the college staff. Ben got himself a mug of black coffee, nothing to eat, and took it over to sit on his own at the bottom end of one of the long trestle dining tables, not too far from the door, intending to gulp down his coffee and slip away without having to get into conversation with anyone.
He glanced at the faces of the others in the hall. They were mostly about his age, and he supposed they were old members from his year, here like him to attend the college reunion. Some of them knew each other and had bundled together into little groups, their laughter and excited chatter echoing in the huge room. He didn’t remember them.
But he quickly remembered the college coffee at the first swallow. It was just as bad as ever. Something on a par with British army coffee, a comparison Ben hadn’t been able to make back in those days. It was too vile to gulp down in a hurry, so he sat sipping it, alone with his thoughts.
That was when a voice from behind him said, in a tone of astonishment, ‘Ben Hope?’
Ben turned, coffee in hand, and looked at the guy standing there, carrying a tray laden with a pot of tea, cup, saucer, jug of milk, bowl of cereal, glass of orange juice. For a second or two they stared at one another. The guy was a little older than him. Neither short nor tall, thin nor plump. Light brown hair beginning to show a dusting of grey around the temples. The face was very familiar. Even more than the face, the eyes. Sharply green, filled with a mischievous kind of sparkle as they peered closely into Ben’s.
‘Ben Hope, it is you, isn’t it? Of course it is. My God, how long has it been?’
‘Nicholas? Nicholas Hawthorne?’
‘Thank God, you remember. I was beginning to think I must have aged beyond recognition. Not you, though. You haven’t changed a bit.’
‘I know that’s not true,’ Ben said. ‘But thanks anyway.’ He motioned at the empty space next to him at the table. ‘Will you join me, Nicholas?’
‘Why, gladly.’ Nicholas Hawthorne settled himself on the bench seat beside Ben. There was that strange, hesitant uncertainty between them that you got when old friends who had gone their separate ways were reunited after many years, and the ice needed to be rebroken. ‘It’s just Nick these days,’ he said with a smile. ‘I only use Nicholas as a performance name. The agent’s idea. He says the formality of it is more appropriate to the classical market. But never mind boring old me. What about you? You’re the last person I ever expected to see here.’
‘Me too.’
‘What have you been doing with yourself all this time?’
‘Oh, this and that.’ The fact was, very little of what Ben had done in the last couple of decades could be discussed in anything more than the vaguest terms. Even if he could have talked about it, and hadn’t been the kind of person who preferred to keep things to himself, the details would only upset most normal, gentle folks for whom his life of risk, trouble and danger would seem alien, even frightening. He’d come prepared for that. His strategy was to provide the briefest and sketchiest account of himself possible, keep it vague and dodge direct questions. He said, ‘I live in France now.’
‘Business or pleasure?’
‘Bit of both.’
‘Are you married? Children?’
Ben shook his head. The easiest answer. The truth was complicated. Like most things in his life.
‘I wouldn’t have thought so, somehow. Not the children part, anyway. Nor me. Too busy with work.’ Nick paused. ‘Actually, what I heard is, you ran off and joined the army. Did very well there, or so the rumour went.’
‘You shouldn’t listen to rumour,’ Ben said.
‘Very true,’ Nick said, laughing. ‘Not that I was the least bit surprised to hear it.’
‘No?’
‘Absolutely not. I mean, the wild man of Christ Church, the legends of whose exploits still echo around the college walls?’
‘I 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
