Tim Stevens - Ratcatcher

‘How much?’

‘Six thousand krooni .’ About four hundred pounds, Purkiss estimated. ‘He was always short.’

‘Perhaps we can help each other find him.’

She studied his eyes, said, ‘I have to get back to work. My shift ends at one o’clock. Will you wait?’

‘Yes.’

She hadn’t taken the note he’d been holding. He made his way back into the heat and noise of the dance floor. At the bar he bought a bottle of water and a Diet Coke, after which he wormed his way over to one of the walls and leaned against it, wincing at the stickiness that tugged at the back of his jacket. Lyuba reappeared behind the bar. She and her fellow bartenders swarmed back and forth, keeping up with the demand. Purkiss checked his watch. Twelve thirty-five.

Fatigue was starting to tug at his eyes and limbs, brought on by the shortage of sleep he’d had the previous night on the way back from Rijeka, as well as the emotional grind of learning about Fallon’s escape. The lingering effects of the chase earlier and the sedative his body had absorbed weren’t helping either. He took a long draught of the soft drink, waited for the caffeine to kick in.

There was no pattern that he could discern. Fallon taking a flat with Seppo, who’d then reported his presence to Vale after several months. Fallon working in a dive of a club and taking up with an apparent street fighter of a woman, stringing her along and then ditching her without warning — and owing her money into the bargain. But in Purkiss’s experience the attempt to fit facts to patterns was one of the great errors of which human beings were capable. Of more use was the notion of probability based on past experience. His experience of Fallon was that the man didn’t get infatuated easily and didn’t run short of cash. His relationship with the woman had to be cover of some sort.

The relentless assault of the music was getting to him, proving hypnotic in both the mesmerising and the soporific senses. He thought about waiting outside but decided that he might miss Lyuba at the end of her shift. Instead he headed for the restroom. As usual the queue for the ladies’ was long, the one for the gents’ non-existent. He shouldered through the swinging door and into the reek of urine and bleach. He edged past the row of men at the communal urinal, found a vacant sink and ran the cold tap, ladling water against his face before pooling it in his hands and gulping it down. It was surprisingly palatable for city water. In the brown flyblown glass his face was pale, full of dark scoops: under the eyes, below the cheekbones and nose.

Beside Purkiss a skinny man with a ravaged face held open a jacket lined inside with slender pill bottles and knuckly twists of hashish. Purkiss shook his head. He was turning to leave when he felt a vibration against his leg. He pulled out his phone. A missed call from five minutes earlier. Vale.

He stood outside the cubicles until one of the doors opened. A man lurched out fumbling up his trousers. Purkiss went in, grimaced at the stink and the swamp of urine and toilet paper on the floor, kept away from the edge of the toilet bowl. He lifted the phone to his ear to hear the voice message while he reached behind him to slide the latch across.

The door slammed open against his thumb and the man cannoned into him shoving him forward so that his shins connected with the toilet bowl. He heard the door bang shut as he fought to keep his balance. With awful speed the man’s hands came down on either side of Purkiss’s neck and he felt the bite of the garrotte.

It was the phone that saved him from immediate death. It was in his left hand because he’d been reaching back to latch the door with his right and hadn’t had time to lower it completely. The garrotte caught across his watch but cut into his neck on the other side. He felt the wire tighten and crush the heel of his hand against the side of his jaw and he felt the closeness of the man behind him and the hot sourness of his breath against his right ear.

Purkiss shifted his head a fraction, all he could, to the right. At the far extreme of his vision was the shape of the other man’s head and part of one fist where it bunched with its fellow at the back of Purkiss’s neck, increasing the torque on the ends of the garrotte. Pain slashed through his neck and he felt the flesh bulging around the crevasse gouged by the wire. There was no blood yet, he was fairly sure of it. His right arm hung free.

Purkiss fought against the roil of nausea and tried for a backwards head butt with his occiput into his assailant’s face, but the twist of the garrotte around his neck might as well have been a vice holding his head in place because there was almost no range of movement. The wave of nausea was turning into one of panic as his watch slipped partially free from the garrotte and the wire began tightening across his forearm.

He pivoted back from the hips. This shifted the man back slightly and Purkiss was able to get his right foot up and onto the edge of the toilet bowl. He shoved himself backwards, pistoning his leg, slamming the man back against the door. Purkiss pushed again and a third time, each time pounding the man into the door and shaking the entire cubicle. From outside a drunken voice laughed what the fuck’s going on in there in Russian — another Russian speaker, this was quite a Russian club, that might be significant flitted through Purkiss’s thoughts — and the man behind him gasped back, ‘Leave us alone,’ which was met with cheers and wolf whistles. Purkiss got his right arm up and grabbed a fistful of the man’s hair and bent his head sideways. The angle was all wrong because his arm was flexed behind him and he was trying to exert force outwards, but the stretch on the man’s neck was enough to make him hiss through clenched teeth and momentarily shift his grip on the ends of the garrotte to secure it more tightly. In that instant Purkiss let go of the hair and gripped his left fist in his right hand and pressed his left forearm against the wire, the separate pains in his arm and in the right side of his neck blinding but the manoeuvre succeeding in creating a little slack. He was able to turn his head a fraction to the right and whip it sideways and he felt his frontal bone just above and to the side of his right eye connect hard with the man’s cheekbone and with a soft cry the man loosed his hold on one end of the garrotte. Purkiss spun to face him and the movement tore the garrotte free from the man’s left hand. Purkiss closed in, striking with a half-fist at the side of the man’s neck.

The blow to his cheekbone had been hard but the man recovered quickly and brought his arm up and deflected Purkiss’s attack. The man countered with a two-fingered eye jab but the space was too confined, ridiculously so, and he didn’t have the distance available to build up any momentum. Purkiss caught his hand and wrenched it around and down. With the edge of his other hand he struck at the man’s exposed neck. The man did his best to avoid it but with his arm held twisted as it was there wasn’t much he could do, and he sagged against Purkiss.

Purkiss let go of his wrist and caught him under the arms and supported the dead weight for a second, catching his breath, blinking until the ceiling stopped rocking, struggling not to topple over the toilet bowl pressed against the backs of his legs. There was a flicker at the man’s eyelids and he’d been bluffing and Purkiss let go of him and brought his knee up just as the man brought both fists stabbing in at Purkiss’s kidneys, an incapacitating blow if done right. Purkiss’s knee into the man’s abdomen as he dropped took some of the force out. Now the man had an arm around Purkiss’s neck and with his other hand he was gouging at Purkiss’s face. Purkiss seized the wrist in his hand and held it quivering. He stared into the man’s face, so close to his, red and sweating, the eyes narrowed to slits and the breath wheezing hot against his face.