bar. She and her fellow bartenders swarmed back and forth, keeping up with the demand. Purkiss checked his watch. Twelve thirty-five.
Fatigue was starting to tug at his eyes and limbs, brought on by the shortage of sleep he’d had the previous night on the way back from Rijeka, as well as the emotional grind of learning about Fallon’s escape. The lingering effects of the chase earlier and the sedative his body had absorbed weren’t helping either. He took a long draught of the soft drink, waited for the caffeine to kick in.
There was no pattern that he could discern. Fallon taking a flat with Seppo, who’d then reported his presence to Vale after several months. Fallon working in a dive of a club and taking up with an apparent street fighter of a woman, stringing her along and then ditching her without warning – and owing her money into the bargain. But in Purkiss’s experience the attempt to fit facts to patterns was one of the great errors of which human beings were capable. Of more use was the notion of probability based on past experience. His experience of Fallon was that the man didn’t get infatuated easily and didn’t run short of cash. His relationship with the woman had to be cover of some sort.
The relentless assault of the music was getting to him, proving hypnotic in both the mesmerising and the soporific senses. He thought about waiting outside but decided that he might miss Lyuba at the end of her shift. Instead he headed for the restroom. As usual the queue for the ladies’ was long, the one for the gents’ non-existent. He shouldered through the swinging door and into the reek of urine and bleach. He edged past the row of men at the communal urinal, found a vacant sink and ran the cold tap, ladling water against his face before pooling it in his hands and gulping it down. It was surprisingly palatable for city water. In the brown flyblown glass his face was pale, full of dark scoops: under the eyes, below the cheekbones and nose.
Beside Purkiss a skinny man with a ravaged face held open a jacket lined inside with slender pill bottles and knuckly twists of hashish. Purkiss shook his head. He was turning to leave when he felt a vibration against his leg. He pulled out his phone. A missed call from five minutes earlier. Vale.
He stood outside the cubicles until one of the doors opened. A man lurched out fumbling up his trousers. Purkiss went in, grimaced at the stink and the swamp of urine and toilet paper on the floor, kept away from the edge of the toilet bowl. He lifted the phone to his ear to hear the voice message while he reached behind him to slide the latch across.
The door slammed open against his thumb and the man cannoned into him shoving him forward so that his shins connected with the toilet bowl. He heard the door bang shut as he fought to keep his balance. With awful speed the man’s hands came down on either side of Purkiss’s neck and he felt the bite of the garrotte.
TEN
It was the phone that saved him from immediate death.
It was in his left hand because he’d been reaching back to latch the door with his right and hadn’t had time to lower it completely. The garrotte caught across his watch but cut into his neck on the other side. He felt the wire tighten and crush the heel of his hand against the side of his jaw and he felt the closeness of the man behind him and the hot sourness of his breath against his right ear.
Purkiss shifted his head a fraction, all he could, to the right. At the far extreme of his vision was the shape of the other man’s head and part of one fist where it bunched with its fellow at the back of Purkiss’s neck, increasing the torque on the ends of the garrotte. Pain slashed through his neck and he felt the flesh bulging around the crevasse gouged by the wire. There was no blood yet, he was fairly sure of it. His right arm hung free.
Purkiss fought against the roil of nausea and tried for a backwards head butt with his occiput into his assailant’s face, but the twist of the garrotte around his neck might as well have been a vice holding his head in place because there was almost no