erupted in fury. Ben saw a punch coming his way and blocked it instinctively. He moved his arm and saw another guy go flying backwards into the wall. Someone else grabbed a cue from the nearby pool table and came at him swinging it like a bat. Ben ducked backwards and felt the wind of it whoosh a couple of inches past his face. Moving around the side of the pool table he scooped up a ball and as the guy came in for a second swing he dashed it in his face at close range. There was a short scream. The cue clattered to the floor, together with some small white-red objects that Ben realised were teeth.
Nobody else tried to attack him after that. The crowd parted as Ben staggered away and tried to make it as far as the door. Then the bar-room floor came rushing up to meet him, and someone turned out the lights.
When Ben woke up, his first thought was that somebody had decided to pull his brain out through his temple with a blunt corkscrew – until he realised it was just the cruellest, most punishing headache he’d ever known. He groaned, and blinked his eyes to clear away the blurriness in his vision.
He was sitting on some kind of hard bench. He could feel vibrations coming up through his feet and against his spine, where his back was pressed to a hard wall. When he tried to move, he found that his ankles and wrists were secured tight.
That realisation cleared his senses and he opened his eyes. The first thing he saw was the unsmiling face of the Portuguese cop sitting opposite him in the back of the police van. The second thing he saw was the short- barrelled shotgun cradled over the cop’s chubby thigh, its muzzle pointed accurately enough at him to blow him in two if he tried anything. Not that he could – he could see now that his wrists and ankles were chained tight to the tubular frame of his bench.
‘Fine,’ he mumbled. ‘Be like that.’ And passed out again.
It was Brewster Blackmore’s voice on the line again, and from his tone it sounded as if he hadn’t called in the middle of the night for nothing.
‘Wait,’ Mason Ferris said. He swung his long, thin legs out of bed, stepped into his slippers and carried the phone out of the master bedroom, out of earshot of Mrs Ferris.
‘Who is it, Mason?’ she murmured sleepily as he left the room. He ignored her, stepped out into the long, broad landing and snicked the bedroom door quietly shut behind him. Moonlight shone in through the house’s high windows. He stood and looked out at the view across London, without really seeing it.
‘It’s after two, Blackmore,’ he said into the phone. ‘Tell me something I want to hear.’
‘Ben Hope’s just been arrested in a village in northeastern Portugal,’ Blackmore said, and Ferris was suddenly much more alert. ‘Local police recognised him after being called out to a bar brawl. He’s being flown back to Rome as we speak, to be treated at Sandro Pertini Hospital before being transferred to Regina Coeli prison.’
‘Hospital?’
‘Gunshot wound to the arm. He managed to get the bullet out and clean himself up. No secondary infections, but he’d lost a lot of blood and there was enough alcohol and codeine in him to kill a horse. We’re lucky we still have him. They want to keep him in for observation for a day or two. That should give us enough time.’
Ferris pondered this latest development for a moment. His plan was back on track. A thin smile traced itself across his lips, then disappeared as his pleasure gave way to darker thoughts.
‘Kane?’ he said.
‘Negative so far,’ Blackmore said. ‘We’ve lost track of her.’
‘Not good enough,’ Ferris said softly.
‘You told me to deal with the Lister situation,’ Blackmore protested. ‘I dealt with it, and I’ll deal with this. I’m doing all I can. For all we know, she’s dead and her body will wash up somewhere down the Seine.’
‘Get it done,’ Ferris told him. He shut off the phone and turned back towards the bedroom.
It was almost a relief for Ben when the doctors came into his tiny private room early that morning and told him he was going to be moved to the prison pending his first hearing. Two days spent lying in a narrow steel- framed bed hooked up to a drip, with nothing to count the hours go by except for the changing of the guard outside his door, had felt like twenty. Other than the grim-faced police officials who’d come to formally arrest him and read him a long list of charges and rights, two doctors and four different nurses had been his only visitors. The youngest of the nurses, a waiflike thing from the deep south of Italy, seemed mortally terrified of him; while one of the older ones, a steel-haired matron with the heft of a Cape buffalo, gave him looks of such intense hatred that he was worried about being left alone with her in case she tried to inject him with some lethal drug.
So far, he’d managed to stay alive, despite the tasteless boiled vegetables they were feeding him, and some kind of pulpy grey matter that passed for meat. It was like being in the army again.
The whole time, they’d kept him strictly as far away from newspapers and TV as a person could be. He could only imagine the fun the media were having with the arrest of Urbano Tassoni’s murderer. His favourite Italian reporter, Silvana Lucenzi, would be right in the thick of it, playing to the gallery and watching her ratings climb.
‘How are you feeling?’ the doctor asked.
‘Like an innocent man about to go to jail,’ Ben said. ‘How are you?’
The murderous-looking nurse came into the room carrying a bulky paper bag, which she laid on a chair before stomping over to Ben’s bedside and unhooking him from his drip with all the delicacy of a person ripping tail feathers out of a dead turkey. Ben gave her his sweetest smile as she left, then climbed out of bed and picked up the paper bag. Inside were his clothes, cleaned and pressed, and his shoes with the laces removed.
‘Damn,’ he said. ‘Foiled again. I was planning to use those laces to throttle everyone on the ward and then escape out of the window.’
The doctor just stared blankly. Ben walked through to his little bathroom, changed out of the hospital gown and dressed. His arm was still a little stiff, but healing up fine now. When he came out again, four armed Carabinieri guards were waiting for him with handcuffs. Ben put out his wrists for the bracelets, and was escorted from the room. More police were outside in the corridor with shotguns. Among their faces was one Ben recognised. Roberto Lario avoided his eye, looked pensive and said nothing.
The guards ushered Ben out of the ward and down a short corridor to a lift. The door whooshed open, and they all piled inside. Ben faced the door, conscious of the loaded and cocked weapons just inches away. His knees were trembling with the thought of what was happening to him, but he was damned if he’d let them see him nervous. As the lift descended towards the ground floor, he turned to the silent Lario.
‘I have to say, I’m disappointed,’ he said. ‘I’d expected Darcey Kane to make an appearance. To thank me in person for letting myself get caught. That’s gratitude.’
Lario looked uncomfortable. ‘I don’t know where she is,’ he replied softly, as if even that was saying too much. Ben wanted to ask him what he meant; but then the lift bell pinged and the doors slid open. The guards shoved him forwards, and moments later he was being walked out into the pale morning sunlight.
A group of plainclothes police agents and armed Carabinieri were waiting by a pair of police Alfa Romeos and
