Tim gave a fractional shake of his head and keeping Ben’s gaze said clearly, “Utter. Complete. Waste. Of. Time. The police in this country aren’t concerned with protecting anyone, Ben—except their paymasters. They’ll probably accuse you of a hate crime, burglary and stalking, and you’ll have to pay him compensation.”
Ben pursed his lips, taken aback. “So what happens when you have no faith in the system left then?” Tim’s gaze still didn’t falter. Ben raised his eyebrows. “Interesting ethics course you must teach, Professor.”
Tim suddenly put his head into his hands. “I did a lot of thinking after our last encounter, Ben. Meeting someone like you, seeing the things you did…Surely the whole point of what I do is to try and see the world from an ethical viewpoint? It’s not a case of what is legal or illegal but what is fundamentally right or wrong—what the universe would want each of us to do. And it never seems as if those who have the power ever think like that. Can you give me one example of anything a politician has ever done that was actually good for the people? One thing? I can’t. Can you give me an example of where the guilty got what they deserved, and the innocent and good got to live the lives they’ve earned by being righteous? I can’t. ”
“You’re saying killing the fucker is the ethical way to go?”
Tim blanched and looked away. “Put like that…” Then he squared his shoulders. “Yes. I’m sick of living in a world where there is so much wrong, Ben. I’m sick of it. I want to make the world a better place, and all I do is teach because I can’t do. You told me once to be on the side of the angels. Well, here I am—I’m on your side. I want to be the change.”
Ben leant back in his chair. “All right. Then it’s decided.” He closed his eyes. “I’m so fucking tired, Tim. Of it all.” He felt a hand on his leg.
“Come to bed…?”
Ben opened his eyes. He could see the whole scenario play out, mounting the stairs, shedding clothes and inhibitions, and then the mounting of other things. But his life had changed now. “I’m pathetic, Tim. I’m sorry. I’m so bloody sorry. I love him. I can’t stop thinking about him. Doesn’t matter what I’m doing, he’s like an obsession, an addiction I can’t cure. The more I get of him, the more I want. I think I know him, but he just ups and changes again. He’s my slippery slope. I think he’ll be the death of me…and this is way too much information given the…” He waved vaguely at the stairs.
Tim shook his head fondly. “Then take the spare room, Ben, and just sleep. Even for a few hours. You’ve been thinking too much for too long, if you ask me. I guess you’ll need clarity and focus now for what you have to do—if you go through with it.”
Ben took the laptop with him, reluctant now to let it out of his sight. Radulf followed him to the bedroom and took the opportunity of being in a stranger’s house to climb onto the bed. Ben let him. He wanted the comfort. He was even more pathetic than he thought, having a scruffy hound in bed with him rather than the gorgeous, eminently beddable professor of ethics he could hear undressing in the next room. Being in love was a total bitch.
§§§
Ben left Devon with a slightly lighter heart. He headed home and arrived in London by mid-morning. Nikolas was in the kitchen, for once not smoking. He was standing at the window, watching a cat negotiating the garden wall. “Hello, stranger.”
Ben put the computer on the table. “We need to talk.”
Nikolas didn’t turn around. “About your latest overnight trip to Devon?”
“Oh, fuck off, you idiot, and sit down.” Nikolas turned, a flash of real anger in his eyes, until he saw Ben’s expression.
“What’s wrong?”
Ben nodded at the chair. Nikolas sat down. Ben leant forward and told him everything—including what he intended to do about it. Then he added, “I slept with the bloody dog, by the way. In case you missed the last month—I love you, you moron.”
Nikolas toyed with the computer, turning it around in small circles, thinking.
“How will you kill him?”
Ben let out a breath of relief. He’d wanted Tim’s advice, but he needed—craved—Nikolas’s affirmation. He always had.
“That’s the easy part.”
“So, the hard part?”
“I’m going to take Alice to her father afterward—as we agreed.”
Nikolas looked up. “That does surprise me. Why?”
Ben shrugged. “She sacrificed her child for a good life. For lunches and fucking clothes and—”
“Ben. No. That is what you believe of your mother.” Nikolas raised his eyes. “Benjamin, I am so sorry, you are seeing parallels here that do not exist.”
Ben’s eyes widened. “No! She—” He couldn’t continue.
All the confusion of the case came flooding out, all his suppressed pain, the connection he’d felt to Alice from the very first day—because Nik was right, that was his mother. She’d left him with his father so she could have a better life. He pushed his chair away from the table, blindly heading to the door and privacy. He felt a hand seize his arm and another catch him around his neck, and he was pulled into a tight embrace. They didn’t speak for many minutes. Ben wasn’t used to being outwardly emotional, and Nikolas certainly wasn’t used to dealing with emotion, but they both coped remarkably well, mainly because the embrace turned to kissing, and Ben’s repressed tears flowed on the intense pleasure of feeling Nikolas’s lips kissing them away. Before they knew it, they were unbuttoning shirts, shrugging off jeans and finding skin. Nikolas utterly refused to lie down on the kitchen floor, so they had to take it to the bed, and by the time he had Nikolas pliant and welcoming beneath him, Ben had recovered from his emotional meltdown. He brushed his thumb over Nikolas’s cheekbone and kissed him again. Nikolas held the back of Ben’s neck and murmured around the kissing, “Do not blame the mother too much, Ben. She has kept the girl safe this far. I believe she has been trying to leave him for sometime, but no one will help her.”
Ben stopped kissing him. “She should just leave!”
Nikolas shook his head sadly, eyeing Ben. “Life is not black and white.”
“Yes. It is. It can be.”
“No. It is not. If she leaves, the child’s whole life changes. No private school, no ballet, no riding lessons, no nice house. Everything changes. Is that better for her?”
“Yes! She’d be safe!”
Nikolas closed his eyes. “Ben, such things as this Jeremy would do…sometimes there is no one to help, and the child has to learn to adapt, to hide in the shadows…” He opened his eyes and sighed. “But that was another child. He learnt too well, perhaps.”
Ben was still fixated on his own thoughts and hardly listening to Nikolas. He rolled off. “You don’t want me to take her to her father? Isn’t that where we came into this case?”
“I do not know. I am confused by this, too. If he suspected this man Jeremy, why not help the wife and daughter together? It strikes me that he may be taking Alice more to punish his ex-wife than he is concerned by the girl’s welfare.”
“Shit! I wish we’d never taken this case. In fact I wish we’d give up this whole line of work. Why are we doing it? We could both do other things.”
“Oh, this will be interesting.”
“You could…crap, I don’t know. Be a translator! There you go.”
“This is true. You could be a dog walker.”
“Thanks. You could run a riding stable.”
“Death first. You could be a model.”
Ben smiled. “Aftershave?”
Nikolas raised an eyebrow. “I was hoping for underwear.”
“Oh, God, all right. She stays with her mother. But what’s to stop her bringing another man into the house? She’s…needy, Nik. She’s weak.”
“Ben, she had the right to try and find a good life for herself—your mother. Don’t blame her too much. Don’t let it cloud your whole life.”
“Don’t blame her!” Ben punched the pillow and Nikolas winced. “I was eight,
Nik. I came home from school one day and all her things were gone. Dad came home from work and found me there. I didn’t speak a word for six months. I ran away every chance I got to look for her. I never believed she’d gone voluntarily. I thought she’d been taken. I thought if I gave up looking she’d be in just…the next place. Eight, Nik, I was eight, climbing out of my window at night to look for her! My dad died of a broken heart. He never even got to see me join the army.”
“I know, Ben. I know all this.”
“And you tell me not to blame her?”
“Yes. It is sad. I know this for you. But she may not have been to blame so much.”
“Fuck off. I was eight. Talk to me about sad.”
Nikolas began to run his fingers through Ben’s hair. Ben resisted at first but then allowed it, turning into the comfort offered. “By the way, Benjamin, I prefer it when you say fuck me rather than fuck off.”
Ben nodded into Nikolas’s chest. “Sorry. It’s been a bloody awful few days.”
“So, what will you do with the stepfather? Nothing must come back to us.”
“No. I was thinking he was going to kill himself.”
“No. Make him disappear.”
“But then there’s no closure for Felicity or Alice.”
“An accidental death then.”
“He doesn’t deserve that.”
“A very painful accidental death?”
Ben chuckled, even though he knew this was hardly appropriate. Nik stopped running his fingers through Ben’s tousled black hair and slapped his head lightly instead in admonition. “Remember the girl and the woman. They will know the method of the death eventually. You would wish to spare them that. It is not easy to know someone died a horrible death, even if you no longer love them.”
Ben raised his head from Nikolas’s chest and took a deep breath for courage. “Is that a personal reflection from prison camp?”
Nikolas pressed Ben’s head back onto his chest. “Good things can come from bad beginnings. You do realise that the nine-year-old boy living rough on the moors turned into the SAS solider I eventually recruited, don’t you? By the time you were sixteen, you were already an exceptional young man with unusual skills and self-reliance.”
“You neatly turned that conversation from you back to me.”
“As I always will. Come.” Nikolas tapped him on the shoulder. “You have work to do. Do it well, Ben. Nothing to tie this to us.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Ben was interested to read in the paper, which he uncharacteristically scanned very carefully every day that week, that a corporate lawyer in the city had recently died in a fluke, but tragic, accident. According to the journalist, the man, Jeremy Haxton, had left work one night and discovered he had a flat tyre. He’d apparently tried to change the wheel. Given the dark of the underground car park, the police concluded he’d been unable to fit the jack correctly. It was an unusual accidental death, they said, but not entirely unheard of. The story went on to point out that the BMW X5 was not one of the heaviest vehicles on the road, but at just under 5,000lbs curb weight, it was heavy enough. Quoted, the coroner explained, “The human head is little more than blancmange wrapped in cling film inside a paper bag placed in a cardboard box wrapped in brown paper.” A diagram of this concept had been provided. Ben liked it. The little brain looked like a sick birthday present.
Ben wondered if there was a widow somewhere reading this same story and, if so, whether she was interested in blancmange brains, or whether she was more concerned to have it confirmed that her husband, Jeremy Haxton, was indeed dead. He hoped that was the case.
§§§
Killing Jeremy had been one of the easiest things Ben had ever done. In so many ways, he’d wanted the man to know what his death was about, but having time to torment your victim with a recitation of his crimes existed only in fiction. Ben had seen a narrow window of opportunity and had taken it. The man never knew what had hit him as he’d emerged from the stairwell late one night.
The laptop’s hard drive he destroyed. Then he smashed the laptop, just because he wanted to.
§§§
When Ben returned home, however, he didn’t know what to do with himself. He felt completely numb. For one terrifying moment, all he wanted to do was run away to the moors. And with a sickening realisation, he saw that this was just like the weeks and months after his mother had abandoned him. He couldn’t concentrate, and he couldn’t care about anyone or anything. Even with Nikolas he was numb, disassociated. He went through the motions of eating, wandering around the house, walking the dog, but nothing registered.
It was worse at night. For the first time in his adult life, he wasn’t interested in sex. It all seemed too much effort, something that should be happening to someone else. The first night, Nikolas had slid into bed alongside him, cupping his face for a kiss. Ben had pushed him off and turned his back, shoulders stiff. He needed endless sleep and felt tired after only a few hours of rising. In some part of his brain, all this worried him for he could see no reason for it—after all, he had killed many people before with less justification—but in the other portion, he just couldn’t care enough to care. He drifted, silent on a still sea of pleasant numbness. He almost stopped talking and dreamt endlessly of the moors. He was almost pleased he could see no end in sight, and wondered whether if he tried hard enough he might just disappear entirely. After three days and nights of seeing his life as a pinprick of light at the end of a long dark tunnel, the end came startlingly abruptly one morning when Nikolas woke him by throwing some clothes at him. “Get up.”
Ben grunted something that sounded remarkably like fuck off but was mumbled enough so Nikolas might just mishear. Nikolas dragged the covers off Ben’s naked body. “Get up. We have a long drive ahead of us.”
Ben sat up reluctantly. “Another job?”
Nikolas pursed his lips, placing a leather travel bag on the bed. “No. Get dressed and then pack for a few nights.”
“Tell me where we’re going first.”
Nikolas gave a sour smile. “And spoil the surprise?”
“I don’t like bloody surprises.”
“Ah. Something we finally have in common. But it is my birthday, so I am enduring one for your sake.”
“You’re giving me a surprise for your—Wait, it’s your birthday? Today?”
“I think I just said that, yes.”
“You didn’t tell me. I didn’t get you—”
“I did not want you to. But I have decided to get myself something. It is a prerogative of old age. Now, get dressed and get in the car or I will go without you. Five minutes.”
“What about Radulf?”
“I have left him some tins and shown him how to use the opener.”
“You can’t just―!”
“He was packed and in the car five minutes ago.” Nik zipped his bag with a look of utter derision.
Ben took half an hour to get ready, but he noticed Nikolas wasn’t holding him to the deadline. He was tossed the keys. “I’m driving?”
“Of course. Why keep a dog and bark yourself. Get in and drive. North.”
“North. Just north?”
“Yes.”
Neither of them was in the mood to make small talk. Radulf was too busy pretending to be important on the rear seat to do his part in easing the tension. Nik turned on Radio 4 and listened to a debate about the economy. Ben felt like screaming. He’d come out of his strange disassociated state with something of a head rush. He wasn’t sailing along numb anymore. He was apparently driving north with the man who he could now see was the cause of all his problems: Sir Nikolas bloody Mikkelsen. He was the one who’d pulled Ben out of the army, which he’d loved and been good at. He was the one who’d turned him into an amoral killer. He was the one who’d seduced him and fucked him over a billiard table. He was the one who’d taken him from the department where at least he’d had a life separate to fucking Nikolas. Literally. Piece by piece, his whole identity ha
d been subsumed by Nikolas Mikkelsen until there was almost nothing of Ben Rider left. Sometimes he wasn’t even sure if that was his real name anymore. He held his tongue until the M1 then silenced John Humphries, asking acidly, “What exactly am I? In this agency?”
“You are frequently annoying. Put the radio back on.”
“Am I your partner?”
Nikolas glanced at the radio then sighed and stared out of the side window. “Of course.”
“Then why did you ask Kate to come and work for you—us—without asking—consulting—me?”
“What would you have said?”
“I don’t know! I haven’t thought about it!”
Love is a Stranger Page 13
