The Armada Legacy

Chapter Six

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

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 actually go 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

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.