Ratcatcher by Tim Stevens Page B

he’d tried to ring him. He’d told them everything, essentially, apart from saying anything about Vale or Abby, and had admitted his bafflement at the signs of Fallon’s presence in Seppo’s flat.
    ‘You think Seppo was setting you up? Luring you to the city?’ Klavan asked.
    ‘Possibly. But it doesn’t explain how he ended up dead in the freezer, unless someone else sent the photo using his phone to lure me over here.’
    For their part, Klavan and Rossiter had been taking coffee outside a café across from the Russian embassy on Pikk Street the previous morning when they’d noticed the small man, who turned out to be Seppo, taking photos apparently of the embassy building with his phone, trying to be surreptitious about it. Their curiosity piqued, they had spent the better part of the morning following him, and tracked him to his flat on the Toompea. They returned to the office to run a check on the address. Later, after she’d finished her day’s routine work, Klavan went back to the flat, expecting Seppo to be at home, in which case she would have found a pretext to enter the flat and nose around. Instead she found Purkiss there.
    ‘Your face was vaguely familiar, and became more so when I discovered you were English. I didn’t spot you tagging me back to the office, though. That was good tradecraft.’
    Purkiss didn’t mention the memory stick he’d found at the back of Seppo’s drawer. He supposed they had the equipment and possibly even the skills to override its password protection, but he decided this was something he’d keep to himself for the time being.
    The coloured lights of stationary police vehicles daubed the streets around the nightclub. Klavan’s and Teague’s flat was two blocks away. They parked in the basement and took the lift. Inside it was comfortably furnished, a home rather than merely a place to sleep.
    ‘How long have you been here?’
    ‘We set up a year ago when the date for the summit became known,’said Klavan. She handed him a mug of tea and although caffeine wasn’t what he needed now he took it gratefully, declining the offer of something to eat.
    Teague threw a sheet and blanket on the couch. It was half-past two. They agreed on a seven a.m. start and Klavan and Teague disappeared. To separate rooms, Purkiss noted wryly.
    He lay in the dark, feeling sleep and fatigue take gradual control. Rossiter didn’t trust him. Nor, clearly, did the other two. That was fine, because he didn’t trust any of them either.
    His last thought before numbness overwhelmed him was of Claire, leaning on her elbows, supporting her frowning brow with her fingers and peering into a monitor, trying to solve some conundrum. He thought: If you were here to help me now…
    But of course that wouldn’t make sense.
     
    *
     
    Beside him his wife slept deeply, untroubled. Venedikt squinted at the bedside clock: two-thirty. He needed sleep for what was to come, but knew he wouldn’t get it by forcing himself. Instead he rose, went into the living room, and turned on the television to a Russian-language twenty-four-hour news channel.
    … will arrive in Tallinn tomorrow evening for a formal banquet...
    … first official visit by a Russian premier since independence...
    … historic signing of a friendship agreement...
    The channel took great pride in what it called its political neutrality. Venedikt thought this a euphemism for cowardice, treacherousness even. Five years earlier he had been in the crowd protesting against the removal of the Bronze Soldier, the statue celebrating those like his grandfather who had fallen defending Estonia. Under cover of darkness the statue had been uprooted from its proud place in Tonismagi in the city centre and dumped in the wasteland of the Defence Forces Cemetery on the outskirts, along with the desecrated remains of Soviet heroes who were buried beneath it. Venedikt and his compatriots had vented their fury tirelessly, for two nights, during which one of