the other.

The security leak, which had resulted in the sniper’s attacking Purkiss in his home even before he’d taken on the Jokerman operation.

The apparent coincidence of the gunman having been poised outside Arkwright’s house at the very same time Purkiss and Hannah had been questioning him.

Vale?

The horror grew within Purkiss as the rumbling of the plane’s engines rose to a roar, then a shriek as it launched into the vast and unknown sky.

Thirty-nine

Purkiss had travelled through King Khalid International many times en route to Iraq during his time there, and then as now he never failed to be struck by the enormous, city-like sprawl of the airport in the desert below the plane, or by the colossal mosque which dominated the passenger terminal as he emerged from the arrivals area.

It was a little after midnight, local time. Still, the terminal bustled as if night hadn’t fallen outside. The building was efficiently airconditioned but Purkiss had received a dose of the night-time heat as he’d stepped off the plane. Riyadh in August: not the best time for a visitor from a temperate clime.

Purkiss switched on his phone, waited for the international roaming function to kick in. He had one text message waiting. It was from Hannah: Call me.

She answered immediately. ‘I have Scipio Rand’s address,’ she said. ‘I managed to stay out of the Service databases, but I had to call in a couple of favours with contacts in the Foreign Office.’ She gave a street address in the Diplomatic Quarter.

‘Good work,’ said Purkiss.

‘Also, I’ve booked a Saudia flight for ten-oh-five — that’s half an hour from now. I’m at Heathrow. Landing time’s seven twenty in the morning at your end.’ She told him the flight details.

Seven hours to go. Purkiss had managed to catch a couple of hours’ sleep on the flight, and didn’t feel tired now. He wandered the length and breadth of the terminal, trying to look purposeful so as not to attract attention as a loiterer. When the shop windows had exhausted his meagre interest, he found an all-night coffee shop that served meals, and fuelled up with caffeine, carbohydrate and protein.

He thought about Hannah as he ate, and the night before. Had it been an outlet for the tension they’d both built up after such a chaotic, threatening day? Probably. But Purkiss found himself genuinely looking forward to seeing her again. He checked his phone for messages, but there were none. Why there would be any, he didn’t quite know. He supposed part of him was anticipating news from the hospital, news about Kendrick. And it wouldn’t be good.

Purkiss’s thoughts tacked back to Vale, no matter how he tried to rein them away. He’d thought it through, and there was no more thinking to be done on the matter. Not now, not until he got back.

Vale had deceived him once, over a complicated matter. He’d led Purkiss to believe that Claire, Purkiss’s fiancée, was the innocent victim of a murder by another agent. That agent had turned out to be one of Vale’s men, and on the side of good, whatever good was in this particular world; whereas Claire was corrupt. Purkiss thought he had forgiven Vale for his deception because Vale had had Purkiss’s best interests in mind, even if Purkiss didn’t agree with his approach.

But this… this was different. If Vale was mixed up in all this, working for Strang, then he was putting himself on the other side of an unbridgeable divide from Purkiss. Had Vale’s shakiness, his nerves, been the outward manifestations of a guilty conscience as he sent Purkiss, a man he’d worked with closely for half a decade, into a trap and to his death? Or was the older man simply human, prone to the drawbacks of ageing — tremulousness, faltering courage — like anybody else? Was Purkiss reading too much into it all?

There were the niggling details, though. The coincidences, the leaks. And treachery on Vale’s part could explain most, perhaps all of them.

A group of women walked past the shop, dressed in full-length abayat. Purkiss wondered whether Hannah would remember she was obliged to cover up or risk falling foul of the mutaween, the religious police. He also wondered how she’d react to being forbidden to drive.

Then he realised how different his attitude was towards her compared with other agents he’d worked with. Normally he took it for granted that colleagues had done their homework. Now, he was fussing over Hannah Holley as if she were a neophyte.

Purkiss shook his head. She’s really got to you.

The buzzing of his phone shook him out of his thoughts. He picked it up.

It was Hannah.

‘John, I’m sorry about this. I missed the flight. Delays at check in, and at the scanner.’

‘Do you think you’ve been compromised?’

‘No, it’s unlikely. Nobody took much time over me. Just large numbers of passengers to process, and too few desks to cope.’

Purkiss looked at his watch. One o’clock.

‘There’s another flight at six in the morning,’ Hannah said. ‘Seven hours from now. I’ve booked a seat on that. But it means I’ll be there with you only around two in the afternoon.’

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Can’t be helped.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘No point just sitting here at the airport,’ he said. ‘I’ll head into the city. Scout around.’

‘Don’t approach the Scipio Rand offices, will you? Not without me.’

‘I won’t,’ he said.

They rang off.

Purkiss sat sipping his coffee, thinking.

Don’t approach Scipio Rand, she’d said, and he’d agreed. But they both knew the temptation would be too great for him to resist. He wasn’t given to loitering about for any length of time, not when there was a target to be investigated.

It was of course entirely possible that Hannah had missed the flight. Heathrow was a notoriously busy airport, and it wasn’t as if Hannah could use her Security Service credentials to buy herself special treatment, working off the books as she was.

But it was also possible she’d deliberately not taken the flight.

The vast, echoing terminal around Purkiss seemed suddenly frighteningly smaller, as though the walls and ceiling were closing in, squeezed by the crushing emptiness of the surrounding desert outside.

If Hannah had missed the flight on purpose, it suggested that she knew Purkiss was going to investigate Scipio Rand on his own, regardless of what he told her. And that meant she knew he’d be walking into a set up. A trap.

His mind rewound and replayed the events in order.

Hannah, appearing out of nowhere just before the bomb in Mohammed Al-Bayati’s Range Rover had gone off.

Hannah, just happening to have found a notebook of Morrow’s with leads pointing to Dennis Arkwright.

Hannah, present at the interview with Arkwright at the very moment he had come under attack.

It didn’t make sense. It didn’t tie together neatly, or even at all. But, as with Vale, it was a series of seemingly unconnected little coincidences and oddities which, in the light of Hannah’s failure to board the plane, unsettled Purkiss.

Without turning his head too obviously he scanned the terminal, or at least as much of it as he could see from where he was sitting. People stood around or ambled or hurried, singly and in pairs and small groups. There was no evident surveillance in place. But then, if it had been obtrusive, it wouldn’t have been surveillance at all.

Purkiss felt the gnawings of unease which would, if indulged, progress to panicky helplessness. A rat in a corner, with no apparent means of escape, will lapse into acceptance of its situation. Purkiss was in a different position, because he didn’t know where the danger was, or which direction it would come from.

Except he did, in a sense. Part of the danger was internal. The corrosive effects of mistrust, of suspicion of those once thought loyal, could be every bit as hazardous as an external threat.

Purkiss closed his eyes to slits, just enough not to exclude all visual data. He drew a deep breath through his nose, centring himself.

Into an impossible cube-shaped container, with no visible seams, he placed mental images of Vale and Hannah. He could still see them hazily through the opaque walls of the box, so he thickened the sides like the cataracts in an elderly eye, until the faces within had disappeared.

Then he allowed the box to plunge, impossibly deeply, into the most inaccessible reaches of his being.

He released the breath. Opened his eyes fully. Found himself not in the tortured past, or the speculation-riddled future, but in the now.

Purkiss left the coffee shop, strode the length of the terminal towards an all-night car rental kiosk he’d seen earlier. He was aware of the soft peeling noise of his soles on the polished floor with every step he took, of the coffee-and-spices aromas breezing around him, of the murmur and susurration of a cleaning machine that hummed robotically past, its driver seemingly less alive than it was.

At the kiosk he considered the options offered to him. Technical requirements — speed, reliability, protection in the event of a collision — always had to be weighed up against the need for discretion and lack of obtrusiveness when choosing a vehicle in a hostile field. After a few minutes’ thought, Purkiss selected a two-year-old silver Audi saloon.

Even in the two hours since he’d stepped off the plane, the heat had built up outside. Purkiss glanced at a digital display on the terminal wall as he walked to collect his car. Twenty-eight degrees Celsius already, at half-past one in the morning. By dawn it would have reached thirty, at least. By noon, forty or more.

He hadn’t been in the Middle East for six years, and was therefore not acclimatised. It meant that any confrontation with the enemy would best take place in the next few hours, before Purkiss was at a distinct disadvantage.

The Audi’s engine felt smooth and beautifully tuned, the air conditioning kicking in immediately. Purkiss took it for a few turns around the car park, getting a feel for the way it handled. Then he headed for the petrol station near the exit. He filled up the tank, marvelling as he had done when he’d first visited the Gulf at the astonishingly cheap price of fuel, before taking the sign for King Fahd Road towards Riyadh, a little over twenty miles to the south.

Despite the bright lights of the highway, the surprisingly active traffic, the sky overhead was clear and luminous with stars, light pollution from the distant city having little effect here. Clear skies were dangerous, in Purkiss’s experience. They reminded him of happier times — Marseille, chiefly — and tended to have a mesmerising, lulling effect. He forced himself to focus on the immediate environment.

Night-time countersurveillance was tricky, because you could never be as certain as you could in daylight that the set of headlights behind you were the ones that had been tailing you since the start of your journey. But the highway was vividly lit in sodium, and by the time the traffic began to build up and slow on the outskirts of the city, Purkiss had identified the tag.

Forty

Riyadh’s broad highways and boulevards, elaborate mosques and palm trees all gave Purkiss the impression of a showcase city, a little tatty around the edges and without quite matching the garish kitsch of Dubai or Abu Dhabi.

He used the Audi’s satellite navigation system to identify the Diplomatic Quarter, then took a deliberate wrong turn, braking late as though in frustration at having missed the road he wanted. As planned, he found himself in a one-way system and therefore couldn’t double back.

In his rearview mirror, the black Lexus hung back, keeping pace with him.

Purkiss had identified it through a simple manoeuvre back on the highway leading from the airport. He’d accelerated to overtake two marginally slower cars in front of him and had dropped in ahead of the first one. The Lexus, not wanting to lose him, had muscled in one car behind. His move had been unremarkable, unlikely to attract suspicion. That of the Lexus confirmed what he’d thought: it had been tagging him since he’d left the airport.

One car, then. Not so much a welcoming committee as a scout party, there to make sure he did indeed head to the Scipio Rand headquarters rather than going off and doing his own thing.

It left Purkiss with a dilemma. He was now in no doubt that if he ventured near the Scipio Rand building he’d be walking into a trap, one from which he was unlikely to escape given all the advantages the enemy had, knowledge of the terrain being one of them. On the other hand, if he very obviously avoided heading there, the person or people in the Lexus would become suspicious, and might surmise that he was on to them. They might call for backup, which would further tip the odds against Purkiss.

He needed to isolate the Lexus, somehow. Draw it away and create a scenario in which he could interrogate its occupants.

The commercial centre of the city was beckoning brightly ahead, most of the lighting from the windows and awnings of shops that wouldn’t open for many hours yet. Light traffic continued to pass Purkiss, a scattering of pedestrians, exclusively male, here and there on the pavements: workmen, mostly, maintaining the city’s infrastructure. Once, a police patrol car eased past him in the opposite direction, two faces turning to watch him as they passed.

On the corner of a quiet-looking junction, beside some kind of walled park, Purkiss indicated and pulled on to the kerb.

He climbed out of the Audi, not looking directly back but noticing the Lexus draw to a halt fifty yards down the street. Purkiss popped the bonnet, propped it open using the thin stick hinged to the body, and peered underneath.

Beyond the bonnet, he saw a man approaching. He shifted position and noted a second man advancing from the other side.

Purkiss drew out the dipstick, examined the end. He touched the radiator cap, winced.

‘Got a problem?’ said a man’s voice, in English.

Purkiss glanced up. The man who’d approached from the left side of the car was Arabic, in his late twenties, sleekly dressed in a business suit. He was the one who’d spoken, in slightly accented American English. On the other side, the second man was similarly attired. He was European, British-looking. Older, in his late thirties, maybe, shaven-headed and brutal featured.

‘Something’s not right here,’ Purkiss muttered, as though exasperated.

As he spoke, he saw the Arabic man’s hand move inside his jacket.

Purkiss grabbed the bar that was propping the bonnet up and twisted it upwards and sideways, yanking it free from the notch in which it was resting and at the same time wrenching it off the hinge at the other end. It was no thicker than his thumb, but rigid. As he swung it lefthanded in a backhand slash the bonnet crashed shut, the sudden noise disorientating.

The steel bar whipped across the Arabic man’s face and he yelled, spinning away and backwards, his hand emerging from his jacket, a handgun dropping onto the pavement. Purkiss swivelled and brought the bar whipping in a forehand motion across his body. The second man, whose gun was already in his hand, caught the blow across his wrist but managed to hold on to his gun. Purkiss moved in with an elbow strike at the man’s neck, connecting before he could step aside, the tip of his elbow driving into the mastoid process below the man’s ear. He wheezed and sagged, bouncing off the front bumper.

The first man was already up again and coming back at Purkiss, palms open before him in a fighter’s pose. Purkiss aimed a kick at the man’s torso, which he sidestepped in the direction Purkiss had been expecting. Purkiss smashed a hammer fist down onto the back of the man’s neck and he crashed against the bonnet, managing somehow to keep his feet. Purkiss drove a foot into the backs of the man’s knees. This time he went down, banging his head again against the metalwork at the front of the Audi.

Purkiss stooped and grabbed the older man, the European-looking one, under the arms, and hauled him to the side of the car. He opened the rear door and dumped the man’s dead weight onto the back seat.

On the pavement behind the Audi, the Lexus’s tyres squealed, its lights leaping forwards.

Purkiss thought: Damn. They left the driver in the car.

He dived into the back seat on top of the man he’d slung there, in case the driver of the Lexus opened fire, and slammed the door shut behind him. Kneeling and crawling across the unconscious body, he clambered through the divide into the driver’s seat. Keeping his head low, he hit the ignition switch.

In the wing mirror the headlights flamed like twin owl eyes, bearing down.

Purkiss rammed the gear shift into reverse and trod down hard on the accelerator. Reversing was a counter-intuitive move by which Purkiss intended to wrong-foot the Lexus driver, and it seemed to work. The Audi rocketed backwards along the pavement just as the Lexus drew level. Purkiss saw the pale oval of the driver’s face turned towards him through the window an instant before it disappeared behind a curtain of shattering glass and plastic as the wing mirrors of the two cars collided and exploded. A screech of grinding metal accompanied the scraping of the Lexus’s bumper against the side panel of the Audi before Purkiss was clear and angling the Audi out onto the road, the Lexus’s brake lights flaring redly through his windscreen.

On the back seat, the man moaned quietly.

Purkiss jolted the wheel sideways and spun out into the middle lane, a limousine blaring furiously past him. He passed the Lexus even as he saw it vault off the pavement where it had partly mounted. Its lights dropped in behind him, alarmingly close, as it gave chase.

On the dashboard, the satnav peeped and bleated, confused by the erratic moves he was making. He ignored it; it was no use to him now. He was aware he was driving blind, in an utterly unfamiliar city enclosed by desert. And he was aware that any moves in the direction of the Scipio Rand headquarters would draw him closer to the centre of the spider’s web, something he needed to avoid.

The boulevard ahead furrowed into two parallel prongs with a tree-lined barrier between them. Purkiss chose the left-hand one, for no especial reason. The Lexus hung close behind, cutting across a mini-convoy of sports cars, and as if spurred on by the cavalcade of angry horns closed in on Purkiss.

He needed to get away. There was no longer any need for deception, for maintaining the fiction that he hadn’t noticed the tag on his tail. Purkiss had one of their men captive — he’d chosen the European because he was older, and therefore more likely to be senior, and in a position to divulge more information — so his goal was to lose the Lexus, avoid whatever reinforcements might be on their way, and escape the bounds of the city.

But the driver of the Lexus was tenacious.

Purkiss considered a sudden braking manoeuvre, to force the Lexus to stop and thereby stall its engine, or even to ram into the rear of the Audi; but his instinct told him the driver was a seasoned professional and would be expecting that, and would simply slow down, thereby gaining precious distance. Instead, Purkiss glanced to his right, at the divide between the two sides of the road, lined as it was by manicured palm trees.

He chose a gap between the trees that looked wider than most, and with a spin of the wheel rammed the Audi through it.

The car howled up the kerb and across the grassy divide, its sides striking the trunks of adjacent trees with a twin thock sound and a crump of bending metal. But it made it through, and crashed across onto the road on the opposite side, traffic there screaming sideways to avoid collision. Momentarily disorientated, Purkiss looked around, and spotted the Lexus running parallel on the other side of the divide. The trees appeared closer together here, and Purkiss didn’t think the driver would have a chance to aim between them.

Ahead, a set of traffic lights turned amber, then red. A heavy stream of vehicles began to cross perpendicularly.

Purkiss weighed the odds. If he continued as he was, straight through the lights, and at his current speed — ninety-five kilometres per hour — he’d almost certainly hit at least one of the cars in the cross-traffic. On the other hand, if he stopped for the lights, the Lexus would in all likelihood reach the lights on its side of the road, which were currently green, hook round, and end up facing Purkiss, ready to ram him where he sat.

He could have snatched up one of the dropped guns back there where he’d taken down the two men, he reflected. But a running gun battle through the night streets of Riyadh wasn’t his idea of a clean solution to the problem at hand.

Somewhere, from off to the right and behind, Purkiss heard a police car’s call. The European-style twin note, not the rise and fall of the British or American siren.

Purkiss hit the accelerator hard, grinding it so that his heel was pressing it down. The speedometer jerked upwards as the Audi gathered momentum, the red-lit junction ahead looming large. Over to the left, the Lexus was temporarily left behind.

At the last moment before he reached the junction, Purkiss spun the wheel, executing a lurching J-turn that took the Audi in a finely judged arc past the impossibly large and gaping Os of a couple’s mouths through the windscreen of a four-wheel drive in the next lane and right across to the side of the road bound in the opposite direction. Once facing away from the junction, Purkiss rode the accelerator and clutch carefully, holding back from stalling the car, and once he was sure it was steady, headed back the way he’d come, at a measured pace, neither fast nor suspiciously slow.

The police cars, two of them, squealed past him towards the junction.

Through the trees lining the central barrier on Purkiss’s right, he could see lights swaying chaotically, and he understood that the driver of the Lexus was making a U-turn himself. As the road was one-way only on that side of the barrier, it meant the driver was intending to head back the wrong way, in the face of oncoming traffic.

Purkiss picked up speed. In his mirror, behind and to his right, he watched the Lexus veer crazily between panic-stricken cars as it wove back down the road. Directly behind Purkiss the police cars had screeched round the junction and were beginning to turn down the road on the other side of the barrier, in pursuit of the Lexus.

The Lexus leaped the barrier, just as Purkiss had done with the Audi and at the same spot, its bumper gouging out a chunk of one of the palm trees’ boles. With a scrape of loosened metal the Lexus made it on to the road and straightened out so that it was behind Purkiss once more.

On the other side of the barrier the police cars slowed, thrown by this sudden manoeuvre.

The first gunshot erupted, the rear window of the Audi bursting inwards in a glittering cascade.

Purkiss floored the accelerator, crouching low over the steering wheel, swinging it fractionally to present an unsteady target. He was fairly sure he’d seen just one man in the Lexus, which meant the driver himself was doing the shooting and was therefore hampered by his need to control the car. But the second shot came then, the blast alarmingly close behind, and this time the bullet struck the upholstery just above Purkiss’s head.

Another junction was coming up rapidly, the lights turning amber. Purkiss saw a large refuse truck beginning to ease over the line to the left, in preparation for the green signal.

He touched the brake to slow himself just enough to get the timing right, gritted his teeth as the Lexus kept on coming behind him, its headlights growing enormous and on full beam. Ahead of him the light was red, and he saw the truck lumber forwards.

Purkiss ground the accelerator down, surging forward into the path of the truck, its bulk towering down in a blare of horn that sounded like a train’s warning. The Audi cleared the front of the truck by such a narrow margin Purkiss thought he could feel the car’s rear rocked by the slipstream. Then he was through and across on the other side.

He slowed but kept driving, eyes locked on the mirror. Behind, the truck too had cleared the junction. On the other side of it the Lexus arced sideways as the driver tried to brake and control it at the same time. The momentum took the car through three hundred and sixty, then five hundred and forty degrees, across the middle of the junction, other vehicles skidding and screeching aside to avoid it. With a punch almost as loud as the earlier gunshots the Lexus smashed side-on into a car parked on the side of the street and rocked to a standstill.

Purkiss sped on, watching the carnage recede in his mirror.

His vision was suddenly blocked by the silhouette of a man’s head, rearing behind him like a final twist in a cheap horror film. Purkiss felt the hand clutch at his shoulder, saw the vague, dazed look in the man’s brutal features.

Holding the wheel with his left hand, Purkiss lashed backwards with his right, his fist connecting with the man’s nose. The head jerked back and the man folded heavily onto the seat once more.

Purkiss cruised, taking turn-offs on instinct, heading to what he sensed was the perimeter of the city, and the desert beyond.

Forty-one

The lizard watched, unblinking, an occasional lightning-fast flick of its tongue the only movement it betrayed. Its skin was the precise colour of the sand, so that it appeared transparent.

Purkiss found the lizard helpful. Its utter refusal to rush about, to do anything except bask in the early morning heat, forced him to try to match it. To slow his thoughts, his movements, even his breathing.

It was the only way to make the waiting bearable.

The man sat on the sand in his boxer shorts. His wrists were secured behind his back with strips torn from his discarded shirt. They weren’t the strongest bonds, and given enough time on his own, he’d manage to work his hands free. But he wasn’t on his own, and if Purkiss thought he was making even a surreptitious effort to free himself, he’d simply pull the strips tighter.

Purkiss sat in the driver’s seat of the Audi, his legs out the open door, his feet on the sand. The dunes, which had changed from orange through yellow to ivory as the sun had crept above the horizon and risen to its current position halfway up the sky, rolled and tumbled in all directions, as far as the eye could make out. The horizon was a shimmering blur.

Apart from Purkiss, the only living creatures visible for miles around were the lizard on the slope of a dune to the left, and the man sitting directly in front of Purkiss several yards away.

Purkiss had found an all-night petrol station soon after fleeing the scene of the Lexus’s crash. If a description of the Audi was going to be circulated by the police, then Purkiss wanted to make the purchases he needed before word got round. At the station he’d filled the tank, then bought two ten-litre cans inside the shop and filled those as well. He’d also bought three five-litre bottles of spring water. All the time, he’d kept an eye on the Audi outside, where the man lay unconscious on the back seat.

Afterwards Purkiss had driven east, leaving the city’s environs and heading out into the desert. He’d kept to the main highway for fifty miles or so, then turned off down a single-lane road in a poor state of repair, following this through small settlements shrouded in darkness. All the while he kept an eye on the Audi’s fuel gauge.

When there was a little over half a tank left, he turned down a still rougher road, barely a strip of gravel through the dunes. This he followed for a further ten miles. He checked the display on the satnav from time to time, to ensure it was still showing a reading. Purkiss didn’t know where he was going, but he wanted to be able to find his way back later.

At last, with no sign of human habitation anywhere in the vicinity, he pulled in at the side of the road and got out, stretching his legs and neck, limbering up. He took a long pull from one of the water bottles, before opening the back door and hauling the man out.

The man struggled vaguely while Purkiss was stripping him, and needed a gentle fist across the head to discourage him. Purkiss trussed his wrists, not bothering with his legs, and propped him in a sitting position on the ground.

Then he sat down to wait.

The sky began to lighten imperceptibly, as though the half-moon’s luminescence was seeping into it. At some point, the man on the sand came round. Purkiss saw the glint of his open eye, even though his head remained bowed.

For ninety minutes, two hours, they sat like that. Purkiss in the open door of the car, taking occasional sips from the water bottle, and the man below him on the sand.

Sunrise came at five thirty-three by Purkiss’s watch, a spectacular burnt-orange glow that spilled and bled over the lip of the horizon. With it came new heat, flooding across the expanse of the dunes.

At six o’clock Purkiss said: ‘Hey.’

It was the first word either man had said since they had arrived, hours earlier.

The man’s head lifted a fraction. His back was to the dawn and his face was still in shadow.

Purkiss reached into the back of the car and lifted out the remaining two water bottles. He held them up.

‘Fifteen litres in total,’ he said.

Purkiss lowered them into the back of the car once more.

‘It’s likely to top forty degrees by early afternoon,’ he said. ‘Any idea how much water a man needs in forty-degree heat?’

The man said nothing.

‘Well,’ Purkiss continued, ‘at rest, and in the shade — as I am — a man needs around ten litres of water per day. Do you understand what I’m getting at?’

Still no reply.

‘I’m saying I’m prepared to wait here all day, if necessary,’ said Purkiss. ‘I’ll be quite comfortable. Plenty to drink.’

Silence.

Purkiss shrugged, took a draught of water, put the cap back on.

The lizard made its appearance. Purkiss studied it for what seemed like an hour, and probably was.

He shifted his gaze to the man. The sweat stood out in stark beads on his denuded scalp. His eyes were lowered, fixed on the sand in front of him.

Purkiss thought he’d chosen the man well. He was holding out. If he’d been a minion, mere hired muscle, he’d have said something by now.

It suggested he had information of value.

The sun soared, losing its orange and red hues and taking on the brilliant white of burning phosphorus.

Purkiss was no torturer. He’d used the threat of physical harm, even death, to loosen his enemies’ tongues on more than one occasion. He’d administered sharp physical shocks as incentives. But he’d never employed the sustained infliction of physical pain. He was averse to it, and he didn’t think he’d be particularly effective at it.

He’d never before had occasion to use the elements — the sun’s heat — or physiological processes such as thirst, to gather intelligence.

At eight o’clock he began the questions. Since he had a lot of time available, he started with the basics.

‘Who do you work for?’

The man said nothing.

‘Who sent you to follow me?’

Still nothing.

‘How did you know I was coming?’

Nothing.

The man’s scalp, his bare torso, his limbs, were slowly, steadily turning the colour of ochre. The sweat was stinging his eyes now, matting his chest hair.

Purkiss was beginning to feel mildly uncomfortable himself, his left arm aching where it had been bitten, and he stood up to pace about, swinging his arms to create a faint breeze. He was reluctant to turn on the car engine to run the air conditioning because he didn’t want to waste fuel. Besides, there would be little point, given the broken rear window where the bullet had struck it.

‘I’m going to rest my voice for a while,’ he told the man. ‘Thirsty work, this.’ He took a long, gulping swig, using his palm to splash some water onto his face and the back of his neck.

On the ground, the man swallowed, the dryness of his throat turning it into a prolonged, sticky action.

Progress, thought Purkiss.

After a few minutes he began the cycle of questions again. Still, the man remained silent; but this time, during one of the pauses, he snapped his head to one side and back, perhaps to shake sweat from his eyes, perhaps in irritation.

Purkiss took note of the man’s breathing. It was becoming shallower, the body trying to conserve moisture in the form of water vapour.

The sun peaked, an incandescent overlord gazing down on the world. The heat shivered across the sand mercilessly, the hazy waves like vibrating strings.

On the ground, the man was making faint snuffling noises.

‘What was that?’ asked Purkiss, stooping, his ear turned. The man gave a half-snarl, half-hiss.

‘Oh,’ said Purkiss, straightening. ‘I thought you were going to tell me something.’

He stood looking down at the man, as if debating with himself.

‘Look,’ he said at last, ‘I suppose I’d better give you a drink so that you don’t expire on me.’

He crouched, tilting the five-litre bottle so that its open neck approached the man’s lips.

‘Just a sip, mind.’

The man lunged, his mouth groping like a fish’s. He toppled forward onto his knees, righted himself awkwardly, ducked his head towards the bottle again.

‘On second thoughts,’ said Purkiss, lifting the bottle away, ‘I reckon you can probably hold out a bit longer.’

The man gnashed his teeth, white flecks crusting the corners of his mouth, in stark contrast to the deep red of his face. His eyes rolled yellowly.

Purkiss checked the temperature reading on his phone.

‘Forty-two degrees,’ he said. ‘Not a record temperature for August. But it’s only eleven thirty. Early yet. Wait till three o’clock. Then we’ll be talking hot.’

He gave it half an hour, then repeated the cycle of questions. This time the man groaned loudly.

Purkiss studied him for a long moment. Then he stood, sighed.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘I was wrong. I thought you’d crack, but you didn’t. Congratulations.’

He shook his head, went round to the front of the car, raised the bonnet and filled the radiator with water. Then he hefted the water bottle back into the car, climbed into the driver’s seat and pulled the door shut.

Purkiss didn’t glance in the mirror until he’d driven a hundred yards down the track.

The man had staggered to his feet and was weaving after the Audi, his hands still tied behind him, his bare feet stepping gingerly on the scorching sand. His head was thrown back as if in supplication to the sun.

Purkiss waited till he was almost at the car, then pulled away again, edging forward almost at the man’s pace.

The man was in a bad way, his lips cracked and blistering, his eyes swollen. But he’d had the presence of mind to come after the car, his only link to another human being in this bleak, angry landscape.

Purkiss crawled forwards, occasionally speeding up and putting distance between the man and the Audi, always dropping back eventually to allow him to catch up.

The jerky, dance-like routine continued for forty-five minutes, during which time Purkiss estimated they’d covered less than two miles. Without warning, the man stopped.

Purkiss watched him in the mirror. He dabbed the brake and kept the Audi idling.

The man dropped to his knees, his head bowed once more. As Purkiss watched, he toppled forwards, face down in the sand.

Purkiss reversed until he reached the prone figure. He climbed out and squatted down beside the man, took his shoulder and turned him on his back.

The bloodshot eyes stared past him between blistered lids. The man’s lips were ragged, bleeding flaps, the tongue a desiccated insect flopping behind them.

The man’s lower jaw moved.

Purkiss bent and put his ear to the man’s lips.

‘Water.’ It was no louder than a rustling of leaves.

‘You’ll talk?’ said Purkiss.

‘Yes.’

Forty-two

‘What’s your name?’

All Purkiss had to do was raise the bottle to catch the glittering sunlight, and the man would answer. It was like a classically conditioned, Pavlovian response.

‘Ericson.’ The man’s voice was still parched, still harsh, but no longer a mere whisper. Purkiss had let him drink half a litre, no more. It wasn’t purely tactical; too much and he was likely to vomit.

‘Who do you work for?’

‘Scipio Rand Security. Please give me some more water.’

‘In a minute.’ Purkiss held the bottle by the neck behind his back. The man, Ericson, was slumped against the wheel of the Audi. His hands were still tied.

‘What were your orders in regard to me?’

‘We were — ’ The man broke off, swallowed. ‘Told to make sure you went from the airport to… to our headquarters, and to accost you if you… seemed to be going somewhere else. More water, please.’

Purkiss tipped the bottle. Ericson gulped like a dog at a trough. Purkiss splashed a little over the man’s face and shoulders.

‘How did you know I was coming to Riyadh?’

Ericson shook his head. ‘I don’t know. We were just given orders.’

Purkiss made to open the driver’s door. Ericson gave a strangled gasp.

‘It’s true. Oh, Christ, I swear to you. I don’t… know.’

‘All right.’ Purkiss swung the bottle idly. ‘Scipio Rand. What’s its business?’

‘Security.’

‘I know that’s what it calls itself. But what does it do that’s not above board? That would cause it to send armed men to the airport, potentially to kidnap a visitor?’

Ericson fell silent, and for a moment Purkiss thought he was going to clam up again, until he realised the man was struggling to find a way to convey his meaning in as few words as possible. He fed Ericson some more water, a little more generously this time.

‘Scipio Rand provides a halfway house,’ the man managed, after a few seconds’ choking.

‘Explain,’ said Purkiss.

‘Transit,’ said Ericson, then shook his head in frustration. ‘Governments, and intelligence agencies, use our facilities here in Riyadh, and… elsewhere, to keep prisoners. Usually… ones on their way to some destination in another country.’

‘Which agencies?’ Purkiss let a note of urgency creep into his voice.

‘CIA and SIS, mostly.’ Ericson ran a crackling tongue over his lips, winced. ‘But the German and French outfits as well. The Turks, sometimes, and the Kuwaitis. Even the Russians, from time to time. It’s a… business thing. The money’s what counts.’

‘What work are you doing for the British at the moment?’

Again Ericson shook his head. ‘Nothing. But there was…’

This time Purkiss knew he’d broken off not because of his physical discomfort, but because he was heading into dangerous territory. Purkiss shook the water bottle before the man’s face, saw the pathetic shine in his eyes as he stared at the plastic.

Ericson went on hastily: ‘There was a time, back in 2006, when we were at our busiest. Weekly consignments of prisoners coming through. I was working there already, back then, and I was involved in the process.’

‘Prisoners from where?’

‘Iraq.’

Purkiss gave him some more water, wanting to keep the words flowing.

Ericson went on: ‘For a while, we were receiving batches of prisoners from Basra and Baghdad on a weekly basis. Sometimes single prisoners, more often groups of them. Captured combatants, suspected orchestrators of terror attacks in the country. We received them, held them if necessary, and shipped them out.’

‘Where to?’

‘Sometimes to Guantanamo, under the CIA. Some of them went to places like Egypt or Morocco. Renditioning. And others we shipped to Britain.’

Purkiss felt his pulse quicken. ‘Dennis Arkwright,’ he said. ‘Do you know him?’

Ericson closed his puffy eyes, nodded. ‘Arkwright was the liaison man from Britain. He was nominally an employee of Scipio Rand, but that was a cover. We didn’t know who he really worked for. I assumed he was with SIS or Five, though he didn’t look like an intelligence agent. More like a thug. He used to turn up here when we had a new shipment of prisoners come in, interrogate them briefly, and pick a few to be escorted back with him to the UK.’

‘Did anyone accompany him on his trips here?’ asked Purkiss.

‘No. He always came alone.’

Purkiss gazed off across the desert. Damn it, he’d thought it sounded promising at first, but it wasn’t really much at all. He was learning very little that was actually new.

‘These prisoners,’ he said. ‘How did they get here? Did Scipio Rand send escorts to Iraq to pick them up?’

‘No,’ Ericson said. He grimaced as he tried to make his arms more comfortable, secured as they were still behind his back. ‘They came with escorts of their own. Military.’

‘Coalition troops?’

‘I suppose so,’ said Ericson. ‘Though they were always British. And it was always the same pool of people. Different combinations at different times, but the same basic ten or so men.’

Something flickered at the periphery of Purkiss’s consciousness, something that darted away before he could get a grasp of it. ‘British soldiers,’ he said.

‘Yeah,’ said Ericson, and coughed. ‘Paras, as it happened.’

Purkiss went still. ‘Paras. The Parachute Battalion.’

‘Right. I know that because a couple of our boys are ex-Paras, and got chatting with them. I think it was Two Para, but I can’t remember.’

Purkiss felt the excitement rising, crackling inside him.

He squatted down before Ericson, fed him water, allowing him to drink his fill this time.

‘Ericson,’ he said. ‘Do you remember any of these men? The escorts? Their names, what they looked like?’

Ericson’s head lolled back against the car, his eyes narrow slits against the sun. ‘God… I don’t know. I don’t think I can — ’

Purkiss began to run through random names he made up as he went along.

‘Peter Tallis.’

‘I don’t think — no.’

‘Chris Major.’

‘No.’

‘Derek Thompson.’

‘No. I’m sorry, I really don’t — ’

‘Tony Kendrick.’

Ericson’s lips moved silently, his eyes still almost closed.

After a second, he said, ‘Yeah. That name rings a bell.’

Purkiss stood up. He turned away from the sitting man, his eyes ranging across the broad, clear sky.

One by one, the pieces started to fall into place.

Forty-three

Purkiss thought about taking Ericson straight to one of the city’s hospitals, but decided he was more likely to be stopped and asked for an explanation if he did so.

Instead, once back within the city limits, he pulled in alongside a bus shelter on a quiet residential road where there was nobody about, hauled the man out of the back seat, dumped him in the shelter, and dialled the emergency number. After establishing that the operator spoke English, Purkiss gave the street address and asked for an ambulance for a man suffering from heat stroke.

He left Ericson propped in the shelter. His wrists were still tied, but his legs weren’t, and he could easily have walked away. It didn’t matter. He was no threat to Purkiss now. His employers at Scipio rand would already know Purkiss was at large, and would be looking for him. They’d have the airport staked out, and probably have a welcoming committee waiting for him there.

Purkiss drove until he found himself in a run-down part of town, where the Audi’s shattered rear window wouldn’t be as conspicuous. He stopped again, sat behind the wheel, and ran over the connections in his head yet again.

Yes. It added up. There were some missing details, but most of it fitted together.

And he’d been blind.

He picked up his phone. The second call he made was to Vale.

‘John. Are you — ’

‘I’m operational.’ Purkiss took a moment to collect his thoughts. ‘Two things, Quentin. First, I need a chartered flight out of here. Preferably from a private airfield, if you can manage it, but if not, from one of the other commercial airports. I can’t go back to King Khalid. It’s being monitored, and this time I won’t get away.’

‘I can arrange that,’ said Vale.

‘The second thing is, tell Kasabian the person we’re looking for is Hannah Holley. She’s a Security Service agent I’ve been working with on this. She’s the person we need to apprehend. But she’ll have gone on the run.’

And Purkiss explained.

Forty-four

Monday morning came, and with it the increasingly pressing need for Emma to start getting things ready for the children’s return to school the following week. New uniforms, stationery, all the paraphernalia of a fresh school year.

She’d been planning to do it herself, but after Brian had left for work, she gave Ulyana the nanny a list and some money, and packed her off with the kids to get the necessary.

After finding the second bug, or whatever it was, in the lipstick tube yesterday, Emma’s instinct had been to turn the entire house upside down. But, mindful of her promise to meet Brian and the rest of the family in Hyde Park, she’d hurried away, her mind churning. She’d found them near the ponds, the children leaping and cartwheeling, Brian smiling and presenting her with a bouquet of flowers he’d bought. For a while, as they enjoyed the Sunday afternoon ambience, Emma had almost been able to put the other matter to one side. Almost.

But in the darkness of the bedroom that night, Brian snoring gently beside her, the fears had crowded in once more.

She had no doubt now that James had planted the tiny and strangely malevolent-looking objects in her lipstick and her handbag, and who knew where else. He’d done so during their trysts in the assorted hotel rooms they’d booked. But as for his reasons, Emma was utterly baffled. Didn’t he trust her in her role as personal physician to Sir Guy Strang? Was he listening to hear if she discussed Sir Guy’s health with her husband, her friends, her fellow doctors? She understood that as Sir Guy’s head of security, James had a responsibility to protect his boss; but this appeared to be taking the notion to ridiculous lengths.

Emma hardly slept, drifting off a couple of hours before dawn crept through the curtains. She was awoken abruptly, not by a noise but by a thought.

Was James spying on his own boss?

Befuddled by lack of sleep, Emma sat up, padded into the bathroom without waking Brian, and got in the shower. The cool water dragged her to full alertness. She returned to the thought.

Had James planted the objects — bugs, she supposed, though the word sounded silly — on her in order to eavesdrop on her conversations with Sir Guy? Again, it seemed ludicrous. James was closer to Sir Guy than almost anyone else she knew. Closer in many respects than Emma was. And surely James would have plenty of easier opportunities to listen in on his boss’s conversations than by going the convoluted route of planting bugs on Emma.

With Brian, Ulyana and the children gone, Emma set about systematically searching the rest of the house. She moved on to the garage, even the garden shed. Three hours later, sweaty, exhausted, she flopped down on a sofa.

Nothing.

She peered at the bug she’d found in the lipstick yesterday.

Should she confront James with it again? He’d shrugged off the one she’d shown him in the gallery yesterday; but then he would, wouldn’t he, if he’d planted it? He’d find it harder to deny the significance of a second such object, though.

But then what? Ought Emma to state her suspicions openly, to ask James directly if he’d been spying on her? He might open up, admit that it was a routine security procedure, and apologise. If that was the case, Emma might be able to understand, and forgive. But what if he continued to deny it? How could she carry on with him, with her doubts about his trustworthiness hanging between them?

A new thought flashed through her mind like a shock.

Sir Guy Strang was her employer. She had a responsibility to go straight to him with this.

But that would blow everything apart. She’d have to admit she was having an affair with his head of security. It would mean the end of her job, and possibly more than that. She might be prosecuted, for putting the security of the Service at risk in some way.

And it would cause irreparable harm to her marriage, and her family, f the truth about her and James came out.

Emma thought about James. Despite her intimacy with him, despite his warmth and his charm, there was something hidden, unknown about him. He had a tendency to clam up at the oddest times, which she’d always taken to be part of the necessarily cautious, secretive character a man in his position had to possess. Overall, she knew relatively little about him. He’d never been married, as far as she knew. He was a former soldier, a veteran of Iraq where he’d been injured, hence his scar. He’d been Sir Guy’s head of security since before Sir Guy assumed the top job three years earlier. And that was about it.

Emma felt unable to get up from the sofa, as though its fat leather embrace was pulling her down. She’d always hated passivity, indecision; hadn’t been able to afford either in her work as a doctor. But now she felt utterly helpless, trapped by her sunlit suburban surroundings, with no course of action open to her that wouldn’t lead to disaster one way or another.

The hell with it. She set her jaw.

If she didn’t bring the subject up with James again, she still wouldn’t be able to continue with him. Her mistrust of him would corrode what they had between them.

She’d confront him, and this time not allow herself to be fobbed off.

Emma considered reaching for her phone, but she was due to meet him that afternoon anyway. It could wait.

With the relief of a decision having been taken, she began to busy herself.

Forty-five

‘It’s pretty thin.’

Kasabian had insisted on meeting Purkiss and Vale at the Covent Garden flat rather than talking on the phone. She looked more haggard than usual, Purkiss thought.

Purkiss had boarded a flight at an airstrip east of Riyadh which looked like it was used by visiting nouveau riche. It had taken Vale an hour to procure it, and by the time the plane touched down at Heathrow it was after eight in the evening. Monday evening, Purkiss had to remind himself. The back-and-forth across time zones and the erratic sleep were confusing him slightly. He’d gone straight to the flat.

‘It’s the best lead we’ve got,’ said Purkiss.

Kasabian blew air out slowly, closed her eyes.

‘Let me get it straight. Hannah Holley is working with Strang.’

‘Yes.’

‘Your evidence being…’

Patiently, Purkiss ticked off the points on his fingers. ‘She conveniently had Morrow’s notebook, with Al-Bayati’s and Arkwright’s names in it. She was conveniently on the scene when the car bomb that killed Al-Bayati went off. She was there with me when Arkwright revealed Strang’s involvement in organising the torture of prisoners, and a few moments later we came under attack. I’m assuming she signalled the attacker somehow. She conveniently missed the flight to Riyadh, because she’d tipped off Scipio Rand that I was coming, and she knew I’d be walking into a death trap.’

Kasabian stared intently at a point Purkiss couldn’t see, as if she was trying the statements out for size. Then she shook her head.

‘Doesn’t fit. Why would she lead you to Arkwright if she knew he might implicate Strang?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Purkiss. ‘Perhaps she didn’t know he’d do that. Perhaps she was supposed to monitor the information he was giving me, and when he went too far, she signalled the gunman.’

‘But if she knows you’re on the trail of her boss, Strang, then why was she enacting this charade of helping you? Why did she appear just at the right time and save you from the bomb blast? Why not just let you die, or kill you herself, and have done with it?’

‘Again, I don’t know,’ Purkiss said. ‘She might have been trying to mislead me in some way, divert me down the wrong path. Or she might have been assigned to find out just how much I, and by association you, knew about Strang’s activities. When it became apparent that I was getting too close, she threw me to the wolves. Hence the ambush by the Scipio Rand people.’

Vale said, ‘Is there any record of this Holley being linked to Strang?’

‘No,’ said Kasabian distractedly. ‘Nothing direct. I don’t know her, personally, but naturally I’ve looked into her records since you called. She’s good. Top-notch work. Too young to have made a huge impact in the Service yet, but she’d have gone far. If it wasn’t for this.’ She ran a hand through her hair. ‘I’ve tried a GPS trace on her phone, but of course she’s destroyed it. She’s a professional. Finding her is going to be difficult.’

‘I have to do it,’ said Purkiss.

Kasabian, who’d been sprawled in an armchair, stood up abruptly. She held up both hands in a theatrical gesture of despair.

‘Jesus Christ, Purkiss. Why the hell did you fall in with her? And why didn’t you tell me? I could have vetted her. We might have found something.’

‘Hey.’ Purkiss was standing now, too, his anger a tone lower than hers. ‘You told me to find Morrow’s killer. You didn’t tell me how to do it, or whom I could or couldn’t work with. If you had, I wouldn’t have taken the job on. So a little less of the high-and-mighty attitude.’

She stared up into his face, her eyes wide. The moment hung between them, razor-keen, until Kasabian blinked and tipped her head.

‘So what do you propose?’

‘I was going to start by visiting her flat,’ Purkiss said. ‘I don’t know the address, but you’ll have it. There might be a clue there.’

‘Doubtful,’ said Kasabian. ‘She’s hardly likely to have left anything lying around that’ll tell you her whereabouts.’

‘But she might have left a trap there for me,’ said Purkiss. ‘She’ll assume I’ll search her place. And springing traps when you know they’re there can sometimes reveal things about the people who set them.’

He waited a moment, then: ‘Unless you can think of something else.’

Kasabian sighed. ‘Worth a try, I suppose.’

From his corner of the room, Vale said, ‘Is there any news on the official investigation into Morrow’s death?’

Kasabian shook her head. ‘No. They’re looking into cases he was currently involved with, but so far nothing’s come up. It’s creating a bit of a panic within the Service, to be honest. But Strang will be sitting pretty. All this flap just keeps the focus away from him.’

She and Vale left together, Purkiss remaining behind in the flat. As soon as they were out the door, Purkiss went over to the armchair Vale had been sitting in. Beneath a cushion, he found the memory stick left there.

Vale could have emailed the information, but emails might be intercepted.

Purkiss opened a laptop computer he’d bought on the way to the flat. He booted it up and inserted the memory stick into the port. A single file popped up.

Purkiss opened it. It was a Ministry of Defence document, which Vale had obtained with relatively ease, or so he’d said, through his SIS links. It listed all the personnel of the Parachute Regiment who’d served in Iraq during Operation Telic, the British campaign in the country which had lasted from the beginning of the invasion in March 2003 until the last troops had left in May 2011.

The Parachute Regiment was divided into three battalions, or four if you counted the Territorial Army one, which served as a reserve force for the other three. Most of the personnel had been there in the first six months, forming part of 16 Air Assault Brigade during the invasion itself and remaining in the immediate aftermath before being withdrawn back to Britain. As the occupation became ever more American-dominated, there was little record of repeated deployments of the three Para battalions in the country. Purkiss knew they’d mostly been diverted to that other arena, Afghanistan.

Which made it all the easier to spot the personnel who had returned.

There were around thirty in all. Glancing through the names, Purkiss noticed that every one of them had been involved in the initial invasion. It suggested that people with local knowledge of the country were being chosen to come back, for some purpose that wasn’t clear, as the document gave no indication of the type of operations the personnel were involved in.

Kendrick’s name was on the list. He’d returned to Iraq, to Baghdad this time instead of Basra where Purkiss had first met him, in late 2005, and remained there until 2007. That was when he’d left the armed forces, as Purkiss remembered.

Kendrick had told him he’d gone back to Iraq, but he hadn’t spoken much about his work there, and Purkiss had assumed it was routine peacekeeping duties.

Out in the desert in Saudi, Ericson had told Purkiss that Scipio Rand had received and processed Iraqi prisoners during 2006. He might have been wrong about the year — dehydration and heat stroke could do that — but the fact that he’d been so specific suggested to Purkiss that the year was the correct one.

Ericson had been less sure about which parachute battalion the prisoners’ escorts had come from — I think it was Two Para, he’d said — so Purkiss decided to stay on the safe side and include members of the other two battalions as well. He created a new document, and included the names of all Paras stationed in Iraq during 2006. There were fifteen of them in total.

A pool of ten or so, Ericson had said. It was about right.

Purkiss sent Vale a text message: Can you talk?

The reply came less than a minute later.

Yes.

Purkiss dialled. ‘Where are you?’ he said, when Vale answered.

‘On Millbank, heading for the tube,’ said Vale. ‘I’ve just left Kasabian.’

‘I need another favour,’ said Purkiss. ‘Can you track down contact details for some of the personnel on that list? Personal mobile numbers, home addresses, workplaces, whatever.’

‘Should be able to.’

‘Got a pen?’ said Purkiss. He listed fourteen of the names, spelling them where necessary, omitting Kendrick’s.

Half an hour later Vale rang back. ‘I’ve got them.’

He began to read them out. After Purkiss had transcribed half of them, he said: ‘Could you check out the other seven? Save a bit of time. I just want to know where they are now, what they’re doing. And if any of them would be available for interview.’

‘Can do,’ said Vale, ‘though it’s half past ten at night. The workplace numbers won’t be much use now.’

‘Let’s just see how far we get,’ said Purkiss.

He rang the first number on the list, which again had come courtesy of the Ministry of Defence via Vale’s SIS link. It was a home phone number for a Para named Hollingworth. The area code was outer London.

After six rings, just as Purkiss assumed the voicemail function was going to kick in, the receiver was snatched up and a woman’s voice said, ‘Hello?’

‘Good evening,’ said Purkiss. ‘Sorry to call so late. It’s nothing to worry about. I wonder if I might speak to Mr Terence Hollingsworth?’

The silence on the other end went on for so long that Purkiss wondered if he’d been cut off. Then he heard the choking sob.

‘Madam?’ he said.

He heard another voice, also a woman’s, and the rustling of the receiver being taken by someone else. ‘Who is this, please?’

‘I’m an associate of Terence Hollingsworth. I need to speak to him urgently.’

The silence was briefer this time. The new woman’s voice said, ‘I’m assuming you don’t know.’

‘Know what?’

‘Terry Hollingsworth was in a climbing accident last week Thursday. He’s… he’s dead. His wife isn’t really up to speaking to anyone right now, especially this time of night.’ The woman’s voice grew firmer. ‘Who did you say you were again?’

Purkiss ended the call.

He dialled the next number. It was a military barracks in Colchester, Essex.

The woman who answered was clipped, professional. Purkiss introduced himself as a solicitor.

‘I’m trying to locate a Darren Wallace as a matter of urgency.’

The woman asked him to hold. She returned a minute later.

‘Sir? I’m afraid I have some unfortunate news. Sergeant Wallace is no longer with us.’

‘Could you perhaps tell me his new address? It’s — ’

‘No, I’m afraid you misunderstand me.’ She kept up the professionally detached tone well, Purkiss noticed distantly. ‘Sergeant Wallace is dead. He and four other military personnel were involved in a fatal motorway collision last month. If you’d like to speak to — ’

Again, Purkiss ended the call.

He rang Vale.

‘Quentin, there’s a problem.’

‘I know,’ said Vale.

Forty-six

They decided together that ringing around and having to find out from grieving relatives that their spouses or sons were dead, was neither the most humane nor the most efficient way of doing it.

Instead, Vale suggested trying his SIS contact once more. The person, whoever it was, had some kind of liaison role with the Ministry of Defence, and the MoD was under instructions to cooperate fully. Purkiss imagined that rankled.

‘I’ll ask for up-to-date records of all military personnel recently deceased,’ said Vale. ‘It won’t capture everyone on the list, because many of these men will have already left the Forces. But it’ll whittle it down.’

While Purkiss waited, his skin crawling in frustration, he thought about what he and Vale had discovered. Six former Paras so far, all of whom had been in Iraq in 2006, turned out to have died within the last two weeks. They’d succumbed to an assortment of fates: car accidents, drive-by shootings, falling in front of a tube train while drunk. And then there was Kendrick, not quite dead, having been shot in the head. Some of the deaths were made to look like accidents, but in others there’d been no attempt to pretend that anything but a deliberate killing had occurred. It was as if the priority was to get these men dead by whatever means were available, and if that meant murder in broad daylight, then so be it.

Purkiss used the waiting time to limber up. His left arm was sore and stiff from the bite he’d sustained, and he had a mild sunburn from the desert. He rode out the pain, doing press ups, sit ups and squats, adrenaline and the caffeine he’d drunk making him feel wired and edgy.

At a little before midnight, the city outside calmed if not slumbering, Purkiss’s phone rang.

Vale said: ‘Of the remaining eight men, we have confirmation that four are dead. Two were with your man, Wallace, in that collision on the motorway. Two were gunned down outside a nightclub in Dartford. That last pair were no longer in the military, but I got someone in the Work and Pensions Department out of bed to check on them.’

Purkiss whistled silently. ‘Great work, Quentin. The others?’

‘No record that they’re dead, or alive. But…’

Purkiss waited.

‘One of the names. Tullivant. He’s got an interesting connection,’ said Vale.

‘Connection.’

‘With none other than Sir Guy Strang.’

Purkiss listened as Vale explained. At the end, he realised he was gripping the phone hard enough to make the plastic squeak.

‘My God,’ murmured Purkiss.

‘Quite.’

And there it was. The way in, at last.

Forty-seven

It should have been perfect, an occasion for Emma to savour.

She and James had previously arranged to meet that Monday evening at nine, in a pub across the river from the headquarters at Thames House. As usual, Emma contrived a call-out to attend to Sir Guy — it was becoming increasingly easy; now that he’d apparently had a run of heart problems, she could just say he’d had a relapse and needed her attention — and greeted Brian at the door to say she was going out. Furthermore, Brian tentatively asked if she minded if he went out for a drink himself with some of his sporting friends that evening, and of course she said yes. It meant she could enjoy her time with James without the constant, niggling guilt tugging at her, the knowledge that Brian was alone at home with the children. Ulyana had said she could stay overnight if necessary to be with the kids, so all the arrangements were in place.

Except that Emma set off for central London with dread bearing down on her like a physical presence.

She considered, as she walked to the tube station, putting off confronting James with the second bug she’d found, at least until after they’d made love. But she wouldn’t be able to relax, to let herself go, and he’d know something was wrong. Better to clear the air at the outset, she thought. If clearing the air was what she was going to achieve, and she had her doubts.

The tube train was crowded on a Monday evening, the air stuffy with hot bodies and poor ventilation, and Emma found herself standing, gripping one of the poles for support and sandwiched in between two other commuters.

It was at Fulham Broadway, as the doors were sliding open, that she felt the arm round her waist, the hand on her arm tugging her towards the doors. Before she could gasp, she heard James’s voice in her ear.

‘It’s me. Come on, we’re getting off.’

Too startled to reply, she allowed herself to be steered down onto the platform. She turned to look at James but he nodded towards the exit, his face grim.

‘Let’s go.’

They marched through the press of passengers towards the stairs, then the escalators. Emma felt panic rising in her.

‘James, what — ’

‘Don’t say anything. Keep moving.’

He hustled her through the exit barriers and out onto the street. A few yards down the road, they stopped at a car, a black BMW. James pushed her into the passenger seat, then started the engine.

She stared at him wordlessly.

Once he was out on the road, he glanced across at her.

‘I’m sorry about that,’ he said.

‘You followed me?’

James ignored that. ‘I need to talk to you,’ he said.

‘I found another bug,’ Emma blurted angrily. ‘One of those things you’ve been hiding in my handbag, in my lipstick. Why, James? Is it just what you do? Spies, spooks, whatever you call yourself? Do you just tag and eavesdrop on people because it’s second nature to you?’

Again he didn’t reply.

‘James.’ Fury was smothering her fear. ‘I need answers. Now.’

He sighed, his eyes on the road ahead. ‘Yes. I planted those devices.’

Emma felt an immediate, immense rush of feeling, though its exact nature wasn’t clear. It wasn’t relief, that was for sure.

‘Why?’

‘Because I needed to find something out.’

‘For God’s sake.’ She felt her voice rising, nudging the lower reaches of hysteria. ‘Enough of the cryptic comments. Just — tell me.’

He was turning down streets unfamiliar to Emma. Darkened, silent residential streets with rows of terraced houses.

‘James, where are you taking me?’ Her voice was suddenly thinner, less bold.

In his temple, a taut ridge of muscle bulged.

‘James…’

This time it was a whisper.

Forty-eight

Dr Emma Goddard.

Purkiss looked at her picture on his phone. She was registered on the General Medical Council’s website as a family doctor of seven years’ standing. There was no photo, but she’d published a couple of research papers through Imperial College London and her mugshot was on the university webpage.

The picture was that of a pretty, coolly confident blonde woman in her mid-thirties. Below it was a brief blurb: she was married with two children, and worked as a general practitioner in south-west London.

That last part was out of date. But the university website could hardly mention that Dr Goddard was the personal physician to the director of MI5, Sir Guy Strang.

Her home address was, surprisingly, still listed on the GMC site. It was in Wimbledon. Purkiss memorised it, then looked at his watch.

A quarter past twelve.

If Dr Emma Goddard was at home right now, she’d be in bed next to her husband. If she wasn’t home, she’d either be at one of those innumerable conferences Purkiss knew doctors were always attending, somewhere in Britain or abroad; or she’d be at the bedside of her principal patient, Sir Guy Strang.

Wimbledon was his only realistic destination.

Purkiss rang a minicab firm, offering a substantial bonus if they arrived to pick him up within fifteen minutes. Then he rang Vale once more.

Eight minutes later he heard the note of the taxi’s horn outside.

He used the time in the back of the cab to flex his wrists and fingers, centre himself on the job at hand. The job was to locate Dr Emma Goddard and remove her for interrogation in regard to her role as Sir Guy Strang’s physician. More specifically, in regard to her relationship with the former parachute battalion captain, Tullivant.

Purkiss was aware the job would likely involve kidnapping.

He stopped the driver well clear of the actual address, paid him, and set off across the common. The night sky was clear, as it had been for the last six or seven weeks. It wasn’t the majestic star-speckled dome Purkiss had glimpsed briefly outside Riyadh, but it was a cosily British version thereof, the galaxies and occasional flaring dominant stars altogether closer and more intimate than their Gulf counterparts.

The house was in darkness.

Purkiss circled it using varying routes and loops. It was a stylish suburban detached property, set on the slope of what was probably Wimbledon’s closest approximation to a hill. There was a copious front lawn, even a swimming pool.

But there were no lights, either downstairs or upstairs.

It wasn’t unusual. Monday, after midnight… most professionals, most working people of any kind, would have turned in for the night.

If Dr Goddard was home, was it likely she’d be alone? Hardly. She was married with a family, and it was a week night.

Purkiss’s phone buzzed.

It was Vale. He recited a cell phone number. Dr Emma Goddard’s personal one.

‘The phone company was not happy,’ Vale murmured. ‘Nor were my SIS contacts.’

‘That’s too bad,’ said Purkiss.

‘I only mention it because I may be approaching the limits of my influence for the time being.’

‘Understood,’ Purkiss said. ‘Thanks.’

Watching the silent house from his position in the shadow of a hedge bordering the front lawn, he dialled Dr Goddard’s number.

It rang once. Twice.

A third time.

Purkiss pictured her floundering up from a deep sleep, grabbing at the phone on a bedside table to silence it.

But the voice, when it came, wasn’t befuddled by drowsiness. It was wide awake. And hesitant.

‘Yes?’

‘Dr Emma Goddard?’

‘Yes?’

Keeping his voice low, Purkiss said, ‘Dr Goddard, listen carefully. Don’t ask who I am or react with surprise in any way, if there’s anyone there with you. Just listen. Your life may be in danger. Are you at home at the moment? Answer simply yes or no.’

‘No.’

‘At work?’

‘Yes.’

‘Attending Sir Guy Strang?’

There was a moment’s pause. Purkiss strained his ears. Was there the trace of another voice in the background? A man’s?

Then she said, ‘Yes.’

‘At Thames House?’

Again, the briefest hesitation.

‘Yes.’

Lowering his voice almost to a whisper, Purkiss said rapidly: ‘When I finish speaking, tell me you’ll call me in the morning, that it’s a bit late now. Then, after I’ve rung off, tell whoever’s there with you that I was a lawyer asking if you’d consider being an expert witness in a forthcoming trial. Embellish it as much or as little as you need, but don’t get tripped up in a contradiction. After that, I want you to find a reason to get out of the building. Say you need some air, that you need a smoke, even if you don’t… anything, no matter how suspicious it looks. The important thing is to get out of that building. You’ll receive further instructions once you’re outside. Do I need to repeat any of that?’

‘No.’

‘Tell me you’ll call me in the morning.’

She repeated the words he’d given her.

The line went dead.

Purkiss walked out onto the pavement in front of the house, took the SIM card from the phone, dropped it and ground it under his heel. He threw the phone between the bars of a drainage grille a little further along the road. From inside his jacket he took another phone, one of two extra prepaid ones he carried on him which he hadn’t used before, and punched in Vale’s number.

‘New phone,’ said Vale.

‘Yes. I’ve just had a conversation with Dr Goddard. She was speaking under some kind of duress. I suspect she was being coached what to say.’

Purkiss had got rid of the other phone in case whoever it was that was with Goddard ran a trace on the number. He relayed the exchange he’d had with the doctor to Vale.

‘I need another favour, Quentin.’

‘I know what you’re going to ask for,’ said Vale.

‘A GPS fix on Dr Goddard’s phone. She’s not at Thames House.’

‘Quite.’

‘Can you swing it?’

‘I said I was approaching the limit of my influence,’ said Vale. ‘I didn’t say I was there yet.’

Forty-nine

The ability to make split-second decisions, to allow the unconscious judgement to take over and control one’s actions unimpeded by the delaying effects of conscious thought, was something Emma had found difficult to give expression to in the early days of her medical training. But it was an essential attribute for a doctor.

You had to weigh up consequences, of course, and apply a weight of knowledge in clinical settings which could only be gained through dogged study over many years. But sometimes you had to trust your instinct, trust the idea that all of that knowledge had seeped down into the deeper layers of your psyche and had been assimilated there into plans of action.

Emma knew the hazards of leaping out of a moving vehicle, even in relatively light traffic. She’d seen enough road traffic accidents that she’d ceased to be surprised at the variety of ways in which the human body could be damaged by colliding at speed with tarmac or concrete.

She also knew that she’d be dead if she didn’t take the risk.

James had turned on to a straight street lined by terraces and was picking up speed. If she jumped out now, she’d be more likely to hurt herself. On the other hand, if she waited till the car slowed down again, James would more easily come after her.

Emma drew a deep breath.

She dropped her hand to the clasp of the seatbelt, popped the button, and grabbed at the door handle, ramming her shoulder against the door at the same time.

It didn’t budge.

Emma pounded her shoulder against the door, desperately aware of how futile it was. Of course he’d locked the doors.

James looked across at her.

‘For God’s sake, calm down,’ he muttered.

She stared back at him. Suddenly she hated him: for his deceitfulness, for the way he’d violated her privacy with his listening devices. For the way he was keeping her prisoner.

For talking to her as though she was a hysterical woman, out of control.

Vaguely aware of the stupidity of what she was doing, Emma grabbed the handbrake and yanked it up.

The BMW rocked, its rear slewing round in a peal of rubber against tarmac. James’s yell was lost in the howl of a horn as a car veered past, its lights flashing across Emma’s vision. Emma was flung against the door, and she felt a jarring impact as the wheel on one side struck the edge of the kerb.

The car had stalled. Emma scrabbled at the door release, felt a surge of hope as the door yielded, the locking mechanism having been disabled. She tumbled out onto hard pavement, her arm barely breaking her fall.

She felt James’s hand close around her ankle.

Emma lashed and twisted her leg at the same time, felt his grip falter, kicked backwards. Her foot connected with some part of him, perhaps his chest, and she was able to wrench her leg free; but her shoe came off.

Emma crawled a few yards, rising to her knees and then stumbling down the pavement, aware how hobbled she was by the missing shoe. Awkwardly she bent and pulled the other one off, before breaking into a run.

A man walking his dog turned in surprise as she passed.

Please, Emma thought, let this look like what it is — a man chasing a woman with the intent to harm her — and let someone intervene.

Two teenage boys in hoodies were loping towards her. She considered appealing to them, asking for their protection, but their glinting eyes beneath their hoods and the peaks of their caps made her decide against it. Their laughter trailed after her.

Behind her, Emma could hear footsteps approaching rapidly.

Should she bang on one of the doors of the houses? It was nine o’clock, early still, and most of the windows had lights on. But what if nobody answered? She’d be trapped.

‘Emma,’ came James’s voice, urgent, shockingly close behind her.

It drove her on, even though she knew she couldn’t outrun him. She was in her bare feet, and while she was in reasonable, gym-honed shape, James was an athlete, a soldier, a man of action. He’d catch her, overpower her… then what?

Unknown horrors made the adrenaline flare, and Emma felt her legs respond, her bare feet not feeling the cracked and stubbled pavement beneath them. She sprinted towards an intersection ahead. If she could make it between the cars and across the road at the right time, the traffic might slow James a little, and give her an advantage, however slight.

He seemed to have sensed her intention because she heard his footsteps quicken behind her. As the junction approached, the cross-traffic cruising past in either direction at a steady speed, Emma spotted a long-necked beer bottle propped on a gatepost to her right. She lunged for it, felt its heft — it was still half-full, left there by some addled passerby — and, barely breaking her stride, whirled round, swinging the bottle in a backhand movement.

Whether because of instinct or luck, James was exactly where she’d sensed him to be. The bottle connected with the side of his head, not hard enough to shatter the glass but sufficiently solidly that Emma felt the blow shiver down her arm. The warm, rancid beer spilled over her hand and sleeve. James rocked sideways, stumbling.

Emma turned and put all her effort into her legs, hurtling towards the road. Already she could see cars braking in anticipation. Her eyes automatically mapped out a trajectory that would — might — take her safely between the vehicles to the other side.

The tackle caught the backs of her legs, James’s full weight barrelling into her and sending her sprawling, her hands not quick enough fully to cushion the impact so that her chin snapped against the pavement and flashes erupted before her eyes.

Copper blood bloomed in Emma’s mouth as she felt James grab her under her arms and haul her up and lead her away.

Fifty

‘Emma.’

She couldn’t look up at his face, couldn’t bear what she’d see there. On the other hand, if she didn’t look at him, she’d be unprepared for what was about to come.

She was torn.

Still dazed from the collision between her jaw and the pavement, Emma had allowed herself to be bundled back down the road towards the BMW. She could have struggled, made a public spectacle; there seemed to be more people about under the streetlamps than there had been when she’d been running. But James had pressed close, murmuring in her ear, ‘Don’t cry out, and don’t fight me. Or I’ll have to hurt you,’ and she’d complied.

The BMW was still in working order. Emma sat staring dully through the windscreen as they travelled a few more blocks. Part of the way up a hill, James pulled in and killed the engine.

Emma let him help her from her seat and towards a house, this one at the end of a terrace and in darkness. He unlocked the door and pushed her gently ahead of him. She began moving along a corridor in the direction of what looked like a living room but he said, ‘No. Down here.’

James pushed open a door to the right. Beyond it, stone steps led down towards, presumably, a cellar.

At the bottom, James flicked a switch, producing bright light. The room was clean and bare, with nothing in it but a pair of foldable chairs propped against one wall. He brought them over and opened them up, taking Emma by the shoulders and lowering her into one of them. He stood by his, but didn’t sit.

‘Emma. I’m sorry about this.’

She said nothing. The faint noises of the city were barely audible down here.

‘Sorry I had to plant those devices on you.’

Had to? she thought.

‘And I’m sorry about all this, tonight.’

Something in his voice made her slowly raise her gaze to his face.

‘I really didn’t mean to hurt you. And I’m not going to hurt you any more. Not physically, anyway. But there’s something I’m going to tell you that you’ll find deeply upsetting. Once again, I’m sorry to have to be the one to do so.’

There was genuine sympathy in his voice, Emma realised. And when she stared at his eyes, they weren’t hostile.

James said: ‘It’s about your husband.’

‘Brian?’ She never used his name in James’s presence. Absurdly, to do so had always seemed to compound her betrayal of him. But this was different. She was hardly in a clinch with James at the moment. Nor would she ever be again.

As if he’d been waiting until he got a response from her, James sat down. He leaned forward, his legs splayed, his forearms resting on his knees. His eyes peered at her intently.

‘How much has he told you about his time in the armed forces?’

Despite her fear, Emma found herself remembering the exasperation she’d felt at Brian’s caginess when it came to his military years. The chuckling way he’d tended to change the subject. She’d always assumed he’d had experiences he’d rather forget, and she didn’t press him; but at the same time she’d felt slightly resentful that she was always forthcoming with the gory details of her own work, yet he kept his from her.

‘Not much,’ Emma said. ‘He spent time in Iraq, which was a worry, of course. Then, when we discovered I was pregnant with our eldest, he left.’

James would have been in Iraq around the same time Brian was serving there, she knew. Sometimes she’d wondered if the two men had ever met, but she’d avoided asking James. She wanted them to be unconnected in every way.

‘And then he became a sports coach at a boys’ school.’ James watched her carefully.

Emma shrugged. ‘He’s always been a very physical person. After he’d left the Paras he was never going to take a desk job.’

‘Those weekend coaching sessions. Those rugby trips away for a few days. Have you ever wondered about them, Emma?’

‘What?’ The brightness of the room, the faint mustiness suggesting the cellar wasn’t used much, the panic and confusion of the last hour, all began to make Emma feel disorientated. ‘You mean, have I ever suspected Brian was lying about them? That he was having an affair, or something?’

The idea was ludicrous. Gentle family men like Brian didn’t have affairs. Unappreciative, needy, chronically dissatisfied women like Emma, on the other hand, did, she thought with a pang of self-loathing.

James’s gaze was unnerving her. He said: ‘I don’t mean an affair.’

She waited for more. Instead, he glanced away for a moment.

‘Those devices I planted on you,’ he said. ‘The bugs. They weren’t meant for you. They were intended for your husband. To monitor what he was saying.’

Her mouth opened, stayed that way though no words came out.

James went on: ‘It would have been easier to wire up your house. But he’d have found the devices. He’ll be sweeping the home regularly for audio surveillance.’

Despite herself, Emma let out a laugh. ‘Brian? Sweeping for — that’s ridiculous.’

‘Emma, listen to me. Your husband isn’t who you think he is. He’s been deceiving you. And so have I.’ He clenched his teeth for a moment as though trying to bite back his words. ‘Your husband has been under my surveillance for the last six months. He’s — ’

‘Wait a minute.’ Emma realised she’d half-risen from the chair. James made a sitting motion with his hands and unconsciously she obeyed. ‘You’re telling me that you and I — our affair — was just… cover? That you used me only to get to Brian?’

‘No.’ His voice was emphatic. ‘It was more than that. Much more. I like you, Emma. I’m strongly attracted to you. I’ve enjoyed our time together as much as I’ve always made obvious. None of that was faked.’

‘But that was all just a happy extra,’ she whispered. ‘A perk along the way. The main thing was to get to my husband.’

He watched her silently for a few seconds, then: ‘Yes. Essentially.’

‘You bastard.’

She rose fully from her chair this time. Her palm cracked across his cheek. His head flinched sideways, but he kept his arms down. Slowly he turned his face towards Emma again, a furious red mark growing on his cheek.

She sat down. Somewhere, deep down, there was rage, and humiliation, and a guilt so corrosive it was a wonder it wasn’t eating her inside out. But at the moment all she was aware of was a grey numbness.

‘Why the surveillance?’ she said dully. ‘What’s Brian supposed to have done?’

Again, though James’s face was burning from the slap, Emma saw unfeigned compassion there.

‘Bad things, Emma,’ he murmured. ‘Things which are so terrible, you’ll understand why I did what I did. Even if you never forgive me — and I can understand why you wouldn’t — you’ll at least understand.’

Brian’s face appeared in her mind’s eye. So reassuring. So bland and unthreatening. Cold terror clutched at her gut. Oh God. Not… something to do with the schoolboys he coached? Not that.

James said: ‘Brian Tullivant is a murderer.’

Fifty-one

When Tullivant realised what had happened, he cursed himself for an idiot.

Should have seen that one coming.

He was seated outside a café on the South Bank, two hundred yards from the entrance to the pub, the babbling summer-evening crowds providing a perfect screen which would render him all but invisible. His Mazda was parked round the back in a side street. The display on his watch said it was five past nine.

He’d been there twenty minutes. When he’d got home and Emma had given him her usual spiel about how she’d been called out, he’d glanced at the clock on the kitchen wall and estimated she was going to be late for her nine p.m. meeting with James Cromer. And by the looks of it, he was right.

Tullivant had allowed Emma ten minutes, then told Ulyana he was going out with some friends for a drink. She was happy enough, with her chocolate and her television programmes, especially now that the kids were in bed. Tullivant had taken the car and headed north into the city, towards the pub across the river from Thames House.

It had taken some fairly simple work on Tullivant’s part to ensure that both Emma’s phones — her usual one, and the one she used to communicate with Cromer, which she assumed Tullivant didn’t know about — transmitted a copy of all text messages, both received and sent, to Tullivant’s own handset. The dates, times and locations of the lovers’ trysts were all noted.

When, yesterday, Cromer had summoned her to meet him at the Tate Modern, Tullivant had been intrigued. They could hardly engage in a quick bout of passion in such a public place, surely? So he’d accompanied Ulyana and the children part of the way to the park, had told them he’d catch up with them after he’d diverted to one or two shops, and had tracked Emma to the Tate. There, he’d seen her huddled with Cromer, and dropping an object into his hand.

That was when he knew she’d found one or other of the bugs which Cromer had been planting on her. And that was when Tullivant realised events were moving into a new phase.

Tonight, he expected Cromer to come clean to Emma. To tell her that her faithful, doting husband was the target of a surveillance campaign by the Security Service. And that could prove fatal, not just for Tullivant himself but for the entire operation. So he needed to make a move on Cromer tonight, and silence him.

By twenty past nine, Tullivant had seen neither Cromer nor Emma enter the pub. Cromer might have arrived there much earlier; but it was unlike Emma to be as late as this.

Tullivant took out his phone and brought up the screen which showed him a tracking beacon for Emma’s own phone. He didn’t use it much, though he did usually check that she’d arrived at her meetings with Cromer at the appointed locations.

The gently pulsing orange dot of the beacon appeared after a few seconds, just as Tullivant was beginning to assume that it wasn’t going to show up, which would mean Emma was still underground on the train and therefore not giving off a detectable signal. But instead of identifying the location of her phone as a few hundred yards away from Tullivant, the beacon’s signal was coming from somewhere four miles away, in Fulham.

Tullivant rose and began striding in the direction of his car. So Cromer had anticipated that Tullivant might close in tonight, and had taken the precaution of intercepting Emma on the tube and diverting her from her planned destination. It was clever, Tullivant had to admit. Far cleverer than Cromer’s cack-handed attempts at audio surveillance had proven, with his hastily planted bugs.

But Cromer might not know that Tullivant had a GPS lock on his wife’s phone.

As Tullivant walked, he studied the beacon on the screen. It was moving, though it was impossible to tell whether the phone it was coming from, and by extension Emma, was in a vehicle or on foot. Tullivant had to assume it was a car.

He reached his Mazda and started the engine, propping the phone in a holder on the dashboard so that he could watch the progress of the beacon on the screen. It was going to be tricky, negotiating inner London’s notoriously convoluted streets in pursuit of a moving target.

As he drove, Tullivant centred himself, controlling his breathing, focusing on the remaining goals. They presented themselves in his mind with sharp, brittle clarity.

The first was to dispose of Cromer. That would be relatively easy.

The second was to neutralise Emma. This one would be harder to achieve, for all sorts of reasons.

The third of his goals was to terminate John Purkiss.

Tullivant had been told yesterday: Purkiss is no longer part of the game. You don’t have to concern yourself with him now. But they had seriously underestimated Purkiss. All of them had, Tullivant included. The fools out there in the desert at Scipio Rand had failed to deal with him; and now he was back, and a significant threat as long as he remained alive, even if he appeared to be pursuing the wrong lead.

Yes; terminating Purkiss was going to be the most difficult task of all.

Fifty-two

The floor of the cellar tilted, the walls looming in, curving.

James was simultaneously nearby and distant, his voice seeming to echo thinly in another room. Emma didn’t look at him, couldn’t, as if to do so would be to bring into final, unbearable focus the reality she was trying to comprehend only indirectly.

‘The car bomb on Saturday, in Lewisham,’ James said softly. ‘That was Brian.’

The words punched her one after the other, the absurdity of them not softening the blows.

Emma felt a tiny flicker of hope within her. She raised her head, still not looking into James’s face, and said: ‘He couldn’t have done that. He was coaching sport that morning. He left home early.’

Into the silence that followed, a terrible understanding dropped and spread like ink in a pool of water.

Brian had said he was coaching sport. But how did she know?

One by one, the realisations came crowding in, too many for her to deal with. The weekend trips on rugby or cricket tours. The late evenings at away matches. The staff meetings, at what now seemed excessively early hours in the morning.

Could they all have been lies? All of them? Was it possible?

Emma knew Brian’s teaching job was genuine; she’d met colleagues of his, had accompanied him to the occasional work do. But she’d never questioned his out-of-hour and weekend commitments, because she’d been too absorbed in her own life, in her work and her affair with James, to take any interest.

My children’s father is a murderer.

The though convulsed her stomach. She turned her head to one side as James rose from his chair opposite in alarm. Emma hadn’t eaten since lunch, ten hours earlier, but what came up was enough to spatter her hand and the rough stone floor.

James was at her side, his hands on her shoulders. She closed her eyes, cringing from his touch, the sour sting of the bile in her nose and mouth humiliating her.

‘I’m sorry,’ he murmured close to her ear. ‘I’ll get some water.’

Before Emma could protest, could insist that she be allowed to find a bathroom in the house and clean herself up, James had disappeared up the cellar stairs. She heard the door at the top clothes, and the unmistakable metal sound of a bolt being slid home.

Through her shock and despair, Emma was aware of the anger returning.

So, he was keeping her a prisoner here.

There wasn’t much Emma could do except wait, so she turned the chair with her back to the evidence of her retching and hunched over.

It occurred to her that she had her phone on her. James hadn’t confiscated that. But whom could she call? Brian? Hardly. The police? James probably had influence over them.

Emma realised she’d never been so alone in her life.

A thought struck her. The children. Jack and Niamh. She had to get them to safety.

The glass of her watch had been cracked when James had tackled her in the street, but the mechanism seemed to be working fine. It was a quarter past ten. Ulyana would be home with the kids. Brian would still be out in the pub with his friends.

Except he probably wasn’t out socialising, of course. He was somewhere secret, doing God knew what.

Emma had her fingertips on the phone in her pocket when James came down the steps, carrying a steaming bucket by the handle in on hand, a mop and cloths in the other, together with a half-litre bottle of mineral water.

When he saw her, he dumped the bucket on the floor and hurried across. He snatched the phone from her.

‘Who have you called?’ he demanded.

Emma stepped back in terror, the backs of her legs nudging the chair. ‘No-one — ’

‘Who have you called?’

‘No-one, I said.’ Her voice had risen with his. ‘I was going to tell the nanny to take the children and get out.’

‘No.’ James shoved her phone into his own pocket and tossed the water bottle to her. He seized the mop and began swabbing the stained floor. ‘It would just tip him off.’

‘Damn it, James. They’re my children — ’

‘They’re in no danger.’ He scrubbed angrily at the stone, as though peeling vegetables. ‘Tullivant — Brian — isn’t an indiscriminate killer. He’s go no reason to harm them. If you talk to the nanny, she might tell him, and the game will be up.’

Emma had been taking a long draught of water. She lowered the bottle and stared at him. ‘The game?’

James pushed the bucket aside, propping the mop in it. ‘I’m close, Emma. Close to trapping Tullivant. Given all that’s happened in the last few days, he’s bound to slip up. Bound to make a mistake somewhere. Say something he didn’t mean to. Then I’ve got him. Then I can bring him down. Put a stop to all the killing.’ He faced her squarely. ‘But I need your help. You’ve got to go back. Pretend nothing’s happened. Get him to incriminate himself somehow.’

She continued to gaze at him, barely able to breathe. ‘Go back.’

‘You have to.’

‘And carry on as before.’

‘It’s the only way.’ He gave a half-shrug.

‘You must be out of your bloody mind.’

‘Emma — ’

‘You kidnap me. Imprison me in a cellar. Tell me my marriage is a lie, my husband is a multiple killer. And now you want me to return to him, and share a house with him, all so that you can use me to ensnare him for your own ends.’

‘Not my ends, Emma. Those of all of us.’

‘The answer’s no, James. I’m not going to play any part in this. Not for you, not for anyone.’

He sighed. Yet again, the concern on his face looked real.

‘Emma, how else are you going to be able to get your children away?’

Terror for Jack and Niamh blazed within her. Her legs faltered and she sat down on the chair, almost overturning it.

‘You have to,’ she whispered. ‘You, the police… whoever. You have to go in there and get them out. Now.’

‘I’m sorry, Emma.’ Now his gentle tone had an undercurrent of hardness. ‘That’s not going to happen.’

‘Then I’m going,’ she said, rising once more.

‘Emma.’ He stepped between her and the stairs.

‘Get out of my way, James,’ she said. ‘Or I’ll scream. And you said you didn’t want to hurt me. You’ll have to hurt me, badly, to make me stop.’

She made to push past him but he blocked her easily, catching her wrist. Emma opened her mouth to yell.

And heard the noise, faint and distant, yet sharp enough to penetrate the closed door at the top of the cellar stairs.

It was the sound of glass breaking.

‘God,’ James breathed.

Fifty-three

By the time Tullivant reached Fulham, the tracking beacon on the screen had remained stationary for some time, in a location just off Parson’s Green. Tullivant didn’t know the area all that well, so he chose his route by instinct, taking the occasional wrong turn but generally homing in.

Because he didn’t know exactly where he was heading, he knew it was a risk to take the car right up to the location marked by the beacon, in case his arrival was easily noted. On the other hand, he wanted to be close enough to his vehicle to be able to access it quickly if necessary. He zoomed in on the display until the names of the individual streets became visible.

The beacon pulsed alongside one of the streets. It suggested that Emma, or Emma’s phone in any case, was inside a building. And probably a house, since this was a residential area. A safe house of some kind, then. One of many that the Security Service would operate throughout the city, and indeed the whole country.

Compromising, Tullivant pulled over at the side of the road under a street lamp two blocks away, and got out. He considered taking the Timberwolf in its bag, which he had stowed in its compartment under the seat, but decided against it. This was more likely to be a close-range job.

Inside his leather jacket he had a Heckler amp; Koch nine millimetre pistol with a spare magazine.

The few passersby didn’t give him a second glance. Cupping his phone in one hand to shield the blue light from the display, Tullivant headed in the direction of the beacon.

At the foot of a hill, he stopped. It was the end-of-terrace house on the left, if the GPS tracking signal was accurate. And he had no reason to believe it wasn’t.

The house appeared to be in darkness. Heavy curtains hung before all the visible windows, so it was possible there was illumination within which was being prevented from escaping.

After standing completely still for two minutes, absorbing the sights and sounds around him, Tullivant detected no tell-tale signs o an ambush, no obvious security measures.

He crept up to the front of the house, one hand inside his jacket and on the grip of the pistol.

Beside the front door, a frosted glass window gave onto a corridor. He’d been wrong; this window wasn’t curtained. And he could see no light beyond.

Tullivant drew a pair of thin rubber surgical gloves from the pocket of his leather coat and pulled them on. From another pocket he took a balaclava, and he fitted it over his head.

Holding his breath, Tullivant turned the doorknob and applied gentle pressure.

It was locked. There was no sudden blare of an alarm from within.

Tullivant put his shoulder to the window beside the door and leaned. The glass gave a little, creaking, before a splintering crack made him wince at its loudness.

He stopped, listening.

From somewhere inside, he heard raised voices. A woman’s, and overlapping with it a man’s, lower, more placating. Tullivant strained to hear, but was unable to make out what they were saying. There was a door between him and the voices; at least one.

With his leather-clad elbow he knocked out the window glass. The clattering of the shards on the hard floor inside might as well have been a hailstorm on the roof.

The voices had stopped.

Tullivant reached quickly through the smashed window, ignoring the pricks of jagged points against his rubber-clad hands. He groped for the latch of the front door, opened it and stepped inside.

He drew the Heckler amp; Koch and looked around. To his right, a closed door; ahead, a corridor from which several other exits led.

He stood very still, once more absorbing his surroundings, reaching out aurally for the slightest clue as to the whereabouts of the owners of the voices he’d heard.

Nothing.

He stepped down the corridor at a slight crouch, gun held in a two-handed grip.

The door at the far end was ajar, and Tullivant thought he could see the arm of a chair beyond. A living room. But it appeared to be in complete darkness. Beside the door, a flight of stairs led up to the next floor.

He registered the tiny creak of an unoiled hinge an instant after he’d started to turn, his reflexes kicking in and leaving his conscious self lagging. The first door on the right when he’d come in had swung open behind him. Tullivant brought the gun up just as something shot towards him, black and gleaming, and he felt agony burn its way up his right arm.

Fifty-four

James pressed his finger hard and upright against his lips, holding the other hand up in a don’t move gesture.

Emma stared at him, her eyes wide, and nodded. He reached inside the pocket of his jacket and drew out a knife in a scabbard. She thought it looked like the kind of thing you’d go hunting with.

Holding one hand up still to make sure she kept her distance, he crept towards the stairs and began to climb them. Emma watched him go, fear rising in her and threatening to erupt into panic. Not daring to move her feet, Emma jammed a fist into her mouth.

At the top of the steps James paused, his ear to the door. The unsheathed knife in his left hand, he took hold of the doorknob with his right, hesitated a second, then twisted it and flung the door open.

Emma watched him step out, turn. She heard a rustle of movement, followed by a gritted gasp of pain.

Then fast footsteps, a thud followed by a crash as what sounded like a human body collided with a door, and the snarling sounds of fighting.

Emma released the breath she’d been suppressing, terrified by the sounds she could hear in the absence of any visual guide to put them in context. She stared about her, not knowing what she was looking for but desperate to find something that might be useful in some way. Apart from the chairs, and the bucket and mop James had used to clean the floor, there was nothing.

She couldn’t stay there, in the cellar, like some zoo animal or lab rat.

Emma started up the steps, her legs faltering like a foal’s. From above her she could hear a choked groaning, as though somebody was being throttled.

At the open door, she stopped. The sounds of struggle were coming from down the corridor, to her right.

The front door was on her left, a few feet away.

Coward, a voice told her.

But another voice, a more reasonable one, said: It’s the only way. You’d be no help to James. You’d just get yourself killed.

Terror and adrenaline reaching a peak within her — she couldn’t tell one from the other — Emma pushed through the door way and reached the front door.

From behind her a voice called, ‘Emma.’

She turned. It was an involuntary move, triggered by the familiarity of the voice.

At the end of the corridor, in the shadows, two shapes were locked together on the ground. She saw James’s white face turn to the side as if he were trying to look round at her. Beneath him, on the stone floor, was another man, his face obscured by a mask of some kind.

It was he who’d called her. And James had turned to see what she was doing.

The man beneath did something with his legs, a roar escaping his mouth through clenched teeth, and James was lifted up to sprawl backwards on his bottom.

Emma stood at the front door, petrified, knowing she needed to run, to get out into the street and get clear and try afterwards to make sense of it all; but she was unable to move her limbs.

The man in the mask rose to his knees and extended his arms. There was something in his hands, something that glinted in the thin light.

The explosions rocked Emma’s ears, claps of thunder that echoed through the corridor, two of them followed by a solitary third.

James was hurled back, his body jerking, a spray of something hot and black in the darkness lashing across the stone floor. He crashed hard, supine, one arm flung out at his side.

Emma clapped her hands to her ears and screamed, the sound choking off as her throat closed. The after-noise of the shots rang on and on, the air in the corridor rich with the stench of cordite and blood.

The other man rose, pulled off his mask. Despite the darkness Emma could see his face clearly.

‘Emma,’ he said quietly.

Brian.

Fifty-five

Tullivant drove, his route meandering but broadly purposeful, describing wide and irregular arcs away from the house in Fulham but staying this side of the river.

In the back, the only sound Emma made was a periodic, muffled sob.

Her wrists and ankle were bound with plastic ties from a supply he kept in his kit bag. In her mouth was a gag, secure enough to prevent most sound from seeping past but not so tight that she was in danger of suffocating. He kept his ears open for sounds of vomiting, which would put her in danger of aspiration.

When he’d been sure she wasn’t going to run out the front door, rooted as she was to the spot in shock, Tullivant had swiftly gone through Cromer’s pockets. He’d left the dead man’s own phone — it could have all sorts of alarms, bugs or traces built into it — but taken the one he’d recognised as Emma’s. Apart from the hunting knife, the man was unarmed.

Tullivant used a strip from the dead man’s shirt to bind the wound in his right arm. The man had thrown well. A few inches to the left and the blade would have penetrated Tullivant’s chest.

Tullivant’s blood was smeared on the floor, the walls, the living room door. In an ideal situation he’d have spent an hour scrubbing it off, and scoring the entire corridor to eliminate other traces of his DNA. In an ideal world, he’d also have taken time to remove Cromer’s body and dispose of it elsewhere, far away.

He’d used a suppressor on the Heckler amp; Koch, but the echo in the empty corridor had been loud enough to alert whoever lived next door, and probably others in the neighbourhood as well. And Emma’s scream would have put paid to anyone’s doubts that they’d heard something unusual in the house at the end of the terrace.

Tullivant left Cromer’s body where it was. He reached Emma in four rapid strides. She cowered against the closed front door, her arms crossed in front of her, her entire body shaking as though in the grip of a fever. She recoiled when he reached for her, but she didn’t try to run away.

Tullivant put his arms round her, held her close, feeling her face against his chest, her lips moving silently. He maintained the embrace for ten long seconds, feeling her juddering slow a fraction.

He took a quick look at her face. The frozen panic had been replaced by a dull caul of passivity.

Tullivant slipped the balaclava back on. Taking Emma gently but firmly by the upper arm, he pushed open the front door and led her down the short driveway, glancing about as he went. Lights blazed across the street and in the house next door. Silhouetted figures peered from behind slanting curtains.

Not breaking his stride, he marched Emma to the Mazda. Her eyes widened a little when she saw it, as if its stultifying familiarity brought home to her the horror of her situation.

She struggled only briefly, and weakly, as Tullivant bundled her into the back. He said, very soft and low: ‘Emma, no,’ and his tone was warning enough that he didn’t have to pull his leather jacket aside to reveal the grip of his gun or anything as melodramatic as that. She went limp, her face averted, her eyes closed, as he secured first the ties, then the gag.

He pulled away, leaving behind a house with a dead body, copious traces of his own recent presence, and a neighbourhood which had heard gunfire and witnessed a man and a woman fleeing the scene.

The situation was messy, that was for sure. But most messes could be cleaned up, given enough time and resources. And Tullivant had plenty of the latter to call upon.

It was the more immediate mess he was less optimistic about.

Tullivant said, ‘Emma, are you conscious? Can you hear me?’

A moan rose from the back seat.

‘In a little while, once we’re a safe distance away, I’m going to take the gag off you and ask you some questions. I’m telling you now because I want to give you the chance to think very, very carefully about how you answer.’

Silence.

He went on: ‘First of all, no matter how frightened you are now, no matter how confused, I want you to know that the children are completely safe. They’ll come to no harm at all, no matter what happens.’

Another low moan, and a sob.

‘But I can’t say the same for you, necessarily. When I come to ask you my questions, I want you to answer completely and unhesitatingly truthfully. I’ll know immediately if you’re lying. As you’ve discovered, I’m not who you thought I was. I have skills you won’t be able to beat.’

He let his words sink in for a few seconds.

‘If any of the answers you give me are less than the full and unvarnished truth, I will hurt you. If the lies accumulate, so will the pain. Eventually you’ll die.’

The closest thing to a scream escaped the confines of the gag. He felt her writhing in the back, thumping her knees against his seat.

‘Think about it, Emma.’

He said nothing more, and Emma’s stifled wails ebbed into harsh-sounding rattles. Tullivant wondered if she’d noticed what he hadn’t said.

That if she told him the truth, she wouldn’t necessarily live.

He found a less-than-salubrious street with faulty lamps that left most of it in darkness, and pulled up. Climbing out, he moved Emma into the front seat and sat beside her. Anyone passing would think they were a couple who’d stopped to pursue a late-night argument.

He pulled the gag free. Red lines marked its pressure across her cheeks.

She turned to look at him. In her eyes there was only wonder.

Tullivant began with some mild test questions — how long had she been having the affair with James Cromer, where had they met on specific occasions — to which he knew the answers. In each case she replied hurriedly, as though desperate not to be suspected of even trying to lie. He watched her carefully much of the time, only occasionally glancing up as a car’s headlights swept past. Before long, he moved on to more recent events.

What had she found that she’d shown Cromer at their meeting in the Tate Modern yesterday?

She paused for the briefest instant. Tullivant thought it was because she was stunned that he’d been there, watching the two of them in what they’d thought was the camouflage of the crowd.

‘Something he’d hidden in my handbag,’ she blurted. ‘A listening device.’

Had she found others?

Yes, she had. Hidden in her lipstick.

Had Cromer told her what they were for?

To eavesdrop on him, on Brian, she replied.

Tullivant closed in with his questions.

‘What did James tell you about me?’

This time her pause was, he knew, because she still couldn’t quite believe the enormity of what she was about to say, despite what she’d seen him do a short while earlier.

‘He told me you were a murderer. That you were responsible for that bomb that went off in Lewisham on Saturday.’

‘Anything else?’

She looked appalled by what must seem like his nonchalance. ‘No. I mean, yes. Just that… you’re a murderer. That you’ve been under surveillance for a long time. That he… used me to get to you.’

It came out in a rush. Tullivant let her continue, allowing her to vent. When Emma’s tone became increasingly shrill, he stopped her, guided her with a specific question.

He owed it to her to give her a chance to speak, because he had a momentous decision to make.

After half an hour, Emma seemed to be flagging. It was time.

Tullivant began the systematic interrogation. The questions about the fine points of what she knew, repeated sometimes in reworded form so as to catch her in a lie if possible. He worked methodically, patiently, relentlessly. Mercilessly.

Twice, Emma broke down in tears, and he had to give her time to regain her composure. Only twice; he thought it did her credit.

By the end, it was as though her eyes were desiccated, unable to express any more fluid. There was no gleam to them, just the dull patina of death in a still-living person.

Tullivant had detected three or four contradictions in her answers, all of them minor ones, none of them deliberate. It was par for the course. An experienced interrogator knew that a sustained barrage of questioning which elicited no errors whatsoever had to be regarded as suspicious.

Emma had told him the truth. And it was clear she knew next to nothing, about Tullivant or about his operations.

The tragedy was that what she did know was enough to condemn her.

He watched the side of her face in the silence of the car, considering the ways he might do it. Weighing them up for efficiency.

Her phone rang in his pocket, and although it was set to vibrate the noise was startling, making even Tullivant start.

He looked at the display. It was a number that was unknown to him.

Tullivant held the phone so Emma could see. ‘Who’s this?’

‘I don’t know.’

He believed her.

Tullivant grabbed pen and paper from the glove compartment and handed the phone to Emma. ‘Answer it. Put it on speakerphone. Follow my written instructions.’

She pressed the keys, just before the voicemail function kicked in, Tullivant thought.

‘Yes?’

‘Dr Emma Goddard?’

A man’s voice. Tullivant knew it.

He made a keep rolling gesture to Emma.

‘Yes,’ she said, her voice steady.

‘Dr Goddard, listen carefully. Don’t ask who I am or react with surprise in any way, if there’s anyone there with you. Just listen. Your life may be in danger. Are you at home at the moment? Answer simply yes or no.’

Purkiss. It meant he’d discovered Tullivant’s identity.

And suddenly Tullivant saw a solution, one that would solve the problems of Emma and Purkiss in one go.

Fifty-six

Purkiss entered Regent’s Park at the western side, just down the road from the Central Mosque. He waited until the cab driver was out of sight, then vaulted over the spiked railing and landed in the shrubbery beyond.

He felt the vastness of the 400-acre park before him, dark and silent. It was closed to the public until five a.m., which was three hours away.

The display on his phone located Dr Emma Goddard, or at least her phone, in the north-west area of the park. Vale had called in what must be the last of his favours while Purkiss had hailed a taxi and made his way into central London, ready to go wherever the signal led him. As the taxi headed down Piccadilly, Purkiss’s phone rang.

‘They’ve got a lock,’ he said.

Purkiss switched to the relevant display. The pulsating dot was moving slowly to the north. Purkiss instructed the driver, his eyes on the display. After a few minutes the dot stopped, and remained stationary as it had done ever since. In Regent’s Park.

Purkiss knew it was a set up. Tullivant had his wife, Emma Goddard, captive, and had been listening in when Purkiss called. Tullivant knew Purkiss was on to him, and would put a trace on Goddard’s phone. And so he was leading him into a trap.

Without knowing exactly what he was heading into, Purkiss understood nevertheless why Tullivant had chosen this particular location. Regent’s Park was large enough that it would be next to impossible to cordon off, should Purkiss call in the police. There would be plenty of escape routes if things went wrong.

En route in the taxi, Purkiss made three calls. The third was to Kasabian.

She answered at once, as if she’d been expecting him. ‘Yes.’

‘It’s Purkiss.’

If she was surprised that he was calling her directly rather than having Vale do so as normal, she didn’t show it. ‘What have you got?’

‘The gunman — Jokerman — is Brian Tullivant, a former captain in the Paras. He’s got his wife hostage in Regent’s Park. I’m heading there now.’

‘What? Start at the — ’

‘I’ll explain later,’ Purkiss cut in. ‘I need you to keep back. Don’t send anyone in, not Special Branch, not an armed response unit. Tullivant wants me. I’ve figured him out, and he knows it. He’s using his wife as bait. He knows I know that he’ll kill her if anyone else but me shows up. Understood?’

After a beat, Kasabian said: ‘Yes. But at least tell me which end of the park. So I can have help on standby.’

‘It looks like the north-west area, just above the Winter Gardens,’ said Purkiss. ‘I mean it, though. Be discreet. Keep everyone well back.’

He rang off.

Once over the railings, Purkiss set off across the grassland. The park was criss-crossed with paths, fewer than in the other Royal Parks, it seemed, which meant that the lamps which lined them were few, casting shadow everywhere. Purkiss skirted the tip of the Boating Pond, water fowl skittering away in a sudden noise that froze him for a moment. The air was cool, giving the merest hint of the autumn which, while not imminent, was on the horizon at least.

Ahead, Purkiss could see the dark outline of a copse of trees. The signal was coming from just beyond it. As he drew nearer, he saw the copse was in fact the nearest edge a rough ring of trees surrounding a central expanse of grass parkland perhaps sixty yards across.

He felt the apprehension rise from his abdomen into his chest, quickening his breathing, and felt the first prick of adrenaline like a surge of speed in his veins.

Through the trees, he could make out something, a silhouette, in the centre of the grass. Light was minimal, a few slanting sheaves managing to get in through the trees from the sparse lamps, but Purkiss believed he could identify a bowed head, narrow shoulders.

He stopped at the edge of the ring of trees, checked the display on his phone. Yes, the signal was coming from the middle of the clearing.

He took a step to the side of one of the trunks and peered through. There was a bench in the middle of the grass, he could see now, the kind that during the daytime people would use for picnicking or simply to rest their feet. Seated on the bench with her back to Purkiss was a woman, who he presumed was Dr Emma Goddard.

He watched her for twenty seconds. There — her head moved a fraction; so she was still alive. He assumed she was bound somehow, or perhaps drugged.

So she was bait, as straightforwardly as an antelope tethered to lure a big cat. Tullivant was somewhere in the ring of trees, with a long gun. If Purkiss approached her, Tullivant would shoot him.

But if Purkiss didn’t arrive, or turned up but then left, Tullivant would shoot the woman.

Purkiss’s gaze roved steadily around the circle of trees. Tullivant knew he was coming, but wouldn’t know which direction he’d approach from. So Tullivant could be anywhere. He might be only a few feet away, even now drawing a bead on Purkiss, prolonging the moment.

Sweat trailed quickly down Purkiss’s back.

If he walked away now, to buy time, he ran the risk that Tullivant might have already detected his presence. Tullivant would shoot the woman.

Purkiss thought of Kendrick, comatose in his hospital bed.

He thought of the terrifying, crippling doubts he’d been forced to entertain about Vale, and about Hannah.

He thought about Claire, who’d betrayed him, but whom he’d failed nonetheless, because where there was life there was the possibility of redemption, and he’d failed to keep her alive.

Purkiss advanced a step.

The advantage he had — the single advantage — was manoeuvrability. If Tullivant had a rifle, then depending on his position in the ring of trees he might not be able to take satisfactory aim instantly, without a degree of movement. That could make his position detectable in time for Purkiss to take evasive action.

It was a hell of a risk.

He bounced on the balls of his feet a few times. Breathed deeply in through his nose, out through his mouth, centring himself.

He broke out of the circle of trees and into the clearing, feeling more naked than if he’d cast all his clothes off.

His environment was more intensely real to him than he’d ever known it: the springy firmness of the grass beneath his soles, the cool of pre-morning dew on his face, the aromas of nose-prickling late-summer pollen and industrial city grime.

The high-velocity bullet smashing through the base of his skull, shearing through bone and muscle and exploding his head in an obscene dark gout…

The bench was twenty yards away. Ten.

The woman’s head turned a fraction.

Purkiss veered round, describing a loose arc, sure that this was it, that Tullivant’s finger was finally tightening on the trigger, squeezing it back, the game needing to brought to an end now. He sprinted towards a point in the trees some twenty yards to the right of where he’d emerged, thinking that if this was to be his last sight on earth, something as natural and joyously verdant as a row of summer trees wasn’t bad.

Then he crashed among the trees, knocking his shoulder into one of the trunks, not caring about the pain, his heart hammering in relief, his primitive self aware that he was still alive while his rational brain thought: Tullivant didn’t take the bait. And now he knows where I am.

Fifty-seven

Tullivant watched Purkiss’s shape detach itself from the trees approximately ninety degrees to his left.

He tracked the running figure through the scope.

Purkiss would reach Emma, frantically haul her up, and try to drag her back to the cover of the trees. She wasn’t bound any longer — Tullivant had cut the ties around her wrists and ankles — and she’d rise and go with Purkiss. It would be a clean, two-shot double kill. Tullivant chose to wait.

He was mildly disappointed at how easy it was going to turn out to be.

The disappointment triggered a warning light in his mind.

A man like John Purkiss didn’t disappoint you. If he appeared to do so, to carry out an action that was so stupidly reckless that it was out of character, it meant he was tricking you.

Halfway towards Emma, Purkiss swerved and turned, heading back at an angle.

Tullivant, who was lying prone on the ground between the boles of two oaks, whipped his head round to one side, then the other, sure that he’d see others bearing down on him, or perhaps nothing more than muzzle flashes before eternal darkness.

But there was nobody.

Tullivant turned his attention back to the clearing. Purkiss had disappeared once more among the trees.

So: his foolhardy sprint hadn’t been to draw Tullivant’s attention while Purkiss’s back-up approached Tullivant from behind. Instead, he’d hoped to get Tullivant to reveal his position. Which he hadn’t.

Stalemate.

Tullivant glanced upward. Dawn was still three hours off or more, even though the sky would begin lightening long before that.

He had time. And if Purkiss didn’t show his hand before the darkness receded too far to be of any use any more, then Tullivant would pull the trigger on Emma. Which Purkiss knew.

Tullivant settled down to wait.

A second later he felt the buzz of his phone against his thigh, signalling the arrival of a text message.

Carefully, moving only his arm, he reached down and pulled out the phone. The text was from Emma’s, diverted to his. And yes, on the bench she was groping for her mobile, no doubt assuming he was texting her with instructions.

The message read: Dr Goddard, I’m the man who phoned you earlier. Don’t look round. I’m in the trees behind you. I’m going to start making my way anti-clockwise round the circle. If you know the location of your husband, message me back with his position on the clock in relation to you.

Tullivant thumbed in a message to Emma. Text him back and tell him one o’clock. I receive all texts sent to and from your phone. I’ll know if you tell him anything else.

Tullivant was at the four o’clock position. If Purkiss made his way round in the direction he’d said, he would encounter Tullivant a lot sooner than he’d be expecting. Tullivant would have the jump on him.

On the bench, Emma straightened in bewilderment; but she managed to suppress the reflex to look over in his direction. If she was working on her phone, she was doing it extremely discreetly.

A moment later Tullivant read her reply to Purkiss: One o’clock.

Tullivant kept the Timberwolf propped and aimed at the bench. He drew the Heckler amp; Koch from his jacket and laid it close to his left hand.

He watched the trees arcing away to his left.

Purkiss would be moving infinitesimally slowly so as not to give his position away. Tullivant glanced at his watch, its illuminated display turned toward him to minimise the light it gave off. Ten minutes passed. Then fifteen.

A rustle from the trees somewhere. Tullivant stiffened.

Had it come form his right or his left? He strained his ears.

A further five minutes passed.

The shrill ringing of a phone shattered the quiet. Tullivant registered that it was coming from his left amongst the trees, maybe ten or fifteen yards away, and although it stopped abruptly as if cut off in panic he felt his senses of sight and hearing and even smell homing in on its location and he was up and charging between the trees, the Heckler amp; Koch primed and aimed, until he felt his foot kick against something and he looked down and saw the abandoned phone and before he could turn he felt Purkiss barrel into him and send him crashing against the trunk of a tree.

Fifty-eight

The woman had answered too readily, texting back her reply, and Purkiss knew it was a further trick.

So, Tullivant wasn’t at the one o’clock position at all. That meant he was probably nearer than that, and intended to surprise Purkiss as Purkiss made his way round the ring of trees.

Purkiss was working with approximations, and also the need to keep himself completely concealed; but he moved swiftly, edging anti-clockwise between the trees until he’d reached the five o’clock position, which was as far as he dared to go, then placing his phone on the ground after flicking off the silent key. He doubled back, resisting the urge to hurry, traversing the ring clockwise this time; and it was when he got to the twelve o’clock position, directly ahead of Goddard on the bench, that he saw Tullivant, or at least the tip of his rifle, round at four o’clock.

He crept round until he must have been within leaping distance, then took out his remaining spare phone and rang his own number.

The jarring shriek of the phone on the other side of Tullivant was like a starting whistle to Purkiss. He wove between the trees, spotting Tullivant rising and leaving behind his rifle and advancing in the direction of the phone’s cry.

With a berserker’s fury, Purkiss launched himself.

The impact drove Tullivant against the solid body of an ancient oak. Purkiss grabbed his hair and rammed his forehead against the tree, getting two blows in before Tullivant regained control and elbowed backwards, connecting with Purkiss’s shoulder but giving Tullivant a degree of momentum so that he half-turned and brought his gun hand across.

No guns, thought Purkiss crazily. No more guns today. Enough.

He smashed the side of his fist into Tullivant’s wrist in a hammer blow that made the arm drop away, then followed with a punch to Tullivant’s face. Tullivant reeled, got in a kick to Purkiss’s thigh that sent a howl of pain and made him stumble. Purkiss used his slightly bent position to his advantage by ramming his lowered head into Tullivant’s abdomen, pinning him against the tree once more.

He sensed Tullivant’s hands raised above his head, clasped, ready to come down in a killer blow that would snap Purkiss’s neck, so he rammed again with his head, imagining he was driving Tullivant’s belly flat against the tree behind him, mashing his abdominal contents to pulp, rammed again, and again, and he felt a weight on top of him, but not that of a blow; rather, of Tullivant’s sagging torso as he jackknifed forward.

Purkiss wrenched away and stood up, watched Tullivant’s doubled body sag face-forward onto the ground. His lips were distorted against the grass and soil, his face waxen, his breathing coming in winded gasps.

Purkiss stood looking down at the man as he caught his own breath. He kicked him, hard, in the ribs, and Tullivant flopped over onto his back, his eyes half-closed.

Purkiss glanced at Tullivant’s gun, a few feet away.

It would be easy.

Just the two of them here, for at least a few minutes more. Nobody about. An easy story to concoct.

He picked up the gun.

Tullivant’s eyelids fluttered in understanding.

Purkiss flung the gun amongst the trees.

‘Up,’ he said.

Tullivant rose to his knees, retched, climbed his hands up his legs, reached a stooped position, keeled over on to one knee.

Purkiss grabbed him by the arm to haul him up. Tullivant swayed drunkenly but remained upright. They manoeuvred out into the clearing.

The woman, Goddard, was still sitting on the bench. Her head was turned towards them.

‘It’s all right,’ called Purkiss. ‘It’s over.’

Beside him Tullivant lurched, and for an instant Purkiss thought the man was either going to collapse again or was making one last attempt at putting up a fight; but then he heard the twin booming cracks, heard Emma Goddard’s scream from across the clearing, saw Tullivant jerk and stagger and twist to his knees, dropping once more to the ground, two bloody ragged holes punched through his jacket.

Kasabian stepped into the clearing, the gun in her hand already lowered, her gaze switching from Purkiss to Tullivant’s body and back again.

Fifty-nine

‘I thought he had the drop on you,’ she said.

The aftershock of the shots rang around the clearing. At the bench, Goddard was cowering, still screaming but with her hands clamped over her mouth so that the sound emerged as a high-pitched keening.

Purkiss said, ‘Nonsense.’

Kasabian’s eyes widened.

‘And you know it,’ he said.

She watched him. She was ten feet away. Purkiss didn’t know how quick her reaction times were, but she was clearly an accurate shot.

‘Tullivant had to die,’ he said. ‘It would have been better if he’d killed me, but now that he’s failed, he couldn’t be allowed to live.’

Sirens, lots of them, were detaching themselves from the low background hum of the surrounding city.

‘That’s why I rang you earlier to tell you Tullivant was here, and I was coming to get him,’ Purkiss said. ‘I wanted to panic you. Make you expose yourself. You knew there was a chance I’d get the better of him, take him alive. And that’s why you’re here. Presumably on your own.’

Stalling was an art. But it helped if you knew how long you had to do it for. Purkiss had no idea.

‘The question you’re asking yourself is, when did I find out about you? The answer’s out in the desert, outside Riyadh. I captured one of the Scipio Rand operatives and interrogated him. He told me that back in 2006, a regular pool of Paras were escorting prisoners from Iraq to Saudi Arabia for further transportation elsewhere. That’s when the penny dropped.’

The sirens were coming closer, but it wasn’t them Purkiss was waiting for.

‘The reason you passed the polygraph test wasn’t that you’re skilled at doing so, but because you never actually lied. I just asked you the wrong questions. Specifically, I asked if you’d sent a gunman to my house to kill me, or to frighten me. And you hadn’t. The gunman, Tullivant, was there to kill Tony Kendrick. Just as he’s been killing every fellow member of that Para outfit who was involved in escorting those prisoners.

‘Because it was you, Kasabian. You were in charge of the torture of prisoners on British soil during the Iraq occupation, specifically in 2006. Not Sir Guy Strang. You liaised with Scipio Rand, ordered the transfer of selected prisoners to the UK, paid and supervised Dennis Arkwright to torture them. But some of them didn’t stay silent afterwards. Mohammed Al-Bayati, for one. And he spoke to Charles Morrow. Somehow, you discovered Morrow was going to blow the whistle on the whole sordid operation. He might not have known all the details, might not even have known of your involvement. But he knew enough to warrant, in your eyes, being killed. So you sent Tullivant to take him out.’

Kasabian had raised the gun now, held it steady on Purkiss’s chest. Her gaze held that fascinated look he’d noticed at their first meeting.

‘I suspect you’d already begun erasing all traces of the 2006 affair, because you were gunning for the top job and were rewriting history in preparation. That’s why most of those Paras were killed in the last couple of weeks, before Morrow was shot. But at some point you hit on a masterstroke: why not implicate Guy Strang in the torture? Concoct evidence that he was behind it all? That way you’d both get rid of him, and emerge a squeaky-clean hero yourself. So you “hired” me. An outsider, renowned for getting results. And you laid a trail of false clues, pointing in Strang’s direction. The supposed notebook in Morrow’s flat, which I imagine I was supposed to find but which Hannah Holley discovered first. That led me to Arkwright. And you’d primed Arkwright to lie, to tell me that Guy Strang had been his boss.’

Come on, thought Purkiss. Kasabian had taken a couple of steps forward, and was holding the gun in a two-handed grip.

‘What did you offer Arkwright?’ he went on. ‘Amnesty? Whatever it was, you had no intention of honouring it. As soon as he’d mentioned Strang’s name, Tullivant had to dispose of him, and his sons. That made me a little suspicious, by the way. I was blinded by teargas that day. Tullivant could have killed me. But he didn’t. I was part of the plan, back then. Part of the team who would reveal Strang as the mastermind of an illegal torture operation. So I had to be kept alive.’

Purkiss held up a finger. ‘One thing that does puzzle me, though. Arkwright mentioned Rossiter as he was dying. Not you. I don’t understand why.’

He thought Kasabian might stay silent, or obfuscate, but she replied directly. ‘Arkwright never knew I was in charge. I recruited him through proxies. We never met. Even when I instructed him to mention Strang’s name, he thought I was acting in good faith, and that Strang genuinely was involved.’

‘So why mention Rossiter?’

She tilted her head. ‘Rossiter recruited Arkwright while he was in the nominal employ of Scipio Rand. Arkwright probably assumed he was somehow involved in this. We’ll never know.’

Purkiss detected movement between the trees, in the park on the other side, some distance away still. He made a point of keeping his eyes on Kasabian’s.

‘But you’ve been after Strang’s job for a long time, haven’t you, Kasabian? Isn’t that why you contrived to get the job for Emma Goddard as Strang’s personal physician? So that her husband, your lackey, Tullivant, would have a way in, if need be? What was it going to be, Kasabian? Poison hidden in one of the drugs she gave him? Details of the exact state of his health, leaked to Tullivant during Dr Goddard’s pillow talk, which he’d pass on to you?’

Definite movement, now, stealthy and approaching the line of trees.

‘All those Paras, who were innocent in all this, mere escorts. Mohammed Al-Bayati. Arkwright and his sons. Charles Morrow. Murder after murder after murder. Was there no length you wouldn’t go to? And just for a job, Kasabian. Just for a job.’

‘It’s not just a job,’ she murmured, her eyes hard now over the gun.

‘Oh, spare me. Don’t try to make out that you’re some kind of Shakespearean figure, brought down by your vaulting ambition. You’re a common, grubby murderer, Kasabian.’

He glanced away, a natural enough move in context, and gave a nod, just as Kasabian’s finger tightened on the trigger.

Purkiss leaped sideways, the crack of the gun followed by the scream of the bullet as it ploughed past and into the trees on the far side. He rolled, came up, saw Hannah beside Kasabian, the muzzle of her own Glock pressed against the side of the older woman’s head.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ Hannah said.

Kasabian closed her eyes. Then she opened them, staring straight at Purkiss.

He yelled a warning as she jammed the barrel of her gun underneath her chin.

‘Uh uh,’ snarled Hannah, and chopped Kasabian’s wrist away with the Glock. Kasabian’s gun was sent spinning.

Purkiss nodded at Hannah. He turned, began to walk heavily to the bench where Emma Goddard sat, hunched, staring at nothing.

Sixty

The ventilator mechanism moved asymmetrically, rising, catching jerkily, and falling rapidly but smoothly.

Purkiss watched it, and thought about hubris.

There was the hubris of Kasabian’s, manifest in the extreme, even insane lengths she had gone to in order to achieve a position which would probably one day have been hers for the taking anyway, and in order to erase a past which might possibly have been quietly forgotten.

There was that of Tullivant, who’d thought even at the bitter end that there might be a way out, a solution, who hadn’t realised that the killing had to stop at some point and that terminating the life of his children’s mother would somehow enable him to escape justice.

And there was Purkiss’s own hubris. The arrogance which had led him to fail to see simple innocence and indeed compassion where it should have been blindingly obvious, to doubt those who were looking out for him: Vale, whose uneasiness and nerves before the trip to Riyadh had been no more than signs that he was worried Purkiss was walking into a death trap, and Hannah, whose failure to arrive at the airport in Saudi had been due to nothing more sinister than a genuine missed flight.

Kendrick’s profile, corpse-still, looked bonier than at Purkiss’s last visit.

Kirsty, the mother of Kendrick’s son, had left three hours earlier, anger holding her face rigid to stop it from crumpling. Hannah had been the next to arrive. She’d sat beside Purkiss, gazing at the man on the ventilator, a man she’d never met and now most likely never would.

At some point, Purkiss realised she’d taken his hand. He squeezed hers back.

‘Get any sleep?’ he asked.

‘An hour.’ It was seven in the evening, some sixteen hours after the police had arrived en masse in Regent’s Park and taken charge. Purkiss had handed Emma Goddard over to a pair of WPCs, who’d wrapped her in a blanket despite the mildness of the night. Kasabian had been led away in handcuffs by a phalanx of uniformed and plainclothes officers.

Vale emerged sepulchrally from the shadows after a few minutes and led Purkiss and Hannah to a waiting chauffeured car. In the rear, a fleshy man moved over to give them room.

‘Guy Strang,’ he rumbled.

Purkiss felt waves of fatigue wash over him as the man’s phrases did the same: words cannot express the debt, true patriots, served your country with great honour. He heard something about a commendation, knew it applied to Hannah.

She’d gone back to Thames House, and Purkiss had gone with Vale for a drive. He’d filled in the gaps, those he was able to, anyway. But there was little more to tell. Purkiss had outlined his theories to Vale when he’d phoned him from Riyadh after the interrogation in the desert, and Vale had concurred. It was then that they had agreed to maintain the fiction to Kasabian that Hannah Holley was the one they were after, in order to make Kasabian think they were heading down the wrong path. Purkiss had rung Hannah, told her of the plan, asked her to lie low until he contacted her again. Which he had, on his way to Regent’s Park that night. He asked her to get there and keep back, but to be on the lookout in case Kasabian showed up.

And now it was over.

Hannah stayed a finely judged hour, neither too long nor too perfunctorily short, gave Purkiss a peck on the cheek, and took her leave.

As if on cue, Vale walked in.

The two men sat in silence, lulled by the two-note hiss of the ventilator.

At last, Purkiss said: ‘It feels like we’ve been here before, after Tallinn, but… what’s going to happen to her?’

‘Kasabian?’ Vale gave a mirthless half laugh. ‘Remember we were talking about Rossiter, and Kasabian mentioned he very nearly got tried for high treason, the first person in nearly seventy years to do so? Well, that’s what Sir Guy wants to do to Kasabian.’

Purkiss thought about it. ‘The grounds don’t exist,’ he said. ‘She’s a murderer, a psychopath in many ways. But technically not a traitor.’

‘Precisely.’ Vale coughed. He smelled of cigarette smoke once more. ‘She’ll get life, probably in solitary. Every charge they can throw at her. And this one they won’t be able to keep out of the public eye. Rossiter was an unknown. Kasabian’s a prominent public figure, rather a romantic one in some quarters, with her no-nonsense feminism, her so-called ideals. The scandal’s going to be enormous.’

‘Just keep my name out of it, will you, Quentin.’

‘Always.’ Vale fell silent for a moment. Then: ‘Tullivant’s wife was having an affair with Strang’s head of security, it turns out. Who was using her in turn to put feelers out on Tullivant, whom he was suspicious about. One James Cromer. Tullivant killed him last night.’

Purkiss thought: God. More killing. No end.

Vale rose. ‘You look dog-tired. Rest.’

There was just Purkiss, then, and the hissing rise and fall, and the semi-person that was Kendrick.

After half an hour a male nurse came in and murmured that Purkiss should be going, that he could come back in the morning.

Purkiss stood. He had no idea what state his Hampstead house was in, and was disinclined to find out just then. It would have to be a hotel for the night.

On the bed, Kendrick’s hand clawed upward, first batting at the apparatus protruding from his mouth, then finding purchase and hauling so that elastic stretched and plastic creaked. A harsh, drain-like gurgling issued from his throat.

Purkiss grabbed at the cotside of the bed, pulled it up to provide a barrier, as Kendrick began to thrash about, the tube gone from his throat, the air sucking in and out of his swollen throat. His eyelids fluttered, opened gummily.

He stared at Purkiss, one eye almost hidden beneath the swathes of bandages around his head.

His lips were bone dry, and moving.

Purkiss leaned in close.

He heard the words, faint but distinct.

‘Who was the bird?’

Content

Tim Stevens
Jokerman

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Twenty-two

Twenty-three

Twenty-four

Twenty-five

Twenty-six

Twenty-seven

Twenty-eight

Twenty-nine

Thirty

Thirty-one

Thirty-two

Thirty-three

Thirty-four

Thirty-five

Thirty-six

Thirty-seven

Thirty-eight

Thirty-nine

Forty

Forty-one

Forty-two

Forty-three

Forty-four

Forty-five

Forty-six

Forty-seven

Forty-eight

Forty-nine

Fifty

Fifty-one

Fifty-two

Fifty-three

Fifty-four

Fifty-five

Fifty-six

Fifty-seven

Fifty-eight

Fifty-nine

Sixty