Tim Stevens - Ratcatcher

The man stood and looked down at him and Purkiss prepared himself for the beating to start again, but the man muttered something Purkiss didn’t catch and he and the other two went through the door to Purkiss’s left and closed it. He heard a key being turned in a lock and their footsteps echoing rapidly up the steps. He squeezed his eye, trying to force out as much of the phlegm and blood as he could, blinked several times and peered around.

It was a basement, almost exactly square, the grey walls plastered but unpainted Two strips of blue-yellow fluorescent lighting in the ceiling provided illumination. The only exit was the door he’d been pushed through. There were no windows or skylights. Purkiss was secured to a chair with plastic flex around his torso from chest to hips. His hands remained fastened separately behind his back. The chair was a solid steel one of the sort used in prisons and secure psychiatric units, too heavy to be picked up and used as a projectile.

The three men had left, but he wasn’t alone.

Sitting opposite him, ten feet away on a similar chair, was a man, shorter and slighter than Purkiss, his head lowered but his eyes watching him.

The pain in Purkiss’s face, the stabs of his ribs with each respiration, the ache throbbing at his kidneys, all faded like a radio signal being tuned out. All sensations, not just sight and sound but those of smell and touch and even taste, seemed focused of their own accord on the man in the chair.

Purkiss had taken a kick to his throat but the word emerged clearly enough, the harshness due to reasons other than injury.

‘ Fallon .’

The laptop was where he’d left it, in the back of the car, and the Jacobin took his time ascending the stairs back up to the flat. He opened the computer on the dining table and typed in the wi-fi key. In a few seconds the internet connection was established.

The girl, Abby, hadn’t had time to shut down the sites she’d been connected to when he’d surprised her in the hotel room. They sprang up in a series of windows: Google Earth, which he closed, and another, a GPS tracking site which informed him that the session had expired and inviting him to log in again. He chose this option and was immediately prompted for a user name and password. The user name was already filled in: Abbyholt53.

He sat, elbows on the table and hands folded at his lips, chin propped on his thumbs. He knew nothing about the dead girl, hadn’t the faintest idea what she might use as a password.

Before taking her from the hotel room — he’d marched her straight past the reception desk and she’d been calm about it, possibly because of the knife at her back — the Jacobin had grabbed her rucksack as well as the laptop. Now he emptied the rucksack on to the table. Computer disks, an MP3 player with headphones, toiletries which she hadn’t got around to unpacking, a wallet.

He gutted the wallet swiftly. Banknotes and loose change, British and Estonian. Credit and debit cards, one each. A clutch of photographs in plastic windows: two people he took to be her parents.

And one of Purkiss, a clear shot of his face even though he wasn’t looking at the camera, didn’t even seem aware he was being photographed.

The Jacobin frowned at it, then put the wallet aside and pulled the laptop back in front of him and in the space marked password he typed purkiss and hit enter.

Password incorrect.

He typed johnpurkiss .

For a moment the screen went blank. Then a telephone number appeared, and beside it the words: signal lost .

He sat back. So, he had access, but no signal, which meant that either Purkiss hadn’t taken along his phone, or Kuznetsov had taken it from him and destroyed it.

The Jacobin kept the laptop open on the off chance that the situation changed.

*

Fallon remained motionless, continuing to watch Purkiss from beneath a lowered brow.

Purkiss had wondered what his reaction would be, seeing him for the first time. Would he feel overwhelming fury, be swamped by grief? But all he found himself thinking was, it wasn’t him on the phone .

There was nothing to say as an opening gambit that wouldn’t sound hopelessly melodramatic, so Purkiss said nothing. The silence was boken only by his breathing, harsh and loud through his swollen throat, by intermittent far-off bangs and echoes, and the faint buzzing of the fluorescent strips.

In the end it was Fallon who spoke first. ‘What time is it?’

The voice… Last heard in the courtroom, where he’d barely spoken, it now caused time to telescope so that to Purkiss days rather than years had passed since they’d last encountered each other.

All he was able to reply was, ‘I don’t know.’

‘No, of course not. I mean, what time was it when you last looked, and how long ago was that, do you think?’

There was something off about the voice now that he’d spoken for longer, a mushiness in the sibilants, and in a moment Purkiss got it. Several of the man’s teeth were missing. Without stopping to wonder why he was answering in so conversational a way, Purkiss said, ‘Four o’clock, and it was about an hour ago, I’d say.’

‘Four o’clock in the afternoon?’

‘The morning.’

‘Jesus.’

When they’d been friends, Fallon and Claire and Purkiss, Fallon had used to pronounce the word with a deliberately exaggerated Irishness — Jaysis — for comical effect, but he didn’t now. It came out quiet, heartfelt.

‘How long have you been here?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

Fallon was lashed to the chair just as Purkiss was to his, if anything more securely so, his legs bound one to each chair leg. He wore an open-necked shirt filthy with old dried blood. The whites of his eyes were webbed red and a cut beneath one eye gaped stickily. His nose appeared intact, but his lower lip was a swollen wedge of meat.

Purkiss understood, then, what Fallon’s stare had meant in the long minutes after they were left alone. The man had been utterly astonished to see him.

It was like a bizarre type of motionless, silent sparring. Purkiss did not know what to say, where to begin. Fallon clearly had lots he wanted to say, urgently, but his words were kept at bay by the huge, the all-encompassing fact that both separated and joined them. Spliced , thought Purkiss absently: that was a good double-edged word to describe the dynamic.

An hour passed, or possibly ten minutes. Neither man dropped his gaze.

Fallon ended the silence again, his mouth moving with the sticky sound of somebody deficient in saliva.

‘We have two things to talk about. One is more urgent. Why don’t we address that first.’

Purkiss said nothing.

‘Why are you here?’

Purkiss watched the face but the question seemed genuine.

‘I came here to find you.’

‘How did you know — ’

‘Somebody sent me a photo of you in Tallinn.’

Fallon blinked slowly, as if considering this.

‘What are you doing here?’ said Purkiss.

‘Trying to stop an attack on the summit.’ He coughed, broke off wincing. ‘Today, is it? It’s the morning of the thirteenth?’

‘Yes. There’s about three hours to go.’ Purkiss would have leaned forward if he could, the urgency beginning to take hold. ‘Keep talking.’

‘I’m on a Service operation. It’s why they got me out of Belmarsh. A rogue Service agent here in Tallinn is helping Kuznetsov, the man who’s holding us here.’

‘Do you know which one? Which of the three agents?’

Fallon stared. ‘You know them?’

‘Yes.’

‘No, I never discovered which one.’

‘Teague.’

‘You stopped him?’ said Fallon.