‘I didn’t realise how hungry I was,’ she said between bites.
‘Getting shot at tends to have that effect on people,’ Ben said.
‘As long as they don’t get killed in the process.’
‘That helps.’
‘You want a beer?’ she asked, offering him a bottle.
He shook his head and cracked open a Coke. ‘I’ll stick with this.’
She shrugged. ‘Suit yourself, if it’s what you prefer.’
He sipped some of it and pulled a face at how sickly sweet it tasted to him. ‘No, I hate the stuff. And I’d love a beer. That’s why I won’t have one.’
‘Why, are you an alcoholic?’ she asked.
He looked at her, taken aback by the directness of the question. In this light her eyes were vivid green, like a cat’s. ‘Let’s just say I’ve been known to overstep the limits,’ he said.
‘My mom’s an alcoholic,’ Erin said matter-of-factly. ‘It’s what I grew up with, so I know all there is to know about it. Tequila and bourbon. Her favourite things in life.’
‘Malt Scotch,’ he said, jabbing a thumb at his chest.
‘How long have you been on the wagon?’
‘I’m still a newbie,’ he confessed.
‘Will it drive you totally crazy if I drink beer in front of you? It’s just that I badly need it, after today.’
He smiled. ‘I won’t break your arm to get at it, if that’s what you mean. You drink, and I’ll smoke. Deal?’
‘Deal.’
They ate a while in silence, then Ben said, ‘So your mother’s an alcoholic and your father’s dead. Any other family?’
She shook her head. ‘I was married a while. Had to walk away from it.’
‘Why was that?’
‘He used to hit me,’ she replied.
‘I’m sorry to hear it.’
‘I never told my daddy. He’d have killed him.’
‘Sounds like a sensible man.’
‘What about you? Family? Kids?’
‘I have a grown-up son,’ Ben said.
‘What’s his name?’
‘Jude.’
‘That’s a nice name. Does he take after you?’
‘A little too much,’ Ben said.
After they’d finished eating and the table was cleared, Ben lit up a cigarette, then went back out to the car and brought in the tools he’d brought from the lock-up. He clamped the vice to the table, then took off his belt.
‘I’m not even gonna ask what you’re doing now,’ Erin said, sitting on the bed and sipping her second beer.
Ben picked up the shotgun and in a few quick moves removed the barrel, just a steel tube a little over two feet long with a fastening lug welded halfway along its underside. Setting the rest of the dismantled gun aside, he wrapped the belt around the breech end of the barrel to protect it from the jaws of the vice, then tightened everything up so that the muzzle end protruded immobile from the edge of the table. The next stage would get noisy, so he turned on the radio. ‘Do they only play country music?’ he said after the third station he tried.
‘Boy, you’re really not from around here, are you?’
Ben sat down at the table with the clamped barrel in front of him and the hacksaw in his hand, and began the process of turning a sporting weapon into a riot gun. It would become hopelessly inaccurate at longer ranges, but he cared as much about that as about the legality of it.
‘You’ve done this before,’ she said, watching him as the saw cut deeper into the steel with a grinding sound that set their teeth on edge.
‘Once or twice,’ he admitted.
‘What a day this turned out to be. I’ve shot two people, I’ve been chased, tasered and almost kidnapped and now I’m sitting watch a strange Brit who doesn’t like country music saw the barrel off of a shotgun.’
‘Half Irish,’ he corrected her.
‘That’s still a Brit, isn’t it?’
He paused sawing, and looked at her. ‘Careful.’
Fifteen minutes of metallic grinding and shrieking later, a length of discarded steel tube fell to the floor and Ben finally laid down the saw. Next he picked up the file and got to work smoothing off the end of the lopped barrel. He cleared up the mess of powdery metal that covered the table, and threw it in the waste basket before reassembling the now much-shortened Ithaca.
Meanwhile, Erin had finished her second beer and had kicked off her shoes as she began the third. Sitting back on the bed, she’d been idly sifting through the contents of her bag when she suddenly remembered the syringe. She took it out and held it in her hands, frowning at it. ‘What do you suppose this crap is they were trying to stick me with?’ she asked, peering at the pale-coloured fluid inside. Ben laid down the gun, walked over and took the syringe from her hand. He unscrewed the bent needle and dripped a couple of drops of the fluid onto the table. He moistened a fingertip and gave it a quick sniff. ‘I’m pretty sure it’s Zotepine,’ he said. ‘I’ve come across it before.’
‘What does it do?’ she asked anxiously.
‘It’s your typical chemical cosh,’ he replied. ‘Kidnappers use it. Powerful antipsychotic, antimanic, fast-acting in high doses. Before it was taken off the market for safety reasons, they used to pump the stuff into severely mentally ill people in hospital when they became aggressive, to make them nice and calm and compliant. Makes a handy date-rape drug, too, in low doses. A whole range of side effects you don’t want to know about. If you keep taking it, you turn into a shuffling brain-dead zombie.’
Erin’s brow was creased with anger. ‘I took it away thinking it might be more evidence, or something. Now I just want to flush it down the toilet.’
Ben thought for a moment. ‘There might be other uses for it.’
‘Just keep it the hell away from me.’
‘You’ve already come as close to it as you’ll ever get. I promise.’ Ben replaced the needle on the end of the syringe and laid it aside. He was quiet for a few moments, thinking. Then he walked back over to the bed and perched himself on the end of it. She moved her bare feet a little to make room for him.
‘How do you feel now?’ he asked gently.
‘A little steadier.’ She held up the beer bottle. ‘This helps. Kinda sleepy.’
‘Tell me about your boss.’
‘Angela?’
Ben nodded.
‘She and I get along great. She’s a good boss, cares about the people who work for her, and is dedicated to her cause. I think she’s a little sad and lonely. What else can I say?’
‘How much does her husband trust her?’
‘Believe me, she has no idea about what he’s into. None, I swear.’
‘You’re sure about that?’
Erin nodded. ‘Very sure.’
‘That’s fine.’
‘What if I wasn’t?’ she asked.
‘Then I’d have said perhaps she could help us fill in a few blanks about hubby’s little operation. Such as where they keep the merchandise.’
Erin shook her head. ‘Leave her out of it, okay? It’s going to be hard enough for her if all this comes out. I mean, it isn’t much of a marriage, but something like this will destroy her.’
‘So we can provisionally draw a line through her name. What about the father?’
‘Big Joe?’
‘Ever met him?’
Erin yawned. The luminous green eyes were getting harder to keep open now that the beer was taking effect. Her long day was catching up with her. ‘Uh-huh. He was with Finn one time, when he came by the office. That old guy scares the crap out of everybody who meets him.’
‘I’ve seen his picture,’ Ben said.
‘Angela’s terrified of him. It’s why she won’t go near Arrowhead Ranch. That, and she’s allergic to horses.’ Erin stretched out a little on the bed, relaxing more with every passing second. ‘Not like me. I love horses.’
‘Let me guess. Your daddy taught you to ride.’
‘Mm-hmm.’ Her lips
curled in a sleepy smile. One of her bare feet touched Ben’s leg. He felt its warm pressure there, pressing against him. Maybe it was because she was getting drowsy that she didn’t take it away.
‘Arrowhead,’ he said. ‘Same name as the oil company the old man founded back in 1935.’
‘The oilfields were all Indian Territory once. The whole state was. Native American names are part of the culture. It’s pretty terrible, I guess. What the settlers did to them.’
‘Have you been there, to the ranch?’
She shook her head. ‘Know where it is, though. Who doesn’t? Big spread out west of the city.’
Ben had a feeling that for an Oklahoman, big really meant big. ‘Does old Joe McCrory live there alone?’ he asked, wondering about all the hidden arms caches you could squeeze into several hundred, maybe even a thousand, acres of ranch land.
‘I think so. His wife died a long time back.’ She yawned again.
Ben stopped firing questions at her and soon afterwards her eyes began to drift shut. She’d had a long day. He took the empty beer bottle from her hand, laid it on the table. She murmured something and curled up on the bed with her head on the pillow, and he reached over her and pulled the covers across her body. Within a minute, she was asleep, leaving Ben alone with his thoughts.
Chapter Forty-Six
He was glad the beer was finished, because it hadn’t been as easy for him to refrain as he’d made it look to Erin. ‘Lead me not into temptation, Lord,’ he muttered. ‘I can find my own way there easily enough.’
He turned the lights off and paced quietly about the room for a while, clearing his mind of all the things that had happened that day and working back through what he’d learned from Elizabeth Stamford’s journal earlier. Her revelation that her husband and his scientific crony Heneage Fitzwilliam had apparently been cooking up some kind of plant blight pathogen in their laboratory was still making his head spin. The implications were almost too much to take on board.
Almost.
Ben walked through to the bathroom, closed the door quietly so as not to wake Erin, and clicked on the string-pull light. Taking out his phone, he sat on the edge of the scuzzy old bathtub and went online to run a search on this Fitzwilliam character. With a name like that, there couldn’t be many others.
The web had a few disparate pieces of information to offer. The man had been a reasonably well-known botanist of his day, a professor at Oxford, the author of a few books and some scientific papers which he’d presented to various scholarly institutes during the 1830s and ’40s. All stuff that Gray Brennan had already talked about. So far, Heneage wasn’t exactly setting Ben on fire. Not until a new piece of information popped up from the web search. Something Brennan hadn’t mentioned.
Professor Fitzwilliam had died suddenly while sitting at his desk in his rooms at Magdalen College, Oxford, on September 9th, 1851, aged forty-seven. Not of a heart attack or a stroke, but of a single pistol shot to the back of the head. That, combined with the fact that no weapon had been found at the scene, had led the magistrates to conclude that his demise had been no suicide. Clever, those magistrates. Naturally, it hadn’t been any more usual then than it was now for quiet-living Oxford dons to have their brains blown out in college by some sneak assassin.
September, 1851. A bell began to ring in Ben’s mind. He searched for ‘Lord Edgar Stamford death’ and came up with September 20th of the same year, which was the date Kristen had said. Just eleven days after the murder of his friend and colleague, Stamford had burned himself to death.
Eleven days was probably about the length of time it would have taken in those days for the news to travel between Oxford and the rural west of Ireland. Had the aristocrat killed himself on hearing of Fitzwilliam’s death? That didn’t ring quite true to Ben – but then, maybe it hadn’t been a deliberate act. Maybe he’d got badly drunk and knocked over a candlestick or something, inadvertently setting the fire that had blitzed Glenfell House. That was possible. But maybe there were other possibilities, too.
Ben went back to see what more he could dig up about Heneage Fitzwilliam, and after a few minutes he came across the first photograph he’d seen of the man. It was a typical period photo, very formally posed and taken at some science event in London in 1845. Fitzwilliam was a diminutive individual with half-moon spectacles, bald on top and sporting a ridiculous growth of side whiskers that could probably have been seen from behind on a clear day. A group of his peers stood stiffly clustered around him, all in dark suits and waistcoats. Beside Fitzwilliam, and looming over him by a good fourteen inches, was a large and imposing figure of a man who seemed to sneer disdainfully at the camera. When Ben looked at the list of names in the caption below the picture and counted left to right, he realised the man was Edgar Stamford. It was the first time Ben had seen him, too, and he looked every bit the arrogant tyrannical bastard that his long-suffering wife had made him out to be. He’d been as big as he was proud-looking, probably at least six-four, maybe six-five. When experts said people of the Victorian era were smaller than folks today, they obviously hadn’t been looking at Edgar Stamford.
But it wasn’t just the size of the guy. There was something else. Something that set Ben’s mind churning and his blood quickening.
He keyed ‘Lord Edgar Stamford Ireland’ into the search engine and hit ‘images’. The phone thought about it for a moment or two, then spat out the goods. Just one picture came up, but one was enough.
Ben stared at it for a long time.
The grainy, sepia-tinged photograph showed an assembled group posing in front of Glenfell House in 1844, in that particular self-conscious and solemn, almost funereal way people had acted around cameras at the dawn of the photographic era. Front and centre was Lady Stamford herself. Ben almost felt he knew her by now. Gray Brennan had said she was beautiful, and she was. Less beautiful by far, wearing the same unpleasant sneer and holding his wife’s arm like the piece of property she was, was her tall, broad lord and master Edgar.
In the background were assembled various household members. There were a number of maids in uniform, some of them looking extremely young and nervous. To one side stood a brute-faced bloke in a tweed suit whom Ben could easily imagine to be Lord Stamford’s villainous manservant, Burrows. Perhaps at Lady Stamford’s request, even the horses had been brought out to have their picture taken with the group: a pair of handsome hunters, held still by a big guy clutching a halter in each large hand and staring with unnatural rigidity at the camera, as if he’d never seen one before. He probably hadn’t.
Ben peered closely at the man’s grainy image, thinking that this must be Padraig, Elizabeth’s slow-witted but intensely loyal stableboy. If you could still be called a stableboy in your mid-thirties. He looked as strong as an ox, towering over everyone in the photo apart from Lord Stamford himself.
Ben’s eyes narrowed to slits as his mind worked. So this was the famous Padraig McCrory Kristen had been so interested in, whose name Ben had followed in her wake trying to find in the parish records in Glenfell. There was little doubt that Kristen had seen the same photo Ben was looking at now. Somehow, this was the key to the whole thing.
Ben looked from the hulking stableboy to the lord. From the lord back to the stableboy. And in that moment, something flashed inside his mind and he knew.
He knew everything Kristen had known, and more. He knew why Finn McCrory wanted the journals so badly. Why Kristen had had to die for them.
The knowledge felt like a living thing inside him, pulsing, throbbing, stirring him up with excitement and anger. It was incredible, unbelievable … and yet it made perfect sense. He put away his phone. Stood up and clicked off the light and walked back into the other room.
Erin stirred on the bed, lifted her head from the pillow and looked at him. Her eyes were half-shut and her hair was tousled.
‘What’s up?’ she asked, staring at him standing there.
‘Tell me about the cabin,’ he said.
C
hapter Forty-Seven
Ben had done a lot more thinking by the time he stepped outside into the starry night, leaving Erin softly asleep inside the room. The night was humid, making his shirt stick to his back. It was after one in the morning and most of the other motel windows were dark. He could hear canned laughter from some TV show playing quietly somewhere. A couple of cats were hissing and growling at each other in the shadows behind a row of dumpsters.
Ben was running out of cigarettes. He put one between his lips, lit it up in the flickering halo glow of his Zippo and sucked in the smoke as he watched the lights of an eighteen-wheeler truck streak by on the distant highway, like a night train headed who-knew-where. He felt a little that way himself, every time Brooke entered his thoughts. She entered them often.
He took out his phone and dialled Finn McCrory’s mobile number. It rang until the answer service cut in. Ben ended the call without leaving a message, then dialled the same number again. Same result. He tried once more, and this time he got a reply.
‘Who the hell’s this?’ McCrory’s voice was a raspy whisper. He sounded exactly like a belligerent, impatient VIP who didn’t take kindly to being woken up in the middle of the night by an unexpected phone call.
‘Careful how you talk to me,’ Ben said. ‘I might get offended and hang up. Then I might decide to call your wife’s office in the morning and speak to her instead. She’ll be interested in what I have to tell her about her husband’s activities on the side.’
An opening line like that couldn’t have failed to get McCrory’s attention. There was a heavy silence over the phone. Ben could hear him breathing, waiting for more.
‘Now I’m sure you’d prefer not to wake Mrs McCrory and have to face all those questions,’ Ben said. ‘So what you need to do is get out of bed, nice and quietly. Go downstairs and find a comfortable chair to sit in. You and I are going to have a little chat. Just us, in private. Do it now, McCrory. I’m waiting.’
He heard a grunt and a series of rustling noises as McCrory heaved himself out of bed, followed by a pause of almost a whole minute before the voice came back on the line. It must be a big house, Ben thought. Whichever part of it McCrory had hurried off to in order to talk, the sleeping Angela was well out of earshot, because her husband wasn’t whispering any more.