A hoarse cry of terror burst from Claudine’s lips as she realised what he was holding. She tried desperately to wriggle away from him but he reached out with a quick and powerful hand, grabbed her hair and pinned her thrashing head to the bed, ignoring the wild blows she flailed out at his face and arms.
With his other hand he jammed the nozzle of the tube into her screaming mouth. She cried out and bit down on the hard plastic and tried to spit it out, gagging as it was forced deep inside.
The man pressed the plunger. Instantly, something foul-tasting, warm and soft filled her mouth. It was coming out under pressure and there was nothing Claudine could do to stop it flowing down her throat. She tried to cough it out, but all of a sudden no air would come. There was an awful sensation of pressure building up inside her as the substance swelled and expanded, filling every cavity of her throat and nasal passages.
She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t scream, couldn’t open or shut her jaws a millimetre. She stopped trying to lash out at him, and in a crazed, agonised panic she clamped her hands to her mouth and felt the hardening foam bulging out from between her lips like some grotesque tongue.
The man dropped the empty canister on the bed and used both hands to hold her bucking, convulsing body down. After a minute or so, as her brain was becoming starved of oxygen, her movements began to slacken. The man let her go and stood up.
The darkness was rising fast as Claudine’s vision faded. For a few seconds longer she could still dimly register the man’s shape standing over her in the red-lit room, watching her impassively with his head slightly cocked to one side.
Soon she could see nothing at all.
The man waited a few more moments before he checked her pulse. Once he was satisfied that she was dead, he left the bedroom. He unlocked the apartment door and left it ajar as he made his silent way towards the stairs.
Chapter Two
‘I wish we didn’t have to do this,’ Jude said.
It was a hazy, warm late Saturday morning in the peaceful village of Little Denton in rural Oxfordshire. Fat bumblebees were humming around the flowerbeds, birds were chirruping happily overhead. Once in a while, a car hissed by the gates of the former vicarage.
A sharp-eyed observer might have spotted the signs that the old house nestling among the trees behind the high stone wall was no longer lived in: the unclipped ivy spreading over the windowpanes; the rather unkempt state of the lawn that stretched far down towards the river; the remnants of last winter’s fallen leaves still lying about the grounds; and it wouldn’t have taken much asking around to discover that the local community was still recovering from the shocking deaths, just six months earlier, of the vicar and his wife in a car crash. Simeon and Michaela Arundel had been much loved and were sadly missed by everyone who’d known them.
The vicarage had been in the Arundel family for generations and now it had passed to twenty-year-old Jude. From time to time the young man drove up from Portsmouth, where he was still half-heartedly studying Marine Biology while considering his future options now that his life had changed so dramatically, to get on with the painful, drawn-out task of sorting out Simeon and Michaela’s possessions and take care of the place as best he could.
Today the task at hand had taken Jude right down to the bottom of the long garden, where he was gazing sadly up at an ancient beech tree. He wasn’t alone. The same astute observer might also have noticed the physical similarity between him and the older blond-haired man, about twice Jude’s age, who was standing next to him: a little taller at just under six feet, a little more muscular though still lithe and athletic-looking, and a good deal more battle-scarred.
That man was called Ben Hope. He’d been and done many things in his time, most of them involving danger and secrecy. Danger he could handle – God knew he’d handled enough of it both during his time with the SAS and since – but one secret even he hadn’t known about for many years, and which had hit him like a high-velocity rifle round, was the stunning revelation that Jude was his own son. He was the product of a short-lived romance back in the distant days when Ben, Michaela and Simeon had all been students together in nearby Oxford and Ben had been set on a career in the Church.
The discovery of who his real father was had come as just as big a shock to Jude. It had taken them both months to even begin to get used to the idea.
‘I seriously wish we didn’t have to do this,’ Jude said again, looking up at the old beech tree. ‘Is it such a problem? Couldn’t we just leave it?’
Ben pointed up at the thick, leafless dead branch that overhung the glass roof of the nearby summer house. ‘We could just leave it,’ he said. ‘But come the next high wind, that branch is going to break off and crash straight through that roof. You don’t want anyone to be underneath it when it happens. Or to have to fork out for the glazier’s bill even if no one is.’
At that moment Scruffy, a wiry-haired terrier of uncertain breed who’d once belonged to the Arundels and now had been more or less adopted by Ben and his fiancée Brooke, burst out of the bushes in pursuit of a darting squirrel. The dog raced across the unmown lawn, ploughed destructively through some roses and disappeared at full pelt into the shrubs on the far side.
Jude rolled his eyes in exasperation at the dog’s antics, then turned back to the tree and shrugged. ‘Then it looks like we don’t have much choice.’
Ben had found all he needed for the job in Simeon’s woodshed behind the house. He grabbed the coil of rope, propped the ladder against the tree and shinnied up twenty feet to the level of the branch. Hanging precariously off the side of the ladder as Jude stabilised the bottom, he looped the rope around the branch’s gnarly tip. Once he was confident that it was securely attached to the sound limb above it, he climbed back down and picked up the chainsaw. ‘Now for the fun part,’ he muttered.
‘Aren’t you supposed to wear protective clothing to handle one of those things?’ Jude asked, frowning.
‘Yup,’ Ben said. He primed the carb, applied just enough choke.
‘So aren’t you going to wear any?’
‘Nope.’
‘You’re a mad bastard, you know that?’
‘So people keep telling me.’ Ben yanked the start cord. The noisy snorting buzz of the two-stroke engine shattered the serenity of the morning.
It took some time to remove the large branch in sections, each one carefully secured by the rope so that it didn’t plunge through the glass roof and defeat the purpose of the whole delicate operation. Eventually, all that remained of the offending branch was a pile of pieces on the ground and a big raw circle on the side of the tree.
‘I hate to see it mutilated like that,’ Jude said when Ben had come down and killed the chainsaw engine. ‘This was Dad’s favourite tree. Told me about how he used to climb right up it when he was a kid …’ Jude suddenly went quiet.
Ben could see the discomfort in his expression, more than just sadness. He laid a hand on Jude’s shoulder. ‘It’s okay, you can call him Dad. We’ve talked about this. That’s how you knew him, all your life.’
‘Except that he wasn’t,’ Jude said glumly.
‘Maybe, but he was still a better father to you than I would’ve been,’ Ben replied. Even though he was being completely sincere, his words seemed surreal to him. The truth was still hard to accept after six months. It weighed heavily on his mind that he hadn’t yet drummed up the courage to reveal to Brooke the real identity of the young man she thought was just the son of a close friend. He wanted to tell her, but the ‘right time’ he kept waiting for just never seemed to materialise.
‘Anyway, it’s a shame,’ Jude said, changing the subject and gazing wistfully up at the tree, shielding his eyes from the bright sun.
‘If it’s any consolation to your green sensibilities, once it’s seasoned that’ll make for pretty good firewood,’ Ben said with a smile. ‘Carbon neutral fuel, negligible environmental impact. Let’s gather it up and stick it in the woodshed.’
Once that warm
work was taken care of, it was midday and they were both ready for one of the beers that Jude had chilling to wash down a ham sandwich or two. In the airy cool of the kitchen they slouched on chairs at the long pine table, munched and sipped from their bottles. Ben was quiet, as he often was these days, deep in thought. Jude wasn’t the only one whose situation had changed in a big way over the last few months. Sometimes, when Ben thought about the radical steps he’d taken towards a completely new direction in life, it made his heart thump.
‘Are you nervous about it?’ Jude asked suddenly, as if he’d been able to read Ben’s thoughts.
Ben took out his pack of Gauloises cigarettes and Zippo lighter, and lit up as he considered the question. ‘Nervous about which bit? Getting married in three days’ time? Or giving up my whole career and business and going back to college yet again, to study along with a bunch of kids half my age?’
‘Hey, I’m half your age, and we get on okay,’ Jude laughed. ‘Anyway, I wasn’t talking about you taking up your Theology course again after all this time, wanting to become a vicar and all that. No problems there. You’d be great in the Church.’
‘Your mother once told me the same thing,’ Ben said, with a trace of doubt showing in his voice.
‘I meant the wedding,’ Jude said. ‘That’s the part that’d scare the shit out of me.’
Ben had to admit he felt pretty much the same way. Marrying his beautiful soulmate Brooke Marcel was the most exciting and wonderful thing that had happened to him in a very long time – and there’d been a time, not so long ago, when he hadn’t been sure whether she’d ever speak to him again, or whether he’d even see her again. But the wedding plans weren’t exactly what he’d had in mind when he’d proposed to her in a remote Peruvian rainforest village back in February.
‘If it was up to me and Brooke,’ he sighed, watching a curl of blue Gauloise smoke curl and drift in the sunlight from the window, ‘we’d have the quietest wedding ever. No messing around, no fuss: get in there, sign the papers, and get out again.’
Jude chuckled. ‘And then Phoebe came along.’
‘Yeah, and then Phoebe came along,’ Ben said. Brooke’s elder sister was married to a blustering overpaid idiot of a City banker called Marshall Kite, whom she’d persuaded in her interfering way to foot the bill for turning what should have been a small, private ceremony into an overblown great extravaganza. Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford was booked for the lavish wedding itself, the reception was due to take place in the county’s most flamboyantly expensive country hotel, and the last time Ben had dared to check the swelling list of guests and assorted bridesmaids and other apparently indispensible personnel, it had seemed to him that half the world’s population would be in attendance. Jeff Dekker, who’d been second-in-command at the Le Val Tactical Training Centre in Normandy before Ben had passed the business over to him, was going to be best man. Ben fully expected the ex-SBS commando to laugh his pants off when he saw the ludicrous scale of the affair.
In fact, the only part of the whole silly circus Ben was looking forward to with any pleasure was that he’d have a rare chance to see his sister Ruth, who was flying in later today from Switzerland in plenty of time for the full-dress wedding rehearsal that Phoebe had arranged ‘just to make sure’. The rehearsal was scheduled for 2 p.m. tomorrow, exactly forty-eight hours before the big show. Ben was as steeled for it as he could be.
‘Ben?’ Jude said.
‘What?’ Ben smiled absently.
‘I appreciate your coming over to help me out.’
‘Least I can do. I know the last few months have been tough.’ Ben looked at his watch. ‘Brooke said she might be coming over sometime after lunch,’ he said. She’d rushed off to London first thing that morning to hand over the keys of her old Richmond flat to her landlord and arrange for the last of her things to be delivered to the rented house in Oxford’s Jericho district where she and Ben would be living while he finished his studies.
Right now, the house was in complete disorder. Ben had never realised that Brooke had so much stuff. On top of that were all the wedding gifts that had already started arriving: such as the one from Winnie. She’d been a faithful housekeeper to the Hope family for many years. After Ben’s parents had died, she’d moved with him to the remote coastal house in Ireland and tried to mother him as best she could, usually to little avail. When Ben had started up the Le Val Tactical Training Centre in Normandy, rather than move with him to France Winnie had chosen to return to her home county of Lancashire and live with her elder cousin Elspeth. Winnie obviously believed that Ben had reached the age of forty without a knife, fork or plate to his name: the kitchen in Jericho was now filled with a sprawling great dinner service that could cover a banquet table.
Then there were the piled-up cases of wine and whisky from Ben’s old SAS comrade, Boonzie McCulloch, who now lived in Italy with his fiery Neapolitan wife, Mirella. The gift from Commander Darcey Kane of the National Crime Agency had come with a card bearing the message ‘Bastard! Love, D’. When Ben had opened the oblong box he’d found a deluxe .308 rifle cleaning kit inside. Darcey was thoughtful like that. Except that Ben didn’t happen to possess a rifle. Not any more. At this juncture in his life he didn’t expect to have to see one, most of all hear one, ever again.
‘It’ll be good to catch up with Brooke,’ Jude said. ‘I like her a lot.’
‘I’m glad the two of you get on so well.’
‘Oh – I just remembered. I’ve got something for you.’
‘There was no need for you to get us a present,’ Ben protested, hoping it would be nothing too large, and that Jude hadn’t spent too much of his limited funds on it.
‘I didn’t. It’s not, I mean, it’s … what the hell.’ Jude drained his beer and got up. ‘Come and I’ll show you.’
Ben stubbed out his cigarette and followed Jude upstairs to the large, airy bedroom that had once belonged to Simeon and Michaela. He felt a chill as he walked in. He still remembered the awful night they’d died, in that accident which had been anything but.
‘There,’ Jude said, pointing at a row of clothing neatly laid out on the bed.
Ben looked. ‘These were Simeon’s.’
Jude nodded. ‘His vicar uniform. Or whatever you’re meant to call it.’
Ben sadly ran his fingers over the clothes. The black clerical shirt, fitted with its Roman collar, lay folded on top of a pair of sharply-creased matching trousers. Next to it was the long black cassock, then the white linen surplice that Simeon would have put on to conduct morning and evening services.
‘He was about your size,’ Jude said. ‘I reckon they’d fit you. When you get ordained one day, I’d like you to wear them. He’d have wanted it too.’
Ben wasn’t comfortable with the idea. But as he was on the verge of saying no, he saw the look on Jude’s face and bit his tongue. ‘Thank you, Jude. It’s a very kind thought.’
‘Then you’ll wear them?’
‘I’ll wear them. I promise.’
There was a silence. Then Jude said, ‘So are you going to try them on, or what?’
‘Now?’
Jude grinned. ‘While you’re doing that, I’m going to go put the chainsaw and stuff away.’
Left alone in his old friends’ bedroom, Ben spent a few moments gazing sadly at the clothes. He thought about the man Simeon Arundel had been. Thought about himself, and how much he had to live up to. Through the open window he could hear Jude knocking about in the woodshed and the dog barking excitedly at something.
‘Fuck it,’ Ben murmured to himself. Reluctantly, hesitantly, he pulled off his jeans and put on the black trousers, then stripped off his T-shirt and buttoned up the black clerical one. Jude had been right about the fit. Even the shiny patent leather shoes could have been made for him.
Ben stared at his reflection in the full-length mirror by the wardrobe. An Anglican vicar’s garb was one uniform he’d never seen himself wearing before, and to his self-conscious
eye he cut an unlikely figure in it.
Reverend Benedict Hope. Could it ever really happen? He’d never turned away from a challenge in his life, but this might just be one of the hardest he’d ever faced. Maybe even harder than the hellish endurance test of qualifying for entry into 22 SAS.
Feeling self-conscious, he was about to start changing back into his own clothes when he heard the front doorbell chime in the hallway downstairs, then again, and again. Who could that be? Brooke, so soon? She wouldn’t ring the bell over and over like that, so insistently.
Ben swore under his breath. He put his head out of the window and called, ‘Jude! Are you going to get that?’ But Jude was now too busy throwing sticks in the garden for Scruffy to take any notice.
Ben was about to snap, ‘For fuck’s sake,’ then caught a glimpse of the swearing vicar in the mirror and shut his mouth. He strode out of the bedroom, thundered down the stairs and across the entrance hall. The doorbell was still ringing relentlessly. ‘All right, I’m coming – I’m coming!’ he yelled.
Ben wrenched open the door.
There was a woman standing on the doorstep. She was slender, about the same age as Brooke. Her hair was longer than it had been when Ben had last seen her, and it had gone back to its natural dark red. She was wearing it loose, ringlets tumbling down over her shoulders.
She looked at Ben in amazement. ‘Holy crap,’ she said. ‘Ben?’
Ben blinked in disbelief. It was her.
It was Roberta Ryder.
Chapter Three
The stunned silence seemed to go on forever as they both stood there staring at one another. He was gaping at her; she was gaping at what he was wearing.
‘Are you—?’ she said at last. ‘You haven’t become a—?’
‘Eh? No, I was just trying them on,’ he muttered, glancing down at himself.
‘Oh, right. That explains it.’
Another few seconds passed, neither of them knowing what to say. ‘Well, aren’t you going to invite me in?’ she asked.