Sacred Sword (Ben Hope 7) (11 page)

Or maybe Ben was just getting slow.

Ben retreated. The man’s eyes didn’t leave his. The muzzle of the shotgun was rock steady.

The other side of the wall, the dog was going wild.

‘Why are you here?’ Ben asked.

‘That’s it. There’s fuck all else in the safe,’ the man with the duffel bag said to his companion. He stood up and slung the strap over his shoulder, then left the study, brushing past Ben. The man with the shotgun waved the weapon ever so slightly towards the open doorway. ‘You. Get your arse in there,’ he told Ben.

Ben took a step backwards into the room. He saw the gunman’s gloved finger flick half an inch back from the trigger and depress the small round button set into the rear of the trigger guard. Safety off.

Ben got the picture. The guy wasn’t intending to leave any witnesses behind. Not the kind who still had their heads attached.

Nothing to lose, then.

Ben retreated another slow step, raising his arms either side of his head. The guy advanced. Ben watched the muzzle of the gun. A rapid step forward, and Ben’s hands flashed towards the weapon. He gripped the cold steel of the barrel and jerked it simultaneously sideways and towards him. As the gun was torn half out of his grip, the man instinctively squeezed the trigger and the gun went off like a bomb just a few inches from Ben’s right ear.

Now the pump-action was a lot less dangerous until it could be re-cocked. Ben had no intention of letting that happen. Still gripping the barrel he pushed it violently back towards the gunman, driving the butt end into the guy’s face. It caught him on the mouth. With a yell of pain and a spurt of blood he fell back and let go of the gun. Ben clubbed him over the head with the forend.

The whole disarming move had taken less than two seconds.
Maybe I’m not getting that slow,
Ben thought.

The man with the duffel bag froze for an instant, then took off down the passage. Ben spun the shotgun around in his hands and worked the pump as he leaped over the slumped body and out of the study doorway.

The escaping intruder was just rounding the corner. Ben could have shot him, but the blast would have blown the guy in half and Ben wanted him alive. Slinging the gun around his shoulder, he sprinted after him. The man crashed past the side table off which Ben had lifted the statuette earlier, and sent it spinning into Ben’s path. Ben vaulted over it, saw that he was catching up, and launched himself at the man with a flying rugby-tackle. Pinned by the ankles, the man sprawled heavily to the floor and let out a grunt of pain. Ben clambered after him. His left hand closed on the strap of the duffel bag as his right fist shot out to land a crippling hammer-punch to the man’s testicles.

The punch didn’t make contact. Ben didn’t see the heavy boot coming for his face until it was too late. The kick slammed into his cheekbone with a huge amount of force behind it, and sent him crashing back against the wall, still tightly clutching the duffel bag by its strap.

The intruder went for his pistol.

Ben went for the shotgun.

The guy thought better of it. He abandoned the bag and ran for the front door. Wrenched it open and burst out into the night.

Scruffy was barking dementedly from the other side of the wall. Ben struggled to his feet, dazed from the kick. He ran out of the open front door and saw the intruder heading around the side of the vicarage, making for the path that led through the back garden and down to the meadow.

Seconds into the chase, Ben knew he was at a major disadvantage. The intruder wasn’t necessarily the faster runner, but he didn’t have to sprint barefoot over the hard, cold ground carrying a cumbersome duffel bag and a shotgun. Ben had only just made it to the edge of the meadow when he realised that his quarry had disappeared into the darkness. Moments later, he heard the roar of an engine from beyond the trees, and a car took off at high speed down the road.

Ben hobbled back to the vicarage on his cut and bruised bare soles. No lights had come on in the neighbouring houses dimly visible through the trees. The blast of a shotgun, muffled within thick stone walls, wasn’t much more than a dull ‘pop’ from a few hundred yards away, not enough to raise the alarm even in a sleepy little village like Little Denton.

It was rather more than that from a few inches away, though. Ben knew he’d have to wait a day or two for the high-pitched whine in his right ear to subside and his full hearing to return. Back inside the vicarage, he strode back to the study. Now to revive his masked friend and get some truth out of him.

But as he walked through the doorway into the room, he stopped dead and stared at the empty patch of floor where the fallen intruder had been lying unconscious just moments ago.

The man was gone.

Ben had hit him pretty hard. Evidently not hard enough, though.

Turning on the lights in the corridor, Ben saw the thin trail of blood spots that led through the house. He followed them all the way to the back door. It was swinging open and bore faint marks from where the intruders had broken in earlier. A clean job, efficient and professional.

And too conveniently timed for the burglary attempt to have been a coincidence. There was no doubt left in Ben’s mind now: the car crash had been no accident. Someone had wanted the Arundels out of the way, and it had something to do with the contents of Simeon’s safe.

Ben looked closely at the shotgun. It was a Mossberg pump-action with a folding stock and a barrel not much more than a foot long, making it a seriously prohibited weapon in Britain and most other countries of the world. It still had four rounds in the magazine plus another five in a shell holder attached to the butt. The ammunition was solid slug, as he’d suspected. But that wasn’t what interested him most.

While the majority of weapons of its kind in circulation among the criminal underworld tended to have been made for civilian use originally, before their crooked new owners adapted them for purpose by sawing the barrels, this one was different. The matt finish and MOD serial numbers and proof marks told him this one clearly had started life as a military weapon. Guns like this didn’t generally fall into just anyone’s hands, and combined with the way the man holding it had shown such skill in sneaking up on him, it confirmed his impression that he was dealing with a former soldier. And a good one, too. Not many guys could have upped and run from the blow Ben had dealt him.

Ben wondered whether he should call the cops, then decided against it. They’d muddy the ground like a herd of cattle and ask too many questions. In any case, he was disinclined to hand them over the shotgun – knowing the British police, it would be treated as though it were a live nuclear warhead, and he as a terror suspect.

No, it was better to keep this incident to himself and follow up whatever leads he could, on his own.

Ben let the dog out of the annexe. Sniffing everywhere and growling to himself, Scruffy followed him as he carried the thieves’ duffel bag through to the kitchen. Ben laid the bag on the old oak kitchen table and pulled up a chair. The numbing sense of grief was losing its bite now, replaced by a mixture of burning rage and adrenaline that made his hands shake as he emptied the bag’s contents onto the table.

There was nothing inside but the brown envelope and the small black Toshiba laptop that Ben had seen the thief take from Simeon’s safe. He laid the computer aside for the moment and picked up the envelope.

It didn’t contain a lot. He found an air ticket to Jerusalem dating back to eighteen months earlier, a hotel bill printed in Hebrew and a collection of glossy photo prints that had presumably been taken while on the same trip to Israel. Most were typical tourist snaps: the Jerusalem skyline at night; the Wailing Wall; a variety of churches and mosques and synagogues; the desert, palm trees, a camel, some sandy ruins.

Ben went through them one by one until he arrived at a group shot of Simeon posing with three other men against a backdrop of the same ancient ruins. They appeared to be on friendly terms, all smiling. Simeon’s arm was around the broad shoulders of the man on the left, who was obviously Israeli, burly and grizzled, around sixty. To the right of Simeon stood a smaller man, perhaps European, with white hair and trim beard, in good shape but quite old, closer to seventy than sixty. The man on the far right of the group was about fifteen years younger, with curly salt-and-pepper hair, a round jovial face and the belly of a
bon viveur
.

Ben was unable to tell much from the photos, but he might have more luck with whatever was on the computer. He flipped open the laptop’s lid, turned the machine on and quickly discovered that it was virtually empty apart from a single Word document file titled TSS.

Whatever it was, it must have been important enough to Simeon to warrant keeping it in a safe. Ben clicked to open the document, and a new window opened on the screen.

The computer was asking for a passcode. Ben had just hit a brick wall.

TSS. It didn’t look like an initial – more like an acronym for something. But what? Then, after a few more moments’ reflection, he remembered what Michaela had told him that morning, and it hit him.

TSS.
The Sacred Sword
. The Word document was the unfinished manuscript of Simeon’s book. It could have told Ben a great deal – but he didn’t rate his chances of breaking Simeon’s security code. Knowing him, it would be some incredibly obscure Bible reference or an unguessable piece of Latin. It was a non-starter. Ben checked the document’s properties, but it was like trying to see into a locked room from outside. The only data he could access were the document’s size, half a megabyte or so, and the date and time it had last been saved: 15.04 on December 14th.

Ben swore to himself and reluctantly closed the laptop down. Remembering the PC in the study, he decided to see if he might find anything out from Simeon’s email.

There was no password to hurdle this time. Sitting at Simeon’s desk, Ben scrolled through hundreds of messages, mostly concerning everyday church matters. Some were from the TV production company, others from an outfit called Blackwood Entertainment Management who seemed to have been in the middle of negotiating an agency deal to represent Simeon in his newfound role as television celebrity.

After flicking through a few more emails, Ben felt a pang of shame and began to sense that he was prying uselessly into Simeon’s affairs. He was on the verge of giving up when another of the messages caught his eye.

It was from the man Michaela had talked about on their walk through the woods. Father Fabrice Lalique, the priest whose recent suicide had so upset Simeon. Ben opened the message. It was dated a couple of weeks earlier and read:

My Dear Friends

By the time you read this message, I will be dead. I ask you not to mourn for me, as I am unworthy of your grief.

The shame of my sins is a burden I can no longer bear. May God have mercy on me for the terrible things I have done.

Let his soul rot in hell for all I care, Ben thought. He clicked out of the emails and went online to run a Google search on the name Fabrice Lalique. It didn’t take long to dig up a whole collection of French news reports about the priest’s suicide and the discovery, shortly after his death, of large amounts of obscene material on the personal computer at his home in Saint-Christophe, near Millau in the Midi-Pyrénées area of southern France.

Revelations about paedophilia had a way of wiping out anything positive that might have been said of a man’s past life or career; not surprisingly, the news reports were full of disgust, even hatred. There were various quotes from members of his diocese, all of them expressing their shock at the appalling discovery and very little in the way of sympathy for the dead man. Some online commentators had dubbed Lalique the Paedo Priest. Ben came across forums and websites where the scandal had sparked a furious debate, with pressure groups demanding that governments step in immediately to end the secret culture of perversion and abuse within the Catholic Church or, better still, tear the whole rotten edifice down once and for all.

Most of the online articles had published the same image of Lalique, pictured at some official event wearing his priest’s garb. Ben immediately recognised him as the jolly-faced, full-bellied man who’d been standing on the right of the group shot in Simeon’s photo. Other images online showed the scene under the Millau viaduct where officials had scooped up what little remained intact of Lalique’s body after the enormous fall from the bridge. As suicides went, it had been highly efficient.

Ben shut down the PC, left the study and made his way through to the living room, trying to make sense of it all and knowing he was a long way from succeeding. As he looked around him for inspiration, one of the books in the antique bookcase suddenly caught his eye. He opened the glass door and slipped the old Bible off the shelf. It was a beautifully leather-bound edition, and one that he hadn’t seen since his first year at Oxford. Carefully turning the cover, he saw his own faded handwriting. ‘To my friend Simeon, from Benedict Hope.’

Ben was touched that Simeon had kept the birthday gift all these years, and saddened. He flicked through the pages of the book he’d once known virtually by heart. He still remembered great chunks of it, though a lot had faded from his memory. Maybe I should read it again, he thought. Simeon wouldn’t have minded if he borrowed it.

Ben set the Bible down on a table and was about to close the bookcase when he noticed the collection of videotapes and DVDs on the top shelf. Some were movies, some were documentaries, some were religion-themed programmes taped from TV, with handwritten labels stuck to their spines. The one that especially caught Ben’s eye was a home-recorded videotape labelled SIMEON VS THE ENEMY. He remembered Simeon’s words from the day before:
‘I have many enemies’
. It had been hard to tell to what extent he’d been joking when he said it.

The Arundels’ TV rested discreetly on a stand in the corner, with a DVD player and VCR nestling below it. Ben took the tape down from the bookcase and inserted it into the machine.