‘Yes.’
‘You and Rebecca?’ He leered.
Purkiss shook his head. ‘No, Tony.’
‘Suit yourself.’
Downstairs, half an hour later, they crowded around a table in the breakfast room. It was at one end, and the place was only a third full, so privacy was easy to obtain.
‘Here’s what we know,’ Purkiss said to Delatour. ‘Vale left a posthumous message for me, telling me to locate a man named Gideon. Saul Gideon. He said he was one of us, whatever that meant. And that he might be dangerous.’
‘One of us,’ repeated Delatour. ‘As in, SIS?’
‘Maybe. The fact that he said he might be dangerous suggests Gideon may have flipped. Turned, in some way.’ Purkiss watched Delatour’s eyes. If he knew anything about this already, he was concealing it expertly. ‘Vale said a starting point would be an island in the Cyclades. An islet, he said. Its name is Ressos.’
That was the first lie. Purkiss had learned from experience that the most effective ones were those that clove most closely to the truth.
Again, there was no reaction from Delatour. Purkiss continued: ‘We need to find a way to Ressos. I suspect it’ll be by chartered boat, since the place doesn’t sound like a tourist trap. Rebecca and I will go out after this and scout around, try and establish access.’
Delatour nodded.
They finished breakfast in silence. As he’d often been in the past, Purkiss was astounded by the amount of food Kendrick put away. He didn’t think it was a lack of restraint resulting from his head injury: Kendrick simply had a huge, soldier’s appetite.
Purkiss went up to his room to make final preparations before going out. From habit, he’d already done a basic security sweep for audio surveillance equipment, even though the chances of the room being bugged were close to zero since they hadn’t pre-booked it. But such a sweep wasn’t just for existing bugs. It was also useful in spotting places where surveillance equipment might later be installed.
He set a dozen small traps: the room service menu angled in a certain way on top of the complimentary writing paper on the dressing table, the towel hung apparently haphazardly on the rail in the bathroom. They were a combination of the obvious and the subtle, and a skilled agent might be expected to pick up some of them but by no means all.
He met Rebecca on the stairs between the second and first floors. She’d changed her clothes and looked fresher than he suspected he did, as if she’d compressed her tiredness into a five-minute power nap and come out fully recharged.
On the way to the hotel, Purkiss had noticed a row of desultory travel agents on a shopping street, a kilometre or so away. They might not be open yet at this time of day, especially if business was slow, but Purkiss was prepared to wait. In any case, it would be Rebecca making the enquiries. Purkiss had other plans.
Three blocks from the hotel, he said: ‘Okay. I’m heading back.’
She nodded.
He reached the entrance to the hotel ten minutes after they’d left it, and made his way across the lobby to the stairs. On the periphery of his vision he saw Kendrick lounging in an armchair next to a potted palm. He didn’t acknowledge him. Purkiss climbed the stairs quickly, pausing at each floor to check the corridor before continuing.
From the top of the stairs on the third floor, he watched the door to his room. Delatour’s own room was on the other side of the building around a turn in the corridor.
Purkiss moved swiftly down the passage to his door and paused outside.
The building had come to life some time ago, the pipes groaning in the walls, the guests already on the move, and the background noises obscured any sounds that might be coming from inside his room. He put his hand on the door handle. The locking mechanism was the old-fashioned kind: a simple mortise lock and key. The key was in Purkiss’s pocket.
The door moved a fraction when Purkiss applied slight pressure. It was unlocked. He’d hung the do not disturb sign on the handle, so it wouldn’t be the maid service in there.
He had seconds, he knew, before the movement of the door was noticed. As was so often the case, surprise was the best weapon.
Purkiss threw the door open and was inside even as he surveyed the interior. He registered the open drawer in the bedside table and the open bathroom door which he’d left closed. At the same time he sensed the shape to his right and turned that way but it was a pillow propped on the window sill, a crude but simple trick to give the fleeting illusion of a human silhouette.
The blow came from his left, a hard jab much like the one he’d used on Billson in Rome beside the river, aimed at the nape of his neck. Purkiss tensed his shoulder muscles an instant before it struck and felt the overwhelming, almost paralysing shock of pain in his trapezius. He swung his left arm as he pivoted round, but the blow had numbed it and he couldn’t put his full force into it.
Delatour grasped Purkiss’s arm in one hand and jerked it aside, exposing his torso, and brought up a claw hand into Purkiss’s face. Purkiss turned his head aside and felt the tip of Delatour’s little finger against his lips and opened his teeth and bit down, hard.
Delatour gave a tiny howl of pain and pulled his hand back. Purkiss pressed home his advantage, slamming his forehead into Delatour’s face, connecting with the bridge of the man’s nose.
Delatour dropped to his knees, his arms sagging by his side. Purkiss raised his foot, ready for a kick, but he saw the man was dazed, his eyes swimming unfocused in his slack face.
Purkiss closed the door and locked it, after a quick look out into the corridor to see if anyone had heard the struggle. He hauled Delatour up and sat him on the bed. The head butt hadn’t been a hard one; Purkiss’s intention hadn’t been to kill the man or even render him unconscious. The bleeding from the nose was minimal.
Purkiss slapped the man’s face, sharply but gently, several times. Delatour put his hands up in a vague warding-off gesture. He shook his head as if to free it from the fug inside.
‘Delatour,’ said Purkiss. ‘Can you understand me?’
Delatour’s eyes swivelled in the direction of Purkiss’s. They appeared to register him. His hand fumbled in his breast pocket, found his glasses, placed them shakily on his nose.
‘Water,’ he said thickly.
Purkiss grabbed a sealed bottle off the bedside table and shook some of it over Delatour’s face, before raising it to his lips. The man sipped, rather than gulping. It showed presence of mind, suggested he was almost fully conscious.
Purkiss had already run his hands over the outline of the man’s torso and limbs, checking for a concealed weapon of some kind. He said: ‘Talk to me.’
Delatour didn’t try to obfuscate or bluster. He said, simply: ‘Self-defence. That was all.’
‘What?’
‘The way I attacked you just then.’ He swigged more water. ‘I realised it was you rather than someone else after I’d already primed myself to act.’
‘What were you doing in my room?’ said Purkiss.
‘Searching it.’
‘For what?’
Delatour moved his mouth, twitched his nose, as if testing whether his facial muscles were in working order. ‘You’ve been cagey with me. Understandably so. I want to find out what happened to Vale. I can’t be sure you’re keeping me entirely in the loop, can’t assume you’re telling me everything. So I decided to see if there was anything else I could learn from you.’ He peered at Purkiss, a shrewdness creeping into his look. ‘You’d have done the same.’
‘Probably.’ Purkiss gazed around the room. A few drawers were open, his small suitcase agape. ‘Did you find what you were looking for?’
Delatour said, ‘No. Why did you come back?’