My Dear Friends
By the time you read this message, I will be dead. I ask you not to mourn for me, as I am unworthy of your grief.
The shame of my sins is a burden I can no longer bear. May God have mercy on me for the terrible things I have done.
Chapter Two
Two weeks later
Storm clouds scudded darkly overhead as another great rolling wave crashed against the bow of the SeaFrance cross-channel ferry Rodin, sending a plume of white foam and spray lashing across her deck. Most of the nine hundred or so passengers braving the gale warnings to cross over to England that freezing December afternoon were huddled in the luxury of the superferry’s bars and lounge areas.
Just one man stood on the outer deck. He leaned against the railing, the collar of his scuffed leather jacket turned up, the wind in his thick blond hair, his body moving easily to the heave and sway of the ship. His eyes were narrowed to blue slits against the salt spray as he gazed northwards, just able to make out the shape of the Cliffs of Dover through the murk. He took a draw on his cigarette, and the wisp of smoke was snatched away by a violent gust.
His name was Ben Hope. Half English, half Irish, just turned forty years of age but still as fit as he’d ever been. In his time he’d been a soldier, before leaving the British Special Forces to plunge deep into the shady world of the international kidnap and ransom business.
Working freelance as what he called a ‘crisis response consultant’, using methods and skills that conventional law enforcement operatives either weren’t allowed or weren’t trained to employ, Ben had delivered more than a few innocent victims safely back into the arms of their loved ones. More than a few kidnappers had been efficiently dispatched in order for that to happen.
These days, home was a tranquil corner of rural Normandy, a place called Le Val. It had been a working farm for most of its history — now it was a specialised tactical training centre where military and police agencies, hostage rescue specialists, kidnap and ransom negotiators and insurance execs from all across the world flocked to learn from Ben and his team. The world was still a troubled enough place to ensure they were seldom short of clients.
It sometimes happened that Ben had to take a business trip to Britain, but this wasn’t one of those times. With Le Val closed for Christmas, he had more personal matters to attend to — both of which, in their different ways, were the reason for his deeply pensive state as he stood there on the deck.
Tomorrow evening he was due to attend the inaugural opening of the new concert venue at Langton Hall, the Oxfordshire music academy created by Leigh Llewellyn. She’d been one of the world’s most celebrated and talented opera stars. She’d also been Ben’s first love — and much later, and for far too short a time, his wife.
Her death was a wound that he knew would never really heal. How it had happened was something he refused to think about, though the nightmare still haunted him some nights. The man who’d taken Leigh from him had been called Jack Glass. He had outlived her by only a few minutes.
As a trustee of the Leigh Llewellyn Foundation, Ben had been invited to cut the inaugural ribbon to open the grand new concert hall, make a speech and present a prize to the most promising young opera singer training at the school. He wasn’t exactly an accomplished public speaker. In his time with the SAS he’d conducted a thousand low-key operational briefings with small teams of men; as a tactical training instructor he was used to giving lectures in the familiar environment of Le Val’s little classroom — but the thought of standing up on a stage and addressing a large audience made him nervous. He was as prepared for it as he could be. It was the least he could do for Leigh’s memory.
The second reason he was travelling to England made him even more nervous. He’d agonised a long time before deciding to make the stop-off in London on his way to Oxfordshire. London was where Brooke lived: Dr Brooke Marcel, formerly visiting lecturer in hostage psychology at Le Val, as well as something a lot more. The way things had gone between them since the terrible argument in September, Ben didn’t know how Brooke would react to his surprise visit. All he knew was how badly he’d missed her these last few months.
When the ferry docked at Dover, Ben headed down to the car deck. While the other passengers climbed into their shiny new Vauxhalls and Nissans and Daewoos, he creaked open the door of the battered and ancient ex- military Series II Land Rover that the guys he worked with referred to as ‘Le Crock’, slung his bag on the worn-out passenger seat and drove out into the late afternoon drizzle.
Le Crock wasn’t the kind of vehicle you could spur along in too much of a hurry — and as he headed for London, Ben wondered if that might have been his unconscious motive for taking the old Landy: he wasn’t in any particular hurry to reach his destination. Twice he was seriously tempted to give it a miss, bypass London altogether and head northwest straight for Oxfordshire. The second time that thought occurred to him he very nearly gave in to the temptation — but by then he was already entering the outskirts of the city and Brooke’s place in Richmond was just a few more miles away.
‘Fuck it,’ he said to himself, ‘I’m here now. Let’s see it through.’
Chapter Three
The rain was threatening to turn to sleet by the time Ben pulled up across the street from the large red-brick Victorian house where Brooke lived. He killed the engine, and for a few seconds his thoughts turned to the whisky flask in his bag that he’d topped up with fifteen-year-old Islay malt before setting out from France. Instead he reached for his crumpled pack of Gauloises and his Zippo lighter. Anything to delay the moment where he’d have to walk up to the door of Brooke’s flat on the ground floor.
As he sat and smoked and watched the rainwater streaming down the window, he wondered again whether turning up like this unannounced was the right thing to do. And he thought back again to the events of three months ago that had left his personal life in such a mess.
Life had never turned out as quiet as he’d have liked it, but the previous September had been an eventful time even for him. It wasn’t every month that you got wrongly accused of murder, dragged into an intrigue involving Russian mobsters and harried across most of Europe by an army of police commanded by a particularly determined, ambitious female SOCA agent named Darcey Kane.
But narrowly avoiding being tortured to death, crushed in a car wreck, getting incarcerated in an Italian prison or pulverised by a Russian attack helicopter hadn’t been the worst things that had happened to Ben that month. None of them had remotely compared to the shock of seeing Brooke in the arms of another man.
Injured and on the run, Ben had been heading for Brooke’s secluded holiday place in the Portuguese countryside, thinking it would be empty and he could lie low there for a while and recuperate. He’d been wrong. Approaching the cottage in darkness, he’d been surprised to see a light in the downstairs window, and peeked through the shutters. The sight he’d witnessed had made him recoil. Brooke and the unknown man had been sitting by candlelight, drinking wine, both obviously fresh from the shower. There was only one possible conclusion to draw.
Ben had slipped away unseen. From Portugal he’d beaten a hazardous path to Italy, from there to Monaco, then Georgia and back to Rome. Along the way, he and Darcey Kane had joined forces to defeat the gangsters who were trying to kill them, and unmask a conspiracy at the heart of British Intelligence. One of the toughest parts of the job had been escaping the amorous clutches of the — he had to admit it — extremely attractive and alluring raven-haired Darcey. When it was all over and they’d ended up at a loose end together in Rome, she’d made it very clear to him that her idea of a weekend in the eternal city wasn’t about visiting the Sistine Chapel and the Colosseum. ‘I won’t give up, you know’ had been Darcey’s disappointed parting words to him as he headed back home to France. ‘I always get my man in the end.’
The first thing Ben had done on his return to Le Val had been to check the diary for Brooke’s next lecture.
