Bring Him Back

7

The Dover base of Finley & Reynolds Investigations Ltd was situated at the end of a tree-shaded terrace of tall three-storey Victorian houses that were now mostly offices apart from one or two residential properties, on a narrow street on the edge of town. Ben had come across quite a few low-rent gumshoe private dick operations in his time, but Finley & Reynolds wasn’t one of them. A sporty Jaguar was among the cars parked in a railed-off area in front, and a wall plaque engraved with the company name glittered in the late-afternoon sun.

He’d known even before leaving Jersey that these guys wouldn’t talk to him. Improvisation was the key in such cases.

He climbed the steps to the front door, which sported a handsome, gleaming brass lion’s-head knocker below a stained glass window panel. More olde worlde charm, doing a fine job of offsetting the stigma that was hard to detach from the sometimes inevitably seedy domain of private investigations. Ben pushed through the heavy door and found himself in a spacious white lobby filled with artificial plants. A woman smiled at him from behind a desk as he walked over.

He didn’t smile back at her. Instead, he clasped a hand to his cheek and twisted his face as if in terrible pain. ‘Think it’s a bloody abscess,’ he said indistinctly. ‘How quickly can I be seen?’

The woman stared blankly at him for a second, then understood. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said with a frown of sympathy. ‘You’ve got the wrong place. The dental surgery is next door. But I think they’re shut on a Saturday.’

Ben mumbled a tortured apology and hurried out. By the time he’d reached the door, a quick sideways glance had told him the location of the alarm system control box a few feet from the entrance, what type it was and how to disable it. This kind of stuff wasn’t exactly new to him.

But it would have to wait a few hours. Toothache miraculously vanished, the patient walked the half mile back to the bed and breakfast he was staying in. There he sorted through some of the kit he always carried in his bag: the mini-Maglite; the set of locksmith’s picks made to resemble an innocent ring of Allen wrenches; the Yale universal bump key that looked just like an ordinary house key and was disguised on a ring of real ones, capable of opening most locks; and a pair of thin leather gloves. Nothing that could mark him out too obviously as a burglar, should a nosy cop decide to take a look inside his bag.

Ben bided his time quietly until early evening. Having never liked breaking and entering on an empty stomach, sometime after seven he made his way to a nearby pub, ordered a steak and lingered for a long time over a couple of pints of Guinness when what he really wanted was whisky.

He was the last to leave the pub at closing time. From there, he took a long stroll along the seafront, then made his way down onto the beach where he leaned back on a bench and watched the lights twinkling on the water while he chain-smoked the last of a packet of Gauloises. It wasn’t quite his own little secluded stretch of shingled Galway beach, though, and the intrusive Saturday-night thump of music drifting down from a nightclub on the esplanade kept reminding him how he missed his sanctuary in Ireland. When the green glow of his watch dial read one-thirty, he shouldered his bag and began making his way back towards the detective agency.

The parking area in front of Finley & Reynolds’ offices was empty now, the rails gleaming dully by the amber glow of the streetlights. Ben slipped on his gloves as he neared the steps. A plain white van and a couple of residents’ cars sat along the kerbside, but other than that, the street was deserted.

He didn’t pause at the bottom of the steps to glance about, or go darting quickly up to the door. The furtive ones were always the ones who got spotted. With all the casual ease of someone who’d worked there for years and was just popping back late to pick up some documents they’d forgotten, he approached the door and took out his bumper key. If that didn’t work, the lock picks would make fast work of it. Once he was inside, the thirty seconds’ delay before the alarm system sounded would be ample time for him to open up the alarm control box and disable the power and phone wires. He’d reconnect them before leaving, so that nobody would ever know he’d been there. In and out: the SAS way, except without blowing anything up.

The bumper key slid into the lock. He felt the serrations engage in the cylinder. Just one twist, and he’d be in.

But just as the lock was about to open, the side door of the van parked at the kerbside slid open with a scrape and a clang. Three dark figures piled out and instantly raced across the pavement to the steps of the building. Figures clutching impact weapons.

Ben instinctively ducked the object that came slicing towards him. The tapered aluminium shaft of the baseball bat swooshed through empty air where his head had been half a second earlier, and smashed into the stained glass window panel on the door, instantly setting off a high, keening alarm.

‘That’s just great,’ Ben said. But he couldn’t afford to worry about that now. The strike that had just been aimed at him would have killed him if he hadn’t moved fast. And that was upsetting. So was the sight of the knife in the hand of one of the other attackers.

At times like these, Ben didn’t have to think about what to do. Thinking was too long-winded a process. Thinking got you killed. So he simply reacted. Fast. Faster than anything any of the three had ever seen before, or could even have imagined.

In less than a second, he’d gained control of the thick end of the baseball bat and jabbed the handle end hard and fast towards its wielder, aiming at the strip between the eyeholes of the ski mask. The round pommel of the bat hammered into the bridge of the guy’s nose with a soft crackling crunch and sent him sprawling backwards down the steps, knocking down the man behind him. The third attacker managed to dodge out of the way and came at Ben with the knife. Ben saw it coming, that slim little four-inch blade glittering like a tongue of flame under the streetlight as it darted towards his stomach.

With his back to the door and nowhere to retreat, he twisted aside; the knife missed him and the force of the stab sent its sharp tip thunking into the wood. Before the man could wrench the blade free, Ben had broken his wrist. Then, without hesitation, he grasped the collar of the man’s jacket and drove his head so hard into the iron railing alongside the steps that the bars bent.

Ben let him collapse in an unconscious heap, plucked the knife out of the door and turned to face the other two, who’d picked themselves up. The one with the smashed nose was unsteady on his feet and pouring blood from under his mask. The other was brandishing his bat but looking much less sure of himself now that it was all on him to finish the job. Ben saw the fear in his eyes, and knew it was over. With barely a glance at their stricken comrade, the two of them retreated quickly to the van. The uninjured one leapt into the driver’s seat, twisted the ignition and hit the gas. The van took off with a wheel-spinning screech and a roar, and went snaking wildly off up the street.

The alarm went on keening, shrill and insistent. Ben’s plan was already blown — now he had just a short time to press some truth out of his remaining attacker. ‘Wakey, wakey,’ he said, slapping him hard about the face and shaking him. The man’s eyes fluttered groggily open in the holes of the ski mask.

‘Nice to know who your friends are, hmm?’ Ben said to him as the escaping van skidded round the corner out of sight. As the man put up a half-hearted struggle, Ben kicked him all the way down the steps, hauled him roughly upright, slammed him hard up against the wall and ripped the mask off his head. He was about thirty. Crew cut, brutish features, scarred cheek. ‘They find you in the pages of a comic book?’ Ben said.

Lights were coming on in the residential part of the street as the alarm began to draw attention. Time was getting shorter by the instant, and Ben wasn’t going to waste words. The guy gasped in terror as the edge of the blade pressed against his windpipe with just enough pressure to break the first layer of skin. The broken wrist and fingers were all but forgotten now. He looked into Ben’s eyes and saw the look that left him in no doubt: here was someone who would not hesitate to saw his head off if he didn’t talk, and fast.

‘Who sent you?’ Ben demanded. Over the shrilling of the alarm came the sound he’d been afraid he’d hear any moment. Saturday night in Dover with little to do, the cops were on the prowl. The siren wasn’t too far away. They’d be here in a minute.

‘I said, who sent you?’ A little more pressure with the blade. Another layer of skin. The thin trickle of blood looked black in the street light.

‘Hunter!’ the man wheezed in panic, desperately trying to pull back from the touch of the blade.

Ben frowned. ‘Drew Hunter?’

‘Yeah—’

‘Where’s the boy?’ Ben rasped, his eyes just inches from the guy’s. He ground the blade’s edge harder against his throat. Any more, and it would sink in so deep that he wouldn’t ever talk again.

‘Aagh! I don’t know!’

The howl of the siren was drawing close. Ben took his eyes off his captive for an instant and saw the swirling blue halo and the blaze of headlights at the end of the street. Time to leave. He let the guy slide down the wall and slump bleeding to the pavement. Picked up his bag and slipped away round the side of the building just as the police car came tearing into sight. There was a little fenced yard at the back, a screen of conifers between it and the neighbouring property. Ben tossed the knife, vaulted over the fence. Without a sound, he merged into the shadows and was gone.