Passenger 13 (Ben Hope eBook originals)

by Scott Mariani

  ‘You probably don’t even remember me,’ she said, catching up. Her face was flushed behind the dark glasses, her voice husky from weeping.

  ‘Of course I remember you, Hilary. My deepest condolences.’

  She hung her head. ‘Thanks, Ben. Or should I say Major?’

  Ben disliked using his title. ‘Just Ben,’ he said.

  Hilary glanced quickly to one side, then the other. He could see something was alarming her. ‘Can I talk to you?’ she said abruptly.

  He shrugged. ‘Sure.’

  ‘Not here. Can we go somewhere?’ She moved towards his BMW. Another glance over her shoulder, as if she thought there was someone else there behind the gravestones and the bushes.

  ‘What about your car?’ he said.

  ‘Please, can we just go? I really need to talk to you.’

  There was only one road through the village. Quarter of a mile beyond the last house, Ben saw a country pub up ahead on the right. ‘Buy you a drink?’ he said.

  She nodded. ‘I could use one.’

  The gravelled car park was almost empty. It was quarter to twelve and the lunchtime clientele obviously hadn’t turned up yet. Ben pulled up a chair for Hilary at one of the outside tables.

  She shook her head. ‘I’d rather not be outside.’ The sunglasses hid much of her expression, but the tone of her voice was edgy.

  ‘Whatever you want,’ Ben said. He noticed the way she kept glancing back over her shoulder as he led her into the coolness of the building. She walked straight across to a corner alcove by the window. Laid her handbag on the table and sat with her back to the wall so that she could watch the car park and the road. Ben asked her what she wanted to drink. ‘I don’t care, as long as it’s strong,’ she replied.

  He came back with a whisky for himself, a gin and tonic for her. She sipped it gratefully, then took off her shades. Her eyes were raw from crying. She kept glancing nervously at the window to her right. Her hands were curled into tight fists on the table. No wedding ring, Ben noticed.

  ‘You came alone,’ he said diplomatically.

  ‘You’re referring to Danny?’ Hilary shook her head ruefully, staring into her drink. ‘That was over a long time ago. I should never have married the arsehole.’

  Which was pretty much what Nick had confided to Ben at the time, though he’d kept his mouth shut for fear of hurting his daughter’s feelings.

  ‘Your dad was a good man,’ Ben said softly. He touched her hand, then withdrew his, not sure it was the right thing. ‘I don’t care what anyone says. Whatever he might have been going through …’

  Hilary glanced sharply up at him. ‘It’s all lies, Ben.’

  ‘What’s all lies?’

  ‘That dad killed himself. All lies.’

  Ben looked at her. He could feel her pain. What could he say to her? That he’d been there himself once, after his mother’s own suicide? That back then, in his teens, he’d have done anything to persuade himself that she hadn’t ended her own life – believed almost anything rather than accept the truth?

  ‘The cops said they found antidepressants at his house,’ she said, shaking her head vehemently. ‘Uh-uh. No way.’

  ‘You know, maybe they did,’ Ben ventured. ‘It wouldn’t have been the first time, Hilary. Maybe we just need to accept that.’

  She shook her head harder, breathing noisily with emotion. Her face was so tight that the muscles of her jaws were bunched up under the skin. ‘No, Ben,’ she insisted. ‘You don’t realise the hell he went through to get away from all that. And anyway, I just know. I know, all right? Don’t you understand?’

  ‘I understand that you’re in a lot of pain,’ he said gently. ‘But we all need to try to reconcile ourselves with what’s happened. It’s not going to be easy, but I promise you that, in time, it will get better.’

  ‘No, Ben, you don’t understand. How could you?’ Hilary paused, as if she was struggling with herself over whether to come out with whatever it was she was clearly desperate to say next. She leaned across the table, lowered her voice and came out with it. ‘I have proof that dad didn’t kill himself.’

  Ben stared at her.

  ‘I know. It sounds crazy. But you’ve got to believe me.’

  Ben could see the absolute earnestness in her eyes. ‘What kind of proof?’ he asked.

  With another furtive glance at the window, Hilary reached into her handbag and took out a mobile phone. ‘This kind,’ she said.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Hilary thumbed the keys of the phone, held it to her ear for a moment and then passed it to Ben. ‘Listen,’ she hissed.

  Not knowing what to say, he took the phone from her, put it to his own ear and heard the robotic voice of the Orange answering service. There was a pause; then the message began.

  Ben’s brows knitted at the sound of his old friend’s voice, barely audible above a background of crackling and white noise and a roaring screech that was hard to identify. Nick sounded extremely agitated and frightened, clearly fighting to keep his voice calm.

  ‘Darling, it’s me, it’s dad … Listen to me … Something’s …’

  For a few seconds, Nick’s voice was lost in the noise. Ben thought he could hear other voices, a distorted, incomprehensible pandemonium of yelling and screaming. There was no question that something terrible was happening in the background.

  ‘The plane …’ Nick Chapman shouted over the chaos. ‘It’s …’ He seemed to pause. When he spoke again, his voice sounded strained to breaking point with sadness. ‘Hilary, I love you. Dad loves you. Remem—’

  Whatever last words Nick had spoken after that, they were dissolved in a storm of fuzz and static. Then it was the voice of the answer-phone service in Ben’s ear again: ‘To listen to the message again, press one. To save it, press two …’

  Ben pressed one and closed his eyes as the message played over again. At the end, he pressed two to save it, then laid the phone on the table. His ribs were burning as if he’d been shot again.

  Hilary was staring at him expectantly, her eyes moist with tears. She snatched up the phone with a trembling hand. ‘What did that sound like to you? Like a man who wanted to die? A man about to kill himself? Tell me.’

  Ben’s mind swam. None of this made any sense. He remembered the audio recording of Nick’s radio communication with the air traffic controller. ‘I’m taking her down!’

  ‘Let me hear it again,’ he said.

  Her expression hardened. ‘You don’t believe it, do you?’

  ‘I just want to hear it again.’ He reached out his hand to take the phone from her fingers. ‘Give it here. Please.’

  She clasped it tightly to her chest. ‘You still think he killed himself.’ Her face was white with fury.

  ‘Hilary, I didn’t say that. I just don’t understand what I’m hearing. Who else knows about this message?’

  She shook her head. ‘Nobody. I don’t trust anybody.’

  ‘Something like this, and you don’t report it to the police?’

  ‘The police!’ she exploded. ‘It was the fucking police who planted the drugs in his house. Don’t you understand? Can’t you see? Cayman Islands police. A British territory? They’re all mixed up in it together.’

  ‘Hilary, I know this is awful for you, but we need to take this one step at a time. To suggest that there’s some kind of conspiracy going on—’

  ‘Explain this, then!’ she rasped at him, waving the phone in his face.

  Ben couldn’t explain it.

  ‘I know something’s going on,’ she said. ‘I’m being followed. Someone’s been watching me. I think maybe they’re tracking my car. That’s why I wanted to come in yours.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Hilary. This all sounds crazy to me. You’re upset, you’re emotional …’

  ‘Next thing you’ll be saying I’m on antidepressants, too, right?’

  ‘I’m just trying to make sense of this whole thing. How can you be so sure someone’s following you?’ />
  ‘I’m an SAS soldier’s daughter. I’m not stupid. I can tell stuff. And I think they’re tracking my car.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Them.’

  ‘What do they look like?’

  ‘They don’t look like anything. They’re just … there.’

  ‘What do they want?’

  ‘They want me, Ben. They know I know the truth.’

  Ben was at a loss for words.

  Hilary was glowering at him with icy contempt. ‘To think my dad spoke so highly of you. He respected you so much. I thought you might understand. Thought you’d be different. But I was wrong, wasn’t I? Well you know what? I don’t need you to believe me and I don’t need your help.’

  ‘Hilary—’

  ‘Go fuck yourself!’ She stood up.

  ‘Hey, come on.’ Ben reached out to take her arm and guide her gently back into her seat. The last thing he’d ever have done was use force on her, but she tore defensively away from him, lashing out and knocking over her drink. The gin and tonic spilled across the table. The glass rolled to the edge and shattered on the floor.

  Ben said, ‘Hilary, please. Where are you going?’

  ‘Don’t worry about me,’ she spat. ‘I’ll get the fucking bus back.’

  He opened his mouth to protest, but she was already storming away towards the door, clutching her phone in her hand. The barman glanced up in alarm from his newspaper as she ran past him and burst outside.

  Ben went after her. From the pub doorway, he could see her running across the pub car park towards the empty road, heading in the direction of the village. He took a few strides after her, then stopped and gave up the idea. She was upset. It wasn’t right to force himself on her like that. He turned back towards the pub, went inside and started heading back towards the table. ‘Sorry about that,’ he said to the barman. ‘I’ll pay for the glass.’

  ‘No problem,’ the barman said, and went off to grab a dustpan and brush.

  It was at that moment that Ben heard the harsh rasp of the engine outside. A diesel van engine, approaching at speed.

  Something wasn’t right.

  He moved towards the window and peered out to see a battered white Transit van approaching. It was the only vehicle in sight, and it was approaching Hilary at speed as she half-jogged, half-ran along the grassy verge in the direction of the village outskirts. She was too preoccupied to notice it coming.

  Something was terribly wrong. But by the time Ben felt that crawling icy sensation grip his body, it was already far too late to do anything.

  In the final yards before it reached her, the van didn’t slow down. Didn’t indicate left and pull out a few feet from the kerb, the way any normal driver would when passing a pedestrian on a stretch of country road.

  Instead it slewed a foot to the left so that its wheels sprayed mud and grass into the air. And bore straight down on Hilary. There was no squeal of brakes, no warning blast of the horn.

  She didn’t notice it until the last instant. Ben caught a fleeting glimpse of her face as she turned – the look of shock, the mouth opening to cry out.

  The crunching impact of four thousand pounds of fast-moving metal against a hundred and twenty pounds of frail living human flesh and bone was one of the most sickening sounds a person could hear, and Ben heard it distinctly from a hundred and fifty yards off. He yelled ‘No!’

  Hilary Chapman’s body hurtled up the steep angle of the van’s bonnet, cannoned off its windscreen and was tossed high in the air. She flew over the roof and landed with a crunch on the road.

  Only then did the driver slam on the brakes.

  Ben was already outside and sprinting towards the scene. He saw the van skid to a halt in a cloud of dust and smoking rubber. Saw the shattered body of the young woman he’d been talking to just moments earlier lying in a heap. Saw the driver’s door swing open and a guy jump out. Nondescript, thirties, short brown hair, T-shirt and jeans.

  The driver saw Ben running towards him, but he didn’t do any of the things a normal guy would have done in the circumstances. He didn’t panic. He didn’t scream out in horror at what he’d done.

  Instead he left his engine running and strode quickly over to the bloody body on the road. He dropped down in a crouch and reached a hand out to her neck. Feeling for a pulse.

  Ben was seventy yards away and running as hard as he could. The pain in his right side screamed for him to slow down.

  The driver had done feeling for a pulse. He unpeeled the fingers of her closed fist, took something from her hand and dropped it in his pocket.

  Hilary’s phone.

  Ben ran harder. A roar of ‘Hey! Stop!’ exploded from his lungs.

  The driver hurried back to the van. He climbed up into the cab. Slammed the door with a clang. Peered past the bloodied web of cracks that the impact had left on his windscreen, engaged gear and accelerated hard away, his wheels throwing up torn grass and mud.

  Ben was just feet from the back door. ‘Stop!’ he yelled again, so loudly he tasted blood at the back of his throat. He made a flying leap to grab the rear door handle – and missed, sprawling to the ground with a cry of pain from the yank on his stitches. In less than a second he was back on his feet, but the van was already roaring off up the road. There was nothing more Ben could do.

  Not even take its registration number.

  Because it had no plates.

  He ran over to Hilary. Kneeled down in the spreading pool of her blood and knew instantly that her killer needn’t have bothered checking for a pulse. Her eyes were staring right into his. Seeing nothing. Her neck was broken and her entire ribcage was crumpled inwards.

  Ben sank his head down to his chest and his vision blurred with the tears of grief and fury.

  CHAPTER SIX

  A small crowd of people quickly gathered as villagers came running down the road and a couple of cars stopped. Someone gave Ben a tartan travel blanket, and he used it to cover Hilary’s body. He stayed at her side until the police and ambulance came, when the paramedics took over and he returned to the empty pub.

  Still numb, Ben gave his witness statement to one of the uniformed cops, watching out of the window as he watched the paramedic team load Hilary’s broken body into the ambulance and take her away. There was no siren. No hurry.

  Until the last minute, he’d been quite prepared to tell the cops the truth and give them an exact account of what had happened. Then he thought about the things Hilary had told him. Don’t trust the police. Her voice echoed in his mind, along with the voice of his conscience that was tormenting him for having failed her so badly. He hadn’t listened. Hadn’t taken her seriously.

  And now he was thinking: what if she’d been right?

  ‘Your name?’ the cop said.

  The guy looked like an arsehole anyway. Ben didn’t like his officious manner. ‘Oscar Gillespie,’ he replied. It was the first name that came into his head, an unholy mash-up of two of his favourite musicians.

  But it seemed to do just fine. The cop wrote the name down on his form. Obviously not much of a jazz fan. ‘Do you have any ID? Driving licence?’

  Ben could see his parked BMW from where he was sitting. ‘I got the train. No ID on me.’

  ‘Address?’

  ‘No fixed abode.’

  ‘Occupation?’

  ‘None,’ Ben said.

  The cop looked at him, then asked, ‘Your relationship to the deceased?’

  ‘A friend of the family, on her mother’s side,’ Ben said. ‘We’d come from her father’s funeral.’

  ‘The barman says you were arguing.’

  ‘She was upset,’ Ben said. ‘Most people would be, if their father had just committed suicide. I was trying to calm her down. She became emotional and ran out into the road. I didn’t see anything until I heard the impact. By the time I got to her, the van driver had already left the scene. I suppose the guy panicked when he saw what he’d done. Maybe he thought there were no witnesses.’
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br />   The cop spent a while noting it all down. ‘You didn’t get the registration of the van?’

  ‘No,’ Ben said. ‘I didn’t get the registration.’

  The cop gave him a speech about needing to be contacted if there were any further questions or the possibility of attending an ID parade. Ben said yes to everything, and gave him a false mobile number to call. Then, once the police had left him alone, he bought another drink from the sullen, shocked-looking barman and sat with it a while, replaying the scene in his mind. He’d witnessed a lot of bad things in the last few years, but he knew this one was going to stay with him a long time.

  Two options: one, the whole thing had been a terrible accident. A woman who believed she was being followed had just happened to be run down by a van with no registration plates, whose driver had just happened to be the kind of guy who would drive off and steal her phone into the bargain – the phone on which she’d just happened to have received an apparently crucially important message.

  The second option couldn’t possibly make any less sense than that. Ben boiled it down: Hilary had been right about being followed, but it hadn’t been her car they’d been tracking. The target had been her phone, and the man sent to kill her had also been under orders to retrieve it. Even ordinary civilians had some inkling that the technology required to triangulate mobile phone signals was a big deal. High-level stuff. The same was true of having people killed when they knew too much – or when someone thought they did.

  Ben thought about the message Nick Chapman had left for his daughter. Whatever the hell it meant, somebody out there had been prepared to kill to obtain it.

  He finished his drink. Laid the empty glass on the table. He looked at his watch, checked the date.

  Eleven days and twenty-one hours still to go before he was due to return to the SAS Regimental Headquarters at Credenhill, Herefordshire, and catch his transport back out to Iraq.

  Eleven days and twenty-one hours that he owed to Nick and Hilary Chapman.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The twenty-one hours had already elapsed by the time Ben stepped off the plane at Owen Roberts International Airport on the island of Grand Cayman. A tiny speck on the map, the largest of the trio of islands lost in the vast expanse of ocean between Cuba to the north, Jamaica to the east and the Mexican coast some four hundred miles to the west. Tax haven to some of the world’s most rampant capitalists, centre of pilgrimage for seekers of sunshine and laid-back Caribbean cool, Mecca for thousands whose perfect vacation was to stick on diving gear and come face to face with a brightly-coloured fish. So this was Nick Chapman’s Paradise, all seventy-six square miles of it.