Sacred Sword (Ben Hope 7) (35 page)

‘You’re the guy. Where do we begin?’

‘We already passed two out of the five on our way in here on the ferry, flanking the mouth of the harbour. They’re called West Chop Light and East Chop Light. Let’s go and check them out.’

Within a few minutes they were driving along East Chop Drive and within sight of the first lighthouse. Built in 1877, according to the guidebook, its first keeper had been a character by the name of Captain Silas Daggett. The eighty-foot whitewashed conical tower stood away from the road, behind a neat white picket fence with a gate and a sandy path that led right up to it.

They got out of the Jeep, walked around the broad base of the lighthouse and scanned the land horizon in all directions, searching for any sign of a billionaire residence with tall windows from which the great man liked to drink in the majestic ocean view. The only houses within sight were fairly unostentatious wooden buildings that nobody would have been ashamed to call home, yet wouldn’t have been the abode of choice for a man of Holland’s limitless wealth. Compared to the Whitworth Mansion, even a comfortable family home for lesser mortals would have seemed like slumming it.

‘This is weird,’ Jude muttered. ‘I feel kind of like a stalker or something.’ After a couple of beats he said, ‘What’s that place over there?’ Ben gazed in the direction he was pointing, and saw a white house through the trees that, from where they were standing, looked larger than the other homes within sight and appeared to offer a view of the waterfront and the lighthouse.

Jude seemed hopeful. ‘Looks promising, wouldn’t you say?’

Up close, the house was obscured from the sea by thick foliage. As they turned into the gate they saw that it was a traditional white-painted wooden nineteenth-century farmhouse with a broad, low veranda over the front porch. There was paint peeling off some of the window frames and the barn roof was rusting in places. Quaint rustic living, low on glamour.

‘Doesn’t look like it to me,’ Ben said. ‘Let’s move on.’

‘Wait. What’s the harm in asking? Maybe somebody here knows him.’ Jude climbed out of the car and walked up to the house. Ben stayed behind the wheel, going through his time-honoured Zippo-and-Gauloise ritual as he watched the house door open and a squat woman with pigtails come out to spend a few moments talking to Jude before shaking her head and returning inside.

‘Told you,’ Ben said as Jude climbed back into the car.

‘At least I tried,’ Jude muttered, brushing his windblown hair out of his eyes. They sped off westwards along Beach Road, skirting the harbour with the Lagoon Pond to their left, before turning north.

The second location was situated on the northernmost fork tip of the island, on the opposite side of the harbour mouth from East Chop Light. They found the lighthouse beyond another neat white fence. Nearby was a pretty wooden house with a U.S. flag hanging from a pole on the neat lawn. It had a balcony facing the sea, with the perfect view of the lighthouse.

‘Possible?’ Jude asked.

‘A little cosy and twee,’ Ben said. ‘But possible. Maybe.’ They parked the car and walked up to the front door together. Ben knocked. An old man answered, and for the briefest instant Ben thought he was standing face to face with the billionaire himself. ‘Mr Holland?’

‘Who?’ the old man asked, gurning up at Ben toothlessly. A dog started yapping from inside. An old woman appeared in the hallway behind her husband. Her legs were swollen and bandaged, and she needed to lean heavily on two crutches to stay upright. ‘Who’s there, Frank?’ she quavered.

‘We’re looking for—’ Jude began.

‘Forget it,’ Ben said. ‘Let’s go. I’m sorry we disturbed you, sir,’ he said to the old man.

Two down, three more to go. It wasn’t time to worry, not quite yet. The next point on the map was the Edgartown Light Station, a few miles to the southeast along the coastal road in the island’s main town. By the time they reached it, the afternoon was already wearing on. The rising, bitterly cold wind from the ocean had dispersed the mist, and the sun was shining.

The Edgartown Light was situated within the harbour itself. As Ben could see through his binoculars, there were many beautiful and expensive-looking homes within sight; but as he scanned around him in a slow arc, taking in every house, every balcony, every window, he thought about what he knew of Holland’s lifestyle and preferences, and his gut instinct told him that this was wrong.

‘He wouldn’t like it here,’ he said, lowering the binoculars.

Jude looked at him. ‘So you know him that well, all of a sudden.’

‘The man’s a known recluse. He’s camera shy and spurns publicity. Why pick a house that didn’t provide the kind of seclusion he needs?’

‘Fair enough,’ Jude grunted. ‘Where next?’

The next spot on the itinerary was about as remote as things got in the Vineyard. The isolated Cape Poge Lighthouse stood on the neighbouring tiny island of Chappaquiddick, which a major storm in 2007 had separated from the main body of Martha’s Vineyard by a narrow strait of water. Ben and Jude were lucky to catch what seemed to be one of the very few ferries just as it was leaving. The barge-like craft was able to carry only one or two cars across at a time to the islet.

‘Didn’t a Kennedy get shot or something here, years and years ago?’ Jude asked semi-curiously, as if Kennedys getting shot was a routine occurrence throughout history.

‘No, but maybe he should have,’ Ben said. ‘The story goes that he crashed his car off a bridge into the sea and hot-footed it away from the scene. A girl drowned in the wreck.’ The moment it slipped out, he bitterly regretted his words. Jude just nodded quietly, said nothing and gazed out of the window as they rolled off the ferry and onto Chappaquiddick Island.

In the wintertime, the place seemed utterly dismal and barren. When Ben and Jude drove up the sandy track close to the lighthouse they found a forlorn, wind-battered beach where the only other living things were the screaming seabirds circling the lonely shingled tower. ‘I don’t see any houses at all,’ Jude said. ‘Let alone the kind we’re looking for.’

‘Me neither,’ Ben said.

‘Let’s go. This place is depressing.’

It was a long time before they were able to catch a return ferry to Martha’s Vineyard. They’d wasted a large chunk of the day, and now Ben was concerned about time slipping away from him, not to mention the prospect of exhausting their list of lighthouses and coming away empty-handed at the end of it. They had a lot of miles still to cover in order to reach the fifth and final spot on the map, inconveniently situated as far away as possible on the island, all the way from east to west at its broadest point. Ben pushed the car on fast, but it still seemed like an endless drive and his watch appeared to tick the time by at double speed as they sped westwards past the towns of Chilmark and Aquinnah. Eventually, a mad dash along the promisingly named Lighthouse Road took them to Aquinnah Circle and their destination, the Gay Head Lighthouse.

The stubby red-brick tower stood among scrubland overlooking rocky cliffs. They climbed out of the car, scrambled through the long grass to the best vantage point nearby and scanned the horizon. To the landward side, there was only empty countryside and the long road snaking off into the distance. Not a single house or farm to be seen. Bare trees quivered in the wind.

‘It’s not here,’ Ben said.

‘But this was our last chance,’ Jude said. ‘How can it not be here? Did we miss something?’

‘We didn’t miss anything. We were careful. But I was wrong about the lighthouses. We’re going to have to start again.’

‘Great.’ Jude looked up at the sky, which had darkened as the biting wind pushed a slab of cloud over the face of the sun. The afternoon would soon be turning into evening. ‘Let’s get back to the car.’

Ben was silent for nearly five miles as he sped back eastwards along the coastal road that skirted the long, almost flat south side of the island. His thoughts were as black as the clouds overhead. They didn’t brighten when the wind parted the cloud cover momentarily and the sun sparkled brightly across the endless miles of sea to the right.

‘Maybe it’s my fault,’ Jude muttered. ‘I might have misled us about the whole Martha thing. I mean, maybe she was a woman after all. Holland could be anywhere, really, if you think about it.’ He threw a nervous glance at the zipping road, then another at the speedometer, which was hovering steady over the ninety mark. ‘You could try easing off a little.’

Ben kept his foot down. ‘Shut up, Jude. I’m trying to think.’

‘Me too.’ Jude paused, doing his best to ignore the speedometer. ‘Thing is, though, Hillel did say “tower of light”. What else could that be? Why don’t we phone him and ask him what he meant by—’

Jude never finished the sentence. He was hurled forwards against his seatbelt as Ben took his foot off the gas and stamped hard on the brake pedal. The Jeep screeched to a halt in the middle of the empty road.

‘What did you do that for?’ Jude yelled, sprawling back in his seat.

‘Look,’ Ben said. He pointed out of the passenger window, towards the sea. Jude frowned, then followed the line of his finger.

‘See it?’

‘See what?’

‘About a mile out. The sunlight caught something. There it is again.’

Jude had spotted it too, just a faint gleam in the distance before the clouds scudded back across the face of the sun. ‘What is that?’

Ben grabbed the binoculars from the back seat and brought the distant object into focus. It was some kind of tall fixed structure out to sea, built on three massive yellow tripod legs, with a platform like a miniature oil rig and a latticework tower pointing up into the sky. It was hard to tell at this range, but Ben guessed the structure was about a hundred feet high.

‘Let me take a look,’ Jude said, grabbing the binoculars as Ben put them down to study the map. Ben traced his finger along the south side of the island near Gay Head, back towards Aquinnah. Whatever the thing was, it didn’t feature on the map.

‘I know what it is,’ Jude said, focused on it. ‘It’s a coastal observatory tower. Unmanned, used for meteorological analysis. I’ve learned about them at Uni.’

‘Tall enough to be a risk to low-flying aircraft in the dark,’ Ben said.

Jude understood his line of thinking immediately. ‘Which would mean it would be lit up at night, wouldn’t it?’

‘The tower of light shining on the water,’ Ben said. He took the binoculars back from Jude and scanned the landward horizon. Trees. More trees. Grassland. And then – his heart gave a jump.

‘And to think we’d have driven straight past it,’ he said.

The majestic house was nestled among its own grounds close to the beach, overlooking a splendid bay and the observatory tower in the distance.

‘Give them over,’ Jude said, making another grab for the binoculars. He quickly saw what Ben had seen. ‘That’s got to be the place.’ He turned excitedly to Ben. ‘We found it!’

They left the Jeep and waded through long grass and rustling reeds that grew in clumps among the dunes, cutting around the side of the property to approach it from the beach. Ben trained the binoculars on the tall windows that overlooked the sea.

And behind one of them, gazing across the beach towards the whispering ocean, stood a figure of a man. He was short, with white hair and a neat white beard, wearing cords and a cardigan.

Ben was finally looking at the billionaire, Wesley Holland.

In a strange way, Wesley thought in a fleeting moment of relaxation as he contemplated the sea and stroked his beard, his being here, his being safely tucked away where nobody could ever find him or his treasure, was all thanks to Giselle.

Ah, Giselle. They’d lost contact long ago. He knew she was still appearing in movies, but he hadn’t seen any of them.

Looking back, Wesley and his fourth and last wife had been completely mismatched right from the start. She’d been too young for him, too impetuous, too absorbed in a burgeoning acting career that dominated her every move and decision, and, for the three and a half years the marriage had endured, limping on, Wesley’s every move and decision as well. For a man whose natural tendency was to shy away from the hubbub of the world, the constant prying of press hounds had been unbearable. Whenever Wesley opened the door, there was a camera poking into his face trying to steal a snap of the celebrity couple. He couldn’t go to the bathroom or undress for bed without fretting that he was being watched through a long-distance lens. As for trying to go anywhere or eat a quiet meal in a restaurant, forget it.

Giselle had adored the attention, of course, feeding off it like a butterfly on nectar. But to Wesley the intrusion into his hallowed privacy was the death of his very soul. The last straw had been when he’d found his dear wife conducting a guided tour of the Whitworth Mansion for journalists from
Persona
magazine.

That was when, driven to distraction, Wesley had made a secret bid on a (for him) modestly-sized, yet tolerably luxurious, beach hideaway on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, off Cape Cod. Through the remainder of his marriage to Giselle he’d escaped there whenever humanly possible, always on some flimsy excuse about making a business trip – Giselle had never cared that much where he was, anyway – and after the inevitable divorce had come and gone it had never once occurred to him to sell it. The deeds were held in the name of an obscure trust he’d set up decades earlier and never developed into anything, so that the real owner was quite untraceable.

Wesley so relished the serenity of his island bolt-hole that he’d always been very reticent about telling anyone about it. Not even his longtime lawyer, Bob Mooney, had any idea about the place. Coleman Nash had been in on it, and Wesley had also confided in Simeon Arundel once, after a few glasses of wine. The secret now rested with the dead.

The first thing Wesley had done on reaching the end of his terrifying journey had been to take the precious fibreglass case straight down to his vault. Built for storing artwork and other valuable items when he wasn’t around (there was no crime to speak of on the island, but you could never be too careful), the vault was buried ten feet beneath the foundations of the house within walls of reinforced concrete that could (according to the architects) withstand a nuclear blast. It was unshakeably secure, fire-proof, flood-proof, humidity-proof, fully air-conditioned, and a whole host of other fancy features for which Wesley had shelled out large amounts of cash and then duly pushed to the back of his mind.