VALLEY OF DEATH
Scott Mariani

Copyright

Published by Avon an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street,

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

Copyright © Scott Mariani 2019

Cover photograph, Ancient building © Katarina Hoglova / Shutterstock; Foreground path © Saeed Husain Rizvi / Shutterstock; Figure © Henry Steadman

Cover design by Henry Steadman 2018

Scott Mariani asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008235963

Ebook Edition © May 2019 ISBN: 9780008235956

Version: 2019-04-10

Join the army of fans who LOVE Scott Mariani’s Ben Hope series …

‘Deadly conspiracies, bone-crunching action and a tormented hero with a heart … Scott Mariani packs a real punch’

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‘Slick, serpentine, sharp, and very very entertaining. If you’ve got a pulse, you’ll love Scott Mariani; if you haven’t, then maybe you crossed Ben Hope’

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‘If you like Dan Brown you will like all of Scott Mariani’s work – but you will like it better. This guy knows exactly how to bait his hook, cast his line and reel you in, nice and slow. The heart-stopping pace and clever, cunning, joyfully serpentine tale will have you frantic to reach the end, but reluctant to finish such a blindingly good read’

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‘Mariani is tipped for the top’

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‘Scott Mariani is an awesome writer’

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Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Read on for an exclusive extract of the new Ben Hope thriller by Scott Mariani

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About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

Kabir removed his pilot’s headset and began flipping switches on the Bell Ranger’s instrument panels to shut down the rotors. He turned to grin broadly at Sai in the co-pilot seat, then at Manish sitting behind.

‘Ready to make history, guys?’ he said over the falling pitch of the turbine.

Kabir’s two associates beamed back at him. Manish said, ‘Let’s rock and roll.’

As the helicopter’s rotors slowed to a whistling whip-whip-whip, the three companions clambered out and jumped down to the rocky ground. It had taken less than an hour from the urban hubbub of their base in New Delhi to reach the remoteness of Hisar District, Haryana, out in the middle of nowhere twenty miles north-west of a once barely-heard-of village called Rakhigarhi.

Kabir stood for a moment and gazed around him at the arid, semi-desert terrain that stretched as far as the eye could see in all directions. Far away beyond the barren escarpment of rocky hills behind him to the north-east lay Punjab, the Land of the Five Rivers; in front of him lay the wide-open semi-desertified plains, arid and rocky with just a few desiccated shrubs and wizened trees scattered here and there and offering no shade. It was mid-September, and the merciless heat of summer was past its worst, but the sun still beat fiercely down, baking the landscape.

Kabir was hardened to the heat, because of the outdoor demands of a job that often took him to difficult and inhospitable places all across the ancient Near East. Unlike his elder brothers, one of whom spent all his time in air-conditioned big-city boardrooms, and the other who, for reasons best known to him, had chosen to live in chilly, rain-sodden Britain. Very strange. Though if it was the life he shared with his beautiful new wife that kept him tied to London, Kabir couldn’t entirely blame the guy. She was something, all right. Maybe one day he, too, might be lucky enough to find a woman like her.

For now, though, Kabir’s sole devotion was to his work.

Kabir stepped back to the chopper, reached into a cool box behind the passenger seat and pulled out three cans of Coke, one for him and one each for Manish and Sai. His two bright, trusty graduate students were both in their early twenties, only a few years younger than Kabir, who happened to be the youngest professor ever to teach at the Institute of Archaeology in Delhi. With his warm personality and winning smile, he was widely held to be the most popular, too – though he was far too modest to admit it.

Sai rolled the cold can over his brow, then cracked the ring and look a long drink. ‘That hit the spot. Thanks, boss.’ Sai never called him ‘Professor’.

‘No littering, please,’ Kabir said. ‘This is a site of special archaeological interest, remember. Or soon to be.’

‘Doesn’t bloody look like it right now,’ Manish said.

Sai finished the can, crumpled it between his fingers and surveyed it with a thoughtful frown. ‘Just think. If I chuck this away among the rocks, four thousand years into the future some guy like us will dig it up and prize it as an ancient relic of our culture, wondering what the hell it can teach him about the long-lost civilisation of the twenty-first century.’

Kabir smiled. ‘That’s history in action for you. Now let’s go and see what we can figure out about the people who lived here four thousand years ago.’

‘I don’t think they drank Coke,’ Manish said.

‘Nah, something else killed them off,’ Sai joked. ‘Question is, what?’

It was one of the puzzles that Kabir had spent his whole career trying to answer, and it was no joke to him. Nor was he the only archaeologist who’d devoted endless hours to solving the mystery, to no avail. He tossed his own empty Coke can back into the cooler, then took out his iPhone and quickly accessed the precious set of password-protected documents stored inside.

Those documents were the single most important thing in his life right now. The originals from which they had been scanned were a set of three old leather-bound journals dating back to the nineteenth century. Not particularly ancient, as archaeological finds went – and yet their chance discovery had been the most significant he’d ever made. And he was hoping that it would lead to an even bigger one.

Outside of Manish and Sai, Kabir trusted virtually no one with his secret. The precious journals themselves were still back in the city, securely locked up in his personal safe while their new custodian travelled out to this arid wilderness, full of excitement and determined to find out if the amazing revelations of their long-dead author were indeed true.

Only time would tell. Sooner rather than later, he hoped. His eagerness to know the truth sometimes bordered on desperation. Yes, it was an obsession. He knew that. But sometimes, he reminded himself, that’s what it takes to get the job done.

Shielding his eyes from the sun’s glare, Kabir slowly scanned the horizon. The chopper was parked on a rocky plateau from where the ground fell away into a rubble-strewn valley. Heat ripples disturbed the air like tendrils rising from the ground, but he was able to make out the curve of the ancient dry river bed that wound for miles into the far distance. Millennia ago, a mighty waterway had flowed through here, nourishing the land and raising lush vegetation all along its banks. Now it was so parched and dusty that even looking at it made Kabir thirsty for another cold drink.

He looked back at the iPhone and scrolled through the selection of documents until he came to the scan of the hand-drawn map from one of the journals. The hundred and eighty-plus years it had lain undiscovered had done considerable damage. A lot of the pages had been nibbled around the edges by mildew and rodents. Others were so badly faded and water-stained as to be barely legible. Kabir had used specialised computer software to enhance the details, and a UV camera to photograph the worst-affected sections. He’d been pleased with the results. The digitised map now looked as sharp and clear as the day the journal’s author had sketched it. The only modification Kabir had made was to insert modern GPS coordinates in place of the original latitude and longitude figures that the author had calculated using the tools of his day, stars and compass.

The map’s key feature was the undulating, meandering curve of a river whose line, as Kabir stood there comparing the two, closely resembled that of the dry bed that stretched out in front of him.

‘What do you reckon, boss?’ Sai, at his shoulder, was gazing at the screen of the iPhone.

‘I think we might have found it, boys,’ Kabir replied. His voice was calm but his heart felt ready to leap out of his chest. He took a couple of deep breaths, then started leading the way down the rocky slope towards the river valley. He ran five miles every day and was as nimble as a mountain goat over the rough terrain. Sai was markedly less so, being overly partial to calorie-laden Delhi street food, and Manish was a city kid too used to level pavements. Slipping and stumbling and causing little rock slides under their feet, they manfully followed their leader down the hillside. By the time they reached the bottom, Kabir was already tracking along the river bed, walking slowly and scanning left and right as though searching for clues.

It was hard to believe that such an arid and inhospitable area could have once been a major centre of one of the largest and most advanced cultures of the ancient world. But that was exactly what it was.

To say that the lost Harappan or Indus Valley Civilisation was Kabir’s overriding interest in life would have been a crashing understatement. Long, long ago, over a stretch of time spanning one and a half thousand years during the second and third millennia BCE, the culture had thrived throughout the north-western parts of South Asia. Their empire had been larger than that of Mesopotamia; greater even than that of ancient Egypt or China. It had covered a vast area comprising parts of what were today Afghanistan, Pakistan and north-west India. At its peak, it was thought to support a population of five million inhabitants, which by ancient standards was enormous.

And yet, virtually nothing was known about these people. Nobody even knew what they called themselves, let alone how they organised their society. The most baffling enigma of all was the question of what had finally caused their whole civilisation to crumble and disappear in an astonishingly short time.

For years, it had been widely assumed in the archaeology world that the main centres of the Indus Valley Civilisation had been the excavated cities at Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, both in Pakistan. This had been a major frustration for archaeologists from India, since tensions between the two nations made it hard for them to travel freely in their neighbouring country. More recently, important finds made at Rakhigarhi in India’s Haryana region had radically changed that view. Many historians and archaeologists now believed that the sheer size of the site excavated at Rakhigarhi, and the wealth of incredible, priceless artefacts found under its dusty, rocky ground, pointed to its having once been the capital of the entire civilisation. If that was true, as Kabir fervently wished it was, then it might offer scholars the opportunity to finally start figuring out the secrets of the ancient lost culture.

Exactly what he hoped to find here, all this way from the main Rakhigarhi site, Kabir couldn’t say for certain. All his hopes were pinned on the remarkable journals, which described ‘a vast treasure most precious to all men on earth’. The man who’d penned those words had been one of the most important explorers of his generation. If his claims were right, Kabir could be standing, literally, on top of the biggest and most valuable archaeological find ever.

Treasure. The excitement he felt at the sound of that word took his breath away.

But even once he found it, getting it out of the ground would be no easy task. Kabir had already made some private, tentative enquiries among his contacts in the Indian government. They were unlikely to agree to fund a new excavation project, but as long as they agreed in principle, Kabir was more than willing to pay for it out of his own pocket. His very own private dig, fully under his own supervision. He calculated that to bring in sufficient manpower and equipment to get things rolling would cost him at least a hundred million rupees, equivalent to about one and a half million American dollars.

Kabir didn’t blink at those figures. The benefits of being born into wealth.

Manish and Sai caught up with him and the three of them walked on, following the river bed. Each man was silent, gazing at the rocky ground underfoot and imagining what wonders might be hidden below. It was a heady feeling. Finally, Manish said, ‘Wow, boss, you really think it’s here somewhere?’

Kabir said nothing. He was gazing into the distance as he walked. His step slowed, then slowed again, and he halted, his eyes still fixed on some faraway point on the rocky horizon to the south-west of the river valley. He frowned. Looked again at the iPhone screen, then studied the horizon once more. Manish and Sai exchanged glances, wondering what the professor had seen. Manish asked, ‘What’s up?’

Kabir remained quiet for a moment longer, then pointed in the direction he’d been gazing. ‘See that range of hills over there?’

Manish and Sai looked. ‘Yeah, I see it,’ Sai replied. Manish asked, ‘What about it?’

Kabir lowered his pointing finger and tapped the iPhone screen with it. He frowned harder. ‘It’s not here.’

Manish shrugged and said, ‘So? Everything else is the same. We must be in the right place.’

Kabir shook his head. ‘Those hills have been there since prehistoric times, Manish. They didn’t just sprout up in the last two hundred years. Trafford would have drawn them on the map, like he drew everything else. He didn’t. Something’s wrong.’ He was suddenly anxious. He bit his lip and compared the map and the landscape once more.

‘But the coordinates led us here,’ Sai said. ‘They must be right.’

Kabir sighed. ‘The coordinates are based on one guy’s skill with compass and stars, long before we had pinpoint-accurate navigational technology. There’s little margin for error. One tiny slip on Trafford’s part and the GPS could take us half a mile off course, or more.’

‘So what are you saying?’ Manish asked, staring at him.

‘I’m saying there’s a disparity between the map and this location that I hadn’t noticed before.’

Sai said, ‘In other words, we’re in the wrong bloody place.’

Manish was about to say something when he suddenly froze. ‘Hear that?’

Sai said, ‘What?’

Now Kabir heard it, too, and turned to look in the direction of the sound.

The approaching vehicle appeared on the ridge above the river valley, some ninety or a hundred yards to the west, the direction of the parked helicopter. Kabir instinctively didn’t like the look of it. As he watched, it tipped over the edge of the slope and started bouncing and pattering its way down the hillside towards them, throwing up a dust plume in its wake. It was moving fast. Some kind of rugged four-wheel-drive, like the Nissan Jonga jeeps the Indian Army used to use.

‘Who are they, boss?’ Sai asked apprehensively.

‘No idea. But I think we’re about to find out.’

The jeep reached the bottom of the hillside and kept coming straight towards them, lurching and dipping over the rubble. Then it stopped, still a long way off. The terrain on the approach to the river bed was too rough even for an off-roader. The doors opened. Two men climbed out of the front. Three more climbed out of the back. All of them were clutching automatic rifles, but they definitely weren’t the Indian Army.

‘Dacoits!’ Manish yelped.

Sai’s jaw dropped open. An expression of pure horror plastered his face. ‘Oh, shit.’

Dacoits were bandits, of which there were many gangs across north-west India. They were growing bolder each year, despite the increasingly militarised and notoriously brutal efforts of the police to round them all up. Kabir had read a few days earlier that an armed gang of them had robbed a bank in Haryana. Their sudden appearance was the last thing he’d have expected out here, in the middle of the wilderness. But all the same he now cursed himself for having left his self-defence pistol at home in Delhi. His mouth went dry.

‘They must have seen us landing,’ Sai said in a hoarse, panicky whisper. ‘What are we going to do, boss?’ Both he and Manish were looking to their professor as though he could magically get them out of this.

The five men were striding purposefully towards them. Spreading out now. Raising their weapons. Taking aim. Looking like they meant it.

‘Run,’ Kabir said. ‘Just run!’

And then the gunshots began to crack out across the valley.

Chapter 1
Three weeks later

The walls of the single-storey house were several feet thick and extremely well insulated, solidly reinforced on the outside and clad on the inside with thick, sturdy plywood. The house featured several rooms and offered spacious facilities well suited to its purpose.

But it wasn’t a dwelling in which anybody would have wanted to live. Not even the mice that inhabited the remote compound’s various other sheds and outbuildings would have been tempted to make their nests in its walls. Not considering the activities that went on there.

Yet, the building wasn’t empty that autumn afternoon. At the end of a narrow corridor was the main room; and in the middle of that room sat a woman on a wooden chair. She wasn’t moving. Her wrists and ankles were lashed tight and her head hung towards her knees, so that her straggly blond hair covered her face. To her right, a kidnapper in torn jeans reclined on a tattered sofa with a shotgun cradled across his lap. To her left, another of the woman’s captors stood in a corner.

Nobody spoke. As though waiting for something to happen.

The waiting didn’t go on long.

The stunning boom of an explosion shattered the silence and shook the building. Heavy footsteps pounded up the corridor towards the main room. Then its door crashed violently inwards and two men burst inside. One man was slightly taller than the other, but otherwise they were indistinguishable in appearance. They were dressed from head to foot in black, bulked out by their body armour and tactical vests, and their faces were hidden behind masks and goggles. Each carried a semiautomatic pistol, same make, model and calibre, both weapons drawn from their tactical holsters, loaded and ready for action.

The two-man assault team moved with blinding speed as they invaded the room. They ignored the hostage for the moment. Her safety was their priority, which meant dealing with her captors quickly and efficiently before either one could harm her. The taller man unhesitatingly thrust out his weapon to aim at the kidnapper in the corner and engaged him with a double-tap to the chest and a third bullet to the head, the three snapping gunshots coming so fast that they sounded like a burst from a machine gun. No human being alive could have responded, or even flinched, in time to avoid being fatally shot.

The other man in black moved across the room to engage the kidnapper on the sofa. Shouting DROP THE WEAPON DROP THE WEAPON DROP THE WEAPON!

The kidnapper made no move to toss the shotgun. The second assault shooter went to engage him. His finger was on the trigger. Then the room suddenly lit up with a blinding white flash and an explosion twice as loud as the munitions they’d used to breach the door blew the shooter off his feet. He sprawled on his back, unharmed but momentarily stunned. His unfired pistol went sliding across the floor.

The room was full of acrid smoke. The kidnapper in the corner had slumped to the floor, but neither the bound hostage nor her captor on the sofa had moved at all. That was because they were the latest type of life-size, high-density foam 3D humanoid targets that were being used for live-fire hostage rescue and combat training simulations here at the Le Val Tactical Training Centre in Normandy, France. The ‘kidnappers’ had already been shot more full of holes than French Gruyère in the course of a hundred similar entry drills performed inside the killing house. So had the hostage, more than her fair share. But they’d survive to go through the whole experience another day, and many more.

The taller of the two assault shooters made his weapon safe and clipped it back into its holster, then pulled off his mask and goggles and brushed back the thick blond lock that fell across his brow. His haircut definitely wouldn’t have passed muster, back in his SAS days. He walked over to his colleague, who was still trying to scramble to his feet.

Ben Hope held out a gloved hand to help him up. He said, ‘Congratulations. You’re dead, your team are dead, your hostage is dead. Let’s review and start over.’

The second man’s name was Yannick Ferreira and he was a counter-terror unit commander with the elite Groupe d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale or GIGN, here on a refresher course. He’d wanted to hone his skills with the best, and there were none better to train with than the guys at Le Val: Ben himself, his business partner Jeff Dekker, their associate Tuesday Fletcher and their hand-picked team of instructors, all ex-military, all top of their game. Ferreira was pretty good at his job too, but even skilled operators, like world-class athletes, could lose their edge now and then. It was Ben’s job to keep them on their toes.

Ferreira said, ‘What the hell just happened?’

Ben replied, ‘That happened.’ He pointed at the floor, where a length of thin wire lay limp across the rough boards where Ferreira had snagged it with his boot.

‘A tripwire?’

‘You must have missed it, in all the excitement,’ Ben said.

The wire was connected to a hidden circuit behind the wall, which when broken activated the non-lethal explosive device right beneath Ferreira’s feet. Seven million candlepower and 170 decibels of stunning noise weren’t quite the same as being blown apart by a Semtex booby trap, but it certainly got its message across.

‘Devil’s in the detail, Yannick,’ Ben said. ‘As we all know, our terrorist friends have no problem blowing themselves to smithereens in order to take us out with them. It can get just a little messy.’

Ferreira shook his head sourly. ‘I can’t believe you caught me out with a damned flashbang. That was a dirty rotten trick, Ben.’

‘Dirty rotten tricks are what you’re paying us for,’ Ben said. ‘How about we stroll back to the house for a coffee, then we can come back and run through it again?’

Chapter 2

‘Keep pouring,’ Jeff said grimly, holding out his wine glass until Ben had filled it to the brim. Jeff downed half the glass in a single gulp like a man on a mission, and smacked his lips.

‘I think I’ll get rat-arsed tonight,’ he declared.

‘Sounds like a brilliant plan,’ Tuesday said dryly. ‘Don’t expect me to carry you back to your hole after you collapse in a heap, though.’

Another busy work day had ended, evening had fallen and the three of them were gathered around the big oak table in the farmhouse kitchen, preparing to demolish a pot of beef and carrot stew that could have fed the French Army and was simmering on the stove. Ben was seated in his usual place by the window, feeling not much less morose than Jeff despite the glass of wine at his elbow, his loyal German shepherd dog Storm curled up at his feet and one of his favourite Gauloises cigarettes between his lips.

While he’d been working with Yannick Ferreira, Jeff and Tuesday had been putting two more of the GIGN guys through their paces on Le Val’s firing ranges. Tuesday had been a top-class military sniper before he’d come to join the gang in Normandy. His idea of fun was popping rows of cherry tomatoes at six hundred yards with his custom Remington 700 rifle, which generally upstaged and occasionally cheesed off their clients. Especially the ones with a tough-guy attitude, who for some reason didn’t expect a skinny Jamaican kid who was forever smiling and ebullient to be so deadly once he got behind a rifle.

Ben had warned Tuesday in the past about the showing off. ‘We’re here to teach them, not embarrass them.’ Still, Ferreira’s guys hadn’t taken it too badly. After class the three trainees had driven off to the nearest town, Valognes, in search of beer and fast food to help soothe their wounded pride and prepare them for another day of humiliation ahead.

Even Tuesday’s spirits were dampened by the gloomy atmosphere around the kitchen table. But the glumness of the three friends had nothing to do with the tribulations of their work. The theme of the dinnertime conversation had been women troubles. Tuesday, who appeared to enjoy a stress-free and uncomplicated love life largely because he was always between girlfriends, had nothing to complain about. For both Ben and Jeff, however, it was a different story.

Ben had recently returned from an unexpectedly adventuresome trip to the American Deep South. There, in between dodging bullets and almost getting blown up and eaten by alligators, he’d met and befriended a lady police officer called Jessie Hogan. They had dinner and went to a jazz gig together, and although Jessie made it pretty obvious that she liked Ben, nothing happened between them. Ben drove back to New Orleans and boarded his flight home without so much as a kiss being exchanged.

But that wasn’t the impression that Ben’s French girlfriend, Sandrine, had formed.

Ben and Sandrine had been together for a few months. It wasn’t love’s young dream. Both of them had been hurt before, and it had been a somewhat cautious, reticent start to the relationship before they fell into a comfortable routine. She was a head surgeon at the hospital in Cherbourg, some kilometres away, whose punishing work schedule meant she didn’t live at Le Val and only visited now and then. It had been on one such visit, a couple of days ago, when the two of them had been hanging out in the prefabricated office building and Ben had needed to step outside for a few minutes to attend to a delivery of some items for the range complex.

While his back was turned, as luck would have it, an email had landed on his screen: Jessie Hogan, saying what a great time she’d had with him and expressing a strong desire to see him again if he happened to swing by Clovis Parish, Louisiana any time in the future. She’d signed off with a lot of kisses.

Sandrine hadn’t taken it too well. Ben had stepped back inside the office to be met with tears and anger. ‘So this is what you get up to on your travels, is it?’

Calmly at first, Ben had protested his innocence. But nothing he could say could persuade her, and after a bitter quarrel and a lot of accusations, Sandrine had driven off in a rage. It was Jeff who’d stopped Ben from going after her. Jeff had been right: following a row with a car chase wasn’t such a good idea.

Ben hadn’t been able to get through to Sandrine on the phone since, and she wasn’t responding to emails. He’d decided to give it a few days and drive up to Cherbourg. But it wasn’t looking good, and her allegations of infidelity had shaken him to the core. It would never have occurred to him not to trust her, if the situation had been reversed. Maybe he was just naïve when it came to these matters.

‘Women,’ Jeff said with a snort. His glass was empty again. He motioned for the bottle. Ben slid it across the table, and Jeff grabbed it and topped himself up, clearly intent on polishing off the whole lot before uncorking another. Tuesday rolled his eyes.

‘Come on, mate, it’s not that bad.’

‘Isn’t it?’

Jeff’s whirlwind love affair with a pretty young primary school teacher called Chantal Mercier had come as a surprise to his friends at the time. The rugged, rough-around-the edges ex-Special Boat Service commando seemed like the last kind of guy a woman like Chantal would go for. To Ben’s even greater amazement, not long afterwards Jeff had announced that he and Chantal were getting engaged. It all seemed to be going full steam ahead. The wedding date was set for later in the year, at the nearby village church in Saint Acaire. Jeff had even been trying to learn French.

But while Ben was in America, a long-simmering dispute between Jeff and his fiancée had finally blown up. Chantal could live with her future husband’s military past but couldn’t tolerate that he made his living by teaching people how to, in her words, ‘kill people’. After much soul-searching, she’d come to the conclusion that she couldn’t reconcile his violent and morally corrupt profession with her calling as a teacher of innocent, vulnerable little children. Chantal would have no truck with Jeff’s explanations that Le Val was a training facility devoted to teaching the good guys how to protect innocent people from the bad guys, and that all the firearms at the compound were kept strictly secure in an armoured vault, and that the place was about as morally corrupt as a Quaker convention. Adamant, she’d given him an ultimatum: if he wouldn’t give up his position at Le Val and let his partner take over his share in the business, then he could wave goodbye to the future he and she had planned together.

Jeff had flatly refused to quit. Whereupon, true to her promise, Chantal had broken off the engagement. The dramatic collapse of their relationship had floored Jeff, and he was still extremely bitter about it. He talked about little else – and Ben got the feeling he was about to start talking about it again now.

‘She knew what I did when we got together,’ Jeff groaned, staring into his glass. ‘What the fuck’s wrong with her? Don’t answer that, I already know.’

Tuesday looked at Jeff with wide eyes. ‘You do?’

‘Damn right I do. She’s a do-gooder, that’s what she is.’ Jeff took another gulp of wine and tipped his glass towards Ben. ‘Just like what’s-her-name. That activist chick Jude runs around with.’

Jude was Ben’s grown-up son from a long-ago relationship, now living in Chicago with his girlfriend. Ben wouldn’t have described her as a ‘chick’, but ‘do-gooder’ was admittedly apt, as was ‘activist’.

‘Actually,’ Ben said, ‘things aren’t going too well there either. Jude called last night. Looks like they might be splitting, too.’

‘There must be something going around,’ Tuesday said.

Jeff grunted. ‘He should never have hooked up with her in the first place. Let me guess, she finally realised Jude isn’t enough of a soy boy commie liberal for her tastes.’

Jeff really wasn’t in a good mood tonight.

Ben said, ‘Not exactly. She’s become a vegan.’

‘Oh, please. Give me a break.’

‘And apparently she expects Jude to follow suit.’

‘What, like, and live on rice and egg noodles?’

‘Can’t have egg noodles,’ Tuesday said.

‘Why not?’ Jeff asked him.

‘Got egg in them,’ Tuesday said.

‘No kidding. So what?’

‘It’s exploitation of chickens. Like honey is exploitation of bees.’

Jeff shook his head in disgust. ‘Jesus H. Christ. What is it with these food fascists? It’s like a disease. It’s spreading everywhere.’

‘Nah,’ Tuesday said. ‘It’s not a disease, it’s psychological. They’re stuck in a developmental phase that Freud called the oral stage. The kid learns as a baby that it can manipulate its parents’ behaviour by refusing to eat this or that. Basically, it grows up as a control freak, having learned at an early age how to get its own way and be the centre of attention all the time. From their teens they start attaching moral or ideological values to justify using food as a weapon.’

Jeff, whose idea of using food as a weapon was restricted to mess-room grub fights and custard-pie-in-the-face comedy routines, stared at the younger man. Tuesday had a way of coming out with things out of left field, whether it was some obscure quotation, a snippet of poetry or assorted little-known facts.

‘Where the hell do you get all this stuff from?’ he asked, not for the first time since they’d known each other. ‘Fucking Freud?’

Tuesday shrugged. ‘Brooke got me interested in it. We were talking about psychology last time she was here.’

The name Brooke was one no longer mentioned too often at the table, or for that matter anywhere around the compound at Le Val. It referred to Dr Brooke Marcel, formerly Ben’s own fiancée, before things had gone bad there, too. Ben’s friends knew that it was a sensitive topic to raise. Likewise, nobody would have dared to mention the fact that the situation with Ben and Sandrine was like history repeating itself. The bullet that had killed the relationship between Ben and Brooke had been the sudden reappearance of an old flame, Roberta Ryder. Nothing had happened there, either, though Brooke hadn’t seen it that way. Then again, maybe Ben’s failure to turn up for their wedding had had something to do with it.

Tuesday regretted his slip the instant he’d blurted out Brooke’s name. He gave Ben a rueful look. ‘Sorry. It just came out. Jeff’s fault.’

‘How’s it my fault?’ Jeff demanded.

‘You asked me. I answered.’

‘How was I to know what you were going to come out with? How can anyone know what you’ll say next?’

‘It’s okay,’ Ben said, to quell the tensions before Jeff’s foul mood made things escalate into a heated debate. ‘Don’t worry about it.’

All these names from the past, all these lost loves, all these bittersweet memories. Ben sometimes felt as though his whole life path was just a trail of destruction, sadness and remorse. It was little comfort to know he wasn’t the only one. He wished that their conversation hadn’t taken such a downward turn. Perhaps it was time to open another bottle of wine, or get out the whisky.

Before Ben could decide which, Storm the German shepherd suddenly uncoiled himself from the stone floor at his master’s feet, planted himself bolt upright facing the window and began barking loudly. The lights of a vehicle swept the yard outside. There was the sound of a car door.

‘Hello, the GIGN boys are back awfully early,’ Jeff said, looking at his watch. It was shortly after seven, only just gone dark outside. Nobody had expected Ferreira’s crew back until close to midnight, once they’d had their fill of junk food and cheap beer.

‘I guess they were less than impressed with the night life in Valognes,’ Tuesday said with a wry grin. ‘Welcome to the sticks, fellas.’

The GIGN guys drove a monster crew-cab truck with enough lights to fry a rabbit crossing the road. Ben turned to look out of the window. It looked like the headlamps of a regular car outside.

‘It’s not them.’

Jeff frowned. ‘We expecting anyone else?’

Tuesday said, ‘Not that I know of.’

Unannounced visitors at this or any time were a rarity at the remote farmhouse, not least because the only entrance to the fenced compound was a gatehouse manned twenty-four-seven by Le Val’s security guys, who wouldn’t let in any stranger without first radioing ahead to the house to check it was okay.

There was a soft, hesitant knock at the front door. Ben said, ‘Let’s go and find out who the mystery visitor is.’ He stubbed out his Gauloise, rose from the table, walked out of the kitchen and down the oak-panelled hallway. He flipped a switch for the yard lights, then opened the door.

The mystery visitor standing on the doorstep was a woman. Her face was shaded under the brim of a denim baseball cap. The yard lights were bright behind her, silhouetting her shape. Medium height, slender in a sporty, toned kind of way. She was wearing dark jeans and a lightweight leather jacket and had a handbag on a strap around one shoulder. Her auburn hair caught the light as it ruffled in the cool, gentle October evening breeze. Her body language was tense and stiff, as if her being here was more out of obligation than choice.

Behind her, a taxicab was parked across the cobbled yard, its motor idling. The courtesy light was on inside and the taxi driver was settling down to read a paper.

But Ben wasn’t looking at him. He stared at the woman. He was aware that his mouth had dropped open, but for a few speechless moments couldn’t do anything about it.

At last, he was able to find the words. At any rate, one word.

‘Brooke?’

Chapter 3

The woman made no reply. She stared back at Ben, as though she was as surprised as he was. The moment he’d said it, he realised he was wrong. The way the cap half-shaded her face under the bright glow of the yard lights had tricked him. But the resemblance to Brooke Marcel was stunning nonetheless. The security guys must have been fooled by it too, and just waved her through. In happier times, Brooke had been a very frequent visitor to Le Val and often stayed there for extended periods.

‘It’s Phoebe,’ the woman said, self-consciously. ‘Are you Ben? You must be Ben.’

‘Yes, I’m Ben Hope,’ he replied, somewhat thrown off balance by her presence. ‘But who are you? I don’t know any Phoebe.’

‘Phoebe Kite. Brooke’s sister. Sorry, I should have said. I’m a little bit nervous, coming here like this.’

Now it made sense. They’d never met, but Ben suddenly remembered Brooke mentioning an elder sister with whom she was often confused. As the details came back to him, he recalled that Phoebe was some kind of yoga coach – no, a Pilates instructor – who made buckets of money teaching celebrity clients how to tie themselves in knots. Left ankle behind right ear, big toe to tip of nose without bending your knee, that kind of thing.

Phoebe lived in Hampstead or some such jet-setter part of London with her husband Marshall Kite, a millionaire stockbroker and director of a large firm called Kite Investments. Now, him, Ben had crossed paths with before, on one memorable occasion. That was another story.

As for why Brooke’s sister should have suddenly landed on his doorstep out of the blue, however, Ben was at a total loss. He said, ‘There’s no need to be nervous.’

‘I hope I haven’t turned up at a bad time. It’s just … well, it’s—’

‘Not at all,’ he said, still baffled, then realised that he was keeping her standing on the doorstep. ‘Please, won’t you come inside.’

He ushered her in the door, catching a whiff of perfume as she passed. Whatever brand the fashionable rich were wearing these days. Ben knew little of these things.

As Ben escorted his visitor up the hallway, Jeff stuck his head through the kitchen door to see what was what, and looked bewildered by the sight of the strange woman in the house. Ben gave him a look that said, ‘It’s okay, I’ve got it.’ Jeff retreated back inside and shut the door.

Ben led Phoebe Kite towards the living room. It was a part of the house where he spent little time personally, preferring the cosiness of the farmhouse kitchen and its proximity to the wine rack and whisky cupboard. But he sensed that she wanted to talk to him in private. The presence of two other men, especially a slightly inebriated Jeff Dekker, would only make her more edgy. He could feel the tension emanating from her, like a crackle of static electricity in the air.

‘This is nice,’ she said distractedly as he showed her into the room and flipped on a light switch.

‘Please, take a seat,’ he said, motioning at the sofa he never sat on, opposite the big-screen TV he never watched. Idle relaxation wasn’t a big part of his lifestyle. ‘Can I offer you a drink?’

Under the soft lighting of the living room side lamps, she looked more uncannily like her sister than ever. She perched on the edge of the sofa, eyes downcast, knees and feet together with her hands clasped in her lap and the handbag still looped over her shoulder. Uptight.

She replied, ‘No, thank you, I’m fine.’

‘What about your taxi outside? You want me to send him away? Wherever it is you have to return to tonight, I’m happy to drive you there myself.’

She made a thin-lipped smile. ‘That’s very kind. But he can wait.’

‘Whatever you prefer.’ Ben moved across to an armchair and sat, so as not to stand over her. Back when he’d worked as a freelancer he’d been used to dealing with a lot of extremely, and understandably, nervous clients. He was good at putting them at their ease. He smiled. In his most reassuring tone he said, ‘Now, you’ve clearly come a long way to see me, so I get the impression it must be for an important reason.’

She nodded. ‘It is. Terribly important.’

‘Then how about you tell me what this is all about?’

Phoebe Kite looked up at him, and for the first time he could see the depth of the distress in her eyes. Green eyes, pure emerald, so much like Brooke’s that it was almost painful for Ben to return her gaze.

Phoebe Kite said, ‘I need your help.’

When people said that to Ben, it was never a trivial request. In his line of work, it had always tended to mean that something very, very serious and life-threatening had happened.

‘I gathered as much. Then what can I do for you?’

She shifted in her seat. Covered her mouth and gave a little cough. ‘Or perhaps I should say, we need your help.’

‘We? As in, you and your husband Marshall?’

‘No, I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Marshall’s … well, he’s Marshall. He’s always embroiled in some business dispute or other. But we’re not in any real trouble. Not your kind of trouble. Sorry, that came out wrong. I meant—’

‘I understand. It’s okay. But tell me, if this isn’t about you—’

‘It’s about Brooke,’ she said in a voice taut with emotion, and Ben felt an icy blade sink all the way through his guts and pin him to the armchair.

‘Something’s happened to Brooke?’ When he said it, the words sounded remote and far away, as though someone else had spoken them. He was suddenly numb.

Phoebe nodded agitatedly and started chewing her lip. Her hands were clasped so tightly in her lap that her fingers were pinched bloodless and white. ‘Yes. No. I mean, sort of.’

Ben stared at her and said, ‘Sort of what?’

‘What I’m trying to say is that something awful has happened. Not to Brooke personally. To her husband.’

Chapter 4

The mixed emotions that flooded through Ben were polarised to opposite extremes. At the same time as the relief melted away the acute terror of something having happened to Brooke, Phoebe’s words were a slap in the face that actually made him flinch.

Brooke, married. Even though their relationship had ended a long time ago now, the idea of it was like being whipped by nettles.

The involuntary thought passed through his mind: Please don’t let it be Rupert Shannon. Long before she and Ben had got together, Brooke had had a brief involvement with the pumped-up, Porsche-driving, self-adoring buffoon who’d managed to push himself up the ranks of the British military thanks to lofty family connections.

If she was back with him, there truly was no God after all.

On the other hand, if something nasty had befallen Rupert Shannon, maybe there was a God, and it was time for Ben to start praying to Him again.

Ben shoved that unworthy thought out of his mind, swallowed hard and said, ‘I didn’t know she was married.’

Phoebe nodded. ‘Oh, yes, for a while now. I think you know her husband. Amal Ray?’

Ben remembered Amal well. He’d been a friend and former neighbour of Brooke’s, dating back to when she’d had an apartment in Richmond, Surrey. Amal had been an aspiring playwright who somehow seemed able to maintain a leisured lifestyle, despite having no job and zero theatrical successes to his name. He was likeable in a neurotic sort of way, bookish and nervy, the kind of guy who looked as though he was rushing around even when he was standing still. Ben had always suspected that Amal harboured a secret admiration for Brooke that went beyond the bounds of friendship, though he’d never have imagined it could be reciprocal. He seemed like the last man on earth she’d be drawn to. Brooke, so full of passion, who loved excitement, thrived on the thrill of the challenge and could handle herself in a difficult spot. He couldn’t imagine two people more different. The idea of them together was unthinkable.

But Ben wasn’t about to let his deeply hurt personal feelings stand in the way of his concern for a friend in trouble. ‘What happened?’

‘Amal’s been kidnapped.’

‘Kidnapped?’ Ben was genuinely amazed. The idea of innocent people being snatched off the streets or from their homes was hardly anything new to him. For years after quitting the military, he’d worked on the right side of the booming kidnap and ransom industry, liberating victims and dispensing to the bad guys the fate they had coming. He, of all people, knew how widespread and pernicious the abduction trade was.

But the thought of Amal Ray falling victim to it seemed crazy. The guy fitted the profile of a kidnap victim about as well as he filled the bill as a potential life partner for a woman like Brooke.

Phoebe nodded. ‘That’s why I’m here. Because that’s what you do, isn’t it? Help people in that sort of situation?’

Ben could have replied, ‘Used to do.’ Instead he asked, ‘When did this happen?’

‘Eight days ago.’

‘Where, in London?’

‘No, in India. That’s where he’s from.’

‘He moved back there?’ Brooke, living the married life in India. It was hard to imagine.

‘No, they still live in London. Amal was on a trip back to Delhi when it happened.’

‘Okay,’ Ben said. ‘What’s the deal? How much are the kidnappers asking for?’

Identifying the motive for the crime, which ninety-nine per cent of the time was financial, was a vital first step. It also offered a reasonable indication that the kidnappers intended to keep their victim alive, at least until they got their hands on the cash. After that, it could go in all kinds of ways. Extremely unpleasant ones, for the victims and their loved ones.

‘They’re not,’ she said.

Ben looked at her. ‘You mean there’s been no ransom demand? Not a letter, or a phone call, or an email, in eight days?’

She shook her head. ‘No contact at all. Nothing.’

Ben pursed his lips, thinking hard. This wasn’t just unusual. It was bad. Even worse than the typical kidnap situation. Because it deviated from the set pattern. The longer kidnappers held their victims, the higher the risk of being caught. Plus, they weren’t interested in playing nursemaid. They were only in it for quick gains. Hence, things tended to move quickly, with the first ransom demand being issued within twenty-four hours, often less. If families paid up too readily, the first demand was invariably followed by a second, bleeding them for more.

But no ransom demand at all was weird. Ben paused a moment then said, ‘So we don’t even know why Amal was taken, let alone by whom?’

She shook her head again. ‘No, he’s simply vanished. Just like Kabir.’

‘Kabir?’

‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘He’s disappeared, too. Three weeks ago. It all started with him.’

‘I think you’d better explain. I’m not following.’

Phoebe sighed. ‘I’m sorry. It’s all so complicated that I can barely keep up with it myself. Kabir is Kabir Ray. Amal’s younger brother, an archaeologist in Delhi.’

‘And Kabir was kidnapped too?’

‘Not exactly. He and two of his work colleagues were attacked. It happened in some remote part of India, miles and miles from anywhere. His colleagues were shot dead.’

This was sounding more serious now, and getting stranger by the second. Ben had a hundred questions, but kept quiet and let her go on.

Phoebe said, ‘The local police there think Kabir was killed along with them, but there was no sign of his body, only theirs. After days and days of frantically worrying and hearing nothing new, Amal flew out there himself to try to find out what had happened to his brother – talk to the police, piece together clues or whatever. Next thing, this dreadful kidnapping. A gang of masked men snatched him right off the street and bundled him into a van. Brooke was with him. It happened right in front of her. Poor Brooke. Poor Amal.’

Ben felt his stomach fill with butterflies. ‘Was Brooke hurt?’

‘No, but it’s so awful.’ Phoebe plucked a tissue from her pocket and started dabbing at her eyes, which had turned pink and begun streaming tears as she talked. ‘I don’t know what to make of it. I’m at my wits’ end. Mr Hope—’

‘You can call me Ben.’

She sniffed, nodded. ‘Ben – please say you’ll help her find out who did this and bring Amal back to her safe and sound. She’s in a terrible state.’

Ben was trying to make sense of all this. A kidnapping with no ransom demand. A deadly shooting in another part of the country. He was thinking reprisals, enemies, someone with a grudge against the family. Or had the brothers been into something that put them in danger?

He asked, ‘Do the police see the two disappearances as connected?’

‘As far as I know, no. They seem to think bandits were responsible for what happened to Kabir and his friends. That part of India is crawling with them, apparently. But not Delhi. I mean, it’s a modern, safe city. Like London.’

Ben looked at her and wondered how anyone could be so disconnected from reality. He said, ‘So as far as the authorities are concerned, these are two separate, coincidental events.’

She nodded. ‘That’s what Mr Prajapati seems to believe, too.’

‘Who’s Mr Prajapati?’

‘He’s supposedly the best private investigator in the capital. Brooke employed him to help search for Amal. She doesn’t think the police are doing enough.’

‘I see.’

Phoebe gazed at him imploringly with her wet, bruised-looking eyes. ‘I’m begging you. After all she’s told me about you in the past, your military background, your experience with kidnapped children, the amazing things you’ve done for so many people, I know that if anyone can find out who’s behind this horrible thing and bring Amal back home, it’s you.’

Chapter 5

Ben leaned back and thought about it for a minute. His past history, both before and after he’d quit the regiment to go freelance, wasn’t a subject for open discussion. SAS guys were famously, and justifiably, cagey in the extreme. Partly out of pure habit, partly because they were strictly bound by the Official Secrets Act, and partly to protect themselves and their families from being targeted for reprisal attacks. He didn’t like the things he’d done being talked about. But he also knew that Brooke was discreet and would have revealed only the broadest outline of the facts to her sister.

He said, ‘Let me get this straight. You’re here by your own volition? Brooke didn’t send you?’

She appeared flustered by his question. ‘I … no … it was my idea. She doesn’t know I’m here. I googled your name and found the Le Val Tactical Training Centre online.’

‘You could have saved yourself a trip. We do have email, telephones, all the trappings of modern-day communication technology.’

Phoebe’s cheeks flushed red and her gaze dropped towards her lap. ‘I was afraid you wouldn’t speak to me. I … I thought that if I met you face to face, I might have a better chance of getting you to agree to help. Will you?’

‘Help, as in, fly out to India?’

She nodded, her face brightening with renewed optimism. ‘There’s a direct flight from Charles de Gaulle in Paris tonight at eleven.’

He stared at her as if she were crazy. ‘You’re taking a lot for granted, Mrs Kite. Even if I said yes, Paris is more than a three-hour drive from here. I’d have to down tools and leave right away.’

‘I know it’s a lot to ask,’ she said. ‘But Brooke would be so grateful. She’s still out there, staying at the Ray family home, isolated in a strange country and having to deal with this nightmare basically all alone.’

‘There’s also the matter of applying for a travel visa. I wasn’t actually planning on taking a trip to India any time soon. It could take days to get the paperwork sorted.’

Phoebe brushed that concern aside. ‘I don’t think you would need to worry about the red tape. The Rays are an important business family with a lot of money and all the right diplomatic connections to get you into the country, no questions asked.’

‘I see. So let’s say I agreed. What would I be doing exactly? Working alongside this Mr Prajapati character, the best private detective in Delhi, who seems to have sussed the whole thing out already? How does he feel about the arrangement? Does he even know he’s being allocated a new assistant?’

‘I understand what you’re thinking. You’re upset that Brooke hasn’t asked you herself.’

Ben shrugged. ‘I just think that if she wanted me to get involved, she’d have got in touch directly. She knows where I am.’

‘Please don’t blame her. She’s terribly distraught by all this.’

‘I’m sure she is. And she has my deepest sympathies. But it sounds to me as though she’s already dealing with it. It also seems to me that the last thing she needs is me turning up there, unexpected and uninvited, to complicate her situation and bring back a lot of bad feelings. Our relationship isn’t exactly as cordial as it used to be. We haven’t spoken in a long while, and the last time we did wasn’t too pleasant.’

‘I’m aware of that. She told me.’

‘And the fact that she hired someone else to help with this situation, instead of contacting me, makes it pretty clear where she stands. Wouldn’t you agree?’

Crestfallen, Phoebe said in a low voice, ‘Then I take it you won’t help?’

‘It’s not my decision to make, Mrs Kite. It was unnecessary for you to come here.’

‘I thought …’

‘I know. You tried. That was a good thing to do.’

‘She loved you so much.’

Ben felt a fresh blade of pain pierce his body. ‘I loved her. She still matters a great deal to me. All the more reason for not hurting her all over again. She doesn’t want me there.’

‘What about Amal? Don’t you care?’

‘Of course I care. I like Amal. But there’s nothing I can do for him, except pray it all works out. Which I’m sure it will. If the Ray family are rich, it points to a clear financial motivation for snatching him and there’ll be a ransom demand any day now. If they pay up, there’s every chance of getting him back without a scratch. It’s just a routine business transaction. Happens all the time. The police know what they’re doing.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Absolutely.’

Most of what he’d just said was a lie. Intended to reassure, but a long way from the dark reality of the kidnap and ransom world. In a high percentage of cases, whether they paid off the crooks or not, families never saw their loved ones alive again. That was Ben’s whole reason for having become what he’d called a ‘crisis response consultant’. His own ways and means of getting the victims home safe had generally involved the rapid and permanent elimination of the kidnappers, while having as little as possible to do with the bungling efforts of law enforcement officials.

But, as he’d said, this one was out of his hands.

Phoebe looked deflated. She glanced towards the window, through which the lights of the taxi could be seen casting pools of light on the yard cobblestones.

‘I suppose I’d better go,’ she sighed. ‘I can catch the nine o’clock flight back to Heathrow.’

Ben stood up. ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like a drink, for the road? You look as though you need one.’

She stood up too. ‘That’s fine, thanks. I’ll have a gin and tonic on the plane. Or perhaps two or three of them. God, I must look a mess.’

‘Try and get some rest,’ Ben said. ‘Brooke, too. I know how tough this must be for her.’

As he was showing her out through the entrance hall, she hesitated, hovered nervously in the doorway and then turned to look at him with a strange expression on her face.

She said, ‘I can’t leave here without telling you the truth.’

‘The truth?’

‘She made me promise, you see. But I’d rather betray her trust than go back empty-handed.’

‘Promise?’

Phoebe nodded uncomfortably. ‘I lied. Brooke did send me to ask for your help. She practically forced me to come and talk to you.’

‘But she didn’t want me to know, so she made you pretend it was all your idea.’

‘She desperately needs you there, Ben. She’s just too proud and embarrassed to admit it. But there was nobody else to run to. Prajapati, the private investigator, is even more useless than the police. You’re her one and only hope. Her words.’

Ben said nothing.

‘One final time. On my knees. For my sister’s sake. For Amal’s. For all of us. Please, please will you help us?’

Chapter 6

Once Ben had relented and said yes, he had to move fast. As Phoebe departed in the taxi his first job was to break the news to Jeff and Tuesday that something had come up and he had to leave immediately. ‘Sorry to leave you in the lurch like this, guys.’

Neither of them could get over Brooke being married, but their concern overrode their surprise. ‘What’s your take on the kidnap?’ Jeff asked. He’d sobered up as sharp as a fighter pilot, his own worries forgotten. His eyes were full of concern.

‘The usual,’ Ben said, rubbing thumb and fingers together. The universal sign for money.

Jeff raised an eyebrow. ‘Writing plays must pay a hell of a lot better than I thought.’

‘Family wealth. A lot of it, or so I’m told.’

Tuesday said, ‘I can’t see Brooke marrying into money. Not her style.’

‘No,’ Ben agreed. ‘That’s what I thought, too. Maybe I was wrong about her, but that’s not important now. What matters is getting Amal out of this.’

‘You want us to come along?’ Jeff asked. Ben knew from repeated experience that his friends were both perfectly prepared to drop everything, clients and all, to be at his side in a time of need. But this was a personal thing, and Ben wanted to face it alone.

He shook his head. ‘Thanks, but—’

‘I get it. Call if you need us, okay?’

Next, Ben threw some clothes and personal items into his old green canvas bag, then spent exactly forty-five seconds under the shower, changed and pulled on his boots and grabbed his bag and jacket, patted the dog and ran out to the barn where he kept his BMW Alpina. It was a fast car, which was very much needed to shave time off his journey to Paris and catch the 23.00 flight. Seconds counted.

Here we go again, he thought as he sped out from the gates of Le Val and accelerated hard away with the BMW’s twin beams carving a tunnel into the darkness. It was like a curse. Every time he tried to settle into a steady routine, another crisis would come out of the blue to turn his life upside-down once more. He was worried for Amal, but what troubled him almost as much was the prospect of meeting Brooke under these circumstances. He lit up a cigarette, shoved on a jazz CD and turned the stereo system up full blast to drive that haunting prospect out of his thoughts. The Zoe Rahman Trio, playing ‘Red Squirrel’.

He was scorching eastwards along Autoroute 13 at over 150 kilometres an hour, passing Rouen and about halfway to Paris, when his phone rang. He answered it on the hands-free, muting the music.

It was Phoebe. Cherbourg to London was only a thirty-five-minute flight and she was already back in the UK.

‘It’s all arranged,’ she told him. ‘You’re booked on the flight, first class, naturally. Ticket will be waiting for you when you get there.’ She gave him a code number to write down. ‘It’s a direct flight, no stopovers. You land at Indira Gandhi International at ten thirty-five tomorrow morning, local time. There’ll be a car to pick you up from the airport.’

‘And the visa?’

‘Just like I told you, not a problem.’ It seemed that Amal had an uncle with high-up Indian government connections influential enough to cut through the bureaucracy and open up a magic VIP portal through which Ben could waltz unimpeded. It was his first whiff of the Ray family’s status. He suspected it wouldn’t be the last.

‘You don’t know how much this means to Brooke,’ Phoebe said.

So much that she can’t call me herself, he thought. Again, he had to shove that bad thought out of his head. She probably wasn’t looking forward to the meeting any more than he was. ‘How’s she doing?’ he asked.

‘Three guesses how she’s doing. Her husband’s missing. She doesn’t know if he’s dead or alive. She’s a mess.’

It had often struck Ben as curious that so many of the women in his life had the title of ‘Dr’. But they were all different kinds of doctors. Dr Roberta Ryder was an American with a biology PhD. Dr Sandrine Lacombe made her living fixing broken bodies and patching up gunshot victims, as she’d done for Jeff Dekker when Ben first met her. While Dr Brooke Marcel had earned her credentials as an expert in psychology, specialising in studying the devastating effects that violent abduction, incarceration and living under constant lethal threat in the most appalling conditions imaginable, for months or even years, could have on the human mind. Nobody understood hostage psychology better. That was how Brooke had come to be employed at Le Val as a visiting lecturer, helping specialist operatives gain insights into the minds of those they might be sent in to rescue.

Brooke also had enough knowledge of the kidnap game to be all too aware of just how bad it was for its victims. There was a high chance she’d never see Amal again, and she knew it. Little wonder she was a mess.

Ben asked, ‘I’m assuming there’s still no ransom demand?’

‘Nope. Zero contact from these shitty bastards who’re holding him. That can’t be a good thing, can it?’

Ben chose not to answer that. ‘And no more progress reports from the police or the private investigator?’

‘If there had been, I would have told you.’ Phoebe’s tone was snappish. He put it down to stress and didn’t blame her for it. She paused, then said in a softer voice, ‘Please say you’ll get Amal back, Ben.’

It was foolish to make promises in this situation. But he did it anyway. ‘I’ll get Amal back.’ One way or another. In one piece, or in several. He kept those dark thoughts to himself as he ended the call.

Ben pushed the car harder into the night. He made it to Charles de Gaulle airport in just over three hours without getting pulled over for speeding, which meant the French traffic police must be slacking on the job. As Phoebe had said, the ticket was ready and waiting for him at the check-in desk. He impatiently whiled away the time before his flight was called, and then he was stretched out on a plush seat in a half-empty first-class section with a glass of single malt scotch, straight, no ice. The benefits of luxury travel. With eight hours ahead of him in which he had nothing much to do except try not to think about meeting Brooke again, the whisky would be the first of several.

After a couple of drinks he ate a light meal from the excellent first-class menu, then had a couple more drinks, then closed his eyes. Still thinking about it. Then again, as long as he was preoccupied with one thing, he couldn’t feel so bad about the other.

He fleetingly wondered where Sandrine was at this moment, and what she was doing. Then he wondered how he’d feel if, say, a couple of years into the future, he heard that Sandrine had married some guy and that he, Ben, was now just a distant and semi-forgotten part of her past. He wasn’t sure how much it would hurt him. Maybe a little. But not the way he was hurting now. Maybe that was how love was measured, he thought: by how brutally it could rip your heart out and feed it through a blender. By that definition, he knew that he must still feel more than he’d realised for Brooke Marcel.

No, not Brooke Marcel, he corrected himself. She’d be Brooke Ray now.

Brooke Ray.

Shit. Time for another drink. Eight hours was plenty of time to sober up.

Eight hours later and fully sober, Ben stepped out into the hazy Delhi sunshine with his bag on his shoulder and began taking in the sights and colours and smells of India. It was mid-morning, local time, and cooler than he’d expected – only about 30°C and rising as he crossed the tarmac towards the arrivals terminal.

Then again, his expectations were a little vague. He’d travelled the whole world several times around, missing only a few spots, but India nonetheless wasn’t a country he knew well. His last visit had been a brief stopover en route to Indonesia, the very same trip that had triggered the end of his relationship with Brooke. It seemed ironic that he was returning here now, under these circumstances.

They say nothing prepares you for the dirt, poverty and chaos of India, but the airport was clean and modern and well organised. Ben passed under a big sign welcoming the new arrivals to the country and was approaching the immigration counter when a well-dressed man with swept-back white hair and a clipped moustache intercepted him with a smile and a handshake, and introduced himself as Vivaan Banerjee of the Indian Foreign Office.

The government man led Ben away from the crowds to a private room, where he made pleasant small talk while checking Ben’s identification papers. ‘This is just a formality,’ he kept insisting as he apologetically asked for signatures on a couple of official documents, and Ben had the strangest feeling of being inducted into some old boys’ club. It was another whiff of the Ray family’s power and influence. Who needs a travel visa, when you have friends in the right places?

With a flourish Banerjee produced an ink stamp and set about vigorously thumping the signed documents as though there were cockroaches lurking under them. Then he grasped Ben’s hand like a long-lost friend and wished him a pleasant stay in India. Ben wondered if Banerjee knew why he was really here, and if that was the reason why the official seemed to be studiously avoiding any mention of the current crisis affecting the Ray family. Maybe now Ben was in the club, the police would be ordered from on high to turn a blind eye if the hunt for Amal got rough.

After he finished with Banerjee, Ben headed for the exit. Phoebe had said there would be a car to pick him up at the airport. As he was walking through the busy lobby, past a life-size statue of two Asiatic elephants penned behind a railing as though they might suddenly rampage and start flattening the public, a young Indian guy picked him out from the crowd and came hurrying over.

‘Mr Hope? Delighted to meet you, sir. My name is Prem Sharma. I work for the Ray family. Please, come this way.’

Prem was about thirty, slender and handsome, with expressive dark eyes and thick black hair. He wore a light grey suit, nicely tailored, silk shirt, expensive watch, quality handmade shoes. His employers clearly paid him well. He carried Ben’s battered canvas bag as diligently as if it had been a Ralph Lauren suitcase and led him outside to a gleaming black Mercedes-Benz S-Class Maybach Pullman limousine longer than some river barges Ben had seen. Yet more evidence of the wealth Brooke had married into.

Prem smiled as he noticed Ben looking at the car. ‘Its previous owner was a former president of India,’ he explained. ‘The most luxurious limousine in all of Delhi, as befits the Ray family’s most important guests. It has a twelve-cylinder biturbo engine producing more than six hundred horsepower. Fully armoured, naturally.’

Ben couldn’t tell if Prem was just bragging, or trying to sell it to him. ‘Naturally. And are we likely to come under attack today?’

Prem replied, ‘I would say that is doubtful. But one can never be too careful. In such an event, we would be protected from any kinds of small arms fire and grenade blasts. The vehicle is also sealed against chemical weapon attacks.’

Ben said, ‘Handy. But what if they shoot the tyres out?’

‘Oh, it will continue to run on four flat tyres for approximately five kilometres,’ Prem replied.

‘Then it looks like we ought to make it to our destination in one piece,’ Ben said. Prem stowed his bag in the vastness of the boot before he smartly walked around to the rear door and held it open for his passenger.

Under different circumstances, Ben might have been faintly amused at being treated like some visiting dignitary. He ignored the offer and opened the front passenger door instead. ‘I prefer to ride up front, thanks.’

‘As you wish,’ Prem replied with a smile, and shut the rear with a soft clunk. Ben settled into the cool, creamy passenger seat, as spacious and comfortable as his first-class armchair on the plane.

So far, it had been an easy trip. The tough part lay just around the corner.

Chapter 7

Prem threw himself behind the wheel of the limousine and fired up the engine, as whisper-quiet as an electric motor and totally insulated from the outside world. Then they were off, and within minutes were carving straight into the hustle and bustle of the vast metropolis that made the hubbub of London, Paris and Moscow seem like ghost towns by comparison. The density of the traffic was insane and the muffled honking of horns all around sounded like distant herds of angry elephants as the huge Maybach nosed its way down wide, leafy boulevards crammed nose to tail with vehicles and narrower streets that were so congested it seemed impossible that the traffic could ever get flowing again. Cyclists, mopeds, pedal rickshaws and little green and yellow tuk-tuk three-wheeler vans were everywhere, weaving among the sea of vehicles and darting across lanes with as little regard for the rules of the road as for their own safety.

If anything, the pavements were even more densely packed. They heaved with a thronging morass of people, people, and more people everywhere. To Ben’s eyes it seemed the city’s populace must have recovered at least fivefold from the dark days of Indian government population control in the 1970s, when armed troops rounded up citizens in the streets of Delhi for transportation to forced sterilisation camps, with the open approval of Western leaders. Now, the multitude of crowds and sights and colours was almost overpoweringly rich. In the middle of it all were street vendors selling their wares, beggars sitting on steps, street kids running in hordes in search of things to get up to, feral-looking dogs scavenging around for scraps, a crazy kaleidoscope of buzzing urban diversity that was too much to take in at once. The morning sky was shrouded by grey smog that trapped the visibly intensifying heat haze, but the limo’s luxurious interior was as cool as an April day at Le Val.

Ben would have happily ridden in silence, but Prem wanted to talk. The car was so silent that he barely needed to raise his voice. ‘So you are a friend of the Ray family?’

‘I only really know Amal,’ Ben said. He added, ‘And his wife. I’m here at her invitation, to offer whatever assistance I can at this difficult time.’

‘A wonderful lady. So beautiful, so brilliant.’ Prem flashed a brief smile at Ben, then shook his head glumly. ‘Poor Mr Amal. Poor Mr Kabir. The family are very upset by these tragic happenings.’

‘Who are the other family members?’

Prem explained that there was a third brother, the eldest, Samarth Ray, who had taken over the family business from their father. Old Basu, the patriarch, was still alive and now lived with his wife Aparna in a secluded villa outside the city. Both were too elderly and too much in shock over recent events to leave their home. The original family residence in the southern part of Delhi was shared by the three brothers, who had divided it up into three separate apartments. ‘But with Mr Amal spending all his time in London and Mr Kabir so often travelling, Mr Samarth and his good lady live there alone mostly.’

‘I look forward to meeting Samarth,’ Ben said, dropping the obsequious ‘Mr’.

‘Oh, he is a great and wonderful man. A very, very important member of the business community here in Delhi, patron of the arts, and donates money to many charities.’

‘What line of business is he in?’

‘The Ray Group has built its empire on commercial real estate and hotels,’ Prem replied proudly. ‘They own much property in Delhi and elsewhere. Also steel and pharmaceuticals, and a construction division with many government contracts to develop new projects across the city. Mr Samarth is working even harder than ever now, because of the stress of the moment. It is his way of coping. I have two brothers myself. I cannot even imagine something so terrible.’

‘And Brooke?’

‘Miss Brooke has been staying in her and Mr Amal’s apartment within the residence. She is there now, waiting for your arrival. Traffic is not too bad today, so we will be there soon. Maybe forty minu— Oh, look at this damn one.’ Prem hit the brakes and had to swerve to avoid a motorbike that had squeezed past the Maybach and darted across their path. The rider, who seemed quite oblivious of how close he’d come to getting wiped out by five tons of car, had a young child riding on the pillion seat, another perched on the rear luggage rack, and a small toddler straddled across the tank in front of him.

‘That’s one way to get yourself and half your family killed,’ Ben observed.

‘Oh, life is very cheap in India,’ Prem said with a dry smile. ‘If you do not already know, you will soon see.’

Soon afterwards, they hit a broader boulevard where the traffic moved more smoothly and there were fewer suicidal motorists. The limo wafted along fast and silently with sweeping lawns and tree-lined canals on either side. ‘That is India Gate,’ said Prem, pointing. The arched monument towered over Delhi’s answer to the Champs-Élysées. ‘It was opened in 1931 to commemorate the sacrifices of Indian soldiers. But the government let it become filthy with rubbish. People are animals.’

Life is cheap and people are animals. Ben was getting the inside track. ‘I’m so happy to have you as my tour guide, Prem,’ he said. But Prem might have missed the sarcasm.

It wasn’t long before they left the big boulevards behind and came into a quieter, tree-lined residential area. Prem announced with great pride that this district of the city was the most prestigious and select place to live in all of India. Ben had already figured that out from the number of luxury cars and the impressive white houses he glimpsed tucked away within verdant gardens as they passed. Not a crippled beggar, street kid, stray dog, food stall or tuk-tuk in sight. Even the hazy grey smog seemed to have dissipated.

But such opulence had to be protected from the teeming masses outside. Prem stopped at a private security checkpoint while guards checked his entry pass before waving the car through. Ben had visited gated communities before, but seldom one where the guards looked like paramilitary troops and carried sawn-off shotguns and submachine guns on open display.

‘Only the very richest families can afford to live here,’ Prem declared as he moved on at a stately pace through the secluded, shade-dappled streets. ‘The Rays have been here since the 1920s, after Mr Basu’s father made his first fortune in land deals. He had arrived in Delhi just a few years earlier, with only some coins in his pocket.’

At last, Prem turned the Maybach off the road towards a driveway entrance barred by tall ornamental wrought-iron gates that were topped with spikes. Prem produced a small black remote device from his pocket, like a miniature phone with a ten-digit keypad. He pointed it through the windscreen towards the gates, and Ben saw his index fingertip enter the four-digit sequence 4-1-9-8. Which happened to be the same as the formula number for the Improved Military Rifle brand of smokeless gunpowder favoured by Tuesday at Le Val for brewing up his super-accurate .223 custom handloads.

The gates whirred aside to let them pass. Prem steered the limo up a long paved driveway that curved through what appeared to be a country park, filled with fruit trees and ornamental shrubs and a profusion of exotic flowers of more colours than Ben had names for.

He already had a pretty good idea of how wealthy Amal’s family must be, but the sight of the house was the final clincher. It was built on a palatial scale, classically modern and elegant in gleaming white stone with notes of marble here and there, all in the best taste that money could buy. Acres of windows overlooked emerald lawns where peacocks strutted majestically and the jets of sprinklers made rainbows in the sunlight.

‘Here we are,’ Prem said. ‘Welcome to the Ray residence.’

Stepping out of the car it was hard to believe that this tranquil paradise setting was situated right in the beating heart of the most polluted city on earth and the second most populous in Asia after only Tokyo, home to sixteen million people. Prem took Ben’s bag from the back of the car and waved him graciously towards the house.

‘Come, this way, please. I will take you to see Miss Brooke.’

Chapter 8

Now came the moment Ben had been so nervous about. Prem, whose duties seemed to include being head butler as well as the family chauffeur, led him into the house. Its interior was as cool as the Maybach, airy and sweetly scented by the flowers that filled every corner. The mosaic floors were marble, the art and furnishings were modern and without a doubt supremely expensive. A rich man’s dream abode, perhaps, but Ben couldn’t understand how anyone could live inside a multi-million-dollar show home.

The house felt empty. Nobody came to meet them as Prem led Ben inside. Ben asked, ‘Are Samarth and his wife at home?’

‘Oh, he will be at the office now. She is most likely taking a nap at this time of the morning.’ Eleven thirty, and the lady of the house was napping. Ben asked no more questions.

The elder brother’s private apartment was on the ground floor of the house, occupying what Prem called the west wing. The separate apartments belonging to Amal and Kabir were upstairs, on the first and second floors respectively. Prem escorted Ben up a sweeping marble double staircase with banister rails capped with gilt, then along about six miles of passages floored with handmade oriental rugs, until they reached the part of the house that comprised Amal’s personal quarters.

Prem said, ‘The apartment has three guest bedrooms. Would you like to inspect them before you choose the one you prefer?’

Ben wasn’t sure he wanted to stay in the house. ‘We’ll talk about my accommodation arrangements later. Where’s Brooke?’

As if in reply, Prem stopped at a door. He was about to knock, but before he could announce the visitor’s arrival the door opened, and there she stood framed in the entrance. Milky light from tall windows filled the room behind her.

‘Hello, Ben.’

‘Hello, Brooke. It’s been a while,’ he said.

‘Yes, it has,’ she replied.

Her hair had been shorter the last time they’d met. It had grown out again now, and hung in rich auburn curls past her shoulders. She’d lost a little weight and her face seemed more sculpted, if anything looking more attractive than Ben had ever seen her, despite the washed-out pallor of her fatigue and the dark shadows under her eyes. She was wearing a loose, sleeveless silk blouse and green satin trousers that matched her irises. She’d been crying.

Ben had known this would be an uncomfortable meeting. It couldn’t have been any other way. The atmosphere was heavy with tension. There was a long, awkward silence. Brooke was the one to break it, by saying politely, ‘Prem, our visitor might like some refreshments.’

Ben was so focused on Brooke that he’d forgotten Prem was still hovering at his shoulder. He shook his head. ‘No, I’m fine.’

‘Then you can leave us now, Prem, thank you.’

‘I’ll take the bag,’ Ben said, taking it from Prem’s hand. Prem seemed reluctant to go. Ben supposed that he must know, or had guessed, a certain amount about the backstory between them. He might be hoping to see some fireworks if he hung around.

Prem gave a courteous nod, muttered ‘If you’re sure there is nothing I can do for you,’ and took his leave.

They waited until he was gone before they spoke another word. Then waited longer, neither one knowing quite what to say now they were alone together. Ben gazed at her face, so familiar, still sometimes in his dreams. He gazed at the light from the window shining in her hair and the way it silhouetted the curve of her shoulders, and he drank in the well of sadness he could see in her beautiful, tired eyes. They stood just two steps apart, but they might as well have been separated by oceans.

Ben knew the correct and proper thing would be to congratulate her on her marriage. Somehow he just couldn’t bring himself to come out with it. Now that their past history had been sealed shut, formally and officially ended, the rekindled memories of their time together came flooding back more wistfully than ever. He could tell she was thinking the same.

Now it was Ben’s turn to break the long silence.

‘Why?’ he said.

She shook her head, not understanding, those two little vertical frown lines appearing above the bridge of her nose the way they did when she was irritated. ‘Why?’

‘Why?’ he repeated.

The frown deepened. ‘You mean, why did I marry Amal?’ Her tone was defensive. She didn’t wait for Ben to answer. ‘I married Amal because he’s a good and kind man and he loves me, and because he was there for me.’

And he didn’t walk out on me literally on the eve of our wedding, to go off on some crazy mission that could have got him killed. The subtext didn’t need to be spelled out. It was there in her eyes. ‘And in case you think I married him for his bloody money,’ she added, ‘I didn’t even know about the family wealth until afterwards, the first time we came to India together.’

‘It’s none of my business why you married Amal. I wasn’t asking that.’

She shook her head again. Confused. ‘Then why what?’

‘Why didn’t you call me when this happened? Don’t you know I’d have been here in a shot? That I’d throw everything down to help you in whatever way I could?’

Brooke’s frown melted. A tear rolled from one eye. She wiped it away quickly with the back of her hand.

‘You know why,’ she said. ‘Phoebe must have told you.’

‘I want to hear it from you. Why didn’t you come to me?’

‘Because it’s you, Ben,’ she said softly. The sadness in her eyes was making something hot and moist and salty rise up inside him. She added, ‘I couldn’t, after all the things between us.’

‘But you’re asking for my help now.’

She nodded and wiped another tear.

‘Yes, Ben. Because it’s you. You’re the only one. I need you to do what you do best. Better than anyone. Find my husband and punish these pieces of shit who’ve taken him. Do whatever it takes.’

He let out a long breath through his nose, looking at her and thinking of all he’d lost that day he’d walked out on her like that. ‘Well, I’m here,’ he said. ‘And I’m not leaving until we fix this. One way or another. Do you understand? I will do everything I can to make this all right.’

She stepped forward. The ocean between them was suddenly gone. She wrapped her arms around his waist and pressed her face into the hollow of his shoulder, and he could feel the wetness of her tears through his shirt. He tenderly stroked her back. Her hair smelled sweet and fragrant, the same scent that brought back a thousand more memories. He wanted to kiss the top of her head, but stopped himself. He moved his hands to her shoulders and very gently pushed her away from him, breaking the embrace.

‘I’m so sorry for what happened,’ he said. He could just as easily have been referring to their breakup as to Amal’s kidnapping. If Brooke picked up on the ambiguity in his words, she didn’t show it.

‘It’s such a relief to have you here. I’ve been at my wits’ end. I’m going crazy in this place. You’ve no idea what it’s been like.’

Ben said, ‘Tell me everything.’

Chapter 9

Brooke invited him inside the room, which was a large living room with various others radiating off it. Amal’s personal quarters within the family residence were at least twice the size of her old flat in Richmond, as Ben remembered it. The décor was more classical and old-fashioned than the parts of the house Prem had led him through. Amal had always had good taste in things, Ben had to give him that.

‘Come, sit,’ she said, motioning to a chaise longue upholstered in satin fleur de lys. ‘You want something to drink?’

‘I thought it was Prem’s job to provide refreshments,’ Ben said.

‘I only said that to get rid of him. He’s a little too nosy for his own good, that one. Cup of tea?’

Ben pulled a face.

‘Of course. I forgot, you hate tea.’

‘How about coffee?’

‘We only have decaf. Amal gets palpitations if he drinks the real stuff.’

‘In that case, no thanks.’

‘You’re right. Tastes like boiled mouse crap, and it’s full of dichloromethane. How about a real drink? God knows I need one.’ She went over to a decorative cabinet and opened it to reveal the bottles and glasses inside. She slid out a bottle and held it up. ‘Laphroaig. Ten years old. Your favourite single malt.’

‘You remembered.’

She gave him a sad, tender smile. The little crow’s feet that appeared at the corners of her eyes were new, at least to him. Worry lines. ‘Ben, there isn’t a single detail about our time together that I would ever forget until my dying day.’

He had no idea what to say to that.

He watched as she set a pair of cut crystal tumblers side by side on the pretty cabinet, uncapped the bottle and poured a generous three fingers of scotch into each. When she’d said she needed a drink, she hadn’t been joking. She handed him his glass, fell into a soft armchair opposite him and took a long, deep gulp of her drink. It wasn’t lunchtime yet and she was attacking the whisky like a trooper. Ben cradled his in his lap, untouched so far. He’d eaten no breakfast on the plane and wanted to keep his head clear.

She studied him for a moment as she savoured her drink. ‘You look good, Ben. I hope life is treating you well.’

‘Things are fine with me,’ he lied. ‘You look good too.’ Another lie. ‘But you need to go easy with the hard stuff.’

‘Whatever,’ she replied carelessly. ‘I don’t sleep any more, I can hardly eat a bite. I’m going insane with stress and a couple of drinks is the only thing that makes me feel better.’

‘That’s my job. We’re going to find out who took Amal, and we’re going to get him back. Okay?’

She nodded. ‘Okay.’

‘Now talk to me. Backtrack. Start at the beginning. Every detail you can think of.’

Brooke took a smaller sip of scotch and leaned forward in the armchair with her elbows on her knees, getting her thoughts together. ‘Did Phoebe tell you about Kabir?’

‘Amal’s younger brother. The archaeology professor. She told me that it all started with him.’

Brooke nodded. ‘What else did she tell you?’

‘That Kabir and his two colleagues were attacked three weeks ago while on a field trip to some remote country area. They were killed. He’s missing.’

Brooke gave a sigh. ‘More or less, in a nutshell. It happened in north-west India, near a place called Rakhigarhi. It’s very remote. They flew there by helicopter.’

‘Charter aircraft?’

She shook her head. ‘Kabir’s own chopper. He’s a licensed pilot. Or was.’

‘What were they doing there?’

‘I’m not quite sure. It’s to do with some big archaeological project that he’s spent years on. Sai and Manish were two of his graduate students at the Institute. It’s not unusual for Kabir to fly out to remote locations for his work, but he always stays in touch with his office. He was supposed to have been back after two days. When he didn’t make contact or return, alarm bells started ringing and the local police were called in. The helicopter was found abandoned, raided and stripped of parts. The police discovered the bodies of Sai and Manish a few hundred yards away, but no trace of Kabir himself.’

Ben digested the details, and remembered what Brooke’s sister had told him. ‘They’d been shot?’

‘To pieces, pretty much. According to the police report. They found scores of cartridge cases lying a short distance from the scene.’

‘Implying multiple shooters. It doesn’t take that much shooting to take down two or three unarmed targets.’

She nodded. ‘Using military weapons. The cases were surplus 7.62 NATO stuff.’

‘Ex-military,’ Ben said. After many years of being issued home-grown copies of the old L1A1 British infantry rifle, the Indian Army had switched to smaller-calibre INSAS weaponry in the eighties. INSAS stood for Indian Small Arms Systems. A backward step, in Ben’s opinion, because the L1A1 with its more powerful cartridge had been one of the best combat weapons ever made. The change had caused a flood of decommissioned but still perfectly usable arms to hit the market, a vast amount of which had inevitably ended up in the hands of irregular forces like guerrilla armies, terrorist organisations and criminal gangs all across Asia and eastern Europe. Along with even vaster quantities of the now-obsolete ammunition, crates of which traded hands for a song. Hence, a lot of very trigger-happy killers on the loose. The kind of morons who’d shoot folks to pieces just for the hell of it. If Kabir had encountered a bunch like that, the chances of his survival didn’t look too promising.

Ben said, ‘Which would tend to support the police’s theory that armed bandits were responsible for the attack.’

‘That’s their take, and they’re sticking with it. The man in charge of the investigation over there is a police captain called Jabbar Dada. He calls himself “the dacoit hunter”.’

‘Dacoit?’

‘Outlaws, bandits, gangsters, whatever you want to call them. Apparently that whole region is overrun with marauding criminal gangs. Captain Dada and his police task force are on a mission to wipe them out. Sounds like he’s got his hands full. So on the face of it, the bandit theory seemed like a likely explanation.’

‘And I gather your Mr Prajapati shares that opinion, too.’

Brooke seemed surprised. ‘Phoebe told you about Prateek Prajapati?’

‘Just that he’s supposed to be the best private investigator in Delhi.’

She shrugged. ‘So they say. It was Amal who hired him initially.’

Ben asked, ‘Why would Amal hire a detective?’

‘Because he still wasn’t satisfied, and he was frustrated that not enough was being done. He thought that Dada was too eager to run with the bandit theory, instead of trying to come up with proper evidence. If Kabir was shot along with Sai and Manish, why was there no body?’

‘How did they account for that?’

‘They just assumed that it must have been dragged off by wild animals,’ Brooke said. ‘Wild dogs, wolves, jackals, maybe even a tiger. Even though the other two bodies hadn’t been touched, as far as we knew. It didn’t seem to make any sense that some hungry scavenger wouldn’t have had a go at them, too. They’d been pecked by vultures, nothing more.’

‘Nice.’

‘So after endless days of going nuts in London, Amal decided he had to fly out to be here in person, and he jumped on the first plane.’

‘You didn’t come with him?’

‘No, I had a conference I couldn’t get out of. I came out to join him a few days later.’

‘Did Amal go to Rakhigarhi and visit the spot where it happened?’

Brooke shook her head. ‘You know Amal. He wasn’t made for roughing it. He freaks out any time he ventures more than ten miles from a major city. He stayed here in Delhi while making a thousand phone calls to Captain Dada’s office. Then he went to see Prajapati and employed him to travel out to Rakhigarhi and visit the crime scene on his behalf. Prajapati spoke to the law enforcement officials there and came back satisfied their take on the situation was probably right, and that Kabir had almost certainly been killed along with his two associates, and that it was time to accept it, close the case and move on. Shit happens, basically.’

‘Nothing like thorough police work,’ Ben said.

‘Amal called me that night. He was very upset. He wouldn’t accept that his brother was dead. Kept insisting that Kabir must be lying injured somewhere, and the police had just missed it, and they weren’t trying hard enough and needed to widen the search. He had a big argument with Samarth about it.’

‘The eldest brother.’

‘Samarth had already spoken to Captain Dada on the phone and believed he must be right. Amal was furious with him.’

‘What about you?’ Ben asked. He could see the questions in her eyes.

Brooke clutched her drink in one hand and raised the other in a gesture of helplessness. ‘I didn’t know what to tell him. The police had searched the whole area and found nothing. Their conclusions seemed to make sense to me too, at the time.’

‘At the time,’ Ben said. ‘But now you’re not so sure?’

‘Neither are you,’ she replied. ‘Or you wouldn’t be asking me all these questions about Kabir. First one brother goes missing, then the other. It can’t be just a coincidence, can it? You see it that way, too, don’t you?’

‘I’m only trying to build a picture in my mind, Brooke. Maybe it is just a coincidence. Maybe the police are right, and the incident in Rakhigarhi was nothing more than just a tragic case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that we need to look in a totally different place to figure out why this thing has happened to Amal.’

‘Or maybe they’re wrong,’ Brooke said. ‘In fact, the more I think about it, the more certain I am that there’s more to this.’

Ben looked at her and could see she was resolute. ‘Based on what?’

‘Based on something Amal said to me, the night those bastards took him.’

Chapter 10

Ben asked, ‘What did Amal say to you?’

Brooke fell silent, and her gaze seemed to turn inwards as though she was reimagining the scene from that night. ‘When I arrived in Delhi, I’d never seen him so miserable and depressed. He felt like nobody was listening to him, he felt betrayed by Samarth who seemed to just want to accept what the police were saying at face value, and he was frantic at the idea that Kabir was lying somewhere badly hurt and suffering, maybe even dying. I wish I’d never suggested it now, but I had the idea that going out for a meal together that evening might cheer him up. There’s a big food district only about twenty minutes’ walk from here, with a lot of great restaurants. He was reluctant at first, but then agreed that a walk and a nice dinner out would do him good. We never got there.’

Brooke choked up as she finished speaking, and had to pause for a few moments as she dabbed her eyes. She took another long sip of her scotch. Ben wished she’d stop drinking. She clasped the glass with both hands in her lap and stared at it, shaking her head. Her eyes were pink and brimming again. She was gripping the glass so tightly that Ben was afraid it would break and cut her. ‘Oh God, what’s going to happen to him?’

‘You don’t want to focus on those kinds of thoughts,’ Ben said. ‘You need to believe he’s all right.’

She flashed her tearful eyes on him. ‘You know perfectly well you’re only saying that. Don’t try to bullshit me. He’s either dead already or he’s sitting in some dark hole, absolutely terrified out of his mind. He’s not strong, Ben. He’ll fall apart under this kind of strain.’

Ben leaned forward and reached out, gently took the glass from her fingers and laid it on the coffee table in front of her. ‘So what did he say?’ he prompted her softly.

Brooke closed her eyes and let out a long sigh. After a few more moments she was collected enough to resume the story.

‘It was as we were walking. It was a lovely evening, cool and peaceful. I’d hoped a stroll would relax him, but he couldn’t stop going over and over the whole thing, about how too little was being done to find his brother, and how he was absolutely certain that this wasn’t just some random bandit attack as everyone thought. I said to him, “Amal, how can you really be so sure it wasn’t?” Like you, I thought maybe the police were actually right and that Amal should listen to Samarth. I couldn’t bear to see him torturing himself that way. But then he stopped walking, and he turned to me in the middle of the street, and he looked at me and said, “There’s something else about Kabir. Something I know that I haven’t told you, or anyone. It changes everything.”’

Ben asked, ‘Something, like what?’

Brooke slowly shook her head. ‘I wish I knew.’

‘He didn’t say?’

‘I could tell he wanted to, but couldn’t bring himself to. It was gnawing at him.’

Ben frowned. ‘Not even a hint?’

‘I only know what little I was able to get out of him. He said that Kabir called him a few days before leaving on his trip, very excited, and confided something really important. Not just your typical run-of-the-mill secret. Something huge.’

‘If the trip was related to his work, this archaeological project you said he was working on, then presumably this piece of information relates to that as well?’

‘It’s a fair assumption.’

‘In which case, what are the possibilities?’

Brooke shrugged. ‘Archaeologists dig stuff up. Maybe Kabir did, too.’

‘A discovery? Of what?’

‘I don’t know, Ben. You tell me.’

Ben mulled it over for a moment or two, then decided that it was all too vague to even try to speculate about. ‘And Amal thought this secret, or discovery, or whatever it is, of Kabir’s might have had some bearing on the reason for the attack?’

Brooke nodded. ‘That was why he was so convinced it wasn’t just some random incident. But whatever it is, Kabir had made him promise not to tell anyone.’

‘Not even you? His own wife?’ It was hard for Ben to say that last bit.

‘That’s what I said to him, too. Asked him why he couldn’t share it with me, if it was so important. Especially if it meant something about what happened.’

‘And his reply?’

‘He said to me, “He’s my brother, Brooke. Please don’t ask me to betray his trust.”’

‘Okay, fair enough. But why would Amal hold this information back from the police, if it might have shed some different kind of light on the investigation?’

‘I asked him the same question. He said a promise was a promise, and that was the end of it.’

‘Is Amal normally this stubborn?’

‘Look, I know you think of him as just this bookish nerd,’ Brooke said.

Ben held up his palms in defence. ‘Did I ever call him that?’

‘But he has principles. If he felt it was wrong to betray his brother’s trust, wild horses couldn’t drag it out of him.’

‘I’m sure. You’d have to give him a Chinese burn to get him to talk, or twist his earlobe or something.’

She gave him a resentful look. ‘That’s a low thing to say, Ben.’

‘I’m sorry. It might help us, too, if we had any clue what it was. You don’t have any idea?’

‘None.’

‘That’s just great. Nice to have so much to go on.’

‘One thing we can be sure of,’ Brooke said. ‘Kabir had some kind of big, important secret apparently connected with his trip to Rakhigarhi. And Amal was in on it too. Next thing, both brothers have disappeared, first one and then the other. The confidential information is what connects them.’

‘Maybe.’

Her cheeks flushed. ‘Not maybe, Ben. Definitely. It means Amal was right. There’s more to this than a chance bandit attack. Has to be. And it also has to mean that whatever happened to him is somehow involved with what happened to Kabir. It can’t possibly be a coincidence.’

‘And all we have to do is find out what this secret was that Kabir made his brother swear never to tell a soul about. Bingo, our first inkling of a lead.’

‘If anyone can find out, you can,’ she said.

‘Do you think he’d have told his other brother?’

‘Samarth?’

‘If Kabir told him what he told Amal, he might share it with us.’

Brooke thought about it, then shook her head. ‘From the way Amal talked, I doubt that Kabir confided in anyone else within the family. The two younger brothers have a closer relationship than with Samarth. He’s always kept himself at a distance. There’s some tension there.’

‘What kind of tension?’

‘This is India. Traditions are still very strong here. It had always been understood that all three brothers would enter the family business, take over from their father when he retired, and work together to expand the empire that old Basu had founded. But Amal and Kabir both chose to go their own ways, which caused a certain amount of bad blood between them and Samarth. Their father too, though he’s really quite sweet once you get to know him. He’s the reason I was able to get you here so fast. A couple of favours were called in from some very high-level people.’

‘So I gathered. Let’s get back to the events of that evening. You say you never made it to the restaurant. The snatch happened on the walk?’

‘Just before we got there. Not long after we’d had that conversation.’

‘I think you’ve been cooped up in this room long enough. Let’s get some air. Do you have a car?’

She looked momentarily blank, thrown by the apparent change of subject. ‘There’s a Jag house car that I use as a runaround. It’s down in the garage. Or else we could get Prem to drive us in the Maybach.’

Jaguars. S-Class Pullman limousines. Back when they were an item, Brooke’s drive had been a clapped-out Suzuki jeep. Ben said, ‘Let’s leave Prem out of it.’

‘Where are we going?’

He replied, ‘To the food district.’

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘We’re not going there to eat. I want to see the crime scene for myself. You’re going to take me to the spot Amal was kidnapped.’

Chapter 11

The sun outside was more intense as midday approached. The air felt as hot and heavy and moist as steam, trapped under the pale sky. Ben’s shirt began to stick to his back the moment he left the air-conditioned cool of the house, but despite the heat Brooke had wrapped a light shawl around her bare shoulders. Green and yellow silk, with a paisley pattern. It looked good on her. She carried a small embroidered handbag, or a clutch purse, or whatever woman termed these accessories, on a thin strap. Ethnic fashion wear, probably bought locally for a fraction of what some trendy London boutique would charge. The handbag seemed to hang heavy on its strap. It always mystified Ben what women carried around in those things.

Bees and giant dragonflies buzzed about the flower beds as she led him across the garden and down a path to the Ray residence’s garage block, a stretched-out and low open-fronted building painted white to match the house, with exotic ivy growing up its walls. ‘I suppose you could call it the family fleet,’ she said, showing Ben the row of cars inside under the shade. All lined up neatly facing outwards, all immaculately waxed and polished. Prem had parked the limousine in a space at the end of the row, dwarfing the bright red Ferrari next to it.

‘Whose is the flying tomato?’ Ben asked. ‘Amal’s?’

‘Amal doesn’t drive,’ she replied. ‘That’s Kabir’s. The Audi roadster is Prem’s. The little yellow Fiat belongs to Esha, Samarth’s wife. She doesn’t get out much, though.’

‘So I gathered. Unlike her husband, who’s never at home.’

‘He parks his Bentley there,’ Brooke said, pointing at an empty space next to the tiny Fiat. ‘He’s usually home by six or seven, if it’s not a busy day at the office. You might get to meet him later.’

The silver Jaguar that Brooke used as general transport occupied the far end of the row. It was the latest F-Pace SUV model, compact and boxy. But its plain-Jane exterior was wrapped around a five-litre supercharged V8 engine. Whatever the Rays owned, it seemingly had to be top of the spec list. By contrast, Esha Ray’s choice of a cheap and cheerful Fiat seemed a little out of place.

Ben pointed at it and said, ‘Not exactly your typical millionaire’s ride.’

Brooke shrugged. ‘She used to drive a Porsche 911. She loved that car, but she sold it a few weeks ago. Actually, Samarth made her sell it.’

‘Made her?’

‘Said the insurance premium was too pricey for a woman’s runaround. That’s what she told me, anyway.’

‘I suppose rich folks don’t get that way by spending money unnecessarily,’ Ben said.

Brooke shrugged again. ‘Whatever. Listen, do you mind driving? I’m a bit light-headed from the whisky.’

‘I think I can just about manage that.’

She walked around to the passenger side, on the left like in the UK. A throwback to the olden days of the British Empire. Ben walked around to the driver’s side and climbed in behind the wheel. The car smelled brand new. He was glad to be free of Prem, and also glad to have their own transport. He was fast running out of countries where he wasn’t banned from booking a rental vehicle. He had absolutely no idea why. Weren’t rental companies insured against their property getting shot to pieces, blown up, flattened or sunk in canals?

Brooke got in the passenger side. Her hair brushed his face as they settled in. ‘It’s keyless,’ she said. ‘You just press the button.’

Ben had already found it. The Jaguar purred into life, not as whisper-softly as the Maybach, but you couldn’t have everything. He pulled out of the garage and started down the driveway, pausing for a peacock that strutted unhurriedly across their path. The gates wafted open for them at the bottom of the drive. Brooke guided him left and down the street. Ben was breathing in her perfume and remembering the last occasion they’d travelled in a car together. It had been back in England, during the short time they’d rented a house in the Jericho district of Oxford. A totally different life, filled with wedding plans and the excitement of the big day looming. Ben had quit Le Val and handed the reins over to Jeff, not intending to return. Those days had been over for him, he’d promised himself and Brooke. Having resumed the theology studies he’d abandoned many years earlier, he’d been looking ahead to a whole new future.

And look at us now, he reflected. Brooke married to someone else, and him back in the same old game as before, with the added twist that he had to help her get her beloved husband back. Life could be strangely ironic at times. His life, especially.

When the armed guards at the gated checkpoint saw Brooke in the Jaguar’s passenger seat they waved them through with friendly smiles and barely a glance at her driver. ‘It’s like living on a bloody military base,’ she said bitterly. ‘You’d know all about that, I suppose.’

‘Just a little bit,’ Ben said.

‘But at least it’s safe. I should never have made him leave home that night. It’s all my fault.’

‘It happened,’ Ben said. ‘We can’t change it. We can only deal with it.’

‘I suppose.’

‘So don’t beat yourself up.’

‘Okay. I’ll try.’

‘Anyhow, what were you going to do, stay hunkered down behind locked gates forever? If they wanted him, sooner or later they’d have had their chance.’

‘They,’ she said. ‘Whoever they are.’

‘That’s what we’re going to figure out.’

‘Ben?’

He turned, and saw she was looking at him. ‘What?’

‘Thanks for being here.’

‘It’s what I do,’ he said.

The twenty-minute route that Brooke and Amal had followed on foot took just three or four by car. Beyond the limits of the serene, upscale residential area they entered a profusion of narrower, humbler and dingier streets crammed to the maximum with activity. Row after row of food stalls and street vendors sprawled over the pavements. Ben fell into line with the slow-moving procession of cars and motor scooters and tuk-tuks that filtered through the jostling crowds of pedestrians. Gangs of children swarmed around the Jaguar, clamouring and waving through the tinted glass.

‘We can stop here and walk the rest of the way,’ Brooke said. Ben pulled over and wedged the car into a parking space between two stalls. The throng of kids closed around them. As Brooke stepped out she tossed them some coins and said something in Hindi that seemed to please them. The biggest kid grabbed the lion’s share of the money and planted himself beside the car like a terrier on guard duty.

‘I’ve been learning a bit of the language,’ she explained to Ben, with a shrug that could have been a little self-conscious.

‘What did you say to them?’

‘That there’d be more rupees if we come back and find the car still in one piece,’ she said. ‘Come on, it’s this way.’

Ben accompanied her through the food market, pressing their way between jostling bodies. The air was intense with the smell of motor fumes mingled with the scents of herbs and exotic spices and aromatic basmati rice and grilled mutton kebab from the vendors up and down the street. The place easily rivalled the grand bazaars of Marrakech, Tehran and Istanbul for sheer buzz and hubbub. Seafood merchants were pulling in scrums of customers for fresh crab and clams and shrimp. There were handicrafts and tourist trinkets and clothes and more exotic varieties of fruit and vegetables than Ben could identify. They passed cafés and small restaurants and musicians and stalls selling mountains of chillies and okra and nuts and teas, all adding to the sensory overload of smells, sounds and colours.

Brooke’s fair skin and auburn hair were drawing a lot of looks from men. Hence the shawl that covered her shoulders and protected her from more prying eyes. Ben threw back a few warning glances at the oglers, who quickly looked away. The white knight, protecting the damsel. Who, in this instance, was someone else’s damsel. Another painful reminder, but he only had himself to blame.

‘It happened down there.’ Brooke pointed down a narrow lane to their left, and turned off the main street away from the bustle. Ben followed. There were no stalls along here, and just enough space for a vehicle to squeeze between the crumbly buildings. She stopped and looked uncomfortably around her, then at Ben. ‘This is it. The restaurant we wanted to go to is at the bottom of this lane. Needless to say, we didn’t get that far.’

‘Pretty public spot to pull off a kidnapping,’ he commented.

‘It’s so much busier by day. There was hardly anyone around to witness what happened. And if anyone did, they soon disappeared.’

Ben stood in the middle of the lane and turned a slow three-sixty, scanning details and forming a scene in his mind. He pictured a couple walking. Not a happy pair, because of the troubles weighing on their minds. But things were about to get much worse for them.

He said, ‘Okay, describe it to me.’

Chapter 12

Brooke said, ‘By the time we got here I was already regretting that I’d dragged him out of the house. We’d walked in silence for the last few minutes. I was annoyed that he wouldn’t tell me what Kabir had told him, and I could sense that he was feeling bad about the whole thing. I think he really wanted to share it with me. Maybe he would have, over dinner, or later that evening. But there was no later that evening.’

She turned to face back towards the lane entrance. ‘The van came from that direction. It turned into the lane, came right for us and screeched to a halt right here.’ She pointed at the ground. ‘You can still see the tyre marks.’

Ben had already clocked the black stains on the road. Nothing of any great forensic value to discern from those, except that a heavy vehicle had come to an abrupt stop and shed some rubber.

‘It happened so fast that neither of us reacted in time. We were caught like a couple of deer in the headlights. Totally defenceless.’

Ben said, ‘How many guys?’

‘Six, not counting the driver. He stayed behind the wheel while the rest of them jumped out. One from the front passenger seat, two from a sliding door on the side, and the other three from the back. They were all wearing ski masks. All about average height, average build, give or take, except for one who was kind of stumpy, built like a fireplug or a fire hydrant, one of those things. Solid. And very hairy.’

‘Hairy?’

‘Like an animal. He had tufts of it sticking out from under the neck of his ski mask, and more at the wrists.’

Small and hairy, like an animal. Ben made a mental note of it. Distinguishing features were a good thing to know about.

Brooke said, ‘And another of them was much bigger than the rest.’

‘How much bigger?’

‘A lot. Really big. Probably a foot taller than you. More, even.’

‘Come on. Seriously?’ Ben was a shade under six feet, not the tallest man in the world by any means, but there weren’t many men who towered over him by that kind of margin.

‘Seriously. And built super-wide, too. A real hulk. Probably pumped full of steroids.’

Ben made a mental note of that, too. A guy that large would be easy to spot. Maybe not so easy to neutralise, if it came to it. But he could worry about that if and when the situation arose. He said, ‘Okay. Go on.’

‘They were on us in seconds. Of course, I had no idea what was happening. I thought they were coming for both of us. Muggers, or a rape gang. Forty percent of all the rapes in India happen in Delhi. They beat up the men, hold them down at knifepoint and make them watch as they line up to go to work on the women.’ Brooke shuddered. ‘But then they made straight for Amal, and I realised that wasn’t what they wanted. He was just standing there, like paralysed. I suppose I was too. Two of them grabbed his arms and started dragging him towards the van. He turned to look at me. He was so terrified. He yelled at me to run, get away.’

Ben knew that Brooke wouldn’t have run, in that situation. She was one of the toughest, bravest women he’d ever met. In unarmed combat training sessions at Le Val she’d been able to hold her own against much stronger and heavier male sparring partners.

She went on, ‘Amal’s a gentle soul. He’s never so much as thrown a punch in his life. But I wasn’t about to stand there and let him be snatched off the street like that. I rushed in and collared one of the bastards.’

‘The stumpy, hairy one or the massive one?’

‘Neither,’ she said. ‘This one was about medium height, medium build. I punched him in the mouth, and when he went down I yanked his mask off.’

‘You saw his face?’

‘I can still see it now,’ she replied. ‘He’s an Indian, as you might expect given that we’re in India. Swarthy complexion, dark hair, mid-thirties. He was sat there dumped on the ground looking up at me with these big bulging eyes full of hate. He has a missing front tooth.’

Ben made another mental note. Bulging eyes, missing tooth. ‘Was it already missing, or did you knock it out when you hit him?’

‘It was lying on the pavement. I didn’t notice it until afterwards. And his mouth was bleeding. So I’d say it was me.’

Ben had to smile in satisfaction at the visual image. He added bruised lip to his mental note. That was, assuming he caught up with the kidnappers before the bruising had time to go down. Which he had every intention of doing.

‘I picked up the tooth and gave it to the police,’ Brooke said. ‘They’ve still got it, far as I know. I was hoping it’d help to find the guy. Can they DNA teeth?’

Ben nodded. ‘Tooth enamel’s one of the best sources for DNA samples. But the police in India are known for being way behind on the technology. They don’t have any kind of database to match samples with. So I’d be surprised if they turn up anything there, but it was good thinking on your part.’

She gave a sour grunt. ‘Fabulous.’

‘What happened next?’

Brooke continued the account, glancing here and there as though she was reliving the action all over again. ‘Meanwhile the rest of them were dragging Amal closer to the van, right there. He was struggling, but couldn’t do a thing. I was screaming at the top of my voice. I could see a few people hanging around, but nobody came to help. I went to grab another of the bastards and pull him off Amal. Then the big hulk I told you about, he lunged towards me and caught me by the arm. Very, very quick for a guy his size. His hand was like a pincer. I tried to put him in a wrist lock, the way you showed me once. Nambudo?’

‘Aikido.’

‘But he was too strong. He held onto me like he was going to stuff me into the van, too. For a second I was certain they were going to take both of us.’

‘You got away?’

‘No, they let me go. One seemed to be the gang leader. He yelled in Hindi at the big one, “No! Not the woman, only the man!”’

Ben said, ‘That suggests it was definitely a targeted attack. They weren’t interested in you, only in Amal.’

‘Seems that way to me, too.’

‘What did the leader look like?’

‘About your height, about your build. Fairly muscular, but lean with it.’

As relieved as he was by the fact, Ben found it strange that they hadn’t taken her too. What kidnapper wouldn’t benefit from capturing two hostages for the price of one? But then, this whole case was strange. The lack of a ransom demand was the most disconcerting thing of all.

Brooke went on, ‘So the big bastard let go of my arm and shoved me away so hard I fell over. Everything spilled out of my handbag. He must have thought I was going to snatch up my phone and snap a picture of him and his buddies, because he stamped on it and smashed it to pieces. Meanwhile, the one I’d knocked down was getting to his feet, and they had Amal in the back of the van. I started running over to try to do more to help him, but then two of them pulled out pistols and pointed them in my face. They looked as if they meant it. I was afraid they were going to shoot me. What else could I do? I backed off.’

‘You did the right thing, Brooke. There was nothing more you could have done.’

‘You’d have done more.’

‘Don’t be so sure about that.’

‘I know you would, Ben. You’d have taken those weapons off them and rammed them down their throats, sideways. You wouldn’t have let them take him.’

‘Sometimes you have to let it go. Happens to the best.’

‘I failed.’

‘You need to get that out of your head,’ he said. ‘Because you’re right, they probably would have shot you. And then you’d be dead. And if you were dead, there’d have been nobody to call in my help. And Amal would have been on his own. No winners in that situation.’

She smiled weakly. ‘Maybe you’re right.’

‘Plus, it would upset me just a little if you were dead.’

‘Thanks. Still, whatever happens, I won’t make that mistake ever again.’ She reached across her side for the little embroidered handbag and unzipped it. She dipped her hand inside and came out with something that made Ben’s eyebrows rise. Now he knew why the bag had looked heavy on its strap.

‘Where the hell did you get that?’

The pistol was a Browning Hi-Power, almost identical to the one Ben kept at the armoury at Le Val. One of his all-time favourite personal defence weapons, for its ruggedness, balance and deadly effectiveness. Nine-millimetre Parabellum. Thirteen-round magazine capacity, plus one in the chamber. All steel, the way guns used to be.

‘It’s Kabir’s,’ she said. ‘He keeps it in a bedside drawer at the house, for personal protection. Showed it to me once, much to Amal’s disapproval. He hates guns.’

‘That figures.’ Ben didn’t hate them, even though he knew too well what they could do. Nor did he love them, and he mistrusted people who did. In his way of thinking, they were simply tools. Ones to be treated with great caution and respect. Sadly, they often weren’t.

‘After the kidnapping, I sneaked in there and borrowed it. I should have done it sooner. If only I’d had it with me that night, things might have gone differently. But carrying it makes me feel more comfortable.’

Ben took it from her hand and examined it. It was old and scuffed, but well maintained and smelling of fresh oil. The magazine was fully loaded up. Nine-millimetre full metal jackets, the cartridge rims marked with the head stamp of the Indian government’s Ordnance Factories Board. Military ammo. Not available to civilians. Ben wondered where Kabir had managed to procure this kind of hardware from.

He said, ‘Might have gone differently for Kabir, too, if he’d taken it on his trip.’

He went to hand the pistol back to Brooke, but she waved it away. ‘You hold onto it. You can handle it better than I can.’

‘I’m hoping I won’t need it.’

‘What’s that saying you told me once? Better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it. It’s a truth I never fully appreciated until now.’

Ben tucked the gun into his waistband, in that old familiar place behind his right hip where he was convinced he had a Browning-shaped hollow from all the years of carrying one concealed. He untucked his shirt and let it hang loose to hide the pistol’s butt. He said to Brooke, ‘Finish the story.’

‘There’s not much more to tell. They all jumped aboard the van and slammed the doors and took off down the street, leaving me standing there alone. The couple of witnesses were long gone. I wanted to call for help, but my phone was in pieces. I ran down to the bottom of the lane and told the staff at the restaurant what had just happened. Or tried to. I was in such a state of shock that I probably wasn’t making much sense. One of the waiters called the police for me. When they finally turned up, I led them back here and described things pretty much the way I just did to you.’

‘What about the van’s registration number?’

‘Got it, memorised it, told it to the police. It was a local plate, with a DL for Delhi. Took four days for them to come back to me and tell me it was a stolen vehicle. I’d already guessed as much.’

‘Okay,’ Ben said. ‘Anything else?’

‘That’s all of it,’ she replied with a deep sigh. ‘Every last detail I can remember. Which basically adds up to zero. We have nothing.’

Ben shook his head. ‘We don’t have nothing.’

Chapter 13

The street kids had done their duty and the Jaguar was still in one piece. Brooke paid them off with more rupees, then turned to Ben. ‘You want to get something to eat? We’re in the right place for it. Or we could have lunch at the house.’

‘Later,’ he said, getting into the car. ‘I’m not hungry.’

‘Me neither.’

‘And we’re not going back to the house. Not just yet.’

‘Fine with me,’ she said. ‘What did you have in mind?’

‘This Mr Prajapati of yours. The best private investigator in Delhi.’

‘He’s not mine,’ Brooke replied, a touch irritably as she got in the passenger seat. ‘I told you, Amal hired him to look for Kabir, then I hired him to look for Amal.’

‘With sensational results on both counts. When was the last report you got from the guy?’

‘Days ago. Don’t ask me how many. I’ve more or less given up waiting for him to call.’

‘Then I think it’s time we had an update,’ Ben said.

‘Want me to call him?’

‘I was thinking we could drop by his office and say hello. You know where it is?’

‘I’ve only been there, like, eight times. I think I can remember the way.’

‘Then let’s pay Mr Prajapati a visit.’

The offices of the P. P. Detective Agency were on the second floor of a dirty building on a busy pedestrianised precinct in Janakpuri District Center, between a shop advertising LAPTOP AND DESKTOP REPAIRING and a boutique selling cheap knockoffs of designer-name jeans.

‘Classy location,’ Ben said. ‘If this guy’s the top private eye in the city, imagine the worst.’

‘He did come highly recommended,’ Brooke said. ‘He spent thirty years with the Delhi police.’

‘What better recommendation is there?’

She led the way inside the building. ‘I always take the stairs. The lift makes creaking sounds like it’s going to stick. And it smells as if someone’s been keeping chickens in there.’

‘Good idea.’ Ben thought the whole building and the street outside smelled pretty bad too, but maybe he just hadn’t been in the city long enough to get used to the ambient aroma that hit the olfactory sense like a mixture of pollution, sewage, sweat, cooking fumes, decaying vegetation, tropical flowers and incense that had been mulched up together in a giant cauldron and stewed for a couple of thousand years.

One thing he was getting used to, and fast, was Brooke’s company. The tension between them had melted away and being with her felt more natural and comfortable with every passing minute they spent together. He had to keep reminding himself not to touch her as they walked.

On the second floor a placard outside the offices read proudly, The Prateek Prajapati Detective Agency specialises in cases relating to anonymous letters and suspicious telephone calls, pre-matrimonial investigations, divorce and adultery, kidnapping and missing persons, extortion, financial crimes and cheatings. Fully licensed and qualified.

‘A man of many and varied talents,’ Ben commented. Brooke knocked, walked in, and he followed her through the door. The small reception area was full of artificial plants, with a desk in one corner behind which sat a small, middle-aged Indian woman in a bright blue sari. Opposite the desk was a cramped waiting area with a couple of plastic chairs. A pair of internal doors led off from the reception area, one marked BATHROOM and the other plain. The receptionist frowned at them over the top of a Dell monitor as they approached the desk. The plastic monster plant next to her needed dusting. If there was any air conditioning in the building it didn’t seem to be working.

Brooke rested her hands on the desk and gave the woman a polite smile. ‘Brooke Ray, to see Mr Prajapati? It’s concerning the case of my husband, Amal.’

The receptionist checked her screen, spent a moment tapping and scrolling, frowned a bit more and said, ‘You do not appear to have an appointment. Mr Prajapati is very busy. If you do not have an appointment he cannot see you right now.’

Ben said, ‘Oh, I think he’ll see us.’ Before the woman could react or hit the intercom button on the phone in front of her, he stepped towards the unmarked door and pushed straight through without knocking.

Delhi’s top private detective was lounging on a sofa with his feet up and a sports magazine in his hands. He was a large, jowly man in his late fifties, with jet-black thinning hair and a bushy moustache that were obviously dyed. Dark rings around his eyes gave him a panda-like appearance and his mound of a belly strained at his shirt buttons. At Ben’s sudden entrance he launched the magazine up into the air and almost fell off the sofa in alarm.

Brooke stepped into the office behind Ben and stood with her hands on her hips. ‘It’s good to see you so hard at work finding my husband, Mr Prajapati.’

Jumping to his feet, Prajapati straightened his rumpled shirt and crooked tie and smoothed his hair and began to bluster indignantly about the need to make an appointment, and how he was just taking a short break in a hectic day. Ben eyed the remains of a large takeout lunch on the desk. Pretty obvious how the busy super-sleuth had spent the last hour or so.

Brooke said, ‘I’ve been hoping you might call to keep me updated on how your enquiries are progressing. Perhaps you lost my number? Anyhow, I just happened to be in the neighbourhood, so I thought I’d stop by.’

Prajapati shot a deeply suspicious glare at Ben, pointed a thick finger his way and said, ‘Who is this person?’

‘I’m your new assistant,’ Ben said. ‘Come to work with you on the Ray kidnap case. It’s a real honour for me.’

‘I have no need for an assistant.’

‘Then I’ll just have to manage on my own,’ Ben said. ‘Shame.’

Brooke said, ‘This is Mr Hope. He’s travelled to India to assist me, doing what it seems nobody else here is willing or able to do. That is, to find my husband and bring him home safely.’

More collected now, Prajapati walked over to the desk and perched on its corner with one leg dangling, like a link of sausage. He laced his fingers together over his belly and looked at Ben with flat cop eyes. ‘You are wasting your time, my friend.’ To Brooke he said, ‘Mrs Ray, please let me remind you that locating your husband is, under the circumstances, a very difficult business.’

‘I’m aware of that. That’s why I hired you, on the understanding that you were the best person for the job. Are you saying you’ve made no progress at all? And have you heard anything from the police inspector in charge of the investigation? Because I haven’t. All this waiting for the phone to ring starts giving you the strangest idea that nothing’s actually happening.’

‘In fact I was intending to call you today,’ Prajapati replied gravely. ‘Mrs Ray, you need to prepare yourself for bad news. Please, take a seat.’ He motioned at the pair of fabric director’s chairs the other side of the desk.

Brooke didn’t sit down. Her face turned pale and her jaw tightened. ‘You’ve heard something. You’re going to tell me that Amal’s been found dead. Is that what you’re going to tell me?’

Prajapati shook his head, and his jowls wobbled. ‘No, Mrs Ray. It isn’t. Your husband has not been found. But in such a case as this, where no ransom demand has been made and the motivation for the crime is obviously something other than financial, a revenge attack perhaps, the chances of a happy outcome are very slight. Very slight indeed. That is why I say you should prepare yourself. The call I had been intending to give you, which now you are here in person is no longer necessary, was to inform you that after much consideration I am resigning from this case. Because in my professional opinion it is almost one hundred per cent certain that your husband is no longer alive, and at this stage we are looking for a corpse.’

Chapter 14

But Prajapati was wrong. Because Amal Ray was still very much alive. For the moment, at any rate – though for how much longer, he was too petrified to contemplate.

Amal could still see the last look on Brooke’s face as they ripped him away from her. Could still hear the echo of his own voice yelling, Run, Brooke, run! Then the van door slamming shut, and the start of the nightmare journey into the unknown. He remembered the van stopping. Sounds, footsteps, voices. Then a sudden flood of harsh light making him blink as the back door was wrenched open. A glimpse of brickwork in the background: had he been taken to a garage or a warehouse of some kind? Then the terrifying sight of one of his kidnappers, the one in charge, his face masked like a terrorist’s, coming up to him with a hypodermic needle in one gloved hand and an evil glint lighting up his eyes.

After that, there was a gaping hole in Amal’s memory. Whatever sedative they’d pumped into him could have rendered him unconscious for minutes, hours, he had no idea. The next thing he’d known was awakening in this place, head aching, feeling nauseous and utterly afraid.

And he’d been here ever since. Long enough to have examined every square inch of his strange new environment a hundred times over.

His prison was thirty feet square, a figure he’d paced out accurately over and over, back and forth and round and round like a zoo animal in a caged enclosure. It was lit by a single naked bulb in the middle of the ceiling that burned around the clock, so that it was impossible to tell night from daytime hours and hard to keep track of the days passing. His captors had taken away his watch, along with his wallet and shoes. Why the shoes, he’d wondered at first. Maybe to make it harder for him to run away, in the unlikely event that he managed to escape this place. Or maybe to prevent him from hanging himself with his laces.

Not that there was anywhere to hang himself from. The ceiling was more than six feet above his head, and the three silver duct pipes that ran across it from end to end were too far up to reach. The ducts looked industrial, making him wonder about the kind of building he was in, and what might be above the ceiling or beyond the four walls that surrounded him. The walls felt like solid concrete, and no matter where he tapped and thumped he could produce no hollow sounds. They could have been a mile thick.

The absence of any windows and the feeling of total insulation from the outside world had led him to conclude early on that he was below ground. Deeper down than a basement. More like a cellar, or some kind of underground bunker. The flight of metal steps that led steeply upwards to the only entrance tended to confirm that impression.

But the cellar wasn’t some dank, stinking hole full of rats and filth. Amal understood that his captors had gone to certain lengths to make his stay here reasonably comfortable. The walls had been painted white to reflect more light, obviously in a hurry, judging by the crude job that had been made of it, and obviously not long ago, judging by the smell of fresh paint. The bed they’d provided for him was narrow and basic, like an old-fashioned hospital bed with a creaky iron frame, but the mattress and pillow were new. He had a plastic chair to sit on, and a small table, which, likewise, he understood were luxuries not necessarily afforded to most people in his predicament.

The same was also true of his toilet arrangements. His kidnappers could have just given him a bucket. Instead, they’d provided him with his own little separate bathroom, albeit a makeshift affair set up in the corner opposite his bed and consisting of two plywood sheets for walls and one for a ceiling, with a doorway sawn out. Inside the bathroom was a chemical toilet, a plastic basin on a stand and a water pipe that was cemented into the wall and protruded a couple of feet with a tap attached to its end. He wouldn’t have drunk the water, but it seemed okay to wash with. He had a toothbrush and toothpaste and spare rolls of toilet paper. They’d even left him some pieces of cheap soap and a couple of towels.

All the comforts a man could wish for, apart from the basic freedom to walk out of here.

The cellar door was the one feature that kept reminding him of what this place truly was, a prison cell. It was solid timber, not ply. No visible hinges, no interior handle, no keyhole, no peephole or window. Only a small trapdoor hatch near its base, about eight inches square, which looked to Amal like a cat flap, except it opened only outwards. It was too small for him to poke his head out of, on the rare occasions when it wasn’t bolted shut, which was when his unseen captors brought him his meals and drinks.

His diet consisted mainly of tinned beans and stewed meat, warmed up and served on disposable paper plates with a plastic fork and spoon to eat with. Each meal came with a litre bottle of water, more than enough to keep him hydrated with a little left over for brushing his teeth. All of which seemed like an excess of consideration on the part of his kidnappers, who seemed oddly prepared to go the extra mile for his wellbeing. They’d even provided him with a fresh T-shirt and jogging bottoms the right size, enabling him to change out of the stale clothes he’d been wearing the night of the kidnap. They were evidently intent on keeping their prisoner adequately nourished, reasonably healthy and clean. For which he was thankful, under the circumstances. But why?

It was the coffee that perplexed him the most. It was served in paper cups along with his food and water. Instant decaf, lots of milk, lots of sugar. Exactly how he drank it at home.

How on earth could they possibly know that?

Amal couldn’t shut those bewildering questions out of his head. He’d sit for hours by the hatch, waiting for it to open so he could scream through the hole, ‘WHO ARE YOU PEOPLE? WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?’

But he never got the chance, because the trapdoor only ever seemed to open when he was sleeping. He’d awaken, look up the steps and there would be his next meal waiting for him by the locked hatch. He’d shuffle up the steps to collect it, then shuffle back down to his living quarters, slump in his chair at the table to go through the motions of refuelling his body, then carry the empty plate and cup back up to the hatch when he’d finished. Next time he awoke, they would be gone.

With no chance of escape and nothing else to do, Amal had had no choice but to settle into the mind-numbing routine of eat, sleep, pace his cell, wear himself out fretting, and then fall into his rumpled bed to try to lose himself once more in sleep. His mind felt so scrambled and befuddled that he feared he was losing his grip on reality. In the more lucid intervals between spells of anguish and dread, he had plenty to think about. And although he had no idea who was keeping him prisoner like this, from the moment he’d been kidnapped he’d had a strong feeling that he knew why this was happening to him.

It was all about the secret Kabir had told him. What else could it be? By its very nature, it was the kind of thing that could get people into terrible trouble. That much had already proved true for Kabir himself.

It was on the third day of his incarceration, as far as he could tell, that Amal’s suspicions had been confirmed. And from that moment, his nightmare had truly begun.

Chapter 15

Brooke was visibly upset after the visit to Prajapati. As they drove away she was angrily saying, ‘What’s he talking about? A revenge attack? Revenge for what? What has Amal ever done to anyone? He’s the gentlest person I’ve ever known. This summer we found a baby bird injured in the garden. It must have fallen from a nest and been mauled by a cat. Amal had to put it out of its misery. He was inconsolable for two whole days afterwards. That’s the kind of man he is. So what’s this idiot saying about a revenge attack?’

Ben replied, ‘Maybe he thinks the brothers were into something.’

She looked at him sharply. ‘Into what?’

‘Something illegal, presumably. Something that would entail running with a bad crowd. And invite certain risks and reprisals, even if they were only peripherally involved.’

‘Crime? Are you serious?’

‘There is the matter of the gun,’ Ben said. ‘I mean, who keeps a nine-millimetre pistol handy by their bedside unless they reckon they have good reason to need it?’ He shifted in the driver’s seat and felt the hard lump of the Browning trapped against the small of his back.

Brooke turned in her seat to stare at him, incredulous. ‘You actually think that?’

He shrugged. ‘It had crossed my mind.’

‘Then you’ve got your head up your arse just like Prajapati, and I’m the only one who can see things properly. Jesus Christ!’

‘I said it crossed my mind. I didn’t say it stayed there very long. Got to consider every possibility, Brooke. Even if it’s just trying it on for size to tell what doesn’t fit.’

Brooke threw herself back in her seat and closed her eyes. Ben fished in a pocket for his pack of Gauloises, tapped one out and lit it, rolled down his window to let the smoke out and went on driving in silence.

After a pause Brooke said in a softer tone, ‘I’m sorry I lashed out at you just then. It was wrong.’

‘It’s okay.’

‘It’s not your fault. It’s that idiot and the things he said. He made me so angry.’

‘Maybe I should have shot him. We could go back, if you like.’

Brooke gave just a flicker of a smile, and fell silent for another long pause. Then she said, ‘The thing is, though, the reason he touched such a nerve is because I must think, deep down, that he’s right.’ It was just like her to analyse everything psychologically, even at times like this.

Ben replied, ‘You can persuade yourself rationally that Amal’s dead. But do you feel it? Do you believe it in your heart?’

‘I’m so tired I don’t know what to believe. What do you think?’

‘I think Prajapati seemed very sure of himself, considering he seems to have damn all proof to support his opinion.’

‘But what if it’s true? How do we know it isn’t?’

‘We have no reason to suppose it is.’

Her lips tightened. ‘You don’t have to humour me, Ben. I’m not a child. Let’s say Amal’s not going to make it out of this. Or he’s dead already, like Prajapati says. What then?’

‘The usual things. You’d bury him, mourn him, and move on. Like everyone does.’

‘I don’t mean that. I mean, what then?’

‘Then we’d move on to the next phase. The hunt would switch gears and become about finding the people who did it. But it’s too early to start talking this way.’

‘And if they could be found? You’ll take them down?’

Ben looked at her and saw the seriousness in her eyes. She wanted them dead, no mistake. He nodded slowly. ‘You said it yourself, Brooke. Whatever it takes to make this right.’

‘You’d do that for me?’

‘And for Amal,’ Ben said. ‘He’s my friend too.’

She reached out and touched his hand where it rested on the wheel. Her fingers lingered for a moment, then she drew her hand quickly away. ‘What about Kabir?’

‘If you’re right that the two cases are connected, then it means the same bad guys are behind both crimes. In which case, we get the people who took Amal, we’re also getting the ones who got Kabir. Two birds with one stone.’

‘And if I’m wrong, and the two aren’t connected at all?’

‘Then all we can do is take it step by step. It’s a process of elimination. Forget about Prajapati. Even if he hadn’t just taken himself out of the equation, he’s of no use to us. Which takes us to the next name on the list, Samarth. At this point, I’d like to be introduced.’

‘Why now?’

Ben replied, ‘Because he’s the only one of the three brothers still available to talk to. Because I’m a visitor in his home and it’s the polite thing to do. And because he might actually know something that could lead us to the next level.’

They passed a busy street-side kebab stall and the aromas of chargrilled lamb and chicken with hot chilli peppers and spicy okra wafted through the car’s open window. Brooke asked, ‘Not hungry yet?’

‘I want to keep moving.’

‘Same here.’ She reached for her handbag, took out her purse and riffled around until she found a business card. Black with gold edging and script, expensive and glossy. ‘Here it is. Ray Enterprises, Connaught Place. That’s the main business district, where all the big corporate offices are.’ She copied the postal code into the on-board sat nav and peered at the screen for directions. ‘You need to get turned around here.’

‘Let’s do it.’ Ben dropped a gear and the Jaguar’s engine growled happily as he cut across the lanes of chaotic traffic to head back in the opposite direction.

That was when he spotted the car in the rear-view mirror. A dusty white Toyota sedan had peeled suddenly out from the traffic flow and pulled a sharp U-turn in his wake. In any other country Ben had travelled in, it would have been the kind of manoeuvre that elicited a symphony of honking horns from angry motorists. Evidently not in India, where nobody seemed to care much what you did on the road, but it caught Ben’s eye nonetheless. Not exactly subtle.

Someone was following them.

Chapter 16

Ben kept it to himself, because he didn’t want to alarm Brooke. Not until he was sure he was right. Then she’d find out soon enough, depending on what happened next.

He took the next right turn, veering sharply into the junction at the last moment. A motor rickshaw driver and a couple of pedestrians had to move fast to get out of his path. Brooke glanced at the sat nav and said, ‘What are you doing? This is the wrong way.’

‘Sorry, my mistake,’ he replied. In the mirror he saw the white Toyota follow them into the junction. Hanging back, keeping its distance, allowing a few other vehicles to filter in between itself and the Jaguar. It had passed the first test. Or failed it, depending on one’s point of view. One more, and Ben would be sure. He said, ‘Let me pull in here and get turned around again.’

He clicked on his indicator, steered nearer the kerb and slowed. A battered taxi sedan, two tuk-tuks and a motorcycle buzzed past. The white Toyota didn’t. It had slowed too, and hovered at the kerbside forty metres behind the Jaguar as though anticipating their next move. Ben waited for a gap in the traffic, then threw the Jag around with a squeal of tyres and accelerated back towards the junction.

Right on cue, the Toyota U-turned and followed.

Brooke still had no idea what was going on, and Ben had decided to say nothing yet. Connaught Place and the Ray Enterprises HQ were twenty minutes away, which he hoped was enough of a distance to provide him with a chance to lose their tail. He left her alone with her thoughts as he followed the sat nav west across the city, cutting and diving into gaps, braking hard now and then to avoid facilitating the suicide of various scooterists and pedestrians, and all the while watching the white Toyota in his mirror. He’d already memorised its Delhi registration number. The glare of the sunlight made it hard to see through its windscreen, but he thought he could see the shapes of two guys inside.

He wondered who they could be. Goons working for Prajapati? Possible, though unlikely.

A traffic light up ahead was changing from green to amber. Ben saw his chance and put his foot down, and the Jaguar surged through just as the light turned red. Some way behind them, the driver of the Toyota had to make a quick decision. He raced through the red, almost collided with a truck, swerved to avoid a motorbike, and kept on the Jaguar’s tail. Ben switched lanes a couple of times, took a couple more turns as directed by the sat nav. He was momentarily distracted by a bus that was trying to force its way up the wrong side of him. Then when he looked in the rear-view mirror again, expecting the Toyota still to be there, it was gone. He slowed a little to let traffic stream past and check that the Toyota wasn’t just lurking further back. Definitely no longer there.

Maybe he’d imagined it, he thought. Then again, he was experienced enough to be pretty damn sure he hadn’t. The stunt back there at the traffic lights had probably been the deciding factor, when the Toyota’s driver had taken the bait and drawn too much attention to himself. It had been time to bail out.

But just because the Toyota had dropped out of the game didn’t mean it was over. Vehicle surveillance, done properly, almost never involved a single tail. The Toyota had most likely passed the baton to another of the surveillance team. The new player could be another car, a van, bike, or even a helicopter if their resources stretched that far. Ben kept glancing around him for a likely suspect, but could see nothing. The view through the Jaguar’s sunroof showed a clear sky above. If someone was still following them, they were being a damn sight more discreet about it than the Toyota. The question was, who might that someone be, and what was their intention?

‘You’re awfully pensive,’ Brooke said.

‘Focusing on driving. This traffic’s terrible.’

‘Welcome to Delhi. Better get used to it.’

Soon afterwards they reached the headquarters of Ray Enterprises. Connaught Place, and the impressive steel and glass tower itself, were a galaxy away from Prateek Prajapati’s seedy neighbourhood. Just a few miles across the city, the slick, contemporary corporate architecture of the business centre rivalled anything London or New York had to offer. This was the world Brooke had married into. Switching off that thought the instant it flashed through his mind, Ben turned down a ramp to the building’s underground car park. Nobody followed them inside. Something to worry about later, Ben decided.

They found a parking space, left the car and walked to a lift. Surveillance cameras watched from every angle. A sign said NO SMOKING WITHIN 15 FEET OF ANYWHERE, which struck Ben as a bit Draconian and tempted him to light another Gauloise just out of defiance. Eight security guys would probably appear and threaten to shoot him if he dared to.

The lift was spacious and modern, and nobody had been keeping chickens in it any time recently. The soft music wafting through its sound system sounded distinctly unIndian to Ben’s ears. He asked, ‘What floor?’

Brooke replied, ‘Top.’

‘Silly question.’ He pressed the button for the eighteenth floor. The doors hissed shut.

‘Samarth has the whole floor to himself. I hope he’s there,’ she added fretfully. ‘We should have called ahead.’

‘If he’s half the workaholic he’s cracked up to be, he’ll be there.’

The lift whooshed upwards. Ben watched the illuminated floor numbers on a panel above the doors tick off, all the way up to eighteen. Then Brooke said, ‘Here we are,’ and to the sound of a two-tone chime the sliding doors hissed open again to reveal the plush surroundings of the company CEO’s personal domain. There wasn’t a dusty plastic plant in sight, the air conditioning worked beautifully, and a secretary or PA a third of the age of Prajapati’s receptionist and much more attractive in her manner greeted them warmly when Brooke walked up to the desk and introduced herself as Mr Ray’s sister-in-law. The PA checked the computer, slim fingers skipping over the keyboard. She wore a ring on her thumb and a name tag marked ‘Salena’.

‘He has a two o’clock meeting, but I believe he’s free for a few minutes. Please hold on while I check for you.’ Salena picked up the phone, spoke briefly in Hindi, then motioned towards a door at the end of a passage and said, ‘Please go through, Mrs Ray. He’ll be very happy to see you.’ Her dark eyes lingered on Ben, and she flashed him a coy smile.

‘Pretty,’ Brooke said in an undertone as they left the reception area.

‘Is she? I hadn’t noticed.’

‘I’ll bet you hadn’t.’

Brooke was about to knock at the door when it opened, and Ben met Samarth Ray for the first time.

Chapter 17

Samarth was several years older and a couple of inches taller than Amal, the same height as Ben at just under six feet. The fraternal similarity was discernible, but you’d have had to look twice. Where Amal was somewhat slight of build and not the sportiest of people, Samarth had the athletic look of a guy who played squash and worked out in the gym four times a week. And while Amal played up to his writerly image by slouching about most of the time in jogging pants and T-shirts, his elder brother was immaculately tailored and carried himself as ramrod-straight as an army colonel. The light grey silk three-piece looked Italian, like his shoes, and the gold ingot on his wrist was Swiss. His thick hair was swept back from a high brow, greying just enough at the temples to add to the look of urbane polish. But for all the veneer of dynamism and success about the man, the signs of stress, fatigue and grief were only thinly hidden below the surface.

Samarth embraced Brooke with real tenderness and invited them into his office. Floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides offered a sweeping panorama of the city. The furnishings were as tasteful and expensive as those at the house.

‘I apologise for dropping in on you out of the blue like this,’ Brooke said.

Samarth touched her arm and replied graciously, ‘It’s always a joy to see you, my dear, even under these tragic circumstances.’ His English was as polished as his appearance, with barely a trace of an accent.

‘I’d like to introduce you to my friend Benedict Hope.’

‘Just Ben,’ Ben said as they shook hands. Samarth’s grip was strong and dry. ‘A pleasure to meet you, Mr Ray. Please may I offer my condolences at this difficult time.’

‘You’re very kind. Thank you. Now, to what do I owe this pleasure?’

‘I came to tell you some news,’ Brooke said. ‘Both bad and good.’

Samarth replied sadly, ‘Given the choice, it’s always better to hear the bad news first. Can anything you have to tell me be worse than what’s already happened?’

‘I had a meeting with Prajapati this morning. There’s been no progress in the investigation.’

‘Unfortunately that comes as no great surprise to me,’ Samarth said.

‘And he’s resigning from the case.’

‘Again, not entirely unexpected. And not entirely negative news, from my perspective. I was never persuaded that he needed to be hired in the first place.’

Brooke said, ‘We need all the help we can get, Samarth. And that’s why I brought Ben to meet you.’

Samarth looked at Ben. ‘Is this the good news?’

Brooke said, ‘There’s nobody more expert when it comes to finding people. He’s come to India to offer us his services.’

Samarth gave Ben a sad smile. ‘Your reputation precedes you, Mr Hope. You’re the military man of whom my brother has spoken with such great admiration. A genuine hero, I gather.’

‘Ex-military man,’ Ben said. ‘As for a hero, I don’t know. But I do know the world of kidnap and ransom. I’m here to do anything I can possibly do to help resolve this situation.’

‘I’m touched by your kindness, Mr Hope. Please, won’t you sit?’ Samarth stepped across to a plush white leather armchair by the window, and slumped in it as though suddenly deflated by so much worry.

Ben perched on the edge of an armchair opposite. Brooke settled on a chair by Samarth’s desk. Ben said, ‘Mr Ray, I know you’re a busy man, so I’ll get straight to the point. It seems that Amal had reason to believe he knew why Kabir disappeared, and who might be responsible for the attack on him and his associates. We’re working on a possible theory that Amal’s own disappearance might be connected.’

Samarth looked blank for a moment, then frown lines etched his face. ‘I don’t understand. Connected in what way?’

Brooke said, ‘Amal told me that Kabir confided a secret to him, just before he left for Rakhigarhi.’

‘A secret? I’m sorry, again I don’t understand what you mean. What kind of secret?’

‘We think it concerned Kabir’s work,’ Ben said. ‘Some discovery he’d made, something he’d found, that he was very excited by and shared with Amal. Something of great importance or value. We’re speculating that it could be some archaeological find, but we don’t know what. I was hoping that you might be able to shed light on the matter. It could provide us with a real insight into what’s happened, not just to Kabir but to Amal as well.’

Samarth began tapping at the arm of his chair with a finger. ‘Are you saying that you believe my brothers’ disappearances to be the work of a single abductor?’

‘Perhaps more than one, but working together. We can’t be sure of that yet.’

Samarth placed his hands in front of him on his lap and laced his fingers together with a thoughtful, sombre expression. ‘It strikes me that this theory you’re working on is really little more than a hypothesis. Do you have any tangible evidence to support it?’

‘Only what Amal told Brooke the night of the kidnap. That he’d found something.’

‘That’s it? He found something?’

‘That’s it,’ Ben said. ‘At this point I’m simply trying to build a picture.’

Brooke said, ‘Samarth, did Kabir tell you what he told Amal? About his work, this thing he’d found?’

Samarth reflected for a moment, then slowly, gravely shook his head. ‘No, I don’t recall his mentioning anything of that nature. I’m afraid I have no idea what this thing could be.’

Brooke looked crestfallen. ‘Are you sure? It might just have been in passing. Some small detail that might not have seemed important at the time.’

Samarth nodded. ‘Quite sure. Whatever conversation my two brothers might have had, I wasn’t party to it.’ The weary sadness had drained out of his expression, replaced by something colder and harder. He pursed his lips, paused a moment longer, then said, ‘Brooke, Mr Hope—’

‘Please call me Ben,’ Ben said.

‘I understand your desire to seek answers to the many mysteries surrounding these terrible recent events. Who feels that pressing motivation more painfully than I?’

Ben sensed a ‘but’ coming.

Samarth went on, ‘However, if you will allow me to speak frankly, I don’t consider this to be a productive line of enquiry. Believe me, I wish it were. But as you admit yourselves, you have no evidence to back it up. It’s just pure conjecture. Speculation. One might say, wishful thinking. Or, to use another expression, it seems to me you’re clutching at straws.’

Brooke stared at her brother-in-law. ‘Were you there, the night Amal was taken?’

Samarth levelly returned her gaze. ‘You know that I wasn’t. It’s a foolish question.’

‘No, you weren’t. But if you had been, and you’d heard what Amal said, seen the look in his eyes, you wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss it. He meant it, Samarth. He knew something. There’s more to this than anyone reali—’

Samarth cut her off. ‘As I’ve made clear more than once, Brooke, I was unhappy with the involvement of a private detective in our family affairs. Now that Mr Prajapati is no longer in the picture I’m just as unwilling to reopen the case up to another investigator, however decent his intentions, and however much I appreciate his travelling all the way to India to offer his services.’

Samarth turned to Ben. ‘Naturally, I will be more than happy to reimburse any expenses you may have incurred, Mr Hope. Please submit your invoice to my secretary, and it will be taken care of immediately. Then it remains only for me to thank you for your concern, and to wish you a pleasant journey home.’

Brooke’s cheeks had reddened and she looked perplexed. ‘Samarth, your father was very keen to have Ben come to help us. He pulled a lot of strings to cut through the red tape and speed things along.’

Samarth replied, ‘I’m well aware of the calls that my father made to his friends at the Foreign Office, Vivaan Banerjee and others. He still commands a huge deal of respect and influence. But as much as it pains me to say it, my father is old and sick and no longer the man he once was. His decisions aren’t always the right ones. Just as I’ve had to assume control of running the business he founded, there are times when I must take charge of other matters, for the good of the family.’

‘For the good of the family,’ Brooke repeated, sounding dumbfounded.

‘Indeed. The loss of two sons has been an unimaginably devastating blow to my parents. I now find myself facing the heart-breaking prospect of organising one brother’s funeral, which has already been delayed too long, and preparing myself to organise the other. This is a time for what’s left of our family to try to find solace and mourn our loved ones. It’s not a time for raising false hopes in the pursuit of some unsubstantiated wishful theory that can only cause more pain and suffering. Surely you must see that?’

‘I can’t believe what I’m hearing. How can you just make these assumptions?’

Samarth heaved a sigh. He got up from his chair and approached Brooke with an outstretched hand of sympathy. ‘My brother found a fine woman. I sincerely admire your strength and resolve, Brooke. I urge you to find within yourself the strength to accept the truth that is glaring us all in the face. My brothers aren’t coming back. You know that, don’t you? Deep down you believe it as much as I do.’

‘I don’t believe it,’ she said. There was a crack in her voice and the muscles of her face were tight.

‘Help her to understand, Mr Hope,’ Samarth said. ‘Explain to her that with no ransom demand, this is no ordinary kidnapping.’

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