‘I think that your friends outside aren’t going to help you with this.’
‘It was a kidnap attempt, wasn’t it?’
‘Sounds like it,’ he agreed. ‘People in your position are a target. You’re high profile, you’re wealthy. Unless, of course, someone is out to do you some harm. Do you have any particular enemies?’
Leigh pursed her lips. ‘Not that I can think of. Why would I? I’m just a singer.’
‘A pretty well-known singer, though. Have you ever thought anyone was stalking you, ever received any strange phone calls, emails, letters?’
She shrugged. ‘I get fans trying to contact me through Pam, my PA. People sometimes recognize me and want an autograph for a CD cover, things like that. But never anything you’d call strange or threatening.’
‘When you got away from your attackers and took the cab, did you come straight here?’
‘I’m not that stupid. I thought they might get the number of the cab and trace me.’
He nodded. ‘So nobody knows you’re here apart from the hotel staff?’
‘Just the police.’
‘They’re never much use in these cases.’
‘Well, they took a statement from me and said they’d look into it.’
‘I don’t suppose you got the number of the car?’
‘Ben, it happened so fast…’
‘That’s all right. It was probably either a false plate or a stolen car anyway.’ He paused, measuring his words for what he wanted to say next. ‘Leigh, I have to ask…it’s been a long time since…’
‘Since you ditched me and vanished?’
He ignored that. ‘I meant, we haven’t been in touch for a long time. Did you ever marry?’
‘Strange question, Ben. I’m not sure I—’
‘It might be important.’
She hesitated before replying. ‘It was a long time after you,’ she said.
‘Who is he?’
‘He’s a composer, writes film scores. His name’s Chris. Chris Anderson.’
‘You’re still together?’
‘It only lasted about two years,’ she said. ‘It just didn’t work out. We still meet occasionally, as friends.’ She frowned. ‘What are you getting at?’
‘Kidnapping is just a business like any other, Leigh. It’s not personal. It’s all about money, and if there’s no family or spouse to pay for your safe return, there’s no motive. It’s the ultimate emotional blackmail. It only works if there’s a third party who’s scared enough of losing someone they love.’ He took a swig of Scotch, draining the glass almost to the bottom. ‘There’s only one exception to that rule, and that’s if the victim has K&R insurance.’
‘K&R?’
‘Kidnap and ransom.’
‘I didn’t even know you could take out insurance against that.’
‘So I take it you haven’t got any?’
She shook her head.
‘That means we can largely rule out a financial motive,’ he said. ‘Unless it was an amateur job. Snatch the person first and worry about the details later. But these guys sound more professional than that. And I don’t think it was a case of mistaken identity either. They knew where you were living. Someone had done their homework.’ He paused to take another long drink of whisky. He laid the empty glass down with a clunk on the table. ‘What are you planning to do now?’ he asked.
‘I want to get out of London, for a start. I can’t stand it here any more, trapped like an animal in this hotel. I’ve got to be in Venice in mid-January for The Magic Flute. But first I’m heading for west Oxfordshire, in the country. Dave and his team are escorting me there.’
‘Why there?’
‘It’s a place I bought a while ago. I’ve been thinking of setting up an opera school.’
‘Who knows about it?’
‘Nobody yet, apart from myself, my PA and my business manager,’ she said. ‘At the moment it’s still just a big old empty house with nothing but a few boxes of stuff sent over from Monte Carlo. I haven’t got around to furnishing it. But it’s liveable in. I’ll stay there for a few days until I decide what to do next.’
‘I’ll tell you what you need to do,’ Ben said. He jerked his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the door. ‘First thing, you need to ditch those idiots outside. They’re a liability. I could have been anybody walking in here. They didn’t even slow me down.’
She nodded. ‘You’ve put things into perspective a little. So, say I agree to ditch them right away. What next?’
‘You want me to step in?’
‘That’s what I was hoping,’ she said.
‘I’m not a bodyguard, Leigh. It isn’t what I do. But I know people. We’ll get you some proper protection.’
She looked unhappy. ‘Why should I exchange one bunch of heavies for another?’
He smiled and shook his head. ‘The people I have in mind are professionals. The real thing. You would barely even know they were there, but you’d be safe. I know, I trained them.’
‘I’d feel safer with you,’ she said.
‘Even after what I did to you?’
‘You won’t let me down again?’ she asked. ‘Not this time?’
He sighed. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I won’t let you down again.’
Chapter Six
Berne, Switzerland
Heini Müller huddled closer to the fire and warmed his hands. Snowflakes were spiralling down from the night sky, sizzling against the metal sides of the brazier.
It had been a long day, and some of the protesters were getting restless waiting for something to happen. He ran his eye over the crowd. They weren’t as vociferous as they’d been that afternoon. People were standing around smoking herbal cigarettes, sipping blackcurrant tea and decaf from their flasks, talking in groups, kicking their feet, looking tired and cold. Some people had given up and gone home, but there were still about four hundred of them.
They’d tried earlier to get inside the hotel grounds, but when these bastards had their conferences the security was tight. The place was locked up solid and they’d had to content themselves with waving banners outside the tall gates. The police were keeping their distance, vans and motorcycles parked some way up the road, and more inside the grounds. The cops were nervous. They knew they were seriously outnumbered.
The big hotel stood a few hundred yards away, across snowy lawns. There were thirteen limos parked outside the conference building, black, identical. A few minutes ago, Heini’s girlfriend Franka had spotted a bunch of drivers emerge from a side entrance to wipe snow off the cars. It looked like something was beginning to happen at last.
‘Here they come,’ someone yelled. The protesters picked up their banners like weapons. STOP CLIMATE CHAOS. ARAGON FOR EUROPE.
Heini watched through Franka’s binoculars as the conference building opened and the attendees filed out under the snow. The youngest of the men were middle-aged. They were all smartly dressed and some of the older ones wore hats. The hotel forecourt had been salted and swept for the Important Men, and the drivers and hotel staff were in attendance with umbrellas. Motorcycle police mounted their white Honda Pan Europeans, and plain-clothed security men stood around talking on radios.
Thirteen drivers simultaneously opened thirteen limo rear doors, and the passengers got in. The doors slammed and the hotel staff gathered respectfully under the snow as the cars pulled away. The procession purred softly down the private road towards the tall gates where the protesters were waiting. Flanking motorcycles led the way, and four security cars brought up the rear.
In the back of the lead limousine a slightly built, smartly dressed man in his late sixties reclined into the leather seat. His name was Werner Kroll and he was the committee president. He folded his hands delicately on his lap and waited patiently as the limo approached the thronging, raging crowd.
Kroll’s assistant sat opposite him. He was a younger man, in his early forties. He was muscular and still wore his hair the way he
had in his military days. He turned to watch the waving banners with a scowl of derision. ‘Idiots,’ he said, pointing a gloved finger. ‘Look at them. What do they think they’re achieving?’
‘Democracy gives them the illusion of freedom,’ Kroll replied softly, gazing at them.
The gates swung open automatically to let the limousines through. The protesters immediately swarmed around the cars, yelling slogans and shaking their banners angrily. There were a lot more of them than usual, Kroll observed. Two years ago the demonstrators outside these meetings would be little more than a disordered band of hippies, sixty or seventy at the most and easily within the police’s power to subdue. Things were different now.
The crowd surrounded the car. The police were mingling with the demonstrators now, grabbing people and dragging them away to the waiting vans. The pitch was rising fast. Three officers grabbed hold of a young man carrying an ARAGON FOR EUROPE banner who was blocking the car’s path. The banner clattered against the windscreen, the rough painted words large against the glass.
Kroll knew the name Aragon very well. Aragon was the man who was giving these people their power. In a few short years the charismatic young Europolitician had risen from obscurity to being able to command massive popular support for his Green and anti-nuclear policies. It wasn’t just a group of hippies, radicals and committed lefties protesting any longer. Aragon was appealing to the middle classes. And that was dangerous.
Heini Müller reached into his bag and took out a box of eggs. He was a vegan and didn’t normally buy them, but for this he’d made an exception. The eggs were months old. Heini stood grinning as the lead limo approached, its headlights blazing. He grabbed an egg out of the box and raised his arm to hurl it against the window of the limo. Someone else was shaking up a spray-can of red paint.
As Heini was about to smash the egg against the first car, it stopped. The opaque window whirred down.
Heini froze. Suddenly the roar of the crowd was silent in his ears. The old man in the back of the limo was staring at him. His gaze was like ice. It seemed to drain the blood out of Heini, who stood transfixed with the egg in his hand. His arm fell limp, and something cracked. The window whirred up again and the gleaming black limo moved silently on.
Heini Müller looked down at his hand. The rotten yolk dripped from his fingers. The cars went by him and he just stood there. Then the yelling filled his ears again. A policeman grabbed his hair and he was on the ground, kicking and squirming.
* * *
Kroll eased back in his seat as the car swept away between the flanking police outriders. His phone rang, and he picked it up slowly.
‘Llewellyn left before we could get to her,’ said the voice on the line. He sounded apologetic and frightened. ‘We were half an hour late.’
Kroll listened impassively, looking at the snowy hills rolling past.
The voice went on, sounding more hopeful. ‘But we have found her again. I have an address for you.’
Kroll reached for a notepad and wrote as he listened. He ended the call without a word, then pressed a button on his console. A small flat-screen TV flashed into life and he pressed play on the DVD control. Kroll looked intently at the screen. He’d seen this before. He enjoyed watching her.
She was reclining in a large armchair in a television studio in London. Her face was animated as she spoke to her interviewer. She wore a creamy cashmere dress and a string of glittering pearls that contrasted strikingly with her jet-black hair.
‘She’s something, isn’t she?’ said Kroll’s assistant.
Kroll didn’t look away from the screen. ‘She certainly is,’ he replied softly. He stopped the video playback. The screen went dark. He fixed the other man with cold eyes for a second before glancing down to the notebook on the seat next to him. He tore off the top sheet and handed it to the younger man. ‘Make the necessary arrangements, Jack,’ he said.
Chapter Seven
The village of Aston
West Oxfordshire
It was dark by the time they reached the sleepy village. Ben had the taxi drop them in the square. They bought a few provisions from the village shop and called a local taxi service to take them the two miles to Langton Hall.
The country house lay secluded in its own land, among wintry oaks and willows at the end of a long, twisty driveway. Its gables and chimney-stacks stood silhouetted against the dark blue sky, and moonlit frost glittered on the roof. The windows were in darkness. An owl hooted from a nearby tree.
Leigh unlocked the heavy oak front door and quickly punched a number into a wall panel to disable the alarm system. She turned on the lights.
‘Nice place.’ Ben’s voice echoed in the empty entrance hall. He looked around him, admiring the ornate wood panelling and the sweep of the wide staircase.
‘It will be when it’s all done up,’ she said. She shivered. ‘Cold, though. The boiler’s almost as old as the rest of the place and the heating doesn’t work.’
‘No problem,’ he said. ‘I’ll get the fires going. We’ll soon warm the place up.’
‘Thanks, Ben. There’s a pile of logs in the woodshed.’
He followed her into a large stone-floored country kitchen and laid the plastic bags of shopping on a long pine table. He checked that the old-fashioned lock on the kitchen door worked, then quietly slid open a drawer and found what he was looking for. He discreetly slipped the carving knife inside his jacket.
‘Leigh, I’m going to fetch some logs and take a look around the place. Lock the door after me.’
‘What…’
‘Don’t worry, just being cautious.’
Leigh did what he said. The big iron key turned smoothly in the lock and she heard his footsteps moving away up the corridor.
She opened a bottle of village-shop wine. There were some beakers and basic cooking equipment stored in the walk-in pantry. She took a heavy cast-iron skillet down from a hook and laid it on the gas range.
She smiled to herself as she took a box of eggs out of one of the shopping bags. It was strange, having Ben Hope around her again after all these years. She’d loved him once, loved him madly enough to have thought about giving up her career for him even before it had begun.
‘You’ll like him,’ Oliver had said that day. And he’d been right. Her brother’s new army friend wasn’t like the others she’d met. She’d just turned nineteen, and Benedict-as he’d been introduced-was four years older. He had an easy smile and a quick mind. He’d talked to her like no other boy had ever done before. Until then she’d thought love at first sight was a fairy-tale, but it had happened to her with him. It hadn’t happened to her since, and she could still remember every day of those five months they’d been together.
Had he changed a lot since those days? Physically he didn’t seem that different. His face was a little leaner, perhaps. A little more careworn, with more frown-lines than laugh-lines. He was still toned and in perfect physical shape. But he had changed. The Ben she’d known back then had been softer and gentler. He could even seem vulnerable at times.
Not any more. Through Oliver she’d heard enough about Ben’s life during the intervening fifteen years to know that he’d seen, and perhaps done, some terrible things. Experiences like that had to leave a mark on a person. There were moments when she could see a cold kind of light in his blue eyes, a glacial hardness that hadn’t been there before.
They ate sitting on the hearth-rug in the unfurnished study. It was the smallest room in the cavernous house, and Ben’s crackling log blaze had quickly chased the chill from the air. Firelight danced on the oak panels. In the shadowy corners of the room, packing cases and tape-sealed cardboard boxes were still piled up unopened from the move.
‘Fried egg butties and cheap wine,’ he said. ‘You should have been a soldier.’
‘When you work the hours I do, you learn to appreciate the quick and simple things in life,’ she said with a smile. The bottle between them was half-empty now and she was feeling
more relaxed than she had for days. They sat in silence for a while, and she let her gaze be drawn by the hypnotic rhythm of the flames.
Ben watched her face in the firelight. He had a clear image in his mind of the last time they’d sat alone together like this, a decade and a half earlier. He and Oliver had been on leave from the army and had travelled up to mid-Wales together to the Llewellyn family home in Builth Wells. The old merchant townhouse, once grand, had by then grown tatty and neglected with the decline of Richard Llewellyn’s antique piano restoration business. Ben had only briefly met Leigh and Oliver’s father, a kindly, heavy man in his mid-sixties, with a greying beard, a face reddened by a little too much port and the sad eyes of a man widowed for six years.
It had been evening, the rain lashing down outside, wind howling through the chimney. Oliver was taking advantage of his week’s freedom to go in search of pulchritude, as he had put it. Richard Llewellyn was up in his private study, as he always seemed to be, poring over old books and papers.
Alone downstairs, Ben had built a roaring log fire and Leigh had sat by him. They’d talked quietly for hours. That had been the night of their first kiss. There hadn’t been many.
He smiled to himself, returning to the present-watching her now, the flickering glow on her cheek. Neither time nor fame had changed her.
‘What are you thinking about?’ he said.
She turned away from the fire to look at him. ‘Thinking about you,’ she said.
‘What about me?’
‘Did you ever marry, find someone?’
He was silent for a moment. ‘It’s hard for me, with the life I lead. I don’t think I’m the settling kind.’
‘You haven’t changed, then.’
He felt the sting of her words, but said nothing.
The Ben Hope Collection: 6 BOOK SET Page 36