Passenger 13 (Ben Hope eBook originals) Page 3

  Ben made his way through passport control among a throng of tourists. He was glad it was low season. Stepping outside with his only luggage, a green military haversack, over his shoulder, he breathed in the warm, palm-scented breeze from the Caribbean Sea. Owen Roberts’ runway virtually overhung the beach; beyond the single terminal, which looked more like a tropical country clubhouse than an international airport, the glittering ocean was the purest and clearest crystalline blue.

  At the nearby Andy’s car hire, Ben shelled out three hundred Cayman Islands dollars for a week’s rental on a silver Jeep Wrangler and headed into the islands’ capital, George Town, looking for a hotel. The one he chose, painted white like virtually every other building in the capital, was just a hundred yards from the waterfront. His room overlooking the sea was small and utilitarian, and suited him perfectly. He took a shower, changed into a loose-fitting white shirt over jeans and stood on his balcony a while, watching the waves roll in and smoking one of his Jordanian cigarettes while pondering his first move.

  Behind him on the bed was the postcard that Nick Chapman had sent him after moving to the island. It was creased and tatty now after spending two years folded up inside the paper jungle of Ben’s wallet. He walked over and picked it up, scanned the handwriting for the thousandth time and wondered what the hell had happened to his friend.

  Only a few drops remained in Ben’s whisky flask. ‘Need to do better than that,’ he muttered to himself, surveying the bottles inside the mini-bar. He slipped on his shoes and went downstairs. The hotel lounge was large and airy, done out in a phoney kind of post-Colonial Officers’ Mess style with large fronded plants everywhere and whirring fans on the ceiling. As he was getting his flask filled up with the best scotch available at the bar, Ben ordered a beer and perched on a bar stool to sip it. He’d never really seen the point of beer, other than as a way to cool down on a hot day. If he wanted to get drunk, he wanted to do it in the fastest and most efficient way possible.

  It looked as if the group of men in the corner of the hotel lounge were set on doing it the slow, sloppy way, and they’d obviously been at it most of the afternoon. Listening in on their conversation, Ben quickly realised they were the stragglers left over from what must have been a fair army of media invading the place in the aftermath of the suicide plane crash.

  ‘Hey, guys,’ he said, carrying his drink over to their table and pulling up a chair. ‘Who are you with?’ The opening shop-talk line of roving reporters the world over. Within minutes, the journalists were enjoying a round of fresh beers on their new best buddy. It wasn’t hard to get them talking. ‘Who’re you with?’ asked the oldest of the group, after introducing himself as Ray Doyle of the Miami Herald.

  ‘I’m on my own,’ Ben said, which seemed to be a good enough reply. Not that anyone cared. The consensus was that, a week after the event, the crash flight story had completely burned itself out and there was nothing left to hang around for. All that remained was the bitter rancour that a lot of people obviously felt for Nick Chapman. Frank Lopez of the Prensa Latina News Agency out of Havana shook his head in disgust at the mention of his name. ‘How anyone let a screw-up like that behind the controls of a fucking aircraft is beyond me.’

  Doyle gulped his beer and nodded in agreement. ‘Total wacko,’ he grated. ‘The daughter too. Dope head, what I heard. The moment daddy decides to check out taking a bunch of innocent lives with him, she goes and throws herself under the nearest goddamn car. I mean, that is one fucked-up family.’ Doyle and a couple of the others laughed uproariously at the idea.

  Ben’s fist clenched around his beer glass and he glanced downwards to hide the spark of anger in his eyes. After a pause he asked, as casually as possible, ‘Anyone get the name of the air traffic guy who talked to Chapman on the radio?’

  Doyle looked blank. Lopez clicked his fingers, trying to remember. The one called Tibbets got there first. ‘Drummond,’ he said. ‘The guy’s name is Bob Drummond.’

  ‘That’s it,’ Lopez said. ‘But forget it, amigo. He won’t talk to you. Nobody wants to talk about nothing any more. It’s yesterday’s news.’

  ‘That’s the kind I like best,’ Ben said, and they all found that very amusing too.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Long before the reporters finally staggered away from the hotel bar to start packing their bags for home, Ben was at the wheel of the Wrangler, blasting the two miles south-east back out of George Town towards Owen Roberts International airport, with the top down and the warm tropical breeze in his hair. He passed rows of stately white beachside homes. Yacht clubs and marinas. A colourful-looking bar and grill restaurant with a signpost on its terrace proclaiming ‘RELAX! YOU ARE ON CAYMAN TIME’.

  He left the Jeep in the main airport car park and headed for the air traffic control building a little way from the terminal: a squat white tower topped by a dark glass hexagonal observation centre bristling with antennas and dishes. A couple of security guards were hanging around the entrance – one white, portly, middle-aged, the other black with some seriously impressive dreadlocks that looked incongruous with his uniform. They were sharing a joke over a cigarette and leaning against the wire fence with their backs to Ben, so that he slipped through unnoticed. He pushed through a set of glass doors and found himself in a busy reception area where a harried-looking guy of about seventy was manning the desk and talking on two phones at once.

  Ben walked up to the desk and asked him if Bob Drummond was working there today. The old guy gave him an exasperated look and pointed down the corridor to Ben’s right. ‘You’ll have to talk to Maud in personnel. It’s the third door. Yeah, Barry? Did you fax through those reports yet? Then where the hell are they?’

  Ben left him to his apoplexy and wandered down the corridor. At the third door he paused, knocked and went inside a tiny office dominated by a broad desk and an even broader heavyset woman packed tightly into a swivel chair and wearing a name tag that said ‘Maud Biggs’. The smile he flashed at her met with a leaden stare.

  ‘Hi, I was wondering if Bob Drummond is working here today?’ he asked. Maud shook her head without a flicker of expression. Ben clicked his tongue. ‘That’s a pity. I’m an old friend of Bob’s and he said that anytime I was on the island I should drop in and see him. But I lost his home address. You couldn’t help me out with that, could you?’

  Maud’s face remained immobile, but at the mention of anything to do with clerical files her eyes darted involuntarily towards the filing cabinet to her left. Reflex action, like a dog salivating at the mention of food. Lagging by about half a second, her conscious mind kicked in and she shook her head severely. ‘We don’t give out details of employees to anyone.’

  ‘All right, I’ll level with you,’ Ben said, beckoning her close. ‘My name’s Jerome Ryerson. I’m with the Lotto,’ he added with a conspiratorial grin, and flashed his tatty old British Armed Forces ID card at her, too fast for her narrow-set eyes to focus on it, and keeping his thumb over the emblem. ‘I’m here to tell Bob that he just won twelve million dollars,’ he went on, and Maud’s eyes opened wide. ‘The only address we have for him is this one and I urgently need him to sign his claim form. I don’t think he’d want to miss out, do you?’

  Maud was still gazing at him in heavy-browed stupefaction when another woman appeared in the office doorway. ‘Maud, can you help me? The damn thing’s frozen up again. Do I need to enter that reference code before the sixteen-digit number, or after it?’

  Maud levered herself out of her chair and waddled to the rescue, shooting a bewildered look at Ben and muttering at him to wait there. While the two women were hunched over the computer in the office across the corridor, Ben went straight over to the filing cabinet, glided open the drawer labelled ‘PERSONNEL A – M’ and flicked through the index cards to D for Drummond. Finding the one he wanted, he managed to stuff it under his shirt just in time before Maud came waddling back into the room.

  ‘What was that about twelve million d
ollars?’ she said, frowning.

  Ben waved his mobile phone at her. ‘Sorry, there’s been a mistake. Head office just called. Looks like we do have the address after all. Thanks for your time.’

  He waited until he was safely back in the Jeep before he examined Drummond’s file. The photo showed a beefy-looking guy in his late thirties, cropped brown hair, bad skin, droopy moustache. Ben scanned quickly through his resumé. Drummond had joined the Cayman Air Authority Navigation Services Regulation Unit back in ’94 as a general assistant before gaining promotion four years later to the Approach Control team at Owen Roberts. His home address was on Shamrock Road, in the district of Bodden Town, a few miles to the east.

  The road skirted the south side of the island and took Ben into a suburban residential neighbourhood where he quickly found Drummond’s nondescript little townhouse just off the street. There was a Ford Taurus parked in the drive, behind a blue van with ‘Bodden Town Cleaning Services’ emblazoned on the side.

  Ben pulled up by the kerb and walked over to the house. The front door was ajar, and he heard a woman’s voice from inside. He knocked and pushed the door open a couple more inches to see a tiny grey-haired woman with a severe expression screeching orders at a pair of guys in overalls the same blue as the van. She stopped in mid-command and turned to glare at Ben.

  ‘Mrs Drummond?’ he asked.

  ‘You gotta be kidding me – Mrs Drummond,’ she snorted. ‘Who’re you?’

  ‘I was looking for Bob.’

  ‘Get in line. You find him, you tell that worthless piece of shit he owes me three months’ back-rent. And he needn’t try coming back to get his stuff. I’ve cleaned the place out.’

  ‘When did you last see him?’

  ‘Five, six days ago. I was coming over here to see him about the money when I saw him take off with these two guys in a car.’

  ‘Friends of his?’ Ben said.

  ‘I never saw them before, but I live across the other side of the island. You one of them debt collectors? Or a cop?’

  ‘Just a friend,’ Ben said.

  Her look softened a little. ‘Listen, son. Don’t waste your time on that jackass. Bob Drummond’s a gambler and a low-life. He ain’t no-one’s friend.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  It was already late afternoon, and the sun was beginning its long, slow dive towards the shimmering blue ocean horizon, by the time Ben arrived at the Cayman Islands Charter complex on the far side of the island, an area called West End, near Seven Mile Beach.

  Seeing his friend’s place of business brought back the sadness as he parked up in the near-empty car park and walked towards the buildings, following a sign that said VISITOR RECEPTION.

  The CIC offices were housed in a long, low, glass-fronted modern building. The little stretch of lawn in front was golf-course perfect. Two palm trees flanked the entrance, waving gently in the breeze.

  Behind the office buildings, next to the check-in and boarding areas for charter and inter-island shuttle passengers, stood a cluster of aircraft hangars – not the type that Ben was used to, the massive brutish military hangars capable of swallowing a Hercules troop transport. CIC ran a more modest kind of fleet. A white Britten-Norman Trislander sat parked on the concrete, identical to the one Nick Chapman had been piloting the day of the crash, with CAYMAN ISLAND CHARTER in bold black script across its fuselage. A slightly odd-looking design of aircraft, Ben observed, with the lumpy third engine protruding from the tail-fin housing and overhanging the rear of the fuselage like a scorpion’s tail. Renowned for its practicality as a short-range civilian utility aircraft: quiet, manoeuvrable, economical to run.

  But not much fun to die in. Ben ran his eye along its fifty-foot length and tried not to imagine what it must have felt like to be trapped inside it as it plummeted towards the sea.

  Parked a few yards behind the Trislander, sitting low off the concrete on its clumsy-looking fixed undercarriage, was an aeroplane that Ben doubted very much had ever been used for CIC operations. He’d seen photographs of the old wartime Sea Otter, but never a real example before. The single-engined flying boat had been manufactured by Supermarine, the makers of the legendary Spitfire fighter, and had been the last biplane ever commissioned by the Royal Air Force. Fewer than three hundred had ever been built. The thing was a relic from a bygone era, still sporting the mounting brackets for its three Vickers machine guns and payload of four 250-pound bombs – and yet it looked completely pristine, repainted in gleaming bright golden yellow. Ben stood admiring it for a moment or two, then turned and walked into the main office building.

  The reception area was as deserted as the visitors’ car park. Ben guessed that business couldn’t have been exactly thriving in the last week or so. To the left of the reception desk was a door that said STAFF ONLY. He figured that staff only areas were much better places to learn valuable details than public areas. He pushed it open and found himself in a large, neatly-ordered office. There was nobody here either, but he could sense a familiar presence nonetheless.

  The instant he walked in, three things told him this had been Nick Chapman’s office. The first was the neatness. Ben hadn’t met an ex-soldier yet whose daily habits hadn’t been permanently imbued by the discipline of military life. Especially SAS life. The second was the framed photograph of Hilary Chapman sitting on the empty desk surrounded by papers, files, tubs full of pens.

  The third was the print that hung on the wall above the empty desk chair. Ben even knew the name of the artist: M.C. Escher, famous for the mind-bending optical illusions that he’d designed into his artwork back in the mid twentieth century. Nick had always been into that kind of stuff, sticking postcards up by his bunk wherever they’d happened to be stationed that wasn’t in the middle of some desert or jungle: a flight of stairs that climbed in an infinite loop without ever getting anywhere; paradoxical structures and impossible realities that seemed to defy logic and tricked the eye into seeing what couldn’t be.

  The picture hanging on the wall had been one of Nick’s favourites. It showed a symmetrical circular mosaic-like web of interlocked patterns. If you looked at them one way, what you saw were legions of heavenly white winged angels on a dark background. Cock your head a little to the side, narrow your eyes, change your perspective, and the angels suddenly melted away and the background leapt into focus to become a horde of sinister, bat-like black demons against a field of white. Nick had used to say it helped him remember the line between good and evil. Ben had always remembered that.

  Another door swung open at the far end of the office and a woman walked in. She was maybe thirty-six, thirty-seven. Tall and straight, tanned, dark-haired, wearing it in a loose ponytail. She was halfway to the desk and reaching out to pick up a file from a stack when she suddenly registered Ben’s presence in the room and froze, looking at him with wide eyes. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I was looking for the manager,’ Ben said.

  ‘I’m Mrs Martínez, Mr Chapman’s personal assistant. I’m acting manager in his … his absence.’ Her voice was strong but the tightness in her throat threatened to overwhelm it at the mention of his name. She covered her emotion, cleared her throat and added firmly, ‘And you can’t come in here. Maybe you didn’t see the sign that says “staff only”?’

  ‘There’s nobody in reception.’

  She rolled her eyes and tutted. ‘Jennifer. That damn temp’s always on a coffee break. I’ll buzz Rachel. She’ll take your booking.’

  ‘I’m not interested in making a booking.’

  ‘Right. You want flying lessons? Then you need to see Phil in the blue building behind the hangar area.’

  Ben shook his head. ‘I didn’t come here for lessons either.’

  She cocked her head to one side and put her hands on her hips. ‘Then may I ask what it is you do want?’

  ‘I have some questions about your late employer, Nick Chapman. I won’t take up much of your time.’

  The PA let out a sigh. ‘I thought yo
u media people were all gone now. Haven’t you had enough?’

  Ben was already tired of playing games. He came straight out with the truth, as simple as he could make it. ‘I’m not a reporter. My name’s Ben Hope. I was a friend of Nick’s and I’ve come here to find out what really happened to him.’

  Mrs Martínez flinched noticeably at his words. She narrowed her eyes, looking hard at him, seeming to scrutinise every detail of his face. After a long beat she replied slowly and carefully, ‘If you’d been watching the news, you’d know what happened.’

  ‘I don’t always believe the news,’ Ben said.

  ‘Listen, everyone here is very upset. We really don’t want to be pestered right now. The press have been flocking around here like goddamned vultures every day.’

  ‘Just a couple of questions and I’ll be gone.’

  ‘Please,’ she said. ‘Nobody here wants to answer any questions. Just go away. Leave me alone, okay?’ She considered a moment, then added, ‘I mean, leave us all alone.’ Before she could stop it, tears had welled up in her eyes and were rolling down her face. She wiped them away.

  ‘I didn’t mean to upset you,’ Ben said. ‘I’m very sorry.’ There was a stack of headed compliment slips on a little stand on the desk next to a computer terminal. He grabbed one and picked up a pen that was lying nearby. ‘This is my number,’ he said, writing. ‘Call me if you change your mind.’