What are you thinking, you bloody fool?
Here he was standing among enough home-grown cannabis plants to stock a garden centre, and he was about to invite the police into his home. Madness. Not in a thousand years would they believe all this was for his personal use only. He could see the headline in the Oxford Mail: CLASSICAL PERFORMER CHARGED WITH DEALING DRUGS. Reputation in shreds. Career gone. He’d have to sell the apartment. His mother would be scandalised. It was all too awful to contemplate.
Get a grip on yourself, Nick. Do something!
But what?
He could still hear the burglars banging about, and the sound of their voices through the door. One of them was making a joke about something. The other one laughed. They weren’t speaking English. Was it Polish? Romanian?
That was when it suddenly occurred to Nick that the solution to his problem was staring him in the face. He couldn’t call the cops, but he could call someone. Someone who wouldn’t be afraid, like him. Someone who could wade in and handle this situation like swatting a couple of flies. The human equivalent of that home-defence shotgun Nick was so badly lacking right now.
Ben Hope.
Nick fell to his knees on the floor and groped in his coat pockets for the business card Ben had given him earlier that day. He shone the glow of his phone over the back of the card and saw the mobile number handwritten there. He punched in the digits with a trembling finger and clamped the phone to his ear, crouched on the floor of the dark room as though he was saying a prayer of penitence.
Nick almost wanted to sob with relief when he heard Ben’s voice in his ear before the second ring. Four in the morning, but he sounded wide awake and alert. Like a kick-ass justice-dealing machine ready to spring into action.
Nick cupped his hand over the phone and spoke in a raspy, urgent whisper. ‘Ben, it’s me, Nick. Listen—’
‘Why are you whispering? What’s up?’
‘I need your help, right now,’ Nick croaked. ‘There are intruders in my apartment.’
Ben Hope wasn’t one to waste time on idle chat. ‘Call 999. Stay safe. On my way.’
‘I can’t call the pol—’ Nick began to explain, but then the line went dead. He stood up, still clutching the phone, listening through the door and realising that something was different. He could no longer hear the intruders. He stalked closer to the door and pressed his ear against it.
Dead silence.
Had they gone? They must have.
A moment earlier, that would have been the most wonderful relief in the world. Now, Nick was almost disappointed that he wouldn’t get to see Ben Hope kicking their sorry arses after all.
He slowly, tentatively, unbolted the door and eased it open a crack. Still not a breath of sound or movement from out there. The worst of the danger seemed to have passed, but all the same his heart was fluttering with mixed dread and fury at the thought of what evidence of horrible damage he was about to find in his home.
Nick stepped nervously out into the pitch-dark hallway and turned towards the living room at the top of the passage, where he could see a faint rectangular outline of light around the edges of the door. His legs felt shaky under him. He reached out a hand to find the light switch.
Then a powerful grip clamped hold of his arm and he cried out in terror as he felt himself being jerked forward off his feet. As he fell, something hard and solid hit him a brutal blow to the face and he felt his nose break.
The light came on. Nick was on the floor, groaning, blood bubbling from his broken nose. He peered through a veil of pain, craned his neck upwards to look at the trio of men standing over him and looking down at him as if he was a dog turd they’d stepped in. The one who had kneed him in the face reached down and grabbed a fistful of Nick’s hair, making him cry out again as he forced him to stagger upright. The man pressed the web of his hand against Nick’s throat and pinned him against the wall.
Helpless and unable to speak or move, Nick stared at his trio of attackers. Big, hard-looking men, all wearing dark clothes. They had broad shoulders and angular, ruddy faces, and eyes that gazed back at him without any trace of compassion. As though he was just an object to them, not even human. To Nick, that was the most terrifying thing of all.
One of them shouldered past, yanked open the spare bedroom door and peered through, flashing a small torch around the inside. He grinned.
‘Like I said, boys. It’s a fuckin’ greenhouse in here.’ Speaking English now, thick with the accent of the language Nick had heard them talking in before. Eastern European, but he still couldn’t place it.
Such things were the least of Nick Hawthorne’s worries now. The man pinning him by the throat drew back his other hand in a clenched fist.
Nick saw little after that. The punches kept coming, hard and violent. He felt his teeth break, with a horrible crack that filled his head. Then he was back down on the floor, heavy kicks striking at his stomach and sides and groin and legs, with nothing he could do except curl up and try to protect himself and hope it would be over soon.
One of the thugs said something that Nick couldn’t have understood, even in English. Then he felt the pincer grips seize him by the arms, and his body being lifted off the floor. They half-carried him into the living room, dragging his limp feet along the floor. He was groaning and half blind with pain, and only caught a fleeting glimpse of the wreckage of the room. Why were they doing this to him? He didn’t understand. He didn’t deserve this.
‘No,’ he tried to plead. But all that came out from his shattered lips was a bubbling moan.
They dragged him towards the window.
Chapter 11
Ben had wanted to ask why Nick couldn’t call the police, but there was no time to lose over questions. He hurriedly pulled on his jeans and boots, put his leather jacket on over the dark T-shirt he’d been sleeping in, and left Old Library at a sprint.
The BMW was in the college car park to the rear of Meadow Buildings, across the quad and through a gated arch. Ben threw himself behind the wheel, and moments later the snarl of his exhausts broke the serenity of the silent meadow.
He skidded out of the college grounds and sped up St Aldate’s. One-way systems and pedestrianised zones weren’t a priority for him, and nor were speed limits as he hustled northwards through the night. Oxford never quite sleeps, but at four in the morning its centre comes closer to being deserted than most modern cities. He hit seventy miles an hour on Cornmarket, and eighty on Banbury Road, before he had to brake to avoid running down a bunch of drunks clowning around in the middle of the street. Moments later, he was roaring into the tranquil part of north Oxford where Nick lived.
Only to find that it was no longer so tranquil. And that he wasn’t the first emergency responder to arrive on the scene.
The houses and trees of Nick’s street were lit by the swirl of blue from the squad of vehicles that half blocked the road. Ben kerbed the BMW opposite and got out. The other side of the street he could see the door to Nick’s place hanging open, police hovering outside like guards. The top-floor windows were lit, and more lights were coming on in neighbouring houses all around as residents woke up to the goings-on. An old man stood framed in his doorway on Ben’s side of the street, wrapped in a dressing gown and squinting across at the police cars and the glare of blue lights. He looked confused and distressed. ‘What’s going on?’
Ben made no reply. A short distance away, a female uniformed officer was taking what looked like a witness statement from a young man and woman in their early twenties who stood huddled and pale at the side of the pavement. They were dressed as though they’d been to a party. Passers-by, rather than neighbours. The guy was clutching a phone at his side. Ben thought he must have been the one who called 999, if Nick hadn’t.
Closer to the apartment entrance, Nick’s Aston Martin was boxed in by a chequered Thames Valley Police Vauxhall Vectra and two unmarked detective cars. One was a Plain Jane Mondeo and the other was some kind of seventies’ Ameri
can muscle car as wide as a river cruiser, blue lights twinkling from behind its grille. As incongruous as it was, Ben gave it only a glance. A chill gripped his insides as he saw the paramedic unit clustered near the entrance to Nick’s building.
They’d backed their ambulance up close, but they hadn’t gone inside, because their focus was down here at street level. Emergency medical equipment was spread out over the pavement, which was strewn with shards of broken glass. Glancing up at the shattered pane of the top-floor window of Nick’s apartment, Ben understood where the glass had come from. But the paramedics had their backs to him, blocking out what they were doing. He needed to see, even if he didn’t want to.
He hovered impatiently as a second police Vectra came screeching onto the scene and then ran across the street for a better look, his heart thumping. The WPC spotted him and left her witnesses for a moment to step towards him with her arms spread to ward him away, but he pushed by her. A cold, sour wave of fear washed through him.
He knew. Even before he got a clear view of what the paramedics were working on, he knew.
Then he saw it. The chill gripped his guts and his vision seemed to telescope into a tunnel, while the sounds of radios and frantic activity were muted in his ears and nothing existed except Ben and the grim sight in front of him.
The body had fallen from the top-floor window above. It hadn’t hit the pavement, because its drop had been arrested by the spiked iron railing below. A man’s body, fully dressed in beige chinos and a bright blue shirt. Hanging over the railing with his arms and legs dangling limp. A spike protruding either side of his spine. In the amber of the streetlights and swirling blue of the emergency vehicles, the blood that was dripping from the railing and pooling on the ground, running along the cracks between the paving stones and coursing in little rivulets off the edge of the kerb into the gutter, looked oily and colourless.
It was Nick Hawthorne. His head was hanging at an angle that made his face visible, or what was left of it. From his busted nose and teeth, it looked like the fall wasn’t the first injury he received at the hands of the intruders. He looked as though he’d been in a bare-knuckle prize fight, and lost badly in the first round. One eye was swollen completely shut, the other wide open in a frozen stare of terror.
When you hit rock bottom, your deepest dread realised, the nightmare come starkly true, that leaves nowhere else to go. Now there was nothing left to be afraid of. Ben closed his eyes for a moment, stilling himself, gathering his strength. Then he reopened them and felt the fear gone, replaced with icy calmness.
He looked back up at the smashed window above. He could see shapes and shadows moving around up there, which he knew were police officers examining the scene. He couldn’t believe how fast they’d got here.
He stood behind the paramedics as they struggled to get his body off the railing. If they were in a hurry, it was only to get the mess cleared up, not because their patient was in need of urgent medical assistance. He wasn’t going anywhere but the John Radcliffe mortuary, across the city in Headington.
‘Sir?’
Ben turned. The WPC, her face half blue in the lights, wisps of mousey hair sticking out from under her hat. Jabs of static and voices blurping from her radio. She looked drawn and tight-lipped, as if she wanted to throw up and was fighting to hold it in. Ben wondered if this was her first impaling. Cops had a dirty job and saw some pretty bad things. But they couldn’t begin to imagine some of the things he’d seen.
‘Sir, I need you to step back, please.’
‘What happened here?’ Ben asked, already building the scenario in his mind. Nick had said there were intruders, plural, in the apartment. It would have taken at least two men to throw him through the window with enough force to shatter it like that. Perhaps three.
Ben glanced across at the witnesses. The young woman was crying, her male companion awkwardly holding her and patting her back as if to console her, though he looked as shocked as she did. Ben saw two possible options there: either they’d happened on the body after it had already hit the railing, or else maybe they’d seen Nick come out of the window and drop to his death, which would have been twice as horrifying and accounted for the shell-shocked looks on their faces. In that case, they might also have seen the perpetrators running off, which could have happened before, during, or after calling the police.
If the couple had observed Nick’s killers flee the scene, Ben expected that any moment now the cops would hustle them into a police car and whisk them off to the station to help the cops with their enquiries, on what was going to turn out a long and sleepless night for all concerned.
‘I have to ask you to step away, please,’ the female officer repeated more firmly. ‘This is a crime scene.’
Crime scene. If the cops had thought it was a deliberate suicide or simply a case of some stupid drunk falling out of a window, either way they’d be calling it an accident scene. The fact that they were calling it a crime scene confirmed for Ben that the witness couple must have seen Nick fall and the bad guys make their escape moments later. If the police hadn’t turned up so uncharacteristically damn fast, he might have been able to talk to them himself, and get a description of the attackers. That chance was blown now. Ben was upset about it.
‘Okay, officer. I didn’t mean to get in the way.’ Ben stepped back. The female officer gave him a look that said, ‘Don’t go anywhere, we might want to talk to you’ and hurried back to the witnesses.
Moments later, as Ben had expected, the WPC was joined by another officer who led the witness couple to one of the marked Vectras and took off with the flashing blues lighting up the trees along the street. Ben seemed to have been forgotten about for the moment, which suited him fine. He needed to learn more, which wasn’t going to happen standing out here with the uniforms. If the plainclothes guys were upstairs in Nick’s apartment, that was where Ben needed to be too.
Chapter 12
Nobody saw Ben as he entered the building and hurried upstairs. He met a couple of Nick’s downstairs neighbours on the first-floor landing, who looked pale and bemused and asked him if he knew what was going on, but he brushed by them without a word.
When he reached Nick’s floor he saw the apartment door lying open and slipped inside, silent as a shadow. Ben’s ability to blend into his environment and move about without being seen or heard had been noted as off-the-scale exceptional by his first instructors in the SAS. Time and practice had made him much better at it since.
The apartment looked as though a small bomb had gone off inside it. Furniture was overturned, paintings torn off the wall, the glass display cabinet broken and knocked on its side with Nick’s music collectables all spilled over the floor. The precious harpsichord had been shunted so roughly to one side, leaving scuff marks on the polished hardwood floor, that one of its three legs had folded under it and the instrument was listing at an angle like a beached ship.
From where Ben stood hovering near the entrance he could see through the open doorway that led to Nick’s kitchen. Halfway down the passage, the spare bedroom door that had been locked earlier was hanging ajar. There was a glow of red light coming from inside the bedroom. Ben wondered what that was about. A strange yet familiar smell hung inside the apartment, and it seemed to come from that open room. He wondered for a moment what that was about, too, until he realised what it was, and put it together with the red light.
In the middle of the devastation of the living room, two plainclothes detectives and another uniformed officer were clustered together deep in conversation. The older detective was doing most of the talking, which told Ben that he was the superior officer. He was a short, reedy individual with dyed black hair oiled over a balding crown and a moustache that twitched as though it was going to fall off when he talked. From the moment Ben saw him, he had the strangest impression that he’d seen him somewhere before. For the moment he couldn’t pin it down, but it would come to him.
The younger plainclothes guy looked to be
maybe a couple of years older than Ben, and a couple of inches taller at around six-one. He was dressed more casually than his superior in jeans and desert boots. He had a craggy, weathered face that looked as if it had been beaten out of Kevlar, and watchful eyes that were locked on the older detective with all the expression of a rough plaster wall, but Ben could tell that he wasn’t impressed with the guy.
None of them noticed Ben’s presence, until he stepped towards them and interrupted their conversation with, ‘So what’s with the incredible response time, guys?’
They all turned around. The one with the craggy face showed no change of expression, but the older detective flushed the colour of liver. ‘Who the hell are you?’ he demanded.
‘I might ask you the same question,’ Ben said.
Which might not have been the best way to win the guy’s favour. Ben was still trying to place him. The moustache bristled like a startled cat as the older detective broke away from the group and stepped aggressively towards Ben, puffing himself up to look bigger. ‘I’m Detective Superintendent Forbes, Thames Valley Police, and this is a closed crime scene. Who the hell let you in here?’
‘You’d have to ask them.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘I’m Ben Hope.’
‘Occupation? Address?’
‘Businessman. I live out of the country. I’m in the UK on a work-related visit.’
‘And you have a reason for being here at four in the morning?’
Ben was getting tired of the rapid-fire interrogation. ‘That’s my friend stuck on the railings down there. All the reason I need, wouldn’t you say?’
‘How do you know the victim?’
‘We were at college together, here in Oxford. Long time ago.’
‘Were you close?’ Forbes asked the question without a trace of sympathy. Ben was definitely not liking him very much.
‘I wouldn’t say that exactly. Yesterday morning was the first time I’d seen him in more than twenty years.’