Tim Stevens - Jokerman

Quickly she dragged him towards one of the cubicles, pulling him in after her and slamming and locking the door.

His arms were already around her, his hands splaying across her back, roving. She twined her own arms round his neck, her mouth seeking his, hard. Hoisting her thighs up around him, she pressed her pelvis against his.

Somehow she tore her face away and pressed her lips against his ear. ‘Now. Here. I want you.’

‘No,’ he murmured.

‘I want it. You want it.’

‘But we can’t.’

Gently but firmly he gripped her hair and lifted her head back so he could look into her eyes. She saw his pupils, dilated with desire, crowding out the dark blue irises.

‘It’s too risky. This is already too risky.’

‘You’re a soldier,’ she mocked. ‘Risks are what you take.’

‘None of them were ever as big as this.’

She felt him tense, his eyes flicking away. A moment later she heard the door to the restroom open and two chattering women’s voices enter.

Emma was relieved the doors to the cubicles didn’t have large gaps beneath them, so that James’s feet wouldn’t be visible.

They kept very still, while the women’s conversation continued even as they positioned themselves in adjoining cubicles. The toilet sounds, shockingly near, made Emma glance sharply into James’s eyes. He was biting his lip, trying not to laugh, and Emma felt her own face contort. Desperately she forced it under control.

At last the women finished their business, washed their hands and left. Emma released a soft laugh that was more like a sob. James shook his head.

‘Jesus,’ he muttered. ‘One of these days…’

He released her. She clung to his neck but he was already pushing her away.

‘Monday,’ he said. ‘I’m off in the evening.’

‘It’s too long to wait,’ she said.

‘We’ll have to.’ He tipped his head to the door of the cubicle. ‘Go on. You first.’

She gave him a last, lingering kiss, searing his lips with hers, and slipped out. When she’d checked the coast was clear, she rapped on the cubicle door and strode away.

He emerged into the corridor a few seconds later and they continued their journey towards the underground garage where her car was waiting, the chauffeur already behind the wheel. Apart from a brief nod of thanks, she didn’t interact with James again. Didn’t look back as the car pulled away.

In the back of the car she took out a small compact and checked herself in the mirror. Lipstick a little smeared. She’d have to be more careful in future.

She studied her face. Not bad for thirty-seven. Not bad at all. Her skin tone was still fresh, and the lines were minimal, apart from the tiniest wisps radiating from the corners of her eyes when she smiled.

No, she didn’t mind looking at her face at all. Except her eyes. Emma had difficulty gazing into her eyes for any length of time, because of what she saw there.

A woman who was cheating on her husband. With one of the most trusted bodyguards of the Director of MI5.

She forced herself to study her reflection for a few seconds more, then put the mirror away.

Through the window, the great sweep of the Thames drew Emma’s eye northwards. The magnificence of the view crowded out the stab of guilt she’d felt when… well, when she’d remembered what she was, and what she was doing.

Four days. Then she and James would be together, for a few stolen hours.

Until then, it was business as usual. Taking the kids to karate and ballet classes, joshing with Ulyana, their live-in nanny, and maintaining the fiction that she had much in common with the woman, joining the other members of the Residents’ Association to plan their strategy when they confronted the council about the proposed new supermarket in the area.

Living in harmony with Brian. Dependable, affable Brian, who’d never done a single thing to hurt her. And whom she was now deceiving in the most clichéd way.

Emma closed her eyes, leant back in the seat, and gave herself over to thoughts of her next meeting with James.

By the time Purkiss unlocked the door to his house it was a little after seven in the evening. The oppressive, beating heat of the late afternoon had simmered down to a sticky drowse; there was even a hint of coolness in the infrequent breezes that wafted about.

Purkiss lived in Hampstead, a former village long ago incorporated into the hungry expanding beast that was London. High up in the north of the city, it afforded spectacular views from the heath nearby. Often in the evenings, when the weather was cooler, Purkiss would go running through the rambling grassland, but he knew it would be infested now with tourists, dogwalkers and picnickers.

His house was a three-storey Victorian oddity, a turreted hexagon built by an 1870s eccentric with a taste for the Gothic. Purkiss had bought it a decade earlier, its individual character, peaceful location and easy access to central London all appealing to him. The price would have been well out of the range of his then SIS agent’s salary, but his father, a well-off Suffolk farmer and landowner, had died the previous year and left Purkiss a comfortable inheritance.

Four years after purchasing the property, Purkiss was stationed in Marseille and met Claire Stirling, a fellow agent, who was to become his fiancée. They made occasional trips back to England together, and gradually began to piece together the home they would make when their postings in southern France came to an end. Claire loved the Hampstead house, and began adding her personal touches to it: artwork, furniture, an upright piano she in turn had inherited from her parents.

Purkiss and Claire never got to live in the house together. A year after they met, Purkiss walked in on another fellow agent in Marseille, Donal Fallon, killing Claire with his bare hands. Fallon was caught, convicted of murder, and jailed.

For months afterwards Purkiss left the Hampstead house exactly as it was, not even clearing out the few clothes Claire had already moved into the wardrobes. As the years went by, he began to let go, giving away or selling most of the things he and Claire had never got round to sharing. The artwork went, as did most of the furniture she’d picked, and Purkiss had reverted to his old, bachelor’s items.

The one thing he hadn’t thrown out was the piano.

In Marseille, in the rented flat provided for him by SIS, there’d been a piano, too, and he and Claire had spent balmy, wine-mellowed evenings working their way through their small repertoire. Claire was a Debussy admirer, her playing dreamy and impressionistic, while Purkiss preferred spiky, storytelling stuff: Shostakovich, or Liszt’s Etudes . But they both loved Beethoven’s Pathetique sonata, and it became the equivalent of “their” song. They would take turns playing it, each trying to perfect it for the other. Claire was always the better player, which pleased Purkiss. It forced him constantly to raise his game.

Now, standing in the doorway to the living room, he wondered if it was time to get rid of the piano.

For the first time in ten months, he went over to it, sat down, lifted the lid, and began to find the keys with his fingers.

The piano hadn’t been tuned in nearly a year and it showed. But the opening chords of the Pathetique , the Grave theme, flowed instinctively, as if Purkiss had been practising the piece every day. He closed his eyes, let the music draw him after it.

It was Kasabian’s talk earlier that day of treachery, of betrayal, which had driven Purkiss to sit down at the piano once more. He understood this, consciously.

Ten months ago, on a boat in the freezing Baltic, a man named Rossiter had told Purkiss the truth about Claire. That she was a killer. A hitwoman. Part of what the Americans would call a black-ops outfit within SIS, one which had taken it upon itself to kill known and assumed enemies of the British state, illegally and without official sanction.