The Armada Legacy

Chapter Twelve

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

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

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.