‘Know what?’
‘What I came here tonight to find out. I thought I recognised you when you walked into the office today. But I needed to be sure that you were the same Ben Hope Nick used to talk about.’ She spun the album round on the table so he could see the picture. It was a shot taken at Hilary Chapman’s engagement party. Ben was in the background, holding a glass.
‘And here,’ she said, flipping back a page to another shot of some of the men of A Squadron, looking hot and exhausted in filthy fatigues, sitting around a clearing in some tropical hellhole that could have been either of the SAS’s jungle training grounds in Belize or Borneo. There was Ben in the middle, his face partially blacked, in the process of field-stripping an AR-15 rifle. Technically speaking, Nick shouldn’t have even had such potentially compromising photos in his possession, though sneaking the occasional memento home wasn’t uncommon practice.
‘You haven’t changed a lot,’ she said.
‘Thanks. So now you know who I am, Mrs Martínez, will you talk to me?’
‘Call me Tamara,’ she said. ‘And yes, if Nick trusted you as a friend, then that’s good enough for me.’
Ben saw the connection right away. ‘Tamara, as in the large capital T in Nick’s address book, next to a mobile number?’
She nodded. ‘You’ve been straight with me, now it’s my turn. Nick and I were having an affair for the last eighteen months. That’s to say, I was having an affair with him. I was the one that was married with two kids. It was our secret, obviously. A very well-kept one, until now. I even had a secret phone he used to call me on.’ She paused a long time, then added softly, ‘I loved him so much.’
Now Ben understood the depth of pain in her eyes. She hadn’t just lost a work colleague.
‘Why the gun, Tamara?’
‘It’s my husband’s. I don’t normally …’
‘Walk about the island packing a pistol?’
She shook her head. ‘No, this is one of the safest places in the world. But I’m scared. I’m scared to death.’ The tears in her eyes caught the light. She opened her mouth to speak, then closed it. But the words building up in her throat were too strong to be hemmed in and after a few moments’ hesitation she blurted it out.
‘Nick didn’t kill himself,’ she said.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
‘I don’t think we should hang around here too long,’ Ben said after a beat.
Tamara sniffed, wiped a tear. ‘We can go back to my place. It’s okay — there’s nobody there right now but me and the maid. You follow me.’
After tidying up behind them and making sure nobody was lurking around outside, they left the villa by the front door. Tamara had parked her Mazda people carrier among the shadows of the trees. Ben watched her climb in and her car lights come on, then got into the Wrangler and followed. They drove eastwards across the island for a few miles, to an area called Omega Bay Estates. The Mazda led the way into what was obviously a prestigious and highly expensive gated community, and pulled up outside a sprawling house set far back from the road.
‘Where’s your husband?’ Ben asked as she led him inside. The tears had dried up now.
‘Dwight? Away on some legal conference. He’ll be gone another ten days. Even if he was here,’ she added with a grimace, ‘he’d be off sailing around the bay on that damn boat of his. And the twins are staying with my mom in Miami.’
Where Nick’s place was unassumingly tasteful and comfortable, the Martínez residence purposefully screamed ‘rich lawyer’ as loudly as it could and shoved its opulence right in your face. Ben got the impression that wasn’t down to Tamara’s influence. He paused to look at a photo of Dwight Martínez on a sideboard, posing with his motor yacht in the background, a sleek white vessel with the name Santa Clara on her bows.
Dwight might have been a fine figure of a man in his youth, but Ben doubted it. He was almost perfectly spherical in shape, all three hundred pounds of him, with thin sandy hair that looked glued on and a smile that was more like a sneer. Ben glanced covertly back at Tamara and muttered ‘Jesus’ under his breath.
‘Let’s get a drink,’ she said, and led him towards the kitchen. In the passage was a reproduction antique display cabinet filled with shotguns — a showy brace of Purdeys, a couple of skeet guns and a short-barrelled Remington semi-auto that looked as if it was kept for home defence. ‘Dwight’s quite the sportsman,’ Ben commented as he followed Tamara into the enormous kitchen.
‘Don’t get me started. Pity any poor creature that crawls or flies when he and his law cronies get together. You want a beer?’
‘I’d sooner have a scotch,’ he said.
‘Sounds good to me.’ Tamara opened a cupboard, fetched out a bottle of Bowmore and two glasses. Ben walked over to the long breakfast bar and pulled out a stool. ‘Mind if I smoke?’
She shook her head as she poured out the drinks. ‘Go ahead. There’s an ashtray on the side.’
‘Want one?’
‘Uh-uh. I quit months ago.’
Ben lit up. Clanged the Zippo shut and blew out smoke. Tamara joined him at the breakfast bar, setting the bottle down between them on the marble top. Handed him his glass and took a long, deep gulp of her own, as if she really needed it. ‘This has been a tough time for me,’ she said in the controlled voice of someone battling their emotions.
Ben didn’t reply. Looking at her he could see a strong-willed woman bravely trying to hold it together, trapped in a nowhere marriage and unable to grieve openly for the man she’d loved. He knew there were times she must veer close to the edge. He understood it. He’d been there in the past, and would certainly find himself there again in the future. Some things didn’t go away.
‘Nick said you didn’t have any family,’ she said. ‘Is that still how it is for you?’
‘That’s still how it is,’ Ben said.
‘I think he told me you’re from Ireland? You don’t sound it.’
‘I wasn’t born there,’ he said. ‘But I love Ireland. My mother was from Galway. I have a home there.’ He pictured it in his mind: a large rambling old house close to the rocky shore where he loved to spend time alone whenever he could, sometimes sitting for hours gazing out to sea. He often missed it.
‘You talk about your mother in the past tense,’ Tamara said.
‘She died a long time ago.’
When Tamara understood he wasn’t going to elaborate, she asked, ‘Do you have any other family?’
He shook his head. ‘It’s just me and Winnie. She was my parents’ housekeeper. She moved with me to Ireland after they died and now she just looks after the place for me when I’m not around. A mad old bat, and it drives her crazy trying to keep me in line,’ he added with a smile, which quickly dropped from his face. ‘She’s the only family I have left now.’
Tamara sensed there was something paining him, something he kept bottled up deep inside and didn’t want to talk about. ‘You want a top-up?’ she asked him.
He nodded, and slid his half-empty glass across for her to refill.
‘Why are you here on Grand Cayman, Ben?’ she said. ‘You don’t believe this bullshit about suicide either, do you?’
‘Let’s start from the beginning,’ he said. ‘Tell me what you know.’
‘I know Ni—’ she started, then broke off. ‘I knew Nick. He told me all about his history — the divorce, the breakdown, his depression, how he’d left the army under a cloud. He didn’t try to hide anything from me. But that was years ago. He wasn’t depressed any more. He was one of the most contented people I’ve ever known. Did you see that yellow plane outside the office?’