Jokerman Read Online Free Page B

house it was a little after seven in the evening. The oppressive, beating heat of the late afternoon had simmered down to a sticky drowse; there was even a hint of coolness in the infrequent breezes that wafted about.
    Purkiss lived in Hampstead, a former village long ago incorporated into the hungry expanding beast that was London. High up in the north of the city, it afforded spectacular views from the heath nearby. Often in the evenings, when the weather was cooler, Purkiss would go running through the rambling grassland, but he knew it would be infested now with tourists, dogwalkers and picnickers.
    His house was a three-storey Victorian oddity, a turreted hexagon built by an 1870s eccentric with a taste for the Gothic. Purkiss had bought it a decade earlier, its individual character, peaceful location and easy access to central London all appealing to him. The price would have been well out of the range of his then SIS agent’s salary, but his father, a well-off Suffolk farmer and landowner, had died the previous year and left Purkiss a comfortable inheritance.
    Four years after purchasing the property, Purkiss was stationed in Marseille and met Claire Stirling, a fellow agent, who was to become his fiancée. They made occasional trips back to England together, and gradually began to piece together the home they would make when their postings in southern France came to an end. Claire loved the Hampstead house, and began adding her personal touches to it: artwork, furniture, an upright piano she in turn had inherited from her parents.
    Purkiss and Claire never got to live in the house together. A year after they met, Purkiss walked in on another fellow agent in Marseille, Donal Fallon, killing Claire with his bare hands. Fallon was caught, convicted of murder, and jailed.
    For months afterwards Purkiss left the Hampstead house exactly as it was, not even clearing out the few clothes Claire had already moved into the wardrobes. As the years went by, he began to let go, giving away or selling most of the things he and Claire had never got round to sharing. The artwork went, as did most of the furniture she’d picked, and Purkiss had reverted to his old, bachelor’s items.
    The one thing he hadn’t thrown out was the piano.
    In Marseille, in the rented flat provided for him by SIS, there’d been a piano, too, and he and Claire had spent balmy, wine-mellowed evenings working their way through their small repertoire. Claire was a Debussy admirer, her playing dreamy and impressionistic, while Purkiss preferred spiky, storytelling stuff: Shostakovich, or Liszt’s Etudes . But they both loved Beethoven’s Pathetique sonata, and it became the equivalent of “their” song. They would take turns playing it, each trying to perfect it for the other. Claire was always the better player, which pleased Purkiss. It forced him constantly to raise his game.
    Now, standing in the doorway to the living room, he wondered if it was time to get rid of the piano.
    For the first time in ten months, he went over to it, sat down, lifted the lid, and began to find the keys with his fingers.
    The piano hadn’t been tuned in nearly a year and it showed. But the opening chords of the Pathetique , the Grave theme, flowed instinctively, as if Purkiss had been practising the piece every day. He closed his eyes, let the music draw him after it.
    It was Kasabian’s talk earlier that day of treachery, of betrayal, which had driven Purkiss to sit down at the piano once more. He understood this, consciously.
    Ten months ago, on a boat in the freezing Baltic, a man named Rossiter had told Purkiss the truth about Claire. That she was a killer. A hitwoman. Part of what the Americans would call a black-ops outfit within SIS, one which had taken it upon itself to kill known and assumed enemies of the British state, illegally and without official sanction.
    Rossiter had been Claire’s handler and mentor, and was now in maximum security somewhere, never to