swallowed and disgorged their patrons. Just beyond a Turkish bistro she stopped. Without a backward glance she opened a door and went through. Instead of approaching the door, Purkiss stood on the other side of the road and peered at the number of the building. It was a narrow three-storey affair with something he couldn’t read stencilled on a glass panel in the door. The phone he’d bought was 3G enabled. He called up a search engine and entered “Living Tallinn”. There it was, the address matching. When he clicked on the newspaper’s website he got an error message. There were no other matches for the name.
He walked to a corner so that he could keep the door in view, punched buttons. When Vale answered Purkiss said, ‘Ever heard of a female Service agent called Elle Klavan?’ He spelled it and described her.
‘Doesn’t ring any bells. I’ll do some checking.’
Purkiss brought him up to date. ‘Also, Living Tallinn. It’s almost certainly bogus, a front. Maybe one of your contacts knows something about it.’
‘What are you going to do now?’
‘Go back to Seppo’s flat and search it properly.’
*
Getting back in would be more difficult, as he couldn’t try the trick of pushing all the buzzers in the block again. On the way back up the hill he spotted something that would fit his purpose: a skip outside a shop. In the skip he found a dilapidated chest of drawers which he hefted with some awkwardness. He attracted a few curious looks on his way back to the flat, but no opposition.
Twenty minutes passed until the door buzzed open and a couple stepped out, dressed for a night on the town. The man held the door open automatically. Purkiss smiled his thanks and hauled the chest into the lobby. He thought: taking advantage of simple human courtesy. What a life we lead.
He worked quickly and methodically, starting with the living room and dining area – the stain on the carpet was damp, he noted – and moving on to the bedrooms. Two of them, men’s clothes of different sizes in each. Vale hadn’t mentioned anything about Seppo’s having a flatmate, but perhaps he hadn’t known.
In Seppo’s room – Purkiss deduced it was his from the size of the clothes in the cupboard, Vale having described Seppo as a small man – he noticed the slightest protrusion of the lower of two drawers in the bedside table when he closed it. He lifted the drawer off its rollers and pulled it out. Taped to the back was a memory stick. He pocketed it and replaced the drawer.
The drawers in the other room, the mattress, yielded nothing. He peered behind the row of paperbacks on the room’s only shelf, then glanced at the books themselves. Estonian titles, some of them translations of popular novels by British and American authors. He turned away before a delayed realisation caused his head to snap round again.
Wedged in between two doorstop novels, its spine furrowed through repeated use, was a paperback he recognised.
He pulled it down. Reflections on the Revolution in France. The same edition. He riffled the pages against his thumb and checked inside the covers. There were no identifying marks, but it was the one.
Fallon’s totem.
Purkiss sagged on the bed, gripping the book in both hands, staring at the cover. The memories were rising.
Claire, in a montage of images and smells and tactile traces, vivid as phantom limbs. Looking back over her shoulder at him while she dressed, grey eyes mischievous and smile gently mocking. Walking towards him in the rain in her turtleneck and the boots he’d bought her which were ruined on the first day she’d worn them. Pressing her small head with its short blonde hair scented with her lemongrass shampoo back against his face on the balcony of the Marseilles flat, his arms around her from behind as they stood and drew on the heady tang of the sea. Arching her back beneath him as he pressed his mouth against the hot musk of her neck.
Dropping sack-like to the carpet, eyes suffused and starred crimson, tongue like lolling liver, neck efficiently dislocated.
Claire, dear sweet Jesus. Claire.
He turned the book over and found that his nails had driven deep crescents into the cover.
*
He held off calling Vale, because although the shaking in his hands had stopped he wasn’t sure his voice would be as steady. Also, he needed some time to process the new information. Suddenly nothing made sense.
He used the time to