through the crowds filtering down the streets between the restaurants, trailing angry cries behind him.
The phone hummed against his hip. Purkiss slipped it out and glanced at the display as he ran. A text message, with an attached photo.
The message was from Vale:
He looked at the picture.
Purkiss stopped running.
He was in the middle of the road and a car bore down in a yowl of brake and horn. He leaped forward onto the pavement.
He stood, staring at the picture, his thoughts cold as sweat.
The bustle around him took on a detached quality, as though he were the observer of a documentary film showing on a wrap-around screen.
At the top of the phone’s screen the time display flicked to ten nineteen.
Purkiss drew a breath and closed his eyes. He shrank the picture and the thoughts and the feelings it evoked into a tiny box in his mind’s eye. Then he sealed the box shut and buried it deep. He felt for the adrenaline wave in his blood, caught it and began to coast on it.
The final run to the water’s edge, and the ground began to level out. Ahead he saw the pier and Spiljak’s boat, a fifteen-metre German model, beginning its slow turn out of its berth towards the open sea.
Purkiss put everything he had into it, palms stiff and straight and arms whipping alternately past his sides and legs pumping, his mind already there and commanding his body to catch up. The end of the pier was twenty metres away, fifteen, five. The boat had turned its back on him and he could see the spume churning at its base. He reached the end and leapt, legs cycling at the air and arms lunging. For an instant he was suspended between pier and boat. Then his torso slammed against the fibreglass of the boat’s stern and his palms slapped the slick surface. He began to slide but caught the upright of the rail, and he gripped it and and hauled himself up on to the deck.
Zagorec brought the gun up as Purkiss stepped through the doorway into the cabin. It was a VHS assault rifle, one of the ugliest weapons Purkiss knew. Beyond Zagorec stood Spiljak himself and another man in his fifties, squat and florid with a ginger tonsure clamped to the back of his head. The Englishman, Hoggart. Through the cabin at the top of the steps in the steering deck Purkiss spotted another of Spiljak’s henchmen at the helm.
From a hook in the centre of the ceiling of the cabin hung a length of rope, the end of which was knotted in a hangman’s noose around the neck of a fifth man. There was a slight slackness to the rope above his head. His hands and ankles were trussed and his feet teetered on a tiny stool. His lank hair and stubbled face were bloody.
‘Where’ve you been?’ said Spiljak.
‘The police pulled me in. Showed me photos of us hanging out together, warned me to back off.’
‘You’re lucky.’ Spiljak’s distorted nose was the result of a knife wound. He had chosen not to have it fixed as a badge of distinction, he’d told Purkiss once. ‘Zagorec saw you jumping after the boat and was going to pick you off in midair.’
Purkiss raised his eyebrows at the man at the end of the rope. ‘Who’s this?’
‘We caught him trying to get close to the boat, just before we’d given up on you and were about to set off. He hasn’t said anything yet.’ Spiljak ran an eye down Purkiss. ‘Know him?’
‘Should I?’
‘Your phone,’ said Spiljak, arm extended. Purkiss took out his phone and handed it over, then raised his arms and let Spiljak frisk him. Previously the phone wouldn’t have been an issue. Spiljak wouldn’t have asked for it, and Purkiss would have used it to record their conversation surreptitiously. Now, Spiljak’s suspicions were up.
The plan had been for Spiljak to introduce him to Hoggart with hearty endorsement. The dynamic was utterly different now. In the confined space he could taste the malice and mistrust. Spiljak had produced a handgun himself. It hung loose and ready by the side of his leg.
Purkiss moved close to the suspended man. ‘He was approaching the boat?’
‘Crouching by the side, looking for a way to get on board without being noticed,’ said Spiljak. ‘I was having a last look around when I spotted him.’
‘Armed?’
‘No. No ID on him either.’
Kendrick had done a crazy, foolhardy thing, but at least he’d left his ID behind. He’d been hit around the face and across the head. Otherwise he looked unharmed.
‘You guys have no idea about interrogation. None whatsoever. What you do is, you hurt them badly,
Spiljak moved behind him and he felt the butt of a handgun slap into his palm. He hefted and glanced at it. A Bulgarian Arsenal, cheap and stubby.
Kendrick glared at his eyes but showed no recognition.
Purkiss stepped back, aimed straight-armed at Kendrick’s left knee, and pulled the trigger.
The hammer cracked on an empty chamber. Purkiss turned, sighed. There was a shift in the atmosphere because he hadn’t turned the gun on one of them as soon as he’d been given it, had instead fired at the prisoner whom they’d suspected of being in league with him. They were off-guard. It was the perfect time to make his move.
He transferred the Arsenal to his left hand and in a spinning backhand strike lashed Zagorec across the face with it. He felt the nose crack and Zagorec was down without a word. Purkiss completed the turn and used the momentum to bring his right leg snapping across in a roundhouse kick which caught Spiljak in the shoulder, sending him staggering back into Hoggart who had risen, his own gun emerging. Purkiss headbutted Hoggart between the eyes, hard frontal bone meeting bridge of nose. As he sagged, Purkiss seized his arm and twisted the gun free and fired at the steps where the helmsman had appeared, catching him in the chest and flinging him back. He crouched and sighted down the length of his arm at Spiljak, who was standing upright, his gun aimed at Purkiss, one foot propped on the stool on which Kendrick was balancing.
From across the water the shouting had started up.
Purkiss had time to notice the gun he’d taken off Hoggart, a Heckler amp; Koch P30. To Purkiss’s right, on the steps leading up to the steering deck, the man he’d shot was groaning.
More shouting, and, distantly, sirens.
Over the guns, Spiljak’s eyes mocked him. He tapped his foot on the stool, making the implication clear.
Purkiss glanced up at the rope above Kendrick’s head.
His first shot caught Spiljak in the right shoulder, jerking his arm upward so that his own shot would go high if it came, which it didn’t. His second smashed into Spiljak’s left knee. Spiljak dropped with a shriek.
And kicked the stool away with his other leg as he fell.
The rope snapped taut and Kendrick swung. Purkiss kicked the gun away from Spiljak’s hand and caught Kendrick. He righted the stool, propped Kendrick’s feet on it, and prised loose the noose around Kendrick’s neck. Moving behind him he slipped out a Swiss Army knife, cut the cords binding his wrists and ankles.
Kendrick dropped off the stool, stumbling but keeping his feet. In a voice like a sheet of ice plummeting into an Arctic gorge he said: ‘Bastard.’
‘We’re even. You shouldn’t have gone in without me.’ But by delaying the departure of the boat he’d allowed Purkiss to get aboard. There’d never been any danger of his neck breaking. Spiljak had committed the novice hangman’s error of making the rope too short. In a few more seconds he’d have strangled to death, but Purkiss hadn’t been planning on waiting that long.
Purkiss glanced out of the window. Flashing red and white lights were massing on the shore. Spiljak was rolling on the floor clutching his wrecked knee, too shocked to scream. On the steps the other thug Purkiss had shot was on his back, whimpering, his breathing not laboured. He’d survive. On the floor of the cabin, Hoggart and
