The Missing Hours (25 page)

The kidnap-and-ransom industry is booming. According to some reports, approximately 75 per cent of Fortune 500 companies invest in K&R insurance. If an employee is taken hostage in some far-flung location, the insurance companies then turn to people like the Cole Group to remedy the situation, negotiating a ransom that is satisfactory to both sides. It is an industry in which we are familiar with bad people who do bad things. But not on a day like that, in the middle of September, in the heart of Brasilia.

I had turned in to the South Hotel Sector. The traffic was busy, cars whipping by faster than you would think they could. I remember the smog, the fumes catching in my throat. I remember the roar of motorbikes.

It’s not an unusual sound in Brasilia. Not something that should have drawn my attention. But there was something about it that made the hairs on my neck stand on end. I slowed, scanning the road ahead, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. It was a motley collection of bikes. There were even a couple of mopeds. They rode two to a bike, driver and pillion passenger. I counted them, not really thinking what I was doing.

Six bikes. Twelve people.

They opened fire almost instantly.

Pop. Pop. Pop.

I would like to say that I rushed forward, that I took hold of the young woman with the jet-black hair as the bullet hit her in the chest, that I at least attempted to pull her out of harm’s way. But the truth is, I did none of those things.

I froze.

Then I ducked behind a car. A Peugeot, I think.

They flooded from the bikes. People dropped in their path. They swarmed up the wide front steps, vanished inside. I didn’t see what happened next, but I heard it. I heard the gunshots, the screams, and then, just when it seemed like there couldn’t possibly be anyone left alive in there to kill, the explosion that ripped the front off the building.

I hid behind the Peugeot. It was red.

I hid there until my knees burned, as the police cars with their flashing lights, the ambulances whirred past me.

Thirty people were killed. More than two dozen injured.

Dr Selena Cole, the woman I was so keen to see, was one of the survivors. She had left the hotel early that morning and hadn’t yet returned. Her husband wasn’t so lucky. Ed Cole was killed in the detonation of the IED.

The culprits were not difficult to identify. A neo-paramilitary group, based in the Colombian portion of the Darién Gap, took to the internet to proudly proclaim their success, crow about the blow they had struck to the world of kidnap and ransom. Escorpion Rojo – the Red Scorpion – had been around for the last decade or so, making a small but solid name for themselves in the production and distribution of drugs, kidnapping unwitting travellers as a nice little sideline to help keep the coffers full.

Yet things had grown lean for the group, as Colombia’s newly introduced anti-narcotics policies began to bite. Escorpion Rojo let their displeasure be known, with IEDs left at police stations in Medellín and Bogotá. A small-arms attack that crossed the border into Venezuela.

And then Brasilia, the brightest and best of the world’s K&R industry gathered together in one place.

It was an awesome attack, one that shifted the paradigm that had for so many years been applied to Colombian paramilitaries. It showed that borders meant little, that it wasn’t simply about territory, power within their own small domain. Not any more.

I still dream about that day. Night after night I wake, sweat pooling across my chest, and I hear the screams, smell the burning flesh. I survived. And yet I did not escape. I think there are few who did. I wake, day after day, in my own bed. But still I have never left Brasilia and the day that the K&R industry was brought to its knees.

Author’s note: I attempted to contact Dr Selena Cole whilst writing this article. The Cole Group is still in operation, still successfully negotiating the release of hostages, but Selena Cole, its founder and owner, is no longer involved in its day-to-day running. Management has now been handed over to the Coles’ managing director, Seth Britten. Selena was unavailable for interview.

The compromise of marriage

DS Finn Hale: Friday, 10.41 a.m.

THERE ARE VOICES
on the other side of the door. I stop, listen. No, one voice. It has lowered now, as though whoever it is does not want to be overheard. I stand there trying to pull words out of the hushed rhythm, but it is futile.

So instead, I just march right in.

A woman sits at one of a pair of desks, receiver tucked into her shoulder, her head in her hands, long copper hair hanging loose down her back. She looks up at me, her mouth dropping open, eyes flaming. I smile, flash my warrant card. She stares at it like it has frozen her to the spot, and it seems that I can hear her heart rate increase.

Interesting.

‘No. No, of course. I understand. Yes. I’ll look into it. I’ll get straight back to you.’ Her accent is northern, unadulterated and clear. She spins the chair away from me slightly as she talks, so she is facing the patio doors that let out on to the bright green garden beyond. There’s a fish pond.

I pull out the chair that is tucked beneath the adjacent desk, sit down without being asked. She glances at me, a quick flare of the nostrils, and I know I’ve got to her.

‘Okay. Yeah. Well, thanks for letting me know.’

Orla Britten hangs up the phone with a thump, turning her chair so that she is facing me dead on. ‘Can I help you with something?’ She doesn’t smile, isn’t going to do the whole playing-to-the-police-officer thing. Which is fine. Because quite frankly I’ve had a titful of this.

‘Detective Sergeant Hale.’

‘Okay.’ She looks at me like she’s about to slap me. But she is shifting in her chair, blinking rapidly, more nervous than she wants me to know.

‘We need a chat, Mrs Britten.’

She stares at me. ‘Sure,’ she says flatly.

‘Your husband around?’

She glances back at the closed patio doors, and it is then that I notice a tall figure at the bottom of the garden. He is walking back and forth across my line of sight, phone clutched tight to his ear.

‘He had to make a call.’

I look pointedly at the phone on the adjacent desk. ‘Cold out today,’ I offer.

‘What did you say you wanted?’ she asks. ‘You know that Selena is back now? That everything is absolutely fine? To be honest, I really don’t understand why you lot keep coming here.’

In my defence, this is my first visit.

I shake my head. ‘It’s not about Selena.’

‘Okay.’

I’m waiting for something. For tears, for a flourish of guilt to erupt from her. She simply stares at me.

‘I’m here about Dominic Newell.’

There it is. A fury of reactions races across her face. She leans back in her chair like she is trying to get away from me, like that will help.

‘I assume you know? About his murder?’ I ask.

She looks from me out into the garden to where her husband is standing. Then closes her eyes briefly and nods. ‘I saw it on the news. At first I thought it couldn’t be him. You know? You never think that someone you know will end up being murdered.’

‘You knew him well?’

She shrugs, a quick glance up at me, then away. ‘Not well. We’ve had a couple of overlapping areas of interest.’

‘Beck Chambers?’

‘Yes. We – Dominic and I – communicated about Beck’s various legal issues.’

‘What was your relationship like with him?’

Orla looks out into the garden. A robin has hopped up on to the path that leads to the patio doors, is staring in at us. I roll my eyes at it.

‘I didn’t have a relationship with him. Not really.’

‘And yet,’ I say, ‘you called him six times on the day he died.’

She looks back at me, and I can see fear in her.

‘Fae, Dominic’s receptionist, said that you seemed pretty upset. That you were desperate to speak to him.’

Orla takes a breath. Readies herself to lie to me. ‘I don’t remember.’

I don’t respond to that. Just look at her. The robin has given up, is hopping away. I don’t blame him.

‘See, what’s interesting to me, Mrs Britten, is that Dominic’s partner Isaac has confirmed that in the days leading up to his death, he discovered that Dominic was having an affair. With a woman. Isaac actually called her. Spoke to her.’

She’s keeping my gaze, but only just. Has the look of a deer about to take flight. There are tears building in her eyes.

‘You were having an affair with him, weren’t you?’ I soften my voice right up, a priest now, ready to take confession.

The tears are overfilling, spilling down her cheeks. She shakes her head, a little exhalation, and I think that this is it, that the confession is coming.

Then she looks directly at me, her expression sad. ‘I wish that was the way of it.’

I watch her. Am wondering what the hell she is about to say next when the patio doors swing open. I didn’t see the husband hang up the phone, didn’t see him approach along the long path. I’m getting sloppy in my old age.

He hasn’t noticed me, is bouncing his mobile phone in his hand, looks like he is carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. He is a little shorter than me, although his slenderness gives the impression of height. He’s wearing a shirt and tie, and I wonder if he has had meetings, or if he always dresses that way, even though the office is set within the Cole home. My eyes fall to the scars that crease his face, and I snatch my gaze away, guilty suddenly.

‘Everything okay?’ He looks from me to his wife.

‘DS Hale, Mr Britten.’

He nods. ‘Hi. Seth. What’s all this?’ He’s asking his wife, or me, whichever one of us feels like answering. But Orla has turned her chair now, so that she is facing the wall. I can just about make out the tears trickling down her cheeks.

Guess that leaves me, then.

‘Seth,’ I say, ‘I’m here investigating the murder of Dominic Newell.’

I don’t know what response I was expecting. I don’t know what it was I thought he would say. Whatever it was, I don’t get it. The mobile phone hits the floor with a clatter, a tinkle that suggests the screen has smashed against the hard tiles. I stare at it for a moment, trying to piece it all together, then look back at Seth. He is staring at me, his mouth moving even though not a sound escapes him. He has paled, his skin taking on an almost grey sheen.

I look at him. Look at Orla.

She has turned her chair around now, is watching her husband. She has stopped crying.

‘He’s … Dom … he’s … he’s dead?’

He doesn’t wait for me to confirm it. It is both a statement and a curse. Then his knees buckle beneath him and he slides to the floor. His hands cover his face and a noise breaks from him, a coarse keening.

I feel the pieces shift before me. The wife staring. The husband bereft. I see all of my expectations crumbling away and the magnitude of my error becoming clear. Isaac was wrong. Dominic was having an affair. But it wasn’t the wife. It was the husband.

A Start in Kidnap and Ransom (continued)

Dr Selena Cole

She was an elegant woman, tall, slender, the type for whom the word willowy seemed to have been invented. A suede coat, faux-fur collar standing up tall, her hair pulled back into a neat bun. Every now and then you would see some tourist or other pause in their picture-taking, leaving off from the London Eye or the Thames with its perennial river cruises, just to watch her pass. She drew attention.

Kate walked like she had all the time in the world, paid little attention to the man following her. But then few people did. He was grey, unremarkable in the best possible sense, seeming to vanish even as you stared at him.

Then came a roar of engines, a car pulling up on to the Embankment kerb, its rear door flung open.

She stopped, her hands flying to her mouth, the sudden realisation that she had made a mistake.

But it was too late.

The grey man was already on her, pushing her into the waiting car.

And then they were gone, like they had never been there, leaving behind only a knot of confused tourists.

‘You drew attention,’ I said.

She stared at me, an alien life form. ‘Well, yes,’ she allowed.

‘When you are in a kidnap hotspot, the last thing you want to do is draw attention. Your clothing, your car, your jewellery, all of it screams out that you would make a valuable commodity.’

The group nodded, transfixed.

It was day five. An intensive training course designed to prepare the employees of Lexix Oil to survive in Nigeria. In fairness to Kate, she had handled her kidnapping with restraint, the fear showing in only the dancing of her fingers.

‘It’s known as stress inoculation. We expose you to stressful circumstances, in a controlled environment, so that if the worst were to happen, you will already have the responses in place to deal with it.’

Kate nodded fiercely, pen moving rapidly across paper. It happens this way: employees coming in, expecting that what we do here will be a cakewalk. Then they experience it, the reality, or the facsimile at least, of a kidnapping, and suddenly life becomes far more serious.