and hairbrush by the sink, her little wash-bag and shower cap on the shelf.
His head was spinning as he thundered back downstairs. ‘You’re sure you didn’t see her this morning?’ he quizzed Mrs Sheenan.
‘Who?’
‘My friend! Brooke! The woman I was here with.’ With some effort, he managed to drag it out of Mrs Sheenan that he was definitely the only guest who’d come down to breakfast that day.
That was when the panic set in for real. Amal began to tremble violently, first his hands, then his whole body, feeling weak and jittery as though his knees might buckle under him. His brow was damp with cold sweat.
‘I have to call the police,’ he said.
Near Étretat, Normandy coast, France
Ben Hope hauled the Explorer sea kayak onto the little tongue of shingle, wiped his hands on his wetsuit and gazed up at the towering white cliff. The saltiness of the cold air was on his lips. Circling gulls screeched overhead. ‘All right,’ he said, as much to himself as to the cliff, ‘let’s see what you’re made of.’
Sunday morning, and the relaxed pace of life in the little corner of rural France Ben now called home was going on much as it always had. He could hear a church bell chiming from a kilometre or so away inland, summoning to Mass those locals who weren’t enjoying a late breakfast, pottering about their homes, feeding their chickens or still lazing in their beds.
Ben Hope’s way of relaxing was a little different from most people’s. The stretch of shoreline he’d driven the ancient Land Rover to that morning with his kayak lashed to the roof was known locally as the Côte D’Albâtre, the Alabaster Coast, for the chalky whiteness of its sheer, gale-battered cliffs. Nineteenth-century painters had travelled here to depict them; writers and poets had been inspired by them – today he was going to climb them. Partly just because they were there, and because Ben’s idea of pleasure was to set himself challenges that normal folks would have done anything to avoid, and also partly because doing this kind of thing helped him to forget all the churning thoughts that otherwise tended to crowd his mind these days.
After securing the kayak and warming up his muscles with some bends and stretches, he pulled on his rock-climbing shoes and gloves, strapped the lightweight waist pack around his middle, then walked up to the foot of the cliff and reached for his first handhold. He paused as a jolt of pain ran up his arm.
The two bullet wounds sustained on Christmas Day were well healed now. They’d both come from the same small-calibre handgun, but even a .25 could do terrible damage at close range. Ben had been lucky. The first shot had glanced off his ribs and passed on through; only the second, lodged in his shoulder, had caused any difficulty to the surgeon who’d pulled it out. Now there was just a little stiffness, some pain from time to time and another couple of scars to add to the collection of war wounds Ben had accumulated over the last twenty years. The man holding the gun had come off very much worse.
Ben waited for the twinge to pass, then launched himself upwards.
The rock face was sheer. As he made his way higher and higher, the wind whistled around him and the hiss of the surf on the rocks below grew fainter. The summit approached, inch by careful inch. Hand over hand, the pain only served to drive him on, energy exploding inside him and a kind of fierce joy filling his heart.
But even suspended from his fingers and toes halfway up a high vertical slope with a dizzy drop beneath him, he found he couldn’t shut out his thoughts completely. Which wasn’t entirely a surprise, considering that he’d recently come through just about the most tumultuous episode of a life that nobody could have called boring. Few things could shock Ben any longer, but the discovery just before Christmas that he had a grown-up son he’d never known about had hit him like an express train. He’d been reeling from it ever since.
He hadn’t told Brooke about it – hadn’t been able to bring himself to, though he’d been on the verge of telling her a dozen times over the phone during the last few weeks. Now that they were speaking again and there seemed to be a faint hope of reconciliation, Ben was extremely wary of complicating matters and placing an added strain on their slowly-mending relationship. The right time would come.
Ben’s son’s name was Jude Arundel, and until the age of twenty he’d taken for granted that his parents were Simeon and Michaela, the vicar and vicar’s wife of the Oxfordshire village of Little Denton. In reality, Simeon had raised Jude as his own son despite knowing full well that the boy had been the product of a brief romance between Ben and Michaela, back when they’d all been students together at Oxford.
It hadn’t been an easy transition. Jude had only learned the truth in the devastating wake of Simeon and Michaela’s deaths in a car smash. Just as Ben was finding it alien and awkward coming to terms with sudden parenthood, not to mention the loss of his friends, Jude had had a difficult time adapting to the knowledge that his whole upbringing had been a lie, and that the man he’d called his father for most of his life hadn’t been at all. He’d gone through every shade of emotion, from outright denial and disbelief, to furious resentment, to simmering rage and finally a brooding acceptance.
But out of all the friction, a fledgling relationship was slowly developing between Ben and Jude – not so much that of a father and a son, but more like two friends, or even two brothers, one of whom just happened to be twenty years older than the other. The fact that Ben had recently rescued Jude from the hands of a secretive and ruthless government agency called the Trimble Group, who were blackmailing Ben into acting as their gun-for-hire, had helped more than anything to forge their friendship.
When Jude had visited Ben’s French home and place of business, an old farm called Le Val, in mid-January while Ben was still convalescing from his injuries, the two of them had had their first real chance to sit down and talk. Among other things, they’d discussed Jude’s growing disenchantment with his Marine Biology degree course at Portsmouth University. Ben, who’d cut his own Theology studies short twenty years earlier and often wished he hadn’t, had encouraged him to see it through to the end.
Jude wasn’t so sure where his future lay. There were times when Ben could see in his newfound son the same restlessness of spirit that had driven him in his own headstrong, sometimes foolhardy younger days, and wished the boy had taken more after Michaela than himself.
Those worries aside, Ben had deeply enjoyed Jude’s visit. When it was over and he’d driven him back to the ferry port at Cherbourg, he’d suddenly realised how much he was going to miss Jude’s company until the next time they’d meet.
Then it had been back to business. The Le Val Tactical Training Centre was still overbooked with people wanting to acquire the specialised skills it had to offer, skills that only men like Ben, his business partner, ex-SBS commando Jeff Dekker and their team of instructors were qualified to teach. The training schedule at Le Val had never been so busy, which made a Sunday morning getaway like this one all the more welcome.
With a final heave, Ben hauled himself up onto the cliff’s summit. He knelt in the grass, dusted his hands and looked down. The moored kayak was a tiny red sliver far below.
‘There, that wasn’t so difficult,’ he murmured to himself. His heart rate was steady and he wasn’t out of breath. Not in disgraceful shape for an old man, he thought. He mightn’t have bet on still being able to fly through ‘sickeners’,
