The Ben Hope Collection: 6 BOOK SET (209 page)

Chapter Fifty-Nine

All his life, even before army training had sharpened his skills past imagining, Ben had possessed a strong sense of direction. As a child he’d been able to wander for hours in the woods and fields without ever once losing his way. Years later in SAS operations – jungle or desert or mountain wilderness – his inborn talent for navigation had more than a few times saved his life and those of his troopers. If he’d been to a place once, he could always rely on finding his way back there again without map or compass.

And it was the same unerring homing ability that led him right to Brooke’s little hideaway tonight. Even in the dark, sagging with fatigue, his morale all but washed away by the relentless rain and bombs of agony bursting in his whole side with every movement, he remembered every tree like a marker, every rock as if it had been put there to guide him. There was the stone wall bordering her property – and there was the grassy mound leading up to the house. He could see the terrace where they’d spent so many happy hours eating, drinking, laughing; and above it the ivy-framed window of the bedroom where they’d lain together watching the stars.

The shutters were closed upstairs and down, as he’d expected Brooke to have left them when the place wasn’t in use. It meant nobody was around. Ben couldn’t wait to get inside. A safe, secret shelter where he could dry his clothes by the log fire, shower and re-dress his wound, fill his empty stomach with some of the tinned provisions Brooke kept in her larder, then take some badly-needed rest and regain his strength.

The rain was slackening as Ben walked the last fifty metres up the gentle slope towards the house. Running his fingers along the rough stone wall that bordered the path, he felt for the gap where she kept the front door key.

It wasn’t there. He paused, wondering where else she might have left it. He didn’t want to have to break his way in.

It was then that Ben noticed the faint light through a gap in the downstairs window shutters, and froze.

Someone
was
here.

Had Brooke started letting the place out when she wasn’t using it? She hadn’t mentioned anything. Maybe she was letting a friend stay there. Ben felt his plan crumbling into pieces. He gritted his teeth and moved closer to the shutter, taking care not to make a noise on the gravel path. He pressed his hand to the cool stone wall, bent down and peered through the gap.

And recoiled as if someone had stabbed a hot needle into his eyeball from the other side of the shutter.

There were two people inside the room. One of them was Brooke. The other was a man Ben had never seen before.

They were sitting close together on the couch. Brooke was barefoot, wearing her pyjama bottoms and her dressing gown. Her hair was frizzed from the shower. The man’s hair was damp, too, and he was in a bathrobe. On the low table in front of them sat a pair of half-empty wine glasses. The room was bathed in soft candlelight.

Brooke and the man were embracing. Not kissing, not passionate. Just the intimate closeness of two people who obviously had a lot to talk about and were very open with one another. As Ben watched in horror, they broke the embrace and Brooke said something to the man. Ben didn’t catch the words, but her expression was soft, her eyes full of warmth. The man looked emotional. He smiled and squeezed Brooke’s hand, murmured something to her. She nodded, smiled back and her lips mouthed the words ‘I know’.

Ben had seen enough. He reeled back from the shuttered window. He felt as winded as if he’d been punched hard in the solar plexus. He fought for air, bent double.

This was it. This explained it all. The lack of communication between them. Brooke’s strangely elusive behaviour of the last few weeks.

She was seeing someone else.

Ben wanted to scream. He wanted to charge inside the house and confront them. He wanted to ask her – why?
Why
?

Wanted to tell her how much he loved her.

But in that moment, he knew he couldn’t. He turned and stumbled away. When he reached the path that wound back down the slope, he broke into a staggering run, and ran and ran back through the night, until his heart was ready to burst and he fell to his knees in the sodden dirt, gasping in pain. He reached in his pocket for the remnants of his codeine supply, popped the last three pills and swallowed them dry.

All he could see in front of him were Brooke and her lover sitting there inside the house. The voices screamed inside his head until he couldn’t bear them any more.

She’s happy with this man. If she doesn’t love you any more, that’s your fault, not hers.

You chased her away. You screwed it all up.

Ben staggered back up to his feet and kept on running through the darkness. Branches whipped his face. He stumbled over rocks and through mud, losing all sense of time as he kept ploughing on. By the time he saw the village lights through the trees, he might have been running for twenty minutes, or he might have been running for a month – he didn’t know.

Half-blind with confusion, he made his way up the village’s main street. He heard the muffled thump of music coming from somewhere and turned to see a squat, stretched-out building with a neon sign and a scattering of cars and trucks and a couple of motorcycles parked outside.

Ben headed that way, and walked into the packed bar. After the stillness of the night, the clamour of a hundred raised voices and the heavy rock blast from the jukebox momentarily overwhelmed his senses. Glancing around him, he ambled up to the bar and perched on a wooden stool. The barman was a grizzled guy with long hair and a Harley Davidson belt buckle digging into his overhanging belly. Ben looked past the guy, saw the whisky bottle on the shelf behind him and pointed.

‘
Duplo,
’ he said.

The barman hesitated, running an eye over Ben’s wet, muddy clothes, then shrugged as if to say ‘what the hell’. He grabbed the bottle, set a glass down in front of Ben on the bar and poured out the double measure he’d asked for.

Ben knocked it back without tasting it. He slammed the glass back on the bar and pointed at it. ‘
Outro.
’

The barman poured another. Ben sank it. ‘
Outro,
’ he said again.

By the fifth refill, the barman was frowning at him. Ben ignored him. He didn’t care about anything. Didn’t care about the people around him, didn’t care about the bullet hole in his arm, didn’t care that a high dose of codeine mixed with alcohol could cause him to black out – or maybe just drop dead on the spot. None of it mattered.

His glass was empty again. ‘
Outro,
’ he said to the barman. The guy shook his head. Ben reached across the bar and grabbed the bottle. The barman tried to wrestle it out of his grip. Ben hung on to it, dug a damp, crumpled banknote out of his pocket and flicked it over towards the guy without checking whether it was twenty euros or five hundred. Whatever it was, the barman must have thought it was a decent price for a bottle of cheap whisky, because he let go and snatched up the money before the crazy foreigner could come to his senses.

Ben couldn’t feel his legs move as he carried the whisky bottle back through the noisy crowd to the far side of the room. He slumped heavily on a padded window seat, clasped the bottle between his knees and sank his head into his hands. When he closed his eyes, he felt himself swirling backwards through a spinning tunnel of nausea. The thud of the music was like one continual roar in his ears. However hard he clamped his eyes shut, he couldn’t close the image of Brooke and the other man out of his mind. He opened them again and took another swig of the whisky.

Some guys at a nearby table covered in bottles and glasses were grinning at him and waving drunkenly at him to come over. Ben shrugged, and swayed up to his feet to join them. He didn’t understand all of the conversation that followed, but vaguely gathered that they were local guys out celebrating someone’s birthday – Ben had no idea whose. In a swirl of blurred impressions, more drinks came, glasses were clinked and in the midst of a lot of shouting and joking, he found himself switching from whisky to beer. He was pretty sure a full glass got shoved in front of him every once in a while, and he just kept numbly drinking the stuff down. The pain in his arm was completely gone now, but there were other kinds of hurt that no amount of alcohol could suppress.

He felt himself muttering her name. Shaking his head, as if he could make it go away just by refusing to accept it.

‘
Quem são vocês falam?
’ one of his new friends asked, clapping him on the shoulder. Who are you talking about?

Ben muttered a reply. He said more than he meant to. Once he started, it all came pouring out, until he stemmed the flow of words with another long pull of beer.

‘
Ela é uma puta cadela,
’ a voice from across the table said. Ben nodded. Then frowned and looked up as the meaning of the words sank slowly in.

‘Bitch whore,’ the guy repeated in English. ‘Like all the rest. You fuck them and then you leave them. Before they can do the same to you. I am right about this, no?’

A couple of the others were nodding and grinning and raising their glasses.

The grins dropped away radically when the guy who’d said it suddenly dived forward in his seat and cracked the table in half with his head. Drink flew. Glasses smashed on the floor.

Ben had hardly felt himself move. He realised he was up on his feet. Tangled in the fingers of his right hand was the big hank of dark hair that had come away from the back of the guy’s head. The guy was face down on the floor, groaning and clutching his bloody face.

There was an instant’s stunned silence; then the whole group were leaping up from their seats and the place erupted in fury. Ben saw a punch coming his way and blocked it instinctively. He moved his arm and saw another guy go flying backwards into the wall. Someone else grabbed a cue from the nearby pool table and came at him swinging it like a bat. Ben ducked backwards and felt the wind of it whoosh a couple of inches past his face. Moving around the side of the pool table he scooped up a ball and as the guy came in for a second swing he dashed it in his face at close range. There was a short scream. The cue clattered to the floor, together with some small white-red objects that Ben realised were teeth.

Nobody else tried to attack him after that. The crowd parted as Ben staggered away and tried to make it as far as the door. Then the bar-room floor came rushing up to meet him, and someone turned out the lights.

When Ben woke up, his first thought was that somebody had decided to pull his brain out through his temple with a blunt corkscrew – until he realised it was just the cruellest, most punishing headache he’d ever known. He groaned, and blinked his eyes to clear away the blurriness in his vision.

He was sitting on some kind of hard bench. He could feel vibrations coming up through his feet and against his spine, where his back was pressed to a hard wall. When he tried to move, he found that his ankles and wrists were secured tight.

That realisation cleared his senses and he opened his eyes. The first thing he saw was the unsmiling face of the Portuguese cop sitting opposite him in the back of the police van. The second thing he saw was the short-barrelled shotgun cradled over the cop’s chubby thigh, its muzzle pointed accurately enough at him to blow him in two if he tried anything. Not that he could – he could see now that his wrists and ankles were chained tight to the tubular frame of his bench.

‘Fine,’ he mumbled. ‘Be like that.’ And passed out again.

Chapter Sixty

The Ferris residence

Kensington, London

It was Brewster Blackmore’s voice on the line again, and from his tone it sounded as if he hadn’t called in the middle of the night for nothing.

‘Wait,’ Mason Ferris said. He swung his long, thin legs out of bed, stepped into his slippers and carried the phone out of the master bedroom, out of earshot of Mrs Ferris.

‘Who is it, Mason?’ she murmured sleepily as he left the room. He ignored her, stepped out into the long, broad landing and snicked the bedroom door quietly shut behind him. Moonlight shone in through the house’s high windows. He stood and looked out at the view across London, without really seeing it.

‘It’s after two, Blackmore,’ he said into the phone. ‘Tell me something I want to hear.’

‘Ben Hope’s just been arrested in a village in northeastern Portugal,’ Blackmore said, and Ferris was suddenly much more alert. ‘Local police recognised him after being called out to a bar brawl. He’s being flown back to Rome as we speak, to be treated at Sandro Pertini Hospital before being transferred to Regina Coeli prison.’

‘Hospital?’

‘Gunshot wound to the arm. He managed to get the bullet out and clean himself up. No secondary infections, but he’d lost a lot of blood and there was enough alcohol and codeine in him to kill a horse. We’re lucky we still have him. They want to keep him in for observation for a day or two. That should give us enough time.’

Ferris pondered this latest development for a moment. His plan was back on track. A thin smile traced itself across his lips, then disappeared as his pleasure gave way to darker thoughts.

‘Kane?’ he said.

‘Negative so far,’ Blackmore said. ‘We’ve lost track of her.’

‘Not good enough,’ Ferris said softly.

‘You told me to deal with the Lister situation,’ Blackmore protested. ‘I dealt with it, and I’ll deal with this. I’m doing all I can. For all we know, she’s dead and her body will wash up somewhere down the Seine.’

‘Get it done,’ Ferris told him. He shut off the phone and turned back towards the bedroom.

Chapter Sixty-One

Sandro Pertini Hospital, Rome

Two days later

It was almost a relief for Ben when the doctors came into his tiny private room early that morning and told him he was going to be moved to the prison pending his first hearing. Two days spent lying in a narrow steel-framed bed hooked up to a drip, with nothing to count the hours go by except for the changing of the guard outside his door, had felt like twenty. Other than the grim-faced police officials who’d come to formally arrest him and read him a long list of charges and rights, two doctors and four different nurses had been his only visitors. The youngest of the nurses, a waiflike thing from the deep south of Italy, seemed mortally terrified of him; while one of the older ones, a steel-haired matron with the heft of a Cape buffalo, gave him looks of such intense hatred that he was worried about being left alone with her in case she tried to inject him with some lethal drug.

So far, he’d managed to stay alive, despite the tasteless boiled vegetables they were feeding him, and some kind of pulpy grey matter that passed for meat. It was like being in the army again.

The whole time, they’d kept him strictly as far away from newspapers and TV as a person could be. He could only imagine the fun the media were having with the arrest of Urbano Tassoni’s murderer. His favourite Italian reporter, Silvana Lucenzi, would be right in the thick of it, playing to the gallery and watching her ratings climb.

‘How are you feeling?’ the doctor asked.

‘Like an innocent man about to go to jail,’ Ben said. ‘How are you?’

The murderous-looking nurse came into the room carrying a bulky paper bag, which she laid on a chair before stomping over to Ben’s bedside and unhooking him from his drip with all the delicacy of a person ripping tail feathers out of a dead turkey. Ben gave her his sweetest smile as she left, then climbed out of bed and picked up the paper bag. Inside were his clothes, cleaned and pressed, and his shoes with the laces removed.

‘Damn,’ he said. ‘Foiled again. I was planning to use those laces to throttle everyone on the ward and then escape out of the window.’

The doctor just stared blankly. Ben walked through to his little bathroom, changed out of the hospital gown and dressed. His arm was still a little stiff, but healing up fine now. When he came out again, four armed Carabinieri guards were waiting for him with handcuffs. Ben put out his wrists for the bracelets, and was escorted from the room. More police were outside in the corridor with shotguns. Among their faces was one Ben recognised. Roberto Lario avoided his eye, looked pensive and said nothing.

The guards ushered Ben out of the ward and down a short corridor to a lift. The door whooshed open, and they all piled inside. Ben faced the door, conscious of the loaded and cocked weapons just inches away. His knees were trembling with the thought of what was happening to him, but he was damned if he’d let them see him nervous. As the lift descended towards the ground floor, he turned to the silent Lario.

‘I have to say, I’m disappointed,’ he said. ‘I’d expected Darcey Kane to make an appearance. To thank me in person for letting myself get caught. That’s gratitude.’

Lario looked uncomfortable. ‘I don’t know where she is,’ he replied softly, as if even that was saying too much. Ben wanted to ask him what he meant; but then the lift bell pinged and the doors slid open. The guards shoved him forwards, and moments later he was being walked out into the pale morning sunlight.

A group of plainclothes police agents and armed Carabinieri were waiting by a pair of police Alfa Romeos and a bulky white prison van staffed by uniformed security staff. The van’s rear doors were open, revealing a stark interior that consisted of two facing steel benches, sheet metal walls and ceiling. No seatbelts. Ben guessed the Italian prison service were concerned about inmates strangling themselves, or each other, in transit. Or maybe they just didn’t care about them getting pulped in an accident. The windows were barred with high-tensile mesh on the inside, black-smoked glass on the outside.

As Ben was marched towards the back of the van he saw there was another cuffed prisoner waiting to be loaded on board with him. It seemed he wasn’t the only bad boy being transported from the hospital. The second prisoner was a stocky, dark-haired guy of about thirty. He didn’t have the look of a hard-boiled criminal. Ben wondered what the guy must have done to deserve being locked up in the back of a mobile cell with a notorious psychopathic killer.

Ben’s travel companion remained sullen and silent as the two prisoners were steered into the back of the van and the doors slammed behind them. It was dark in the back. The steel shell resonated with the growl of the diesel starting up, and then the van pulled away with a lurch. After a moment’s pause at the gates, they drove out into the streets of Rome.