The Ben Hope Collection: 6 BOOK SET

by Scott Mariani

  ‘Words cannot express my sorrow at your loss, Signor Strada,’ Tassoni went on gravely. ‘I myself am divorced and have never known the joy of parenthood. It makes it all the more heartbreaking for me to hear of this terrible tragedy that has befallen your family. May there be some comfort in knowing that Donatella and Gianni will never be forgotten. And I give you my personal guarantee that I will not rest until every last perpetrator of this terrible crime has been brought to justice.’

  As Tassoni spoke, Ben noticed the one flaw in his immaculately-groomed appearance – a red weal on his cheekbone, as though he’d recently been punched. The photographer had clearly been ordered to shoot his good side only. Tassoni finished expressing his condolences, nodded solemnly to all, and then graciously exited the room with the photographer in his wake. Ben saw his chance to slip away at the same time. He said his last respects to the injured man and his family, then left them to their private grieving.

  He’d done what he’d come here to do. It wasn’t enough. Nothing would ever be.

  Tassoni was talking to the photographer in the corridor. Seeing Ben coming, he turned and gave a well-practised smile. ‘Signor Hope,’ he said, and Ben groaned inwardly.

  ‘I wish to thank you for your heroic efforts,’ Tassoni said in English. ‘All Italy is in your debt.’ He shook Ben’s hand with such vigour that it tugged painfully on the stitches in his shoulder. Ben winced a little.

  ‘I’m sorry. You were injured.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it. You’ve been in the wars yourself, it seems,’ Ben said.

  Tassoni touched his fingers to the weal on his face. ‘This is nothing. A minor fracas.’

  Ben looked at his watch. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me, I should get going. I have a flight to catch later on.’

  ‘You are leaving Italy?’

  ‘Is that a good thing or a bad thing?’

  ‘I regret very much that you could not stay longer,’ Tassoni said. ‘As it happens, I am free for the rest of the day. A rare luxury, I can assure you. I have some paperwork to go through at home this afternoon, but you would be a most welcome guest for dinner there this evening. I am a simple bachelor, but I do appreciate the finer things in life.’

  ‘So I’ve heard,’ Ben said.

  ‘You are a connoisseur of wine?’

  ‘I’ve been known to pull a cork or two.’

  ‘Then it would be my pleasure to introduce you to some of the treasures from my little cellar, over a dish of homemade pollo ripieni. My mother’s recipe. I once had the honour of cooking it for your prime minister.’

  ‘He isn’t my prime minister,’ Ben said. ‘You are not a political animal, as they say?’

  ‘Just not a hopelessly gullible one.’

  Tassoni smiled. ‘But a man of strong opinions. I respect that. What do you say, Signor Hope? Just you and me, man to man, setting the world to rights?’

  ‘You, me, and half of Italy’s press. How cosy,’ Ben wanted to say, but he kept it to himself. ‘That’s a generous offer. Thank you, but I’m afraid I’ll be in London by this evening.’

  ‘Then perhaps you are free for lunch? I know an excellent restaurant not far from here.’

  ‘Another time, perhaps,’ Ben said.

  ‘As you say, another time.’ Tassoni slipped a business card from his jacket. ‘Should you ever find yourself in Rome again.’

  ‘You never know,’ Ben said, taking the card. He stuffed it in his jeans pocket without looking at it. They parted with a nod, and Tassoni headed for the lifts while Ben made his way back to the stairs.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  There was a somewhat cryptic message from Roberto Lario waiting for Ben at the hotel reception desk. Ben hesitated, reached for his phone and then remembered it was broken. When he asked if he could use the hotel phone, his new fan club were only too happy to fuss him into their cluttered little office behind the reception area and pester him with offers of coffee and cake. It took several minutes to beat them politely away.

  ‘I have received an unusual call this morning,’ Lario said. ‘You might wish to know about it. It was from a woman desiring most eagerly to speak with L’eroe della galleria after seeing you on the television news.’

  Ben groaned inwardly. ‘I’m not feeling like much of a hero, Roberto. What did she want?’

  ‘She would not say. But it sounded very urgent. An Italian woman, living in Monaco. Her name is Mimi Renzi.’

  ‘What did you tell her? You didn’t tell her where I was staying, did you?’

  ‘Just that I would try to pass the message on. Nothing more.’

  ‘Good. It’s obviously just another bloody reporter.’

  ‘She sounded old,’ Lario said. ‘Very old. I do not think she is a reporter.’

  ‘I don’t really care, Roberto. I’m leaving soon, and I’m not interested in old women in Monaco, whoever they might be.’

  Back upstairs, Ben took his time packing his few things together. He was still aching from the tumble down the fire escape, and his cut shoulder hurt. He dozed a while, catching up on lost sleep and happy to give his mind a rest.

  It didn’t quite work out for him that way. Fitful dreams full of noise and pain woke him sometime before two. The room was stifling. He took another shower, then dressed stiffly and grabbed his bag and went down to the desk to settle his bill. The owners wouldn’t take any money, and he had to fight to persuade them. Eventually managing to tear himself away, he hacked across Rome and made the 30-kilometre drive southwest to Fiumicino airport. He handed over the Shogun at the car rental office, and checked in only to find that some technical problem had delayed the flight by an hour. Take-off wouldn’t be until almost five o’clock.

  He found a payphone and used it to call Jeff Dekker at Le Val. When he got no answer, he left a message to say he was at the airport waiting for a delayed flight and would be back home from London in a couple of days or so. The truth was, he had no idea what awaited him in London and he didn’t really want to think about it until he got there.

  After leaving the message, he chose a quiet spot at the edge of the departure lounge and watched the people go by. Time passed. He watched parents with their kids. The tender and romantic couple in one corner who couldn’t get enough of each other, the sour-looking couple in the other corner who’d had way too much of each other. The businessman going through his papers with worry written all over his face. The captive audience of bored shoppers lured into the departure lounge’s various boutiques and stores by duty-free goods made to look glitzy and tempting under the lights. An electronics boutique window display was filled with an array of screens of different sizes, some of them showing an explosive movie while others displayed a news programme. Ben kept expecting to see himself appear, splashed across the window for all to see. The next thing, people would be recognising him, pointing at him, and there’d be nowhere to hide.

  To his relief, that didn’t happen. Instead, the news focused on the arrest of one Tito Palazzo, an environmental protester charged with throwing a lump of coal at Presidential candidate Urbano Tassoni a few days earlier, as a protest against the politician’s election promise to build more coal-fired power stations in Italy.

  That accounted for the damage to Tassoni’s face, Ben thought with a smile.

  Footage showed police officers dragging Palazzo out of an apartment building and stuffing him into the back of a car. The environmentalist was yelling, ‘Yes, I threw it at the stronzo; and I’d do it again!’

  Some people were watching the TV screens. ‘Good for him,’ a man laughed. ‘I wish he’d shot the bastard.’

  Onscreen, the stony-faced talking head paused for effect, then said that police were investigating Palazzo’s possible connections to the radical environmentalist terror organisation known as the Earth Liberation Front, or ELF, who had claimed responsibility for acts ranging from spiking trees marked for deforestation to blowing up mobile phone masts. Then the screens cut to footage of the assault itself: T
assoni looking unflappably self-possessed as he strode towards a waiting limo, flanked by his bodyguards in dark suits and sunglasses. They were all large, heavyset men; one in particu lar looked as if he must have his suits specially tailored to contain his muscular bulk. The press were all over Tassoni, cameras flashing and the air full of questions and jeering while the police struggled to hold back the crowd. As Tassoni was about to climb into his limo, the environmentalist Tito Palazzo was clearly to be seen forcing his way through the police line and hurling a black fist-sized object at Tassoni’s face from just three metres away.

  Tassoni staggered from the blow. The crowd went wild, the police barely able to contain them. The video cameraman shooting the film zoomed in close to catch the shot of the bleeding politician being helped into the limo. The big bodyguard rushed over to shove the camera away. A protester pushed him, knocking off his sunglasses. A scuffle ensued, and the picture froze with an extreme close-up of the body-guard’s angry face looming into the lens.

  It was only onscreen for a second, but Ben could see the image clearly in his mind’s eye even after the newsreader had moved on to the next item.

  He was so stunned that he didn’t even realise he’d spilt his coffee.

  He didn’t give a damn about Urbano Tassoni’s election manifesto, or how popular or otherwise it was with Italian voters. It wasn’t that.

  It was what he’d just seen.

  A big, muscular man. With one dark brown eye.

  And one hazel eye.

  Ben was still staring at the television screens when he dimly heard his flight being called. He looked at his watch. 4.51 p.m. Moving as if dazed, he picked up his bag and followed the line of people filtering out of the departure lounge.

  As he walked, the sounds and sights around him seemed to blur out and become an indistinct jumble. He slowed his pace, staring down at the floor. Someone lugging a heavy suitcase bumped into him from behind and tutted irritably, but he was only vaguely aware that he was in everyone’s way.

  The men outside Fabio Strada’s door at the hospital. The way Tassoni had ordered them away after seeing Ben inside the room. It made sense now – and there was only one possible reason why the politician would have sent his bodyguards away like that. It was because there was a witness present who might have recognised the big guy from the robbery.

  And that meant Tassoni was in on it.

  Ben was still a hundred metres from the plane when he stopped dead in his tracks. Passengers streamed past either side of him like a fast-flowing river current divided by a rock.

  No, he thought. And said it out loud. ‘No.’

  And turned round and started walking back the other way. His step became a purposeful stride as he headed back towards the arrivals lounge. Stopping at a row of lockers, he removed enough cash from his wallet to be getting on with, put the wallet in his bag and stuffed the bag into locker 187. Better to travel light, for what he had in mind. Then he went outside into the sunshine and looked for the taxi rank.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Richmond, London

  Brooke Marcel’s current contract as a hostage psychology consultant with the specialist risk assessment firm of Sturmer-Wainwright Associates Ltd allowed her to manage her time quite freely and spend a lot of hours working from home on her latest research paper. One of the benefits of managing her own schedule was that she could train in her local gym in the middle of the afternoon, like today, when the place was all but empty. After the running and rowing machines, the ab exercises and the free weights it was nearly four o’clock and she was finishing her workout with a last two-minute full-on sprint on the stationary cycle. Breathing through her nose, staring straight ahead as her body arched over the handlebar and her legs pumped hard and fast, she could feel the muscles in her thighs flooding with blood and oxygen, her calves burning, her heart stepping up to meet the challenge.

  Ten seconds to the two-minute target, her phone buzzed inside the pocket of her shorts, and she eased off the pressure and stopped pedalling. The call was from her sister.

  ‘You sound a lot more cheerful today,’ Brooke said, noting the upbeat tone of Phoebe’s voice.

  ‘I think I’ve made a big mistake,’ Phoebe said, sheepish and relieved at the same time.

  ‘Marshall?’

  ‘Yes. I think I got him all wrong. I completely overreacted and I’m so sorry about it.’

  Brooke listened and said nothing. ‘Remember that receipt I found?’

  ‘Tiffany’s.’ How could I forget, Brooke thought.

  ‘You were right. He got it for me. Gave it to me last night over dinner. A beautiful gold necklace.’

  ‘That’s wonderful, sis,’ Brooke said. She didn’t quite know how to react.

  ‘I feel terrible. How could I have been so suspicious? You were right. He told me he was sorry he’d been a bit out of sorts lately. This really big deal at work looked about to fall through, something they’d been working on for months, and it’s been driving him up the wall, apparently.’ Phoebe sighed. ‘I only wish he could have told me.’

  Brooke said nothing.

  ‘But everything’s fine now,’ Phoebe went on brightly. ‘Anyway, that’s one reason I’m calling, just to let you know and to thank you for having been there for me. I really appreciate it, and when I get back from Devon I’m going to take you out for a fancy lunch.’

  ‘Devon?’

  ‘That’s the other reason I’m calling, Brooke. You know we arranged to meet on Thursday for coffee? I’d totally forgotten I have this continuing professional development Pilates course that I enrolled on ages ago, and I just looked at the calendar and realised the bloody thing starts tomorrow. So I’m rushing off to Exeter tonight, for five days. Really sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. Have a great time. Call me when you get back.’

  ‘I will. Bye.’

  Brooke slipped the phone back in her pocket and let out a long sigh of relief. So it was over. No more worrying about how she was going to deal with the situation. Marshall must have finally got the hint that she wasn’t interested in him. Maybe it was true that he’d been going through some crisis. But whatever the cause of it, his infatuation with her had obviously burnt itself out and things were going back to normal. Thank God.

  Brooke showered, changed and left the gym. Dusk was falling, and the car park was quiet as she walked to her Suzuki Grand Vitara.

  She heard footsteps coming up behind her, and turned abruptly.

  ‘Marshall!’

  ‘Brooke—’

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  He shrugged. ‘I followed you.’ As if it were the most obvious, natural thing.

  ‘So you’re stalking me now, is that it?’

  ‘I had to see you.’

  She stared at him. ‘Why?’

  ‘You know why.’

  ‘I don’t understand. Phoebe’s just been on the phone, all happy because you gave her that necklace.’

  ‘I gave Phoebe the necklace because I love her,’ Marshall protested. ‘But I’m in love with you. I know I shouldn’t say it—’

  ‘Then why do you keep saying it?’

  ‘I just can’t help myself. I don’t have any control over my feelings. You think I enjoy deceiving Phoebe like this?’

  ‘You’re seriously confused, Marshall. Go away and leave me alone.’ She reached her car, unlocked the back and threw her gym bag inside. When she turned to walk around to the driver’s door, Marshall grabbed her by the shoulders and tried to kiss her on the mouth. She pushed him away. ‘You do that again and I’ll punch you. I swear it.’

  ‘Brooke—’

  ‘Piss off, Marshall. Keep away from me.’ Brooke clambered into the Suzuki, slammed the door and roared away, leaving him standing at the side of the road, red-faced and wild-eyed. A hundred metres down the street, she slammed her palms on the steering wheel. ‘Jesus Christ!’ she burst out in frustration.

  By the time she’d reached her place in Richmond, the
realisation had dawned on her that Phoebe’s five days in Devon were only going to make things worse. Marshall wasn’t going to leave her alone, the whole time. Five whole days free to pursue and harass her to his heart’s content. The situation was bound to escalate, and then she’d have little choice but to tell her sister what was happening. Shit. God only knew how things would go from there. Unthinkable.

  As she parked the Suzuki and walked to the entrance of her ground-floor apartment, Brooke was thinking that maybe she should call Ben and get him to have a word with Marshall after all. Maybe the threat of a black eye was the only language Marshall would understand.

  But then a better idea came to her. It wasn’t going to cure the problem, but it would put some distance between her and Marshall and buy her some time to figure out what to do.

  She dumped her gym stuff in her apartment and then trotted up to the first floor and knocked on her upstairs neighbour’s door. His name was Amal, and he was a twenty-something ‘aspiring playwright’ who kept himself to himself and tended to be around during the day. In fact, she doubted he ever went anywhere. How he paid the dizzying rent was one of life’s great mysteries, but she didn’t ask. She was content to have a nice, dependable guy living upstairs on whom she could call from time to time and get him to water her plants while she was away.

  The door opened. ‘Brooke. Hi!’Amal grinned at her like a long-lost friend.

  ‘Need to ask you another favour, Amal,’ she said apologetically.

  He clicked his fingers and pointed at her. ‘The plants, right?’

  ‘You don’t mind?’

  ‘My pleasure. Off to Bob’s place in France again? How is he?’

  ‘It’s Ben.’ She’d been deliberately vague about him with Amal, and had never revealed too much about the nature of her work trips to Normandy. ‘Not this time. I’m nipping over to Portugal for a few days.’