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 falling, it’d been accidentally kicked out of sight under the armchair. He’d picked up the fallen chair, her fleece and her bag. She’d stooped down to snatch up her personal items. Neither of them had noticed the pouch still lying there.
He wondered whether she’d missed it on her way back towards the guesthouse. Had that been why she’d been running towards the cottage as the men chased her?
The pouch was about four inches by five, soft black lambskin with a larger main compartment and a smaller zippered pocket on its front. He already knew what she kept inside. He hesitated a moment, thinking that perhaps he ought to turn this stuff over to the police as possible evidence.
The idea didn’t linger long in his mind. Opening up the main compartment, he found her notebook. He flicked quickly through it and saw pages of notes, names of places she’d visited on her travels about Ireland during her stay. Laying the notebook aside for the moment, he unzipped the front pocket. There were her two phones, a well-worn BlackBerry and a much less expensive Samsung pay-as-you-go type of device that still had the protective plastic over the screen and the glossy look of a recent purchase.
Ben thought hard, casting his mind back to when he’d first met Kristen and had been walking along the beach. She’d taken the leather pouch from her bag, removed one of the two phones and checked it for messages, and then seemed frustrated when there hadn’t been any. She’d said she’d been hoping to hear back from someone, and that it was something to do with her research. He remembered how she’d seemed a touch anxious, not wanting to say too much about it.
At the time, it had meant nothing. Now, just maybe, it meant a great deal.
Which phone had she been using? He gazed at the two side by side, and his memory told him it had been the cheap Samsung. He turned it on. The first thing to check was her list of contacts, as an important caller might be among them. But the contact list was empty: either all entries had been deleted, or there had been none to begin with. He pressed the ‘back’ key and then, following a hunch, went into the SMS messages menu.
He wasn’t surprised to find nothing other than a ‘welcome, new user’ message from the service provider, dated three days earlier. As he’d suspected, this was a brand-new phone, barely used and so fresh from the box that Kristen might even have bought it here in Ireland, in the middle of her research trip.
Why had she felt the need for a second phone? he wondered. Could it have anything to do with the discovery she’d claimed to have made ‘a few days ago’? Ben pondered the possibility and its implications.
Leaving the messages menu, he checked her call history. As expected, she hadn’t used the phone a great deal. In fact she’d made exactly three calls with it, all on the same day as the received text from the service provider, which was to say the day she’d bought it. The first call had been to an overseas landline number, with the international prefix for the USA. Kristen had called it at 3.04 p.m., local time, speaking for just a few seconds. The second call had been made less than ten minutes later, at 3.12. It was to another landline, this time in London, and had lasted seven minutes.
Some time later, at 5.22 p.m., she’d made her third and final call, this time to a mobile number, again in the USA. It was the longest in duration, at thirteen minutes. There was a growing American connection here – but what did it signify? If indeed it meant anything at all, he thought.
Checking the received calls, Ben found just one. It had come in at 5.18 p.m. the same day as the others, and it was from the same London number she’d dialled a little over two hours earlier. Whoever had called her obviously hadn’t had much to say, keeping her on the line for less than two minutes. Almost immediately afterwards, she’d called that US mobile number. No traffic either way since.
Ben returned to the landline call Kristen had made to America, pressed ‘options’ and called the number again while glancing at his watch. It was after three here, morning there. A woman’s voice came on the line. ‘Tulsa City Hall. Mayor’s office. May I help you?’ She spoke with a nice southern twang.
Mayor’s office? Surprised, Ben had to think fast. Morning, this is Ronnie Galloway in London. I’m following up the call to your office from my colleague, Kristen Hall, three days ago.’
‘Uh-huh. What’s it regarding?’ the woman asked curtly.
‘I’d need to speak to the mayor about that,’ Ben said.
‘And you work for …?’
‘Marshall Kite Enterprises,’ Ben replied. Marshall Kite was Brooke’s investment banker brother-in-law. Ben had no compunction about using his name. Sensing the woman’s reticence, he pressed on in a brisk tone. ‘Listen, we have an issue here that I need to get cleared up as a matter of priority. Can I confirm that my colleague Ms Hall contacted your office three days ago?’
His bluff threw her a little. ‘Uh, hold on, let me check.’ Pause. ‘Uh, yes, I’m showing a call from a Kristen Hall for the mayor on that date. But—’
‘Did she speak to the mayor personally?’ Ben asked, interrupting.
‘No, he wasn’t available. Can I ask—’
‘She didn’t say what she wanted to talk to him about, did she?’ Ben said, cutting her short again. This conversation was getting crazier by the second, but he had nothing to lose by pushing.
‘Who is this?’ the receptionist snapped.
And with that, Ben knew he’d got all he could out of her. ‘Thanks. Have a nice day,’ he said, and ended the call.
What the hell was Kristen doing calling the mayor of Tulsa? Ben racked his brains pointlessly for a few moments, then moved quickly on to the next number on his list, the call she’d made to London. There was no reply, and no answering service, so he immediately followed up by trying the American mobile she’d called.
Another dead end. Whoever it belonged to had it switched off.
Ben turned to Kristen’s other phone. As he’d suspected from its appearance, the BlackBerry had had a lot more use and was crammed with numbers, many of them personal calls to her parents and
