Passenger 13

CHAPTER SIX

A small crowd of people quickly gathered as villagers came running down the road and a couple of cars stopped. Someone gave Ben a tartan travel blanket, and he used it to cover Hilary’s body. He stayed at her side until the police and ambulance came, when the paramedics took over and he returned to the empty pub.

Still numb, Ben gave his witness statement to one of the uniformed cops, watching out of the window as he watched the paramedic team load Hilary’s broken body into the ambulance and take her away. There was no siren. No hurry.

Until the last minute, he’d been quite prepared to tell the cops the truth and give them an exact account of what had happened. Then he thought about the things Hilary had told him. Don’t trust the police. Her voice echoed in his mind, along with the voice of his conscience that was tormenting him for having failed her so badly. He hadn’t listened. Hadn’t taken her seriously.

And now he was thinking: what if she’d been right?

‘Your name?’ the cop said.

The guy looked like an arsehole anyway. Ben didn’t like his officious manner. ‘Oscar Gillespie,’ he replied. It was the first name that came into his head, an unholy mash-up of two of his favourite musicians.

But it seemed to do just fine. The cop wrote the name down on his form. Obviously not much of a jazz fan. ‘Do you have any ID? Driving licence?’

Ben could see his parked BMW from where he was sitting. ‘I got the train. No ID on me.’

‘Address?’

‘No fixed abode.’

‘Occupation?’

‘None,’ Ben said.

The cop looked at him, then asked, ‘Your relationship to the deceased?’

‘A friend of the family, on her mother’s side,’ Ben said. ‘We’d come from her father’s funeral.’

‘The barman says you were arguing.’

‘She was upset,’ Ben said. ‘Most people would be, if their father had just committed suicide. I was trying to calm her down. She became emotional and ran out into the road. I didn’t see anything until I heard the impact. By the time I got to her, the van driver had already left the scene. I suppose the guy panicked when he saw what he’d done. Maybe he thought there were no witnesses.’

The cop spent a while noting it all down. ‘You didn’t get the registration of the van?’

‘No,’ Ben said. ‘I didn’t get the registration.’

The cop gave him a speech about needing to be contacted if there were any further questions or the possibility of attending an ID parade. Ben said yes to everything, and gave him a false mobile number to call. Then, once the police had left him alone, he bought another drink from the sullen, shocked-looking barman and sat with it a while, replaying the scene in his mind. He’d witnessed a lot of bad things in the last few years, but he knew this one was going to stay with him a long time.

Two options: one, the whole thing had been a terrible accident. A woman who believed she was being followed had just happened to be run down by a van with no registration plates, whose driver had just happened to be the kind of guy who would drive off and steal her phone into the bargain — the phone on which she’d just happened to have received an apparently crucially important message.

The second option couldn’t possibly make any less sense than that. Ben boiled it down: Hilary had been right about being followed, but it hadn’t been her car they’d been tracking. The target had been her phone, and the man sent to kill her had also been under orders to retrieve it. Even ordinary civilians had some inkling that the technology required to triangulate mobile phone signals was a big deal. High-level stuff. The same was true of having people killed when they knew too much — or when someone thought they did.

Ben thought about the message Nick Chapman had left for his daughter. Whatever the hell it meant, somebody out there had been prepared to kill to obtain it.

He finished his drink. Laid the empty glass on the table. He looked at his watch, checked the date.

Eleven days and twenty-one hours still to go before he was due to return to the SAS Regimental Headquarters at Credenhill, Herefordshire, and catch his transport back out to Iraq.

Eleven days and twenty-one hours that he owed to Nick and Hilary Chapman.