Jokerman (23 page)

Fifty

‘Emma.’

She couldn’t look up at his face, couldn’t bear what she’d see there. On the other hand, if she didn’t look at him, she’d be unprepared for what was about to come.

She was torn.

Still dazed from the collision between her jaw and the pavement, Emma had allowed herself to be bundled back down the road towards the BMW. She could have struggled, made a public spectacle; there seemed to be more people about under the streetlamps than there had been when she’d been running. But James had pressed close, murmuring in her ear, ‘Don’t cry out, and don’t fight me. Or I’ll have to hurt you,’ and she’d complied.

The BMW was still in working order. Emma sat staring dully through the windscreen as they travelled a few more blocks. Part of the way up a hill, James pulled in and killed the engine.

Emma let him help her from her seat and towards a house, this one at the end of a terrace and in darkness. He unlocked the door and pushed her gently ahead of him. She began moving along a corridor in the direction of what looked like a living room but he said, ‘No. Down here.’

James pushed open a door to the right. Beyond it, stone steps led down towards, presumably, a cellar.

At the bottom, James flicked a switch, producing bright light. The room was clean and bare, with nothing in it but a pair of foldable chairs propped against one wall. He brought them over and opened them up, taking Emma by the shoulders and lowering her into one of them. He stood by his, but didn’t sit.

‘Emma. I’m sorry about this.’

She said nothing. The faint noises of the city were barely audible down here.

‘Sorry I had to plant those devices on you.’

Had to?
she thought.

‘And I’m sorry about all this, tonight.’

Something in his voice made her slowly raise her gaze to his face.

‘I really didn’t mean to hurt you. And I’m not going to hurt you any more. Not physically, anyway. But there’s something I’m going to tell you that you’ll find deeply upsetting. Once again, I’m sorry to have to be the one to do so.’

There was genuine sympathy in his voice, Emma realised. And when she stared at his eyes, they weren’t hostile.

James said: ‘It’s about your husband.’

‘Brian?’ She never used his name in James’s presence. Absurdly, to do so had always seemed to compound her betrayal of him. But this was different. She was hardly in a clinch with James at the moment. Nor would she ever be again.

As if he’d been waiting until he got a response from her, James sat down. He leaned forward, his legs splayed, his forearms resting on his knees. His eyes peered at her intently.

‘How much has he told you about his time in the armed forces?’

Despite her fear, Emma found herself remembering the exasperation she’d felt at Brian’s caginess when it came to his military years. The chuckling way he’d tended to change the subject. She’d always assumed he’d had experiences he’d rather forget, and she didn’t press him; but at the same time she’d felt slightly resentful that she was always forthcoming with the gory details of her own work, yet he kept his from her.

‘Not much,’ Emma said. ‘He spent time in Iraq, which was a worry, of course. Then, when we discovered I was pregnant with our eldest, he left.’

James would have been in Iraq around the same time Brian was serving there, she knew. Sometimes she’d wondered if the two men had ever met, but she’d avoided asking James. She wanted them to be unconnected in every way.

‘And then he became a sports coach at a boys’ school.’ James watched her carefully.

Emma shrugged. ‘He’s always been a very physical person. After he’d left the Paras he was never going to take a desk job.’

‘Those weekend coaching sessions. Those rugby trips away for a few days. Have you ever wondered about them, Emma?’

‘What?’ The brightness of the room, the faint mustiness suggesting the cellar wasn’t used much, the panic and confusion of the last hour, all began to make Emma feel disorientated. ‘You mean, have I ever suspected Brian was lying about them? That he was having an affair, or something?’

The idea was ludicrous. Gentle family men like Brian didn’t have affairs. Unappreciative, needy, chronically dissatisfied women like Emma, on the other hand, did, she thought with a pang of self-loathing.

James’s gaze was unnerving her. He said: ‘I don’t mean an affair.’

She waited for more. Instead, he glanced away for a moment.

‘Those devices I planted on you,’ he said. ‘The bugs. They weren’t meant for you. They were intended for your husband. To monitor what he was saying.’

Her mouth opened, stayed that way though no words came out.

James went on: ‘It would have been easier to wire up your house. But he’d have found the devices. He’ll be sweeping the home regularly for audio surveillance.’

Despite herself, Emma let out a laugh. ‘Brian? Sweeping for – that’s
ridiculous
.’

‘Emma, listen to me. Your husband isn’t who you think he is. He’s been deceiving you. And so have I.’ He clenched his teeth for a moment as though trying to bite back his words. ‘Your husband has been under my surveillance for the last six months. He’s –’

‘Wait a minute.’ Emma realised she’d half-risen from the chair. James made a sitting motion with his hands and unconsciously she obeyed. ‘You’re telling me that you and I – our affair – was just…
cover
? That you used me only to get to Brian?’ 

‘No.’ His voice was emphatic. ‘It was more than that. Much more. I like you, Emma. I’m strongly attracted to you. I’ve enjoyed our time together as much as I’ve always made obvious. None of that was faked.’

‘But that was all just a happy extra,’ she whispered. ‘A perk along the way. The main thing was to get to my husband.’

He watched her silently for a few seconds, then: ‘Yes. Essentially.’

‘You bastard.’

She rose fully from her chair this time. Her palm cracked across his cheek. His head flinched sideways, but he kept his arms down. Slowly he turned his face towards Emma again, a furious red mark growing on his cheek.

She sat down. Somewhere, deep down, there was rage, and humiliation, and a guilt so corrosive it was a wonder it wasn’t eating her inside out. But at the moment all she was aware of was a grey numbness.

‘Why the surveillance?’ she said dully. ‘What’s Brian supposed to have done?’

Again, though James’s face was burning from the slap, Emma saw unfeigned compassion there.

‘Bad things, Emma,’ he murmured. ‘Things which are so terrible, you’ll understand why I did what I did. Even if you never forgive me – and I can understand why you wouldn’t – you’ll at least understand.’

Brian’s face appeared in her mind’s eye. So reassuring. So bland and unthreatening. Cold terror clutched at her gut. Oh God. Not… something to do with the schoolboys he coached?
Not that.

James said: ‘Brian Tullivant is a murderer.’

Fifty-one

When Tullivant realised what had happened, he cursed himself for an idiot.

Should have seen that one coming.

He was seated outside a café on the South Bank, two hundred yards from the entrance to the pub, the babbling summer-evening crowds providing a perfect screen which would render him all but invisible. His Mazda was parked round the back in a side street. The display on his watch said it was five past nine.

He’d been there twenty minutes. When he’d got home and Emma had given him her usual spiel about how she’d been called out, he’d glanced at the clock on the kitchen wall and estimated she was going to be late for her nine p.m. meeting with James Cromer. And by the looks of it, he was right.

Tullivant had allowed Emma ten minutes, then told Ulyana he was going out with some friends for a drink. She was happy enough, with her chocolate and her television programmes, especially now that the kids were in bed. Tullivant had taken the car and headed north into the city, towards the pub across the river from Thames House.

It had taken some fairly simple work on Tullivant’s part to ensure that both Emma’s phones – her usual one, and the one she used to communicate with Cromer, which she assumed Tullivant didn’t know about – transmitted a copy of all text messages, both received and sent, to Tullivant’s own handset. The dates, times and locations of the lovers’ trysts were all noted.

When, yesterday, Cromer had summoned her to meet him at the Tate Modern, Tullivant had been intrigued. They could hardly engage in a quick bout of passion in such a public place, surely? So he’d accompanied Ulyana and the children part of the way to the park, had told them he’d catch up with them after he’d diverted to one or two shops, and had tracked Emma to the Tate. There, he’d seen her huddled with Cromer, and dropping an object into his hand.

That was when he knew she’d found one or other of the bugs which Cromer had been planting on her. And that was when Tullivant realised events were moving into a new phase.

Tonight, he expected Cromer to come clean to Emma. To tell her that her faithful, doting husband was the target of a surveillance campaign by the Security Service. And that could prove fatal, not just for Tullivant himself but for the entire operation. So he needed to make a move on Cromer tonight, and silence him.

By twenty past nine, Tullivant had seen neither Cromer nor Emma enter the pub. Cromer might have arrived there much earlier; but it was unlike Emma to be as late as this.

Tullivant took out his phone and brought up the screen which showed him a tracking beacon for Emma’s own phone. He didn’t use it much, though he did usually check that she’d arrived at her meetings with Cromer at the appointed locations.

The gently pulsing orange dot of the beacon appeared after a few seconds, just as Tullivant was beginning to assume that it wasn’t going to show up, which would mean Emma was still underground on the train and therefore not giving off a detectable signal. But instead of identifying the location of her phone as a few hundred yards away from Tullivant, the beacon’s signal was coming from somewhere four miles away, in Fulham.

Tullivant rose and began striding in the direction of his car. So Cromer had anticipated that Tullivant might close in tonight, and had taken the precaution of intercepting Emma on the tube and diverting her from her planned destination. It was clever, Tullivant had to admit. Far cleverer than Cromer’s cack-handed attempts at audio surveillance had proven, with his hastily planted bugs.

But Cromer might not know that Tullivant had a GPS lock on his wife’s phone.

As Tullivant walked, he studied the beacon on the screen. It was moving, though it was impossible to tell whether the phone it was coming from, and by extension Emma, was in a vehicle or on foot. Tullivant had to assume it was a car.

He reached his Mazda and started the engine, propping the phone in a holder on the dashboard so that he could watch the progress of the beacon on the screen. It was going to be tricky, negotiating inner London’s notoriously convoluted streets in pursuit of a moving target.

As he drove, Tullivant centred himself, controlling his breathing, focusing on the remaining goals. They presented themselves in his mind with sharp, brittle clarity.

The first was to dispose of Cromer. That would be relatively easy.

The second was to neutralise Emma. This one would be harder to achieve, for all sorts of reasons.

The third of his goals was to terminate John Purkiss.

Tullivant had been told yesterday:
Purkiss is no longer part of the game. You don’t have to concern yourself with him now.
But they had seriously underestimated Purkiss. All of them had, Tullivant included. The fools out there in the desert at Scipio Rand had failed to deal with him; and now he was back, and a significant threat as long as he remained alive, even if he appeared to be pursuing the wrong lead.

Yes; terminating Purkiss was going to be the most difficult task of all.

Fifty-two

The floor of the cellar tilted, the walls looming in, curving.

James was simultaneously nearby and distant, his voice seeming to echo thinly in another room. Emma didn’t look at him, couldn’t, as if to do so would be to bring into final, unbearable focus the reality she was trying to comprehend only indirectly.

‘The car bomb on Saturday, in Lewisham,’ James said softly. ‘That was Brian.’

The words punched her one after the other, the absurdity of them not softening the blows.

Emma felt a tiny flicker of hope within her. She raised her head, still not looking into James’s face, and said: ‘He couldn’t have done that. He was coaching sport that morning. He left home early.’

Into the silence that followed, a terrible understanding dropped and spread like ink in a pool of water.

Brian had
said
he was coaching sport. But how did she know?

One by one, the realisations came crowding in, too many for her to deal with. The weekend trips on rugby or cricket tours. The late evenings at away matches. The staff meetings, at what now seemed excessively early hours in the morning.

Could they all have been lies?
All
of them? Was it possible?

Emma knew Brian’s teaching job was genuine; she’d met colleagues of his, had accompanied him to the occasional work do. But she’d never questioned his out-of-hour and weekend commitments, because she’d been too absorbed in her own life, in her work and her affair with James, to take any interest.

My children’s father is a murderer.

The though convulsed her stomach. She turned her head to one side as James rose from his chair opposite in alarm. Emma hadn’t eaten since lunch, ten hours earlier, but what came up was enough to spatter her hand and the rough stone floor.

James was at her side, his hands on her shoulders. She closed her eyes, cringing from his touch, the sour sting of the bile in her nose and mouth humiliating her.

‘I’m sorry,’ he murmured close to her ear. ‘I’ll get some water.’

Before Emma could protest, could insist that she be allowed to find a bathroom in the house and clean herself up, James had disappeared up the cellar stairs. She heard the door at the top clothes, and the unmistakable metal sound of a bolt being slid home.

Through her shock and despair, Emma was aware of the anger returning.

So, he was keeping her a prisoner here.

There wasn’t much Emma could do except wait, so she turned the chair with her back to the evidence of her retching and hunched over.

It occurred to her that she had her phone on her. James hadn’t confiscated that. But whom could she call? Brian? Hardly. The police? James probably had influence over them.

Emma realised she’d never been so alone in her life.

A thought struck her. The children. Jack and Niamh. She had to get them to safety.

The glass of her watch had been cracked when James had tackled her in the street, but the mechanism seemed to be working fine. It was a quarter past ten. Ulyana would be home with the kids. Brian would still be out in the pub with his friends.

Except he probably wasn’t out socialising, of course. He was somewhere secret, doing God knew what.

Emma had her fingertips on the phone in her pocket when James came down the steps, carrying a steaming bucket by the handle in on hand, a mop and cloths in the other, together with a half-litre bottle of mineral water.

When he saw her, he dumped the bucket on the floor and hurried across. He snatched the phone from her.

‘Who have you called?’ he demanded.

Emma stepped back in terror, the backs of her legs nudging the chair. ‘No-one –’

‘
Who have you called?’

‘No-one, I said.’ Her voice had risen with his. ‘I was going to tell the nanny to take the children and get out.’

‘No.’ James shoved her phone into his own pocket and tossed the water bottle to her. He seized the mop and began swabbing the stained floor. ‘It would just tip him off.’

‘Damn it, James. They’re my children –’

‘They’re in no danger.’ He scrubbed angrily at the stone, as though peeling vegetables. ‘Tullivant – Brian – isn’t an indiscriminate killer. He’s go no reason to harm them. If you talk to the nanny, she might tell him, and the game will be up.’

Emma had been taking a long draught of water. She lowered the bottle and stared at him. ‘The
game
?’

James pushed the bucket aside, propping the mop in it. ‘I’m close, Emma. Close to trapping Tullivant. Given all that’s happened in the last few days, he’s bound to slip up. Bound to make a mistake somewhere. Say something he didn’t mean to. Then I’ve got him. Then I can bring him down. Put a stop to all the killing.’ He faced her squarely. ‘But I need your help. You’ve got to go back. Pretend nothing’s happened. Get him to incriminate himself somehow.’

She continued to gaze at him, barely able to breathe. ‘Go back.’

‘You have to.’

‘And carry on as before.’

‘It’s the only way.’ He gave a half-shrug.

‘You must be out of your bloody mind.’

‘Emma –’

‘You kidnap me. Imprison me in a cellar. Tell me my marriage is a lie, my husband is a multiple killer. And now you want me to return to him, and share a house with him, all so that you can use me to ensnare him for your own ends.’

‘Not
my
ends, Emma. Those of all of us.’

‘The answer’s no, James. I’m not going to play any part in this. Not for you, not for anyone.’

He sighed. Yet again, the concern on his face looked real.

‘Emma, how else are you going to be able to get your children away?’

Terror for Jack and Niamh blazed within her. Her legs faltered and she sat down on the chair, almost overturning it.

‘You have to,’ she whispered. ‘You, the police… whoever. You have to go in there and get them out. Now.’

‘I’m sorry, Emma.’ Now his gentle tone had an undercurrent of hardness. ‘That’s not going to happen.’

‘Then I’m going,’ she said, rising once more.

‘Emma.’ He stepped between her and the stairs.

‘Get out of my way, James,’ she said. ‘Or I’ll scream. And you said you didn’t want to hurt me. You’ll have to hurt me, badly, to make me stop.’

She made to push past him but he blocked her easily, catching her wrist. Emma opened her mouth to yell.

And heard the noise, faint and distant, yet sharp enough to penetrate the closed door at the top of the cellar stairs.

It was the sound of glass breaking.

‘God,’ James breathed.