don’t know about that,’ Ben said. He hoped he wasn’t about to be treated to one of the stories. They weren’t ones he wanted to hear.
He didn’t have to. Nick seemed to pick up on his unwillingness to discuss the legend that had been young Ben Hope, and quickly changed the subject.
‘It’s so good to see you again. What on earth brings you back to Oxford?’
Ben replied, ‘As a matter of fact, you do.’
Which was true, in a sense. Though only a few days earlier, the name Nick Hawthorne was just the vaguest scrap of a distant memory, a faint echo from another life. But some echoes have a way of coming back to you just when you least expect them.
Ben had been sitting in the prefabricated office building across the yard from the old stone farmhouse, tucked away at the heart of a fenced-off compound deep in the sleepy backwaters of rural Normandy. A place called Le Val, a place he had strayed away from too many times. A place he now felt happy to call home. Spring was springing, the sun was shining, and all was pretty much okay with the world, apart from the fact that he was working on a Sunday, and the stack of paperwork piled on his desk that he had to finish ploughing through by lunchtime.
The joys of running a business. But he couldn’t complain. The enterprise he co-directed from this secluded base along with his partners, Jeff Dekker and Tuesday Fletcher, was growing steadily every quarter. Ben and Jeff had founded it a few years back and it would soon get to the point where they might have to expand to a second location, somewhere suitably remote and isolated, maybe further south where the climate was softer and they could spread out a little more.
For the moment, though, they were rattling on just fine and had established a comfortable, if by necessity slightly detached due to the nature of the business, rapport with the majority of the locals. In an area where most folks were farmers, or cheese makers, or small-scale cider and calvados producers, the idea of a bunch of British ex-servicemen setting up a tactical training centre to instruct military, police, hostage rescue and elite close-protection teams in some of the finer points of their trade must have seemed a little odd. The tall perimeter fences, KEEP OUT signs and roving German shepherd guard dogs might equally have unsettled one or two folks, not to mention the crack of high-velocity gunfire that was often to be heard rolling over the countryside from the safe confines of Le Val’s five-hundred-metre range. They certainly unsettled Jeff’s new fiancée, Chantal Mercier, who taught at a local primary school and frowned upon such gung-ho activities. Ben could see trouble ahead there, but he kept his mouth shut and didn’t interfere with his friend’s affairs.
Right now, Ben had his own affairs to deal with. And he heartily wished someone would come and interfere with those by relieving him of all this damned bureaucratic red tape. Paperasse, they called it in France. Ben had other words to describe it. Jeff often joked that you needed a licence to fart in this country, and he wasn’t far off the mark.
The latest irritation they had to deal with was the need for a special import licence to obtain firearm components, even though the contents of the Le Val armoury were already itemised and catalogued down to the last screw and spring. There was a guy called Lenny Hobart in Surrey making what he claimed were the world’s best, lightest and most stable tactical sniper bipods out of titanium and carbon fibre. Ben and Jeff were interested in trying them out and maybe buying in a few to use on the rifle range, where Tuesday had taken over as head sniper instructor to the SWAT teams who came to Le Val to train.
And so, Ben was due to travel up to Surrey in a few days, meet Hobart at the Stickledown shooting range in Bisley and put one of his prototypes through its paces at twelve hundred yards. At that kind of distance, where the wind was fickle, the very curvature of the earth came into play and even a microscopic amount of rifle cant could knock a bullet’s point of impact way off course, anything you could do to improve the chances of hitting your mark was a definite boon. If the new bipod lived up to the claims of its inventor, Ben planned on coming home with half a dozen, with a view to ordering more.
Enter the French government, who in their wisdom now insisted on making him trawl through an additional raft of forms just to obtain a few inert bits of machined titanium, carbon fibre, spring steel and rubber. Making the world a safer place.
Ridiculous. You could do more hurt to a person with a candlestick.
Ben spent a few more minutes soldiering on through reams of officialese that might as well have been written in Yupik or Pawnee, then decided to give it a break. He was leaning back in his chair and enjoying his fourth untipped Gauloise cigarette of the morning when it occurred to him that he would be more usefully employed working on clearing the backlog of emails in his spam folder.
The Le Val email server had been getting bombarded with a lot of unsolicited mail recently. Offers of cut-price Viagra, phishing scams of one kind or another, and so many messages from prospective Russian brides called Tatiyana or Olga or Mayya, invariably 28 years old and offering to send images of themselves that Ben had been starting to wonder what Tuesday was getting up to online. He was getting almost as fast with the delete button as he was with a pistol.
Working his way through the pile, Ben came across an undeleted message from somebody called Seraphina Lewis. He glanced at the name for a fraction of a second before his finger gave its reflex twitch and got rid of it. Nice try, he thought. An unusual name. Intended to draw attention, maybe, as the scammers and phishers became more sophisticated in their techniques. The part of Ben’s mind that still recalled anything from his theology studies from two decades earlier, before he’d dropped that future life to join the army and then the SAS, flashed up the name Seraphina as being the feminine derivative of the biblical Seraphim from the Book of Isaiah. Why he still retained such information inside his head, he had no idea. The Seraphim were the fiery-winged beings, high-placed in angelic hierarchy, who fluttered around the throne of God in heaven. Maybe the oblique reference to ‘the fiery ones’ was supposed to convey a subconscious image of hot, burning passion. Or maybe it was meant to project a sense of purity and innocence to catch the unwary recipient and lure them to read more.
Either way, by the time those thoughts had flickered through his mind at the speed of light, the email was already in the trash and he was turning his attention back to his paperwork.
But then Ben hesitated. Something else was unusual about the message. More than the name, it was the email address itself. He could see it still imprinted like a ghost image on his retinas: the suffix @chch.ox.ac.uk. The official domain name for Christ Church, Oxford.
Ben’s old college. Which, as strange as that seemed, meant that the email was genuine, and meant for him. Ben hesitated a moment longer, then clicked open the trash folder and saw the unread message there at the top, above the collection of Viagra ads and Tatiyanas and Mayyas waiting to be permanently binned.
‘Okay, Seraphina,’ he muttered to himself, ‘let’s see what it is you wanted.’ Donations to help restore some crumbling part of the college’s architecture, no doubt, or to pay for de-moling the Dean’s private garden or restore the paintings in the art gallery that nobody ever looked at anyway. He clicked again, and the message opened.
Strange indeed, but stranger things had happened in his life.
The message wasn’t the begging letter he’d expected. Rather, it was a month-old invitation to all former members of the ‘House’, that being the rather grand name by which his old college Christ Church colloquially referred to itself, studiously avoiding the word ‘college’ as a way to elevate itself above its smaller, less prestigious siblings. None of which could boast having a city cathedral as their college chapel, for instance, or thirteen British prime ministers and at least one English monarch among their illustrious alumni.