The Ben Hope Collection: 6 BOOK SET (14 page)

Six months earlier, near Montségur, southern France

Anna Manzini was unhappy at having put herself in such a situation. Who would have thought that the author of two acclaimed books on medieval history and a respected lecturer at the University of Florence would have behaved in such an impulsive and idiotically romantic fashion? To give up a well-paid professional position to go off and rent a villa-a very expensive villa, at that–in the south of France to begin a whole new fiction-writing career from scratch wasn’t the kind of measured and logical behaviour that Anna was known for amongst her former colleagues and students.

Worse, she’d deliberately chosen a secluded house, deep in the rugged mountains and valleys of the Languedoc, in the hope that the solitude would fire her imagination.

It hadn’t. She’d been there for over two months, and had hardly written more than a sentence. To begin with she’d kept herself to herself, not seeing
anyone. But more recently she’d started welcoming the attentions of local intellectuals and academics who’d discovered that the author of the books
The Crusade that History Forgot
and
God’s Heretics: Discovering the Real Cathars
was now living just a few kilometres away in the countryside. After months of boredom and loneliness she’d been relieved at the chance to befriend the vivacious Angélique Montel, a local artist. Angélique had introduced her to an interesting new circle of people, and Anna had eventually decided to have a dinner party at the villa.

While she waited for her guests, she remembered what Angélique had been saying on the phone two days before. ‘You know what I think, Anna? You have writer’s block because you need a man. So for your dinner party I’m bringing along a good friend of mine. He’s Dr. Edouard Legrand. He’s brilliant, rich, and single.’

‘If he’s so wonderful,’ Anna said smiling, ‘then why are you so keen to pass him onto me?’

‘Oh, you wicked girl, he’s my
cousin
.’ Angélique giggled. ‘He’s been divorced only a short while, and he’s lost without a woman. He’s six years older than you, forty-eight, but has the physique of an athlete. Tall, black hair, sexy, sophisticated…’

‘Bring him along,’ she’d said to Angélique. ‘I look forward to meeting him.’
But the last thing I need in my life right now is a man
, she thought to herself.

There were eight for dinner. Angélique had strategically managed to ensure that Dr. Legrand was seated beside Anna at the top of the table. She’d been
right–he was very charming and handsome in a well-tailored suit, hair greying at the temples.

The conversation had dwelt for a while on a modern art exhibition that many of the guests had attended in Nice. Now they were all keen to know more about Anna’s new book project.

‘Please, I don’t want to talk about it,’ said Anna. ‘It’s so depressing. I have writer’s block. I just don’t seem to be able to do it. Maybe it’s because I’m writing a book of fiction for the first time, a novel.’

The guests were surprised and intrigued. ‘A novel? What about?’

Anna sighed. ‘It’s a mystery story about the Cathars. The trouble is that I have such difficulty imagining my characters.’

‘Ah, but I have the right man here to help you,’ Angélique said, seeing her opportunity. ‘Dr. Legrand is a famous psychiatrist and can help anyone with any kind of mental problem.’

Legrand laughed. ‘Anna hasn’t got a mental problem. Many of the most talented people have sometimes suffered from temporary loss of inspiration. Even Rachmaninov, the great composer, found his creativity blocked and had to be hypnotized in order to create his greatest works.’

‘Thank you, Dr. Legrand,’ Anna said, smiling. ‘But your analogy does me far too much credit. I’m no Rachmaninov.’

‘Please, call me Edouard. But I’m sure you
are
very talented.’ He paused. ‘However, if it’s interesting characters you’re looking for, with a taste of the
mysterious and the gothic, there I may be able to help you.’

‘Dr. Legrand is director of the Institut Legrand,’ said Madame Chabrol, a music teacher from Cannes.

‘The Institut Legrand?’ asked Anna.

‘A psychiatric hospital,’ Angélique filled in.

‘Just a small private establishment,’ Legrand said. ‘Not far from here, outside Limoux.’

‘Edouard, are you referring to that strange man you once told me about?’ Angélique asked.

He nodded. ‘One of our most curious and fascinating patients. He’s been with us for about five years now. His name is Rheinfeld, Klaus Rheinfeld.’

‘His name sounds like Renfield, from the Dracula story,’ Anna commented.

‘That’s quite apt, although I haven’t yet observed him eating flies,’ Legrand replied, and everyone laughed. ‘But certainly he’s an interesting case. He’s a religious maniac. He was found not far from here, in a village, by a priest. He self-mutilates–his body’s covered in scars. He raves about demons and angels, convinced he’s in Hell–or sometimes in Heaven. He continually recites Latin phrases, and is obsessed with meaningless series of numbers and letters. He scrawls them all over the walls of his ce-…his room.’

‘Why do you allow him to have a pen, Dr. Legrand?’ asked Madame Chabrol. ‘Could that not be dangerous?’

‘We don’t, any longer,’ he said. ‘He writes them in his own blood, urine and faeces.’

Everyone around the table looked shocked and
disgusted, except Anna. ‘He sounds terribly unhappy,’ she said.

Legrand nodded. ‘Yes, I believe he probably is,’ he agreed.

‘But why would anyone want to…
mutilate
themselves, Edouard?’ asked Angélique, wrinkling her nose. ‘Such an awful thing to do.’

‘Rheinfeld displays stereotypic behaviour,’ Legrand replied. ‘That is to say, he suffers from what we call an obsessive-compulsive disorder. It can be triggered by chronic stress and frustration. In his case, we think that the mental disorder was caused by his years of fruitless searching for something.’

‘What was he searching for?’ Anna asked.

Legrand shrugged. ‘We don’t really know for sure. He seems to believe he was on some form of quest for buried treasure, lost secrets, that sort of thing. It’s a common mania among the mentally ill.’ He smiled. ‘We’ve had a number of other intrepid treasure hunters in our care over the years. As well as our share of Jesus Christs, Napoleon Buonapartes and Adolf Hitlers. I’m afraid they’re often not very imaginative in their choice of delusions.’

‘A lost treasure,’ Anna said, half to herself. ‘And you say he was found not far from here…’ Her voice trailed off in reflection.

‘Can nothing be done to help him, Edouard?’ asked Angélique.

Legrand shook his head. ‘We’ve tried. When he first came to us, he received psychoanalysis and occupational therapy. For the first few months he appeared
to respond to treatment. He was given a notebook to record his dreams. But then we discovered that he was filling its pages with insane babble. Over a period of time, his mental state deteriorated and he began to self-mutilate again. We had to take away his writing implements and increase his medication. Since then, I’m afraid to say, he’s descended deeper and deeper into what I can only describe as madness.’

‘What a terrible pity,’ Anna breathed.

Legrand turned to her with a charming smile. ‘In any case you would be more than welcome to have a tour of our little establishment, Anna. And if it could help you gain inspiration for your book, I could arrange for you to meet Rheinfeld in person–under supervision of course. Nobody ever comes to see him. You never know, it might do him good to have a visitor.’

Paris

The pieces of the puzzle were virtually flying together for Luc Simon. The description that the two seriously embarrassed officers had given of the man who’d bundled them into Roberta Ryder’s cupboard exactly matched Ben Hope.

Then had come the report about the Mercedes limo involved in the recent railway incident. The car itself was hot as hell. No registered owner. False plates. Numbers filed off both engine and chassis. Its internal locking system had been altered like a kidnap car. It looked as though it had been used for that kind of purpose too, as someone had obviously been trying to shoot their way out of it with a 9mm handgun.

Whoever that someone was, judging by the analysis report on the spent 9mm case found in the back, they were the same person as the mystery shooter from the scene of the riverside killings. And who was he? It had seemed impossible to find out. But then the cops at the scene of the railway incident had found a
business card inside the Mercedes. The name on the card was Benedict Hope.

There was more. In the parking lot of a nearby bar-restaurant they’d found the Citroën 2CV that had been mixed up in the railway incident. The missing grille badge, traces of paint from the Mercedes, even the dirt on the wheels, all matched the railway scene. The 2CV was registered to Dr. Roberta Ryder.

And it got even better. When the forensic team had gone through Ryder’s apartment with a fine-tooth comb, they’d found something. Right in the spot where she’d claimed her attacker had been lying dead, a speck of blood that whoever had cleaned the place up had missed. Simon bullied forensics into the fastest DNA test they’d ever done, comparing it against samples from Ryder’s hairbrush and other personal effects. The blood wasn’t hers. It did, however, match DNA samples from a grisly find that had turned up in the Parc Monceau. A severed human hand.

The hand’s previous owner had been one Gustave LePou, a criminal with a long history of sex offences, aggravated rape, assault with a deadly weapon, burglary and two suspected murders to his credit. It looked as though Ryder had been telling him the truth after all. But why had LePou been in her apartment? Was it just burglary? No chance. Something bigger was going on. Someone must have hired LePou to kill her, or to steal something from her–or maybe both. Simon felt like kicking himself that he hadn’t taken her seriously at the time.

More questions. Who had covered up the traces of
LePou’s death, removed his corpse from Ryder’s apartment, chopped it up and tried, rather unsuccessfully, to dispose of it? What was the connection with Zardi, the laboratory assistant, and had the same people killed him? Where did Ben Hope fit in–was he the Englishman who Roberta Ryder had told him was in danger? If the railway incident had been meant to kill Hope, when Simon had seen him later that evening he looked pretty cool for someone who’d just narrowly escaped a horrific death. Where were Hope and Ryder now? Was Hope predator or prey? The thing was a complete enigma.

Simon was sitting in his cramped office drinking a coffee with Rigault when the expected fax came through from England. He tore it out of the machine. ‘Benedict Hope,’ he muttered as he read. ‘Thirty-seven years of age. Oxford educated. Parents deceased. No criminal record, not a parking-ticket. Squeaky clean, the bastard.’ He slurped his coffee.

He passed the sheet to Rigault as the fax started churning out a second page. It spat the paper into his hand and he read it, his eyes darting along the lines. Across the top of the sheet was the British Ministry of Defence letterhead. There was a lot of text below. Official stamps and confidentiality warnings in large bold print everywhere. The second page was more of the same. So was the third. He whistled.

‘What’s that?’ Rigault asked, looking up.

Simon showed him. ‘Hope’s military record.’

Rigault read it and his eyebrows rose. ‘Fuck me,’ he breathed. ‘This is serious stuff.’ He looked up at Simon.

‘He’s our mystery shooter, no doubt about it.’

‘What’s he doing? What’s going on?’

‘I don’t know,’ Simon said, ‘but I’m going to bring him in and find out. I’m putting out an alert on him right now.’ He picked up the phone.

Rigault shook his head and tapped the fax printout with his fingers. ‘You’re going to need half the French police force to catch
this
fucker.’

The drive southwards down the autoroute from Paris was long and hot. At Nevers the motorway was interrupted for a while and they took the Nationale road as far as Clermont-Ferrand, then drove back onto Autoroute 75 heading towards Le Puy Ben’s destination was still a long way south, down in the Languedoc region where he could pick up the trail of Klaus Rheinfeld and, he hoped, make some progress on his search.

With only Fulcanelli’s half-read Journal for guidance, he still had no clear idea of what he was even looking for. All he could do was follow the thin clues as best he could and hope that things got a bit more promising along the way.

Roberta was asleep next to him, her head rolling on her shoulder. She’d been sleeping for the last hour or so, which was about the same length of time he’d known for sure that they were being followed. The blue BMW that he was now watching with half an eye in the rearview mirror, keeping pace with them through the traffic, had been on their tail since sometime after Paris.

The pursuing car had first caught his attention at a refuelling stop when the Peugeot had been ahead in the line. The four men in the BMW had been acting jittery. He could tell they didn’t want to lose sight of him.

They headed back onto the road, and Ben tested them. Whenever he overtook a slower vehicle in front of him, the BMW would follow. When he slowed right down to a pace guaranteed to annoy other motorists, the BMW followed suit, ignoring the blaring horns of the indignant drivers until Ben accelerated and it accelerated with him. There was no doubt about it.

‘Why’re you driving so erratically?’ Roberta complained sleepily from beside him.

‘Just my erratic personality, I guess,’ he replied. ‘Actually, I hate to tell you this, but we’ve got a friend. The blue BMW,’ he added as she twisted round in her seat, suddenly wide awake.

‘You think it’s them again?’

He nodded. ‘Either that, or they want to ask directions.’

‘Can we get out of it?’

He shrugged. ‘Depends how sticky they are. If we can’t shake them off, they’re going to follow us until we get to a quiet road and then they’re going to try something.’

‘Try what? Don’t answer that. See if you can shake them.’

‘OK. Hang on tight.’ He dropped down two gears and accelerated hard. The Peugeot surged forwards, weaving as he turned hard to overtake a truck. A horn
sounded from behind. The roar of the engine filled the car. Ben glanced in the mirror and saw the BMW giving chase, dipping in and out between lanes. ‘If that’s the way you want it,’ he breathed, and pushed the accelerator down harder.

Up ahead, a lorry was pulling out of its lane. The Peugeot darted into the gap and overtook it on the wrong side. The lorry gave a furious wobble as it shrank fast in his mirror, its airhorns blasting angrily.

‘Are you suicidal?’ she yelled over the engine noise.

‘Only when I’m sober.’

‘Are you sober?’ She made a face. ‘Don’t answer that either.’

A clear stretch ahead. Ben floored the throttle, pushing the speedo needle past the 160 km/h mark. Roberta clutched the sides of her seat. The BMW emerged through the confusion of traffic they’d left in their wake, powering after them.

Ben wove the 206 at high speed in and out of the honking traffic. It was far more agile than the heavy BMW, and by the time they reached a turn-off their pursuers were lagging 100 metres behind. The Peugeot tore along a winding country road. Ben took two random junctions, left and then right. But what the BMW lacked in agility it gained in speed and with an obviously determined driver it was tough to shake off.

A sign flashed up for a village, and Ben skidded into the turning. They were on a long straight. The bigger car edged up on them. His eye was on the dial and he was going as fast as he dared. Behind them, one of the passengers of the BMW stuck an arm out
of the window and squeezed off several shots from a pistol. The Peugeot’s rear window shattered.

They entered the village and sped through the main square, skidding to avoid a fountain and panicking some drinkers at a bistro terrace who roared and shook their fists only to dive for cover a second time as the BMW came roaring through and sent tables and chairs spinning across the pavement.

A junction flashed up and Ben skidded left with a screech of tyres. A truck swerved and narrowly missed them, crashing into a parked Fiat. The Fiat rolled into the path of the BMW as it veered around the bend in pursuit. The BMW hit the loose car a clanging blow from the side and spun it across the road into a wall. The BMW, with a crumpled wing and buckled bonnet, composed itself and came on again, picking up speed.

They were out of the village, blasting down a twisting road with trees zipping by on either side. A gap in the trees appeared on the right. Ben twisted the wheel and the Peugeot veered off the road, hitting the farm track with its tyres spinning on the loose surface. He controlled the skid and the car straightened up, then a severe rut hammered the suspension hard into its stops and their stomachs were in their mouths.

The BMW was doggedly hanging on behind. Dirt flew in their wake. Roberta twisted round again to see the BMW’s crumpled nose disappear in a cloud of dust as it plunged through the rut.

The Peugeot raced into a sharp bend. Suddenly a tractor filled the road. Skidding wildly on the loose
surface Ben managed to aim the car through a flimsy farm gate. It splintered like balsawood and the Peugeot crashed on through into the field. It went bucking across the ridged surface of the field and down a sharp incline. A sudden dip as the front of the car plunged into empty space. Then a crash as they smashed into the opposite bank of the deep trench. The Peugeot bounced and lay still.

They climbed out as the BMW came bounding down the hillside after them. Seeing the dust rising from the crashed Peugeot, the driver braked–too hard, sending the BMW into a sideways skid. It spun, hit another rut, went up sideways on two wheels and rolled, coming to a rest upside down in a great plume of dust.

Its four dazed occupants spilled out. A fat man with blood streaming down his temple fired a pistol at the Peugeot. The passenger window burst and showered Roberta with glass as she crawled for cover.

‘Roberta!’ Ben grabbed the Browning and returned fire, the gun bucking in his hand as his bullet went through the side of the BMW four inches from the fat man’s head. She took cover next to him.

Three of their pursuers dived behind the BMW. The fourth scrambled behind a rock, clutching a short-barrelled shotgun. He fired. The shot blew a ragged hole in the roof of the Peugeot, and Roberta screamed. Ben brought the Browning up again and loosed off four rapid shots. Dust flew up around the prone shooter. Ben’s fourth shot caught him in the upper arm. He rolled out from the cover of the rock, racking
the shotgun. Ben fired at him again, and kept squeezing off round after round until he was down and the Browning was out of ammunition. He ejected the spent mag and reached into his pocket for a spare one.

His pocket was empty. He suddenly remembered that all the magazines and ammunition were in his bag inside the car.

Another man came out from behind the upside-down BMW. The gun in his hands was black and oblong, with a stubby silencer and a long pistol-grip magazine. He fired a chattering burst from the Ingram submachine gun which peppered the side of the Peugeot with holes and forced Ben to take cover as he tried to get into the car. The third and fourth shooters were stepping out from behind the BMW, pistols in their hands, cautiously advancing. The man with the Ingram let off another spray, whipping up dust and stones in a line to Ben’s left.
Not good.

Suddenly the Ingram had shot itself empty, and the man was struggling to reload it. Ben saw his chance. He reached inside the Peugeot and grabbed his bag. Fumbled with the catches and found what he was looking for. He slammed in a fresh magazine as the man with the Ingram came closer. Throwing his gun arm up over the top of the car, Ben shot him twice in the chest and saw him go down on his back with his legs kicking in the air. The gunman nearest the BMW ran back for cover, snapping a wild shot over his shoulder. His colleague, realizing he was too
far from the car, went down on one knee and emptied his 9mm at Ben.

Ben ducked down as bullets whanged past him.

But one caught him. The blow to his right side jerked him round. He righted himself and returned fire. The man came down sprawling with his arms outflung and his pistol tumbling to the ground.

Ben staggered. There was blood everywhere. His vision clouded and suddenly he was gazing up at a circle of treetops and grey sky.

Roberta saw him go down, screaming
NO!!!
and catching his pistol as it fell. She’d never fired a gun before, but the Browning was easy–just point and squeeze. The last gunman stepped out again from behind the BMW and fired at her. She felt the crack as the bullet zipped past her. With the Browning in both hands she fired back and sent him under cover in a shower of glass. She grabbed her shoulder-bag out of the Peugeot’s broken window.

‘Can you run?’ she yelled at him. Ben groaned, rolled and staggered to his feet. His knees were weak. Another shot rang out. Her wild answering bullet caught the man in the thigh, and with a scream and a spray of blood he fell back behind the car. Now the Browning was empty again and wouldn’t work any more. The injured man came crawling back out with a double-barrelled shotgun. He fired and the Peugeot’s wing-mirror exploded.

‘Come on!’ She grabbed Ben’s arm and they ran down the steep slope. Below them, a rough earth bank led sharply down to a winding country lane. A farm
truck carrying a load of hay was lumbering slowly by. In four running leaps they were ten feet right above it and then Roberta threw herself into the air, taking him with her. They sailed through space for a terrifying second. The back of the truck rushed up to meet them–and then they plummeted into the prickly bed of hay, all arms and legs and confusion.

The man with the shotgun hobbled swearing down the slope past his three dead companions. He roared with fury as he watched the truck, with Ben and Roberta in the back, disappear in the fading light.