TWENTY-FIVE
The hotel Abby had been using was on a corner. Elle parked three blocks away across the road within sight of the entrance. They watched the front for a while. There wasn’t much traffic in and out of the glass doors, and the street, while doubtless busier than usual for this time of night, had lost the press of shoppers Purkiss had noticed when he’d been there before.
‘I’m going in on my own,’ he’d said, and she immediately objected. But he prevailed. If Fallon or his people had set up an ambush then at least some of them would be outside to block any escape. It made sense to keep the entrance under watch with Elle at the wheel and Kendrick riding shotgun, rather than corralling one or both of them inside the hotel.
Purkiss stepped out of the car and crossed towards the entrance without looking back, flinching at the squeal of tyres somewhere off in the distance but not breaking his stride. The midnight air was cold and the wind was up, whip points of rain flicking the exposed skin of his face and hands.
In the foyer, a post-dinner business party milled boozily and a cleaner pushed a desultory mop across the tiled floor. Purkiss went up to the reception desk and waited for the woman seated there to come off the phone.
He said, trying English and his best smile, ‘Good evening. I know it’s late but I wonder if you might have a room.’
She glanced at the mark on his neck, at his unshaven cheeks, but only briefly. There was blood on his cuffs from where he’d worked on Rossiter, but he’d rolled them up. In any case she wouldn’t be able to see them from where she was sitting. With a tight smile she peered at her computer screen.
‘Yes, sir, we do.’
He cut in: ‘Something on the first floor?’
Her eyebrows twitched. It was an odd request. Pursing her lips slightly, she considered. ‘One three one’s available –’
‘And overlooking the courtyard, if possible.’
He could see she was fighting the urge to roll her eyes. ‘One one seven?’
‘Perfect.’ It was the one next door to Abby’s.
He took the registration card and filled it in below the level of the desk so she couldn’t see the blood on his sleeves. He handed it across with his Martin Hughes credit card, and waited while she entered the details, hoping she wouldn’t ask about luggage. After she handed across two key cards he thanked her and turned, expecting either the hotel’s security or someone worse to be bearing down on him. There was nobody.
Purkiss ignored the lift and walked across to the stairs. He climbed them to the first floor. Stepping into the carpeted gloom of the landing he waited, listening. Voices somewhere, the low murmur of a television set through one of the walls. He walked to a bend in the landing and risked a look round. A defective lighting panel in the ceiling gave an occasional flicker, but otherwise the corridor was empty.
Abby’s room was 119. He resisted the temptation to listen at the door and instead approached 117. As softly as he could he slipped in the key card, wincing at the electronic click. He pushed open the door, controlling it as it closed behind him. He took a glass from the bathroom and put its open end against the wall adjoining room 119, pressing his ear to the base. Within a minute he had become acclimatised to the creaks and hollow noises being conducted from far-off parts of the hotel, and was able to distinguish them from the nearer sounds on the other side of the wall: the rustling of cloth, the shift of bedsprings, a footfall.
Purkiss went back into the bathroom. He saw a round shaving mirror affixed to the wall with an extendable arm. He fished a handful of change from his pocket and sorted through it till he found a coin of the right size, then used it to unscrew the arm of the mirror from the wall. Quietly he eased open the sliding door at the far end of the room, the noise muffled by the gathering rain, and stepped out on to the tiny balcony. Below was a courtyard with a scrap of garden. To his right was the identical balcony to room 119. The sliding doors were closed, the heavy curtains drawn.
He pulled the arm of the mirror so that it was maximally extended, and reached across with it as far as he could over the other balcony, tilting it until he had the view he wanted. The curtains were separated a crack at chest height. As he watched the mirror, a man’s torso appeared fleetingly inside the room. Purkiss adjusted the angle some more and saw the side of a man’s face, his mouth moving as he addressed somebody to the side of and below him.
At least two, then.
Back in the room he squatted down at the minibar. He found a bottle of wine and eight miniature bottles of spirits. Among the coffee things on the dresser were six sachets of sugar. He took everything to the bathroom and poured the wine down the sink, then poured the contents of the miniatures into the wine bottle, half filling it. Using his teeth he ripped the edge of a hand towel and tore it lengthways. He rolled it and pushed it deep into the neck of the bottle, dousing in the mixture, before removing it and emptying the sugar over the soaked cloth. He reinserted one end into the bottle’s neck so that it dipped below the surface of the alcohol. It wasn’t much, certainly nowhere near as effective as a petrol bomb would have been, but he wasn’t looking for something deadly.
He took out his phone. When Elle answered, he said very quietly, ‘There are at least two of them in her room. I’m in the one next door. I want you to phone the hotel switchboard and ask to be put through to room one one nine. Speak in Russian. Tell whomever answers that his orders are to withdraw. I’ll take your call as my cue.’
‘Understood.’
Purkiss used a chair to prop open the door of his room. He stepped along the corridor to the door of room 119 and placed the end of the keycard Abby had given him into the slot, taking care not to push it far enough to unlock the door. He left his door ajar. On his way back to the balcony he picked up the makeshift Molotov cocktail and the complimentary book of matches on the coffee table.
He waited on the balcony, the rain batting gently at his face, the enclosed layout of the courtyard protecting him from the wind. He had counted to twenty-two when the phone began to ring in room 119.
Purkiss lit half the matches at the same time, twisting and tilting the protruding length of towel, smearing the flame over its length. He watched it catch and begin its slow crawl towards the neck of the bottle. Faintly, through the closed glass doors of the room next door, he heard the man’s voice. Purkiss drew a breath. As he released it, he hurled the bottle backhanded against the glass doors of the adjacent room.
It smashed in a burst of flame and glass, but he was already running back down the length of his room and out to the corridor. He rammed the keycard home, waited the half second for the click, and pushed the door open. It was as he’d hoped, the phone was on the side of the bed nearer the door as he’d remembered it and the man was still there having just dropped the receiver. The other man had also backed off towards the door, recoiling from the shock of the noise and flame against the balcony doors. Purkiss charged the man at the phone first because he was nearer and caught him with a flying kick square in the chest. It slammed him hard against the wall, and as the man started to slide down Purkiss dropped and grabbed the gun half-grasped in the man’s limp hand and spun, keeping low by the side of the bed.
The other man was fast, already taking aim. The noise from the suppressed shot was like a heavy table being tipped over, and the duvet inches from Purkiss’s face erupted in a furrow of feathers. At the same time Purkiss fired, his gun fitted with a suppressor too. His shot caught the man in the throat, his head snapped round and back, and he twisted and crashed back against the television set in the corner.
Purkiss hauled the slumped man to a sitting position. He’d hit his head in the impact with the wall and was semiconscious, his eyes fluttering. Purkiss slapped his cheeks, drove a knuckle into his breastbone. Apart from a moan, the man didn’t react.
Purkiss pulled out his phone. ‘I have one of them. I need to interrogate him but he’ll make too much noise, and somebody might have heard something already anyway. I’m coming down.’
She said, ‘Got it.’
He strode over to the balcony doors and flung them open. The fire from the homemade bomb had already burned itself out. Purkiss craned to look up and down the iron steps of the fire escape that ran alongside the balcony. At the bottom was the courtyard, where he would be hemmed in. It would be more straightforward to go out the front door, though he’d have to get the man at least partly mobile first.
He glanced at the man in the corner, the one he’d shot and whose throat had sprayed gore across the television screen. The man was quite dead, but a few inches from his hand was a phone, its display still lit up as if it had been used in the last minute or so. Purkiss had been paying attention to the man’s gun, naturally enough, but hadn’t noticed what else he had in his hands. Had he had time to make a call before Purkiss had come through the door?
Purkiss’s own phone vibrated.
‘John.’ Elle’s voice, low and urgent. ‘They’re approaching the entrance. Four of them.’