Which might possibly be a significant detail. It was a weapon Ben had come across many times, and personally used on several occasions to do things he didn’t really want to remember. Light and handy at just over a pound in weight, with a murderous seven-inch Bowie-style blade and grippy handle made of stacked, hard-lacquered leather washers, the American-made knife had been in military service since World War II. Along with the British Fairbairn-Sykes commando dagger, it was one of the most famous and recognisable pieces of edged weaponry of all time, used in every modern American war from Vietnam to Iraq.
Assuming that Detective Inspector Healy had the wits to understand what Goudier had told him, the cop was most likely supposing that a type of weapon so easily available from a thousand mail-order outfits to anybody over eighteen wasn’t a key indicator in this case. Ben could see two problems with that:
One, Healy’s stamping ground was a place with the lowest violent crime rate in the whole of the British Isles.
Two, the guy was an idiot.
An inexperienced idiot, who’d probably never dealt with a single stabbing before and wouldn’t stop to think that the vast majority of knives used in crime were kitchen knives. Ubiquitous, cheap to obtain, not a big deal to throw away after the dirty was done.
The Ka-Bar, on the other hand, was an expensive and sought-after specialist tool. Which instantly set this case apart. No low-end thug would contemplate kitting themselves out with such a high-end item to butcher somebody, only to have to chuck it away afterwards. But a trained killer, someone used to handling such weapons and proficient in their use … that person might.
Ben was building a profile in his mind. A profile of two men who’d done this kind of work before and knew the kind of gear that suited them for the job. Men who had no problem taking the risk of carrying a piece of concealed military hardware about with them in public. Who’d come through an extensive and rigorous training, possibly several years long over the course of a military career – and not at the spit-and-polish, square-bashing level of a simple squaddie either. Which meant that, in the darker corners of the civilian world where they could find employment, their deadly skills wouldn’t come cheap.
No matter how much they enjoyed using them.
Now the question was where the money came from, and why. Who was financing these guys? Someone with contacts and resources, who also had some reason to feel threatened by whatever it was that Kristen Hall had dug up in the course of her research travels in Ireland. The wrong kind of knowledge had killed more people than bullets. There was no question in Ben’s mind that Kristen had been one of that kind of casualty.
Knowledge of what? Find the answer, reveal the motive. Find the motive, and the money trail would lead right back to source.
Only one problem there. Ben had nothing to go on.
By the time he reached the cottage, he was drenched and his head had begun to ache badly again now that the last dose of painkillers he’d taken at the hospital was wearing off. He felt suddenly weak, almost despairing. Something had to take the edge off. Something.
The whisky bottle and tumbler stood on the dresser where he’d left them yesterday evening. Before he’d even thought about drying himself off and getting out of his damp clothes, he impulsively made a beeline for the booze. The bottle was empty, but there was still a couple of inches in the tumbler.
He reached out to snatch it up – then stopped as the realisation hit him, full force, that this was the same glass of whisky he’d been about to gulp down at the very moment Kristen was being attacked. He drew his hand back and stood for a moment staring at the tumbler.
What the hell are you doing?
He reached out again, picked the glass up together with the empty bottle and marched into the kitchen. He tossed the bottle in the recycling bin, then resolutely poured the contents of the glass down the sink. Then he marched back into the other room, grabbed the box containing the rest of his whisky stash and carried it, jinking and clinking, to the kitchen sink. He dumped it heavily on the draining board. Thrust his hand inside the box and yanked out the first bottle by the neck, like a chicken about to be placed on the block for slaughter. For an instant of terrible weakness, he gazed at the familiar label and the warm caramel-hued liquid inside the clear glass. He sighed, then ripped open the foil, plucked out the cork and upended the bottle over the sink.
Seven bottles, over one gallon of ten-year-old cask-strength Islay single malt. By the time the last of it had washed down the plughole, Ben’s eyes and nose were full of the fumes and the small kitchen reeked like a distillery.
‘There,’ he said fiercely.
The afternoon rain was falling steadily outside, streaming down the windows. His head was aching worse. But he didn’t care. He kicked off his shoes and went digging in his luggage for the pair of trainers he remembered having packed but hadn’t worn in weeks. The moment he’d finished lacing them up, he launched himself out of the cottage door and into the rain.
Once upon a time, he’d run this beach every day. End to end, taking in the whole curve of shingle from beyond his former home all around the headland, there was a five-mile stretch that had been his regular morning exercise, to which he’d added the punishing regimen of press-ups, sit-ups and crunches that had kept him at peak fitness. He could spend hours at it without getting out of breath. Damned if he wasn’t going to prove to himself he could get back into that condition again.
The pain and breathlessness were already on him after the first mile, but he just gritted his teeth and kept on through the rain, letting his anger and remorse push him harder. His feet pounded over the rocks, every step jarring his aching head. His muscles screamed. His lungs felt raw as he gasped in as much rainwater as air. On and on, willing himself to keep moving by reciting inside his head the motivational lines from the James Elroy Flecker poem, The Golden Road to Samarkand, that had for many years been an unofficial motto of his old regiment and were inscribed on the clock tower at the SAS headquarters in Hereford:
We are the pilgrims, master; we shall go
Always a little further: it may be
Beyond the last blue mountain barred with snow,
Across that angry or that glimmering sea.
When he eventually staggered back inside the cottage, he could barely stand. He left a wet trail across the varnished living room floorboards before collapsing in an armchair near the dresser. His legs and calves were inflamed beyond pain. Groaning, he lifted his right leg to rest his ankle on his other knee, unlaced his wet, dirty trainer, peeled it off along with the wet sock and flung it carelessly across the room. He let his bare right foot flop down to the floor like a dead piece of meat, then went to remove his left shoe.
As the sole of his bare left foot slapped heavily to the floorboards, a lancing pain jolted all up his leg. He winced loudly and bent down to inspect the sole of his foot, then swore as he saw the thin, triangular shard of glass stuck into the flesh. He grasped the shard between finger and thumb and plucked it out. A trickle of blood ran down his foot and dripped to the floor. The cut wasn’t bad, but now he was even more annoyed with himself that he couldn’t manage to sweep up a bit of broken glass without leaving half of it lying about.
Cursing, he got down on his hands and knees to search for more fragments that might have found their way under the armchair, an accident waiting to happen. He grabbed the bottom edge of the armchair’s frame and tipped it up a few inches to reveal a dusty square patch on the floorboards. There were no more shards of broken glass under there.
But there was something else.
He reached underneath the armchair and retrieved it.
It was a black leather pouch. And it wasn’t his.
Chapter Thirteen
Ben sat back on the floor and inspected the pouch with a growing frown on his face, trying to think how it had got there. So much had happened since, but now he remembered how Kristen’s bag had been hanging over the back of the wooden chair to dry out. When, a litt
le tipsy from the Laphroaig, she’d upset the chair and the bag had dropped to the floor, the pouch must have spilled out along with the other items. He could only guess that when she’d stumbled and reached out for his arm to stop herself from falling, it’d been accidentally kicked out of sight under the armchair. He’d picked up the fallen chair, her fleece and her bag. She’d stooped down to snatch up her personal items. Neither of them had noticed the pouch still lying there.
He wondered whether she’d missed it on her way back towards the guesthouse. Had that been why she’d been running towards the cottage as the men chased her?
The pouch was about four inches by five, soft black lambskin with a larger main compartment and a smaller zippered pocket on its front. He already knew what she kept inside. He hesitated a moment, thinking that perhaps he ought to turn this stuff over to the police as possible evidence.
The idea didn’t linger long in his mind. Opening up the main compartment, he found her notebook. He flicked quickly through it and saw pages of notes, names of places she’d visited on her travels about Ireland during her stay. Laying the notebook aside for the moment, he unzipped the front pocket. There were her two phones, a well-worn BlackBerry and a much less expensive Samsung pay-as-you-go type of device that still had the protective plastic over the screen and the glossy look of a recent purchase.
Ben thought hard, casting his mind back to when he’d first met Kristen and had been walking along the beach. She’d taken the leather pouch from her bag, removed one of the two phones and checked it for messages, and then seemed frustrated when there hadn’t been any. She’d said she’d been hoping to hear back from someone, and that it was something to do with her research. He remembered how she’d seemed a touch anxious, not wanting to say too much about it.
At the time, it had meant nothing. Now, just maybe, it meant a great deal.
Which phone had she been using? He gazed at the two side by side, and his memory told him it had been the cheap Samsung. He turned it on. The first thing to check was her list of contacts, as an important caller might be among them. But the contact list was empty: either all entries had been deleted, or there had been none to begin with. He pressed the ‘back’ key and then, following a hunch, went into the SMS messages menu.
He wasn’t surprised to find nothing other than a ‘welcome, new user’ message from the service provider, dated three days earlier. As he’d suspected, this was a brand-new phone, barely used and so fresh from the box that Kristen might even have bought it here in Ireland, in the middle of her research trip.
Why had she felt the need for a second phone? he wondered. Could it have anything to do with the discovery she’d claimed to have made ‘a few days ago’? Ben pondered the possibility and its implications.
Leaving the messages menu, he checked her call history. As expected, she hadn’t used the phone a great deal. In fact she’d made exactly three calls with it, all on the same day as the received text from the service provider, which was to say the day she’d bought it. The first call had been to an overseas landline number, with the international prefix for the USA. Kristen had called it at 3.04 p.m., local time, speaking for just a few seconds. The second call had been made less than ten minutes later, at 3.12. It was to another landline, this time in London, and had lasted seven minutes.
Some time later, at 5.22 p.m., she’d made her third and final call, this time to a mobile number, again in the USA. It was the longest in duration, at thirteen minutes. There was a growing American connection here – but what did it signify? If indeed it meant anything at all, he thought.
Checking the received calls, Ben found just one. It had come in at 5.18 p.m. the same day as the others, and it was from the same London number she’d dialled a little over two hours earlier. Whoever had called her obviously hadn’t had much to say, keeping her on the line for less than two minutes. Almost immediately afterwards, she’d called that US mobile number. No traffic either way since.
Ben returned to the landline call Kristen had made to America, pressed ‘options’ and called the number again while glancing at his watch. It was after three here, morning there. A woman’s voice came on the line. ‘Tulsa City Hall. Mayor’s office. May I help you?’ She spoke with a nice southern twang.
Mayor’s office? Surprised, Ben had to think fast. Morning, this is Ronnie Galloway in London. I’m following up the call to your office from my colleague, Kristen Hall, three days ago.’
‘Uh-huh. What’s it regarding?’ the woman asked curtly.
‘I’d need to speak to the mayor about that,’ Ben said.
‘And you work for …?’
‘Marshall Kite Enterprises,’ Ben replied. Marshall Kite was Brooke’s investment banker brother-in-law. Ben had no compunction about using his name. Sensing the woman’s reticence, he pressed on in a brisk tone. ‘Listen, we have an issue here that I need to get cleared up as a matter of priority. Can I confirm that my colleague Ms Hall contacted your office three days ago?’
His bluff threw her a little. ‘Uh, hold on, let me check.’ Pause. ‘Uh, yes, I’m showing a call from a Kristen Hall for the mayor on that date. But—’
‘Did she speak to the mayor personally?’ Ben asked, interrupting.
‘No, he wasn’t available. Can I ask—’
‘She didn’t say what she wanted to talk to him about, did she?’ Ben said, cutting her short again. This conversation was getting crazier by the second, but he had nothing to lose by pushing.
‘Who is this?’ the receptionist snapped.
And with that, Ben knew he’d got all he could out of her. ‘Thanks. Have a nice day,’ he said, and ended the call.
What the hell was Kristen doing calling the mayor of Tulsa? Ben racked his brains pointlessly for a few moments, then moved quickly on to the next number on his list, the call she’d made to London. There was no reply, and no answering service, so he immediately followed up by trying the American mobile she’d called.
Another dead end. Whoever it belonged to had it switched off.
Ben turned to Kristen’s other phone. As he’d suspected from its appearance, the BlackBerry had had a lot more use and was crammed with numbers, many of them personal calls to her parents and the other friends and family members in her busy address book. He couldn’t find anything of interest connected to her work, and after a few minutes was beginning to feel bad for snooping into the dead woman’s personal business.
He slipped both phones into his pocket.
With his options running low, Ben examined the notebook. On closer inspection, it was a composite of a notebook and a diary, with enough space for a few notes on any given daily entry. Kristen had been one of those researchers who liked to keep records of where she’d been and who she’d met along the way. But while her mind was tidy, her handwriting was anything but. Flipping through to August, Ben quickly found the section of pages devoted to her most recent Irish research trip, and spent a while deciphering them. She’d done a few miles in the last couple of weeks, and her scribbled notes mentioned locations she’d visited all around rural Ireland. Among them were the ruins of the old Stamford mansion, and several villages in its vicinity that had once belonged to the sprawling Glenfell Estate. One of her notes read:
Spoke to Father Flanagan, St Malachy’s church
Looked at records NOT ONLINE
PADRAIG BORN 1809
→107!!!! HOW POSSIBLE?????
The names, dates and numbers meant nothing to Ben, but now it seemed to him as if he needed to get out and cover a few miles himself, retracing her steps.
Only then might he begin to find out what the hell was going on.
He closed the notebook, sprang to his feet and went to grab the BMW keys. It felt good to get moving.
Chapter Fourteen
Oklahoma
Before nine a.m., and already the sun was burning the concrete outside. Even in the relative coolness of the lock-up garage, the air was stifling.
Erin carefully shut the t
runk of the old car, locked it and pulled the tarpaulin back down over the smooth, waxed bodywork. Always have a backup, her daddy’s voice echoed once more in her head.
She stepped away from the covered car, moving quietly in the shadows as if her every move was being watched and listened to by unseen eyes and ears. After two days of hiding, she was jumpy as hell. But now, at least, she’d made a decision. It was the right thing to do. The only thing.
A strip of sunlight shone from the gap beneath the garage’s steel rolldown shutter door. Erin dropped to her knees and slid out under it, blinking in the strong light. She peered left and right with her hand shielding her eyes, to make sure nobody was following her. The weed-strewn, graffiti-walled yard between the rows of lock-ups was deserted.
So far, so good. Her spirits brightened at the thought that the killers might not even have the slightest idea that there was a witness to their actions on Friday night. If that was the case, then they were about to find out. The hard way.
She hurried away from the lock-ups and towards the street, where the taxicab was waiting for her with the meter running. ‘Where to now, missy?’ the driver wanted to know.
‘Downtown,’ she said. ‘Police Department Headquarters.’
‘It’s a done thing,’ the driver said, and took off as she shut herself in the back. Erin leaned against the seat and closed her eyes, thinking about what she was going to say, about the DVD and phone in her backpack. And about Angela’s husband.
At the downtown police building, she walked up to the main desk and cleared her throat to get the attention of the grizzled duty sergeant. He looked up at her, unsmiling. He was in a dark blue shirt with short sleeves and the shield that bore the cityscape logo with the legend ‘TULSA POLICE’.
The Forgotten Holocaust (Ben Hope, Book 10) Page 8