The Ben Hope Collection - Scott Mariani

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jacket pocket. He straightened up. He’d forgotten the ball. He estimated the throw from the ejector and tried to figure out where the shooter might have been standing.

      A thought began to form in his mind. There was nobody about. He reached down and brushed the dog’s head pensively with his fingers. ‘Come, boy.’ They walked back to the car. He opened the hatch and Max bounded inside, tongue lolling. The spare wheel was strapped to the inside wheel arch, and he unfastened it. He rolled it back down to the lakeside.

      The fog was thickening all the time, and when Kinski sent the spare wheel trundling out across the frozen lake all he could see was a fuzzy patch of blackness against the grey ice. The wheel rolled to a halt, then fell over and lay still. The ice held its weight.

      He reached inside his jacket and popped open the thumb-strap of his holster. He flipped off the safety on his service SIG-Sauer P226, looked around him, then fired at the ice where the wheel lay. The flat report of the 9mm pistol jabbed painfully at his eardrums and echoed far across the lake. He fired again, and again, then waited.

      The ice cracked. Fifteen yards from the shore, the spare wheel slipped into the water with a gurgle.

      Kinski wasn’t thinking about the cost of replacing an expensive Mercedes wheel. He was thinking about the weight of a man. Thicker ice would take more cracking. How much more? Would twenty-one rounds of 9mm do it? He felt in his pocket and heard the dull jangle of the spent cases that his gut was now telling him had been lying here since last January.

       Chapter Thirteen

       Oxfordshire

      The video-clip was shaky and the picture quality was poor and grainy. The camera panned slowly around a big stone-walled room that was lit orange-gold by hundreds of candles. Long shadows lay across the black and white tiled floor. Three thick stone pillars stood in a wide-spaced triangle around the edges of the room, reaching to the vaulted ceiling. Against the far wall stood a raised platform, looking like a small stage. Above it, a golden sculpture of a ram’s head with long, curled horns glittered in the flickering light.

      Leigh frowned. ‘What the hell is this place?’

      ‘I can hear something,’ Ben muttered. He turned up the volume on the laptop. The sound was the heavy breathing of whoever had been filming. Suddenly the camera whipped sideways and the picture became confused. ‘Oh, fuck’, said a frightened voice, close into the microphone.

      ‘That’s Oliver’s voice,’ Leigh whispered. She was gripping the edge of the table with white fingers.

      They watched. The camera righted itself. A dark, craggy edge obscured a third of the picture. ‘He’s hiding behind a pillar,’ Ben said.

      Some people were coming into the room. Blurred at first, the picture jerky, then sharpening up as the autofocus kicked in. The men filtered in through an archway. There were twelve or fifteen of them, all wearing black suits. The camera retreated further behind the pillar.

      ‘Olly, what were you doing?’ Leigh said with a sob in her voice.

      Now the men were arranging themselves in a semicircle around the raised platform. They all stood in the same way, like soldiers standing to attention with their feet together and their arms clasped behind their backs. Their faces were hard to make out. The nearest was standing only a few feet from where Oliver was hiding. The camera hovered on the man’s back, travelled up to his neck and his cropped sandy hair. It autofocused on his ear. It was mangled and scarred, as though it had once been half torn off and sewn back on.

      Ben turned his gaze on the platform, straining to make out the details. He realized what he was looking at was an altar. It was the focus of the room, illuminated by dozens of candles set in recesses in the wall. The centre of whatever was about to happen. It was like some kind of religious ceremony. But none that he’d ever seen before.

      In the middle of the altar was an upright wooden post, maybe a foot and a half thick and about eight feet high, rough and unvarnished. Lengths of chain hung from it, two of them, thick and heavy, fastened to a riveted steel belt around the top of it.

      Now there was movement. A tall iron door behind the altar swung open. Three more men came into the large room. Two were wearing black hoods. The third seemed to be their prisoner. They were clutching his arms. He was struggling. They dragged him across the platform to the altar.

      The camera wobbled and the heavy breathing was quickening. In the background, the prisoner’s cries were echoing off the stone walls.

      ‘I don’t think you should see this,’ Ben said. He could feel his own heartbeat beginning to race. He reached for the Stop button.

      ‘Let it play on,’ she snapped back.

      The men in black hoods shoved the prisoner against the wooden post and manacled him to the chains. His cries were louder now.

      One of the hooded men stepped forward with something in his hand. He went up to the prisoner and raised his hands up to the man’s face. He had his back to the camera and it was hard to see what was happening. The prisoner’s screams were becoming shriller and he was struggling wildly against the chains.

      Then the hooded man stepped away. There was something hanging from the prisoner’s mouth. It was a thin rope or cable. As the hooded man stepped away the cable was pulled tauter and Ben realized with a horrified lurch what was happening. The camera was beginning to shake badly.

      ‘Oh Jesus!’ Leigh exclaimed in horror. ‘They put a hook through his tongue!’

      The hooded man stopped and turned to face the audience. The cable was pulled as tight as it would go. The prisoner couldn’t scream any more. His tongue was stretched six inches out of his mouth. His eyes were bulging, his body quaking.

      The second hooded man came forward. Something glinted in the candlelight. He raised the ceremonial dagger above his head.

      It came down in a flashing arc. The prisoner’s head was thrown backwards as his tongue was sliced off. The cable snaked away like a bowstring with the glistening tongue attached. Blood spurted from the prisoner’s mouth and his head jerked from side to side, his eyes rolling.

      But his suffering was cut short. The hooded knifeman stepped forward again. The dagger came in low and stuck deep into the man’s abdomen. The blade sawed and stabbed like a butcher’s knife, slicing a path from groin to ribcage.

      When his guts began to spill, even Ben had to look away.

       Chapter Fourteen

      It had taken a long time to calm Leigh afterwards. Eventually, the tranquillizers began to take effect and she lay sleeping on the hotel bed, her black hair spread across the pillow and her body rising and falling slowly.

      Ben covered her with a blanket and sat beside her on the edge of the bed, watching over her and thinking hard. Then he stood up, went back to the desk and watched the video-clip again.

      He watched it three times, pausing it frequently to study the details. He watched it right to the end. After the victim was disembowelled the cameraman had had enough. The picture went jerky, dark, then jerky again. He could hear Oliver’s ragged breathing. He was running.

      Ben kept pausing the clip, staring at the screen. Stone walls. Some kind of staircase. The picture was crazy but by pausing frame by frame he could just about make it out. As Oliver ran on, the rough stone walls disappeared and he seemed to be in what looked like a very opulent house. A doorway, then a corridor. Shiny wood panels. A painting, brightly illuminated by a lamp above its frame. Ben paused the clip and studied it closely.

      It was hard to tell, but the painting seemed to show some kind of meeting. The setting was

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