Twenty-seven frantic minutes had gone by since Ben had received Lynch’s text. Still an hour to go before the first red shards of dawn would come creeping over the hills. Racing towards the scene he saw the blue lights of the Garda vehicles through the darkness and the sheeting rain, and brought the BMW to a slithering halt inches behind them.
On a grassy slope fifty yards from the roadside was the only building in sight, a tumbledown old stone bothy. A century or two ago the tiny primitive structure would have served as a refuge for shepherds – nowadays it was more likely to be used by tramps and drug addicts.
This was the place. Light shone from its only window. There were figures in reflective Garda vests moving in and out of the single entrance. Thick electric cables snaked down the slope, hooked up to the forensic investigation van that had been at the kidnap site the previous evening.
‘Brooke’s in there, isn’t she?’ Amal whispered. His eyes were red and puffy.
‘We don’t know that, Amal,’ Ben replied through clenched teeth. Until the last minute before setting off, he’d been resolved not to wake him up and bring him out here. He regretted his change of mind now.
‘It’s obvious, isn’t it? I can feel it. Oh, God.’
Ben cut the engine and flung open his door. ‘Stay in the car.’
‘You must be kidding. I’m coming too.’
‘I said, stay in the damn car.’ Whatever was in that building, Ben didn’t want Amal to see it. He jumped out of the BMW and sprinted up the steep, slippery path towards the bothy. The building had no door, just a crude stone doorway thick with moss. Ben ran inside. The earth floor was damp-smelling from the long winter months. That wasn’t all he could smell. The place was rank with the stink of death.
The bothy was filled with people and activity and bright lights, but they couldn’t have been there more than forty-five minutes or so. Before that it had been empty and silent. Empty, apart from its grisly occupants.
Almost the first person Ben saw as he rushed in was Kay Lynch. She was standing near the entrance, looking drawn and pallid. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t say much in my text,’ she said in a low voice. ‘I couldn’t get away from Hanratty.’
‘Where are they?’ Ben said. He was breathless, but not from the fifty-yard sprint up the hill.
‘Over there,’ she said, motioning towards the far corner, where the forensics team were clustered around something Ben couldn’t see.
‘It’s not a pretty sight. Are you sure you—’
Ben was already pushing past her. With his heart in his mouth he shoved two cops out of the way and saw what the forensics team were attending to under the white glare of their lights.
‘They were found by the farmer who lives over the hill,’ Lynch said from behind his shoulder. ‘He was looking for a missing sheep when his dog picked up the scent of blood and ran in here. The poor fellow’s being treated for shock now.’
Lying sprawled on the floor were the corpses of a man and a woman. The woman was face down in the dirt. She wore a green cardigan over a red dress. Her bare legs were kicked out at unnatural angles and one of her shoes was missing. From the blueish hue of her skin it was clear that she’d been dead for some time. The right side of her head had been blown away at extreme close range by a gunshot. Her blond hair was thickly matted with congealed blood and pulped brains.
‘Samantha Sheldrake, Forsyte’s PA,’ Lynch said.
Ben felt suddenly dizzy and had to lean against the stone wall. He was boiling with anger at Lynch for not having said more in her message. She could have spared him the torture of the last half hour. But he was too overcome by a strange mixture of relief and horror to say anything. After a few moments his breathing had slowed a little and he turned to look at the other corpse.
Roger Forsyte was recognisable from his pictures, although he looked very different in death, especially after such an obviously horrible death. His face was twisted in agony and terror. His pupils had rolled completely under his lids, so that just the ghoulish white eyeballs stared up at the ceiling. There was no gunshot wound. Forsyte had died some other way. Something much worse.
He had no hands. Somebody had chopped his arms off a few inches above the wrist and tossed the severed body parts across the bothy. From the quantity of blood that had sprayed over the rough walls, saturated his clothing and soaked into the floor, it had been done while he was still alive. Corpses didn’t bleed this much.
The double amputation looked as though it had been carried out with a heavy blade: an axe or a butcher’s cleaver. The shock of such an injury could be fatal, but not always. In his SAS days Ben had seen enough poor limbless survivors of African war atrocities to know that the human body could withstand the most brutal acts of mutilation. No, it wasn’t the hacking off of his hands that had killed Sir Roger Forsyte. Ben observed the telltale signs – the leprous pallor of the skin, the grotesque swelling, the tongue protruding from the lips. Extreme pain, then creeping muscle paralysis and eventual asphyxia. Maybe an hour to death, maybe two. Not a good end. Whoever had done this had intended to make Forsyte suffer, and they’d got what they wanted.
‘He’s been poisoned,’ Ben said.
Lynch gave a dark little smile. ‘In the Poisoned Glen. Someone’s idea of a joke? Looks as if you might have been right, too. There goes our whole kidnap theory.’
And with it had gone any remnant of a chance that getting Brooke back might be as simple as paying over whatever ransom the kidnappers demanded in return for Forsyte. Even if they’d wanted more for the women than the insurance policy could cover, Ben would have happily sold Le Val and reduced himself to a pauper to bring her back.
But that faintest, most tentative shred of hope was dead now. For all he knew, Brooke was dead too, her body dumped elsewhere for another passerby to find, hours, days, weeks from now. Or she might have tried to escape and be lying hurt or dying in a ditch somewhere, anywhere.
Lynch must have been able to read his thoughts from the strain on his face. ‘We’ll keep searching for her. The Dog Support Unit came up from Dublin during the night. We might turn up evidence that she was here. It’s not the end. Not yet.’
Ben didn’t reply. The sight of Forsyte’s mutilated body had set something jangling deep in his memory. He couldn’t bring it into focus; it was like a word on the tip of his tongue that wouldn’t come, gnawing at him, teasing him through the mist of fear and stress and confusion that was clouding his mind. What was it?
Just when it seemed about to come to him, the sound of an angry voice interrupted his thoughts – a voice that was becoming way too familiar for Ben’s liking. Hanratty had spotted him at last.
‘I don’t believe this! Who let him in here? Lynch! Did you tell him about this?’
Ben turned away and stepped out into the rain. It was pouring even harder now, but he could barely feel the cold water running down his face and soaking his hair and clothes. He gritted his teeth and tried to focus on the vague, fleeting memory that still eluded him. What the hell was it that seeing Forsyte’s severed hands had triggered in his mind?
From fifty yards away, Amal had seen Ben emerge from the bothy. He swung the BMW’s passenger door open. The inside light shone on his worried face. ‘Well?’ he called out nervously, expecting the worst.
Ben trudged down the muddy path. ‘There are two bodies in there,’ he said to Amal. ‘Brooke’s not one of them. It’s Forsyte and his PA.’
The tension dropped from Amal’s face. He climbed out of the car. The rain began to spot on his expensive coat. ‘Then she’s alive. I mean, it’s awful. For the others, that is … but Brooke’s alive. Thank God!’
Ben wasn’t sure he had anything to thank God for.
‘She