Kroll listened impassively, looking at the snowy hills rolling past.
The voice went on, sounding more hopeful. ‘But we have found her again. I have an address for you.’
Kroll reached for a notepad and wrote as he listened. He ended the call without a word, then pressed a button on his console. A small flat-screen TV flashed into life and he pressed play on the DVD control. Kroll looked intently at the screen. He’d seen this before. He enjoyed watching her.
She was reclining in a large armchair in a television studio in London. Her face was animated as she spoke to her interviewer. She wore a creamy cashmere dress and a string of glittering pearls that contrasted strikingly with her jet-black hair.
‘She’s something, isn’t she?’ said Kroll’s assistant.
Kroll didn’t look away from the screen. ‘She certainly is,’ he replied softly. He stopped the video playback. The screen went dark. He fixed the other man with cold eyes for a second before glancing down to the notebook on the seat next to him. He tore off the top sheet and handed it to the younger man. ‘Make the necessary arrangements, Jack,’ he said.
The village of Aston
West Oxfordshire
It was dark by the time they reached the sleepy village. Ben had the taxi drop them in the square. They bought a few provisions from the village shop and called a local taxi service to take them the two miles to Langton Hall.
The country house lay secluded in its own land, among wintry oaks and willows at the end of a long, twisty driveway. Its gables and chimney-stacks stood silhouetted against the dark blue sky, and moonlit frost glittered on the roof. The windows were in darkness. An owl hooted from a nearby tree.
Leigh unlocked the heavy oak front door and quickly punched a number into a wall panel to disable the alarm system. She turned on the lights.
‘Nice place.’ Ben’s voice echoed in the empty entrance hall. He looked around him, admiring the ornate wood panelling and the sweep of the wide staircase.
‘It will be when it’s all done up,’ she said. She shivered. ‘Cold, though. The boiler’s almost as old as the rest of the place and the heating doesn’t work.’
‘No problem,’ he said. ‘I’ll get the fires going. We’ll soon warm the place up.’
‘Thanks, Ben. There’s a pile of logs in the woodshed.’
He followed her into a large stone-floored country kitchen and laid the plastic bags of shopping on a long pine table. He checked that the old-fashioned lock on the kitchen door worked, then quietly slid open a drawer and found what he was looking for. He discreetly slipped the carving knife inside his jacket.
‘Leigh, I’m going to fetch some logs and take a look around the place. Lock the door after me.’
‘What…’
‘Don’t worry, just being cautious.’
Leigh did what he said. The big iron key turned smoothly in the lock and she heard his footsteps moving away up the corridor.
She opened a bottle of village-shop wine. There were some beakers and basic cooking equipment stored in the walk-in pantry. She took a heavy cast-iron skillet down from a hook and laid it on the gas range.
She smiled to herself as she took a box of eggs out of one of the shopping bags. It was strange, having Ben Hope around her again after all these years. She’d loved him once, loved him madly enough to have thought about giving up her career for him even before it had begun.
‘You’ll like him,’ Oliver had said that day. And he’d been right. Her brother’s new army friend wasn’t like the others she’d met. She’d just turned nineteen, and Benedict-as he’d been introduced-was four years older. He had an easy smile and a quick mind. He’d talked to her like no other boy had ever done before. Until then she’d thought love at first sight was a fairy-tale, but it had happened to her with him. It hadn’t happened to her since, and she could still remember every day of those five months they’d been together.
Had he changed a lot since those days? Physically he didn’t seem that different. His face was a little leaner, perhaps. A little more careworn, with more frown-lines than laugh-lines. He was still toned and in perfect physical shape. But he had changed. The Ben she’d known back then had been softer and gentler. He could even seem vulnerable at times.
Not any more. Through Oliver she’d heard enough about Ben’s life during the intervening fifteen years to know that he’d seen, and perhaps done, some terrible things. Experiences like that had to leave a mark on a person. There were moments when she could see a cold kind of light in his blue eyes, a glacial hardness that hadn’t been there before.
They ate sitting on the hearth-rug in the unfurnished study. It was the smallest room in the cavernous house, and Ben’s crackling log blaze had quickly chased the chill from the air. Firelight danced on the oak panels. In the shadowy corners of the room, packing cases and tape-sealed cardboard boxes were still piled up unopened from the move.
‘Fried egg butties and cheap wine,’ he said. ‘You should have been a soldier.’
‘When you work the hours I do, you learn to appreciate the quick and simple things in life,’ she said with a smile. The bottle between them was half-empty now and she was feeling more relaxed than she had for days. They sat in silence for a while, and she let her gaze be drawn by the hypnotic rhythm of the flames.
Ben watched her face in the firelight. He had a clear image in his mind of the last time they’d sat alone together like this, a decade and a half earlier. He and Oliver had been on leave from the army and had travelled up to mid-Wales together to the Llewellyn family home in Builth Wells. The old merchant townhouse, once grand, had by then grown tatty and neglected with the decline of Richard Llewellyn’s antique piano restoration business. Ben had only briefly met Leigh and Oliver’s father, a kindly, heavy man in his mid-sixties, with a greying beard, a face reddened by a little too much port and the sad eyes of a man widowed for six years.
It had been evening, the rain lashing down outside, wind howling through the chimney. Oliver was taking advantage of his week’s freedom to go in search of pulchritude, as he had put it. Richard Llewellyn was up in his private study, as he always seemed to be, poring over old books and papers.
Alone downstairs, Ben had built a roaring log fire and Leigh had sat by him. They’d talked quietly for hours. That had been the night of their first kiss. There hadn’t been many.
He smiled to himself, returning to the present-watching her now, the flickering glow on her cheek. Neither time nor fame had changed her.
‘What are you thinking about?’ he said.
She turned away from the fire to look at him. ‘Thinking about you,’ she said.
‘What about me?’
‘Did you ever marry, find someone?’
He was silent for a moment. ‘It’s hard for me, with the life I lead. I don’t think I’m the settling kind.’
‘You haven’t changed, then.’
He felt the sting of her words, but said nothing.
‘I hated you for a long time,’ she said quietly, looking into the flames. ‘After what you did to me.’
He said nothing.
‘Why didn’t you turn up that night?’ she asked, looking round at him.
He