Sacred Sword (Ben Hope 7) (17 page)

‘Ben Hope,’ he said out loud. The name came up twice. Once as the witness at the scene of the fatal car crash, and again as a speaker at the musical event, a concert at the Leigh Llewellyn Foundation, which Simeon Arundel and his wife had attended – shadowed, unknown to them, by Dave Mills.

What was a man like this doing hanging around a supposedly empty vicarage in the middle of the night, and getting in the way of his carefully laid plans? Penrose had always been a keen researcher, and nothing motivated him like utter hatred. Digging a little deeper, he quickly unearthed the connection between this Ben Hope and the deceased opera star Leigh Llewellyn. The old news item announcing their marriage was still viewable online and provided Penrose with his new enemy’s full name and title: Major Benedict Hope, British Army, retired.

From there it was just a short skip to Hope’s business website. He ran something called a tactical training facility in northern France. Penrose had little idea of what a tactical training facility was, but he understood enough to know what it suggested about the kind of skills this Hope possessed. He opened the page titled ‘About the Team’ and read, then re-read, the two short paragraphs describing Hope’s background. The man’s military experience was extensive, that much was patently obvious, but the information seemed carefully pruned, as though much of his past history couldn’t be revealed. Even to someone with Penrose’s limited understanding of military matters, that in itself was revealing enough. As for the connection between Hope and Arundel, that remained a mystery.

Wasn’t bloody O’Neill meant to take care of this kind of stuff?

Penrose summoned Cutter back to his office. Minutes later the mercenary was standing at the desk, looking no less battered and sour than he had earlier, and every bit as wary. He soon understood that his boss’s psychopathic rage had settled down to a mere simmering fury, and the gun would remain in the desk this time. Cutter relaxed a little.

His eyes flicked across to the holdall and the bundles of cash that were visible through the open zipper. That looked like one hell of a lot of money in there. Cutter noticed two more holdalls just like it on an armchair at the back of the room. He remembered what the boss had said that night back in London.
Money’s the easy part.

‘Is this the man you encountered in Arundel’s home?’ Penrose demanded, showing him the picture on the website.

‘That’s him,’ Cutter said instantly, with a flash of pain and humiliation.

‘You were a soldier. Can you tell more about who he is?’

Cutter studied the webpage. ‘Not your regular ex-squaddie. This guy’s been in deep.’

‘The question is, can we deal with him?’

‘We can deal with him. We were just unlucky. He had the element of surprise, that’s all.’

Penrose nodded thoughtfully. ‘Did you say the rest of the team were still in position?’

‘Vince Napier’s just waiting for my call.’

‘Then make it,’ Penrose commanded.

Ben headed west on the motorway with the dog perched on the passenger seat beside him. After three hours of fast driving he left the M5 at Exeter to cut across the bleak, rugged landscape of Dartmoor National Park. He still didn’t know exactly where he was going. As he drove, he called Jude four, five, six more times. Still no response. Evidently, not all of the younger generation were surgically attached to their mobile phones.

The weather was closing in as the afternoon wore on. Dark rolling clouds scudded menacingly over the craggy landscape, and a freezing mist was descending. The roads were getting narrower now, and almost deserted. This was one of England’s last real wildernesses, and the place he was looking for could be just about anywhere. The sense of frustration was slowly rising as he neared Bodmin.

Suddenly feeling the buzz of the phone in his pocket, he made a grab to answer it. ‘Jude, is that you?’ He’d left him so many messages that he felt he knew the kid.

‘This is Sophie Norrington,’ said a clipped-sounding female voice.

There was hardly any mobile signal up here, and Ben was worried about getting cut off. He thanked her for calling back, explaining again that he was a friend of the Arundel family.

‘Mum told me what’s happened. It’s awful. Poor Jude!’

‘He doesn’t know yet,’ Ben said. ‘I’m travelling to the farm in Cornwall to tell him.’

‘That dump,’ Sophie sniffed. Like mother, like daughter.

‘Your mother told me you’d been there,’ Ben said. ‘Can you give me directions?’

‘It’s really isolated. I think the nearest village was called War … War-something. Warleg. Warlego.’ Sophie’s voice kept breaking up, and he had to strain to make out her words. He pulled the car over to the side of the road, flipped on the inside light and began scouring the map he’d bought at the last fuel stop. ‘There’s a place here called Warleggan.’

‘That’s it.’

‘What about the name of the farm itself?’ he asked quickly, anxious that he was going to lose the phone signal at any moment.

Sophie thought for a moment. ‘It was something suitably grim and lugubrious-sounding like “Bleak Mountain”. No, that’s not it. Black Rock. Black Rock Farm. Ask any of the locals. They’ll tell you how to find it, but you might get some funny looks.’ She paused, then said in a softer tone, ‘Will you tell Jude I asked after him?’

‘I’ll do that,’ Ben said. He was about to thank her when he realised the phone signal had died on him.

As they’d been speaking, Ben had been looking in the rear-view mirror at the lights of the car behind. Near as he could tell, it was a Range Rover Sport, dark blue or black. It had been there with him for a few miles, holding steady at the same pace as the Mazda. Now it was pulled in at the side of the road a hundred or so yards behind, as if waiting for him to drive on so it could follow. In the dimming light Ben could make out nothing of its occupants. The mist swirled like gunsmoke in the beams of its headlights.

Scruffy growled.

‘I was thinking the same,’ Ben said. He watched the Range Rover a moment longer, then put the Mazda back into gear and pulled away sharply with a rasp of tyres.

Close up ahead was a narrow lane cutting away perpendicular to the road. He waited until the last moment and then threw the Mazda into it, skidding on the loose surface and accelerating away hard.

The Range Rover didn’t follow.
I must be imagining things
, Ben thought to himself, and as more miles passed and dusk fell to night, he became convinced of it. The only other light that appeared in his rear-view mirror was that of a solitary motorcyclist who followed him for a while along the winding moor roads and lanes, then shot past in a blast of twin exhausts on the approach to the tiny, remote village of Warleggan. Ben caught a glimpse of the pillion passenger holding on tightly to the grab-rails on the bike’s tail; then it was gone in the mist.

As Ben drove through the village he saw the lights of a pub and pulled up outside, climbed out of the car and went in. The place was filled with locals, warm and noisy with chatter. He got the usual sideways glances from a few of the locals taking notice of a stranger as he walked up to the bar, perched on a stool and bought a double of malt scotch. As he sipped it, the barman, a thick-chested man who resembled an old-time sailor with his beard and gold earring, asked him cheerfully if he was on holiday.

‘Not exactly,’ Ben said. ‘I’m looking for Black Rock Farm.’

‘It’s all hippies up there,’ the barman muttered after a pause, his cheerful demeanour instantly evaporated. In just a couple of words, the welcome stranger had morphed into a drug dealer, or worse. ‘Got business there, have you, sir?’ the barman asked, eyeing Ben sternly as he reached out for a glass to polish.

‘Of a kind,’ Ben said, meeting his eye but keeping the smile on his face. ‘And I’d be grateful for directions, if you know how to get there.’

Outside in the misty street, the leather-clad rider sat astride his motorcycle and blipped the throttle. He had his visor up and was leaning across the bike’s fuel tank to speak quietly to the driver of the gleaming black Range Rover Sport that had pulled up beside him and rolled down its window. The driver’s face was long and lean. The hem of his beanie hat covered the scar over his eye.

There were five other men inside the car, and they were all gazing in the direction of the pub and the Mazda Roadster parked outside it. So was the bike’s pillion passenger, his face hidden behind his helmet’s opaque visor.

The scruffy-looking mongrel inside the Mazda had jumped up on the passenger seat and had his nose pressed to the window, staring intently back at the watchers. The dog bared his fangs and let out a long, low snarl.

A few more words passed between the driver and the motorcyclist; then the motorcyclist nodded, lowered his visor, nudged his bike into gear and rode off. The Range Rover purred slowly on past the pub. The driver reached for a mobile phone.

The car rolled to a halt fifty yards up the street. Its lights went out. Waiting.

*

After the interminable journey aboard the cramped, overheated hellhole of the Greyhound coach, Wesley Holland had reached Boston’s South Station intercity bus terminal. Now that he was a seasoned expert in covert travel, he’d paid cash for another bus ride that had taken him and his valuable cargo southwards to the town of Falmouth, Cape Cod. Stepping off the bus in the picturesque village of Woods Hole on the edge of Falmouth, he sucked in a deep lungful of the cold, salty sea air and his heart leaped in jubilation.

He’d made it. Nearly there now, just a six-mile ferry trip left to go. As he hurried towards the port he could see no sign anywhere of his pursuers and was utterly certain that he’d managed to throw them off. The next ferry wasn’t for a few hours. Wesley made himself comfortable in a cosy hotel lounge nearby and sipped a glass of warming cognac, gazing out of the window at the steely ocean and thinking of the safe haven that awaited him just a few short miles over the horizon.

He’d be there soon.

The few directions Ben had managed to get out of the barman were just about adequate to find Black Rock Farm. The mist thickened to a blanket of fog as he followed the narrow, twisting road higher and higher. He was pretty sure that on a clear day, you could see for many miles across the rolling moorland. Not tonight.

The dilapidated gate left him in no doubt that he was in the right place. Whoever had hand-carved the name in the wood had done so a long time ago, perhaps back in the days when its owners had cared more about the state of the place. The jagged white-painted scrawl underneath that said PRIVATE PROPERTY – PISS OFF was much more recent and a lot more telling.

Ben stepped out of the car to open the gate, drove through the entrance and started making his way down the long bumpy track. Le Crock would have been better suited to the potholes and ruts; the low-slung Mazda grounded out with a nasty grinding scrape two or three times as he approached the dimly lit buildings.

Rolling up into the frosty yard, Ben glanced around him and could immediately picture the kind of open-toed-sandalled, pot-smoking middle-class hippies who would keep a farm like this as an occasional holiday place and let their son and his mates run riot in it whenever they wanted. If there was a line somewhere between decadent Bohemian chic and out-and-out neglect, Black Rock Farm had crossed it a long time ago. Sophie Norrington hadn’t been far wide of the mark when she’d called it ‘grim and lugubrious’. Simeon’s description ‘derelict’ hadn’t been wildly off, either.

Ben parked the Mazda outside the crumbling low wall that ringed the old stone farmhouse. ‘You stay here,’ he told the dog. As he climbed out of the car he heard the thump-thump-thump of music in the distance, a riffy rock guitar over bass and drums. He turned to see that it was coming from the looming dark shape of a barn across the far side of the yard. Shards of light glowed out here and there from the gaps in the walls. Ben followed the sound, his footsteps crunching on the deep frost. Through the mist he could see a few cheap cars, the kinds of cars students drove, parked in the shadows. If it had been California there’d have been a couple of bad-boy Harleys, too. But this wasn’t California.

As Ben walked up to the barn he could hear that the music was being played live – so much was obvious from the fact that the musicians either weren’t very good, or were just too drunk or stoned to hit the right notes or keep a steady beat. He found the door and pushed it open. Warmth, light, noise and the smell of booze and smoke hit him as he stepped inside.

The floor of the barn was compacted earth. The walls were rusty corrugated iron sheets held together in places with baling twine. The halogen lamps that hung from wires draped over the beams were probably a massive fire risk, but not so much as the ancient-looking wood-burner that someone had dragged in and set up on bricks in a corner.

A lot of the heat inside the barn wasn’t coming from the blazing logs, but from the thirty or so bodies dancing to the music, young men and women, none of them far out of their teens. Most of them appeared pretty inebriated, almost as far gone as the musicians up on the makeshift stage that was littered with wires, bottles, and amplifiers cranked up to maximum volume. The lead guitarist was using an empty beer bottle as a glass slide to screech out some truly hideous dissonant notes over the lumbering rhythm that his mates onstage were hammering out from the bass and drums. A military firing range would have done a more harmonious job of damaging the eardrums.

Ben shook his head at the spectacle, and hoped to God he’d never managed to look this ridiculous at their age.

Few people seemed to notice his presence. Sitting in a row on a collapsed sofa to one side of the barn were a young girl who was either asleep or maybe in a coma, a spotty gingery youth on whose shoulder her head was resting, and another young guy who seemed about to throw up. Ben reckoned that the spotty gingery one was the best option to speak to. ‘I’m looking for Jude Arundel,’ he shouted over the noise, bending low to be heard.