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.’
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.
Ben made his way through passport control among a throng of tourists. He was glad it was low season. Stepping outside with his only luggage, a green military haversack, over his shoulder, he breathed in the warm, palm-scented breeze from the Caribbean Sea. Owen Roberts’ runway virtually overhung the beach; beyond the single terminal, which looked more like a tropical country clubhouse than an international airport, the glittering ocean was the purest and clearest crystalline blue.
At the nearby Andy’s car hire, Ben shelled out three hundred Cayman Islands dollars for a week’s rental on a silver Jeep Wrangler and headed into the islands’ capital, George Town, looking for a hotel. The one he chose, painted white like virtually every other building in the capital, was just a hundred yards from the waterfront. His room overlooking the sea was small and utilitarian, and suited him perfectly. He took a shower, changed into a loose-fitting white shirt over jeans and stood on his balcony a while, watching the waves roll in and smoking one of his Jordanian cigarettes while pondering his first move.
Behind him on the bed was the postcard that Nick Chapman had sent him after moving to the island. It was creased and tatty now after spending two years folded up inside the paper jungle of Ben’s wallet. He walked over and picked it up, scanned the handwriting for the thousandth time and wondered what the hell had happened to his friend.
Only a few drops remained in Ben’s whisky flask. ‘Need to do better than that,’ he muttered to himself, surveying the bottles inside the mini-bar. He slipped on his shoes and went downstairs. The hotel lounge was large and airy, done out in a phoney kind of post-Colonial Officers’ Mess style with large fronded plants everywhere and whirring fans on the ceiling. As he was getting his flask filled up with the best scotch available at the bar, Ben ordered a beer and perched on a bar stool to sip it. He’d never really seen the point of beer, other than as a way to cool down on a hot day. If he wanted to get drunk, he wanted to do it in the fastest and most efficient way possible.
It looked as if the group of men in the corner of the hotel lounge were set on doing it the slow, sloppy way, and they’d obviously been at it most of the afternoon. Listening in on their conversation, Ben quickly realised they were the stragglers left over from what must have been a fair army of media invading the place in the aftermath of the suicide plane crash.
‘Hey, guys,’ he said, carrying his drink over to their table and pulling up a chair. ‘Who are you with?’ The opening shop-talk line of roving reporters the world over. Within minutes, the journalists were enjoying a round of fresh beers on their new best buddy. It wasn’t hard to get them talking. ‘Who’re you with?’ asked the oldest of the group, after introducing himself as Ray Doyle of the Miami Herald.