CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The footsteps moved closer inside the room. The torch beam swept from side to side. Ben tucked himself in tightly behind the desk, but he knew that he had zero chance of remaining hidden for long.

The torch beam flashed across the desk. Ben saw his own shadow appear on the floor. He had a split second to react before the intruder did.

Nobody, not even a trained SAS soldier, really wants to launch themselves, unarmed and blind, at someone holding a cocked and loaded revolver. But under the circumstances, Ben didn’t have a lot of choice. Surprise was his only advantage, and he used it. With a roar he burst out from behind the desk, shining his own torch straight back at the intruder’s face. And hurled himself at the guy in a flying leap.

There was no deafening gunshot while he was in the air. Ben’s shoulder connected with what felt like the intruder’s midriff, driving him violently backwards against the wall. The intruder let out a grunt of pain and shock. The torch beam slashed upwards to point at the ceiling, then fell towards the floor. There was the distinct thump of a chunky revolver landing on the rug.

Pinning the wildly struggling intruder down hard with a knee to the throat, Ben reached for the switch of the side lamp.

And with a shock, recognised the face staring up at him as that of Mrs Martínez, Nick’s PA.

He instantly relaxed the pressure on her neck before she blacked out. She was wheezing and clutching her throat as he hauled her to her feet and set her down in a chair. ‘I wasn’t expecting to meet you again so soon, Mrs Martínez,’ he said.

‘How did you get in here?’ she gasped, rubbing her neck.

Ben stooped to pick up the fallen revolver. It was a Smith & Wesson Model 28, the ‘Highway Patrolman’ version of their large-framed .357 hand cannon. Four inch barrel, blue steel. Enough firepower to stop a Freightliner truck. The US Highway Patrol had used them to stop runaway vehicles by blasting holes in the engine blocks.

‘That’s a lot of handgun for a nice lady like you to be carrying around,’ Ben said. He eased the hammer down. Pushed the knurled catch behind the recoil shield and flipped out the cylinder to see the six bright brass cartridges stamped FEDERAL .357 MAGNUM. He tipped the rounds out into his palm, dropped them in his pocket and laid the unloaded pistol on the desk. He could see her eyeing it. ‘Did I hurt you?’ he asked.

‘I’m fine.’ Her throat and jaw were turning a fine red, but it would fade in an hour or two. He wasn’t so sure the pain in his side would ease as fast. His little altercation with Beard’s boys earlier hadn’t done his healing wound too many favours, and leaping up from behind the desk just now had added an unpleasantly sharp new dimension to the discomfort that had him worrying about busted stitches.

‘You want to know why I broke into Nick’s house, Mrs Martínez, and I’ll level with you,’ Ben said. ‘I’m here because people aren’t answering my questions and I get the feeling my presence on this island is less than welcome in some quarters. I don’t think Nick would have minded me coming to check out his place. Now, you level with me. I’m wondering why someone with a key to the front door would come armed with a flashlight and a Magnum.’

‘What questions?’ she said.

‘Ones that would help me understand the truth of what really happened out there that day.’

She hesitated. ‘I’ll answer your questions if you’ll let me go over to that bookcase.’ She pointed across the other side of the study.

‘What’s that? The old “hidden weapon in the bookcase” trick?’

‘Please. I’m not that stupid.’

‘What’s in the bookcase?’

‘You’ll understand.’

‘Slowly,’ he said.

Avoiding his eye, she crossed the room, stopped at the bookcase and gazed along the rows of titles. Most of Nick’s collection seemed to be aviation-related. She plucked at the spine of a big, thick leather ring-bound book, slid it out and held it tight against her chest.

‘Now set it down on that table and step away from it,’ Ben said.

She did as he said. Ben approached the table and flipped open the leather cover. It was a photo album, nothing more.

‘I need to see something,’ she said. ‘It’s important.’

‘Be my guest,’ Ben said.

Mrs Martínez flipped through a few pages of the album. She stopped, pressed a finger to one of the pages, stooped a little to peer at it more closely, then flipped another page and did the same again. She looked up at Ben, studying his face with the same careful scrutiny he’d noticed that afternoon at the CIC offices. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Now I know for sure.’

‘Know what?’

‘What I came here tonight to find out. I thought I recognised you when you walked into the office today. But I needed to be sure that you were the same Ben Hope Nick used to talk about.’ She spun the album round on the table so he could see the picture. It was a shot taken at Hilary Chapman’s engagement party. Ben was in the background, holding a glass.

‘And here,’ she said, flipping back a page to another shot of some of the men of A Squadron, looking hot and exhausted in filthy fatigues, sitting around a clearing in some tropical hellhole that could have been either of the SAS’s jungle training grounds in Belize or Borneo. There was Ben in the middle, his face partially blacked, in the process of field-stripping an AR-15 rifle. Technically speaking, Nick shouldn’t have even had such potentially compromising photos in his possession, though sneaking the occasional memento home wasn’t uncommon practice.

‘You haven’t changed a lot,’ she said.

‘Thanks. So now you know who I am, Mrs Martínez, will you talk to me?’

‘Call me Tamara,’ she said. ‘And yes, if Nick trusted you as a friend, then that’s good enough for me.’

Ben saw the connection right away. ‘Tamara, as in the large capital T in Nick’s address book, next to a mobile number?’

She nodded. ‘You’ve been straight with me, now it’s my turn. Nick and I were having an affair for the last eighteen months. That’s to say, I was having an affair with him. I was the one that was married with two kids. It was our secret, obviously. A very well-kept one, until now. I even had a secret phone he used to call me on.’ She paused a long time, then added softly, ‘I loved him so much.’

Now Ben understood the depth of pain in her eyes. She hadn’t just lost a work colleague.

‘Why the gun, Tamara?’

‘It’s my husband’s. I don’t normally …’

‘Walk about the island packing a pistol?’

She shook her head. ‘No, this is one of the safest places in the world. But I’m scared. I’m scared to death.’ The tears in her eyes caught the light. She opened her mouth to speak, then closed it. But the words building up in her throat were too strong to be hemmed in and after a few moments’ hesitation she blurted it out.

‘Nick didn’t kill himself,’ she said.