Jokerman (14 page)

Purkiss slumped forwards, his face making contact with the soggy, bristly ground. For long moments he inhaled the cloying, sweet smell of the wet earth, relishing its raw coolness.

No good. You’ve lost him. It’s no good.

He tried rising, failed once and dropped back, tried again. When he was confident his legs would support him, he leaned on the shotgun and studied the line of trees beyond the fence.

The man was either long gone, or rearming himself from a hidden stash. In neither case did it make any sense for Purkiss to stay there.

Feeling sick, both from the blow and with a sense of failure, of a missed opportunity, he began to make his unsteady way back across the meadow to the cottage.

Twenty-nine

The teargas had largely dissipated, but a lightly stinging haze remained, like a lingering, spiteful spirit. Purkiss picked his way across the yard between the bodies. He identified the three sons, all unstirring in death.

Near the door of the cottage, Dennis Arkwright lay on his back, Hannah crouched beside him, something in her hand. Arkwright’s chest was black with gore, and cavernous. His face was still, not twisted in agony.

Hannah glanced up, surveyed Purkiss, studying his head. Her eyes remained inflamed. ‘What happened?’

Purkiss touched the side of his head and face, felt stickiness. ‘He got away. I’m okay.’ He tipped his head at Arkwright. Hannah shook hers.

‘Died a few minutes ago.’

Purkiss squeezed his eyes shut in frustration.

‘There might be something, though.’ Hannah held up the object in her hand. It was her mobile phone. ‘Listen.’

She touched a key and a rough, ragged recording began to play. At first Purkiss thought it was obscured by static, until he realised he was listening to a dying man’s laboured breathing.

‘
Shot… me…’

Hannah’s voice, low and urgent.
‘Tell me again. What you said in there. Who did you see when you were interrogating – torturing – those prisoners? Who was there?’

More rasping, then an explosion of a cough that seemed to go on for an entire minute.

‘Ah, God, that hurts.’

‘
Talk to me, Arkwright.’
Hannah.
‘That name.’

‘
Something…’

‘
Yes?’

‘
Tell you… something else.’

  A wheeze, then his voice came back, a whisper now:
‘Hospital.’

‘
I’ll get you to hospital. Just –’

‘
Hospital.’

A melange of scratchy, unidentifiable noises took over then. Hannah put the phone away.

‘That was all.’

‘Okay. Good thinking.’ Purkiss took out his own phone. He couldn’t hear sirens. ‘A place like this won’t have its own police station, but someone’s bound to have heard the shooting and phoned it in. They’ll be coming from Cambridge or somewhere.’

Vale answered. Purkiss said: ‘I’m at Arkwright’s address. He’s dead, and so are his three sons. I need you, Kasabian or whoever, to pull strings immediately and lock this place down. Keep the local police out, and send in only people Kasabian knows well and can trust.’

‘Understood.’

‘Also, I need a face to face debrief with you and Kasabian at the earliest opportunity.’

‘Done,’ said Vale. ‘Are you intact, John?’

‘Bit jittery, but otherwise fine,’ said Purkiss. ‘One gunman. He killed Arkwright and his sons, and got away. He was the one who attacked me at my house. Who shot Kendrick.’

‘Interesting,’ said Vale.

‘Get a move on, if you could,’ said Purkiss. ‘I can hear sirens.’

He rang off. Hannah, who had risen from Arkwright’s side, said, ‘How do you know it was the same man as the one at your house? You said he was wearing a balaclava.’

‘And this one had a gas mask on,’ Purkiss said. ‘But it was his build, and the way he moved. The same man. I’m almost certain of it.’

Hannah looked around, blinking, rubbing at her eyes. ‘Water helps,’ she said.

They found a tap near the barn and used it to sluice their eyes. As the irritation eased, Purkiss became more aware of his other discomforts: the bite in his upper arm, the head wounds.

He said, ‘The man will have dropped whatever he used to fire the teargas grenades somewhere nearby. Plus, there’s his handgun, which he also dropped.’

There wouldn’t be any prints – the attacker was a professional, and had been using gloves – but the weapons might produce other important information. Purkiss and Hannah were heading round the side of the cottage when his phone rang.

It was Vale: ‘The local police and other emergency services have been ordered to hang back. Special Branch are coming in. You’re to get out of there immediately and not let them see you. Any information they need, Kasabian will relay to them after we’ve met and debriefed.’

‘Thanks, Quentin.’ He put the phone away, said to Hannah, ‘You okay to drive?’

They left the property over a side wall, assuming there’d be a throng of onlookers at the end of the driveway, which turned out to be the case as they crept past. Wherever possible they avoided passing another human being until they made it to the green and Hannah’s Peugeot.

On the journey back to London, Hannah squinting against the setting sun, Purkiss replayed the sequence of what had happened over and over in his mind. He knew false notes, misremembered details, would creep in, as they inevitably did; but he’d found such rehearsal useful for giving a more-or-less accurate account later.

‘It won’t be enough,’ Hannah said.

Purkiss looked at her.

‘What Arkwright said about Sir Guy Strang,’ she said. ‘It isn’t enough for Kasabian to do anything with.’

‘But it’s a start,’ said Purkiss. ‘It’s a pointer in a definite direction.’

He asked for Hannah’s phone, and began to play the recording of Arkwright’s dying words in a loop, holding the device close to his ear so he could pick up any nuances, any background details. He heard, distantly, the boom of the shotgun several times as he fired it at his assailant.

Purkiss focused on the later part of the recording.

‘
Something…’

‘
Yes?’

‘
Tell you… something else.’

  Wheeze.
‘Hospital.’

‘
I’ll get you to hospital. Just –’

‘
Hospital.’

He played it again.

And again.

‘
Hospital.’

It was like three words, the syllables broken up as Arkwright struggled to get them out.

Hos…pi…tal.

Except it wasn’t at all clear that the plosive
p
was there. It might have been a click or a pop caused by Arkwright’s jagged breathing, or by external interference.

Nor was the final
l
distinct.

Purkiss rewound to the first time Arkwright used the word, after the long wheeze.

This time there was no mistaking it.

Arkwright hadn’t been saying
hospital
at all.

Purkiss stared through the windscreen at the lengthening shadows on the motorway, the firefly lights of the cars ahead.

He picked up his own phone. Dialled.

Vale sounded surprised. ‘I haven’t confirmed the rendezvous time with Kasabian yet,’ he said. ‘I told you I’d call –’

‘You’re not going to believe this,’ Purkiss said.

Thirty

‘It could be coincidence,’ said Vale.

‘It’s him,’ Purkiss said.

‘It certainly
sounds
like his name, but –’

‘It’s him.’

‘There must be hundreds, thousands of people with the same –’

‘Oh, give me a break, Quentin.’ Purkiss paced about the living room of the Covent Garden flat. He’d arrived there half an hour earlier to find Vale already ensconced. Hannah had dropped Purkiss nearby and gone off on her own, to await his call. They’d agreed he wouldn’t say anything about her yet, to either Vale or Kasabian.

Hannah had insisted on the way down that Purkiss have his wounds attended to, and had pressed him, ignoring his protestations until he’d rung Vale once more and asked for a doctor to attend at the flat. The doctor had arrived five minutes after Purkiss and before Purkiss could reveal his discovery to Vale. A middle-aged, taciturn man, the doctor had probed Purkiss’s wounds, asking a few questions about the circumstances in which they’d been sustained but passing no comment. He’d cleaned and dressed them, given Purkiss a tetanus shot even though he was up to date, offered painkillers which Purkiss declined, and handed him two bottles of pills.

‘Antibiotics,’ the doctor said curtly. ‘For the bite. Don’t miss any. If the wound turns septic, seek help at once.’

With a nod to Vale, he’d left.

‘Service?’ Purkiss asked. He meant their service, SIS, not Kasabian’s lot.

‘A friend,’ said Vale.

It was code for
one hundred per cent discreet and trustworthy
.

Then Purkiss had laid his phone, with the sound file he’d transferred from Hannah’s, on the dining table and hit the
play
key.

He watched Vale while the older man listened, not getting it the first time.

Purkiss rewound the final exchange and played it a second, and a third time. Vale leaned forward a fraction.

‘Again,’ he murmured.

On the fourth listen, he glanced up at Purkiss, a question in his eyes. Purkiss said: ‘Tell me what you heard.’

‘Not
hospital
,’ said Vale. ‘
Rossiter.
’

And he’d started coming up with arguments against it, against the notion that Arkwright’s dying words had referred to Richard Rossiter, the man Purkiss had last seen as they’d both been hauled off a boat on the freezing Baltic Sea. The man who had very nearly succeeded in assassinating the Russian president a few minutes before that.

The man who’d corrupted Purkiss’s fiancée, Claire, and whom Purkiss should have killed when he’d had the chance.

Vale closed his eyes, as though mentally reaching out for possibilities that made sense. He shook his head slightly.

‘Let’s come back to that.’

‘Quentin –’

‘We’ll come back to it. First, debrief.’

Purkiss didn’t point out that Kasabian hadn’t arrived yet, and that he’d have to repeat the story for her benefit. Hearing the account for a second time, Vale would spot inconsistencies, details that hadn’t been there the first time. Sometimes that led to clues. Breakthroughs, even.

Purkiss related everything he’d learned from Arkwright, virtually word for word. He omitted all mention of Hannah Holley, giving the impression that he’d obtained Arkwright’s name himself from Morrow’s notes. When he reached the remarks Arkwright had made about Guy Strang, Vale reacted almost imperceptibly: he parted his lips, blinked twice. For Vale, that was like slapping the table in delight.

‘My take on it,’ said Purkiss, ‘is that this attacker – the one who killed Arkwright and his sons, the one who came after me at my home – had Arkwright wired. Either him personally, or his cottage. He was holed up close by, and when Arkwright dropped the Strang bombshell, he moved in.’

‘He was well equipped,’ said Vale. ‘Teargas grenades and mask, small arms.’

‘Arkwright was a Royal Marine, remember. And his sons, though they weren’t professional fighters, were experienced brawlers. The attacker knew what he was up against.’

Vale tipped his head in acknowledgement.

‘It bothers me, though,’ said Purkiss. ‘Why would he happen to be holed up just then, when I arrived?’

‘Because he knew somehow you were coming,’ offered Vale.

‘Then why did he wait until Arkwright crossed the line before making his attack? Why not just smoke us all out as soon as he knew I was in the cottage?’

‘Perhaps he wanted to avoid out-and-out carnage.’ Vale shrugged. ‘Perhaps he’d have preferred to wait till you’d left, then pick you off away from the cottage. You forced his hand by getting Arkwright to reveal what he did.’

Purkiss reached for the two-litre bottle of water he’d filled from the tap. Something else was bothering him about the way the whole episode had played out. He grasped at it, but it eluded him.

Kasabian arrived, letting herself in. She looked Purkiss over, noted the dressed arm, the facial plasters and bruises.

Without asking how he was, she got to the point.

‘Quentin here has told me some of it. Earlier he mentioned you were investigating a man named Arkwright, who had SIS connections.’ She took the mug of tea Vale handed her. ‘I’ve searched our files myself, manually. There’s nothing on him.’

‘Nothing,’ said Purkiss.

‘Not a mention of him anywhere. Which is odd. These former high-level military types who get themselves kicked out… they usually come up on our radar. I’m not talking ordinary squaddies who basically joined the armed forces to knock heads together and who’ll have ample opportunity to carry on doing so as civilians. I mean career soldiers. Proud men. They take badly to having their aspirations terminated. Often they set up mercenary groups, and we catch them domestically doing deals with gun runners. Or, they join right-wing extremist outfits. But this Arkwright doesn’t feature at all.’

‘Is it possible all intelligence on him might have been erased from your databases?’ asked Purkiss.

‘Possible, yes.’

That would make sense
, thought Purkiss.

She raised her eyebrows, the rest of her pouchy face failing to lift with them. ‘So who is he?’

Purkiss told her.

When he reached the part where Guy Strang was mentioned, her reaction was more conventional than Vale’s had been. She jammed a thumbnail between her teeth and tore it audibly.

‘Fuck
me
,’ she hissed, her eyes distant.

She took three strides over to Purkiss, seemed about to embrace him, thought better of it and clapped a hand on his uninjured shoulder.

‘
Excellent
work.’

‘It’s hardly proof,’ Purkiss said, thinking of what Hannah had said.

‘It’s proof enough for me,’ Kasabian breathed. ‘It means I’m right. I
knew
he was involved.’ She gazed off again, her expression wondering, but also triumphant. ‘It means we’ve got a focus for our efforts.’

Purkiss concluded his account. He described the recording of Arkwright’s last words, and played it back for her. Afterwards she rocked her head.

‘Difficult to tell,’ she said. ‘The two of you are more likely to hear Rossiter than I am, because you’ve had a personal involvement with him.’

‘You know of him, though,’ Purkiss said.

‘Of course. He was very nearly the first person to be tried in this country for high treason since William Joyce in 1946. It would’ve been difficult to keep that secret, though, so the Crown got him on terrorism and murder charges. It’s multiple life sentences either way.’

Purkiss had deliberately been kept from involvement in the proceedings against Rossiter, but he knew the man had undergone due process, in a trial which had been conducted as far as possible out of the public eye.

‘The one thing that does make sense,’ said Vale, ‘is that Arkwright did some freelance work for SIS as well. This would have been later, after the work he alleges he did for Strang. Rossiter was SIS. There might be a connection there.’

‘Okay,’ said Kasabian. She ran a hand through her hair. Purkiss could see she was distracted, her thoughts still on Strang. ‘I’ll see what I can dig up on Rossiter, though I doubt it’ll be much of relevance. He did a pretty good job of covering his tracks. Quentin, maybe you can look at the SIS databases again. See if there’s anything fresh that might link him to Arkwright.’

‘There’s something else we can do as well,’ said Purkiss.

Kasabian looked at him. ‘What’s that?’

‘Get me access to Rossiter.’

They were both silent, Kasabian and Vale.

Purkiss went on: ‘Direct, face to face access. You can swing it.’

Kasabian breathed out, shook her head slowly. ‘There’s no way you’re using duress against him.’

‘I’m not talking about using duress,’ said Purkiss. ‘I won’t be interrogating him at all.’

‘Then... what?’

‘I’ll ask him for his help.’

Kasabian probed his face with her eyes. Vale, on the other hand, looked thoughtful. Purkiss wondered if he knew what Purkiss had in mind.

Purkiss said, ‘Rossiter’s a patriot. A twisted, misguided, delusional patriot, but a patriot nonetheless. He has his own view of what’s best for the country, and he’ll follow that path no matter what. Even at the cost of his own skin. On that boat, in the baltic, he actually asked - begged - me to kill him, rather than bring him in and cast the Service into disrepute.’

Kasabian glanced at Vale, then back at Purkiss. She made a rolling movement with her hand:
keep going
.

‘If I put it to Rossiter that his cooperation is important to national security, and if I can convince him of it, he’ll play ball. He might try to manipulate me, to play games, but he’ll do it. The hard part will be convincing him of it. Because we don’t know that this does involve national security at all. I’ll have to lie persuasively.’

‘How will you know he’s telling you the truth, rather than feeding you misinformation?’ asked Kasabian. ‘He hoodwinked you before.’

‘I won’t know. I’ll just have to be on my guard.’ Purkiss looked at each of them in turn. ‘Come on. It makes sense. The sooner we do this, the better. In the mean time you can look for connections within the respective services.’

Kasabian was silent for a beat. Then she said: ‘All right. I’ll arrange it.’

‘Thank you.’

‘It’ll be tough,’ she said. ‘Doing it without tipping off Strang... it’ll take some doing.’

‘I’m sure you’ll find a way.’

Kasabian left. Purkiss thought she had a spring in her step.

‘It was risky, telling her,’ said Purkiss.

‘She had to know, John.’

‘Nevertheless.’ Purkiss began to pace again. ‘If she’s not careful, she’ll play straight into Strang’s hands. Make a blunder of some kind.’

Vale said, ‘There’s something else that’s risky. It concerns your meeting Rossiter.’

‘What’s that? If you’re worried I’m going to attack him, finish what I started in Tallinn, forget it. I wouldn’t have the opportunity, anyway. The security around him will be airtight.’

‘It’s not him I’m concerned about,’ Vale murmured. ‘It’s you.’

‘Why?’

‘Coming face to face with him for the first time since... well, since then. You don’t know what it’ll trigger in you.’

Purkiss stopped pacing, faced Vale. ‘I’ve come to terms,’ he said. ‘I’ll be fine.’

‘Very well.’ Vale looked at his watch. ‘I’d better set to work.’