'Right. Not so difficult was it?'
Mike Clark was propped up against a wall watching with an impassive expression, as if he'd seen it all before.
'What are you doing here?'
'Environmental health.'
'Really?'
Trent nodded, not daring to look Proctor in the eye. He didn't want to antagonise Proctor any further and thought if he kept to his cover story, they'd have to let him go.
'I don't believe you. Perhaps you need a little encouragement to remember the truth.' Proctor snapped his fingers at Clark who looked up, puzzled. 'See what tools you can find in the kitchen.'
Clark jumped off the wall and left the room with a grudging lumber.
'The question is what sort of encouragement do you need.' Trent's pupils grew wide. 'We don't want to leave any visible marks, so that rules out the face. What about the knees? Do you think that would be persuasive enough?'
Before Trent could answer, Proctor drove a clenched fist into his stomach with such force that the chair scraped backwards across the polished floor. Trent coughed and spluttered, gasping for breath.
'Will this do?' asked Clark, as he reappeared whistling nonchalantly and holding up a wooden chopping board and a silver steak tenderising hammer.
'Perfect.'
He handed the items to Proctor and untied Trent's arms.
'Now, which is it to be, pinky or ring finger?' said Proctor, with a sickly smile, as Clark twisted Trent's wrist so that his hand lay flat on the chopping board Proctor had placed on the journalist's thigh.
'Please, God, no,' Trent sobbed.
'Stop being a baby.' Proctor reached for the tenderising mallet and raised it up to his shoulder. With his free hand, he spread Trent's fingers.
'I'll tell you everything you want to know,' Trent blurted. 'I'm a journalist investigating the BFA -' The rest of his sentence stuck in his throat.
'Keep talking,' said Proctor.
'I'm trying to prove a link between the BFA and Larry Hopper.'
Proctor looked blankly at him. 'Who's Larry Hopper?'
Trent frowned, momentarily thrown by Proctor's ignorance. 'The guy who owns this yacht? You were in the room with him just now.'
Proctor shrugged and lowered the mallet. Trent sucked in a lungful of air, relieved that the threat to his hand had receded.
'Well, that wasn't so hard, was it? Now, I think your co-operation deserves a little drink,' said Proctor, sweeping out of the room.
Trent twisted in the chair, clutching his hand. He watched Proctor return with a cheap bottle of cooking brandy. He opened the bottle with his teeth and spat out the cork.
'It'll have to be brandy. It's the best I could do.' Proctor snatched Trent's jaw and prised his mouth open. 'Come on, open up.'
Clark stood behind Trent, and held his head steady with two meaty hands clamped over his ears. Proctor forced the glass bottle between Trent's lips and manipulated his jaw to stop him clamping his teeth shut. The alcohol burned as it hit the back of Trent's throat, causing him to cough and splutter a mouthful over Proctor's T-shirt.
Proctor wiped spittle from his face and attacked Trent's jaw with renewed vigour, ramming the bottle forcefully into his mouth. 'Drink!' he yelled, tipping up the bottle.
Trent gulped the liquid down, trying to ignore how it seared his gullet on its journey to his stomach. Twice he suppressed a compulsion to gag, knowing it would only incense the two thugs.
'Swallow it,' Proctor shouted in his ear, until the brandy dripped from Trent's mouth and stained his shirt.
When he choked on the liquid for a second time, and sprayed brandy across the floor, Proctor punched him in the sternum, knocking Trent's breath from his lungs.
'There's still some left,' said Proctor, holding the bottle up to a strip light on the ceiling. It was still at least half-full. 'Aren't you thirsty?'
It took another ten agonising minutes for Trent to consume the whole bottle. When he was done, his eyes had glazed and his head lolled languorously on his shoulders as the alcohol coursed through his veins. At least it had numbed the pain in his foot, but now a wave of nausea swept through his body, and he couldn’t stop himself retching, vomiting a foul pool at Proctor's feet, disappointed to see the skinhead step out of the way just in time.
'Get him some fresh air,' said Proctor. Rough hands pulled him from the chair and dragged him out of the room.
A door opened and a wall of air hit Trent in the face, cool and refreshing after the stuffiness of the storeroom where the odious smell of alcohol-laced vomit hung like a vile fug. He breathed it in through his mouth, momentarily revived as he submitted to the will of the two men dragging his semi-conscious body along a damp gangway.
They came to a halt and stood Trent upright. He swayed and stumbled with no idea or little care as to where he was. He heard water lapping against the hull of the yacht, but was conscious of very little else until he felt hands lifting him off the ground and over a hard edge.
Suddenly, he was plummeting, his heart shocked into working double-time by a spike of adrenaline. His body hit the icy water with a noisy splash, enveloping him in its darkness. His arms and legs thrashed in an uncoordinated effort, driving him farther down into the frigid depths. He forced his eyes open, but in his drunken confusion had no sense of which direction to find the surface.
The pressure on his lungs grew ever stronger, urging him to draw a watery breath until a vice-like grip squeezed his chest and crushed his sternum and spinal column. Eventually, his resistance failed, and his eyes bulged as he drew water deep into his lungs, regretting too late the agony of the liquid drawn deep in his chest. Starved of oxygen, his body became limp and he sank slowly to the bottom of the quay.
Chapter 35
He was standing knee-deep in a lush field of cornflowers, a cool breeze ruffling his hair. Alpine mountains rose like giants, their snow-capped peaks glistening in the rising sun, while wisps of clouds drifted through the azure sky above. At his feet, Trent heard the chirrup of a contented cat. He scooped up a thin tabby tangling herself around his legs.
'Tabitha, what are you doing here?' The cat purred and arched her head to rub against his cheek.
Suddenly, darkness threw its cloak over the day and the fields and mountains vanished. Trent dropped the cat onto the old red carpet of his childhood bedroom. Familiar thick curtains were drawn across the window, but a bright moon allowed his eyes to pick out the furniture; a bookcase full of dog-eared paperbacks, a wardrobe with its handle missing, and his bed with its inviting heap of crumpled bedclothes.
'Trent? Is that you?' His father's voice called from the landing.
'Dad? I'm here -' His mouth formed the words, but he made no sound.
His arm shot above his head, and with a sharp tug, he was pulled upwards, floating up through the ceiling and into the night air where the stars winked and shimmered, out of focus and indistinct.
His head broke the surface of the water, and a strong arm gripped him around the chest and under his arm. A deep chill penetrated him to the core and he felt death's cold breath on his neck.
Something dug into his back as he lay asleep. It woke him from his dreams, but when he tried to roll over, he was overwhelmed by the feeling he was suffocating. He gagged and vomited hard, coughing up lungfuls of water. Trent sucked in a gulp of air, which prompted a further bout of coughing.
Above him, a figure hovered, holding his head, his face a blur. He tried to focus, but the blackness took him again.
Strips of light flashed past with mesmeric regularity. Trent prised open his eyes. He was lying on the back seat of a car, wrapped in a woollen blanket that scratched his neck. It reminded him of childhood, driven in his father's old Jaguar on the long journey home from a trip to his ageing relative. Street lamps scrolling by threw strange shapes over the seat in front, slowly elongating into curious shapes before vanishing.
His head was thumping, and he shivered despite the warmth of the blanket, fight
ing to suppress the nausea, which came in waves rising from his stomach as his face flushed hot and sweaty. It wasn't helped by the overpowering factory-fresh smell of new plastic and oil. His eyes fell on the silver buckle of a seatbelt, watching as it reflected lights and shapes of unknown objects whistling past and, for a moment, he felt quite calm.
When Trent's eyes flickered open, he found he was in a sterile white room, lying under white sheets and with a wooden veneer table bridging his legs. He tried to push himself up on the pillows, but his ribs were sore and he was connected to an intravenous drip with a looping, transparent tube flowing into a needle protruding from his right hand.
'How are you feeling?' A voice spoke softly from the far side of the room.
'Where am I?'
'You had an accident. You're in hospital.'
Trent squinted at the stranger, who stood and walked towards the bed. 'Who're you?'
'That doesn't matter right now,' said Blake. 'Do you remember anything about last night?'
'Are you a doctor?'
'I pulled you out of the water after you fell from a boat in Canary Wharf. Can you remember anything about it at all? '
Trent shook his head and licked his lips. A memory slowly surfaced. 'The Clara Barton?'
'Why were you on board?' Blake poured water into a plastic cup from a jug and handed it to Trent.
'The last thing I remember is hitting the water when they threw me overboard.'
'You were lucky.'
'I don't feel very lucky.'
'You didn't die.'
'I suppose not.'
'So what were you doing on Larry Hopper's yacht?'
'Why all the questions? Are you a copper?'
'I work for the government. It's really important that you try to recall the details.'
'So secret service then?' Blake didn't reply. 'And the fact that you were staking out the yacht means you have the same concerns about Hopper.'
'What concerns?'
'Hopper and the BFA. They're in partnership. You didn't know?'
'Mr Garside, you're an investigative reporter who was unlawfully on board a yacht belonging to an American national in British territorial waters. You were also risking a highly sensitive intelligence operation. I need to know what you were doing and what happened on board, or there could be serious consequences.'
'So what's your interest? Larry Hopper? Or the BFA?'
'We could always arrange to have your body found floating in the quay as they originally planned and nobody would be any the wiser. I saved your life last night. In return I'm asking for a few straight answers.' Blake dragged the armchair to the side of the bed and sat down. 'Or there are alternative methods I could employ.' The threat was implicit in Blake's tone. Trent swallowed hard. 'You obviously know that the Clara Barton is owned by Larry Hopper but what were you hoping to achieve by sneaking on board?'
'Okay, I'll tell you. But it goes no further, right? This is my scoop. I was trying to prove that Hopper is funding the BFA. It's common knowledge that they've benefited from a large injection of cash, right, but the donor's remained anonymous. If it's Hopper, and he's pulling Longhurst's strings, then the public has a right to know. I needed a paper trail, something that links him with Longhurst. So I told the guards I was an environmental health officer to get on board. It was pathetically easy really.'
'Except they caught you before you found anything.'
'That's not true,' said Trent, beginning to enjoy himself. 'I stumbled across Hopper in a meeting, and guess who he was entertaining?'
'Longhurst?'
'It was late, so I was surprised they were still up. I've no idea what the meeting was about, but it doesn't matter. The fact that Longhurst was on that boat is all the proof I need that they're working together.'
'Not necessarily.'
'Come on, it's incontrovertible. Listen, if you like, I can quote you in the piece. What's your name?'
'You can't publish any of this,' said Blake, folding his hands in his lap.
'To hell with you. You can't tell me what I can and can't publish.'
'I can draw up a D-Notice if you want to make it official.'
'This isn't a security issue. Unless you think Hopper's orchestrating something more than a pay cheque to the BFA?'
'All I'm saying is it wouldn't be helpful right now for Hopper to find out that his friendship with Longhurst is public knowledge. If you wait until I give you clearance to publish, I'll give you the full inside story,' said Blake.
'Seriously? The whole inside track?
Blake said nothing.
'Okay, it's a deal. I'll hold off, but only on the understanding that I get the exclusive later.'
'I'll be in touch,' said Blake, rising from the chair. 'Right now, you need to concentrate on recovering.'
Blake pushed the chair back into the corner of the room and returned to the side of Trent's bed. 'Just one more thing.' He leaned in close and spoke in Trent's ear.
A moment later, the journalist's head slumped onto his chest as he fell into a deep hypnotic trance.
'When you wake up you'll have no recollection of our conversation and no memory that I was in your room. When you're discharged from hospital, you're free to continue your investigations into the BFA, but you won’t publish any information about Ken Longhurst or Larry Hopper. Start counting backwards from ten, and when you reach zero you'll be fully awake and feeling refreshed.'
Trent counted down slowly and opened his eyes. He was in a sterile white room, lying in a hard bed under crisp sheets and with a drip attached to the back of his hand. He eased himself up on his elbows, surveyed the empty room, and wondered where the hell he was.
Chapter 36
A veil of low cloud hung over the horizon, showering the landscape with a persistent drizzle and coating the roads with a greasy sheen. The wipers on Blake's Audi swept the windscreen with a metronomic beat, but the screech of rubber on glass was lost among the soft notes and epic crescendos of Faure's Requiem blasting from the speakers. Blake, navigating his way back to Sussex on autopilot, was pre-occupied pondering on the BFA, Larry Hopper, and the information provided by the journalist who'd been captured on board the Texan's super-yacht.
At first, he didn't register the flash of red that hurtled around a blind bend, threatening to spill onto the wrong side of the road. The car was rolling on its suspension, its wheels rumbling over the cat's eyes in the middle of the carriageway.
Blake, whose speed had crept well over the limit, jumped on the brakes and flicked the steering wheel with no panic, training and experience sub-consciously kicking in. The incident would have been a small blip on an otherwise uneventful journey, but for the fact that in the damp conditions, his rear end slid out onto the wet verge, and as the tyres lost traction, the Audi was thrown into a sideways spin. Blake steered expertly into the skid, and with a squeal of protesting tyres, the car came to a juddering halt across the carriageway. A small hatchback flashed past without slowing, accelerating away with black smoke belching from its exhaust, the driver seemingly oblivious to the accident he'd almost caused.
'Idiot!' Blake slammed his palm against the steering wheel.
Instinctively, he noted the number plate, which was partially obscured by mud and dirt, and realised it was the red Renault from Stoneleigh Cottage. He'd expected Proctor and Clark to be lying low at the house, not tearing around the countryside drawing attention to themselves. Something was wrong.
He hit the accelerator hard and set the Audi's front wheels spinning. He over-revved the engine and crashed through the gears, and within a mile had caught up with the Renault. He followed discreetly as it approached a small town and settled into a crawl through heavy traffic.
It pulled up in a narrow space in the half-empty car park of a train station. Proctor emerged in a black top with a hood covering his shaven head. Blake parked and followed him into the concourse, where Proctor bought a ticket from a dispensing machine and caught the next train i
nto London. Blake slipped unseen into the same carriage and chose an aisle seat where he could see the back of Proctor's head.
Proctor sat silently throughout the journey, staring out the window at the changing landscape flashing past, and eventually jumped off at London Bridge, where he was swamped by a crowd of businessmen, students, and tourists. He headed through a ticket barrier onto the Underground and followed signs for the Jubilee Line. Blake trailed him at a distance as he skipped down a slow moving escalator and onto a near-deserted northbound platform.
Blake hung back, waiting for the rush of hot, dirty air from the tunnels that signalled the arrival of a train, and joined an adjacent carriage to where Proctor had slumped into a seat. He kept an eye on his agent through a scratched, square window between the compartments, while hanging onto an overhead strap.
They passed through Waterloo, Westminster, and Green Park, where an ebbing tide of passengers flowed on and off the train like waves on a beach. Through Bond Street, the crowds eased, but Proctor stayed seated until Dollis Hill, where he finally alighted.
He turned out of the station and onto the corner of a residential street, sauntering past rows of Victorian terraces with a spring in his step that gave the appearance he might actually own the road. His fists were clenched as if in a perpetual rage, and he held his like a libidinous cockerel. A young mother with a pushchair and a toddler in tow deliberately crossed the road to avoid him. There was no doubt about it, Ben Proctor looked like trouble.
He crossed a metal footbridge over a railway line and through a park into a residential estate, then slipped through a gate and into an allotment, a large expanse of open ground where hundreds of plots were meticulously tended.
Blake ducked behind a wooden shed and watched as Proctor pulled out his phone and made a call. He chatted briefly and hung up. Less than a minute later, a man in scruffy jeans, a misshapen woollen jumper, and curls of ginger hair spilling from under a peaked cap appeared. He reached out a hand to greet Proctor, and as they turned to walk away, Blake had a clear view of him.
He was surprised that there was a familiarity about the shape of the eyes, the angle of his nose and the cut of his jaw. Age and a wispy beard had altered his appearance since the last time Blake had seen his face, but he was sure he wasn't mistaken. The only question was what Martin Kelly was doing in the heart of the British capital meeting with a representative from the British Freedom Alliance.