Tim Stevens - Ratcatcher

In the passage by the front door, the Jacobin retrieved the small grip dropped there on entry. Inside was the equipment that, given more time, the Jacobin would have installed at leisure after first establishing that the man wasn’t at home. The man’s body would have to be hidden within the flat. The smell would attract attention in a few days, of course, but by that time it would all be over.

Spreading the contents of the grip across the dining table, the Jacobin set to work.

Vale was a motionless silhouette against the cold morning sky. Purkiss parked in the dirt semicircle at the bottom of the track and made his way up through the light ground fog towards the churchyard. It was Vale’s way, always had been. Remote locations for meetings to minimise the risk of surveillance. Purkiss had no idea where Vale’s office was, or if he even had one.

They’d arrived back from Zagreb mid-morning. To be on the safe side Purkiss had packed Kendrick off to see a doctor about the strangulation injury. He had freshened up, then phoned Vale for a rendezvous.

Driving out into the Hertfordshire countryside, Purkiss let his thoughts drift back four years. He’d replayed those events many times but there had always been the imperative to look forward, not to wallow. There was nothing more that could be done, and justice of a sort had been achieved. Now, that justice seemed ephemeral, like a software programme whose licence had expired.

He’d met Claire Stirling at a consulate bash when he was stationed in Marseille, and he’d immediately recognised her as SIS, like him at the time. The service disapproved of office relationships but with discretion Purkiss and Claire managed it. They were spies, after all. After a few months they were engaged.

A field agent of five years’ standing, Purkiss’s work in Marseille involved the study of immigration patterns into the city from Middle Eastern countries and the application of closer scrutiny when anybody suspicious arrived. Someone, for instance, whose name had come up before in connection with a Service operation elsewhere. Claire’s work was to all appearances more humdrum, monitoring radio traffic between the various embassies. They both enjoyed their work, they socialised mainly with diplomatic staff, and they loved together passionately, the clandestine nature of their union adding to the thrill.

The change came with the death of Behrouz Asgari. An Iranian-born businessman who had made Marseille his home for the previous twenty years, he was also a philanthropist whose investment in local infrastructure had lifted thousands of residents out of slum tenements. Asgari was openly opposed to the incumbent American and British governments and a devout Shi’a Muslim. He’d been extensively investigated, of course — Purkiss had done a lot of the work himself — and came up clean, with no links to hostile activity against the West.

One evening, while Asgari had been strolling along the waterfront with his wife, a lone motorcyclist had ridden up and shot him dead. The hit was a professional one, a double tap to the head using modified hollow-point nine-millimetre rounds. Asgari had been a personable, well-liked man, but he had business rivals aplenty, and the police investigation, such as it was, concluded that some unnamed competitor was responsible.

Two weeks after the murder, Claire had come round one evening to Purkiss’s flat — circumstances dictated that they live separately — in an odd mood, silent and brooding. He’d gone easy, coaxing gently but knowing when to back off. At last over a glass of Beaujolais she’d told him. For the last six months she had been investigating her immediate superior, Donal Fallon, for corruption. She suspected he was the person who’d carried out the hit on Asgari.

Fallon was a legend, an Anglo-Irish agent only half a decade older than Purkiss and Claire but a veteran of numerous high-intensity arenas, including Islamabad and Damascus. Purkiss had met Fallon many times through Claire, had been impressed by the man’s wit, his intellectual nimbleness, had liked his obvious gentleness and his affection for Claire. The three of them had become a trio, Fallon conniving at their affair with a twinkle.

Slowly, Claire had begun to detect irregularities in his working patterns, in what he did with the information she supplied him. She had started to pay closer attention, working off her own bat, relaying her suspicions to nobody. She amassed circumstantial evidence, unexpected blips in Fallon’s bank account, little more, and she was about to give up the search when Fallon asked her to post surveillance on Asgari without giving her a satisfactory explanation. He’d received without comment the intelligence she gathered for him, though she sensed he was looking for connections to radical Islamist groups, the kind of thing Purkiss himself had investigated.

Then the hit took place, at a time when Fallon was allegedly on a solitary hiking holiday in the Scottish Highlands.

‘It wasn’t business related. It was political.’ Purkiss had let her talk without interruption, the flow becoming a surge under the influence of the wine and of her agitation. ‘Fallon saw Asgari as a potential threat to us, couldn’t pin anything on him, and decided to take him out pre-emptively.’

She fell silent and he said, ‘A one-man death squad.’

There’d been rumours, for at least as long as he’d been with the Service, but most people considered them to be urban legends.

She looked straight at him for the first time. ‘The trouble is, I don’t know if it’s just one man.’

He understood then why she’d kept her fears to herself, why she hadn’t taken her suspicions over Fallon’s head the moment she’d been sure. If there were others working with him, they might be senior to her.

They talked past the dawn. Purkiss wanted her to back off, thought she was in far too deeply. Claire countered that she had come too far to quit. Besides, she was certain Fallon didn’t know she was on to him. They reached a compromise. Purkiss would take over the active role, surveilling Fallon. Claire would provide logistical support. They would involve nobody else for the time being.

Two evenings later Purkiss let himself into Claire’s flat, arms laden with groceries for their meal. In the second before he was able to react, he saw Claire arched backwards, her feet off the floor, Fallon behind her with an arm across her throat and a knee in her lower back.

Purkiss yelled, the primal roar of a berserker, and covered the distance between them even as Claire dropped away, dead weight. Fallon met Purkiss with a speed and grace Purkiss would have marvelled at under other circumstances, a kick to the face, another to the knee, felling him. Purkiss clawed at his foot and almost got a hold, but Fallon was at the door and was gone.

There was no question of going after him, of leaving her. Purkiss crouched with Claire’s head between his palms and her lifeless, bruised eyes staring past him. He gave vent to a stream of nonsense words he could no longer remember. Later he recalled begging the paramedic to keep trying to revive her, not to let her down as he, Purkiss, had let her down by not overriding her decision to keep after Fallon, by not being there with her when Fallon paid a visit, by being so stupid as not to realise Fallon, the master spy, would have noticed he was under scrutiny.

Purkiss wasn’t a believer in the idea of repressed emotions, the notion that feelings could actually exist as entities in their own right, simmering under the surface whether or not you were aware of them. But, fists white on the wheel, he understood the appeal of the concept. The fury, the anguish, had returned to him now in so whole and so familiar a form that it was easy to believe they’d never gone away.