But he quickly remembered the college coffee at the first swallow. It was just as bad as ever. Something on a par with British army coffee, a comparison Ben hadn’t been able to make back in those days. It was too vile to gulp down in a hurry, so he sat sipping it, alone with his thoughts.
That was when a voice from behind him said, in a tone of astonishment, ‘Ben Hope?’
Ben turned, coffee in hand, and looked at the guy standing there, carrying a tray laden with a pot of tea, cup, saucer, jug of milk, bowl of cereal, glass of orange juice. For a second or two they stared at one another. The guy was a little older than him. Neither short nor tall, thin nor plump. Light brown hair beginning to show a dusting of grey around the temples. The face was very familiar. Even more than the face, the eyes. Sharply green, filled with a mischievous kind of sparkle as they peered closely into Ben’s.
‘Ben Hope, it is you, isn’t it? Of course it is. My God, how long has it been?’
‘Nicholas? Nicholas Hawthorne?’
‘Thank God, you remember. I was beginning to think I must have aged beyond recognition. Not you, though. You haven’t changed a bit.’
‘I know that’s not true,’ Ben said. ‘But thanks anyway.’ He motioned at the empty space next to him at the table. ‘Will you join me, Nicholas?’
‘Why, gladly.’ Nicholas Hawthorne settled himself on the bench seat beside Ben. There was that strange, hesitant uncertainty between them that you got when old friends who had gone their separate ways were reunited after many years, and the ice needed to be rebroken. ‘It’s just Nick these days,’ he said with a smile. ‘I only use Nicholas as a performance name. The agent’s idea. He says the formality of it is more appropriate to the classical market. But never mind boring old me. What about you? You’re the last person I ever expected to see here.’
‘Me too.’
‘What have you been doing with yourself all this time?’
‘Oh, this and that.’ The fact was, very little of what Ben had done in the last couple of decades could be discussed in anything more than the vaguest terms. Even if he could have talked about it, and hadn’t been the kind of person who preferred to keep things to himself, the details would only upset most normal, gentle folks for whom his life of risk, trouble and danger would seem alien, even frightening. He’d come prepared for that. His strategy was to provide the briefest and sketchiest account of himself possible, keep it vague and dodge direct questions. He said, ‘I live in France now.’
‘Business or pleasure?’
‘Bit of both.’
‘Are you married? Children?’
Ben shook his head. The easiest answer. The truth was complicated. Like most things in his life.
‘I wouldn’t have thought so, somehow. Not the children part, anyway. Nor me. Too busy with work.’ Nick paused. ‘Actually, what I heard is, you ran off and joined the army. Did very well there, or so the rumour went.’
‘You shouldn’t listen to rumour,’ Ben said.
‘Very true,’ Nick said, laughing. ‘Not that I was the least bit surprised to hear it.’
‘No?’
‘Absolutely not. I mean, the wild man of Christ Church, the legends of whose exploits still echo around the college walls?’
‘I don’t know about that,’ Ben said. He hoped he wasn’t about to be treated to one of the stories. They weren’t ones he wanted to hear.
He didn’t have to. Nick seemed to pick up on his unwillingness to discuss the legend that had been young Ben Hope, and quickly changed the subject.
‘It’s so good to see you again. What on earth brings you back to Oxford?’
Ben replied, ‘As a matter of fact, you do.’
Chapter 3
Which was true, in a sense. Though only a few days earlier, the name Nick Hawthorne was just the vaguest scrap of a distant memory, a faint echo from another life. But some echoes have a way of coming back to you just when you least expect them.
Ben had been sitting in the prefabricated office building across the yard from the old stone farmhouse, tucked away at the heart of a fenced-off compound deep in the sleepy backwaters of rural Normandy. A place called Le Val, a place he had strayed away from too many times. A place he now felt happy to call home. Spring was springing, the sun was shining, and all was pretty much okay with the world, apart from the fact that he was working on a Sunday, and the stack of paperwork piled on his desk that he had to finish ploughing through by lunchtime.
The joys of running a business. But he couldn’t complain. The enterprise he co-directed from this secluded base along with his partners, Jeff Dekker and Tuesday Fletcher, was growing steadily every quarter. Ben and Jeff had founded it a few years back and it would soon get to the point where they might have to expand to a second location, somewhere suitably remote and isolated, maybe further south where the climate was softer and they could spread out a little more.
For the moment, though, they were rattling on just fine and had established a comfortable, if by necessity slightly detached due to the nature of the business, rapport with the majority of the locals. In an area where most folks were farmers, or cheese makers, or small-scale cider and calvados producers, the idea of a bunch of British ex-servicemen setting up a tactical training centre to instruct military, police, hostage rescue and elite close-protection teams in some of the finer points of their trade must have seemed a little odd. The tall perimeter fences, KEEP OUT signs and roving German shepherd guard dogs might equally have unsettled one or two folks, not to mention the crack of high-velocity gunfire that was often to be heard rolling over the countryside from the safe confines of Le Val’s five-hundred-metre range. They certainly unsettled Jeff’s new fiancée, Chantal Mercier, who taught at a local primary school and frowned upon such gung-ho activities. Ben could see trouble ahead there, but he kept his mouth shut and didn’t interfere with his friend’s affairs.
Right now, Ben had his own affairs to deal with. And he heartily wished someone would come and interfere with those by relieving him of all this damned bureaucratic red tape. Paperasse, they called it in France. Ben had other words to describe it. Jeff often joked that you needed a licence to fart in this country, and he wasn’t far off the mark.
The latest irritation they had to deal with was the need for a special import licence to obtain firearm components, even though the contents of the Le Val armoury were already itemised and catalogued down to the last screw and spring. There was a guy called Lenny Hobart in Surrey making what he claimed were the world’s best, lightest and most stable tactical sniper bipods out of titanium and carbon fibre. Ben and Jeff were interested in trying them out and maybe buying in a few to use on the rifle range, where Tuesday had taken over as head sniper instructor to the SWAT teams who came to Le Val to train.
And so, Ben was due to travel up to Surrey in a few days, meet Hobart at the Stickledown shooting range in Bisley and put one of his prototypes through its paces at twelve hundred yards. At that kind of distance, where the wind was fickle, the very curvature of the earth came into play and even a microscopic amount of rifle cant could knock a bullet’s point of impact way off course, anything you could do to improve the chances of hitting your mark was a definite boon. If the new bipod lived up to the claims of its inventor, Ben planned on coming home with half a dozen, with a view to ordering more.
Enter the French government, who in their wisdom now insisted on making him trawl through an additional raft of forms just to obtain a few inert bits of machined titanium, carbon fibre, spring steel and rubber. Making the world a safer place.
Ridiculous. You could do more hurt to a person with a candlestick.
Ben spent a few more minutes soldiering on through reams of officialese that might as well have been written in Yupik or Pawnee, then decided to give it a break. He was leaning back in his chair and enjoying his fourth untipped Gauloise cigarette of the morning when it occurred to him that he would be more usefully employed working on clearing the backlog of emails in his spam f
older.
The Le Val email server had been getting bombarded with a lot of unsolicited mail recently. Offers of cut-price Viagra, phishing scams of one kind or another, and so many messages from prospective Russian brides called Tatiyana or Olga or Mayya, invariably 28 years old and offering to send images of themselves that Ben had been starting to wonder what Tuesday was getting up to online. He was getting almost as fast with the delete button as he was with a pistol.
Working his way through the pile, Ben came across an undeleted message from somebody called Seraphina Lewis. He glanced at the name for a fraction of a second before his finger gave its reflex twitch and got rid of it. Nice try, he thought. An unusual name. Intended to draw attention, maybe, as the scammers and phishers became more sophisticated in their techniques. The part of Ben’s mind that still recalled anything from his theology studies from two decades earlier, before he’d dropped that future life to join the army and then the SAS, flashed up the name Seraphina as being the feminine derivative of the biblical Seraphim from the Book of Isaiah. Why he still retained such information inside his head, he had no idea. The Seraphim were the fiery-winged beings, high-placed in angelic hierarchy, who fluttered around the throne of God in heaven. Maybe the oblique reference to ‘the fiery ones’ was supposed to convey a subconscious image of hot, burning passion. Or maybe it was meant to project a sense of purity and innocence to catch the unwary recipient and lure them to read more.
Either way, by the time those thoughts had flickered through his mind at the speed of light, the email was already in the trash and he was turning his attention back to his paperwork.
But then Ben hesitated. Something else was unusual about the message. More than the name, it was the email address itself. He could see it still imprinted like a ghost image on his retinas: the suffix @chch.ox.ac.uk. The official domain name for Christ Church, Oxford.
Ben’s old college. Which, as strange as that seemed, meant that the email was genuine, and meant for him. Ben hesitated a moment longer, then clicked open the trash folder and saw the unread message there at the top, above the collection of Viagra ads and Tatiyanas and Mayyas waiting to be permanently binned.
‘Okay, Seraphina,’ he muttered to himself, ‘let’s see what it is you wanted.’ Donations to help restore some crumbling part of the college’s architecture, no doubt, or to pay for de-moling the Dean’s private garden or restore the paintings in the art gallery that nobody ever looked at anyway. He clicked again, and the message opened.
Strange indeed, but stranger things had happened in his life.
Chapter 4
The message wasn’t the begging letter he’d expected. Rather, it was a month-old invitation to all former members of the ‘House’, that being the rather grand name by which his old college Christ Church colloquially referred to itself, studiously avoiding the word ‘college’ as a way to elevate itself above its smaller, less prestigious siblings. None of which could boast having a city cathedral as their college chapel, for instance, or thirteen British prime ministers and at least one English monarch among their illustrious alumni.
Somewhere close to the bottom of that list, way down there beneath the King Edward the Seconds and the William Gladstones and the Anthony Edens and the Lewis Carrolls – lower still than the likes of the infamous archbishop-turned-pirate Lancelot Blackburne and the German cokehead aristocrat Gottfried Von Bismarck – was the very little-known name of a certain Benedict Hope, Major, British Armed Forces, Ret. Though apparently not so little known as to be excluded from the invitation that had now unexpectedly, and slightly belatedly, landed in Ben’s lap. The hard copy of the letter that the college had presumably sent out ahead of the email must have ended up in the Le Val shredder weeks ago, unopened, along with a ton of junk.
With mixed feelings, he read on.
Seraphina Lewis, as it turned out, was the new college administrator tasked with tracking down and reaching out to old House members. Christ Church was a bit like the SAS: once you were in, you were in for life. Even if you left there under the darkest of clouds. Even if you had almost set fire to the place on at least one occasion, and in a separate incident hurled down three flights of stairs a fridge containing a roast pheasant and a bottle of expensive champagne belonging to the son of the Italian president, almost causing an international flap in the process. Such trifling matters seemingly were omitted from House records, in a spirit of forgive and forget.
The invitation read:
Dear Old Member,
This is to remind you that you are cordially invited to attend a special Easter reunion for all Christ Church Alumni, to be held on Wednesday, 12 April. The event will include refreshments in the Deanery Garden and a celebration dinner in the Great Hall (gowns to be worn). In addition, this year we are delighted to invite you to a private recital in the college chapel by Old Member and former Christ Church Organ Scholar Nicholas Hawthorne, who since leaving the House has gone on to become an internationally acclaimed classical recording artist. Nicholas will be performing works by William Byrd, Olivier Messiaen and Johann Sebastian Bach on the cathedral’s magnificent Rieger organ. I hope you will be able to attend, and warmly look forward to welcoming you back in person to Christ Church for this very special event. Accommodation will be available within college at no extra cost for Old Members and spouses.
Warmly, Seraphina Lewis, Christ Church (1993)
Development and Alumni Office
R.S.V.P. to
[email protected] Ben stubbed out his cigarette, lit a fresh one, and leaned back from the desk to think. The date of the event was only three days from now, the email having sat ignored in the spam folder all these weeks. His automatic inclination was to dismiss the matter without a second thought and not even bother replying. He hadn’t been back to Oxford since the brief time he and his then-fiancée Brooke Marcel had rented a house in Jericho, in the west of the city. Much had happened since then. Too much.
But then Ben thought about it some more, and felt himself slowly softening to the idea of attending the reunion. Not all his memories were bad ones. He remembered a moonlit summer’s night many years ago, sitting under the ancient cloister arches near Old Library with Michaela, the two of them listening to the strains of one of Nick Hawthorne’s late-night organ practice sessions emanating from where the cathedral nave adjoined the far corner of the cloister.
Though Nick had been the eldest by some margin, he’d been a key member of the ‘gang of four’: him, Ben, Michaela and Simeon. They’d all met during Ben’s second year at Christ Church, which would turn out to be his last, and become good friends. When you could drag Nick away from his music, he was fun company, knew the wickedest jokes and could drink real ale like it was going out of style.
Simeon Arundel had been a very different personality. Like Ben, he’d studied theology. Unlike Ben, he’d been heavily committed long-term to the subject and would go on to see it through to the end by being ordained as a vicar. Michaela Ward had been a first-year student of PPE, Oxford’s abbreviation for Philosophy, Politics and Economics. And she’d been Ben’s first serious girlfriend, though the relationship hadn’t lasted long. Following their break-up, Ben’s life had reached an unhappy point where he terminated his studies and left university. Then, in the wake of Ben’s dramatic departure, the friendship that had always existed between Michaela and Simeon suddenly deepened and they’d got together, married and settled in a village not too far from Oxford. As it turned out, those two had been meant for each other.
Ben would never forget either of them. Or the way they’d died, many years later.
With Simeon and Michaela gone, the original gang of four had been halved. Which might have impelled the survivors to keep in touch – but Ben and Nick never had. Ben was aware that it was his fault, since keeping in touch had never been his forte. Now after all these years, the thought of seeing Nick again filled him with a bittersweet feeling. Maybe it was time to rebuild the contact between them. The date
of the reunion fitted right in with his planned trip to Surrey. Bisley was only an hour’s drive away from Oxford, and it would save him having to find a hotel in nearby Guildford.
It was a spur of the moment thing. A snap decision. Ben thought fuck it, leaned forward, hit reply and started typing his response to Seraphina Lewis.
Two days later, he was slinging his old green bag on the front seat of his shiny silver BMW D3 Alpina Bi-Turbo, a replacement for the blue one he’d ditched at the bottom of the River Arno in Florence before Christmas, speeding off up Le Val’s bumpy track, past the gatehouse and away.
If he’d known how things were about to turn out, Ben would have stayed at home. Or maybe not. Because trouble seemed to draw him like a magnet. And trouble was coming, just as it always seemed to. Especially when your name was Ben Hope.
Chapter 5
‘I still can’t believe it’s you,’ Nick Hawthorne said. ‘Feels like such a blast from the past.’
‘Feels strange for me too,’ Ben replied. ‘Being back here after all these years. Time seems to have stood still.’
They’d finished breakfast and were walking down the stone staircase from the Great Hall. Sunlight shone from the archway that led to the south-east corner of Tom Quad.
‘Speaking of time,’ Nick said, ‘do you have any plans for the rest of the morning, or lunch?’
‘None in particular.’
‘Only, I’m having a few people over at my place for drinks and a bit of a buffet this lunchtime. Nothing formal, you know. It’s a way for me to loosen up with a few laughs and a couple of glasses of wine before tonight’s performance. Why don’t you come?’
‘I’d like that very much,’ Ben said.
Nick looked pleased. He glanced up at the clock that adorned the massive Tom Tower, which straddled the college’s entrance and loomed over St Aldate’s. ‘There are still a couple of hours before the first guests will start to turn up,’ Nick said. ‘If you like, we could head over there now. Give us a chance to catch up a bit on old times. And if you don’t mind, you can help me set up the buffet while we’re chatting.’