up with wine, slumped in his chair at the top of the table and began working on finishing the bottle with Storm lying glumly at his feet, having given up trying to cheer his master’s spirits.
The bottle was empty by the time Jeff reappeared soon afterwards. Ben knew from his footsteps in the flagstone-floored passage and the telltale banging open of the kitchen door that his old friend and business partner wasn’t in the best of moods either. Jeff stalked into the room, saw Ben sitting there, stood with his arms folded and gave him one of his patented hard glares.
‘Something on your mind, Jeff?’
Jeff glared a little longer, then said, ‘Out of your league?’
Ben stiffened. Knowing a fight was coming. Jeff wasn’t a man to hold back with his opinions, nor to back down in an argument.
‘That’s right,’ Ben said. ‘I’ve already explained why.’
If Ben had declared he was becoming transgender and henceforth wished to be known as Lolita, Jeff wouldn’t have been looking at him with any more incredulity. ‘Bullshit. What’s the real reason? You getting old? Tired out? Not up to it any more?’
‘I belong here now,’ Ben said. ‘You and I have a business to run, remember? We’ve got bookings coming in every day, more classes than we can handle and a waiting list as long as your arm, we’re expanding all the time, mortgaged up to our eyeballs; and in case you’ve forgotten, we’re in the middle of looking for a second location to grow the business even more.’
That idea had been on the cards for a few months. They’d looked at a couple of rural properties in the south of France, though no commitments had so far been made.
‘To hell with the business,’ Jeff spat.
‘Oh, to hell with the business?’
‘You heard the old man. You saw the look on that woman’s face. They need help, and fast.’
‘He’s not going to hurt her.’
‘He’s not going to give her back, either,’ Jeff said.
‘Kaprisky can easily find someone else to do the job.’
Jeff shook his head. ‘Kaprisky’s going to hit the panic button, is what Kaprisky’s going to do. He’s liable to either bring in the bloody A Team, a bunch of trigger-happy numbskulls who think they’re Dolph Lundgren. Or even worse, he’ll take your advice and call the authorities. Either way he’s going to drive Petrov even deeper underground, or something bad will happen.’
‘That’s the risk,’ Ben agreed. ‘But even if I still worked in K&R, which I don’t, I can’t be in two places at once. If I said yes to Kaprisky, there’s no telling how long I could be away hunting for this guy.’
‘I can draft in a couple of temporary replacements to cover for you. I could call Boonzie. He knows a million guys out there who’d come in at short notice.’
‘I didn’t realise I was so replaceable.’
‘We’ll muddle through somehow.’ Jeff unfolded his arms, reached out and spun a chair out from the table and sat down, leaning towards Ben on his elbows and giving him an earnest, penetrating stare. ‘Seriously. This is what you do, mate.’
‘Did. We’ve moved on, Jeff. I’ve moved on. I’m retired from all that.’
‘Start talking like that, pretty soon you’ll be gathering moss in front of the fire with your fucking carpet slippers on, and a briar pipe in your gob, listening to Bing Crosby albums.’
‘That’ll be the day,’ Ben said.
‘Want my opinion?’
‘Do I have any choice?’
‘Nope. My opinion is that if you don’t find this Petrov guy and bring that girl home, you’ll never forgive yourself. I’ve never known you to turn down a chance to help someone who needed it, and I’m buggered if I’m going to stand by and watch you do it now. If you’re afraid of failing, you just need to look in the mirror, ’cause the guy looking back at you doesn’t do failure. And don’t you dare try to put this on me by talking about the sodding business.’
‘I have responsibilities,’ Ben said.
‘Too right, you do.’
‘I’ve already spent far too long away from home, running around the world doing too much crazy stuff.’
Jeff shrugged. ‘You know what they say. When the going gets tough, the tough get going.’ Jeff always had an appropriately hackneyed saying to hand.
‘Maybe they do. But I wouldn’t want you thinking I was the kind of bloke who’d just up and run off towards trouble at the first beat of the drum.’
Jeff craned his neck closer over the table, and his eyes bulged. ‘Mate, I already know that’s exactly who you are. So get the bloody hell out there and find that little girl and bring her home to her mother. Because you know you want to.’
And so it came to pass that, two hours later, Ben Hope was sitting behind the wheel of his silver twin-turbo Alpina B7 with his old green army haversack on the passenger seat next to him, Miles’ Bitches Brew blasting on his speakers and a 180-kilometre-an-hour wind streaming in the windows as he tore southwards on the motorway towards Le Mans.
Persuasive, that Jeff Dekker. And incredibly perceptive, for all his rough edges. He could read Ben’s mind as if his skull were made of glass. As usual, he was dead right. Because despite all his protests and refusals, Ben had known all along he wanted to do this. He was back in the saddle. Back doing what he did best. And the thought of a missing child was the only thing that could take the smile off his face.
The home and reclusive sanctuary of Auguste Kaprisky was a seventeenth-century castle that had formerly belonged to the Rothschild dynasty. The security cordon its current owner had built around himself made entry into his private world something like accessing the Pentagon. If Ben hadn’t called from the road and left a message with Kaprisky’s PA to say he was coming, the armed guards on the gate probably wouldn’t have let him in at all.
Once inside the perimeter, Ben drove for almost twenty minutes through the vastness of the chateau’s landscaped grounds, past rolling green paddocks where magnificent Arab horses grazed and cantered; past hectares of carefully tended orchards and vines, and along the shores of a perfectly blue glass-smooth lake with boathouses and a jetty where a moored sail cruiser rocked gently in the late afternoon breeze.
Just as it seemed the grounds might go on forever, the fantastical chateau with its baroque architecture and columns and turrets rose up in front of him like a mirage. A classical fountain with a bronze statue of the goddess Diana the huntress dominated the circular courtyard, spouting jets of water that made rainbows in the air. Ben drove around it and crunched to a halt on the gravel, next to a row of cars. Most men of Kaprisky’s wealth would own a collection of the world’s most expensive supercars, but Ben happened to know that his personal vehicle was the battered, ancient Renault
