Tim Stevens - Jokerman

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.

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.

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.’