‘But that’s just a theory,’ Mike said, still perplexed. ‘It doesn’t prove that he actually did lose weight.’
‘No, but it got me interested in finding out more. Not long before the kidnap, Drew took a blazer to be repaired at a little clothes alterations place in St Helier.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because I’ve just been to collect it.’ Ben opened up his bag, pulled out the blazer and showed them.
‘That was a birthday present for him, years ago, before all the troubles began,’ Jessica said.
Next, Ben took the police artist’s sketch from his pocket. ‘You agree there’s no way the man in this picture could get into that blazer?’
‘I doubt it,’ Jessica said, raising an eyebrow.
‘Right. Then how do we explain why he’d have a missing button and a ripped lining fixed on a jacket he couldn’t wear any more?’
Mike and Jessica looked at each other. ‘I don’t know,’ she said.
‘Simple explanation,’ Ben said. ‘He isn’t the man in the picture. He just wants us to think he is. The blazer repair tells us two things. One, he didn’t just fake his hair and beard when he came here for Carl. I think he was all padded up to make himself look overweight, to mislead the police. He could easily have disposed of the padding, the wig and the beard afterwards. Based on how carefully he’s gone about the whole thing, I’d say he burned them.’
‘And the second thing?’ Mike asked intently.
‘The blazer’s been ready for collection since two days after the abduction. The repair took about a week, which tells us Drew took it in about five days before snatching Carl: let’s say the second of May. Now, we also know that four days before snatching Carl, probably the day after taking the blazer in for repair, he withdrew all the money from the bank.’
‘That just indicates he was acting randomly, without logic. Like a crazy person,’ Mike said.
‘No, I think it indicates that the scheme to snatch Carl all came together quite suddenly,’ Ben replied. ‘Why would he have bothered with the clothes repair, if he’d known he wouldn’t be around for the collection date? That suggests he hadn’t been planning the kidnapping for very long. Something triggered him off, and we can narrow down the moment that happened to sometime between his taking the blazer for repair to the time of the cash withdrawal first thing on the fourth of May. That’s a pretty tight window. He was suddenly in a hurry.’
‘But you said he’d been working on losing the weight all this time,’ Jessica said, confused. Doesn’t that sound like he was planning it all long in advance?’
Ben nodded. ‘Like you said, weight loss doesn’t happen overnight. It’s been a medium-term goal for Drew. But I don’t think he was doing it as part of his kidnap plan. He was doing it for the same reason anyone else would. To become healthier, to get himself together, sober up, clean up his act and maybe, in time, be allowed to see his son again. Then something else happened. Something that made him take this sudden drastic action.’
‘But what?’ Jessica asked. Tears were forming in her eyes.
‘That I don’t know,’ Ben said.
‘This is all guesswork,’ Jessica burst out. ‘We’re just sitting here speculating over tiny details, when Drew is out there with Carl, God knows where, and getting further away every minute.’ She was glaring angrily at Ben.
‘They’re not tiny details, Jessica,’ Mike said, putting a hand on her arm. ‘Ben has done some great work here. If this is right, and we can give a much more accurate description to the police, we stand a far better chance of finding them.’
‘I can’t take this any longer,’ Jessica said in a choking voice. Getting up abruptly from her stool, she excused herself and ran from the room, leaving Ben alone with Mike. A door slammed. They could hear the sound of her crying inconsolably from another room.
‘I’m sorry about that,’ Mike said. ‘She’s under so much strain.’
‘I don’t blame her for a minute,’ Ben said.
‘I think your ideas make sense,’ Mike said. ‘And I’m also thinking I might know what triggered Drew. Don’t tell Jessica I said this, because it’s a sore subject and I don’t want to upset her any more than she already is. But shortly before Carl was taken, I’d been trying to persuade her to sell up here and leave Jersey. Fresh start, you know? A new life, just her and me and Carl, leaving behind the past and all the painful memories. Not to mention that I wasn’t happy living in the house she’d shared with Drew. Sleeping in the same bed.’
‘I understand,’ Ben said.
‘It’s sensitive, you know? We argued a lot about it. Jessica didn’t want to leave, and thought I was trying to force her unfairly. Now, I’m thinking that what if Carl overheard us arguing? What if he’d mentioned it to his biological father? He could easily have called him behind our backs. Couldn’t that have prompted Drew to want to take him away sooner rather than later, before he lost touch entirely? Maybe it drove him into a panic.’
Ben thought about it, and nodded. ‘It’s possible.’
‘And if it’s true, then it means …it means I’m partly to blame. If I hadn’t put that pressure on her . . .’
‘Don’t beat yourself up,’ Ben said. ‘It was Drew who took him, remember.’
Mike looked relieved. ‘Thanks, Ben. Keep us posted, won’t you?’
‘Of course,’ Ben said, opening the door.
‘I really appreciate what you’re doing for us,’ Mike said. ‘I know you’re going to find him.’
Ben just nodded, and left.
7
THE DOVER BASE of Finley & Reynolds Investigations Ltd was situated at the end of a tree-shaded terrace of tall three-storey Victorian houses that were now mostly offices apart from one or two residential properties, on a narrow street on the edge of town. Ben had come across quite a few low-rent gumshoe private dick operations in his time, but Finley & Reynolds wasn’t one of them. A sporty Jaguar was among the cars parked in a railed-off area in front, and a wall plaque engraved with the company name glittered in the late-afternoon sun.
He’d known even before leaving Jersey that these guys wouldn’t talk to him. Improvisation was the key in such cases.
He climbed the steps to the front door, which sported a handsome, gleaming brass lion’s-head knocker below a stained glass window panel. More olde worlde charm, doing a fine job of offsetting the stigma that was hard to detach from the sometimes inevitably seedy domain of private investigations. Ben pushed through the heavy door and found himself in a spacious white lobby filled with artificial plants. A woman smiled at him from behind a desk as he walked over.
He didn’t smile back at her. Instead, he clasped a hand to his cheek and twisted his face as if in terrible pain. ‘Think it’s a bloody abscess,’ he said indistinctly. ‘How quickly can I be seen?’
The woman stared blankly at him for a second, then understood. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said with a frown of sympathy. ‘You’ve got the wrong place. The dental surgery is next door. But I think they’re shut on a Saturday.’
Ben mumbled a tortured apology and hurried out. By the time he’d reached the door, a quick sideways glance had told him the location of the alarm system control box a few feet from the entrance, what type it was and how to disable it. This kind of stuff wasn’t exactly new to him.
But it would have to wait a few hours. Toothache miraculously vanished, the patient walked the half mile back to the bed and breakfast he was staying in. There he sorted through some of the kit he always carried in his bag: the mini-Maglite; the set of locksmith’s picks made to resemble an innocent ring of Allen wrenches; the Yale universal bump key that looked just like an ordinary house key and was disguised on a ring of real ones, capable of opening most locks; and a pair of thin leather gloves. Nothing that could mark him out too obviously as a burglar, should a nosy cop decide to take a look inside his bag.
Ben bided his time quietly until early evening. Having never liked breaking and entering on an em
pty stomach, sometime after seven he made his way to a nearby pub, ordered a steak and lingered for a long time over a couple of pints of Guinness when what he really wanted was whisky.
He was the last to leave the pub at closing time. From there, he took a long stroll along the seafront, then made his way down onto the beach where he leaned back on a bench and watched the lights twinkling on the water while he chain-smoked the last of a packet of Gauloises. It wasn’t quite his own little secluded stretch of shingled Galway beach, though, and the intrusive Saturday-night thump of music drifting down from a nightclub on the esplanade kept reminding him how he missed his sanctuary in Ireland. When the green glow of his watch dial read one-thirty, he shouldered his bag and began making his way back towards the detective agency.
The parking area in front of Finley & Reynolds’ offices was empty now, the rails gleaming dully by the amber glow of the streetlights. Ben slipped on his gloves as he neared the steps. A plain white van and a couple of residents’ cars sat along the kerbside, but other than that, the street was deserted.
He didn’t pause at the bottom of the steps to glance about, or go darting quickly up to the door. The furtive ones were always the ones who got spotted. With all the casual ease of someone who’d worked there for years and was just popping back late to pick up some documents they’d forgotten, he approached the door and took out his bumper key. If that didn’t work, the lock picks would make fast work of it. Once he was inside, the thirty seconds’ delay before the alarm system sounded would be ample time for him to open up the alarm control box and disable the power and phone wires. He’d reconnect them before leaving, so that nobody would ever know he’d been there. In and out: the SAS way, except without blowing anything up.
The bumper key slid into the lock. He felt the serrations engage in the cylinder. Just one twist, and he’d be in.
But just as the lock was about to open, the side door of the van parked at the kerbside slid open with a scrape and a clang. Three dark figures piled out and instantly raced across the pavement to the steps of the building. Figures clutching impact weapons.
Ben instinctively ducked the object that came slicing towards him. The tapered aluminium shaft of the baseball bat swooshed through empty air where his head had been half a second earlier, and smashed into the stained glass window panel on the door, instantly setting off a high, keening alarm.
‘That’s just great,’ Ben said. But he couldn’t afford to worry about that now. The strike that had just been aimed at him would have killed him if he hadn’t moved fast. And that was upsetting. So was the sight of the knife in the hand of one of the other attackers.
At times like these, Ben didn’t have to think about what to do. Thinking was too long-winded a process. Thinking got you killed. So he simply reacted. Fast. Faster than anything any of the three had ever seen before, or could even have imagined.
In less than a second, he’d gained control of the thick end of the baseball bat and jabbed the handle end hard and fast towards its wielder, aiming at the strip between the eyeholes of the ski mask. The round pommel of the bat hammered into the bridge of the guy’s nose with a soft crackling crunch and sent him sprawling backwards down the steps, knocking down the man behind him. The third attacker managed to dodge out of the way and came at Ben with the knife. Ben saw it coming, that slim little four-inch blade glittering like a tongue of flame under the streetlight as it darted towards his stomach.
With his back to the door and nowhere to retreat, he twisted aside; the knife missed him and the force of the stab sent its sharp tip thunking into the wood. Before the man could wrench the blade free, Ben had broken his wrist. Then, without hesitation, he grasped the collar of the man’s jacket and drove his head so hard into the iron railing alongside the steps that the bars bent.
Ben let him collapse in an unconscious heap, plucked the knife out of the door and turned to face the other two, who’d picked themselves up. The one with the smashed nose was unsteady on his feet and pouring blood from under his mask. The other was brandishing his bat but looking much less sure of himself now that it was all on him to finish the job. Ben saw the fear in his eyes, and knew it was over. With barely a glance at their stricken comrade, the two of them retreated quickly to the van. The uninjured one leapt into the driver’s seat, twisted the ignition and hit the gas. The van took off with a wheel-spinning screech and a roar, and went snaking wildly off up the street.
The alarm went on keening, shrill and insistent. Ben’s plan was already blown – now he had just a short time to press some truth out of his remaining attacker. ‘Wakey, wakey,’ he said, slapping him hard about the face and shaking him. The man’s eyes fluttered groggily open in the holes of the ski mask.
‘Nice to know who your friends are, hmm?’ Ben said to him as the escaping van skidded round the corner out of sight. As the man put up a half-hearted struggle, Ben kicked him all the way down the steps, hauled him roughly upright, slammed him hard up against the wall and ripped the mask off his head. He was about thirty. Crew cut, brutish features, scarred cheek. ‘They find you in the pages of a comic book?’ Ben said.
Lights were coming on in the residential part of the street as the alarm began to draw attention. Time was getting shorter by the instant, and Ben wasn’t going to waste words. The guy gasped in terror as the edge of the blade pressed against his windpipe with just enough pressure to break the first layer of skin. The broken wrist and fingers were all but forgotten now. He looked into Ben’s eyes and saw the look that left him in no doubt: here was someone who would not hesitate to saw his head off if he didn’t talk, and fast.
‘Who sent you?’ Ben demanded. Over the shrilling of the alarm came the sound he’d been afraid he’d hear any moment. Saturday night in Dover with little to do, the cops were on the prowl. The siren wasn’t too far away. They’d be here in a minute.
‘I said, who sent you?’ A little more pressure with the blade. Another layer of skin. The thin trickle of blood looked black in the street light.
‘Hunter!’ the man wheezed in panic, desperately trying to pull back from the touch of the blade.
Ben frowned. ‘Drew Hunter?’
‘Yeah—’
‘Where’s the boy?’ Ben rasped, his eyes just inches from the guy’s. He ground the blade’s edge harder against his throat. Any more, and it would sink in so deep that he wouldn’t ever talk again.
‘Aagh! I don’t know!’
The howl of the siren was drawing close. Ben took his eyes off his captive for an instant and saw the swirling blue halo and the blaze of headlights at the end of the street. Time to leave. He let the guy slide down the wall and slump bleeding to the pavement. Picked up his bag and slipped away round the side of the building just as the police car came tearing into sight. There was a little fenced yard at the back, a screen of conifers between it and the neighbouring property. Ben tossed the knife, vaulted over the fence. Without a sound, he merged into the shadows and was gone.
8
BACK IN HIS digs across town, Ben threw open the window, leaned out and lit a Gauloise. He washed the first deep draw of smoke down with a sip from his whisky flask to quell the last of the adrenaline rush still pumping around his system. There was a small shard of glass in his hair. He picked it carefully out and laid it on the windowsill, gazing thoughtfully at it and trying to understand what the hell was going on.
The anomalies were stacking up. There were more questions than answers, but one thing was for sure: this case was about more than just a kidnapping. If Drew Hunter had sent in a bunch of heavies to take Ben down, it could only be for one reason: to stop him from finding out too much about whatever business Hunter had had with the private detective. But what, and why?
Ben was as expert at following people as he was at telling when he was being followed himself – and he was certain he hadn’t been. Yet somehow, Hunter had known where to find him. The man was full of surprises. Was he also behind Paul Finley’s death? It was a worrying thou
ght. If Hunter was a killer as well as an abductor, then Carl might be in more danger than anyone, even Ben, had anticipated.
More certain than ever that the files of Finley & Reynolds held an important key to all this, he resolved not to leave Dover until he knew more. And when he returned there the following night he’d be ready for the unexpected.
Ben awoke the next morning knowing that today was going to be a waiting game. He gulped down breakfast and then spent a while in his room, going over his case notes in an attempt to make sense of them. Around lunchtime, he returned to the beach, biding his time, quietly smoking, watching the tide. Waiting was a skill he’d perfected in the SAS. He’d learned how to remain still for long periods, outwardly so calm that an observer might think he was in a trance – while mentally he was ultra-alert, aware of everything around him and analysing a thousand details at once.
It was afternoon when his phone rang. It was Jessica, sounding in a high state of agitation. ‘Where are you?’
‘Still in Dover,’ he replied. ‘Something came up.’
Strange that she didn’t seem interested to ask what, he thought. In the next moment, he understood why.
‘We heard from Carl.’
Ben’s eyes narrowed. ‘What do you mean, heard from him? When?’
‘He phoned us. Just half an ago.’
‘You talked to him?’
‘No,’ she groaned. ‘We weren’t here. We were only gone twenty minutes, to get some shopping because there wasn’t a scrap of food left in the house. When we got back, there was a message on the answer machine. We’d only just missed him. We tried calling the number back but it didn’t come up. It sounded like a mobile.’
Bring Him Back Page 4