‘You think it’s connected to the murder?’
‘You think it isn’t?’ Ben said. ‘Like you said, the case was gone from the death scene.’
There was a long, appalled silence on the phone while Maxwell struggled to get his thoughts in order. ‘What can I say? I … I’m aware that in his speech that night Roger alluded to some other discovery from the wreck of the Santa Teresa that he wasn’t going to make public yet. I can only assume that’s what the case contained, or something connected with it. I didn’t have access to that information.’
‘You’re now the company’s top executive and you didn’t have access to that information?’
‘Look, Roger moves … oh, Jesus … I mean moved in mysterious ways. He was a very secretive man at times, but nobody questioned his way of doing things, because he always turned out to be right in his decisions and he’d made this company very wealthy indeed.’ Maxwell paused, reflecting. ‘If anyone might know more about this business, it’s Simon Butler. He was the one most directly involved with handling and itemising the artefacts, and he and Roger were close friends. It’s possible that Roger may have said something about it to him.’
‘Is Simon Butler still with you at Carrick Manor?’
‘Neither of us is at the manor any longer. What’s the point of hanging around sitting on our hands in the arsehole of nowhere? I’m back here at the company offices, fielding a million phone calls and trying to cope with this whole nightmare. Simon went home yesterday and I haven’t heard from him since. I can give you his address, if it helps. It’s his old family place a few miles from Southampton.’
As soon as the call was over, Ben was keying in the number Maxwell had given him for Simon Butler. There was no reply, no answerphone. Ben tried a couple more times before he put the phone away. He sat there in the darkened car, staring at the digital readout of the dashboard clock.
Forty-three hours and thirty-nine minutes since Brooke had been taken.
It didn’t take long to decide what he had to do next. He fired up the BMW, sped out of the country club car park and headed once more for the airport.
This time, he was pretty sure he wouldn’t be coming back.
Chapter Twenty-Five
It was ten-thirty in the evening by the time Ben’s rental Lexus IS F pulled up at the side of a quiet road on the village outskirts. The sky over southern England was cloudy and starless. He turned off the ignition, flipped on the little overhead light and checked the address Justin Maxwell had given him.
This was the place, all right. A nameplate on the wall by the gate read ‘Knightsford’. The large stone period house stood in the shadows some distance from the streetlamps, at the end of a long driveway.
Ben noticed the FOR SALE sign planted near the front gate and wondered what kind of mansion Butler must be planning to upgrade to from his old family home. NME obviously must pay well.
He stepped out of the car and breathed in the cold night air. He was wearing a newly-bought pair of black jeans and a black sweater and had cleaned himself up as best he could at the airport. There were fresh scuffs on his leather jacket that he couldn’t do much about, but he looked presentable enough for his purpose. He went in the gate and walked up the long driveway towards the house. The lawns were smooth and rolling. Most of the house’s windows were dark, but the new Mercedes sports coupé parked outside told him someone might be at home.
Ben rang the front doorbell and stood waiting for a few moments on the doorstep, running through in his mind what he wanted to ask Simon Butler about the contents of Forsyte’s briefcase. A minute went by. He rang the doorbell again, more insistently. This time he heard stirring inside the house. A light came on through the dappled glass; a figure appeared and the front door opened.
‘Yeah?’
It wasn’t Simon Butler, but a skinnier, acne-spangled version of him about twenty-five years younger. The teenager was experimenting with some kind of proto-punk look, lip-stud and nose ring and weird hair. His eyes were a little unfocused, which Ben reckoned might have to do with the smell of marijuana smoke that wafted out of the doorway. It looked as if Mum and Dad weren’t home, but Ben introduced himself and asked anyway.
‘He’s not here,’ the teen told him in a laconic drawl. ‘They’re letting him out tonight. She’s gone to fetch him.’
‘Letting him out of where?’ Ben asked.
‘Out of the hospital.’
‘Hospital?’
‘Yeah. Should be back soon. You want to wait inside? Might as well come on in.’
The house was warm, and even bigger than it looked on the outside. Everything was expensive. The carpets were thick and soft underfoot. Ben had expected to be shown into a living room or maybe the kitchen, but instead the punkish teenager led him through the house to a doorway at the end of a dark passage. The doorway led to a downward flight of steps and a dimly-lit, bare-brick basement. A couple of heavily made-up teenage girls were lounging on a sagging sofa, either side of a chubby kid of about the same age who was in the middle of some anecdote that nobody seemed particularly interested in. A young guy who was obviously the twin brother of Ben’s punkish host, but without the facial adornments or the chilled-out demeanour, was firing balls across a billiard table. Marijuana smoke drifted in the glow of the single naked bulb. Empty beer cans were strewn carelessly about and there was an overflowing ashtray perched on the edge of the billiard table. A giant Lesbian Vampire Killers poster was peeling off the brickwork. Ben guessed that Mum and Dad probably didn’t venture too often into their kids’ domain.
The twin at the billiard table glanced up as his brother led Ben down the steps. ‘Who’s this?’
The punkish one blinked, as if he’d forgotten Ben was even there. ‘Uh? Oh, some guy to see Dad. What was your name again?’ he said absently to Ben.
‘Ben,’ Ben repeated.
‘Right. I’m Damien. That’s my brother Rupe. Never mind that lot of morons.’
‘Hey, watch it,’ came a slurred protest from one of the girls on the sofa.
Ben sat on a bar stool and picked up the thread of the conversation. The chubby kid was still doing all the talking and seemed set on holding the stage for hours. ‘They’re out there,’ he kept insisting with relish, waving his joint around for emphasis and scattering ash over the girl next to him, who didn’t seem to notice. ‘Fucking believe it. You can’t see ’em yet cause there’s not enough of ’em and they’re lying low, taking the odd farmer here and there. But pretty soon it’ll start to spread geometrically. First we’ll see ’em in the villages, then the towns, then the cities. Then everywhere. Full-scale apocalyptic shit.’
It took a couple of moments before Ben realised the kid was fantasising about an impending zombie pandemic. Just as he was thinking of making his way back upstairs and waiting in another room, the twin called Rupe laid down his billiard cue and fixed him with a look of suspicion. ‘You a friend of Dad’s, then?’ He was either an angrier kid generally than his brother, or he was just marginally less stoned out of his wits.
‘We’re like this,’ Ben said, holding up crossed fingers.
‘Right. So you’re not a fucking debt collector come to, like, break everyone’s legs or something. Well that’s good news. You want a beer?’
‘Anyway, like I was saying about the coming invasion,’ the chubby kid said, keen to share more.
‘Oh, bollocks to your coming invasion,’ Rupe snapped at him.
‘I’m fine,’ Ben said, waving away the proffered beer. Now his curiosity was piqued. ‘Tell me, why would I be a debt collector?’
‘Yeah, Rupe, why would he be?’ Damien said, squeezing up next to one of the girls on the sofa and putting an arm round her. ‘We’re not on the hit list any more, remember?’
Rupe pulled a sarcastic face and rolled his eyes. He grabbed a beer can and slurped noisily, then crushed it and tossed it with a clatter into the corner. ‘Oh sure. Now that Daddy’s rich again for five minutes. Sorry. I lose track o
f his little ups and downs. So what d’you want to see him for, then?’ he added, glancing back at Ben.
‘This and that. Boring stuff you don’t want to know about,’ Ben said. ‘Tell me, what was he in hospital for? Nothing serious, I take it?’
Rupe snorted loudly. ‘Just a little prefrontal lobotomy. That’s what the twat needs, anyway.’
‘Give it a rest, Rupe,’ Damien muttered. ‘Happened last night,’ he explained to Ben. ‘They kept him in all day for observation.’
Rupe picked up his billiard cue and fired a shot that scattered the balls violently all over the table. ‘Next time that arsehole tells me to act more mature, I’ll remind him that I’m not the one who swallowed half a bottle of vodka and a pile of sleeping pills and ended up getting carted off in an ambulance to get his stomach pumped. That’s a dad to be proud of.’
‘S’pose he’ll have to go back to that shrink again, or whatever,’ Damien said glumly.
‘Huh. Like it’s ever helped him in the past.’
‘At least we don’t have to move house now and go off and live in some poxy little close. Wish someone’d come and take that bloody sign away. It’s embarrassing.’
‘And at least I won’t have to share a room with you, you farter.’
‘Arse-picker.’
‘Twat face.’
The twins’ repartee continued to degenerate as Ben reflected in silence. Now he knew why Julian Maxwell hadn’t heard from Butler since he’d left Ireland. People tended not to be in contact much when they were bent on ending it all. The question was why Butler had tried to do it in the first place.
As a professional soldier for thirteen years, most of them with the SAS, Ben had lived very much in a world of men. Moreover, it was a world where men under the extreme pressures of military training and conflict tended to form strong bonds with one another only, too often, to see their friends die. Grief for a lost comrade was commonplace, often everlasting – yet Ben had never once known a soldier to kill himself over it. Sure, a man could be heartbroken enough over a lost love, the passing of a beloved wife, that he couldn’t go on any more – it happened. But over another man’s death? Ben thought about that. Had the relationship between Butler and Forsyte been closer than they’d outwardly let on? It was certainly possible. But more likely there was another reason.
‘Has he ever done anything like this before?’ he asked Damien.
The kid shook his head. ‘I wish,’ Rupe said, and that got them arguing again. Ben went on thinking, about the house that had been put up for sale only for it to be taken back off the market; and about Daddy getting suddenly rich again.
There was a faint rumble of car tyres on the gravel outside, then the sound of a key in the front door. ‘Here they come,’ Rupe muttered. ‘Good old home sweet home again.’
‘Won’t be long before they’re at it like cats and dogs,’ Damien said, glancing anxiously up the basement steps. ‘I give it thirty seconds.’
Ben made his excuses, climbed the steps and left the basement. It was good to breathe air again. From the end of the dark passage he could see the Butlers taking off their coats and hanging them up in the front hall. Neither of them was aware of their unexpected visitor’s presence.
Ben watched them a moment and could immediately sense the tension between husband and wife. They barely spoke to one another. Butler looked even more wrecked than he had in Ireland, and as subdued and shamefaced as any man driven home from hospital after a suicide attempt. His wife, a small birdlike woman with mousy hair, was tight-lipped, tense, and looked like a spouse trying her best to be supportive but coming close to the end of her tether.
Ben stepped towards them. Butler’s wife was the first to see the movement out of the corner of her eye. ‘Rupert,’ she began in an exasperated tone, ‘if you think I can’t smell what you and your brother have been—’ She stopped mid-sentence with a gasp as Ben came closer, and stared at him in alarm.
An instant later Butler saw Ben too, and froze like a statue. The recognition in his eyes was quickly followed by a glimmer of fear that Ben found just as intriguing as the things the twins had been saying a few moments earlier.
‘I didn’t mean to scare you,’ Ben said to Mrs Butler. ‘Your son Damien let me in.’
‘W-who are you?’ she asked, nonplussed.
‘Mr Butler knows who I am,’ Ben said. ‘And I think he knows why I’m here. We need to talk.’
‘It’s all right, Rachel,’ Butler said wearily. ‘I do know this man.’ To Ben he said, ‘Please, I don’t want to talk to anyone right now. Just leave me alone, all right?’
‘Listen, whoever you are,’ Rachel Butler said, rounding on Ben. ‘My husband isn’t well. This is a very difficult time for us. Please leave at once or I’m afraid I’ll have to call the police.’
‘It’s a lovely home you have here,’ Ben said, looking intently at Simon Butler. ‘It’d have been a shame to have to sell it. You must have come into some money. That was luck.’
A look of panic flashed across Butler’s face at Ben’s words. ‘It’s okay,’ he quickly reassured his wife. ‘I’ll talk to him. We’ll go into the study.’
Chapter Twenty-Six
Butler’s study was at the other end of the ground floor. The walls were covered with framed pictures, nearly all of them blown-up prints of scenes from various marine salvage expeditions. One showed the Neptune Marine Exploration flagship Trident taken from the air; nearby Ben noticed three others of Butler himself, photographed on deck with Roger Forsyte, the two of them surrounded by NME crew members and all grinning like schoolkids over a barnacled hunk of unrecognisable marine salvage that was obviously some fantastically valuable artefact they’d just dredged up from the sea bed.
The Simon Butler in the photos was a far cry from the defeated, pale, shrunken man who threw himself down in a chair by the desk. ‘All right. What do you want?’
‘I came here to talk about the briefcase that your employer had cuffed to his wrist the night he was kidnapped,’ Ben said, sitting on the arm of a couch opposite. ‘Nobody seems to know what was inside. I thought maybe you might. And we’ll get to that, but now I’m here I see there’s more to all this. Isn’t there, Butler? Better start talking fast, because I’m not in a patient mood.’
‘I … I …’
‘What was it, the horses? Cards? Or just drugs and women?’
Butler just stared. He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again.
‘That’s fine,’ Ben said. ‘Frankly, I don’t give a damn what kind of sordid little vice it is that you need your head examined for and almost had to sell your house over. I’m more interested in knowing where all the money came from all of a sudden to pull you up out of the shit.’
‘It’s … an inheritance,’ Butler stammered. ‘From a wealthy uncle.’
‘People normally celebrate a windfall like that with a bottle of champagne,’ Ben said. ‘You went for vodka and sleeping pills instead. Some people might find that odd.’
‘Who the hell do you think you are, coming into my home and prying into my affairs?’ Butler rose up out of his chair and started marching towards the door. ‘You’re going to have to leave now.’
Before he’d made it halfway, Ben stood up and blocked him, grasping a fistful of his shirt collar and propelling him back into his chair. ‘Why don’t we get Mrs Butler and the twins in here and talk more about this wealthy uncle of yours?’
Butler gaped up at him from the chair.
‘The truth,’ Ben said. ‘All of it, and fast. Or when you leave this room, it’ll be another ambulance trip. One way only.’
Butler’s face suddenly contorted and he began to weep miserably. ‘It wasn’t meant to happen like this!’ he wailed.
‘What way was it meant to happen, Butler? Speak to me.’
Butler did, and Ben sat and listened as it all came out: the usual squalid tale, and with it all the usual excuses. The urge was stronger than him. Nothing, no form of therapy ever invent
ed, not even the terror of total ruin and social and professional disgrace, could rein it in. It had started years ago with a few innocent flutters on the fruit machines, and steadily grown from there into a full-blown addiction to anything and everything that could be gambled on, at the expense of the family’s savings and, very nearly, his marriage. Losing the house would have been the last straw.
‘You’ve no idea how deep I was in,’ Butler sobbed. ‘There was no way out. I was on the verge of losing everything. I had to think of my family. It’s what any husband or father would have done. I swear, I didn’t know anyone would get hurt. It was just business. Why was I so weak? Oh Christ, why did I … ?’
‘I’m going to break your neck in the next minute if you don’t tell me exactly what happened,’ Ben said quietly.
‘All right, all right, I’ll tell you. Let me start at the beginning.’ Butler wiped away tears and looked pitifully up at him. ‘It wasn’t all my fault,’ he sniffed. ‘I mean, it wasn’t as if they hadn’t tried to buy it from Roger, fair and square. I knew how pig-headed he could be. They said he’d turned them down flat, wouldn’t budge no matter how much they offered him for it.’
‘Offered him for what?’
‘What he was carrying in the case,’ Butler said. ‘I’m certain it was what he found inside that casket.’
‘Forty seconds,’ Ben said.
‘Let me explain,’ Butler pleaded. ‘You see, back in early December, we were pulling up so much stuff from the Santa Teresa that the whole staff, including Roger, were mucking in to help bring it aboard Trident, clean it up, categorise it and store it. It wasn’t usual for Roger to get his hands dirty like that. It was as if he knew in advance that the casket would be there. It was just this iron-bound strongbox with a kind of seal on the lid, not like any of the others, and nothing much to look at compared to some of the incredible pieces we were finding. The moment the crane brought it up, Roger took it away to his office and spent a long time alone with it before locking it up in his private safe.’