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Chapter Eleven
Ben didn’t return to the cottage for a few hours. The bus he took back from the hospital wound its unhurried way back through several villages and finally dropped him on the main road, quarter of a mile from Pebble Beach. From there, avoiding the guesthouse, he cut across a patch of wasteground and down a rocky slope that joined the coastal path where it curved around the headland. A short way further on was a little cove he’d discovered years ago. It was a place he knew he’d be alone, and solitude was what he needed.
He found a place to sit among a cluster of rocks overhanging the water, and took out his cigarettes. He lit one mechanically, shielding the Zippo flame from the wind with a cupped hand. He stared out to sea, watched the hissing foam boil around the foot of the rocks. The cigarette didn’t taste of anything much. He plucked it from his lips and tossed it into the surf where it fizzed briefly and then was gone.
He barely noticed the grey swell. All he could see was the choice that now lay in front of him.
It was a simple matter of two options. Left, or right. Black, or white.
The first option was to step back, yield to the police and trust them to deal with this. He’d meet with Kristen’s family, offer condolences and support. He’d hang around here for as long as necessary, do whatever he could to assist the authorities, but remain firmly in the background. He could be passive, patient and calm. Take a back seat and stay there.
But as he sat there, he knew in his heart that could never happen. He’d never been passive in his life, let alone supportive towards the authorities – two ingrained habits that right now didn’t seem a good time to start trying to break. That led him to the second option.
He thought again about Kristen, replayed one more time in his mind the brief period they’d spent together, and the way it had ended. He’d barely known her, and yet he couldn’t have felt the responsibility more heavily. Maybe it was because he felt so powerless to fix other things in his life that this pressed on him so much. He didn’t know why, and he didn’t care to ponder the reasons too closely. He just knew what felt right to him. In fact, he realised, there never had been a choice. This had to be finished his way, the way he’d always done things. The only way he really knew. No matter how hard he tried to stay off that road, it kept calling him back. Maybe it always would.
From the cove, he walked back along the beach. It was after lunchtime but he wasn’t hungry. He passed his cottage at a distance and barely glanced at it. He passed the crime scene, saw the police tape flapping in the wind and the Garda Land Rover parked on the shingle. Nearby, a pair of chunky, unfit-looking cops were scratching slowly about for whatever clues bare rocks could yield up. He had no doubt that pretty soon, they’d retire empty-handed to their vehicle and go trundling back to the comfort of the police canteen for their pie and chips.
Ben walked on towards the guesthouse. Inside, he found the reception desk unoccupied. While nobody was about, he grabbed the register and flipped it around on the desk to check for the names of the Belgian guests Healy had said had witnessed the attack. They weren’t hard to find. Monsieur and Madame Goudier had been staying for most of the week and were scheduled to leave tomorrow.
‘Room five,’ Ben said to himself as he headed for the stairs. Before he got there, what had once been the door to his office, now with a sign that said ‘STAFF ONLY’, swung open and Mrs Henry appeared in the passage. Her eyes were red and puffy. She stopped dead when she saw him, took one look at his battered face and instantly broke out blubbering.
I don’t need this now, Ben thought as the tears flowed and the words flowed faster.
‘That poor girl,’ Mrs Henry repeated over and over, though Ben got the impression that she was generally more concerned with the impact this would have on bookings. The media hadn’t stopped pestering her all morning, she complained, and they were whipping up a storm that their poor fragile business could surely never weather. What kind of reputation would they have now that it wasn’t safe to walk the beach with all these maniacs and killers lurking about the place? If things got any worse, Bryan might have to give up his golf club membership. It would be the end of him.
Ben briefly expressed his sympathies for Bryan’s imperilled sporting career. He pointed up the stairs. ‘Which is room five?’
‘That’d be the Goodyears’,’ Mrs Henry sniffed, mopping the corner of her eye with another tissue. ‘They’re in the conservatory, finishing their lunch. Though they could hardly eat a thing, poor souls, after the shock they’ve had.’ It didn’t seem to occur to her to ask why Ben wanted to speak to them, and he didn’t feel the need to explain. As quickly as he could, he detached himself from her and headed for the conservatory.
A gloomy pall seemed to have descended on the guesthouse, and the few guests having lunch in the conservatory were eating quietly, just a murmur of occasional conversation and the clinking of cutlery. Ben spotted the middle-aged couple from the unmistakably European way they were dressed. They were both lean, as if they did a lot of sports or hiking. The man’s hair was silvery and swept back from his high forehead, while his wife’s was an expensively coiffured bottle-blonde. They were sitting in silence at a table in the corner, drinking an after-lunch pot of coffee. Even at a distance, they looked obviously upset and shaken by the horror of what they’d witnessed yesterday. They didn’t notice Ben walk up to them.
‘Monsieur and Madame Goudier?’ he said.
They looked up at him, startled. ‘I am Bernard Goudier,’ the man said in accented English. ‘This is my wife Joelle. And you are …?’
‘Hope, Ben Hope. I’m sorry to interrupt your coffee,’ Ben said, switching to French. In the amazed silence, he motioned at the empty chair at their table. ‘May I join you for a moment? This won’t take long.’
‘What won’t take long?’
‘I’d like to talk to you about yesterday,’ Ben said. ‘A few questions, and I’ll leave you in peace.’
The Goudiers both stared, too taken aback to say no as he pulled out the empty chair and sat down. ‘You’re not from the police,’ Joelle Goudier said. She had perfect teeth and smelled of Chanel.
‘No, I’m the man you witnessed trying to stop the attack.’
‘I see you were hurt,’ Bernard Goudier said, glancing at Ben’s cut.
‘I’ll survive. But as you might have noticed, I didn’t get to see all that happened. I’m just trying to flesh out the picture.’
The Belgian gave a dry smile. ‘Is it normal in Ireland for civilians to conduct their own inquiry?’
‘It’s not normal for a young woman to be murdered on this beach, either. You’re the only witnesses. Please. Is there anything else you can remember about the incident?’
‘We told the police everything,’ said Joelle Goudier. ‘Bernard and I had spent the afternoon walking and we were returning towards the guesthouse when we heard an engine revving loudly, and turned to see a big, black car—’
‘A Range Rover V6 Sport,’ her husband filled in for her.
‘—veer off the road and drive very fast towards the beach. We soon realised who they were chasing. The poor woman began to run as they got out of the car and chased her. She dropped the bag she was carrying, and one of the attackers picked it up. For a moment I thought that would be the end, that they would leave her alone now that they had stolen from her. But no, they continued chasing her. Then we saw you come to help her. You were very brave, Monsieur.’
‘I have an interest in birdwatching,’ Bernard Goudier explained, ‘and I’d been hoping to get a close sighting of a sandwich tern that afternoon, as they’re around at this time of year. I use excellent binoculars, Zeiss Victory HT ten-by-fifties, which is why, even though the sun was setting, I had a very good view of the man who took out the knife.’
‘Was it the one in the green hooded top, or the one in the navy jacket?’ Ben asked.
‘Jacket. I thought he looked like a soldier. And it was a military-issue knife.’
Ben looked at him. ‘May I ask how you would know that?’
‘It happens that another of my interests is collecting militaria,’ Goudier said. ‘Insignia, medals, also items such as bayonets and knives. The weapon used was a United States Marine Corps fighting and utility knife. Seven-inch blackened blade, clip point, leather handle.’
‘A Ka-Bar,’ Ben said, and the Belgian nodded. ‘You told the police these details?’ Ben asked him.
‘Naturally,’ Goudier said. ‘Anyhow, when the man produced the weapon, the woman was in extreme terror and tried to get away from him. That was when she disappeared out of my sight, behind a large rock. The man in the navy jacket stepped after her with the knife in his hand. He seemed very calm, deliberate. I soon lost sight of him too, but I could see the other man, the one in green, watching. I knew what was happening. It was sickening. The man was smiling.’
‘Smiling,’ Ben said, his fists tightening.
‘As if he was enjoying the spectacle of the woman being butchered. As if it was just an amusing game for them. And I could do nothing but watch. I was so shocked that I was simply paralysed for several moments.’
Goudier looked as if he could spit into his coffee. ‘Then the man in the navy jacket reappeared. He still looked very calm, like someone who does this every day. He began to walk towards where you were lying unconscious, and I knew that his intention was to kill you too, in cold blood. That was when I regained my wits. I had to do something, so I started running towards them, waving my arms like a lunatic and shouting at the top of my voice. The men saw me and ran back to their car.’
‘Then I have you to thank for saving my life,’ Ben said. ‘But you risked your own. You might have regretted it.’
‘What I regret is that I didn’t act sooner,’ Goudier said. ‘I won’t ever forget the look on that poor girl’s face.’
Joelle Goudier reached across and clutched her husband’s hand. ‘Then we called the police,’ she said. ‘But of course it was too late. What a terrible, horrible thing to happen.’
‘And I apologise to you both for making you relive it,’ Ben said, getting up.
‘Can we buy you a drink, Monsieur Hope?’ Bernard Goudier asked.
‘No, thanks. Have a safe journey home.’
Chapter Twelve
As Ben walked back along the beach, the wind blew more dark clouds in from the sea and the gusting curtains of rain soaked him to the core. He didn’t try to hurry out of the weather. He was too busy thinking about the knife.
Bernard Goudier seemed to be a man who paid attention to details. The exact type of Range Rover. The precise model and magnification of Zeiss optics. Maybe he was a little anal-retentive. But maybe that wasn’t always a bad thing. In this case, it meant Ben could be fairly certain the Belgian was being accurate when he’d said that the killing tool had been a USMC Ka-Bar.
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 little 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.
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