A moment later Tullivant read her reply to Purkiss: One o’clock.
Tullivant kept the Timberwolf propped and aimed at the bench. He drew the Heckler amp; Koch from his jacket and laid it close to his left hand.
He watched the trees arcing away to his left.
Purkiss would be moving infinitesimally slowly so as not to give his position away. Tullivant glanced at his watch, its illuminated display turned toward him to minimise the light it gave off. Ten minutes passed. Then fifteen.
A rustle from the trees somewhere. Tullivant stiffened.
Had it come form his right or his left? He strained his ears.
A further five minutes passed.
The shrill ringing of a phone shattered the quiet. Tullivant registered that it was coming from his left amongst the trees, maybe ten or fifteen yards away, and although it stopped abruptly as if cut off in panic he felt his senses of sight and hearing and even smell homing in on its location and he was up and charging between the trees, the Heckler amp; Koch primed and aimed, until he felt his foot kick against something and he looked down and saw the abandoned phone and before he could turn he felt Purkiss barrel into him and send him crashing against the trunk of a tree.
Fifty-eight
The woman had answered too readily, texting back her reply, and Purkiss knew it was a further trick.
So, Tullivant wasn’t at the one o’clock position at all. That meant he was probably nearer than that, and intended to surprise Purkiss as Purkiss made his way round the ring of trees.
Purkiss was working with approximations, and also the need to keep himself completely concealed; but he moved swiftly, edging anti-clockwise between the trees until he’d reached the five o’clock position, which was as far as he dared to go, then placing his phone on the ground after flicking off the silent key. He doubled back, resisting the urge to hurry, traversing the ring clockwise this time; and it was when he got to the twelve o’clock position, directly ahead of Goddard on the bench, that he saw Tullivant, or at least the tip of his rifle, round at four o’clock.
He crept round until he must have been within leaping distance, then took out his remaining spare phone and rang his own number.
The jarring shriek of the phone on the other side of Tullivant was like a starting whistle to Purkiss. He wove between the trees, spotting Tullivant rising and leaving behind his rifle and advancing in the direction of the phone’s cry.
With a berserker’s fury, Purkiss launched himself.
The impact drove Tullivant against the solid body of an ancient oak. Purkiss grabbed his hair and rammed his forehead against the tree, getting two blows in before Tullivant regained control and elbowed backwards, connecting with Purkiss’s shoulder but giving Tullivant a degree of momentum so that he half-turned and brought his gun hand across.
No guns, thought Purkiss crazily. No more guns today. Enough.
He smashed the side of his fist into Tullivant’s wrist in a hammer blow that made the arm drop away, then followed with a punch to Tullivant’s face. Tullivant reeled, got in a kick to Purkiss’s thigh that sent a howl of pain and made him stumble. Purkiss used his slightly bent position to his advantage by ramming his lowered head into Tullivant’s abdomen, pinning him against the tree once more.
He sensed Tullivant’s hands raised above his head, clasped, ready to come down in a killer blow that would snap Purkiss’s neck, so he rammed again with his head, imagining he was driving Tullivant’s belly flat against the tree behind him, mashing his abdominal contents to pulp, rammed again, and again, and he felt a weight on top of him, but not that of a blow; rather, of Tullivant’s sagging torso as he jackknifed forward.
Purkiss wrenched away and stood up, watched Tullivant’s doubled body sag face-forward onto the ground. His lips were distorted against the grass and soil, his face waxen, his breathing coming in winded gasps.
Purkiss stood looking down at the man as he caught his own breath. He kicked him, hard, in the ribs, and Tullivant flopped over onto his back, his eyes half-closed.
Purkiss glanced at Tullivant’s gun, a few feet away.
It would be easy.
Just the two of them here, for at least a few minutes more. Nobody about. An easy story to concoct.
He picked up the gun.
Tullivant’s eyelids fluttered in understanding.
Purkiss flung the gun amongst the trees.
‘Up,’ he said.
Tullivant rose to his knees, retched, climbed his hands up his legs, reached a stooped position, keeled over on to one knee.
Purkiss grabbed him by the arm to haul him up. Tullivant swayed drunkenly but remained upright. They manoeuvred out into the clearing.
The woman, Goddard, was still sitting on the bench. Her head was turned towards them.
‘It’s all right,’ called Purkiss. ‘It’s over.’
Beside him Tullivant lurched, and for an instant Purkiss thought the man was either going to collapse again or was making one last attempt at putting up a fight; but then he heard the twin booming cracks, heard Emma Goddard’s scream from across the clearing, saw Tullivant jerk and stagger and twist to his knees, dropping once more to the ground, two bloody ragged holes punched through his jacket.
Kasabian stepped into the clearing, the gun in her hand already lowered, her gaze switching from Purkiss to Tullivant’s body and back again.
Fifty-nine
‘I thought he had the drop on you,’ she said.
The aftershock of the shots rang around the clearing. At the bench, Goddard was cowering, still screaming but with her hands clamped over her mouth so that the sound emerged as a high-pitched keening.
Purkiss said, ‘Nonsense.’
Kasabian’s eyes widened.
‘And you know it,’ he said.
She watched him. She was ten feet away. Purkiss didn’t know how quick her reaction times were, but she was clearly an accurate shot.
‘Tullivant had to die,’ he said. ‘It would have been better if he’d killed me, but now that he’s failed, he couldn’t be allowed to live.’
Sirens, lots of them, were detaching themselves from the low background hum of the surrounding city.
‘That’s why I rang you earlier to tell you Tullivant was here, and I was coming to get him,’ Purkiss said. ‘I wanted to panic you. Make you expose yourself. You knew there was a chance I’d get the better of him, take him alive. And that’s why you’re here. Presumably on your own.’
Stalling was an art. But it helped if you knew how long you had to do it for. Purkiss had no idea.
‘The question you’re asking yourself is, when did I find out about you? The answer’s out in the desert, outside Riyadh. I captured one of the Scipio Rand operatives and interrogated him. He told me that back in 2006, a regular pool of Paras were escorting prisoners from Iraq to Saudi Arabia for further transportation elsewhere. That’s when the penny dropped.’
The sirens were coming closer, but it wasn’t them Purkiss was waiting for.
‘The reason you passed the polygraph test wasn’t that you’re skilled at doing so, but because you never actually lied. I just asked you the wrong questions. Specifically, I asked if you’d sent a gunman to my house to kill me, or to frighten me. And you hadn’t. The gunman, Tullivant, was there to kill Tony Kendrick. Just as he’s been killing every fellow member of that Para outfit who was involved in escorting those prisoners.
‘Because it was you, Kasabian. You were in charge of the torture of prisoners on British soil during the Iraq occupation, specifically in 2006. Not Sir Guy Strang. You liaised with Scipio Rand, ordered the transfer of selected prisoners to the UK, paid and supervised Dennis Arkwright to torture them. But some of them didn’t stay silent afterwards. Mohammed Al-Bayati, for one. And he spoke to Charles Morrow. Somehow, you discovered Morrow was going to blow the whistle on the whole sordid operation. He might not have known all the details, might not even have known of your involvement. But he knew enough to warrant, in your eyes, being killed. So you sent Tullivant to take him out.’