The Ben Hope Collection: 6 BOOK SET (208 page)

Lister splayed out his hand, thumb and fingers together. Then folded the little finger and ring finger in.

He was making a number.

One. Five. Three.

‘What’s one-five-three?’ she asked him urgently. She glanced back at the bloodied pound coin. Did he mean money? A hundred and fifty-three what? Million? ‘I don’t understand!’

The motorcyclists were now just twenty metres away. The rider had opened his jacket to reveal a shoulder holster. As he walked, he nonchalantly drew a pistol. The pillion passenger held his Uzi at the hip and let off a rasping blast of gunfire. Darcey ducked as bullets punched through the bodywork and ricocheted around the inside of the car.

When she looked up again, Lister was dead. A round had blown out his temple.

She scrambled out of the car. Gunfire ripped up the ground around her as she sprinted away through the trees at the river’s edge.

There was only one place to go.

She ran straight for the concrete bank and dived into the waters of the Seine. In mid-air, she filled her lungs and prepared herself for the imminent shock of the cold water. She gasped as her body knifed into the surface, then began swimming ferociously, driving deep underwater with strong strokes. The water roared in her ears. Bullets stabbed past her, leaving little spiralling trails. She swam harder, thrashing through the water until her heart was pounding and her lungs felt ready to burst.

When Darcey surfaced with a gasp, she was a hundred metres downriver, hidden by the arched support of a bridge. She huddled against the side and watched as the two motor-cyclists returned to the crashed Laguna. One of them tossed a small black object in through its broken window.

Almost instantly, flames engulfed the car. The motor-cyclists turned and started running back towards the bike. A police siren began to wail in the distance. Then a second.

As the motorcycle roared off, the burning Laguna blew apart.

Chapter Fifty-Seven

Northeastern Portugal

A few kilometres from the Spanish border

A couple of hours’ rest around dawn had done little to make Ben feel refreshed or any stronger, but the fear of being discovered curled up asleep in the old Daihatsu by a farmer or one of the hands had been all the incentive he’d needed to move on early.

Some horses in a nearby paddock had stopped munching and stared at him warily as he took a drink from a rainwater barrel that was fed from their stable-roof guttering. Then the strange, furtive creature seemed to vanish as suddenly as it had appeared, and the horses relaxed and went back to their grazing.

Through the morning and the early afternoon, Ben had kept moving on foot. Public transport was less risky in the city, where people tended to ignore each other and individuals could lose themselves in the crowd. In country areas folks took much more interest, especially in strangers, and a sleepy railway station or half-deserted bus stop could spell disaster out here. All it took was one curious local to recognise his face from the TV news, and he’d have Darcey Kane and her troops back after him like greyhounds running down a hare. Hitching a lift was too risky for the same reason, and trying to steal a vehicle from one of the villages or farms he passed by was just asking for trouble – and maybe a couple of barrels of bird-shot from someone’s twelve-gauge into the bargain.

He kept shy of main roads, keeping to the rural lanes as much as he could and avoiding built-up areas. The effort of the long walk quickly tired him again. His arm was burning in agony under the clean dressing he’d wrapped over the stitches. There were still some codeine tablets left, but the narcotic drug could affect judgement and reaction time; he needed to keep his wits about him as best he could.

Just after four in the afternoon, near the town of Castelo Branco, he heard the chug of an old diesel coming up the road and ducked into the trees as it came by. The pickup truck had seen better days. Its motor sounded like a bag of nails and a hazy blue mist of burnt oil smoke hung in its wake. Behind the pickup was a large trailer heaped with loose straw. Ben saw his chance to gain some ground. It was better than hitch-hiking. The driver, an old man with a face like leather and one deeply tanned arm dangling out of his window, looked too half-asleep to notice an uninvited passenger joining him en route. Ben waited until the pickup had lumbered past, then ran after it, grabbed hold of the tailgate of the trailer and jumped aboard. The straw was prickly as he dug in, concealing himself from any vehicles that might come up behind.

After a bumpy, rattling, twenty-five or so kilometres westwards, the pickup lurched off the road and headed up a sun-cracked earth track towards a farm in the distance. Ben parted ways with it, picking bits of straw out of his hair as he carried on walking. By his reckoning, Brooke’s place wasn’t more than about another nine or ten kilometres away.

The closer he got, the more he kept thinking about her. The thoughts helped him to forget the pain that lanced through him with every step – but brought a different, deeper kind of pain, a sense of desolation and terrible loneliness. He wished he could call her, just to hear the sound of her voice. He wondered where she was, what she was doing. He trudged on.

Another hour passed. His step was getting heavy, as if he were wading through desert sand, and having to skirt around the edge of a village slowed his progress even more. The heat was stifling and oppressive. Ben wiped sweat from his face and looked up at the dark clouds that were rolling in from the distant hills, gradually amassing to blot out the clear blue sky. His lips were dry and his throat was parched, but he had a feeling that before too long he’d have all the water he needed, and more. A storm was brewing.

Chapter Fifty-Eight

Vila Flor, Portugal

After spending most of the day curled up on the sofa with her laptop and a pile of notes to work on her research paper, Brooke had changed into shorts and training shoes and gone for an early evening run through the forested countryside that surrounded her cottage for miles around. She was on her way back, still a couple of kilometres from home, when the sky turned ominously dark and she smelled the electric burning smell of an imminent storm. As the first rumble of thunder rolled across the hills, she felt the first heavy raindrop spatter on her arm. Moments later, the heavens opened. By the time she came running back to the shelter of the cottage, she was soaked to the skin and shivering.

Feeling invigorated after a long, hot shower, she lightly towelled her hair and pulled on a sleeveless T-shirt, a pair of loose jogging pants she used as pyjama bottoms and for general lounging-around duties, and her cosy old dressing gown. She trotted downstairs, put on some Django Reinhardt and idled away some time with a magazine while her hair dried before going into the little kitchen to start putting together a simple evening meal.

As she padded around the kitchen in her bare feet, the rain was lashing the windows and the darkening sky was lit up every few seconds by the lightning flashes. These late summer storms could go on for hours. After dinner, she planned to read a hundred pages of the paperback she was deep into, before getting an early night and listening to the wind howling and the rain on the roof. She loved storms. They comforted her, somehow.

Dinner was going to be a rice salad with mixed beans and some freshly sliced tomatoes from the garden. Brooke made a dressing with olive oil, garlic and just a little wine vinegar. She was grinding a sprinkle of black pepper onto it when the music paused momentarily between tracks.

That was when she heard the sound from outside. Brooke looked up from her pepper grinder.
What was that?

It had sounded like footsteps outside, on the gravel path next to the house. She strained to listen, but then the thunder growled loudly again across the hills.

Maybe it was Fatima, she thought. The farmer’s wife could be coming by with some eggs or wine, the way she often did.

During a storm?

Brooke went to the front door, opened it and peered outside into the sheeting rain. ‘Fatima?’

No reply. There seemed to be nobody there. Brooke shut the door, then bolted it as an afterthought. She was just about to head into the kitchen when she heard it again – the same sound of shoes crunching on wet gravel, footsteps moving quickly round the side of the house.

A fleeting movement past the kitchen window caught her eye. It could have been anything in the falling darkness – leaves blowing from a tree, or a bird wrestling against the wind. But she could have sworn she’d seen the figure of a man hurrying past.

She caught her breath, stepped quickly across the kitchen and drew the largest of the carving knives out of the block on the worktop. She walked back to the front door. Her heart beat fast and her hand was trembling a little as she slid back the bolt and turned the handle.

‘Luis? Is that you?’

Still nothing.

Had she imagined it? It wasn’t like her to get jumpy in a storm.

Brooke strode back to the kitchen and replaced the knife in the block.

And looked up to see the face squashed up against the window pane.

She let out a gasp.

The man outside was staring at her. His hair and clothes running with rainwater. His face was wild, plastered with mud down one side.

It was Marshall.

‘Brooke – let me in,’ he implored. The aggression that had burned in his eyes last time she’d seen him in London had fizzled out. He looked utterly forlorn.

Brooke stared at him through the window for a second, then marched to the door and tore it open.

‘What the hell are
you
doing here?’ she managed to say through her shock.

‘I came to see you,’ he replied lamely. The rain was still pelting down around him, bouncing off the ground. The small case at his feet looked soaked through.

‘You scared the life out of me, Marshall,’ she said angrily. ‘Sneaking around like a bloody rapist or something.’

‘I’m sorry. I thought you wouldn’t want to see me.’

‘Damn right I didn’t want to see you. How did you know I was here, anyway?’

‘Your neighbour told me where you’d gone to.’

‘You’re lying, Marshall. Amal is someone I can trust, unlike you.’

Marshall hung his head. ‘OK, OK, I tricked him into letting me inside your flat, and I went into your computer.’

‘You really are a piece of shit, aren’t you?’

‘Yes. I know. I am. You’re right. But I had to see you.’

‘I don’t want you here,’ she yelled. ‘I came here to get
away
from you!’ She was about to slam the door in his face, then something made her hesitate. The wetness on his face was more than rainwater. He was weeping openly. She’d never seen a man so empty, so defeated.

‘All right, Marshall,’ she sighed. ‘You can come in. Have a shower and dry your clothes, and we’ll talk. But you can’t stay here. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

He nodded. Brooke stepped back from the entrance steps to let him through. He left a trail of muddy steps on the hallway flagstones.

‘What happened to you?’ she said, looking at the mud caked down his side.

‘Bloody cab driver dropped me miles away,’ he mumbled. ‘I had to walk. Slipped and fell in this stinking bog.’

‘You know there’s no access for a car here, you silly sod. That’s what the path is for. You should have stuck to it.’ She pointed up the stairs. ‘You do remember where the bathroom is, don’t you? There’s a clean towel and a bathrobe on the rail. Go.’

While he was cleaning himself up, Brooke paced in the kitchen, cursing loudly. ‘What do I do now?’ she asked herself over and over. A shutter banged in the wind, and she went round the downstairs rooms closing them. As she bolted the last one, the lights went out and the house went dark.

‘Shit. There goes the power.’ She’d been half-expecting it. It didn’t take much of a storm to cut her off out here. She lit candles and placed them around the kitchen and living room. A few minutes later, Marshall came downstairs, feeling his way in the dim light. He was wearing the bathrobe. His hair was still wet. He came shuffling into the living room and slumped on the sofa.

Brooke stood over him with her arms folded and glared at him. ‘You know your being here is totally out of order, don’t you? You’re lucky I didn’t leave you out there to drown like a rat.’

‘I
am
a rat,’ he mumbled miserably. ‘You came all the way to Portugal to state the obvious?’

‘Don’t hurt me. You have no idea how I’m feeling right now.’

‘Things cannot go on like this, Marshall. You’ve got to snap out of this fixation, or whatever it is. You may have convinced yourself that you’re madly in love with me, but you aren’t.’

His face twisted. ‘Speaks the great psychologist. Is that a clinical diagnosis? I’m delusional, is that what you’re saying?’

Brooke breathed deeply and tried to sound calm. ‘I think you’re confused, Marshall. Maybe you work too hard and you’re going through a crisis, and now you’re at risk of losing everything. Phoebe loves you, you know. You’ll break her heart if you carry on like this. And you’ll end up with nobody, because the simple fact is that I don’t love you. I like you, you’re a great guy – or at least, you could be if you started acting more normally – and you’re family to me. But I could never feel anything beyond that for you and it’s important that you get that through your head. I’m with Ben. And even if I weren’t with Ben, even if I did have those kinds of feelings for you, do you think for a moment I could ever betray my sister?’

There was a long silence. Marshall sank his head into his hands and his shoulders began to quake. When he looked up at her, his eyes were red and his face streaked with emotion in the candlelight. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me,’ he sobbed. ‘I just can’t control my feelings.’

Brooke sighed. He was a pathetic sight. ‘I think we could both use a drink,’ she said, going over to a little cabinet where she kept some red wine, some glasses and a corkscrew. She quickly opened a bottle, poured out two glasses and carried them over to the sofa. Keeping well away from him, she perched herself on its arm and laid the glasses down on the low table in front of them.

Marshall snatched his up and drained half of it down in one gulp. ‘Oh, Jesus, I’m such a wreck,’ he muttered. ‘I’ve been a real prick, haven’t I? You must hate me. I wouldn’t blame you if you did.’

‘I don’t hate you,’ she said softly. ‘I think you must be in a lot of pain and I wish there was more I could do to help you.’

‘What am I going to do?’

‘You’re going to go back to Britain. You’re going to drive straight to Exeter and find Phoebe and take her away from that course she’s on. Surprise her. Take her on a cruise. Jet out to the Bahamas. Look after your wife.’

He nodded slowly, sniffed, smeared tears down his cheeks with the back of his hand and slurped more wine. ‘Maybe you’re right,’ he murmured weakly.

‘There’s no maybe. As for me, I might be moving to France soon – could be when my contract is over, in six weeks’ time. That means you and Phoebe won’t be seeing so much of me, and you can seek some professional help to forget these irrational feelings you’ve been having. Get on with your life.’

‘Ben is a lucky guy.’

‘So are you. You have Phoebe.’

He started to cry again. ‘This is so hard.’

Brooke felt a surge of pity for him. She moved from the arm of the sofa to sit closer to him, set down her glass and laid her hand gently on his arm. He sank towards her, pressing his face into her shoulder, and she held him for a few moments.

‘It’s all going to work out fine,’ she said. ‘Trust me.’