The Ben Hope Collection: 6 BOOK SET (37 page)

Near Vienna

It was a murky, foggy mid-afternoon, and getting cold. The lake was beginning to freeze over, and light powdery snow was settling on its surface. Four hundred yards out across the thin ice, the pine forest was a black jagged silhouette against the grey sky.

Markus Kinski clapped his hands together and pulled up his jacket collar. He leaned back against the side of the four-wheel drive, remembering the last time he’d been back here. The day the foreigner had been brought out from under the ice.

The year was coming full circle, winter closing in again. So what was he doing back here? Maybe Monika had been right when she’d said he was obsessive by nature.

For a moment he thought about his wife. She’d been gone nearly three years now. Too young to die. Misdiagnosed twice. He missed her.

He sighed and his mind drifted back to the Llewellyn case. It had been shut months ago, but the damn thing
haunted him. There was something not right about it. It had been closed too neatly, dealt with too efficiently, even by perfectionist Austrian standards. Things just didn’t
happen
like that. It had taken him months to get it out of his head, and then just when he was beginning to forget about the whole damn thing, who should pop up out of nowhere but Madeleine Laurent.
Or whoever she was.

So far, the search for Laurent was going nowhere. The Erika Mann credit card had been real enough, but who was she? The address from the credit company had led him to a deserted warehouse in an industrial zone of the city. No big surprise.

So now there was more to add to the bunch of unanswered, nagging questions that already clustered around the Llewellyn case.

Madeleine Laurent wasn’t the only mystery connected to the drowned man. There was the matter of Fred Meyer, too. Meyer had a lot in common with Llewellyn. Too much. Both musicians, both pianists, both dead. Just a few kilometres apart, and both on the same night. Llewellyn’s watch, an old clockwork relic, had stopped when the water hit it and they pretty much knew the exact time of death. When they’d found Fred Meyer hanging in his student digs, he’d been dead about twelve hours. Which meant the two pianists had met their end within a short time of one another. Meyer first, probably, then Llewellyn soon after.

There’d been no suicide note in the Meyer case, no apparent motive. Interviews with family had thrown up no history of depression. As for most students
money was tight, but he’d been careful and there was no significant debt hanging over him. No emotional problems either, and from all accounts he was getting on well with his steady girlfriend. He’d recently landed a job teaching music at a school in Salzburg and was looking forward to starting after the summer, when his studies at the Vienna Conservatoire were over. Life had been pretty good for Fred Meyer.
Until he’d found
himself on the end of a rope.

OK, coincidences happened and maybe there wasn’t anything to connect one musician’s foolish accident to another’s pointless suicide. At least, that was what Kinski had been trying to make himself believe over the last few months. Just one other detail stuck in his craw, like a breadcrumb that wouldn’t go down. It was the matter of the opera tickets found in Meyer’s room.

Kinski sighed and looked out across the misty lake. The ice was still too thin to walk on, but in a few weeks it would have thickened enough to take the weight of a man. He’d seen people out here skating on the lake sometimes.

He tried to imagine what it would be like to fall through ice. The shock of the freezing water, enough to stop a man’s heart. The current carrying you away under the solid ice sheet, so hard it would take a sledgehammer to fight your way back to the air just a couple of inches away.

He thought about all the different types of death he’d seen, and the looks on the faces of all the dead people his work had brought him into contact with. The look on Oliver Llewellyn’s blue, half-frozen face
had been one of the worst things he’d ever seen. For months afterwards he only had to close his eyes and it was there staring at him. No shutting it out. Standing here by the lakeside was bringing that image back sharp in his mind.

He glanced at his watch. He’d been here too long. His misgivings about the case seemed to hold him here, when he should be getting back. He’d told Helga, Clara’s sitter, that he’d pick the kid up from school himself today for a change. She was growing up fast, coming on nine and a half now, and he was missing a lot of it. It would be a nice surprise for her. He was determined to spend the evening doing something fun, like taking her skating, or going to a movie. He threw everything at his child-the private bilingual school that would give her the best education, the violin lessons, the expensive toys. Clara had everything, except time with her father.

He heard footsteps coming up behind him in the frosty grass. He turned. ‘Hey, Max, where were you?’

The dog sat on his haunches and looked up expectantly with his big black head slightly cocked to one side, the rubber ball clenched in his powerful jaws. The gentle Rottweiler was old for his breed but Kinski kept him in shape.

‘Give it, then,’ Kinski said gently. ‘One throw, and then we’re out of here. Should never have come here in the first place,’ he added.

The dog dropped the ball delicately in his hand. It was slimy with saliva and mud. ‘You don’t know how lucky you are,’ Kinski said to him. ‘Chasing balls all
day would suit me just fine. Better than the shit I have to deal with, believe me, my friend.’ He tossed the ball away into the long grass and watched as the dog thundered after it, sending up a spray of frosty mud.

Max hunted around for the ball, snuffling in the reeds. He looked hesitant, pawing the ground and turning his big head this way and that.

‘Don’t tell me you’ve lost it again,’ Kinski called out in exasperation. He walked over and searched among the reeds for a glimpse of blue rubber among the frosty grass and mud. The dog had flattened a lot of the rushes searching for the ball. ‘Nice going, Max,’ he muttered. ‘You know, those fucking things cost eight euros each, and how many is that you’ve lost now?
Du
Arschloch
.’

There were cigarette butts in the mud. Kinski drew his hand away, thinking of hypodermics. Fucking junkies shitting the place up.

But then he looked more closely. He picked one up and examined it. It wasn’t a cigarette butt. It was a spent cartridge case. The brass was tarnished and dull, green in places. The rusted primer was indented in the middle where the firing pin had hit. Around the bottom of the case’s rim were stamped in tiny letters the words
9mm Parabellum—CBC.

Who’s been firing nine-mil out here?
Kinski thought. He rummaged in the grass. Max stood over him, watching fixedly. He bent back a frosty clump and found another. It was just the same. Then another, and then two more, lying half-buried in the yellowed roots. He pulled the grass back in fistfuls and kept finding more.
After three minutes’ searching he’d gathered up twenty-one of them, using the end of a ballpoint to pick them up and lay them in a little pile.

Twenty-one was a lot of brass. All lying in one spot. That meant a single shooter, firing all the shots from a fixed position. Too many rounds for a standard pistol, unless he was using an extended magazine. It was more likely a burst from a fully automatic weapon, about a second and a half from a typical submachine gun. Serious. Disconcerting.

He examined each cartridge case carefully in turn on the end of his pen, careful not to handle them. They all had the same scrape marks where they’d been slotted into a tight-fitting magazine, and the same slight dent on the lip where they’d been violently spat through the ejector port. The scent of cordite was long gone. He dropped the cases one by one in a small plastic bag and stored it in his jacket pocket. He straightened up. He’d forgotten the ball. He estimated the throw from the ejector and tried to figure out where the shooter might have been standing.

A thought began to form in his mind. There was nobody about. He reached down and brushed the dog’s head pensively with his fingers. ‘Come, boy.’ They walked back to the car. He opened the hatch and Max bounded inside, tongue lolling. The spare wheel was strapped to the inside wheel arch, and he unfastened it. He rolled it back down to the lakeside.

The fog was thickening all the time, and when Kinski sent the spare wheel trundling out across the frozen lake all he could see was a fuzzy patch of blackness
against the grey ice. The wheel rolled to a halt, then fell over and lay still. The ice held its weight.

He reached inside his jacket and popped open the thumb-strap of his holster. He flipped off the safety on his service SIG-Sauer P226, looked around him, then fired at the ice where the wheel lay. The flat report of the 9mm pistol jabbed painfully at his eardrums and echoed far across the lake. He fired again, and again, then waited.

The ice cracked. Fifteen yards from the shore, the spare wheel slipped into the water with a gurgle.

Kinski wasn’t thinking about the cost of replacing an expensive Mercedes wheel. He was thinking about the weight of a man. Thicker ice would take more cracking. How much more? Would twenty-one rounds of 9mm do it? He felt in his pocket and heard the dull jangle of the spent cases that his gut was now telling him had been lying here since last January.

Oxfordshire

The video-clip was shaky and the picture quality was poor and grainy. The camera panned slowly around a big stone-walled room that was lit orange-gold by hundreds of candles. Long shadows lay across the black and white tiled floor. Three thick stone pillars stood in a wide-spaced triangle around the edges of the room, reaching to the vaulted ceiling. Against the far wall stood a raised platform, looking like a small stage. Above it, a golden sculpture of a ram’s head with long, curled horns glittered in the flickering light.

Leigh frowned. ‘What the hell is this place?’

‘I can hear something,’ Ben muttered. He turned up the volume on the laptop. The sound was the heavy breathing of whoever had been filming. Suddenly the camera whipped sideways and the picture became confused.
‘Oh, fuck’
, said a frightened voice, close into the microphone.

‘That’s Oliver’s voice,’ Leigh whispered. She was gripping the edge of the table with white fingers.

They watched. The camera righted itself. A dark, craggy edge obscured a third of the picture. ‘He’s hiding behind a pillar,’ Ben said.

Some people were coming into the room. Blurred at first, the picture jerky, then sharpening up as the autofocus kicked in. The men filtered in through an archway. There were twelve or fifteen of them, all wearing black suits. The camera retreated further behind the pillar.

‘Olly, what were you
doing
?’ Leigh said with a sob in her voice.

Now the men were arranging themselves in a semicircle around the raised platform. They all stood in the same way, like soldiers standing to attention with their feet together and their arms clasped behind their backs. Their faces were hard to make out. The nearest was standing only a few feet from where Oliver was hiding. The camera hovered on the man’s back, travelled up to his neck and his cropped sandy hair. It autofocused on his ear. It was mangled and scarred, as though it had once been half torn off and sewn back on.

Ben turned his gaze on the platform, straining to make out the details. He realized what he was looking at was an altar. It was the focus of the room, illuminated by dozens of candles set in recesses in the wall. The centre of whatever was about to happen. It was like some kind of religious ceremony. But none that he’d ever seen before.

In the middle of the altar was an upright wooden post, maybe a foot and a half thick and about eight feet high, rough and unvarnished. Lengths of chain
hung from it, two of them, thick and heavy, fastened to a riveted steel belt around the top of it.

Now there was movement. A tall iron door behind the altar swung open. Three more men came into the large room. Two were wearing black hoods. The third seemed to be their prisoner. They were clutching his arms. He was struggling. They dragged him across the platform to the altar.

The camera wobbled and the heavy breathing was quickening. In the background, the prisoner’s cries were echoing off the stone walls.

‘I don’t think you should see this,’ Ben said. He could feel his own heartbeat beginning to race. He reached for the Stop button.

‘Let it play on,’ she snapped back.

The men in black hoods shoved the prisoner against the wooden post and manacled him to the chains. His cries were louder now.

One of the hooded men stepped forward with something in his hand. He went up to the prisoner and raised his hands up to the man’s face. He had his back to the camera and it was hard to see what was happening. The prisoner’s screams were becoming shriller and he was struggling wildly against the chains.

Then the hooded man stepped away. There was something hanging from the prisoner’s mouth. It was a thin rope or cable. As the hooded man stepped away the cable was pulled tauter and Ben realized with a horrified lurch what was happening. The camera was beginning to shake badly.

‘Oh
Jesus
!’ Leigh exclaimed in horror. ‘They put a hook through his tongue!’

The hooded man stopped and turned to face the audience. The cable was pulled as tight as it would go. The prisoner couldn’t scream any more. His tongue was stretched six inches out of his mouth. His eyes were bulging, his body quaking.

The second hooded man came forward. Something glinted in the candlelight. He raised the ceremonial dagger above his head.

It came down in a flashing arc. The prisoner’s head was thrown backwards as his tongue was sliced off. The cable snaked away like a bowstring with the glistening tongue attached. Blood spurted from the prisoner’s mouth and his head jerked from side to side, his eyes rolling.

But his suffering was cut short. The hooded knifeman stepped forward again. The dagger came in low and stuck deep into the man’s abdomen. The blade sawed and stabbed like a butcher’s knife, slicing a path from groin to ribcage.

When his guts began to spill, even Ben had to look away.