The first three words of the text message had said: Gatwick, Nth Terminal.
The next: Locker C26.
She could have no more avoided complying with the instruction inherent in the message than Pavlov’s dogs could have prevented themselves from salivating at the sound of his bell.
In the pocket of her jeans — which she’d changed into quickly in the car, tossing her nursing assistant’s uniform into the back seat — she felt the small hard shape of the key.
She’d kept the key with her, never more than a few feet away even when she was in bed or in the bath, for the last six years. Ever since her mother had given it to her, a couple of days before her death. A thin, superficial layer of Rebecca’s mind had told her she’d never have occasion to use it.
But, deeper, she’d known this day was as inevitable as sunrise.
She found the locker, an anonymous square block among a grid of identical ones, and inserted the key. Almost surprisingly, the door opened immediately.
Inside was a small canvas case. Rebecca drew it out, feeling something shifting within. She closed the locker and turned the key again. Then she walked towards the public toilets at the end of the passage and found an empty cubicle and bolted the door shut, before sitting on the lowered lid and unzipping the case.
Inside, she found a tiny flash drive, a mauve-coloured UK passport, a wad of euro bills — she estimated the total came to at least a couple of thousands’ worth — and a handwritten note, with a photo attached.
The passport was in her own name, Rebecca Deacon. All the other details were accurate, too: her date of birth, her home address. It was an eerie clone of her own passport.
The note read: You’re booked on one of the next three British Airways flights to Rome. Find out which one at the BA check-in desk. When you get there, find the man in the photograph. His name is John Purkiss, and this is the address where he’s staying.
A hotel listing followed, with a room number.
She read the rest of the note.
One phrase caught in her mind.
Do the necessary.
Rebecca studied the face in the photograph, absorbing the essentials, noting the benign expression, the dark hair, the direct look straight at the camera.
She tore both note and photo into tiny pieces, and flushed them down the toilet, several times, until every fragment was gone. She pocketed the flash drive.
Then made her way towards the check-in desks, her heart seeming to pump newly found blood through her vasculature, her entire body tingling as though she’d sloughed off her old dead skin and had been reborn.
Five
Purkiss suspected David Billson would go straight back to his apartment, rather than to a hospital. After all, Purkiss hadn’t hit him all that hard, and the last thing Billson would want was staff asking difficult questions, and possibly involving the police.
So it was to Billson’s apartment that Purkiss himself headed.
He knew the man had a girlfriend, a local Italian woman who didn’t live with him but had stayed over at least one night since Purkiss had arrived in Rome and had been keeping Billson under surveillance. She might be there tonight, which would complicate matters, but not insurmountably.
It was after one a.m. by the time Purkiss reached the apartment block. The desultory rain had stopped, the clouds tugged away by a light breeze, and the yellow autumn moon hung three-quarters full overhead.
Billson’s third-floor apartment was in apparent darkness.
Purkiss had already established the layout of the building from his examination of it over the last two nights, and he knew the fire escape at the rear ran close to the balcony at the back of Billson’s apartment. He walked round the block a couple of times, satisfying himself that no lights were on in any of the windows. Then he stole up the fire escape, his running shoes making only the faintest sound on the iron rungs.
His hands were empty. He’d stashed the damaged briefcase with its probably worthless contents beside a dustbin in an alley at the back of the apartment building.
When he was close to the balcony, he lifted one foot up onto the banister of the stairs. The distance between the fire escape and the railing of the balcony above was approximately ten feet.
Pistoning his leg out, Purkiss launched himself across the gap, the moment freezing as he hung, terrifyingly, over the sheer drop.
Then his hands slapped against the railing and he caught hold and hauled his body up and over the low wall onto the platform of the balcony.
It was directly outside the main bedroom, he assumed, as balconies tended to be. If Billson was in there, and awake, he’d likely have heard the soft thump of a man landing outside.
Purkiss flattened himself on the floor of the balcony beside a tall pot plant and waited.
He closed his eyes, held his breath to shut off his sense of smell temporarily. Focused on the data reaching his auditory cortex, channelling all his attention into the sensations passing through his ear where it was pressed against the cold stone.
He heard nothing through the floor. No footfall. No creak of furniture shifting under someone’s weight.
Purkiss opened his eyes. The sliding glass doors between the balcony and the room beyond were hung with heavy drapes on the other side. There was no light through the slight gap at the top of the drapes.
He rose to his knees, then his feet, keeping himself to one side of the doors. Cautiously he crept forward and peered through the gap. He had a dim impression of a shadowed room beyond.
Purkiss looked at the glass doors. There was a single mortise lock, the key presumably on the other side.
He could pick the lock, but it would require pushing the key out first, and that would make a sound. The lock would yield in perhaps twenty seconds, if he was lucky. Twenty seconds would allow plenty of time for anybody in the room beyond to prepare himself.
Purkiss glanced at the plants on the balcony. They stood four feet high, and sat in matching ceramic pots.
Sometimes, finesse was the best approach. At other times, sudden force was necessary.
Purkiss grasped the stem of the nearest plant, felt the solidity of its roots deep in the soil and the heft of the pot, and swung it through a hundred and eighty degrees.
The ceramic cracked against the glass of the door, the noise exploding into the night. Purkiss swung the pot again, the glass splintering this time. The door was double glazed, and Purkiss’s third blow sent a nebula of cracks across the inner pane.
He pistoned his foot against the glass and kicked great shards away and ducked his head so that it was protected by his arms and his shoulders and the padded material of his duffel jacket and charged at the ruined pane. He registered that there was indeed a bedroom beyond as he burst through the glass and hit the floor with his shoulder, rolling, balling himself up as tightly as he could to reduce the surface area available to anyone who might be waiting there, gun in hand.
Purkiss was on his feet again even before he consciously registered what his senses had already told him: that there was a man in the room, on the bed to the right of the balcony doors.
David Billson sat up, the bedsheets covering him to his waist. His eyes were wide in shock, but his face was puffy with sleep.
Purkiss seized the quilt covering Billson and tore it away. No gun in the man’s hands, and he was wearing shorts and a T-shirt. Billson shrank away, pulling his legs up so that he was kneeling. But Purkiss realised immediately the man wasn’t prepared for an attack, and wasn’t in need of subduing immediately.