Ratcatcher - By Tim Stevens Page 0,4

from the heightened level of alertness at which it had been cruising. Then he fumbled out his phone and looked at the impossible picture Vale had sent him.

It was a three-quarter view of a man’s head and shoulders, taken in the glare of morning sunlight. The man was squinting against the light. There was no mistaking him.

The face belonged to a man named Fallon. It wasn’t in itself especially memorable, but Purkiss would never forget it. The reason the photograph was impossible was that Fallon was serving a life sentence in Belmarsh prison.

The reason Purkiss would never forget the face was that four years earlier Fallon had murdered Purkiss’s fiancée. Purkiss had seen him do it.

TWO

All the Jacobin had wanted to do was ask the man a few questions. Was he photographing those people in particular, or did they happen to be standing in shot at the time? Was he freelance or part of an organisation? And why had he appeared now, an apparent complication when there weren’t supposed to be complications at this late stage?

The Jacobin hadn’t meant to kill him.

The man was small and slight, with prematurely receding hair and goggling eyes. The fight he’d been able to put up had been revealing, had confirmed the Jacobin’s earlier suspicions that there was more to him than his appearance implied.

He had opened the door readily. The moment the Jacobin saw the flare of recognition in his eyes the time for innocent questions was obviously past. The Jacobin moved in and kicked the door closed, bringing a sword hand against the man’s throat. But he was fast, faster than he should have been and therefore a professional. He spun away and crouched. They faced each other across the carpet.

The man leaped backwards and sideways through a door off the entrance hall. The Jacobin followed. Inside the living room the man was at the mantelpiece, scooping a vase in his hand and swinging it. The Jacobin dodged, feeling the slipstream of the heavy ceramic sigh past and hearing the vase shatter against the wall behind, not taking an eye off the man because the vase was a distraction, intended to disorientate with pain and noise. The man lunged for a real weapon, a curved sword on the wall. Its blade gasped as he drew it from its scabbard.

Blades were a problem, more so than guns, as any experienced fighter knew. In the Jacobin’s favour, the man didn’t look like a trained swordsman. He gripped the weapon in two hands which left him with neither one free and with both elbows, those exquisite points of vulnerability, exposed.

The Jacobin’s first kick cracked the head of the radius bone in the man’s left elbow, an injury so painful that the involuntary opening of the hand was automatic. The second kick was more daring: still using the left leg as a pivot, the Jacobin snapped a toecap into the upright blade, lifting it spinning out of the man’s right hand to clatter across the bare wooden boards across the room.

Clutching his elbow, the man feinted to his right and darted left. The Jacobin didn’t move. It was a battle of morale, now, one the man couldn’t win. The Jacobin indicated one of the armchairs. The man didn’t sit.

From inside the man’s pocket a phone began to ring. They watched each other’s eyes through one ring, two. The man reached into his pocket with the hand on his good arm.

‘No,’ said the Jacobin, voice soft, and moved in, a quick fist punching the man’s ruined elbow provoking a yell, the other jamming up under the man’s breastbone so that he rocked back and slumped down the wall.

The Jacobin dragged him to the centre of the living room, checked his phone. He hadn’t had a chance to answer, and the call was denoted as ‘missed’. The number was prefixed with the international dialling code for the United Kingdom. Pocketing the phone, the Jacobin propped him into a sitting position on the rug and knelt behind him. Sliding an arm across his throat, the Jacobin applied gentle pressure.

‘How did you know me just now?’

No reply.

‘Why the photographs?’

Still nothing. The pressure wasn’t enough to be preventing him from speaking. The Jacobin applied fingertips to points in the neck, harmless but agonising. The man hissed rapidly between clenched teeth, his body shuddering.

He would have to die now, there was no question about that. The question was whether he was likely to divulge anything useful first. Clearly he was trained to