Jokerman (24 page)

Fifty-three

By the time Tullivant reached Fulham, the tracking beacon on the screen had remained stationary for some time, in a location just off Parson’s Green. Tullivant didn’t know the area all that well, so he chose his route by instinct, taking the occasional wrong turn but generally homing in.

Because he didn’t know exactly where he was heading, he knew it was a risk to take the car right up to the location marked by the beacon, in case his arrival was easily noted. On the other hand, he wanted to be close enough to his vehicle to be able to access it quickly if necessary. He zoomed in on the display until the names of the individual streets became visible.

The beacon pulsed alongside one of the streets. It suggested that Emma, or Emma’s phone in any case, was inside a building. And probably a house, since this was a residential area. A safe house of some kind, then. One of many that the Security Service would operate throughout the city, and indeed the whole country.

Compromising, Tullivant pulled over at the side of the road under a street lamp two blocks away, and got out. He considered taking the Timberwolf in its bag, which he had stowed in its compartment under the seat, but decided against it. This was more likely to be a close-range job.

Inside his leather jacket he had a Heckler & Koch nine millimetre pistol with a spare magazine.

The few passersby didn’t give him a second glance. Cupping his phone in one hand to shield the blue light from the display, Tullivant headed in the direction of the beacon.

At the foot of a hill, he stopped. It was the end-of-terrace house on the left, if the GPS tracking signal was accurate. And he had no reason to believe it wasn’t.

The house appeared to be in darkness. Heavy curtains hung before all the visible windows, so it was possible there was illumination within which was being prevented from escaping.

After standing completely still for two minutes, absorbing the sights and sounds around him, Tullivant detected no tell-tale signs o an ambush, no obvious security measures.

He crept up to the front of the house, one hand inside his jacket and on the grip of the pistol.

Beside the front door, a frosted glass window gave onto a corridor. He’d been wrong; this window wasn’t curtained. And he could see no light beyond.

Tullivant drew a pair of thin rubber surgical gloves from the pocket of his leather coat and pulled them on. From another pocket he took a balaclava, and he fitted it over his head.

Holding his breath, Tullivant turned the doorknob and applied gentle pressure.

It was locked. There was no sudden blare of an alarm from within.

Tullivant put his shoulder to the window beside the door and leaned. The glass gave a little, creaking, before a splintering crack made him wince at its loudness.

He stopped, listening.

From somewhere inside, he heard raised voices. A woman’s, and overlapping with it a man’s, lower, more placating. Tullivant strained to hear, but was unable to make out what they were saying. There was a door between him and the voices; at least one.

With his leather-clad elbow he knocked out the window glass. The clattering of the shards on the hard floor inside might as well have been a hailstorm on the roof.

The voices had stopped.

Tullivant reached quickly through the smashed window, ignoring the pricks of jagged points against his rubber-clad hands. He groped for the latch of the front door, opened it and stepped inside.

He drew the Heckler & Koch and looked around. To his right, a closed door; ahead, a corridor from which several other exits led.

He stood very still, once more absorbing his surroundings, reaching out aurally for the slightest clue as to the whereabouts of the owners of the voices he’d heard.

Nothing.

He stepped down the corridor at a slight crouch, gun held in a two-handed grip.

The door at the far end was ajar, and Tullivant thought he could see the arm of a chair beyond. A living room. But it appeared to be in complete darkness. Beside the door, a flight of stairs led up to the next floor.

He registered the tiny creak of an unoiled hinge an instant after he’d started to turn, his reflexes kicking in and leaving his conscious self lagging. The first door on the right when he’d come in had swung open behind him. Tullivant brought the gun up just as something shot towards him, black and gleaming, and he felt agony burn its way up his right arm.

Fifty-four

James pressed his finger hard and upright against his lips, holding the other hand up in a
don’t move
gesture.

Emma stared at him, her eyes wide, and nodded. He reached inside the pocket of his jacket and drew out a knife in a scabbard. She thought it looked like the kind of thing you’d go hunting with.

Holding one hand up still to make sure she kept her distance, he crept towards the stairs and began to climb them. Emma watched him go, fear rising in her and threatening to erupt into panic. Not daring to move her feet, Emma jammed a fist into her mouth.

At the top of the steps James paused, his ear to the door. The unsheathed knife in his left hand, he took hold of the doorknob with his right, hesitated a second, then twisted it and flung the door open.

Emma watched him step out, turn. She heard a rustle of movement, followed by a gritted gasp of pain.

Then fast footsteps, a thud followed by a crash as what sounded like a human body collided with a door, and the snarling sounds of fighting.

Emma released the breath she’d been suppressing, terrified by the sounds she could hear in the absence of any visual guide to put them in context. She stared about her, not knowing what she was looking for but desperate to find something that might be useful in some way. Apart from the chairs, and the bucket and mop James had used to clean the floor, there was nothing.

She couldn’t stay there, in the cellar, like some zoo animal or lab rat.

Emma started up the steps, her legs faltering like a foal’s. From above her she could hear a choked groaning, as though somebody was being throttled.

At the open door, she stopped. The sounds of struggle were coming from down the corridor, to her right.

The front door was on her left, a few feet away.

Coward
, a voice told her.

But another voice, a more reasonable one, said:
It’s the only way. You’d be no help to James. You’d just get yourself killed
.

Terror and adrenaline reaching a peak within her – she couldn’t tell one from the other – Emma pushed through the door way and reached the front door.

From behind her a voice called, ‘
Emma.
’

She turned. It was an involuntary move, triggered by the familiarity of the voice.

At the end of the corridor, in the shadows, two shapes were locked together on the ground. She saw James’s white face turn to the side as if he were trying to look round at her. Beneath him, on the stone floor, was another man, his face obscured by a mask of some kind.

It was he who’d called her. And James had turned to see what she was doing.

The man beneath did something with his legs, a roar escaping his mouth through clenched teeth, and James was lifted up to sprawl backwards on his bottom.

Emma stood at the front door, petrified, knowing she needed to run, to get out into the street and get clear and try afterwards to make sense of it all; but she was unable to move her limbs.

The man in the mask rose to his knees and extended his arms. There was something in his hands, something that glinted in the thin light.

The explosions rocked Emma’s ears, claps of thunder that echoed through the corridor, two of them followed by a solitary third.

James was hurled back, his body jerking, a spray of something hot and black in the darkness lashing across the stone floor. He crashed hard, supine, one arm flung out at his side.

Emma clapped her hands to her ears and screamed, the sound choking off as her throat closed. The after-noise of the shots rang on and on, the air in the corridor rich with the stench of cordite and blood.

The other man rose, pulled off his mask. Despite the darkness Emma could see his face clearly.

‘Emma,’ he said quietly.

Brian.

Fifty-five

Tullivant drove, his route meandering but broadly purposeful, describing wide and irregular arcs away from the house in Fulham but staying this side of the river.

In the back, the only sound Emma made was a periodic, muffled sob.

Her wrists and ankle were bound with plastic ties from a supply he kept in his kit bag. In her mouth was a gag, secure enough to prevent most sound from seeping past but not so tight that she was in danger of suffocating. He kept his ears open for sounds of vomiting, which would put her in danger of aspiration.

When he’d been sure she wasn’t going to run out the front door, rooted as she was to the spot in shock, Tullivant had swiftly gone through Cromer’s pockets. He’d left the dead man’s own phone – it could have all sorts of alarms, bugs or traces built into it – but taken the one he’d recognised as Emma’s. Apart from the hunting knife, the man was unarmed.

Tullivant used a strip from the dead man’s shirt to bind the wound in his right arm. The man had thrown well. A few inches to the left and the blade would have penetrated Tullivant’s chest.

Tullivant’s blood was smeared on the floor, the walls, the living room door. In an ideal situation he’d have spent an hour scrubbing it off, and scoring the entire corridor to eliminate other traces of his DNA. In an ideal world, he’d also have taken time to remove Cromer’s body and dispose of it elsewhere, far away.

He’d used a suppressor on the Heckler & Koch, but the echo in the empty corridor had been loud enough to alert whoever lived next door, and probably others in the neighbourhood as well. And Emma’s scream would have put paid to anyone’s doubts that they’d heard something unusual in the house at the end of the terrace.

  Tullivant left Cromer’s body where it was. He reached Emma in four rapid strides. She cowered against the closed front door, her arms crossed in front of her, her entire body shaking as though in the grip of a fever. She recoiled when he reached for her, but she didn’t try to run away.

Tullivant put his arms round her, held her close, feeling her face against his chest, her lips moving silently. He maintained the embrace for ten long seconds, feeling her juddering slow a fraction.

He took a quick look at her face. The frozen panic had been replaced by a dull caul of passivity.

Tullivant slipped the balaclava back on. Taking Emma gently but firmly by the upper arm, he pushed open the front door and led her down the short driveway, glancing about as he went. Lights blazed across the street and in the house next door. Silhouetted figures peered from behind slanting curtains.

Not breaking his stride, he marched Emma to the Mazda. Her eyes widened a little when she saw it, as if its stultifying familiarity brought home to her the horror of her situation.

She struggled only briefly, and weakly, as Tullivant bundled her into the back. He said, very soft and low: ‘Emma, no,’ and his tone was warning enough that he didn’t have to pull his leather jacket aside to reveal the grip of his gun or anything as melodramatic as that. She went limp, her face averted, her eyes closed, as he secured first the ties, then the gag.

He pulled away, leaving behind a house with a dead body, copious traces of his own recent presence, and a neighbourhood which had heard gunfire and witnessed a man and a woman fleeing the scene.

The situation was messy, that was for sure. But most messes could be cleaned up, given enough time and resources. And Tullivant had plenty of the latter to call upon.

It was the more immediate mess he was less optimistic about.

Tullivant said, ‘Emma, are you conscious? Can you hear me?’

A moan rose from the back seat.

‘In a little while, once we’re a safe distance away, I’m going to take the gag off you and ask you some questions. I’m telling you now because I want to give you the chance to think very, very carefully about how you answer.’

Silence.

He went on: ‘First of all, no matter how frightened you are now, no matter how confused, I want you to know that the children are completely safe. They’ll come to no harm at all, no matter what happens.’

Another low moan, and a sob.

‘But I can’t say the same for you, necessarily. When I come to ask you my questions, I want you to answer completely and unhesitatingly truthfully. I’ll know immediately if you’re lying. As you’ve discovered, I’m not who you thought I was. I have skills you won’t be able to beat.’

He let his words sink in for a few seconds.

‘If any of the answers you give me are less than the full and unvarnished truth, I will hurt you. If the lies accumulate, so will the pain. Eventually you’ll die.’

The closest thing to a scream escaped the confines of the gag. He felt her writhing in the back, thumping her knees against his seat.

‘Think about it, Emma.’

He said nothing more, and Emma’s stifled wails ebbed into harsh-sounding rattles. Tullivant wondered if she’d noticed what he hadn’t said.

That if she told him the truth, she wouldn’t necessarily live.

He found a less-than-salubrious street with faulty lamps that left most of it in darkness, and pulled up. Climbing out, he moved Emma into the front seat and sat beside her. Anyone passing would think they were a couple who’d stopped to pursue a late-night argument.

He pulled the gag free. Red lines marked its pressure across her cheeks.

She turned to look at him. In her eyes there was only wonder.

Tullivant began with some mild test questions - how long had she been having the affair with James Cromer, where had they met on specific occasions - to which he knew the answers. In each case she replied hurriedly, as though desperate not to be  suspected of even trying to lie. He watched her carefully much of the time, only occasionally glancing up as a car’s headlights swept past. Before long, he moved on to more recent events.

What had she found that she’d shown Cromer at their meeting in the Tate Modern yesterday?

She paused for the briefest instant. Tullivant thought it was because she was stunned that he’d been there, watching the two of them in what they’d thought was the camouflage of the crowd.

‘Something he’d hidden in my handbag,’ she blurted. ‘A listening device.’

Had she found others?

Yes, she had. Hidden in her lipstick.

Had Cromer told her what they were for?

To eavesdrop on him, on Brian, she replied.

Tullivant closed in with his questions.

‘What did James tell you about me?’

This time her pause was, he knew, because she still couldn’t quite believe the enormity of what she was about to say, despite what she’d seen him do a short while earlier.

‘He told me you were a murderer. That you were responsible for that bomb that went off in Lewisham on Saturday.’

‘Anything else?’

She looked appalled by what must seem like his nonchalance. ‘No. I mean, yes. Just that… you’re a murderer. That you’ve been under surveillance for a long time. That he… used me to get to you.’

It came out in a rush. Tullivant let her continue, allowing her to vent. When Emma’s tone became increasingly shrill, he stopped her, guided her with a specific question.

He owed it to her to give her a chance to speak, because he had a momentous decision to make.

After half an hour, Emma seemed to be flagging. It was time.

Tullivant began the systematic interrogation. The questions about the fine points of what she knew, repeated sometimes in reworded form so as to catch her in a lie if possible. He worked methodically, patiently, relentlessly. Mercilessly.

Twice, Emma broke down in tears, and he had to give her time to regain her composure. Only twice; he thought it did her credit. 

By the end, it was as though her eyes were desiccated, unable to express any more fluid. There was no gleam to them, just the dull patina of death in a still-living person.

Tullivant had detected three or four contradictions in her answers, all of them minor ones, none of them deliberate. It was par for the course. An experienced interrogator knew that a sustained barrage of questioning which elicited no errors whatsoever had to be regarded as suspicious.

Emma had told him the truth. And it was clear she knew next to nothing, about Tullivant or about his operations.

The tragedy was that what she
did
know was enough to condemn her.

He watched the side of her face in the silence of the car, considering the ways he might do it. Weighing them up for efficiency.

Her phone rang in his pocket, and although it was set to vibrate the noise was startling, making even Tullivant start.

He looked at the display. It was a number that was unknown to him.

Tullivant held the phone so Emma could see. ‘Who’s this?’

‘I don’t know.’

He believed her.

Tullivant grabbed pen and paper from the glove compartment and handed the phone to Emma. ‘Answer it. Put it on speakerphone. Follow my written instructions.’

She pressed the keys, just before the voicemail function kicked in, Tullivant thought.

‘Yes?’

‘Dr Emma Goddard?’

A man’s voice. Tullivant knew it.

He made a
keep rolling
gesture to Emma.

‘Yes,’ she said, her voice steady.

‘Dr Goddard, listen carefully. Don’t ask who I am or react with surprise in any way, if there’s anyone there with you. Just listen. Your life may be in danger. Are you at home at the moment? Answer simply yes or no.’

Purkiss. It meant he’d discovered Tullivant’s identity.

And suddenly Tullivant saw a solution, one that would solve the problems of Emma and Purkiss in one go.