Still no response.
I tried another tactic.
‘My brother-in-law is aware of everything I know, so killing me will not stop it being passed to the relevant tax authorities.’
I now wished that I’d sent a few more e-mails, including one to the taxman.
‘Why don’t you just stop the car and let me out?’ I said. ‘Make Martin pay his tax and that will be an end to it. I’ll make no further complaint against any of you.’
Sir Richard went on driving, and the creepy Bentley said nothing. He just continued to smile at me, and the gun in his hand wavered not an iota.
We turned off the main road down little more than a track, with no visible lights from any nearby houses. What had Henri said? Most of the eastern half of the island is just deserted mangrove swamp.
It didn’t look particularly promising for my long-term prospects.
Was my good luck finally running out?
But at least now I would die knowing the reason I was being killed.
Did that make me any happier?
Probably not, but maybe it was better than being randomly knifed to death in my flat without having the slightest idea why.
The track seemed to go on for ever until we eventually stopped at the very end, where it ran out into a small beach surrounded by the mangroves. Through the windscreen, in the glow of the headlights, I could see a boat with an outboard engine, its bow pulled up on the white sand. This was no spur-of-the-moment plan, not if that boat had been pre-positioned.
The two men got out of the car, leaving the headlights on. Bentley then opened the rear door next to me. He was still aiming the gun at my chest.
‘Get out,’ he ordered.
‘No,’ I replied.
‘I said, get out.’
‘And I said, no.’
‘I’ll shoot you,’ he said, lifting the gun to his eyeline and aiming it at my face.
‘If I get out, you’ll definitely shoot me,’ I said. ‘In here, maybe not. Your car, is it? Or hired? Either way it would take too much explaining if my blood and brains were splattered all over the inside.’
‘Get out!’ He was almost screaming.
‘No,’ I repeated.
He clearly hadn’t envisaged such an impasse. He looked to Sir Richard for assistance.
‘Shoot him in the foot,’ Sir Richard said without any visible emotion.
‘He’ll still bleed,’ said Bentley.
Sir Richard walked around the car to our side and took the pistol from Bentley.
‘Get out of the car,’ he said, pointing the gun at my right leg. ‘I’ll shoot you in the foot first, then in your knee. Get out of the car now. You have three seconds.’
It was his matter-of-fact tone that was most appalling. This was clearly a man very accustomed to getting his own way, and I could detect the ruthlessness in him that would have been needed to transform the small ship-loading company of his grandfather into the multi-national corporation it was today.
I could also recall the words of the Special Forces sergeant, who had run the ‘escape and evasion’ part of the army captains’ course: Resist your captors if you can, but try to avoid leg injuries. If you can’t walk or run, then you’ll not be able to take advantage of an escape opportunity, if it arises. Lack of mobility is a sure death sentence.
‘OK,’ I said.
I got out of the car.
Sir Richard Reynard smiled broadly. Just like Dave Swinton, he always liked to win.
‘Over to the boat,’ he said, waving the gun to the left.
I walked in front of him while Bentley kept well to the side, out of reach and out of the line of fire.
There was a diver’s buoyancy compensator in the bow attached to a common-or-garden, plain grey aluminium dive tank, connected to a regulator set.
‘Not more carbon monoxide,’ I said.
‘That was Bentley’s idea,’ Sir Richard said, smiling. ‘And it almost worked.’
And it would have, I thought, if it hadn’t been for Henri pulling me up to the surface and Carson Ebanks’s timely intervention with his oxygen.
‘Put it on,’ Sir Richard said.
‘I’ll wash up somewhere on a beach. How are you going to explain away a diver with bullet wounds? Fish don’t have guns.’
‘You’ll not wash up from where you’re going,’ Bentley said with a smile. ‘Over the wall and down into the depths. They say the sea is three miles deep just a mile off-shore in these parts.’
Perhaps for the first time I was truly frightened.
I had hoped and half expected that they wouldn’t go through with it — that they would come to their senses and work out that the risks outweighed the benefits. But proving murder without a body was always difficult, if not impossible.
In 1660, three people were convicted and hanged for the murder of a local official who subsequently turned up alive and well, having been away abroad. Since that time, English common law adopted the ‘no body, no murder’ rule, maintaining that there could be no conviction for murder without the victim’s body. The rule has been overturned in only a handful of cases in recent years when other circumstantial and modern forensic evidence has been overwhelming.
I would have to try to leave some of my DNA, in the hope it would be found.
‘Put it on,’ Sir Richard repeated.
I leaned over and spat into the bottom of the boat, first scraping the inside of my cheek with my teeth to ensure that there were plenty of my cells present. Then I picked up the scuba equipment. It was heavy.
My abdomen complained, but that was the least of my worries. I knew that from the moment I was in the boat with the equipment on, my time was up. It was not easy to dress a body, even in scuba gear. And lifting my literal ‘dead weight’ into the boat would be far from easy, especially for a man of sixty-nine and his diminutive sidekick. But once I was in there, it would be a fairly simple task for even just one of them to roll my lifeless form over the side into the water.
I checked the console at the end of its hose. The pressure gauge read zero. The tank was empty. What’s more, I could see that the valve assembly was loose. As soon as this tank was submerged it would fill with water and provide the necessary ballast to take me all the way to the bottom.
I placed the tank on the edge of the boat and put my arms into the sleeves of the BC jacket.
‘I thought Martin would be here to help you,’ I said.
‘Martin is a fool,’ Sir Richard pronounced. ‘It was he who got us into this mess. Now Bentley and I have to pick up the pieces.’
‘Why not pay the tax?’ I said. ‘It can’t be that much.’
‘Shut up,’ Bentley said.
I ignored him.
‘Even the corporation tax can’t be worth murdering for,’ I said.
Although I couldn’t be sure of that.
Martin had stayed too long in the UK, which meant that, of the five main-board directors of Reynard Shipping Limited, the majority were now UK tax residents. Consequently, it would be considered by the revenue to be a UK-based company, subject to British tax on all its worldwide profits, including the eye-watering capital gain realized from the sale of the Hong Kong operation.
The tax would run into many hundreds of millions of pounds. Maybe as much as half a billion.
Was that worth murdering for?
‘I need that money for my new yacht,’ Sir Richard said.
So, I was to be sacrificed on the altar of Sir Richard Reynard’s new yacht, no doubt a huge multi-suite gin-palace with every luxury, including gold taps and a helicopter landing pad on the deck.
Even if Quentin did follow things through and report my suspicions to the tax authorities, it wouldn’t save me now from a watery grave.