The Armada Legacy (15 page)

Brooke watched in amazement as one of them glided down to land on the roof of one the buildings just fifty feet from her window, folded its broad red and yellow wings and strutted along the ridge of terracotta tiles to scrape at a piece of moss with its huge nutcracker beak. It was a macaw.

‘I’m in South America,’ Brooke murmured to herself.

Chapter Twenty-One

Ben drove. He had nowhere to go, no destination in mind, no longer any plan to work to. He just kept moving because he needed something to do in order to prevent the black despair from swallowing him up.

He’d been so sure he was on the right track. Like a predator steadily closing in on its quarry, that single-minded certainty of purpose had been his only focus, the only thing sustaining him. It seemed ridiculous now, bitterly ridiculous and pathetic.

As he sat there mechanically going through the motions to keep the car on the road, he struggled to get his thoughts in order. But if he was hoping for some miracle of inspiration to strike him out of nowhere, it wasn’t happening. Smoking a cigarette often helped him think; he lit a Gauloise, but it tasted bad and felt self-indulgent, as if he no longer deserved such pleasures. After a few shallow puffs he flicked it out of the window.

He’d been driving aimlessly on and on like that for almost an hour when his phone went off. He had to summon up all his energy just to answer it.

‘It’s Kay Lynch,’ said the familiar voice on the line. ‘How are you holding up?’

‘What do you think?’ he muttered.

‘You don’t sound so good.’

‘I’ll be doing a lot better if you tell me you’ve found her.’

‘I wish I could do that, Ben. We’re still searching.’

‘Until Hanratty calls it off,’ he said.

‘He won’t. And even if he did, I won’t stop. I can assure you of that.’

‘Neither will I,’ Ben said.

‘Yeah, well, we talked about that, didn’t we? Where are you now?’

He didn’t even know. ‘I’m … on a road,’ he muttered.

‘In France, I hope.’

‘No. I’m still in Ireland.’

‘You sound exhausted, Ben. There’s nothing you can do. Go home. Get some rest before you burn yourself out.’

‘Is that why you called me?’ he said with a stab of anger. ‘To tell me to give it up and go home?’

‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I was calling because I’d promised to keep you updated, and something’s come up. Thought you ought to know. It’s, well, it’s a little unusual.’

Ben was suddenly alert again. ‘I’m listening.’

‘Strictly between you and me, all right? My job’s on the line if you breathe a word of this to Hanratty or anyone else.’

‘Strictly between you and me.’

Lynch spoke fast as she filled him in. ‘All right. Forsyte’s and Samantha Sheldrake’s bodies were flown down to Dublin just after dawn this morning for autopsy because we don’t have enough facilities here. Top priority – the lab were at work on it by seven this morning. I’ve been waiting impatiently all day for them to feed back to us. Nothing until just a few minutes ago, when I finally got the reports faxed over. I have them here in front of me.’

Ben heard a rustle of paper over the phone, then Lynch went on: ‘No surprises with Sheldrake. It’s what it looked like, single large calibre expanding handgun bullet to the head, did a vast amount of damage and she didn’t stand a chance. The delay in getting the reports through was down to Forsyte. It’s taken them most of the day to figure out what kind of poison killed him. Turns out it was some kind of extremely rare venom. There’s a chemical analysis here, a whole list of stuff, like serotonin, 5’-nucleo—’ She tutted. ‘Sorry, excuse my lack of medical knowledge here, I’m reading this from the page. 5’-nucleotidase, phosphodiesterase, and it goes on. You still there?’

‘I’m listening.’

‘The first one, the serotonin, causes the victim extreme, unbearable pain. The other two are enzymes responsible for causing tissue breakdowns typical of the kind seen in stingray evenomations. Cause of death was a catastrophic accelerated necrosis of heart tissue, culminating in right ventricular rupture and fatal cardiac tamponade. I had to look that up. It means a massive and sudden accumulation of fluid or blood.’

Ben frowned. ‘Hold on. Did you just say that Forsyte was poisoned with the venom from a stingray?’

‘As strange as it sounds, yup. I phoned them just now to double-check, talked to the lab guy who did the tests. Thank God for chemistry nerds. He’s been working on this for eight straight hours, and he’s never seen anything like it either. But he’s one hundred per cent certain that’s the source. And not just any old stingray, either. He reckons the venom was extracted from a unique freshwater species that only lives in South America. Amazonia, to be precise. That’s been checked out with the zoology department at Trinity College, Dublin.’

‘Amazonia,’ Ben echoed, narrowing his eyes.

‘It’s weird. I mean, this is Ireland, for Christ’s sake,’ Lynch said. ‘And there’s something else, too. The forensic examiner also found a small metal key inside Forsyte’s stomach. It hadn’t been there long, and lacerations inside his throat suggest that he might have swallowed it down in a hurry sometime not long before his death. We think he did it after the kidnappers struck, while the victims were in transit.’

‘What kind of key?’

‘Examination shows that it’s the key to a set of handcuffs. Not the universal type key you can use to open just about any make of cuffs. Looks like it’s some kind of special custom job. We don’t know what to make of it.’

Ben’s mind was working so furiously hard that he was going to crash the BMW if he didn’t pull in. He rolled to a halt on the verge and killed the engine.

Cutting off Forsyte’s hands hadn’t been a reprisal at all, neither by a former IRA man sworn to revenge, nor by anyone else.

‘He had something cuffed to his wrist,’ he said. ‘A briefcase, maybe. That’s what the kidnappers were after, and Forsyte knew it. Must have swallowed the key to try to stop them getting it from him. He obviously didn’t reckon on what they were capable of doing to get the cuff off his arm.’

Lynch sounded doubtful. ‘That was my initial thought too. But then why chop off both hands, not just the one holding the case or whatever it was?’

The obvious answer was as simple as it was callous. ‘To throw us off the mark,’ Ben told her. Like ransom extortionists tossing their phones onto the back of a long-distance lorry to lead the cops astray, the ploy had worked beautifully.

‘It’s highly speculative,’ Lynch said. ‘For a start, we don’t know that Forsyte was carrying anything.’

‘If he had it cuffed to him when he left the country club, someone must have noticed.’

‘Officers already talked to all the staff who were on duty that night.’

‘Every single one?’

‘Yes, everyone, and nobody saw Forsyte leave. He must have gone out a back way to avoid the photographers. Secondly, even if we did know he was carrying, say, a briefcase, we’d still be no closer to knowing who did this.’

‘Not unless we knew what was inside,’ Ben said. ‘If it was something worth killing for, it could lead us back to the killers. And maybe to Brooke.’

Lynch must have heard something in his tone. ‘You and I had a deal,’ she reminded him a little more severely. ‘I agreed to keep you in the loop if you agreed to stay out of this. That’s a condition I need you to respect. You
are
staying out of this, aren’t you, Ben?’

‘I’m a law-abiding citizen, Detective Sergeant.’

‘I’m glad to hear it. Look, the fact that we have these fresh leads now takes us a step closer to finding her. You need to trust that. Promise me you’ll go home.’

‘I will go home,’ he said.

But he never said when. The instant the call was over he restarted the BMW and slewed it violently round in the road to point back the way he’d come.

‘Sorry, Kay,’ he said out loud.

Chapter Twenty-Two

South America?

It took a while for the initial shock to pass. Once Brooke’s mind had settled enough for her to think more clearly and the lingering effects of the tranquillisers had worn off, she paced the luxurious suite of rooms – her gilded cage – and tried to understand what in the world was happening to her. One minute on a couple of days’ break in Donegal, the next whisked halfway round the world for no reason she could imagine.

It was hard to shut out of her mind what those people had done to Roger Forsyte; even harder to stop replaying the sickening memory of what had happened to poor Sam. Her eyes wouldn’t stop clouding with tears every time she thought about her dead friend.

Clearly, Forsyte had been the target, for some reason connected to whatever was inside that briefcase attached to his wrist. Sam and Brooke had both been in the wrong place at the wrong time, Sam because of her job and Brooke just from sheer wild chance.

Then why was she here now? Why had these men who’d murdered her friend brought her here to this villa, or whatever the hell it was?

The clothes she’d been wearing when she was kidnapped had disappeared; the only possession she had left, apart from her own skin, was the little gold chain. She slipped it back around her neck. It made her think of Ben: what he was doing at this moment, where he was, how he was going to react when he heard the news she was missing.

Peeping furtively through the bars of the window whose blind she’d smashed away, she observed her surroundings. Her quarters seemed to be on the first, maybe the second, floor of what was obviously a very large house, almost like a fortress in size. It was hard to tell whether there were any more floors above hers. Outside her barred windows was what looked like a rooftop garden, tastefully laid out with pots of flowers everywhere and surrounded by a stone balustrade. Beyond that she could see the figures of men down below among the complex of buildings that stood clustered around the house.

Even if she’d been able to open the sealed window pane or yell loudly enough to be heard through the thick glass, she quickly realised there was little point in calling to anyone down there for help. The automatic weapons the men wore on their belts or slung round their shoulders as they came and went in twos and threes, attending to their mysterious duties, were enough proof of that. She was being well guarded.

Unable to do much else, Brooke spent a while watching the movements down below and trying to count the number of guards. They were all Hispanic, mostly in their twenties and thirties as far as she could tell from this distance. All were armed, whether with a handgun or a high-capacity military rifle, or both. The men wore no kind of uniforms, but it wasn’t hard to see that the place was run with careful organisation and discipline. It made her think of an army base.

Twice she saw a vehicle appear from what she now realised was the main hangar or garage building, making billows of dust as it approached the barred gateway in the wall that seemed to be the only way in and out of the complex. The first vehicle was an open Jeep carrying three men, the second an olive-green military truck with a canvas top. Each time the armed guards opened up the gates, waved the vehicle through and then locked them shut again. Brooke caught only a brief glimpse of what lay beyond the gates – a winding dusty road that soon disappeared into the depths of the dark green forest.

Her head-count of the guards had reached eighteen when she heard a noise outside the door and whirled away from the window. There was the tinkle of a key in the lock, and the sound of a deadbolt being slid back. Brooke held her breath as the handle turned and the door began to open, fully expecting a host of armed men to come swarming into the room. What would happen next was something she didn’t want to think about. Her heart began to pound. She looked about her for somewhere to hide. It was too late.

But it wasn’t kidnappers with guns who entered the room. It was a pair of women, both olive-skinned and black-haired and dressed in simple, plain maids’ outfits. The short one was middle-aged, thick-hipped, somewhat swarthy and carrying a white cardboard box a little larger than a shoebox. The taller one was twenty years younger and rail-thin with enormous brown eyes, but the family resemblance was obvious. Mother and daughter were muttering softly to one another in Portuguese as they came through the door.

Portuguese
, Brooke thought.
Was this Brazil?

The two women fell silent as they saw Brooke standing there in the light from the window, and stared at her for a moment before both gazing in horror at the crumpled metal blind on the floor.

Brooke stared back at them.

‘I Consuela,’ the elder woman said shyly after a few moments, then, motioning at her daughter, ‘This Presentacion.’

Brooke said nothing. Consuela laid down her box on a table and lifted off the lid to reveal rustling paper and something shimmering blue inside. ‘You wear,’ she told Brooke in hesitant English, and jabbed a finger towards the box’s contents.

The women appeared harmless, and a lot more nervous of Brooke than she was of them – especially Presentacion, who seemed transfixed with awe and apparently couldn’t take her eyes off her. Brooke stepped a little closer and peered suspiciously into the box. The blue was some kind of satin material. As Consuela lifted it out and laid it across the back of an armchair with extreme care, Brooke saw that it was a very expensive and beautiful dress. There was underwear in the box, as well as a pair of high-heeled shoes the same shade as the dress.

‘You wear,’ Consuela said again.

Brooke shook her head. ‘You must be kidding,’ she said emphatically. ‘Uh-uh. No way.’

Consuela pointed at Brooke’s hair, her face, her nightdress. Brooke felt almost nude in it, and wished she had something to cover herself up with. ‘You need get ready,’ Consuela said in her stumbling English.

‘Ready for what?’ Brooke replied in Portuguese. She’d started learning the language when she’d first bought a tiny holiday retreat near Vila Flor, and could manage rudimentary conversation. No reply. She tried a different tack. ‘Where am I?’