The Armada Legacy bh-8 Read online

  ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘The first one, the serotonin, causes the victim extreme, unbearable pain. The other two are enzymes responsible for causing tissue breakdowns typical of the kind seen in stingray evenomations. Cause of death was a catastrophic accelerated necrosis of heart tissue, culminating in right ventricular rupture and fatal cardiac tamponade. I had to look that up. It means a massive and sudden accumulation of fluid or blood.’

  Ben frowned. ‘Hold on. Did you just say that Forsyte was poisoned with the venom from a stingray?’

  ‘As strange as it sounds, yup. I phoned them just now to double-check, talked to the lab guy who did the tests. Thank God for chemistry nerds. He’s been working on this for eight straight hours, and he’s never seen anything like it either. But he’s one hundred per cent certain that’s the source. And not just any old stingray, either. He reckons the venom was extracted from a unique freshwater species that only lives in South America. Amazonia, to be precise. That’s been checked out with the zoology department at Trinity College, Dublin.’

  ‘Amazonia,’ Ben echoed, narrowing his eyes.

  ‘It’s weird. I mean, this is Ireland, for Christ’s sake,’ Lynch said. ‘And there’s something else, too. The forensic examiner also found a small metal key inside Forsyte’s stomach. It hadn’t been there long, and lacerations inside his throat suggest that he might have swallowed it down in a hurry sometime not long before his death. We think he did it after the kidnappers struck, while the victims were in transit.’

  ‘What kind of key?’

  ‘Examination shows that it’s the key to a set of handcuffs. Not the universal type key you can use to open just about any make of cuffs. Looks like it’s some kind of special custom job. We don’t know what to make of it.’

  Ben’s mind was working so furiously hard that he was going to crash the BMW if he didn’t pull in. He rolled to a halt on the verge and killed the engine.

  Cutting off Forsyte’s hands hadn’t been a reprisal at all, neither by a former IRA man sworn to revenge, nor by anyone else.

  ‘He had something cuffed to his wrist,’ he said. ‘A briefcase, maybe. That’s what the kidnappers were after, and Forsyte knew it. Must have swallowed the key to try to stop them getting it from him. He obviously didn’t reckon on what they were capable of doing to get the cuff off his arm.’

  Lynch sounded doubtful. ‘That was my initial thought too. But then why chop off both hands, not just the one holding the case or whatever it was?’

  The obvious answer was as simple as it was callous. ‘To throw us off the mark,’ Ben told her. Like ransom extortionists tossing their phones onto the back of a long-distance lorry to lead the cops astray, the ploy had worked beautifully.

  ‘It’s highly speculative,’ Lynch said. ‘For a start, we don’t know that Forsyte was carrying anything.’

  ‘If he had it cuffed to him when he left the country club, someone must have noticed.’

  ‘Officers already talked to all the staff who were on duty that night.’

  ‘Every single one?’

  ‘Yes, everyone, and nobody saw Forsyte leave. He must have gone out a back way to avoid the photographers. Secondly, even if we did know he was carrying, say, a briefcase, we’d still be no closer to knowing who did this.’

  ‘Not unless we knew what was inside,’ Ben said. ‘If it was something worth killing for, it could lead us back to the killers. And maybe to Brooke.’

  Lynch must have heard something in his tone. ‘You and I had a deal,’ she reminded him a little more severely. ‘I agreed to keep you in the loop if you agreed to stay out of this. That’s a condition I need you to respect. You are staying out of this, aren’t you, Ben?’

  ‘I’m a law-abiding citizen, Detective Sergeant.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it. Look, the fact that we have these fresh leads now takes us a step closer to finding her. You need to trust that. Promise me you’ll go home.’

  ‘I will go home,’ he said.

  But he never said when. The instant the call was over he restarted the BMW and slewed it violently round in the road to point back the way he’d come.

  ‘Sorry, Kay,’ he said out loud.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  South America?

  It took a while for the initial shock to pass. Once Brooke’s mind had settled enough for her to think more clearly and the lingering effects of the tranquillisers had worn off, she paced the luxurious suite of rooms – her gilded cage – and tried to understand what in the world was happening to her. One minute on a couple of days’ break in Donegal, the next whisked halfway round the world for no reason she could imagine.

  It was hard to shut out of her mind what those people had done to Roger Forsyte; even harder to stop replaying the sickening memory of what had happened to poor Sam. Her eyes wouldn’t stop clouding with tears every time she thought about her dead friend.

  Clearly, Forsyte had been the target, for some reason connected to whatever was inside that briefcase attached to his wrist. Sam and Brooke had both been in the wrong place at the wrong time, Sam because of her job and Brooke just from sheer wild chance.

  Then why was she here now? Why had these men who’d murdered her friend brought her here to this villa, or whatever the hell it was?

  The clothes she’d been wearing when she was kidnapped had disappeared; the only possession she had left, apart from her own skin, was the little gold chain. She slipped it back around her neck. It made her think of Ben: what he was doing at this moment, where he was, how he was going to react when he heard the news she was missing.

  Peeping furtively through the bars of the window whose blind she’d smashed away, she observed her surroundings. Her quarters seemed to be on the first, maybe the second, floor of what was obviously a very large house, almost like a fortress in size. It was hard to tell whether there were any more floors above hers. Outside her barred windows was what looked like a rooftop garden, tastefully laid out with pots of flowers everywhere and surrounded by a stone balustrade. Beyond that she could see the figures of men down below among the complex of buildings that stood clustered around the house.

  Even if she’d been able to open the sealed window pane or yell loudly enough to be heard through the thick glass, she quickly realised there was little point in calling to anyone down there for help. The automatic weapons the men wore on their belts or slung round their shoulders as they came and went in twos and threes, attending to their mysterious duties, were enough proof of that. She was being well guarded.

  Unable to do much else, Brooke spent a while watching the movements down below and trying to count the number of guards. They were all Hispanic, mostly in their twenties and thirties as far as she could tell from this distance. All were armed, whether with a handgun or a high-capacity military rifle, or both. The men wore no kind of uniforms, but it wasn’t hard to see that the place was run with careful organisation and discipline. It made her think of an army base.

  Twice she saw a vehicle appear from what she now realised was the main hangar or garage building, making billows of dust as it approached the barred gateway in the wall that seemed to be the only way in and out of the complex. The first vehicle was an open Jeep carrying three men, the second an olive-green military truck with a canvas top. Each time the armed guards opened up the gates, waved the vehicle through and then locked them shut again. Brooke caught only a brief glimpse of what lay beyond the gates – a winding dusty road that soon disappeared into the depths of the dark green forest.

  Her head-count of the guards had reached eighteen when she heard a noise outside the door and whirled away from the window. There was the tinkle of a key in the lock, and the sound of a deadbolt being slid back. Brooke held her breath as the handle turned and the door began to open, fully expecting a host of armed men to come swarming into the room. What would happen next was something she didn’t want to think about. Her heart began to pound. She looked about her for somewhere to hide. It was too la
te.

  But it wasn’t kidnappers with guns who entered the room. It was a pair of women, both olive-skinned and black-haired and dressed in simple, plain maids’ outfits. The short one was middle-aged, thick-hipped, somewhat swarthy and carrying a white cardboard box a little larger than a shoebox. The taller one was twenty years younger and rail-thin with enormous brown eyes, but the family resemblance was obvious. Mother and daughter were muttering softly to one another in Portuguese as they came through the door.

  Portuguese, Brooke thought. Was this Brazil?

  The two women fell silent as they saw Brooke standing there in the light from the window, and stared at her for a moment before both gazing in horror at the crumpled metal blind on the floor.

  Brooke stared back at them.

  ‘I Consuela,’ the elder woman said shyly after a few moments, then, motioning at her daughter, ‘This Presentacion.’

  Brooke said nothing. Consuela laid down her box on a table and lifted off the lid to reveal rustling paper and something shimmering blue inside. ‘You wear,’ she told Brooke in hesitant English, and jabbed a finger towards the box’s contents.

  The women appeared harmless, and a lot more nervous of Brooke than she was of them – especially Presentacion, who seemed transfixed with awe and apparently couldn’t take her eyes off her. Brooke stepped a little closer and peered suspiciously into the box. The blue was some kind of satin material. As Consuela lifted it out and laid it across the back of an armchair with extreme care, Brooke saw that it was a very expensive and beautiful dress. There was underwear in the box, as well as a pair of high-heeled shoes the same shade as the dress.

  ‘You wear,’ Consuela said again.

  Brooke shook her head. ‘You must be kidding,’ she said emphatically. ‘Uh-uh. No way.’

  Consuela pointed at Brooke’s hair, her face, her nightdress. Brooke felt almost nude in it, and wished she had something to cover herself up with. ‘You need get ready,’ Consuela said in her stumbling English.

  ‘Ready for what?’ Brooke replied in Portuguese. She’d started learning the language when she’d first bought a tiny holiday retreat near Vila Flor, and could manage rudimentary conversation. No reply. She tried a different tack. ‘Where am I?’

  All she got in return from either of the women was blank stares. It was impossible to tell whether they just hadn’t understood her, or whether they were too frightened to answer. Very reluctantly, she allowed them to usher her back into the bedroom, where they sat her down at a dressing table and began clumsily fussing with her hair, speaking to one another in rapid-fire snatches of Portuguese that she couldn’t catch. What the hell were they doing to her?

  ‘Não,’ she said firmly as Presentacion approached brandishing a tall can of hairspray. ‘Por favor, okay? I don’t want it. Get it away from me.’

  They kept insisting she put on the dress. Brooke would as soon have ripped it into little blue tatters, but anything was more dignified than the almost translucent nightie, and in the end she relented. ‘Fine. Give it here.’ She snatched the dress from Presentacion’s hands, grabbed the box and carried them angrily into the ensuite bathroom.

  ‘This is the most insane kidnapping ever,’ she muttered to herself in the brightly-lit mirror as she slipped off the nightdress. She emerged a few minutes later wearing all but the high heels, which she’d left in the box and dumped on the bed. She drew the line at those.

  Mother and daughter smiled and gazed at her in satisfaction, though they seemed concerned that she hadn’t put on the shoes. ‘Bonita, bonita,’ they said over and over, and then Consuela came out with a stream of rapid Portuguese of which Brooke only caught the name ‘Alicia’ mentioned at least two or three times.

  ‘Who’s Alicia?’ she demanded.

  The women suddenly looked worried, exchanging nervous glances. Presentacion seemed about to say something, but her mother shot her a look and shook her head, then turned back to Brooke and pointed at the shoes on the bed. ‘You must wear,’ she said.

  ‘What do I have to wear them for?’ Brooke snapped in English. ‘I’ve been brought here against my will and now you want to dress me up like a fucking doll? Why won’t you tell me what’s going on?’

  ‘You meet El Senhor,’ the older woman replied, motioning agitatedly at the shoes. ‘Must put on.’

  ‘El Senhor? The master? Your boss, yes?’

  ‘Yes, yes. You come meet now. He want see you.’

  ‘All right, we go meet,’ Brooke said. ‘I’ve got a few things to say to this El Senhor of yours.’ She grabbed the shoes off the bed and carried them in her hand as the women nervously led her out of the room.

  Three guards were waiting in the corridor. They were big, solidly muscular men, and in her bare feet Brooke felt dwarfed by them. One was holding a large black assault rifle with a long, curved magazine; the other two cradled compact submachine guns in their arms. Her impression that the one with the assault rifle was in command was confirmed when he turned to one of the others and, without a word, sharply gestured at him to get rid of the stinking cigar he was smoking.

  It figures, she thought. A basic lesson in male psychology. The guy with the biggest gun rules.

  The flimsy dress might have been a step up from the nightie, but Brooke still felt so exposed and vulnerable under the eyes of the men that she swallowed back all the furious questions that she was bursting to ask, and kept her mouth shut. They all seemed to keep their distance, though, she noticed, and the glances they threw up and down her figure were careful and oblique, as if to ogle her too openly was off limits to them.

  They were clearly under orders to handle her with care. There was something in their eyes. More than just professional discipline. It looked like fear.

  Nothing she’d ever learned, or taught to any of her students, about kidnapping and hostage situations could have prepared her for such a situation. Her instinct told her she was in no immediate danger – but another voice in her mind was warning her that her predicament was as uncertain as it was bizarre. Anything could happen at any moment.

  The man with the rifle motioned brusquely down a broad passage that was lined with antique chairs and oil paintings in heavy gilt frames. ‘This way,’ he grunted in thickly-accented English.

  She felt like some kind of mascot on parade as she was escorted down the corridor and out onto a broad, galleried landing that looked like something from a movie. More paintings, enough to fill an art exhibition. A gleaming marble staircase swept down to the opulent hallway below.

  From behind a doorway came the sound of someone playing the piano. Playing it very well, Brooke couldn’t help but notice. The piece was a Bach fugue that she’d heard before. So kidnappers have culture now? she grunted to herself.

  Brooke could see the deepening apprehension on all the guards’ faces as they approached the sound of the piano. The one with the assault rifle knocked on the door. It seemed odd to see such a tough-looking, intimidating guy behave so furtively, almost meekly, like a child sent to see the headmaster. He waited for the music to trickle to a close after a few more bars, then opened the door and showed Brooke in.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Brooke found herself inside a salon that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the Palace of Versailles. Near one window, a pair of graceful chairs was drawn up to a small table laid with fine chinaware and a silver coffee pot, a basket filled with croissants. But she had other things on her mind than to admire the furnishings or smell the coffee.

  In the middle of the room stood a gleaming black grand piano. Rising up from the keyboard and turning to greet her with a smile was a tall, elegant man in beige slacks and a white silk shirt. His thick black hair was swept back from a face that was handsome and lean, slightly olive in complexion. His eyes were dark. There was no smile in them. The intensity of their gaze made Brooke want to look away, but she wouldn’t let herself. As she padded across the polished floor, still barefoot and carrying the high-heeled shoes in her hand, s
he realised with a chill that this wasn’t the first time she’d seen this man.

  He was the man in her nightmare. The tall figure behind the light. The killer of Forsyte, and of Sam Sheldrake. Brooke couldn’t repress the shiver that ran from the nape of her neck all the way down her back.

  The man dismissed the guards with a curt wave. They seemed relieved to go. The door closed, leaving Brooke and the man alone in the magnificent room.

  He stepped towards her, his dark eyes still watching her intently. ‘My name is Ramon Serrato,’ he said, in the same studiously perfect English with that merest hint of an accent she couldn’t place. ‘It’s my pleasure to welcome you to my home, Dr Marcel. Or may I call you Brooke?’

  She forced herself to return his unflinching gaze. Working hard to mask the tremor in her voice, she said, ‘I see you’ve been going through the handbag you stole from me. Was that before or after you killed my friend and her employer, you murdering piece of shit?’

  Serrato’s composure remained unruffled. ‘Like many others, you may be ignorant of certain things about Sir Roger Forsyte. He was an evil man, and he surrounded himself with evil people. However, I deeply regret that you were made to witness that unpleasant spectacle. It was not for such beautiful eyes to see.’

  He motioned over to the little table. ‘Please. I wish to make your stay here as comfortable as possible. Would you care for some breakfast? The coffee is excellent. Actually,’ he added with a smile, ‘I export the brand myself.’

  ‘No coffee, thanks. How about a fucking explanation instead?’

  Serrato sat down at the table, picked up the silver coffee pot and poured himself a cup. ‘Explanation?’ he asked nonchalantly, tearing a croissant and dunking it into the coffee.