The Armada Legacy

Chapter Twenty-One

Ben drove. He had nowhere to go, no destination in mind, no longer any plan to work to. He just kept moving because he needed something to do in order to prevent the black despair from swallowing him up.

He’d been so sure he was on the right track. Like a predator steadily closing in on its quarry, that single-minded certainty of purpose had been his only focus, the only thing sustaining him. It seemed ridiculous now, bitterly ridiculous and pathetic.

As he sat there mechanically going through the motions to keep the car on the road, he struggled to get his thoughts in order. But if he was hoping for some miracle of inspiration to strike him out of nowhere, it wasn’t happening. Smoking a cigarette often helped him think; he lit a Gauloise, but it tasted bad and felt self-indulgent, as if he no longer deserved such pleasures. After a few shallow puffs he flicked it out of the window.

He’d been driving aimlessly on and on like that for almost an hour when his phone went off. He had to summon up all his energy just to answer it.

‘It’s Kay Lynch,’ said the familiar voice on the line. ‘How are you holding up?’

‘What do you think?’ he muttered.

‘You don’t sound so good.’

‘I’ll be doing a lot better if you tell me you’ve found her.’

‘I wish I could do that, Ben. We’re still searching.’

‘Until Hanratty calls it off,’ he said.

‘He won’t. And even if he did, I won’t stop. I can assure you of that.’

‘Neither will I,’ Ben said.

‘Yeah, well, we talked about that, didn’t we? Where are you now?’

He didn’t even know. ‘I’m … on a road,’ he muttered.

‘In France, I hope.’

‘No. I’m still in Ireland.’

‘You sound exhausted, Ben. There’s nothing you can do. Go home. Get some rest before you burn yourself out.’

‘Is that why you called me?’ he said with a stab of anger. ‘To tell me to give it up and go home?’

‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I was calling because I’d promised to keep you updated, and something’s come up. Thought you ought to know. It’s, well, it’s a little unusual.’

Ben was suddenly alert again. ‘I’m listening.’

‘Strictly between you and me, all right? My job’s on the line if you breathe a word of this to Hanratty or anyone else.’

‘Strictly between you and me.’

Lynch spoke fast as she filled him in. ‘All right. Forsyte’s and Samantha Sheldrake’s bodies were flown down to Dublin just after dawn this morning for autopsy because we don’t have enough facilities here. Top priority – the lab were at work on it by seven this morning. I’ve been waiting impatiently all day for them to feed back to us. Nothing until just a few minutes ago, when I finally got the reports faxed over. I have them here in front of me.’

Ben heard a rustle of paper over the phone, then Lynch went on: ‘No surprises with Sheldrake. It’s what it looked like, single large calibre expanding handgun bullet to the head, did a vast amount of damage and she didn’t stand a chance. The delay in getting the reports through was down to Forsyte. It’s taken them most of the day to figure out what kind of poison killed him. Turns out it was some kind of extremely rare venom. There’s a chemical analysis here, a whole list of stuff, like serotonin, 5’-nucleo—’ She tutted. ‘Sorry, excuse my lack of medical knowledge here, I’m reading this from the page. 5’-nucleotidase, phosphodiesterase, and it goes on. You still there?’

‘I’m listening.’

‘The first one, the serotonin, causes the victim extreme, unbearable pain. The other two are enzymes responsible for causing tissue breakdowns typical of the kind seen in stingray evenomations. Cause of death was a catastrophic accelerated necrosis of heart tissue, culminating in right ventricular rupture and fatal cardiac tamponade. I had to look that up. It means a massive and sudden accumulation of fluid or blood.’

Ben frowned. ‘Hold on. Did you just say that Forsyte was poisoned with the venom from a stingray?’

‘As strange as it sounds, yup. I phoned them just now to double-check, talked to the lab guy who did the tests. Thank God for chemistry nerds. He’s been working on this for eight straight hours, and he’s never seen anything like it either. But he’s one hundred per cent certain that’s the source. And not just any old stingray, either. He reckons the venom was extracted from a unique freshwater species that only lives in South America. Amazonia, to be precise. That’s been checked out with the zoology department at Trinity College, Dublin.’

‘Amazonia,’ Ben echoed, narrowing his eyes.

‘It’s weird. I mean, this is Ireland, for Christ’s sake,’ Lynch said. ‘And there’s something else, too. The forensic examiner also found a small metal key inside Forsyte’s stomach. It hadn’t been there long, and lacerations inside his throat suggest that he might have swallowed it down in a hurry sometime not long before his death. We think he did it after the kidnappers struck, while the victims were in transit.’

‘What kind of key?’

‘Examination shows that it’s the key to a set of handcuffs. Not the universal type key you can use to open just about any make of cuffs. Looks like it’s some kind of special custom job. We don’t know what to make of it.’

Ben’s mind was working so furiously hard that he was going to crash the BMW if he didn’t pull in. He rolled to a halt on the verge and killed the engine.

Cutting off Forsyte’s hands hadn’t been a reprisal at all, neither by a former IRA man sworn to revenge, nor by anyone else.

‘He had something cuffed to his wrist,’ he said. ‘A briefcase, maybe. That’s what the kidnappers were after, and Forsyte knew it. Must have swallowed the key to try to stop them getting it from him. He obviously didn’t reckon on what they were capable of doing to get the cuff off his arm.’

Lynch sounded doubtful. ‘That was my initial thought too. But then why chop off both hands, not just the one holding the case or whatever it was?’

The obvious answer was as simple as it was callous. ‘To throw us off the mark,’ Ben told her. Like ransom extortionists tossing their phones onto the back of a long-distance lorry to lead the cops astray, the ploy had worked beautifully.

‘It’s highly speculative,’ Lynch said. ‘For a start, we don’t know that Forsyte was carrying anything.’

‘If he had it cuffed to him when he left the country club, someone must have noticed.’

‘Officers already talked to all the staff who were on duty that night.’

‘Every single one?’

‘Yes, everyone, and nobody saw Forsyte leave. He must have gone out a back way to avoid the photographers. Secondly, even if we did know he was carrying, say, a briefcase, we’d still be no closer to knowing who did this.’

‘Not unless we knew what was inside,’ Ben said. ‘If it was something worth killing for, it could lead us back to the killers. And maybe to Brooke.’

Lynch must have heard something in his tone. ‘You and I had a deal,’ she reminded him a little more severely. ‘I agreed to keep you in the loop if you agreed to stay out of this. That’s a condition I need you to respect. You are staying out of this, aren’t you, Ben?’

‘I’m a law-abiding citizen, Detective Sergeant.’

‘I’m glad to hear it. Look, the fact that we have these fresh leads now takes us a step closer to finding her. You need to trust that. Promise me you’ll go home.’

‘I will go home,’ he said.

But he never said when. The instant the call was over he restarted the BMW and slewed it violently round in the road to point back the way he’d come.

‘Sorry, Kay,’ he said out loud.