Ratcatcher

by Tim Stevens

  It was a three-quarter view of a man’s head and shoulders, taken in the glare of morning sunlight. The man was squinting against the light. There was no mistaking him.

  The face belonged to a man named Fallon. It wasn’t in itself especially memorable, but Purkiss would never forget it. The reason the photograph was impossible was that Fallon was serving a life sentence in Belmarsh prison.

  The reason Purkiss would never forget the face was that four years earlier Fallon had murdered Purkiss’s fiancée. Purkiss had seen him do it.

  Two

  All the Jacobin had wanted to do was ask the man a few questions. Was he photographing those people in particular, or did they happen to be standing in shot at the time? Was he freelance or part of an organisation? And why had he appeared now, an apparent complication when there weren’t supposed to be complications at this late stage?

  The Jacobin hadn’t meant to kill him.

  The man was small and slight, with prematurely receding hair and goggling eyes. The fight he’d been able to put up had been revealing, had confirmed the Jacobin’s earlier suspicions that there was more to him than his appearance implied.

  He had opened the door readily. The moment the Jacobin saw the flare of recognition in his eyes the time for innocent questions was obviously past. The Jacobin moved in and kicked the door closed, bringing a sword hand against the man’s throat. But he was fast, faster than he should have been and therefore a professional. He spun away and crouched. They faced each other across the carpet.

  The man leaped backwards and sideways through a door off the entrance hall. The Jacobin followed. Inside the living room the man was at the mantelpiece, scooping a vase in his hand and swinging it. The Jacobin dodged, feeling the slipstream of the heavy ceramic sigh past and hearing the vase shatter against the wall behind, not taking an eye off the man because the vase was a distraction, intended to disorientate with pain and noise. The man lunged for a real weapon, a curved sword on the wall. Its blade gasped as he drew it from its scabbard.

  Blades were a problem, more so than guns, as any experienced fighter knew. In the Jacobin’s favour, the man didn’t look like a trained swordsman. He gripped the weapon in two hands which left him with neither one free and with both elbows, those exquisite points of vulnerability, exposed.

  The Jacobin’s first kick cracked the head of the radius bone in the man’s left elbow, an injury so painful that the involuntary opening of the hand was automatic. The second kick was more daring: still using the left leg as a pivot, the Jacobin snapped a toecap into the upright blade, lifting it spinning out of the man’s right hand to clatter across the bare wooden boards across the room.

  Clutching his elbow, the man feinted to his right and darted left. The Jacobin didn’t move. It was a battle of morale, now, one the man couldn’t win. The Jacobin indicated one of the armchairs. The man didn’t sit.

  From inside the man’s pocket a phone began to ring. They watched each other’s eyes through one ring, two. The man reached into his pocket with the hand on his good arm.

  ‘No,’ said the Jacobin, voice soft, and moved in, a quick fist punching the man’s ruined elbow provoking a yell, the other jamming up under the man’s breastbone so that he rocked back and slumped down the wall.

  The Jacobin dragged him to the centre of the living room, checked his phone. He hadn’t had a chance to answer, and the call was denoted as ‘missed’. The number was prefixed with the international dialling code for the United Kingdom. Pocketing the phone, the Jacobin propped him into a sitting position on the rug and knelt behind him. Sliding an arm across his throat, the Jacobin applied gentle pressure.

  ‘How did you know me just now?’

  No reply.

  ‘Why the photographs?’

  Still nothing. The pressure wasn’t enough to be preventing him from speaking. The Jacobin applied fingertips to points in the neck, harmless but agonising. The man hissed rapidly between clenched teeth, his body shuddering.

  He would have to die now, there was no question about that. The question was whether he was likely to divulge anything useful first. Clearly he was trained to stand up to interrogation, to lie convincingly under duress.

  In the event the Jacobin’s hand was forced. The man made a last desperate effort, an extended-knuckle punch with his good arm behind him which connected with the kidney area. The Jacobin swallowed against the roiling pain and flexed the arm across the man’s throat until he sagged. Not wanting to take any chances, the Jacobin gripped the pale, high head between the heels of both palms, and with a quick twist dislocated the vertebrae of the man’s neck.

  The Jacobin sat on the rug for a minute, eyes closed, finding calm. It wasn’t formal meditation of any kind, but rather a necessary process of reestablishing equilibrium after the taking of another human being’s life. For the dead man himself, the Jacobin felt nothing. For the fact of having killed – again – there was disquiet, a feeling that was growing, not diminishing, with each such episode. A limb that was beginning to rot with gangrene could be salvaged by the excision of the corrupted matter. Did the same apply to a soul? Could it?

  In the passage by the front door, the Jacobin retrieved the small grip dropped there on entry. Inside was the equipment that, given more time, the Jacobin would have installed at leisure after first establishing that the man wasn’t at home. The man’s body would have to be hidden within the flat. The smell would attract attention in a few days, of course, but by that time it would all be over.

  Spreading the contents of the grip across the dining table, the Jacobin set to work.

  *

  Vale was a motionless silhouette against the cold morning sky. Purkiss parked in the dirt semicircle at the bottom of the track and made his way up through the light ground fog towards the churchyard. It was Vale’s way, always had been. Remote locations for meetings to minimise the risk of surveillance. Purkiss had no idea where Vale’s office was, or if he even had one.

  They’d arrived back from Zagreb mid-morning. To be on the safe side Purkiss had packed Kendrick off to see a doctor about the strangulation injury. He had freshened up, then phoned Vale for a rendezvous.

  Driving out into the Hertfordshire countryside, Purkiss let his thoughts drift back four years. He’d replayed those events many times but there had always been the imperative to look forward, not to wallow. There was nothing more that could be done, and justice of a sort had been achieved. Now, that justice seemed ephemeral, like a software programme whose licence had expired.

  He’d met Claire Stirling at a consulate bash when he was stationed in Marseille, and he’d immediately recognised her as SIS, like him at the time. The service disapproved of office relationships but with discretion Purkiss and Claire managed it. They were spies, after all. After a few months they were engaged.

  A field agent of five years’ standing, Purkiss’s work in Marseille involved the study of immigration patterns into the city from Middle Eastern countries and the application of closer scrutiny when anybody suspicious arrived. Someone, for instance, whose name had come up before in connection with a Service operation elsewhere. Claire’s work was to all appearances more humdrum, monitoring radio traffic between the various embassies. They both enjoyed their work, they socialised mainly with diplomatic staff, and they loved together passionately, the clandestine nature of their union adding to the thrill.

  The change came with the death of Behrouz Asgari. An Iranian-born businessman who had made Marseille his home for the previous twenty years, he was also a philanthropist whose investment in local infrastructure had lifted thousands of residents out of slum tenements. Asgari was openly opposed to the incumbent American and British governments and a devout Shi’a Muslim. He’d been extensively investigated, of course – Purkiss had done a lot of the work himself – and came up clean, with no links to hostile activity against the West.

  One evening, while Asgari had been strolling along the waterfront with his wife, a lone motorcyclist had
ridden up and shot him dead. The hit was a professional one, a double tap to the head using modified hollow-point nine-millimetre rounds. Asgari had been a personable, well-liked man, but he had business rivals aplenty, and the police investigation, such as it was, concluded that some unnamed competitor was responsible.

  Two weeks after the murder, Claire had come round one evening to Purkiss’s flat – circumstances dictated that they live separately – in an odd mood, silent and brooding. He’d gone easy, coaxing gently but knowing when to back off. At last over a glass of Beaujolais she’d told him. For the last six months she had been investigating her immediate superior, Donal Fallon, for corruption. She suspected he was the person who’d carried out the hit on Asgari.

  Fallon was a legend, an Anglo-Irish agent only half a decade older than Purkiss and Claire but a veteran of numerous high-intensity arenas, including Islamabad and Damascus. Purkiss had met Fallon many times through Claire, had been impressed by the man’s wit, his intellectual nimbleness, had liked his obvious gentleness and his affection for Claire. The three of them had become a trio, Fallon conniving at their affair with a twinkle.

  Slowly, Claire had begun to detect irregularities in his working patterns, in what he did with the information she supplied him. She had started to pay closer attention, working off her own bat, relaying her suspicions to nobody. She amassed circumstantial evidence, unexpected blips in Fallon’s bank account, little more, and she was about to give up the search when Fallon asked her to post surveillance on Asgari without giving her a satisfactory explanation. He’d received without comment the intelligence she gathered for him, though she sensed he was looking for connections to radical Islamist groups, the kind of thing Purkiss himself had investigated.

  Then the hit took place, at a time when Fallon was allegedly on a solitary hiking holiday in the Scottish Highlands.

  ‘It wasn’t business related. It was political.’ Purkiss had let her talk without interruption, the flow becoming a surge under the influence of the wine and of her agitation. ‘Fallon saw Asgari as a potential threat to us, couldn’t pin anything on him, and decided to take him out pre-emptively.’

  She fell silent and he said, ‘A one-man death squad.’

  There’d been rumours, for at least as long as he’d been with the Service, but most people considered them to be urban legends.

  She looked straight at him for the first time. ‘The trouble is, I don’t know if it’s just one man.’

  He understood then why she’d kept her fears to herself, why she hadn’t taken her suspicions over Fallon’s head the moment she’d been sure. If there were others working with him, they might be senior to her.

  They talked past the dawn. Purkiss wanted her to back off, thought she was in far too deeply. Claire countered that she had come too far to quit. Besides, she was certain Fallon didn’t know she was on to him. They reached a compromise. Purkiss would take over the active role, surveilling Fallon. Claire would provide logistical support. They would involve nobody else for the time being.

  Two evenings later Purkiss let himself into Claire’s flat, arms laden with groceries for their meal. In the second before he was able to react, he saw Claire arched backwards, her feet off the floor, Fallon behind her with an arm across her throat and a knee in her lower back.

  Purkiss yelled, the primal roar of a berserker, and covered the distance between them even as Claire dropped away, dead weight. Fallon met Purkiss with a speed and grace Purkiss would have marvelled at under other circumstances, a kick to the face, another to the knee, felling him. Purkiss clawed at his foot and almost got a hold, but Fallon was at the door and was gone.

  There was no question of going after him, of leaving her. Purkiss crouched with Claire’s head between his palms and her lifeless, bruised eyes staring past him. He gave vent to a stream of nonsense words he could no longer remember. Later he recalled begging the paramedic to keep trying to revive her, not to let her down as he, Purkiss, had let her down by not overriding her decision to keep after Fallon, by not being there with her when Fallon paid a visit, by being so stupid as not to realise Fallon, the master spy, would have noticed he was under scrutiny.

  Purkiss wasn’t a believer in the idea of repressed emotions, the notion that feelings could actually exist as entities in their own right, simmering under the surface whether or not you were aware of them. But, fists white on the wheel, he understood the appeal of the concept. The fury, the anguish, had returned to him now in so whole and so familiar a form that it was easy to believe they’d never gone away.

  Purkiss had missed the opportunity to mete out his own punishment to Fallon at the site of Claire’s murder. Although there would have been ways to get at him after his imprisonment – there were always ways, even in an environment as hermetic as Belmarsh – Purkiss had found the idea of cold revenge wearying, depressing even. Now, though, if there was any substance to the intelligence Vale had forwarded to him, any possibility at all that Fallon was on the loose –

  This time, he thought, you don’t get away.

  Three

  Vale’s overcoat shrouded his tall, rawboned frame like a cloak against the autumn chill. He was a black man in his sixties with salted hair and the beginnings of a stoop. Under the roving of his yellow eyes, Purkiss felt as though he were being measured for a coffin. Vale raised a thumb and fingertips to his lips and drew on his cigarette and from his nostrils blew scythes of smoke.

  With two movements of his head – a nod and a tilt – he conveyed a greeting and a request to walk. They headed across the lawn to the graveyard.

  ‘Hoggart pose any problems?’ Vale had a habit of speaking in a virtual monotone which led people to assume he was on some kind of medication.

  ‘No. He’s small fry. It’s the end of him.’

  ‘Clean job?’ He meant had Purkiss been discreet, left any traces of himself.

  ‘The Rijeka police have me on camera with Spiljak. That’s about it. No names.’

  Vale nodded again. He stopped at an ancient gravestone and scuffed at the moss with his toe, crouching to peer at what was carved underneath. It wasn’t his way to look someone in the face when delivering difficult information.

  ‘The photo was taken yesterday morning in Tallinn, Estonia, by a contact of mine who lives in the city and who spotted Fallon in a market square. I called him, of course. He said he’d tried to follow Fallon but lost him.’ He glanced up at Purkiss. ‘He had no doubt it was him, even if you think that picture might have caught a lookalike.’

  ‘How?’ Purkiss meant, how was it possible? Fallon, outside?

  Vale straightened. ‘I rang the Home Office, got stonewalled. Tried Little Sister, same there. Eventually a friend in Big Sister came through.’

  Little and Big Sisters were respectively SIS and the Security Service, or Six and Five. The adjectives referred to the sizes of their personnel lists.

  ‘And?’ Vale had started walking again and Purkiss kept pace.

  ‘Donal Fallon was released from prison on February eighteenth last year.’

  ‘Hang on.’ Purkiss stopped, Vale turning to face him. ‘Released?’

  ‘Yes, it would seem so. I’m waiting for more details but it could only have been an amnesty granted by the Home Secretary.’

  Disorientation set in. Purkiss had been expecting a narrative about an audacious escape from Belmarsh and an embarrassed cover up. Not this.

  ‘He’d served two years.’

  ‘Slightly less than.’

  ‘The tariff was ten years.’

  ‘I know.’

  Purkiss fought the urge to gabble. ‘For God’s sake, Quentin.’

  ‘It turns the stomach, doesn’t it.’ Vale paced. ‘And it gets worse. Once I’d established that he’d been released, I went back to my Little Sister contacts and confronted them. Lots of awkward coughs and shuffling of feet, and they admitted that Fallon had started working for them again. A brilliant agent, guilty of a terrible crime but given a last shot at
redemption, so forth. Then, after a fortnight, he vanished.’

  ‘Vanished.’

  ‘Before he’d even been briefed on his new mission. Took off without trace. They pulled out all the stops to find him, at first, but after a while they gave up. He was too good an agent to let himself be found, and chances were they’d never hear from him again. Better to avoid a scandal, put the whole sorry matter to bed.’

  Purkiss walked away from Vale, making his way rapidly between the headstones. The hills, the grey sweep of the sky didn’t seem vast enough to contain what he was experiencing within. His jaw muscles felt locked.

  In time he walked back. Vale hadn’t moved, had had the good grace not to watch him.

  ‘Who’s your contact in Tallinn?’

  ‘A former Service chap, Estonian but one of us. Jaak Seppo. I’ve known him ten years. He does a bit of freelance work for me now and then, keeps me in the picture.’ Vale thumbed his phone. ‘I’m texting you his number and address. I’ve already told him you’re coming.’

  A connection fired in Purkiss’s mind. ‘Tallinn.’

  Vale gave a faint nod. ‘Yes. Quite.’

  ‘When is it happening, again?’

  ‘October the thirteenth. The day after tomorrow.’

  ‘You think Fallon’s got something planned?’

  Vale fired up another cigarette. ‘I know precisely as much as you do. But… I have a feeling.’

  *

  Abby’s office, or “command centre” as she was pleased to call it, was a basement flat in Whitechapel which had been converted into one large room with a kitchenette, miniature bathroom and shower and fold-out bed. Two L-shaped desks dominated the floor, straining under an assortment of desktop computers, laptops, printers and scanners in various states of physical integrity. A gigantic plasma screen television had conquered one wall and was tuned to a news channel Purkiss didn’t recognise. A pile of lesser TV sets in the corner displayed a cornucopia of what Purkiss assumed was real-time footage of mundane scenes: empty streets, the interior of a shopping centre, a busy motorway.