Ratcatcher - By Tim Stevens Page 0,82

He regained his footing and stood and a heavy scrape behind him was followed by the jarring of some hefty object against the backs of his knees and now the hands were on his shoulders pressing him down on to the chair and he felt something like plastic cord being lashed around his torso and binding him to the back of the seat. He drew a deep breath, held it as long as he could, inflating his chest so the cords would be looser when he exhaled, trying to ignore the screaming of his bruised and cracked ribs.

The hood was pulled off abruptly, the scab gumming the wet stiff khaki to his nose torn away. The sudden return of vision after an hour or more of varying shades of darkness was shocking as a car crash. To turn his head hurt too much, but he was aware of three men surrounding him. One of them squatted before him and brought hot sour breath close to his face. It was the bull-necked man he’d headbutted earlier, his rotten teeth bent and bloodied in his mouth. The man stared into his eyes for a long minute, then hawked and spat blackly into one of them before Purkiss could blink.

The man stood and looked down at him and Purkiss prepared himself for the beating to start again, but the man muttered something Purkiss didn’t catch and he and the other two went through the door to Purkiss’s left and closed it. He heard a key being turned in a lock and their footsteps echoing rapidly up the steps. He squeezed his eye, trying to force out as much of the phlegm and blood as he could, blinked several times and peered around.

It was a basement, almost exactly square, the grey walls plastered but unpainted Two strips of blue-yellow fluorescent lighting in the ceiling provided illumination. The only exit was the door he’d been pushed through. There were no windows or skylights. Purkiss was secured to a chair with plastic flex around his torso from chest to hips. His hands remained fastened separately behind his back. The chair was a solid steel one of the sort used in prisons and secure psychiatric units, too heavy to be picked up and used as a projectile.

The three men had left, but he wasn’t alone.

Sitting opposite him, ten feet away on a similar chair, was a man, shorter and slighter than Purkiss, his head lowered but his eyes watching him.

The pain in Purkiss’s face, the stabs of his ribs with each respiration, the ache throbbing at his kidneys, all faded like a radio signal being tuned out. All sensations, not just sight and sound but those of smell and touch and even taste, seemed focused of their own accord on the man in the chair.

Purkiss had taken a kick to his throat but the word emerged clearly enough, the harshness due to reasons other than injury.

‘Fallon.’

THIRTY-TWO

The laptop was where he’d left it, in the back of the car, and the Jacobin took his time ascending the stairs back up to the flat. He opened the computer on the dining table and typed in the wi-fi key. In a few seconds the internet connection was established.

The girl, Abby, hadn’t had time to shut down the sites she’d been connected to when he’d surprised her in the hotel room. They sprang up in a series of windows: Google Earth, which he closed, and another, a GPS tracking site which informed him that the session had expired and inviting him to log in again. He chose this option and was immediately prompted for a user name and password. The user name was already filled in: Abbyholt53.

He sat, elbows on the table and hands folded at his lips, chin propped on his thumbs. He knew nothing about the dead girl, hadn’t the faintest idea what she might use as a password.

Before taking her from the hotel room – he’d marched her straight past the reception desk and she’d been calm about it, possibly because of the knife at her back – the Jacobin had grabbed her rucksack as well as the laptop. Now he emptied the rucksack on to the table. Computer disks, an MP3 player with headphones, toiletries which she hadn’t got around to unpacking, a wallet.

He gutted the wallet swiftly. Banknotes and loose change, British and Estonian. Credit and debit cards, one each. A clutch of photographs in plastic windows: two people he took to be her parents.

And one