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Chapter 11
Ben had wanted to ask why Nick couldn’t call the police, but there was no time to lose over questions. He hurriedly pulled on his jeans and boots, put his leather jacket on over the dark T-shirt he’d been sleeping in, and left Old Library at a sprint.
The BMW was in the college car park to the rear of Meadow Buildings, across the quad and through a gated arch. Ben threw himself behind the wheel, and moments later the snarl of his exhausts broke the serenity of the silent meadow.
He skidded out of the college grounds and sped up St Aldate’s. One-way systems and pedestrianised zones weren’t a priority for him, and nor were speed limits as he hustled northwards through the night. Oxford never quite sleeps, but at four in the morning its centre comes closer to being deserted than most modern cities. He hit seventy miles an hour on Cornmarket, and eighty on Banbury Road, before he had to brake to avoid running down a bunch of drunks clowning around in the middle of the street. Moments later, he was roaring into the tranquil part of north Oxford where Nick lived.
Only to find that it was no longer so tranquil. And that he wasn’t the first emergency responder to arrive on the scene.
The houses and trees of Nick’s street were lit by the swirl of blue from the squad of vehicles that half blocked the road. Ben kerbed the BMW opposite and got out. The other side of the street he could see the door to Nick’s place hanging open, police hovering outside like guards. The top-floor windows were lit, and more lights were coming on in neighbouring houses all around as residents woke up to the goings-on. An old man stood framed in his doorway on Ben’s side of the street, wrapped in a dressing gown and squinting across at the police cars and the glare of blue lights. He looked confused and distressed. ‘What’s going on?’
Ben made no reply. A short distance away, a female uniformed officer was taking what looked like a witness statement from a young man and woman in their early twenties who stood huddled and pale at the side of the pavement. They were dressed as though they’d been to a party. Passers-by, rather than neighbours. The guy was clutching a phone at his side. Ben thought he must have been the one who called 999, if Nick hadn’t.
Closer to the apartment entrance, Nick’s Aston Martin was boxed in by a chequered Thames Valley Police Vauxhall Vectra and two unmarked detective cars. One was a Plain Jane Mondeo and the other was some kind of seventies’ American muscle car as wide as a river cruiser, blue lights twinkling from behind its grille. As incongruous as it was, Ben gave it only a glance. A chill gripped his insides as he saw the paramedic unit clustered near the entrance to Nick’s building.
They’d backed their ambulance up close, but they hadn’t gone inside, because their focus was down here at street level. Emergency medical equipment was spread out over the pavement, which was strewn with shards of broken glass. Glancing up at the shattered pane of the top-floor window of Nick’s apartment, Ben understood where the glass had come from. But the paramedics had their backs to him, blocking out what they were doing. He needed to see, even if he didn’t want to.
He hovered impatiently as a second police Vectra came screeching onto the scene and then ran across the street for a better look, his heart thumping. The WPC spotted him and left her witnesses for a moment to step towards him with her arms spread to ward him away, but he pushed by her. A cold, sour wave of fear washed through him.
He knew. Even before he got a clear view of what the paramedics were working on, he knew.
Then he saw it. The chill gripped his guts and his vision seemed to telescope into a tunnel, while the sounds of radios and frantic activity were muted in his ears and nothing existed except Ben and the grim sight in front of him.
The body had fallen from the top-floor window above. It hadn’t hit the pavement, because its drop had been arrested by the spiked iron railing below. A man’s body, fully dressed in beige chinos and a bright blue shirt. Hanging over the railing with his arms and legs dangling limp. A spike protruding either side of his spine. In the amber of the streetlights and swirling blue of the emergency vehicles, the blood that was dripping from the railing and pooling on the ground, running along the cracks between the paving stones and coursing in little rivulets off the edge of the kerb into the gutter, looked oily and colourless.
It was Nick Hawthorne. His head was hanging at an angle that made his face visible, or what was left of it. From his busted nose and teeth, it looked like the fall wasn’t the first injury he received at the hands of the intruders. He looked as though he’d been in a bare-knuckle prize fight, and lost badly in the first round. One eye was swollen completely shut, the other wide open in a frozen stare of terror.
When you hit rock bottom, your deepest dread realised, the nightmare come starkly true, that leaves nowhere else to go. Now there was nothing left to be afraid of. Ben closed his eyes for a moment, stilling himself, gathering his strength. Then he reopened them and felt the fear gone, replaced with icy calmness.
He looked back up at the smashed window above. He could see shapes and shadows moving around up there, which he knew were police officers examining the scene. He couldn’t believe how fast they’d got here.
He stood behind the paramedics as they struggled to get his body off the railing. If they were in a hurry, it was only to get the mess cleared up, not because their patient was in need of urgent medical assistance. He wasn’t going anywhere but the John Radcliffe mortuary, across the city in Headington.
‘Sir?’
Ben turned. The WPC, her face half blue in the lights, wisps of mousey hair sticking out from under her hat. Jabs of static and voices blurping from her radio. She looked drawn and tight-lipped, as if she wanted to throw up and was fighting to hold it in. Ben wondered if this was her first impaling. Cops had a dirty job and saw some pretty bad things. But they couldn’t begin to imagine some of the things he’d seen.
‘Sir, I need you to step back, please.’
‘What happened here?’ Ben asked, already building the scenario in his mind. Nick had said there were intruders, plural, in the apartment. It would have taken at least two men to throw him through the window with enough force to shatter it like that. Perhaps three.
Ben glanced across at the witnesses. The young woman was crying, her male companion awkwardly holding her and patting her back as if to console her, though he looked as shocked as she did. Ben saw two possible options there: either they’d happened on the body after it had already hit the railing, or else maybe they’d seen Nick come out of the window and drop to his death, which would have been twice as horrifying and accounted for the shell-shocked looks on their faces. In that case, they might also have seen the perpetrators running off, which could have happened before, during, or after calling the police.
If the couple had observed Nick’s killers flee the scene, Ben expected that any moment now the cops would hustle them into a police car and whisk them off to the station to help the cops with their enquiries, on what was going to turn out a long and sleepless night for all concerned.
‘I have to ask you to step away, please,’ the female officer repeated more firmly. ‘This is a crime scene.’
Crime scene. If the cops had thought it was a deliberate suicide or simply a case of some stupid drunk falling out of a window, either way they’d be calling it an accident scene. The fact that they were calling it a crime scene confirmed for Ben that the witness couple must have seen Nick fall and the bad guys make their escape moments later. If the police hadn’t turned up so uncharacteristically damn fast, he might have been able to talk to them himself, and get a description of the attackers. That chance was blown now. Ben was upset about it.
‘Okay, officer. I didn’t mean to get in the way.’ Ben stepped back. The female officer gave him a look that said, ‘Don’t go anywhere, we might want to talk to you’ and hurried back to the witnesses.
Moments later, as Ben had expected, the WPC was joined by another officer who led the witness couple to one of the marked Vectras and took off with the flashing blues lighting up the trees along the street. Ben seemed to have been forgotten about for the moment, which suited him fine. He needed to learn more, which wasn’t going to happen standing out here with the uniforms. If the plainclothes guys were upstairs in Nick’s apartment, that was where Ben needed to be too.
Chapter 12
Nobody saw Ben as he entered the building and hurried upstairs. He met a couple of Nick’s downstairs neighbours on the first-floor landing, who looked pale and bemused and asked him if he knew what was going on, but he brushed by them without a word.
When he reached Nick’s floor he saw the apartment door lying open and slipped inside, silent as a shadow. Ben’s ability to blend into his environment and move about without being seen or heard had been noted as off-the-scale exceptional by his first instructors in the SAS. Time and practice had made him much better at it since.
The apartment looked as though a small bomb had gone off inside it. Furniture was overturned, paintings torn off the wall, the glass display cabinet broken and knocked on its side with Nick’s music collectables all spilled over the floor. The precious harpsichord had been shunted so roughly to one side, leaving scuff marks on the polished hardwood floor, that one of its three legs had folded under it and the instrument was listing at an angle like a beached ship.
From where Ben stood hovering near the entrance he could see through the open doorway that led to Nick’s kitchen. Halfway down the passage, the spare bedroom door that had been locked earlier was hanging ajar. There was a glow of red light coming from inside the bedroom. Ben wondered what that was about. A strange yet familiar smell hung inside the apartment, and it seemed to come from that open room. He wondered for a moment what that was about, too, until he realised what it was, and put it together with the red light.
In the middle of the devastation of the living room, two plainclothes detectives and another uniformed officer were clustered together deep in conversation. The older detective was doing most of the talking, which told Ben that he was the superior officer. He was a short, reedy individual with dyed black hair oiled over a balding crown and a moustache that twitched as though it was going to fall off when he talked. From the moment Ben saw him, he had the strangest impression that he’d seen him somewhere before. For the moment he couldn’t pin it down, but it would come to him.
The younger plainclothes guy looked to be maybe a couple of years older than Ben, and a couple of inches taller at around six-one. He was dressed more casually than his superior in jeans and desert boots. He had a craggy, weathered face that looked as if it had been beaten out of Kevlar, and watchful eyes that were locked on the older detective with all the expression of a rough plaster wall, but Ben could tell that he wasn’t impressed with the guy.
None of them noticed Ben’s presence, until he stepped towards them and interrupted their conversation with, ‘So what’s with the incredible response time, guys?’
They all turned around. The one with the craggy face showed no change of expression, but the older detective flushed the colour of liver. ‘Who the hell are you?’ he demanded.
‘I might ask you the same question,’ Ben said.
Which might not have been the best way to win the guy’s favour. Ben was still trying to place him. The moustache bristled like a startled cat as the older detective broke away from the group and stepped aggressively towards Ben, puffing himself up to look bigger. ‘I’m Detective Superintendent Forbes, Thames Valley Police, and this is a closed crime scene. Who the hell let you in here?’
‘You’d have to ask them.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘I’m Ben Hope.’
‘Occupation? Address?’
‘Businessman. I live out of the country. I’m in the UK on a work-related visit.’
‘And you have a reason for being here at four in the morning?’
Ben was getting tired of the rapid-fire interrogation. ‘That’s my friend stuck on the railings down there. All the reason I need, wouldn’t you say?’
‘How do you know the victim?’
‘We were at college together, here in Oxford. Long time ago.’
‘Were you close?’ Forbes asked the question without a trace of sympathy. Ben was definitely not liking him very much.
‘I wouldn’t say that exactly. Yesterday morning was the first time I’d seen him in more than twenty years.’
‘So, in fact, you hardly know him at all,’ Forbes said, arching one eyebrow as if Ben had just admitted to a criminal offence. ‘Therefore I repeat, why are you here?’
‘I’m sentimental,’ Ben said. ‘And I don’t like it when people throw innocent folks out of windows. Especially when I was just getting to know them again. That’s why I’m here. What about you?’
Perhaps sensing the rising tension between Ben and his superior, the younger plainclothes guy stepped forward and introduced himself. ‘I’m DI Tom McAllister.’ He spoke with a Northern Irish accent that was only slightly attenuated from however many years he’d been on the Thames Valley force. ‘I was first on the scene, less than five minutes after it happened. By the time I got here it was already too late to do anything for your friend. I’m sorry.’
‘You must live nearby,’ Ben said. ‘It took me less than fifteen to get here from the centre, from when he phoned me.’
McAllister shrugged. He had an open, ruggedly sincere face that Ben liked. Which wasn’t a usual reaction for Ben when dealing with cops.
McAllister replied, ‘I don’t, but I happened to be driving through the area when the radio call came through.’ Ben noticed he was holding a ring of car keys, the old-fashioned one-piece metal kind you could puncture someone’s throat with. The leather key fob medallion featured a fierce-looking fish and bore the emblem BARRACUDA. The American muscle car parked down in the street. Ben thought that maybe if he lived in Oxfordshire and had a big V8 rumbler like that and nothing better to do on a balmy April night, he’d be driving about at four in the morning too.
‘You say he phoned you?’ Forbes asked.
‘Check his phone and you’ll see my number was the last call he made,’ Ben said.
‘And where were you at the time?’
‘At our old college. I’m staying there. You want my room number too?’
‘Just making sure we have our facts straight,’ Forbes said. ‘So you’re in Oxford on business. What kind of business might that be?’
Ben gave one of his standard vague replies. ‘I’m a security consultant.’ It would take ten seconds to look him up and find out about Le Val and his military background. If they poked a little deeper they’d soon hit the brick wall of MoD secrecy concerning the true nature of Ben’s past, and the fun would begin.
‘Security consultant. That covers a lot of ground, doesn’t it?’
Ben looked at Forbes. ‘Am I a suspect?’
‘Not at this time.’
‘Just as well, because that won’t sit well with me. If you want proof of where I was at the time of the incident, the next thing you’ll want to check is the registration number of the silver Alpina down there in the street, and the footage from the speed cameras I just tripped on my way here. All of which gives me a pretty good alibi, so you needn’t think about giving me any crap.’
‘Nobody’s giving you any crap,’ McAllister put in.
‘No?’ Ben said. ‘I’m only trying to help here. So far I haven’t heard anyone saying much about catching the people who killed my friend.’
McAllister nodded and pulled a grim face, as if he could barely wait to get his hands on them, either. Judging by the guy’s rough, scarred knuckles, Ben would have said McAllister had got into a few scrapes in his time.
‘And what exactly did the victim say to you on the phone?’ Forbes asked.
‘What do you think he said? He was scared, same way you would be if you woke up at four in the morning to find a bunch of intruders smashing up your home. He needed my help to deal with it. I got here too late. End of story.’
Now Forbes was staring at Ben with a look of extreme suspicion. ‘Deal with it?’
‘I didn’t say I was going to shoot them,’ Ben said. ‘Though it wouldn’t be a bad idea.’
McAllister was looking at Ben as if to say, take it easy.
The moustache twitched. ‘Then what were you going to do?’
‘Ask them politely to leave,’ Ben said. ‘With the gentlest touch of persuasion.’
‘Dealing with violent attackers is the responsibility of the police, not the public,’ Forbes said in a hectoring tone. Ben noticed the way McAllister gave an exasperated eye roll behind his superior’s back. Ben was thinking that if he had to work with this guy Forbes, Forbes might end up getting thrown out of a window too.
‘Then it looks like we all failed him,’ Ben said.
Forbes asked, ‘Why would he call you and not us?’
‘I think we both know the answer to that one.’ Ben pointed through the open passage towards the doorway of the spare bedroom. ‘It’s obvious he didn’t want the police here. You can almost smell the marijuana from outside. And judging by the infrared lamp, he was probably growing the stuff.’
‘He was virtually farming it,’ Forbes said. ‘Tell me, Mr Hope. How long has your friend been dealing drugs?’ He folded his arms smugly, as if he could already see the headline. Thames Valley police unmasks kingpin drug lord. ‘It’s obvious this was a deal gone bad. Happens all the time.’
‘You’re dead wrong, Forbes. He used the cannabis for arthritis pain. You can verify that with his doctor in about three seconds. He’d already tried every type of conventional medication going. But I can’t blame you for wanting to wrap this up nice and easy. That’s what a hack like you does best, isn’t it?’
Forbes turned a shade of purple. He took a step closer to Ben, which forced him to look up as he scrutinised Ben’s face. ‘Do I know you from somewhere?’
The fact was, while they’d been talking, Ben had remembered where he’d seen Forbes before. Take away the moustache, give him some more hair on top and knock off twenty-odd years, and the memory was as sharp in Ben’s mind as though it had happened yesterday. Ben allowed himself a cold smile as he played it back. He was pretty sure that Forbes’ colleague McAllister would enjoy the story. For the moment, he decided to spare Forbes the humiliation.
‘Something amusing you?’ Forbes said.
‘My friend just died. I’m not in a laughing mood.’
‘Then why are you looking at me like that?’
Ben leaned closer to him and sniffed. ‘Thought I could smell something. Must be my imagination.’
‘I’ve had enough of this nonsense,’ Forbes said. ‘Let me remind you, Mr Hope, that you’re trespassing on a crime scene. So I suggest you bugger off before I do pull you in for questioning.’
Ben melted Forbes with a long, hard glare that lingered so long that McAllister was starting to get edgy. There was nothing more to be said. Ben turned and walked away.
Outside, the police SOCO unit had erected a forensic tent over the railings. The ambulance had gone, and the broken glass on the pavement was all cleaned up. All that was left of Nick was the blood congealing in the gutter.
Ben walked slowly across the street to his car and drove back through the city of dreaming spires. By the time he stepped out of the Alpina in the college car park the first light of dawn was breaking, washing the trees of the meadow and the old limestone buildings of Christ Church with red and gold. The air was fresh and sweet, and Ben filled his lungs with it to try to flush out the sour taste of death and violence that wouldn’t go away. Maybe it never would.
As he made his way towards Old Library he paused in the cathedral cloister. Listening to the silence of the organ that Nick Hawthorne would never play again. It was too late to go to bed, and even if it hadn’t been, Ben knew he couldn’t have slept. He wondered if the killers were sleeping.
First Simeon and Michaela. Now Nick too. All gone. Ben was the last of the gang left.
Someone was going to wish he wasn’t.
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