Tim Stevens - Jokerman

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.’

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.

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.