The Ben Hope Collection: 6 BOOK SET

by Scott Mariani

  As Ben finished dressing and laced up the training shoes, he ran quickly through what he knew about the counterfeit Goya. ‘My bet is that the real artist was Gabriella Giordani herself. Back when she was a young countess, she had to paint in secret because her husband didn’t allow it. I think she forged ‘The Penitent Sinner’ – maybe for money, maybe just for the hell of it. Pride in her skill or something. I don’t know. The point is, Shikov sent his son to steal it even though he knew it was a fake. His man Gourko told me as much before you crashed the party.’

  ‘Why would he do that?’

  ‘Only one possible reason,’ Ben said, tucking the Browning into the waistband of his new jeans. ‘There’s something about that sketch. Something that goes way beyond any inherent value it could have, even if it was genuine. When I talked to Pietro De Crescenzo in Salamanca, he couldn’t come up with any ideas. But I have a feeling Mimi knows. And I have a feeling it’s going to help lead us to Shikov.’ He pulled the floppy rim of the fatigue hat down low over his face, and clambered into the front passenger seat.

  ‘Very nice,’ Darcey said, glancing him up and down. ‘A definite improvement. Though I have to say, those overalls really brought out the colour of your eyes.’

  ‘Please,’ Ben said, and slipped the sunglasses over them.

  They made it out of Rome and southwards to Fiumicino without an army of Carabinieri coming after them. Leaving the Ford on the far side of the car park, they merged with the crowds funnelling inside the airport building. A newspaper stand in the lobby was screaming with the latest reports of the dramatic shootout in the streets of Rome and the disappearance of Urbano Tassoni’s killer as his armed gang sprung him from police custody.

  ‘You just can’t stay out of the news, can you?’ Darcey said. Ben didn’t reply. Security cameras watched them from all sides, and it felt as if every one of them was staring right at them as they crossed the busy lobby. Ben tried not to worry about them, and fretted instead that some resourceful cop going through his things after his arrest might have figured out what the little key tagged ‘187’ was for. At the enquiries desk he did his best rendition of a hapless British tourist who’d lost his wallet with his luggage locker key inside. Darcey handed over the ten euro fine, the attendant went to fetch a duplicate key, and suddenly Ben had one less thing to worry about. Five minutes later he had his old green canvas bag slung over his shoulder, still containing his wallet and cash, and they were heading back towards the car.

  Forty-seven minutes after that, shortly before midday, they parked the stolen Ford for the last time near Stazione Termini, Rome’s main railway station. After pressing nervously through the crowds under the watchful eye of armed police, Ben bought tickets and they boarded a Trenitalia express heading for Milan and connecting to the Riviera train service to Monaco.

  ‘First class,’ Darcey noted as they found their seats, which faced across a table by the window. ‘You wouldn’t be trying to impress me, Ben Hope?’

  Ben dumped his green bag on the seat next to his and shoved the holdall under the table. ‘Don’t flatter yourself. First’s quieter. I’d prefer to stay away from crowds right now.’

  After a few minutes, the train pulled away. Nobody else had boarded their carriage. Ben leaned back in his seat, watched the outskirts of Rome flash by through the window, and closed his eyes as the clatter of the tracks settled into that same steady, hypnotic rhythm that he’d found relaxing ever since childhood. His thoughts swam for a while.

  Then some instinctual sense made him open his eyes suddenly, and he saw Darcey watching him across the table.

  ‘I thought you were sleeping,’ she said.

  ‘I can’t sleep with you staring at me. I can feel it.’

  ‘I was thinking about you and Boonzie,’ she said. ‘He’s been following the news and really worrying about you. If I hadn’t threatened him with all manner of dire consequences, he’d have been out here like a flash to be with you in person.’ She paused, and added, ‘He loves you like a son, you know.’

  Ben grimaced. ‘First you disturb me, then you embarrass me. This is going to be a great journey.’

  ‘A long lost son, from the sound of it,’ Darcey went on. ‘Seems you don’t keep in touch with your old friends much. You’re a bit of a rolling stone, aren’t you, Major Hope?’

  ‘I told you, don’t call me Major Hope,’ Ben said. ‘He’s ancient history. I’m just Ben, all right?’

  ‘Tell me about Dr Marcel.’

  ‘What do you know about Brooke?’ Ben said. He felt his face flush as he said it.

  ‘Jeff Dekker told me you were on your way to London to see your girlfriend. Brooke is your girlfriend, isn’t she?’

  Ben stared out of the window.

  ‘She’s very attractive,’ Darcey said. ‘I saw her photo on your website. Love that whole pre-Raphaelite look, with the curly red hair.’

  ‘It’s auburn,’ Ben muttered without looking at her. ‘How come she wasn’t expecting you in London?’ Darcey asked.

  He glared at her. ‘Jesus, you’re like a pit bull with these questions.’

  ‘Just that it seemed to me that if she’d known you were on your way to see her, she’d have stayed put. She appears to have gone off somewhere.’

  ‘Portugal,’ Ben said. As it came out, he heard the sigh in his voice and wished he’d kept his mouth shut.

  ‘You don’t want to talk about her, do you? Raw nerve?’

  ‘That’s very perceptive of you. So yes, I’d appreciate it if you could either change the subject or shut up.’

  Darcey smiled. ‘Ah. I think I get it now.’

  He looked at her sharply. ‘Get what?’

  ‘The answer to a question I’ve been asking myself ever since I heard you’d been arrested. How a guy good enough to get away from me twice could have been stupid enough to get himself picked up for drunken brawling in some bar-room.’

  ‘It’s so unusual for people to get away from you?’

  ‘Never happened before,’ she said. ‘Kind of got under my skin.’

  ‘So what’s your expert analysis, Commander Kane?’ Ben snapped.

  ‘You and she met up in Portugal. What happened between you? Lovers’ tiff? That’s why you got so boozed up. Next thing, picking fights with the local lads.’

  Ben looked away. He gazed at a farm that was rolling by in the distance. The fields and orchards looked peaceful. He suddenly felt a great yearning to be there, strolling in the long, waving grass under the late summer sun.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Darcey said, noticing his expression. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you.’

  ‘She has a place there,’ Ben said quietly after a long pause. ‘Isolated, quiet. Somewhere to lie low, hide out. I didn’t know she’d be there.’

  Darcey watched him closely, reading his thoughts. ‘She wasn’t alone, was she? That’s what this is about.’

  Ben frowned. ‘Can we stop talking about this now, please?’ He leaned his head back and shut his eyes.

  The train rumbled on. Darcey sat and watched Ben’s body relax slowly and in stages, as if it was a struggle for him to give in to sleep. After a while he was completely still, breathing slowly, his head nestled against the patterned cloth of the seat, rolling gently with the movement of the train. She studied his face, the faint lines around the eyes, the way his thick fair hair fell across his brow. There was a serenity about him as he slept that almost made her want to reach out to him and stroke his cheek.

  ‘Darcey, Darcey,’ she muttered under her breath. She looked at her watch. They were still an hour out from Milan. She got up from her seat and wandered down the length of the train to stretch her legs and fetch a coffee from the buffet car. None of the carriages were packed. On the way back, she spotted a newspaper lying discarded on an empty seat. A British paper, she noticed – a copy of that day’s Daily Telegraph. She picked it up.

  Ben was still fast asleep when Darcey returned to her seat. She sipped her coffee and spread the paper
out on the table. ‘Tassoni killer still on the loose’ was becoming old news now in the UK media, as they sought to divert their readers’ attention to a breaking scandal of some ageing former pop idol who’d been caught allegedly grooming twelve-year-old girls for sex via the Internet. Darcey flipped overleaf.

  And stopped, staring at the photo of the young man smiling up at her from the page.

  It was Jamie Lister. The headline shouted: ‘Civil Servant Slain in Paris Shooting’. Darcey’s heartbeat picked up a step as she dived into the text. ‘French police launched an official inquiry yesterday following the death of junior British civil servant, James Lister, 29, in a brutal attack in Paris earlier this week . . .’

  ‘Junior civil servant,’ she muttered. She read on.

  ‘. . . speculation that Mr Lister’s murder may have been a case of mistaken identity . . .’

  ‘Huh,’ she said. ‘Right.’

  ‘. . . body of a male passenger so far remains unidentified. Police are also searching for a woman seen leaving the car at the time of the incident. French Ministry of Justice official Philippe Roux is urging members of the public to come forward with information that . . .’

  Darcey thought about Paolo Buitoni and her throat tightened. She shifted her gaze to an adjoining article with the heading ‘Tennis Club Mourns Loss’.

  ‘“We here are all devastated by this tragic news,” said Edward Harrington, Secretary of London’s prestigious Queen’s Club, where James Lister had been a member for four years. “Jamie was more than just a popular member and a talented tennis player. I counted him as a close personal friend. He will be sorely missed.”’

  Darcey looked up from the paper. ‘Borg,’ she muttered.

  He hadn’t chosen the name at random. Poor Jamie.

  Darcey’s brow furrowed as her mind went into overdrive. Then a second realisation hit her. ‘Queen’s,’ she said out loud.

  ‘What?’ Ben said, waking up.

  ‘The coin,’ she told him. ‘The Queen’s head on the coin.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘In the car. In Paris. It wasn’t money he was talking about. He was trying to tell me the name of his tennis club.’

  Ben looked confused. She ignored him, biting her lip, thinking hard. Why? Why?

  As she racked her brains, she found herself staring at Ben’s green army bag on the seat next to him.

  ‘Oh my God,’ she said. ‘That’s it. The locker. Every locker has a number, right?’

  Ben was beginning to catch up. He’d flipped the newspaper round and was scanning quickly through the text. ‘Lister. The MI6 guy.’

  ‘Just before he died, he was trying to tell me a number. On his fingers, like this. A number you can make on one hand.’ Darcey struggled to remember, visualising the scene in her head. ‘One-five-three,’ she said. ‘I’m sure of it.’

  Ben pushed the newspaper back across the table. ‘The man was dying,’ he said. ‘His brain was shutting down, neurons firing randomly all over the place. I’ve seen people do strange things in those last moments. You can’t always take them at face value.’

  Darcey shook her head adamantly. ‘This wasn’t just a brainstorm, some kind of neural meltdown. He looked right at me. He was trying to communicate, and he had a specific reason.’

  ‘What reason?’

  ‘I reckon Jamie Lister wanted me to see whatever it is that’s inside locker 153 at the Queen’s Club in West Kensington,’ she said. ‘And I know someone who can help us get to it.’

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  Arriving in Milan, they bought a prepaid mobile phone at a stall in the crowded railway station. Darcey started keying in a number from memory.

  ‘You’d better be able to trust this guy,’ Ben said. His shoulder was hurting and he was feeling irritable. He set down the holdall at his feet.

  ‘I’d trust Mick Walker with my life,’ she retorted.

  ‘That’s very touching. But not with mine,’ Ben warned her. ‘Don’t tell him where we are or where we’re going.’

  He hovered unhappily in the background as Darcey’s contact answered the call. She spoke fast and clearly. From the way Walker kept interrupting her with questions, it sounded to Ben as if he was concerned.

  ‘I’m all right,’ Darcey assured him. ‘Everything’s under control. But I need a favour, Mick.’ She ran quickly through the details.

  Picking up the holdall, Ben moved a few steps away and leaned against a railing nearby where he could still listen to Darcey’s call over the echoing noise of the station. According to the arrivals and departures noticeboard, their train to Monaco was dead on time and should be rolling into the station any minute. A cigarette would be nice around now, he thought. He missed his old Zippo lighter. It had taken a bullet for him once, saving his life. Now it was probably buried in a box in an Italian prison service storeroom.

  Darcey finished her call and looked pleased as she joined Ben at the railing. ‘Sorted. He’ll do it.’

  ‘There’s every chance they’ll have already opened up the locker to pass Lister’s stuff on to his next of kin,’ Ben said. ‘Could be a waste of time.’

  ‘Mick knows he needs to move fast,’ she said.

  ‘Even if it’s still there, you think this Mick of yours can just stroll into the place and ask them to open up a member’s private locker?’ He shook his head.

  ‘A SOCA ID can open a lot of doors,’ Darcey said.

  ‘I don’t see the point of it. You involving this guy, and for what exactly? You risk compromising us for nothing.’

  ‘I have a feeling,’ she insisted, with a look halfway between hurt and indignation. ‘I always trust my feelings about things.’ She paused. ‘You resent me, don’t you?’

  ‘It’s not so long ago you were trying to stick me in a jail cell. Maybe I’m not quite over it yet.’

  ‘That’s not what I’m talking about. You don’t like it that I’m coming up with the ideas.’

  ‘I have no problem with useful ideas,’ he said.

  ‘You know what I think? You’re a little too used to working on your own, Ben Hope. Stubborn, grouchy, set in your ways.’

  ‘I can be a team player,’ Ben said. ‘But I like to know who else is on my side. If I’d known you were going to start bringing every Tom, Dick and Harry on board I might not have let you tag along with me so easily.’

  She stared at him, her hands on her hips. ‘Tag along? Maybe you’d have preferred it back in Rome, with that guy Gourko punching holes in you.’

  ‘Forget it,’ Ben said, picking up the holdall. ‘We have a train to catch.’

  It was just after six in the afternoon when they stepped down onto the platform at Monaco station. In the second smallest country in the world after Vatican City, its thirty-thousand-strong population crammed into just two square kilometres of intensely moneyed Riviera paradise, Ben was pretty sure Mimi Renzi wouldn’t take a lot of finding. Five minutes later, he and Darcey grabbed an out-of-the-way table in the back of a cyber-café near the railway station, paid an extravagant amount for two tiny cups of espresso, and he started his search.

  As he’d guessed, it didn’t take him long. An online local business directory listed her as the managing director of a real estate company called Immobilier Renzi. A quick check of the company website confirmed that Signora Renzi had managed the firm since founding it in the seventies, running the operation from her villa in the Les Revoires district of the city. Immobilier Renzi seemed to have grown into quite a little empire over the years, with branches all up and down the Riviera catering for the rich and famous. Even Ben couldn’t fail to recognise some of the movie star names on her client list.

  ‘Now we’ll find out if it was worth coming all this way,’ Darcey said to nobody in particular as their taxi climbed the steep cliff road to the highest point of the tiny city, past verdant gardens and the glittering white homes overlooking the Rock of Monaco and the wide expanse of the Mediterranean. ‘If this biddy we’re
going to see was the companion of Gabriella Giordani back when she was a countess, she must be a million years old.’

  Ben kept his mouth shut. He wasn’t inclined to argue with her – partly because of the frosty distance that had come between them ever since Milan, and partly because Darcey’s doubts only echoed his own. The worry that Mimi Renzi might have nothing of value to tell them had been growing in his mind with each passing mile. Plus, a lot of things had happened since she’d tried to make contact with him. He was the Tassoni killer now, and desperate criminals on the loose couldn’t just wander into respectable elderly folks’ homes and expect tea and biscuits.

  The Renzi villa was perched high on a cliff overlooking Monaco harbour, set back a long way from the road. It was about four times the size of Pietro De Crescenzo’s cosy little pad in Rome. White stone balustrades and columns glittered in the falling sun, and palm trees whispered in the early evening breeze. As they approached the house, a long-haired Pekingese dog barked furiously at them from a gated ornamental garden. A black limousine with smoked windows was parked outside the villa. Someone was obviously home. Ben laid down the holdall and knocked on the door.

  The woman who answered couldn’t have been much over sixty. Her hair was bottle-blond and she wore too much makeup and a well-tailored jacket with two pens sticking out of the breast pocket. Ben stared at her for a moment. ‘Signora Renzi?’

  The woman shook her head and informed them curtly in French that her aunt was not available. ‘I am Madame Dupont.’

  ‘We’re here about a property,’ Ben said. ‘Signora Renzi is expecting us.’

  ‘You have an appointment?’ The woman flicked a disdainful up-and-down glance at him, from the floppy hat to the white training shoes. Evidently, prospective clients did not generally present themselves attired in T-shirts that said ‘Yeah, Baby!’. Not unless they’d arrived in a chauffeur-driven Rolls.

  Ben took out his wallet, slipped an old receipt from inside, reached out and plucked one of the pens from the woman’s pocket before she could react. He scribbled something on the back of the receipt, folded it, then handed it to her.