by Tim Stevens
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 fr
om 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.
