The Lost Relic

Chapter Forty-Six

Rome

Urbano Tassoni and his two bodyguards had long since taken up residence in the morgue downtown, but the villa was still swarming with police and forensics. Darcey and Buitoni left their car in the street and threaded through the cluster of vehicles parked up in front of the house.

Darcey was feeling tired, hot and ratty as they walked in through the entrance hall. A few snatched hours’ sleep, a cool shower and a change of clothes hadn’t done much to alleviate the smarting frustration of letting her target slip through her fingers the night before, and she’d just spent the whole morning in a fruitless attempt to get hold of the surveillance tapes that the Italian police had, according to some vague information from on high, taken from Tassoni’s place shortly after the killing. But now, after she’d bludgeoned Buitoni into chasing up a hundred people who either didn’t answer their phone or simply passed callers from this desk to that department to some other idiot who didn’t seem to know what day it was, it seemed that the whereabouts of the key evidence showing the assassin Ben Hope escaping from the scene of the murders were a complete mystery. It riled Darcey Kane to boiling point when things stood in her way like this.

‘I don’t know why you wanted to come here,’ Buitoni said at her shoulder. ‘They’ve already gone through the place.’ A large plaster covered the cut over his left eye where the falling timber had gashed him.

‘Same reason I wanted to see those bloody tapes,’ she told him without looking at him. ‘To pick up the details that other people usually miss.’

‘How lucky we are to have you,’ Buitoni muttered. He’d been testy all morning. She fired him a glance, but let it go and scanned the crime scene in front of her.

Three sprawled outlines on the floor and the stairs showed where the dead men had lain. Judging their angle and pos ition, Darcey walked over to where the shooter would have been standing when the shots were fired. A mirror on the far wall had been shattered by a bullet that had passed through one of the bodyguards. Behind the smashed glass, the round had chewed a hunk of masonry the size of a pineapple out of the wall. The same had happened with one of the shots fired at Tassoni himself. The bullet had travelled at an upwards angle over the stairs, done its work on the man and gone on to penetrate the plasterwork a metre or so behind where his head had been.

Darcey stepped over the police tape and climbed the stairs. Peering into the bullet hole in the wall, she could see daylight shining through from the other side. She walked across the landing to a door, nudged it open with her toe and found herself inside a brightly lit room that was all glossy wood panels and expensive repro antiques. After expending maybe two-thirds of its muzzle energy blowing out Tassoni’s brains, the bullet had punched through in here and finally come to a stop in the heart of an ornate grandfather clock that stood against the far wall. It looked like the forensics people had already been here to retrieve the bullet for testing and matching. There wouldn’t be much left of it, just a flattened, distorted mushroom of lead alloy bearing only faint traces of the rifling marks from the gun barrel.

Darcey crossed the thick cream carpet and examined the dead clock. Its gold-tipped hands were frozen at precisely three minutes to six. The piece was dressed up to look like something from an eighteenth-century chateau, but through the splintered mahogany case she could see where the bullet had taken out a thoroughly modern radio-controlled quartz movement. The kind of clock that would lose maybe a second every couple of million years or so. Which meant its testimony could be pretty well trusted. Tassoni had met his maker at exactly three minutes to six.

But Darcey was less concerned with that than the fact that the bullet had made it as far as here in the first place. It didn’t fit Ben Hope’s profile to use such a weapon for this kind of job. It clashed with her instinctive understanding of the guy. A big, noisy, over-penetrative .357 Magnum hand cannon was more the kind of gun you’d expect to find stuck in the belt of a crass thug like Thomas Gremaj. A bad boy piece, for cocky little dickheads who modelled themselves on what they saw in bad action movies, holding the thing sideways and screaming ‘Fuck you, asshole!’ at their victims before spraying bullets all over the place with reckless abandon. That wouldn’t be the style of a man who had been through the SAS training mill. From the killing house at Hereford to the jungles of Borneo and the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, the lessons were ground so deeply into these guys that they never forgot. Darcey would have bet her left thumb that Ben Hope’s instinctive choice for a killing like this, as second nature to him as brushing his teeth or tying his shoelaces, would have been a suppressed 9mm automatic using subsonic ammunition. Neat and discreet, clinical and professional. No excess noise, no hideous mess, no going up against three opponents with only six rounds in the cylinder.

Still, she thought, even the best of them can lose their edge.

Then again, had the man who’d escaped her last night seemed like someone who’d lost their edge?

Her phone buzzed in her pocket. She carried two, one SOCA-issue and the other her personal phone, which she seldom used. It was her own phone that was ringing. She wondered who could be calling her.

‘Darcey Kane.’

No reply.

‘Who is this?’

Still nobody spoke. Just the sound of heavy breathing on the other end.

‘Fuck off, then,’ she said, and ended the call. She checked the incoming call records. The number had been withheld.

She was still frowning about it when Buitoni turned up. ‘I’ve seen enough,’ she told him. ‘Take me back to the office.’

An hour later she was in Roberto Lario’s empty office in the Carabinieri headquarters. She’d had no stomach for lunch. The police cafeteria coffee was strong enough to stand a spoon up in, and was keeping her going just fine.

As she’d pretty much expected, the Tassoni surveillance tapes still hadn’t materialised. Nor had a single trace of Ben Hope. The streets of Rome seemed to have just swallowed him up.

She was thinking seriously about lobbing her coffee cup at the wall when Lario walked into the office looking rumpled and harassed. He tossed a file on the desk in front of her.

‘Interpol agents visited Hope’s business premises in Normandy early this morning,’ he said. ‘That is the statement they took from his colleague, Jeff Dekker.’

By the time Lario had slumped in a chair, rubbed his eyes and straightened his tie, Darcey had scanned to the end of the statement. Loud protestations of Hope’s innocence, naturally. She swivelled her chair round, grabbed a laptop with a wireless Internet connection and tapped in Ben Hope’s business web address. She scrolled through the site until she came to Jeff Dekker’s name, clicked on it and studied the image of the dark-haired man that came up onscreen. Dekker’s military record was clipped to the statement Lario had given her. He was a couple of years younger than Hope. Royal Marines, followed by five years in the Special Boat Service. Then a spell doing private contract work, before he’d left to join Hope’s operation in France.

Darcey kicked the swivel chair away from the desk and faced Lario. ‘You talked to Ben Hope, before the Tassoni killing.’

Lario nodded. ‘Right here in this very office.’

‘What kind of man did he seem to you?’

Lario shrugged. ‘Articulate. Calm. Intelligent. Capable.’

‘You were sitting here face to face with him, and you didn’t see anything out of the ordinary?’

Lario spread his hands. ‘What can I say? The man sat there. He was rational. He was perfectly normal, considering what he had just been through. He told me he was here on business—’

‘Did you ask him what kind of business?’ she cut in. ‘It did not strike me as being important. In any case he was due to fly back to England the next afternoon.’

‘And you believed that?’

‘Why would I not?’

‘Did you check it out?’

‘There was no reason to. He was not under suspicion at the time. He was l’eroe della galleria. I had no cause to suspect this man presented any threat to Tassoni or anyone else—’

She raised a hand to interrupt him. ‘So you just let him walk out of here, and the rest is history. More than a little slack, don’t you think?’

Lario’s face reddened and his eyes bulged. ‘How old are you?’ His tone was hard and challenging.

‘If it’s any of your business, I’m thirty-five.’

‘I have been a police officer since you were just a small girl. I’m not going to be treated like a fool by some raggazina.’

Darcey let him have a cool smile. ‘Let’s say I have every respect for your vastly superior experience and intuition. So educate me, Roberto. Why did Ben Hope kill Tassoni?’

Lario said nothing.

‘Maybe you think he didn’t do it?’

Lario was silent for a moment longer, then got up and headed for the door. ‘I have nothing more to add at this time, Signorina,’ he said brusquely.

‘That’s Commander,’ she fired at his back as he strode out of the room. But he was already out of the door and slamming it behind him. ‘Prick,’ she muttered under her breath and went back to the website to get the number for Le Val. She snatched up the phone and dialled. ‘Jeff Dekker, please.’

‘Speaking,’ said the voice on the other end. He sounded pleasant, but tense with worry. When she introduced herself, the pleasantness vanished and the worried tone turned to hostility.

‘Get lost. Drop dead.’

Darcey took a breath. She kept her voice soft and steady. ‘Don’t hang up, Mr Dekker. Please.’

‘I haven’t anything more to say than what I told the other arseholes who turned up here early this morning,’ Dekker said angrily. ‘You want to know what I told them, read my statement.’

‘I’m looking at it,’ she said. ‘Then you know exactly what I think. You’re hunting the wrong man.’

‘If he’s innocent, he has nothing to fear from us. He needs to come in. He needs to talk to me.’

Dekker chuckled grimly. ‘You’re wasting your time, you know. All of you. You haven’t a clue what you’re dealing with.’

‘I have a pretty fair idea,’ Darcey said.

‘And meanwhile, whoever did this is laughing their pants off.’

‘Have you heard anything from Ben?’

‘What makes you think I’d tell you if I had?’

‘Because you want to help your friend,’ Darcey said calmly. ‘He can’t run forever. I know how clever he is, but he’s not Superman. He’ll surface. They always do, and when that happens some trigger-happy cop fresh out of the academy is liable to put one in his back. So I suggest that the best thing you can do for Ben is to help me do my job and resolve this situation.’

Jeff Dekker paused, and when he spoke again, the defensive tone in his voice seemed to have slackened a little. ‘Ben called here.’

Darcey stiffened. That information wasn’t in Dekker’s police statement. ‘When?’

‘Yesterday afternoon. He left a message on the office phone, but I didn’t pick it up until just a couple of hours ago, after the Interpol people had left. We’ve been getting storms here. The phone lines go down sometimes.’

Darcey snatched up a pen and a notepad. ‘What did the message say?’

‘Don’t get too excited,’ Dekker said. ‘He was just checking in. He was calling from Rome airport. Said he was just about to leave for London, and that he’d be back home again in a couple of days or so.’

‘What time was this?’

‘Around four.’

‘And he didn’t say anything else?’

‘Only that his flight was delayed. I told you not to get too excited.’

Darcey’s heart had sunk again. ‘And you have no idea where he is now?’

‘No, I don’t. As though I’d tell you if I did.’

‘Why was he travelling to London?’

‘That’s personal.’

‘Nothing is personal in a murder investigation, Mr Dekker.’

‘Because it’s where his girlfriend lives,’ he said after a beat. ‘Name and address?’

Dekker sighed irritably, and then told her. Darcey wrote it down. ‘Brooke Marcel. Is she French?’

‘Half French, on her father’s side. Don’t think she’ll tell you anything different from what I’ve said.’

‘What was the purpose of Ben’s trip to Italy?’

‘I think he mentioned something about wanting to kill this guy called Tass-something.’

‘Please, Mr Dekker.’

‘He was there to offer a job to someone.’

‘A job?’

‘Here at Le Val. I imagine you’ve seen the kind of work we do.’

‘And I imagine you can tell me the name of this person he was looking to employ?’

‘Yes, I can,’ Dekker said. ‘Though it won’t do you any good whatsoever. And if you’re thinking of calling him, let me tell you he’s not as warm and fuzzy as me.’

‘Thank you for the warning. I’d appreciate that name,’ Darcey said patiently.

Jeff Dekker told her.

She made him repeat it, then wrote it down on her pad underneath the details for Brooke Marcel.

She thanked Dekker, put the phone down and sat for a long time staring at the name of the man he’d just given her.