the most famous and recognisable pieces of edged weaponry of all time, used in every modern American war from Vietnam to Iraq.
Assuming that Detective Inspector Healy had the wits to understand what Goudier had told him, the cop was most likely supposing that a type of weapon so easily available from a thousand mail-order outfits to anybody over eighteen wasn’t a key indicator in this case. Ben could see two problems with that:
One, Healy’s stamping ground was a place with the lowest violent crime rate in the whole of the British Isles.
Two, the guy was an idiot.
An inexperienced idiot, who’d probably never dealt with a single stabbing before and wouldn’t stop to think that the vast majority of knives used in crime were kitchen knives. Ubiquitous, cheap to obtain, not a big deal to throw away after the dirty was done.
The Ka-Bar, on the other hand, was an expensive and sought-after specialist tool. Which instantly set this case apart. No low-end thug would contemplate kitting themselves out with such a high-end item to butcher somebody, only to have to chuck it away afterwards. But a trained killer, someone used to handling such weapons and proficient in their use … that person might.
Ben was building a profile in his mind. A profile of two men who’d done this kind of work before and knew the kind of gear that suited them for the job. Men who had no problem taking the risk of carrying a piece of concealed military hardware about with them in public. Who’d come through an extensive and rigorous training, possibly several years long over the course of a military career – and not at the spit-and-polish, square-bashing level of a simple squaddie either. Which meant that, in the darker corners of the civilian world where they could find employment, their deadly skills wouldn’t come cheap.
No matter how much they enjoyed using them.
Now the question was where the money came from, and why. Who was financing these guys? Someone with contacts and resources, who also had some reason to feel threatened by whatever it was that Kristen Hall had dug up in the course of her research travels in Ireland. The wrong kind of knowledge had killed more people than bullets. There was no question in Ben’s mind that Kristen had been one of that kind of casualty.
Knowledge of what? Find the answer, reveal the motive. Find the motive, and the money trail would lead right back to source.
Only one problem there. Ben had nothing to go on.
By the time he reached the cottage, he was drenched and his head had begun to ache badly again now that the last dose of painkillers he’d taken at the hospital was wearing off. He felt suddenly weak, almost despairing. Something had to take the edge off. Something.
The whisky bottle and tumbler stood on the dresser where he’d left them yesterday evening. Before he’d even thought about drying himself off and getting out of his damp clothes, he impulsively made a beeline for the booze. The bottle was empty, but there was still a couple of inches in the tumbler.
He reached out to snatch it up – then stopped as the realisation hit him, full force, that this was the same glass of whisky he’d been about to gulp down at the very moment Kristen was being attacked. He drew his hand back and stood for a moment staring at the tumbler.
What the hell are you doing?
He reached out again, picked the glass up together with the empty bottle and marched into the kitchen. He tossed the bottle in the recycling bin, then resolutely poured the contents of the glass down the sink. Then he marched back into the other room, grabbed the box containing the rest of his whisky stash and carried it, jinking and clinking, to the kitchen sink. He dumped it heavily on the draining board. Thrust his hand inside the box and yanked out the first bottle by the neck, like a chicken about to be placed on the block for slaughter. For an instant of terrible weakness, he gazed at the familiar label and the warm caramel-hued liquid inside the clear glass. He sighed, then ripped open the foil, plucked out the cork and upended the bottle over the sink.
Seven bottles, over one gallon of ten-year-old cask-strength Islay single malt. By the time the last of it had washed down the plughole, Ben’s eyes and nose were full of the fumes and the small kitchen reeked like a distillery.
‘There,’ he said fiercely.
The afternoon rain was falling steadily outside, streaming down the windows. His head was aching worse. But he didn’t care. He kicked off his shoes and went digging in his luggage for the pair of trainers he remembered having packed but hadn’t worn in weeks. The moment he’d finished lacing them up, he launched himself out of the cottage door and into the rain.
Once upon a time, he’d run this beach every day. End to end, taking in the whole curve of shingle from beyond his former home all around the headland, there was a five-mile stretch that had been his regular morning exercise, to which he’d added the punishing regimen of press-ups, sit-ups and crunches that had kept him at peak fitness. He could spend hours at it without getting out of breath. Damned if he wasn’t going to prove to himself he could get back into that condition again.
The pain and breathlessness were already on him after the first mile, but he just gritted his teeth and kept on through the rain, letting his anger and remorse push him harder. His feet pounded over the rocks, every step jarring his aching head. His muscles screamed. His lungs felt raw as he gasped in as much rainwater as air. On and on, willing himself to keep moving by reciting inside his head the motivational lines from the James Elroy Flecker poem, The Golden Road to Samarkand, that had for many years been an unofficial motto of his old regiment and were inscribed on the clock tower at the SAS headquarters in Hereford:
We are the pilgrims, master; we shall go
Always a little further: it may be
Beyond the last blue mountain barred with snow,
Across that angry or that glimmering sea.
When he eventually staggered back inside the cottage, he could barely stand. He left a wet trail across the varnished living room floorboards before collapsing in an armchair near the dresser. His legs and calves were inflamed beyond pain. Groaning, he lifted his right leg to rest his ankle on his other knee, unlaced his wet, dirty trainer, peeled it off along with the wet sock and flung it carelessly across the room. He let his bare right foot flop down to the floor like a dead piece of meat, then went to remove his left shoe.
As the sole of his bare left foot slapped heavily to the floorboards, a lancing pain jolted all up his leg. He winced loudly and bent down to inspect the sole of his foot, then swore as he saw the thin, triangular shard of glass stuck into the flesh. He grasped the shard between finger and thumb and plucked it out. A trickle of blood ran down his foot and dripped to the floor. The cut wasn’t bad, but now he was even more annoyed with himself that he couldn’t manage to sweep up a bit of broken glass without leaving half of it lying about.
Cursing, he got down on his hands and knees to search for more fragments that might have found their way under the armchair, an accident waiting to happen. He grabbed the bottom edge of the armchair’s frame and tipped it up a few inches to reveal a dusty square patch on the floorboards. There were no more shards of broken glass under there.
But there was something else.
He reached underneath the armchair and retrieved it.
It was a black leather pouch. And it wasn’t his.
Ben sat back on the floor and inspected the pouch with a growing frown on his face, trying to think how it had got there. So much had happened since, but now he remembered how Kristen’s bag had been hanging over the back of the wooden chair to dry out. When, a little tipsy from the Laphroaig, she’d upset the chair and the bag had dropped to the floor, the pouch must have spilled out along with the other items. He could only guess that when she’d stumbled and reached out for his arm to stop herself from