The Armada Legacy

Chapter Eight

Evening had fallen like a black shroud and their conversation had lapsed into a heavy silence by the time Ben stopped the car. He cut the engine but left the headlights on, spilling a broad pool of white light across the road and carving through the slowly-drifting fog of drizzle.

Amal looked up from his lap as if emerging from a trance, and saw that Ben was checking his phone. ‘You expecting a call?’ he asked.

‘From a guy called Starkey,’ Ben muttered, frowning at the phone.

‘Who’s that?’ Amal asked, but Ben was too preoccupied to answer. There had been no call. He tutted and shoved the phone back in his pocket.

‘What is this place?’ Amal said, peering through the glass.

Ben said nothing. He got out of the car. The night felt damp. He could hear the whisper of the Atlantic in the distance, and smell the salt tang in the air.

‘This is where they were taken, isn’t it?’ Amal said ominously, climbing out of the passenger side and hugging his coat tightly around him.

Ben just nodded grimly. He wanted to break into a run, but forced himself to walk calmly towards the lights and activity he could see up ahead. As he made his way up the road he glanced left and right, up and down, drinking in details.

He hadn’t walked far when he paused in his stride. Faintly discernible on the glistening wet road surface by the glow of the BMW’s headlamps were the traces of heavy skid marks where a car had pulled to an emergency stop. He considered them for a moment and then continued a few steps further, before pausing again and turning to look to his left, where a small section of the roadside verge had been cordoned off with markers and police tape.

A short distance further up the road was a second set of tyre marks. The vehicle that had made them had a wider wheel track than the first, and judging by the curve of the marks it had overtaken at speed and then swerved across the road from right to left, screeching to a stop. What was odd about the second set of tyre marks was the additional smudge of rubber that seemed to indicate that the vehicle had been shunted sideways after coming to a halt. He pictured it in his mind.

Ben knelt down and pressed a fingertip against the cold, wet road. Lifting it back up, he examined the tiny flake of paint stuck to it. It was white on one side, blue on the other.

He flicked it away, stood up and walked on again. Some thirty yards ahead on the right-hand side of the road, a large area of the verge and the ground beyond was barricaded off and illuminated by blazing halogen floodlights perched up on tall masts, haloed by drifting moisture. Rows of cones and a temporary traffic control had been set up to filter what few vehicles might pass by through the narrowed gap. Three Garda Land Rovers were parked off-road, casting their flashing blue glow over the rugged ground.

Tucked in in single file behind the row of cones sat an empty Toyota Avensis patrol car, an ageing unmarked Vauxhall Vectra and a van that Ben guessed belonged to the forensic team he could see combing the large field to the right of the road, their reflective vests shining yellow in the distance. The van’s number plate bore the county identifier D for Dublin: his guess about the forensics guys having to come all the way from the Garda HQ in the capital had been correct. That didn’t make him feel any better.

He wasn’t hugely surprised either to see that, some twenty hours or so after the fact, the cops were only now getting themselves organised to conduct a proper search and remove the crashed Jaguar XF from the scene. A pair of uniformed officers were standing back watching as the vehicle was winched up onto a flatbed lorry. All that would be left behind were the skid marks and the pieces of debris littering the verge at the foot of the large roadside rock that Ben could make out in the glow of the recovery vehicle’s swirling orange light. The Jaguar’s front end was badly crumpled and it was obvious it had hit the rock at some speed after skidding violently to the right.

Even more noticeable were the bullet holes that had chewed up the Jaguar’s rear bodywork and shredded its back tyres.

Ben swallowed. The particular kind of hole made by a nine-millimetre full metal jacket round as it punched through thin sheet steel was a very familiar sight to him. He’d seen enough bullet-riddled vehicles in enough war zones all over the world to tell at a glance that this kind of damage was the work of fully-automatic weapons. Whoever had carried out the attack, they were disturbingly well equipped and not afraid to use it.

Ben sensed a presence next to him and turned to see that Amal was standing at his shoulder.

‘Oh, my God, look at the state it’s in,’ Amal groaned as the recovery crew started securing the Jaguar to the lorry’s flatbed. ‘It looks even worse than it did on TV. How could anyone—?’

Survive that, Ben knew Amal had been about to say. And under normal circumstances, Amal would have been right. Nothing could walk away from that kind of firepower.

Unless …

‘See where most of the damage is?’ Ben asked him, pointing. ‘The mass of the gunfire was concentrated on the car’s undercarriage, not the bodywork at passenger height.’

‘So what does that mean?’

‘That the gunmen were aiming to disable and stop it, not to kill everyone inside. If they’d wanted to do that, it would have been easy for them.’

Amal nodded, but didn’t seem much reassured.

Ben couldn’t feel entirely reassured either. He didn’t want to think about the amount of lead that had been sprayed into the car with Brooke inside, or the fact that a stray bullet could easily have ripped a path through enough layers of thin steel and plastic and leather to find its mark. But the thought wouldn’t go away. He kept seeing Brooke’s face in his mind, and he wondered with an icy chill whether he’d ever see it again for real. His hands felt shaky and he was breathing fast.

But there was no time for sentimentality here, he reminded himself with an effort. He had to keep his wits about him or he’d be about as much use to her as the police.

‘What are we doing here?’ Amal asked. The cold and damp were getting to him, making him shiver.

‘I wanted to see it for myself.’

‘So you’ve seen it. What happens now?’

‘I need a moment,’ Ben said. He left Amal hovering uncertainly as he walked a few yards closer to the crime scene. Among the sparse grass of the verge near the cordon was a tall flat rock, wet and glistening under the floodlights and the blue swirl from the police vehicles. Ben leaned against the rock and reached into his jacket’s hip pocket for his crumpled pack of Gauloises and his Zippo lighter. He fished out a cigarette and lit it, but after a few seconds the drizzle had made the paper soggy and his heart wasn’t in it anyway. He tossed the fizzling cigarette down into the grass at his feet, and was mechanically crushing it into the dirt with the heel of his boot when he felt something under his sole and looked down.

It wasn’t a pebble. He dropped into a crouch and poked around in the wet grass. When he found the small object, he held it up to the light to examine it closely.

‘What’ve you found?’ Amal asked him, walking across.

Ben didn’t reply. Clasping the object in his palm he stepped over the police tape to look for more.

An angry yell made him turn to see a short, stout figure in a flapping raincoat marching rapidly towards them from the direction of the Land Rovers.

‘Hoi! You! This is a police crime scene!’ As the man approached, shouting and gesticulating at them, Ben could see in the glare of the overhead floodlights that it was a plain-clothes detective, a stockily-built guy in his mid fifties or thereabouts.

‘That’s him,’ Amal said in a low voice. ‘Hanratty, the one I told you about.’