Just after ten, on a clear, cold night in late February, and the moon-glow over the Donegal Atlantic coast cast a speckled diamond glimmer across the dark sea. High above the shoreline, a solitary car was weaving its way along the twisty coastal road, leaving behind the distant lights of the Castlebane Country Club and heading inland towards Rinclevan on the far side of New Lake.
The chauffeur of the black Jaguar XF was a square-shouldered former Grenadier Guard called Wally Lander. He kept his eyes on the winding road and drove in silence, studiously detached from the conversation of his passengers: his employer Sir Roger Forsyte, Forsyte’s personal assistant Samantha, Sam for short, and an auburn-haired woman Wally had never seen before. Attractive, he could tell from the couple of discreet rearward glances he’d snatched at her – very attractive in fact, wearing a tight-fitting black dress that he frustratingly couldn’t see enough of in the driver’s mirror. He presumed she must have attended that evening’s Neptune Marine Exploration media event and was now coming along as a guest to this private party, which would probably last well into the wee small hours. Maybe something to do with Sir Roger’s latest caper, Wally mused. If she was alone, that meant she was almost certainly single. Definitely worth a crack at it. There was a chance he’d get to chat to her at the party, find out more about her.
Wally couldn’t know it yet – none of them could know it – but that would never happen. Because Wally didn’t have very long to live.
Nor would Wally ever know the mystery woman’s name. It was Brooke Marcel, or Dr Brooke Marcel, when she was in her professional capacity as an expert consultant in hostage psychology and former visiting lecturer at the Le Val Tactical Training Centre in Normandy, France. Tonight, though, she was just here as a guest of her friend Sam, who was sitting between Brooke and Sir Roger, all clipped efficiency with a tiny netbook resting across her knees and its screen reflected in her glasses as they ran through some NME business details together. Sir Roger had loosened the tie he’d put on for the presentation and was leaning comfortably back against the Jaguar’s cream-coloured leather.
As Sam started detailing the plans for the following day, Brooke tuned out and drifted back to the thoughts that preoccupied her so much of the time, with the same mixture of emotions that always came flooding back whenever Ben was on her mind.
She wished he could have been here. He loved Ireland, would have been completely in his element here on the Donegal coast. Maybe she’d been wrong in coming without him – but the fact was, she’d been plain too nervous to ask him. The wrong signals, she’d worried. Moving too fast, trying to force things prematurely. Or something like that. She didn’t know any more. For a gifted and highly trained psychologist, it struck her how little she understood her own feelings.
Ben Hope. What an enigmatic, complex man he was. Even before they’d got together she’d been aware he had ghosts in his past, stuff you could never ask him about and which he kept fiercely private; so closed, and yet he could be so open, so warm and tender. Sometimes she felt as if he’d been there all her life; sometimes as if she’d never known him at all.
As she gazed out of the window at the rocky landscape flashing by in the car’s lights, Brooke wondered whether her troubled relationship with Ben would ever recover. It had started so blissfully, only to crash and burn so senselessly just when it was beginning to look as though it could last forever.
The crash had come in September. The autumn months had been a forlorn, empty time, drowning herself in her work; the Christmas holiday without him had been almost unbearably miserable. Then, slowly, slowly, over the last couple of months had dawned the prospect of a possible reconciliation. The phone conversations between her home in London and his in France were growing longer and more frequent. Sometimes he even called her.
It was still fragile, though, still just a tiny candle flame that might be snuffed out at any time. There were moments when Brooke thought he was holding