by Tim Stevens
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 chi
ldren 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.
