So far, so good. The sum of money involved made her ears pop. She tried to imagine it all sitting there in front of her, a mountain of cash. She couldn’t. But if all went smoothly, she wouldn’t have to imagine it. It would be there, real, all hers.
This second call was even more critically important to carry off right than the first. By now his shock and surprise would have worn off. He’d be ready to talk business. There was a lot riding on this for him, too.
He might even be so eager to talk business that he’d tried calling her while she’d been with Ben. There’d been no message from him earlier – but there might be one now. As she strode over the pebbles, she dipped her hand in her bag for the leather pouch in which she kept her personal BlackBerry and the untraceable, cheap prepaid Samsung she’d bought especially for her plan.
She stopped.
The pouch wasn’t there.
‘No! No!’ She rummaged urgently in the bag. Definitely gone. Where the hell was it?
Only one place it could be. Ben’s cottage, still lying there on the floor.
She remembered picking up the items that had fallen from her bag. Make-up, mirror, hairbrush, purse. What about the pouch? Now that she thought about it, she’d no recollection of picking it up. That’s what you get for drinking all that whisky, she thought angrily. It must have slipped under the sofa or something, and her wits had been too astray to notice.
Kristen looked at her watch. Damn it. Nine minutes to ten. She had time to make it back to the cottage, but there was no way she’d reach the privacy of her room at the guesthouse in time to make the call.
She’d have to make it from Ben’s place after all. Maybe she could lock herself in the bathroom, get him to put some music on so he wouldn’t overhear her conversation. This phone call was definitely not one she wanted anyone else to listen in on, even accidentally.
But she had no choice, and nobody to blame but herself. She turned and started heading impatiently back in the direction of the cottage. She hadn’t gone far before she noticed the black Range Rover again.
It had been driving slowly along the empty lane in the distance, in the same direction she was walking. Kind of meandering along, as if the driver were taking their time to drink in the sea view. Or as if they were lost and looking for someone to ask for help. Now that she’d doubled back the opposite way, it had U-turned, pulled right off the tarmac and was bouncing diagonally in her direction across the uneven grassy ground between the lane and the beach. The sinking sun reflected on its shiny black metal.
She turned to peer back at it as she walked. There was no question that the Range Rover was following her. Should she stop? She couldn’t help them, not being local. And she was in too much of a hurry. In any case, some instinct told her to keep walking, told her something about the vehicle wasn’t quite right. A frisson of worry went down her back.
The Range Rover kept coming, constantly correcting its course across the grass, as if tracking her, just thirty yards behind and catching up rapidly. As it reached the edge of the grass and began crunching over the pebbly beach, Kristen really began to worry. She suddenly felt quite sober.
Something’s wrong here, she told herself. Something is very wrong.
The driver’s intentions were clear. They meant to cut her off before she could get to the cottage. Her heart began to race in panic. What did they want from her? Thoughts of abduction, rape, or worse, flew through her mind. She broke into a run.
Ben’s cottage was almost in sight up ahead.
The Range Rover’s engine growled and it accelerated after her, its tyres crunching, spitting pebbles left and right. Kristen reached the rocky part of the path. She tripped over a boulder and nearly fell. Swore and ran on. Behind her, the Range Rover lurched to a sudden halt. Its front doors swung open and two men got out. She threw a frightened glance at them over her shoulder and saw they were both staring right at her. They left the vehicle doors open and started striding quickly, purposefully, after her.
Kristen had once got away from a man who was pestering her with a lucky kick in the groin. But this situation was something else. There was no chance she could fight them off if they caught her. They were both big, powerful-looking men. One was wearing a hooded top, the other a baseball cap. Their faces looked hard and determined.
And whatever they wanted from her, she could be certain it wasn’t directions.
This was for real. She was in serious trouble.
She ran faster. Her cloth bag kept slipping down her shoulder and the computer inside slapped against her leg as she ran. She let it fall. Glanced back and let out a whimper of fear as she saw the men’s pace quicken.
Suddenly they were sprinting after her. Without slackening his pace, one of the men bent and scooped up her fallen bag. What did they want from her? They split up, taking different lines over the rocks, one to head her off and the other to block her retreat. Hunting her like two dogs after a rabbit. If she didn’t make it to the cottage before them, the only place she could run was right into the sea.
She raced on, her mind a blank, too terrified even to dread what they’d do if they caught her.
The cottage was almost in sight.
Chapter Seven
As Ben swept fragments of broken glass into the dustpan, he was considering the wisdom of pouring himself another drink. In fact, he was contemplating opening another bottle after the remnants of this one, and keeping it company for the rest of the evening. It seemed like a very inviting prospect.
You’ve had plenty enough already, said one part of him.
Don’t know about that, said another.
‘What the hell,’ he muttered out loud. He carried the remnants of the smashed tumbler through into the kitchen, dumped it in the recycling bin with the collection of empty bottles he’d already accumulated, chucked the dustpan and brush back in the cupboard and headed back into the living room with the thought of another generous measure of cask-strength Laphroaig looming large in his mind.
The night was young. He was just getting started.
He reached for the bottle and poured himself the last of its contents. He put the tumbler to his lips.
That was when he heard the sound outside.
A woman’s scream.
He slammed the bottle and tumbler down on the dresser and hurried over to the window. His movements weren’t perfectly coordinated and he bumped his hip against the corner of the table as he went, making a lamp sway on its pedestal. He stared out of the window and saw a figure, eighty or so yards from the cottage, running towards it for all she was worth.
Kristen.
Behind her, chasing her across the rocks, were two men. Both white, both fit and lean, both around Ben’s age or a little younger. One had dark hair shaved into a military-style buzz cut and wore a navy-blue jacket; the other was in a green hooded top. They were running fast. The one with the blue jacket had a distinctive cloth bag over his shoulder that Ben recognised as Kristen’s.
Ben blinked. For an instant he just stood there, unable to react or move.
Kristen screamed again, calling his name. Her voice was hoarse with fear. ‘Ben! Help me!’
Suddenly spurred into action, Ben raced to the door and burst outside. Kristen was just fifty yards away now, but the men had almost caught up with her.
He ran down the path towards the front gate, crashed it open and went bounding over the rocks towards her. He tripped on a boulder and almost went sprawling on his face. You bloody idiot, he seethed inside. Whatever the hell was happening here, this was the wrong time to be pissed.
The men caught up with Kristen. If they’d noticed Ben racing towards the scene, it didn’t seem to put them off. The one in the navy jacket grabbed her by the shoulder and spun her violently around, then shoved her harshly to the ground. She cried out as she fell.
Ben sprinted faster. His heart pounded and his breathing rasped in his ears. He saw Kristen trying to struggle to her feet and tear herself away from her attackers. S
aw the second man, the one in the green hoodie, kick her brutally back down.
But now Ben was on them. He ran straight into the hoodie without slowing down, twisting slightly to ram his shoulder into the guy’s chest. Ben heard the grunt as the impact drove the wind out of him. Up close, he smelled a minty smell on the man’s breath. The man staggered but stayed on his feet. He reached behind him to draw a stubby black cylindrical object from his belt. Clutching it at one end, he gave it a sharp flick and the extending law-enforcement baton whipped out to its full length: an impact weapon prohibited from civilian use in most countries and capable of belting a man’s brains to jelly with a well-aimed strike.
Ben had been in dozens of fights against multiple armed attackers. In situations like these, gaining control of the weapon was always the first priority. He shouldered his way inside the arc of the coming blow and made a grab for the hand clutching the baton. But while years of training had sharpened his instincts to a fine edge, weeks and months of drinking and self-neglect had dulled them back down. Not all the way down to the defenceless, vulnerable level of Joe Public, but enough to make the difference when up against two men like these.
They were quick and determined. They weren’t afraid of him. They’d done this before.
Ben’s lunge for the weapon was too slow. The man side-stepped him and came back with a downward baton strike that hissed through the air an inch from Ben’s face.
He ducked back. Suddenly he was on the defensive. The other man was coming at him from the side, ripping an identical baton from his jacket and extending it with a practised flick of the wrist. Ben skipped backwards over the rocks, dodging a blow that would have smashed his collarbone. But as he moved, his heel caught a rock behind him and he fell. He rolled, twisted, ready to spring back to his feet.
Too slow again. A boot lashed out at him and his vision exploded white as the hard kick caught him in the side of the head. Pain bursting inside his skull, he managed to get upright just in time to see the guy in the navy jacket make another move at him. He was lucky this time. His right fist closed on the guy’s wrist. Yanked it sideways and downwards while he twisted the elbow upwards with a rising blow from the heel of his left hand. The man cried out and dropped the baton. Without letting go of his opponent’s wrist, Ben threw a kick and caught him in the belly. But it was a bad kick with not enough drive and power behind it, and failed to bring him down.
The next thing, it was Ben’s arm that was being trapped. He twisted his body around to wrench it free. The man had a strong grip. Ben punched him in the face and saw blood.
But now the other one was rushing back into the fight, and Ben didn’t react in time. The baton flashed towards him in a dark blur that his senses were too blunted to block quickly enough, and connected hard with his cheekbone.
Ben went straight down, blinded by agony.
Then the baton hit him a second time, and a third, and the lights went out.
Chapter Eight
From out of the dark depths, Ben felt himself rising. It was a long, slow swim to the surface. Sounds were faraway, all blended into a roar of meaningless noise that filled his head and made it feel about to explode with pain. He blinked, rubbed his eyes. The left one felt strange. It wouldn’t open at all. What little he could see through the right one was blurry and dancing with flashes and strobes of light. He couldn’t think straight or stand up. His head was pounding badly.
Slowly, things began to focus.
The twilit beach and the rocks were illuminated by a glow of swirling blue. Radios fizzed. Someone was helping him to sit up. He felt cold. He winced as another searing stab of pain pierced his head. He still couldn’t quite see straight, but could make out figures of people around him. Shapes that he made out to be a police car and an ambulance were parked a little way off, at the edge of the beach. No, two ambulances. Why were there two?
‘Let me go,’ he mumbled to the person who was helping him, brushing them away. Looking up, he saw the person was a woman. She was wearing overalls like a paramedic, and her voice was gentle and reassuring even though he couldn’t make out the words she was saying. He tried to stand up so he could see past the crowd of people and find out what was happening, but pain and dizziness made it impossible. The paramedic helped him patiently over to a rock, where he sat and bowed his aching head between his hands. He felt the wetness of his palms and stared at them in the flashing blue light. They were slick with blood. He touched his face and realised where the blood was coming from. It was all down the front of his T-shirt and spotted over the blanket that someone had draped around his shoulders. He put his fingers to his blind eye.
‘Try not to touch it,’ said the paramedic, her words sounding clearer now. His cheek felt swollen and hurt badly to the touch. He wiped the blood from his eye, and found he could make out blurry images with it again. He remembered that he’d been hit there. Hit very hard. He remembered the baton. Recalled the man holding it.
‘Kristen,’ he mumbled, his voice coming out garbled and indistinct. He looked around. ‘Where’s Kristen?’
A policewoman appeared out of the confusion and spoke to the paramedic. Ben heard her say, ‘We need to ask him some questions.’ The paramedic replied, ‘He’s got to be seen to first.’ And something about a hospital. It didn’t feel as if they were talking about him.
‘Where’s Kristen?’ Ben repeated. ‘I have to help her.’
The paramedic said something that sounded like, ‘You can’t help her.’
‘Those men … they were attacking her,’ he protested. But nobody seemed to pay any heed to what he was saying. Couldn’t they understand?
Finally he stopped trying to speak, as his voice was slurring and his eyes wouldn’t stay open. He felt himself being lifted and laid down on a stretcher.
Time seemed to drift. Then there was the sound of doors slamming and an engine, and he could sense he was in a moving vehicle. Someone was with him, maybe the same gentle female paramedic. Maybe someone else. He was somewhere very far away. He floated off and felt numb.
Then suddenly he was in a new environment, hard white light dazzling him, walls rushing past either side of him. Faces peering down. He realised he was lying on his back on a gurney being wheeled through a white corridor.
‘I’m okay,’ he tried to protest. ‘I just need to find Kristen …’ Then he passed out again.
The next several hours were a blur. How he got from the gurney to the couch in the curtained cubicle, his bloodied clothes replaced by a hospital robe, seemed to pass him by. He was half-conscious of the activity that milled around him. People came, people went. More faces looking down at him, as if he was some kind of specimen under observation. The nip of a needle, followed by a tickling sensation, he realised was the gash in his scalp being stitched. He vaguely remembered all the occasions in the past when he’d been sewn back together. This was nothing. Twice he tried to tell them so and get up, but dizziness overcame him and he slumped down against the couch.
His eyelids felt heavy, but they wouldn’t let him sleep. ‘I feel much better already,’ he kept saying. Still, he’d been through this routine enough times to know that was the procedure in suspected concussion cases. A grey-haired consultant named Dr Prendergast, sporting a florid bow tie and an ironic sense of humour to match, shone a light in his eyes and asked him a lot of questions about his headache, his vision, whether he felt any weakness down one side of his body, which he didn’t. Nor was he showing other telltale symptoms – he wasn’t vomiting, his skin wasn’t pale, his speech was no longer slurred and he didn’t have one pupil dilated larger than the other.
But Dr Prendergast seemed concerned about the severity of the headache and the dizziness. Ben was wheeled off to have his head X-rayed to check for a skull fracture before being taken back to the cubicle, where they still wouldn’t let him sleep, plied him with pills and as gently as possible refused to answer his questions about what had happened to Kristen, where she was, whether she was all right
. He clearly remembered seeing two ambulances at the scene. Had she been in the other? Either they didn’t know, or they wouldn’t say.
Every hour, a different nurse returned to do a neuro check on him. ‘It was just a bang on the head,’ he told each one in turn. ‘If I was going to drop dead, I’d have done it by now.’
After half the night seemed to have dragged tortuously by and they finally seemed satisfied that he hadn’t suffered a major concussion and wouldn’t fall into a permanent coma the moment he shut his eyes, he was moved to a ward and allowed to sleep. He didn’t have much choice in the matter, because whatever cocktail of stuff they’d pumped him full of made him woozy. He laid his head on the pillow and was instantly floating.
But it was an uneasy sleep. He kept seeing Kristen in his mind, snatches of their conversation drifting through his consciousness but meaning little. Then his dream turned darker and he replayed the images of the two men chasing her along the beach. The fight. The baton held up in the air and then flashing down towards him—
He woke with a start. Blinked. Focused. White ceiling. Sunlight streaming through blinds. It was morning. He’d slept right through the night.
He craned his head to the side and saw that his bed was at the end of a ward. Most of the other beds were occupied by much older men. One of them couldn’t stop hacking and coughing. A large, intimidating matron was doing the rounds. A clock on the far wall read just after ten past eight.
Ben was feeling a little stronger, less hazy, but his headache was still thumping painfully. It was partly thanks to the smart couple of blows his skull had received, partly a hangover from the Laphroaig. He missed his Gauloises and wanted another drink.
He drew his hand up from under the crisp sheet and touched the thick dressing on his brow. It hurt, and so did the bruises on the rest of his body from the fight. But what really pained him was that he’d failed to protect someone who was vulnerable, who needed his help.