Ratcatcher

then filled a tooth glass and drank. In the bath the body looked cramped, its face turned downward so that only a quarter was visible. There would be plenty of time to move it later on, after eight o’clock had come and gone.

He stood at the sink, finishing the water, gazing at the huddled mass, and was reminded of the much smaller crumpled figure of the girl on the lawn. In mid-swallow the thought struck him.

Purkiss had gone into the exchange knowing there was no escape for him, that if he wasn’t killed immediately he’d be taken captive. In which case, what precautions had he taken to allow his colleagues to track his whereabouts after his capture?

The Jacobin put down the glass, took out his phone.

Down the steps he was shoved, vertigo and the lack of visual cues making them seem steeper than they really were. His shoulders bashed off the walls. At the bottom he finally lost his balance and tipped forwards, unable to use his trussed hands to break his fall, colliding face-first with something wooden — a door, he guessed — that was like yet another punch to his swollen nose and lips, sending a surge of pain all the way through his head to the back of his neck.

Hands steadied Purkiss and he heard the faint whine of hinges and another shove propelled him into a wider space, judging by the slight echo. He regained his footing and stood and a heavy scrape behind him was followed by the jarring of some hefty object against the backs of his knees and now the hands were on his shoulders pressing him down on to the chair and he felt something like plastic cord being lashed around his torso and binding him to the back of the seat. He drew a deep breath, held it as long as he could, inflating his chest so the cords would be looser when he exhaled, trying to ignore the screaming of his bruised and cracked ribs.

The hood was pulled off abruptly, the scab gumming the wet stiff khaki to his nose torn away. The sudden return of vision after an hour or more of varying shades of darkness was shocking as a car crash. To turn his head hurt too much, but he was aware of three men surrounding him. One of them squatted before him and brought hot sour breath close to his face. It was the bull-necked man he’d headbutted earlier, his rotten teeth bent and bloodied in his mouth. The man stared into his eyes for a long minute, then hawked and spat blackly into one of them before Purkiss could blink.

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.’

Thirty-Two

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