The Armada Legacy
The Armada Legacy
Scott Mariani
THE MASTER BESTSELLER RETURNS WITH THIS GRIPPING THRILLER.A SUNKEN SECRET. A MISSING WOMAN.A RACE AGAINST TIME.Former SAS major Ben Hope is relaxing at his home in Normandy when he hears the worst news of his life. His ex-girlfriend Dr Brooke Marcel has been kidnapped.Racing against the clock, Ben’s frantic search for Brooke leads him from Ireland to the Spanish mountains and the rainforests of Peru.What is the mysterious link between the kidnapping, the salvage of a sunken 16th-century Spanish warship and the secret activities of its wealthy discoverer?As the trail of wreckage and mayhem intensifies, Ben soon uncovers a web of intrigue, corruption and brutal murder.But will he be too late to find Brooke alive?BEN HOPE is one of the most celebrated action adventure heroes in British fiction and Scott Mariani is the author of numerous bestsellers. Join the ever-growing legion of readers who get breathless with anticipation when the countdown to the new Ben Hope thriller begins…
Copyright (#ulink_29c6c391-043a-5bd8-b8a9-b56424be410b)
Published by Avon an imprint of
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2013
This ebook edition published by HarperCollins Publishers in 2016
Copyright © Scott Mariani 2016
Cover photographs © Arcangel Images
Cover design © Henry Steadman 2016
Scott Mariani asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007398430
Ebook Edition © September 2016 ISBN: 9780007398447
Version: 2018-06-22
That’s my last Duccd hess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now: Frà Pandolf’s hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
Will’t please you sit and look at her?
Robert Browning, My Last Duchess
Contents
Cover (#uef63c7b1-af61-5cb8-b25d-eccdfc6cb21a)
Title Page (#u2ccb33f9-89de-5f2f-ba53-cd8b270c6ccb)
Copyright (#uae179b12-9497-5c2b-a84c-bdca28b75e58)
Epigraph (#ub2ad3c5b-489a-5139-91f3-e09e13f76511)
Chapter One (#ud1a0816f-8c10-5314-9266-8f555c86464b)
Chapter Two (#u81371e80-1e7a-5e19-9e82-0fe16c3e99eb)
Chapter Three (#ue301fd78-bd1f-527d-8b16-db663f184ad3)
Chapter Four (#uf50234f2-a5f6-525a-8a4d-68d5aea69594)
Chapter Five (#u1aad9600-81cc-5135-afed-ab4efd6a73e7)
Chapter Six (#ufa92c6c6-8e33-56aa-9cd5-06b7a8951f9f)
Chapter Seven (#u3da9a189-cf0d-54bc-b2bb-e00f0dfb9ae7)
Chapter Eight (#u55a346fd-dcf8-589e-9277-928c5493a5ea)
Chapter Nine (#ub03e0bc7-1263-58bd-9739-d36174799cb1)
Chapter Ten (#u37a53661-128a-52c2-9fb7-caca9f846a7d)
Chapter Eleven (#ucb020dcc-28ab-5b30-9e5c-260a1d300b82)
Chapter Twelve (#ubebad20f-ce3c-5806-bbed-b056d476c2a8)
Chapter Thirteen (#u82ad07c5-de1f-53cd-a2c5-b5e1b5655d56)
Chapter Fourteen (#uf297d13b-a232-55aa-a041-313e1dc22777)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Scott Mariani (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One (#ulink_5a4122d3-3d28-5fcc-9de2-28355acb7a1e)
Just after ten, on a clear, cold night in late February, and the moon-glow over the Donegal Atlantic coast cast a speckled diamond glimmer across the dark sea. High above the shoreline, a solitary car was weaving its way along the twisty coastal road, leaving behind the distant lights of the Castlebane Country Club and heading inland towards Rinclevan on the far side of New Lake.
The chauffeur of the black Jaguar XF was a square-shouldered former Grenadier Guard called Wally Lander. He kept his eyes on the winding road and drove in silence, studiously detached from the conversation of his passengers: his employer Sir Roger Forsyte, Forsyte’s personal assistant Samantha, Sam for short, and an auburn-haired woman Wally had never seen before. Attractive, he could tell from the couple of discreet rearward glances he’d snatched at her – very attractive in fact, wearing a tight-fitting black dress that he frustratingly couldn’t see enough of in the driver’s mirror. He presumed she must have attended that evening’s Neptune Marine Exploration media event and was now coming along as a guest to this private party, which would probably last well into the wee small hours. Maybe something to do with Sir Roger’s latest caper, Wally mused. If she was alone, that meant she was almost certainly single. Definitely worth a crack at it. There was a chance he’d get to chat to her at the party, find out more about her.
Wally couldn’t know it yet – none of them could know it – but that would never happen. Because Wally didn’t have very long to live.
Nor would Wally ever know the mystery woman’s name. It was Brooke Marcel, or Dr Brooke Marcel, when she was in her professional capacity as an expert consultant in hostage psychology and former visiting lecturer at the Le Val Tactical Training Centre in Normandy, France. Tonight, though, she was just here as a guest of her friend Sam, who was sitting between Brooke and Sir Roger, all clipped efficiency with a tiny netbook resting across her knees and its screen reflected in her glasses as they ran through some NME business details together. Sir Roger had loosened the tie he’d put on for the presentation and was leaning comfortably back against the Jaguar’s cream-coloured leather.
As Sam started detailing the plans for the following day, Brooke tuned out and drifted back to the thoughts that preoccupied her so much of the time, with the same mixture of emotions that always came flooding back whenever Ben was on her mind.
She wished he could have been here. He loved Ireland, would have been completely in his element here on the Donegal coast. Maybe she’d been wrong in coming without him – but the fact was, she’d been plain too nervous to ask him. The wrong signals, she’d worried. Moving too fast, trying to force things prematurely. Or something like that. She didn’t know any more. For a gifted and highly trained psychologist, it struck her how little she understood her own feelings.
Ben Hope. What an enigmatic, complex man he was. Even before they’d got together she’d been aware he had ghosts in his past, stuff you could never ask him about and which he kept fiercely private; so closed, and yet he could be so open, so warm and tender. Sometimes she felt as if he’d been there all her life; sometimes as if she’d never known him at all.
As she gazed out of the window at the rocky landscape flashing by in the car’s lights, Brooke wondered whether her troubled relationship with Ben would ever recover. It had started so blissfully, only to crash and burn so senselessly just when it was beginning to look as though it could last forever.
The crash had come in September. The autumn months had been a forlorn, empty time, drowning herself in her work; the Christmas holiday without him had been almost unbearably miserable. Then, slowly, slowly, over the last couple of months had dawned the prospect of a possible reconciliation. The phone conversations between her home in London and his in France were growing longer and more frequent. Sometimes he even called her.
It was still fragile, though, still just a tiny candle flame that might be snuffed out at any time. There were moments when Brooke thought he was holding something back from her; times when she could sense the tension between them, ready to flare up all over again. In their separate ways, they’d both been equally to blame for the split. What a couple of hotheads we are, she thought wryly to herself as she recalled the awful quarrel that had bust them apart. The worst thing was that, in the end, it had all been about nothing. Just a stupid, horrible misunderstanding.
‘The chopper will pick us up at the house and take us over to Derry Airport first thing in the morning,’ Sam was saying to her employer. ‘We arrive at Gatwick just after ten-thirty, then on to Málaga in plenty of time to make your meeting with Cabeza.’
Forsyte pursed his lips and gave a grunt of assent. Drifting momentarily back to the present, Brooke noticed the way he kept fingering the handle of the attaché case secured to his wrist by a steel cuff and a slim chain, and she briefly wondered what was inside that must be so valuable; but her curiosity waned rapidly as she turned back towards the dark window and resumed her own private thoughts.
A flash of white light caught Brooke’s eye. The road behind was no longer empty: the bright headlights of a car were coming up fast. No, she thought, twisting round to peer out of the rear window – not a car, but a van of some kind. Going somewhere in a real hurry, too.
Forsyte glanced back as the van’s main-beam headlights loomed close enough to fill the inside of the Jaguar with their glare. ‘Just some idiot,’ he said nonchalantly. ‘Pull in a little and let him past, will you, Wally?’
Wally shook his head in exasperation, then flipped on his indicator, slowed to just over thirty and steered towards the side of the narrow road to let the van by. The large vehicle noisily overtook them – a plain white Renault Master panel van, scuffed and spattered with road dirt – then cut in tightly at an angle and screeched to a halt, blocking the road.
Wally hit the brakes and the rear passengers were thrown forwards, except for Brooke who’d braced herself against the front passenger seat a fraction of a second before the emergency stop. Sam let out a little cry as her netbook went flying. ‘What the hell—?’ Forsyte shouted.
‘Fucking arsehole!’ Wally thrust the automatic gearbox into park and left the engine running as he climbed out of the car. ‘What’s your game, you bloody prick?’ he yelled, slamming his door shut and storming up to the stationary van.
The Renault Master’s doors burst open simultaneously. Wally stopped dead in his tracks and went quiet as two men jumped out and strode aggressively towards him. They were both wearing black balaclavas, and not because of the biting February wind.
Brooke’s blood turned icy at the sight of the weapons in the men’s hands: identical compact submachine guns, black and brutal with long tubular sound moderators attached to their muzzles. She’d seen weapons like those before.
So had Wally Lander, once upon a time, but his nine years out of the army had blunted his senses and all he could do was gape.
‘Oh, my God!’ Sam gasped. Forsyte stared in speechless horror, clutching his attaché case.
Neither of the masked men spoke a word. Instead, almost casually, they turned their weapons towards Wally and opened fire. From inside the car, the silenced gunfire seemed like no more than a rapid string of muffled thumps. Wally’s legs folded under him, then he collapsed lifelessly at the roadside. His blood was bright in the beams of the Jaguar’s headlights. Sam screamed in panic and clung onto Forsyte. ‘What do they want with us, Roger? Oh Jesus, they’re going to kill us!’
Brooke hesitated, but for no more than a second before she launched herself at the gap between the front seats and scrambled in behind the wheel. She wrenched the stick into drive, stamped the heel of her Italian designer party shoe on the gas and held it all the way down.
The Jaguar took off with a roar and a rasp of tyres. Clenching the wheel, Brooke had no choice but to drive grimly over Wally’s dead body with a sickening bump-bump.
The masked men hurled themselves out of the way. There was a jarring impact as the car slammed into the angled side of the van; a rumpling of plastic and the screech of metal grinding on metal as she forced her way through the gap, the Jaguar’s wheels spinning wildly and revs soaring to drown out Sam’s screams and Forsyte’s indistinct roar of fury. Then, suddenly, the way was clear and Brooke could see the open road stretching ahead in the headlight beams. She’d made it.
But then the strobing muzzle flashes lit up the rear-view mirror and she felt the steering wheel go heavy in her hands as a flurry of gunfire blew out the back tyres. There was nothing she could do to prevent the car skidding out of control and veering across the road. Brooke caught a glimpse of a large grey rock looming in front of the car – then a crunching collision, and the airbag exploded in her face, dazing her.
Running footsteps. Voices. The next Brooke knew, the Jaguar’s doors were opening and there was a gun at her head. She turned to face her attacker. His eyes were cold and hard in the slits of the balaclava.
‘Get out, bitch,’ he said.
Chapter Two (#ulink_d56107ca-de71-5c92-929d-fcd5140901e9)
Three days earlier
‘I’m telling you, Brooke, it’s going to be great,’ Sam insisted for about the fifth time in twenty minutes. ‘You can’t possibly miss it. Seriously.’
That was Samantha Sheldrake all over. She’d always been the pushy one, ever since their university days. It was easy to see how she’d managed to land the position of PA to one of Europe’s most dynamic multi-millionaire entrepreneurs, the head of the Southampton-based company Neptune Marine Exploration.
‘I don’t know,’ Brooke replied, stretching out on the rug and wiggling her bare toes in the warmth of the open fire as she cupped the phone between shoulder and ear. The remains of a TV dinner for one were cooling on a tray nearby. Another solitary end to another dull day, with just an unexpected phone call from the northwest coast of Ireland to raise her spirits a little. ‘Seems a long way to go for a party,’ she said. ‘And you said yourself it’s for company personnel.’
‘Rog—’ Sam caught herself, ‘ – Sir Roger won’t mind if I invite a guest. Get you out of London. It’s so grey and dismal there at the moment.’
It had only been a minor slip, but Brooke had picked up on it and wondered whether Sam’s relationship with her boss might be a little closer than she liked to let on. Brooke kept her observation to herself, and said, ‘Get me out of London for what? So I can come and see the grey ocean instead?’
‘Hey, we’re talking about Donegal,’ Sam insisted. ‘Even the drizzle is beautiful. I should know, I’ve spent most of the last few months here. Besides, I told you, this is no ordinary party. First there’s going to be this brilliant media event at a very swish country club – you’ll be blown away – more than three hundred delegates – all arranged by yours truly.’
‘Naturally.’
‘Naturally. And then we’re all heading back to the house, where the fun starts for real. Sir Roger’s sparing no expense. You should see the manor house he’s rented – it’s like a chateau, and the party’s going to take over a whole wing. You’ve never seen so much champagne in your life, I kid you not.’
‘Remind me again what we’re celebrating?’
‘Does the “we” mean you’re coming?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘Well, it’s only the grand unveiling of one of the most important historic sunken treasure salvage operations of the last twenty years,’ Sam said, with only a trace of smugness. ‘The recovery of the sixteenth-century Spanish warship the Santa Teresa has been Neptune Marine Exploration’s biggest coup since Sir Roger founded the company.’
Brooke smiled into the phone. ‘Now you sound like one of your own public relations blurbs. What’s the wreck of a Spanish warship doing off the Irish coast, anyway?’
‘Did I not tell you all about this when we were in Austria?’
Sam and Brooke had spent a few days in Vienna before Christmas. Brooke had been too preoccupied by her troubles with Ben to enjoy the short break very much. ‘Maybe you did,’ Brooke said. ‘Refresh my memory.’
‘Come to Donegal and you’ll learn all about it.’
‘I have to tell you, Sam, mouldy old boats are not exactly the most fascinating thing in my life right now.’
‘Oh, come on.’ Sam paused, and Brooke could tell from the momentary silence that she was hatching some new plan. ‘Why don’t you bring a friend along?’ Sam went on slyly. ‘As in, a very special friend? You know who I mean. That’s if things are, you know, back on an even keel.’
‘Ben?’ Brooke hesitated, a little thrown by the suggestion. ‘That might not be such a great idea. Things are still a bit …’ Her words trailed off uncertainly.
‘I knew it. He’s treated you like shit, really. When was the last time you set eyes on him?’
Brooke said nothing. She reached up to finger the slender gold chain she wore around her neck. Ben had bought it for her in Paris soon after they’d got together. She’d been wearing it nearly constantly ever since, although she sometimes wondered why she was so attached to it now that their relationship was meant to be finished.
‘I’ll tell you when it was,’ Sam went on. ‘It was when he came to pick up that horrid little mongrel he left you with. Am I right?’
‘Scruffy’s not horrid,’ Brooke protested lamely.
‘There you go again. Being nice. You’re too good for that guy. He’s using you, can’t you see it?’
‘Let’s not go there, all right? It’s complicated.’
Sam was undeterred. ‘All right, so maybe it’s not a good idea. Then why don’t you invite that dishy upstairs neighbour of yours I met once? The novelist guy?’
‘You mean Amal?’
‘That’s the one. Between you and me, I don’t know how you can keep your hands off him.’
‘Oh, come on. We’re not all like you.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Sam said, in mock indignation.
‘Amal and I are just friends. And he’s a playwright, not a novelist.’
‘Hmm. You can’t stay single forever, darling, waiting for that Ben to make up his mind. You’ll end up a dried-out old spinster, like Miss Havisham.’
‘Watch it, I’m only thirty-six,’ Brooke protested. ‘And four months younger than you, I might add. Besides which, I don’t see you heading to the altar with anyone. Miss Havisham, indeed.’
‘Well, whatever. The point is, are you coming to Donegal or not? Won’t cost you a penny, you know. Neptune Marine will pick up the tab, first class all the way and back again.’
‘I’m thinking about it.’ Brooke wasn’t usually so quick to let herself get swept up in Sam’s enthusiastic schemes, but she was beginning to warm to it. ‘Maybe it’d be good for Amal. He’s had a bit of a letdown recently. A change of scenery might cheer him up.’
‘Then it’s settled,’ Sam said briskly. ‘Now, there’s a very nice guesthouse not far from the country club. Not the Ritz, as you’d imagine, but it’s cosy and comfortable. I’ll take care of everything. All you two have to do is turn up. I’ll text you the details.’
‘Hold on—’ Brooke began. But before she could say any more, Sam interrupted her. ‘Oh, listen, Sir Roger’s on the other line. I’d better take this. See you on Saturday, darling. Pronto.’
Brooke sighed, holding a dead phone. Typical Sam. Once she got a notion into her head, there wasn’t a force on earth that could stop her.
‘I’ve never been to Ireland before,’ Amal mused over coffee later that evening when Brooke trotted upstairs to put the idea to him.
He’d answered his door looking morose, unusually dishevelled and clutching a Jean-Paul Sartre novel guaranteed to cast a pall over the most optimistic soul – but brightened up visibly at the sight of her, and invited her eagerly inside. It never ceased to amaze Brooke how beautifully decorated the inside of his flat was. Not bad for a struggling playwright still not thirty, whose first play had just tanked spectacularly and drawn unanimously abysmal reviews from all the critics.
‘I thought it’d be nice for you to get away for a couple of days,’ she said. ‘I know you’ve been a bit down lately.’
‘It’s true,’ he sighed. ‘Though maybe I’ve taken it harder than I should have. I mean, it can’t have been the first utter disaster in the history of theatre, can it? And not everyone walked out. Did they?’ he added, hopefully.
On the night, Brooke had counted twenty-six hardy survivors out of an initially well-packed house, but hadn’t had the heart to reveal it to him. ‘You make it sound a lot worse than it was,’ she said, smiling. ‘The play’s great. I just think its appeal is, you know, selective.’
‘I don’t know, perhaps people just don’t want to see a three-act tragedy about toxic waste,’ he muttered, shaking his head glumly. ‘It’s all about bums on seats at the end of the day. Now, if I’d written about … say, the Vietnam War as seen from the viewpoint of a mule, or something, now that would’ve—’
Brooke could see that she needed to get back on topic. ‘So, what do you think about Ireland, then?’ she cut in. ‘A breath of sea air, a bit of partying, a few glasses of champagne …?’
Amal gazed into his coffee for a moment, then set the cup firmly down on the table and forced his face into a broad, white grin. ‘Screw it, why not? I haven’t been out of this bloody flat for days. Sitting here moping all the time like a big self-indulgent baby.’
‘That’s the spirit, Amal. You won’t regret it, I promise you.’
Chapter Three (#ulink_d79d8ee6-826b-57f2-9378-b032eccd19a0)
Saturday evening, and the vehicles were arriving in droves through the gates of the grand-looking Castlebane Country Club. Brooke and Amal got out of the taxi that had brought them from the guesthouse, and joined the stream of smartly-dressed people filtering towards the illuminated main entrance.
The night air was sharp and cold. Brooke could smell the sea and hear the whisper of the waves in the distance. It was clear from all the press IDs on display and the prevalence of cameras everywhere around her that Sam had done a fine job of whipping up media interest in the event. A paunchy white-haired man who appeared to be the local mayor, judging by the gaudy chain and badge of office that dangled like a cowbell from his neck, was stepping out of a car and straightening his jacket, flanked by official minions.
‘This ought to be interesting,’ Amal said without any great conviction as they approached the gold-lit facade of the building. But if he’d been having second thoughts about abandoning his Richmond sanctuary for the wintry wilds of Donegal, he was far too polite to show it. As always, he was fastidiously groomed, and had swapped his travelling clothes for an elegant grey suit that looked tailor-made.
It had been a while since Brooke had been to any kind of party, and she’d had to dig deep in her wardrobe back in London to search out the knee-length black cashmere dress for the occasion, which she was wearing over fine black silk leggings and cinched around her waist with a wide belt. Her only jewellery was the little gold neck chain, Ben’s gift. The shoes were Italian – a pair of her sister Phoebe’s cast-offs – with heels that made her feel perched ridiculously high. They were strictly not for walking more than a few yards in unless you were some kind of masochist. Just covering the distance from the guesthouse to the taxi, then from the taxi to the foyer of the country club, had been enough to raise a blister on her heel.
Why did women insist on inflicting this kind of bondage on themselves, she wondered as she tottered over to the desk to give her and Amal’s names to the receptionist. They were checked against the guest list, then waved through a doorway with a smile and a warm ‘enjoy the show’, and found themselves in a gigantic ballroom that echoed to the buzz of a three-hundred-strong crowd.
Sam hadn’t been kidding about the place being swish. At the far end of the room, a podium stood on a low stage in front of a big screen; to its left, an area had been curtained off. A gleaming dance floor separated the stage from forty or fifty tables, each surrounded by red velvet chairs. For the moment, though, most of the attention was centred on the bar, around which a couple of hundred people were bustling to grab their free drinks. The catering staff couldn’t hand out the complimentary canapés and dainty little sandwiches fast enough.
Over the background muzak came a piercing squeal from across the room. Brooke would have known that voice anywhere. She turned to see Sam running over, or trying to run, her stiletto heels clattering on the floor. She’d dyed her hair a couple of shades blonder since the brief break the two of them had taken in Vienna before Christmas. Her crimson strapless dress appeared to be in some danger of slipping down, but Sam didn’t seem to care too much, and the assorted men ogling her with varying degrees of discretion certainly had no objections either.
‘You made it!’ Sam beamed.
‘You left me very little choice,’ Brooke said as Sam pecked her on both cheeks with a pronounced ‘mwah – mwah’, something she’d taken to doing now that she moved in higher social circles.
‘I’m so pleased.’
Of course you are: it was your idea, Brooke said inwardly. Out loud she said, ‘You know my friend Amal Ray,’ putting a subtle emphasis on the word ‘friend’ that only Sam would be able to detect.
‘Of course, the playwright,’ Sam cooed, ignoring the warning look that Brooke shot at her. ‘Amal, that’s a lovely name. Tell me, are you very famous?’
‘You might say I’ve recently shot to notoriety in certain quarters,’ Amal said graciously. ‘But we won’t talk about that.’
That’s a relief, Brooke thought.
‘Come and meet Sir Roger.’ Sam motioned for them to follow, and led them through the throng. At the heart of a large cluster of people in the middle of the room, a tall, stately silver-haired man in a sombre suit and navy tie was doing the grip’n’grin routine with the mayor and the other local officials for the benefit of the photographers.
‘It’s such a boost for the local economy,’ Sam whispered in Brooke’s ear. When the cameras stopped flashing, she did the introductions: ‘Dr Brooke Marcel; Amal Ray the award-winning playwright: my boss, and the CEO of Neptune Marine Exploration, Sir Roger Forsyte.’ She made it sound as though Brooke had found the cure for cancer and Amal had a Pulitzer Prize for literature in his pocket. Brooke noticed Amal’s sharp wince.
Forsyte was about sixty, though he was in better shape than many men half his age. His manner was smooth and dignified, if a little cool. He welcomed Sam’s guests, expressed his pleasure that they’d be attending the private party afterwards, and insisted they should help themselves to drinks and snacks before the presentation began. ‘Speaking of which,’ he said, glancing at his well-worn Submariner watch, ‘I have a few things to attend to before we kick off, so if you’ll excuse me …’
Sam shot a grin back at Brooke as she followed her employer towards a door marked PRIVATE. ‘You heard the man,’ Amal said. ‘Let’s grab something before this lot drink the bar dry.’ They pressed their way through the swarm and had to shout their orders to be heard by the harried bar staff.
‘I didn’t know you were a gin and tonic type of guy,’ Brooke said, once they’d escaped the chaos and found a quieter spot on the far side of the ballroom.
‘I’ve decided to become that type of guy,’ Amal replied, knocking back a slug of it, ice clinking in his glass. ‘Starting right here, right now.’
She touched his arm. ‘You’re okay, aren’t you?’
Amal swallowed a handful of peanuts, washed them down with another long swig, then gave a shrug. ‘I’m not about to go hurling myself madly off the cliffs, if that’s what you mean. What’s a bit of salt rubbed into the wound, between friends? Award-winning playwright,’ he added in a sullen undertone. ‘Like I really needed that.’
These artists. She wished he didn’t have to be so sensitive. ‘Sam didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. It’s just her way.’
The crowd was rapidly drifting away from the bar to gather at the foot of the stage. People were checking their watches in anticipation of the start of the show. The mayor and his little entourage had positioned themselves right at the front, where a photographer took a few more half-hearted snaps of them for the local news. There was a stirring behind the curtain to the left of the stage, as if someone was putting the finishing touches to whatever exhibits lay behind it.
Sam reappeared through the door marked PRIVATE, spotted Brooke and bustled over to join her, diverting her attention for a few minutes with her animated chatter. When Brooke was able to tear herself away for an instant, she saw that she’d lost Amal in the crowd. Peering through the milling bodies she caught a glimpse of his back as he slunk over towards the bar for a refill. He didn’t look very happy. Shit, she thought. Maybe this whole thing had been a bad idea.
‘It’s so great you’re here for this,’ Sam was babbling happily for the twentieth time, clutching her champagne. ‘Should be starting any moment now … yes! There he is. Here we go. Shush, everyone.’
To enthusiastic applause, Sir Roger appeared under the lights, stepped up to the podium and launched into his speech as the glittering Neptune Marine Exploration corporate logo flashed up on the big screen behind him.
Chapter Four (#ulink_be5d1e71-36d4-5b06-8876-616567aad727)
‘It’s no secret,’ Sir Roger began, ‘how in July of last year, after many months of exhaustive mapping and researching possible locations over countless square miles of the Atlantic Ocean, Neptune Marine Exploration, the world leader in historic marine salvage, succeeded in locating one of the greatest finds of the last several decades.’ He waved at the screen, and right on cue there flashed up an underwater image that Brooke had to peer hard at to make out. Against a murky, greenish sea bed was the shape of a decayed hulk barely recognisable as a sailing ship. Its masts had long since vanished, leaving just the crumbling ruin of its hull, scattered in fragments and half buried under countless tons of sand and shingle.
Marvellous, Brooke thought, thoroughly unimpressed. She glanced over in the direction of the bar. Amal had his back to the rest of the room, sitting hunched over his second gin and tonic. Or maybe his third by now.
‘The previously undiscovered wreck of the Spanish warship Santa Teresa,’ Forsyte announced proudly. ‘Sunk in 1588 off Toraigh Island near the Donegal coast after the Spanish Armada, repelled by the Royal Navy following their abortive invasion of England, were chased northwards and headed for Ireland in the hope of finding a friendly port and refuge among their Catholic allies, only to have the remnants of their fleet devastated by freak Atlantic storms.’
He turned to gaze lovingly at the screen. ‘I know, she’s not much to look at after sitting at the bottom of the ocean for over four hundred and twenty years. But thanks to the unique 3D underwater scanning technology developed by Neptune’s own computer engineers, we are now able to reconstruct in perfect detail the splendour of this once magnificent warship. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Santa Teresa.’
Forsyte motioned grandly at the screen, and an appreciative murmur rippled through the crowd as the computer reconstruction of the ancient vessel appeared in all her former glory – a vast spread of pearly-white sails billowing against the blue ocean, her majestic bow splitting the water in a white crest, the sun glinting off the dozens of bronze cannon muzzles protruding from her open gun ports, crewmen swarming up and down her rigging, files of brightly-armoured troops lining the deck. Even Brooke had to raise an eyebrow at the impressive sight.
Amal still had his back to the room.
‘I’m proud to say that the salvage of the Santa Teresa has turned out to be one of the most successful projects ever undertaken by Neptune Marine Exploration,’ Forsyte said with a grin. ‘This incredible achievement would not have been possible without the dedication, determination and diligence of our salvage crew and dive team. Nobody will contradict me when I say the man most directly responsible for this triumphant success is Neptune’s incomparable dive team manager. He’s been with us since the humble beginnings of the company back in 1994 and I’m proud to call him my friend. Ladies and gentlemen: Mr Simon Butler.’
More applause as a slightly-built man with sandy hair appeared on the stage and stepped up to the podium. Forsyte clapped him warmly on the shoulder, then moved aside to give him the mike.
Once the applause had died down, it was immediately apparent that Butler lacked Sir Roger’s flair for public speaking. He stumbled his way, red-faced, through a speech of thanks that consisted solely of cramming as many of the names of his team members as possible into a couple of minutes. The audience was soon shifting about restlessly and losing interest. Butler was visibly relieved when Forsyte returned to the podium.
Forsyte went on, and almost instantly regained the interest of the crowd. ‘As he launched the Armada to its fate, King Philip II of Spain spoke these words: “We are quite aware of the risk that is incurred by sending a major fleet in winter through the Channel without a safe harbour, but … since it is all for His cause, God will send good weather”.’ He gave a dark smile. ‘Sadly for him, and perhaps fortunately for England, it didn’t quite work out that way. And just as the fleeing Armada had to face the most challenging and perilous conditions that Mother Nature could unleash, even a highly skilled and expert outfit like Neptune Marine Exploration, with the most cutting-edge modern technology at its disposal, has faced sometimes appalling conditions and enormous difficulties to restore this historic treasure to the world. All through autumn and winter our salvage vessel Trident was battered by the same severe storms faced by the Spanish sailors all those centuries ago.’
‘That’s true,’ Sam whispered to Brooke. ‘I was seasick like you wouldn’t believe.’
‘We learned first-hand about the force of nature that drove the Santa Teresa onto the rocks off Toraigh Island and sent every one of the six hundred souls aboard to a watery grave,’ Forsyte continued. ‘But thanks to the heroic struggle of our entire team against all the wrath of the elements, we can now reveal for the very first time the extent and magnificence of the treasures that this lost wreck has yielded up for posterity.’
‘He’s a great speaker, isn’t he?’ Sam whispered to Brooke.
‘A little on the florid side,’ Brooke said, ‘but he makes his point.’
Forsyte motioned towards the curtains to his left, and as if by magic they glided open to reveal the screened-off area of the ballroom. This was the moment the audience had all been waiting for, and they surged eagerly forwards, the buzz of chatter rising to fever pitch as they took in the awesome splendour of Neptune Marine Exploration’s haul.
Arranged like a museum exhibit were racks and units covered in a dizzying array of gold and silver plates, goblets, candlesticks, trinkets. Open caskets piled high with coins and jewels. Entire dinner sets of fine porcelain. Then there was the weaponry – row on row of pikes, swords and armour, all gleaming under the lights. Mounted on an enormous plinth, a set of bronze cannons, polished to a dazzle. At the centre of it all was the warship’s salvaged figurehead, badly pitted with age but somehow brought to the surface intact.
Nothing could get a crowd excited like incredible wealth. There were whistles and exclamations. One of the journalists gasped ‘Fuck my boots’ loudly enough to be heard by the mayor, who turned and shot him a filthy look. A scrum of photographers jostled for the best shot. Everyone was thinking the same thing, even Brooke.
‘How many millions must this stuff be worth?’ she asked Sam, who beamed with pleasure.
‘Enough to have already sparked quite a nasty little war between the British government and the Spanish treasury officials claiming ownership of the wreck and its contents. It’ll rage on for months. But however it’s all divided up in the end, Sir Roger will get his forty per cent share. Look at him. I’ve never seen him this chuffed with himself.’
Brooke could see the security men positioned discreetly at the rear of the exhibit, at least eight of them, all extremely serious-looking. She wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d been government agents. There must be an army of them backstage, she thought, and a convoy of trucks waiting to whisk the priceless treasures away to a bank vault somewhere.
Remembering Amal, she looked back over towards the bar. He was still sitting slumped over his drink, mountains of gold coins, emeralds and rubies the last thing on his mind. She thought about going over to him, then decided he probably wanted to be left alone.
‘Now, it was by no means uncommon through history for regular line-of-battle warships of any nation to carry all manner of splendid artefacts,’ Sir Roger went on from the podium as the cameras carried on flashing in a frenzy. ‘But let’s remember that the Spanish Armada was no ordinary naval fleet. This was a full-blown invasion force, whose commanders were quite assured would make short work of the English defences, sweep rapidly inland and within weeks, perhaps even days, establish a new Spanish territory upon English soil. In fact, they were so confident in the overwhelming force of this massive fleet that its officers, many of them noblemen of the highest position, loaded their ships with a wealth of luxury goods, artwork and other finery – not just to enjoy on the voyage, but with which the country’s new Spanish rulers would have refurnished the palaces and stately homes of Tudor England. And of course if you want to set up a new government, you’re going to need money. Lots and lots of it. Aboard the Santa Teresa were scores of wax-sealed casks, stuffed with greater quantities of coin, gold bars, jewellery and precious stones than have ever previously been salvaged from a warship wreck. What you see here is only a sample.’
Perhaps sensing that many of the audience were too busy goggling at the treasure to pay him much attention, Forsyte quickly brought his speech to an end and invited questions from the media people. A forest of hands instantly shot up. ‘Yes?’ he said, picking out the prettiest of the journalists.
‘Sir Roger, Neptune Marine Exploration is famous for the amount of preliminary research it does before starting an excavation project. You must have been aware of what you’d find down there. But were there any surprises among the treasure?’
Sam leaned close to Brooke’s ear. ‘That girl’s a plant,’ she whispered.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Just listen.’
Forsyte chuckled. ‘Apart from the sheer quantity and value of it?’ he said, and the crowd joined in his laughter. More seriously, he added, ‘Well, in fact, we did make one highly unexpected discovery.’ He paused for effect. ‘It’s not on display yet, and I’m afraid you’ll have to wait for me to reveal it.’
There were groans and calls of ‘Give us a clue’ and ‘Come on, Sir Roger’. Forsyte held up his palms. ‘All in good time, my friends. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed when we eventually make it public.’
What a showman, Brooke thought. Forsyte certainly knew how to bait his hook. ‘What’s the big surprise?’ she asked Sam.
Sam shrugged. ‘You think he’d tell me? I only run most of the company for him.’
‘Now, enough talk,’ Forsyte said. ‘Please feel free to wander among the displays, and of course there’s still plenty more food and champagne to come. Enjoy.’ To a final thunderous roar of applause he stepped down from the podium and slipped away among a sea of arms reaching out to pat him on the back and shake his hand.
Sam turned to Brooke and tapped her watch. ‘Now that’s over, it’s party time.’ She seemed to notice for the first time that Amal was missing. ‘Where’s your friend?’
‘He’s … ah …’
‘Best go and get him, eh? Wally’s coming round with the car. We’ll be out of here in a few minutes.’
At the bar, Brooke laid her hand on Amal’s shoulder and said, ‘You okay?’ She knew the answer even before she’d asked the question. There were four empty glasses lined up on the bar in front of him and he was hard at work on the fifth. That many gin and tonics wouldn’t have put too big a dent in Ben Hope’s sobriety – but that was just one of the ways Amal differed greatly from Ben. His eyes were unfocused and his jaw was slack.
‘I’m fine,’ he slurred. ‘Fresh as a daisy.’ He slid down off his bar stool, walked three steps and had to prop himself against a wall for support. ‘Christ,’ he mumbled, clasping his head. ‘I want to be in bed.’
‘Oh, Amal, what have you done to yourself?’
‘The car’s waiting,’ Sam announced, materialising out of the crowd and pointing at a side exit. She was holding a laptop case and had slipped on a green cardigan over her dress. ‘You two ready?’
‘Amal’s not feeling well,’ Brooke told her. ‘I don’t think we can make it to the party.’
‘You’re kidding,’ Sam said, reeling as if all her plans were crumbling.
‘No, no,’ Amal protested. Making an effort to speak coherently, he said very carefully, ‘I don’t want to be responsible for spoiling your evening. You go.’
‘Hurry up and decide, guys,’ Sam said irritably, and headed towards the exit with a glance at her watch.
Brooke sighed. ‘What about you?’
‘Don’t worry about me. I’m still sober enough to call a cab.’
‘Are you sure? I’ve got no problem going back to the guesthouse with you. The party doesn’t mean that much to me.’
He wagged a finger at her. ‘You came here to have a good time. Now go. I … I command it.’
Sam was waving at them from the open doorway, mouthing ‘come on’ and gesticulating at the waiting Jaguar outside.
‘You’re quite sure?’ Brooke asked Amal.
‘Go and have fun,’ he muttered with a sickly smile. ‘Go. Go.’
She made her decision. ‘Oh, what the hell. I’ll see you for breakfast, then,’ she said. ‘Sleep well, and take care, all right?’
Amal watched as she left the building. The Jag’s engine was purring gently, its exhaust billowing in the cold night air. He couldn’t make out the face of the driver, but recognised Sir Roger Forsyte in the back seat. Sam opened the rear door of the Jag, climbed in and slid along to the middle to make room for Brooke. With a final glance back at Amal, Brooke climbed in after her and closed the door.
The Jaguar took off towards the gates.
That was the last he saw of her.
Chapter Five (#ulink_142d1b11-95a9-5f46-bf89-f25a6a1d8fdb)
The pale light of the Sunday morning sun hauled Amal up from the dark, dreamless depths, and with consciousness came the first rush of nausea. ‘Oh God,’ he groaned.
He lay miserably curled up under the covers for a while, nursing his throbbing headache and cursing himself for having drunk so much. What the hell had possessed him? A vision of a tall, frosted glass kept appearing in his mind, making his stomach threaten to flip. He realised he was fully clothed under the duvet. ‘Oh, God,’ he repeated. ‘Why? Why?’
Gradually, the scattered pieces of his memory fitted themselves back together to form a coherent picture of the previous night. He remembered calling the taxi from the country club – nothing at all about the car coming to pick him up, or the journey to the guesthouse. Only the vaguest recollection of letting himself in the door and managing to stagger up to bed.
Once he was fairly certain that the slightest movement wasn’t going to trigger off a violent spate of vomiting, Amal gingerly hauled himself out of bed. He kicked off his shoes and left a trail of scattered clothing on the way to the bathroom. Showered, changed and feeling marginally more human, he left his room. It was twenty past eight. Brooke’s door across the landing was shut. He tapped lightly on it and murmured her name. When he got no reply, he figured she must either be downstairs or had come back so late last night that she was still sleeping.
Amal tramped heavily downstairs. The frying grease smell that wafted up to meet him was almost more than he could bear, but he managed not to puke as he wandered into the breakfast room.
No Brooke. No anybody, except for the landlady, Mrs Sheenan, who was in the adjoining kitchen frying up a mound of eggs and bacon that would have fattened the Irish Army.
Mrs Sheenan didn’t appear to notice his presence, or hear his mumbled ‘Good morning’. That was partly due to the fact that she was half deaf – something he and Brooke had discovered when they’d checked in to the place the day before – and partly due to the blaring TV in the kitchen, which was turned up to full volume.
Amal dragged himself over to a table by the window, where Mrs Sheenan would be bound to notice him sooner or later. He couldn’t stomach food, but yearned for a comforting mug of hot, sugary tea. He sat there for a few moments, gazing towards the misty bay and thinking how strangely out of his element he felt in this place, and then felt suddenly angry with himself for being so ungrateful towards as generous and warm-hearted a friend as Brooke. He started brooding once again over the way he’d let her down by going and getting wasted. What a prat. He could only hope it hadn’t totally ruined her evening.
Eight twenty-five. Amal was lucid enough by now to remember that they’d have to check out in about an hour and forty minutes’ time to catch their flight back to London. If Brooke wasn’t awake soon he’d have to go and rouse her. Then again, he thought, she might have been up for hours and be about to return any moment, rosy-cheeked and tousle-haired from a brisk walk or a run on the windy beach. That was more her style.
Amal’s thoughts were punctured by Mrs Sheenan, who had suddenly registered his presence and begun fussing over him, frying pan in hand, screeching in a voice that pierced through his skull. Yes, he’d slept fine, thank you. Yes, the room was lovely and warm. But her broad, toothy smile vanished as, averting his eyes from the pool of grease swilling in the pan, he informed her as politely as he could that he didn’t want any bacon.
‘Oh,’ she said, scanning his face and then pursing her lips in extreme disapproval. ‘You must be one of them Muslins.’
‘I’m just not hungry … really, a cup of tea would be fine.’
‘Just tea, is it.’ Mrs Sheenan sighed loudly and returned to the kitchen to dump her frying pan with a crash on the stove.
‘You haven’t seen my friend Brooke this morning, have you?’ Amal called after her through the open door. He had to make an effort to raise his voice over the din of the television. The kitchen was now reverberating to the opening theme of the local RTÉ news.
‘Eh?’ Mrs Sheenan screwed up her face with a hand cupped behind her ear, then glanced back at the television. ‘Shall I turn it down?’ she bawled, making a move for the remote control. ‘You’ve an awful quiet voice.’
‘I was asking—’ Amal began.
He stopped mid-sentence as he realised what had just come on TV. He burst out of his chair and hurried towards the kitchen, his hangover suddenly forgotten. ‘No!’ he yelled. ‘Don’t turn it down!’
Too late: Mrs Sheenan had pressed the mute button. Amal stopped in the doorway and gaped at the screen.
The soundless television picture was of a wrecked car on a winding country road, in the middle of a rugged, empty landscape that looked shockingly familiar to Amal.
The black Jaguar had skidded into the opposite verge and smashed into a huge rock. Wreckage was scattered across the road. Teams of police were milling around the vehicle, blue lights swirling in the early morning mist.
As Amal went on staring in increasing horror, he saw a team of paramedics loading a bagged-up body on a gurney into the back of an ambulance. A close-up of the car showed what were unmistakably bullet holes punched through the black bodywork. The rear window was shattered and the rear wheels shredded, the tyres clearly blown out by the gunfire.
‘No, no, no, this can’t be happening,’ Amal murmured. He blinked his eyes tightly shut and then opened them again.
It was happening.
Mrs Sheenan gave a derisory snort. ‘There you go. Another eejit gone and killed himself.’
The silent picture changed to a shot of Sir Roger Forsyte, followed by one of Sam Sheldrake. ‘Turn the sound on!’ Amal yelled. Flustered, Mrs Sheenan fumbled with the remote. Now the picture showed the face of a stocky-looking man in his forties whom Amal didn’t recognise.
At that moment, Mrs Sheenan managed to get the sound back on.
‘… found a short distance from the vehicle, has been identified as Wallace Lander, forty-two, a former British soldier employed as a driver by Sir Roger. Early reports suggest that Mr Lander was gunned down by at least two automatic weapons, killing him instantly. Police sources have confirmed that both Sir Roger and Miss Sheldrake remain missing, presumed kidnapped by the attackers.’
Amal slumped in a kitchen chair and numbly absorbed what he could. It barely seemed real to him. The empty, bullet-riddled car wreck had been discovered before dawn that morning by a night shift worker returning home from a local packing plant. Police had traced the Jaguar to a luxury car hire firm in Derry, and confirmed that the vehicle had been leased to Sir Roger Forsyte’s company, Neptune Marine Exploration. Forsyte was known to have been en route from Castlebane Country Club to nearby Carrick Manor, his temporary base in the area, when the attack took place. Witnesses had reported seeing the Jaguar leave the country club shortly before ten o’clock that evening; it was estimated that the incident had occurred at approximately 10.05 p.m.
Amal’s breath was coming in short gasps as he anticipated the mention of a third passenger. Any moment now, Brooke’s face would be on the screen, with the news that she’d been found dead like the car’s driver, or snatched by the kidnappers. But there was nothing at all.
An idea came to him, like a flash of white light. Maybe Brooke had changed her mind at the last minute – maybe she hadn’t gone off to the party at all, but had got out of the car and taken a taxi back to the guesthouse, assumed he was already in bed and not wanted to disturb him? The wild notion suddenly seemed utterly convincing. Headache and nausea forgotten, he leaped to his feet, ran upstairs and hammered on her door. ‘Brooke? Are you there?’ She had to be. Come on, Brooke. Be there. Come on.
Silence. Amal burst into the room and saw it was empty: the bed neatly made, unslept in, Brooke’s clothes folded on top of the sheet, her travel bag sitting on the rug nearby, the novel she’d been reading propped open on the bedside table. Amal dashed into the ensuite bathroom, but all there was of Brooke were her toothbrush and hairbrush by the sink, her little wash-bag and shower cap on the shelf.
His head was spinning as he thundered back downstairs. ‘You’re sure you didn’t see her this morning?’ he quizzed Mrs Sheenan.
‘Who?’
‘My friend! Brooke! The woman I was here with.’ With some effort, he managed to drag it out of Mrs Sheenan that he was definitely the only guest who’d come down to breakfast that day.
That was when the panic set in for real. Amal began to tremble violently, first his hands, then his whole body, feeling weak and jittery as though his knees might buckle under him. His brow was damp with cold sweat.
‘I have to call the police,’ he said.
Chapter Six (#ulink_b3e0772a-f369-53ea-b425-f1939db3ee66)
Near Étretat, Normandy coast, France
Ben Hope hauled the Explorer sea kayak onto the little tongue of shingle, wiped his hands on his wetsuit and gazed up at the towering white cliff. The saltiness of the cold air was on his lips. Circling gulls screeched overhead. ‘All right,’ he said, as much to himself as to the cliff, ‘let’s see what you’re made of.’
Sunday morning, and the relaxed pace of life in the little corner of rural France Ben now called home was going on much as it always had. He could hear a church bell chiming from a kilometre or so away inland, summoning to Mass those locals who weren’t enjoying a late breakfast, pottering about their homes, feeding their chickens or still lazing in their beds.
Ben Hope’s way of relaxing was a little different from most people’s. The stretch of shoreline he’d driven the ancient Land Rover to that morning with his kayak lashed to the roof was known locally as the Côte D’Albâtre, the Alabaster Coast, for the chalky whiteness of its sheer, gale-battered cliffs. Nineteenth-century painters had travelled here to depict them; writers and poets had been inspired by them – today he was going to climb them. Partly just because they were there, and because Ben’s idea of pleasure was to set himself challenges that normal folks would have done anything to avoid, and also partly because doing this kind of thing helped him to forget all the churning thoughts that otherwise tended to crowd his mind these days.
After securing the kayak and warming up his muscles with some bends and stretches, he pulled on his rock-climbing shoes and gloves, strapped the lightweight waist pack around his middle, then walked up to the foot of the cliff and reached for his first handhold. He paused as a jolt of pain ran up his arm.
The two bullet wounds sustained on Christmas Day were well healed now. They’d both come from the same small-calibre handgun, but even a .25 could do terrible damage at close range. Ben had been lucky. The first shot had glanced off his ribs and passed on through; only the second, lodged in his shoulder, had caused any difficulty to the surgeon who’d pulled it out. Now there was just a little stiffness, some pain from time to time and another couple of scars to add to the collection of war wounds Ben had accumulated over the last twenty years. The man holding the gun had come off very much worse.
Ben waited for the twinge to pass, then launched himself upwards.
The rock face was sheer. As he made his way higher and higher, the wind whistled around him and the hiss of the surf on the rocks below grew fainter. The summit approached, inch by careful inch. Hand over hand, the pain only served to drive him on, energy exploding inside him and a kind of fierce joy filling his heart.
But even suspended from his fingers and toes halfway up a high vertical slope with a dizzy drop beneath him, he found he couldn’t shut out his thoughts completely. Which wasn’t entirely a surprise, considering that he’d recently come through just about the most tumultuous episode of a life that nobody could have called boring. Few things could shock Ben any longer, but the discovery just before Christmas that he had a grown-up son he’d never known about had hit him like an express train. He’d been reeling from it ever since.
He hadn’t told Brooke about it – hadn’t been able to bring himself to, though he’d been on the verge of telling her a dozen times over the phone during the last few weeks. Now that they were speaking again and there seemed to be a faint hope of reconciliation, Ben was extremely wary of complicating matters and placing an added strain on their slowly-mending relationship. The right time would come.
Ben’s son’s name was Jude Arundel, and until the age of twenty he’d taken for granted that his parents were Simeon and Michaela, the vicar and vicar’s wife of the Oxfordshire village of Little Denton. In reality, Simeon had raised Jude as his own son despite knowing full well that the boy had been the product of a brief romance between Ben and Michaela, back when they’d all been students together at Oxford.
It hadn’t been an easy transition. Jude had only learned the truth in the devastating wake of Simeon and Michaela’s deaths in a car smash. Just as Ben was finding it alien and awkward coming to terms with sudden parenthood, not to mention the loss of his friends, Jude had had a difficult time adapting to the knowledge that his whole upbringing had been a lie, and that the man he’d called his father for most of his life hadn’t been at all. He’d gone through every shade of emotion, from outright denial and disbelief, to furious resentment, to simmering rage and finally a brooding acceptance.
But out of all the friction, a fledgling relationship was slowly developing between Ben and Jude – not so much that of a father and a son, but more like two friends, or even two brothers, one of whom just happened to be twenty years older than the other. The fact that Ben had recently rescued Jude from the hands of a secretive and ruthless government agency called the Trimble Group, who were blackmailing Ben into acting as their gun-for-hire, had helped more than anything to forge their friendship.
When Jude had visited Ben’s French home and place of business, an old farm called Le Val, in mid-January while Ben was still convalescing from his injuries, the two of them had had their first real chance to sit down and talk. Among other things, they’d discussed Jude’s growing disenchantment with his Marine Biology degree course at Portsmouth University. Ben, who’d cut his own Theology studies short twenty years earlier and often wished he hadn’t, had encouraged him to see it through to the end.
Jude wasn’t so sure where his future lay. There were times when Ben could see in his newfound son the same restlessness of spirit that had driven him in his own headstrong, sometimes foolhardy younger days, and wished the boy had taken more after Michaela than himself.
Those worries aside, Ben had deeply enjoyed Jude’s visit. When it was over and he’d driven him back to the ferry port at Cherbourg, he’d suddenly realised how much he was going to miss Jude’s company until the next time they’d meet.
Then it had been back to business. The Le Val Tactical Training Centre was still overbooked with people wanting to acquire the specialised skills it had to offer, skills that only men like Ben, his business partner, ex-SBS commando Jeff Dekker and their team of instructors were qualified to teach. The training schedule at Le Val had never been so busy, which made a Sunday morning getaway like this one all the more welcome.
With a final heave, Ben hauled himself up onto the cliff’s summit. He knelt in the grass, dusted his hands and looked down. The moored kayak was a tiny red sliver far below.
‘There, that wasn’t so difficult,’ he murmured to himself. His heart rate was steady and he wasn’t out of breath. Not in disgraceful shape for an old man, he thought. He mightn’t have bet on still being able to fly through ‘sickeners’, the gruelling SAS selection tests he’d endured long ago, but he was pretty sure that he’d give young squaddies half his age or less a decent run for their money.
Ben stood up, unzipped a compartment of his waist pack and took out a small bottle of mineral water. He cracked the seal and drank, then spent a few moments gazing out to sea, the breeze ruffling his thick blond hair, as he considered whether to take the long, easy footpath back down to the shore or descend the way he’d come.
The phone buzzed inside his waist pack before he could decide. He answered, expecting the call to be from Jeff Dekker with some work-related query or other.
It wasn’t Jeff.
‘Am I talking to Ben Hope?’ someone said on the other end.
A man’s voice, shaky, uncertain. Ben was certain he’d heard the voice before; but where?
‘Who is this?’ Very few people had this number.
‘My name’s Amal,’ the voice replied. ‘Amal Ray. We met once, around Christmas time. Brooke’s upstairs neighbour.’
Ben remembered him perfectly well, and if it hadn’t been for the tension and anxiety he could hear in the guy’s voice, he might have responded with something like, ‘Hi, Amal, it’s a pleasure to hear from you.’ Instead he frowned and stayed silent.
‘Something’s happened to Brooke,’ Amal said. ‘Something terrible.’
Chapter Seven (#ulink_7a515e1e-482d-5bd9-a0e4-03a1a371f12a)
A constant thin drizzle was slanting down out of the dark afternoon sky as the Ryanair flight from London Stansted touched down at City of Derry Airport, a few miles east of the border between Ulster and the Irish Republic.
There was a hard set to Ben’s face as he strode from the plane. Outwardly, he was calm, but a violent storm was raging inside and he fought to contain his impatience going through passport control and customs. His only luggage was the battered and well-travelled old green canvas army bag into which he’d thrown a few things before dashing away from Le Val, leaving everything in the hands of Jeff Dekker.
Jeff had been as shocked as Ben to hear the news of Brooke’s disappearance. ‘Just call if you need me,’ he’d said. ‘I’ll be there.’
Amal was waiting nervously for Ben near the airport entrance. His eyes were red-rimmed and he looked several years older than when Ben had last seen him.
There was no time for greetings. ‘Anything new?’ Ben asked, and Amal morosely shook his head. They left the terminal in silence and went outside into the gathering dusk. The drizzle had intensified, and Ben turned up the collar of his scuffed leather jacket. He motioned at the smattering of vehicles in the car parking area. ‘Which is ours?’ His final instruction to Amal over the phone earlier that day had been to hire the fastest car he could find locally.
‘That one,’ Amal said, and bleeped a key at a dark blue BMW saloon. ‘Hope it’s okay. It was the best I could get.’
Ben tossed his bag into the back of the car. ‘I’ll drive,’ he said, taking the keys. Amal didn’t argue, and climbed into the passenger side. Before he’d shut his door, Ben was already gunning the car backwards out of its parking space. The tyres squealed on the damp concrete as they took off for the exit. Ben aimed the car westwards, heading for the N13. ‘Now tell me everything,’ he said.
Amal closed his eyes and let out a sigh. ‘What more is there to say? I already told you everything on the phone.’
‘Let’s go through it again. Starting from the beginning.’
Amal miserably recounted the whole thing: Brooke’s idea for getting him out of London; the media event at Castlebane Country Club; how he’d got too drunk to go on to the party afterwards and she’d reluctantly gone off without him; how that had been the last he’d seen of her. Ben listened and pushed the BMW on hard and fast as Amal talked, overtaking traffic and keeping an eye on the mirror, on the lookout for police. He didn’t want anyone slowing him down.
‘It’s all about this Forsyte guy, isn’t it?’ Amal said, interrupting himself. ‘Surely it must have been him they were after?’
Ben had used every moment of his journey from France to plough through all he could find online about Sir Roger Forsyte, the company he’d founded, Neptune Marine Exploration, and its various highly lucrative exploits over the years salvaging sunken treasures around the world’s oceans. Despite the wealth of material available, from reams of newspaper articles to spreads and interviews in National Geographic and other publications, Ben had noticed that the details of Forsyte’s past career, prior to NME’s founding in 1994, seemed just a little hazy. As his flight had crossed westwards over England, he’d wondered why that might be.
He’d also been pondering over where he’d heard the name Roger Forsyte before. The bell it was ringing in his mind was distant and faint, but it was ringing nonetheless and he was frustrated that he couldn’t make more of it.
‘Seems that way,’ he replied to Amal’s question. ‘Successful businessman, just made a killing and splashing it all over the media. He’s the primary target for a kidnap and ransom job. The others just happened to be there. Wrong place at the wrong time.’
‘It’s a nightmare,’ Amal said, on the edge of panic. ‘Oh, God, it’s a nightmare. It isn’t really happening. Tell me it isn’t happening.’
‘It’s happening. Take a breath. Focus, keep talking.’
Amal took several deep breaths to compose himself. ‘What more is there to say? I got up this morning, saw the news and realised Brooke hadn’t come back, so I called the cops. They call them the Garda here.’
‘Yeah, I know that. Go on.’
‘It took ages for them to send a car out. When they finally got there, they gathered some of Brooke’s personal things and sealed them in these plastic pouches …’
‘For DNA sampling.’
‘I can’t believe they even have that kind of technology in this backwater.’
‘They probably have to send them to Dublin. Go on.’
‘Well, then they put me in the police car and drove me miles to the nearest proper town, a place called Letter-something …’
‘Letterkenny.’
‘They took me into this tiny room with no windows. I spent over an hour there giving my statement to this angry, racist little bastard who’s in charge of the case. Felt like I was being interrogated.’
Border signs flashed by as the speeding BMW passed from Northern Ireland into the Republic. When Ben had first known the place as a young soldier the border had been thick with heavily-armed checkpoints, and vehicles passed through under the stern eye of a British Army GPMG gunner with his finger on the trigger. Those days were all but over now, but the memories of the Troubles were soaked like blood into the land.
‘What’s the name of the detective in charge?’ Ben asked.
‘Hanratty. Detective Inspector Hanratty. Real charmer. Needless to say, they’d never heard of Brooke being in the car until I told them. At first, I reckon they thought I was some kind of crank. Next thing you know they’re grilling me as if it was me who was under investigation. Anyway, when I finally managed to get away from the police station I wandered up the road and found this café where you can actuallygo online. That’s when I thought about looking you up. Brooke’s told me a little about what you used to do for a living, and the business you run now in France. God knows how I remembered the name of it. I called and spoke to a guy named Jeff who gave me your mobile number.’ Amal shrugged wearily. ‘That’s it. We should never have come to this bloody place. It’s all because of me and that stupid play …’
‘Never mind the stupid play,’ Ben said. ‘What else can you tell me?’
‘Only what I’ve seen on TV. When Forsyte’s car didn’t turn up for the party last night, the people waiting for him at the big house just assumed at first that he’d been delayed by the media, or whatever. Then more time went by, no sign of him, and they started making phone calls. It wasn’t until the middle of the night that anyone called the cops. Even then, the police didn’t lift a finger until after the car’d been found by some guy on his way home from work early this morning.’ Amal glanced anxiously at Ben. ‘They’ll be looking for them, won’t they? I mean, surely they’ll be doing everything they can …’
‘There are standard procedures,’ Ben said, cautiously. ‘First priority is to establish contact with the kidnappers. Forsyte’s been divorced for years. No siblings, no children, so the ransom demand will probably be made to the company itself. Meanwhile, it’s a question of combing over the crime scene to see what they can dig up, fingerprinting everything in sight, bringing in the sniffer dogs, taking any evidence back to the lab for analysis. They’ll want to talk to staff at the country club for anyone who might have seen anything, and check out CCTV footage. Round up every photographer who was at the media event, and check through all their images for anything suspicious – someone hanging around, looking out of place. Go through the records of local vehicle rental companies during the last week or so for anything paid in cash. Liaise with the Coastguard and check the registers of any boats in and out of local harbours, as well as spot-checks on vessels. Call out the air support unit to scout for possible safehouses, empty farm buildings, disused industrial units, where kidnappers might try to hide a victim.’
‘Sounds pretty thorough,’ Amal said, sounding marginally more optimistic.
Ben agreed, in principle. But the caution in his tone was because he also knew that this particular crime had occurred in one of the sleepiest parts of rural Ireland, even more slothlike in its ways than Galway, where he’d lived for a number of years. The place was so neglected by the authorities that it had come to be known as ‘the forgotten county’. Even at the height of the Troubles in the seventies and eighties, when the occasional IRA incident would take place on the Republic side of the border, there had been comparatively little for the Garda to deal with – hence they had even less experience of this kind of contingency than the most parochial police force in England. The local cops would most likely have had to send out to faraway Dublin for a forensic investigation team equipped and specialised enough for the job.
In short, Ben would have been extremely surprised if Detective Inspector Hanratty had got his thumb out of his arse to do half the things he’d just described to Amal.
‘Lastly,’ he said, ‘they should be talking to all the Neptune Marine Exploration employees, checking phone records and finding out if anyone’s been unfairly dismissed recently or might have any kind of grudge against Forsyte. In a case like this they’ll study the victim’s background and history for significant enemies, and to check whether Forsyte might have any financial problems of his own, like gambling debts, dangerous and expensive habits, the kind of thing that might cause someone to stage their own kidnap for ransom.’
‘What?’
‘It’s not unheard of.’ The speedometer needle climbed above the ninety mark as Ben urged the powerful BMW past a slow-moving truck.
‘I can’t believe that,’ Amal said. ‘But then, nothing makes sense to me. Like, for instance, if someone kidnapped Forsyte for ransom, why did they take Brooke and Sam? They’re not rich like Forsyte. Nobody can pay millions to get them back. Is it because they were witnesses?’
Ben shook his head. ‘No. You can shoot a witness, like they shot Forsyte’s driver. It’s more than that. From a kidnapper’s point of view, female hostages give you better leverage, more bargaining power. Nobody wants to see them get hurt, so ransoms get paid faster.’ His voice sounded detached, but speaking those words cost him a lot of pain. The moment he’d said them, he wished he’d kept his innermost thoughts bottled up more tightly.
‘Leverage? Oh, Jesus.’ The horror in Amal’s eyes reflected what was in Ben’s own mind. Images of severed body parts sent in the mail. Torture. Or worse. ‘They won’t harm them, will they? Will they? Answer me. They won’t do anything to Brooke, will they? Ben?’
Ben’s fists clenched around the steering wheel. He was silent for a beat, swallowing back the rising tide of crazed anxiety that made him want to scream and pound the dashboard to pieces.
Then he said quietly, ‘I’ll get her back.’
And the voice inside his head replied: if she’s still alive.
Chapter Eight (#ulink_fb737f69-bec7-50a3-884a-2a280e067435)
Evening had fallen like a black shroud and their conversation had lapsed into a heavy silence by the time Ben stopped the car. He cut the engine but left the headlights on, spilling a broad pool of white light across the road and carving through the slowly-drifting fog of drizzle.
Amal looked up from his lap as if emerging from a trance, and saw that Ben was checking his phone. ‘You expecting a call?’ he asked.
‘From a guy called Starkey,’ Ben muttered, frowning at the phone.
‘Who’s that?’ Amal asked, but Ben was too preoccupied to answer. There had been no call. He tutted and shoved the phone back in his pocket.
‘What is this place?’ Amal said, peering through the glass.
Ben said nothing. He got out of the car. The night felt damp. He could hear the whisper of the Atlantic in the distance, and smell the salt tang in the air.
‘This is where they were taken, isn’t it?’ Amal said ominously, climbing out of the passenger side and hugging his coat tightly around him.
Ben just nodded grimly. He wanted to break into a run, but forced himself to walk calmly towards the lights and activity he could see up ahead. As he made his way up the road he glanced left and right, up and down, drinking in details.
He hadn’t walked far when he paused in his stride. Faintly discernible on the glistening wet road surface by the glow of the BMW’s headlamps were the traces of heavy skid marks where a car had pulled to an emergency stop. He considered them for a moment and then continued a few steps further, before pausing again and turning to look to his left, where a small section of the roadside verge had been cordoned off with markers and police tape.
A short distance further up the road was a second set of tyre marks. The vehicle that had made them had a wider wheel track than the first, and judging by the curve of the marks it had overtaken at speed and then swerved across the road from right to left, screeching to a stop. What was odd about the second set of tyre marks was the additional smudge of rubber that seemed to indicate that the vehicle had been shunted sideways after coming to a halt. He pictured it in his mind.
Ben knelt down and pressed a fingertip against the cold, wet road. Lifting it back up, he examined the tiny flake of paint stuck to it. It was white on one side, blue on the other.
He flicked it away, stood up and walked on again. Some thirty yards ahead on the right-hand side of the road, a large area of the verge and the ground beyond was barricaded off and illuminated by blazing halogen floodlights perched up on tall masts, haloed by drifting moisture. Rows of cones and a temporary traffic control had been set up to filter what few vehicles might pass by through the narrowed gap. Three Garda Land Rovers were parked off-road, casting their flashing blue glow over the rugged ground.
Tucked in in single file behind the row of cones sat an empty Toyota Avensis patrol car, an ageing unmarked Vauxhall Vectra and a van that Ben guessed belonged to the forensic team he could see combing the large field to the right of the road, their reflective vests shining yellow in the distance. The van’s number plate bore the county identifier D for Dublin: his guess about the forensics guys having to come all the way from the Garda HQ in the capital had been correct. That didn’t make him feel any better.
He wasn’t hugely surprised either to see that, some twenty hours or so after the fact, the cops were only now getting themselves organised to conduct a proper search and remove the crashed Jaguar XF from the scene. A pair of uniformed officers were standing back watching as the vehicle was winched up onto a flatbed lorry. All that would be left behind were the skid marks and the pieces of debris littering the verge at the foot of the large roadside rock that Ben could make out in the glow of the recovery vehicle’s swirling orange light. The Jaguar’s front end was badly crumpled and it was obvious it had hit the rock at some speed after skidding violently to the right.
Even more noticeable were the bullet holes that had chewed up the Jaguar’s rear bodywork and shredded its back tyres.
Ben swallowed. The particular kind of hole made by a nine-millimetre full metal jacket round as it punched through thin sheet steel was a very familiar sight to him. He’d seen enough bullet-riddled vehicles in enough war zones all over the world to tell at a glance that this kind of damage was the work of fully-automatic weapons. Whoever had carried out the attack, they were disturbingly well equipped and not afraid to use it.
Ben sensed a presence next to him and turned to see that Amal was standing at his shoulder.
‘Oh, my God, look at the state it’s in,’ Amal groaned as the recovery crew started securing the Jaguar to the lorry’s flatbed. ‘It looks even worse than it did on TV. How could anyone—?’
Survive that, Ben knew Amal had been about to say. And under normal circumstances, Amal would have been right. Nothing could walk away from that kind of firepower.
Unless …
‘See where most of the damage is?’ Ben asked him, pointing. ‘The mass of the gunfire was concentrated on the car’s undercarriage, not the bodywork at passenger height.’
‘So what does that mean?’
‘That the gunmen were aiming to disable and stop it, not to kill everyone inside. If they’d wanted to do that, it would have been easy for them.’
Amal nodded, but didn’t seem much reassured.
Ben couldn’t feel entirely reassured either. He didn’t want to think about the amount of lead that had been sprayed into the car with Brooke inside, or the fact that a stray bullet could easily have ripped a path through enough layers of thin steel and plastic and leather to find its mark. But the thought wouldn’t go away. He kept seeing Brooke’s face in his mind, and he wondered with an icy chill whether he’d ever see it again for real. His hands felt shaky and he was breathing fast.
But there was no time for sentimentality here, he reminded himself with an effort. He had to keep his wits about him or he’d be about as much use to her as the police.
‘What are we doing here?’ Amal asked. The cold and damp were getting to him, making him shiver.
‘I wanted to see it for myself.’
‘So you’ve seen it. What happens now?’
‘I need a moment,’ Ben said. He left Amal hovering uncertainly as he walked a few yards closer to the crime scene. Among the sparse grass of the verge near the cordon was a tall flat rock, wet and glistening under the floodlights and the blue swirl from the police vehicles. Ben leaned against the rock and reached into his jacket’s hip pocket for his crumpled pack of Gauloises and his Zippo lighter. He fished out a cigarette and lit it, but after a few seconds the drizzle had made the paper soggy and his heart wasn’t in it anyway. He tossed the fizzling cigarette down into the grass at his feet, and was mechanically crushing it into the dirt with the heel of his boot when he felt something under his sole and looked down.
It wasn’t a pebble. He dropped into a crouch and poked around in the wet grass. When he found the small object, he held it up to the light to examine it closely.
‘What’ve you found?’ Amal asked him, walking across.
Ben didn’t reply. Clasping the object in his palm he stepped over the police tape to look for more.
An angry yell made him turn to see a short, stout figure in a flapping raincoat marching rapidly towards them from the direction of the Land Rovers.
‘Hoi! You! This is a police crime scene!’ As the man approached, shouting and gesticulating at them, Ben could see in the glare of the overhead floodlights that it was a plain-clothes detective, a stockily-built guy in his mid fifties or thereabouts.
‘That’s him,’ Amal said in a low voice. ‘Hanratty, the one I told you about.’
Chapter Nine (#ulink_92a4a8c6-5855-5148-97fc-0b439679b714)
Detective Inspector Hanratty stormed up to them, scowling. A slick of carrot-red hair was plastered across his puckered brow. He had mud spattered over his shoes and the bottoms of his trouser legs were sodden. But Ben guessed that spending hours out here in the shit weather wasn’t the sole reason for the sour grimace on Hanratty’s face. It looked permanently etched into his ruddy features. Ben’s first impression was of a chronically malcontented guy who, when he’d finished harrying and persecuting his work colleagues for the day, bullied his wife and kicked the dog.
‘This is a police crime scene,’ Hanratty repeated loudly. ‘Get out.’
Following a few yards behind was a female officer. Like her colleague, she was in plain clothes – a detective sergeant, was Ben’s guess. She was petite, elfin in her looks, with dark shoulder-length hair that had gone limp from the drizzle. She was visibly tired, but in contrast to the dogged stupidity in Hanratty’s eyes, hers were quick and sharp.
‘My name’s Hope,’ Ben said. ‘I’m a close friend of one of the victims, Brooke Marcel.’ He reached for his wallet and took out the little photo of her that he carried inside. The picture had been taken in France during summer. She was smiling and the sun was in her hair. He couldn’t bring himself to look at it.
Hanratty gave it only a cursory glance. ‘See that police tape there?’ he blustered. ‘Know what that means? It means keep your nose out of where it doesn’t belong, understand?’ He turned his sour gaze on Amal, and his eyes narrowed with recognition. ‘Ah, Mr … Ray, wasn’t it? What are you doing poking around here with him? We’ve taken your statement already, so now you can—’
Ben looked at him. ‘Listen, I came to help, not to argue with you, okay?’
Hanratty flushed and was about to fire an angry reply, but his colleague got in first. ‘Mr Hope, I’m Detective Sergeant Lynch,’ she said calmly. ‘We do have the situation under control, thank you, so if you’d like to return to your vehicle …’
Ben opened his clenched palm and tossed them the small object he’d found in the grass. Hanratty caught it in his fist, peered down at it and then stared up at Ben in surprise and indignation. Lynch stepped closer to her colleague to see what it was.
‘It was lying over there by the roadside,’ Ben said. ‘Thought it might be useful. It’s a nine-millimetre shell casing.’
Hanratty’s features twisted into a sardonic leer. ‘How helpful of you, sir. It happens we’ve already recovered a number of these.’
‘Then I imagine you’ve learned something from them,’ Ben said.
Lynch took the small steel casing from Hanratty’s hand and examined it. ‘Who the hell do you think you are?’ Hanratty growled. ‘Get out of here before I—’
‘Learn what?’ Lynch said. ‘We already know shots were fired at the car.’
Ben pointed at the cartridge in her fingers. Her nails were trimmed short and practical. ‘Thin steel, not brass,’ he said. ‘Plus, two small flash holes in the primer socket instead of the more usual single larger hole means the cartridge was designed to take a Berdan type primer. That’s unusual. You don’t normally see them, except with milsurp ordnance. That’s military surplus,’ he added for the benefit of Hanratty, who was glaring at him with widening eyes and turning mottled under the floodlights. ‘Secondly—’
‘Secondly?’ Lynch said. She was listening closely, her head cocked slightly to one side.
‘See where the case mouth is dented from the weapon’s ejector port, where it spins and smashes against the receiver on its way out? That denting is typical of the way the Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun mashes its spent shells. Expensive weapon, and this one was brand new.’
‘How the hell can you tell that?’ Hanratty snapped impatiently.
‘Scrape marks on the side of the casing, from loading,’ Ben said. ‘The magazine isn’t fully broken in yet, follower spring’s a little stiff. It’s normal for the first few hundred rounds. So your perpetrators are using milsurp ammo, hard to come by without the right contacts, and they’re very professionally equipped.’
Lynch arched an eyebrow. ‘Is there more?’
‘Just that the placement of the empty casings you’ve already found, and the others that’re probably still scattered in the grass, should allow you to figure out by the distance and the angle of ejection more or less where the gunmen were standing, how they moved,’ Ben said. ‘Might help you to find footprints, determine the exact number of shooters, little things like that. If it were me, I’d have the team searching over here instead of out there in the field.’ He smiled a thin, humourless smile. ‘But then, who am I to tell you your job?’
‘What did you say your name was?’ Hanratty demanded.
‘Forget it,’ Ben said. ‘I don’t have time to waste talking to idiots. Come on, Amal, let’s go.’
‘Hey!’ Hanratty yelled as they headed back towards the car. ‘Don’t you walk away from me. Who’re you calling an idiot?’
Ben kept walking. Amal followed along nervously.
‘Hold on a minute,’ Lynch called out, trotting after them. ‘Mr Hope, wait.’
‘I’ve seen all I need to see here,’ Ben said without turning round. He was nearly at the car when she caught up with him and gently grasped his arm.
He wheeled round to face her. ‘I’ve dealt with a thousand Hanrattys in my time,’ he said. ‘He’s a fool, and he’s totally out of his depth.’
A long-suffering little smile played at the corners of Lynch’s mouth, as if she’d be only too happy to agree with him if she were free to. ‘You’re not dealing with him now,’ she said calmly. ‘You’re dealing with me, DS Kay Lynch. Let’s talk, Mr Hope. Please.’ There was no hostility in her expression, no suspicion, just earnestness and fatigue.
‘No offence, Kay, but I think someone like Tommy Logan at the ERU in Dublin should be handling this.’ The Garda’s Emergency Response Unit was the nearest thing the Irish police had to SCO19. One or two of their units had undergone hostage extraction training with the SAS during Ben’s time, and Commander Tommy Logan had sent a team for instruction under Ben and Jeff Dekker’s tutelage last year.
Lynch frowned. ‘Who are you?’
‘I told you who I am. I’m a friend of Brooke Marcel who was in that car.’
‘No, I mean, who are you really? You’ve got experience at this kind of thing, haven’t you?’
‘More than your friend there, for sure,’ Ben said, with a dismissive gesture at the distant figure of Hanratty, who was marching back over to the Land Rovers and barking orders at the forensic team.
Ben had had enough of this place. He was about to turn back towards the car, but the expression in Lynch’s eyes made him hesitate. He slipped his wallet and a ballpoint from his inside pocket and pulled out one of his business cards, slightly crumpled. It bore the name Le Val Tactical Training Centre in bold letters, with his name below. For the sake of appearances, it showed his former military rank – something Ben had never liked but which Jeff Dekker had persuaded him would impress clients.
Ben scribbled his mobile number on the back of the card and handed it to Lynch. ‘The web address is there too, if you want to check me out,’ he told her. ‘It’ll give you an idea of my background and what I do.’ In fact, the information about him on the website had been trimmed and edited down to the barest possible minimum. Little of what he’d done in his life, both during and since his military days, could be stuck up online for all to see.
But the card alone was enough. Lynch glanced at it and raised an eyebrow. ‘All right, I’m impressed. Do I call you Major Hope?’
‘It’s just Ben now,’ he said.
‘So what did you mean when you said you came here to help, Ben?’
‘I came here to find Brooke. That’s what I’m going to do.’
‘This is a police investigation. We don’t normally invite civilians to come on board.’
‘I didn’t ask to be invited. I’ll do this with you or without you.’
‘I have to caution you to stay out of it. For your own sake as well as hers, and that of the other victims.’
‘Of course. The last thing you need is a crazy guy like me messing the whole thing up.’
Lynch looked at him. ‘I understand that this a very difficult time for you. You’re upset and frightened. The police have a victim support counselling service …’
‘What frightens me the most is that prick Hanratty,’ Ben said.
‘I’m serious,’ she warned. ‘You can’t go meddling in this on your own. I don’t want to have to arrest you.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘You don’t.’
Her eyes narrowed for an instant as she sensed the quiet menace in his voice. Then she seemed to soften. ‘Look. There’s nothing you can do here.’
‘You’re still waiting for the ransom demand, correct?’ he said after a pause.
Lynch hesitated to reply. ‘There has been no contact as yet, no. They’re still up at Carrick Manor.’
‘Carrick Manor?’
‘That’s where the party was supposed to take place,’ Amal put in. ‘The big house.’
‘Forsyte’s land base during the salvage project,’ Lynch said, ‘while he wasn’t supervising the operation from on board his ship. They’re expecting the ransom demand call either to come through there, or to the company’s main offices in Southampton.’
Ben pointed past Lynch’s shoulder. ‘Now, that cordoned area on the left side of the road. What’s that?’
Lynch didn’t need to look round to know which area he was talking about. She pursed her lips. ‘You think I can’t see what you’re doing, trying to prise information out of me? I told you, you can’t get invol—’
‘It’s where the body of the driver, Lander, was found, isn’t it?’ Ben cut across her.
She rolled her eyes, nodded reluctantly.
‘Thirty yards back from the crash site,’ Ben said. ‘Ideas?’
‘You’re pretty damn persistent, aren’t you, Mr Hope?’
‘Just Ben. And yes, I can be. Tell me something, Kay. Lander’s body. Apart from the gunshots, what other injuries did he have?’
She looked at him.
‘Crush injuries, for instance? Like he’d been run over?’
‘Y-yes,’ she blurted, her eyes opening wider. ‘There were tyre marks on the body that matched the tread pattern of the Jaguar. But how …?’
‘Indicating that the car was driven over the top of him after he’d been shot. I thought so. And I’m guessing that there are traces of paint on the front right wing of the car. White or blue?’
‘White,’ Lynch said, staring at him.
Ben nodded. ‘So it was blue before. It was an overspray,’ he explained. ‘Figures.’
‘How do you know all this?’
‘Just from looking around,’ he said. ‘This is how I see it. The car was coming along this road when it was overtaken and forced to stop by a white van. A Ford Transit, maybe, or a Fiat Ducato, something like that, bought cheap and repainted in a hurry.’ His eyes were fixed on the scene, as if he were watching the events unfold in front of him in real time. ‘Lander, the driver, gets out of the Jaguar to have it out with the van’s occupants, who have already stepped out of their vehicle. I’d say two of them, at least. He’s got no idea of their intentions, not until it’s too late. They open fire on him from near the van, shooting in this direction. Just a short burst, three rounds apiece. The empty cases are ejected into the left-side verge.’
‘We found half a dozen of them there,’ Lynch muttered.
‘Lander goes down at the side of the road. Brooke, Forsyte and his PA must have seen it all happen right in front of them. It’s at this point that someone inside the Jaguar takes charge of the situation and gets behind the wheel.’
‘That’s more or less what we figured out, too,’ Lynch said, still stupefied but struggling to hide it. ‘One of them tried to make a break for it. Probably Forsyte. That’s what the DI says, at any rate.’
Ben was certain it had been Brooke. He knew the way she responded in a tight spot, and this was exactly what she’d have done here. The stab of proud admiration he felt was quickly swallowed up by a fresh surge of grief and anxiety. He reined in his emotions and pressed on.
‘Now whoever’s taken the wheel of the Jaguar needs to get out of there by the most direct route. They’ve got the van in front of them partially blocking the way, and Lander’s body in between. But there’s no other way round, no choice but to aim straight ahead. That’s what I’d have done. The car goes right over Lander’s body and rams into the left wing of the van from an angle, shunting it far enough aside to the right to create a gap. Hence the traces of white paint on the car’s wing, and the sideways tyre marks on the road. The gunmen must have had to jump out of the way as the Jaguar forced its way through. But as the car accelerates up the road, they open fire on it. Now they’re shooting in the opposite direction and the empty cases are flying this way, bouncing off the tarmac into the right-side verge. There’ll be a lot more there besides the one I found. They take out the tyres and the car loses control.’
Lynch finished for him. ‘The victims are moved out of the car and transferred into the van, leaving Lander’s body behind. That pretty much sums it up. Well, you’ve certainly put this together, haven’t you?’
‘You’d have to confirm it with your genius friend Hanratty,’ Ben said. ‘But that’s how I see it happening.’
‘And now what?’ Amal said restlessly. ‘What’s being done?’
‘All that can be done,’ Lynch told him. ‘You need to believe that. And you,’ she said, facing Ben, ‘need to go home, sit tight and get some rest.’
Ben shook his head. ‘What I need is to be kept informed. I can’t be left on the outside. If there are developments I don’t want to be seeing them on the TV along with the rest of the public half a day later.’
Lynch said nothing.
‘Will you do that for me, Kay? Please. I’m not asking for a lot.’
‘Hanratty—’
‘Doesn’t need to know. He’s been ignorant all his life. A little more can’t hurt him.’
Lynch held up Ben’s business card. ‘It’s this tactical stuff that concerns me. You’re not going to do anything silly, are you?’
‘If I promise not to do anything silly, will you help me?’
‘I’ll do what I can,’ Lynch replied after a beat.
Chapter Ten (#ulink_31e35a1a-69ca-5908-ba17-72d29b73aeab)
‘So where to now?’ Amal asked, slumping heavily into the passenger seat.
‘Castlebane Country Club,’ Ben replied. He twisted the key in the ignition. The BMW’s engine roared into life, the tyres rasped and the car reversed hard down the road until he stamped on the brake and slewed round to face the direction they’d come from.
Ben didn’t need to ask Amal the way. He’d already studied the map and found the same winding coastal route the Jaguar had taken the night before – besides which, he had precious little trust in his companion’s navigational skills. He glanced in the rear-view mirror at the retreating figure of Kay Lynch, who was walking back to rejoin Hanratty, then put his foot down.
Amal was getting the hang of Ben’s driving by now. He gripped his door handle tightly, braced himself for the acceleration and closed his eyes as they hurtled into the first set of bends.
Not long afterwards, the BMW was one of the steady procession of vehicles entering the country club’s illuminated gateway and filling up the car park. The drizzle had finally petered out and the clouds were breaking up to reveal a clear and starry sky. There were no police vehicles anywhere to be seen outside the country club, but then Ben hardly expected any. He looked at his watch and saw that it had taken twelve minutes to cover the distance between here and the scene of the kidnapping. Assuming that Wally Lander had made similar time in the Jaguar, that pretty much tallied with the official estimate of when the attack had taken place.
It was now quarter to eight. Brooke had been missing for twenty-one hours and forty minutes.
With Amal silently in tow he walked up to the building, climbed the steps and pushed through the heavy door into the foyer.
Ben took in his surroundings. The carpet was red and lush. Faux olde-worlde decor designed to impress the nouveau-riche golfing and tennis crowd. Glossy oak panelling. Display cabinets filled with polished silver trophies. Whirring overhead fans that mimicked the colonial era. Artificial foliage spilling out from reproduction antique urns. A stream of mostly middle-aged and elderly couples was filtering into the foyer behind him, heading towards the busy restaurant area he could see through an open doorway to the right of the reception desk and being greeted by a solemn-looking maitre d’. It was clearly business as usual at the Castlebane Country Club. The events of the night before seemed to have left barely a ripple.
The smell of food from the restaurant reached Ben’s nostrils; it occurred to him that he’d eaten nothing at all since leaving France. He shoved the thought to the back of his mind and wandered deeper inside the foyer. A young woman looked up at him with a frown from behind the reception desk. He glanced at the arriving diners in their suits and ties and dresses and pearls, then at Amal in his silk polo-neck and expensive designer coat. Catching a glimpse of himself in a mirror, he saw an unshaven and tousle-haired character in a scuffed old leather jacket, faded denim shirt, well-worn jeans and combat boots who didn’t exactly fit with the place’s dress code. That was tough shit. He returned the woman’s gaze with a cold glare and she averted her eyes.
‘I’m pretty sure that’s where we were last night,’ Amal whispered, pointing at a gleaming double doorway off to the left. ‘It’s a ballroom, or something. I don’t remember it so well.’
Then it was time to refresh Amal’s memory, Ben thought. He headed for the doorway. The woman at reception threw him another glance, but nobody tried to stop him. The doors glided open. Ben walked through, Amal followed, and they found themselves inside a vast room, empty except for the stacks of tables and velvet-backed chairs that lined the far wall.
‘This is it,’ Amal said, gazing around, slowly remembering. ‘At least, I think it is. It all looks so different.’
‘Is it or isn’t it?’ Ben said testily. Impatience flared up inside him for a moment, then subsided as he told himself to go easy. Amal was just as upset as he was.
‘It is, definitely. But they’ve cleared everything away. It’s weird, as if none of these things had happened. Shouldn’t the police have made them keep the place the way it was? For evidence, or whatever?’
‘Hanratty,’ Ben grunted. ‘Never mind him for now.’
‘It’s coming back to me,’ Amal muttered, narrowing his eyes to slits and cocking his head to one side as though that would help him visualise the scene more clearly. He turned to motion at a large expanse of empty floor in the corner nearest the door. ‘That’s where the bar was.’ He grimaced as if to say, the less said about that the better. ‘Over there was a curtain, with all the exhibits and stuff behind it. To the left of it was the stage, with a speaking podium and a big screen. That’s where Forsyte and that other guy gave their speeches.’
‘What other guy was that?’
‘One of the company employees. I only got a quick glimpse of him when I turned round at some point to see where Brooke was.’
‘This is while you were sitting at the bar?’
Amal sighed and nodded.
‘With your back to the room.’
Amal sighed and nodded again. ‘I remember … I remember that he was a younger guy than Forsyte. Quite small, sandy hair. Forsyte introduced him as … as some kind of manager. Dive team manager, something like that. His name was … I don’t know. Baxter? Baker?’
‘Butler,’ Ben said, remembering the name from the Neptune Marine Exploration website. ‘Simon Butler. But I’m not so interested in him right now. Take a minute, look around and see if anything else jogs your memory. Anything at all that might have seemed unusual at the time, or maybe has struck you since as odd. Anyone hanging around Forsyte, for example, or acting out of the ordinary.’ As he said it, he was painfully aware that the kind of things a trained eye could pick out would go quite unnoticed by an ordinary observer. Especially one who’d made a point of hitting the bar.
Amal looked anxiously around him for a few moments. ‘I don’t know. The place was full of people. Journalists firing questions, photographers everywhere. I’ve never been to anything like that before. I wouldn’t know what was strange and what wasn’t. Anyway,’ he admitted miserably, ‘I wasn’t even paying a lot of attention. I was too busy drowning my pathetic little sorrows in bloody gin and tonic. And Brooke – poor Brooke – what’s happened to her? It’s all my fault …’ He ran quaking fingers through his hair, dug the balls of his thumbs into his eyes. His breathing was ragged, as though he was about to burst into tears.
‘Nobody’s blaming you,’ Ben said. ‘Lay that idea aside. Get a grip, Amal. You’re no use to me otherwise.’ He was conscious of the harshness in his tone. In a softer voice he asked, ‘You want to go into the lounge bar for a drink? You look like you could use one.’
Amal shook his head vigorously. ‘No way. Never again. I swear.’
Ben fought back his own desire to drain the place dry of every drop of liquor they had. Anything to slow his mind down, dull the thoughts that kept spinning round and round inside his head, threatening to drive him crazy. ‘All right,’ he said, taking the BMW key from his pocket. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
‘Are we going back to the guesthouse?’ Amal asked as they headed outside towards the car.
Ben’s jaw tightened. He wanted, needed, to keep moving. ‘Not yet.’ He bleeped the central locking open and slid behind the wheel. ‘There are some people I’d like to talk to.’
‘People?’
‘At Carrick Manor.’
‘But how do we find the place?’
‘There’s something called Google Maps nowadays. I thought you writers knew these things.’
‘I’m not really that kind of … never mind.’ Amal closed his door and Ben fired the car up again.
They were three or four miles from Castlebane Country Club and speeding inland when Ben’s phone buzzed in his pocket. He dug it out urgently and answered without slackening his pressure on the gas. ‘Thanks for calling back, Mike.’
‘No problem, mate,’ said the raspy voice on the other end. ‘Gather you’ve got a bit of trouble. Sorry to hear it. Anyway, I’ve dug up the info you asked for. Not a word to anyone, mind, or it’s my arse. It’s only because it’s you.’
‘Appreciated,’ Ben said. ‘Fire away.’
‘All right. Neptune Marine Exploration took out a comprehensive K&R policy four years ago with Rochester and Saunders. Apparently they’d had a near miss with Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden while hauling up some shipwreck or other, and got jumpy in case they were less lucky the next time. Deal was brokered by that greedy bastard Ronnie Galloway.’
‘I don’t know him. What’s the coverage?’
‘Twelve million. That’s pretty much all I can tell you.’
‘It’s plenty. I owe you one, Mike.’
‘Or two. Good luck, mate.’
Ben ended the call. He knew the name Rochester and Saunders well. Operating from a glittering glass tower in central London, they were one of the top players in their field and provided kidnap and ransom insurance services to high-risk corporate employees, VIPs and other potential kidnap targets all over the globe.
As Ben had known all too well for too many years, kidnap and ransom was a booming industry, not just for those who did it but also for those who could claim to offer protection from it. Long before he’d given up active field work to move to France and set up Le Val, he’d now and then been hired as a freelance negotiator by the insurance companies, to maintain contact with kidnappers, obtain the crucial proof of life, smooth along the negotiations and do everything humanly possible to ensure the early release, unharmed, of the hostages.
Occasionally, other ways and means – more or less peaceable, more or less legitimate – became necessary to get them out. In those cases, the insurance companies were no longer involved. Nobody was, not officially. Those contingencies, and the direct action needed to resolve them, had been Ben’s particular area of expertise.
A lot of K&R operatives had come from a military background – some, like Ben, from 22 SAS and other Special Forces units; Mike Starkey had been a twenty-year veteran of the London Met before switching careers. Many of the guys knew each other well, and because their work tended to take them to the world’s concentrated kidnap and ransom hotspots, their paths often crossed, frequently in the seedier bars and nightclubs where criminal informants and other undesirables tended to hang out. Theirs was a strange, closed and often clandestine community, made more so by the fact that in some countries getting paid to help secure the release of kidnap victims was considered tantamount to profiting from the kidnap itself. Some negotiators burned out from the stress, some ended up on the wrong side of the rails completely, or dead, or kidnap targets themselves. Some simply got tired of the life and ended up behind a desk.
Mike Starkey had been one of those. Nowadays he filled a cushy, safe little niche as a broker in London, the world’s K&R capital, acting as middleman between the clients desperate for kidnap protection insurance and the underwriters who collectively raked in over £150 million a year in return and were extremely reluctant ever, ever to part with a penny of it in the not-uncommon event of a claim. Business was soaring year on year and guys like Starkey were happily surfing the wave.
Some critics partly blamed the meteoric rise in the popularity of K&R insurance for the terrifying worldwide growth of the trade in human misery, on the grounds that the insurers were only fuelling potential kidnappers with greater financial incentives than they’d ever enjoyed before. It was a point of view Ben privately couldn’t disagree with.
‘Was that the call you were expecting?’ Amal asked as Ben put the phone away.
Ben nodded. ‘A contact in London.’
Amal waited for more, and when it wasn’t forthcoming he said, ‘Are you always this talkative and open with people?’
‘Yup, I’m a regular chatterbox,’ Ben said, and drove faster.
Chapter Eleven (#ulink_f1527dca-2dee-5ece-9b69-0f020560173a)
It was 8.27 p.m. when Ben and Amal rolled up on the crunching gravel outside Carrick Manor. The huge, imposing house was sequestered in its own sweeping grounds at the end of a long private road. A golden glow of light illuminated the entrance and the cluster of vehicles parked outside it.
As Ben stepped out of the BMW he noticed the same unmarked Garda Vauxhall Vectra that had been at the crime scene earlier that evening. He brushed his fingers along the bonnet as he walked by and felt the warmth from the still-ticking engine.
‘Hanratty,’ he said to Amal.
‘I’d a feeling we hadn’t seen the last of him,’ Amal groaned.
The manor house’s front door wasn’t locked and the huge entrance hall was empty. Ben paused, listening. From an open doorway at the far end of the hall came the distant sound of voices. Crossing the hall, he followed the sound down a long corridor, Amal tagging along behind him. The sound of voices grew louder and finally led them to another door. Ben peered in.
It was a dining room, or had been before it had been turned into a makeshift operations room by the crowd of police personnel and the fifteen or so other people inside. The room was uncomfortably warm and smelled of stale coffee, sweat and fear. The atmosphere was fraught. Everyone was too busy pacing up and down, looking extremely nervous or shouting at one another to notice Ben slip through the door, followed by Amal.
At the centre of the hubbub was a telephone, sitting silently on the gleaming surface of the long dining room table under the fixed eye of half a dozen men and women in suits.
Ben recognised a number of faces from the Neptune Marine Exploration website: the company had clearly flown out most of its chief executives to Ireland. One of them was the big, broad, balding man in the grey suit, Justin Maxwell, who until yesterday had been Sir Roger Forsyte’s second-in-command and now found himself apparently Neptune’s most senior executive, a responsibility that he wore gravely. He was leaning over the table, staring down at the phone as if trying by sheer force of will to make it ring.
Ben ran his eye over the monitoring equipment. An ordinary splitter cable was plugged into the wall socket and hooked up to a digital recording device with headphone outputs so that the police could listen in live to calls. Nearby stood a pair of laptops, one to trace the origin of any call online, whether via the GPS tracking system of a prepaid mobile phone or to a landline, and one to pick up any emails the kidnappers might send, complete with video clips of hooded hostages with guns at their heads. It was a pretty minimal setup, but that wasn’t the problem.
In fact there were two problems Ben could see, which were of a more fundamental nature. One was that, based on their behaviour so far, these kidnappers didn’t seem the kind of people who’d let themselves be so easily traced. Only an idiot nowadays would use a landline to make a ransom demand call, or hold on to a mobile phone they’d used for that purpose. It was just too easy to pinpoint the call’s origin, which was why a common trick kidnappers played was to toss the phone onto the back of a long-distance freight lorry after use, to lead the police far off the trail. Other times, they simply burned them.
The second problem was much more worrying. It had to do with timing. Ben looked at his watch.
It was almost eight-thirty. Not good.
A third laptop stood open on another table, surrounded by a small group of people. Onscreen was the BBC News website, showing the unfolding story in all its colourful drama: images of the bullet-riddled Jaguar; a shot of Castlebane Country Club; of NME’s ship Trident; and of each of the victims in order of newsworthiness – Forsyte’s was the most prominent, then Wally Lander, then Samantha Sheldrake. Brooke’s had now been added to the bottom. The cops had dug up the same photo of her that she’d given Ben to use on the Le Val site. He’d often caught himself gazing at it when they were apart. He couldn’t look at it now.
Hanratty and Kay Lynch were standing on the far side of the room. Neither had seen Ben and Amal come in; their attention was fully occupied by the slightly-built, sandy-haired man who was yelling at them. Ben recognised him as Neptune Marine’s dive team manager, Simon Butler. The man looked completely destroyed from stress – his face pale and moist, eyes rimmed with red, his hair and shirt damp with sweat. His voice was slurred, as if he’d been hitting the sherry. ‘Surely Scotland Yard should have been flown out here by now?’ he was demanding. ‘I mean, what is being done?’
Hanratty was protesting vigorously that it was his job to liaise with the English police, that everything was in hand, that he knew what he was doing. Lynch was saying nothing, looking down at her feet.
‘Ben? Ben Hope?’ said a voice. Ben turned round to see a much-changed but still familiar face peering at him out of the crowd.
‘Hello, Matt.’
Matt Webster had been one of the regulars on the hostage negotiator circuit when Ben had still been active. He obviously hadn’t opted for life behind a desk yet, though he looked as if he should before too long. What little hair he had left had turned grey.
They shook hands, and Ben briefly introduced him to Amal. ‘It’s been a long time,’ Webster said. ‘Six years?’
‘Seven,’ Ben said. ‘Lahore.’
‘Lahore. Christ, who could forget that one?’ Webster shook his head at the memory. Seven years earlier, a wealthy Kent-based private doctor named Shehzad, who had some time before taken out a kidnap and ransom insurance policy with a leading firm, had been violently abducted by an armed gang while visiting family in Pakistan. The ransom demand had been quickly followed up by a severed toe thrown from a passing car; when the toe had been verified as indeed belonging to Dr Shehzad, the insurance underwriters had panicked and sent in a whole team of negotiators. Both Ben and Webster were on it.
The negotiations had been looking reasonably positive until the Pakistani police had managed to trace the phone used by the idiotic kidnappers and taken it upon themselves to storm their hideout in a pre-dawn raid using two armoured personnel carriers. In the ensuing gun battle several officers had been shot to pieces, as well as the entire gang of kidnappers and the doctor himself. The episode had been just one of the instances that had made Ben extremely wary of police involvement in kidnap cases, in any country.
‘So Rochester and Saunders sent you up here,’ Ben said.
Webster motioned across the room to a colleague who had his back turned to them. ‘Me and Dave Hughes there.’ He paused and looked puzzled. ‘So what are you …? I heard you were doing your own thing now.’
Ben nodded. ‘You heard right. My involvement in this is private. I’m here because of Brooke Marcel. She and I …’ He didn’t finish the sentence.
‘God, I had no idea,’ Webster said, blanching. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘What’s the situation, Matt? There’s been no contact, has there?’ Even as he asked the question, he already knew the answer. Just one glance at the haggard faces around the room had told him what he’d come to Carrick Manor to find out.
Webster shook his head. ‘Zilch. Not a squeak.’
Ben could have asked Webster if he was thinking the same thing he was, but there was no need. He could see it in his eyes.
He said nothing. It was eight thirty-two. He glanced across at the silent phone. Justin Maxwell was still staring at it fixedly, barely blinking.
At that moment Detective Inspector Hanratty, managing to get away from the angry Simon Butler, spotted Ben and Amal across the room. ‘Here comes trouble,’ Amal muttered as Hanratty battled his way round the long table and strutted up to them with his fists clenched.
‘Not you again,’ he growled. ‘Did I not tell you to stay out of this, Hope? There’s the door.’
‘Why don’t you fuck off, Hanratty?’ Ben said quietly, looking him directly in the eye.
Hanratty blanched. ‘What did you just say to me?’
‘You heard me,’ Ben said more loudly. ‘You’ve three seconds to get out of my face before I put you through that window.’
Kay Lynch was watching Ben from across the room with an expression that said, ‘See, this is what I meant by you being silly’.
The buzz of noise dropped to a murmur. People looked around. Hanratty’s eyes bulged. Two seconds went by, then three. Hanratty swallowed and took a step back from Ben. Before he could muster up a riposte, Justin Maxwell spoke up.
‘Will someone please tell me who this gentleman is?’
‘I know him,’ Matt Webster cut in. ‘I can totally vouch for him.’
Hanratty exploded in protest.
‘Let me put it this way, pal,’ Webster said, giving him a cold glower. ‘If you were kidnapped, this is the guy you’d want on your side.’
‘With respect, sir,’ Lynch said to Hanratty, ‘I think he can be of some use to us. He’s got more experience in this kind of situation than the rest of us put together.’
‘Then perhaps he should introduce himself,’ Maxwell said, silencing Hanratty’s objections with a raised hand and looking expectantly at Ben.
Ben disliked talking about himself or his background, but there were times when it was to his advantage to reveal a little more than usual. ‘My name’s Ben Hope. I served as a Major in the British Special Air Service before becoming a freelance crisis response consultant. In that capacity I’ve been involved in over a hundred hostage rescue situations. Sometimes as a negotiator, sometimes more directly. I’m here because of Dr Brooke Marcel.’
‘I see,’ Maxwell said. ‘May I ask what is your relationship to Dr Marcel?’
‘That’s none of your business,’ Ben said. ‘What does concern all of us here is that the clock’s ticking. It’s eight thirty-three. Approximately twenty-two and a half hours since the snatch. In my experience, that’s a hell of a long time to wait for first contact.’
‘Meaning what exactly?’
‘Meaning that you people can stand here staring at that phone all you like, but I don’t think it’s going to ring anytime soon, if ever.’
Maxwell looked long and hard at Ben. His eyes were wide-set and penetrating. ‘Couldn’t the delay be a deliberate strategy?’ he asked. ‘The longer we stew, the greater the kidnappers’ psychological advantage over us and the more likely we are to acquiesce to their demands. Although we’d do anything to secure Sir Roger’s and Miss Sheldrake’s release. And that of Dr Marcel, naturally,’ he added quickly.
‘Kidnappers like to play mind games,’ Ben said. ‘That’s true enough. We call it The Wait, and it’s a nightmare for negotiators, victims’ families and everyone concerned except the insurers, who’re happy to hang onto their money for as long as they can. The kidnappers will often go quiet for days, months, sometimes years, to soften you up like putty so that you’ll cave in to whatever terms they throw at you. But not,’ he emphasised, ‘before making that initial contact. It’s crucial to them to approach you and identify themselves as the real kidnappers. This story’s already all over the internet by now – it’s only a question of time before a hundred opportunists start coming out of the woodwork making phoney demands. Kidnappers generally just want money, and they want it as quickly as possible. Especially when there’s an eight-figure sum on the table, you wouldn’t expect them to hang around.’
Maxwell narrowed his eyes. ‘Who said anything about an eight-figure sum?’
‘Let’s not mess about,’ Ben said. ‘I know that your company’s insured for ransom claims of up to twelve million with Rochester and Saunders. And if I know it, rest assured the kidnappers will know it. You’re not dealing with amateurs, that much is clear.’
‘Where did you get that information?’ one of the other Neptune executives demanded.
‘Ronnie Galloway told me,’ Ben said.
The executive shook his head in outrage. ‘That little—’ he began. Maxwell quieted him with a stern gesture.
‘Which strongly suggests to me that the time for a ransom demand has been and gone,’ Ben went on. ‘Believe me, I don’t like it any more than you do.’
Maxwell’s brow furrowed into deep creases. He looked at Simon Butler, then at Matt Webster and his colleague from R&S. Butler was chewing his fingernails in agitation. Webster’s face was taut.
‘Matt will agree with me,’ Ben said.
‘Is that the case, Mr Webster?’
Webster sighed. ‘It’s getting pretty damn late in the day,’ he admitted. ‘I’d have expected to hear something by now. Frankly, I’m more than a little concerned that every passing hour makes it less likely we’ll hear anything at all.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Maxwell said. ‘Where does this leave us? I’d assumed … I mean, if it’s not about ransom … what’s going on?’
‘I think you might need to re-evaluate the whole situation,’ Ben said. ‘You might want to consider other reasons why someone would want to snatch your man.’
‘Such as?’
‘I’d imagine the treasure recovered from the Santa Teresa’s worth a good deal more than twelve million,’ Ben said.
‘You’re suggesting what? That they’d use force against Sir Roger to make him give them access?’
‘Unless he’s in on it,’ Ben said.
There was a shocked silence in the room. After a few seconds, Maxwell said, ‘That’s absolutely out of the question and totally impossible. Besides, not even Roger could have access. Every single item recovered from that vessel is under secure lock and key.’
‘Then maybe there’s something else,’ Ben said. ‘Something we don’t know about, but which Forsyte does.’
‘But that’s just a guess,’ Maxwell said.
‘At this moment, guesswork is pretty much all we have,’ Ben replied. ‘All we know for sure is that while we stand around here staring at that phone, whoever did this is somewhere far away, laughing.’
‘And?’
‘And so it’s going to have to be done the hard way,’ Ben said. ‘They’re going to have to be found, and caught. That was meant to be Hanratty’s job. Whether he’s up to it is another question.’
‘I’m not having some outsider come into this investigation to cause trouble and make wild allegations like this,’ Hanratty burst out, pointing at Ben. ‘And you count yourself lucky, Hope, that I don’t charge you with threatening a police officer and obstructing the course of justice. Sergeant, get him out of my sight.’
Lynch hesitated, but she couldn’t refuse a direct order from her superior. She stepped towards Ben with a veiled look of apology in her eyes.
‘Hold on,’ Maxwell said. ‘This property is under lease to Neptune Marine Exploration. It’s not a crime scene and I don’t think you have the authority to expel anyone, Inspector. Mr Hope is welcome to stay and I appreciate any help he can offer us in this terrible situation.’ He looked at Ben. ‘Mr Hope, I’d be extremely grateful if you’d allow me to formally enlist your services.’
Ben shook his head. ‘Thanks, but I’m not interested in being on your company payroll. Like I told you, I’m here for my own reasons.’
Maxwell shrugged. ‘I’m sorry to hear that. Here’s my number, in case you change your mind.’
Ben pocketed the card. ‘No need to see me out, Sergeant,’ he said to Lynch. ‘I was leaving anyway.’
‘What are we going to do now?’ Amal asked as they headed back towards the car.
‘I don’t know, Amal,’ Ben said. ‘Right now, I really don’t know what to do.’
Chapter Twelve (#ulink_5b0d752c-1ba1-5d6f-943a-b3f08f79d2a3)
There was nothing more to say on the drive back to the guesthouse. When they arrived, Ben took his bag from the back seat of the car and followed Amal up the steps to the door. Amal had gone very quiet and was visibly upset as he let them inside. Mrs Sheenan was nowhere to be seen, but there was a TV blasting from somewhere upstairs. Ben was grateful not to have to speak to anyone.
Amal led him to the first floor, showed him Brooke’s room and announced in a shaky murmur that he needed to be alone for a while. Shuffling like an old man, he disappeared into his own room.
Ben stood for a long time outside Brooke’s door before he eventually reached out and grasped the handle. He slowly opened the door, summoned up his strength and walked in.
She had never been one to wear a lot of perfume, but the subtle, fresh scent in the air was so familiar that for a weird, disorientated moment or two he fully expected to find her sitting there on the bed. She wasn’t.
Of course she wasn’t. Sickening reality closed back in on him. He shut the door, feeling numb and utterly deflated and more tired than he could remember having felt for many, many years.
Where are you, Brooke?
He wanted to scream it, but at that moment he would barely have had the energy to raise his voice above a whisper.
He unslung his bag from his shoulder and laid it down with his leather jacket, then gazed around him at the room. Brooke’s travel holdall was sitting next to an armchair, unzipped. The slender reading glasses she sometimes wore at night, and a novel by an author he knew she liked, were sitting on the bedside table. Lying neatly folded on the pillow were the lightweight jogging bottoms she wore in bed, along with her favourite faded old pyjama top.
They suddenly seemed so much more a part of her now that she wasn’t here. He reached down and stroked them with his fingertips. Closed his eyes a moment, then moved away from the bed and walked into her little ensuite bathroom. On the tiled surface by the sink were some of her things that the police hadn’t taken away: her wash bag, her little jar of face cream, and several other of those familiar little items he remembered seeing in the bathroom at Le Val and at her place in Richmond, that signalled the warmth of her presence close by and made him feel happy to be alive.
Now there was only emptiness.
He couldn’t stop seeing her face in his mind, thinking of the last time they’d been together. If only those stupid, senseless arguments between them had never happened. She’d have been with him at Le Val, far away from all this mess. Or maybe it would have been him here with her in Ireland instead of Amal – he might have been there to protect her when it happened.
He had to believe she was alive. It couldn’t be any other way.
Mustn’t be any other way.
He looked in the oval mirror above the sink. The face that stared back at him was one he barely recognised, gaunt and pale, with a terrible look in its eyes. A sudden gushing torrent of rage welled up inside him. More than rage. Hatred. Hatred for whoever had done this, whoever had taken her like this. If they harmed her … if they did anything to her … He lashed out with his fist and his reflection distorted into a web of cracks.
Fragments of glass tinkled down into the sink. He gazed at his bloody knuckles. There was no pain; it was as if he’d become completely detached from his physical body.
Where are you, Brooke?
He mopped the blood up with a piece of toilet paper, flushed it away and walked stiffly back into the bedroom. Turned off the main light and clicked on the bedside lamp. Knelt down by his bag, undid the straps, rummaged inside for his whisky flask and shook it, feeling the slosh of the liquid inside. He slumped on the edge of the bed and unscrewed the steel cap. He was about to drain most of the flask’s contents in one gulp when he stopped himself.
No. This wasn’t the way. This wasn’t going to bring her back. He tightened the cap and tossed the flask into his bag.
But then another thought hit him like a kick in the face and almost made him reach for the flask again.
If it’s not about ransom, he heard Julian Maxwell’s voice say in his mind, If it’s not about ransom, what’s going on?
And then his own reply, coming back to him like a faraway echo: You might need to re-evaluate the whole situation … You might want to consider other reasons …
What if they’d all been getting this horribly, dreadfully wrong – him, the police, the company executives, Amal, everyone? What if their whole basic assumption was flawed, and this wasn’t about Roger Forsyte at all? What if he hadn’t been the target?
What if the target had been Brooke?
The idea left Ben stunned, winded. It was possible. Off-the-charts crazy, but possible, that this was some kind of reprisal against him. A sick, twisted punishment for something he’d done in his past. A relative of someone he’d killed or had put away, perhaps – had Jack Glass had a brother? – or maybe one of the many other enemies Ben had made over the years who were still out there.
Then wouldn’t the kidnapper have wanted Ben to know the truth, just to hurt him even more? Wouldn’t they have contacted Le Val?
Maybe they had, it occurred to him. A call could have come after he’d left. The phone could be ringing right this moment in the empty house; an email could be pinging into an unattended inbox.
Get a grip on yourself, he thought angrily. Jeff’s there. Jeff would have told you about it.
But the thought wouldn’t stop haunting him, and neither would the awful visions that kept circling through his head.
‘I’m going to find you, Brooke,’ he said out loud. ‘I’m going to …’
His voice trailed off into a croak. He sank his head into Brooke’s pillow and clutched her clothes tightly to his face, like a child needing comfort. His vision blurred. His tears moistened the pyjama top. The pain felt like too much to bear.
For the next hour he lay there curled up, staring at the door, praying for it to open and for Brooke to walk through it with a cheery greeting and a smile on her face. But time passed on and on, and the door stayed shut. He turned off the bedside light and went on staring into the darkness for what seemed a lifetime before he eventually slipped away into a shallow and restless state of unconsciousness.
When Ben awoke, it was still dark. His phone was thrumming in his jeans pocket. Instantly alert, heart thumping, he turned on the light and grabbed the phone to reply. This is it, the voice said in his mind. This is when you get your payback.
But there was nobody on the line, no mysterious voice from the past to make his worst nightmare come true. It was a text message alert.
The text was from Kay Lynch. Ben’s heart almost stopped when he read its opening words.
Think u need 2 know. Found bodies.
Chapter Thirteen (#ulink_67bc628b-9ebe-5256-9c0a-7d6e98d1dc1e)
The location given in the brief message was just a few miles from the abduction spot, deep within the heart of the rugged Glenveagh National Park, in an area of lakes and valleys known as the Poisoned Glen.
Twenty-seven frantic minutes had gone by since Ben had received Lynch’s text. Still an hour to go before the first red shards of dawn would come creeping over the hills. Racing towards the scene he saw the blue lights of the Garda vehicles through the darkness and the sheeting rain, and brought the BMW to a slithering halt inches behind them.
On a grassy slope fifty yards from the roadside was the only building in sight, a tumbledown old stone bothy. A century or two ago the tiny primitive structure would have served as a refuge for shepherds – nowadays it was more likely to be used by tramps and drug addicts.
This was the place. Light shone from its only window. There were figures in reflective Garda vests moving in and out of the single entrance. Thick electric cables snaked down the slope, hooked up to the forensic investigation van that had been at the kidnap site the previous evening.
‘Brooke’s in there, isn’t she?’ Amal whispered. His eyes were red and puffy.
‘We don’t know that, Amal,’ Ben replied through clenched teeth. Until the last minute before setting off, he’d been resolved not to wake him up and bring him out here. He regretted his change of mind now.
‘It’s obvious, isn’t it? I can feel it. Oh, God.’
Ben cut the engine and flung open his door. ‘Stay in the car.’
‘You must be kidding. I’m coming too.’
‘I said, stay in the damn car.’ Whatever was in that building, Ben didn’t want Amal to see it. He jumped out of the BMW and sprinted up the steep, slippery path towards the bothy. The building had no door, just a crude stone doorway thick with moss. Ben ran inside. The earth floor was damp-smelling from the long winter months. That wasn’t all he could smell. The place was rank with the stink of death.
The bothy was filled with people and activity and bright lights, but they couldn’t have been there more than forty-five minutes or so. Before that it had been empty and silent. Empty, apart from its grisly occupants.
Almost the first person Ben saw as he rushed in was Kay Lynch. She was standing near the entrance, looking drawn and pallid. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t say much in my text,’ she said in a low voice. ‘I couldn’t get away from Hanratty.’
‘Where are they?’ Ben said. He was breathless, but not from the fifty-yard sprint up the hill.
‘Over there,’ she said, motioning towards the far corner, where the forensics team were clustered around something Ben couldn’t see.
‘It’s not a pretty sight. Are you sure you—’
Ben was already pushing past her. With his heart in his mouth he shoved two cops out of the way and saw what the forensics team were attending to under the white glare of their lights.
‘They were found by the farmer who lives over the hill,’ Lynch said from behind his shoulder. ‘He was looking for a missing sheep when his dog picked up the scent of blood and ran in here. The poor fellow’s being treated for shock now.’
Lying sprawled on the floor were the corpses of a man and a woman. The woman was face down in the dirt. She wore a green cardigan over a red dress. Her bare legs were kicked out at unnatural angles and one of her shoes was missing. From the blueish hue of her skin it was clear that she’d been dead for some time. The right side of her head had been blown away at extreme close range by a gunshot. Her blond hair was thickly matted with congealed blood and pulped brains.
‘Samantha Sheldrake, Forsyte’s PA,’ Lynch said.
Ben felt suddenly dizzy and had to lean against the stone wall. He was boiling with anger at Lynch for not having said more in her message. She could have spared him the torture of the last half hour. But he was too overcome by a strange mixture of relief and horror to say anything. After a few moments his breathing had slowed a little and he turned to look at the other corpse.
Roger Forsyte was recognisable from his pictures, although he looked very different in death, especially after such an obviously horrible death. His face was twisted in agony and terror. His pupils had rolled completely under his lids, so that just the ghoulish white eyeballs stared up at the ceiling. There was no gunshot wound. Forsyte had died some other way. Something much worse.
He had no hands. Somebody had chopped his arms off a few inches above the wrist and tossed the severed body parts across the bothy. From the quantity of blood that had sprayed over the rough walls, saturated his clothing and soaked into the floor, it had been done while he was still alive. Corpses didn’t bleed this much.
The double amputation looked as though it had been carried out with a heavy blade: an axe or a butcher’s cleaver. The shock of such an injury could be fatal, but not always. In his SAS days Ben had seen enough poor limbless survivors of African war atrocities to know that the human body could withstand the most brutal acts of mutilation. No, it wasn’t the hacking off of his hands that had killed Sir Roger Forsyte. Ben observed the telltale signs – the leprous pallor of the skin, the grotesque swelling, the tongue protruding from the lips. Extreme pain, then creeping muscle paralysis and eventual asphyxia. Maybe an hour to death, maybe two. Not a good end. Whoever had done this had intended to make Forsyte suffer, and they’d got what they wanted.
‘He’s been poisoned,’ Ben said.
Lynch gave a dark little smile. ‘In the Poisoned Glen. Someone’s idea of a joke? Looks as if you might have been right, too. There goes our whole kidnap theory.’
And with it had gone any remnant of a chance that getting Brooke back might be as simple as paying over whatever ransom the kidnappers demanded in return for Forsyte. Even if they’d wanted more for the women than the insurance policy could cover, Ben would have happily sold Le Val and reduced himself to a pauper to bring her back.
But that faintest, most tentative shred of hope was dead now. For all he knew, Brooke was dead too, her body dumped elsewhere for another passerby to find, hours, days, weeks from now. Or she might have tried to escape and be lying hurt or dying in a ditch somewhere, anywhere.
Lynch must have been able to read his thoughts from the strain on his face. ‘We’ll keep searching for her. The Dog Support Unit came up from Dublin during the night. We might turn up evidence that she was here. It’s not the end. Not yet.’
Ben didn’t reply. The sight of Forsyte’s mutilated body had set something jangling deep in his memory. He couldn’t bring it into focus; it was like a word on the tip of his tongue that wouldn’t come, gnawing at him, teasing him through the mist of fear and stress and confusion that was clouding his mind. What was it?
Just when it seemed about to come to him, the sound of an angry voice interrupted his thoughts – a voice that was becoming way too familiar for Ben’s liking. Hanratty had spotted him at last.
‘I don’t believe this! Who let him in here? Lynch! Did you tell him about this?’
Ben turned away and stepped out into the rain. It was pouring even harder now, but he could barely feel the cold water running down his face and soaking his hair and clothes. He gritted his teeth and tried to focus on the vague, fleeting memory that still eluded him. What the hell was it that seeing Forsyte’s severed hands had triggered in his mind?
From fifty yards away, Amal had seen Ben emerge from the bothy. He swung the BMW’s passenger door open. The inside light shone on his worried face. ‘Well?’ he called out nervously, expecting the worst.
Ben trudged down the muddy path. ‘There are two bodies in there,’ he said to Amal. ‘Brooke’s not one of them. It’s Forsyte and his PA.’
The tension dropped from Amal’s face. He climbed out of the car. The rain began to spot on his expensive coat. ‘Then she’s alive. I mean, it’s awful. For the others, that is … but Brooke’s alive. Thank God!’
Ben wasn’t sure he had anything to thank God for.
‘She must be alive, mustn’t she?’ Amal said, seeing the look in Ben’s eyes. ‘This is good news, isn’t it? Isn’t it?’
But Ben couldn’t give him that reassurance. They both turned to look as Kay Lynch came down the path from the bothy and joined them beside the car. ‘I’m grateful to you for letting me know about this, Kay,’ Ben said sincerely. His anger with her hadn’t lasted more than a minute or two.
‘I’m sorry it wasn’t better news,’ she said. ‘And I’m afraid there’s something else you should know. The Inspector’s on the phone to Scotland Yard right now. He’s requesting for a search warrant to be issued for your friend Dr Marcel’s home in Richmond.’
‘What? Why!?’ Amal exploded.
Lynch gave a shrug. ‘Because he thinks that in the light of this turn of events, her disappearance looks suspicious. He’s dispatched a patrol car to Sea View Guest House to collect the rest of her belongings for examination. He says we can’t afford to assume she isn’t implicated somehow.’
‘Implicated?’ Amal yelled.
‘Don’t tell me you agree with Hanratty about this,’ Ben said to Lynch.
‘He’s my superior. I don’t have an opinion. Not one that matters, at any rate. And I’ve already told you far more than I should. I’m sticking my neck right out here.’
‘It’s insane!’ Amal shouted. ‘It’s absolute cretinous imbecility of the highest order! What kind of utter moron would—?’
Lynch glanced over her shoulder. ‘I’d keep my voice down, if I were you. Here he comes.’
Hanratty marched down the muddy slope towards them. ‘Well, well. Having a party, are we? Fancy you two just happening to turn up again.’ He glowered at Lynch, then turned to face Amal and stabbed a stubby finger into his chest. ‘You,’ he said, blowing spittle, veins standing out on his forehead, ‘had better not be thinking of going back to your own country, wherever that is. The situation has changed now, and you’re mixed up in it, pal.’
‘I happen to be a British citizen, pal. England is my country,’ Amal shot back in fury. ‘And I suppose you think I’m a suspect too? It’s outrageous. Brooke and I were here for a bloody party, that’s the beginning and end of it. We went through all this yesterday, over and over. Instead of standing here wasting time with these ridiculous allegations, why don’t you go and do your job, you colossal great prick?’
‘Amal,’ Ben said, putting a hand on his arm to quiet him. The cop’s eyes were beginning to burn with a dangerous light, and he was quite capable of having Amal dragged away to a cosy little cell if he carried on like this. ‘My friend’s upset,’ Ben said to Hanratty. ‘We’ll be getting out of your way now.’
‘Delighted to hear it,’ Hanratty snorted. He was about to say more when his phone rang and he wheeled back towards the bothy to take the call.
‘I’m sorry,’ Lynch said, seeing the look in Ben’s eyes. ‘It’s not me.’
‘I know,’ Ben said.
‘The moment I hear anything more, I’ll call you, okay? But you have to promise me to stay out of this and leave the investigating to us.’
‘I promise,’ Ben said. Lynch nodded, then turned to follow Hanratty back up the slope.
‘It’s just unbelievable,’ Amal was raging as they got back into the car. ‘Brooke a suspect? Based on what?’
‘It’s time for you to go home,’ Ben said.
Amal looked at him with hurt and confusion in his eyes. ‘So that’s it? No protest, no nothing? How can you just accept this shit from Hanratty, after all the things you said before? I thought you were going to do something. That’s why I thought you could help, because you had expertise in this kind of thing.’
‘There’s nothing more we can do here,’ Ben told him. ‘It’s over.’
Amal boggled at him. ‘It’s over? Are you serious?’
‘We’ll go back and get your stuff,’ Ben said. ‘Then I’ll take you to the airport.’
Amal stared. His throat gave a quiver. ‘You think she’s dead, don’t you? That’s why you’re giving up.’
Ben didn’t reply. He started the engine and put the car in reverse.
‘Why can’t you just be straight with me and say so? That’s right, just go silent on me again. I can’t stand it. I can’t stand any of it.’ Amal slumped despairingly in his seat as Ben backed the car away from the police vehicles and turned it round in the narrow road.
Arriving back at the guesthouse, they found a Garda patrol car parked outside and two officers loading the rest of Brooke’s things into the back of it, sealed up in plastic evidence bags. Mrs Sheenan was watching from the doorway in her curlers, dressing gown and slippers, extremely displeased to have been roused so early from her bed and even more mortified that her establishment had been ransacked by the Garda like it was a den for common criminals. It would be the talk of the village for evermore. Amal tried in vain to mollify her and explain what was happening, then gave it up to go to his room and start packing to leave.
Ben watched the police car disappear down the street before returning inside to check flight times and book Amal a seat on the first plane to London that morning. Minutes later, they were back in the BMW and setting off.
Amal looked deep in thought all the way to Derry Airport, privately chewing over something with a set expression on his face. As they were about to part, he turned to Ben. ‘Listen, I, ah, I don’t generally go around telling people this, but I do actually have some family connections. Fairly powerful ones, in fact. And I have my own money, a lot of money. I believe that Brooke is alive. I’d do anything – I mean anything – to find her. Whatever it takes. You understand me?’
‘I understand you,’ Ben said. He thanked him. Left him standing clutching his bags and headed back towards the car.
The truth was, he’d only wanted Amal out of the way. He knew what he had to do next, and that it was something he needed to do alone.
Because as he’d been standing there on the dark, rainswept roadside in the middle of the Poisoned Glen listening to Amal ranting at Lynch and Hanratty, Ben had suddenly remembered.
Chapter Fourteen (#ulink_6e2b5076-8113-5141-81f8-c6a92d9df9dc)
With the realisation of what had happened to Forsyte, the situation was suddenly totally altered. Things were about to turn an awful lot uglier than they already were.
Ben also knew now that there was no point in crossing back into the Republic. He was already on the side of the border he needed to be. Sitting behind the wheel of the BMW at Derry Airport, he took out his phone and dialled a number in Italy. After a few rings he heard a familiar, warm voice that would normally have made him smile. ‘Pronto?’ she said.
‘Hello, Mirella.’
‘Ben!’ She was delighted to hear from him. ‘Are you coming to see us again?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘What is wrong?’ she asked, hearing the tone of his voice.
‘I need to talk to Boonzie, Mirella. Is he there?’
‘I will call him,’ she said anxiously. A muffled clattering on the line as Mirella laid down the phone and went off to fetch her husband. Ben could hear her voice in the background shouting ‘Archibald!’. Boonzie would never have tolerated anyone but his beloved wife calling him by his real name. After a few moments, his gruff Scots voice came on the line.
‘I don’t suppose you’ve been following the British news,’ Ben said.
‘What’s going on?’ Ben could see the grizzled, granite-faced Scot standing there, his eyes narrowing in concern.
‘I have a problem, Boonzie.’
Boonzie McCulloch had been a long-serving 22 SAS sergeant, and a mentor and friend of Ben’s for many years, before he’d astounded everyone by quitting the army to settle in the south of Italy and set up a smallholding with a vivacious black-haired Neapolitan beauty he’d fallen head over heels in love with while on a few days’ leave. The flinty, battle-hardened fifty-nine-year-old had found his own private heaven at last, contentedly working his sun-kissed couple of hectares to produce the basil and tomato crop that Mirella turned into gourmet bottled sauces the local restaurant trade couldn’t do without.
But the soft life hadn’t got to Boonzie completely. He still had a few aces up his sleeve, like the small arsenal of military weaponry that had got Ben out of a sticky moment in Rome the year before. And because the SAS had always been so much more deeply embroiled in matters of political secrecy and delicacy than other British army regiments, he still carried around with him a headful of the kind of privileged information that the likes of Detective Inspector Hanratty wouldn’t have had access to in a thousand years.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Boonzie muttered when Ben had finished quickly filling him in. ‘Need help?’ He’d always been the practical type. Ben knew it would take only one word for him to lay down everything and be on the first flight to Ireland.
‘I just need to know I’m on the right track. Forsyte. Roger Forsyte. It was before my time, but it’s ringing bells.’
‘Aye, me too, laddie. Big fuckin’ bells. In some ears they havnae stopped ringing since Belfast, 1979.’
Ben nodded, but it wasn’t much of a relief to have it confirmed that his hunch had been correct. ‘The Liam Doyle incident.’
‘Think it was maybe my second stint in that godforsaken hole,’ Boonzie said, ‘maybe my third, when they found Doyle’s body. This shit was happening all the time, but they’d normally just blow your brains oot, not chop both your arms off that way. Nasty.’
‘About six inches above the wrist?’
‘With a cleaver,’ Boonzie said. ‘While he was still alive.’
‘Just like Forsyte.’
‘Then they put a nine-milly between his eyes and dumped the body out in the sticks in County Antrim. It was never confirmed that Doyle was IRA. Neither were the rest of the rumours, like who’d done it. A lot of folks were certain it wisnae the handiwork of the UVF or any of the other Loyalist bunch, though Lord knows some o’ those fuckers were even worse than the Republican boys. Let’s just say that in certain circles, it wisnae any secret who wiz behind it.’
‘And Forsyte?’
‘Roger Forsyte,’ Boonzie said. ‘Hold on a sec. I’m looking him up on the internet.’ Ben could hear a tapping of keys. ‘Here he is. Oh, aye. Marine Exploration?’ Boonzie gave a dark chuckle. ‘So that’s what former MI5 agents end up doing, digging up sunken treasure? There’s a lot of digging up to be done in Northern Ireland too. A lot of dead bodies were put in the ground in those years, and yer man’d know where to find half of them.’
‘You’re sure? Forsyte was MI5?’
‘You can bet your arse on it, Ben. I’ve seen that face before. These bastards were all over the place. And I heard the name Forsyte mentioned more than a couple of times.’
‘I need facts, Boonzie. Not surmises.’
‘Trust me. He was mixed up deep in this shite.’
Although it had taken place a decade or so before Ben had joined the army and while he was still a boy, he’d heard enough about that unsavoury chapter in Ulster’s history to know of the scandal that had erupted over the Liam Doyle incident. It was later to be overshadowed by the events of Operation Flavius during the Thatcher era, when three unarmed suspected Provisional IRA members had been shot dead in Gibraltar by the SAS amid strong concerns about government cover-ups and misinformation – but at the time the cruel, unusual nature of Liam Doyle’s murder and the mass of rumours surrounding it had sparked off a great deal of heat. Many Catholic Republicans had been convinced that the brutal killing had been sanctioned by British Intelligence.
Ben knew all about the ugly, complex backdrop to the incident, too. In those days, Northern Ireland had been the tense staging ground for a hidden war between Britain and America, both of which were illicitly supplying weapons and intelligence to their respective sides of the conflict. On the one hand, interests sympathetic to the Republican cause within the CIA were allegedly arming the Provos with weaponry and information to help them kill their Loyalist enemies. As part of the deal, the FBI had turned a blind eye when IRA members visited America to liaise with their secret allies there. Meanwhile, the British government and MI5 had been doing exactly the same thing to help the opposite side, by providing guns, explosives and intelligence to members of both the Ulster Defence Force and Ulster Volunteer Force against the IRA, with the tacit compliance of Northern Ireland’s police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Both sides had been guilty of all manner of atrocities, but few had been so shocking as the mutilation done to Liam Doyle.
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Scott Mariani
THE MASTER BESTSELLER RETURNS WITH THIS GRIPPING THRILLER.A SUNKEN SECRET. A MISSING WOMAN.A RACE AGAINST TIME.Former SAS major Ben Hope is relaxing at his home in Normandy when he hears the worst news of his life. His ex-girlfriend Dr Brooke Marcel has been kidnapped.Racing against the clock, Ben’s frantic search for Brooke leads him from Ireland to the Spanish mountains and the rainforests of Peru.What is the mysterious link between the kidnapping, the salvage of a sunken 16th-century Spanish warship and the secret activities of its wealthy discoverer?As the trail of wreckage and mayhem intensifies, Ben soon uncovers a web of intrigue, corruption and brutal murder.But will he be too late to find Brooke alive?BEN HOPE is one of the most celebrated action adventure heroes in British fiction and Scott Mariani is the author of numerous bestsellers. Join the ever-growing legion of readers who get breathless with anticipation when the countdown to the new Ben Hope thriller begins…
Copyright (#ulink_29c6c391-043a-5bd8-b8a9-b56424be410b)
Published by Avon an imprint of
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2013
This ebook edition published by HarperCollins Publishers in 2016
Copyright © Scott Mariani 2016
Cover photographs © Arcangel Images
Cover design © Henry Steadman 2016
Scott Mariani asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007398430
Ebook Edition © September 2016 ISBN: 9780007398447
Version: 2018-06-22
That’s my last Duccd hess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now: Frà Pandolf’s hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
Will’t please you sit and look at her?
Robert Browning, My Last Duchess
Contents
Cover (#uef63c7b1-af61-5cb8-b25d-eccdfc6cb21a)
Title Page (#u2ccb33f9-89de-5f2f-ba53-cd8b270c6ccb)
Copyright (#uae179b12-9497-5c2b-a84c-bdca28b75e58)
Epigraph (#ub2ad3c5b-489a-5139-91f3-e09e13f76511)
Chapter One (#ud1a0816f-8c10-5314-9266-8f555c86464b)
Chapter Two (#u81371e80-1e7a-5e19-9e82-0fe16c3e99eb)
Chapter Three (#ue301fd78-bd1f-527d-8b16-db663f184ad3)
Chapter Four (#uf50234f2-a5f6-525a-8a4d-68d5aea69594)
Chapter Five (#u1aad9600-81cc-5135-afed-ab4efd6a73e7)
Chapter Six (#ufa92c6c6-8e33-56aa-9cd5-06b7a8951f9f)
Chapter Seven (#u3da9a189-cf0d-54bc-b2bb-e00f0dfb9ae7)
Chapter Eight (#u55a346fd-dcf8-589e-9277-928c5493a5ea)
Chapter Nine (#ub03e0bc7-1263-58bd-9739-d36174799cb1)
Chapter Ten (#u37a53661-128a-52c2-9fb7-caca9f846a7d)
Chapter Eleven (#ucb020dcc-28ab-5b30-9e5c-260a1d300b82)
Chapter Twelve (#ubebad20f-ce3c-5806-bbed-b056d476c2a8)
Chapter Thirteen (#u82ad07c5-de1f-53cd-a2c5-b5e1b5655d56)
Chapter Fourteen (#uf297d13b-a232-55aa-a041-313e1dc22777)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Scott Mariani (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One (#ulink_5a4122d3-3d28-5fcc-9de2-28355acb7a1e)
Just after ten, on a clear, cold night in late February, and the moon-glow over the Donegal Atlantic coast cast a speckled diamond glimmer across the dark sea. High above the shoreline, a solitary car was weaving its way along the twisty coastal road, leaving behind the distant lights of the Castlebane Country Club and heading inland towards Rinclevan on the far side of New Lake.
The chauffeur of the black Jaguar XF was a square-shouldered former Grenadier Guard called Wally Lander. He kept his eyes on the winding road and drove in silence, studiously detached from the conversation of his passengers: his employer Sir Roger Forsyte, Forsyte’s personal assistant Samantha, Sam for short, and an auburn-haired woman Wally had never seen before. Attractive, he could tell from the couple of discreet rearward glances he’d snatched at her – very attractive in fact, wearing a tight-fitting black dress that he frustratingly couldn’t see enough of in the driver’s mirror. He presumed she must have attended that evening’s Neptune Marine Exploration media event and was now coming along as a guest to this private party, which would probably last well into the wee small hours. Maybe something to do with Sir Roger’s latest caper, Wally mused. If she was alone, that meant she was almost certainly single. Definitely worth a crack at it. There was a chance he’d get to chat to her at the party, find out more about her.
Wally couldn’t know it yet – none of them could know it – but that would never happen. Because Wally didn’t have very long to live.
Nor would Wally ever know the mystery woman’s name. It was Brooke Marcel, or Dr Brooke Marcel, when she was in her professional capacity as an expert consultant in hostage psychology and former visiting lecturer at the Le Val Tactical Training Centre in Normandy, France. Tonight, though, she was just here as a guest of her friend Sam, who was sitting between Brooke and Sir Roger, all clipped efficiency with a tiny netbook resting across her knees and its screen reflected in her glasses as they ran through some NME business details together. Sir Roger had loosened the tie he’d put on for the presentation and was leaning comfortably back against the Jaguar’s cream-coloured leather.
As Sam started detailing the plans for the following day, Brooke tuned out and drifted back to the thoughts that preoccupied her so much of the time, with the same mixture of emotions that always came flooding back whenever Ben was on her mind.
She wished he could have been here. He loved Ireland, would have been completely in his element here on the Donegal coast. Maybe she’d been wrong in coming without him – but the fact was, she’d been plain too nervous to ask him. The wrong signals, she’d worried. Moving too fast, trying to force things prematurely. Or something like that. She didn’t know any more. For a gifted and highly trained psychologist, it struck her how little she understood her own feelings.
Ben Hope. What an enigmatic, complex man he was. Even before they’d got together she’d been aware he had ghosts in his past, stuff you could never ask him about and which he kept fiercely private; so closed, and yet he could be so open, so warm and tender. Sometimes she felt as if he’d been there all her life; sometimes as if she’d never known him at all.
As she gazed out of the window at the rocky landscape flashing by in the car’s lights, Brooke wondered whether her troubled relationship with Ben would ever recover. It had started so blissfully, only to crash and burn so senselessly just when it was beginning to look as though it could last forever.
The crash had come in September. The autumn months had been a forlorn, empty time, drowning herself in her work; the Christmas holiday without him had been almost unbearably miserable. Then, slowly, slowly, over the last couple of months had dawned the prospect of a possible reconciliation. The phone conversations between her home in London and his in France were growing longer and more frequent. Sometimes he even called her.
It was still fragile, though, still just a tiny candle flame that might be snuffed out at any time. There were moments when Brooke thought he was holding something back from her; times when she could sense the tension between them, ready to flare up all over again. In their separate ways, they’d both been equally to blame for the split. What a couple of hotheads we are, she thought wryly to herself as she recalled the awful quarrel that had bust them apart. The worst thing was that, in the end, it had all been about nothing. Just a stupid, horrible misunderstanding.
‘The chopper will pick us up at the house and take us over to Derry Airport first thing in the morning,’ Sam was saying to her employer. ‘We arrive at Gatwick just after ten-thirty, then on to Málaga in plenty of time to make your meeting with Cabeza.’
Forsyte pursed his lips and gave a grunt of assent. Drifting momentarily back to the present, Brooke noticed the way he kept fingering the handle of the attaché case secured to his wrist by a steel cuff and a slim chain, and she briefly wondered what was inside that must be so valuable; but her curiosity waned rapidly as she turned back towards the dark window and resumed her own private thoughts.
A flash of white light caught Brooke’s eye. The road behind was no longer empty: the bright headlights of a car were coming up fast. No, she thought, twisting round to peer out of the rear window – not a car, but a van of some kind. Going somewhere in a real hurry, too.
Forsyte glanced back as the van’s main-beam headlights loomed close enough to fill the inside of the Jaguar with their glare. ‘Just some idiot,’ he said nonchalantly. ‘Pull in a little and let him past, will you, Wally?’
Wally shook his head in exasperation, then flipped on his indicator, slowed to just over thirty and steered towards the side of the narrow road to let the van by. The large vehicle noisily overtook them – a plain white Renault Master panel van, scuffed and spattered with road dirt – then cut in tightly at an angle and screeched to a halt, blocking the road.
Wally hit the brakes and the rear passengers were thrown forwards, except for Brooke who’d braced herself against the front passenger seat a fraction of a second before the emergency stop. Sam let out a little cry as her netbook went flying. ‘What the hell—?’ Forsyte shouted.
‘Fucking arsehole!’ Wally thrust the automatic gearbox into park and left the engine running as he climbed out of the car. ‘What’s your game, you bloody prick?’ he yelled, slamming his door shut and storming up to the stationary van.
The Renault Master’s doors burst open simultaneously. Wally stopped dead in his tracks and went quiet as two men jumped out and strode aggressively towards him. They were both wearing black balaclavas, and not because of the biting February wind.
Brooke’s blood turned icy at the sight of the weapons in the men’s hands: identical compact submachine guns, black and brutal with long tubular sound moderators attached to their muzzles. She’d seen weapons like those before.
So had Wally Lander, once upon a time, but his nine years out of the army had blunted his senses and all he could do was gape.
‘Oh, my God!’ Sam gasped. Forsyte stared in speechless horror, clutching his attaché case.
Neither of the masked men spoke a word. Instead, almost casually, they turned their weapons towards Wally and opened fire. From inside the car, the silenced gunfire seemed like no more than a rapid string of muffled thumps. Wally’s legs folded under him, then he collapsed lifelessly at the roadside. His blood was bright in the beams of the Jaguar’s headlights. Sam screamed in panic and clung onto Forsyte. ‘What do they want with us, Roger? Oh Jesus, they’re going to kill us!’
Brooke hesitated, but for no more than a second before she launched herself at the gap between the front seats and scrambled in behind the wheel. She wrenched the stick into drive, stamped the heel of her Italian designer party shoe on the gas and held it all the way down.
The Jaguar took off with a roar and a rasp of tyres. Clenching the wheel, Brooke had no choice but to drive grimly over Wally’s dead body with a sickening bump-bump.
The masked men hurled themselves out of the way. There was a jarring impact as the car slammed into the angled side of the van; a rumpling of plastic and the screech of metal grinding on metal as she forced her way through the gap, the Jaguar’s wheels spinning wildly and revs soaring to drown out Sam’s screams and Forsyte’s indistinct roar of fury. Then, suddenly, the way was clear and Brooke could see the open road stretching ahead in the headlight beams. She’d made it.
But then the strobing muzzle flashes lit up the rear-view mirror and she felt the steering wheel go heavy in her hands as a flurry of gunfire blew out the back tyres. There was nothing she could do to prevent the car skidding out of control and veering across the road. Brooke caught a glimpse of a large grey rock looming in front of the car – then a crunching collision, and the airbag exploded in her face, dazing her.
Running footsteps. Voices. The next Brooke knew, the Jaguar’s doors were opening and there was a gun at her head. She turned to face her attacker. His eyes were cold and hard in the slits of the balaclava.
‘Get out, bitch,’ he said.
Chapter Two (#ulink_d56107ca-de71-5c92-929d-fcd5140901e9)
Three days earlier
‘I’m telling you, Brooke, it’s going to be great,’ Sam insisted for about the fifth time in twenty minutes. ‘You can’t possibly miss it. Seriously.’
That was Samantha Sheldrake all over. She’d always been the pushy one, ever since their university days. It was easy to see how she’d managed to land the position of PA to one of Europe’s most dynamic multi-millionaire entrepreneurs, the head of the Southampton-based company Neptune Marine Exploration.
‘I don’t know,’ Brooke replied, stretching out on the rug and wiggling her bare toes in the warmth of the open fire as she cupped the phone between shoulder and ear. The remains of a TV dinner for one were cooling on a tray nearby. Another solitary end to another dull day, with just an unexpected phone call from the northwest coast of Ireland to raise her spirits a little. ‘Seems a long way to go for a party,’ she said. ‘And you said yourself it’s for company personnel.’
‘Rog—’ Sam caught herself, ‘ – Sir Roger won’t mind if I invite a guest. Get you out of London. It’s so grey and dismal there at the moment.’
It had only been a minor slip, but Brooke had picked up on it and wondered whether Sam’s relationship with her boss might be a little closer than she liked to let on. Brooke kept her observation to herself, and said, ‘Get me out of London for what? So I can come and see the grey ocean instead?’
‘Hey, we’re talking about Donegal,’ Sam insisted. ‘Even the drizzle is beautiful. I should know, I’ve spent most of the last few months here. Besides, I told you, this is no ordinary party. First there’s going to be this brilliant media event at a very swish country club – you’ll be blown away – more than three hundred delegates – all arranged by yours truly.’
‘Naturally.’
‘Naturally. And then we’re all heading back to the house, where the fun starts for real. Sir Roger’s sparing no expense. You should see the manor house he’s rented – it’s like a chateau, and the party’s going to take over a whole wing. You’ve never seen so much champagne in your life, I kid you not.’
‘Remind me again what we’re celebrating?’
‘Does the “we” mean you’re coming?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘Well, it’s only the grand unveiling of one of the most important historic sunken treasure salvage operations of the last twenty years,’ Sam said, with only a trace of smugness. ‘The recovery of the sixteenth-century Spanish warship the Santa Teresa has been Neptune Marine Exploration’s biggest coup since Sir Roger founded the company.’
Brooke smiled into the phone. ‘Now you sound like one of your own public relations blurbs. What’s the wreck of a Spanish warship doing off the Irish coast, anyway?’
‘Did I not tell you all about this when we were in Austria?’
Sam and Brooke had spent a few days in Vienna before Christmas. Brooke had been too preoccupied by her troubles with Ben to enjoy the short break very much. ‘Maybe you did,’ Brooke said. ‘Refresh my memory.’
‘Come to Donegal and you’ll learn all about it.’
‘I have to tell you, Sam, mouldy old boats are not exactly the most fascinating thing in my life right now.’
‘Oh, come on.’ Sam paused, and Brooke could tell from the momentary silence that she was hatching some new plan. ‘Why don’t you bring a friend along?’ Sam went on slyly. ‘As in, a very special friend? You know who I mean. That’s if things are, you know, back on an even keel.’
‘Ben?’ Brooke hesitated, a little thrown by the suggestion. ‘That might not be such a great idea. Things are still a bit …’ Her words trailed off uncertainly.
‘I knew it. He’s treated you like shit, really. When was the last time you set eyes on him?’
Brooke said nothing. She reached up to finger the slender gold chain she wore around her neck. Ben had bought it for her in Paris soon after they’d got together. She’d been wearing it nearly constantly ever since, although she sometimes wondered why she was so attached to it now that their relationship was meant to be finished.
‘I’ll tell you when it was,’ Sam went on. ‘It was when he came to pick up that horrid little mongrel he left you with. Am I right?’
‘Scruffy’s not horrid,’ Brooke protested lamely.
‘There you go again. Being nice. You’re too good for that guy. He’s using you, can’t you see it?’
‘Let’s not go there, all right? It’s complicated.’
Sam was undeterred. ‘All right, so maybe it’s not a good idea. Then why don’t you invite that dishy upstairs neighbour of yours I met once? The novelist guy?’
‘You mean Amal?’
‘That’s the one. Between you and me, I don’t know how you can keep your hands off him.’
‘Oh, come on. We’re not all like you.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Sam said, in mock indignation.
‘Amal and I are just friends. And he’s a playwright, not a novelist.’
‘Hmm. You can’t stay single forever, darling, waiting for that Ben to make up his mind. You’ll end up a dried-out old spinster, like Miss Havisham.’
‘Watch it, I’m only thirty-six,’ Brooke protested. ‘And four months younger than you, I might add. Besides which, I don’t see you heading to the altar with anyone. Miss Havisham, indeed.’
‘Well, whatever. The point is, are you coming to Donegal or not? Won’t cost you a penny, you know. Neptune Marine will pick up the tab, first class all the way and back again.’
‘I’m thinking about it.’ Brooke wasn’t usually so quick to let herself get swept up in Sam’s enthusiastic schemes, but she was beginning to warm to it. ‘Maybe it’d be good for Amal. He’s had a bit of a letdown recently. A change of scenery might cheer him up.’
‘Then it’s settled,’ Sam said briskly. ‘Now, there’s a very nice guesthouse not far from the country club. Not the Ritz, as you’d imagine, but it’s cosy and comfortable. I’ll take care of everything. All you two have to do is turn up. I’ll text you the details.’
‘Hold on—’ Brooke began. But before she could say any more, Sam interrupted her. ‘Oh, listen, Sir Roger’s on the other line. I’d better take this. See you on Saturday, darling. Pronto.’
Brooke sighed, holding a dead phone. Typical Sam. Once she got a notion into her head, there wasn’t a force on earth that could stop her.
‘I’ve never been to Ireland before,’ Amal mused over coffee later that evening when Brooke trotted upstairs to put the idea to him.
He’d answered his door looking morose, unusually dishevelled and clutching a Jean-Paul Sartre novel guaranteed to cast a pall over the most optimistic soul – but brightened up visibly at the sight of her, and invited her eagerly inside. It never ceased to amaze Brooke how beautifully decorated the inside of his flat was. Not bad for a struggling playwright still not thirty, whose first play had just tanked spectacularly and drawn unanimously abysmal reviews from all the critics.
‘I thought it’d be nice for you to get away for a couple of days,’ she said. ‘I know you’ve been a bit down lately.’
‘It’s true,’ he sighed. ‘Though maybe I’ve taken it harder than I should have. I mean, it can’t have been the first utter disaster in the history of theatre, can it? And not everyone walked out. Did they?’ he added, hopefully.
On the night, Brooke had counted twenty-six hardy survivors out of an initially well-packed house, but hadn’t had the heart to reveal it to him. ‘You make it sound a lot worse than it was,’ she said, smiling. ‘The play’s great. I just think its appeal is, you know, selective.’
‘I don’t know, perhaps people just don’t want to see a three-act tragedy about toxic waste,’ he muttered, shaking his head glumly. ‘It’s all about bums on seats at the end of the day. Now, if I’d written about … say, the Vietnam War as seen from the viewpoint of a mule, or something, now that would’ve—’
Brooke could see that she needed to get back on topic. ‘So, what do you think about Ireland, then?’ she cut in. ‘A breath of sea air, a bit of partying, a few glasses of champagne …?’
Amal gazed into his coffee for a moment, then set the cup firmly down on the table and forced his face into a broad, white grin. ‘Screw it, why not? I haven’t been out of this bloody flat for days. Sitting here moping all the time like a big self-indulgent baby.’
‘That’s the spirit, Amal. You won’t regret it, I promise you.’
Chapter Three (#ulink_d79d8ee6-826b-57f2-9378-b032eccd19a0)
Saturday evening, and the vehicles were arriving in droves through the gates of the grand-looking Castlebane Country Club. Brooke and Amal got out of the taxi that had brought them from the guesthouse, and joined the stream of smartly-dressed people filtering towards the illuminated main entrance.
The night air was sharp and cold. Brooke could smell the sea and hear the whisper of the waves in the distance. It was clear from all the press IDs on display and the prevalence of cameras everywhere around her that Sam had done a fine job of whipping up media interest in the event. A paunchy white-haired man who appeared to be the local mayor, judging by the gaudy chain and badge of office that dangled like a cowbell from his neck, was stepping out of a car and straightening his jacket, flanked by official minions.
‘This ought to be interesting,’ Amal said without any great conviction as they approached the gold-lit facade of the building. But if he’d been having second thoughts about abandoning his Richmond sanctuary for the wintry wilds of Donegal, he was far too polite to show it. As always, he was fastidiously groomed, and had swapped his travelling clothes for an elegant grey suit that looked tailor-made.
It had been a while since Brooke had been to any kind of party, and she’d had to dig deep in her wardrobe back in London to search out the knee-length black cashmere dress for the occasion, which she was wearing over fine black silk leggings and cinched around her waist with a wide belt. Her only jewellery was the little gold neck chain, Ben’s gift. The shoes were Italian – a pair of her sister Phoebe’s cast-offs – with heels that made her feel perched ridiculously high. They were strictly not for walking more than a few yards in unless you were some kind of masochist. Just covering the distance from the guesthouse to the taxi, then from the taxi to the foyer of the country club, had been enough to raise a blister on her heel.
Why did women insist on inflicting this kind of bondage on themselves, she wondered as she tottered over to the desk to give her and Amal’s names to the receptionist. They were checked against the guest list, then waved through a doorway with a smile and a warm ‘enjoy the show’, and found themselves in a gigantic ballroom that echoed to the buzz of a three-hundred-strong crowd.
Sam hadn’t been kidding about the place being swish. At the far end of the room, a podium stood on a low stage in front of a big screen; to its left, an area had been curtained off. A gleaming dance floor separated the stage from forty or fifty tables, each surrounded by red velvet chairs. For the moment, though, most of the attention was centred on the bar, around which a couple of hundred people were bustling to grab their free drinks. The catering staff couldn’t hand out the complimentary canapés and dainty little sandwiches fast enough.
Over the background muzak came a piercing squeal from across the room. Brooke would have known that voice anywhere. She turned to see Sam running over, or trying to run, her stiletto heels clattering on the floor. She’d dyed her hair a couple of shades blonder since the brief break the two of them had taken in Vienna before Christmas. Her crimson strapless dress appeared to be in some danger of slipping down, but Sam didn’t seem to care too much, and the assorted men ogling her with varying degrees of discretion certainly had no objections either.
‘You made it!’ Sam beamed.
‘You left me very little choice,’ Brooke said as Sam pecked her on both cheeks with a pronounced ‘mwah – mwah’, something she’d taken to doing now that she moved in higher social circles.
‘I’m so pleased.’
Of course you are: it was your idea, Brooke said inwardly. Out loud she said, ‘You know my friend Amal Ray,’ putting a subtle emphasis on the word ‘friend’ that only Sam would be able to detect.
‘Of course, the playwright,’ Sam cooed, ignoring the warning look that Brooke shot at her. ‘Amal, that’s a lovely name. Tell me, are you very famous?’
‘You might say I’ve recently shot to notoriety in certain quarters,’ Amal said graciously. ‘But we won’t talk about that.’
That’s a relief, Brooke thought.
‘Come and meet Sir Roger.’ Sam motioned for them to follow, and led them through the throng. At the heart of a large cluster of people in the middle of the room, a tall, stately silver-haired man in a sombre suit and navy tie was doing the grip’n’grin routine with the mayor and the other local officials for the benefit of the photographers.
‘It’s such a boost for the local economy,’ Sam whispered in Brooke’s ear. When the cameras stopped flashing, she did the introductions: ‘Dr Brooke Marcel; Amal Ray the award-winning playwright: my boss, and the CEO of Neptune Marine Exploration, Sir Roger Forsyte.’ She made it sound as though Brooke had found the cure for cancer and Amal had a Pulitzer Prize for literature in his pocket. Brooke noticed Amal’s sharp wince.
Forsyte was about sixty, though he was in better shape than many men half his age. His manner was smooth and dignified, if a little cool. He welcomed Sam’s guests, expressed his pleasure that they’d be attending the private party afterwards, and insisted they should help themselves to drinks and snacks before the presentation began. ‘Speaking of which,’ he said, glancing at his well-worn Submariner watch, ‘I have a few things to attend to before we kick off, so if you’ll excuse me …’
Sam shot a grin back at Brooke as she followed her employer towards a door marked PRIVATE. ‘You heard the man,’ Amal said. ‘Let’s grab something before this lot drink the bar dry.’ They pressed their way through the swarm and had to shout their orders to be heard by the harried bar staff.
‘I didn’t know you were a gin and tonic type of guy,’ Brooke said, once they’d escaped the chaos and found a quieter spot on the far side of the ballroom.
‘I’ve decided to become that type of guy,’ Amal replied, knocking back a slug of it, ice clinking in his glass. ‘Starting right here, right now.’
She touched his arm. ‘You’re okay, aren’t you?’
Amal swallowed a handful of peanuts, washed them down with another long swig, then gave a shrug. ‘I’m not about to go hurling myself madly off the cliffs, if that’s what you mean. What’s a bit of salt rubbed into the wound, between friends? Award-winning playwright,’ he added in a sullen undertone. ‘Like I really needed that.’
These artists. She wished he didn’t have to be so sensitive. ‘Sam didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. It’s just her way.’
The crowd was rapidly drifting away from the bar to gather at the foot of the stage. People were checking their watches in anticipation of the start of the show. The mayor and his little entourage had positioned themselves right at the front, where a photographer took a few more half-hearted snaps of them for the local news. There was a stirring behind the curtain to the left of the stage, as if someone was putting the finishing touches to whatever exhibits lay behind it.
Sam reappeared through the door marked PRIVATE, spotted Brooke and bustled over to join her, diverting her attention for a few minutes with her animated chatter. When Brooke was able to tear herself away for an instant, she saw that she’d lost Amal in the crowd. Peering through the milling bodies she caught a glimpse of his back as he slunk over towards the bar for a refill. He didn’t look very happy. Shit, she thought. Maybe this whole thing had been a bad idea.
‘It’s so great you’re here for this,’ Sam was babbling happily for the twentieth time, clutching her champagne. ‘Should be starting any moment now … yes! There he is. Here we go. Shush, everyone.’
To enthusiastic applause, Sir Roger appeared under the lights, stepped up to the podium and launched into his speech as the glittering Neptune Marine Exploration corporate logo flashed up on the big screen behind him.
Chapter Four (#ulink_be5d1e71-36d4-5b06-8876-616567aad727)
‘It’s no secret,’ Sir Roger began, ‘how in July of last year, after many months of exhaustive mapping and researching possible locations over countless square miles of the Atlantic Ocean, Neptune Marine Exploration, the world leader in historic marine salvage, succeeded in locating one of the greatest finds of the last several decades.’ He waved at the screen, and right on cue there flashed up an underwater image that Brooke had to peer hard at to make out. Against a murky, greenish sea bed was the shape of a decayed hulk barely recognisable as a sailing ship. Its masts had long since vanished, leaving just the crumbling ruin of its hull, scattered in fragments and half buried under countless tons of sand and shingle.
Marvellous, Brooke thought, thoroughly unimpressed. She glanced over in the direction of the bar. Amal had his back to the rest of the room, sitting hunched over his second gin and tonic. Or maybe his third by now.
‘The previously undiscovered wreck of the Spanish warship Santa Teresa,’ Forsyte announced proudly. ‘Sunk in 1588 off Toraigh Island near the Donegal coast after the Spanish Armada, repelled by the Royal Navy following their abortive invasion of England, were chased northwards and headed for Ireland in the hope of finding a friendly port and refuge among their Catholic allies, only to have the remnants of their fleet devastated by freak Atlantic storms.’
He turned to gaze lovingly at the screen. ‘I know, she’s not much to look at after sitting at the bottom of the ocean for over four hundred and twenty years. But thanks to the unique 3D underwater scanning technology developed by Neptune’s own computer engineers, we are now able to reconstruct in perfect detail the splendour of this once magnificent warship. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Santa Teresa.’
Forsyte motioned grandly at the screen, and an appreciative murmur rippled through the crowd as the computer reconstruction of the ancient vessel appeared in all her former glory – a vast spread of pearly-white sails billowing against the blue ocean, her majestic bow splitting the water in a white crest, the sun glinting off the dozens of bronze cannon muzzles protruding from her open gun ports, crewmen swarming up and down her rigging, files of brightly-armoured troops lining the deck. Even Brooke had to raise an eyebrow at the impressive sight.
Amal still had his back to the room.
‘I’m proud to say that the salvage of the Santa Teresa has turned out to be one of the most successful projects ever undertaken by Neptune Marine Exploration,’ Forsyte said with a grin. ‘This incredible achievement would not have been possible without the dedication, determination and diligence of our salvage crew and dive team. Nobody will contradict me when I say the man most directly responsible for this triumphant success is Neptune’s incomparable dive team manager. He’s been with us since the humble beginnings of the company back in 1994 and I’m proud to call him my friend. Ladies and gentlemen: Mr Simon Butler.’
More applause as a slightly-built man with sandy hair appeared on the stage and stepped up to the podium. Forsyte clapped him warmly on the shoulder, then moved aside to give him the mike.
Once the applause had died down, it was immediately apparent that Butler lacked Sir Roger’s flair for public speaking. He stumbled his way, red-faced, through a speech of thanks that consisted solely of cramming as many of the names of his team members as possible into a couple of minutes. The audience was soon shifting about restlessly and losing interest. Butler was visibly relieved when Forsyte returned to the podium.
Forsyte went on, and almost instantly regained the interest of the crowd. ‘As he launched the Armada to its fate, King Philip II of Spain spoke these words: “We are quite aware of the risk that is incurred by sending a major fleet in winter through the Channel without a safe harbour, but … since it is all for His cause, God will send good weather”.’ He gave a dark smile. ‘Sadly for him, and perhaps fortunately for England, it didn’t quite work out that way. And just as the fleeing Armada had to face the most challenging and perilous conditions that Mother Nature could unleash, even a highly skilled and expert outfit like Neptune Marine Exploration, with the most cutting-edge modern technology at its disposal, has faced sometimes appalling conditions and enormous difficulties to restore this historic treasure to the world. All through autumn and winter our salvage vessel Trident was battered by the same severe storms faced by the Spanish sailors all those centuries ago.’
‘That’s true,’ Sam whispered to Brooke. ‘I was seasick like you wouldn’t believe.’
‘We learned first-hand about the force of nature that drove the Santa Teresa onto the rocks off Toraigh Island and sent every one of the six hundred souls aboard to a watery grave,’ Forsyte continued. ‘But thanks to the heroic struggle of our entire team against all the wrath of the elements, we can now reveal for the very first time the extent and magnificence of the treasures that this lost wreck has yielded up for posterity.’
‘He’s a great speaker, isn’t he?’ Sam whispered to Brooke.
‘A little on the florid side,’ Brooke said, ‘but he makes his point.’
Forsyte motioned towards the curtains to his left, and as if by magic they glided open to reveal the screened-off area of the ballroom. This was the moment the audience had all been waiting for, and they surged eagerly forwards, the buzz of chatter rising to fever pitch as they took in the awesome splendour of Neptune Marine Exploration’s haul.
Arranged like a museum exhibit were racks and units covered in a dizzying array of gold and silver plates, goblets, candlesticks, trinkets. Open caskets piled high with coins and jewels. Entire dinner sets of fine porcelain. Then there was the weaponry – row on row of pikes, swords and armour, all gleaming under the lights. Mounted on an enormous plinth, a set of bronze cannons, polished to a dazzle. At the centre of it all was the warship’s salvaged figurehead, badly pitted with age but somehow brought to the surface intact.
Nothing could get a crowd excited like incredible wealth. There were whistles and exclamations. One of the journalists gasped ‘Fuck my boots’ loudly enough to be heard by the mayor, who turned and shot him a filthy look. A scrum of photographers jostled for the best shot. Everyone was thinking the same thing, even Brooke.
‘How many millions must this stuff be worth?’ she asked Sam, who beamed with pleasure.
‘Enough to have already sparked quite a nasty little war between the British government and the Spanish treasury officials claiming ownership of the wreck and its contents. It’ll rage on for months. But however it’s all divided up in the end, Sir Roger will get his forty per cent share. Look at him. I’ve never seen him this chuffed with himself.’
Brooke could see the security men positioned discreetly at the rear of the exhibit, at least eight of them, all extremely serious-looking. She wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d been government agents. There must be an army of them backstage, she thought, and a convoy of trucks waiting to whisk the priceless treasures away to a bank vault somewhere.
Remembering Amal, she looked back over towards the bar. He was still sitting slumped over his drink, mountains of gold coins, emeralds and rubies the last thing on his mind. She thought about going over to him, then decided he probably wanted to be left alone.
‘Now, it was by no means uncommon through history for regular line-of-battle warships of any nation to carry all manner of splendid artefacts,’ Sir Roger went on from the podium as the cameras carried on flashing in a frenzy. ‘But let’s remember that the Spanish Armada was no ordinary naval fleet. This was a full-blown invasion force, whose commanders were quite assured would make short work of the English defences, sweep rapidly inland and within weeks, perhaps even days, establish a new Spanish territory upon English soil. In fact, they were so confident in the overwhelming force of this massive fleet that its officers, many of them noblemen of the highest position, loaded their ships with a wealth of luxury goods, artwork and other finery – not just to enjoy on the voyage, but with which the country’s new Spanish rulers would have refurnished the palaces and stately homes of Tudor England. And of course if you want to set up a new government, you’re going to need money. Lots and lots of it. Aboard the Santa Teresa were scores of wax-sealed casks, stuffed with greater quantities of coin, gold bars, jewellery and precious stones than have ever previously been salvaged from a warship wreck. What you see here is only a sample.’
Perhaps sensing that many of the audience were too busy goggling at the treasure to pay him much attention, Forsyte quickly brought his speech to an end and invited questions from the media people. A forest of hands instantly shot up. ‘Yes?’ he said, picking out the prettiest of the journalists.
‘Sir Roger, Neptune Marine Exploration is famous for the amount of preliminary research it does before starting an excavation project. You must have been aware of what you’d find down there. But were there any surprises among the treasure?’
Sam leaned close to Brooke’s ear. ‘That girl’s a plant,’ she whispered.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Just listen.’
Forsyte chuckled. ‘Apart from the sheer quantity and value of it?’ he said, and the crowd joined in his laughter. More seriously, he added, ‘Well, in fact, we did make one highly unexpected discovery.’ He paused for effect. ‘It’s not on display yet, and I’m afraid you’ll have to wait for me to reveal it.’
There were groans and calls of ‘Give us a clue’ and ‘Come on, Sir Roger’. Forsyte held up his palms. ‘All in good time, my friends. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed when we eventually make it public.’
What a showman, Brooke thought. Forsyte certainly knew how to bait his hook. ‘What’s the big surprise?’ she asked Sam.
Sam shrugged. ‘You think he’d tell me? I only run most of the company for him.’
‘Now, enough talk,’ Forsyte said. ‘Please feel free to wander among the displays, and of course there’s still plenty more food and champagne to come. Enjoy.’ To a final thunderous roar of applause he stepped down from the podium and slipped away among a sea of arms reaching out to pat him on the back and shake his hand.
Sam turned to Brooke and tapped her watch. ‘Now that’s over, it’s party time.’ She seemed to notice for the first time that Amal was missing. ‘Where’s your friend?’
‘He’s … ah …’
‘Best go and get him, eh? Wally’s coming round with the car. We’ll be out of here in a few minutes.’
At the bar, Brooke laid her hand on Amal’s shoulder and said, ‘You okay?’ She knew the answer even before she’d asked the question. There were four empty glasses lined up on the bar in front of him and he was hard at work on the fifth. That many gin and tonics wouldn’t have put too big a dent in Ben Hope’s sobriety – but that was just one of the ways Amal differed greatly from Ben. His eyes were unfocused and his jaw was slack.
‘I’m fine,’ he slurred. ‘Fresh as a daisy.’ He slid down off his bar stool, walked three steps and had to prop himself against a wall for support. ‘Christ,’ he mumbled, clasping his head. ‘I want to be in bed.’
‘Oh, Amal, what have you done to yourself?’
‘The car’s waiting,’ Sam announced, materialising out of the crowd and pointing at a side exit. She was holding a laptop case and had slipped on a green cardigan over her dress. ‘You two ready?’
‘Amal’s not feeling well,’ Brooke told her. ‘I don’t think we can make it to the party.’
‘You’re kidding,’ Sam said, reeling as if all her plans were crumbling.
‘No, no,’ Amal protested. Making an effort to speak coherently, he said very carefully, ‘I don’t want to be responsible for spoiling your evening. You go.’
‘Hurry up and decide, guys,’ Sam said irritably, and headed towards the exit with a glance at her watch.
Brooke sighed. ‘What about you?’
‘Don’t worry about me. I’m still sober enough to call a cab.’
‘Are you sure? I’ve got no problem going back to the guesthouse with you. The party doesn’t mean that much to me.’
He wagged a finger at her. ‘You came here to have a good time. Now go. I … I command it.’
Sam was waving at them from the open doorway, mouthing ‘come on’ and gesticulating at the waiting Jaguar outside.
‘You’re quite sure?’ Brooke asked Amal.
‘Go and have fun,’ he muttered with a sickly smile. ‘Go. Go.’
She made her decision. ‘Oh, what the hell. I’ll see you for breakfast, then,’ she said. ‘Sleep well, and take care, all right?’
Amal watched as she left the building. The Jag’s engine was purring gently, its exhaust billowing in the cold night air. He couldn’t make out the face of the driver, but recognised Sir Roger Forsyte in the back seat. Sam opened the rear door of the Jag, climbed in and slid along to the middle to make room for Brooke. With a final glance back at Amal, Brooke climbed in after her and closed the door.
The Jaguar took off towards the gates.
That was the last he saw of her.
Chapter Five (#ulink_142d1b11-95a9-5f46-bf89-f25a6a1d8fdb)
The pale light of the Sunday morning sun hauled Amal up from the dark, dreamless depths, and with consciousness came the first rush of nausea. ‘Oh God,’ he groaned.
He lay miserably curled up under the covers for a while, nursing his throbbing headache and cursing himself for having drunk so much. What the hell had possessed him? A vision of a tall, frosted glass kept appearing in his mind, making his stomach threaten to flip. He realised he was fully clothed under the duvet. ‘Oh, God,’ he repeated. ‘Why? Why?’
Gradually, the scattered pieces of his memory fitted themselves back together to form a coherent picture of the previous night. He remembered calling the taxi from the country club – nothing at all about the car coming to pick him up, or the journey to the guesthouse. Only the vaguest recollection of letting himself in the door and managing to stagger up to bed.
Once he was fairly certain that the slightest movement wasn’t going to trigger off a violent spate of vomiting, Amal gingerly hauled himself out of bed. He kicked off his shoes and left a trail of scattered clothing on the way to the bathroom. Showered, changed and feeling marginally more human, he left his room. It was twenty past eight. Brooke’s door across the landing was shut. He tapped lightly on it and murmured her name. When he got no reply, he figured she must either be downstairs or had come back so late last night that she was still sleeping.
Amal tramped heavily downstairs. The frying grease smell that wafted up to meet him was almost more than he could bear, but he managed not to puke as he wandered into the breakfast room.
No Brooke. No anybody, except for the landlady, Mrs Sheenan, who was in the adjoining kitchen frying up a mound of eggs and bacon that would have fattened the Irish Army.
Mrs Sheenan didn’t appear to notice his presence, or hear his mumbled ‘Good morning’. That was partly due to the fact that she was half deaf – something he and Brooke had discovered when they’d checked in to the place the day before – and partly due to the blaring TV in the kitchen, which was turned up to full volume.
Amal dragged himself over to a table by the window, where Mrs Sheenan would be bound to notice him sooner or later. He couldn’t stomach food, but yearned for a comforting mug of hot, sugary tea. He sat there for a few moments, gazing towards the misty bay and thinking how strangely out of his element he felt in this place, and then felt suddenly angry with himself for being so ungrateful towards as generous and warm-hearted a friend as Brooke. He started brooding once again over the way he’d let her down by going and getting wasted. What a prat. He could only hope it hadn’t totally ruined her evening.
Eight twenty-five. Amal was lucid enough by now to remember that they’d have to check out in about an hour and forty minutes’ time to catch their flight back to London. If Brooke wasn’t awake soon he’d have to go and rouse her. Then again, he thought, she might have been up for hours and be about to return any moment, rosy-cheeked and tousle-haired from a brisk walk or a run on the windy beach. That was more her style.
Amal’s thoughts were punctured by Mrs Sheenan, who had suddenly registered his presence and begun fussing over him, frying pan in hand, screeching in a voice that pierced through his skull. Yes, he’d slept fine, thank you. Yes, the room was lovely and warm. But her broad, toothy smile vanished as, averting his eyes from the pool of grease swilling in the pan, he informed her as politely as he could that he didn’t want any bacon.
‘Oh,’ she said, scanning his face and then pursing her lips in extreme disapproval. ‘You must be one of them Muslins.’
‘I’m just not hungry … really, a cup of tea would be fine.’
‘Just tea, is it.’ Mrs Sheenan sighed loudly and returned to the kitchen to dump her frying pan with a crash on the stove.
‘You haven’t seen my friend Brooke this morning, have you?’ Amal called after her through the open door. He had to make an effort to raise his voice over the din of the television. The kitchen was now reverberating to the opening theme of the local RTÉ news.
‘Eh?’ Mrs Sheenan screwed up her face with a hand cupped behind her ear, then glanced back at the television. ‘Shall I turn it down?’ she bawled, making a move for the remote control. ‘You’ve an awful quiet voice.’
‘I was asking—’ Amal began.
He stopped mid-sentence as he realised what had just come on TV. He burst out of his chair and hurried towards the kitchen, his hangover suddenly forgotten. ‘No!’ he yelled. ‘Don’t turn it down!’
Too late: Mrs Sheenan had pressed the mute button. Amal stopped in the doorway and gaped at the screen.
The soundless television picture was of a wrecked car on a winding country road, in the middle of a rugged, empty landscape that looked shockingly familiar to Amal.
The black Jaguar had skidded into the opposite verge and smashed into a huge rock. Wreckage was scattered across the road. Teams of police were milling around the vehicle, blue lights swirling in the early morning mist.
As Amal went on staring in increasing horror, he saw a team of paramedics loading a bagged-up body on a gurney into the back of an ambulance. A close-up of the car showed what were unmistakably bullet holes punched through the black bodywork. The rear window was shattered and the rear wheels shredded, the tyres clearly blown out by the gunfire.
‘No, no, no, this can’t be happening,’ Amal murmured. He blinked his eyes tightly shut and then opened them again.
It was happening.
Mrs Sheenan gave a derisory snort. ‘There you go. Another eejit gone and killed himself.’
The silent picture changed to a shot of Sir Roger Forsyte, followed by one of Sam Sheldrake. ‘Turn the sound on!’ Amal yelled. Flustered, Mrs Sheenan fumbled with the remote. Now the picture showed the face of a stocky-looking man in his forties whom Amal didn’t recognise.
At that moment, Mrs Sheenan managed to get the sound back on.
‘… found a short distance from the vehicle, has been identified as Wallace Lander, forty-two, a former British soldier employed as a driver by Sir Roger. Early reports suggest that Mr Lander was gunned down by at least two automatic weapons, killing him instantly. Police sources have confirmed that both Sir Roger and Miss Sheldrake remain missing, presumed kidnapped by the attackers.’
Amal slumped in a kitchen chair and numbly absorbed what he could. It barely seemed real to him. The empty, bullet-riddled car wreck had been discovered before dawn that morning by a night shift worker returning home from a local packing plant. Police had traced the Jaguar to a luxury car hire firm in Derry, and confirmed that the vehicle had been leased to Sir Roger Forsyte’s company, Neptune Marine Exploration. Forsyte was known to have been en route from Castlebane Country Club to nearby Carrick Manor, his temporary base in the area, when the attack took place. Witnesses had reported seeing the Jaguar leave the country club shortly before ten o’clock that evening; it was estimated that the incident had occurred at approximately 10.05 p.m.
Amal’s breath was coming in short gasps as he anticipated the mention of a third passenger. Any moment now, Brooke’s face would be on the screen, with the news that she’d been found dead like the car’s driver, or snatched by the kidnappers. But there was nothing at all.
An idea came to him, like a flash of white light. Maybe Brooke had changed her mind at the last minute – maybe she hadn’t gone off to the party at all, but had got out of the car and taken a taxi back to the guesthouse, assumed he was already in bed and not wanted to disturb him? The wild notion suddenly seemed utterly convincing. Headache and nausea forgotten, he leaped to his feet, ran upstairs and hammered on her door. ‘Brooke? Are you there?’ She had to be. Come on, Brooke. Be there. Come on.
Silence. Amal burst into the room and saw it was empty: the bed neatly made, unslept in, Brooke’s clothes folded on top of the sheet, her travel bag sitting on the rug nearby, the novel she’d been reading propped open on the bedside table. Amal dashed into the ensuite bathroom, but all there was of Brooke were her toothbrush and hairbrush by the sink, her little wash-bag and shower cap on the shelf.
His head was spinning as he thundered back downstairs. ‘You’re sure you didn’t see her this morning?’ he quizzed Mrs Sheenan.
‘Who?’
‘My friend! Brooke! The woman I was here with.’ With some effort, he managed to drag it out of Mrs Sheenan that he was definitely the only guest who’d come down to breakfast that day.
That was when the panic set in for real. Amal began to tremble violently, first his hands, then his whole body, feeling weak and jittery as though his knees might buckle under him. His brow was damp with cold sweat.
‘I have to call the police,’ he said.
Chapter Six (#ulink_b3e0772a-f369-53ea-b425-f1939db3ee66)
Near Étretat, Normandy coast, France
Ben Hope hauled the Explorer sea kayak onto the little tongue of shingle, wiped his hands on his wetsuit and gazed up at the towering white cliff. The saltiness of the cold air was on his lips. Circling gulls screeched overhead. ‘All right,’ he said, as much to himself as to the cliff, ‘let’s see what you’re made of.’
Sunday morning, and the relaxed pace of life in the little corner of rural France Ben now called home was going on much as it always had. He could hear a church bell chiming from a kilometre or so away inland, summoning to Mass those locals who weren’t enjoying a late breakfast, pottering about their homes, feeding their chickens or still lazing in their beds.
Ben Hope’s way of relaxing was a little different from most people’s. The stretch of shoreline he’d driven the ancient Land Rover to that morning with his kayak lashed to the roof was known locally as the Côte D’Albâtre, the Alabaster Coast, for the chalky whiteness of its sheer, gale-battered cliffs. Nineteenth-century painters had travelled here to depict them; writers and poets had been inspired by them – today he was going to climb them. Partly just because they were there, and because Ben’s idea of pleasure was to set himself challenges that normal folks would have done anything to avoid, and also partly because doing this kind of thing helped him to forget all the churning thoughts that otherwise tended to crowd his mind these days.
After securing the kayak and warming up his muscles with some bends and stretches, he pulled on his rock-climbing shoes and gloves, strapped the lightweight waist pack around his middle, then walked up to the foot of the cliff and reached for his first handhold. He paused as a jolt of pain ran up his arm.
The two bullet wounds sustained on Christmas Day were well healed now. They’d both come from the same small-calibre handgun, but even a .25 could do terrible damage at close range. Ben had been lucky. The first shot had glanced off his ribs and passed on through; only the second, lodged in his shoulder, had caused any difficulty to the surgeon who’d pulled it out. Now there was just a little stiffness, some pain from time to time and another couple of scars to add to the collection of war wounds Ben had accumulated over the last twenty years. The man holding the gun had come off very much worse.
Ben waited for the twinge to pass, then launched himself upwards.
The rock face was sheer. As he made his way higher and higher, the wind whistled around him and the hiss of the surf on the rocks below grew fainter. The summit approached, inch by careful inch. Hand over hand, the pain only served to drive him on, energy exploding inside him and a kind of fierce joy filling his heart.
But even suspended from his fingers and toes halfway up a high vertical slope with a dizzy drop beneath him, he found he couldn’t shut out his thoughts completely. Which wasn’t entirely a surprise, considering that he’d recently come through just about the most tumultuous episode of a life that nobody could have called boring. Few things could shock Ben any longer, but the discovery just before Christmas that he had a grown-up son he’d never known about had hit him like an express train. He’d been reeling from it ever since.
He hadn’t told Brooke about it – hadn’t been able to bring himself to, though he’d been on the verge of telling her a dozen times over the phone during the last few weeks. Now that they were speaking again and there seemed to be a faint hope of reconciliation, Ben was extremely wary of complicating matters and placing an added strain on their slowly-mending relationship. The right time would come.
Ben’s son’s name was Jude Arundel, and until the age of twenty he’d taken for granted that his parents were Simeon and Michaela, the vicar and vicar’s wife of the Oxfordshire village of Little Denton. In reality, Simeon had raised Jude as his own son despite knowing full well that the boy had been the product of a brief romance between Ben and Michaela, back when they’d all been students together at Oxford.
It hadn’t been an easy transition. Jude had only learned the truth in the devastating wake of Simeon and Michaela’s deaths in a car smash. Just as Ben was finding it alien and awkward coming to terms with sudden parenthood, not to mention the loss of his friends, Jude had had a difficult time adapting to the knowledge that his whole upbringing had been a lie, and that the man he’d called his father for most of his life hadn’t been at all. He’d gone through every shade of emotion, from outright denial and disbelief, to furious resentment, to simmering rage and finally a brooding acceptance.
But out of all the friction, a fledgling relationship was slowly developing between Ben and Jude – not so much that of a father and a son, but more like two friends, or even two brothers, one of whom just happened to be twenty years older than the other. The fact that Ben had recently rescued Jude from the hands of a secretive and ruthless government agency called the Trimble Group, who were blackmailing Ben into acting as their gun-for-hire, had helped more than anything to forge their friendship.
When Jude had visited Ben’s French home and place of business, an old farm called Le Val, in mid-January while Ben was still convalescing from his injuries, the two of them had had their first real chance to sit down and talk. Among other things, they’d discussed Jude’s growing disenchantment with his Marine Biology degree course at Portsmouth University. Ben, who’d cut his own Theology studies short twenty years earlier and often wished he hadn’t, had encouraged him to see it through to the end.
Jude wasn’t so sure where his future lay. There were times when Ben could see in his newfound son the same restlessness of spirit that had driven him in his own headstrong, sometimes foolhardy younger days, and wished the boy had taken more after Michaela than himself.
Those worries aside, Ben had deeply enjoyed Jude’s visit. When it was over and he’d driven him back to the ferry port at Cherbourg, he’d suddenly realised how much he was going to miss Jude’s company until the next time they’d meet.
Then it had been back to business. The Le Val Tactical Training Centre was still overbooked with people wanting to acquire the specialised skills it had to offer, skills that only men like Ben, his business partner, ex-SBS commando Jeff Dekker and their team of instructors were qualified to teach. The training schedule at Le Val had never been so busy, which made a Sunday morning getaway like this one all the more welcome.
With a final heave, Ben hauled himself up onto the cliff’s summit. He knelt in the grass, dusted his hands and looked down. The moored kayak was a tiny red sliver far below.
‘There, that wasn’t so difficult,’ he murmured to himself. His heart rate was steady and he wasn’t out of breath. Not in disgraceful shape for an old man, he thought. He mightn’t have bet on still being able to fly through ‘sickeners’, the gruelling SAS selection tests he’d endured long ago, but he was pretty sure that he’d give young squaddies half his age or less a decent run for their money.
Ben stood up, unzipped a compartment of his waist pack and took out a small bottle of mineral water. He cracked the seal and drank, then spent a few moments gazing out to sea, the breeze ruffling his thick blond hair, as he considered whether to take the long, easy footpath back down to the shore or descend the way he’d come.
The phone buzzed inside his waist pack before he could decide. He answered, expecting the call to be from Jeff Dekker with some work-related query or other.
It wasn’t Jeff.
‘Am I talking to Ben Hope?’ someone said on the other end.
A man’s voice, shaky, uncertain. Ben was certain he’d heard the voice before; but where?
‘Who is this?’ Very few people had this number.
‘My name’s Amal,’ the voice replied. ‘Amal Ray. We met once, around Christmas time. Brooke’s upstairs neighbour.’
Ben remembered him perfectly well, and if it hadn’t been for the tension and anxiety he could hear in the guy’s voice, he might have responded with something like, ‘Hi, Amal, it’s a pleasure to hear from you.’ Instead he frowned and stayed silent.
‘Something’s happened to Brooke,’ Amal said. ‘Something terrible.’
Chapter Seven (#ulink_7a515e1e-482d-5bd9-a0e4-03a1a371f12a)
A constant thin drizzle was slanting down out of the dark afternoon sky as the Ryanair flight from London Stansted touched down at City of Derry Airport, a few miles east of the border between Ulster and the Irish Republic.
There was a hard set to Ben’s face as he strode from the plane. Outwardly, he was calm, but a violent storm was raging inside and he fought to contain his impatience going through passport control and customs. His only luggage was the battered and well-travelled old green canvas army bag into which he’d thrown a few things before dashing away from Le Val, leaving everything in the hands of Jeff Dekker.
Jeff had been as shocked as Ben to hear the news of Brooke’s disappearance. ‘Just call if you need me,’ he’d said. ‘I’ll be there.’
Amal was waiting nervously for Ben near the airport entrance. His eyes were red-rimmed and he looked several years older than when Ben had last seen him.
There was no time for greetings. ‘Anything new?’ Ben asked, and Amal morosely shook his head. They left the terminal in silence and went outside into the gathering dusk. The drizzle had intensified, and Ben turned up the collar of his scuffed leather jacket. He motioned at the smattering of vehicles in the car parking area. ‘Which is ours?’ His final instruction to Amal over the phone earlier that day had been to hire the fastest car he could find locally.
‘That one,’ Amal said, and bleeped a key at a dark blue BMW saloon. ‘Hope it’s okay. It was the best I could get.’
Ben tossed his bag into the back of the car. ‘I’ll drive,’ he said, taking the keys. Amal didn’t argue, and climbed into the passenger side. Before he’d shut his door, Ben was already gunning the car backwards out of its parking space. The tyres squealed on the damp concrete as they took off for the exit. Ben aimed the car westwards, heading for the N13. ‘Now tell me everything,’ he said.
Amal closed his eyes and let out a sigh. ‘What more is there to say? I already told you everything on the phone.’
‘Let’s go through it again. Starting from the beginning.’
Amal miserably recounted the whole thing: Brooke’s idea for getting him out of London; the media event at Castlebane Country Club; how he’d got too drunk to go on to the party afterwards and she’d reluctantly gone off without him; how that had been the last he’d seen of her. Ben listened and pushed the BMW on hard and fast as Amal talked, overtaking traffic and keeping an eye on the mirror, on the lookout for police. He didn’t want anyone slowing him down.
‘It’s all about this Forsyte guy, isn’t it?’ Amal said, interrupting himself. ‘Surely it must have been him they were after?’
Ben had used every moment of his journey from France to plough through all he could find online about Sir Roger Forsyte, the company he’d founded, Neptune Marine Exploration, and its various highly lucrative exploits over the years salvaging sunken treasures around the world’s oceans. Despite the wealth of material available, from reams of newspaper articles to spreads and interviews in National Geographic and other publications, Ben had noticed that the details of Forsyte’s past career, prior to NME’s founding in 1994, seemed just a little hazy. As his flight had crossed westwards over England, he’d wondered why that might be.
He’d also been pondering over where he’d heard the name Roger Forsyte before. The bell it was ringing in his mind was distant and faint, but it was ringing nonetheless and he was frustrated that he couldn’t make more of it.
‘Seems that way,’ he replied to Amal’s question. ‘Successful businessman, just made a killing and splashing it all over the media. He’s the primary target for a kidnap and ransom job. The others just happened to be there. Wrong place at the wrong time.’
‘It’s a nightmare,’ Amal said, on the edge of panic. ‘Oh, God, it’s a nightmare. It isn’t really happening. Tell me it isn’t happening.’
‘It’s happening. Take a breath. Focus, keep talking.’
Amal took several deep breaths to compose himself. ‘What more is there to say? I got up this morning, saw the news and realised Brooke hadn’t come back, so I called the cops. They call them the Garda here.’
‘Yeah, I know that. Go on.’
‘It took ages for them to send a car out. When they finally got there, they gathered some of Brooke’s personal things and sealed them in these plastic pouches …’
‘For DNA sampling.’
‘I can’t believe they even have that kind of technology in this backwater.’
‘They probably have to send them to Dublin. Go on.’
‘Well, then they put me in the police car and drove me miles to the nearest proper town, a place called Letter-something …’
‘Letterkenny.’
‘They took me into this tiny room with no windows. I spent over an hour there giving my statement to this angry, racist little bastard who’s in charge of the case. Felt like I was being interrogated.’
Border signs flashed by as the speeding BMW passed from Northern Ireland into the Republic. When Ben had first known the place as a young soldier the border had been thick with heavily-armed checkpoints, and vehicles passed through under the stern eye of a British Army GPMG gunner with his finger on the trigger. Those days were all but over now, but the memories of the Troubles were soaked like blood into the land.
‘What’s the name of the detective in charge?’ Ben asked.
‘Hanratty. Detective Inspector Hanratty. Real charmer. Needless to say, they’d never heard of Brooke being in the car until I told them. At first, I reckon they thought I was some kind of crank. Next thing you know they’re grilling me as if it was me who was under investigation. Anyway, when I finally managed to get away from the police station I wandered up the road and found this café where you can actuallygo online. That’s when I thought about looking you up. Brooke’s told me a little about what you used to do for a living, and the business you run now in France. God knows how I remembered the name of it. I called and spoke to a guy named Jeff who gave me your mobile number.’ Amal shrugged wearily. ‘That’s it. We should never have come to this bloody place. It’s all because of me and that stupid play …’
‘Never mind the stupid play,’ Ben said. ‘What else can you tell me?’
‘Only what I’ve seen on TV. When Forsyte’s car didn’t turn up for the party last night, the people waiting for him at the big house just assumed at first that he’d been delayed by the media, or whatever. Then more time went by, no sign of him, and they started making phone calls. It wasn’t until the middle of the night that anyone called the cops. Even then, the police didn’t lift a finger until after the car’d been found by some guy on his way home from work early this morning.’ Amal glanced anxiously at Ben. ‘They’ll be looking for them, won’t they? I mean, surely they’ll be doing everything they can …’
‘There are standard procedures,’ Ben said, cautiously. ‘First priority is to establish contact with the kidnappers. Forsyte’s been divorced for years. No siblings, no children, so the ransom demand will probably be made to the company itself. Meanwhile, it’s a question of combing over the crime scene to see what they can dig up, fingerprinting everything in sight, bringing in the sniffer dogs, taking any evidence back to the lab for analysis. They’ll want to talk to staff at the country club for anyone who might have seen anything, and check out CCTV footage. Round up every photographer who was at the media event, and check through all their images for anything suspicious – someone hanging around, looking out of place. Go through the records of local vehicle rental companies during the last week or so for anything paid in cash. Liaise with the Coastguard and check the registers of any boats in and out of local harbours, as well as spot-checks on vessels. Call out the air support unit to scout for possible safehouses, empty farm buildings, disused industrial units, where kidnappers might try to hide a victim.’
‘Sounds pretty thorough,’ Amal said, sounding marginally more optimistic.
Ben agreed, in principle. But the caution in his tone was because he also knew that this particular crime had occurred in one of the sleepiest parts of rural Ireland, even more slothlike in its ways than Galway, where he’d lived for a number of years. The place was so neglected by the authorities that it had come to be known as ‘the forgotten county’. Even at the height of the Troubles in the seventies and eighties, when the occasional IRA incident would take place on the Republic side of the border, there had been comparatively little for the Garda to deal with – hence they had even less experience of this kind of contingency than the most parochial police force in England. The local cops would most likely have had to send out to faraway Dublin for a forensic investigation team equipped and specialised enough for the job.
In short, Ben would have been extremely surprised if Detective Inspector Hanratty had got his thumb out of his arse to do half the things he’d just described to Amal.
‘Lastly,’ he said, ‘they should be talking to all the Neptune Marine Exploration employees, checking phone records and finding out if anyone’s been unfairly dismissed recently or might have any kind of grudge against Forsyte. In a case like this they’ll study the victim’s background and history for significant enemies, and to check whether Forsyte might have any financial problems of his own, like gambling debts, dangerous and expensive habits, the kind of thing that might cause someone to stage their own kidnap for ransom.’
‘What?’
‘It’s not unheard of.’ The speedometer needle climbed above the ninety mark as Ben urged the powerful BMW past a slow-moving truck.
‘I can’t believe that,’ Amal said. ‘But then, nothing makes sense to me. Like, for instance, if someone kidnapped Forsyte for ransom, why did they take Brooke and Sam? They’re not rich like Forsyte. Nobody can pay millions to get them back. Is it because they were witnesses?’
Ben shook his head. ‘No. You can shoot a witness, like they shot Forsyte’s driver. It’s more than that. From a kidnapper’s point of view, female hostages give you better leverage, more bargaining power. Nobody wants to see them get hurt, so ransoms get paid faster.’ His voice sounded detached, but speaking those words cost him a lot of pain. The moment he’d said them, he wished he’d kept his innermost thoughts bottled up more tightly.
‘Leverage? Oh, Jesus.’ The horror in Amal’s eyes reflected what was in Ben’s own mind. Images of severed body parts sent in the mail. Torture. Or worse. ‘They won’t harm them, will they? Will they? Answer me. They won’t do anything to Brooke, will they? Ben?’
Ben’s fists clenched around the steering wheel. He was silent for a beat, swallowing back the rising tide of crazed anxiety that made him want to scream and pound the dashboard to pieces.
Then he said quietly, ‘I’ll get her back.’
And the voice inside his head replied: if she’s still alive.
Chapter Eight (#ulink_fb737f69-bec7-50a3-884a-2a280e067435)
Evening had fallen like a black shroud and their conversation had lapsed into a heavy silence by the time Ben stopped the car. He cut the engine but left the headlights on, spilling a broad pool of white light across the road and carving through the slowly-drifting fog of drizzle.
Amal looked up from his lap as if emerging from a trance, and saw that Ben was checking his phone. ‘You expecting a call?’ he asked.
‘From a guy called Starkey,’ Ben muttered, frowning at the phone.
‘Who’s that?’ Amal asked, but Ben was too preoccupied to answer. There had been no call. He tutted and shoved the phone back in his pocket.
‘What is this place?’ Amal said, peering through the glass.
Ben said nothing. He got out of the car. The night felt damp. He could hear the whisper of the Atlantic in the distance, and smell the salt tang in the air.
‘This is where they were taken, isn’t it?’ Amal said ominously, climbing out of the passenger side and hugging his coat tightly around him.
Ben just nodded grimly. He wanted to break into a run, but forced himself to walk calmly towards the lights and activity he could see up ahead. As he made his way up the road he glanced left and right, up and down, drinking in details.
He hadn’t walked far when he paused in his stride. Faintly discernible on the glistening wet road surface by the glow of the BMW’s headlamps were the traces of heavy skid marks where a car had pulled to an emergency stop. He considered them for a moment and then continued a few steps further, before pausing again and turning to look to his left, where a small section of the roadside verge had been cordoned off with markers and police tape.
A short distance further up the road was a second set of tyre marks. The vehicle that had made them had a wider wheel track than the first, and judging by the curve of the marks it had overtaken at speed and then swerved across the road from right to left, screeching to a stop. What was odd about the second set of tyre marks was the additional smudge of rubber that seemed to indicate that the vehicle had been shunted sideways after coming to a halt. He pictured it in his mind.
Ben knelt down and pressed a fingertip against the cold, wet road. Lifting it back up, he examined the tiny flake of paint stuck to it. It was white on one side, blue on the other.
He flicked it away, stood up and walked on again. Some thirty yards ahead on the right-hand side of the road, a large area of the verge and the ground beyond was barricaded off and illuminated by blazing halogen floodlights perched up on tall masts, haloed by drifting moisture. Rows of cones and a temporary traffic control had been set up to filter what few vehicles might pass by through the narrowed gap. Three Garda Land Rovers were parked off-road, casting their flashing blue glow over the rugged ground.
Tucked in in single file behind the row of cones sat an empty Toyota Avensis patrol car, an ageing unmarked Vauxhall Vectra and a van that Ben guessed belonged to the forensic team he could see combing the large field to the right of the road, their reflective vests shining yellow in the distance. The van’s number plate bore the county identifier D for Dublin: his guess about the forensics guys having to come all the way from the Garda HQ in the capital had been correct. That didn’t make him feel any better.
He wasn’t hugely surprised either to see that, some twenty hours or so after the fact, the cops were only now getting themselves organised to conduct a proper search and remove the crashed Jaguar XF from the scene. A pair of uniformed officers were standing back watching as the vehicle was winched up onto a flatbed lorry. All that would be left behind were the skid marks and the pieces of debris littering the verge at the foot of the large roadside rock that Ben could make out in the glow of the recovery vehicle’s swirling orange light. The Jaguar’s front end was badly crumpled and it was obvious it had hit the rock at some speed after skidding violently to the right.
Even more noticeable were the bullet holes that had chewed up the Jaguar’s rear bodywork and shredded its back tyres.
Ben swallowed. The particular kind of hole made by a nine-millimetre full metal jacket round as it punched through thin sheet steel was a very familiar sight to him. He’d seen enough bullet-riddled vehicles in enough war zones all over the world to tell at a glance that this kind of damage was the work of fully-automatic weapons. Whoever had carried out the attack, they were disturbingly well equipped and not afraid to use it.
Ben sensed a presence next to him and turned to see that Amal was standing at his shoulder.
‘Oh, my God, look at the state it’s in,’ Amal groaned as the recovery crew started securing the Jaguar to the lorry’s flatbed. ‘It looks even worse than it did on TV. How could anyone—?’
Survive that, Ben knew Amal had been about to say. And under normal circumstances, Amal would have been right. Nothing could walk away from that kind of firepower.
Unless …
‘See where most of the damage is?’ Ben asked him, pointing. ‘The mass of the gunfire was concentrated on the car’s undercarriage, not the bodywork at passenger height.’
‘So what does that mean?’
‘That the gunmen were aiming to disable and stop it, not to kill everyone inside. If they’d wanted to do that, it would have been easy for them.’
Amal nodded, but didn’t seem much reassured.
Ben couldn’t feel entirely reassured either. He didn’t want to think about the amount of lead that had been sprayed into the car with Brooke inside, or the fact that a stray bullet could easily have ripped a path through enough layers of thin steel and plastic and leather to find its mark. But the thought wouldn’t go away. He kept seeing Brooke’s face in his mind, and he wondered with an icy chill whether he’d ever see it again for real. His hands felt shaky and he was breathing fast.
But there was no time for sentimentality here, he reminded himself with an effort. He had to keep his wits about him or he’d be about as much use to her as the police.
‘What are we doing here?’ Amal asked. The cold and damp were getting to him, making him shiver.
‘I wanted to see it for myself.’
‘So you’ve seen it. What happens now?’
‘I need a moment,’ Ben said. He left Amal hovering uncertainly as he walked a few yards closer to the crime scene. Among the sparse grass of the verge near the cordon was a tall flat rock, wet and glistening under the floodlights and the blue swirl from the police vehicles. Ben leaned against the rock and reached into his jacket’s hip pocket for his crumpled pack of Gauloises and his Zippo lighter. He fished out a cigarette and lit it, but after a few seconds the drizzle had made the paper soggy and his heart wasn’t in it anyway. He tossed the fizzling cigarette down into the grass at his feet, and was mechanically crushing it into the dirt with the heel of his boot when he felt something under his sole and looked down.
It wasn’t a pebble. He dropped into a crouch and poked around in the wet grass. When he found the small object, he held it up to the light to examine it closely.
‘What’ve you found?’ Amal asked him, walking across.
Ben didn’t reply. Clasping the object in his palm he stepped over the police tape to look for more.
An angry yell made him turn to see a short, stout figure in a flapping raincoat marching rapidly towards them from the direction of the Land Rovers.
‘Hoi! You! This is a police crime scene!’ As the man approached, shouting and gesticulating at them, Ben could see in the glare of the overhead floodlights that it was a plain-clothes detective, a stockily-built guy in his mid fifties or thereabouts.
‘That’s him,’ Amal said in a low voice. ‘Hanratty, the one I told you about.’
Chapter Nine (#ulink_92a4a8c6-5855-5148-97fc-0b439679b714)
Detective Inspector Hanratty stormed up to them, scowling. A slick of carrot-red hair was plastered across his puckered brow. He had mud spattered over his shoes and the bottoms of his trouser legs were sodden. But Ben guessed that spending hours out here in the shit weather wasn’t the sole reason for the sour grimace on Hanratty’s face. It looked permanently etched into his ruddy features. Ben’s first impression was of a chronically malcontented guy who, when he’d finished harrying and persecuting his work colleagues for the day, bullied his wife and kicked the dog.
‘This is a police crime scene,’ Hanratty repeated loudly. ‘Get out.’
Following a few yards behind was a female officer. Like her colleague, she was in plain clothes – a detective sergeant, was Ben’s guess. She was petite, elfin in her looks, with dark shoulder-length hair that had gone limp from the drizzle. She was visibly tired, but in contrast to the dogged stupidity in Hanratty’s eyes, hers were quick and sharp.
‘My name’s Hope,’ Ben said. ‘I’m a close friend of one of the victims, Brooke Marcel.’ He reached for his wallet and took out the little photo of her that he carried inside. The picture had been taken in France during summer. She was smiling and the sun was in her hair. He couldn’t bring himself to look at it.
Hanratty gave it only a cursory glance. ‘See that police tape there?’ he blustered. ‘Know what that means? It means keep your nose out of where it doesn’t belong, understand?’ He turned his sour gaze on Amal, and his eyes narrowed with recognition. ‘Ah, Mr … Ray, wasn’t it? What are you doing poking around here with him? We’ve taken your statement already, so now you can—’
Ben looked at him. ‘Listen, I came to help, not to argue with you, okay?’
Hanratty flushed and was about to fire an angry reply, but his colleague got in first. ‘Mr Hope, I’m Detective Sergeant Lynch,’ she said calmly. ‘We do have the situation under control, thank you, so if you’d like to return to your vehicle …’
Ben opened his clenched palm and tossed them the small object he’d found in the grass. Hanratty caught it in his fist, peered down at it and then stared up at Ben in surprise and indignation. Lynch stepped closer to her colleague to see what it was.
‘It was lying over there by the roadside,’ Ben said. ‘Thought it might be useful. It’s a nine-millimetre shell casing.’
Hanratty’s features twisted into a sardonic leer. ‘How helpful of you, sir. It happens we’ve already recovered a number of these.’
‘Then I imagine you’ve learned something from them,’ Ben said.
Lynch took the small steel casing from Hanratty’s hand and examined it. ‘Who the hell do you think you are?’ Hanratty growled. ‘Get out of here before I—’
‘Learn what?’ Lynch said. ‘We already know shots were fired at the car.’
Ben pointed at the cartridge in her fingers. Her nails were trimmed short and practical. ‘Thin steel, not brass,’ he said. ‘Plus, two small flash holes in the primer socket instead of the more usual single larger hole means the cartridge was designed to take a Berdan type primer. That’s unusual. You don’t normally see them, except with milsurp ordnance. That’s military surplus,’ he added for the benefit of Hanratty, who was glaring at him with widening eyes and turning mottled under the floodlights. ‘Secondly—’
‘Secondly?’ Lynch said. She was listening closely, her head cocked slightly to one side.
‘See where the case mouth is dented from the weapon’s ejector port, where it spins and smashes against the receiver on its way out? That denting is typical of the way the Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun mashes its spent shells. Expensive weapon, and this one was brand new.’
‘How the hell can you tell that?’ Hanratty snapped impatiently.
‘Scrape marks on the side of the casing, from loading,’ Ben said. ‘The magazine isn’t fully broken in yet, follower spring’s a little stiff. It’s normal for the first few hundred rounds. So your perpetrators are using milsurp ammo, hard to come by without the right contacts, and they’re very professionally equipped.’
Lynch arched an eyebrow. ‘Is there more?’
‘Just that the placement of the empty casings you’ve already found, and the others that’re probably still scattered in the grass, should allow you to figure out by the distance and the angle of ejection more or less where the gunmen were standing, how they moved,’ Ben said. ‘Might help you to find footprints, determine the exact number of shooters, little things like that. If it were me, I’d have the team searching over here instead of out there in the field.’ He smiled a thin, humourless smile. ‘But then, who am I to tell you your job?’
‘What did you say your name was?’ Hanratty demanded.
‘Forget it,’ Ben said. ‘I don’t have time to waste talking to idiots. Come on, Amal, let’s go.’
‘Hey!’ Hanratty yelled as they headed back towards the car. ‘Don’t you walk away from me. Who’re you calling an idiot?’
Ben kept walking. Amal followed along nervously.
‘Hold on a minute,’ Lynch called out, trotting after them. ‘Mr Hope, wait.’
‘I’ve seen all I need to see here,’ Ben said without turning round. He was nearly at the car when she caught up with him and gently grasped his arm.
He wheeled round to face her. ‘I’ve dealt with a thousand Hanrattys in my time,’ he said. ‘He’s a fool, and he’s totally out of his depth.’
A long-suffering little smile played at the corners of Lynch’s mouth, as if she’d be only too happy to agree with him if she were free to. ‘You’re not dealing with him now,’ she said calmly. ‘You’re dealing with me, DS Kay Lynch. Let’s talk, Mr Hope. Please.’ There was no hostility in her expression, no suspicion, just earnestness and fatigue.
‘No offence, Kay, but I think someone like Tommy Logan at the ERU in Dublin should be handling this.’ The Garda’s Emergency Response Unit was the nearest thing the Irish police had to SCO19. One or two of their units had undergone hostage extraction training with the SAS during Ben’s time, and Commander Tommy Logan had sent a team for instruction under Ben and Jeff Dekker’s tutelage last year.
Lynch frowned. ‘Who are you?’
‘I told you who I am. I’m a friend of Brooke Marcel who was in that car.’
‘No, I mean, who are you really? You’ve got experience at this kind of thing, haven’t you?’
‘More than your friend there, for sure,’ Ben said, with a dismissive gesture at the distant figure of Hanratty, who was marching back over to the Land Rovers and barking orders at the forensic team.
Ben had had enough of this place. He was about to turn back towards the car, but the expression in Lynch’s eyes made him hesitate. He slipped his wallet and a ballpoint from his inside pocket and pulled out one of his business cards, slightly crumpled. It bore the name Le Val Tactical Training Centre in bold letters, with his name below. For the sake of appearances, it showed his former military rank – something Ben had never liked but which Jeff Dekker had persuaded him would impress clients.
Ben scribbled his mobile number on the back of the card and handed it to Lynch. ‘The web address is there too, if you want to check me out,’ he told her. ‘It’ll give you an idea of my background and what I do.’ In fact, the information about him on the website had been trimmed and edited down to the barest possible minimum. Little of what he’d done in his life, both during and since his military days, could be stuck up online for all to see.
But the card alone was enough. Lynch glanced at it and raised an eyebrow. ‘All right, I’m impressed. Do I call you Major Hope?’
‘It’s just Ben now,’ he said.
‘So what did you mean when you said you came here to help, Ben?’
‘I came here to find Brooke. That’s what I’m going to do.’
‘This is a police investigation. We don’t normally invite civilians to come on board.’
‘I didn’t ask to be invited. I’ll do this with you or without you.’
‘I have to caution you to stay out of it. For your own sake as well as hers, and that of the other victims.’
‘Of course. The last thing you need is a crazy guy like me messing the whole thing up.’
Lynch looked at him. ‘I understand that this a very difficult time for you. You’re upset and frightened. The police have a victim support counselling service …’
‘What frightens me the most is that prick Hanratty,’ Ben said.
‘I’m serious,’ she warned. ‘You can’t go meddling in this on your own. I don’t want to have to arrest you.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘You don’t.’
Her eyes narrowed for an instant as she sensed the quiet menace in his voice. Then she seemed to soften. ‘Look. There’s nothing you can do here.’
‘You’re still waiting for the ransom demand, correct?’ he said after a pause.
Lynch hesitated to reply. ‘There has been no contact as yet, no. They’re still up at Carrick Manor.’
‘Carrick Manor?’
‘That’s where the party was supposed to take place,’ Amal put in. ‘The big house.’
‘Forsyte’s land base during the salvage project,’ Lynch said, ‘while he wasn’t supervising the operation from on board his ship. They’re expecting the ransom demand call either to come through there, or to the company’s main offices in Southampton.’
Ben pointed past Lynch’s shoulder. ‘Now, that cordoned area on the left side of the road. What’s that?’
Lynch didn’t need to look round to know which area he was talking about. She pursed her lips. ‘You think I can’t see what you’re doing, trying to prise information out of me? I told you, you can’t get invol—’
‘It’s where the body of the driver, Lander, was found, isn’t it?’ Ben cut across her.
She rolled her eyes, nodded reluctantly.
‘Thirty yards back from the crash site,’ Ben said. ‘Ideas?’
‘You’re pretty damn persistent, aren’t you, Mr Hope?’
‘Just Ben. And yes, I can be. Tell me something, Kay. Lander’s body. Apart from the gunshots, what other injuries did he have?’
She looked at him.
‘Crush injuries, for instance? Like he’d been run over?’
‘Y-yes,’ she blurted, her eyes opening wider. ‘There were tyre marks on the body that matched the tread pattern of the Jaguar. But how …?’
‘Indicating that the car was driven over the top of him after he’d been shot. I thought so. And I’m guessing that there are traces of paint on the front right wing of the car. White or blue?’
‘White,’ Lynch said, staring at him.
Ben nodded. ‘So it was blue before. It was an overspray,’ he explained. ‘Figures.’
‘How do you know all this?’
‘Just from looking around,’ he said. ‘This is how I see it. The car was coming along this road when it was overtaken and forced to stop by a white van. A Ford Transit, maybe, or a Fiat Ducato, something like that, bought cheap and repainted in a hurry.’ His eyes were fixed on the scene, as if he were watching the events unfold in front of him in real time. ‘Lander, the driver, gets out of the Jaguar to have it out with the van’s occupants, who have already stepped out of their vehicle. I’d say two of them, at least. He’s got no idea of their intentions, not until it’s too late. They open fire on him from near the van, shooting in this direction. Just a short burst, three rounds apiece. The empty cases are ejected into the left-side verge.’
‘We found half a dozen of them there,’ Lynch muttered.
‘Lander goes down at the side of the road. Brooke, Forsyte and his PA must have seen it all happen right in front of them. It’s at this point that someone inside the Jaguar takes charge of the situation and gets behind the wheel.’
‘That’s more or less what we figured out, too,’ Lynch said, still stupefied but struggling to hide it. ‘One of them tried to make a break for it. Probably Forsyte. That’s what the DI says, at any rate.’
Ben was certain it had been Brooke. He knew the way she responded in a tight spot, and this was exactly what she’d have done here. The stab of proud admiration he felt was quickly swallowed up by a fresh surge of grief and anxiety. He reined in his emotions and pressed on.
‘Now whoever’s taken the wheel of the Jaguar needs to get out of there by the most direct route. They’ve got the van in front of them partially blocking the way, and Lander’s body in between. But there’s no other way round, no choice but to aim straight ahead. That’s what I’d have done. The car goes right over Lander’s body and rams into the left wing of the van from an angle, shunting it far enough aside to the right to create a gap. Hence the traces of white paint on the car’s wing, and the sideways tyre marks on the road. The gunmen must have had to jump out of the way as the Jaguar forced its way through. But as the car accelerates up the road, they open fire on it. Now they’re shooting in the opposite direction and the empty cases are flying this way, bouncing off the tarmac into the right-side verge. There’ll be a lot more there besides the one I found. They take out the tyres and the car loses control.’
Lynch finished for him. ‘The victims are moved out of the car and transferred into the van, leaving Lander’s body behind. That pretty much sums it up. Well, you’ve certainly put this together, haven’t you?’
‘You’d have to confirm it with your genius friend Hanratty,’ Ben said. ‘But that’s how I see it happening.’
‘And now what?’ Amal said restlessly. ‘What’s being done?’
‘All that can be done,’ Lynch told him. ‘You need to believe that. And you,’ she said, facing Ben, ‘need to go home, sit tight and get some rest.’
Ben shook his head. ‘What I need is to be kept informed. I can’t be left on the outside. If there are developments I don’t want to be seeing them on the TV along with the rest of the public half a day later.’
Lynch said nothing.
‘Will you do that for me, Kay? Please. I’m not asking for a lot.’
‘Hanratty—’
‘Doesn’t need to know. He’s been ignorant all his life. A little more can’t hurt him.’
Lynch held up Ben’s business card. ‘It’s this tactical stuff that concerns me. You’re not going to do anything silly, are you?’
‘If I promise not to do anything silly, will you help me?’
‘I’ll do what I can,’ Lynch replied after a beat.
Chapter Ten (#ulink_31e35a1a-69ca-5908-ba17-72d29b73aeab)
‘So where to now?’ Amal asked, slumping heavily into the passenger seat.
‘Castlebane Country Club,’ Ben replied. He twisted the key in the ignition. The BMW’s engine roared into life, the tyres rasped and the car reversed hard down the road until he stamped on the brake and slewed round to face the direction they’d come from.
Ben didn’t need to ask Amal the way. He’d already studied the map and found the same winding coastal route the Jaguar had taken the night before – besides which, he had precious little trust in his companion’s navigational skills. He glanced in the rear-view mirror at the retreating figure of Kay Lynch, who was walking back to rejoin Hanratty, then put his foot down.
Amal was getting the hang of Ben’s driving by now. He gripped his door handle tightly, braced himself for the acceleration and closed his eyes as they hurtled into the first set of bends.
Not long afterwards, the BMW was one of the steady procession of vehicles entering the country club’s illuminated gateway and filling up the car park. The drizzle had finally petered out and the clouds were breaking up to reveal a clear and starry sky. There were no police vehicles anywhere to be seen outside the country club, but then Ben hardly expected any. He looked at his watch and saw that it had taken twelve minutes to cover the distance between here and the scene of the kidnapping. Assuming that Wally Lander had made similar time in the Jaguar, that pretty much tallied with the official estimate of when the attack had taken place.
It was now quarter to eight. Brooke had been missing for twenty-one hours and forty minutes.
With Amal silently in tow he walked up to the building, climbed the steps and pushed through the heavy door into the foyer.
Ben took in his surroundings. The carpet was red and lush. Faux olde-worlde decor designed to impress the nouveau-riche golfing and tennis crowd. Glossy oak panelling. Display cabinets filled with polished silver trophies. Whirring overhead fans that mimicked the colonial era. Artificial foliage spilling out from reproduction antique urns. A stream of mostly middle-aged and elderly couples was filtering into the foyer behind him, heading towards the busy restaurant area he could see through an open doorway to the right of the reception desk and being greeted by a solemn-looking maitre d’. It was clearly business as usual at the Castlebane Country Club. The events of the night before seemed to have left barely a ripple.
The smell of food from the restaurant reached Ben’s nostrils; it occurred to him that he’d eaten nothing at all since leaving France. He shoved the thought to the back of his mind and wandered deeper inside the foyer. A young woman looked up at him with a frown from behind the reception desk. He glanced at the arriving diners in their suits and ties and dresses and pearls, then at Amal in his silk polo-neck and expensive designer coat. Catching a glimpse of himself in a mirror, he saw an unshaven and tousle-haired character in a scuffed old leather jacket, faded denim shirt, well-worn jeans and combat boots who didn’t exactly fit with the place’s dress code. That was tough shit. He returned the woman’s gaze with a cold glare and she averted her eyes.
‘I’m pretty sure that’s where we were last night,’ Amal whispered, pointing at a gleaming double doorway off to the left. ‘It’s a ballroom, or something. I don’t remember it so well.’
Then it was time to refresh Amal’s memory, Ben thought. He headed for the doorway. The woman at reception threw him another glance, but nobody tried to stop him. The doors glided open. Ben walked through, Amal followed, and they found themselves inside a vast room, empty except for the stacks of tables and velvet-backed chairs that lined the far wall.
‘This is it,’ Amal said, gazing around, slowly remembering. ‘At least, I think it is. It all looks so different.’
‘Is it or isn’t it?’ Ben said testily. Impatience flared up inside him for a moment, then subsided as he told himself to go easy. Amal was just as upset as he was.
‘It is, definitely. But they’ve cleared everything away. It’s weird, as if none of these things had happened. Shouldn’t the police have made them keep the place the way it was? For evidence, or whatever?’
‘Hanratty,’ Ben grunted. ‘Never mind him for now.’
‘It’s coming back to me,’ Amal muttered, narrowing his eyes to slits and cocking his head to one side as though that would help him visualise the scene more clearly. He turned to motion at a large expanse of empty floor in the corner nearest the door. ‘That’s where the bar was.’ He grimaced as if to say, the less said about that the better. ‘Over there was a curtain, with all the exhibits and stuff behind it. To the left of it was the stage, with a speaking podium and a big screen. That’s where Forsyte and that other guy gave their speeches.’
‘What other guy was that?’
‘One of the company employees. I only got a quick glimpse of him when I turned round at some point to see where Brooke was.’
‘This is while you were sitting at the bar?’
Amal sighed and nodded.
‘With your back to the room.’
Amal sighed and nodded again. ‘I remember … I remember that he was a younger guy than Forsyte. Quite small, sandy hair. Forsyte introduced him as … as some kind of manager. Dive team manager, something like that. His name was … I don’t know. Baxter? Baker?’
‘Butler,’ Ben said, remembering the name from the Neptune Marine Exploration website. ‘Simon Butler. But I’m not so interested in him right now. Take a minute, look around and see if anything else jogs your memory. Anything at all that might have seemed unusual at the time, or maybe has struck you since as odd. Anyone hanging around Forsyte, for example, or acting out of the ordinary.’ As he said it, he was painfully aware that the kind of things a trained eye could pick out would go quite unnoticed by an ordinary observer. Especially one who’d made a point of hitting the bar.
Amal looked anxiously around him for a few moments. ‘I don’t know. The place was full of people. Journalists firing questions, photographers everywhere. I’ve never been to anything like that before. I wouldn’t know what was strange and what wasn’t. Anyway,’ he admitted miserably, ‘I wasn’t even paying a lot of attention. I was too busy drowning my pathetic little sorrows in bloody gin and tonic. And Brooke – poor Brooke – what’s happened to her? It’s all my fault …’ He ran quaking fingers through his hair, dug the balls of his thumbs into his eyes. His breathing was ragged, as though he was about to burst into tears.
‘Nobody’s blaming you,’ Ben said. ‘Lay that idea aside. Get a grip, Amal. You’re no use to me otherwise.’ He was conscious of the harshness in his tone. In a softer voice he asked, ‘You want to go into the lounge bar for a drink? You look like you could use one.’
Amal shook his head vigorously. ‘No way. Never again. I swear.’
Ben fought back his own desire to drain the place dry of every drop of liquor they had. Anything to slow his mind down, dull the thoughts that kept spinning round and round inside his head, threatening to drive him crazy. ‘All right,’ he said, taking the BMW key from his pocket. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
‘Are we going back to the guesthouse?’ Amal asked as they headed outside towards the car.
Ben’s jaw tightened. He wanted, needed, to keep moving. ‘Not yet.’ He bleeped the central locking open and slid behind the wheel. ‘There are some people I’d like to talk to.’
‘People?’
‘At Carrick Manor.’
‘But how do we find the place?’
‘There’s something called Google Maps nowadays. I thought you writers knew these things.’
‘I’m not really that kind of … never mind.’ Amal closed his door and Ben fired the car up again.
They were three or four miles from Castlebane Country Club and speeding inland when Ben’s phone buzzed in his pocket. He dug it out urgently and answered without slackening his pressure on the gas. ‘Thanks for calling back, Mike.’
‘No problem, mate,’ said the raspy voice on the other end. ‘Gather you’ve got a bit of trouble. Sorry to hear it. Anyway, I’ve dug up the info you asked for. Not a word to anyone, mind, or it’s my arse. It’s only because it’s you.’
‘Appreciated,’ Ben said. ‘Fire away.’
‘All right. Neptune Marine Exploration took out a comprehensive K&R policy four years ago with Rochester and Saunders. Apparently they’d had a near miss with Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden while hauling up some shipwreck or other, and got jumpy in case they were less lucky the next time. Deal was brokered by that greedy bastard Ronnie Galloway.’
‘I don’t know him. What’s the coverage?’
‘Twelve million. That’s pretty much all I can tell you.’
‘It’s plenty. I owe you one, Mike.’
‘Or two. Good luck, mate.’
Ben ended the call. He knew the name Rochester and Saunders well. Operating from a glittering glass tower in central London, they were one of the top players in their field and provided kidnap and ransom insurance services to high-risk corporate employees, VIPs and other potential kidnap targets all over the globe.
As Ben had known all too well for too many years, kidnap and ransom was a booming industry, not just for those who did it but also for those who could claim to offer protection from it. Long before he’d given up active field work to move to France and set up Le Val, he’d now and then been hired as a freelance negotiator by the insurance companies, to maintain contact with kidnappers, obtain the crucial proof of life, smooth along the negotiations and do everything humanly possible to ensure the early release, unharmed, of the hostages.
Occasionally, other ways and means – more or less peaceable, more or less legitimate – became necessary to get them out. In those cases, the insurance companies were no longer involved. Nobody was, not officially. Those contingencies, and the direct action needed to resolve them, had been Ben’s particular area of expertise.
A lot of K&R operatives had come from a military background – some, like Ben, from 22 SAS and other Special Forces units; Mike Starkey had been a twenty-year veteran of the London Met before switching careers. Many of the guys knew each other well, and because their work tended to take them to the world’s concentrated kidnap and ransom hotspots, their paths often crossed, frequently in the seedier bars and nightclubs where criminal informants and other undesirables tended to hang out. Theirs was a strange, closed and often clandestine community, made more so by the fact that in some countries getting paid to help secure the release of kidnap victims was considered tantamount to profiting from the kidnap itself. Some negotiators burned out from the stress, some ended up on the wrong side of the rails completely, or dead, or kidnap targets themselves. Some simply got tired of the life and ended up behind a desk.
Mike Starkey had been one of those. Nowadays he filled a cushy, safe little niche as a broker in London, the world’s K&R capital, acting as middleman between the clients desperate for kidnap protection insurance and the underwriters who collectively raked in over £150 million a year in return and were extremely reluctant ever, ever to part with a penny of it in the not-uncommon event of a claim. Business was soaring year on year and guys like Starkey were happily surfing the wave.
Some critics partly blamed the meteoric rise in the popularity of K&R insurance for the terrifying worldwide growth of the trade in human misery, on the grounds that the insurers were only fuelling potential kidnappers with greater financial incentives than they’d ever enjoyed before. It was a point of view Ben privately couldn’t disagree with.
‘Was that the call you were expecting?’ Amal asked as Ben put the phone away.
Ben nodded. ‘A contact in London.’
Amal waited for more, and when it wasn’t forthcoming he said, ‘Are you always this talkative and open with people?’
‘Yup, I’m a regular chatterbox,’ Ben said, and drove faster.
Chapter Eleven (#ulink_f1527dca-2dee-5ece-9b69-0f020560173a)
It was 8.27 p.m. when Ben and Amal rolled up on the crunching gravel outside Carrick Manor. The huge, imposing house was sequestered in its own sweeping grounds at the end of a long private road. A golden glow of light illuminated the entrance and the cluster of vehicles parked outside it.
As Ben stepped out of the BMW he noticed the same unmarked Garda Vauxhall Vectra that had been at the crime scene earlier that evening. He brushed his fingers along the bonnet as he walked by and felt the warmth from the still-ticking engine.
‘Hanratty,’ he said to Amal.
‘I’d a feeling we hadn’t seen the last of him,’ Amal groaned.
The manor house’s front door wasn’t locked and the huge entrance hall was empty. Ben paused, listening. From an open doorway at the far end of the hall came the distant sound of voices. Crossing the hall, he followed the sound down a long corridor, Amal tagging along behind him. The sound of voices grew louder and finally led them to another door. Ben peered in.
It was a dining room, or had been before it had been turned into a makeshift operations room by the crowd of police personnel and the fifteen or so other people inside. The room was uncomfortably warm and smelled of stale coffee, sweat and fear. The atmosphere was fraught. Everyone was too busy pacing up and down, looking extremely nervous or shouting at one another to notice Ben slip through the door, followed by Amal.
At the centre of the hubbub was a telephone, sitting silently on the gleaming surface of the long dining room table under the fixed eye of half a dozen men and women in suits.
Ben recognised a number of faces from the Neptune Marine Exploration website: the company had clearly flown out most of its chief executives to Ireland. One of them was the big, broad, balding man in the grey suit, Justin Maxwell, who until yesterday had been Sir Roger Forsyte’s second-in-command and now found himself apparently Neptune’s most senior executive, a responsibility that he wore gravely. He was leaning over the table, staring down at the phone as if trying by sheer force of will to make it ring.
Ben ran his eye over the monitoring equipment. An ordinary splitter cable was plugged into the wall socket and hooked up to a digital recording device with headphone outputs so that the police could listen in live to calls. Nearby stood a pair of laptops, one to trace the origin of any call online, whether via the GPS tracking system of a prepaid mobile phone or to a landline, and one to pick up any emails the kidnappers might send, complete with video clips of hooded hostages with guns at their heads. It was a pretty minimal setup, but that wasn’t the problem.
In fact there were two problems Ben could see, which were of a more fundamental nature. One was that, based on their behaviour so far, these kidnappers didn’t seem the kind of people who’d let themselves be so easily traced. Only an idiot nowadays would use a landline to make a ransom demand call, or hold on to a mobile phone they’d used for that purpose. It was just too easy to pinpoint the call’s origin, which was why a common trick kidnappers played was to toss the phone onto the back of a long-distance freight lorry after use, to lead the police far off the trail. Other times, they simply burned them.
The second problem was much more worrying. It had to do with timing. Ben looked at his watch.
It was almost eight-thirty. Not good.
A third laptop stood open on another table, surrounded by a small group of people. Onscreen was the BBC News website, showing the unfolding story in all its colourful drama: images of the bullet-riddled Jaguar; a shot of Castlebane Country Club; of NME’s ship Trident; and of each of the victims in order of newsworthiness – Forsyte’s was the most prominent, then Wally Lander, then Samantha Sheldrake. Brooke’s had now been added to the bottom. The cops had dug up the same photo of her that she’d given Ben to use on the Le Val site. He’d often caught himself gazing at it when they were apart. He couldn’t look at it now.
Hanratty and Kay Lynch were standing on the far side of the room. Neither had seen Ben and Amal come in; their attention was fully occupied by the slightly-built, sandy-haired man who was yelling at them. Ben recognised him as Neptune Marine’s dive team manager, Simon Butler. The man looked completely destroyed from stress – his face pale and moist, eyes rimmed with red, his hair and shirt damp with sweat. His voice was slurred, as if he’d been hitting the sherry. ‘Surely Scotland Yard should have been flown out here by now?’ he was demanding. ‘I mean, what is being done?’
Hanratty was protesting vigorously that it was his job to liaise with the English police, that everything was in hand, that he knew what he was doing. Lynch was saying nothing, looking down at her feet.
‘Ben? Ben Hope?’ said a voice. Ben turned round to see a much-changed but still familiar face peering at him out of the crowd.
‘Hello, Matt.’
Matt Webster had been one of the regulars on the hostage negotiator circuit when Ben had still been active. He obviously hadn’t opted for life behind a desk yet, though he looked as if he should before too long. What little hair he had left had turned grey.
They shook hands, and Ben briefly introduced him to Amal. ‘It’s been a long time,’ Webster said. ‘Six years?’
‘Seven,’ Ben said. ‘Lahore.’
‘Lahore. Christ, who could forget that one?’ Webster shook his head at the memory. Seven years earlier, a wealthy Kent-based private doctor named Shehzad, who had some time before taken out a kidnap and ransom insurance policy with a leading firm, had been violently abducted by an armed gang while visiting family in Pakistan. The ransom demand had been quickly followed up by a severed toe thrown from a passing car; when the toe had been verified as indeed belonging to Dr Shehzad, the insurance underwriters had panicked and sent in a whole team of negotiators. Both Ben and Webster were on it.
The negotiations had been looking reasonably positive until the Pakistani police had managed to trace the phone used by the idiotic kidnappers and taken it upon themselves to storm their hideout in a pre-dawn raid using two armoured personnel carriers. In the ensuing gun battle several officers had been shot to pieces, as well as the entire gang of kidnappers and the doctor himself. The episode had been just one of the instances that had made Ben extremely wary of police involvement in kidnap cases, in any country.
‘So Rochester and Saunders sent you up here,’ Ben said.
Webster motioned across the room to a colleague who had his back turned to them. ‘Me and Dave Hughes there.’ He paused and looked puzzled. ‘So what are you …? I heard you were doing your own thing now.’
Ben nodded. ‘You heard right. My involvement in this is private. I’m here because of Brooke Marcel. She and I …’ He didn’t finish the sentence.
‘God, I had no idea,’ Webster said, blanching. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘What’s the situation, Matt? There’s been no contact, has there?’ Even as he asked the question, he already knew the answer. Just one glance at the haggard faces around the room had told him what he’d come to Carrick Manor to find out.
Webster shook his head. ‘Zilch. Not a squeak.’
Ben could have asked Webster if he was thinking the same thing he was, but there was no need. He could see it in his eyes.
He said nothing. It was eight thirty-two. He glanced across at the silent phone. Justin Maxwell was still staring at it fixedly, barely blinking.
At that moment Detective Inspector Hanratty, managing to get away from the angry Simon Butler, spotted Ben and Amal across the room. ‘Here comes trouble,’ Amal muttered as Hanratty battled his way round the long table and strutted up to them with his fists clenched.
‘Not you again,’ he growled. ‘Did I not tell you to stay out of this, Hope? There’s the door.’
‘Why don’t you fuck off, Hanratty?’ Ben said quietly, looking him directly in the eye.
Hanratty blanched. ‘What did you just say to me?’
‘You heard me,’ Ben said more loudly. ‘You’ve three seconds to get out of my face before I put you through that window.’
Kay Lynch was watching Ben from across the room with an expression that said, ‘See, this is what I meant by you being silly’.
The buzz of noise dropped to a murmur. People looked around. Hanratty’s eyes bulged. Two seconds went by, then three. Hanratty swallowed and took a step back from Ben. Before he could muster up a riposte, Justin Maxwell spoke up.
‘Will someone please tell me who this gentleman is?’
‘I know him,’ Matt Webster cut in. ‘I can totally vouch for him.’
Hanratty exploded in protest.
‘Let me put it this way, pal,’ Webster said, giving him a cold glower. ‘If you were kidnapped, this is the guy you’d want on your side.’
‘With respect, sir,’ Lynch said to Hanratty, ‘I think he can be of some use to us. He’s got more experience in this kind of situation than the rest of us put together.’
‘Then perhaps he should introduce himself,’ Maxwell said, silencing Hanratty’s objections with a raised hand and looking expectantly at Ben.
Ben disliked talking about himself or his background, but there were times when it was to his advantage to reveal a little more than usual. ‘My name’s Ben Hope. I served as a Major in the British Special Air Service before becoming a freelance crisis response consultant. In that capacity I’ve been involved in over a hundred hostage rescue situations. Sometimes as a negotiator, sometimes more directly. I’m here because of Dr Brooke Marcel.’
‘I see,’ Maxwell said. ‘May I ask what is your relationship to Dr Marcel?’
‘That’s none of your business,’ Ben said. ‘What does concern all of us here is that the clock’s ticking. It’s eight thirty-three. Approximately twenty-two and a half hours since the snatch. In my experience, that’s a hell of a long time to wait for first contact.’
‘Meaning what exactly?’
‘Meaning that you people can stand here staring at that phone all you like, but I don’t think it’s going to ring anytime soon, if ever.’
Maxwell looked long and hard at Ben. His eyes were wide-set and penetrating. ‘Couldn’t the delay be a deliberate strategy?’ he asked. ‘The longer we stew, the greater the kidnappers’ psychological advantage over us and the more likely we are to acquiesce to their demands. Although we’d do anything to secure Sir Roger’s and Miss Sheldrake’s release. And that of Dr Marcel, naturally,’ he added quickly.
‘Kidnappers like to play mind games,’ Ben said. ‘That’s true enough. We call it The Wait, and it’s a nightmare for negotiators, victims’ families and everyone concerned except the insurers, who’re happy to hang onto their money for as long as they can. The kidnappers will often go quiet for days, months, sometimes years, to soften you up like putty so that you’ll cave in to whatever terms they throw at you. But not,’ he emphasised, ‘before making that initial contact. It’s crucial to them to approach you and identify themselves as the real kidnappers. This story’s already all over the internet by now – it’s only a question of time before a hundred opportunists start coming out of the woodwork making phoney demands. Kidnappers generally just want money, and they want it as quickly as possible. Especially when there’s an eight-figure sum on the table, you wouldn’t expect them to hang around.’
Maxwell narrowed his eyes. ‘Who said anything about an eight-figure sum?’
‘Let’s not mess about,’ Ben said. ‘I know that your company’s insured for ransom claims of up to twelve million with Rochester and Saunders. And if I know it, rest assured the kidnappers will know it. You’re not dealing with amateurs, that much is clear.’
‘Where did you get that information?’ one of the other Neptune executives demanded.
‘Ronnie Galloway told me,’ Ben said.
The executive shook his head in outrage. ‘That little—’ he began. Maxwell quieted him with a stern gesture.
‘Which strongly suggests to me that the time for a ransom demand has been and gone,’ Ben went on. ‘Believe me, I don’t like it any more than you do.’
Maxwell’s brow furrowed into deep creases. He looked at Simon Butler, then at Matt Webster and his colleague from R&S. Butler was chewing his fingernails in agitation. Webster’s face was taut.
‘Matt will agree with me,’ Ben said.
‘Is that the case, Mr Webster?’
Webster sighed. ‘It’s getting pretty damn late in the day,’ he admitted. ‘I’d have expected to hear something by now. Frankly, I’m more than a little concerned that every passing hour makes it less likely we’ll hear anything at all.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Maxwell said. ‘Where does this leave us? I’d assumed … I mean, if it’s not about ransom … what’s going on?’
‘I think you might need to re-evaluate the whole situation,’ Ben said. ‘You might want to consider other reasons why someone would want to snatch your man.’
‘Such as?’
‘I’d imagine the treasure recovered from the Santa Teresa’s worth a good deal more than twelve million,’ Ben said.
‘You’re suggesting what? That they’d use force against Sir Roger to make him give them access?’
‘Unless he’s in on it,’ Ben said.
There was a shocked silence in the room. After a few seconds, Maxwell said, ‘That’s absolutely out of the question and totally impossible. Besides, not even Roger could have access. Every single item recovered from that vessel is under secure lock and key.’
‘Then maybe there’s something else,’ Ben said. ‘Something we don’t know about, but which Forsyte does.’
‘But that’s just a guess,’ Maxwell said.
‘At this moment, guesswork is pretty much all we have,’ Ben replied. ‘All we know for sure is that while we stand around here staring at that phone, whoever did this is somewhere far away, laughing.’
‘And?’
‘And so it’s going to have to be done the hard way,’ Ben said. ‘They’re going to have to be found, and caught. That was meant to be Hanratty’s job. Whether he’s up to it is another question.’
‘I’m not having some outsider come into this investigation to cause trouble and make wild allegations like this,’ Hanratty burst out, pointing at Ben. ‘And you count yourself lucky, Hope, that I don’t charge you with threatening a police officer and obstructing the course of justice. Sergeant, get him out of my sight.’
Lynch hesitated, but she couldn’t refuse a direct order from her superior. She stepped towards Ben with a veiled look of apology in her eyes.
‘Hold on,’ Maxwell said. ‘This property is under lease to Neptune Marine Exploration. It’s not a crime scene and I don’t think you have the authority to expel anyone, Inspector. Mr Hope is welcome to stay and I appreciate any help he can offer us in this terrible situation.’ He looked at Ben. ‘Mr Hope, I’d be extremely grateful if you’d allow me to formally enlist your services.’
Ben shook his head. ‘Thanks, but I’m not interested in being on your company payroll. Like I told you, I’m here for my own reasons.’
Maxwell shrugged. ‘I’m sorry to hear that. Here’s my number, in case you change your mind.’
Ben pocketed the card. ‘No need to see me out, Sergeant,’ he said to Lynch. ‘I was leaving anyway.’
‘What are we going to do now?’ Amal asked as they headed back towards the car.
‘I don’t know, Amal,’ Ben said. ‘Right now, I really don’t know what to do.’
Chapter Twelve (#ulink_5b0d752c-1ba1-5d6f-943a-b3f08f79d2a3)
There was nothing more to say on the drive back to the guesthouse. When they arrived, Ben took his bag from the back seat of the car and followed Amal up the steps to the door. Amal had gone very quiet and was visibly upset as he let them inside. Mrs Sheenan was nowhere to be seen, but there was a TV blasting from somewhere upstairs. Ben was grateful not to have to speak to anyone.
Amal led him to the first floor, showed him Brooke’s room and announced in a shaky murmur that he needed to be alone for a while. Shuffling like an old man, he disappeared into his own room.
Ben stood for a long time outside Brooke’s door before he eventually reached out and grasped the handle. He slowly opened the door, summoned up his strength and walked in.
She had never been one to wear a lot of perfume, but the subtle, fresh scent in the air was so familiar that for a weird, disorientated moment or two he fully expected to find her sitting there on the bed. She wasn’t.
Of course she wasn’t. Sickening reality closed back in on him. He shut the door, feeling numb and utterly deflated and more tired than he could remember having felt for many, many years.
Where are you, Brooke?
He wanted to scream it, but at that moment he would barely have had the energy to raise his voice above a whisper.
He unslung his bag from his shoulder and laid it down with his leather jacket, then gazed around him at the room. Brooke’s travel holdall was sitting next to an armchair, unzipped. The slender reading glasses she sometimes wore at night, and a novel by an author he knew she liked, were sitting on the bedside table. Lying neatly folded on the pillow were the lightweight jogging bottoms she wore in bed, along with her favourite faded old pyjama top.
They suddenly seemed so much more a part of her now that she wasn’t here. He reached down and stroked them with his fingertips. Closed his eyes a moment, then moved away from the bed and walked into her little ensuite bathroom. On the tiled surface by the sink were some of her things that the police hadn’t taken away: her wash bag, her little jar of face cream, and several other of those familiar little items he remembered seeing in the bathroom at Le Val and at her place in Richmond, that signalled the warmth of her presence close by and made him feel happy to be alive.
Now there was only emptiness.
He couldn’t stop seeing her face in his mind, thinking of the last time they’d been together. If only those stupid, senseless arguments between them had never happened. She’d have been with him at Le Val, far away from all this mess. Or maybe it would have been him here with her in Ireland instead of Amal – he might have been there to protect her when it happened.
He had to believe she was alive. It couldn’t be any other way.
Mustn’t be any other way.
He looked in the oval mirror above the sink. The face that stared back at him was one he barely recognised, gaunt and pale, with a terrible look in its eyes. A sudden gushing torrent of rage welled up inside him. More than rage. Hatred. Hatred for whoever had done this, whoever had taken her like this. If they harmed her … if they did anything to her … He lashed out with his fist and his reflection distorted into a web of cracks.
Fragments of glass tinkled down into the sink. He gazed at his bloody knuckles. There was no pain; it was as if he’d become completely detached from his physical body.
Where are you, Brooke?
He mopped the blood up with a piece of toilet paper, flushed it away and walked stiffly back into the bedroom. Turned off the main light and clicked on the bedside lamp. Knelt down by his bag, undid the straps, rummaged inside for his whisky flask and shook it, feeling the slosh of the liquid inside. He slumped on the edge of the bed and unscrewed the steel cap. He was about to drain most of the flask’s contents in one gulp when he stopped himself.
No. This wasn’t the way. This wasn’t going to bring her back. He tightened the cap and tossed the flask into his bag.
But then another thought hit him like a kick in the face and almost made him reach for the flask again.
If it’s not about ransom, he heard Julian Maxwell’s voice say in his mind, If it’s not about ransom, what’s going on?
And then his own reply, coming back to him like a faraway echo: You might need to re-evaluate the whole situation … You might want to consider other reasons …
What if they’d all been getting this horribly, dreadfully wrong – him, the police, the company executives, Amal, everyone? What if their whole basic assumption was flawed, and this wasn’t about Roger Forsyte at all? What if he hadn’t been the target?
What if the target had been Brooke?
The idea left Ben stunned, winded. It was possible. Off-the-charts crazy, but possible, that this was some kind of reprisal against him. A sick, twisted punishment for something he’d done in his past. A relative of someone he’d killed or had put away, perhaps – had Jack Glass had a brother? – or maybe one of the many other enemies Ben had made over the years who were still out there.
Then wouldn’t the kidnapper have wanted Ben to know the truth, just to hurt him even more? Wouldn’t they have contacted Le Val?
Maybe they had, it occurred to him. A call could have come after he’d left. The phone could be ringing right this moment in the empty house; an email could be pinging into an unattended inbox.
Get a grip on yourself, he thought angrily. Jeff’s there. Jeff would have told you about it.
But the thought wouldn’t stop haunting him, and neither would the awful visions that kept circling through his head.
‘I’m going to find you, Brooke,’ he said out loud. ‘I’m going to …’
His voice trailed off into a croak. He sank his head into Brooke’s pillow and clutched her clothes tightly to his face, like a child needing comfort. His vision blurred. His tears moistened the pyjama top. The pain felt like too much to bear.
For the next hour he lay there curled up, staring at the door, praying for it to open and for Brooke to walk through it with a cheery greeting and a smile on her face. But time passed on and on, and the door stayed shut. He turned off the bedside light and went on staring into the darkness for what seemed a lifetime before he eventually slipped away into a shallow and restless state of unconsciousness.
When Ben awoke, it was still dark. His phone was thrumming in his jeans pocket. Instantly alert, heart thumping, he turned on the light and grabbed the phone to reply. This is it, the voice said in his mind. This is when you get your payback.
But there was nobody on the line, no mysterious voice from the past to make his worst nightmare come true. It was a text message alert.
The text was from Kay Lynch. Ben’s heart almost stopped when he read its opening words.
Think u need 2 know. Found bodies.
Chapter Thirteen (#ulink_67bc628b-9ebe-5256-9c0a-7d6e98d1dc1e)
The location given in the brief message was just a few miles from the abduction spot, deep within the heart of the rugged Glenveagh National Park, in an area of lakes and valleys known as the Poisoned Glen.
Twenty-seven frantic minutes had gone by since Ben had received Lynch’s text. Still an hour to go before the first red shards of dawn would come creeping over the hills. Racing towards the scene he saw the blue lights of the Garda vehicles through the darkness and the sheeting rain, and brought the BMW to a slithering halt inches behind them.
On a grassy slope fifty yards from the roadside was the only building in sight, a tumbledown old stone bothy. A century or two ago the tiny primitive structure would have served as a refuge for shepherds – nowadays it was more likely to be used by tramps and drug addicts.
This was the place. Light shone from its only window. There were figures in reflective Garda vests moving in and out of the single entrance. Thick electric cables snaked down the slope, hooked up to the forensic investigation van that had been at the kidnap site the previous evening.
‘Brooke’s in there, isn’t she?’ Amal whispered. His eyes were red and puffy.
‘We don’t know that, Amal,’ Ben replied through clenched teeth. Until the last minute before setting off, he’d been resolved not to wake him up and bring him out here. He regretted his change of mind now.
‘It’s obvious, isn’t it? I can feel it. Oh, God.’
Ben cut the engine and flung open his door. ‘Stay in the car.’
‘You must be kidding. I’m coming too.’
‘I said, stay in the damn car.’ Whatever was in that building, Ben didn’t want Amal to see it. He jumped out of the BMW and sprinted up the steep, slippery path towards the bothy. The building had no door, just a crude stone doorway thick with moss. Ben ran inside. The earth floor was damp-smelling from the long winter months. That wasn’t all he could smell. The place was rank with the stink of death.
The bothy was filled with people and activity and bright lights, but they couldn’t have been there more than forty-five minutes or so. Before that it had been empty and silent. Empty, apart from its grisly occupants.
Almost the first person Ben saw as he rushed in was Kay Lynch. She was standing near the entrance, looking drawn and pallid. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t say much in my text,’ she said in a low voice. ‘I couldn’t get away from Hanratty.’
‘Where are they?’ Ben said. He was breathless, but not from the fifty-yard sprint up the hill.
‘Over there,’ she said, motioning towards the far corner, where the forensics team were clustered around something Ben couldn’t see.
‘It’s not a pretty sight. Are you sure you—’
Ben was already pushing past her. With his heart in his mouth he shoved two cops out of the way and saw what the forensics team were attending to under the white glare of their lights.
‘They were found by the farmer who lives over the hill,’ Lynch said from behind his shoulder. ‘He was looking for a missing sheep when his dog picked up the scent of blood and ran in here. The poor fellow’s being treated for shock now.’
Lying sprawled on the floor were the corpses of a man and a woman. The woman was face down in the dirt. She wore a green cardigan over a red dress. Her bare legs were kicked out at unnatural angles and one of her shoes was missing. From the blueish hue of her skin it was clear that she’d been dead for some time. The right side of her head had been blown away at extreme close range by a gunshot. Her blond hair was thickly matted with congealed blood and pulped brains.
‘Samantha Sheldrake, Forsyte’s PA,’ Lynch said.
Ben felt suddenly dizzy and had to lean against the stone wall. He was boiling with anger at Lynch for not having said more in her message. She could have spared him the torture of the last half hour. But he was too overcome by a strange mixture of relief and horror to say anything. After a few moments his breathing had slowed a little and he turned to look at the other corpse.
Roger Forsyte was recognisable from his pictures, although he looked very different in death, especially after such an obviously horrible death. His face was twisted in agony and terror. His pupils had rolled completely under his lids, so that just the ghoulish white eyeballs stared up at the ceiling. There was no gunshot wound. Forsyte had died some other way. Something much worse.
He had no hands. Somebody had chopped his arms off a few inches above the wrist and tossed the severed body parts across the bothy. From the quantity of blood that had sprayed over the rough walls, saturated his clothing and soaked into the floor, it had been done while he was still alive. Corpses didn’t bleed this much.
The double amputation looked as though it had been carried out with a heavy blade: an axe or a butcher’s cleaver. The shock of such an injury could be fatal, but not always. In his SAS days Ben had seen enough poor limbless survivors of African war atrocities to know that the human body could withstand the most brutal acts of mutilation. No, it wasn’t the hacking off of his hands that had killed Sir Roger Forsyte. Ben observed the telltale signs – the leprous pallor of the skin, the grotesque swelling, the tongue protruding from the lips. Extreme pain, then creeping muscle paralysis and eventual asphyxia. Maybe an hour to death, maybe two. Not a good end. Whoever had done this had intended to make Forsyte suffer, and they’d got what they wanted.
‘He’s been poisoned,’ Ben said.
Lynch gave a dark little smile. ‘In the Poisoned Glen. Someone’s idea of a joke? Looks as if you might have been right, too. There goes our whole kidnap theory.’
And with it had gone any remnant of a chance that getting Brooke back might be as simple as paying over whatever ransom the kidnappers demanded in return for Forsyte. Even if they’d wanted more for the women than the insurance policy could cover, Ben would have happily sold Le Val and reduced himself to a pauper to bring her back.
But that faintest, most tentative shred of hope was dead now. For all he knew, Brooke was dead too, her body dumped elsewhere for another passerby to find, hours, days, weeks from now. Or she might have tried to escape and be lying hurt or dying in a ditch somewhere, anywhere.
Lynch must have been able to read his thoughts from the strain on his face. ‘We’ll keep searching for her. The Dog Support Unit came up from Dublin during the night. We might turn up evidence that she was here. It’s not the end. Not yet.’
Ben didn’t reply. The sight of Forsyte’s mutilated body had set something jangling deep in his memory. He couldn’t bring it into focus; it was like a word on the tip of his tongue that wouldn’t come, gnawing at him, teasing him through the mist of fear and stress and confusion that was clouding his mind. What was it?
Just when it seemed about to come to him, the sound of an angry voice interrupted his thoughts – a voice that was becoming way too familiar for Ben’s liking. Hanratty had spotted him at last.
‘I don’t believe this! Who let him in here? Lynch! Did you tell him about this?’
Ben turned away and stepped out into the rain. It was pouring even harder now, but he could barely feel the cold water running down his face and soaking his hair and clothes. He gritted his teeth and tried to focus on the vague, fleeting memory that still eluded him. What the hell was it that seeing Forsyte’s severed hands had triggered in his mind?
From fifty yards away, Amal had seen Ben emerge from the bothy. He swung the BMW’s passenger door open. The inside light shone on his worried face. ‘Well?’ he called out nervously, expecting the worst.
Ben trudged down the muddy path. ‘There are two bodies in there,’ he said to Amal. ‘Brooke’s not one of them. It’s Forsyte and his PA.’
The tension dropped from Amal’s face. He climbed out of the car. The rain began to spot on his expensive coat. ‘Then she’s alive. I mean, it’s awful. For the others, that is … but Brooke’s alive. Thank God!’
Ben wasn’t sure he had anything to thank God for.
‘She must be alive, mustn’t she?’ Amal said, seeing the look in Ben’s eyes. ‘This is good news, isn’t it? Isn’t it?’
But Ben couldn’t give him that reassurance. They both turned to look as Kay Lynch came down the path from the bothy and joined them beside the car. ‘I’m grateful to you for letting me know about this, Kay,’ Ben said sincerely. His anger with her hadn’t lasted more than a minute or two.
‘I’m sorry it wasn’t better news,’ she said. ‘And I’m afraid there’s something else you should know. The Inspector’s on the phone to Scotland Yard right now. He’s requesting for a search warrant to be issued for your friend Dr Marcel’s home in Richmond.’
‘What? Why!?’ Amal exploded.
Lynch gave a shrug. ‘Because he thinks that in the light of this turn of events, her disappearance looks suspicious. He’s dispatched a patrol car to Sea View Guest House to collect the rest of her belongings for examination. He says we can’t afford to assume she isn’t implicated somehow.’
‘Implicated?’ Amal yelled.
‘Don’t tell me you agree with Hanratty about this,’ Ben said to Lynch.
‘He’s my superior. I don’t have an opinion. Not one that matters, at any rate. And I’ve already told you far more than I should. I’m sticking my neck right out here.’
‘It’s insane!’ Amal shouted. ‘It’s absolute cretinous imbecility of the highest order! What kind of utter moron would—?’
Lynch glanced over her shoulder. ‘I’d keep my voice down, if I were you. Here he comes.’
Hanratty marched down the muddy slope towards them. ‘Well, well. Having a party, are we? Fancy you two just happening to turn up again.’ He glowered at Lynch, then turned to face Amal and stabbed a stubby finger into his chest. ‘You,’ he said, blowing spittle, veins standing out on his forehead, ‘had better not be thinking of going back to your own country, wherever that is. The situation has changed now, and you’re mixed up in it, pal.’
‘I happen to be a British citizen, pal. England is my country,’ Amal shot back in fury. ‘And I suppose you think I’m a suspect too? It’s outrageous. Brooke and I were here for a bloody party, that’s the beginning and end of it. We went through all this yesterday, over and over. Instead of standing here wasting time with these ridiculous allegations, why don’t you go and do your job, you colossal great prick?’
‘Amal,’ Ben said, putting a hand on his arm to quiet him. The cop’s eyes were beginning to burn with a dangerous light, and he was quite capable of having Amal dragged away to a cosy little cell if he carried on like this. ‘My friend’s upset,’ Ben said to Hanratty. ‘We’ll be getting out of your way now.’
‘Delighted to hear it,’ Hanratty snorted. He was about to say more when his phone rang and he wheeled back towards the bothy to take the call.
‘I’m sorry,’ Lynch said, seeing the look in Ben’s eyes. ‘It’s not me.’
‘I know,’ Ben said.
‘The moment I hear anything more, I’ll call you, okay? But you have to promise me to stay out of this and leave the investigating to us.’
‘I promise,’ Ben said. Lynch nodded, then turned to follow Hanratty back up the slope.
‘It’s just unbelievable,’ Amal was raging as they got back into the car. ‘Brooke a suspect? Based on what?’
‘It’s time for you to go home,’ Ben said.
Amal looked at him with hurt and confusion in his eyes. ‘So that’s it? No protest, no nothing? How can you just accept this shit from Hanratty, after all the things you said before? I thought you were going to do something. That’s why I thought you could help, because you had expertise in this kind of thing.’
‘There’s nothing more we can do here,’ Ben told him. ‘It’s over.’
Amal boggled at him. ‘It’s over? Are you serious?’
‘We’ll go back and get your stuff,’ Ben said. ‘Then I’ll take you to the airport.’
Amal stared. His throat gave a quiver. ‘You think she’s dead, don’t you? That’s why you’re giving up.’
Ben didn’t reply. He started the engine and put the car in reverse.
‘Why can’t you just be straight with me and say so? That’s right, just go silent on me again. I can’t stand it. I can’t stand any of it.’ Amal slumped despairingly in his seat as Ben backed the car away from the police vehicles and turned it round in the narrow road.
Arriving back at the guesthouse, they found a Garda patrol car parked outside and two officers loading the rest of Brooke’s things into the back of it, sealed up in plastic evidence bags. Mrs Sheenan was watching from the doorway in her curlers, dressing gown and slippers, extremely displeased to have been roused so early from her bed and even more mortified that her establishment had been ransacked by the Garda like it was a den for common criminals. It would be the talk of the village for evermore. Amal tried in vain to mollify her and explain what was happening, then gave it up to go to his room and start packing to leave.
Ben watched the police car disappear down the street before returning inside to check flight times and book Amal a seat on the first plane to London that morning. Minutes later, they were back in the BMW and setting off.
Amal looked deep in thought all the way to Derry Airport, privately chewing over something with a set expression on his face. As they were about to part, he turned to Ben. ‘Listen, I, ah, I don’t generally go around telling people this, but I do actually have some family connections. Fairly powerful ones, in fact. And I have my own money, a lot of money. I believe that Brooke is alive. I’d do anything – I mean anything – to find her. Whatever it takes. You understand me?’
‘I understand you,’ Ben said. He thanked him. Left him standing clutching his bags and headed back towards the car.
The truth was, he’d only wanted Amal out of the way. He knew what he had to do next, and that it was something he needed to do alone.
Because as he’d been standing there on the dark, rainswept roadside in the middle of the Poisoned Glen listening to Amal ranting at Lynch and Hanratty, Ben had suddenly remembered.
Chapter Fourteen (#ulink_6e2b5076-8113-5141-81f8-c6a92d9df9dc)
With the realisation of what had happened to Forsyte, the situation was suddenly totally altered. Things were about to turn an awful lot uglier than they already were.
Ben also knew now that there was no point in crossing back into the Republic. He was already on the side of the border he needed to be. Sitting behind the wheel of the BMW at Derry Airport, he took out his phone and dialled a number in Italy. After a few rings he heard a familiar, warm voice that would normally have made him smile. ‘Pronto?’ she said.
‘Hello, Mirella.’
‘Ben!’ She was delighted to hear from him. ‘Are you coming to see us again?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘What is wrong?’ she asked, hearing the tone of his voice.
‘I need to talk to Boonzie, Mirella. Is he there?’
‘I will call him,’ she said anxiously. A muffled clattering on the line as Mirella laid down the phone and went off to fetch her husband. Ben could hear her voice in the background shouting ‘Archibald!’. Boonzie would never have tolerated anyone but his beloved wife calling him by his real name. After a few moments, his gruff Scots voice came on the line.
‘I don’t suppose you’ve been following the British news,’ Ben said.
‘What’s going on?’ Ben could see the grizzled, granite-faced Scot standing there, his eyes narrowing in concern.
‘I have a problem, Boonzie.’
Boonzie McCulloch had been a long-serving 22 SAS sergeant, and a mentor and friend of Ben’s for many years, before he’d astounded everyone by quitting the army to settle in the south of Italy and set up a smallholding with a vivacious black-haired Neapolitan beauty he’d fallen head over heels in love with while on a few days’ leave. The flinty, battle-hardened fifty-nine-year-old had found his own private heaven at last, contentedly working his sun-kissed couple of hectares to produce the basil and tomato crop that Mirella turned into gourmet bottled sauces the local restaurant trade couldn’t do without.
But the soft life hadn’t got to Boonzie completely. He still had a few aces up his sleeve, like the small arsenal of military weaponry that had got Ben out of a sticky moment in Rome the year before. And because the SAS had always been so much more deeply embroiled in matters of political secrecy and delicacy than other British army regiments, he still carried around with him a headful of the kind of privileged information that the likes of Detective Inspector Hanratty wouldn’t have had access to in a thousand years.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Boonzie muttered when Ben had finished quickly filling him in. ‘Need help?’ He’d always been the practical type. Ben knew it would take only one word for him to lay down everything and be on the first flight to Ireland.
‘I just need to know I’m on the right track. Forsyte. Roger Forsyte. It was before my time, but it’s ringing bells.’
‘Aye, me too, laddie. Big fuckin’ bells. In some ears they havnae stopped ringing since Belfast, 1979.’
Ben nodded, but it wasn’t much of a relief to have it confirmed that his hunch had been correct. ‘The Liam Doyle incident.’
‘Think it was maybe my second stint in that godforsaken hole,’ Boonzie said, ‘maybe my third, when they found Doyle’s body. This shit was happening all the time, but they’d normally just blow your brains oot, not chop both your arms off that way. Nasty.’
‘About six inches above the wrist?’
‘With a cleaver,’ Boonzie said. ‘While he was still alive.’
‘Just like Forsyte.’
‘Then they put a nine-milly between his eyes and dumped the body out in the sticks in County Antrim. It was never confirmed that Doyle was IRA. Neither were the rest of the rumours, like who’d done it. A lot of folks were certain it wisnae the handiwork of the UVF or any of the other Loyalist bunch, though Lord knows some o’ those fuckers were even worse than the Republican boys. Let’s just say that in certain circles, it wisnae any secret who wiz behind it.’
‘And Forsyte?’
‘Roger Forsyte,’ Boonzie said. ‘Hold on a sec. I’m looking him up on the internet.’ Ben could hear a tapping of keys. ‘Here he is. Oh, aye. Marine Exploration?’ Boonzie gave a dark chuckle. ‘So that’s what former MI5 agents end up doing, digging up sunken treasure? There’s a lot of digging up to be done in Northern Ireland too. A lot of dead bodies were put in the ground in those years, and yer man’d know where to find half of them.’
‘You’re sure? Forsyte was MI5?’
‘You can bet your arse on it, Ben. I’ve seen that face before. These bastards were all over the place. And I heard the name Forsyte mentioned more than a couple of times.’
‘I need facts, Boonzie. Not surmises.’
‘Trust me. He was mixed up deep in this shite.’
Although it had taken place a decade or so before Ben had joined the army and while he was still a boy, he’d heard enough about that unsavoury chapter in Ulster’s history to know of the scandal that had erupted over the Liam Doyle incident. It was later to be overshadowed by the events of Operation Flavius during the Thatcher era, when three unarmed suspected Provisional IRA members had been shot dead in Gibraltar by the SAS amid strong concerns about government cover-ups and misinformation – but at the time the cruel, unusual nature of Liam Doyle’s murder and the mass of rumours surrounding it had sparked off a great deal of heat. Many Catholic Republicans had been convinced that the brutal killing had been sanctioned by British Intelligence.
Ben knew all about the ugly, complex backdrop to the incident, too. In those days, Northern Ireland had been the tense staging ground for a hidden war between Britain and America, both of which were illicitly supplying weapons and intelligence to their respective sides of the conflict. On the one hand, interests sympathetic to the Republican cause within the CIA were allegedly arming the Provos with weaponry and information to help them kill their Loyalist enemies. As part of the deal, the FBI had turned a blind eye when IRA members visited America to liaise with their secret allies there. Meanwhile, the British government and MI5 had been doing exactly the same thing to help the opposite side, by providing guns, explosives and intelligence to members of both the Ulster Defence Force and Ulster Volunteer Force against the IRA, with the tacit compliance of Northern Ireland’s police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Both sides had been guilty of all manner of atrocities, but few had been so shocking as the mutilation done to Liam Doyle.
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Scott Mariani
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 25.04.2024
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О книге: THE MASTER BESTSELLER RETURNS WITH THIS GRIPPING THRILLER.A SUNKEN SECRET. A MISSING WOMAN.A RACE AGAINST TIME.Former SAS major Ben Hope is relaxing at his home in Normandy when he hears the worst news of his life. His ex-girlfriend Dr Brooke Marcel has been kidnapped.Racing against the clock, Ben’s frantic search for Brooke leads him from Ireland to the Spanish mountains and the rainforests of Peru.What is the mysterious link between the kidnapping, the salvage of a sunken 16th-century Spanish warship and the secret activities of its wealthy discoverer?As the trail of wreckage and mayhem intensifies, Ben soon uncovers a web of intrigue, corruption and brutal murder.But will he be too late to find Brooke alive?BEN HOPE is one of the most celebrated action adventure heroes in British fiction and Scott Mariani is the author of numerous bestsellers. Join the ever-growing legion of readers who get breathless with anticipation when the countdown to the new Ben Hope thriller begins…